Heaven with a Gun Read Online Free PDF Page B

with a flourish of her pink tongue. He closed his eyes and begged for strength.
    “It would be a shame to let it go to waste. Good meat. Mind if I . . .”
    “No. No,” he said, glad for the distraction. “Be my guest. Go right ahead.”
    Happily, she speared the steak and began sawing into it. She ate with such enthusiasm that he wondered if maybe she wasn’t a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, a kid who’d never gotten enough to eat. Poor child.
    The thought blackened his mood. If she was sixteen, then she really was a child, and he was lusting after a girl young enough to be his daughter. “Sixteen,” he muttered.
    “Sixteen what?” she asked, fork half-raised to her sinful-looking mouth.
    Maybe she was real close to seventeen. . . . Eighteen years wasn’t so very—Christ! What the hell was he thinking?
    “When’s your birthday?” he demanded. “You know, you don’t look all that young to me. I would have put your age around twenty-one. For your own sake, when you’re finally caught—and you will be— don’t try pulling any ‘shucks, I’m just a kid. I didn’t know better’ defense. It won’t work. You look old enough to know better.”
    “Thank you for the advice, Mr. Coyne, but there are two minor points I’d like to make: One, I don’t intend to get caught, and two, I’m not sixteen. I’m twenty-seven.”
    “Huh?”
    She laughed. “I’ve always looked young for my years. Granted, not that young—and it isn’t very gentlemanly of you to point it out even if it’s true— but when that woman started in on you I just couldn’t help myself.”
    He relaxed in relief, extraordinary and unaccountable. “You have a diabolical sense of humor.”
    She smiled, flattered.
    Could she be twenty-seven, or was that just another in her string of endless lies? HNah, he believed her. For all her trust and vitality, there was a touch of weariness in her gaze, a tensile maturity in the set of her throat and shoulders, the brand of experience in her humor.
    “Jim!” The thunk between his shoulder blades announced Vance Calhoun’s arrival. Jim offered up thanks that his mouth hadn’t been full. He turned, looking straight up at the undercarriage of Margaret Calhoun’s bosom. He stumbled to his feet.
    Margaret gazed at him with cool amusement. She was a handsome, sharp-featured woman with a bosom worth noting and a possessive, nearly predatory air. He could see her in the role of Lightning Lil far more easily than he could the woman across from him.
    “I heard your wife had arrived in town, Jim,” Vance said, hauling out a chair next to Gilly’s and dropping into it. “I told Margaret we had to come and meet her. Stuck way out here like this, Margaret gets starved for the company of women of her own class.”
    “Mrs. Calhoun, my wife . . . er, Mrs. Coyne,” Jim said. “Mrs. Coyne, Mrs. Vance Calhoun.”
    “Come now, James,” Margaret said. “I’m certain your bride and I shall become close friends. What do you call her?”
    Jim swallowed. His brain seized up as he searched for a name, any name.
    “Darling,” said Gilly softly. “Jim calls me ‘darling.’”
    Margaret’s head swiveled, like a snake watching a particularly colorful bird. The corners of her lips lifted. “How utterly charming,” she murmured. “But I can hardly call you ‘darling’ too.”
    Gilly didn’t respond; her attention turned to Vance who, having seized her hand, was patting it. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Coyne.” No, the bastard was stroking it. “You’ll certainly be a fine addition to the female population.”
    “Thank you,” Gilly said in an odd, hushed voice. She made no move to retrieve her hand from Vance’s clasp. “Won’t you join us? We were just finishing dinner.”
    “Uh, darlin’,” Jim said, “I don’t think—”
    “Isn’t that sweet, dear?” Margaret cut in, studiously avoiding the sight of her husband playing with Gilly’s hand. “James wants to be alone with his