Page 34 of Charlotte's Reckoning
Stunned, her hands dropped to her sides, uncaring that her robe fell open. He’d seen everything she had to see.
“Permanently?” she asked.
Fenton shrugged, stamped his cigar out in the ashtray, and rolled to set it on the side table before facing her again. Only it wasn’t her face his eyes focused on.
“Time will tell,”he said, the telltale huskiness of desire in his voice when he bade, “Come here.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to fuck you again.”
“No, I mean, why are you leaving?”
“I’ve decided to head west. It’s an untapped, wide-open frontier, and I intend to get my piece of the pie.”
“Doing what? Prospecting?”She couldn’t see Fenton staking a claim and panning for gold. As far as she knew, he drank and gambled and hadn’t done manual labor in his life. It would ruin his manicured fingernails and the ruffled shirts he always wore.
“Any gold to be had is long gone. But whiskey and cards are unlimited.”
“You’re leaving to do what you already do here?”
He shot her a disgusted look. “The liquor and gambling won’t be for me, woman. It’ll be for the hardworking men settling the raw frontier.”
“You’re buying a saloon,”she stated as understanding dawned.
“Not exactly.”
“You won it in a card game,”she guessed.
“Lottie, my love, you know me too well. Now get your delectable ass over here so I can have it again.”
She didn’t budge. If she was losing a customer, why did pleasing him matter?“Where is this saloon?”
“Hell if I know, other than somewhere in the territories, in a small town onthe stagecoach line. Word is, the new railroad is going to run right through it. That means people traveling through, including men with an appetite for cards, liquor, and women.”He punched a pillow and scooted down in the bed. When he didn’t like how it fit under his head, he tossed it aside and propped himself on his hand instead. “They have little law to speak of, as yet. A band of outlaws who owned the only saloon took advantage. They terrorized the locals, forcing them to turn over the deeds to the land they settled. If they refused, they shot ’em dead on the spot and claimed it as theirs. From what I’ve heard, they killed thirteen in only a few months.”
“Dear heavens, Fen. Why on earth would you want to go to such a place?”
“Because it will be an adventure,”he replied, with a grin that could melt the bloomers off a nun.
“Your idea of fun and mine are a world apart.”
“Truth is, I’m bored. Not with you,”he quickly clarified. “That would never happen, but I’m tired of the same old thing day in and day out. Besides, those boys won’t be bothering anyone else. The ranchers took it upon themselves to do something about it. They slapped a star on one of ’em’s chest, he deputized half the men in town, and together, they stormed the saloon for a trio of lynchings.”
“It sounds like something right out of a dime novel.”
“Huh?”
Apart from perusing the headlines in the newspaper, Fen had no interest in reading. “Never mind,”she replied. “So, how did you end up with a saloon hundreds of miles away from here?”
“By drawing a gutshot straight over his full house,”he quipped with a slow, disarming grin.
“What did you bet?”
“All I had with me at the time—twenty thousand.”
She gasped for two reasons. First, because she could live out her life comfortably in a cozy cottage in a quiet town with that amount of money. Second, his audacity amazed her. Fen had taught her a great deal about poker. To hit a gutshot straight, he had to draw a specific cardinthe middleofthe five-card series. It was a long-shot wager, high risk, high reward—if you considered a saloon in the western territories a reward.
His grin said it all. The thrill of the gamble was the win for him.
