Forever And A Day
Mary McBride

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Leslie, again

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Prologue

N ew Mexico Territory—1884

Race Logan had about as much use for trains as he did for bank robbers.Both seemed bent on his ruination. The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe had muscled him out of the freight hauling business some years ago. And now, after he’d turned his hand and his considerable fortune to banking, that new endeavor was threatened by a gang of desperadoes who kept slipping through the bumbling grasp of the territory’s lawmen.

He couldn’t decide which he hated more—railroads or thieves. He guessed it didn’t make much difference anyway since the Bankers’ Association had outvoted him on this harebrained scheme that had him here—three miles from Lamy Switch on the short line between Albuquerque and Santa Fe—waiting for the 3:45 and a damn convict from the Missouri State Penitentiary.

The dun mare beside him lifted her nose from a bramble of snakeweed now and pricked her ears. Only seconds later Race could feel the ground begin to tremble beneath his boots. Right on time, blast its oak-burning heart. He dashed his cigar down and ground it to dust with his heel while he squinted into the distance.

Up till then it had been a clear and bright summer afternoon. But the big black locomotive coming down the line seemed to carry a weather all its own. Bad weather, Race thought as he watched gray smoke swirl from its stack and hover like a storm cloud against the high green backdrop of Glorieta Pass. The massive engine thundered past him while the brakes squealed and shot sparks, slowing the train just enough for a man to leap through a billow of steam and to land like a cat, despite leg irons and wrist cuffs.

The train picked up speed again, spitting enough cinders in its wake to blind a man as well as choke him.

Race Logan muttered a curse as he groped in his vest pocket for the keys they’d forwarded from the prison in Jefferson City. The warden’s accompanying letter had been blunt. He remembered it word for word.

Dear Mr. Logan,

Over my strenuous objections, the governor of Missouri has directed me to transport Mr. Gideon Summerfield to New Mexico Territory and to remand the prisoner into your custody.

In my considered opinion, you and your business associates are making a grave mistake by taking the law into your own hands. In light of your friendship with the governor, however, I wish you well in your endeavor, misguided as I believe it is.

The prisoner will remain shackled during transport. Enclosed please find the appropriate keys, and be advised that once they are used, you will be seeing the last of Gideon Summerfield.

Harmon Sadler, Warden

Missouri State Penitentiary for Men

With that warning in mind and an oath on his lips, Race strode toward the prisoner through the lifting steam, ready to unshackle him, only to discover one loose cuff already dangling from the man’s wrist.

The convict squatted down. “Are you Logan?” His glance cut toward Race briefly before he turned his full attention to the leg irons.

Race barely had time to respond before the man straightened up, jingling loose chains in his left hand as he extended his right in greeting.

“Gideon Summerfield,” he said. Then he cocked his head toward the disappearing caboose. “Figured it was best not to get folks all riled up on the train. Let’s hear your plan, Banker, and then I’ll tell you whether it’ll work or not.”

While Race spoke, the prisoner sifted handfuls of earth between his fingers, his gray gaze following the dust as the wind blew it away. Probably hadn’t felt either—earth or wind—in years, Race thought. Good. The man had eyes like a wolf. Cold. Cautious. Calculating. He was suddenly and oddly glad his only daughter was a thousand miles away, vaguely relieved that by the time she came home from school, this business would be done. He hoped.

“How long?” Race asked him now.

“Couple weeks, I’d guess. Three. Less than that if I’m real lucky. But I’ll bring them in, Banker. You can count on that.” He brushed the dust from his hands and glanced up. “Whose damn fool plan is this, anyway? Yours?”

“The Bankers’ Association,” Race grumbled. “Outvoted me seven to one. We’re not like Texas, Summerfield. We don’t have an outfit like the Texas Rangers. Dwight Samuel and his gang just keep picking our banks clean and then falling through the cracks between the local law agencies.”

“So you got yourselves a thief to catch a thief,” the convict stated in his flat Missouri drawl.

“I guess you could look at it that way.” Race Logan folded his arms and pinned the man with his own icy stare. “We don’t want any unnecessary trouble. No bloodshed. I want that understood from the start. I won’t have any innocent people getting hurt.”

“It’s your party, Banker. You best tell your associates and all those innocents of yours not to get on the dance floor once the band starts to play.”

“Our people all know what to expect. Just stick to the plan, Summerfield. I don’t think I have to remind you that every hope you have for a parole depends on it.”

“Well, then.” A sudden grin slashed across the convict’s taut lips. “You’ll be wanting to hang on to these, Banker.” He gave the leg irons and wrist cuffs a jingle before tossing them to Race. “Just in case.”

Chapter One

Race Logan’s daughter yanked on the heavy bank door as if she meant to tear it off its hinges. Warm noon air gusted into the lobby with her, riffling papers and the top page of the tearaway calendar on the wall. The elderly teller glanced over the rims of his glasses—first at the date, then at the high hands of the regulator clock and finally at the young woman who stood there tugging off her gloves.

He plucked off his spectacles, put them on again and gulped. “Miss Honey!”

“Hello, Kenneth.” By now she had whisked her porkpie hat from her head and was stabbing the pins back into the velveteen confection.

“Aren’t you...shouldn’t you be...?” Kenneth Crane crooked a finger under his tight collar to make room for his Adam’s apple as he swallowed hard and loud. “I thought you were east...at school.”

Honey Logan sniffed in reply, an eloquent proclamation that not only was she no longer east, but she was very much here and intended to remain.

“Y-your father’s not here,” the teller stammered. “Actually no one is supposed to be here this afternoon. Only...only me.” His eyes sought the calendar once more, then jerked to the clock. “You see, Miss Honey, any minute now we’re expecting...we’re going to be...”

“Just go on with whatever you were doing, Kenneth,” Honey snapped as she moved toward the paneled oak door that separated the president’s office from the lobby of the bank. If the fussy old teller tried to stop her, she was prepared to jab him with a hat pin.

“But, Miss Honey...”

She slammed the door on his protest. For a minute Honey leaned against the smooth oak surface, breathing in the familiar fragrance of the dim, cool office, letting it fill her senses. Leather. Her father’s Cuban cigars. The pungent, clean scent of ink. Or was it money? She’d never been entirely sure.

Her gaze lit on the vacant swivel chair behind the massive oak desk. Its tufted leather bore the impression of Race Logan’s wide shoulders. “Daddy, I’m back,” she whispered. “And I’m staying, whether you like it or not.”

She tossed her hat onto the horsehair sofa, then crossed the room and plopped into her father’s chair, kicking it into a spin that ended abruptly when her foot collided with the safe.

Staring at the huge black vault with its embossed faceplate and brass combination lock, Honey remembered the day it had arrived on the back of a mule-drawn wagon. Was it ten years ago? Eleven? It seemed like yesterday, but she couldn’t have been more than nine or ten then. She remembered how the sun had blazed on the gilt letters—Logan Savings and Loan. Most of all, she recalled the way her fingers had itched to turn the big brass dial and the way her heart had swelled with pride to see her name—Logan—in such bold, beautiful letters. So beautiful. So important. So...responsible.

For the past few months she’d been toying with the notion of changing her name, and the sight of the imposing vault convinced her now. She was indeed going to take back the name with which she’d been christened—in memory of her mother’s first husband, Ned Cassidy, who had died the day she was born. It was a name as sober and imposing as the iron safe before her. “Edwina.” She said it softly, savoring the feel of it on her tongue. Just heavy enough. Like oatmeal or one of her mother’s Christmas fruitcakes, neither of which she particularly cared for, but the name had a gravity that was infinitely appealing.

“Honey.” She had Race Logan to thank for that. He couldn’t abide anything that smacked of the Cassidys, back then or now, and when he’d come back from the war to discover he had a daughter who had a Cassidy name, he’d tricked her into naming herself by asking “What’s your name, honey?” She’d given the obvious and parrotlike response and had been Honey Logan ever since. Well, if she’d named herself once, she thought, she could certainly do it again.

She swung the chair full circle and gazed thoughtfully at the desk top. Her father’s distinct, almost stern penmanship covered an assortment of papers there. The little oval tintype of her mother gazed calmly from its place beside the crystal inkwell.

They were going to kill her. For the first time since her abrupt and unannounced departure from Miss Haven’s Academy in St. Louis several days ago, Honey felt her courage wavering. She swallowed in the hope of drowning the butterflies that were beginning to flutter in her stomach. Bankers didn’t suffer from butterflies, she reminded herself. Bankers didn’t succumb to doubt and dread. They were tough and strong. Like her father.

She glanced at the gold lettering on the safe again. Bankers were, above all, responsible. And that was exactly what she intended to be. Unless, of course, her father killed her before she got the chance.

Heaven knew Race Logan was capable of it. And although her father didn’t say much about that aspect of his life, Honey had listened to her Uncle Isaac spin stories over the years about her father’s legendary exploits as a wagon master on the Santa Fe Trail. The moral of most of those stories, however, wasn’t about murder. It was about hard work and responsibility.

Honey had taken those tales to heart. There was nothing she wanted more than to follow Race Logan’s example. But while she craved responsibility, her father merely wanted her to be safe and secure—preferably in his own house, on a high shelf in a glass box whose key rested comfortably in his vest pocket. Having just spent the past two years in a glass box called a finishing school, Honey had decided she was indeed finished—with glass boxes.

But how in the world was she going to convince her father? The mere mention of the word responsibility now was guaranteed to bring a dark scowl to his handsome face and his voice would surely thunder like God Almighty’s when he proclaimed, “Don’t talk to me about responsibility, young lady. Not after you walked out of school the way you did.”

Well, she hadn’t walked out, Honey thought now. Not exactly. It had been more like storming out. She hadn’t wanted to attend Miss Haven’s Academy in the first place, but her father had insisted. Then, after nearly two years of trying to please him by applying herself diligently to the study of music and literature and the domestic arts, Honey had had enough of arias and sonnets and delicate stitchery. She yearned to accomplish more.

Longing to follow in her father’s footsteps, she had at last approached the academy’s directress about her wish to pursue a new and individualized curriculum. But after Miss Euphonia Haven’s palpitations subsided, the woman had sniffed indignantly and had informed Honey in no uncertain terms that the study of higher mathematics and finance was unsuitable for young ladies. So Honey had packed her trunks and taken the first train home. Unsuitable! She’d show them unsuitable!

This was her rightful place. Honey shifted in the big leather chair, aware of the way the back and seat had been molded by her father’s solid frame and how the leather on the arms had been nearly worn away by his sleeves. She was, after all, his eldest child. Didn’t she deserve the opportunity to be his heir? Surely she could convince him.

If not, perhaps her mother could. Tiny Kate Logan had gone toe-to-toe with her strapping husband more than a few times over the years on her daughter’s behalf. Honey smiled wistfully now, remembering the last time her mother had come to her rescue by engaging her father in an all-out bidding war for a supper basket he was determined to keep from any and all of his daughter’s young suitors. Although her mother had won, Honey hadn’t enjoyed the fruits of the supper basket or the victory all that much. The beau in question had turned out to be little more than a fawning fool. The first of many.

On the other hand, her mother might not help. Not long after that bidding war and giving birth to her fifth child, Kate Logan had announced her unconditional withdrawal from the fray.

“I’m tired of being in the middle all the time,” her mother had said. “You look like him, you think like him, and sometimes you’re even more bullheaded. You two Logans can butt heads for a while without me between you. I swear, Honey, you and your daddy have just plain worn me down.” True to her word, Kate had even abstained from the battle over finishing school, leaving Honey to lose it on her own.

But she wasn’t going to lose anymore. She was here, her fanny planted firmly in Race Logan’s big chair, and here she was going to stay.

Holy hellfire! Couldn’t anybody see that she was bright and eager and willing to work hard to prove herself? Didn’t anybody understand that she needed to prove she could be a trustworthy human being?

Apparently not, Honey thought glumly. She was just going to have to show them. And that was why she had come directly to the bank after getting off the train. She planned to be here—in the bank—working—when her father returned from his noon meal. She was going to show him what a valuable asset his daughter was—how diligent she could be—how trustworthy and, dammit, just how responsible.

Yanking open the bottom desk drawer, intending to stow her gloves there, Honey found herself gawking instead.

“What in the world...?” she murmured at the sight of chains and an odd metal contraption, which she lifted, cautiously, by one end. Wrist cuffs! How odd. Now why would her father have a pair of wrist cuffs in his desk drawer?

Curious, she fit the circlet of steel around her wrist and stared at it while a shiver rippled the length of her spine. What a horrible, ugly thing it was. A bracelet for a desperado. Jewelry for a thief.

A sharp rap sounded on the door just then. Honey jerked upright, and the cuff clicked closed.

“Miss Honey,” Kenneth Crane called through the door. “I must speak with you. Now.”

“I’ll be right out.” Honey tugged at the steel bracelet. Damn! All she needed now was for Kenneth to see what a fool thing she’d done. He’d promptly tell her father, and then she’d be lucky if Race Logan didn’t clamp the other half of the wrist cuffs to a doddering old dueña, a chaperon who would never let Honey out of her sight. Or worse, to his own thick wrist.

She tried unsuccessfully to slide the steel over her hand.

“Miss Honey,” the teller called again, rapping once more for emphasis.

“Just one confounded minute, Kenneth.”

Honey could hear his footsteps retreating to his post behind the teller’s window as she glared at the shackle on her right wrist. If looks alone could melt steel, the metal would have dissolved right then. But it didn’t. She was stuck and she knew it. Like a rat in a trap.

As she rose from the swivel chair, the empty cuff clanked against the desk. “Damnation!” she muttered. She’d just have to keep her hand behind her back until she could find somebody with a hacksaw to get her out of this fool thing. Maybe she could bribe her brother, Zack, to... No. Zack could keep a secret about as well as a parrot, and nothing would delight him more than seeing his trouble-prone sister cuffed like a common thief. She’d just have to seek elsewhere for help. In the meantime, though, she was going to carry on with her plan to be right here, hard at work, when her father returned from lunch.

The lobby was still empty, thank heaven, when she sidled up behind Kenneth, her right hand concealed in the pocket of her skirt, her lips forcing a cheerful grin.

“I’ll help you count those greenbacks, Kenneth.”

The elderly teller spun around at the sound of her voice. He threw up his hands helplessly, and suddenly greenbacks were everywhere—sliding off the counter, slithering along the floor, settling under Honey’s skirts.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, she thought. The man was as skittish as a colt in a storm. He had just tossed about a thousand dollars like a handful of confetti, but if her father walked in now, Honey knew very well just who would get the blame.

“Get a grip on yourself, Kenneth,” she snapped, crooking her knees and lowering herself to the floor to gather as much currency as she could one-handed.

The aged teller seemed to melt beside her. “You...you’re not supposed to be here, Miss Honey. Please. Nobody else is supposed to be...”

Boot heels clomped on the opposite side of the counter, followed by the distinct sound of iron clearing leather. And then a deep, whiskey-rich drawl.

“The name’s Summerfield.”

What little color remained in Kenneth Crane’s face drained away. His Adam’s apple somersaulted in his throat as he mumbled something unintelligible, then crumpled into a dead faint on the floor beside Honey’s knees.

* * *

“Gideon Summerfield?” she exclaimed.

Gideon contemplated the pretty face that had bobbed up from behind the counter like a windflower after a warm spring rain. The blue-green eyes that bloomed big and round with surprise. The moist petaled lips that forgot to close completely after speech. The dark tendrils of hair that framed her face, then spilled over her shoulders and couldn’t quite conceal a breathless, ample bosom.

After five years in prison, the sight of a female—pretty or otherwise—windflower or weed—was enough to snap every nerve in his body. And the sight of this particular female jolted him like white-hot lightning. For a dizzying second, he didn’t know where he was...or why.

“The Gideon Summerfield?” The blue-green eyes blinked and the petaled lips quivered.

He wrenched himself from the empty-headed bewilderment. For crissake! If he wasn’t careful, Gideon thought, he’d be on his way back to Jefferson City in leg irons and steel bracelets. No woman in the world was worth that.

“That’s right, sweetheart. And now that you know who, let’s move on to why.” He leaned against the counter, edging the barrel of his pistol between the brass bars. “Hand it over.”

Honey wasn’t sure which terrified her more—the Colt or the deadly, gunmetal gray of the eyes that were narrowed on her face. Gideon Summerfield! If what she had read in the papers was true, this man wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. Frank and Jesse James. Cole Younger. Gideon Summerfield. Dwight Samuel. The names rolled through her mind like a funeral march. They were cold-blooded killers, all.

Her knees were knocking together beneath the counter as Honey raised her hand, still clutching some of the bills she had gathered from the floor. “Here.” She shoved them beneath the brass grille. “Take these.”

The gunmetal gaze dipped to the crumpled banknotes, then swung back to Honey’s face. A tiny grin played at the corners of his mouth as Gideon Summerfield tipped back the brim of his hat with the muzzle of his gun.

“Must be all of twenty dollars there,” he drawled.

That amused expression only chilled her more. “Just...just take it and get out. I won’t scream. I promise. I won’t even tell anyone you were here.”

His grin flashed wider. “Hard to make a living robbing banks at twenty bucks a throw, wouldn’t you say?”

She stood there just staring at him now, her turquoise eyes big and bright with fear, her lips pressed together to still the trembling, her chin tilted that defiant little notch.

Something twisted in Gideon Summerfield’s gut then. What the hell kind of a man was Race Logan to leave a windflower to face this situation alone? The girl was terrified, and rightly so with the cold barrel of a Colt pointed at her young heart. Logan no doubt had figured a defenseless flower would cause the least trouble, provoke the least amount of violence from the jailbird. But, dammit, didn’t the banker have any inkling how frightened this little teller would be? Didn’t he care?

Gideon cursed himself for his own misguided sympathy. What good would it do anyway? Most likely just land him back in a dank five-by-eight cell in Missouri. Hell, the little bank clerk would survive this fine, even wind up with a doozy of a tale to tell her grandchildren one day.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said brusquely. “Let’s just get this over with. Hand over the money.”

“No.”

He stared at her in disbelief, not certain he had heard her right. “This isn’t a Presbyterian social, darlin’. I wasn’t asking you to dance. I said hand over the money.”

Her chin came up another notch. “No.”

“You’re playing this out for all it’s worth, aren’t you, sweetheart?” He thumbed back the hammer of his gun as his eyes narrowed to steely slits. “The money. Now.”

Honey was about to tell him no again when Kenneth Crane rose shakily behind her.

“I—I’ll get it for you,” he stammered.

“Much obliged.” Gideon’s eyes remained on the windflower, whose pretty face had puckered indignantly at the old man’s words. There was as much fire in her eyes now as fear.

“Kenneth, don’t you dare...” she began, then fell silent when the tip of Gideon’s pistol touched her chin.

His words were directed to the teller, who was heading for the paneled oak door of the office, but his gaze skewered Honey. “I appreciate your compliance, mister. I’ll appreciate your speed even more.”

“Kenneth!” Honey wailed.

“Shh. Hush up, sweetheart. It’ll all be over within a minute or two. Nobody’ll blame you for this.”

Honey glared at him. “A lot you know, you... you...”

His lips quirked into another grin and one eyebrow lifted rakishly. “Thief?”

“No-good, degenerate snake!”

Gideon Summerfield laughed out loud. “Plenty of folks would agree with you, darlin’, but none of them would have the vinegar to say it to my face.” Gray eyes skimmed her face, her throat, the lace frills on the bodice of her dress. “Vinegar,” he murmured huskily, “and lace and honey. Sweet, warm honey.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

His gaze jerked up to her face and the remnants of his smile disappeared. “You should be,” he ground out from between clenched teeth, thinking if she had even a glimmer of the fire blazing in him right now this little girl would run screaming from the bank, whether he held a gun on her or not.

“Well, I’m not.” What she feared right now was facing her father’s rage when he discovered his bank had been robbed while his daughter was in it. If she had ever hoped to impress him with her responsibility, this incident would dash those hopes irreparably. He’d never let her even visit the bank again, much less work in it.

Damnation! She wanted to reach across the counter and just choke this desperado for the way he was messing up her plans and her life. Her hands clenched into fists at the thought, and then Honey realized she was still wearing half of the wrist cuffs. The legal half. Jewelry for a thief. Now, if only...

Kenneth Crane came out of the office, lugging a large canvas bag by its leather handles. “Here...here it is,” he said as he shuffled toward Summerfield on the public side of the counter.

Ignoring the gun, Honey scurried around the counter. Then, just as Gideon Summerfield extended his hand for the bag, Honey reached out and clamped the empty cuff around his wrist. At the sound of the click, her eyes blazed victoriously and her mouth settled into a smug line.

“Oh, Lord,” breathed Kenneth Crane, appearing to wither inside his suit.

Honey flicked the teller a disdainful look. She had expected that from the fainthearted wretch. From Gideon Summerfield, on the other hand, she expected curses and a battle royal with fists and fingernails and feet. She stiffened her body in preparation.

He did curse—a soft, almost whispered expletive that seemed more prayer than oath—and then he shook his head just before his free arm circled Honey and he hoisted her onto his hip.

“Put me down,” she shrieked. “Kenneth, for God’s sake, don’t just stand there gawking. Do something.”

“Oh, Lord,” the teller moaned. “I don’t know what to do.”

It was Gideon Summerfield who answered him with a growl. “I’ll tell you what to do, fella. You tell your boss to be a whole lot more careful about who he invites to his parties.”

Then, with the money bag in one hand and a flailing Honey in the other, he walked out the door.

Chapter Two

“Here now. You drink this, Miz Kate. It’ll put them roses back in your cheeks.”

Kate Logan gave Isaac Goodman a weak but grateful smile as she took the proffered glass, then drained it.

“Better?” Isaac raised a grizzled eyebrow, watching her shiver slightly after swallowing the brandy.

She nodded. “What are we going to do, Isaac?” she asked the bear-size former slave, who had been her husband’s partner on the Santa Fe Trail as well as her own dear and trusted friend for so many years. “What in the world are we going to do?”

Kenneth Crane had come and gone from the rambling adobe house just off the plaza. The bank teller—chalk faced and trembling on the verge of tears—had told them of Honey’s return and her unplanned involvement in the planned robbery. But the news that had left Kate pale and weak had had the opposite effect on her husband. Race had exploded. His curses had thundered through the house, and even now the pounding of his footsteps and the sound of slamming drawers and doors shook the oak floors and the thick adobe walls.

“We ain’t going to do anything,” Isaac answered, angling his head toward the hallway in the direction of Race’s resounding curses. “‘Neath all that thunderation, I suspect Horace is working out a plan. He’ll get her back, Miz Kate. You know he will.”

Kate’s hands fluttered in her lap. “I’m so frightened for her, Isaac. She’s out there all alone.”

The black man eased himself into the chair beside hers. He sighed as he reached out his one good arm to pat Kate’s trembling hand. “Well, now, she ain’t exactly alone, is she?”

Kate threw a dark glance at the beamed ceiling. “I almost wish she were. Whatever was that child thinking, leaving school without permission and then clamping herself to an outlaw like Gideon Summerfield?”

“She wasn’t thinking.” Race Logan’s voice reverberated off the thick walls of the parlor as he stomped across the threshold. “Your daughter hasn’t used her head once in her life as far as I can tell. It’s the Cassidy influence on her. Goddamn moon-faced people who couldn’t find their way out of a privy without a map and a torch.”

Isaac Goodman grinned and settled back in his chair. The mere mention of the Cassidy name always guaranteed a good ten minutes of fireworks between Race Logan and his wife. Twenty years ago in Leavenworth, Kansas, a pregnant Kate had married Ned Cassidy in desperation when she believed Race Logan had abandoned her. It never seemed to matter that the sickly, round-faced storekeeper had died before Kate’s child was born or that she’d never loved him anyway. Truth and logic never seemed to count for much when Race got heated up. Nothing could light a fire under him like the name Cassidy. And nothing could light up Miz Kate like Race. Isaac looked at her now—anticipating her fiery reaction. He wasn’t disappointed.

Her green eyes flashed like emeralds. “Your daughter inherited the Cassidy fortune, Race, not the Cassidy blood. It’s your hot blood that runs through her veins and your hard head on her shoulders. If she quit her schooling and clamped herself onto some cutthroat you hired to rob your bank, the Cassidys have nothing to do with it. Honey’s pure Logan.” She paused only long enough to catch her breath. “And just what do you think you’re doing, strapping on that gun?”

Race glared at her, then gave his belt a yank to settle the holster against his thigh. “What does it look like, Kate?” he muttered as he bent to tie the leg strap.

“It looks like you’re leaving me again.” Kate’s voice quivered and tears brimmed in her eyes.

Race straightened up from anchoring his sidearm. For a second his big hands hung helplessly at his sides. “Katie.” His voice was gentle now. “Look at me, love.”

Her lids lifted to find warmth and solace in his lake-colored gaze.

“I won’t be gone long. I promise you.” He bent on one knee and grasped her fidgeting hand, then pressed it to his lips. “Only long enough to find her and bring her back.”

“Don’t go alone,” she pleaded. “Can’t you organize a posse? Since Summerfield is supposed to have robbed the bank...”

Race’s mouth tautened.

“Too many eager guns in a posse,” Isaac said. “Horace’ll do fine by himself, Miz Kate. Besides, there ain’t no stopping him now. Leastways nothing comes to mind.”

“That’s right, partner,” Race said, straightening up and shooting the old man a hard look. “Can I count on you staying put and keeping an eye on Kate and the boys for me?”

Isaac grinned. “I’m getting too old to go traipsing off after you, Horace. But you might want to remember that you ain’t getting any younger neither. You’re carrying about twenty years that convict ain’t even seen yet.”

“He took off with my daughter, Isaac.”

The older man slowly raised an eyebrow. “From what that pale, shaky teller of yours observed, Horace, didn’t sound like the man had much choice.”

Kate rose from her chair and moved close to her husband. Touching his arm, she could feel the tension that hardened his muscular frame. It didn’t matter what Isaac said. Race was done listening. Rage and determination emanated from his body like pure heat, and she knew from experience that the combination made her husband a dangerous man. In twenty years, his hair had silvered some and his face had a few more weather marks, but his temper was still a fearsome thing. Gideon Summerfield, God help him, wouldn’t be the first man Race Logan had killed.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Honey chastised herself for the hundredth time. Dumber than a post. That was what she should have cuffed him to. A post. A rail. Something permanent rather than five and a half feet of portable female. Gideon Summerfield had carried her out of the bank, then had slung her up onto his saddle like a sack of potatoes, swinging himself up behind her and jamming his heels into his big roan gelding. They’d been riding hard ever since. Two hours. Maybe three. Honey wasn’t sure. Her sole certainty was her own damn blasted stupidity. That, and the outlaw’s hot breath on the nape of her neck and his iron grip around her middle.

She had spent the first hour screaming and cursing and railing over her shoulder at him, catching glimpses of the hard set of his mouth and the steely cast in his gray eyes. The outlaw remained silent, soaking up her ravings like a sponge. After that—hoarse, exhausted, expecting at any moment to be yanked from the saddle then flung to the ground and raped—Honey settled into a grim and wary silence as Santa Fe fell farther and farther behind them. Ahead there was nothing but sky and sage-dotted hills.

And it was so damn hot, Honey thought she might melt like a stick of butter. After two years in St. Louis she had forgotten just how fiercely a June sun could blaze in the territory. It wasn’t helping any, either, having a man’s chest—as hard and hot as a stovetop—rubbing against her shoulder blades and his breath like the blast of a furnace on her neck.

“Stupid,” she hissed, this time out loud.

Gideon Summerfield’s hand twitched on her rib cage. His other hand pulled back on the reins. “Yup,” he said as he slid to the ground, jerking her right hand along with his.

All of Honey’s senses sharpened in self-defense. “Stop it. What do you think you’re doing?” she squealed as he hauled her down from the tall horse.

“Answering nature’s call.” He began walking toward a low-growing juniper, towing Honey along at arm’s length.

“You’re not,” she said. “I mean, you...you can’t.”

Gideon Summerfield continued toward the bush. “Lady, I can and I am.”

“But we’re...I’m...there’s no privacy,” she wailed.

He halted. “You should have thought of that before you decided to be my Siamese twin, sweetheart.” Saying that, Gideon Summerfield reached to unbutton his fly.

Honey twisted her head in the opposite direction, closed her eyes and her ears as well. She had been prepared to deal with rape, with a violent assault on her person. But not this. It was an assault on sheer decency. Mortified, her face burning, she began babbling.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid. What was I thinking? That you’d just hand back the money and accompany me to the sheriff’s office? What a dolt. What a fool. I’d have been better off if you’d just shot me. Left me for dead on the damn bank floor. Or cut my arm off and left me for the buzzards ten miles back. I’d have been better off—”

“Are you done?” he drawled.

Honey blinked. “Oh! Are you?”

He buttoned his pants. “Your turn, sweetheart.”

“I should think not,” she said with a sniff.

“Suit yourself.” He started back toward the horse with Honey stumbling in his wake.

But this time it was Honey who halted, digging her heels into the dry ground, resisting the pull on her wrist. “I demand to know where you’re taking me, Mr. Summerfield. Where, and what your intentions are.”

Gideon gritted his teeth. His intentions, for chrissake! For the past couple hours his intentions had been at war with his baser instincts as he held this lush package of female in his arms, as he breathed in the sweet, clean scent of her hair and made himself dizzy contemplating the delicate shape of her ear and the pale, smooth curve of her neck. He looked into the blue-green defiance of her eyes. Then he reeled her in by flexing his arm.

Honey collided with the toes of his boots, the solid wall of his chest. “Don’t,” she snapped, trying to twist away.

“Don’t what?” Gideon’s lips just brushed the crown of her head. “Don’t breathe in your woman scent? Don’t touch you? What?” He slid his fingers into the wealth of her hair, then clenched a fistful of the dark silk, pulling back, tilting her face to meet his. “Don’t kiss you?”

Honey stiffened beneath his gaze. “Don’t act like a brute, Mr. Summerfield.”

His eyes roved slowly over her face—saw the spark of fear in her eyes, the hectic color on her cheeks, the defiant twist of her sensuous mouth. This brute, he thought, hadn’t touched another human being in five years except to give or receive punches, except to clap his hand on the hard shoulder of a convict in front of him to shuffle down a corridor in lockstep. He’d felt the cold stone floor of his cell, the icy metal of his cage, the sting of leather, the clout of wood. And this brute was dazed now, dizzy with the touch and smell and sight of sweet flesh and moist lips. He didn’t want to possess her so much as blanket himself in the softness of her, lose himself in the womanliness and purity of her, warm himself in her essential fire.

They were in the middle of nowhere with only scrub and dust, a weary horse and a hot blind sun for witnesses. She was his for the taking. And Gideon Summerfield, brute, hard and hot and wanting her, let her go.

His teeth were clenched so hard he could barely form the words. “Don’t worry, bright eyes. You’re not my type.” It wasn’t so far from the truth, after all. The women in his life had been whores for the most part, professional or not so professional. There had been a lady or two along the way, more curious than amorous, more interested in bedding a notorious thief than making love to a man. Not like this lady, though. Young as she was, her quality ran deep. More quality than he could handle at the moment.

When he eased his hand from her hair, Honey straightened up and smoothed the folds of her skirt, keeping her head down to hide the hot flush that had spread like wildfire over her cheeks. “I should hope not,” she snapped. “And I’d like an answer to my question. About where we’re going. And when you plan to let me go.”

The sooner the better, she thought. For one heart-stopping moment, she had thought he was going to kiss her. But then he didn’t, and rather than relief, Honey had felt a vague and bewildering disappointment. She didn’t want this desperado to kiss her. Most assuredly she didn’t.

She raised her chin and gave him the most scathing look she could muster. “When do you plan to let me go?”

His mouth hooked into a lazy grin and he lifted their joined wrists. “Let you go? Hell, I thought I was your prisoner, bright eyes.”

“That isn’t very funny, Mr. Summerfield.”

“Gideon,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

He shrugged. “Look. Why not call me by my Christian name as long as we’re going to be cuffed together for a while.” He slanted a meaningful glance toward their wrists. “And you might as well tell me your name while we’re at it. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense keeping up such niceties when we’re going to have to be answering nature’s—”

“Edwina,” she said sharply, cutting him off.

An odd smile touched his lips. “Doesn’t suit you.”

“Neither do you, Mr. Summerfield.”

He hung his head in mock surrender, and as he did a lock of hair fell across his forehead. For the first time, Honey noticed its rich color. Nutmeg? No. More like cinnamon. It looked warm and spicy where it curled over the collar of his shirt. There were glints of gold wherever the sun touched it.

“Edwina,” he murmured now, making the name sound antique, if not downright crotchety. “You got a better last name?”

Still contemplating his hair, Honey was about to reply with the truth, but suddenly and thankfully refrained. If he knew she was the daughter of the owner of Logan Savings and Loan, there was no telling what this desperado would do. Even if he did have spice-colored hair and such an engaging, lopsided little grin. “Cassidy,” she said.

He lifted a finely shaped hand to touch the brim of his hat. It was a gesture Honey found most men performed awkwardly, like gawky little boys. But this outlaw managed it with the ease and grace of a man who had spent his past few years in a palace rather than a prison.

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Edwina Cassidy. We’d best get on our way now.” He slid his gaze toward the shrubs. “You sure you don’t have to...”

“I’m quite sure, Mr. Summer—”

“Gideon,” he corrected as he swept her up into his arms and carried her toward the grazing horse.

After he settled behind her, Honey angled her head over her shoulder. “You never did tell me where we were headed, Mr...um, Gideon.”

He slid an arm around her waist, fanning his fingers out on her midriff. “Didn’t I?” He urged the big horse forward with a nudge of his heels, then added with a deep-throated chuckle, “Fancy that.”

* * *

“We need a room.” Gideon’s voice was a low rumble as he approached the desk clerk. Miss Edwina Cassidy slept soundly in his arms while he attempted to keep his own right hand as well as hers hidden in the folds of her skirts.

The gangly young clerk eyed him blandly, suppressing a yawn. “You and the missus?”

“That’s right.”

The boy let out a knowing little snort, coupled with a wink. Since the small hotel on the main street of Cerrillos was the front half of a dance hall, Gideon suspected the kid had seen women taken up to rooms every which way—awake, asleep, alive or dead drunk.

“That’ll be four dollars, in advance,” the boy told him now.

Gideon shifted the little bank clerk’s deadweight so he could dig into his pocket. “Here’s five,” he said, flipping a gold coin onto the counter. “Make sure we get some hot water and clean towels.”

“Yeah. Sure thing.” The boy pushed a brass key toward him. “Up those stairs and down the hall on the right,” he said, angling his head in that direction.

“Dance hall stay open all night?” Gideon asked him.

The boy looked at the sleeping female, shifted his gaze back to Gideon’s face, then winked again. “All night. All morning. All the liquor you can tuck away. All the women you can—”

Gideon cut him off. “You want me to sign a register or something?”

“Dad-blast, I almost forgot.” The boy dipped a bent-tipped pen in an inkwell and passed it, dribbling, across the stained counter. “Just scribble anything,” he mumbled. “It don’t matter.”

Slowly, with his left hand while balancing his sleeping cuff-mate on one hip, Gideon printed his name, then turned the book so the boy could read it. “How’s that?”

“Yeah. Sure.” The boy’s bored, half-open eyes skimmed the page, then widened and bulged. “Its fine, Mr. Summerfield.” His throat crackled as he attempted to swallow. “It’s just fine, sir. I’ll be sure and get those clean towels for you. Hot water, too. Anything else I can do for you, sir?”

“Nope. Towels and water will do fine. Much obliged.” Gideon shifted the soft burden in his arms, then headed up the stairs, all the while feeling the boy’s amazed gaze on his back. Five years in prison, he thought, hadn’t dimmed his reputation all that much. Good thing, too. He was going to need every bit of it to accomplish what he had to do.

The room was small and spare and no doubt flyspecked, but to Gideon’s eyes anything with four walls and a bed was sheer heaven compared to iron bars and a wooden pallet. He closed the door with his foot, then lowered the sleeping woman onto the mattress.

She didn’t wake, but Gideon hadn’t expected her to. The ride from Santa Fe had been long and hard. Twelve hours in the saddle under a relentless sun. He’d offered her his hat, but she had refused with a proud stiffening of her shoulders and a cluck of her tongue that told him pretty clearly where she thought he could put his hat. She had ignored him for the most part, staring ahead, stewing, fretting, plotting Lord only knew what as her teeth worried her lower lip.

By moonrise, though, she hadn’t been able to fight exhaustion anymore, and her proud chin had dipped wearily onto the high-buttoned bodice of her dress. Gideon had tucked her head onto his shoulder and pressed his cheek to the soft fall of her hair, easing back on the reins and slowing the big roan to a lullaby walk. He wasn’t in such a hurry for cold revenge that he couldn’t savor the warmth of Miss Edwina Cassidy for a quiet little while.

He sat beside her now, watching as the light from a three-quarter moon glossed the dark tangle of her hair. With his free hand, he reached to smooth it away from her sunburned face, thinking maybe he could scare up some vinegar to take some of the sting out of that delicate skin. Lord knew his own was smarting from the harsh New Mexico sun.

Sighing, he reached in the pocket of his shirt and withdrew a quill toothpick. While his mouth twitched in a grin, it took him all of a minute to jimmy the lock on his half of the cuffs. It took him a tad longer, though, to wrestle the limp lady out of her rumpled dress.

“Stupid,” he muttered softly as he felt the dampness of her underskirts. Damn stubborn female would have let her insides explode rather than lose her confounded dignity. Only total exhaustion and sleep had finally relieved her.

With a gruff curse, Gideon proceeded to strip her of the wet underthings. He swore again when he discovered she wore a combination. Corsets and drawers came off easy, but these damn one-piece garments were hell on a man in a hurry, or one with a decent purpose and trembling fingers such as his were now while they worked the buttons down the front then slipped the soft cotton from her shoulders.

Moonlight silvered the pale skin beneath his fingertips and gleamed in the deep valley between her lovely breasts. Their crests bloomed like roses in a night garden. As he beheld her, Gideon realized he wasn’t breathing. His mouth had gone dry as sand, and his hands had clenched into tight fists as his leaden, shuttered gaze failed to respond to his wish to turn away. His lips moved soundlessly, once again damning the banker for planting this innocent flower in his path. It was more than a sane man could stand.

Almost more. Gideon stood up and stared at the wall as he whisked the garment from her hips and legs and tossed it into the sodden pile beside the bed. He folded her gently into the bed linens then and raised her arm to clamp his half of the cuff onto the iron bedpost.

“Sleep tight, Miss Edwina Cassidy,” he murmured. He gathered up her clothes and walked softly out of the room.

* * *

The string band stuttered in the middle of its tune when Gideon pushed through the batwing doors into the dance hall. He felt the keen appraisal of every eye in the smoky room, and he heard the telling shift in the rhythm of everyone’s breathing, the way voices stilled a second, then softly rose again as he crossed to the bar.

A perverse pride welled in the back of his throat, and his gut tugged a little as he thought of so many other rooms he had entered with his cousins—with Jesse and Frank and Dwight. The young desk clerk had done his job just right. The word had been spread. The name of Gideon Summerfield had gotten around. And its magic was still there. But it wasn’t magic, as Gideon well knew. It was fear that was rippling through the room. It was the rush from the wings of the angel of death.

“Name your poison, Summerfield,” the bearded bartender said.

Gideon leaned an elbow on the carved sweep of walnut and lifted a boot onto the rail. “Rye, if you’ve got it, otherwise anything’ll do.”

As the barman turned to retrieve a glass from the wall behind him, Gideon surveyed the dimly lit room. A dozen men. A sprinkle of whores, including the one who was sashaying toward him now.

“You’re a hell of a long way from Clay County,” she purred, fitting her hip against his, slipping her fingers between the buttons of his shirt.

“You, too, darlin’, judging from the sound of you.” Gideon immediately recognized the flat border state drawl. He tried to ignore her inquisitive little hand as it traced over his belly. He tried and failed to ignore the tightening in his groin.

“Born and bred in Liberty,” she said. “How ‘bout you?”

“Colton.”

“Never heard of it.”

Gideon’s mouth twitched. “It wasn’t much, even before the Yankees burned it. I’m looking for somebody from home. Maybe you can help me.”

“Maybe.” She slipped a button on his midriff to allow her hand freer, warmer access.

Gideon reached back for the glass on the bar top, tilted his head and downed the liquor in a single swallow. He tapped the empty glass on the counter, raising an eyebrow to signal a refill. “And one for the lady,” he drawled, returning his gaze to the painted, fine-handed redhead.

“Who’re you looking for, honey?” she asked him, angling her blue-lidded eyes up to his. “Other than me, of course.”

“My wife,” he said in a low, level tone.

The redhead blinked. “Word is you’ve got one of those upstairs right now.”

Word, thought Gideon, traveled fast. Good. “I’m looking for my first wife. The one who walked out on me.” He narrowed his gaze on the whore’s curious face. “With Dwight Samuel. You know him?”

Her expression seemed to melt. Only two bright dabs of rouge remained to color her suddenly pallid face. Her red mouth opened, hung slack for a moment, then snapped closed.

Gideon sipped his drink. That was answer enough for him, he thought. “Dwight get to Cerrillos often, does he?”

She eased her hand from his shirt and took a small step back. “I don’t know nothin’. I don’t want to know nothin’.”

He caught her wrist in an iron grip. “Tell him I’m looking for him.” His lips sliced into a grin. “Do that for me, sugar, will you? Tell my cousin I’m looking to join up with him again.”

Chapter Three

Honey woke slowly. Like a lazy fish, a languid swimmer rising to the surface of warm, dark water. At first she thought she was back at school in St. Louis, but then she remembered her long train ride back to New Mexico. This wasn’t her room, though. She wasn’t home. Where in the world...? Then her mind broke through the murky barriers to reality.

“Oh, Lord!” She moved to sit up, but steel clinked on iron, and the metal cuff bit into her wrist. “Hell and damnation,” she muttered.

Unable to sit up, she lay there, taking bleak inventory of her situation. The last thing she remembered was staring ahead at the rough, moonlit contours of the hills, trying to ignore the dull ache in her bladder, trying desperately to stay awake. Obviously, she thought now, she hadn’t. The ache was gone, and she shuddered to even think about that. She shuddered, too, at the feel of the scratchy linens against her skin.

Gideon Summerfield had left her—naked as a jaybird—cuffed to the bedpost. The idea of that desperado taking off her clothes was enough to set her blood boiling, but even worse at the moment was the thought that he had escaped with the bank’s money.

Lifting her head, Honey searched the moonlit room, then breathed a small sigh of relief when she saw the canvas sack leaning against the washstand. Thank heavens. If the money was still here, she still had a fighting chance to get it back for the bank. But her sense of relief was fleeting. If the money was still here, then so was Gideon Summerfield. And she was hooked to the bed like a fish on a line. A naked fish at that.

Jerking on the steel cuff did nothing but hurt her already bruised wrist. With her free hand, Honey tossed the covers off, then clambered up on her knees. If that damn bandit had opened his half of the cuffs, then surely there was a way...

A key scraped and turned in the lock on the door. Honey dived beneath the covers just as light from the hall wedged into the room. She held her breath while the door clicked closed and the bolt shot home.

Her wildly pounding heart was crowding the breath from her lungs now. She made a fist of her free hand beneath the covers. If he so much as touched her, she thought, she’d claw his eyes out. She’d rip his flesh with her teeth. She’d...

The sound of water splashing into the washbasin sidetracked her panicky thoughts. Then came the soft rustle of fabric, followed by more splashing. Honey opened one eye and peeked over the covers.

The moon seemed to sculpt his broad, wet shoulders and cast in dark pewter the cords of his neck. Silvered water streaked down his ropy arms. He shook his head, sending quick beads of diamond water into the air. As he started to turn, Honey caught a glimpse of the hard-carved muscles on his chest before she squeezed her eyes closed again. She didn’t dare let him know she was awake. No telling what he might do. Worse, she’d die of shame if he knew she’d been watching him with such outright curiosity.

She swallowed, then gritted her teeth, hoping he hadn’t heard the dry contraction of her throat, which had sounded loud as a thunderclap to her.

She heard the clink of his belt buckle, the pull of leather against cloth, and the dull thud of his heavy holster settling against the bedpost. The mattress dipped under his weight then, and Honey held her breath. She lay so still she could feel her heart crashing against her ribs.

Gideon exhaled wearily as he pulled off his boots and let them drop on the floor. The sponge bath hadn’t done much to clean up his mood, but it beat being hosed off with icy water once a week. He hated being dirty almost as much as he hated being locked in a cage. What he wanted, he thought, was a hot bath in a big copper tub where he could sink to his chin, breathe in the rising steam, close his eyes and let every muscle and nerve relax.

A bed was the next best thing. Although sharing it with the little bank teller wasn’t his idea of the perfect way to relax. Maybe he should have spent an hour or two with one of the girls downstairs, he thought now, just to take the edge off. But it hadn’t seemed worth it at the time. Their dull eyes dispelled the promises of their warm hands.

Anyway, right now sleep was nearly as compelling as loving. Good God, he was tired. Sighing roughly, he eased back on the mattress and closed his eyes.

“Don’t you come one inch closer or I’ll scream. I swear I will.”

Eyes still closed, Gideon grinned. “No, you wouldn’t.”

“Just try it and see.”

He levered up on one elbow, gazing down at her stubborn little mouth, the moonfire burning in her eyes. “Is that an invitation, Miss Cassidy?”

Her eyes widened fearfully, but her voice stayed level and brave. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“You’re right,” he growled as he lowered himself back onto the mattress. “Go to sleep, bright eyes. You’re safe.”

Honey rattled the chain hooked to the iron bedstead. “You don’t expect me to sleep like this, do you?” she hissed.

“Hush.”

She rattled the chain once more, and kept up the racket until Gideon rose with a muted curse. Five years in prison had made him remember only the fair part of the fair sex; he’d clean forgotten how irritating they could be without half trying. And this one was trying. He retrieved the quill pick from his shirt pocket, jimmied the lock, then clamped the steel bracelet over his left wrist and clicked it closed. “Happy now?”

“Thrilled,” she muttered.

“Good.” Gideon dug his shoulders deep into the mattress. “Close your eyes, Ed. It’ll be morning all too soon.”

She was quiet a moment, listening to the cadence of his breathing. “What are you planning to do?”

“Sleep.”

“I mean tomorrow.” She raised both hands in a gesture of frustration, tugging his arm up along with hers.

Gideon wrenched back his hand. “I’m planning to be dead on my feet tomorrow if I don’t get ten minutes of shut-eye. Now hush.”

Honey was quiet another moment, until she couldn’t keep still or stand the suspense any longer. “Where are my clothes?”

His silence was nearly palpable, like the quiet before a storm, like fire working its way along a fuse. Honey expected an explosion, but instead she felt the muscles of his arm relax and heard him release his breath in a long sigh.

“They’re being washed,” he answered quietly.

“Oh.” She was sorry she had asked. She was mortified, and grateful for the dark to hide the color staining her cheeks. Her voice, so strident before, quavered now. “You...you must think—”

“I think,” he said, cutting her off, “that you’re as stubborn as a weed. Now go to sleep, will you? Or at least just keep that pretty little mouth of yours closed.”

But she couldn’t sleep. Honey lay there for a long time, wide-awake, listening to the sound of Gideon Summerfield’s deep and even breathing. She shifted slightly onto her side to watch the rise and fall of his muscular chest, to study the soft hair that thinned as it neared his belt line, to feel the warmth that radiated from his arm where it touched hers.

A week ago, under the watchful eye of Miss Haven and her staff, Honey wasn’t permitted to promenade with beaux or to have tea alone with a gentleman caller. Now here she was—naked as the day she was born—sharing a bed with a notorious outlaw. The preposterousness of the situation brought a wild little giggle to the back of her throat when she probably ought to have been screaming for help.

But she wasn’t afraid of Gideon Summerfield, even when reason told her she should be. The man had had ample opportunity to do whatever he pleased with her, and the fact of the matter was that he had conducted himself as a gentleman. She remembered the moment on the trail this afternoon when she had thought that he was going to kiss her. But he hadn’t, and there had been that surprising little quiver of disappointment inside her, like air being let out of a balloon.

Honey tilted her head now, the better to peruse his profile in the moonlight. He wasn’t bad looking. In fact, Gideon Summerfield was decidedly handsome. There was strength in his face—from the firm line of his jaw to the deep slashes that parenthesized his mouth to the slight hook of a nose that had undoubtedly been broken once or even twice. But, strong as they were, his features possessed a certain vulnerability now that he was sleeping, now that those gunmetal gray eyes were closed.

His hand twitched. His closed lids fluttered. Honey wondered what sort of dreams a desperado had. Was he planning more robberies? Figuring out how to spend his ill-gotten gains? Somewhere, deep in his sleep, was he lining up innocent bank tellers like tin ducks in an arcade, taking aim and shooting them one by one? Was he...?

His hand twitched again, jingling the chain that linked them, and then—slowly, warmly—his big hand slid over hers and closed. Honey’s heart shifted perilously and her breath snagged within her chest. From beneath her lashes, she watched as his lips parted in a soft, almost desolate moan. Perhaps, she thought, it wasn’t a dream at all inside his head, but a nightmare. Perhaps it was Gideon Summerfield who was the target....

He rolled to his left, casting a heavy arm across her, bringing his face just inches from her own. “Cora,” he murmured in a voice thick with sleep and need. “Hold me. I’m so cold. So goddamn cold.”

Without even thinking, only responding to the husky plea, Honey slipped her free arm around him. Slowly she spread open her hand, over smooth skin, over sleek muscle. She smiled softly. Some desperado, she thought, adjusting her vision to study the face so close to hers.

His breath mingled with hers. Soap. A hint of whiskey. The pure male fragrance she recalled from snuggling in her father’s arms and burying her face in his neck. Aside from him, she’d never really been this close to a man before, even though she’d had more than her share of beaux. It seemed they were always in someone’s shadow, though, or under someone’s watchful eye. When they kissed her—and few had ever dared—it was always brief, fleeting, tentative.

Her eyes focused on Gideon Summerfield’s lips, wondering what they would feel like against her own. Even in sleep, there was a hardness to his mouth. Could such a hard mouth kiss softly? Honey wondered. She moved closer. Then closer still, until her lips felt the warm flutter of his breath.

A deep groan issued from him, and before Honey could shift away his mouth had claimed hers with a warm urgency that sent tremors through her. His lips were softer than she’d have dreamed as they covered hers. His tongue was warm and gentle as it explored, then delved. She moaned helplessly as waves of pleasure surged through her, as new feelings were born in her along with strange and bewildering urges.

It was Gideon who broke the kiss, sighing, shouldering more deeply into the mattress. “Hush, darlin’. Hush, Cora,” he murmured against her wet mouth. “Sleep now.” His hand slid beneath the covers to settle firmly and protectively over Honey’s breast. “Sleep.”

Sleep! She couldn’t breathe. Her entire body was thrumming and her mind was snapping like a telegraph wire whose messages were positively scandalous. What was she doing in bed with a bank robber and enjoying it? Honey closed her eyes and clamped her lips together, shocked at her behavior, stunned and surprisingly warm beneath Gideon Summerfield’s big, gentle hand. But sleep? She might never do that again, she thought. And who in the world was this Cora?

* * *

When she woke, the room was golden and warm with sunshine. The light of day revealed a tawdriness in the room she hadn’t been aware of the night before. Above her head, the ceiling was cracked and peeling. The wallpaper was patterned with stains and poorly rendered roses, all of them stuck to the wall at a queasy tilt. There was a scuffed wooden dresser with a missing drawer, a cracked mirror and a chipped pitcher and bowl. It was the worst-looking room Honey had ever been in. And to think last night, lying in the outlaw’s arms in this bleak iron bed, it had all seemed quite elegant.

The outlaw, she realized dully, was gone. The handcuffs were gone, too. And so was the canvas money bag from Logan Savings and Loan. Honey groaned. Then, after casting a woeful look down at her exposed bosom, she groaned again. What was she supposed to do now?

And what was that red-and-black satin concoction draped over the foot of the bed. He didn’t expect her to wear that, did he? She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. Well, all in all, she supposed, it was better than wearing handcuffs and a sheet.

After she had gritted her teeth and pulled it on, the dress turned out to be nearly a perfect fit, even if it did leave little to the imagination in the vicinity of her chest. Honey glared in the mirror over the dresser, tugging at the rigid stays in the bodice, then watching the weight of her breasts drag the satin fabric down once more. Good Lord, she’d be glad when she got her own civilized clothes back. She’d be even gladder when she got her father’s money back, which was what she was aiming to do.

There was a hairbrush beside the pitcher. She scowled at it viciously enough to kill any critters that might be lurking in its bristles, then dragged it through her dark, tangled locks. After a sigh at her less-than-fetching reflection in the mirror, Honey stalked to the door.

She pulled it open and walked smack into an enormous plaid shirtfront.

“Well, now, ain’t we in an all-fired hurry to find another man.” The rough voice assailed her ears as the breath that carried it assaulted her senses.

Honey pushed both hands hard against the greasy flannel. “Get out of my way.”

“Hold on there, sis. You don’t have to go all the way downstairs looking for your next poke. I’m right here. And right ready, too.” Saying that, the huge man grabbed Honey’s wrist and plastered her hand, palm side down, against the front of his trousers.

A little squeak of shock broke from her throat, and then Honey Logan did the only thing she could manage to think of in the name of decency and in the way of self-defense. She squeezed—hard.

“Lemme go, you she-devil,” the giant howled. He raised his hand to strike her.

“You do that and you’re a dead man.”

Coming from the stairwell, Gideon’s voice was low and lethal, the devil’s own. At that moment, though, to Honey it sounded better than any choir of angels.

The big man twisted his head toward the warning. “What’s this little bitch to you?” he grunted, his arm still poised to loose a powerful blow.

“She’s my wife.”

The arm came down, and now the giant’s voice was closer to a sob than a howl. “Well, hell, fella, your wife’s got my...”

“Let him go, Edwina,” Gideon commanded.

It was only then that Honey realized her hand was still clamped like a vise on her assailant’s private parts. She wrenched it away immediately, allowing the man to retreat at an awkward lope down the hallway, nodding curtly to Gideon as he passed.

Honey crossed her arms and sagged back against the wall, closing her eyes briefly, trying to absorb the liquid shaking that had begun in her knees. Gideon covered the distance between them in two long strides.

“You’re going to get one of us killed if you’re not careful, bright eyes,” he admonished her in the same lethal tone he had used a moment ago.

Honey’s eyes flashed open. She was prepared to burn him alive with a look of hot and righteous indignation, but when she saw the glint of cool amusement in Gideon Summerfield’s eyes she felt a sudden and uncontrollable urge to giggle. She clapped her hand over her mouth, trying to stifle it.

Gideon grinned, briefly. Then his gray eyes clouded. “Lucky for you I just happened along.”

Suppressing the remnants of her laughter, she raised her chin into his somber face. Whatever she had intended to say escaped her momentarily as she caught a whiff of shaving soap and spied the tiny nick beneath his ear. He’d had a shave and a haircut, too. Yesterday’s shaggy cinnamon locks barely brushed his collar now.

The sight set off a swirl of butterflies in her stomach. But when she noted that that collar was attached to a clean and apparently brand-new shirt, Honey squelched the confounded fluttering inside her. New clothes cost money, and she had a pretty good idea where it had come from.

“Thank you for rescuing me, but it really wasn’t necessary, I assure you.”

“I could see that, Ed,” he drawled, shifting his hips lazily and leaning a shoulder into the wall. His mouth slanted into the smallest of grins. “You had the, um, situation pretty well in hand by the time I came along.”

The color that suffused her cheeks forced her to avert her eyes. Where she’d be right now if Gideon Summerfield hadn’t come along just when he had, Honey didn’t even want to consider. But then again, he didn’t have to treat her like a helpless, witless child either.

“What have you done with my money?” she snapped, going on the offense.

“Your money?”

She glared up into his face. “I suppose you think it’s yours now that you’ve stolen it from decent, law-abiding, hardworking people.”

He chuckled softly. “Possession is nine points of the law, bright eyes.”

“And what about me, Mr. Summerfield? Do you believe that you possess me as well?”

His slate gaze skimmed her face, then lowered to the black lace edge of her skimpy bodice. “Nope. I just think you need a little looking out for, at least as long as you’re filling out that dress the way you are.”

She tugged up on the red-and-black satin. To no avail, she realized. “Well, don’t look, dammit.”

“Hard not to.”

The sudden and unbidden thought that this man had undressed her made Honey’s heart begin a brisk, panicky tattoo. Had those dark pewter eyes caressed her then as they were now? And—the thought shocked her—had they liked what they had seen?

“Are you hungry?” he asked her.

“What?” For all the images skittering through her brain just then, Honey barely heard him and could only vaguely comprehend his meaning.

“Come on.” He nudged himself away from the wall, towered over her a moment, then curled his fingers around her upper arm. “Let’s get some food in you and then we’ll see about getting you back to Santa Fe.”

Honey pulled away. “With or without my money?” she demanded hotly.

“Without. You’ll be lucky to get back there with your virtue, let alone your life.”

“I’m not leaving without my money.” Honey crossed her arms and widened her stance.

“Fine with me, lady.” Gideon threw up his hands. “When you find it, you let me know. I’ll be down the street eating breakfast at the café.” He turned on his heel, stalked down the hallway and left her standing there.

“Fine,” she called after him, shaking a fist for emphasis, even though he couldn’t see it. “I hope you choke.”

She was going to get that money back if it was the last thing she ever did. She’d hand that canvas sack to her father, proving once and for all, beyond the shadow of a doubt, just how capable and responsible she was. He’d be so grateful as a consequence he’d probably trade in his desk for an enormous partner’s desk, then install her in a big leather chair right across from his. She smiled wistfully at the prospect.

Beneath her crossed arms, Honey’s traitorous stomach churned and growled. She’d find that canvas sack if she had to turn the hotel and the whole town upside down. In the meantime, though, steak and eggs and steaming coffee was beginning to sound like a king’s ransom. Starving to death wasn’t going to accomplish anything anyway, she thought.

She gave another quick upward tug to the red-and-black bodice of her dress and trotted down the stairs in Gideon Summerfield’s wake. She’d find the money—right after breakfast.

Chapter Four

The big plate glass window in the café was thick with grit, inside and out, but still Gideon could see across the street where the lady in the skimpy red-and-black dress was facing off against a young prospector. The boy looked to be about seventeen, thin as grass, and just about as green. Gideon didn’t see a need to intervene—yet.

He sipped from his mug of coffee as he continued to gaze out the window. Lord, she was a beauty. The morning sun blazed like wildfire through her deep mahogany hair. Her skin—plenty of which was showing—was smooth as cream. Her legs—and plenty of those showed, too—were long and slim. From this distance he couldn’t see the color of her eyes, but he figured they must be burning like blue flames, judging from the cowed stance of the young prospector. The poor kid looked as if he was about to use his shovel to dig himself a hidey-hole right there on the planked sidewalk.

Gideon felt his mouth slide into a crooked grin. Edwina. The grin got a little more lopsided. Ed. A hell of a woman, he thought. One of these days that little bank teller was going to make some man’s life pure heaven—and sheer, unadulterated hell—on earth.

He’d had a brief taste of her heaven this morning, waking as he did with his hand curved over her lush, sleep-warm breast. He was surprised he hadn’t awakened her the way he had wrenched his hand away, then bolted from the bed feeling like a kid caught raiding the candy jar. Not candy, Gideon thought now. There was no candy that had ever filled his hand the way her firm flesh did. More like sweet, ripe, sun-warmed fruit. Like late summer apples. And just as dangerous in their allurement, for this was no Garden of Eden and he had already fallen farther than Adam had ever dreamed.

His grin hardened into a scowl. He was going to fall even farther, too, as soon as he located Dwight Samuel. The plan, as the banker Logan had outlined it, was to lure his cousin and former partner into a doomed bank robbery. The reward for that betrayal was supposed to be Gideon’s parole. But Gideon had other plans, and the only reward he sought was revenge. After that, it didn’t make much difference what happened. He planned to cross the border into Mexico with enough money to see him through however many days remained in his sorry life.

Now through the dirty window he watched the little bank teller tossing her proud head, slashing the young prospector with the sharp tilt of her chin, dashing the boy’s hopes for good as she sashayed away from him toward the café. Gideon held her in his gaze while his breath changed rhythm, his heart suddenly pressed hurtfully against his ribs, and the rest of him grew heavy and hot with desire. There was no denying that he wanted her. And there was also no denying that there was no room for Miss Edwina Cassidy in his plans.

She shot through the café door and strode to his table, standing there, haughty and a little breathless, glorious in her ire, a lady demanding her due. Well, not from him, he thought. He was glad she was riled because that anger would serve her as a weapon now. It would help see her through. Because he couldn’t. He tamped down on his natural inclination to rise to seat her, and instead slid his foot to shove out a chair.

“Have a seat,” he said almost gruffly.

She sat, her spine stiff as a rod, her legs tucked primly to the side, her slim ankles crossed.

“Want some coffee?” he asked, taking a sip of his own, foolishly believing the hot liquid would somehow douse the hotter flames rising inside him.

Honey bit her lower lip. She was dying for coffee, but Gideon Summerfield always made her feel so contrary she almost told him no. “Yes. Please.”

He signaled the lumpish Mexican cook, who seemed loath to leave his griddle to approach their table.

“Coffee for the lady,” Gideon told him. He angled his head toward the sizzling griddle. “And we’ll each have a plate of whatever it is you’re fixing back there.”

“Huevos,” the cook said.

“Whatever,” Gideon replied. Then, after the cook had turned and shuffled away, he looked at Honey. “Do you speak Spanish?” he asked almost sheepishly. “What the hell did I just order?”

“Rattlesnake,” she snapped. “I hope you like it.”

He swallowed, hard, and drummed his fingers on the table. “Yeah. Oh, sure. How’s it fixed?”

“With onions usually. Or sourweed. Sometimes they mix in frogs’ eggs.” She shrugged. “It depends on the cook.”

Honey had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from giggling as she watched the outlaw wince and cast a quick, suspicious glance toward the kitchen at the back of the café.

“Pretty tasty, is it?” he asked. “You eat it often?”

Honey fashioned her sweetest smile. “Oh, my, yes. It’s considered quite a delicacy, even out here where rattlesnakes are so prevalent.”

The cook brought Honey’s coffee. “Algo más?” he asked Gideon, whose brow was furrowed now and whose voice cracked just slightly when he replied, “Huevos, huh?”

The Mexican smiled and bobbed his head affably. “Sí, señ or. Huevos.”

Gideon nodded and, with a soft sigh, lowered his worried gaze to the tabletop.

“No más, gracias,” Honey told the cook. When the man left, she sipped her coffee. Between sips, she smiled sunnily at her nervous breakfast companion.

Good, she thought. She didn’t mind making him uncomfortable one little bit. It pleased her enormously to watch Gideon Summerfield sweat. The man had been much too cool and controlled behind those ice gray eyes. He deserved a little spoofing, in Honey’s estimation. Then, quite suddenly, she remembered the night before, when he had turned to her in his sleep, pleading for warmth. So cold. So goddamn cold.

“Who’s Cora?” she asked him now.

His gaze shot up from the stained oilcloth that covered the table. “What?”

Honey managed a casual tone. “I asked you who Cora is.” She’d never seen such a surprised or bewildered expression on anyone’s face, which piqued her curiosity to the extreme. The man could barely put two words together when he tried to speak.

“What...? How do you...”

She sipped her coffee again, then shrugged indifferently as she set the cup back on the table. “It’s just that you mentioned her name in your sleep last night. I was merely wondering who she was.”

A muscle worked furiously in Gideon’s cheek and his teeth seemed clenched so tight, Honey despaired that he would even get a word out.

But he did.

Two words. A harsh, hard-bitten phrase.

“My wife.”

And now it was her turn to feel bewildered. Stunned, actually. His answer had struck her like a blow and sent her thoughts reeling. Why the fact that this man had a wife should have any impact at all on her feelings was a mystery to her. Honey drew in a sharp little breath. “Oh.”

He just sat there then, silent as a stone, staring out the window.

“Where...where is she? Cora. Mrs. Summerfield, I mean,” Honey inquired, her voice lower now, bereft of its former sunny lilt. “I don’t believe you’ve ever mentioned where you’re from.”

“Missouri.”

“Ah.”

Her comment met with a blank wall of silence, but Honey was determined to claw her way over it.

“Then she’s back there? In Missouri?” It wasn’t all that easy, she decided, posing questions to a stone. “Whereabouts? I know something of the state because my fath—” She broke off in the middle of the word, reminding herself that Gideon Summerfield wasn’t the only one at the table who had secrets. She had one or two of her own.

“I have some relatives—distant ones—who used to live in Westport. Near Kansas. On the border, isn’t it?”

He offered no comment, but nodded slightly, leading Honey to presume he had at least heard her. “Gideon,” she persisted, “I asked you where...”

“I don’t know,” he snarled, his steel gaze at last leaving the window and finding her face.

Her eyes widened. “You don’t know where your wife is?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I don’t understand that at all. It would seem to me...”

He raised a hand to silence her. “Look. She took off after I went to prison. End of marriage. End of story.”

Not by a long shot, Honey said to herself. “So you’re still married, then. Legally, I mean.”

“What difference does that make?”

Honey sat a little straighter. “It doesn’t. I’m just curious.” It wasn’t a total lie. She was curious—intensely so. But she still didn’t know why it did indeed make a difference whether or not Gideon Summerfield was married.

“Well, don’t be,” he said just as the cook put a plate of scrambled eggs and fried peppers on the table in front of him.

“Huevos, señor,” the Mexican announced proudly.

Gideon glared at the plate, then extended the dark look to Honey. “Rattlesnake,” he muttered, shaking his head.

One corner of her mouth lifted in a grin. “I said I spoke Spanish. I didn’t say I spoke it well.” She picked up her fork and proceeded to taste the delectable, familiar food.

Gideon devoted his complete attention to his breakfast. Honey enjoyed their companionable silence until her appetite was satisfied. Her curiosity, however, remained ravenous.

“How long ago?” she asked, slanting her fork across her empty plate.

“How long ago what?”

“When you went to...you know...” Why, she wondered, was it so difficult for her to say the word? She already knew he was a criminal, for heaven’s sake. She’d met him at a bank robbery, hadn’t she?

Gideon put his fork down now like a man who’d just lost his appetite. “Prison,” he said. “That’s English, bright eyes. Not your blasted, misconstrued Spanish.”

“Prison.” She repeated it if only to prove that she could. The word, however, seemed to stick in her throat.

“Five years ago,” he added as he pulled the quill pick from his shirt pocket and settled it in the corner of his mouth.

“Why?”

“I got caught,” he answered bluntly. “Why else?”

“Robbing a bank?”

Gideon eased back in his chair, tipping it onto the two back legs. “More or less,” he replied, then worked the quill to the center of his lips, preventing further conversation.

He hadn’t been robbing the bank, he thought bleakly. Not that time anyway. For a year and for the first time in his life, he’d been on the right side of the law. He’d married Cora, more out of high hope than hot affection. He’d taken up tenant farming with something like a vengeance, planting oats and corn and wheat till his hands were blistered and his back nearly broken. When he wasn’t being a farmer, he was being a carpenter and a bricklayer, fixing up that down-and-out tenant property till it looked like a real home. All the while, he’d bowed and scraped to the local authorities till his forehead was nearly rubbed raw. Trying. Trying for once to do right.

Hell, he’d been living so clean he practically squeaked, when his cousin, Dwight Samuel, had shown up one afternoon at his little hardscrabble farm just east of Sugar Creek. Dwight had called it quits with Jesse and Frank, forming his own ragged gang of cutthroats and thieves. The trouble was he couldn’t trust a single one of them, and he needed a man to watch his back.

A fool was what Dwight had needed, Gideon thought now, and a fool was just what he’d found. Dwight had played on his sympathy. His cousin had played him like some kind of fiddle, to the tune of old times, past crimes committed in the name of the Confederate States of America and William Clarke Quantrill, old loyalties and long-lingering hates.

“Family,” Dwight had said finally. “I helped raise you, Gid. You owe me.”

A dubious debt, Gideon had thought. His cousins had raised him to ride fast, shoot straight and steal. Still, they had taken him in when there was no one else to look out for him. And dubious or not, it was a debt.

He remembered Dwight laughing as they rode into Liberty the following day. “Hell,” his cousin had said, “this bank’s been robbed so many times, I expect they’ll just hand over the money right quick and breathe a sigh of relief to see us ride out.”

But they hadn’t. The bank had been robbed so many times they were bound and determined not to let it happen again. The tellers had been armed. Half the town had been on the alert. Gideon had been holding the horses outside when Dwight had come flying empty-handed out the door, gunsmoke billowing at his back.

“They’re all dead. Shot down like dogs,” he’d yelled. “Let’s get.”

Dwight had leapt on his horse, grabbing the reins from Gideon just as hot metal had torn through Gideon’s thigh, and then a bullet in the shoulder had pitched him into the dirt of the street.

“They get you?” his cousin had yelled down at him.

Gideon only remembered raising a bloody hand. “Pull me up. I can ride.”

Dwight’s horse’s hooves had danced perilously close to Gideon’s head as the robber had peered down at him. “Hell. You’re dead, too. Sorry, cousin,” he’d said, then slashed his heels into the horse and was gone.

A feminine voice cut through Gideon’s reverie now. He looked at the woman across the table, almost surprised to find her there, startled to discover himself alive and breathing.

“Which was it?” she asked him now, her eyes brilliant with curiosity. “More or less?”

“More,” he said, thinking it had been more than he’d ever bargained for. Enough to land him in the state penitentiary when he recovered from his wounds.

Her head tilted fetchingly. She raised a hopeful eyebrow. “It wasn’t a case of mistaken identity or anything like that, was it?”

Gideon laughed in spite of himself. She was so young, so unspoiled. He appreciated her innocence and her willingness to believe in his, even though he wasn’t worthy of it. “I was guilty, Ed,” he said.

Her optimistic expression slackened a moment, hope withering in the harsh glare of fact. “Oh,” she said.

He grinned. “Disappointed?”

She shook her head vehemently.

“Yes, you are,” he said with a sigh. “You’re like most females. You want to make a man better than he is. Change his past to suit your own sweet notions. If you can’t change his past, then you set out to change his future.” He slanted back in his chair and crossed his arms, eyeing her with amusement.

But she didn’t appear to be amused, either by his views on the opposite sex or by his evasions. “Is that what Cora tried to do?” she snapped.

A bitter laugh broke from Gideon’s throat. “Hardly. Cora had enough trouble with her own past to waste her time worrying about mine.”

“Did she rob banks, too?”

“She was a whore.” The words came out more harshly than he intended, causing the little bank teller to flinch and drag in her lower lip. Gideon leaned forward. “Forget about Cora, will you? She took off five years ago, and I haven’t given her a second’s thought since then.”

“Yes, you have.” Her voice was quiet and firm. “You turned to her for warmth and for comfort last night in your sleep.”

He probably had, Gideon thought mournfully. But he wasn’t going to admit it to this little girl just to satisfy her overblown female curiosity. “What I turned to,” he growled, “was a woman in my bed. Any woman.”

“You spoke her name,” she insisted. “You said—”

Gideon shoved back his chair. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what I said. All right? Will you just stop?” He stood up and dug some bills out of his pocket, then tossed them on the table. “Come on.”

Honey rose slowly to her feet, shoulders stiff, chin tilted. “Where are we going?”

“To catch the ten o’clock train.” Gideon slung his arm around her and propelled her out of the café before she could respond.

The tracks ran north and south at the edge of the little town, and by the time Gideon had pushed, pulled and bullied Honey in that direction, the locomotive was already getting up a thundering head of steam. He clamped his hands around her waist and lifted her onto the platform of the last car, then vaulted up behind her.

Honey, who had been muttering under her breath all the way from the café, shook the red-and-black flounces of her short skirt now. “I can’t ride on a train dressed like this. What’ll people think?”

The look that Gideon gave her was a clear indication of what he was thinking. His lips were poised somewhere between a smile and a leer. His gray eyes sparked over her bodice as he stepped closer to her, forcing Honey to edge backward until her shoulders were pressed against the rear door of the train. Honey felt like a spring lamb in the grim shadow of a famished wolf. When she opened her mouth to protest his nearness, she could only squeak.

“They’ll think you’re beautiful, bright eyes,” Gideon said. He lowered his head to kiss her, doing what he had wanted to do from the first minute he’d laid eyes on her in the bank, allowing himself this taste of heaven now, knowing this was all he would ever have of her. And while his mouth claimed hers, Gideon slid his arms around her and worked his fingers into the red satin sash at the back of her waist.

Stunned by the warm assault, Honey’s first instinct was to push him away, but when her hands made contact with the hard press of his chest, when his heartbeat surged against her open palm, when he breathed, “Kiss me back, darlin’” against her rigid lips, she was lost. Almost against her will, she found herself relaxing in his embrace. And, as if they had a will of their own, her lips parted in invitation to his warm, seeking tongue.

Dizzy now, and trembling down to her toes, Honey dimly realized she wasn’t breathing. When she wrenched her mouth away to take in a great gasp of air, Gideon didn’t release her. And he didn’t stop kissing her, only now those kisses were burning across her cheeks, along her jawline and down the length of her neck. When his lips brushed over the exposed swell of her breasts and his tongue blazed a sizzling trail in the crevice between them, Honey sucked in another gulp of air.

Gideon moaned softly against her wet mouth. “Ah, Ed. Lord, honey, I wish...” He drew in a breath, filling his lungs with the sweet scent of her, while reminding himself that wishes were useless things for a man like him. If wishes were wings, the jails would be empty and the sky would darken with convicts.

He raised his head, studying her dazed expression, reveling in the flush of color his kiss had brought to her pretty face. He couldn’t imagine ever wanting a woman more than he wanted this one, now, this minute. “I wish...” he began, then fell silent at the choked sound of his own voice.

Her huge, luminous eyes glowed with a strange mixture of desire and curiosity and fear. Her lips glistened from his kiss. “What?” she whispered. Her sweet breath riffled against his cheek. “What do you wish, Gideon?”

He merely shook his head with his arms still around her, their gazes locked.

Honey could feel his hands moving along the back of her dress, tugging at the sash. For a moment she thought he was going to undress her, and to her own bewildered amazement, she found herself yielding to those hands, to the will of this man who seemed to paralyze her own will while he drugged her senses.

There was a deafening rumble then, followed by the long ear-splitting blast of a steam whistle. The train jolted forward. And Honey was jolted to her senses.

“Stop that,” she snapped. She stiffened in his embrace. “Get away from me.”

Gideon stepped back. He eased his arms from around her, widening his stance and locking his knees to absorb the swaying motion of the train as it began to slowly pick up speed. He smiled down at her now, then bent for one last taste of her lips.

“It would have been a little bit of heaven, Edwina Cassidy. You and me.” He sighed, and then his face hardened. “Well, hell. You take care of yourself now. So long, bright eyes.”

He gave a brief glance to the ground that was beginning to blur beneath the moving train, then took another step away from her and launched himself over the metal rail of the platform.

Wide-eyed, too stunned to react, Honey saw him land on bent knees between the rails, then watched as he straightened up, grinned devilishly and blew her a kiss.

“Gideon,” she yelled. He was leaving her! The thought hit her like a lightning bolt. And like the inevitable thunderclap came the realization that he was getting away with the money.

Like hell he was, Honey thought. If he could jump from a moving train and land like a damn cat, then so could she. But when she took a step toward the railing, something promptly jerked her back.

Honey reached both hands frantically behind her for a moment, then shook her fists toward the outlaw’s receding form.

“Damn you, Gideon Summerfield, you no-good, lying, snake-tongued thief!” she screamed.

The whole time the desperado had been kissing her senseless, he had also been tying her sash to the rear door of the train.

Chapter Five

Gideon paused in the lobby of the hotel, his eyes lingering on the batwing doors of the saloon at the back. It was early afternoon, but already he could hear the chink of bottles against glasses, the slap of cards, the rough harmony of male curses and throaty female laughter. The tightness in his gut pulled in another notch. Too easy, he thought. It would be too easy to push through the doors, down the liquor to put out the fire that was burning in him, take a woman upstairs to douse the other flames.

He wished...

Forget it!

With a brittle curse, he headed for the stairs, took them two at a time, then slammed the door of his room behind him. Before him there, on the bed, all prim and pressed, were the little bank teller’s clothes. The dress was laid out—its skirt fluffed out and the sleeves set primly at each side—as if waiting for Edwina Cassidy to take shape inside. He focused on the pristine white lace of the dainty underclothes carefully folded there, ready to be lifted and fleshed out. Gideon’s mouth went dry.

His eyes slanted to the mirror. “You’re one sorry case,” he told his gaunt, dusty reflection. Pretty sad when the mere sight of feminine smallclothes bashed a man’s heart against his ribs and dried his tongue like so much jerky. But it wasn’t the clothes, and he knew it. It was the woman who had worn them. The little windflower who had gotten in his way, thanks to the banker’s indifference.

But Edwina Cassidy was gone. Gideon grinned in spite of his sullen mood as he pictured her shaking her fists at him from the back of the speeding train. She’d have jumped. He had known that instinctively. That was why he’d hitched her to the door with a succession of half-knots and slipknots that would take her a good ten minutes to undo. He hoped. Hell, his fingers had been shaking so bad while he was kissing her it was a wonder he hadn’t tied himself up right along with her.

He sighed. By now she was probably hunkered down in a seat, still mad as hell. He could almost see her, staring out the window, gnawing on her lip, attempting to conceal her lush bosom while she tried to figure out what to do next about the stolen money. But once she got back to Santa Fe and once she discovered nobody at the bank held her accountable for the loss, the tiny teller would calm down and go about her business as if nothing had ever happened.

Probably in a week she wouldn’t even remember him. Some young storekeeper or cowhand would walk into the Logan Savings and Loan to make a deposit, take one look at the little teller’s sea-colored eyes and hand his damn heart right over the counter along with his money. Probably in a month or two...

A sudden rapping on the door obliterated his thoughts. Gideon’s hand rested on the butt of his gun as he called, “Yeah? Who is it?”

“Angie.”

He opened the door in response to the feminine voice, then leaned against the frame, looking down at the redheaded whore from Missouri. From home. It flashed through his mind that here stood a kind of answer to his needs, and he wondered why it suddenly seemed to matter that she wasn’t the right answer. When he finally spoke, his voice was as taut and barbed as wire. “What do you want?”

The whore’s mouth twitched in quick disappointment, then smoothed out to resume its customary, half amused, half bored expression. “There was a man downstairs asking after the girl,” she said. “Just thought you’d want to know.”

Angie shrugged then and turned to go, but Gideon’s hand flashed out to catch her arm.

“Who?” he growled.

“Said his name was Logan. That’s all I know. Said he was looking for a girl, about twenty, about my height.” She lowered her voice. “He mentioned your name.”

“What did you tell him?”

She glanced at her arm, where his fingers were compressing her pale flesh. Gideon followed the direction of her gaze. He released her, cursing under his breath as he saw the crimson imprint that would soon turn black-and-blue. He closed his eyes briefly. “Sorry,” he said through clenched teeth.

“Hey. Don’t worry about it, Missouri.” Angie gave her head a little toss. “I’ve been treated worse.”

Ashamed because he had bruised her, unaccustomed to apologizing, Gideon simply stared at her. The whore’s mouth tilted into a small, fleeting grin.

“A lot worse,” she added. “And don’t worry none about Logan. He was looking for her, not you. I heard you’d put the girl on the northbound train, so that’s what I told him. He was out of here so fast it like to made my head spin. Seems to set great store by the girl.”

That was obvious, Gideon thought. It was obvious, too, that the banker had much more than an employer’s interest in his little teller if he had followed her all the way here.

Well, hell, what natural man wouldn’t? If Miss Edwina Cassidy worked for him, Gideon would open the bank early and toil late just to keep her in his sights. Why should Race Logan be any different? Still, it didn’t make any sense when the man had allowed her to face a hard-bitten bank robber all alone.

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