Kitabı oku: «Tucker's Claim»

Selected praise for the men of

HELL’S EIGHT

Caine’s Reckoning

“Sarah McCarty’s new series is an exciting blend of raw masculinity, spunky, feisty heroines and the wild living in the old west… Caine’s Reckoning is an erotic novel with spicy hot love scenes…Ms. McCarty gave us small peeks into each member of the Hell’s Eight and I’m looking forward to reading the other men’s stories.”

—Erotica Romance Writers

“Intense, edgy and passionate, this is old-school historical romance at its finest.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews (4.5 stars)

“Caine’s Reckoning is a can’t-put-it-down adventure story.…Superb writing and characterization…This exceptional first-in-series book has this reader eagerly anticipating future stories and earns it the RRT Perfect 10 rating…a hands-down winning tale that is not to be missed.”

—Romance Reviews Today

“Though Caine and Desi alone would have made this a wonderful romance, the many other men of Hell’s Eight are an integral part of the series and we are certainly left anxious for the next installment.”

—A Romance Review (5 roses)

Sam’s Creed

“Once again using an erotic backdrop, [McCarty] creates a mythic western hero, protective, dominant, and emotionally distant—but never cruel—who believes he is not worthy of the heroine who loves him…Readers who enjoy erotic romance but haven’t found an author who can combine it with an historical setting may discover a new auto-buy author…I have.”

—All About Romance

“McCarty continues her Hell’s Eight series with this solidly plotted tale. There’s wonderful chemistry between Sam and Bella, and the witty banter between them makes the story come alive.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews (4 stars)

“The jaunty banter between Sam and Isabella is almost as much fun to read as the sexual tension that develops. I’m definitely looking forward to future [Hell’s Eight] stories.”

—A Romance Review (4½ roses)

Tucker's Claim
A Hell’s Eight Erotic Adventure
Sarah McCarty

www.spice-books.co.uk

To all the ladies of my yahoo group. No one could ask for a better group of ladies with which to laugh and share life’s ups and downs. You are simply the best.

Chapter 1

Music drifted out of the gaily decorated church into the humid night air, wrapping around Sally Mae in a breath of lilting joy. She shifted her hip on the railing, leaned her head against the rough porch support and let the notes roll through her, not feeling the guilt so strongly this time. She was healing, from the inside out, the way Jonah said she would in what he’d considered a kindness. But then Jonah had been that type of man, always able to put others before him, always able to see God’s light with no questions attached to the end of the message. His way had always been clear while hers was always a struggle.

Despite their differences, or maybe because of them, she’d been a good wife to him. Their marriage hadn’t been the kind that little girls dreamed up while playing in the yard on a summer’s day, but it had been the stable kind an impulsive woman valued. No matter what her inclinations, Sally had always known that if she couldn’t find the answer in meditation, she would find it with Jonah. He’d been her rock, her balance, her guiding light, and when he’d been murdered, it had shattered her inner light into a never-ending pitch of black, to the point that she’d stopped feeling anything.

For months, she’d walked around in a daze, going through life as if she hadn’t lost a vital part of her faith. And then the townsfolk had started coming to her for healing, seeing her as the next best thing to a doctor, and she’d found solace in being needed. From that solace had come a light that flickered through the darkness. Purpose. Life since Jonah’s death hadn’t been perfect, but she’d found a reason to get out of bed, a pretense on which to keep functioning, and gradually, that pretense had grown into a calling she’d only assumed was hers before Jonah’s death. A calling that distracted her from the emptiness left by her husband’s death. An emptiness she’d been able to ignore until six months ago when Tucker McCade had come back to town.

She grimaced and shifted her position, the star-studded vastness of the landscape striking her anew with its beauty, almost as though it was the first time she was seeing it. And maybe it was. Sometimes she felt that Jonah’s death had wiped clean her understanding of who she was and left a stranger in its place. A stranger who was familiar in her love of these beautiful nights of endless sky and sparkling stars, yet foreign in her attraction to the big Texas Ranger.

She couldn’t pinpoint what drew her to the man. Tucker was too big, too wild, too unpredictable to be described in easy terms. He breathed the violence she abhorred, seemed to believe in nothing but the moment, and the only emotion he let anyone see never made it to his eyes. He was a man of secrets and pain, larger than life, and nothing to which she should be attracted, and yet, somehow, he’d become part of her emerging life.

Laying temptation in front of a man like me is dangerous, pretty thing.

The remembered warning rumbled over her nerves in a deep promise. At the time, she hadn’t thought she’d been laying anything anywhere, just tending the nasty cut on his arm, but looking back, she had stood closer than she’d needed to, and her fingers had lingered longer than they’d needed to. She blamed it completely on the utter fascination of the man. His eyes alone would be enough to fascinate most women—a shocking silver-gray in his dark face. But for her, the fascination went much deeper than his heavily muscled frame and harshly exotic good looks. For her, the fascination went to the glimpses of gentleness that he hid beneath a sarcastic wit and a propensity for violence. A gentleness she suspected he wore with the same ease with which he wore his guns and knives. Tucker McCade was a man who was very comfortable with himself, in the same way Jonah had been, but for different reasons. While Jonah had been comfortable with the path God had revealed to him and his ability to stick to it, Tucker was comfortable with the path he had laid out for himself, and comfortable with his ability to hold it where he wanted.

Sally shook her head, breathing deeply of the humid night air, fragrant with the aroma of the roasting pig that had been served up earlier. Tucker fought at the drop of a hat. He’d fought for Cissy Monroe, who’d changed her mind about prostituting herself to make ends meet, fought for a mongrel puppy pinned down after stealing a loaf of bread, and sometimes he just fought for reasons that had no discernible cause other than that he wanted to. It was in those moments that Tucker McCade scared her, because those were the moments when he was everything his reputation held him to be. Everything she feared. The very thing that had taken her husband. A man as lawless and as violent as this land.

But he was also beautiful and compelling in the way of all wild things. And, much like the music she was trying not to break her mourning by enjoying, he had a way of getting under her skin, reaching down to the primal part of her that responded on instinct and didn’t give a hoot about logic or her Quaker beliefs. The part of her that wanted him very badly.

Closing her eyes, Sally indulged in a bit of harmless fantasy. Imagined Tucker was before her, so wonderfully tall he made her feel small while those broad shoulders of his blocked her view of anything else. Most of all the past. His silvery eyes, so startling above the high slash of his cheekbones, would stare down at her in that semimocking, farseeing way he had that made her both nervous and breathless at the same time. And that long, shiny black hair he wore parted in the center would fall free about his exotic face as he leaned down, enhancing his Indian ancestry to the point of challenge. Enhancing the power of his personality, the magnetism of his sexuality, the sensual fullness of his mouth…He’d reach for her with his big, callused hands that never touched, but instead lingered a scant breath from her skin, promising so much even as they withheld everything. Passion, pleasure, heaven. Hands that killed as easily as they gave joy. A shiver, half negation, half anticipation, shook her from head to toe.

As a Quaker and a pacifist, she never saw the point of fighting. She also didn’t see the point of daring everyone around a body to make something of nothing, but Tucker definitely had a take-me-as-I-am-or-suffer-the-consequences element in his approach to the world. When a woman added the easy confidence with which he did everything to that disregard for convention, it totaled up to a potent combination. One she was finding harder and harder to resist in the bright light of common sense. One she didn’t want to resist in the soft cloak of night with the moon shining brightly and her imagination so willing to sketch out a moment between them.

The music slowed to a swirling crescendo. Inside dancers would be gliding to a stop with varying degrees of style, poised for the next beat, the next partner. While for her, here in this dream, hers already waited. All she had to do was take that step toward Tucker, that forbidden, terrifying step she’d never managed in real life, because in many ways she was a coward. Not because he was half-Indian, not because society said that was wrong—in her world all women and men were equal—but because Tucker McCade stood with his feet in blood while she followed a different path. But still, in her dreams, she could have him, and in her dreams she took that step forward into the touch of his hand, into the warmth of his embrace, into the protection of his strong arms. She sighed as desire coursed through her body at the imagined culmination of months of longing.

He was a cruel man, some said. A hard man, others whispered. But, on an instinctive level, she knew the only thing she would find in his arms was joy. She’d seen the promise of it in his marvelous eyes, felt it vibrate between them whenever they got close, knew deep inside that Tucker would take care of her body the same way he took care of her safety. Totally and completely, whether she wanted it or not.

Folding her arms across her chest and balancing her weight, Sally Mae hugged the knowledge to her, letting it weave through the fantasy, granting to Tucker in dreams the access that she couldn’t in the daylight. Access to touch, access to pleasure. Through the break between songs, when everything was possible, she gave her fantasy permission to move forward into the forbidden with a sense of inevitability. Tucker was a force to be reckoned with at any time, wearing down his quarry with slow, steady pressure. And when it came to resistance, she was apparently no stronger than the outlaws who inevitably surrendered to his law. She didn’t want to fight him anymore. Fighting was draining, especially when what she was resisting was the one thing instinct said could color the darkness that enshrouded her life.

The music inside broke into a merry jig, the rhythm percolating through her blood, picking up her spirits, increasing the tempo of her fantasy, moving from languid to fervored as she imagined his long fingers closing around her wrists, skimming her forearms, her upper arms, her shoulders, the rough calluses abrading her skin in a delicious way that Jonah’s smooth hands never had.

The edges of her dream rippled at the disloyalty. Tucker was Jonah’s opposite in many ways, and it might be the biggest delusion in the world to believe he could be gentle with a woman, but this was her daydream, her escape, and she wanted to believe Tucker could be gentle enough to bring her to the point where she didn’t need gentleness anymore. She forced herself to be honest. Past the point where Jonah had always stopped.

She flinched, shattering the last of her dream, and it was once again just her, the night and the longing that wouldn’t go away. For the warmth of a man’s embrace, the strength of his arms, the burn of his passion. And not just any man. She’d never been indiscriminate. Jonah had been her only lover and until his death she’d never looked at another man, and in those first weeks, hadn’t even been aware that Tucker existed. But one day she’d looked up from the cup of coffee that had been placed in her hand, and there he’d been, his expression solemn, his touch gentle, his eyes reflecting the understanding of the loss she couldn’t accept. He’d been there ever since, popping into her life when he came into town, sheltering her from the worst of everything while he was there, making sure she ate, making sure her patients didn’t get ideas, making sure she was safe and cared for. Making sure she knew he waited. For her.

Moonlight became Sally Mae. It poured over the paleness of her skin with a lover’s tenderness, bringing out the silver gilt in her hair, the smooth perfection of her skin, the mystery of who she was. By day Sally could hide the truth under a bustle of activity, but in the quiet of the night, her secrets escaped. Her loneliness, her hunger, her thirst for adventure. Tucker was a man who’d always preferred night and those things it embraced. Sally was no exception. The woman had integrity, beauty, and an appeal from which he couldn’t walk away. Even if he should. She turned ever so slightly and he could just make out the gentle swell of her breast beneath the inevitable gray of her dress. He narrowed his gaze until the tempting curve filled his line of vision. He smiled. Thank God he’d never been much on “shoulds.”

He watched her, perched like a fairy against the support, her arms crossed over her chest, her head dropping back. The blond of her hair not covered by the fine lawn cap perched on the back of her head shimmered against the dark wood. Sunshine and shadow. The woman was a mystery. Her shoulders lifted on a slight sigh. That emotion he’d noticed lately and couldn’t place shifted over her expression, narrowing her eyes and drawing her upper lip between her teeth.

She’d been in that strange mood a lot lately. Full of a restlessness that teased the edges of his awareness. Made him hard with its potential promise. He’d like nothing better than to step out of the shadows, take her hands in his, uncross her arms and draw them around his neck, accepting the weight of her willowy body against his, her troubles as his. If it were left to him, he’d wrap her in cotton wool and keep her safe from any threat, any worry. But it wasn’t up to him. Though it sure as hell should be up to someone. Sally took too many risks. And lately, whenever he came into town from the hunt for Caine’s wife’s sister, nerves jangled, senses hungry for respite, she’d be watching him with those dark gray eyes that had no idea how they tempted, and he’d forget why he was keeping his distance.

Sally Mae sighed and closed her eyes as the music leaped into the calm of the night. The same moonlight that cast her skin in a silvery glow provided the shadows in which he hid. He knew she wasn’t aware of his presence. She’d be strung as tight as a drum if she had any inkling that he watched her. And not because she found him distasteful. He wasn’t a fool. He knew Sally Mae wanted him, the same as he knew she’d never get serious about it. A brief affair to see how it would be to lie down with a savage, maybe, but he’d learned the hard way that a white woman did not openly take up with a man with Indian blood—not for love or money. She might enjoy him on the side, if the affair could be safely hidden, but there was too much hate between whites and Indians for any more than that to be tolerated. Already there were rumblings because he stayed in her barn.

Not that he gave a shit. Tucker flexed his fingers, remembering the last time someone had suggested he move. It’d felt good to knock the man’s teeth down his throat. Release a bit of that hostility Sally Mae had suggested he pray away. Well, quiet contemplation is what she called it. Tucker shook his head. As if prayer was going to settle the discord caused by a randy wrangler’s speculation. He flexed his fingers again, enjoying the response of muscle. He’d never found talk as effective as action. Might was a great equalizer, and he had plenty of that. And if he had to go back and do it again, that would be the one thing he’d thank his father for giving him the muscle to make a place for himself in a world that had never wanted to give him one.

The hem of Sally Mae’s dress fluttered, drawing his eye. Beneath the somber gray trim of her skirt, he could make out the top of her sturdy boot. Her toe was tapping.

Tucker had never seen Sally Mae dance, had always assumed it was against her religion, but maybe she’d just been in mourning for her murdered husband. Maybe that tapping toe indicated she was ready to come out and join the living. He straightened, the same surge of anticipation thrumming through his blood as when he closed in on his quarry at the end of a long bounty hunt. With the same cold precision, his senses homed in on Sally Mae. He’d lain awake nights, imagining touching his tongue to the smooth white skin at the hollow of her throat where her pulse beat against her smooth white skin. She always smelled of lemon and vanilla, and he bet the scent was strongest there, heated from her excitement and fear. He’d draw a deep breath and take it into himself right before he unbuttoned her prim dress and eased the flaps aside to reveal the treasure beneath.

Some men liked their women plump and soft, some liked them curvy. He’d decided, about two minutes after Sally Mae touched him, that he liked willowy blondes. He’d been in a rage—angry at life, indulging his temper on an equally big man who was in an equally big snit when she’d walked into the saloon, stepped between them and started to lecture them on the foolishness of fighting. He’d had to deck the bastard when he’d hauled back his arm, ready to flatten her. Then he’d had to listen to her lecture him all the way to her house, half-lit, keeping his steps steady because he knew if he tripped she’d try to catch him, and with her delicate build she’d only end up pancaked beneath him. She’d ranted at him in that quiet way she had as she’d gathered her supplies, as if her wild opinions had weight.

He’d sat and listened, breathed her scent, and as he looked around her cozy kitchen later, the longing had hit him with the force of a blow. Had things been different—his mother white or his father Indian—his blood wouldn’t have been mixed and he could have had a home in either the white world or Indian, but as it was, he didn’t fit anywhere except Hell’s Eight. He certainly didn’t fit here, but he’d wanted to. For the first time since his family and town had been wiped out by a Mexican raid when he was sixteen, he’d wanted to fit somewhere other than Hell’s Eight. And when Sally Mae’s hand had settled on his bare arm in an offer of pure comfort, for that brief moment in time, he’d wanted to fit here.

In the months since that night, the need kept creeping back. Didn’t matter how much he told himself Sally Mae was a good woman. Not the kind a man trifled with, he couldn’t shake the belief that she was meant for him. For however long he could tickle her fancy. Since that moment she’d touched him, he’d been biding his time. He was good at that. It made him a good Texas Ranger. A good horse trainer. He eyed the gentle thrust of Sally’s breasts beneath her demure lace collar. A damn good lover.

The music resumed a lively beat. Sally’s toe kept time. He bet she danced with the same inherent grace underlined with an innate sexuality, as she did everything. She was the only woman he knew who could make stitching a wound a sexy event. A smile tugged on the corner of her wide mouth. Probably too wide for beauty, but Tucker liked the generous way she smiled. It reflected the generosity of her spirit. He liked the way her nose wasn’t some small bit of nonsense, too. Straight and narrow it complemented the strength in the rest of her features.

Truth was, a moment spent studying Sally’s face revealed a lot about the woman’s personality. Including how stubborn she was. Just look at the set of her chin. More than one person had tried to get her to move back east after her husband had been shot, but she’d refused politely. When pressed, she’d just ended all argument with a simple statement that she wouldn’t be run out of her home. And when the suggestions had started that she needed to remarry, she’d been just as blunt. Her husband had been a good man. She’d mourn him properly.

The town had backed down. Which had been pure foolishness, in Tucker’s opinion. Texas wasn’t a place for a woman who believed God lived in everyone and turning the other cheek beat a beating when dealing with a threat. Tucker would have put her ass on the next train east, bound and gagged if he’d had to. Sally Mae was too fine for life alone out here. Green to the difficulties she faced, green to the reality that she’d have to marry again. Green to the danger she faced from him. Hell, she’d even pointed out that with a Texas Ranger living in her barn, how much of a threat could there be? Completely missing the connotation people might put on that. Completely missing how right they’d be to speculate on his interest. He did want her and he intended to have her.

On a sensual sigh, she smiled and settled further against the porch wall. Alone in the dark, apart from the town, the way she always was, even though she tended to the townspeople with an evenhandedness a preacher couldn’t fault, taking care of good and bad alike, losing all caution under a sense of dedication. Lately, even more so. As if driven to prove something only she understood. Which was another reason he was still here and not out following the latest lead on what had happened to Ari, Caine’s wife’s sister, why he’d turned down Sam and his new fiancée’s invitation to make his home off Hell’s Eight at their comfortable ranch. He grimaced. He was a glutton for punishment, that was for sure, but someone had to watch over the widow when her common sense took a hike. Like last week when she’d taken in Lyle Hartsmith after he’d been knifed in a bar fight.

Lyle Hartsmith was a real no account, an outlaw with no morals and no allegiance, and if there was any justice in the world, the wound would have killed him, but there was no convincing Sally Mae of that. In her eyes, the prairie rat was one of God’s creatures and entitled to care. And that was the end of it. So Tucker was here cooling his heels, keeping an eye on things, making sure she didn’t take on more than she could handle, feeding a hunger that could go nowhere while he paid back a debt she wouldn’t acknowledge he owed. He shook his head. Who the hell had said that with age comes wisdom? He was thirty-one, and from all recent signs, getting dumber by the day.

The fiddler dropped into a slow, popular tune and Sally’s smile changed, becoming sad and just a little bit lost in the memories the song evoked. No doubt, of her dead husband. Tucker wanted to resent the man for having Sally for his wife, but he couldn’t. Jonah had been a good man who’d deserved better than he’d received. And he’d been stolen from Sally the same way Tucker’s life had been stolen from him when he’d been sixteen—in a hail of bullets and with no warning. He knew the sense of shock left by that kind of murder, the feeling that there was nothing left to hold on to. His parents might not have been the best, but they’d been better than the nothing that had remained when the Mexican soldiers had finished annihilating his small town.

A thinning of Sally Mae’s lower lip told him she was biting it. To hold back sobs? Hell, the night was too beautiful for tears. Especially Sally Mae’s. He stepped out of the shadows, drawn by her sorrow and the need to alleviate it. Drawn by his lust and his hunter’s instincts. Drawn by the desire to make this moment in her life better than the memory that consumed her. It took only three steps to get to the bottom of the stairs. He held out his hand, looked up and asked, “May I have this dance?”

There was a slight start to reveal her surprise, but Sally Mae didn’t move away from the wall, and she didn’t open her eyes, but her smile changed. Softened. She really was in a mood tonight.

“That would be scandalous.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “So was taking a notorious outlaw into your house, but I didn’t see you balk at that.”

Her right eye cracked open. “In that, I didn’t have a choice.”

His instincts perked. His blood thickened with the slow course of desire. “And now you do.”

He didn’t expect her to take his hand, and she didn’t, but her other lid opened and the gaze with which she weighed him was as keen as anyone’s, even Caine’s. And Caine had a wicked ability to take a person’s measure. It’s what made him the natural leader of the Hell’s Eight.

“I find I am at a fork in the road of my life, Ranger McCade.”

His heart beat faster and his senses sharpened. “Forks can be good.”

She closed her eyes again and took a slow breath. The way a person did when they were thinking. “True, but only if one can discern the difference between an opening and temptation.”

She had him there. “An opening?”

“An opportunity provided by God to grow.”

“And without this opening you can’t dance with me?”

With her eyes closed and the moonlight catching on her hair, she looked like an angel he’d seen in a book he’d stolen as a child.

Her eyes opened and he changed his mind. No angel looked that earthy.

“It means I must decide the source of thy temptation for me.”

“As in good or bad?”

“Yes.”

Placing his foot on the bottom step, he grazed his finger over her knee. The practical wool of her skirt did nothing to dim the impact on his senses. “Then I vote for bad.”

Her lids flickered and her lip slipped between her teeth. “Why?”

He smiled, holding her gaze, his pulse kicking up. She wasn’t fighting him. “Because I can make being bad…very, very good.”

Her breath caught. Exhaling, she confessed, “Such is what I suspect, which simply makes my decision that much harder.”

The flush on her cheeks destroyed the last of his good intentions. Sliding his fingers to the back of her knee, he curved his palm over the point. “Want me to make it easy for you?”

Sally’s expression shifted. An element he didn’t recognize enriched the speculation as she ran her gaze over him. The glance, rich in feminine knowledge, burned along his desire, as it traveled from the top of his hat to the toes of his boots, neither of which were courting clean. “Would thee be willing?”

The lack of disapproval in her summation only goaded his anger with the message it sent. He’d been here often enough to recognize the signs. She wasn’t looking for proper from him, just a few illicit moments in bed that she could hug as her sexy little secret on cold winter nights. He dropped his hand and stepped back. “Is your bed getting so cold that you’re lowering yourself to invite a savage into it?”

She blinked and slid off the rail. It was easy to read the emotions chasing across her expression this time. Horror. Affront. Anger. And then pity. “Thee do not think much of thyself.”

That wasn’t true. He thought a lot of himself, he just didn’t think much of how other people saw him. “Thinking on changing me?”

With a cock of her head, she acknowledged his displeasure, then she shrugged. “I’ve been thinking on many things.”

“Like what?” He didn’t trust that too-calm way in which she observed him.

“Like the fact that thee are a good man, as well as being a very big temptation.”

He might be a temptation, but he wasn’t good. And she damn well knew it. “Have you been drinking?”

“I don’t believe in drink.”

She didn’t drink, she didn’t dance and she didn’t believe in violence. “What do you believe in?”

She didn’t answer right away, just studied him with her big gray eyes to the point that he was beginning to feel like a bug under a magnifying glass. And then in that regal way she always moved, which spoke of confidence and commanded respect, she descended the steps. When she reached the bottom one, it was natural to hold out his hand, natural that she place hers in it, natural that he continue to hold it as she took that last step that brought her directly before him. Her fingers curled around his. Her hand was cool and dry. She wasn’t nervous about dancing with him. “I believe in choice.”

And this close it was easy to determine why. There was a touch of alcohol on her breath. Someone had spiked the punch. Sally Mae probably wasn’t in command of all her faculties. A decent man would have escorted her back inside to the dance. But he wasn’t a decent man. He was Tucker McCade, known more for his brawling skills than his scruples. In short, he was no better than he had to be.

“Then I’m glad you’re choosing me.”

Her head cocked to the side as he pulled her in. “Thee are lying.”

Yes, he was. What with Sam just having left with Bella, Tucker was more conscious than ever of what would never be his. A woman to love him for what he was. The way Bella loved Sam. The way Desi loved Caine. But tonight, he was in the mood to pretend that it could be, and with Sally Mae. He drew their linked hands up and to the right, guiding her into his arms. The top of her head tucked under his chin as if it belonged there. “Do you care?” he asked against the silk of her hair.

“Not tonight.”

“Good.”