Wildfire in His Arms (13 page)

That thought infuriated Degan, but it was nothing compared to what he felt when Allison entered the stable. She shouldn't be there in Helena. He'd come West to make sure they never crossed paths again. More memories came flooding back. Think of Max, he told himself. Max, murderer or not, was a breath of fresh air compared to his past. And where the hell would she hide while she waited for him to stop looking for her?

“You just walk away without a single word to me?” Allison said incredulously. “
Really
, Degan?”

He did it again, walked away from her and the memories. He needed to search Luella's brothel. It was the obvious place Max would go to hide—maybe a little too obvious. He didn't expect to find her there but he still had to check.

“Degan, don't you dare!”

He swung around as he reached the stable door. “I don't know what you're doing here and I don't care. Go home, Allison.”

“I'm here for you.”

“Then you've wasted your time.”

“We were friends before we were lovers. And I'm still your fiancée.”

“The hell you are.”

“You can't still be holding that one night against me. After all these years that I've waited for you to come home?”

“Waited faithfully for me? Is that going to be your next lie?”

“I searched for you! I hired countless detectives. All they brought back were silly rumors that you had become a pistoleer of sorts and were in the habit of killing men. Utterly absurd. I can't tell you how many of them I fired for such incompetence.”

“That's not what it's called out here.”

“I honestly don't care what you want to call it. None of us believed it, of course. Well, your brother did. Flint thought it was funny, ironic actually, that you might have taken to wearing a gun when you always hated them. He insisted that confirmed that you were never coming back. But I didn't believe it.”

She sounded far too triumphant now. “I'll bite. How did you actually end up here?”

“A friend told me that I was probably going about my search the wrong way. He pointed me to the Pinkers Agency, er, Pinkerers.”

“Pinkerton?”

“Yes, those people. And they have men all over the country apparently. The nice man who helped me simply spent a few days sending off telegrams to his associates. Within a week he informed me I could find you in the small town of Nashart in this rustic territory. But by the time I arrived in Nashart, I learned you'd already—”

“Is that who sent me a telegram to arrange a meeting for tomorrow? One of your Pinkertons?”

“Yes, but that was only to delay you from leaving this town before I arrived, and I wasn't at all sure I would. It was such a grueling trip. But the Callahans told me that you intended to continue westward in this direction, so I took the chance that I could catch up to you. And here we are.”

That was the last time Degan would ever share his intentions with anyone, friend or not. “I've already said it, Allison, but I guess I need to repeat it. You've wasted your time in coming here.”

“But I found you!” she exclaimed. “And not just for me. You
have
to come home before there's no home for you to come back to. Flint is—”

He cut in harshly, “I don't want to hear it. I don't care about anything that happens back there. When I cut those ties it was for good.”

She looked appalled. “You can't mean that.”

“I do.”

Degan saw her gaze moving over him, stopping at his gun belt. “You've—changed.”

“You haven't.”

“You
used
to listen to reason.”

“I used to do a lot of things, be a lot of things, a dutiful son, a loving brother—a devoted fiancé. But you took all that away from me, didn't you?”

“You didn't have to leave!”

“Didn't I? Would you like to know what would have happened if I'd stayed?”

He slowly walked toward her and put his hands on her shoulders. She immediately wrapped her arms around him and raised her face, obviously thinking he meant to kiss her. He shoved her back. Whatever he might have done, saner thoughts prevailed and he simply walked away.

A shot was fired as he reached the stable doors, a bullet hitting the wall next to him, too close to be a stray. His gun in hand, he took in the scene outside as people scattered for cover. An ambush in broad daylight? That sounded like something Jacob Reed would do, and Reed had been searching for him for several years now. The man was so bent on revenge for the death of his brother at Degan's hands that he was willing to die for it.

Allison had heard the shot, too, and rushed to his side. Degan grabbed her shoulder and pushed her behind the wall. “Get down before you get shot.”

“What about you? This place is so horrible! This wouldn't happen in Chicago, where you
should
be.”

He ignored her and continued to look for the shooter. The rooftops across the way appeared empty but had places to hide. Quite a few open windows across the street, too, especially in the hotel. But the shooter could be anywhere. Or it could just have been a misfire, an accident that no one was laying claim to out of embarrassment. He stepped out of the stable to test that theory, ready for any movement, but there was none. If someone was trying to kill him, he must not be willing to try it when Degan was prepared for it. And he'd wasted enough time when he needed to find Max.

Allison was smart enough not to follow this time. But that didn't mean he could get her out of his mind. He was still beyond surprised to see her in Helena. Why had she, a socialite from one of Chicago's richest families, come all this way to find him? He shouldn't have let her say so much, or maybe he should have controlled his temper and let her say more. What did she mean that he had to go home before there was no home to go back to? Was Flint ruining the family because he didn't know how to handle money? Did that mean Degan's father had died? If that was Allison's news, he wasn't going to let her see whether it affected him. He wasn't sure it would. When he'd left home, he'd expected never to see his family again, or to hear from them. He hadn't cared what happened to them. He hadn't just cut the ties, he'd thrown away the damn ropes.

Before going to Max's favorite brothel, he detoured to send a telegram to an old acquaintance in Chicago.

John's badge came in handy at the brothel, forestalling any protests the madam might have made about her establishment's being searched. It took him a couple of hours because he was thorough. He went through every room, looking under every bed, inside every chest, cupboard, and wardrobe, startling a few customers and many of the women, who were in various stages of undress or were busy getting dressed. But he had been right. Max was too smart to return to the first place he would look for her. So where the hell was she hiding?

Before he started checking the saloons, cafés, and back alleys, he went back to the telegraph office, where he picked up a reply to his telegram. Neither his father nor his brother had died, and both were occupied in the same manner they'd been five years ago. Whatever Allison Montgomery was up to, it pertained solely to her and not his family, or at least it didn't concern his family in any way that mattered to him.

Degan spent the rest of the day searching for Max. His frustration grew steadily because no one had seen her run out of the hotel; no one had seen her going into a saloon or a store or darting into an alley. How was that possible? He stopped showing her wanted poster when two unsavory types overheard him talking with the owner of a stable five blocks away from the one Degan was using. The men thanked him for the tip that Max Dawson might be nearby because they sure could put $1,000 to good use. He didn't like the idea of anyone else capturing Max. She was his prisoner.

When he returned to the hotel that night, he didn't run into Allison, but he saw her guard dogs sitting in the lobby watching him. She was traveling with two of them, big and armed. He didn't give her another dark thought.

The next morning, Degan was up early to search the other side of town. No one he spoke to had seen Max Dawson, but every one of them seemed excited that an outlaw with such a high bounty on his head had been spotted in town and assured him they'd start looking for Max Dawson, too. By early afternoon, Degan rode out to the closest gold camp to question the miners. And got the same answer: no one had seen hide or hair of Max Dawson. He even rode out to the shack, thinking she might have gotten someone to give her a ride out there. But the place was empty.

Back at the hotel, Allison's guard dogs were still planted in the lobby. The clerk at the front desk handed him a note, but he ripped it up when he saw that it was from Allison. As he ate dinner in his room, he concluded that Max had somehow managed to get out of town fast. She was resourceful enough to have managed it without her horse. He hated to admit it, but he was disappointed. He might not have decided yet what to do with her, but he'd begun to enjoy her company. She tried to be so boyish, but when she'd traded gold dust for soft soap, she'd been all woman.

She didn't have an artful bone in her body, preferred brazen boldness instead. Her first attempt at seduction had been laughable, even though he had been tempted. There were no two ways about it—he was attracted to her. Her gruff bravado and lightning-quick temper that she didn't seem to know how to control were amusing. She was tempestuous—and adorable. Oh, she was more than that. She'd cleaned up far too beautiful for his peace of mind, so he should be glad that he hadn't been able to find her. And yet he wasn't.

He took out John's satchel and started flipping through the wanted posters. He was done wasting his time in Helena. He had to start making some progress on paying back that favor.

He checked out of the hotel early and collected his horse. He stared at Max's chestnut gelding for a long minute. He almost decided to take it with him. But she'd succeeded in eluding him. She'd bested him fair and square. He wasn't going to strand her here just to be ornery—if she was still here. He left her coat there, too, with her saddle. She went to extremes to hide who she was under that garment. He understood that. He'd done the same thing, just with a gun instead.

He had a sack of food from the hotel, enough to last several days, but he needed one more thing before he left town, a bottle of whiskey. He wasn't used to tracking or going off the beaten path, but searching for Kid Cade might require a night or two of camping out. And while the days had been getting uncomfortably hot, the nights could still get chilly, and a dram or two of whiskey could ward off the cold. So he headed straight for the one saloon he knew would be open in the morning, Big Al's.

Before he entered the saloon, he glanced back at the brothel across the street. The windows were all open but the building was quiet, the girls probably sleeping late. Two men stumbled out the door, apparently having spent the night there. They crossed the street to the saloon instead of heading home and appeared to be having a friendly argument.

Degan ignored them and went inside to pay for his bottle, but he paused on the way back out when he heard the men arguing over who was going to have Chicago Joe's new girl first. He turned to one of the men and asked, “When did the new girl show up?”

“Two days ago, mister. There's already a long waiting line for her, and we're at the head of it.”

“Have you seen her?”

“No one has yet, but the madam says she's the prettiest little blond whore ever to set foot in Montana.”

Degan left the saloon, put his whiskey away, and led his horse across the street. Madam Joe was in the parlor. He wondered if the woman ever slept. She was sitting on a sofa with a cup of coffee in her hand, flanked by two of her girls in their morning attire, which was merely their skimpy underwear barely covered by their open robes.

Joe smiled at him. One of her girls did, too, eyeing him from head to toe. Degan knew that familiarity usually calmed people's nerves, and he'd been to the brothel three times now because of Max—without killing anyone. So the women no longer saw him as quite as big a threat. They also seemed to view him as a lawman now.

“I'm beginning to think you like us, Deputy Marshal,” the madam purred. “Pleasure this time, or more business?”

“That depends.”

“On?”

“Whether your new girl is wanted by the law or just by your customers.”

Joe laughed and winked at him. “That sweet thing is as innocent as they come. If she's guilty of anything, it's being too pretty.”

“I'll have her for the day.”

“She's not ready yet. She's still in training.”

“Then I'll teach her a few things. I'm not inclined to wait.”

The madam frowned slightly as if she were about to argue, but changed her mind and shrugged, nodding toward the stairs. “Suit yourself. Second door on the right. But don't complain if you aren't satisfied.”