Heaven with a Gun by Connie Brockway Read Free Book Online Page B

he’d lost Gilly to the Lil role, and he strongly suspected Gilly was the real woman, the woman he wanted to . . . write about. Damn it.
    “But, by the time I met Francis—his name was Francis.”
    “As in Assisi.”
    “Yes.” She gave him her three-cornered smile. “By the time I met Francis, I was too far gone on the road to ruin. My hand was on the whip and I couldn’t find the brakes. I had grown accustomed to the wicked ways of the flesh, the material prizes in Satan’s carnival.”
    Some prizes, Jim thought. Her dress had to have been reworked at least three times.
    “I didn’t want to give them up.”
    “So that was that.”
    “Yup.” She held out her hand, studied her nails, and peeped at him out of the corner of her eye.
    He tilted his head back and stared upward, as though petitioning the ceiling for patience. The light hit his jaw and illuminated the white line marking it. “Let’s go on to another question.”
    “Sure. How’d you get that scar? The one on your chin.”
    “A fight.”
    “Fight?”
    “Yeah. This Swede had a bruising right uppercut that—” He stopped suddenly, took the two long steps separating them and loomed over her, exasperation evident in every line of his big body. “Lady, will you please answer my questions?”
    “Yes, Mr. Coyne.” She folded her hands primly in her lap.
    “Don’t call me Mr. Coyne. It makes me feel older than I already am, and right now that’s about as old as anyone in this territory.”
    She grinned. He was fine. Mature and seasoned and luscious, but she couldn’t help teasing him. “That old . . . Jim?”
    He almost smiled back. “I think there’s a sequoia out there that might have a few months on me.”
    She burst into laughter, and he responded with that full, dazzling smile, leaning over her a little as he did so. She could feel his warm breath, taste it, flavored with some sort of minty tooth cleanser.
    “You,” he said softly, “are the prettiest outlaw I’ve ever met.”
    His low, intimate tone washed over her like a physical stroke. His eyes were so close she could see the little copper flecks that danced near the pupil of his blue eyes. It unbalanced her. Caught her off guard. “Pshaw,” she responded breathlessly. “You haven’t met any outlaws.”
    “I come from New York, darlin’. The last census listed outlaw as the second-most-common occupation in the city.” He straightened with what appeared to be reluctance.
    “And the first?”
    “Politician.”
    She laughed again, and he watched her in obvious enjoyment until some sudden, unwelcome thought shuttered his expression, leaving formal pleasantness where there had been intimacy.
    “I need to telegraph my editor in New York that I’m on a story,” he said. “Let’s go. On the way we can get something to eat.”

Chapter Six
     
     
    What the hell were those women doing, Jim wondered. The Carmichael twins had practically run up the walkway, shouldered their way past Jim and Gilly, and were now lying in wait a few yards ahead. One of them slouched against the rail, panting, color splotching her chubby white cheeks. The other held up Mudruk’s exterior wall, her breasts jostled around the framework of her bodice like poached eggs on toast.
    “Hey!” one of them—Merry?—panted. “You . . . must be . . . Jim’s . . . wife.”
    “Tall, ain’t ya?” the other said, eyes insolently tracing each long inch of Gilly’s form. Jim had the mental image of a spark touching off the fuse on a powder keg.
    “Surprising Jim never mentioned he had a wife.” Terry—it had to be Terry—said. “But maybe then it ain’t so surprising.” Her slow perusal noted and dismissed each one of Gilly’s attributes.
    The three women stared at one another for a dozen heartbeats.
    “Well, Jim’s a man,” Gilly finally said. “What man that you know would acknowledge ties to an absent woman? ’Specially when there’s two such pretty ones around?”
    Whatever powder keg had