Gold Dust Saloon. He thought he had been teased by the world expert, one Savannah Marie Carrington. She had tied him in sexual knots and then dragged promises from him before she would let him so much as kiss her hand again.
But each time the promise she really wanted — a settled life in West Virginia — wasn’t forthcoming, she had buttoned her bodice with calm fingers and left him. It hadn’t been that easy for Reno to turn passion on and off. Not at first. But he had learned. Savannah Marie was a good teacher.
«I didn’t promise to stop,» Reno said coolly. «I just said we’d negotiate after one kiss. Offer me something, gata. Offer me something as interesting as this.»
Reno’s hand moved once more, pressing against Eve, caressing her. Again she tried to push him away.
«The mine,» Eve said. «The Lyons’ gold mine.»
«Spanish treasure?»
«Yes!»
Reno shrugged and bent toward Eve again.
«I already won that, remember?» he asked.
«Just the journal. It’s no good to you without the symbols,» she said quickly.
He paused, watching her through narrowed eyes. She might have been eager for his kisses earlier, but now she was eager only to be free of his touch.
Abruptly Reno removed his hand from Eve. He was damned if he would allow himself to be teased into wanting a girl more than she wanted him. That was the kind of mistake a smart man never made more than once.
«What symbols?» he asked skeptically.
«The ones Don Lyon’s ancestor carved along the trail to mark dead ends and dangers and gold and everything else that would help.»
Slowly Reno moved back, giving Eve more room. But he was careful not to get beyond arm’s reach of her. He had seen Eve move. She had an unsettling speed, every bit as fast as a cat.
«All right, gata, talk to me about Spanish gold.»
«My name is Eve, not cat,» she said.
She grabbed the camisole that Reno had tossed aside and yanked it on.
«Eve, huh? Somehow I’m not surprised. Well, my name isn’t Adam, so don’t try feeding me any apples.»
«Your loss, not mine,» she muttered. «I’m told my apple pie is the best to be found west of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line, and maybe south of it as well.»
Hurriedly Eve fastened the camisole with fingers that were unusually clumsy. She knew she had just had a narrow escape.
And she was grateful that gunfighters kept their word.
«I’m more interested in gold than I am in apple pie,» Reno retorted. «Remember?»
He stroked Eve’s thigh. The action was both a caress and a threat.
«Don Lyon was the descendant of Spanish gentry,» Eve said quickly.
Then she looked from Reno’s hand to his eyes, plainly reminding him of their bargain. Slowly he lifted his hand.
«One of his forebears had a license from the king to explore for metals in New Mexico,» Eve said. «Another ancestor was an officer assigned to guard a gold mine run by a Jesuit priest.»
«Jesuit, not Franciscan?»
«No. It was before the Spanish king threw the Jesuits out of the New World.»
«That was a long time ago.»
«The journal’s first entry is dated in the fifteen-fifties or eighties,» Eve said. «It’s hard to tell. The ink is faded and the page is torn.»
When Eve didn’t say anything else immediately, Reno’s hand went to her belly. He spread his fingers wide, almost spanning her hipbones.
Her breath came in with a rushing sound. It was as though he were measuring the space for a baby to grow.
«Go on,» Reno said.
He knew his voice was too deep, too husky, but there was nothing he could do about it, any more than he could control the heavy running of his desire, no matter how foolish he knew it was to want the calculating little saloon girl.
The heat from her body was like a drug seeping through his skin and being absorbed into his blood, making it harder with each heartbeat to remember that she was just one more girl out to get whatever she could by using her body as a lure.
Then Reno realized that Eve had said nothing more. He looked up and saw her watching him with yellow cat’s eyes.
«Going back on your word so quickly?» Eve asked.
Angrily Reno lifted his hand.
«I think it must be 1580,» Eve said.
«More like 1867,» Reno retorted.
«What?»
Without answering, Reno looked at the frail cotton of the camisole, which served only to heighten rather than to conceal the allure of Eve’s breasts.
«Reno?»
When he looked up, Eve was afraid she had lost the dangerous game she was playing. Reno’s eyes were a pale green, and they burned.
«It’s 1867,» he said, «summer, we’re on the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, and I’m trying to decide if I want to hear any more fairy tales about Spanish gold before I take what I won in a card game.»
«It’s not a fairy tale! It’s all in the journal. There was a Captain Leon and someone called Sosa.»
«Sosa?»
«Yes,» Eve said quickly. «Gaspar de Sosa. And a Jesuit Priest. And a handful of soldiers.»
Through a screen of thick brown eyelashes, she watched Reno warily, praying that he believed her.
«I’m listening,» he said. «Not real patiently, mind you, but I’m listening.»
What Reno didn’t say was that he was listening very carefully. He had tried to retrace the trail of the Espejo and Sosa expeditions more than once. Both expeditions had found gold and silver mines that had yielded vast wealth.
And all of their mines had been «lost» before their riches ran out.
«Sosa and Leon were given license to find and develop mines for the king,» Eve said, frowning as she tried to remember all that she had learned from the Lyons and the old journal. «The expedition went north all the way to the land of the Yutahs.»
«Today we call them Utes,» Reno said.
«Sosa followed Espejo, who was the one who gave the land the name of New Mexico,» she said hurriedly. «And he was the one who called the routes leading out of all the mines and back to Mexico the Old Spanish Trail.»
«Nice of them to write in English so you could figure all this out,» Reno said sardonically.
«What do you mean?» Eve asked, giving him a quick glance. «They wrote in Spanish. Funny Spanish. If s the very devil to puzzle out.»
Reno’s head lifted sharply. Eve’s words, rather than her body, finally had his full attention.
«You can read the old Spanish writings?» he asked.
«Don taught me how before his eyes got too bad to make out the words. I would read them to him, and he would try to remember what his father had said about those passages, and his grandfather, too.»
«Family tales. Fairy tales. Same difference.»
Eve ignored the interruption. «Then I’d write down what Don remembered in the journal’s margins.»
«Couldn’t he write?»
«Not for the past few years. His hands were too knotted up.»
