Pale Moon Stalker (The Nymph Trilogy)

PALE MOON STALKER

By

SHIRL HENKE

Previously published by Leisure Books

Copyright 2008 by Shirl Henke

All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means without the written permission of the publisher.

* * * *

Electronic Novels by Shirl Henke:

A FIRE IN THE BLOOD

BROKEN VOWS

McCRORY'S LADY

BRIDE OF FORTUNE

* * * *

The Blackthorne Trilogy:

LOVE A REBEL…LOVE A ROGUE

WICKED ANGEL

WANTON ANGEL

* * * *

House of Torres Books:

PARADISE & MORE

RETURN TO PARADISE

* * * *

The Cheyenne Books:

SUNDANCER

THE ENDLESS SKY

CAPTURE THE SUN

* * * *

The Texas Trilogy:

CACTUS FLOWER

MOON FLOWER

NIGHT FLOWER

* * * *

The American Lords:

YANKEE EARL

REBEL BARON

TEXAS VISCOUNT

* * * *

Colorado Couplet:

TERMS OF LOVE

TERMS OF SURRENDER

* * * *

Santa Fe Trilogy:

NIGHT WIND'S WOMAN

WHITE APACHE'S WOMAN

DEEP AS THE RIVERS

* * * *

The Californios:

GOLDEN LADY

LOVE UNWILLING

* * * *

The Nymph Trilogy:

THE RIVER NYMPH

PALE MOON STALKER

CHOSEN WOMAN

* * * *

Electronic novellas by Shirl Henke:

"Love for Sail"

"Falling in Love"

"Billie Jo and the Valentine Crow"

"Surprise Package"

Chapter One

Dakota Territory, May 1884

"You're going to kill a man for me."

A strident female voice dragged him back to consciousness. For a blurry moment Max forgot where the hell he was. Rosie's place? He looked up, eyelids feeling as if they'd been shaved with a dull razor, and recognized the battered chairs and tables strewn like discarded dice across the beer-soaked wood floor. Yes, Rosie's. He was collapsed on his own table in the farthest corner of the room where nobody could get at his back. Her bartender Ben had a shotgun that would keep off the jackals.

Then who was the harpy standing next to him? Exhaustion combined with whiskey made considering the question too difficult. With a guttural grunt he dropped his head over his arms and returned to oblivion.

"I said, you're going to kill a man for me. Wake up, you drunken sot!"

Max looked up and tried to focus on the source of the voice. Damn, he was bone weary. Twenty hours of hard riding could do that to a man—and that was after two weeks on the hunt with almost no sleep whatever. Once more he lowered his head.

"I said wake up, and this is the last time I'll tell you." There was a tight desperation in her tone now.

He should have paid attention to that. Ordinarily he would have. His head barely touched his arms before he felt her hand seize a fistful of his hair and yank backward until he thought she had broken his neck. Why had Ben not blown her to hell with his twelve gauge? Because she was female, Max guessed. Damn the softhearted bastard! He struggled to open his swollen eyelids when she suddenly released her grip on his hair.

"Put your head down one more time and I'll kick the bottom of this table till your brains rattle like beans in a gourd."

To make her point, she gave one leg a stout kick, nearly overturning the table. He rubbed his burning eyes and looked at her for the first time. Yep, a female all right, even though she was dressed like a man in buckskin pants and a shirt that laced up the front. The generous curve of her breasts strained against the lacing. No doubt she was a she. His eyes swept down her body, which was a very good one indeed.

A narrow waist gave way to the gentle swell of hips followed by long legs. She stood with her back to the door, silhouetted in the morning sun so that he could not make out her facial features beneath the low-crowned, flat-brimmed plainsman's hat she wore. Some sort of old Winchester was clutched in her right hand, barrel to the floor.

"Well, Sleeping Beauty, looks as if you're finally waking from your drunken stupor."

He struggled to unglue his furry tongue from the roof of his mouth, then said, "Look, lady, I'm not a hired gun. I don't kill men for money."

"If you're the one called 'The Limey,' reports say otherwise."

"I genuinely dislike that sobriquet. My name is Maxwell Stanhope. If you must address me, call me Maxwell, Stanhope, even Max. And I repeat, I am not a gun for hire."

"Well, Mr. Stanhope, I take issue with that. You hunt men for bounty, specializing in murderers. I've heard you've brought back over twenty men...and eight came back facedown across a saddle. I call that killing men for money."

She possessed a clear, deep voice—but it was beginning to grate on his overtaxed nerves. "Lady, I don't give a damn what you call it. I'm not for hire."

"I think you'll want this job," she said, grabbing his ear in her left hand and twisting it forward and down. At the same time she pulled him out of his chair so quickly that the table almost tipped over. A shot glass and the half-empty bottle of Rosie's best, which wasn't all that good, crashed to the floor.

"Ouch!" He cut loose with a string of oaths. "That's not a damn handle!" He was rapidly coming awake now. Her grip was strong as steel and he could see the hard gleam in her brilliant blue eyes. "Are you crazy?" Max reached down for the Smith & Wesson in his holster.

It was not there. Then he saw it lying on the floor in a puddle of whiskey beside the table. The damned female must have tossed it away just before she grabbed his ear. Mortifying! That never would have happened if he were not insensate with exhaustion. He swatted at her hand and the pain in his ear intensified for an instant. Then she released him and raised the Winchester to his gut.

"You're going to listen to what I have to say...and we're going to talk in private. Do I make myself clear?" It was a rhetorical question.

Sky Eyes backed him stumbling across the floor of the empty saloon, heading for the door. From the corner of her eye she caught the motion when the barman started to raise a double-barreled shotgun. "I wouldn't," she said coolly to the dapper little man. She prodded Maxwell Stanhope's midsection with the barrel of her modified Winchester '66 "Yellow Boy."

"The Limey" teetered, nearly falling backward, then groaned, clutching his gut. "Lady, unless you want me to christen those fancy buckskins with the contents of my stomach, I wouldn't do that again." His voice was raspy and he coughed as he righted his balance.

With one eye on the barkeep, Sky said to Max in a low, emotionless voice, "Be quiet." To the man with the shotgun she said, "I mean to talk with your friend." When his thumb reluctantly slid back toward one of its hammers, Sky cocked the hammer of the Yellow Boy. The metallic click seemed loud in the large room. The bartender froze in nervous confusion. Sky waited unblinking.
Probably hates the thought of shooting a woman...even one like me.

Their standoff was interrupted by the creak of floorboards at the top of the stairs leading to the second-floor bordello. She watched the barman's eyes lift. Keeping her rifle trained on Stanhope, she glanced quickly up, then back to her groggy target.

The small, round woman dressed in a pink wrapper looked old enough to make her coal black hair improbable. "You mean to hurt 'im?" she asked. Her voice seemed incongruously young coming from a decidedly middle-aged female.

Sky hesitated for a moment, then asked in a flat voice without challenge, "Why do you care?"

"Max is my friend, honey."

"No, I won't hurt him," Sky said. "I need him fully functional—to discuss private business. He seems inclined to be stubborn."

Rosie chuckled. "Well, honey, Max is stubborn, or he'd spend most his time conductin' 'private bidness' with half the females west of the Mississip. Still, 'pears your bidness ain't that kind." She paused for a moment, as if considering, then said, "He stays in room seven in that fleabag 'cross the street." She shook her head at Ben, who very slowly slid his shotgun back under the bar and carefully brought up his empty hands to rest them on its scarred surface.

Sky uncocked the Winchester. She pushed her quarry out the door while he continued growling obscenities.

After they had banged through her front doors, Rosie waddled down the stairs, bursting into laughter. "Lordy, Max Stanhope, the darling of news rags from Chicago to San Francisco, 'The Limey,' 'Scourge of the Bad Men,' 'The Hangman's Hound,' dragged out of a whorehouse with a rifle in his gut—by a young gal, no less!" she chortled. "Damned if I wouldn't like to be a fly on the wall fer that conversation."

Outside, Sky considered the Englishman who spoke with the perfectly clipped accent of an aristocrat. Small wonder he'd been dubbed the Limey by ordinary citizens out West. The irony of an upper-class Englishman being given a pejorative name did not escape her. Neither did his physically imposing appearance.

He topped her own five-eight by five or six inches. She'd had no idea her bounty hunter would turn out to be a perfect male specimen, tall, lithe and sinuous with curly silver blond hair a London belle would kill to have. Lord, it was pale as moonlight! Small wonder so many women wanted to conduct "private bidness" with him. Even filthy with sweat and trail dust, his sun-bronzed face was as patrician as one of those old oil paintings she had seen in museums back East. The nose was long and slender, the mouth wide, the jaw chiseled.

But it was Stanhope's eyes that held her attention. Even after one brief confrontation with him in the bar, she would never forget those eyes. Framed by arched silvery eyebrows, they were dark green, slitted and ice-cold. This was a dangerous man. She had been blessed lucky to get him this far. She imagined his trail fatigue and the rotgut had more to do with it than her skill. He was killingly angry at her, but somehow she would convince him to go for her proposition. She absolutely had to.

After their short trip across the dusty street, Sky Eyes Brewster and her charge entered the lobby of the Angel's Rest. The scruffy old hotel's small lobby was devoid of any furnishings except for a scarred desk, unmanned. Behind it on the wall keys hung from pegs. "Grab number seven," she instructed him.

In spite of his obscene protests, he stretched one long arm across the desk and retrieved his key, squinting through bloodshot eyes. "Now what?" he asked in an arctic voice.

"We go to your room and have our private talk, what else? Do you think I find you so irresistible I'll molest you at rifle point?" He shook his head. She wasn't certain if it was to disagree with her, or simply to clear out the cobwebs.

"At the moment, I am so limp...from fatigue, you could not 'molest' me at cannon point, dear lady."

"Your virtue is safe with me, Mr. Stanhope," she said tersely, motioning with her rifle toward the stairs.

Max climbed the creaking wooden steps and fumbled with the key until he got the door open. Once inside, he made a flourishing bow, gesturing with his hand, as if to welcome her. "My humble hovel, ma'am." Sky stepped inside, backing him over to a straight-backed chair in the corner.

"Sit down," she commanded, much relieved that he complied. In truth, he looked ready to drop to the floor with exhaustion. She quickly surveyed the shabby quarters. Besides the chair, a bed with a lumpy mattress, a washstand, a chipped pitcher and a bowl were the only furnishings. In one corner a Winchester '76 with a checkered pistol grip and special target sights leaned over carelessly tossed saddlebags, his only personal possessions. If he made a fraction of the reward money reported in the newspapers, he certainly was not spending it here.