Chapter Eight #3
But ranch kids got smarter around ten or twelve. They didn’t grab and hang on to an electric fence the way he just had. He’d thought he was tugging on a piece of fishing line that someone had tossed and forgotten, and he was trying to pull it out of the bushes to dispose of it properly.
“Cow fences are about half the voltage of bear fences,” Jayce said.
Adam changed the subject. “I was talking to Mavis. She told me about our guest’s career ambitions.”
The bear fence wasn’t nearly as jarring as Malika and her desire to school men in the art of attracting women.
Adam would be with him on this.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with women these days,” Jayce complained. “Why do they want to play prostitutes and women with ruined reputations? What’s wrong with being a schoolteacher? Or a shopkeeper?”
“Soiled doves were savvy businesswomen. They knew their market, and they made money off men. A number of those ladies invested in other businesses, too, and became rich in their own right, so I can see the appeal.” Adam’s thoughtful gaze bored into him.
“But I was referring to pie-making. That’s what the berries are for, aren’t they?
Pie-making seems respectable enough. What are you talking about? ”
Back away. Slowly.
“Just thinking out loud,” he said.
Silence clicked for a few erratic heartbeats.
“I’ve got something else for you to think about,” Adam said, letting it drop.
“The client coming at the end of August wants to rob a bank. He’ll lead a gang of outlaws, and one of them is going to betray him.
Mavis says you get to be the outlaw with the heart of gold who turns do-gooder, then has a shootout with our guest during the getaway outside the bank.
Grady’s already started a draft of the script. ”
Immediately, Jayce was suspicious. Guests usually liked to play the do-gooder.
“Which one of us dies?”
Adam patted his shoulder. “Sorry, do-gooder. You aren’t going to pull through.”
Didn’t that figure.
“We’re going to need nitroglycerin,” Adam said thoughtfully.
“But back to the soiled doves … you’re in charge of the sheik’s little sister because he trusts you around her, but I’ve seen the way she looks at you, and she’s up to no good.
Do you honestly believe that Tilly’s going to be a steadying influence on her? ”
Jayce would rather discuss nitroglycerin than Malika and her unsteady ways. “I thought so last night. I’m not as sure of it this morning.”
Tilly Wynn was another wild card, even after six years.
He’d run into her—literally—at a horse auction in Grand, Montana.
She was picking pockets, and doing a good job of it, too, by all accounts, but got overconfident when she targeted Adam, who knew a thing or two about picking pockets, himself.
She had a good head start on him, though, because a bad leg slowed him down, but Jayce, who’d missed the opening credits to the main feature, had felt obligated to step in when he spotted Adam in hot pursuit.
To this day, they didn’t know Tilly’s story. Her sister Loretta’s, either. But that the sisters were hungry and desperate went undisputed, and Jayce was almost as big a sucker for women in trouble as Adam.
These days, Loretta ran Burning Scrub’s dairy and kept mostly to herself. Tilly was smart, and a whiz with computers, and much more outgoing. She turned out to be the little sister Jayce hadn’t known he didn’t want.
On the outside, Tilly looked young for her age, and as cherubic as Linda. Inside, however, lurked the soul of a bandit. One with no common sense. Of all the people at that horse auction whose pockets she could have picked, she’d targeted Adam.
“Keep an eye on those two,” Adam said, indicating Malika and Tilly. “No soiling of doves. The sheik wants us to keep his sister out of trouble, and he’s already paid us for it. We don’t want to have to give the money back. But it’s about more than the money. Our reputation’s at stake.”
A hot lump of guilt seared Jayce’s chest. Burning Scrub relied on clients like Sheik Ali to spread the word to their rich family and friends, meaning kissing Ali’s sister had been a major mistake on his part, because that wasn’t the word the town wanted to spread.
Malika was engaged to someone her brother had chosen for her.
She was unlikely to confide in her brother as to what happened, because Ali would be almost as unhappy with her as with him. That was the good news.
But he hoped she didn’t confide in Tilly either, because that would be bad. Very bad. If she did, he was doomed. The women in this town liked to gossip. Why had he kissed her?
He knew full well why he had. He’d do it again, given the chance. He couldn’t look at her directly, because whenever he did, all he could think of was sex. She looked back at him in a way that said she was thinking about it too.
And Adam had noticed.
“No idea what you’re talking about, pardner,” he said to Adam. “I’m just a poor, honorable cowboy whose duty it is to keep a young lady out of harm’s way while her brother escapes ruthless killers.”
Adam clapped him on the back.
“That’s the spirit,” he said.