Chapter 7
When Prophet’s beer and double bourbon arrived, Phoebe Dahlstrom lifted her wineglass. “Let’s have a toast, shall we?”
“A toast,” Prophet said, lifting his bourbon glass. “To what?”
“To your bringing Charlie Butters to town in handcuffs.” She arched a brow and dipped her chin, like a gently admonishing schoolmarm. “Sooner rather than later.”
“I’ll drink to that.” Prophet couldn’t help casting one more quick glance toward Louisa and Ford, who were now ordering, the dining room’s single waiter scribbling on a small pad.
He clinked his glass to Phoebe’s and sipped his bourbon.
“And how about if we make a little agreement, Mr. Prophet?”
“Only if you call me Lou, Phoebe.”
“All right, then. Lou it is. Let’s you and I agree to give each other our full attention this evening, shall we? I mean, it does look like we’re all each other has.” Phoebe gave a smoky half grin, glanced around, then leaned intimately forward. “And, if you won’t think me too forward for saying so, I think I have the pick of the crop. At least, as far as this dining room is concerned.”
Prophet smiled, feeling a flush in his cheeks. Now that he was giving this woman his full attention, having put Louisa where she belonged—on the back burner of the range in his mind—he saw again, as he’d seen in Ford’s office, how pretty and sensual Phoebe Dahlstrom was. Every bit as alluring as Louisa, though in her own unique way.
Prophet followed the woman’s gaze around the room. There were about twelve other diners, including Ford and Louisa. Most were men—businessmen and three or four fellas who appeared freighters. Maybe a stock buyer or two, whom you could distinguish from range men by their large, soft bellies and pasty complexions. Two of them sat with a gaudily dressed woman who Prophet assumed was a doxie. She laughed a little too loudly, and her late-middle-aged dinner companions didn’t seem to care.
By far the handsomest man in the room was also the youngest—Jonas Ford.
“The marshal has me all beat to hell,” Prophet said. “If you’ll forgive my farm manners and blue tongue.” He sipped his frothy ale, which was surprisingly cool for these parts. The hotel must have a deep cellar.
“If you like well-groomed men,” Phoebe said. “If you like men who have as good a taste in clothes as I do.”
“You don’t?”
“Nothing against Jonas,” Phoebe said, a fleeting, deprecating smile twitching across her mouth. “He and I grew up together. I know him well. A nice man; a learned man as well as an ambitious man. But he’s always had a bit of the dude in him. Maybe because of my own crude upbringing, I’ve always been attracted to large, masculine men. Men who could wield a filthy tongue when one was necessary, and know how to swing their fists when words won’t settle the debate. That’s the kind of man Carson’s Wash needs for its lawman.”
Prophet compared the woman’s fragile beauty to her words, and the contrast was stark. As well as more than slightly arousing . . .
“You don’t approve of Jonas’s law-bringing skills?” he asked.
“I did before . . . well, before Butters murdered my husband and Jonas and his deputies did nothing to bring him in except to get two of them killed and Jonas with his arm in a sling.”
Prophet didn’t want to talk about Jonas Ford anymore. He felt funny about the topic, because he saw Jonas as a friend. He couldn’t also help seeing him as competition, though he didn’t want to see him that way. It was a nasty feeling. A boyishly immature one. If he’d been a few years younger, he might have thrown a punch or two by now and made a total ass out of himself.
No, he didn’t want to talk about Jonas Ford.
By way of switching the topic of the conversation, he angled toward the thing about Phoebe Dahlstrom that had been percolating in the back of his brain.
“Speaking of your so-called crude upbringing, Mrs. . . . I mean, Phoebe . . .”
“Yes?”
“Jonas told Louisa and me something earlier, outside his office, that I found a little hard to believe—given the circumstances, and all.”
Phoebe gave a wry grin, pink lips parting just a little. She blinked once, slowly. “He told you that George Hill is my father.” She dragged the words out as though she were confessing a secret she’d been keeping for a long time. One that she didn’t like to even think about.
“So it’s true.”
“It’s true.”
Phoebe emptied her wineglass and set the glass back down on the table. As she refilled it, she said, “Let’s order some food, shall we? If I’m going to tell you my life’s story, I’m going to need some fortification beyond wine”—she set the nearly empty bottle down on the table and rolled her eyes—“though the wine helps.”
Later, when their steaks and all the surroundings, including a steaming wicker basket of crusty bread, had arrived, and they were cutting into their meat, she said, “Yes, my father is George Hill. He raised me here in Carson’s Wash—before there was anything but the wash. And the Apaches. There were plenty of Apaches. And rattlesnakes.
“My mother died when I was twelve. She and my father had had a terrible row, and my mother ran out. My father had slapped her while I cowered under the kitchen table. It was night. She must have lost her sense of direction and fell into a deep gorge. That was the Lord taking pity on her, saving her from my father’s rough ways. God or whoever’s up there took no such pity on me. George Hill was and is a coldhearted devil. I didn’t realize it when I was much younger. Before my mother died. Before he killed her. He was a big, tough man who started the town when he built up a spring that made it possible to haul freight through this country. Then he built a saloon and a trading post that were the only ones within two hundred miles. He seemed to me a man who could do anything. To me, he was God!
“Only, this god had an enemy.”
“Dahlstrom?”
“The man I came to marry.”
“How did that happen? If I’m bein’ overly curious, Phoebe, just tell this cat to lay down. I don’t need to know any more than I already do to run Butters to ground.”
“I have nothing to hide, Lou. All of my skeletons are right out in the open for all to see. I first fell in love with my husband Max’s son, Erik. My father, however, forbade me to marry Erik. Max came into this country around the same time my father had, saw the future in that spring, and bought an old Spanish land grant on which he built his own ranch. He built several businesses here in Carson’s Wash, and he partnered up with Hannibal Ford, or ‘the General,’ as everyone around here knows him, to establish a bank and trust as well as a land office and a stagecoach line, which is still running.
“All three men—Max, the General, and my father, George Hill—were tough, belligerent, domineering men. They’d fought in the war back East and then the Apaches out here. All they really knew was violence. Naturally, they found themselves in competition with each other. Max and the General joined forces against my father. The two factions tried to drive each other out. Things got violent on both sides. Both sides hired gunmen. Men were killed in town and on the range.
“Through all this chaos, I fell in love with Erik Dahlstrom and saw him on the sly. When my father found out, he had Erik beaten to within an inch of his life. Erik survived, but, like a whipped dog, he was ruined. He headed for Mexico and died down there while running with a gang of ex-Confederate outlaws. My heart was broken. I turned against my father. I had nowhere to live, so Max took me in to keep house for him.
“A month after his sickly wife passed, Max and I were married. That was five years ago. On our wedding day, Max and I and his men came to town to celebrate and to stay here, in Max and the General’s hotel, the Rio Grande. My father and his men came over from my father’s saloon and mercantile and lumberyard to wreak havoc right here in this dining room. My father and Max fought mano a mano.
“They were a couple of splendid bulls fighting over past and current injuries. For their honor. For a woman. Damn near killed each other. When my father fell, beaten and exhausted, half his clothes ripped off his body, Max turned his left eye to pudding with a spur rowel. While my father screamed, clutching his bloody eye, I knelt before him and laughed in his face!”
Phoebe had lifted her chin proudly, defiantly, as she’d espoused this last in a voice buoyant with jubilation. Again, Prophet had the impression of the prow of a clipper ship cleaving a turbulent ocean. She smiled brightly over the rim of her wineglass.
Prophet had stopped eating midway through his meal. He’d been riveted on the girl’s tale as well as on the passion with which she’d relayed it. He couldn’t help being more than a little aroused, as well, by the half-crazed fervor in her eyes.
It was as if she were seeing it all again—that horrific mano a mano fight right here in the Rio Grande, and her father’s eye turned to “pudding” by her husband on their wedding night. Her husband, who had likely been twice her age or more.
A man whom she had no doubt married for the sole purpose of defying her father.
“I believe the cat has your tongue, Mr. Prophet,” Phoebe said, and laughed.
“It does indeed,” Prophet said, clearing the frog in his throat and staring back at the ravishing young woman before him. He wasn’t sure if it was the bourbon, but his brain was slow to absorb the information. Or the full impact of the violence and bloodshed that had occurred here. “Seems like such a nice, quiet little town.”
“True, it’s been a lot quieter here over the past five years. It helped when Jonas Ford came back from college in the East to take over as marshal. He’d returned a year before his father died. The General had always been respected in these parts, as he’d fought valiantly in the war, and that respect was passed down to his son.”
“So why do you suppose your father waited until now to kill your husband?”
Phoebe cocked a brow and shrugged a shoulder as she resumed eating. Forking a large chunk of meat into her mouth, she said, “Evil. Wickedness. A malevolence he was born with. I knew that when things settled down they’d only really settled down on my father’s part for one reason. He was biding his time. He was licking his wounds, savoring his pain. He wanted me and Max to have some time together, to come to love and respect each other. Which we did, in fact, despite the broad gap in our ages. Max might have been old, Lou, but I will tell you this”—she leaned forward to mutter with a devilish glint in her sexy eyes—“he had not only the right equipment but the skill to go along with it, to satisfy a woman.”
Phoebe winked, gave a husky chuckle, and forked more bloody meat between her pretty, pink lips.
“I think that cat has got your tongue again, Lou!” she said with naughty delight, laughing as she chewed.
Prophet had never known a woman to make him blush as many times in one sitting, but Phoebe Dahlstrom wasn’t just any woman. This was one whose mold had been broken across the knee of whatever laughing god had made her. Prophet had thought he’d had his hands full with Louisa. Here was another one who could tie a man’s britches in a knot.
Prophet cleared his throat again. The last chunk of meat and potatoes he’d eaten had gotten turned cattywampus somewhere around his vocal cords.
While he was trying to pick some coherent words out of the confusion of thoughts running through his brain, Phoebe shoved her nearly empty plate aside, picked up her wineglass, and clutched it to her breasts as she leaned intimately forward and cast a furtive glance toward where Ford and Louisa were eating on the other side of the room.
“Tell me, Lou—and please admonish me if I’m being too forward—but have you and the Vengeance Queen . . . uh . . . slept together?” She turned to him and fluttered an eyelid. “And I don’t mean slept.”