Free Heaven with a Gun by Connie Brockway Page A

empathetic reply. Then he rolled his shoulder into it, working the sore muscle.
    “Stay still.” Her voice sounded a little breathy, even to her own ears, but she didn’t care. His chest was beautiful, dense, with long, sloping muscles tight beneath supple, bronzed skin. She flattened her palm on his pectoral and smoothed the warming oil across the bulging muscle, working it in with the heel of her hand and her fingertips, kneading the resilient flesh deeply, finding little knots of tension and easing them out. “This speeds up healing all kinds of injuries,” she murmured. “Cuts and scrapes and bruises.”
    Her fingertip brushed across his flat nipple and returned, moving across his broad chest, back and forth, soothing, rubbing, stroking him.
    Lord in heaven.
    Though he sat absolutely still beneath her touch, the heat rushing up from her palm swirled through her entire body, making it hard to breathe. He was smooth and hard and warm, and she wanted to fondle and stroke and urge his virility into expression, to make the male in him answer the female in her, to touch her lips to his skin, test the heated temperature of his body with her tongue, move—
    “Gilly.”
    She struggled out of her sensuous torpor. Slowly, her gaze refocused. He was regarding her strangely, his head cocked to one side. The curls at the nape of his neck hung in damp ringlets that she wanted to—
    “Darlin’.”
    “Hmm?”
    “There aren’t any cuts or bruises there.”
    “What?” Her voice was hazy, unfocused. She could look into his eyes for hours, locked in their blue embrace. . . .
    “I wasn’t injured there.”
    “Oh? Oh!” She broke eye contact with a jolt. She glanced down. Her hand was on his left breast; fingers spread wide, barely denting the muscle beneath. There wasn’t a mark on him.
    Embarrassment rippled in a molten current through her, steaming her cheeks with color. She wheeled.
    “Gil!”
    She stopped, counted to ten, and dared a glance back over her shoulder. He sat where she’d left him, hands clenched into fists on top of his knees, head bowed slightly, lips parted, and eyes riveted on the floorboards.
    “We have a business arrangement.” He looked up at her, tension in his voice, in his hard face. “Don’t we? Isn’t that what this is?”
    She wanted to say no, to deny it. To deny the past she hadn’t asked for and the future she didn’t want. But that wouldn’t be fair to him. She didn’t want him despising her more than he already would. “Yes. It’s business.”
    “Then keep up your part of the bargain. Tell me.”
    “What?” she asked in confusion.
    “Tell me the truth. Why are you a thief?” It was a demand, an urgent imperative.
    He couldn’t have made himself any more clear. He had her heart, but he didn’t want that. He wanted her story, and even that must be on his terms. She wouldn’t give it to him. It was the one thing she had left. Her identity.
    “Sure.” Her voice was clipped and hard. She swung around. “Where should I begin?” She flopped down sideways in the upholstered chair, swinging her cast nonchalantly over the arm, petticoats playing peekaboo with him. “I suppose birth would be too early?” He didn’t comment. Just sat watching her, his flesh rimed by the soft light, beautiful and unreachable. She pulled the tortoiseshell combs from her hair and shook her head, tilting it back so the unbound tresses fell to the ground. “Okay. I’m the daughter of an outlaw queen. I guess that makes me an outlaw princess, don’t it?” She let loose a coarse chuckle.
    “Outlaw princess.”
    “Yup. A hard-riding, hard-shooting woman who takes what she wants when she wants it. No questions asked, no answers given.”
    “Really?” His tone dripped doubt. “I suppose you’re the James brothers’ lost sister too.”
    “Sister? Hell, I hope not. You don’t do with a sister the things me and the James boys have done. Shouldn’t you be writing this down?”
    “Had a lot