Free Merline Lovelace by The Colonel's Daughter Page B

He’d brought Suzanne and the kid into Rawhide Buttes. It was time, past time, to be shed of her. Digging into his vest pocket, he pulled out his roll.
    “The whiskey’s on me,” Bess Shephard protested.
    “This is for Miss Bonneaux and the kid.” He peeled off a few bills, tossed them down on the pine plank. “Big Nose Parrott and his gang got her purse. ’Far as we know, they got the kid’s stake, too. The Express Line will pick up the cost of feeding and bedding them down, but this should cover whatever else they might need.”
    The saloon-keep tucked the banknotes into the front of her sweat-stained bodice. “Short on cash, are they?” Puffing like a chimney, she let her gaze drift to Suzanne. “A woman like that one couldmake eight, ten dollars a night easy on the dance boards.”
    The idea of Suzanne Bonneaux shuffling around the smoke-filled saloon was so absurd that Jack found himself fighting a grin. “Thinking of offering her a job?”
    “I lost one of my hurdies to a bleedin’ lung a few months back. I could use another girl to replace her. It’s honest money,” she added. “She wouldn’t have to take no customers out back unless she had a mind to.”
    “Why don’t you talk to her about it?” he suggested wickedly. “See what she says.”
    “I might just do that, long as you don’t object.”
    “What the lady does is no concern of mine.”
    And yellow-eyed bats don’t beat night air, Bess Shephard thought, inhaling deeply. She’d been around long enough to recognize a bad case of crotch itch when she saw it. Sloan might not have bedded that bit of fluff and lace, but he wanted to. Bad.
    Smiling, she rolled her stogie to one corner of her mouth and bit down. Juice squirted onto her tongue and cut through the fuzz left by the young stallion she’d taken out to her sod hut a few hours back. He’d been so primed he could hardly wait till he got his pole between her gums before he let fly. But unless Bess missed her guess, even that young stud hadn’t hurt for it the way Black JackSloan was hurting for the woman he had brought into Rawhide Buttes.
    She wanted him, too. Bess saw the eye games they’d played with each other, she all seemingly exasperated, he with a twist to his mouth that looked ugly but did funny things to a female’s insides.
    She hadn’t missed, either, the size of the roll Sloan had pulled out of his pocket. A businesswoman first and foremost, she searched for a way to separate the gunman from a few more of those banknotes.
    “You and the kid can bed down in Rosie’s hut. I been renting it out to the stage line since we lost her.” She rolled her cigar around. “If you’re lookin’ for company, I got a little Chinee girl who empties slops and scrubs the boards. She don’t talk much, and lies stiff as a corpse under the men who climb on top of her, but there’s some as prefer a woman who don’t require a lot of fuss or botheration.”
    Unlike Miss Suzanne Bonneaux, Bess would bet.
    “You want I should send Ying Li to you when you get ready to bed down?”
    “No.”
    “You sure? You got the look of a man strung tighter than barbed wire.”
    Annoyed, Jack shoved away from the bar without bothering to answer. Four strides took him to the circle of men surrounding Suzanne. Her gaze met his over their heads. He saw the farewell forming in her eyes.
    She’d make out all right. She had a whole passel of men panting to ride shotgun for her tomorrow. If she had any sense, though, she wouldn’t choose the toothless old geezer as her escort. Despite his claim that he used to haul freight up from Cheyenne and knew every rut in the road from here to Fort Meade, he looked ready for the coffin-maker. The randy young buck didn’t strike Jack as any more reliable. The fool made more noise than he did sense. In fact, none of the men clustered around her looked to be either safe or reliable.
    Hell! One more day. He’d give her one more day.
    “I’m going to see to the