Twin of Fire Read online

  “Then tell me how you got into trouble and why I didn’t hear about it. I’m sure that in Chandler it would have made front-page news: Saint Leander Does Something Less Than Perfect.”

  Lee grinned broader. “You didn’t hear of it because my father somehow managed to keep it quiet and, also, because it happened in Colorado Springs. What I did was get myself shot twice.”

  “Shot?” she gasped. “But I didn’t see any scars.”

  Lee grunted. “You’ve yet to look at me. I get near you and you pounce on me.”

  “I do no such—.” Blair stopped because what he said was true. “How did you get shot?” she asked meekly.

  “I went with Dad to Colorado Springs when I was about fourteen. He had to talk to a witness for a client of his, and he was to meet the man at a hotel not far north of the bank. We’d just eaten dinner and were leaving the hotel when suddenly guns started firing and somebody yelled that the bank’d been robbed. I looked down the street and saw half a dozen men with bandannas over their faces riding toward us.

  “I guess I didn’t think, I just acted. There was a buckboard in the alley, hitched with four horses and loaded with feedbags. I jumped into the seat, yelled at the horses and drove the wagon into the street and blocked the outlaws’ exit.”

  “And they shot you.”

  “I couldn’t very well jump off the wagon. The horses would have run ahead and left the street clear.”

  “So you just sat there and held the horses,” Blair said with some awe.

  “I stayed there until the sheriff caught up with the bank robbers.”

  “And then what?”

  He smiled. “And then my dad pulled me off the wagon and carried me to a doctor who gouged one bullet out—the other one went through my arm. He also let me get drunk, and I swear the hangover was worse than the holes in me.”

  “But, thanks to you, the robbers were caught.”

  “And spent years in jail. They’re out now. You even met one of them.”

  “When?” she asked.

  “The night we went to the reception. Remember when we went to the house on River Street? The suicide case? Remember the man outside? I don’t think you liked him very much.”

  “The gambler,” she said, thinking of the way the man’d looked at her.

  “Among other things. LeGault spent ten years in prison after that robbery in Colorado Springs.”

  “Because of you,” she said. “He must hate you, since you’re the one who caught him.”

  “Probably,” Lee said, without much interest. He opened his eyes and looked at her. “But then, I believe you used to hate me, too.”

  “Not exactly hate…,” she began, then smiled. “Where did you go on our wedding night?”

  “Want to see my bullet scars?”

  She started to say something about his refusal to answer her, but she compressed her mouth into a tight little line and said no more.

  He put his fingertip under her chin. “Honeymoons aren’t the place for anger, or for sulky looks. How about if I tell you about the time I delivered triplets?”

  She didn’t say a word to him.

  “One of them was breech.”

  Still nothing.

  “And they were a month early, and they were each born an hour apart, and to keep them alive we had to…”

  “To what?” she asked after several minutes of silence.

  “Oh, nothing. It wasn’t very interesting. It was only written about in three journals. Or was it four?” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Why was it written about?”

  “Because our method of saving them was…But you probably wouldn’t be interested.” With a yawn, he lay back against the log.

  Blair leaped on him, her hands clenched into fists. “Tell me, tell me, tell me,” she shouted at him while Lee, laughing, began to roll across the grass with her. He stopped when she was on the bottom.

  “I’ll tell you, but you have to tell me a secret about yourself.”

  “I don’t have any secrets,” she said, glaring at him, reminded of his refusal to tell her where he’d gone.

  “Oh, yes, you do. Who put the snakes in my lunch pail and the grasshoppers in my pencil box?”

  She blinked a couple of times. “I’m not sure, but I think it might have been the same person who put the taffy in your shoes, who sewed the sleeves of your jacket closed, who put hot peppers in your sandwiches, who—.”

  “At my mother’s garden party!” he said. “I sat there and ate those sandwiches and thought everyone else’s were hot, too, and that I was just a coward because they were about to kill me. How did you manage it?”

  “I paid Jimmy Summers a penny to release his muddy dog when I dropped my spoon. The dog ran into the garden, and you, always the rescuer, ran to get rid of the dog. Everybody watched you, so I had plenty of time to doctor the sandwiches on your plate. I thought I’d burst to keep from laughing. You sat there sweating, but you ate every bite.”

  He loomed over her, shaking his head. “And the dried cow pie in my favorite fishing hat?”

  She nodded.

  “And the pictures of Miss Ellison on my slate?”

  She nodded.

  “Did anyone besides me ever catch you?”

  “Your father did once. Houston said you were going fishing, so I sneaked over to your house, dumped out the worms you’d just dug and put a garter snake in the can. Unfortunately, your father caught me.”

  “I would imagine he had a few words to say. He hated any pranks of Nina’s.”

  “He said that I was never going to be a lady.”

  “And he was right,” Lee said solemnly, beginning to rub about on her. “You aren’t a lady at all. You’re a flesh and blood woman.” He grinned. “Lots of flesh in all the right places.”

  Her eyes widened. “Are you planning to take my virtue, sir? Oh, please, sir, it’s the only thing I have left.”

  “You don’t deserve even that for what you’ve done, young lady,” he said, leering, lowering his voice. “You’ve been tried and found guilty, and you are to be punished.”

  “Oh?” she said, arching a brow. “Taffy in my shoes?”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of your becoming my love slave for the rest of our lives.”

  “Isn’t that a little severe for a bit of taffy?”

  “It’s for the hot peppers and the—.” His eyes widened. “Did you put the sneezing powder on my crackers? And the soot on my father’s binoculars the day I took them to school?”

  She nodded, beginning to feel a little guilty about the sheer volume of pranks she’d played on him.

  He was looking at her with some awe. “I knew you did some of them but I’d always thought John Lechner did most of them. You know, I saw him four years ago in New York and I remembered all the things I thought he’d done to me, and I’m afraid I was barely civil to him.”

  “You didn’t retaliate?”

  “About a hundred times. I spent years with bruises from fights with John.” He grinned. “And to think: he was innocent. As for the ones I knew you did, what could I do? You were six years younger than me and, besides, just thinking of the whipping my father gave me after that one time I did punch you was enough to make me think twice about striking a girl.”

  “So now I have to pay for some childhood foolishness,” she said with an exaggerated sigh. “Life is hard.”

  “That’s not all that’s hard,” he said with a one-sided smirk.

  “It’s a good thing I’m a doctor and impossible to shock.”

  “It wasn’t your doctoring that attracted me.”

  “Oh? And what did attract you to me?”

  “Your persistence in trying to get my attention. I withstood it long enough but can stand no more.”

  “If you insist,” she said tiredly.

  “I love obedient women,” he murmured as he ran his hand under her shirt and began to caress her rib cage, moving his hand up to touch her breasts.