Just This Once Read Online Free PDF Page B

great man,
matters between himself and the earl had gone from bad to
worse.
    Oh, yes, he ought to be sorry about his
father, and about Hugh. But he wasn’t.
    And as for Stonecliff Park...
    “I don’t want it. You’ve wasted your time,
Latherby. Nothing would tempt me to set foot on British soil
again.”
    “But, my lord—”
    “Call me Mr. Savage. I’m no English
lord.”
    “But you will be, you must. You have only to
marry and the title is yours.”
    “Marry!”
    “Sir, I implore you. The lands and estates
are in need of an heir. Think of the tenants, the servants, all
those employed by your lordship. There are many to whom you are
responsible, not the least of whom is yourself and your
forebears.”
    “To hell with my forebears. And to hell with
you. I don’t want it—not an inch of it. Not a farthing, or a blade
of grass on Stonecliff Park land, not a single lamp or rug or chair
from that damned house—from any of the houses. And I damn well
don’t want to get married! Seems to me I’ve got a cousin, name of
Winthrop. He’d be glad enough of the place. Give it to him. You
savvy, Latherby?”
    And he stalked past the openmouthed
solicitor without a backward glance and pounded down the
stairs.
    Ethan’s mind churned with emotions he didn’t
want to feel, with thoughts he didn’t want to consider. He hurled
himself back into the main room of the saloon, nearly knocking down
one of the saloon girls. He grabbed her in time, muttered an
apology, and headed for the table.
    A poker hand was just finishing up.
    “Deal me in,” he barked, and claimed his
seat in his former chair.
    Everyone at the table observed his dark
face, the almost feverish glint in his eyes. They all sat up a
little straighter, held their cards a little tighter, not knowing
what had happened to so dangerously irk the tall stranger, but
sensing, down to a man, that they’d best tread carefully with him
from this point forward.
    Ethan Savage was in a dangerous mood.
    * * *
    Two hours later, he was losing heavily. And
he was drunk. Drunker than he’d been in years, since he’d been a
schoolboy at Eton who’d engaged in a drinking contest with five
others and had won. In those days he’d never been able to refuse a
contest, or a dare. It was only one of the things that had made his
austere father and brother so despise him.
    Since that night, he had imbibed sparingly.
But now as he sat at the poker table in a haze of cigar smoke
mixing with the saloon women’s cheap perfume, while laughter and
raucous talk rang out all around him, while the heat in the room
made him perspire and itch to jump in a cool lake, he downed glass
after glass of Stickley’s whiskey and played hand after losing
hand.
    The father and brother who had ignored and
deplored him his entire life were dead. Dead and buried. And buried
with them, he told himself, were the ugly deeds they had
perpetrated trying to keep him in line.
    It was over now.
    Yet the irony that the black sheep son, the
one who had dared to befriend the lowly and the vulgar, the one who
had been a disgrace because he’d refused to settle down and marry
respectably and live the elegantly proper life they’d chosen for
him, the one who’d sought out the wildest life imaginable in the
American West, he was the one who had survived, the one who
stood to inherit the vast and burdensome fortune of Stonecliff
Park.
    “Whiskey!” Ethan roared, and slammed the
empty bottle on the table. The cards swayed in a dizzying blur
before his eyes. The other men at the table were starting to
rise.
    “Game’s over, Savage. That was the last
hand, remember?” the cowboy reminded him with a grin. His words
were slurred, his balance shaky. He was none too sober himself,
though the miner’s eyes were still bright as fool’s gold. “You owe
me, uh... one hunert and ten dollars.” The cowboy belched, then
grinned wider. “Ye-ep. Time to settle up and go home.”
    Home. Hell, Ethan thought with