Free Sweetwater Seduction by Joan Johnston Page A

Kerrigan.”
    “Just Kerrigan. No mister.”
    “Certainly . . . Kerrigan.”
    Burke Kerrigan calmly perused the uncomfortable men sitting timidly on the delicate chairs and sofas in the drawing room of the Westbrook mansion. The weather-hewn cattlemen in their leather chaps and spurs seemed out of place in a room lit by a brilliant crystal chandelier and featuring rose-point lace curtains, a fireplace fronted with English tile, polished parquet floors, and handcarved cherry woodwork. He presumed the house had been built for a woman, for while a man might take pride in its appearance, and appreciate its beauty, the cowmen he knew would not readily welcome so domesticated a stomping ground.
    The members of the Association would have been surprised to know the agitation he felt at the announcement that he had wasted his time coming to Wyoming. Kerrigan had already made plans for the balance of the money he was supposed to have earned for this job. He had been thinking lately about the future. Most hired guns didn't live to see their hair turn gray. Kerrigan already sported a touch of silver at the temples. He figured to get out of the business before his luck ran dry. Every job moved him one step closer to that goal. So he was more than a little disappointed that this deal was going bust.
    Kerrigan's voice revealed none of what he was feeling when he asked, “You got rid of the rustlers on your own?”
    Oak Westbrook chewed on the soggy end of his unlit Havana cigar—Regina forbade him lighting it anywhere except his study—before he slid it to a corner of his mouth and said, “Not exactly. Uh, something has come up . . . uh . . . I'm not sure we're going to be able to wait the length of time it would take you to find the rustlers before we have to come to some accommodation with the nesters.”
    “I don't understand,” Kerrigan said flatly.
    “Uh . . . it's not something I can easily explain,” Oak hedged.
    “Just tell him,” Rusty Falkner said in an irritable voice.
    “Tell me what?”
    “We're being blackmailed,” Cyrus Wyatt blurted.
    “By whom?” Kerrigan asked.
    “Our wives,” Oak answered through jaws clamped ti on his cigar. Although the gunslinger stared at him in patent disbelief, that was all Oak could bring himself to say. He had no intention of admitting the hoops Regina had put him through last night. First the teasing, the taunting, the kind of anticipation he hadn't experienced in thirty years, and then the ultimatum given in soft, dulcet tones before the bedroom door slammed right in his face. He shook with anger as he remembered pounding on the door in vain. Only Regina's warning that he would disturb Hadley had made him turn tail. He had spent the night in the guest room. On a too short bed. With a scratchy wool blanket. And a pillow with feathers that made him sneeze.
    He hadn't felt any better when Rusty and Cyrus and a half-dozen other husbands had arrived at the Association meeting ranting about equally high-handed treatment from their wives.
    “I told her she was getting a mite too big for her britches,” Cyrus had related, “and you know what she said? There was no chance she was going to be ‘getting big' anytime soon unless this business with the nesters is settled!”
    There were veiled hints to Cyrus that he should have taken his wife anyway, if he wanted her, to which he had replied in heated tones, “I tried that. She just laid there like . . . like . . .”
    “Like a bumpy log,” another man volunteered. “That's what my wife did,” he mumbled when he became the object of all eyes.
    From what the members of the Association had been able to piece together before Burke Kerrigan had arrived to silence them, all the wives in Sweetwater—including the nesters' wives—had joined in the game. The rough-and-ready cattlemen exchanged guilty glances, wondering how they were going to admit to the gunman from Texas