"I'm glad now," she whispered. "Glad I never took my vows." She traced his numb lips with the tips of her fingers. "Because tonight, Garret MacQuade, when you were kissing me... touching me... you would've made me want to break them."
Chapter Eleven
Cain Garvey stalked down the stairway of the Double Eagle Saloon, adjusting the crotch of his trail-stained buckskins. The woman in the room he had just left was still whimpering, her pale, perfumed skin darkening with bruises left by his fists. The white line of her throat was nicked by the knife blade he'd held there to prevent her from calling for aid, and lying on the coverlet was enough money to keep her mouth shut now that he was gone.
She had been a pretty one, all buxom and yellow-haired, reminding Cain vaguely of the woman in St. Joe who had thwarted the capture of Kennisaw Jones weeks ago. That resemblance had been the whore's crime. But she had paid for it in blood.
Paid like the prisoners and guards who had perished in the flames he had set before he and Eli had escaped from the prison that had been a living death for twenty years.
His lips curled in an ugly smile as he remembered how carefully he'd arranged the blaze so it would seem all within had perished, the Garvey brothers included. He and Eli were probably even now on the death roster—forgotten. Free.
Yes, the whore was real lucky he hadn't wanted to draw the attention of the law down upon him. He had wanted to kill her, slow and lingering-like. Had wanted to wring screams out of her with delicate, excruciating tortures learned in the depths of the prison where he'd spent so long. But he'd save those little pleasures for the real object of his hatred, once he found her.
And he would find her. After he tracked down that bastard MacQuade.
MacQuade. The only survivor of that bloody day at Stormy Ridge. The only remaining link to wealth beyond imagining, now that Kennisaw Jones was roasting on the devil's spit.
Stomping over to the bar, Cain shoved a frightened saloon girl out of his way and grabbed a bottle of rotgut.
The old man shouldn't have died. Not before Cain had had the pleasure of flaying the skin off him one knife-length at a time for each year spent in that hellhole of a prison. But it was like that old bastard to elude his just punishment and die laughing. Making the Garvey brothers look the fool for a second deadly time.
Cain guzzled the whiskey, trying to burn away the half-crazed rage that had eaten in his gut since the moment he'd awakened to find their dying captive riding away from their camp outside of St. Joe. A rage fired hotter still by the fact that Jones had managed to get off a shot from his rifle before Eli's six-gun had filled him with lead.
Cain flexed the muscles in his shoulder, feeling still the tightness that marked the path the bullet had blazed in his flesh.
That bullet had effectively quashed any thought of pursuit—for the time being. But Cain had known that Jones was injured himself and would have to hole up somewhere until he gained enough strength to travel. They'd thought that they'd have no trouble picking up the man's trail long before then, no trouble beating the truth out of him regarding Santa Ana's gold.
In the weeks that followed Eli and the rapidly mending Cain had scoured the countryside trying to find some trace of the man, but there had been none. Until the day they had ridden into West Port only to find that Kennisaw Jones had escaped them forever in death.
Disbelieving, Cain had gone to Cemetery Hill and seen Jones's body buried real proper, a marker at its head. Garvey had kicked the wooden slab down, half tempted to claw away the dirt and search the rotting body for any clues Jones might have kept hidden on his person.
But in the end Cain had had to face the truth.
They had lost in this deadly gamble with the cunning Kennisaw Jones. There was only one chance left.
Garret MacQuade.
A man grown, no longer the terrified boy who had shrieked and clawed at Cain like a wolf cub, trying to save his dying father.
Cain flexed his scarred left hand, the throbbing that dogged him for twenty-odd years burning afresh. Maybe there was a kind of twisted justice in that—that in the end it would be MacQuade who screamed out the truth beneath the cut of Cain's knife, spilled the whereabouts of the treasure. MacQuade—the boy who had shown a man's courage that day in the clearing, and a man's deadly fury.
This way, Cain thought grimly, he could repay the one who had cost him so much—the slash across his hand, the scar twisting one side of his face, and the loss of bulging chests of gold.
Gold he should've been wallowing in when he was young—with a face so handsome he'd rutted with the preacher's daughters in three different towns.
Gold that should've bought him enough whiskey to drown in, a fancy house up on a hill with rooms upstairs even richer than the ones in this damn saloon, draped in red satins with mirrors on the ceilings, and enough women to sate even his darker sexual drives.
A commotion at the top of the stairs made Cain cast a surly glance upward, his lips curling in disgust as his gaze alighted on the coarse-featured face of his brother. Staggering drunk, Eli looked like even more of a blubbering idiot than usual, his eyes showing only the vaguest sense of awareness, his mammoth, loose-limbed body all but collapsing as he wove down the risers.
Cain's stomach turned at the sight of him, Eli's mouth gaping open, dribbles of whiskey and chewing tobacco running down his chin to stain the shirt beneath. But those dull dog eyes lit up, that mouth stretching into a disgustingly wide grin when Eli caught sight of him.
"Cain! Gimme some more whiskey!" Eli bellowed across the room, stumbling over to grab the bottle from Cain's hand. He gulped it down, slobbering over the glass rim.
"Yer th' besht brother inna whole world." Eli flung one heavy arm around Cain's shoulder. "The besht—"
"Shut up, you damn fool!" Cain snarled, shoving the arm away.
Hurt flickered in Eli's face, and he shoved the whiskey bottle back toward Cain. "Shorry, didn't mean... to make ye mad at me. Are ye mad at me, Cain?"
