My Darling Gunslinger (9 page)

Ty decided to take the dare. He prowled across the room to stand before her, close enough he could smell the sweet floral scent surrounding her, close enough she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes.

He held his hands between their faces, slowly turned them for her inspection.

“Do you want to smell them?” he growled low in his throat.

She sucked in a shocked breath, all of the color draining from her face.

“Naw, she never wants to smell them,” Sebastian said with a giggle.

“Christ,” Ty muttered, turning away from the look of absolute horror on Charlotte’s face.

“Does Ty pass muster?” Sebastian asked, oblivious to the tension between the two adults.

“He does,” his mother agreed.

Ty fell into a seat at the table, resisted the urge to drag his hands over his face in frustration. Instead he fiddled with the silverware lined up on both sides of the plate before him.

“Use them in order,” Sebastian whispered as he took the seat next to him.

“All of them?” Ty asked in mounting alarm.

“Only when Daisy’s cooking. She likes to give us a proper English dinner.”

Huh, a former whore who liked to cook a proper English dinner. Whatever that meant.

What it meant, as Ty learned over the next hour, was six courses beginning with a sliver of tomato smothered in a creamy white sauce and ending with little lemon tarts no bigger than his thumb served on a plate smeared with tangy raspberry preserves.

If anyone noticed him hesitate over each new course while he waited to see which utensil the others would use, no one said a word. They were all too busy talking and laughing between trips through the swinging door to help Daisy serve.

Only Charlotte was quiet.

Ty watched her push the food around on her plate without eating a single bite. Every few minutes she looked down the length of the table at her friend and housekeeper, a frown pulling at her lips.

“Akeem will cook tomorrow,” Sebastian said, pushing his empty plate away. “He likes to cook spicy stuff like curry and paneer, and we’ll all sit on pillows on the floor in the front parlor and eat with our fingers.”

“I’ll be sure to scrub my hands extra clean,” Ty replied.

“Don’t let Mother worry you,” the boy said with a smile. “Magnus says she’s just confused on account of she can’t make up her mind whether she’s a proper lady or a regular hoyden.”

Ty wished she was a hoyden, wished she was the type of woman who would allow him the use of her body for a night. With a sigh, he decided a night wouldn’t be near long enough to satisfy the lust that had taken up residence in his groin since he’d watched her dancing around in her bare feet on a cold and rainy night.

No, to be honest, it had happened before then.

He’d been consumed with fantasies of Charlotte since the moment she’d stepped from that ridiculous railcar on a blistering cold day more than a year before. Lady Blue had been his faithful companion ever since.

In his fantasies he’d coaxed her from shy to wanton, from hesitant to eager, from lady to wanton.

If it had been only lust that had kept her firmly with him through all those long, lonely months, he wouldn’t be nearly as frustrated and angry as he was. But in his dreams, she’d offered more than the use of her body. She’d offered him something he’d never had, something he’d seen only rarely in his travels. Affection. Not the kind he could rent in a whore’s room for a night, but true affection. The kind that led a woman to pamper her man, to touch him at odd moments, to smile at him for no reason, to kiss him on the underside of his jaw, to wrap her hands around him from behind and lay her cheek upon his back.

Shaking his head in an attempt to jog loose the images, Ty was forced to admit that part of his anger, part of his growing frustration, was aimed at the woman who was blissfully unaware she was slowly, steadily destroying those fantasies.

Lady Blue had been his, to do with as he wanted, if only in his mind.

Charlotte Green was a living, breathing, vibrant woman who pushed Lady Blue into the shadows. With each day that passed, those fantasies dimmed, until eventually they would leave him altogether.

And then he’d be left with no one.

No Lady Blue and no Charlotte Green.

Guard your lips as you would your chastity, for the gift of the former often leads to the theft of the latter.

Nanny Bettelheim

Charlotte paced her room, too confused and edgy to remain below stairs with the others.

Tyler Morgan and Daisy.

It made an odd sort of sense.

Daisy was a pretty lady with soft curves and a gentle smile. She would make a wonderful wife for some lucky man. She sewed a straight stitch, could knit a sweater in three days and knew her way around the kitchen.

She hadn’t a temper that Charlotte had ever seen.

She spoke simply and softly and sincerely.

A man intent upon taking up ranching would certainly see the perfect wife in Daisy.

What would such a man see in Charlotte?

A prickly widow who worried about clean hands, insisted upon traveling in a luxurious private railcar, no matter the inconvenience of shipping it from continent to continent, and surrounded herself with knife-wielding, gun-toting, deadly-handed bodyguards.

Magnus, Chang and Akeem saw Tyler for what he was—a hardened gunslinger who dreamed of being a rancher.

Surely he saw her friends for what they were.

Magnus had argued that marriage was the best way to convince Tyler Morgan to join forces with them, to ensure Sebastian was safe on the ranch.

Maybe he was right.

If Ty married Daisy would his loyalty to his wife extend to Sebastian?

Or would he see the boy, and the threat that followed him, as a detriment to a quiet life in the shadow of the mountains?

Ken and Ethel wanted to bring their future children into a world free from danger and were even now planning to return to Ethel’s native Norway.

Surely Ty and Daisy would wish Sebastian and his entourage as far away as possible when they started a family of their own.

Her frantic thoughts were no more than supposition, she knew.

A few kisses in a linen closet did not mean the man wanted to marry Daisy.

It seemed unlikely the quiet, hard-edged gunslinger would want to marry at all.

There was a separateness to him, a wary solitude, a watchful intensity that set him apart, even at a crowded dining room table with conversation and laughter flowing around him like Daisy’s fictional champagne. Had he been any other man, Charlotte might have imagined him to be lonely. But a man who crisscrossed the country alone in pursuit of outlaws and the bounties on their head was surely accustomed to his solitude.

He’d get little solitude, and even less privacy, at the Zeppelin. Charlotte could attest to that fact.

Nor would he be permitted to dally with Daisy without consequence. Akeem would see to that.

With that thought uppermost in her mind, and ignoring the others crowding about, Charlotte decided to brave the lion in his den and demand an accounting of his actions.

For Daisy’s sake, of course.

Her jitters, the gnawing ache in her chest, the foreign emotion that felt like possessiveness but couldn’t be, had nothing to do with her decision.

A light shone beneath the door of Ty’s room. Stopping before it, she heard soft whistling.

Tucking a wayward lock of hair back into the coil of braids resting at her nape, she raised her hand and knocked.

“Come,” he called out in his unmistakable dark, raspy voice.

Taking a deep breath, she pushed the door open and stepped into the room.

Tyler stood before a small oval mirror nailed to the wall above the dresser, naked to the waist, a razor in one hand, the blade dragging over his cheek. He met her eyes in the mirror. If he was surprised by her appearance in his room he gave no indication.

Charlotte watched as he pulled the razor over his taut skin before dipping it into a bowl of water on the dresser.

“Something you need?” he drawled as he brought the blade up again.

Just what the lady needs.

She wondered if he’d chosen the words intentionally.

“I would like to speak with you,” she replied, debating whether to close the door behind her.

The man was unclothed from his broad shoulders to his trim waist, his back a smooth glide of muscles beneath tanned skin. His trousers, crisp new dungarees Magnus had brought back from town the day before, rode low on his hips, cupping his backside as neatly as any gentleman’s tailored breeches she’d ever seen.

The room was lit only by the lowering sun shining through the open window, casting golden light across the center of the room, leaving the corners in shadow. It struck Charlotte as terribly intimate, her standing in the shadowy room watching him shave.

“About?” he barked, his hand once more swirling the razor in the bowl.

“I’ll return when you’ve finished,” she replied warily, taking a step back so she stood at the threshold of the door, balanced perfectly between the intimacy of the room and the safety of the hall beyond.

“No need,” he said in a fractionally less hostile manner. “I’m near to done.”

“I’ve never watched a man at his ablutions.” She could have bitten her tongue right off. Why, oh why, was she forever letting her brain run away with her mouth?

Ty arched a brow in question, something he seemed to do quite frequently around her.

“Does it sometimes seem as if we speak two different languages?” she asked, feeling terribly awkward.

“Ablutions,” he repeated, more to himself than to her.

“I meant to say, well…toilet…um…hygienic routine?” She was beyond feeling awkward now, moving right along toward idiotic.

“Hygienic.” Again he seemed to be speaking to himself rather than to her.

“Washing, shaving, combing your hair, those functions you perform out of a desire for cleanliness.” Charlotte stepped back into the room, carefully closing the door behind her.

She couldn’t be certain, but she thought he might have smiled then.

“You never watched your husband shave?”

The idea was so preposterous she answered without thought. “George? Good Lord, no. Simmons would have had a fit.”

“Simmons?” Ty asked before tilting his head back and bringing the razor to just below his chin.

Fascinated, Charlotte moved farther into the room, until she reached the footboard and the tall post nearest to the shaving man. She wrapped her arms around the carved wood, crossing them and curling them up to grip the newel post at the top. She leaned her cheek onto her clasped hands and her hip against the footboard.

“My husband’s valet,” she responded, watching the lather on his strong neck disappear in the wake of the blade. “A more proper gentleman’s gentleman you’ve never seen.”

His only response was a grunt.

“Does it bother you?” she asked. “My watching you, I mean.”

Up went his brow.

“I suppose it is a bit late to ask as I’m standing here doing just that,” she agreed with a smile born of an odd sort of contentment.

She watched the remainder of the decidedly masculine exercise, watched him tilt his head this way and that and contort his facial muscles in all manner of ways, in silence lest she distract him and cause him to nick his bronzed skin.

When he was finished, he lifted a towel from the dresser top and blotted at the drops of lather remaining.

“What did you want to discuss?” He turned and leaned back against the dresser, his long legs spread out before him.

His feet were bare and so pale compared to the rest of him.

Charlotte made every attempt not to look at the expanse of his naked chest. Still, even with her eyes resolutely fastened upon his face, she couldn’t help but see the dusting of dark hair that swirled around the copper disks of his nipples and trailed down past his navel to disappear into his trousers. His chest was wide and sinewy, his shoulders and upper arms sculpted with muscles. A fresh, puckered scar ran from his shoulder to just above his nipple.

“Surely not my ablutions,” he said when she only stood staring at him in all his glory. Well, a good portion of his glory.

He was definitely smiling now, likely trying not to laugh at the silly English lady who’d foolishly asked him to kiss her in this very room and now stood gawking like the lonely widow she was.

“Of course not,” she replied, trying to sound worldly and flippant and suspecting that she’d failed miserably.

He waited patiently, not the least put out to have a woman in his room while he was partially undressed. Likely he was quite used to women ogling him.

“I wanted to discuss what happened earlier.” She straightened from her rather slouchy embrace of the bedpost, her hands still clasped around the newel. “With Daisy.”

“Nothing happened.”

Charlotte waited for him to offer an explanation for what she’d seen in the linen closet, for the two of them being
in
the linen closet. It took her only a few seconds to understand she wasn’t to get one.

“I am cognizant of the fact we might view this situation from conflicting perspectives,” she began.

“Am I the only person who doesn’t understand you?” he asked around a huff of breath that could only be aborted laughter.

“Certainly not,” she replied, thrown off by both the interruption and the question.

“That’s good to know,” he answered.

“No, that’s not what I meant to say,” she replied with a huff of her own, one due entirely to annoyance. “You are the only one.”

“Is that so?”

There was a gleam in his eyes she couldn’t define. Whatever it was, it sent a little spark of electricity through her limbs until her fingers tingled. She released the bedpost and stepped toward him, all the while knowing she ought to step away.

“If other people find my dialect incomprehensible, they graciously withhold their sentiments, endeavoring not to offer insult where none was intended,” she said, annoyance quickly giving way to simmering anger.

Ty crossed his arms over his chest and stared at her.

“Am I to understand from your silence that the insult was entirely intentional?” she demanded.

“What you ought to understand from my silence is that I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied quietly after a pause during which she’d begun to believe he wouldn’t answer her at all.

“Oh,” she breathed, finally realizing it was she who’d unintentionally offered insult. “I’m terribly sorry.”

“That I don’t understand your fancy words?” he asked in the same quiet tone.

“That I’ve offended you,” she replied.

“You haven’t.”

“Good. I’ll begin again, shall I?” she asked. “In words you can understand.”

“Don’t patronize me, lady,” he said, straightening to his full height.

“Oh, for mercy’s sake!” Charlotte threw her hands in the air. “I am not patronizing you, you big oaf! I am simply trying to find common ground so we might discuss what’s between you and Daisy.”

Ty stepped toward her, and instead of backing away, Charlotte met him in the middle of the room, her head tilted back to meet his sizzling eyes.

“There is nothing between me and Daisy,” he growled.

It occurred to her they were now as close as he and Daisy had been in the linen closet, close enough she could smell the shaving soap on his skin and the earthy scent that lingered just beneath it, a scent that was purely masculine, purely Ty.

“If you dally with her,” she began, her words lacking the force she’d hoped for.

“I have no intention of dallying with Daisy,” he interrupted, leaning down until they were nearly nose to nose. “You’re a different matter.”

Heat pooled low in her belly, shifted to lodge deep between her suddenly trembling legs.

“I…” at a loss, she clapped her mouth shut.

“No big words to fend me off?” he murmured, his gaze dropping to her lips.

She shook her head.

“Last chance to run.” His whispered words drifted over her, setting gooseflesh rising on her arms.

Charlotte stood resolutely rooted to the spot, her fingers twisting in her skirt in an effort not to reach for him, not to pull his lips down to hers. She watched his eyes drift shut and his chest rise with a stuttering breath.

“Do you want to kiss me?” Her words were more vibration than sound.

“More than I want my next breath.” His reply was equally low.

Then his lips were on hers.

Ah, so soft. Tyler Morgan’s kiss was the softest, sweetest thing she’d ever known. His lips brushed over hers, the touch light, gentle. He grazed along her bottom lip, coasted to one corner, lingered a while, then skimmed along her top lip toward the other corner, stopping along the way to nibble and cuddle. His lips cuddled hers, caressed them, discovered them, as if to memorize the sensations of flesh on flesh.

His kiss was unimaginably tender and set off a yearning deep within her unlike anything she’d ever experienced. With a wondering sigh, Charlotte opened to him, wanting more.