Devil in Texas(5)

"Don't go putting Rangers in the same category as tyrant-husbands. Rangers aren't even allowed to get married."

"So now I'm supposed to believe you refuse to be roped into matrimony because you dream of a tin star?"

"I'm a wanted man."

"By every wedding-bell chaser in the West."

He had the audacity to smirk. "A renegade makes a worse husband than a Ranger. I'm doing womankind a favor."

She rolled her eyes. How many times had he used that cheesy line on some adoring belle?

"And now your roving has brought you full circle," she accused. "You've returned to Texas. To do what? Get yourself hanged?"

He arched a sun-gilded eyebrow. "If you keep talking sweet to me, I might get the notion you're still fond of this ol' red neck."

Redneck, indeed. Lawmen might call him Coyote Cass, but his brain was mostly weasel.

"You've taken a ridiculous risk by showing your face here, Cass. You need to leave Texas."

"Oh, I get it. You figure I should high-tail it to Mexico 'cause you got yourself a fella who packs a bratwurst and a big gun."

Smartass.

"Are you even capable of dragging your mind out of the gutter?"

"Sure. But what fun would that be?"

A creaking floorboard made her jump.

Like magic, a pistol materialized in Cass's black-gloved fist. The glint of that .38 was more than a little unnerving—and not just because he was notorious for a temper that fired as fast as his guns. At 25-years-old, Cass still didn't believe he was mortal.

Afraid to move, afraid to breathe, she waited, counting heartbeats. Eyes like blue steel raked the shadows for eavesdroppers—or maybe bounty hunters. Cass never had answered her question about why he'd returned to Texas.

Finally, reluctantly, he depressed the gun's hammer.

"Are you always so jumpy these days?" she demanded, her voice quavering with relief.

His glare didn't inspire confidence in his self-restraint. "If I have a reason."

She imagined what that reason might be, and her stomach clenched. "Then like I said, Cass. You need to leave. Before someone else finds you here."

Silence stretched as taut as any gallows' rope between them. She saw his chest rising and falling to the wild rhythm of applause. Tankards were thumping; boots were stomping; cries of, "More!" were shaking the oak planks of the floor. Randie's delighted laughter bubbled past the curtain. Apparently, Sadie's "stupid cowboy song" had been a smash with the sailors and conventioneers.

"Watch your back," Cass told her quietly.

He pinched his hat brim in farewell.

A moment later, he'd vanished, as if a drape of shadows had dropped between them, too thick and dark for even a moonbeam to pierce. For Randie's encore, fiddlers begun sawing out The Night the Preacher Rang The Whorehouse Bell. Sadie strained her ears, but she could hear nothing else above the whoops and whistles of the seamen: not Cass's spurs, not the echo of his boots, not even the squealing of the hall door when it swung closed behind him.

She swallowed hard.

Fool. She cursed her lapse into sentiment. How could she have let him get under her skin, even now, when she finally had everything she wanted: the freedom to live her life as she pleased. The freedom to give her body to any man she wanted...

Baron! Crap! I almost forgot!

Anxious to spring her trap, she hurried toward the brothel stairs. She figured she had about 15 minutes to change her clothes before the private poker game started. Since Cass had spoiled her stage appearance, she needed to put Plan B into action: to make her first contact with Baron as a high-class beerjerker.

The senator had invested heavily in the western expansion of the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railroad. The Pinkertons suspected he was using the drought and its resulting range wars as a cover to dispose of inconvenient sodbusters, who'd refused to give the railroad permission to lay tracks across their fields. The suspicion had risen when a disgruntled ranch hand, whom Baron's wife had fired for "drunken hooliganism," started complaining in capitol-area saloons that folks who made an enemy of Baron disappeared.

A week later, that same ranch hand, who'd trained horses for 22 years, got kicked in the head by his cowpony.

No one could pin that accidental death on Baron, of course. But accidental deaths seemed to pave the way to Baron's success. He'd been appointed to his first term in the Texas Senate because his duly elected rival got stampeded by steers. In business matters, Divine Providence had interceded at least six times on Baron's behalf, getting court cases dismissed because opposing witnesses hanged themselves, or got crushed by an overturning wagon, or fell through the rotted planks of a bridge. To make matters worse, Baron served as the chairman of the senate's Criminal Justice Committee. For two years, he'd had the power to appoint and remove Rangers. Texas's elite crime-fighting force practically worked for him!

No wonder Governor Ireland doesn't trust his own Rangers, Sadie thought grimly.

As she began climbing the dimly lit stairwell, her scalp prickled. She couldn't have said why; no one was following her. Even so, she was relieved when she reached the comparative brightness of the second story. Over all but four bedrooms, a red lantern burned to signal the whore was working. Two of those empty rooms belonged to her and Randie. The other two were owned by shrilly laughing women, who were allowing their drunken, belching admirers a strategic grope in the hall to lure them over the threshold—if not for a rut, then for a roll to relieve them of their casino winnings.

Sadie had witnessed this scene a thousand times. She'd lived it for eleven years after her father's murder and her mother's suicide. She didn't judge bawds for what they had to do to survive. Most of them were under the age of 17, and the vast majority of those girls died before the age of 25. Every bawd she'd ever known had been orphaned, destitute, and one meal shy of starvation before they'd wound up on the steps of a brothel.

That's why Sadie nurtured the secret dream to help her former rival and friend, Wilma LeBeau, run a training center for "Pinkies," as female detectives were affectionately called. Sadie figured if she could save just one penniless girl from the streets, then God might relent and decide not to cast her into Satan's deepest dungeon for letting her twin sister drown.

Wracked by the usual self-loathing, Sadie forced her chin higher as she moved down the hall. Two pairs of kohl-lined eyes blinked resentfully at her as she passed the younger girls and their slobbering Johns without her own meal ticket in tow. Under the circumstances, the hall stretched on forever—at least, it seemed that way. Fishtail skirts didn't lend themselves to speed. Nor did spiky little heels.

But Sadie had learned at a tender age that clothing held only one value to a bawd: the degree to which it tantalized. That's why she wasn't wearing more than garters and stockings beneath her skin-tight satin.

Relieved to duck into her bedroom, she didn't waste any time kicking off her shoes and stripping off her fishtails.

Quick costume changes were a requisite skill for a stage performer. The orchestra had launched into a rousing version of The Drunken Sailor by the time Sadie finished strapping her holster to her thigh. She could feel the pulse of the music through her stockings.

But the pounding of boots and tankards, below, was accompanied by a fresh gust of goosebumps, this time down her spine.

Now what?

With the .32 gripped expertly in her fist, she looked beneath her bed. She wrenched open the doors of her stately, Louis XIV wardrobe. She poked the bombazine draperies that rippled from the sea breeze, blowing through her window. She imagined she should be hunting for a rat or a scorpion, since she'd exhausted all the places where a grown human could hide in her 9-foot by 12-foot box.