Chapter One
RANCH FOR SALE
Prime acreage. Plenty of grazing land,
with a two-story frame house in good condition.
Barn needs roof. Stock negotiable.
Contact Samuel Jones, Esq., Box 24CBE
c/o The Denver Chronicle
“Madam, you do not seem to understand.” Davidson Smythe took one step closer to the raven-haired vision in faded calico standing on the front porch steps of what should now be his home.
“One more step, and I’ll blow your brains out the back of your head.”
Bloody hell. The woman actually sounded as if she’d do it. Smythe’s gaze raked her from head to toe. Tall for a woman, but curvy; the kind of curves that made a man’s hands itch to settle around her waist.
He glanced beyond her at the two-story structure with its peeling paint and sagging porch and, remembering the wording of the advertisement, wondered what exactly constituted poor condition if this was considered good.
Out of his element, thousands of miles from Boston’s elite society, Smythe faltered. Women out West were definitely of a different ilk altogether. Should he heed the woman’s words and lethal-looking rifle aimed at his head?
Mindful of the long barrel pointed at him, he decided to test his theory that women in general were the weaker sex, and he took another step. The thunderous blast from the gun had him freezing in his tracks while heat seared across his scalp, burning it.
He reached for the hat that was no longer there. “Damnation! You could have killed me!”
The woman’s face lost every ounce of color, and she swayed on her feet. She’d shot at him and now it looked like she was going to keel over. Watching her closely, her finger trembling on the trigger, he took the second biggest gamble of his life and moved closer to catch her if she fainted.
He was near enough now that he could see the way her eyes drifted shut, long dark lashes resting against pale-as-flour skin. He watched the rifle waver and nearly moved to catch it before it hit the porch floor and fired, but a pain-filled moan of agony stopped him.
“Madam?”
The woman’s eyes shot open. “Don’t call me that. I don’t run that kind of place.”
God, please either send me a handbook on women or just let her kill me and be done with it. He looked around him; if this was the Colorado equivalent of a brothel, then business must be very slow. The location was expected, a few miles outside of town. Pretty enough land, wide open with lush green grass, good for grazing, with a tall oak standing near the side of the house.
Another soft moan called his attention back to her. Tilting his head to the side, he let his gaze drift from the top of her head down to her toes. Something about her just didn’t fit the persona usually associated with houses of ill repute.
Unwilling to upset her further, he tried another tack, suggesting, “Perhaps you should sit down.”
He did not want to see the fragile-looking female end up hitting the ground face first. And wasn’t that perverse of him? He smiled. His good friend, Runyon, would have needled him no end if he were here. Runyon would laugh telling him that only he, Smythe, would allow a woman to shoot at his head and then feel sorry for her when she looked as if she’d faint at his feet.
His smile deepened as he remembered their last foray into the seamier side of life near the docks at Boston Harbor, but a soft rustling sound brought his attention back to sharply focus on the defiant woman still standing on his front porch.
Rather than reply, or heed his suggestion, she steadied the rifle, narrowed her eyes, and aimed at his trail-weary, but still new, boots.
Not again. Stubborn female. Hoping to distract her, and save his feet, he reminded her, “Your aim’s just a bit off. Maybe you should try again when you’re feeling better.” Praying she would listen this time, he waited for her to take her finger off the trigger.
For a split second, he thought she would, but then she smiled at him, right before she shifted her aim slightly and shot at a stone two inches to the right of his left foot. The hard-packed dirt formed a small cloud of dust that rose to his knees.
“What was that about my aim?”
Smythe tried to swallow to ease the dry-as-dust feeling in his mouth, but looking down at the bits of rock that were left after the shot obliterated it only added to the dryness. He’d later swear every ounce of spit in his mouth was gone.
He shook his head. What to do? He’d never been in this sort of situation before. Moving about in society had never been this tricky. She still looked awful: pale, pasty, and weaving on her feet. But Lord above, she was now aiming at his manly parts. If he had doubts about her ability with a gun, he certainly wasn’t going to take a chance that she’d hit what she aimed at now.
“So far only your hat’s been mortally wounded.” She paused. “Are you a betting man?”
She was toying with him. The realization angered him, but he couldn’t afford to let his temper rise. The time called for rational thinking. It would be best just to meet her volatile anger with his own calm, clear reason. It had certainly won the day on many a previous occasion.
“Now then, madam, you don’t really wish to shoot an unarmed man. Do you?”
Her gray eyes blazed with anger as her lips curved downward in a sneer. “I don’t normally like to kill men on a Monday. Sort of starts the week off all wrong, but in your case, I’ve a notion to change my mind. I’d start saying my prayers if I were you, stranger.”
She squinted through the sight, aiming at a spot in the middle of his forehead. “Your brains scattered across my front yard would be a mess I don’t want to have to clean up.” She paused. “But sometimes a woman has to get her hands dirty.”
How had he lost control of the situation? No longer amused by her gun-waving antics, he eyed the woman carefully. He’d played enough hands of cards to know when a person was no longer bluffing. There was not a doubt in his mind that she was capable of blasting his brains across her flower garden. People back East were much easier to deal with.
“Madam, if you’d just listen—”
“I told you not to call me that!”
Damn, she had, but his mother’s training was not that easy to forget. Just then something in her eyes dried up the pitiful bit of spit left in his mouth and had him hitting the dirt a heartbeat before she fired again.
“Where I come from,” Smythe snarled, “people have civilized conversations. They do not point rifles at one another.” He stood, brushing the dust from his knees, wincing where he’d connected too hard with the ground.
The woman’s sneer curved upward into a grin, and her grin slid into a dimpled smile. “Well, mister. Out here, where I come from, strangers don’t come traipsing up to your front door pretty as you please after they’ve been warned not to.”
“If you’d let me get a word in edgewise, I could clear up this whole misunderstanding.”
“I’m thinking you’re the one not understanding. I warned you not to take another step or I’d shoot.” She nodded her head, and a thick dark curl slipped free from her topknot, sliding down in front of her left eye.
Then the blasted woman swayed again, and he could swear even more color leached out of her face. What the hell is wrong with her? He tried to ignore the tiniest bit of sympathetic feelings struggling to surface, all the while wondering how someone so obviously dead on her feet could continue to fight him?
Not taking her eyes—or her rifle—off of him, she steadied herself and blew the curl out of her eye. “You stepped,” her eyes brimmed with laughter as she added, “I shot. Seems pretty straightforward to me.”
It hit him with the force of a blow. She was laughing at him! If there was one thing he refused to tolerate, it was being laughed at. He was tired, his feet hurt, and she’d shot at him—three times. Smythe felt the hot lick of temper surging up from the tips of his too-tight Western-style boots.
He didn’t even try to hold it back. His temper let loose, anger pouring through his veins like the boiling tar they used in the shipyards back home.
With one swift leap, he grabbed the rifle from her shock-stiffened fingers, tossing the weapon toward the corral, then captured her hands in his ironclad grip.
Her laughter died, and her cool gray eyes widened with fear. It was only then he noticed the yellowing bruises along the length of her jaw, and corner of her right eye.
“I won’t hurt you,” he ground out. “I just want to know why you are standing on my front porch waving a rifle in my face as if you have the right to be standing here, protecting what is obviously mine.”
Return to Pearl’s RedemptionBuy the Book
