Lawman (23 page)

He preceded her to the hotel's wide front
door, and opened it on a comforting wash of familiar territorial
sights and sounds. Across the street, Zeckendorf's general store
competed as usual with Tully and Ochoa's. In the distance, the
cottonwood trees at Levin's Park rose in a haze of green over the
whitewashed
presidio
shops clustered around it. Along the
street fronting the Cosmopolitan, dust-strewn wagons clattered
past, their beds piled with vegetables or hay—or packed with
children, wide-eyed at the sights of town.

With a gallantry that was doubtless as false
as the smile he gave her to go with it, Gabriel held the hotel door
ajar and motioned for her to go before him. Megan tamped down a
sudden urge to haul up her skirts and run instead for whatever
safety she could find. His watchful eyes told her he hadn't
forgotten the lie he had accused her of...and neither had he given
up on awaiting a response from her.

"You didn't
have
to mention your
visit to Maiden Lane to me," she bluffed, raising her skirts to
sail past him onto the narrow hotel porch beyond. "I simply assumed
you'd go there. Being a man, as you are. And ah, especially one so,
so...."

Tongue-tied, she turned to watch him pass
through the doorway behind her. The breeze ruffled his thick, dark
hair, lending him a boyish quality. A gathering of travelers parted
to make way as he came toward her, and it struck her that in
Tucson, Gabriel's citified clothes seemed about as at home as a
brass button in a barrel of sugar.

It was just as she'd guessed. The Pinkerton
man was unused to life in the rough-and-tumble Arizona Territory.
His unfamiliarity could only be counted in Megan's favor, she
figured. Despite that fact, she felt strangely at a disadvantage as
she watched him approach.

Perhaps it was because of the way he
moved—with a sense of surety that should have been out of place
with his powerful, rangy man's body...but wasn't.

Especially one so very masculine
, she
finished silently.
So very charming. So blasted
good-looking
. No, she couldn't say any of those things.

At the porch pillar beside her, Gabriel
stopped and smiled. "Especially one so...what?"

Leaning his shoulder against the pillar with
a casualness she envied, he paused to put on his flat-brimmed black
hat. Beneath its shadow, his face took on a coaxing expression that
was surely meant to slip free all her secrets...and all her
defenses, too.

His brogue deepened. "Come out with it,
Megan. It's plain you meant to say something more."

"You must have misheard me."
A
half-cooked excuse if ever she'd served one
. Would he swallow
it?

Gabriel shook his head. "I heard you. I'm a
listening kind of man." He straightened away from the pillar.
Waited. "But that doesn't mean I don't see plainly, too. I've got
to tell you, sugar—what I see right now has got me listening harder
than ever."

"Bosh." She raised her parasol against the
glare of the early morning sun, then chanced another look at him
from beneath its protection. Despite her best efforts to ignore it,
her curiosity about what he'd said proved too much for her. "What
do you see?"

"When I came through that doorway just now—"
he jerked his head toward the Cosmopolitan Hotel "—you looked at me
like a girl eyeballing butterscotch sticks in a general store
window." He lingered over the notion. Smiled like a man with a
winning hand of poker. Then he said, "You're doing it still."

Butterscotch sticks, indeed
! With
despair—and a mounting sense of panic—Megan realized he was right.
She did feel like that girl he'd imagined. Felt just as though
she'd sampled her first morsel of candy...and wanted another lick
of sweetness to tide her over between tastings. But how had Gabriel
guessed?

Perhaps he felt the same. Hungry
for...something.

"It's got me understandably curious," he
went on. "Especially one so...what?"

Afraid her feelings would show on her face,
Megan turned her gaze toward the hard-packed dirt length of the
street facing them. She watched the freight wagons and buggies pass
by in a blur of motion, felt the warm September breeze on her
face—worked hard to come up with an answer to a question she could
barely remember.

How did he affect her so strongly?

Before she could speak, though, Gabriel
leaned closer. His shoulder brushed past the starched blue cotton
of her dress sleeve, then his smooth-shaved cheek touched her
ear.

"You don't really have to say," he murmured,
"so long as you keep doing it. I like your looking at me like
that—like you're wanting to hold me still, then lick me up one side
and down the other."

She gasped, but he went on. His deep,
intimate voice wound its way past every barrier of propriety, past
every doubt she might have harbored, past every defense she'd ever
possessed.

Gabriel's lips touched her ear. "Makes a man
feel downright...sweet, like rock candy." His breath whispered past
the place he'd kissed, calling forth shivers in its wake. "You're a
dangerous woman, Megan Kearney. Don't imagine I'll be forgetting
it."

How could she? A sigh escaped her. She
couldn't help it. Even if—when—the Pinkerton man forgot
her
,
Megan knew she would never fail to remember him. How did a woman
forget the first man who had actually made her knees go weak?

Feeling wobbly, she looked up...straight
into the astonished face of Mrs. Prudie Webster. The woman who held
the key to Megan's future gaped up from beside the hotel's hitching
rail at a sight she must never have expected to witness.

Kearney Station's most famous spinster,
being courted by a man. And a spectacularly good-looking one, at
that.

"
M—Miss Kearney
?" Prudie's thin nose
narrowed still further, and she squinted as though unable to
believe her eyes. "Is that you?"

Perhaps she could pretend not to hear, Megan
thought desperately, but Prudie's shrill repetition of her question
put an end to that hope. Fighting an urge to duck behind the
Pinkerton man's broad shoulders, Megan held her ground. Mrs.
Webster did, too, her mouth working like a trout on a line. In an
instant, the sight returned to Megan all the realization of her
circumstances she'd lost track of.

Gabriel Winter didn't want her. He wanted
her papa. In jail. And the better she remembered that hard truth,
the better she'd fare.

Needing to put some distance between them,
Megan rose on tiptoes. She put her mouth beside his ear and
whispered, "I'm sorry to disappoint you, agent Winter. But I have a
terrible habit of crunching right through my candies."

He flinched.

She couldn't allow herself to care.
Trembling with nervousness, Megan planted her heels against the
plank porch floorboards once more and addressed Prudie Webster.

"Imagine meeting you here, Mrs. Webster,"
she said, taking Gabriel's arm in what she hoped seemed a
companionable way. "I don't believe you've met Mr. Winter. He's my,
ahh—"

She paused, wildly seeking a way to describe
Gabriel that would not reveal his true reasons for being with her.
The truth of his mission would surely turn Prudie and Jedediah
against completing the dressmaker's shop sale. Megan refused to see
her future ground beneath a Pinkerton man's wrongheaded
investigation.

With an overtly curious expression, the man
in question watched her fumble for an explanation. In another
minute, Gabriel would concoct one of his own. Heaven only knew what
he
would think was suitable.

Megan frowned at him—and a solution struck
her. She squeezed his arm tighter and happily smiled at Mrs.
Webster.

"He's my new
mannequin
. Did I mention
to you that I also design men's clothing?"

Chapter Thirteen

The sun dipped toward the leafy cottonwoods
at the place called Levin's Park by the time they reached it later
that afternoon. In Gabriel's opinion, they arrived not a damned
moment too soon.

Weary to the soles of his feet, he guided
Megan through the dappled shade toward the low stone wall bordering
a fountain. Birds scattered at their approach, then settled again
at their feet as he and Megan plopped onto the cool stones beside
the fountainhead. To their backs, mist dampened the air, and water
spilled into the pool with a sound like so many chattering
voices.

Or maybe it only sounded that way to him.
After a day packed brimful with more prattling women than Gabriel
had ever hoped to encounter, he couldn't be sure.

Groaning, he shrugged out of his suit coat
and laid it aside on the wall. He dug his fingers into his necktie
to loosen its four-in-hand knot. With another low groan, he rolled
the stiffness from his shoulders, inwardly cursing the hours of
tea-taking and mindless chatter that had knotted his muscles.

Christ, but he ached. Sitting on those tiny
chairs women favored was enough to break a man's back. Were
feminine backsides really that much smaller than a man's?

Gabriel angled a glance toward Megan's
bottom. He couldn't tell. The rounded blue bell of her bustle made
it impossible to know if she possessed a backside at all, much less
what it looked like.

His imagination offered up several
possibilities, all of them intriguing. All of them minus her bustle
and whatever else she piled on beneath it. None of them satisfying.
He returned his thoughts to the events of the afternoon, cursing
again the thumbnail-sized sandwiches, the never-ending tea, the
giggling and prodding...the chairs.

He'd owned bigger boots.

Tiredly, he ran his hand over his gun belt,
checking to be sure his weapons and ammunition were at the ready.
Only a fool sat unprotected in a place as public as Levin's Park,
especially with a woman to care for.

Not that he meant to care for Megan
Kearney.

Hell, no.

If ever there'd been a woman who could take
care of herself, it was Megan. She didn't need him.

And if a part of him
wanted
her to
need him...well, that was just a man's natural protectiveness for a
woman. Nothing more.

It didn't mean he wanted her to look at him
with more of the butterscotch-sweet hunger he'd glimpsed in her
eyes—and less prickly defensiveness. Didn't mean he could see a
future where they lay down together at night without handcuffs to
bond them and a battle of wills in between. Didn't mean he could
forget the job he'd come here to finish, and lose himself in
wonderings about a future that could never be.

He had to find Joseph Kearney. Every
moment's delay endangered his livelihood, and his reputation as an
agent. He couldn't start over on a past choked with failings...and
he couldn't find a new life with the one he had still
unfinished.

With wariness born of long-standing habit,
Gabriel gazed across the park. From the cottonwood groves to the
beer gardens to the white picket fence bordering it, the place was
the picture of leisure. Luckily for him. In truth, had one of
Pinkerton's most-wanted parted from the clumps of picnicking
families surrounding them, or passed by on his way to the tenpin
alley just beyond, Gabriel would have been hard-pressed to stop
him. He couldn't remember when he'd spent a more wearisome day.

It was almost enough to make him wish he'd
gone back to Kearney Station himself, rather than sending McMarlin.
But after having tracked his mentor to the alleyway—and the refuse
pile—Megan's knotted sheet getaway ruse had led him to, it had
seemed better not to leave the two of them alone together
again.

In all, McMarlin hadn't seemed to mind being
sent away. He'd departed for Kearney Station on the mid-morning
stage, carrying Gabriel's instructions to find the missing
strongbox key—and Megan's parting surprise—with him.

Unfortunately, no quantity of explaining how
the trio of cheroots she gifted him with was meant as a goodwill
gesture had been enough to persuade McMarlin to actually smoke
one.

Gabriel grinned to recall the agent's
parting words.
Probably packed with dynamite, knowing that wily
miss
.

As someone who had been on the wrong side of
too many of Megan's ideas since he'd met her, Gabriel had to
agree.

In her company, vigilance was decidedly
necessary.

Beside him, Megan yawned loudly. Looking
more like a girl who'd count endless cut-tin stars than the devious
conspirator McMarlin had made her out to be, she abandoned her
attempts to fan herself cool and dropped her painted fan to her
lap.

"Ahhhh. This shade is wonderful, isn't it?"
Her bright gaze invited him to agree, but she didn't wait for an
answer. "No matter how much papa and I come to town, I never seem
to get to Levin's Park often enough."

"This place suits you." Gabriel took in the
skittering cottonwood-leaf canopy overhead and the tumbling
fountain waters behind them. He breathed in the shifting scents of
earth and brewed ale, wet stones and burning mesquite. "It's as
changeable as you are."

She paused in the act of unbuttoning her
gloves to deliver him a frown. "You sound as though you believe
that's a bad thing, agent Winter."

"Gabriel."

"Of course."

The mischievous tilt of her head left little
doubt she meant to ignore his correction forever, if necessary. She
would 'agent Winter' him to death, if she chose to, and nothing he
did would stop it. If he wished her to call him by his given name,
that was the one thing Megan would never do.

Naturally, her resistance only compelled him
to make sure she did call him Gabriel. Freely. Openly.

Soon.

She tugged off one of her gloves, finger by
finger, then let it fall atop the fan in her lap. Gracefully
turning up her other wrist, she worked at the row of buttons
there.