CHAPTER 17
At the same time, but roughly a hundred and fifty miles to the northeast, Jaycee Breckenridge drew in a deep draught of fresh, northern Colorado air and said, “What a heavenly time of the day. Thank you so much, Cisco, for luring me out of the Thousand Delights for a badly needed stretch of my legs and a good lung clearing.”
“Not at all, Jay. Glad I could help.”
“I swear,” Jay said as they stopped, arm in arm, at the west edge of town to stare toward Horsetooth Rock, beyond which the sun had just dropped, pulling the crimson bayonets of its last rays down along with it, “I inhale so much cigarette and cigar smoke all day, I forget what clean air really smells like. I go to bed feeling as though I’ve smoked a couple dozen quirleys rolled with cheap tobacco!”
“Yes, it can’t be healthy,” the tall, handsome marshal said, squeezing her hand in his. “But I have to admit that my motives for asking you out for a walk were farther reaching than just my concern for your health, Miss Breckenridge.” He rose up on the toes of his polished black cavalry boots and gave his chin a cordial dip while lifting his dragoon-style mustache in a toothy smile.
Jay turned to him, giving both her copper brows a feigned coy arch. “Oh? And what other motives might you have, pray tell? Careful now, Marshal, I do believe I’m within hailing distance of First Avenue. You wouldn’t want a scandal on your hands—now, would you? To be arrested by your own deputies would be downright embarrassing, I would think!”
She chuckled throatily.
Marshal Walsh chuckled, as well, and patted her hand, which he held firmly in his own. “Never to worry, milady,” he said through another oily grin. “I give you my word as a gentleman as well as an upholder of the law that your honor is safe in my hands.”
He chuckled again, a tad nervously, self-consciously, Jay silently opined. Then he cleared his throat and, sobering somewhat, bounced up and down again on the toes of his boots and said, “All jokes aside, I must confess that I invited you out here because I’ve simply come to enjoy your company.”
“Oh?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Obvious?” Jay frowned. “In what way?”
“Well, you must have seen me frequenting the Thousand Delights. Several times a day,” he added with another charming smile.
“You’re not the only man, Cisco, who enjoys our free lunch counter. Some of that summer sausage I ship up here from Denver, and the cheese—”
“It is not the sausage nor the cheese, dear Jay, that beckons me through your doors so often.”
“It’s not? Oh, well, then’t. . .” Jay let her voice trail off as she returned her gaze toward the appropriately named Horsetooth Rock, now fully silhouetted against a lime green sky. “You have me at a disadvantage, then, Marshal Walsh. I do know you haven’t called on any of my girls in several weeks . . .”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Do you find them, um . . . less than satisfactory? Let me assure you, I have Dr. Raskin examine each one every two weeks, just to make sure none of my customers can complain of unexpected surprises.”
Walsh canted his head to one side and arranged a mock-admonishing expression on his broad, handsome face beneath the narrow brim of his crisp bowler. “Come now, Jay. Don’t be coy. You know how I feel about you. You must have known how I’ve felt about you since we first met in Abilene.”
“A hundred years ago,” Jay said.
“It sure is funny.”
“What’s funny, Cisco?”
Walsh turned square to Jay and placed his hands on her shoulders, bare beneath a teal-green shawl that matched the green of her sparkling gown. His eyes dropped furtively—or with what he probably thought was furtiveness—to her freckled cleavage, revealed by the gown’s low bodice cut to accentuate the handsome woman’s rounded curves, before rising again to her eyes. “It feels like only yesterday to me. And you don’t look a day older. In fact, I do believe you’ve become even more beautiful than when you were a bouncing young redhead singing and kicking your legs up high for those border roughs in the Armadillo!”
“Oh, well,” Jay said, chuckling her surprise. “That’s quite the compli—”
Before she could complete the sentence, Walsh leaned down to place his mouth on hers. Jay was startled by the man’s sudden show of passion. She tried to return the kiss. She wanted to, in fact, but for some reason her lips wouldn’t soften and yield to his the way he wanted her to.
Walsh pulled his head away, dropped his hands from her shoulders, and averted his gaze, vaguely sheepish. “I’m . . . I’m sorry if that was unwanted.”
Jay smiled, flushed a little, and turned away to stare off toward the shelving stone dikes to the north of Horsetooth Rock, which were turning a darker purple now as the light left the sky. “Oh, Cisco, it wasn’t so much unwanted as . . . as it just sort of startled me a little. Caught me off guard. I’m sorry.”
She truly was sorry. She welcomed this man’s attentions. She was flattered by them, for she was attracted to him. And yet she felt a barrier between them, a hesitancy, an aloofness in her own demeanor when he was near, which she’d known even before he’d mentioned it that he very much wanted to be near.
A part of her wanted that, as well.
And yet . . .
“It’s Braddock, isn’t it?”
The name as well as the question drew her shoulders together slightly.
She turned around to face the tall man again, frowning at him. “What?”
“It’s Jimmy Braddock. Slash. He stands between us—doesn’t he, Jay?” Walsh paused. He removed his hat, swept a hand through his wavy, thick brown hair with a sigh, then took the hat in both hands, tossing it absently, turning it between his long fingers.
Jay pondered that, made a sour expression. “I don’t know. Yes. I guess so.” She turned away again, abruptly. She sighed, lifted her chin, and laughed dryly deep in her chest. “Yes, yes, yes. Indeed, he does, Cisco. I’m sorry. Honestly, I don’t know what it is about that scruffy, owly, cold, and aloof, middle-aged cutthroat—but I do harbor a deep fondness for him, indeed.” She gave a guttural groan of frustration through gritted teeth.
She turned back to the marshal, frowning up at him in deep consternation. “I have no idea why.”
“Sometimes the heart doesn’t always tell the brain.”
Jay smiled and placed a hand on Walsh’s cheek, caressing it a little with her thumb. “That’s very wise.”
“Oh, I’ve got all kinds of wise things to say, Jay. But I guess I’ll be needing to find another woman to tell them to.” Walsh gave a pained smile. “Won’t I?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Cisco.”
“Yes, you do. The man is gone for you, Jay. I could tell it in your room the other night. There was something between you. It was in the air, like electricity after a lightning storm. I was jealous. I’ll be honest with you . . . as I so seldom am with other women, for some damn crazy reason . . . but I was jealous as hell!”
“Maybe you’re so seldom jealous,” Jay said, keeping her hand on his cheek, then playfully poking her finger against his broad, blunt-tipped, sun-seasoned nose. “Maybe, mostly, other men are jealous of you. You’re uncomfortable with having the tables turned.”
Walsh laughed at that, turned away. He was kneading his hat brim as though it were a flour crust he was packing along the lip of a pie pan. “You know me too well, Jay.”
“That’s not a hard thing to figure out.” Jay sighed and fingered the edge of her shawl, staring at the dirt of the trail they’d followed out from town. “What’s hard to figure is a person’s own heart.”
“I have a feeling you’re a lot alike—you an’ Slash,” said Walsh. “If that helps any.”
“Oh?” She frowned up at him. “How so?”
Walsh shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. It was just a sense I got up in your room the other night.”
“Hmmm.” Jay nodded slowly. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Does he know how you feel?”
Jay continued to nod, and she smiled a little. “He knows.”
“Has he told you how he feels about you?”
“No. But not for lack of trying.”
Walsh frowned, curious. “Come again?”
She laughed again, but with more than a little irony. “Slash has told me more about how he feels with his eyes, when he didn’t know I was looking, than he’s ever said with his words. Long ago, I thought we were going to get together—Slash an’ me. Before Pete came along. But Slash could never find the words back then, just as he doesn’t seem able to find them now. So I took up with Pete.
“Oh, I was in love with Pistol Pete—don’t get me wrong. Such a big, handsome, commanding figure, with more than a little of the rascal in him” She hacked out a bawdy laugh and shook her head in wonder. “But I think I was always a little in love with Slash, too. There was just something about his lonesomeness and his grumpy demeanor. That anger he always tries to show is betrayed by the gentleness of his eyes. I know he has a romantic turn of mind. Maybe not as much as Pecos does. Lord, Pecos can fall in and out of head-over-heels love in a week and do the very same thing the next week, and end up howling like a gut-shot coyote when the next one leaves him. Hah!”
Jay toed a line in the dirt with the heel of her high-heeled leather boot. “Slash falls harder and deeper, I think. And he doesn’t do himself any good by being unable to express his feelings. I think I know why he has trouble with people, though.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“He was an orphan, Slash was. He was raised along the river piers and warehouses in St. Louis. Back when that town was wide open. His mother was a prostitute. She died when he was very young. Slash was raised by other prostitutes, each one of whom ended up the same unfortunate way as his mother. Dying slowly of one disease or another. Pleurisy, consumption, black fever . . . syphilis. That kind of life does something to a boy, and the man that boy becomes. He never trusts anybody. Not fully. Not ever. Never feels a part of something larger than himself. Can never fully belong. Can never tell a woman he loves her, because—who knows?—she might not return the favor and leave him even lonelier than he was before.”
Jay sighed and looked up at the sky, in which the first stars kindled brightly. “Pecos had a mother. In New Mexico. I don’t think she was worth much, but he had her, just the same. And the men who came in and out of her life for a time. I know he loved his mother very much. He told me one time. Slash never told me peanuts about himself. I learned what I learned about him from the women I knew on the line. Those who’d known him . . . had known his situation at home—back before he killed a man who killed one of the prostitutes who had unofficially adopted him. Then he cut out for the Wild West, and he’s been running off his leash out here ever since. Him an’ Pecos, who is the light tempering Slash’s darkness. They met down in Texas. In some bordello, of course. All these years ago now.”
She stopped and just stared at the stars for a time. Walsh stood beside her, staring skyward, as well.
Finally, he glanced over at her. “What are you going to do, Jay? About Slash, I mean.”
She thought about that as she stared at the stars growing brighter with each flicker. She glanced over at Walsh and said thoughtfully, firmly, “I’m going to give him some time. Not a lot. Because neither of us is getting any younger, and I’d as soon not die alone, with no one around to give my cheek one more kiss. No, I’m not going to wait on him forever. But I’m going to wait a little while longer.”
She smiled wistfully. “I owe him that much.”
Walsh drew a deep breath and gave a dubious half-smile. “Far be it from me to say this, but say it I will. I don’t think you owe him that much. Or is that my envy speaking again?” He smiled, shook his head. “Whatever is doing my talking for me, just know this, Jaycee Breckenridge.”
He closed his hands over her shoulder again, drew her toward him. “If that old cutthroat can’t muster up the courage to make an honest woman out of you, I’ll be waiting in the wings to do just that.”
Jay looked up at him in surprise, deeply touched. “Really, Cisco? You’d do that for me?”
“That, darling woman, is testament to how deeply I feel for you. I for one am not afraid to say it. I am also not so proud that I’d let pride stand in my way of one day placing a ring on your finger, facing a judge, saying ‘I do forevermore,’ and lifting your veil and kissing your tender lips.”
He gave a courtly bow and kissed her hand.
“My God, Cisco,” Jay said, sucking back a powerful wave of emotion, “I think I might have just swooned!”
“Don’t worry—I’m here to catch you when you fall.”
Jay frowned. “You said ‘when.’ Are you so certain?”
Walsh gave a regretful half-smile. “Unfortunately, I am.”
“Don’t be offended that I do hope you’re wrong.”
“Not at all.” Walsh smiled. “But only if you’ll join me for one drink before you start the wild part of your night in the Thousand Delights.”
“First one’s on me!”
Cisco turned sideways to her and crooked his arm. Jay hooked hers through his. They started back to the bustling heart of Fort Collins in the northern Colorado gloaming.