Dancing With the Devil Read Online Free PDF

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    It was all she had left of her parents. It was all that mattered.
    When the silence nearly swallowed her, Rhea stood and pushed her chair beneath the table.
    “So what do we do?” she asked.
    Colin shook his head in utter disbelief. “I have no idea.”
    “It seems to me”—Deacon cleared his throat—“the easiest thing would be for us to marry for real.”
    If she hadn’t been holding the back of her chair, Rhea would have fallen straight on her face.
    “I…” She stopped, took a breath and kept her eyes fixed on Colin. “No.”
    “Why not?” Both spoke in unison, each sounding just as affronted.
    “Colin, please.” She lowered her voice, but there was no way to prevent Deacon from hearing. “There are things you don’t know about him.”
    “Like what?”
    She couldn’t tell him! For goodness sake, it was still unbelievable to her most of the time; she certainly couldn’t try to explain it to her brother. It only took the briefestof glances at Deacon to know he was thinking the same thing.
    Rhea cleared her throat and forced her voice into an impatient sigh. “He doesn’t love me, and after what he did…there’s no possible way I could ever trust him again.”
    “Excuse me,” Deacon said, “but noth—”
    Rhea spoke over him before Colin could pay him any mind. “There must be another way,” she said, desperation clawing its way out on every word.
    “Like what?” he snipped.
    “Why can’t we simply…continue this way?” she asked tentatively. “Nobody has to know any of this, and if Deacon leaves right away…”
    “I’m not leaving.”
    Colin cast a quick glance in Deacon’s direction. “You’re staying ?”
    “For a short while,” he said cautiously.
    Rhea clicked her tongue. “How long is a ‘short while’?”
    “Doesn’t matter,” Colin said. “Thanks to Ernest, half the town knows you’re back and that Rhea tried to blow your head off. The other half’ll know by sundown. So for the time being, until we can find a way out of this, you two are going to have to keep up the impression you’re married. And you’re going to have to come up with one helluva good story about how he came back from the dead.”
    “Wait just a minute,” Deacon said, his hand raised. “Don’t I get any say in this?”
    Colin’s expression turned hard as granite. “By all means,” he quipped. “Have your say. You can choose to spend the next little while doing right by my sister—the same woman you compromised and then humiliated by taking up with a whore at the saloon—or you canchoose to humiliate her further, and ruin any chance she has of living a normal life. Which will it be?”
    Deacon didn’t answer right away, and it took every ounce of self-control Rhea could muster not to throttle him. What was there to think about? It wasn’t like she was asking him to love her for real—all she needed was for him to pretend.
    They both knew he’d done it before, so surely it wouldn’t be too much work for him to do it again.
    After a horribly long moment, Deacon pushed up slowly from the bed, took a second to find his balance and grinned.
    “I’m happy to pretend if she is.” He tipped his head a little to the right. “What do you say, Rhea? Can you pretend to love me?”
    Rhea’s fingers itched for the Winchester. One more shot—that was all she’d need.

C HAPTER T HREE
    D eacon sat in the gloom of the tiny cabin, staring at the closed door. It had been hours since Rhea had shut it behind her and walked back to town, yet her presence lingered all around him. And just when his mind started accepting the fact she wasn’t even thinking about him the same way, Ernest arrived with a bottle of laudanum from her.
    So why didn’t he sleep? He’d downed enough of the damned tincture to set an elephant on its rear, yet here he was, wide awake, trying his damnedest not to think about being married to Rhea.
    He cursed aloud and banged his head back against the wall. What the