His lips edged up. “Except for Nell.” He reached out and caught her chin, tilted her head up and lightly kissed her. “What about me, Jenny? Do you trust me?”
“When you give your word, I believe you keep it.”
“Yes or no?”
“I trust you, Cain.”
He frowned. “Why does that sound like you still have doubts?”
She rested her palms on his chest, her eyes still on his face. “I don’t trust you not to break my heart.”
Cain pulled her into his arms and just held her. He wondered if, in the end, it wouldn’t be the other way around.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
AFTER THEIR CONFRONTATION LAST NIGHT, CAIN HAD BEEN ESPECIALLYsolicitous in his lovemaking. Such a big, virile male. She hadn’t known he could be so tender. Her emotions were in even more turmoil than when he’d showed up at the bar last night, jealous and accusing.
Perhaps she had forgiven him too easily. But Cain seemed to be suffering from the same anxiety she was. She had never felt so conflicted about a man before. She wasn’t ready to get seriously involved. And yet she couldn’t handle the thought of losing Cain.
Maybe Cain felt the same way.
Or maybe not.
Time would give her the answers. In the meantime, she had a business to run, and she needed answers of a different sort.
That afternoon, Jenny went to the library. First, she browsed books that told the early history of Jerome. The town had come into being when some of the richest copper deposits ever found were discovered in the area. As many as twenty-three different nationalities worked in the United Verde Mines.
The town was just as wild as she had heard. The first wooden structure was Butter’s Bar, a two-story brothel and saloon owned by Nora “Butter” Brown. An article dated November 27, 1879, insisted that Wyatt Earp had an encounter with Billy the Kid in Butter’s Bar. An altercation in the street had sidetracked the men and saved Wyatt from having to kill the Kid.
Butter had written in her journal that she had spent the night with Wyatt, a true gentleman, one of the best nights she had ever enjoyed. No one seemed to know if the story was true, but Butter, who was murdered by her opium-addicted husband in 1905, never backed down on her claim.
Jenny smiled. For Butter’s sake, she hoped it had actually happened.
Jenny finally found an article that zeroed in on the Copper Star. An earlier hotel in the same location, owned by the same man who had built the Star, had burned down twice before the turn of the century. The last conflagration had destroyed half the town, leaving ten people dead and forty missing.
The Star had been rebuilt and reopened in 1899, but in the Wickedest Town in the West, the deaths just kept mounting.
By now, Jenny knew that thousands of people had died in Jerome over the years. She hadn’t known most of them were cremated in the blast furnaces, their ashes dumped on the slag piles and later used for concrete aggregate in the sidewalks.
When people visited Jerome, they were literally walking on the remains of dead people.
Jenny shivered.
The hours slipped past. A stop in the Mine Museum and Gift Shop netted a stack of books about ghostly happenings, which she carried into her office and sat down to read. A story caught her eye about a ghost in the Liberty Theatre, the redbrick building around the corner from the Star.
A woman in the theatre was supposedly murdered by her lover while the piano was playing loud enough to cover up the sounds of her struggle.
Jenny’s gaze sharpened on an article about ghosts in the Star. A woman known as the Lady in Red had been seen wandering the upstairs hallways. She mostly appeared in room 1, where she’d been visited by a past owner of the hotel. True or false—who knew? Jenny had never seen her.
She sighed. There were tons of ghost stories, but none of them explained the murder that had happened in room 10.
Jenny wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad.
She worked a while in the saloon, helping Barb serve cocktails and delivering food, then went back to the Grandview, arriving in time to join Cain for drinks.
The bar was nearly completed. The mahogany tables and chairs had arrived and been carefully positioned around the room. Softly lit, gilt-framed desert landscapes hung on the wood-paneled walls.
The bartender, a woman named Hannah McKenzie, an attractive redhead in her forties, was working behind the long, polished counter, sliding wineglasses onto the rack upside down by their stems.
