Storming Paradise

“Ah,” crowed Libby. “Money and appearances.”

Shula glared at her. “I’m sure our daddy doesn’t want two ragtag, mop-headed women descending on the ranch. Gracious! I want to look nice for him, that’s all. Who knows? We might be the last human beings he’ll ever see. It’s our duty to make his final moments as pleasurable as possible.”

“Foolish,” Libby muttered under her breath.

“I heard that,” her sister shot back. “It’s all right with me if you want to look like a frump. But men take great pleasure in the way a woman presents herself. And maybe if you spent a little more time worrying about your appearance, you might not be Miss Kingsland all your life, Miss Kingsland.”

It was an ancient argument. Their surroundings may have changed, but their differences remained. And it was an argument that Libby knew she would never win, so she was relieved when a soft knock sounded on their door.

“Now who do you suppose that is?” Shula did up a few fast buttons, then bustled to the door. She opened it a fraction.

Libby could hear a deep Texas drawl coming from the opposite side of the door. In a flash, it brought back the music of Paradise. A shiver rippled up and down the length of her spine.

Then, a moment later, Shula closed the door and just stood there, looking a little addled, breathing as if she had only just mastered that most difficult task.

“Who was it?” Libby inquired

Shula sucked in a full breath then, and waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, I don’t know. Just some big, dirty cowboy who says he’s supposed to take us to supper. I told him we had made other arrangements.”

“Shula!” Libby strode through the trunks, kicked a hat box out of her path and opened the door herself. Then, like her sister, she suddenly couldn’t remember how to breathe. And when she did remember, Libby was overwhelmed.

The big, dusty cowboy was halfway down the hall, but still the fragrance of Paradise lingered where he had stood. Leather and lye soap and dust. Sunshine and something more. Something purely and gloriously male. Libby cleared her throat and called out to him.

“Sir. Just a moment, please.”

Hell and damnation. Shadrach Jones stopped dead in his tracks. Another couple yards of carpet and he would have been trotting down the stairs, whistling, then pushing through the hotel’s fancy front door toward freedom. And Rosa and Nona and—bless her—Carmela.

Now he shook his head slightly, then scraped off his hat again and pressed it over his heart as he turned to get a look at the lady who’d just put the capper on his escape.

This one looked every bit the lady, too. The redheaded sister who had answered his knock on the door had been as painted and powdered as any whore he’d ever seen. This one, though, had lady written on every stiff pleat, every rigid bone, and every square inch of her prim little face. Tiny, this one. Pretty, too. For a lady.

“Ma’am,” he drawled, moving toward her.

She reached out a small, pale hand. “I’m Elizabeth Kingsland.”

Even though he’d just washed up and his hands were probably cleaner than they’d been in weeks, Shad still felt compelled to run his palm along his pant leg before he took her hand. Her grip was firmer than he anticipated. Even so, her bones felt delicate and breakable as a newborn kitten in the depths of his hand. He let her go after one quick pump.

“I’m your father’s foreman, ma’am. Shadrach Jones.” He shifted his weight onto one hip and held his hat in both hands now, dragging the brim through his fingers, wishing like hell this little lady would slam the door in his face the way the other one had.

“My sister said you had mentioned supper?” She tipped her heart-shaped face up.

Well, hell. There went half his evening. He was doomed, but for Amos’s sake he figured he’d just have to smile and take it like a man. “Yes, ma’am.”

His sudden, slantways grin did the oddest, most unexpected thing to Libby’s stomach. It quivered and then drew taut, like a reticule whose strings had been pulled tight. Or perhaps it wasn’t the grin at all, she thought fleetingly. Perhaps it was as simple as hunger. Still, almost before she knew it, Libby was accepting the huge cowboy’s invitation.

“I can’t speak for my sister, Mr. Jones, but I’d be happy to accompany you. If you’d like to wait downstairs, I’ll join you in a few moments.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She closed the door on that engaging grin.

“Well? What did he say?” Shula was reclining atop the bed now, with a damp cloth covering her eyes.

Libby smiled. “’Yes, ma’am,’ mostly.”

“He didn’t happen to say what time he’ll be calling for us tomorrow, did he?” Shula whined. “I hope it’s not before ten o’clock. You know how I am in the morning.”

“He didn’t say.” Libby was gazing in the mirror now, frowning. All of a sudden her hair seemed wrong—too curly, not curly enough, just wrong somehow—and she wasn’t quite sure why that bothered her. She picked up her hat and jammed in the pins. “I’ll ask him at supper.”

Shula swiped the cloth from her eyes. “You’re not actually considering going with him, are you?”

“I’m not considering it, Shula.” Libby turned and faced her sister. “I’m doing it. One of us ought to go since the man was kind enough to ask. If you’d like to go yourself, I’ll stay here and watch over Andy.”

Shula lay back on the pillows and returned the cloth to her eyes. “I can think of a million things I’d rather do than suffer through a meal with some big, dumb ranch hand who only says ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, ma’am.’” With a little sigh, she added, “Even if he is handsomer than sin.”

“Really?” Libby shrugged as she pulled on her gloves. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Shula yawned. “Now why doesn’t that surprise me one little bit?” She flounced onto her side and scrunched a pillow beneath her cheek. “Try not to wake me when you come back, Libby. I’m sure we’ll have to be up before the damn chickens tomorrow.”

Libby didn’t know how handsome sin was, but she had to admit, seeing the tall cowboy spilling out of the dainty chair in the hotel lobby, he was a very nice looking man. All of him. From his wide shoulders to his trim waist and on down the endless length of his denim-clad legs.

His hair was dark and longer than she was accustomed to seeing on gentlemen. She thought she liked the way the raven waves brushed his collar and framed his angular face. That face wasn’t tan so much as it was bronze, and not all of that deep color had come from long hours under a hot Texas sun, she was sure. Judging from his cheekbones, the strong flare of his nose and the flint in his dark eyes, Libby assumed her father’s foreman was more Indian than Jones.

Funny, she thought as she crossed the Persian-carpeted lobby while scrutinizing the man in the chair. She felt an overwhelming sense of recognition, yet she doubted that Shadrach Jones had been at Paradise fifteen years ago. He didn’t look like the type to stay in a place fifteen minutes, let alone fifteen years. He looked wild somehow—dark and shiny as a mustang stallion she remembered from years before.

The thought brought instant color to her cheeks. Stallions, indeed, Libby admonished herself, straightening her shoulders and firming her mouth as she proceeded toward him.

When he caught sight of her, he unwound from the little chair and rose with what Libby could only define as a casual grace. The way smoke rises on a windless day. He was, she thought suddenly, handsomer than sin.

“Mr. Jones.” She extended a gloved hand.

Damnation! There she went again, putting that little paw out for him to crush. He could feel the kitten warmth even through the thin fabric of her glove. And, as before, he had intended to let go immediately when it struck him like a lightning bolt that this lady was the dark-haired, skinny little girl who’d been crying all those years ago. Elizabeth? No…Libby. Sad little Libby.

She was looking up at him now, dry-eyed, even a trifle confused. He wondered all of a sudden if he had said her name out loud.

“Miss Kingsland,” Shad said now, letting go of her hand, trying to clear his head of visions from half a lifetime ago.

“It was kind of you to ask us to supper, Mr. Jones.”

“It’s not exactly me, ma’am. Your father—”

“I realize that,” she said, cutting off what was probably going to be a pretty muddled, bush-beaten excuse anyway.

“My sister has decided not to join us, I’m afraid.”

Shad didn’t know if he was glad about that or not. Was one lady worse than two? Especially when the one was prim little Miss Libby? He shrugged slightly as he planted his hat on his head.

“Well, let’s get going then,” he drawled as he gestured toward the hotel’s front door.

It wasn’t exactly an enthusiastic invitation, Libby thought. More like a man on his way to the gallows than one preparing to dine. The man had all but admitted he was just doing his job and following her father’s orders. Still, he offered her another of those sunny Texas grins as he was waving her toward the door.

“Yes, let’s,” she said with as much brightness as she could muster, once again aware of that peculiar thread tightening in her stomach.

Libby sniffed garlic as she stepped into the foyer of the restaurant. She sniffed trouble, too, the minute she caught a glimpse of the crystal sconces and the silk-swagged windows. It was a very elegant establishment. Much too elegant for a big dusty cowboy and a woman in a wilted traveling suit.

Behind her, Shadrach Jones muttered a grim little oath as his hand pressed into the small of her back to urge her forward toward a mustachioed little man in a black cutaway coat whose expression was hovering between panic and disgust.

The maître d’ dismissed her with a quick “Bon soir, madame,” then slid his gaze to her companion. “I am sorry, monsieur, but gentlemen are not permitted to dine without the appropriate neckwear.”

There was a sudden change in the temperature of the room. It had seemed merely warm before, but now Libby noticed that it had become distinctly hot. And she realized that the source of that heat was the man standing behind her. Shadrach Jones was giving off heat like a blast furnace.

“Appropriate neckwear,” he muttered now from between clenched teeth, making the phrase sound like an oath.

“Oui, monsieur.” The little man gave his mustache a quick twist. His eyes flicked toward the door, as if inviting them to use it.

Libby would have, too, only her father’s foreman was bolted to the floor like a big, hot stove behind her.

“You mean like a tie?” he drawled now.

The little man lofted his gaze heavenward as if to seek patience and deliverance from ill-dressed, persistent fools. “Oui, monsieur,” he said with a sigh.

“Kinda like the one you’re wearing?”

The question seemed innocent enough, but Jones’s tone—much to Libby’s horror—was what a snake might use if snakes could speak. Its lethal quality seemed lost on the officious little man, however, who lifted a finely manicured hand to touch his black cravat.

“Oui, monsieur. Comme ça.”

The words were barely out of the Frenchman’s mouth when a dark hand flashed out and, in what seemed like a single movement, flicked loose the bow and whipped the tie from beneath the starched white collar with such incredible speed that Libby thought she caught a whiff of smoke from rope-burned skin.

A second after that, Shadrach Jones was looping the black silk around his own neck and grinning down on the stupefied maćtre d’.

“We’d like a table for two,” he drawled.

The little man swallowed audibly. “Oui, monsieur.”

Chapter Three

You wanted fancy, Amos? Here’s your goddamn fancy. Shad yanked at the silk noose around his neck and let his gaze travel around the room as he forced himself to cool off. Actually, he thought, he’d acted with considerable restraint in just relieving that snooty horse’s ass of his necktie when what he’d really wanted to do was take the man’s life for looking at little Miss Libby like she wasn’t good enough to shine his shoes. Prissy, pointy-toed French shoes, too. Good thing he—

“Mr. Jones?”

His eyes flicked back to the lady across the table. Hell, he’d been so steamed up he’d almost forgotten she was there. And what the hell was she smiling about?

“Ma’am?”

“You’re either grinning or you’re grumbling, Mr. Jones.” She cocked her head to one side, causing the silk flowers on her hat to sway. “Do you have any neutral expressions?”

Shad laughed, and he felt the heat of his temper dissipate and his whole body relax. “I guess not. I apologize, ma’am.”

“There’s no need. But thank you. I suspect it’s something you don’t do too often.” She tilted her head the other way now and the silk posies followed along while her smooth brow wrinkled and her fine eyebrows pulled together. “You remind me of my father, Mr. Jones.”

From her tone, Shad couldn’t tell if she meant that as a compliment or not. He didn’t know how to respond, so he just kept looking at her. He caught himself wondering what she’d look like without that silly garden of a hat, then dismissed the thought. What did he care anyway?

“How is my father?” she asked him now. “Is he truly dying, or was that just a ruse to draw us to Texas?”

“He’s dying.”

She winced and sucked in a quick little breath, making Shad immediately sorry he’d been so blunt. But, hell, she’d asked, hadn’t she? He sighed roughly.

“Your father’s had a good life, Miss Kingsland. A long one, too. I don’t know for a fact, but I think he’s ready to go.”

“I imagine he’s in a great deal of pain.” Her lips drew together, wavering just a bit.

“It’s tolerable,” he replied.

She nodded, letting her gaze fall to her clasped hands. Damnation! She wasn’t going to cry, was she? Shad felt a fine film of sweat glaze his skin now. Oh, hell. Don’t cry, lady. Please.

He was almost relieved when the snooty little Frenchman appeared at the table just then and distracted her by putting a menu into her hands. When she thanked him, her voice was solid and her eyes were dry. Lord! Thank you.

Along with sweet relief, Shad suddenly felt hungry enough to stick a fork right into a steer. He reminded himself he needed to keep his strength up for the night ahead, too, once he ditched Miss Libby. He opened his own menu, muttered a gruff curse when he saw that it was written in French or some prissy language, then closed it and slapped it on the table. “I’ll have whatever you’re having,” he told the lady glumly.

Her sister hadn’t been entirely wrong, Libby thought. Mr. Jones’s conversation during dinner had been largely limited to “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am.” Of course, she didn’t suppose her own was any more scintillating, unaccustomed as she was to dining with men.

She had ordered two thick steaks, and when he was finished, she offered Jones what was left of her own. As they exchanged plates, their hands touched. Just a touch. It barely lasted a second, and yet it had such an immediate and potent effect on Libby that she nearly dropped the plate. She could feel the color rise in her face until her cheeks were burning. And her stomach once again began that infernal fluttering.

Touching her wrist to her forehead, she wondered if she wasn’t coming down with a fever of some sort. But her skin was cool, or relatively so considering it was summertime in Texas. Her water goblet was empty, so she took a healthy sip of the champagne she had ignored earlier.

Her dark companion winked at her now, which didn’t do a thing to dispel the butterflies inside her. “Go easy on that, Miss Kingsland. I wouldn’t want your daddy to think I’d gotten his daughter drunk.”

She had felt a little drunk even before swallowing the pale champagne, Libby thought. Shula ought to be the one sitting here, sipping the bubbly liquid. She was the one who loved fine wines and elegant settings, who conversed easily and thrived on the warm attentions of the opposite sex.

What in the world was she doing even thinking about a man’s warm attention? Her father’s foreman had paid more attention to his steak than he had to her. But that was just the way Libby wanted it. Didn’t she always dress in dowdy, dull-colored clothes specifically to avoid such attentions? And wasn’t she always secretly glad to hide in Shula’s gaudy shadow?

You best remember just who and what you are, Libby Kingsland, she reprimanded herself sharply. Then, deciding her cheeks had cooled off sufficiently, she raised her face to meet the dark eyes of Shadrach Jones.

“What time will we be leaving for Paradise, Mr. Jones?”

“Oh, about eight o’clock.” Shad was making some quick mental calculations, beginning with the wee hour he’d finally get to sleep tonight upstairs at the Steamboat. “Best make that nine.”

She nodded. “We have a great deal of luggage. I hope that won’t be a problem.” She paused then—just long enough, Shad noticed, for her little pink tongue to make an appealing pass over her lower lip. “Also, I believe I forgot to mention that I have a child traveling with me.”

Shad blinked. She had a child? Little Miss Libby didn’t look as if she’d ever been within spitting distance of a man, let alone close enough to make a baby. He narrowed his eyes now, seeing her suddenly in a whole new light. “Yours?” he asked.

“Well, yes. In a way.”

He leaned back and crossed his arms. Hard to imagine such a prim little lady rolling in the arms of a man, he thought. And that thought nettled him for some reason. Irked the daylights out of him. “I didn’t realize you’d ever been married,” he said almost gruffly.

She looked surprised. Even the posies on her bonnet looked wide-eyed now. “Oh, no. I’ve never been married,” she said.

Now both her little hands flew up to her face like sparrows flushed from cover. “Oh, no. I didn’t mean…not that. Not ever.” Her face got about as red as a sunset. “What I mean is…”

Shad would have liked to find out exactly what it was she meant, but just then a hand gripped his shoulder and a big voice boomed, “Shadrach Jones! As I live and breathe. And this must be one of Amos’s pretty daughters. How do, honey. I’m Hoyt Backus. Just call me Hoyt.”

The man was burly as a bear. And, if bears smoked fat cigars and drank rye whiskey, Hoyt Backus smelled like one, too. A gray-haired grizzly with a roar like a wounded bull. A big arm that finished off with a meaty paw angled across the table now, scooping up Miss Libby’s little birdlike hand.

While that arm was working Miss Libby’s like a pump handle, Shad pushed his chair back and rose. “You’re a long way from Hellfire, Hoyt.” What was the old coyote up to? he wondered.

“Aw, hell. I come to Corpus to meet with my lawyers a couple times a year.” He had released Miss Libby’s hand by now, freeing his paw to clap Shad on the shoulder. “I like to keep them on their toes.”

Shad eased away from the man’s grasp. “And you just happened to do it on the same day Amos’s daughters got to town, I guess.”

“Pure coincidence,” Hoyt boomed. He threw Libby a wink. “Ain’t that something?”

“That’s something, all right,” Shad said through clenched teeth as he reached across the table and jerked Libby up and out of her chair, then brought her into the protective curve of his arm. “Too bad we’re just leaving, Hoyt. Nice seeing you though.”

“Now wait just a damn minute, Jones.” The burly man got hold of Libby’s hand again. “I’m only being neighborly here.”

Shad laughed. “That’s what a fox claims when he sneaks into the chicken coop, you old devil.” He tossed two gold coins onto the table, then tightened his arm around Libby. “Come on, Miss Kingsland. Let’s go while you still have a few feathers left to pluck.”

Outside the restaurant Libby dug her heels into the planked sidewalk. The big cowboy was sweeping her along like a broom, as if she were some inanimate object he could just push this way and that. “Stop it,” she hissed.

He stopped walking, but his arm was still wrapped around her like a boa constrictor, and he continued to curse under his breath. It seemed to be a perpetual thing with him—like a dark melody twisting through an opera.

She wriggled out of his grasp, and stood there trying to repair some of the damage he’d inflicted on her. Her hat was askew; one glove was on while the other dangled from her bare hand. Her corset felt as if it were climbing up her neck.

Worse, now she found that she was muttering, too. Words like “rude” and “insufferable.” Even a few choice curses of her own. Shadrach Jones, she decided, was definitely bringing out the worst in her.

“You know who that fella was, don’t you?” he growled at her now.

“Of course I do,” Libby snapped back. “Hoyt Backus. He and my father used to be partners until they had some kind of falling-out.” She lifted her chin to glare at him. “That’s no excuse to be rude to him. Or,” she added hotly, “to manhandle me.”

“Manhandle!” He swiped his hat off and slapped it against his leg, then shouted the word once more, nearly choking on it. “Manhandle!”

Libby stiffened her spine, as much to demonstrate her outrage as to reposition her errant corset stays. Then she sniffed indignantly. “Well, your ears work, Mr. Jones.” She graced him with a tight little smile. “Now why don’t we see if your feet do as well? Would you mind escorting me back to the hotel?”

“Glad to, ma’am.” The statement might as well have been another oath, the way he swore it.

“Fine, then.”

“Fine,” he snarled, slapping his hat back on his head, gesturing down the street. “After you.”

She took off like a jackrabbit in a silly hat. Shad stalked behind her, gritting his teeth, trying not to step on the damn drag of her dress, then thinking maybe he would. That would bring her to a right quick stop. Then he could take her by the shoulders and shake a little sense into whatever lay beneath that milliner’s nightmare. Hoyt Backus hadn’t come to Corpus today to keep tabs on any lawyers, and it was no coincidence he’d just happened into them at the restaurant. The man was getting a reckoning on his competition for Paradise.

It didn’t take a lawyer to figure it out. With Amos on his deathbed, the ranch would soon belong to his daughters. And if they decided to sell the place, Hoyt intended to be first in line, his big fist stuffed with cash. If the Kingsland sisters decided to keep it…hell, who knew what that wily old fox would do then? Who cared? Shad wasn’t going to be around once Amos was dead and buried.

He’d been walking—head down and his hands jammed into his back pockets—thinking so hard about Hoyt that he didn’t notice when Libby stopped in front of the hotel. He rammed right into her. Then he blistered the air with curses as he wrapped his arms around her before she hit the sidewalk. Tiny. God, she was just a little bit of a thing under all those pleats and puffs. Well, most of her, he thought, vaguely aware that his hand was curved around a firm, fine breast.

Shad couldn’t let go fast enough. Good thing, too, because he needed both hands to deflect her flying little fists.

“Whoa now, Miss Kingsland.”

The prim little lady was suddenly a hellcat, hissing. And turning him into a howling fool when her foot slammed into his shinbone. What the hell was wrong with her? When he turned his head to see the little crowd that was gathering around them, her palm connected with his cheek. If word got back to Paradise that the foreman couldn’t control five feet two inches of female, he’d be trying to live this incident down much longer than he cared to imagine.

A little fist caught him in the rib cage now.

“That’s it, honey,” somebody cheered. “Use your knee now and give that big lug something to really remember.”

Her knee came up.

“Dammit, Miss Libby.” Shad yanked her toward him and wrapped his arms around her, crushing her against him in a defensive embrace.