Sullivan (35 page)

"This is the lady I told you about," he said, "Eden Sullivan. Eden, this is Rafe. He's going to be staying with us."

Rafe looked terrified, as if he expected an argument. He held onto Sin's hand and stared up at her with big green eyes. The sun made his hair look like honey, and it was as fine as spun silk. He probably wasn't much older than Millie.

She gave him a smile. "Well, I'm glad to have you here, Rafe."

"You are?" he asked suspiciously.

"Of course," Eden said, her voice leaving no room for doubt.

Millie and Teddy had to vie for Sin's attention, Millie springing up until he caught her, Teddy standing close until Sin dropped to his haunches.

With Millie still in his arms, Sin looked Teddy in the eye, man-to-man. "You been keeping an eye on things around here, like I asked you to?"

Teddy nodded. "Yes, Papa." His eyes got wide. "Uncle Jed is teaching me to shoot a rifle," he added with unconcealed excitement.

Jedidiah and Teddy had spent a lot of time together in the past few days. Teddy didn't glare at his new uncle anymore, and had even confided to Eden once that not all uncles were bad.

"He is?" Sin asked.

"Yep. I have to be able to defend my sister with something other than the pointy toe of my boots. That's what Uncle Jed says. He said I'm a natural marksman." And then something wonderful happened; Teddy smiled. "I'm glad you're home."

Sin ruffled the hair on Teddy's head, not making a big deal out of the smile, and he offered his cheek when Millie leaned forward to kiss him again.

Eden had to do something, otherwise she was sure to cry, right there in the middle of the street. "Teddy, why don't you take Rafe upstairs and show him where he'll be staying. In the room with you two, for now. In a few minutes I'll fix our travelers something to eat. Do you like custard pie, Rafe?"

"I don't know, ma'am," he said softly. "I never had any custard pie."

"That is an injustice that will soon be remedied."

Sin rose slowly to his feet and readjusted the hat on his head. The three children headed into the hotel, leaving Eden to stare up into his face. She'd worried incessantly for days, but in the shadow of the hat she could see no bruises, no cuts. He looked perfect, in fact.

"Got my hat back," he said sheepishly. "And my rig." He jangled the well-worn holster and plain six-shooter that hung low on his hips.

"And I suppose the fine men of Webberville just handed them over without a fuss," she said.

"No, ma'am. I had to kick some ass to get my hat back."

She put a finger on his jaw and turned his head this way and that. "Looks like they didn't touch you."

"Not this time." His smile faded. "That's where I found Rafe. His mother used to work upstairs, but she died a while back. The kid was sweeping the floor when I got there, cleaning up after a bunch of drunks."

"That's terrible," she whispered.

Sin opened his mouth, closed it again, shifted uneasily on his booted feet. "Hell, Eden, I couldn't just leave him there."

She smiled and wrapped her arms around his neck. "Of course you couldn't."

He gave her a belated kiss hello, in spite of the fact that people passed all around. Neither of them cared. When she pulled away, Eden reached up and grabbed his hat.

"Let me get a good look at this hat that's worth so much trouble."

She didn't look at the hat after it left Sin's head. He'd cut his hair. Short. A barber somewhere between Rock Creek and Webberville had given him a crisp, neat, very ordinary haircut. She reached up to touch the strands above his ear.

"You cut your hair," she whispered.

"Do you mind?"

She shook her head. "It's very handsome, but..."

"I don't need it anymore," he interrupted. "On the way into Webberville it kept blowing in my face, and getting tangled against my neck, and I wondered why the hell I'd kept it long all these years."

Eden raised her eyebrows skeptically.

"Besides," he said, "the haircut goes with the job."

Oh, he was going to leave again! She took a deep breath to calm herself. She would be the wife he needed, even if she didn't always like what that entailed. "What job?"

He pulled a telegram from his pocket. "You are looking at the new sheriff of this fine county. The governor's appointed me to the office until we hold a special election and make it official."

"Sheriff Sullivan," she said with a smile. He wasn't going to leave her, after all. He wasn't going to come and go like a nomad. He was going to stay.

He leaned down, placing his handsome face close to hers. "Did you really think I could ride away from you and be content?"

"I did wonder..."

"Well, stop your wondering, Mrs. Sullivan. I'm home to stay."

Sin put his arm around her shoulder and they walked toward the hotel entrance. He glanced up once and studied the new sign.

"Paradise," he muttered as they stepped into the shade of the boardwalk. "You got that right."

The End

Page forward for an excerpt from

Rico

Book 3 of the Rock Creek Six

Excerpt from

Rico

The Rock Creek Six

Book 3

by

Lori Handeland

Chapter 1

"Your job, Betty, is to sing. Singing pays for this room, your food, those brightly colored silks you wear. So get your exquisite, expensive rear end downstairs before I kick you out on the street where you belong."

Betty Lillian lifted the hot, damp cloth from her aching forehead and opened one eye to glare at her employer, Randolph Ward. The volume of his voice did nothing for the pounding in her head. "I'm ill, RW. Everyone becomes ill now and again."

He stepped closer to her bed, one he often shared by virtue of his position and hers. One of these days, Betty was going to be in charge of her own bed, her own future, her own life. R.W. had promised her the world then given her nothing but New Orleans.

"No blood," R.W. concluded after studying her like a bug on a pin. He put a beringed finger against her cheek. "No fever. Get your butt onstage. It's carnival; the crowd is thick. Once the men get an eyeful of you—that face, such hair, the body—then an earful of your voice, no one will be able to stop themselves from throwing their money into my coffers when you deal poker."

"I might manage to sing, but I doubt I'd make it through an entire night dealing cards, as well."

"You'll do what I say, Betty. Have you forgotten who took you in and made you what you are? Have you forgotten that without me you'd still be singing on that street corner in Baton Rouge, near starved and worse?"

Some days Betty wondered what could be worse than this, but most nights she still dreamed of her time alone in the dark—belly screaming, heart aching, wolves, albeit human, circling.

"I don't know how I could forget, since you remind me every day."

"Excellent." His smile was as warm as his heart. A handsome man, with a trim golden beard that matched his close-cropped hair, R.W. had sky blue eyes, which should have been kind but weren't. He had little in the way of personality unless you counted avarice and selfishness among the traits of a worthy disposition. "I'll see you downstairs in ten minutes."

He left without another glance, slamming the door behind him. R.W. knew Betty would comply. What choice did she have? What choice had she ever had?

Betty dragged herself from the bed. She did have a headache, but not as bad as she made out. Once in a while her life, this place, R.W., became more than she could bear.

Seven nights out of seven Betty sang for her supper—and everything else. She might have been born a poor woman's child whose daddy had left them behind without a second glance, but she'd also been born beautiful. That alone would have been a curse in her world. Beautiful, uneducated, poor women had one option—selling that beauty on the streets or in a house built for such purposes.

However Betty had an additional asset. She could sing, amazingly well. She might not have been able to read until R.W. taught her or speak like a lady until she'd been with him for three years, but there had been music in her heart and soul, and that, combined with her body and her face, had saved her.

Betty set about making her ink black hair appear tousled, as if she'd just stepped from the bed of a lover. It didn't take long. Her hair, her curse, had always been riotously curly and unmanageable. Some nights she wanted to pull the waist-length mass into a proper bun to keep the strands out of her eyes. But R.W. would never allow that.

Her hair hypnotized, he said, and when she pulled it away from her face, she looked too thin, with cheekbones too pronounced, too high. Without her hair as a distraction, her eyes loomed large and black in her pale face, frightening all the customers—or so R.W. insisted.

Though Betty might look foreign, she was anything but. Born in the bayou, like her mother before her, she shared her mama's dark eyes and hair, but Betty's pale skin reflected the ancestry of a father she'd never known.

R.W. had hired people to teach her to move like a courtesan and to speak as a member of the Creole elite. In New Orleans, descendants of the early French and Spanish settlers formed a circle whose wealth was based on planting, banking, and brokering sugar and cotton. Their mystique hovered above the city like a cool mist over a heated summer day.

A Yankee carpetbagger if ever there was one, R.W. had hoped to cash in on the grace and refinement of the upper class. Unfortunately, certain things could not be taught. Betty did her best. She spoke French here and there, and she had always moved as if the music in her heart played to the beat of her feet, but she was a singer who'd come out of the swamp, and there was no changing that no matter how much money R.W. spent.

She finished dressing in the usual tight, low-cut, jewel-toned gown—this one garnet—then applied powder and lip rouge. Twenty-nine years old, she had a few years left but no illusions that R.W. would keep her around once her age began to show. Beauty without the voice would have gotten her nowhere, just as the voice without the beauty would get her to the same place.