Lawman (11 page)

Was that the Webster's mercantile,
there?

She stopped on a humble whitewashed
building, squinting harder. It was. Someday, it would house her new
dressmaker's shop, her dreams for the future—even herself, in the
living quarters behind the storefront. Megan imagined herself
already there, self-assured and resplendent in her
modiste's
fashionable dresses and impeccable manners, taking orders from
customers eager to sample her wares.

Once there, she'd be safe. No one would be
able to rouse the doubts she'd have put to rest behind braid and
buttons and cunning hats. No one would be able to hurt her. She'd
be done with reliance, and the ties it wound to hold her. She would
be done, once and for all, with being left behind.

This time, she'd take the role of the one
who left herself, and be forever beyond the reach of the fears that
bedeviled her.

From so high a vantage point, the tiny shop
seemed uncommonly close.
Felt
close, as though she might
reach out and cup the baked adobe bricks and all they promised
right in the palms of her hands.

Movement behind the mercantile captured
Megan's attention and cut short her thoughts of the future. A
figure dressed in black clothes and a matching hat crossed the yard
with a bundle of goods in his arms. Jedediah Webster, she guessed,
carrying his and his wife's belongings to their wagon parked in
back and preparing for their trip to the States. She had so little
time to secure their shop for her own! Only three days, and with
Gabriel Winter tracking her every step....

She couldn't think about that now. Wouldn't.
Somehow, she would find a way to clear her father's name and have
the dressmaker's shop she longed for. With a sense of determination
as steady as the black wrought iron railing in her fists, Megan
leaned a little further. She could drive away the uncertainty that
the Pinkerton man's arrival had aroused in her, just as she could
bring her dream into sharper focus with a closer vantage point.

She had to.

Megan leaned, squinting once more at the
shop. A longing to go there, to finish what she'd begun with the
Websters and have her future secured, pulled at her.
Why did you
do it, Papa
?
Why now, why—

"Megan!"

Gabriel's voice shattered her thoughts.
Turning to see him charging through the entrance to their shared
room destroyed her balance, as well. Thrown akilter by the sudden
crash of the heavy paneled door against the wallpapered wall, by
the sight of Gabriel's big body moving toward her at surprising
speed, Megan wobbled sideways. With a squeal, she clutched at the
railing.

Her grasp met scrollwork...and slid. Her
midsection jabbed into the railing as she fought to steady herself,
and the maze of streets and shops below her whirled. Would a fall
from this height be enough to kill her? she wondered wildly. Or
would it only leave her with broken limbs and less time than before
to help her father, and herself?

Neither
, she realized as she
straightened her arms and somehow caught her balance again. She'd
live to see her father's name cleared—and to tell agent Winter
exactly what she thought of his bull-in-a-china-shop manners.
Raising herself to her full height, Megan started to step from the
railing so she could confront the man headed toward her.

Instead, his strong arms closed hard around
her middle before she could speak. Her breath left her in an
undignified grunt as Gabriel yanked her from her perch. With a roar
of determination so fierce it made her heart pound, Gabriel lifted
her against him from behind.

"No!" he bellowed. "You'll not escape it
that way."

He shouldered his way backwards between the
balcony doors and hauled her inside. Warmer air struck her, and the
room's furnishings jogged by in a jumble as he carried her in his
arms beyond the lace-curtained windows, past the marble-topped
bureau and cluster of traveling satchels piled beside it, past the
potted palm and horsehair settee, all the way to—

The bed. Its white tufted counterpane rose
at the edge of her vision, and in that instant Megan realized his
intent. Squirming against his iron hold, she yelled for all she was
worth.

"Let me go!" she demanded. "Have you lost
your mind?"

The rest of the words she'd meant to speak
flew from her thoughts as she felt herself lifted, higher than
before. He'd ascended the step stool used to clamber into the
fancy, four-poster hotel bed. Megan wriggled harder, twisting and
arching in his arms, but Gabriel's strength surrounded her. It made
her struggles useless and her cries as ineffective as shouts into
the wind.

She sailed downward. Her body struck the bed
hard enough to make the counterpane and down-filled mattress billow
at her sides, temporarily blinding her with their snowy
thickness.

"Be still!" he growled.

Was he insane
? Momentarily stunned,
Megan told herself he couldn't really mean to throw her onto the
bed and simply ravish her with no warning at all—could he? Agent
Winter was a lawman, a self-professed man of truth. Surely his
baser instincts were under stricter control than those of the
average cowboy or rustler or station hand in town for an
afternoon's carousing.

The impact of Gabriel's hard, wool-clad body
following hers onto the mattress squashed those hopes. Caught
beneath his taut muscles and unforgiving strength, Megan remembered
how easily he had overpowered her at the balcony railing, and knew
that in this instance at least, she was beaten.

For now.

"I won't let you do it," he said. "Christ,
but if I'd been a step or two later—"

His voice choked to a stop, strangled by
whatever impulse tightened his long-fingered grasp on her wrists,
as well. Panting, Megan arched her neck and looked from side to
side, taking in the sight of his sun-browned hands on her arms long
enough to confirm with her eyes what her mind already knew.

Gabriel Winter was a man as untrustworthy as
she'd suspected from the start. She'd do well to remember that in
the future.

"If you had been a step or two later, I
wouldn't be lying here," she felt compelled to point out, "with
you! And I'd be glad for it."

Frustration assailed her. What in heaven's
name was he about? What kind of man would assault her this way, and
then regret aloud the fact that he'd done it too slowly for his
liking?

Megan prided herself on her ability to
understand people, including the station hands, drivers, and
businessmen she came into daily contact with. But Gabriel Winter
confounded her. If she lived to be a thousand, it wouldn't be time
enough to comprehend the workings of his mind.

"
Glad of it
?" His head bowed. "Dear
God, not again," he whispered.

"Again? But I'd only just—"

"Yes, and come too close, at that!" His
interruption came fierce and unguarded, his brogue strengthened by
the force of his emotions. "I said you were a wily one, Megan
Kearney, and I knew it to be true. From the moment I first laid
eyes on you in that station yard, I knew you were uncommon to me as
the rest of this damned Territory. But I wouldn't have pegged you
for this."

"For what?"

His passing mention of the very
unfamiliarity she'd surmised—and now knew—he held with Arizona
Territory and its people intrigued her. Reassured her, too. But
this wasn't the time to explore what might be her only advantage
against him. Plain and true, Gabriel Winter wasn't making sense,
and the feeling of being two thoughts behind him in their dealings
unsettled her more than Megan wanted to admit.

Needing to get to the base of his reasoning,
she returned to what he'd said before without waiting for an answer
to her question.

"There's nothing wily in looking out over
the city," she told him, trying to imagine what he'd seen when he'd
come into the room and glimpsed her at the balcony railing.
"Nothing uncommon or strange in looking toward release from
the—"

His gaze sharpened. Megan saw his interest
and snapped her mouth closed. However flap-jawed an agent he might
be, nothing demanded that she confide her plans for the future in
him. Indeed, it would be wiser not to. If Gabriel Winter learned of
her missing nest egg money, learned of her father's role in its
disappearance, that would only incriminate Papa more.

Striving to seem indifferent—no easy task,
given the unexpected stimulation of being sandwiched between the
cradling mattress at her back and the hot, wholly unyielding
Pinkerton man at her front—Megan gazed up at him.

Sweet mercy, but he was a handsome man! His
face held angles and experience too hard-edged to be called
beautiful. But just for a moment, she glimpsed the goodness beneath
the grit Gabriel Winter showed to the world around him, and that
peek inside him was enough to entrance her. Breath held, Megan
stared more boldly—and then reality returned.

Despite her earlier hopes, she hadn't
magically become immune to his charms. The realization kindled
something close to panic inside her, a sensation very like the way
she used to feel as a child, twirling round and round the station
yard until she came up dizzy.

At least then it had been apurpose.

"Go on," he said, his voice a rumble she
felt clear through the clothes that separated them.

Go on with what
? her despairing mind
wondered. And then she remembered.

"In, in looking toward release from
the...stifling air of the hotel," Megan countered, doing her best
to ignore Gabriel's raised eyebrows and skeptical expression. She
wished her hands were free to flutter before her face, fan-like,
and bolster her excuse. "I swan, they must never air out these
rooms. It's nigh sweltering in here, and only a few minutes past
noon, at that."

His gaze bored into hers, deep blue and
filled with a tumult of emotions Megan couldn't begin to name.
Lust
, a part of her whispered—but some hidden part of her
nearly hoped for more.

"Deny it all you want," he said,
stone-faced. "I'll go on believing the truth of what I saw."

"And what did you see?"

She felt his body tense against hers, every
muscle rigid with remembrance or restraint...or deceit, Megan
warned herself. Turning softhearted over Gabriel Winter would only
endanger her further.

But gazing up at the lines of weariness
bracketing his mouth, at the darkness shadowing the eyes she'd
admired so much upon meeting him, she did feel softhearted.
Stupidly, Megan wished herself free of his grasp, if only to hold
him in her arms instead. Despite her wariness, she couldn't help
wanting to ease him. Nor could she help wanting to know what he'd
been about by dragging her from the railing by force.

"What did you see, Gabriel?" she asked
again. "When I stood at the balcony before?"

His haunted gaze met hers. He bowed his
head, showing her the shining midnight of his hair falling near to
his suit collar...and, in sharp, unknowing contrast, the pale skin
at the nape of his neck where he'd been shielded from the sun.

"I saw my past," he said.

The rasp in his voice warned her his past
was nothing he remembered fondly. Nothing he spoke of willingly.
And then Gabriel blinked, and whatever ghosts of the past he
carried vanished with the gesture.

"You were ready to jump, Megan. Don't deny
it again." His hand caressed her cheek, and his breath feathered
past her hair with a gentleness that surprised her as much as his
words did. "Rather than admit the truth that's in front of you, the
truth about your father, you were ready to jump to escape it."

Her mouth fell open. "You thought I was—"
Sweet heaven, she could barely bring herself to say it aloud! "—was
about to
jump
from the balcony?"

Were he not so deadly serious, the very
notion would have made her laugh. She, give up her life for the
sake of an accusation that most certainly couldn't be true?

"If I were broken so easily as that, I'd
never have survived beyond girlhood."
Or beyond all that had
come on its heels
. "No, agent Winter, I wasn't—"

"You wouldn't be the first," he said
solemnly.

Or the first he'd stopped from taking such a
desperate measure, Megan guessed, and the knowledge that Gabriel
had thought he was saving her life just now cast a brighter light
on all he'd done.

"And I'll wager you wouldn't be the last,"
he went on. "No one wants to believe the worst of the people they
love."

"Fortunately for me, I do not."

She wriggled experimentally, succeeded only
in wedging herself more firmly beneath the weight of his chest and
thighs, and stilled to catch her breath. Mercy, the man must have
been born straight from the mouth of a quarry, to be so hard
everywhere!

"Fortunately for you," Megan added,
searching for another strategy to free herself—or at least to put
more than a shadow's width between them, "I tend not to believe the
worst of the people I don't love, as well."

"Maybe you should, when the proof is all
around you."

"I wouldn't begin to know how."

"Then it's time you learned." His words were
rough. But the steady caress of his thumb against her temple told
another, gentler tale—one that came from the heart, not the mind.
Aloud, he said, "Denial can't hold back the truth. No more than you
could hold me back when I brought you inside."

He'd halted her, not defeated her. She
couldn't let him think he'd won already. "I could have! If only
I—"

"No. No more than you could hold me back
now...if you had a mind to try."

Heavens! Suddenly, she tingled with
awareness of her situation, caught fully beneath a man's body for
the first time in all her twenty-eight spinster's years.