Chapter 1
Something or someone peeled Lou Prophet’s right eyelid open.
A female voice, soft as tiny wooden wind chimes stirred by an April breeze, said as though from far away, “You’ve ruined me!”
The bounty hunter’s rye-logged brain was only half registering what his optic nerve was showing it, what his ears were telling it.
A face hovered over him, down close to his own, in fact, but the features of that face were a blur. He could better make out what he was not looking at directly. The head that the face belonged to owned a pretty, thick, long mess of light red tresses curling down onto slender shoulders as white as new-fallen snow on Christmas Day in the north Georgia mountains of Lou Prophet’s original and long-ago home.
The girl released Prophet’s lid, and she disappeared behind a veil of darkness. The accusatory words had stirred him somewhat, despite that his brain was a sponge still soaked in last night’s tornado juice. He had no idea what had been meant by the accusation, and, while vaguely curious, slumber tugged at the ex-rebel bounty hunter like a heavy wind, albeit a wind that owned the inviting aroma of lilac water and natural, bed-fermented female musk.
Down, down, Prophet fell . . . until his other lid was tugged open, and the face appeared again, even closer to his own this time, so that he could see a gunmetal blue eye staring into his own left one. “Did you hear me? You’ve utterly and completely ruined me! Ohh! ”
That nudged Prophet closer to full wakefulness. What in the hell was this girl, whoever in hell she was, talking about?
Ruined ?
While Prophet had a somewhat wide-ranging reputation as a hard-nosed man hunter, he’d never been anything but gentle with women. Unless said women were running on the wrong side of the law and had tried to kill him, of course. (One of the first things he’d learned when he’d first turned to bounty hunting after venturing west after his beloved South had been whipped during the War of Northern Aggression was that not all hardened outlaws were men.) But those women were the exception rather than the rule, and he doubted that any of them would say he’d “ruined” them.
Prophet tried to say the word but, just as his brain was not yet hooked up to his eyes, it was not attached to his mouth, either, so that what he heard his own lips say as they moved stiffly against each other was: “Roo-hoom . . . d . . . ?”
“Ruined!” the girl said, louder, heartbroken. “Purely ruined !”
The half squeal, half moan was a cold hand reaching down into the warm water of the bounty hunter’s slumber and plucking him into full wakefulness. He bolted upright in bed, blinking, heart thudding, wondering if he’d done something untoward during his inebriation.
Untoward, that was, beyond the usual transgressions of gambling himself into mind-numbing debt, drinking himself (as he’d obviously done last night) into a coma, frolicking with fallen women, brawling, fighting with knives, pistol-shooting shot glasses off neat pyramids arranged on bar tops, howling at the moon, swinging from the rafters, herding chickens, stealing bells from courthouse cupolas, singing to his horse, getting beaten up or thrown in jail or both, and, as per one occasion, asking a fallen woman to be his bride and actually going through with the ceremony. (Fortunately, the union had been rendered null and void when it was revealed that the minister had been defrocked due to his having had carnal knowledge of his organist.)
Prophet turned to the girl sitting naked beside him, not having any recollection of who she was or where he had met her but vaguely amazed at her sparkling, Christmas-morning beauty, and wrapped his left arm around her. “Oh, honey, I’m sooo sorry if I did anything last night that . . . that—”
“Oh, Lou—you’ve ruined me for all men hereafter. Last night was . . . well, it was absolutely magical. I’ve never been treated that way before . . .”
“Honey, who is your pa, anyway? Apparently, he knows me . . . ?”
“Oh, Lou,” she said, rubbing against him and purring like a kitten, “stop fooling around, would you? You know very well my father is Richard Teagarden, governor of Colorado.”
Prophet’s heart hiccupped. He jerked his head up as a rush of disconnected images from last night battered his tender, sodden brain. As disjointed as the images were, they told the story of Prophet recently riding into Denver with the body of Lancaster Smudge draped over the saddle of the horse Prophet had trailed behind his own hammerheaded dun, Mean and Ugly.
Over the past year and a half, Lancaster Smudge and his gang of five other owlhoots had become the bane of the territory not to mention of the Denver & Santa Fe Railroad, whose trains they’d preyed on without mercy, threatening to run the company into the ground and leave Colorado where it had been ten years before—relying on stagecoach services and mule trains for transport and commerce.
Many lawmen had been sicced on the gang, and a goodly portion of those few lawmen who’d gotten close to their quarry had ended up turned toe-down and snuggling with the diamondbacks in a Rocky Mountain canyon. The Smudge Bunch, as the papers had cheekily called Smudge’s gang, were as elusive as Arizona sidewinders.
Prophet, however, working in cahoots with his sometime partner, Louisa Bonaventure, had proven the equals of the Smudge Bunch, and taken them down in their hideout up near the little mining town of Frisco, when the boys had let their hair as well as their pants down to enjoy a romp in Mrs. Beauchamp’s House of the Seven Enchantments.
After Prophet had turned Smudge into the federals for the two-thousand-dollar reward, the jubilant governor had insisted on inviting the bounty hunter out to the Larimer Hotel for a meal on the state’s tab. There, Prophet had met the stately, smiling but distracted-seeming Mrs. Teagarden as well as the governor’s pretty, precocious daughter, Clovis.
Clovis! Her name was Clovis Teagarden! Whew!
Prophet had never been given such grand treatment before. Bounty hunters were more or less considered vermin on the frontier, not all that higher on the human ladder than the men they hunted for the bounties on their heads. So Prophet was more accustomed to being treated like dog dung on a grub line rider’s boots when he wasn’t being ignored altogether by those of a more prestigious link in society’s chain.
He certainly had never been invited out to dinner by anyone as important as a governor.
However, it had turned out that Governor Teagarden, being of a romantic turn of mind as well as a frequent reader of dime novels and the Police Gazette, was a secret fan of both Prophet and Louisa Bonaventure, whom the pulp rags had dubbed “the Vengeance Queen.” Teagarden had apparently followed the duo’s bounty hunting careers in the western newspapers, including Denver’s own Rocky Mountain News.
Prophet suspected that the dapper little gray-haired man, who wore a gold ring on his arthritic little right finger and a giant, gray, walrus mustache on his lean, pasty face, had wanted to meet the comely blond Louisa far more than he’d wanted to dine with the scruffy Prophet. When Lou had informed the man that Louisa would not be joining them, as she’d decided to light out after a trio of outlaws they’d learned about near Leadville rather than accompany her partner back to Denver with a dead man, Teagarden had acquired a fleeting but poignant expression of deep disenchantment.
His sprightly and precocious daughter, Clovis, however, had kept her eyes on Prophet all through dinner, till he thought her smoldering gaze would burn a hole right through him. Still, the bounty man had been more than mildly taken aback when she’d slipped him a room key as he’d shaken her hand after dinner. It turned out the girl often spent nights in her father’s private suite in the Larimer Hotel—under the strict supervision of a female chaperone, of course—because she attended a finishing school only two blocks from the hotel.
It also turned out, to Prophet’s incredulity, that the girl’s chaperone, Mrs. Borghild Rasmussen, who supposedly resided in the hotel, did not, in fact, exist, and that the bank drafts the governor wrote her were, in fact, never cashed. The governor’s private secretary, a male no doubt under the mesmerizing influence of the carnal Clovis, kept it all a secret from the doddering fool.
So Clovis was pretty much running off her leash in the burgeoning and colorful cow town of Denver, inviting bounty hunters—well, one, at least—to her room.
Prophet rubbed the heels of his hands against his temples. “Clovis, I, uh . . . don’t know what to say.”
“You did remember my name!” the girl said.
“How could I forget a girl like you? It was a wonderful night, Clovis, but I tell you, honey, I never realized you were only sixteen. Hell, I thought you were at least twenty-one pushin’ forty-five!”
Prophet scuttled over to the side of the bed that was, he saw now, enormous. It was easily the largest bed he’d ever seen let alone slept in.
“Oh, Lou—where are you going? You can’t go yet! The day is just getting started!”
Prophet scowled over his shoulder at her, trying to ignore the fact that she was naked, not an easy task even in his whiskey-logged state. “You best get ready for school, little girl.”
“Oh, phooey,” Clovis said, leaning back on her elbows, pooching her pink lips out in a pout. “I’m going to skip school today. I often do. Father doesn’t care. Neither does Mother. She’ll be busy with her tea parties and such. Father’s so busy with affairs of state he doesn’t think about much of anything but work, work, work . . . and getting reelected, of course.”
She rolled her eyes then beamed at Prophet. “That’s why we can spend the whole day together, Lou.”
“Doesn’t your father ever check up on you?”
She only tittered an ironic laugh and wrapped her hands around her ankles, pulling her feet back toward her shoulders, giving him a haunting but unwanted eyeful.
Between love bouts the previous night, she’d told him a lot about herself, but he’d drunk so much whiskey, having gone without any skull pop for the past month he’d been hunting owlhoots in the mountains with the teetotaling Vengeance Queen, that he could remember only bits and pieces.
Clovis was a talker, though—he remembered that.
He’d made a mistake when he’d tramped up the Larimer’s broad, carpeted stairs to find the lock that fit the key Clovis had given him.
Having entered a celebratory frame of mind the second he’d hit town, he’d gotten drunk before he’d dined with the governor’s family, so his judgment had been off. And, if the truth be told, Prophet was far too weak a man to be able to ignore the fact of a pretty young woman handing him her room key with a coquettish dip of her chin and alluring glint in her eye.
In such a situation he was not now nor ever had been the type of jake who could shake his head and say, “Sorry, ma’am, but I’m not that sort of fella,” and walk away. Just as he was having trouble averting his attention to what she was teasing him with now . . .
And some day he’d likely be fed a couple loads of buckshot for just that failing . . .
Or . . . maybe that day was here now, he amended the unspoken warning to himself as someone hammered on the room’s door and a man’s angry voice said, “Clovis? Clovis, are you in there?”