An Unlikely Lady Read online

  “Why? I needed a job, she needed a piano player.” He shrugged indifferently. “Besides, I didn’t see you turning her down.”

  “That isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Rose helped me when I needed help. Singing for her for one night is the least I can do.”

  “Whether you want to or not.”

  The words brought an unexpected sting of tears to her eyes. He sounded so . . . protective. So compassionate. How often, when she’d been young and naive enough, had she dreamed of finding someone with those qualities? “Your concern for my welfare is touching, cowboy, but it’s also misplaced. I’ve been taking care of myself for quite some time now, so I would appreciate you keeping your thoughts to yourself.”

  Fearing her emotions would get the better of her, Honesty tried to push past him but found herself halted by his grip. She glowered at the long fingers wrapped around her wrist, then at his face. His eyes, a compelling swirl of green grasses and blue skies, glittered with a demand for answers. “Let go of me.”

  “Not until you tell me why you’re so upset with me.”

  Because you’re here. Because you’re too handsome for your own good. Because against all wisdom, I’m attracted to you, and when you touch me, I forget everything that’s important. She locked the words inside, refusing to give him more power over her than he already had. “Because if you hadn’t played that stupid song, I wouldn’t have been manipulated into singing.”

  His own temper leapt up a notch. “Look, I don’t like this situation any better than you, but I gave Scarlet my word. So you and I are just going to have to make the best of it.”

  “Fine. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.” Just in case he could read the truth in her eyes, she flung away from him and headed for the doorway. Abruptly, she paused on the threshold. “Oh, and one more thing, Mr. Jones—I might have to suffer your company for the next few days, but that’s as far as it goes. Don’t expect me to tend to your bath—or any other duty that requires bodily contact. If you feel another whim”—her gaze dropped to the bulge at his crotch—”arise, I suggest you direct it elsewhere.”

  As she disappeared up the stairs and out of his sight, Jesse waged an inner battle between laughing at her spunk and grinding his teeth in frustration. Never had he met such a contradictory, unpredictable female: one moment provocative and eager, the next, stiff and proper. And never had his emotions been riled into such a frenzy.

  He fished in his shirt pocket, found a bent cigarette that he saved for emergencies, and struck a match to it. Then he sank back against the rough plank wall and willed the night air to cool the fever raging in his bloodstream.

  How did she do it? That’s what he couldn’t figure out. There was just something about Honesty, a blend of brassy boldness and furtive vulnerability that aroused his curiosity and his desire in a way no woman had done since. . . . No, not even Miranda had intrigued him this much.

  Maybe he’d deserved the lambasting she’d given him; where she went was none of his damn business. Hell, he’d put in his time trying to protect the innocent, and look where it had gotten him. Not that Honesty was innocent, he thought with a snort. Far from it. Yet sometimes he’d catch glimpses of softness, like when she sang the old southern song, or spoke of Rose helping her. And he couldn’t decide which was the true Honesty: the haughty princess, the reluctant siren, or the mesmerizing performer.

  Even more dangerous was the temptation to find out.

  Chapter 6

  After a night of fitful slumber, the sound of rain sprinkling on a hot tin roof drifted into Honesty’s subconscious in a pattern of aching familiarity. She lay still, heavy nostalgia filling her for a place only in her dreams, where the grass sparkled like emeralds and the sea like sapphires, and the sun glittered like gold. She didn’t know why she continued having the same dream. She saw it so clearly that it was almost as if she’d been there before. She hadn’t, of course. Her entire childhood had been spent traveling from one end of the western states to the other, searching for that fabled pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yet no place she’d ever been compared to the mysterious place that so often beckoned to her at night.

  She stared at the filmy window curtains and listened, a wistful longing spreading through her for something she could neither define nor understand. Even as the lilting melody opened the door to an aching sorrow, it wove threads of comfort around her, filling an emptiness she’d carried around inside for as long as she could remember, and she savored the sensation the way a convicted man savored the notion of freedom—

  Until a sour note and mild curse snapped her to awareness. Silly girl, she chided herself, the sprinkling music had come not from her dreams, but from the piano downstairs.

  Jesse was playing again.

  With a sigh, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and rubbed her eyes. When she’d returned to her room last night, it had taken all the self-discipline she could muster not to slam the door behind her. A man of his word. Any other time she’d have considered that an admirable quality, but at that moment, she felt his honor wind around her like a black widow’s web.

  As tempting as it was to avoid rehearsing with him today, cowardice had never been in her nature, nor would dallying get anything accomplished. She hadn’t exercised her vocal cords in months. If they were to be ready for Saturday’s performance, she needed to practice.

  A few minutes later, dressed in an old but neat calico dress, Honesty shoved one last pin into her hair and went downstairs, determined to keep her composure no matter what Jesse said or did.

  Her resolve splintered the instant she saw him, and she paused on the bottom step with one hand on the banister. He wore his streaked blond hair tied back with a strip of leather. The silky tail flowed past his shoulders like heaven’s path and slid along his gunmetal blue shirt as he bobbed his head in time to the music. The anger she’d felt toward him last night dissipated like frost on warm steel. It was so unfair that someone so beautiful could be so forbidden.

  As the last note died away, Rose entered the room from the kitchen.

  “Oh, good, I’m glad I caught the two of you together!”

  Honesty froze. Jesse swung around to face her, surprise on his face. As his gaze swept over her, that peculiar buzzing again suffused her blood. For a moment, she thought she saw the same longing in Jesse’s eyes that she’d woken up to a short time ago.

  “Am I interrupting?” Rose asked.

  Jesse jerked his head away and Honesty self-consciously patted the up-sweep of her hair, then dropped her hand when she caught a glimpse of Rose’s sly smile. Let Rose make of her momentary bout of vanity what she would, Honesty thought, lifting her chin. She simply didn’t like feeling dowdy in the face of such beauty.

  “I found somethin’ you might be able to use.”

  “What are they?” Honesty asked as Rose handed several books over to Jesse.

  “Song books.”

  “Where’d you get these?” Jesse asked, thumbing through one of them.

  “From an old suitor. He used to serenade me each night. Beautiful voice, lousy lover . . . anyway, I found them in one of my trunks and figured the two of you might find them useful.” She tugged on a pair of black gloves and flipped a cape around her shoulders. “The pantry is lookin’ pretty pitiful, so I thought I’d carry myself over to Wentworth’s and see if Sarah is expecting any shipments soon. There’s biscuits and gravy on the stove, if you’re hungry.”

  “Thanks, Scarlet,” Jesse said.

  “Call me Rose, will you? All my friends do.” She patted him on the shoulder, then sailed toward the door. “Be back in a bit.”

  After she left, an awkward silence stretched between Honesty and Jesse. Usually she didn’t have to think about how to act in any given situation, she simply slipped into a role. A girl didn’t spend all her life with the greatest con man in the West without learning to adapt. But Jesse had a way of rattling her to the bone, making her feel awkward and unsure and completely out
of her element. She didn’t like the feeling. She didn’t like it at all.

  “That song you were playing . . .” she finally said, if only to break the tension. “It was lovely.”

  “I didn’t realize you were listening.”

  She almost told him that she’d practically crawled inside the music, but bit her tongue at the last minute. “Who wrote it?”

  “I did. A long time ago.”

  If he had written it, then she couldn’t possibly have heard it before. So why did it sound so familiar?

  “What’s it called?”

  He turned and pinned her with a merciless stare. “‘Tell Me No Lies.’” A flush crept into her cheeks, and Honesty couldn’t help but wonder if Jesse suspected how often she’d been false with him. “Well, you have an amazing talent. Where did you learn to play?”

  “I didn’t. I just sat down one day and played.” Honesty realized then that she’d touched some hot spot, for he turned on the bench, signaling an end to the conversation. “If you’re ready, I thought we’d warm up with some scales.”

  “Fine by me.” Honesty shrugged as if it made not a whit of difference and stood beside the upright while Jesse spread his fingers on the keys. Closing her eyes, she focused all her energy into the range of climbing notes in an effort to block out the man beside her.

  Once she’d warmed up with a few octaves, Jesse opened the first book Rose had given them, flipped over a couple of pages, then once again set his fingers lightly upon the keys. A sprightly tune she hadn’t heard before filled the saloon. Drawn to Jesse by a force beyond her control, Honesty moved closer to him and tried to make sense of the black dots on the page, but they could have been crows on a barbed wire fence, for all the meaning she got from them. “That book tells you to play that?”

  “You don’t read music?”

  “No, I just sing what I hear.”

  “It’s quite simple, actually. There are different symbols for different notes, and each symbol represents a sound.”

  “Did you just sit down and read music, too?”

  “Not hardly,” he replied with a grimace. “As soon as Father realized I could play, he hired instructors to teach me everything there was to know about classical music.”

  Father. Not Pa, or Papa, as she’d called Deuce. And from the stiffness of his tone, they hadn’t had a close relationship. She thought that a shame. “Yet here you are, playing in a saloon.”

  “We all have our vices. Would you like to try?”

  Honesty hesitated, then nodded.

  “The keys have the same pattern of notes repeated across the keyboard,” he said after she’d taken a seat beside him. “Each pattern is an octave. The middle key is a C.” He hit a key in the center of the board, then pointed to a black circle hanging on a middle bar in the book.

  As he explained the effect of whole notes and half notes, Honesty tried to concentrate on his instructions, but found it nearly impossible when his voice flowed through her like melted gold. Gone was the rough saddle-tramp who’d wandered into town a couple days ago; in his place sat a more educated, more polished, more . . . elite Jesse than she’d ever dreamed existed.

  He glanced at her now and again, sometimes he even smiled, but mostly his gaze remained fixed on the page.

  Hers remained on him. On his face. The way his hair pulled back from a smooth, high brow. The angle of his jaw, lightly bristled.

  The curve of his lashes, gold tipped and thick; the slope of his nose, straight and narrow without being sharp. The shape of his mouth. Lips firm and ambitious, yet soft and seductive.

  A liquid warmth pooled low in Honesty’s belly; her mouth watered.

  Her gaze dipped down to where his collar lay open at his throat, lingered on the smooth, sun-darkened skin, then drifted down to his hands where they rested on the dingy white keys. He had such fine hands. His fingers were long and tanned, the knuckles slim yet strong. Flexing. Bending. Stretching again and again to touch keys just out of reach.

  Those same fingers had been on her. Touched her. Stroked her. Played her like the instrument now filling the room with song. Who was this entrancing man? And what had he done with her ire-provoking scoundrel?

  “You keep staring at me like that, and I’m likely to think you want a repeat of the other night.”

  Honesty’s gaze snapped to his eyes, and she found the old Jesse looking at her with undisguised amusement. A flush of embarrassment crept into her cheeks. Denying it when he’d caught her all but drooling over him seemed not only futile, but pointless. “You’d have to earn the privilege first,” she quipped.

  A grin tugged at Jesse’s mouth. One minute seducing him out of his senses, the next spurning him like a saintly virgin—he didn’t know from one moment to the other what to expect from her.

  Throwing down a challenge of his own, he launched into a bawdy tune. She slid off the bench and gave him a wicked smile. The temperature in the room had already spiked a good ten degrees; now the blood in Jesse’s veins started to simmer.

  As she sang the old range parody, she held his gaze over her shoulder, swished her hips to and fro, and taunted him with the lyrics to “The Juice of the Forbidden Fruit.”

  Jesse’s groin hardened and sweat beaded his brow. Images he’d tried to forget flashed in his mind: of naked skin and lilac perfume, of swollen lips and tousled hair . . .

  Damn, he wished he could remember the rest of that night.

  He abruptly shut the book and got up from the bench. “That’s enough practicing.”

  “But I was just starting to have fun!”

  Yeah, he’d bet she was, the little minx. The look of mock innocence on her face told him that she’d known exactly what she was doing.

  He felt like a coward, escaping from the saloon like a two-bit bandit with six-guns barking at his heels, but a man could take only so much.

  He stopped at the edge of the porch and sucked in a deep draft of air, patting his pocket for a smoke. He didn’t know how she did it. It wasn’t as if she’d been wearing that should-be-illegal red dress, or even that black-lace-lined corset. She’d been wearing faded calico that covered her from neck to ankle, for God’s sake, and still she managed to set him on fire. His only chance of surviving till Saturday was to take her in small doses.

  When his search for an emergency smoke came up empty, he dug into his pocket, found a nickel, then scanned the town. It had rained sometime during the night and the rich scent of damp earth rose up from the ground. Already the early summer sun was drying up the puddles left behind, and birds swooped down from the trees behind skeletal buildings in search of worms.

  A door opened across the street and a woman emerged from the old general store, her shoulders hunched, a white bib apron tied around her portly belly. Jesse watched her set a broom to swinging across planks that never seemed void of dirt. She was eighty if she was a day, with hair a rich silver color piled atop her head in one of those intricate knots women seemed so partial to, and wrinkles that populated her face like briars in berry patch.

  She caught sight of Jesse in mid-swing, stopped, and shaded her eyes with her hand.

  Hoping she might keep makings on her shelf, Jesse pushed away from the wall and cut across the road at a leisurely stroll.

  She leaned against the handle of the broom and watched him approach. “You must be the tall drink of water staying over at Rose’s,” she said when he reached the step then gave him one of those up-and-down inspections he’d come to expect from the opposite sex.

  “For the time being.”

  “She always could snag the good ones.” She struck out her hand. “Name’s Sarah Wentworth. I own this heap of spit and boards.”

  “Jesse Jones,” he said, returning the introduction. He glanced behind her into the storefront window. The glass was spotless and Jesse could see that pickin’s were running awful slim. “You don’t by chance carry tobacco and papers, do you?”

  “Are you ever in luck—I think I’ve got some Georgia
Fine left over.” She picked up the broom and carried it inside the store.

  Jesse followed her waddling steps, absently taking in the empty shelves behind the counter, the scanty supply of canned goods and fabric, the utter lack of wares, period. “How long have you been here, Mrs. Wentworth?”

  “First to arrive, last to leave. And call me Miss Sarah. Aha, I knew I had bit left.” She set a pinch of tobacco onto a piece of paper and rolled it into a tube, folding the ends. “So I hear you’ll be playing the piano for the stage passengers come Saturday night.”

  “News travels fast.”

  “It doesn’t have far to travel around here,” she replied with a reedy laugh. “Rose was just in, gloating about her catch. She said you came in looking for work.” She added a packet of papers to his purchase and shoved both across the counter top. “I’m surprised you didn’t head over to the Black Garter. Everyone else did.”

  A puzzled frown pulled at his brow. “The Black Garter?”

  “A saloon over in Poverty Gulch, a few miles east of here. It sits on the main route, so it gets a steady business, and Eli Johnson is always looking for helpers.”

  She leaned over the counter and looked both ways, as if someone might overhear. “Back in the days when Rose worked for Eli, before she built the Scarlet Rose, he fell for her like a load of iron ore. Rose didn’t return his affections, though, and I can’t say as I blame her. The man’s got a temper like a keg of explosives. One spark, and phooosh! When she spurned him, he swore he’d make her pay.” She gave a succinct nod. “He’s doing a fine job of it, too. First he lured her girls away, now he’s set on stealing her business. It does my heart good to see her fighting back with both barrels.”

  Now he understood Rose’s dogged determination to see the Scarlet Rose succeed.

  Still, she could have told him about the Black Garter when he’d asked her about a job. What other tidbits of information might she be keeping from him? He’d had no reason not to believe Rose when she’d said she hadn’t seen McGuire; what if McGuire detoured through Poverty Gulch?