“Beg pardon, ma’am.”
He appeared completely embarrassed, which to Sarah’s mind constituted a huge improvement over looking stone-faced. She cast a fleeting glance at Joshua who looked as if he was going to choke.
“My Great-Aunt Maude used to say that the devil himself hid in cuss words,” she announced primly.
“Yes, ma’am,” Caleb replied, still obviously miffed with himself.
Now that’s interesting. He seems willing to submit to a well-deserved tongue lashing when I would have wagered he never took any rebuke from anyone
.
As much as she enjoyed seeing this new facet of Caleb Benedict’s personality, she was far too fair minded to let him dangle on the hook for long. She looked out the window at the gradually slowing scenery. “Of course, that damn woman has never been anywhere
near
Normal in her entire life. So what does she know, really?”
This time Caleb was the one to give her a quick, wide-eyed look. In response to his shock, she could only smile.
His laughter filled her with pleasure even as it entered her bloodstream and increased the sensation of attraction.
The train came to a stop and the sounds of civilization, horses and people, a dog barking and some children laughing and playing, rolled in through the window on wisps of dust. Sarah sighed with the respite from train noise and motion.
“I’m coming to the conclusion that this is your first train trip,” Caleb said.
Sarah’s lesser angel wanted to comment on how nice it felt to no longer be totally ignored by the big, dark-haired man, but she easily defeated the impulse. She liked his dry humor and the way his lip curled up at the corner. She wondered what it would be like to trace it with her finger.
The shock of that thought pulled her gaze down to her lap. It took every bit of will she had to raise her head, look him in the eye, and answer him. She hoped he thought the high color in her face was a result of the heat of the day and
not
inappropriate thoughts.
“It is. I must admit that it’s nothing at all like I imagined it would be. How long until we get to St. Louis, do you think?”
Caleb raised one eyebrow, then looked over at his brother.
Joshua shook his head. “Tomorrow afternoon. We’ll be stopping for the night in Springfield,
Several hours later, Sarah found herself sitting across a dining table from her traveling companions. The hotel seemed to be doing a brisk business, thanks to so many of her fellow passengers needing food and lodging for the night. She’d never felt so tired or grubby, and, truthfully, didn’t know whether she could do her meal justice, despite being famished.
The Benedicts didn’t seem to be having any trouble in that regard.
Since that one stop in the unforgettable town of Normal, Caleb had become somewhat more loquacious. She’d been certain prior to that moment there must have been something about her Caleb Benedict found objectionable. She no longer believed that to be the case.
She felt a gaze on her and looked up to see both men had cleaned their plates and now stared at hers.
She looked back down at her food and forked a small bite of potato. This silence that had fallen upon them wasn’t a good thing at all. In the silence her mind played games, such as telling her the brothers regarded her with the same hungry expressions they’d regarded their roast beef just a few minutes earlier. She needed to do something to dislodge these forbidden, albeit exciting, thoughts.
“Could you tell me a little about where we’re going?” It seemed to her a good idea to focus on the reason for this trip.
She was, after all, a married woman. Even if she had married a man she’d only met hours before the ceremony. A man who, after the nuptials, had seemed not the least bit interested in her at all. Perhaps it would prove an embarrassment, asking these two to discuss her husband and the ranch that would be her home for the rest of her life. But surely the conversation would keep her thoughts from straying where they truly ought not to go.
“We’ll arrive in St. Louis tomorrow afternoon, probably late. We’ll stay the night and then take a Wells Fargo stagecoach to Springfield, Missouri. There we’ll board another train to Waco. From the station in Waco it’s just a few hours to your ranch.”
Caleb’s deep voice shivered her skin. Sarah put the reaction out of her mind. She found it uncharacteristically difficult to concentrate. “Thank you, but I meant could you tell me a little bit about the ranch itself, and maybe a little about my husband?”
Caleb and Joshua exchanged a look she couldn’t read.
“Pardon me, Mrs. Maddox, but you want us to tell you about your husband?” Joshua asked.
“You have to call me Sarah. Both of you. And yes, I know it’s probably an imposition and maybe not even appropriate, seeing as he’s your boss and all but—”
“Tyrone Maddox isn’t our boss,” Caleb said quickly. “Not in the way I think you mean. He hired us solely to escort you from Chicago to
“Oh.” Which meant once she arrived at her husband’s ranch, she’d likely never see the brothers Benedict again.
That was probably for the best. It wouldn’t do to have these kinds of strange feelings for the two men while being married to another. Inhaling deeply, she pushed those thoughts aside and tried to ignore the tightness in her chest. “So if you’re not ranchers, what are you?”
“I thought you knew. At least the look you gave us from the top of your stairs in Chicago, when you spied on us, seemed to suggest you did.”
Caleb’s tone had gone quiet with that last sentence, and oh, the unexpected teasing glint in his eyes stirred her emotions in a way she knew she should ignore—even if it did feel delicious.
“I’m not going to apologize for that,” Sarah said, pitching her tone to match Caleb’s. She leaned forward just a little, to help ensure their conversation remained private. “I needed to have a look at you before I came down those stairs.”
“Can’t blame you for that. We had a look at you, too. And we won’t apologize either.”
“Oh.” His words, his voice, went straight to that secret place between her legs. She grew damp there, a sensation she’d never felt before. She sat back, thoroughly flummoxed by the way her body kept reacting to these men. So far her attempt to bring her body under control and her attention to where it should be, on her husband, was proving to be a dismal failure. Determined, she leaned forward once more. “So, if you’re not ranchers, what are you, then?”
Joshua leaned forward and Sarah blinked, for the heat had been between herself and Caleb. With his action, Joshua claimed his piece of her attention. With his words, he sent a chill down her spine and proved he could melt her innards as well as his brother could.
“Why,
Miss Sarah
, my brother and I are gunslingers.”
Chapter 3
“I’ll flip you. Heads I get guard duty, tails you do,” Joshua said the moment the door to their hotel room closed behind them. He knew his brother, knew every mood, every expression, every stance. And what he knew right now was that Caleb was wound tighter than the spring on his Colt 45. Joshua still had the double-headed coin that gambler he’d met last year in Dallas had given him. In Caleb’s frame of mind, he might have forgotten about the coin. He figured it couldn’t be called cheating when he did it for his brother’s own good.
“No, you sleep. I’ll watch. That way I have an excuse for closing my eyes on the train ride tomorrow. I might even sleep. That would help.”
While Joshua wandered over to the room’s one window that looked down on the narrow alley between the hotel and the saloon next door, Caleb took the straight-back chair and dragged it to the door. He opened the portal a crack, then took his place on the chair. His brother could be vigilant to their surroundings and talk to him at the same time.
Sarah’s room was across the hall and down one. That’s how he and Caleb had arranged things just so one of them
could
keep her door in sight, stay on guard all night.
Not that they expected trouble. They really didn’t. But when the Benedict brothers gave their word to keep a woman safe, they damn well kept her safe.
“She bothers you,” Joshua said, his back to his brother.
“Bothers me? If you call the way she gets my cock hard a bother, then yeah. Yeah, she bothers the hell out of me.
Fuck
.”
“Me, too. Been a long time since a female’s made me this horny this fast—if ever. Good thing she’s married. With both of us randy as young bucks we’d be pulling her under us, otherwise.”
Caleb chuckled, and Joshua knew there was no humor in it. “It’s not like she’s cut from the same cloth as some of the women we’ve shared over the years.”
“No kidding.” Joshua didn’t bother to kick off his boots, just dumped himself on the bed, smiling when the springs gave him a two-bounce ride. Folding his hands behind his head, he settled in, got comfortable.
“Thinking about past experiences isn’t helping here because it doesn’t take much imagination for me to see Sarah naked and writhing on top of you while I fuck her ass from behind. I have a feeling one taste of Sarah would wipe the memory of every other woman from our minds and our cocks.”
“
Fuck
. That’s a nice hot image to take into sleep with me. Thanks a lot, brother.”
“What can I say? You’re my brother and my best friend. If I suffer, you suffer too.”
“The way I see it, no matter what, we’re both going to suffer until we get to Maddox’s spread and give him his wife,” Joshua said. There could be no question, of course, of trying to see if they could talk the lovely Sarah out of her clothes and into their bed. She had chosen to marry Tyrone Maddox. She must have had a good reason. Hell, even though she didn’t seem to know much about him, she could have fallen in love with him at first sight. None of his business.
“Damn straight. Married means off limits.”
Exactly. Over the years there were some things he and Caleb had done that neither one of them would have wanted their mother to know about. But they did have their standards and poaching another man’s wife was on the list of things they’d never do.
Even the tempting young wife of a man who’d rubbed them wrong the way Maddox had.
That got his mind working. “Why do you suppose Adam wanted us to take this job in the first place?” Adam Kendall had been in their unit during the war, and the three of them had become good friends. If Joshua needed a man at his back and for some reason Caleb wasn’t available, he’d want Adam there. Unlike them, Adam didn’t have any difficulty settling down in one place in the years since 1865. He’d become a Texas Ranger and rose to the rank of Captain of the Waco troop.
He looked over to find Caleb frowning at him. “I don’t have the damndest idea. He didn’t give us a reason at all. At first, I thought that he asked in order to do a favor for the man, Maddox being a wealthy landowner and rancher in his neck of the woods and all.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. But now—”
“Now when I think on it, it seems strange because there’s no way I can picture Maddox and Adam as friends.”
“No way in hell,” Joshua agreed, closing his eyes. It didn’t surprise him that Caleb’s thoughts mirrored his own. They might not look like twins on the surface, but under the skin they often thought as one. “And since we both know the way Adam’s mind works, you have to wonder if there’s another reason he wanted us here other than just giving us a way to earn some extra cash.”
“I’m not going down that road any further,” Caleb said quietly. “I’m sticking to the here and now, focusing on what we know for certain and on what we have on our plates, not what looks good on the sideboard. We’ll get Mrs. Maddox to her husband because that’s what we’ve been paid to do. And that’s all we’re going to do.”
“Sideboard sure as hell holds one tempting morsel,” Joshua said. Caleb didn’t respond, and Joshua let it go. His brother was right. No sense in trying to bend speculation just to suit their prurient needs.
On the other hand, it made no sense to
not
pay attention to their instincts, either. Maybe his instincts hummed because he was drawn to Sarah Maddox, because the sight of her and the scent of her went straight to his cock. And maybe another reason existed altogether for this strange sense of alertness. So while he didn’t specifically expect any trouble between here and Waco, he’d keep a sharper eye about him anyway, just as he knew his brother would do.
Just in case.
* * * *
Smoke hung heavily in the air, the space illuminated only by the gaslights set on the wall and the Tiffany lamps placed around this upper-floor private game room in the Old Ranch saloon. Tyrone Maddox had his cigar clamped securely between his teeth, his cards tucked confidently into his hand as he eyed the rest of the players around the table. He’d known every man there a decade or more. A couple had been born in Waco, the others newcomers of a dozen years or so. He knew every important fact about each and every one. And he trusted not one of them.