The Unlikely Groom. Wendy Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ they’d flickered with a golden light that was nothing if not the color of whiskey.

      Lucas settled back in his chair at the same table where he always sat and thought about Ashlynne Mackenzie’s eyes. He hadn’t seen anything quite like them, expressive and yet guarded at the same time. But then, that described nearly everything about her. She was nothing like the working girls who made their ways north. Aside from that, she was worlds different from Emily.

      His stomach knotted and he signaled for another drink. Maybe he hadn’t been in the mood moments ago, but now, suddenly, he needed the alcohol. The last thing he could tolerate were comparisons between Emily and a woman he didn’t even know. There could be no comparison. Emily had been…special. Unique. A woman not quite of this earth. And Ashlynne Mackenzie was…not. She was simply one more woman who had most likely made a questionable match and now had to live with the consequences.

      It was none of his concern.

      “You thirsty, sugar?”

      Candy sidled up from behind him, scattering his thoughts as she delivered whiskey in a fresh glass. She bent low, hesitating long enough to draw considerable attention to the thrust of her breasts. Balancing herself with one hand on his shoulder, she offered him a seductive smile and leaned close, running her fingers down his chest and toying with the buttons of his vest beneath the suit jacket. Instinct urged him to pull away, but something else—some latent sense of self-preservation—stopped him. He needed to put behind him these unnerving memories of Emily, these unwelcome thoughts of Ashlynne Mackenzie. There could be no better way to do it than with another—and most certainly available—woman.

      He lifted one corner of his mouth in a smile. “Where have you been, Candy? Looking for a better man?”

      She gave him a wide smile of her own, made up of equal parts knowing seduction and wicked invitation. “There isn’t a better man in all of Skagway, sugar. I was just giving you some time to remember there’s no better woman than me.”

      Lucas couldn’t help himself. He laughed at Candy’s audacity and took a moment to remind himself of just how much a man he was. Not only that, but Candy was most definitely a woman. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t a man worth wanting—at least not in the traditional sense. Anything between Candy and him had nothing to do with that.

      It was only sex and nothing permanent.

      He reached up to tangle his fingers with hers. “Just what did you have in mind?” he asked in a voice pitched low enough to sound deliberately suggestive.

      Candy smiled, a familiar expression that spoke of both seduction and attraction—and generated little response within Lucas. Uneasy, he searched for another smile, a real one this time, and parted his lips when she leaned farther down.

      Her mouth settled over his with unerring precision and Lucas waited for his body to awaken. Of the few girls with whom he’d spent any time, Candy had always been one of his favorites. Tonight, though, when she sent her tongue forward to twine around his, he knew only a mild aversion for her kiss. Neither the taste of her nor the cloying scent of rosewater enticed him to want anything more. Certainly he had no urge to take her to his bed—or anything else. Rather, some deep, elemental part of him wanted to pull away, to rub his hand across his mouth and wipe away the taste of her.

      Don’t be crazy, he told himself impatiently, and opened his mouth to deepen the kiss. He’d let his emotions, his thoughts, become too stirred up tonight—and not in a good way. He needed to find a release for the tension that coursed through him.

      Not just any release, but a sexual one. He made the point for himself deliberately.

      Lucas reached up to shove his fingers into Candy’s carefully styled hair and anchored her mouth against his. She made a deep, guttural noise that he took to mean approval—or agreement, at the very least—and her tongue picked up the dance, swirling through the cavern of his mouth. It plunged deeper, darted away, then plunged again before she finally wrenched her mouth free.

      “You want to go someplace, sugar?” Her whisper sounded like more of a pant and she arched her breasts toward him with brazen disregard for others in the room. “We can go in the back. Or we can go to my place. It’s—”

      A sharp sound cut off her invitation. It came strange and unexpected and not immediately identifiable. The others in the Star fell silent, as well, all listening. Lucas paused to catch his breath, more labored than he might have expected after Candy’s kiss, and the sound echoed in his mind. Scuffling noises from outside gave him another clue, and then it hit him.

      Gunfire.

      The sound had been a pistol shot, and in Skagway, that could mean only one thing.

      Trouble.

       Chapter Two

       T he Star of the North went abruptly silent and the air grew thick with tension. Lucas didn’t have to wonder why. Anyone who’d spent more than a day in Skagway would know that, chances were, Soapy Smith or one of his men was responsible for the gunfire.

      But what, exactly, had they done now?

      A woman’s scream tore through the eerie silence, which changed everything as far as Lucas was concerned. Soapy Smith or not, women had mostly been protected from Skagway’s troubles in the past. At least the kind of trouble that involved gunfire.

      Lucas shoved Candy away and surged to his feet. Most of the others around him had begun to move, as well, and now they all headed for the door. The crowd bottled up at the entrance, but Lucas didn’t let that slow him down. Using his size and his shoulders to his advantage, he demanded, “Let me through,” in a voice of authority that guaranteed others would comply. He’d acquired that certain tone when he’d first opened the Star, and it worked as well now as whenever he’d used it in the past.

      “Wait for me, sugar!” Candy cried from behind him.

      Lucas ignored her and shoved his way through the door and out into the cold. He hadn’t stopped to grab his heavy coat and now held himself stiff against the first shiver produced by the bitter winter wind. He put the frigid temperatures from his mind.

      Groups of men had begun to gather in the nighttime streets and Lucas elbowed his way through the milling throng, again using his size to his advantage. No one seemed of a mind to argue and a path cleared for him until he reached the front of the crowd.

      A few men had brought lanterns and now held them high, illuminating various patches of the shrouded, darkened street. Lucas peered into the shadows, searching for any sign of the ruckus. A man, judging from the size and mode of dress, lay unmoving and crumpled in the street. The body was twisted at an odd, unnatural angle that warned the man was dead. A smaller figure knelt next to him.

      The woman who had screamed?

      An unwelcome, ancient urge—could it have been decency?—sent a frisson of unease chasing up his spine. Instinct prodded him to go to the woman and her dead companion. To do what he could?

      He shook his head, nothing more than a sharp, single movement, but he would have liked to have kept even that much to himself. What was wrong with him that he would consider helping anyone? He knew better. He could do nothing. If there were things that needed doing, then he was not the one to attempt them.

      Another Lucas Templeton might have felt differently, might have made another choice, but that Lucas СКАЧАТЬ