Eight

      Travis muttered to himself as he walked back to Fortune.

      Damn her to hell!

      Of all the gold camps in all the mountains in all the world, why did she have to wind up in his? Protecting Kate VanNam would be a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and just himself and his deputy, Jiggs, wouldn’t be enough manpower to keep ten thousand desperate miners at bay.

      Impossible.

      He’d be damned if he’d spend all his time worrying about a woman who didn’t have enough sense to know what she was in for. She’d confront all sorts of problems up there all alone in that run-down mansion where she didn’t even have a door to lock.

      By the time Travis reached the sidewalks of town, he was in a black mood. He would have to forget about Miss Kate VanNam.

      It had been a long day. Travis was tired and thirsty.

      But when he heard the piano music coming from the Golden Nugget, he finally smiled. He walked into the saloon and immediately felt better. All was as it should be.

      In a corner was Big Maude, the muscular, six-foot-plus Amazon who was a fixture at the Golden Nugget, presiding nightly over the roulette wheel. With a smile, she called for him to come join her.

      In the most crowded part of the room, Rosalita, a strikingly pretty Spaniard, sat behind the monte table, a cigarillo dangling from her painted red lips. Players flocked to Rosalita’s table, their hard-earned money going across the green baize and into her small deft hands.

      Travis walked inside just as the beautiful, dark-haired Valentina, garbed in a dazzling gown of bronze satin, climbed up on the square piano, smiled down at the piano player and crossed her shapely legs.

      Whistles and applause from the roomful of men was deafening.

      Valentina caught sight of Travis and threw him a kiss. He nodded and headed for the bar. She turned her attention on her adoring audience. Raising her hands for silence, she waited until they had calmed a bit before she placed a palm on the skirt of her shimmering gown, raised it a trifle, opened her mouth and began to sing.

      “Ring, ring de banjo,

      I love that good old song,

      Come again my true love,

      Oh where you been so long?”

      Travis stood at the bar. He tossed down a straight whiskey and motioned the barkeep to pour another. As the liquor burned its way down into his chest, he relaxed and stopped worrying about the strong-willed, golden-haired Kate VanNam. Instead he looked at Valentina perched atop the piano, singing to the miners in her sweet, clear voice.

      She was both a temptress and a tease. Her gown was cut so low and the waist was so tight that the tops of her full breasts swelled above the bronze silk. Travis grinned. He could see the twin nipples pushing against the shimmering fabric and a shapely gartered knee of her crossed legs.

      “…Come again my true love,” she sang, and looked directly at Travis.

      He lifted a hand, pointed a finger at the ceiling. She smiled and nodded, knowing exactly what he meant.

      Travis turned and walked out of the saloon. For a time he stood just outside in the cool mountain air, listening to Valentina sing. Then he walked away. When he reached the alley, he turned and went to the back of the two-story building that housed the rollicking Golden Nugget. He climbed the outside stairs, fished in his trousers pocket for the key and turned the lock.

      When he entered Valentina’s private quarters Gigi bowed and quickly took her leave. She had been told that anytime—day or night—Travis McCloud came to visit, she was to leave and stay in her quarters until Valentina summoned her.

      Travis stripped down to his skin and sat down on Valentina’s bed. From the silver box on the night table that Valentina kept filled for him, he took a fragrant cigar and lit it. Next to the silver box was a cut-crystal decanter filled with Kentucky bourbon that was also for him. Valentina drank only French champagne.

      Travis poured himself a drink, then sank back onto the soft bed. He knew he’d have to wait at least an hour for Valentina to finish entertaining, but he didn’t mind. He’d enjoy a smoke and a drink and unwind so he’d be completely rested and ready to make love to the beautiful Creole when she arrived.

      When an hour finally passed and Valentina walked through the door, she smiled seductively at Travis. Yanking the covering sheet down, she glanced at his flaccid groin and said, “Well, now, I can’t allow this.”

      Travis grinned. “No? Then what are you going to do about it?”

      Valentina assured him she could fix it. She laid a warm hand on him and felt him immediately stir against her palm. She leaned down, kissed his bare chest, nipped playfully at his flat brown nipple, then raised her head.

      “That’s better, my love,” she said. “I like my man with a drink, a smile and a hard cock.” She laughed musically. “And not necessarily in that order.”

      Travis laughed, too, then surged upward when she ran her long-nailed forefinger the length of his erection and around its thrusting head.

      “Don’t torture me tonight, Valentina,” he said, ready for her to come into his arms.

      “My impatient darling,” she murmured as she hastily shed her shimmering satin gown and climbed astride her lover. She wore nothing but her long silk stockings and a necklace of glittering jewels.

      Hands folded beneath his head, Travis watched approvingly as Valentina reached out to the bedside table, stuck her fingers in his shot glass of bourbon, rubbed up and down the length of his straining masculinity, then guided him up inside her. She moved her hands away, loosened her swept-up hair from its restraints and allowed the dark locks to fall down around her bare ivory shoulders.

      “I’m gonna give you some extra special loving tonight, my darling,” she promised, rolling her pelvis and setting her heavy breasts to swaying. “And I will not allow you to get out of this bed before morning,” she whispered, using her lush body to excite him in ways she had been taught in New Orleans. There she had learned how to please a man so completely he’d become a helpless slave to the unique sexual pleasures she could provide. Valentina practiced everything she knew to keep Travis satisfied and coming back for more. She wanted only to please this darkly handsome lawman, with whom she was madly in love.

      She was extremely disappointed when Travis said, not an hour later, that he couldn’t stay the night.

      “What is it?” Valentina asked, when he rose and hunched into his trousers. “What’s bothering you, Travis?” She sat up in the bed and wrapped her arms around her raised knees.

      “Not a thing. But you know that I can’t lie around here all night making love. I’m the sheriff, hired by the Committee of Vigilance to keep the peace.”

      Left unsaid was that he couldn’t forget about a young, foolish woman who was living alone and unprotected in a run-down mansion. Or that he felt compelled