LITMIR.BIZ

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She blinked at him as if she didn’t understand the question. “Fun?”

      He shook his head, swallowed and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “I’m sensing a severe shortfall in your basic vocabulary here. Lunch. Fun. Do I dare introduce the word play?”

      The woman had some expressions. Most of them pinched—as if she was sitting on something prickly and was too polite to take care of the problem in public. What would people think?

      He wondered what it was going to take to make her smile. He’d given it a halfhearted effort for five years now and so far he hadn’t hit the magic word, number or combination. Maybe it was time he got serious.

      “I thought we were going to talk about your new conditions.”

      “Fine. Right. We are.” He bit into his burger and chewed thoughtfully. “First tell me why—no smoke screen this time—that stuff is so important to you.”

      She considered him across her uneaten burger and fries. Instead of answering, she asked a question. “You’re a Texas Cattleman’s Club member, right?”

      “Right,” he said, popping a fry into his mouth and letting her play this out.

      “And Cattleman’s Club members are sworn to certain values. Like loyalty and trust and honor and all that, right?”

      He nodded and leaned back on the faded gray vinyl booth, wondering where this was going.

      “Then if I tell you something in confidence—some thing that could affect Royal’s future—you’re sworn to secrecy, correct?”

      He matched her pinched-brow scowl. “Absolutely. Of course, to make certain there’s no breach in that confidence, we’re both going to have to swear it in blood. You got a pocketknife on ya?”

      She let out a disgusted little huff. “Do you take anything seriously?”

      “Not if I can help it. Now, for Pete’s sake, spit it out. If you want me to keep it on the QT, all you have to do is ask.”

      “Well, I’m asking,” she said, so sober it was all he could do not to laugh.

      “Okay. Consider it done. Now give.”

      “You know the Jessamine Golden legend?”

      “Some of it,” he said. If you grew up in Royal, you’d heard about Jessamine Golden. It was as staple a part of the town’s history as the feud between two prominent families, the Windcrofts and the Devlins. “She was an outlaw, right? Killed the mayor and the sheriff. Stole some gold. Let’s see…disappeared somewhere around the early 1900s.”

      “Right. Okay. Well…the saddlebags?” She leaned in close and lowered her voice.

      “Yes?” he said, doing the same. Mostly because it got him a little closer to her and he’d been wondering if that really was gold shot through her pretty hazel eyes. Not only gold but silver, he realized. So that’s what gives them that iridescent color.

       And didn’t she have the longest, most lush eyelashes he’d ever seen? Soft as sable, thick as a paintbrush. Why hadn’t he ever noticed that before?

      Or her freckles. Cute little angel kisses lightly dusted the rise of her cheekbones and skimmed the bridge of her pixie nose. He was surprised he’d never noticed them before, either. Of course, he’d never been this close. Kissing close, if he were of a notion to steal one, which he might be if he didn’t have a pretty good idea of how she’d react. Those even pearly whites of hers would probably rip into his lip like tiger teeth.

      “I’m sure,” she said, and he was mesmerized by the mobility of her full lips, “that those saddlebags belonged to Jess Golden.”

      “Where did you get that?” he asked, frowning suddenly when he noticed a very fine, very faint crescent line of a scar at the bottommost edge of her pointed chin. It was about an inch long, and of course he’d never noticed it before, either. That close factor again.

      She pulled back, looking exasperated. “Where did I get what?”

      “That scar,” he said, reaching across the battered gray Formica tabletop and gently pinching her chin between his thumb and index finger so he could angle her head for a better look. And on second look, it wasn’t so fine and it wasn’t so faint. “Man. That had to have hurt like blazes.”

      “We were talking about the saddlebags,” she said, pulling away from his hold and touching her fingers to her chin in a gesture that was both self-conscious and embarrassed.

      Okay. The scar was a sore subject. So he let it drop. For now. But after five years of dancing around the edge of her fire, he seriously wanted to know what fueled her flames. He could be patient when the need arose. “What about the saddlebags?”

      “I said I’m certain they belonged to Jess Golden.”

      He sat back. Shrugged. “What makes you think so?”

      She went into an excited diatribe about Jess Golden once living in Jonathan Devlin’s house, about the purse and the rose petals and the six-shooters and the map coming from Jonathan’s attic. And there was that pink blush on her cheeks again. So. Anger and excitement were two of her triggers. He wondered what else got her going and flashed on an image of her face flushed with the heat of great sex.

       Whoa.

      That was interesting. And the picture was a little too vivid.

      “The roses are a dead giveaway,” she finished.

      “Hmm. Roses, huh? An outlaw who liked roses?”

      “I have always figured there was more to Jess Golden than what was written in the local newspapers at the time and recorded in local history books.”

      He considered her and realized she’d finally revealed a chink in that airtight armor. “Well, well, well, Chrissie. You’ve got a romantic streak.”

       She blinked several times in rapid succession, clearly flustered. “I am not a romantic.”

      “You’ve romanticized an outlaw,” he pointed out.

      “Romanticized? That’s ridiculous.” She blushed again, as if the notion that he might think that she—Christine Travers of the straitlaced, all work, no play variety—would have any thought on the subject of romance was too absurd to consider. Or because he was right and she really was a closet romantic.

      Huh. Who’da thunk it? And on the heels of that discovery, possibilities abounded. How hard would it be to romance this standoffish little blonde? How soft would she be when she let some of the starch out of her spine?

      “The point is,” she pressed on, “if I’m right and those are Jess Golden’s things, the map could lead to the stolen gold.”

      “Okay. Hold it. If those are her things, what makes you think the gold is still here? Why wouldn’t she have taken it with her?”

      She gave him a “duh” look and evidently decided he needed remedial training. “You’re an outlaw,” she began as if she was talking to a five-year-old.

      He leaned back, held both hands up, palms out. “Swear to God, I did not steal that gold.”

      Nothing. Not even a smirk. And he wanted to pry one out of her so badly.

      “I didn’t mean that you are an outlaw literally,” she said, enunciating each word, again as if she were talking to someone who was intellectually challenged. “I meant, you’re an outlaw hypothetically. And you’re on the run because everyone in Texas believes you killed not only the mayor of the town but the sheriff, as well. You stole the gold and don’t have the time or the means to take it with you. It’s heavy and cumbersome. So you hide it. And you draw a map. You hide the map somewhere—like in the house where you live, in the attic or something—and then you run, hoping things will settle down after a time and you can go back and get it.”

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