Free Blaze by Susan Johnson Page B

had slipped from the table. Stunned and frustrated, he watched her run toward the door. In a few rapid adjustments she replaced the bodice of her gown, rearranged the lace drapery on her arms, opened the door, and disappeared into the summer night.
     
    Jon Hazard Black swore into the grey shadows of the summer kitchen. He hadn't been left tormented with unconsummated desire since adolescence. Infuriated, he banged out of the building, exasperated with illogical women in general and one in particular. For a brief moment he listened to the lilting dance music coming from the glittering ballroom, and then, concluding he was past the point of civility that evening, walked back to his hotel and went to bed.
     
    The following day, Lucy Attenborough received more attention than usual from Hazard. He had promised her the morning but he spent longer than that with her. Finally, very much later, when the heat of the afternoon had dwindled and the lethargy of a well-spent day enveloped the occupants of room 202, the only Absarokee prospecting for gold in Diamond City left the soft bed and warm woman and headed north out of Virginia City to his cabin on the mountaintop.
     

Chapter 4
     
    THE next weeks were uninterrupted slogging hard work. Up with the dawn, Hazard built sluices, dug drainage, pickaxed and blasted deeper into the mine shaft he'd carved out of the hillside. He ate briefly each noon and then worked until sunset. His body, already powerfully muscled and bright-edged from years of training, took on a new toughness. The grueling regimen continued without break, day after day. At the end of the long workday, Hazard was normally too exhausted even to think—only sleep beckoned, not contemplative musing. But on the rare occasions it took him more than thirty seconds to fall asleep, a recurring image of red-hot hair, peach skin, and ivory silk slid uninvited into his mind.
     
    Blaze, in contrast, had considerable leisure, and those unoccupied portions of her time were increasingly tenanted by vivid recollections of a boldly sensuous man. She disliked the arresting memories; no man's likeness had ever insinuated itself so into her senses. And with his image, of course, came remembrance of the unnerving, inexplicable response he'd drawn from her. Embarrassment flushed her skin each time she recalled her astonishing brazenness, her very near fall from grace. Only her father's voice breaking into the heated rapture had saved her. Without that reprieve, she would have readily and willingly succumbed to Lucy Attenborough's—and whoever else's?—very persuasive lover.
     
    He was a womanizer of the worst kind, she decided after listening to the licentious rumor surrounding Hazard; everyone had a story about his way with women. He was the type of man who used women like frivolous playthings, with a casual male disregard she couldn't convince herself was cultural. After all, treating women as expendable receptacles for masculine passion was not without precedent in the white man's world. It was, she ruefully conceded, very obvious in the privileged world of wealth that she inhabited.
     
    Yet within her own world, she refused to fit neatly into the niche reserved for affluent young ladies. The need to marry well, all the frivolous irrelevance so prevalent and cloying, the tedious boredom of fashionable society, were written in her future as surely as the days dawned. And that sort of stultifying, empty existence haunted her like a grotesque specter from hell. Consciously or not, she had fought against the final resolution of a proper marriage all her life. Over the years, occasional bursts of resentful tears rebuked the nasty quirk of fate which had sent her into this world as a susceptible female. Men weren't constantly boxed in and curtailed by hundreds of punctilious rules of etiquette. It was grossly unfair.
     
    Owing, however, to her own fierce determination and a supportive father who gave rein to her capricious