Forever And A Day

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.