when he noticed a very fine, very faint crescent line of a scar at the bottommost edge of her pointed chin. It was about an inch long, and of course he’d never noticed it before, either. That close factor again.
She pulled back, looking exasperated. “Where did I get what?”
“That scar,” he said, reaching across the battered gray Formica tabletop and gently pinching her chin between his thumb and index finger so he could angle her head for a better look. And on second look, it wasn’t so fine and it wasn’t so faint. “Man. That had to have hurt like blazes.”
“We were talking about the saddlebags,” she said, pulling away from his hold and touching her fingers to her chin in a gesture that was both self-conscious and embarrassed.
Okay. The scar was a sore subject. So he let it drop. For now. But after five years of dancing around the edge of her fire, he seriously wanted to know what fueled her flames. He could be patient when the need arose. “What about the saddlebags?”
“I said I’m certain they belonged to Jess Golden.”
He sat back. Shrugged. “What makes you think so?”
She went into an excited diatribe about Jess Golden once living in Jonathan Devlin’s house, about the purse and the rose petals and the six-shooters and the map coming from Jonathan’s attic. And there was that pink blush on her cheeks again. So. Anger and excitement were two of her triggers. He wondered what else got her going and flashed on an image of her face flushed with the heat of great sex.
Whoa.
That was interesting. And the picture was a little too vivid.
“The roses are a dead giveaway,” she finished.
“Hmm. Roses, huh? An outlaw who liked roses?”
“I have always figured there was more to Jess Golden than what was written in the local newspapers at the time and recorded in local history books.”
He considered her and realized she’d finally revealed a chink in that airtight armor. “Well, well, well, Chrissie. You’ve got a romantic streak.”
She blinked several times in rapid succession, clearly flustered. “I am not a romantic.”
“You’ve romanticized an outlaw,” he pointed out.
“Romanticized? That’s ridiculous.” She blushed again, as if the notion that he might think that she—Christine Travers of the straitlaced, all work, no play variety—would have any thought on the subject of romance was too absurd to consider. Or because he was right and she really was a closet romantic.
Huh. Who’da thunk it? And on the heels of that discovery, possibilities abounded. How hard would it be to romance this standoffish little blonde? How soft would she be when she let some of the starch out of her spine?
“The point is,” she pressed on, “if I’m right and those are Jess Golden’s things, the map could lead to the stolen gold.”
“Okay. Hold it. If those are her things, what makes you think the gold is still here? Why wouldn’t she have taken it with her?”
She gave him a “duh” look and evidently decided he needed remedial training. “You’re an outlaw,” she began as if she was talking to a five-year-old.
He leaned back, held both hands up, palms out. “Swear to God, I did not steal that gold.”
Nothing. Not even a smirk. And he wanted to pry one out of her so badly.
“I didn’t mean that you are an outlaw literally,” she said, enunciating each word, again as if she were talking to someone who was intellectually challenged. “I meant, you’re an outlaw hypothetically. And you’re on the run because everyone in Texas believes you killed not only the mayor of the town but the sheriff, as well. You stole the gold and don’t have the time or the means to take it with you. It’s heavy and cumbersome. So you hide it. And you draw a map. You hide the map somewhere—like in the house where you live, in the attic or something—and then you run, hoping things will settle down after a time and you can go back and get it.”
“Okay,” he said, marginally intrigued now. “I’m an outlaw—well, not me specifically, because we’re still doing hypothetical, right?”
Only a card-carrying optimist could interpret her sneer as camouflage for a grin.
“What makes you think that I—the hypothetical outlaw—didn’t come back and dig up the gold later?”
“Because there are absolutely no accounts of Jess Golden ever being spotted in or around Royal again. Ever. And the gold was in the form of numbered bars. If they’d been converted to cash, there would be a record. There’s not. I checked.”
She was thorough. He’d give her that. And he’d give her something else. She hid it well, but there was a treasure trove of pent-up passion buried beneath the layers that comprised Chrissie Travers. At least she had passion about this issue. He suspected there might be something else that would fire her up and toyed with the idea of being the man to discover exactly what that something was.
The prospect of peeling those layers and discovering, little by little, the woman hiding behind the steel facade suddenly fascinated him. For years he’d found a certain sophomoric satisfaction in simply pulling her chain, then leaving her stewing in her own juices.
He didn’t feel so much like leaving now. Instead he felt as if maybe he owed it to her to help her come out of her cocoon. Yeah, he thought, warming to the idea. And maybe he owed it to himself to see whether a butterfly or a bug wiggled its way out.
“Tell you what,” he said, putting his money on the butterfly. “Since you’ve made such a compelling argument—” he reached for the ketchup bottle and dumped a generous glob on top of her uneaten French fries “—I think you deserve to have the box.”
“But?”
He smiled at her insight and helped himself to some of her fries. “But there are still conditions.”
He was getting a little addicted to that icy glare. He didn’t know anyone who did it so well. He swiped a few more fries. “Condition number one—you eat at least half of your burger and some of the fries.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Pretty minor, really.”
She leaned back in the booth, her head tilted with both impatience and irritation. “What do you want from me? Why do you take such pleasure in baiting me?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I didn’t have a clear answer to that question myself until a few minutes ago.”
“And what happened to clear things up?”
“I think it’s the freckles,” he said happily and watched her eyes shift from irritation to confusion to flat-out exasperation. “They’re cute. And so are you. Now eat your lunch and then we’ll lay out the rest of the terms.”
“And one of the conditions is a dinner date?” Alison asked later that evening. She sounded just a little too cheery to suit Christine.
