Beauty and the Bounty Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page A

his chin, indicating the chest at the bottom of his bed. She wondered where the trunk had come from; it certainly wasn’t hers. However, when she lifted the lid she saw that everything inside was.
    On the trail for the past year, in constant pursuit of evil men, Cat couldn’t drag along her ever-increasing array of costumes. She could have bought a new set for each new guise, since she still possessed most of the money she’d earned as a bounty hunter. She had little to spend it on, living the way she did. But why buy new ones when the best worked again and again? Which meant…
    Cat dug through several outfits she’d worn in saloons and whorehouses over the past year, tossed aside a serape, chaps, and a gambler’s vest until she found more cloth to bind her breasts and another homespun shirt.Once she resembled the person she’d been when she arrived, less the blood, she rooted around until she unearthed a costume she hadn’t worn in a very long time, then stuffed it into her saddlebags.
    After a few more minutes spent returning everything she’d tossed onto the floor to its former place, Cat closed the lid and stood. Ben stared again through the window as if he might find the answers to everything out there on the prairie.
    Hell, maybe he could.

C HAPTER 3
    C at boarded the train to St. Louis dressed as a lady. She’d found it safer to journey by train or stage as a woman. She was accorded a respect she wouldn’t get in pants.
    Though traveling this way was safer, it certainly wasn’t easier. The crinoline she’d purchased that morning—she couldn’t very well carry such a contraption on her horse from Rock River to Kansas City even if she’d had one in Ben’s trunk—added a fashionable bell shape to the rear of her teal silk skirt. But it was difficult to manage. She bumped into things and people whenever she turned and sometimes when she didn’t. In addition, she wanted to tear the corset off her person and stomp on it with her pointed ankle boots.
    The only portion of the ensemble that she didn’t itch to destroy was her brand-new spoon bonnet. And not because it perched comfortably on her demurely coiffed head, but rather the colorful flowers upon the brim drew curious eyes away from her face.
    It had taken her all of two minutes after leaving the Rock River sheriff’s office to decide that her next stop was St. Louis. If Alexi hadn’t sold knowledge of her whereabouts to the highest bidder—and she still wasn’t certain of that—she thought he might know who had. Ifshe was lucky, he might even know why. Alexi, as he often told her, did his best to know everything.
    When the conductor called, “Next stop, St. Lou-eee!” Cat slipped into the washroom. There, after much tugging and cursing and one accidental knock of her elbow against the basin—followed by more cursing—she stuffed the damnable crinoline through the window. She watched it fly backward and out of her life with immense satisfaction.
    She exited the train dressed as a boy. In the city, on the streets alone, a woman drew too much attention.
    St. Louis was a river town. Old by American standards. Settled in the late 1600s by the French. More urbane than Wichita or Abilene, St. Louis smelled of water instead of dust, fish instead of cattle. Not that one was much better than the other.
    She found what she was looking for on a vacant slice of land near the river. A kaleidoscope of people—male and female, short and tall, fat and skinny, young and old, blondes, brunettes, redheads—crowded around the covered wagon, awaiting the show.
    And a show it would be. Sleight of hand. Glib of tongue. Promise the world. Deliver much less. Then disappear.
    Everyone’s attention remained on the curtain draped across the back of the wagon. A heavy board jutted out to provide a stage. Not an ordinary Conestoga, this one had been fashioned, as the sign attached to the canvas proclaimed, for
Count Sukhorukov! Famed Healer of Balshika!
    Cat snorted.