“More or less. Somebody hit me in the knees and I went down, then about thirty or forty others decided to walk across me.”
“I saw you go down, but there was nothing I could do.”
“And I heard you call out to me. I’m sorry I couldn’t get to you,” he said softly.
She looked back at him, but his eyes were on the part of her anatomy that was bulging over the top of her corset. Now he looks at me, she thought angrily, and poured whiskey onto the cut.
He sat up straight, drawing in his breath. “A little gentler, if you don’t mind.”
“I’m being as gentle as you deserve.”
“Then I deserve the best. If it weren’t for me, you’d probably be in some miner’s tent right now, at the mercy of half a dozen men.”
She stepped away from him. “At least they’d know that I was a woman. At least they wouldn’t look at me on the sly.”
He put his hand up to the side of her face, burying his hand in her hair, his thumb at the corner of her mouth. “Don’t you understand anything? Anything at all? You’re the most desirable woman I’ve ever met in my life. Between your body and that voice of yours, I—Never mind what I feel, but I don’t want you if you want just any man. I want you only when you want me. Me, ’Ring, not Captain Montgomery, not a man you don’t trust, not a man you consider an enemy. You’re much too important for anything less than that.”
There was too much of him unclothed, too much of her uncovered, and they were too close together. She backed away from him. “You want information from me.”
“I want a lot more than that from you.”
“To sing for you?” she whispered.
He sighed and turned away. “Do you think this cut needs sewing?”
“No.” She was confused by his words, didn’t at all understand what he was saying. In fact, the more she was around him, the less she understood about him. She didn’t want to talk anymore about whatever it was that they were talking about.
“Who was the man who sang with me?” she said as she began bandaging the cut on his back, winding clean strips of linen around his shoulder, under his arm, and across his back. She tried to ignore the way her nearly bare breasts rubbed against his bare back and chest as she reached around him.
“I didn’t have much time, and, if the truth be known, I could hardly take my eyes off the spectacle you were making of yourself, but, from what I gather, he is the town drunk of a town of drunks. Comes from a place called Desperate.”
“Not a bad voice. I can’t imagine where he got the music to Carmen. I wouldn’t have thought it had come west yet. There, that should hold you.”
He caught her hand. “Thank you.” He looked at her hand, then turned it over and kissed the palm, holding it for a moment against his lips. She put her hand on his thick, dark hair. When he looked up at her, she felt a little weak-kneed. “You were great tonight. I imagine you changed a few minds about opera.”
Now she was far enough away from her performance to remember it with embarrassment—including her performance in the tent with him. “I’m afraid I went a little too far in the other direction. I’m afraid they’re going to have a new opinion of opera that is as bad as their old one.”
“They are certainly going to think of opera singers in a new way.” He looked pointedly at her bosom which was about three inches from his face.
Maddie nearly jumped away from him and pulled her dress together. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Carmen did,” he said, then stretched, his hands touching the canvas of the tent. “But I’m glad you’re back. Carmen’s not the kind of woman I’d choose. Tell me, what happens to her in the opera?”
“Don José kills her.”
“That would have been my guess. You ready to go to bed? You may be willing to stay up all night, but I need my sleep.”
She was staring at him. What did he mean by, “the kind of woman I’d choose”?
“You plan to wear that to bed?”
That shook her out of her trance. “You expect me to undress in front of you?”
“From what you were wearing tonight, I expect you to put on more clothes to go to sleep. Want me to help you with your ties?”
“You lay one hand on me or my undergarments and I’ll give you a wound that’ll make the one on your back look like nothing.”
“It might be worth it. I’ll have to consider the matter.”