The Untamed Heart. Kit Gardner

over him in a cloud of smoke and heat as he shoved open the saloon’s double doors and stepped inside.

      He paused to draw his top hat from his head, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dim lighting. The place was small. Every table bulged with cowboys and hard-bitten men, most engaged in card playing. The air hung thick and oppressively hot with the stench of smoke, drink and bodies gone stale. Candles dripped wax from two cheap gilt chandeliers hanging overhead. In one corner an old man hunched over a piano, struggling out a tinny tune. A cowboy jostled heavily against Sloan, belched, then stumbled out the door. Behind the bar a shinypated, massive barkeep in white shirt and suspenders splashed whiskey into an endless row of glasses, then turned and disappeared through a back door.

      On the wall above the bar hung a garish portrait of a copperhaired woman reclining naked amidst lush grapevines. One leaf rode conveniently high between her plump thighs. Demure fingertips brushed at the base of her neck. A secretive curve graced her small lips, promising the world. Her belly was full, pink and smooth, her breasts like firm, ripe, overgrown white melons. Sloan’s eyes narrowed on the large, rosy peaks and his belly tightened. A feast for any man’s fantasy.

      His blood seemed to heat.

      He saw her then at the bar, carefully arranging full whiskey glasses on a tray. Gertie, copper haired as the lady in the portrait, peach skinned and luminous in a sheath of white. For some reason an unexpected jolt jarred through Sloan. Perhaps because she looked too young to have experienced widowhood already. The way she moved reminded him of a girl not yet fully a woman: the willowy, long-limbed, rangy sort of unselfconscious movement common to prepubescent girls. Not to widows, or to women who took men up to their room for a hard ride on a squeaky bed because they had no other way to feed themselves.

      Cornwall’s brew houses were full of women whose husbands never returned from the mines or the sea. Scrubcheeked, freckle-nosed women of all shapes, ages and sizes, yet all had the same dead look in their eyes, a look that made a parody of the seductive words they whispered in a man’s ear and the breast they offered for him to fondle, all to lure him to their bed for a few shillings.

      Sloan had become a champion for those forgotten miners’ widows. The stipend Cambridge sent him for his contributions to their publications had retired many a widows’ debt on her brew house and freed them of their servitude to the mine owners. Sloan had come to know those women well enough to recognize that Gertie was not one of their lot. At least not yet.

      She turned from the bar, tray -balanced in her hands, hair sliding from the knot on top of her head. She focused on the whiskey sloshing out of the glasses with eyes uncommonly large and uniquely slanted. Her tongue peeked out of one corner of her mouth as she attempted to maneuver among the tables. The bustle seemed to be causing her some navigational problems. The dress was all wrong—high-collared, rose-sprigged, virginal white, at least one size too small. Sloan had seen dresses like that several fashion-years before on girls going to church in London.

      Sloan watched her hips swing around one cowboy’s chair. Uncomfortable though she might be in her clothes, she possessed a fluidity of movement uncommon to most young women. In that dress she looked like a beautifully tapered white lily.

      A subtle fullness settled deep in his loins.

      She lifted the tray over her head and turned sideways to shimmy through a narrow path between tables. The movement, unconscious as Sloan was certain it was, offered up her more visible assets like a feast to a roomful of starving men. Every eye in the place seemed to rivet on her. A sudden hush descended over the room, save for the piano’s off-key tune.

      A seated cowboy turned, licked the spittle from his lips and ogled her bosom with a lascivious intent that fired a longdormant but staggering fury in Sloan. He took a step, watching the cowboy’s dirty hands.

      Another cowboy slid his chair into Gertie’s path, trapping her with the tray balanced above her head. Her smile cut like a knife through Sloan. It was the smile of a child, a guileless, slightly mischievous smile that had no place in the Silver Spur around these men. She belonged in a sun-dappled, tightly sealed parlor with all the other virgins of the world, working a needle through cloth and dreaming of the noble man who would love her.

      The first cowboy rose from his chair, his lean, muscular body not a hairbreadth from Gertie’s. Narrow hips jutting, broad chest straining at his shirt, he braced his muscled thighs wide and poised his sinewy, sun-hardened arms to crush around her. Sloan could smell the man’s thoughts. Those slitted eyes had already stripped Gertie of her sheath and laid her on that squeaky bed.

      Sloan moved through space without volition or thought to consequences. All he could see was Gertie turning in profile to face the cowboy. Her eyes widened as he spoke to her and realization swept over her. Her lips parted in silent protest. She wasn’t strong enough to defend herself against a man gone rabid with need. His cohorts would cheer him on. She had only one champion in this room.

      Shoving a cowboy from his path, Sloan shouldered between two others and then he burst upon them.

      Gertie’s head snapped around. Her gaze froze him midstride. He saw the helplessness in the quiver of her brows, the desperation in the heightened color in her cheeks. He knew only that the upward curve of her breasts brushed against the cowboy’s chest with her breaths.

      “Madam Gertie,” he rumbled as he surged past her, “I will handle this matter for you. Step aside.”

      “But—”

      The cowboy’s eyes met Sloan’s long enough to register the challenge issued. But his fingertips got no further than his gun belt. With a lightning-quick slice of his hand Sloan slapped the cowboy’s trigger hand away, blocked a wild punch with his forearm and easily ducked another. In two strides he drove the cowboy back against the table and the table up against the wall. The cowboy raised his hands beside his ears in wide-eyed, dumbfounded surrender.

      “I jest asked her ta dance, mister,” the cowboy sputtered. “Ain’t no laws against dancin’ in a public place.”

      Sloan shoved his nose an inch from the cowboy’s. “Is that what you call it here? Where I come from, we call it something else, and we conduct it privately. I doubt very much the lady would have consented to what you suggested.”

      “The hell she didn’t. I was gonna give her two dollars!”

      Sloan stared at the man as the grumbles of agreement rippled through the crowd. He turned and found Gertie standing directly at his back. Hands on her hips, one brow arched with disdain, she didn’t look the least bit grateful for his intervention and saving of the day. She looked…as if he’d muddled her plans.

      “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Sloan said, suddenly very much aware that he towered over her and that the air seemed to grow instantly thicker between them. And hotter. Her skin was of the most astonishing shade of warm apricot.

      Her emerald eyes dropped to his tailored topcoat, then narrowed on the stickpin at his neck. Suspicion lurked in her voice. “Who are you?”

      He found himself watching the slow descent of one thick copper curl onto her shoulder. “Sloan Devlin, madam, late of—”

      “You’re from the railroad.” An icy shadow fell over her features.

      “Indeed, I came from—”

      “Get the hell out”

      He bit off his reply as Gertie turned abruptly and made her way through the swarm of men. Sloan’s attempt to follow was instantly thwarted by the bulging chest of one particularly foul smelling man with only a handful of teeth to register his sneer. Sloan set his jaw wearily. “Don’t make me move you.”

      “D’ya hear that, fellas?” The man spread his sausage legs wide and punched one fist into his palm. “This gussied-up railroad gent says he’s gonna move ol’ Reuben. Better take off yer fancy coat, railroad gent. Don’t wanna mess up yer Sunday best with yer blood.”

      “No chance of that” Sloan’s eyes slid over the man’s shoulder. Gertie stood at the bar, arranging whiskey glasses on