Free A Wanted Man by Susan Kay Law Page A

as he checked the loading of his pistol before holstering it.
    “What am I missing here?” Laura asked. “Who are you?”
    “I just told you—”
    She impatiently waved off the rest of his answer. “Yes, yes, Sam Duncan. What are you, then. Why is Mr. Hoxie still standing there with his mouth open, looking as if he might start curtsying at any moment?”
    “He’s almost as famous as you, Miss Hamilton,” Mr. Hoxie informed her.
    “I don’t know as I’d go that far,” he said.
    “Don’t be so modest,” Erastus told him. “Miss Hamilton, Duncan here’s the most famous gun in the West! I read about him in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper . They say all he has to do is show up in town and all the penny-ante crooks go scurrying like cockroaches in the light. They say grown men, hard-hearted and battle-hardened, weep when they discover he’s signed on for the other side.”
    Mr. Duncan rolled his eyes. That he could laugh at such nonsense rather than be puffed up by it was one point in his favor.
    Unfortunately, it was a very minor point. He sold his gun, his honor, to the highest bidder. She’d heard of such men. Their scruples were nonexistent, their allegiance bought and paid for, as fickle as a whore, always drawn to the heaviest purse. If he were the most famous of his kind, then he was, by logic, the most villainous, for surely one did not achieve such a reputation by kindness and adherence to high principles.
    He had lied to her by omission. He had flirted with her to gain access to do his job. No man spent as much time warmly listening to a woman’s chatter as he had in the square without there being at least a bit of flirting in it.
    “You could have told me the truth from the first,” she said.
    “Could I?” he replied, his voice low, pitched as if he made an intimate declaration. But there was no emotion in his eyes. “I learned long ago to hold my cards close, Miss Hamilton. I suppose I could have, but I didn’t have to.”
    Well, that should be a good warning to her, shouldn’t it? Never to assume he’d reveal anything of himself that he wasn’t absolutely forced to?
    Not that there’d ever be the opportunity to need to remember that.
    She stepped yet closer, forcing herself to look steadily up into his face. Her palms were damp. Her heart thudded. Grown men might quail before him, but Baron Hamilton’s daughter did not.
    “I have no need of your services,” she said.
    “Your father doesn’t agree.” He smiled at her then, asmile filled with charm but devoid of any real warmth, calculated to lure her into compliance.
    “A hired gun, are you?”
    “Sometimes a man must undertake whatever employment is offered,” he said mildly.
    “Interesting. A man sells himself out to the highest bidder and they laud his deeds in newspapers and novels. A woman does the same, and the name for her is very different.”
    His smile vanished. Good. It looked patently false on him anyway. If he ever smiled at her again she wanted it to be genuine.
    Not that she ever wanted him to smile at her.
    “Some of us, Miss Hamilton, have not had the luxury of parents who are able to indulge us. Sometimes necessity does not allow us to be so…whimsical in our choices.”
    “Whimsical?” He thought her spoiled? “You know nothing of me. You assume much.”
    “You mean that I drew conclusions of what and who you are by what was written and said rather than what I’ve witnessed by my own experience?”
    Her retort died before it made it out of her mouth. “Point taken.”
    Mrs. Bossidy recovered her wits. “We don’t even know for certain if your father did hire him, Laura. Let me cable before we leave Kearney.”
    “No kidding, Miss Hamilton,” Hiram added. “It’s not like me and Hoxie need the help, y’know. Another fellow in the way’d probably just muck things up.”
    “Apparently you do,” the man said. “Or you wouldn’t have lost your guns. You should hire me if he hadn’t