Gold Dust (22 page)

Andy puttered casually with a box of hairpins. “Ain’t every woman who’ll latch onto a man with Jonah’s temper. Especially
a woman who’s been makin’ good money off of her looks. You wouldn’t want that face of yours to get messed up.”

“Get outta here! Jonah Armstrong’s a gentleman if I’ve ever met one.”

“He sure is, most of the time.”

“Shit, kid. Every man’s got a temper. Goes with the balls, you know? Well, no, you probably don’t know. You’re not old enough
yet. But trust me, I know. Most men is just naturally mean as snakes.”

“No kiddin’?”

“No kiddin. Besides, Jonah Armstrong’s a goddamned hero. He saved my life. How much of an asshole could he be?”

“Yeah. You’re probably right,” Andy agreed with just a slight grimace. “You owe him, and I do admire a person who pays up
what’s owed. Hope he’s nice to ya.”

Maude threw a hand mirror in the bag, hesitated a moment, then pulled it out and held it up. She pouted prettily while examining
first one side of her face, then the other. “He’s really got a temper, huh?”

“I reckon it ain’t any worse than others, if’n ya say all men is such mean devils. Leastwise he’s a nice-lookin’ gent who
don’t spit in front of ladies. I guess hittin’ ain’t as bad manners as spittin’.”

“Hittin’?”

“Hell yes! He’s got a punch you just gotta admire. You shoulda’ seen the one he threw at Miss Katy a couple’a weeks ago. You
know how she looks so crochety all the time? Well, let me tell you…”

“What the hell is keeping them?” Jonah went to the edge of the firelight for the tenth time and peered through the darkness
in the direction of the sporting ladies’ campsite. “They’ve been gone for an hour and a half.”

“Maybe Maude’s packing the whole camp to bring over here,” Katy speculated sourly.

Jonah returned to the fireside and smiled ruefully. He dished up a plateful of the beans that he’d refused earlier. “She’s
a persistent little devil, isn’t she?”

“So is a snake. When I was a kid I once spent hours watching a snake swallow a mouse. You wouldn’t have thought it could get
that furry body down its gullet, but it surely did. Ate it whole.”

Jonah pushed the beans around on his plate. “That’s an appetizing picture.”

“Yep. That old snake just kept working at it and working at it.” She lifted a brow in his direction. “You might take a lesson
from that poor mouse.”

His eyes reflected the fire’s orange blaze, or was that glint part of the amused smile he gave her. “Thanks for the warning,
sis.”

Katy expelled a frustrated breath. “Men have got no taste!”

Jonah laughed. “What? Do you think I’m lusting after Maudie? I haven’t been deprived of a woman’s company that long!”

Katy’s temper instantly flared. Deprived of a woman’s company, was he? What did he think she was? And if she wasn’t a woman,
just who had he kissed not so long ago—kissed deep enough to suck the lungs out of her chest? He
had
been making fun of her.

“I don’t give a fig who you lust after,” she snapped. “It’s nothing to me. She’s a bother, that’s all. She’ll slow us up.”

“Probably. She’d make colorful reading in the
Record,
though. Likely a bit too colorful for my editor.”

Katy merely huffed her disgust. She agreed with Jonah’s editor.

Jonah took a bite of beans and swallowed with a grimace. He speared another couple and nibbled at them cautiously. “They’ve
been gone too long,” he complained, glancing into the darkness.

“Don’t worry about Andy. That kid can take care of himself. He can take care of Maude, too,” she said. A smile twitched at
the corner of her mouth. At least she hoped Andy could take care of Maude—with something short of murder.

“He’s just a kid.”

“Like you said, kids his age are curious about these things.”

“I’d better go see what the problem is.” He set his plate on the ground for Hunter to finish—a task the wolf accomplished
with a few enthusiastic gulps. “I’ll be back soon.”

Katy watched Jonah’s lantern bob in the darkness until it disappeared behind the mass of Stone House. Not for a minute did
she believe Jonah was heading toward the whore’s den to see what was keeping Andy. The kid could take care of himself, and
Jonah knew it as well as she did. Katy set her plate on the ground and sighed. Just what was it those floozies had that she
didn’t?

“Dumb question,” she told herself, looking down at her sturdy, sensible clothes and resisting a silly urge to unplait the
thick braid that held her hair. “Dammit!” She kicked at her plate. Hunter shot her an uncertain look. “Go ahead,” she told
him. “Finish it off. I’m not hungry anyway.” She ran her hand fondly through the gray coat as he gulped down the last of her
supper. “Why do I care, anyway?” she asked the wolf. “I don’t want to wear face paint and walk as if my hips are out of joint.”

Licking his greasy chops, Hunter seemed to be in agreement.

“If Jonah Armstrong likes that sort of thing, he can have it. What do I care what he thinks?”

The wolf lost interest in the conversation and started to sniff around the fireside for dropped morsels he might have missed.
Katy hunkered down and stared into the flames. What Jonah thought did matter, she admitted reluctantly. She’d never before
had such feelings of inadequacy. All her life she’d been a rough-and-tumble scamp. Knowing how to skin a hare had been more
important than knowing how to sew the hare’s skins into a hat. Bringing home the game had been more important than knowing
how to cook it. She wore dresses and tried to learn manners to please Olivia and her pa, but her heart was always dressed
in trousers and boots.

Only since meeting Jonah had she wished to be different. He made her want to curl her hair, wear frills and lace and ruffly
petticoats that swirled and swayed and cunningly peeked out around her ankles whenever she lifted her skirt to walk.

“Dumb!” she told Hunter. “I am really being dumb.”

Hunter raised his nose from its quest and padded over to lie beside her, as if understanding her need for something warm and
familiar. She glided her fingers through his fur. “Love you, you old wolf you.”

But she certainly didn’t love Jonah Armstrong, in spite of all the feminine silliness that afflicted her. The notion was preposterous.
He was not at all the type of man she admired. He enjoyed paved streets, tall buildings, and crowds of people;
he scarcely knew the butt of a pistol from its barrel; he would rather fight with words than fists.

Yet he’d fought for her on the steamer from Seattle, and he’d fought Jack Decker for the sake of those poor horses. He’d risked
his life to save a strumpet when everyone else was willing to let her drown. And though he might be accustomed to paved streets
and soft beds, he didn’t complain about the mud of the trail nor the hard earth that they slept upon at night—nor about a
sky that either blasted them with the sun’s furnace or drenched them with cold rain.

Jonah had a nice laugh, Katy decided. She liked his face, with its clean planes and strong chin. She liked the laugh lines
around those devilish blue eyes. She liked the way his hair grew in springy curls that he couldn’t quite tame. Sometimes she
longed to touch the wisps of hair that curled every which way at his nape. His voice made her shiver inside—a pleasurable
sort of a shiver. The long, strong line of his back made her shiver too, and his legs. Jonah had nice legs. A nice backside
as well.

Katy hid her heated face against her drawn-up knees. Shame on her for being such an idiot. She wanted the old familiar Katy
back—the one who didn’t care what men looked like any more than she cared what she looked like. Damn Jonah Armstrong for making
her feel this way. She would make him sorry he preferred the whores’ company to hers. She would show him that a girl didn’t
need perfume and bosoms the size of a cow’s udder to be a woman.

Jonah’s humor was high as he and Andy walked back toward their own camp. His worry about the boy had been groundless. He’d
found him in the ladies’ tent, a veritable palace strewn with silken pillows and scented with heavy perfume. A customer or
two was being entertained among the pillows, but most of the ladies were gathered around Andy, who regaled them with anecdotes
from his mother’s unsavory life in Seattle. The kid showed little interest in the erotic spectacles
that were being played out in front of him—Jonah assumed that he’d seen plenty of the like before. And the girls seemed to
take a motherly rather than a salacious interest in the boy, a virtuous attitude that didn’t apply to the attention they showered
upon Jonah when he walked in.

While Jonah had tried to politely fend off the flock of debauched lovelies, Andy had not helped the situation by offering
to return to camp with the explanation that Jonah would be spending the night with Maude’s friends. The boy’s eyes had sparkled
with the devil’s own light.

Jonah had scarcely escaped the tent with his clothing and virtue intact, but one good thing had come of it all: Maude had
suffered a change of heart about lavishing him with her attention. She wasn’t ready to become a one-man woman, she’d told
him. The way she’d jumped like a skittish filly when he’d entered the tent made Jonah suspect she was a bit off her rocker.
Not two hours past she’d been hanging on him like moss on a magnolia, and now she acted as if he’d grown horns.

Good thing, too. Katy had been simmering ever since Maude had swaggered into their camp. Jonah didn’t mind little Miss Daniel
Boone finding out that not every woman considered him a piece of useless baggage. Some women found him attractive, even if
he didn’t have an overdeveloped trigger finger and smell like the rear end of a cow. On the other hand, an annoyed Katy was
something akin to a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse. One didn’t want to let the situation go on too long.

Katy’s simmer appeared to have reached a boil by the time Jonah and Andy got back to the campsite.

“Nice party over there?”

“Ask Andy,” Jonah said. “He was the center of attention.”

She cocked a brow toward Andy. He shrugged and smiled.

“Where’s Maude?”

“Maude’s had a change of heart,” Jonah told her. “Seems
her friends convinced her there’s more future in high-stepping than walking the straight and narrow.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call anything about Maude straight and narrow,” Katy quipped. She had an impish smile for Andy that belied
her tart tone, however, and Andy puffed himself up like an overproud sparrow.

“I’ll just be goin’ to sleep now,” Andy said. “Tomorrow I’ll find us some packers. We’ll be on the trail by noon.” Grinning
from ear to ear, the scamp grabbed his blankets and tarp and went to find a sleeping place.

“What was all that about?” Jonah asked suspiciously.

“I told him earlier he could come with us to Dawson. I figured you wouldn’t mind. You seem to collect colorful characters
like some men collect notches on their pistols. You can write about him for one of your stories about the wild and woolly
West.”

Jonah was getting a bit tired of the Wild West and the wild women it nurtured. He recalled the Chinese curse of wishing a
man the misfortune of living in interesting times. The curse could more effectively wish a man to become involved with an
interesting woman.

“This has something to do with Maude, doesn’t it?” he ventured.

Katy smiled with silky satisfaction.

“All right, Katy. Maude was my fault. I admit it. I should have hustled her out of here the minute she showed up. But let
me tell you something about men and their little weaknesses—”

“I know a lot about men and their weaknesses,” Katy declared archly.

“Well, it’s damned near impossible for a mortal man to be real diligent about getting rid of a female who makes him feel as
if he’s God’s gift to women.”

“So men like to be drooled over like some kind of juicy steak?”

“Well…” Jonah could feel himself getting into hot water. “On occasion.”

“And Maude was one of those occasions?”

Maude had been an excuse to get a rise out of Katy—an excuse that had gotten out of hand. “Maude was… a bit of stupidity on
my part. Satisfied?”

Katy snorted indelicately.

“How long are you going to carry a grudge?”

“I’m not carrying a grudge,” she corrected with a feline grin. “I was just watching out for your virtue. After all, you were
the one so concerned about reputation.”

“Reputation and virtue are two separate things—especially for a man.”

“Well you ought to know!”

She kicked dirt onto the fire with unnecessary violence. Jonah wasn’t sure if the subsequent hissing came from the buried
coals or from an indignant Katy. She turned and marched into the tent. Jonah followed. The little devil was not going to have
the last word!

“Katy, you’re acting like a child. In fact, you’re beginning to act like a real sister.”

“I’m not your goddamned sister!”

“I should hope not.”

“I’m just your guide. What do I care if you drag every two-bit whore with you on the trail to Dawson. If you have such a need
to be drooled over, don’t let me stand in your way.”

Katy smiled suddenly in a manner that made Jonah very uneasy. It also sent a jolt of pure lust arrowing to his groin. It was
the same smile she’d turned loose on those hapless fools in the Skaguay saloon, and it glowed with a heat that would make
Venus herself envious.

“Just what do men find so entertaining about those women, anyway?” she purred. “Is it the way they walk?”

“Katy…”

She turned and slowly took three paces that were the length of the tent, her hips swaying with a graceful lilt that would
have turned Maude green. A coy peep over her shoulder made Jonah’s temperature rise a notch farther.

“Is that the way they do it?”

“Katy, what are you doing?” He could feel the sweat break out on his brow. His appetites were in no condition to withstand
such bombardment. He’d spent the last two weeks coming to a boil over Katy, and Maude’s every touch, every subtle hip thrust,
every heated glance, had sharpened his hunger, not for the whore, but for the girl who’d stood by watching with her face in
a high flush and her eyes shooting fireworks.