Devil in Texas (Lady Law & The Gunslinger Series, Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

street-side bedroom, Mace remained in the hall. He was shouting for folks to stay calm. To find an open window and take turns jumping into the flower bushes below. Wails of female protest greeted this suggestion, but Sadie didn't hesitate. The building was only two stories tall, and this bedroom, in particular, had a sturdy Mexican plum tree butting against its casement. She knew this fact because she'd cased every blessed inch of the casino to locate the best escape routes.
    Pinkertons can't be too careful, the manual had instructed.
    Ripping her burn-blistered palm, she nevertheless managed to shimmy down the trunk and stumble into the shadows of the privy before the first of the hurtling bodies crashed into the oleander bushes.
    "Sadie! Has anyone seen Sadie?"
    It was Cass's voice, adding to her cover problem. She shrank against the outhouse even as she recognized her ex-lover's pale gold hair in the casino's milling refugees on the lawn. He was turning his head every which way, shouting her name, searching the faces of the beerjerkers, who'd been ushered, along with the gamblers, from the building.
    Surely, Cass wasn't part of the arson conspiracy.
    Was he?
    Suddenly, her casement blew out. Flames spewed triumphantly through the hole. Orange-red reflections flickered over Cass's face, illuminating his horror as the inferno devoured her bedroom. The building shuddered. The timbers groaned.
    Cass was screaming for Cassandra McGuire now, shaking off Baron and Randie and knocking some lanky kid on his ass beside a raccoon. The Siren's bouncer entered the fray. Fists started swinging. Cass's .38 glinted in the firelight. Tito managed to wrestle the gun from Cass's fist before he knocked Cass out cold.
    Sadie exhaled a shaky breath. She forced herself to be logical. To think like a Pinkerton, not a jilted lover. Cass had coyote cunning; he survived in the world because he was a consummate liar with a flair for the dramatic. If he'd been part of the arson conspiracy, of course he would have faked his concern for her, if he'd wanted her dead.
    In any event, Tito had neutralized him. Now was her chance to flee.
    Flipping up her coat collar, she turned her back on the soaring flames. She drove her leaden legs toward Harborside Drive and the fishing wharves. Her plan was to disappear while she still had time, while the brothel refugees were too confused to notice the flight of a sloppily dressed figure with a scarf-wrapped face. Let Cass—and everyone else in that building—think Cassandra McGuire had perished in the fire.
    That way, Sadie Michelson could live to fight Baron Westerfield another day.

Chapter 3

    Six Weeks Later
    Rocking W Ranch
    Burnett County, Texas
    "Good God. Is that gun loaded?"
    "Who wants to know?" Cass growled, but the question was rhetorical. About a minute before he'd heard a mincing stride crunch gravel on the drive, a morning breeze had blown the scent of licorice hair tonic through the open doors of the carriage house.
    "You know very well it's Pendleton!" snapped Baron's secretary.
    Cass grimaced. Pendleton Prouse was the last man he wanted to deal with while sober.
    After the brothel debacle, Cass had hired out his guns to Baron and started living in the Rocking W's bunkhouse with Collie and a passel of cowboys. Needless to say, this move had reignited his feud with Pendleton—or rather, Pendleton's feud with him.
    A fussy little man, who nursed lifelong grudges, Pendleton preferred bowties to bolos and spats to spurs. He rarely ventured into the sun, as his milky complexion could attest, and he shunned any activity more rigorous than climbing a ladder to reach the top shelf in the library. Perhaps because he huddled over Baron's ledgers from sunrise to sunset, or perhaps because Baron paid him better than all his cowpokes combined, Pendleton thought himself exceedingly important.
    "I demand an explanation, Mr. Cassidy!"
    "All right." Cass didn't bother to turn. He was too busy focusing on his task.