Warming Emerald Read online

  The night was early, with the setting sun still painting the skyline in shades of amber and apricot. Behind the bar, Amy was laughing and chatting and wiping the sweat from her brow as she hurried from one drink order to another and occasionally even took a shot when a particularly flirtatious regular bought her one. Charlie was also hard at work, banging out the lively strains of King Alcohol and The Ole Grey Goose. Somewhere behind the stage curtains, his wife, Silver, would be getting ready for her next show and no doubt half the grubby cowboys and miners packed in here tonight had come to hear her sing. The other half had come for Sunny, kicking up her heels on the stage, the ruffles and hems of her skirt well up above the hem of her drawers as she whooped and blushed and danced the Can-can to the delight of every man sitting in the front row.

  Tucked behind the far end of the bar, lingering in her office doorway, Jewel stood with arms folded and one ear tipped to something Gabe was whispering. She might be listening, but her sharp blue eyes never stopped scanning the swell of patrons clapping, stomping, drinking and dancing, gambling, flirting and in every way possible, spending the hard-won proceeds of their week’s labor in her place. They didn’t have enough girls, not enough by far, but Dottie was doing her best to entertain as many as possible as she danced within a circle of rowdy men, laughing and kicking up her feet as she gave each a skirt-twirling turn around the circle. Her cheeks were flushed and rosy, as if she were having the time of her life, and she probably was despite the stifling heat.

  And oh, was it hot. Every window had been pinned wide open, letting in as much fresh air as the California night saw fit to provide when it was mid-October and summer stubbornly refused to relinquish the temperature to fall. Everywhere she looked, she saw dirty cowpokes and dirtier miners, gamblers and town folk, the richest and poorest of Culpepper Cove’s citizenry with more than one public official with a wife waiting for him at home. Rupert Stowe, for instance; the manager at Culpepper’s Savings and Loan, he was the one person no gem from the Red Petticoat (or any woman from any profession, for that matter) wanted to run into while doing business at the local bank. His opinion of whores was clear in every dirty look he shot them… in the cool sanctity of his bank, at any rate. His look here was far, far warmer. As lecherous as any other man, fresh in off the plains or down from the mountain with a pocket full of gold dust, a body full of aches and strain, and the bone-deep thirst to lose himself in either mug after mug of warm beer and whiskey, or the equally warm flesh of a smiling woman.

  Lydia had more than one regular in tonight, and… oh God… there he was. Garrett Drake, youngest brother to the man who had only months ago stormed into the Red Petticoat Saloon with vengeance on his mind and two fists that would not be stopped before he’d exacted it. He had gone after Gabe as if the two men had been mortal enemies for years, and all because of Jade.

  Well, she was gone now. Most of the gems Lydia had known when she first started here were now gone.

  Lydia would be here until the day she died. Some days, she almost hoped that would come sooner rather than later.

  Her hand light on the rail, Lydia didn’t realize she had stopped two steps from the bottom of the staircase with her gaze frozen on that tall man waiting patiently across the saloon with his hat in his hands. Like a gentleman caller when she knew full well he was nothing but a hard-scrabble rancher, barely making ends meet. Or a soldier; her gut seized in trepidation, but there was no denying the way he stood by those swinging doors. As if they were a post and he the sentry assigned to guard them. He kept to himself. He often did when he came, but he was smiling. He was always smiling.

  And he’d brought flowers. Again.

  A yellow rose this time. Just the one. He had it tucked into the folds of the black wristband he wore, keeping it safe from having the fragile bud crushed or those sunshine-colored petals from accidentally being plucked. Last week he’d brought a pink one. The time before that, it was blue with a white and black center, though it wasn’t a rose. Where he kept getting them, she had no idea. But he was persistent, devilishly so. She had to give him that.

  He also hadn’t noticed her yet. He turned his hat between his hands, before combing back his light brown hair with his fingers. It was too long, the wisped ends a good inch below his collar line and in desperate need of a barber. They practically touched his shoulders when he turned his head to survey the room and twirled his hat around and around between his idle hands. He looked amused, but then, he always looked amused, even when he wasn’t eyeballing a couple of drunken miners do-si-doing one another in increasingly unbalanced circles. He laughed a little before his eyes were caught by Sunny, skirts held high for the Can-can she was dancing, her bare feet, shapely ankles and calves holding more than one man in the boisterous crowd spellbound. Garrett tipped her a wink and a nod before looking away. It was probably too much to hope that he’d fix his infatuation on her instead. Deputy Tey wouldn’t like it, but that would be his problem instead of hers.

  Frowning, Lydia picked up her black velvet skirts, showing off the bright red petticoat ruffles underneath but also ensuring she didn’t trip on the hem as she descended those last few steps into the midst of the crowd. The minute her shoe touched the main floor, she felt him. It was a trick of her imagination and she knew it, but she felt him all the same. His energy, crackling under and around all the many feet stomping, tromping and just plain standing between them on these whiskey-splattered floorboards until it found her. She felt that slow shiver of awareness fizzle up the back of her legs, sparking across the surface of her bottom, crawling up the ladder of her spine to raise every fine hair upon the nape of her neck. She didn’t go to Garrett—she never would—but it didn’t matter. Though she headed straight for Gabe and Jewel, her body reacted just as it had that night four months ago, while rolling on the floor under Garrett’s cloying embrace, tasting his blood in her mouth, feeling his skin on her lips even after he’d taken his hand away, hearing the amusement in his voice as he told her again and again with that light of seductive amusement dancing in his grey eyes: Behave.

  He’d all but sung it to her, the crooning allure of his voice setting her belly on fire. Her nipples had tightened and they tightened still, a maddening sensation that was amplified by the press and rub of her corset as she breathed and that refused to be ignored. Head held high, Lydia crossed the floor, feeling nothing but her own electric awareness of him and the erotic scouring of her breasts within the confines of her tightly-laced clothes.

  “Emerald, my girl!” came a boisterous shout to her right.

  Her stomach clenched and spasmed. Lydia turned, but already she knew that voice. As if having Garrett in the bar weren’t bad enough, her number one regular (in his own mind, at least) was also here. Lewis “Colonel” Curbe, a man who, had he ever truly been in the military, likely never reached quite so high a rank. Still, that’s what everyone called him, including his wife. Like so many Red Petticoat patrons, the Colonel didn’t let a little thing like marriage get between him and the fun to be had behind the Red Petticoat’s swinging front doors. Lydia found it hard to hold that against him. If she had nothing but Abigail Curbe’s pinched, disapproving face to go home to night after night, she might opt to spend them at the Red Petticoat as well.

  Muscling his way through the crowd, the Colonel grabbed her up with a whoop and a toss into the air before catching her about the waist in a bear-hug that all but crushed his massive drink-reddened nose into her breasts.

  “Down!” Lydia bellowed, grabbing onto his shoulders for fear of being dropped. Her tone startled him almost as much as it did Lydia herself. She caught her balance when he immediately thunked her back on the floor, then quickly covered her upset with a laugh that was as shaky as it was false. “My!” She caressed his arm, pretending to be impressed by the ripple of biceps she barely felt. He might well have been military at one point in his youth, but he’d spent all that time since supervising his sons’ work on their mining claim from the comfort of his li
ving room chair, and he had the belly now to prove it. “Y-you surprised me, Colonel.”

  He looked from her to the hand she caressed upon his upper arm. His frown eased back to smugness. “Scared you, did I?” He obligingly pumped a fist to make his lack of a bicep a little more noticeable. “You oughter know by now, Emmy girl, ‘virile’ is my middle name.”

  A less likely middle name, Lydia could not imagine. More like “pant, wheeze and pass out” or, as she preferred to think of him whenever she absolutely had to think of the Colonel, “twenty-dollars base fee with a five-dollar tip on the dresser if she let him do the kinky extras.”

  Lydia faked a broader smile and swallowed enough of her slow budding anger to bat her lashes at him. “How very strong you—”

  The room spun as Lydia was seized from behind, her arm only this time and only long enough for Garrett to step between her and the Colonel. A living, breathing, smiling wall of muscle that did not have to be pumped to be seen or felt.

  “Do that again,” Garrett said, “and I just might get upset with you.” He still had his hat in his hand, that flower tucked into his wristband, and that smile that never quite reached as far as the cool stone of his eyes.

  The Colonel was too drunk to be impressed. He stiffened, a bantam rooster on the verge of crowing. “Son…”

  “I am not your son.”

  The Colonel puffed up even more. “If you were, you’d know your place, by God! You’d also know not to go stickin’ your peter into matters that don’t concern you. Me and this lil’ gal, we have us an arrangement.”

  “Not tonight you don’t.”

  Recovering her own shock, Lydia grabbed Garrett’s arm—now those were biceps worth noting—and wrenched herself free. “You hold it right there, buster!” Trying to shove him back far enough to get between the men was like trying to uproot a mountain. Apart from raising his hand to halt her further objections, he didn’t budge.

  “Just a minute, sweetheart. The menfolk are talking.” When her jaw dropped, he tossed her a wink that suggested he might not be entirely serious. “You can cuss me out for saying so later.”

  That slow bud of anger became a blackberry bramble large enough to swallow the whole of the Red Petticoat within its thorny embrace in the time it took Lydia to snap her mouth shut again. Heat seared her cheeks. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Gabe pushing through the crowd, heading right for them with his interfering intent darkening his already black stare. Lydia could see Jewel, too. The madam was frowning, but while both of the Petticoat’s owners had forgiven Cullen Drake for the brawl that had disrupted their lives and destroyed their furniture once they understood he did so in defense of Jade, thinking it had been Gabe who had abused her, both Jewel and Gabe continued to worry about Chin. That no one had seen her since Cullen had taken her away was a constant source of worry and speculation. No one had seen much of Cullen either, but as Sheriff Jeb Justice so often liked to say, the Drake brothers had always kept pretty much to themselves.

  Until Garrett, that is. Over the last four months, they had seen a lot of Garrett and every time they did, he caused problems. Just like this one, those problems almost always involved her.

  “You got a lot of nerve,” the Colonel growled.

  “You ain’t seen half of what I’ve got,” Garrett assured him, “but I can appreciate how you must be feeling. You’ve worn your hide to a frazzle all week long. You got a little jingle in your pocket and you’ve probably thought of nothing but dipping your Little Man Johnson into an Emerald well of pure, unadulterated delight, but now—” Garrett raised both hands, halting not only her huff of affront, but the Colonel’s sputtering. “—now, that’s just not going to happen. Not in Emerald’s well, at any rate, not for at least a good hour.”

  The Colonel grew apoplectic, his face turning ruddy and his eyes bulging.

  “I don’t know what other gems are available, but I’m sure if you asked, you might find you a Sapphire well—”

  “Sapphire doesn’t work here anymore,” Lydia said stiffly, knuckles grinding into her hips as the brambling vines of her anger seethed through her.

  “All right,” Garrett allowed. “An Amber well, then.”

  “Married.”

  “Pearl?”

  “The same.”

  Garrett snapped his fingers. “Ruby.”

  “She doesn’t work the upstairs.”

  “I’m not a worldly man, sweetheart. Can you help me out a little? I’m running out of stones. Ah, Mr. Gabriel,” Garrett announced as the Mexican reached them at last. “I believe I’ve discovered the reason for the Red Petticoat’s constant lack of female staffing. All your gems keep running off with other men.”

  The broad fingers of one hand flexed, but otherwise Gabe kept his temper. “Leave,” he said. “Now before I summon the sheriff and have you jailed for trespassing. I told you the last time you were here not to come back.”

  Waggling his finger under Gabe’s nose, Garrett said, “Chinny tells us each gem has the right to choose.”

  Every thistle on those blackberry vines pricked all at once and her tight grip on her own temper slipped. “If you think for one second that I would ever—” She stopped when Garrett abruptly held up both hands. He made a grand display out of showing her they were empty, then he waved them, snapped his fingers, and suddenly two ten-dollar gold coins appeared where none had been mere seconds before. She blinked, the heat of her temper faltering. “How did you do that?”

  “Sometimes what passes between two people can only be described as magic.” He offered her the coins. “Dance with me.” His smile never faltered as he held up a staying finger. “Just one dance, that’s all.”

  Lydia frowned, the mere thought of deliberate physical contact with this man raising all her fine hairs all over again. It awakened that dreadful pulsing now, too. The one that began in the tip of both already tense nipples and then spread, moving deep down into the pit of her belly until all she could feel was the distracting throb of it centering between her thighs. She stared at those twin coins, already finding it hard to think of anything beyond the alluring thrum of simply wanting to be touched. She’d hated him for doing that to her the night of the brawl. She didn’t harbor any more affection for him now for the same damn reason.

  She glared past the money to him. “One dance?”

  “Just one.” His smile turned smug in the way that men did when they knew they’d just won the argument. The arrogance intensified in the victorious look he shot the Colonel. “One dance all right by you, hoss, or you want to try outbidding me for a kick-up around the floor?”

  Red-faced and flustered, the Colonel glared from Garrett to Gabe, and then, fury darkening him further, at her.

  Her reaction was instantaneous. She flinched, jerking back to avoid the grab the Colonel hadn’t thrown, and crashed into the chair of the patron seated directly behind her. Beer sloshing into his lap, the man leapt up with a shout, swiping at his soaked crotch before whipping around.

  “Hollis, what a mess.” Gabe quickly stepped in, shielding Lydia who shrank back from that fury too. She bumped into Garrett, who caught her shoulders and did not let go. Gabe moved again, keeping himself between them and his tone smooth and friendly. “Let me get you another beer and—” He quickly swept the crowd, snapping his fingers and gesturing. “—and some help getting cleaned up.”

  “Cleaned up?” The grizzled miner slammed his half-empty glass down on the table. “My britches is soaked through! I look like I pissed myself!”

  “Then let’s get those britches off you,” Dottie said with grin, appearing through the crowd as if by magic to take the startled miner’s arm. “Ooo!” she purred, pressing in so close that her breasts bumped his chest. In the dense crush of the crowd, no one noticed where her other hand had dipped down to until Hollis jumped. “One of us just hit the mother lode! You ain’t got gold ‘dust’ in your britches, honey. These here are half-pound nuggets if ever I’ve felt ‘em.”


  Clearing his throat, no trace of his earlier irritation anywhere about him now, Hollis said, “I wouldn’t say half pound, but… they are a might big.”

  “Let’s get your wet duds off,” Dottie coaxed, pulling his arm to lead him upstairs. “And you can tell me all about why you ain’t never come up to see me before this.”

  Shaken, the brambles of her anger having completely abandoned her, Lydia shot her a grateful, silent apology.

  Behind his back, Dottie pointed back at Garrett and mouthed, ‘Don’t do it’ before becoming all smiles again for Hollis’s benefit.

  “Well, now that that’s all taken care of.” Presenting his arm, Garrett tipping his hat as Gabe turned once more to glare at him. “I’m not promising to have her back before morning.”

  “You’re not taking her anywhere,” Gabe told him.

  “Gems get to choose,” Garrett reminded and held up the two gold coins for her to see again. “Isn’t that right, Emerald?”

  He coaxed her with the coins and her chest tightened.

  Yes, gems got to choose. Of course they got to choose, but what choice was there for her really? She was a mother without a husband, in a world that offered no means of gainful employment to women. Twenty dollars for a dance? She didn’t like Garrett. His brother had stolen away a fellow gem under highly suspicious circumstances and for the last few months it had been as if Jade had never existed in that town. But like him or not, he was willing to pay her as much for a dance as she would be paid to lie flat on her back upstairs, most likely beneath the sweating, rutting pumps of the Colonel. Or worse, bent her over the foot of the bed while his full weight pressed down upon her and the sour heat of his whiskey-laden breath fouled her breaths as he commanded, “Talk ‘savage’ for me. You like it rough, don’t you? Don’t you? Let’s see if a white man can’t tame the wild squaw.”