The Temptress Read online

  Dysan smiled. “I can assure you that there is no way to escape. You got in because I allowed you to enter.” He took the cigar from his mouth and looked at it. “I wondered which one of the women you’d go after first.”

  Dysan stood and walked to stand behind Chris, putting a gun to her head, running his hand along her throat and pulling her head back. “Why do I get the feeling that she’s not what she seems? Hamilton said she was his cousin, a mousey little thing that allowed her husband to beat her, but here she is, having escaped down the side of a four-story building, and I somehow sense that she isn’t what she appears.”

  “What do you want? If it’s money, you’ll be paid. All you have to do is release her.”

  “Money?” Dysan sounded genuinely surprised. “And do you have money to pay for her ransom?”

  “I can get it.”

  Dysan walked away from Chris but not far enough that he couldn’t have hurt her if Tynan tried anything. “And what do you have that you can sell? Do some of the prostitutes you know have money? Will they sell their diseased bodies to get money for you? Or has that miner of yours finally found gold?”

  Tynan just looked at the man, not saying a word.

  “Ah, the rescuing hero doesn’t want to tell what he knows. What can I do to loosen your tongue? Remove pieces of this little lady?”

  Still, Tynan didn’t move.

  Dysan moved closer to Chris and began to run his hands down her arms. “Do you mind that other men touch her? Do you insist that this one is yours alone?”

  “Do what you want with her,” Tynan said. “She’s just a job to me. I get paid to take her back to her father.”

  “And who is her father that he would pay for her?”

  Tynan took his time in answering. “Del Mathison,” he said into the silence.

  The only sign Dysan gave that he heard was that his cigar shook just once as he held it in his hand.

  There was a long silence in the room as Dysan stared at Tynan. “I think I have underestimated you. I thought you only went in for whores.”

  “I do. I want nothing to do with girls like her. She’s been nothing but trouble so if you have some grudge with me, you can leave her out of it.”

  Dysan ran his hand along Chris’s neck. “Shall I test your words? Shall I see how little you care about her?”

  “Mathison won’t take kindly to his daughter being mistreated and I don’t think you’re big enough to buck a man like him.”

  Dysan seemed to be considering this, but, after a moment, he walked toward the door, his gun aimed at Chris and looked out. Immediately, two men appeared. “Take them to the cellar and lock them in.”

  Tynan stood back as he watched Chris being untied, and when she was released, she fell forward. One of the men caught her arm roughly and jerked her upright. Ty still stood where he was as she looked up at him as she was being pulled along.

  Without any protest, he followed behind her, in front of a man bearing a rifle.

  They were led downstairs into a deep basement. There was a door against one wall and one of the men took a key and opened it, throwing Chris into the dark, dank little room. Tynan entered of his own accord, standing by the door until the men closed and locked it behind them.

  Instantly, he was across the room to Chris, groping for her in the darkness. “Chris, Chris,” he whispered repeatedly while running his hands over her body as if he were inspecting her. “Are you hurt?”

  Chris clung to him as if she were drowning. “He’s a horrible man,” she gasped, then choked over her tears. “He told me about three women who’d been here. He told me about using a riding crop and—”

  “Sssh,” Ty said, holding her, stroking her back. “It’s over now.”

  Chris hiccupped. “The woman died. He killed her. He told me in florid detail what he did and how he made the other women watch. The woman bled to death.”

  “Chris, stop crying. He won’t do anything to you now.”

  “But how could one human do something like that to another? He told me about it and he wasn’t sorry. Why wasn’t he punished?”

  “I don’t know, just so long as he didn’t hurt you.”

  It took Chris several minutes more to control herself. “What does it matter to you?” she asked, pushing away from him and moving back against the wall. “I’m well enough to get back to my father if that’s what’s worrying you.” She sniffed.

  Ty’s hands moved away from her and there was resignation in his voice. “I’ll see if I can find a light.”

  She leaned against the wall and listened to him rummaging around the room. Her head ached, there were rope burns on her ankles and wrists and along with Dysan’s hideous stories, her ears were ringing with Tynan’s words that she was nothing to him.

  She watched as he struck a match and lit a candle. It was a dreary little room, dirt walls on three sides, the heavy wooden door on the other. There was a crude wooden cabinet against one wall, the door hanging off its leather hinges, exposing a few jars of canned fruit and a couple of half-burned candles on the shelves. Except for a few plants trying to grow out of the walls, the room was bare—and cold.

  “Let me look at you,” Tynan said, his voice cool, his face set.

  Chris jerked away from his approaching hands. “Don’t touch me. I am perfectly all right,” she said. “You don’t need to concern yourself with me.”

  Ty rocked back on his heels. “We’ll get along a lot better if we work together. As long as you fight me, we’ll never get anything done.”

  “So you can get me back to my father and you can get your money? Maybe Dysan will let you go free now that you’ve told him who I am. Maybe you two can share the money from my father.”

  “Of all the ungrateful—I ought to leave you here.”

  “Go ahead. There’s the door.”

  Tynan opened his mouth to speak but closed it again, then stood and walked to the door and began looking at it.

  “You have on new clothes again,” Chris said after a while.

  Tynan didn’t answer her but kept looking at the door.

  Chris tried to stand up, using the wall for support. “I guess you got Pilar out safely.”

  “If you’d stayed in your room, you’d be out now, too.”

  “He knew when you were inside the house so what makes you think he didn’t know when you were in the upstairs room?”

  Ty didn’t look back at her but kept searching the room, inspecting the ceiling which looked as if it were always wet, and the floor which was nothing but hardened mud.

  “Dysan said he’d sent out a hundred men to stop anyone from finding us, so how did you get here?”

  “Your father’s money was a powerful incentive. It got me through clouds of gunfire.”

  Chris leaned against the damp wall, flexing her sore ankles. “All right, maybe I was rude and I apologize. I thank you for trying to rescue me and I’m sorry that I’m going to cause your…that I’m going to cause whatever will happen to us.”

  He turned back to her. “I think that finding out that you’re Mathison’s daughter will curtail whatever Dysan planned. Now, I suggest that you sit down and get what rest you can because, come morning, I think he’ll take us out of here.”

  Chris sat down on the floor and was silent for a moment. “You could have gotten away in there. You could have overtaken those two men. Why didn’t you?”

  Tynan stretched out with his back against the door, his eyes half closed. “Maybe, maybe not. Why don’t you get some sleep now? You might need to do some running in the morning.”

  Chris couldn’t sleep, but she was quiet as she sat and watched Tynan across from her. Since that awful night in the cabin, she’d done her best not to think of him, not to remember what he looked like, how he smelled, how he’d touched her, but now, with him so near, it was impossible not to recall every bit of it.

  And with the pleasant memories came his words: he only wanted to get her back to her father, that all she was to