Only 03 - Only You

1
    Canyon City, Colorado
    Late summer 1867
    O UT of money, out of luck, alone, and frightened, the girl known as Evening Star did the only thing she could think of to stay at the saloon’s poker table.
    She bet herself.
    But first Eve shuffled the deck with dazzling speed, subtly arranging the cards as she had been taught to do by Donna Lyon. While she worked, she tried not to look at the dark-haired stranger who had sat down at her table without warning. The man’s hard good looks were unsettling.
    Outlaws like Raleigh King and Jericho Slater were enough for any girl to deal with. She didn’t need a handsome stranger to make her sore hands shake.
    Eve took a secret, steadying breath and said, “Five-card draw. Table stakes. Ante up.”
    “Just a minute, little lady,” Raleigh King objected. “You’re busted. Where’s your ante?”
    “Sitting right here.”
    “Huh?”
    “I’m the ante, Mr. King.”
    “You’re betting yourself?” Raleigh asked in disbelief.
    Reno Moran didn’t have to ask. He had read the determination in the girl’s posture when he sat down and took cards. It had been her combination of steady eyes and slightly trembling lips that had lured him across the room.
    Whatever happened, he knew she meant every word.
    “Yes, I’m betting myself.”
    Eve glanced at the jewelry and coins stacked around the table in front of each man.
    “I’m worth as much as anything any one of you has now,” she added.
    Then she smiled a brilliant, empty smile and continued shuffling.
    Silence spread out from the poker table, followed by a rush of whispering as the other men in the room asked one another if they had heard correctly.
    The whispers told Reno that a lot of men had wanted the girl, but none had gotten her. A cynical smile shifted the line of Reno’s black mustache. There was nothing new in that particular game. Girls had been teasing and promising and then withholding their bodies for a long time.
    Reno glanced from the deck of cards in the girl’s hands to the girl herself. In the saloon’s dim interior her eyes were a clear, uncanny gold that matched the lantern light rippling through her tawny hair. The cut of her dress was demure enough, but it was made of a crimson silk that seta man to thinking about what it would be like to unfasten all the gleaming jet buttons and touch the luminous skin beneath the fabric.
    The direction of Reno’s thoughts irritated him. He was old enough to know better. He had been taught and teased by the most expert female since Adam’s wife fed him the forbidden fruit.
    Looking at Reno, Slater stirred the pearls and gold coins he had just won from Eve.
    “I figure this should match the ring you won off of Raleigh,” he said to Reno, “and be worth a damn sight more than that journal you’ve got left,” he added to Raleigh.
    “The hell you say,” Raleigh retorted. “I have it on good authority that this here old journal contains a gen-u-ine Spanish treasure map worth more than all the pearls in the Orient.”
    Slater looked coldly at the book but didn’t object to Raleigh’s statement.
    Reno picked up the elegant, ancient ring he had won earlier from Raleigh. Emeralds flashed subtly, surrounded by gold so pure it took the imprint of his fingernail.
    The stones were pretty enough, but it was the gold that held Reno’s interest. To him the feel and weight of gold was like nothing else. Women’s flesh was sweet and soft, but women were as fickle as a spring wind. Gold never changed, never corrupted, never turned out to be less than it seemed.
    Silently Reno measured the ring against the girl whose name was as improbable as the innocence in her golden eyes.
    It was Raleigh who expressed Reno’s doubts aloud.
    “Huh,” Raleigh said to Eve. “So you figure you’re worth as much as the ring, the pearls, orthe treasure map? You must know some pretty fancy tricks.”
    The smile he gave Eve was frankly insulting.
    “Give the little lady what she wants,” Slater said coldly. “One way or another, she’ll pay up. At Denver prices, a month of her time should cover it.”
    Eve barely managed not to shudder at the thought of being at the mercy of a man like Jericho Slater for a single night, much less for a month.
    Silently she told herself she didn’t have to worry. She wouldn’t have to pay off the bet, because she had no intention of losing.
    For once the idea of cheating at cards didn’t make Eve squirm with unhappiness. If anything, there