Look away. Look away.
The plea went unheard. More prickles of awareness flustered her composure. Even more flustering was the reality of who that man was. Luke Bellen. One of the infamous Hell’s Eight. Men said to chew nails and spit bullets, eat danger for breakfast and gather women like wildflowers. Another shiver went down her spine at the thought. She didn’t want to be gathered.
Liar.
The accusation came from within.
“Traitor,” she whispered back. The last thing she needed right now was an ill-advised sense of temptation distracting her from the job for which she’d traveled so far. She was here to commemorate the wedding of her Uncle Jarl. Big and blustery, a handsome, hard-eyed businessman, Jarl Wayfield was very dear to her, and while not actually blood, he was as close to a real father as she’d ever had. From the day he’d come courting her mother, they’d had a bond. When his relationship with her mother had ended, he’d stuck around in the background of Josie’s life. She’d long since stopped wishing he was her father and instead settled for the security he offered.
He was probably the only one who saw the sense of adventure that lurked beneath her persistent shyness. And he’d indulged it by summoning her away from the smothering small town in which she’d been born and the ever-stifling presence of her overly judgmental mother. Without him she wouldn’t have this opportunity to see the West, to indulge her passion for taking pictures. She owed him so much. Too much to let six feet of wide-shouldered, lean-hipped, dark-haired pure temptation take her off task. Still feeling the weight of Luke Bellen’s gaze, she hurried on, almost dropping the tintype in the rush to her wagon.
Darn it!
The wagon had been an off-the-cuff purchase, but she only had so long to develop her images and hard experience told her that in a household environment, no one respected her need for darkness to do her work. They were forever trying to shed light on her process. These images were too important to risk. Jarl giving her this opportunity to photograph his wedding meant the world. His faith in her ability to forever capture this precious time was a much-needed boost to her flagging confidence. Being dumped like yesterday’s garbage by the man to whom she’d thought she’d been discreetly engaged for the past five years had been a hard lesson in humility. And shame. She’d been a fool to let Jason convince her to keep their engagement a secret. She’d been more than a fool. She’d been an accomplice in her own humiliation when he’d announced his engagement to another. And worse, expected her to understand.
She grimaced as she opened the back of the peddler’s wagon and stepped up. She hadn’t understood. She’d wanted to kill him. Her foot slipped and her knee scraped the metal edge. She bit back a cry and the need to burst into tears. She hated being emotional. She hated being clumsy even more. And truth was, she was only clumsy when she was under scrutiny. So it was really all Bellen’s fault.
Holding the tintype securely, she glared over her shoulder at the cause of her distress. He didn’t even have the decency to show remorse. Instead, he stood up there on the porch with another of the Hell’s Eight, nonchalantly leaning against the rough-hewn support, looking for all the world like a lion surveying his pride. She had the childish urge to stick out her tongue.
As if he heard the thought, he smiled at her, a slow, knowing smile. The full-on flush started in her toes, crept up her thighs, heated her chest and burned in her cheeks. It was sheer bravado that had her snubbing him with a lift of her chin before pure unadulterated cowardice sent her diving into the wagon. Cowardice had often been the bane of her existence. And sometimes, her salvation.
The door banged shut behind her. Placing the undeveloped tintype on the plank counter, she braced herself, hands spread across the uneven wood as she took a steadying breath. She was twenty-six years old, for heaven’s sake. Far too old to be undone by a man’s glance. But there was something about Luke that just ferreted its way past the defenses she’d built up over the years and reduced her to the cripplingly shy child she’d been. She hated it. She wanted to blame him. And if he only would say or do something other than observe her from afar, she probably could. But he didn’t.
He was probably doing it on purpose.
She reached for the developing chemicals only to notice her hand was shaking. She took another breath and waited. The chemicals that made the miracle of photography possible were highly flammable. Not to mention noxious smelling. She needed a steady hand when dealing with them.
She soon discovered that standing in the hot, humid interior of the darkened wagon was not conducive to relaxation. Alone in the dark, it was too easy for her mind to wander. And without anything else to distract her attention, her mind inevitably wandered to Luke Bellen. As she was sure hundreds of other women’s minds had done before.
All the men of Hell’s Eight were compelling but there was something about Luke that stood out. There was a symmetry to his broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, well-muscled body that made her breath catch. A smoothness in the way he moved that made her fingertips tingle. And the way his utter masculinity prowled beneath the nonchalance of his expressions... She sighed. Well, that just made her want to sink to the ground at his feet and let nature take its course.
If she let him, he would take advantage. She was sure of that. Just as he would with any other woman who succumbed to his blatant sexuality, no doubt. She had only to look back at her own engagement to see the folly of her first line of thought. Her fiancé, Jason, had nowhere near the presence Luke had, but it had been enough for her to convince herself the words he’d whispered in her ear were real. That the emotions he professed were honest. And that the passion he’d made her feel was unique to them. All that only to find out at her own long-awaited engagement party that he’d whispered those same words to, invoked those same passions in so many others. And she’d been such a blind fool, building excuses on top of her ignorance because the little he’d given her had been easier to accept than venturing back into the tenuous social position of being unclaimed. Bastards could only be so bold.
She grabbed the bottle of developer from the wooden box. Thank goodness Uncle Jarl had offered her this escape. More than once he’d been her salvation, often stepping in to give her breathing room from her mother’s constant expectations. As he had this time when he’d sent her the tickets to come out to Texas—Texas!—to memorialize his wedding with her tintypes. Even if she hadn’t been wanting to escape her mother’s newest press for her to choose a husband—she loved her, but in some ways she was absolutely relentless—she would have jumped at the chance to come out to the wild-and-wonderful West she’d read so much about. Texas was just Texas. Big, wild and full of potential. She couldn’t take two steps without wanting to pull out her camera box and capture a moment.
Her mother was constantly seeking ways to regain the respectability she’d abandoned when she’d fallen for the wrong man and had a child—Josie—out of wedlock, and the subsequent pressure for Josie to accept any invitation dropped off at the house was becoming impossible to duck. One of the reasons Josie had been thrilled to take up Uncle Jarl’s invite was to escape that sudden increase in invitations. She was long past marriageable age anyway. She’d been cast aside. By all measures, she should be a pariah, but in the wake of her mother’s suddenly full social calendar, Josie had just as suddenly been receiving callers. As those callers had been of a certain age, she’d had the uncomfortable feeling her mother had found a new way to increase her value as a marriage prospect. It was too mortifying to contemplate. And too distasteful. She did not want to marry an old man, no matter how good their tailors made them look in their suits.
And that fast, her thoughts were back to Bellen and the way he looked in his suit. So many men looked awkward in more formal attire. But that man wore his clothes the way he wore his confidence, as if they were an extension of some deeper
