An Unlikely Lady Read online

  Despite his impatience, Honesty couldn’t bring herself to hurry. A heaviness invaded her limbs and her heart, and it was hard to find the energy to face another day that would no doubt end in disappointment.

  As Honesty rolled off her woolen pallet, she had to face the fact that she might never find Deuce’s hiding place. They were running out of stars on the map. What would happen if she didn’t find the stones?

  Fighting discouragement, she donned her ankle-high shoes and rolled up her bedding, then joined Jesse by the horses. “Jesse, tell me about them,” she said, strapping her bedroll behind the saddle.

  “Who?”

  “The people who hired you.” The question had been haunting her since she’d first learned of the little girls’ abduction. What her parents must have gone through, the grief they must have suffered . . . “What are they like?”

  “I wouldn’t know; I never met them. My orders were to find McGuire.”

  “But you must know something.” She stepped into his cupped hands and let him boost her into the saddle. “Their names, where they’re from, if they have other children.”

  “Hoping I’ll feed your story?”

  “If it’s my family, I deserve to know something about them.”

  “If it’s your family, I’ll tell you what I know.”

  Well, there was her answer. If she couldn’t prove her identity, she could look forward to spending the next ten years behind bars. Jesse would see to that.

  The rain had left shimmering rainbows in the grass as she and Jesse set out across the rolling land. She blanked her mind of everything save the motion of her mare, unable to find the strength to deal with Jesse’s bitter anger or the discouragement of trying to find a legacy that might or might not have been left by a man who might or might not have been her father. That numb, mindless state got her through the morning and part of the afternoon.

  Then a strange tingling crept up the base of her neck, drawing Honesty’s head up to the undulating land before her.

  Ho-ne-sty . . .

  Was it the echo of a dream?

  Or the shadow of a memory?

  Honesty’s heartbeat slowly quickened as, in her mind, she saw herself as a very young girl, traveling across the grasslands with a much younger Deuce. “It’s here,” she whispered, reining in her horse. “Jesse, this is it—the place of the flowing stones; I know it is.”

  “Here? There’s nothing but trees.”

  “This is it. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.”

  Kicked into action by the knowledge that filled her, Honesty swung herself out of the saddle and gazed at the terrain. Mile upon mile of grassland spread before her, with patches of live-oak woods here and there, and litters of rock. Her mind flashed back to an image of herself running across the grass, laughing so hard as her father chased her that she stumbled and landed in a pile of petticoats. But when she picked herself up and looked over her shoulder, Deuce was nowhere to be seen. There was just an echo of her name, coming from the ground.

  Her heart picked up a faster rate; her skin tingled from her toes to her fingertips. “He fell. I remember thinking the ground ate him.”

  Jesse scanned the ground. “Honesty, we could spend days searching this area.”

  “Then we’ll spend days searching the area. Jesse, I’m telling you, this is the place. There’s a hole in the ground—I think it’s near some rocks, but I can’t be sure . . .”

  “A hole like this?”

  She spun around. Jesse was hunkered near a weather-eroded ravine banked by craggy red stone. Honesty hastened to his side and braced her hand against his shoulder. A spark shot up her arm at the contact and Jesse stilled, as if he’d felt it, too. “What’s down there?” she asked, her breath catching.

  “It’s too dark. I can’t see a damn thing.” He rose quickly, refusing to meet her eyes. “Fetch me one of your petticoats and I’ll fetch the tinderbox.”

  Elation rushed through her bloodstream as she hurried to her packs, whether from Jesse’s discovery of the hole or her own discovery that he wasn’t as immune to her as he wanted to believe, she didn’t know. Perhaps a combination of both.

  They met at the opening. Jesse soon fashioned a torch using one of her petticoats torn into strips and a green oak limb he’d broken off a tree. “It looks like some sort of underground cavern,” he said, poking the lighted torch into the hole.

  Honesty bent over his shoulder, trying to see past him.

  The salty maleness of his skin assailed her senses, and for a moment she forgot why she stood so close. She shook her head to clear it. “How far down do you think it goes?”

  Jesse stared at her in awe. “If you think I’m letting you go in there, you’re out of your mind. There’s no telling what’s down there.”

  “My future is down there, and if you think you can stop me, you’re out of your mind.” She’d spent the last four months searching for this place, and nothing or no one, not even Jesse, would stop her.

  Her respect for him soared when after several moments, he grudgingly conceded with a short nod. “Then I’ll go first. It doesn’t look like too much of a drop, but appearances can be deceiving.”

  She granted him that favor. Still, the minutes dragged by after he fetched a rope from his horse, then lowered himself feet first through the opening, then disappeared. She heard a thud, then a curse.

  Finally, his voice echoed up from below. “Hand me the torch, then come straight down. It’s a bit of a drop, but I’ll catch you.”

  After tossing the torch down to him, Honesty gathered her skirts in one hand and back-stepped into the hole. Her courage almost deserted her when she found herself dangling from the mouth of the hole by her fingertips.

  “Just drop, Honesty. I’m right here to catch you.”

  And she understood, as she released her grip, just what it meant to take a leap of faith.

  She landed hard against his chest, and for the second time in as many minutes, the contact with him had her light-headed and giddy.

  Then he set her on her feet and stepped away, his expression almost guilty as he picked up the torch.

  Honesty glanced away, wanting to ask him if her touch was so abhorrent, but the sight that met her eyes stole conscious thought from her mind. It looked as if a thousand giant fingers speckled with diamonds dripped from the ceiling. The torchlight caught every single one and turned them into sprays of glittering jewels. “Oh, my gosh,” she breathed. “Oh, my gosh! Have you ever seen anything so beautiful in your life?”

  Not until the moment he looked at Honesty’s face. The majesty of the underground caverns faded in comparison to the splendor of her expression—one of such bliss that he wished he could capture it on canvas. The closest he’d come to ever seeing her so alive, so uninhibited, was in the throes of lovemaking. Knowing the danger of that line of thought, Jesse pressed his mouth into a tight line and scanned the cave with the torch. Several chambers branched off the main area where they stood. Before he could decide which tunnel to start exploring, Honesty lifted the hems of her soiled skirts in her hand and moved toward the one farthest to the left.

  “Do you hear water?” she asked.

  “Don’t go wandering off, Honesty. We have no idea where those tunnels lead.”

  He could have been talking to one of the stalagmites, for all the attention she paid him. She was like a child as she wandered in and out of chambers, exploring every formation, gasping in wonder and clapping in delight, and it was all Jesse could do to keep up with her and still mark their passage with a chunk of slate. The deeper they got into the caverns, though, the tighter the band grew around his chest. Forbidden memories began to crowd into his mind, turning his hands clammy and creating beads of sweat above his lip. “We’d best get out of here,” he told her when she started venturing down another narrow corridor.

  “You go on. I’m going to keep looking.”

  “We’ll come back later when there’s more light. It’s going to take us week
s, maybe months to search this place.”

  “I don’t care how long it takes. It’s here, and I’m not leaving until I find it.”

  Jesse fought the sense of panic creeping into his bloodstream. His lungs felt as if they were shrinking, and spots were starting to blur his vision. He couldn’t stay in here any longer; it was a wonder he’d been able to hold the memories at bay this long.

  Then the torch, having lost its source of fuel over the last few hours, sputtered and died.

  The darkness closed in on him like a clamp around his heart. Darkness had long since fallen outside, leaving them with no illumination save the torch. Jesse stumbled toward Honesty, hands outstretched, calling her name, trying to find her.

  “I’m here, Jesse.”

  Forever seemed to pass before his fingers made contact with soft, warm skin. He grabbed her to him and held on, fearing that she, too, might disappear as quickly as the flame that had guided them.

  “Jesse, you’re shaking.”

  “It’s colder than a well-digger’s ass in here.”

  With the eyes and instincts of a cat, she guided them to a wall where they slid down to sit. Jesse propped his hands on his knees and searched the darkness, feeling caged and anxious. “Can’t we light a fire?”

  “There’s nothing in here to burn,” she said. “You don’t care much for the dark, do you?”

  “I don’t mind the dark. I just don’t like being underground in the dark. Reminds me too much of being in tomb.”

  “You don’t have to stay in here with me, Jesse. I’ll be fine on my own.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone down here. There might be bats or something.” He didn’t realize he’d been clenching his fists until Honesty’s hand covered his own. Then one arm crept around his neck. She smelled so damn good, sweet and womanly, so different from the rank, musty odor that permeated the walls of the cavern. “What are you doing?” he asked over the knot in his throat.

  “Holding you.”

  “That’s obvious, but why?”

  “You don’t like being held?”

  “I didn’t say that.” In fact, he liked it too much.

  “You held me when I was afraid. It’s my turn to now.”

  She just had to remind him of that day at the Triple Ace, didn’t she? “What makes you think I’m afraid of anything?”

  “You’re ready to come out of your skin, Jesse,” she pointed out.

  He decided not to tell her that her nearness had as much an effect on him as the damn cave. With her head on his shoulder, her breasts pressed against his arm, and the scent of her hair teasing his senses, it was all too easy to forget the lies that lay between them and remember the nights he’d spent in the pleasure of her arms.

  They sat in silence for quite a while listening to the hollow drip of water somewhere in the distance. He could almost hear Honesty trying to figure out a way to appease him. It was one of the things he liked about her—the way she had of sensing his moods, his fears, his thoughts, and making him feel as if no matter what he did or how he behaved, she would adjust to it. Sometimes it meant getting back in his face, at times she’d used her womanly wiles, and at still other times, like now, she’d just sit beside him with her head on his chest and listen to the dew drop.

  And then, she began to hum.

  Low at first, it took him a moment to recognize the tune as his own song, the last one he’d written before the music died inside him. “Tell Me No Lies,” inspired by his father.

  And his throat tightened as her voice carried him back to the past.

  She stopped, looked up at him, and touched two fingers to his cheek.

  “Thank you for helping me search for the stones, Jesse.”

  “You could have saved us a lot of time and a whole lot of misery, if you’d been truthful with me from the start.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you about Deuce a long time ago, but I was afraid.”

  “Of me?”

  “Of what you wanted with my fath—with Deuce.” She lifted her head and rested her hand on his chest. He felt her looking at him in the dark. “Try and understand, Jesse, there are people who would have stopped at nothing to get to him.”

  Like the Treat brothers. “Why didn’t you go to the law after he was shot?”

  “What could the law do? The man who killed him was dead—or so I thought.”

  “They could have protected you. Helped you find out where you belonged.”

  “I considered it, but I was raised to run from the law, not to it. Anyone with a badge was someone who could tear me and my father apart, someone to fear. I was afraid if they knew who I was, they’d put me in jail for all the years I helped him swindle people.” She brushed her cheek against him and tightened her arms around his waist. “You’re the only one I’ve ever felt truly safe with since he died.”

  Jesse shut his eyes against the pleasure-pain of having her so close. Of smelling her hair and hearing her sweet, smoky voice. She sounded so damn sincere . . .

  “How did you become an operative?” she asked.

  Maybe it was the intimacy of the moment, or the fact that his identity was no longer an issue, but Jesse sighed and leaned back against the cold, damp wall. “A stroke of fate. My father was gone a lot on business. As I grew older, his visits home got scarcer and scarcer. When I was fifteen or sixteen, they stopped altogether and my mother was worried out of her mind. So I went searching for him.” As if aware that the outcome was not one of pleasure, she let her hand clasp his. Strangely enough, though, as Jesse told her the story, the bitter anger that he usually felt didn’t materialize. “It took me about a year, but I finally tracked him down to a plantation in Tennessee where he was living with his other wife.”

  “He had another wife?”

  “Not just any wife—my mother’s sister. He’d amassed a fortune through cotton and wanted a son to carry on the Randolph name. She came from a good family and was pleasing to the eye, so he courted her and they fell in love, so he said. The problem was, my aunt couldn’t bear children.”

  “Why didn’t he just adopt a child? The war left thousands of orphans.”

  “You don’t know my father. He wants what he wants, no matter who it hurts. He wanted a son from his own loins to inherit both the fortune he’d amassed and the old money that came from my mother’s family.”

  “But without a child, he couldn’t get the old money.”

  “Exactly. So he married my mother and used her to breed himself a legal heir.”

  “And she went along with this?”

  “She had no idea. She and her sister had a falling out over the War between the States and hadn’t seen each other in years. My aunt was a staunch Southern supporter, my mother a Yankee to the bone.”

  “She must have been devastated when she found out what he’d done.”

  Jesse had to smile at that. “Spittin’ mad was more like it. She sold the house in Chicago and we moved west. Neither of us wanted anything to do with him again, so she gave him back everything he’d given her: his name, his money, his music . . . everything except me.”

  “And your aunt?”

  “She died two years later.”

  “And you joined the Pinkertons.”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Jesse’s arm was starting to go numb, trapped beneath Honesty, so he shifted it to around her back. “I happened to tell an acquaintance of mine how I tracked down my father; he relayed the story to a friend of his, who just happened to be the supervisor for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Next thing I knew, I was being recruited. I had nothing better to do at the time, so I took the job. I’ve been with them ever since.”

  “I think it’s amazing that you were able to forgive your father for what he did.”

  “Forgiving him means I’d have to care. And I don’t. He lied. He cheated. He used people for his own advantage. He broke my mother’s heart and shredded her good name. To me, he doesn’t exist.”

  “He must, or
you wouldn’t have spent half your life going after those who preyed on the innocent, the way your father preyed on you and your mother.”

  His chest shook with laughter at her naiveté. “Oh, Honesty, you couldn’t be more wrong. Joining the agency wasn’t some sort of noble effort to right the wrongs of my father, it was a way to get back at him. To be everything he detested: wild, reckless, uncivilized. I didn’t realize until it was almost too late that that kind of anger can get you killed.”

  “How so?”

  “Years ago, I was assigned to a case involving a gang of criminals who’d taken over a mining operation. These were dangerous men, men who killed and raped and stole for the thrill of it. My job was to be accepted as one of them, cozy up to the leaders, and expose them. I thought I was smarter than they were, and I got involved with a woman who promised to help me bring them down since they’d killed her husband.

  “Soon after that they suspected I was an informer, and I got a coffin notice. But they didn’t kill me. Instead, they kept me in the deepest bowels of the mines for months. That way I couldn’t possibly know what was going on, or get a message to the outside.” His voice dropped an octave with raw emotion. “But something big was going down; I could smell it. I bribed a guard into giving Miranda a message for my superintendent, who was also working undercover, but he never got it. She took it to the body master instead and put the whole operation in jeopardy. McParland was forced to shoot me to prove he wasn’t part of the operation, or hundreds of lives would have been lost.”

  “So that’s what you meant when you said he had to kill you to save your life.”

  Jesse nodded. “Once I recovered, I went back to Denver and turned in my resignation. But McParland wouldn’t take it. Instead, he offered me the moon. All I had to do was solve a sixteen-year-old case.”

  “My father.” She sighed. “I supposed when this is all over, you’ll go back to Denver.”

  “Well, Honesty, that’s going to depend on you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know things about me that no one else knows.”

  “You think I would betray you?”

  “If it meant saving your own skin, I’d expect you to do it in a heartbeat.”