Beauty and the Bounty Hunter by Lori Austin Page A

opposite direction—she’d rarely seen Alexi with a bruise anywhere. And she’d seen everywhere.
    The memory of that seeing, the touching, the tasting suddenly hit her so hard she swayed.
    He cursed. French? Spanish? Italian? She wasn’t certain, but whatever language, the words, the tone, the cadence were both beautiful and brutal. Kind of like Alexi himself.
    She brushed her fingertips across his face. “Why did you let him hurt you?”
    “Sometimes,” he said, “the hurt just happens.”
    She didn’t think he was talking about Langston anymore.
    He peered at her as if trying to see into her mind, her heart, her soul. “Don’t you agree?”
    Cat froze, hand still in the air. She’d never shared a single word about her hurts. As she didn’t plan to start now, she sidled away.
    Alexi crossed to the table, where he picked up the deck of cards and began to shuffle. She became entranced, seduced by the grace, the rhythm. How couldshe have forgotten? In Alexi’s hands, cards did whatever he wanted them to. Kind of like women.
    “When you say ‘knock,’” Cat murmured, bringing them back to their earlier conversation, happy to pretend the other had never happened, “you mean ‘bust in here and drag us back to jail’?”
    “No.” He didn’t look up; he just kept shuffling the cards. “As long as you keep that kid in place and Meg on your face, we’ll be fine.”
    Why was he irritated with her? She’d just saved his life.
    Cat paced in front of the window. The urge to peer from it again was nearly overwhelming. What was out there that was bothering her? If there was a rifle, and considering the prickling of her skin, there might be, she should stay
away
from the window.
    She sat. First on the bed. Then on the chair. Then on the bed again. Alexi ignored her, seemingly captivated with the cards.
    Cat went to the door, put her hand on the knob. Alexi “tsked,” and she turned away. Her gaze went again to the window, and from this angle, with the horizon framed like a picture, she saw what was wrong. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it before, but she’d been Meg, and Meg wouldn’t recognize that vista. Only Cathleen would.
    She had not been back to the farm since she had left it nearly two years ago. It took Cat only an instant to decide that she was going back now. Or at least as soon as she could get away from Alexi.
    “Deal,” she said. Alexi glanced up, expression curious, hands still shuffling, shuffling, shuffling. “If we have to stay in here, we can at least make it interesting.”
    His lips curved. “Faro?”
    Cat took a chair at the table. “You know better.”
    Cat loathed faro, known by many as “Bucking the Tiger.” Every saloon between St. Louis and San Francisco offered the game, and most of them cheated. Stacked decks, with many paired cards that allowed the dealer, or banker, to collect half the bets, as well as shaved decks and razored aces were common.
    Alexi wouldn’t stoop to such tactics; he’d consider mundane cheats beneath him. Besides, he’d already taught her how to spot them, so why bother? Certainly he cheated, but with faro, Cat had never been able to discover just how.
    He’d swindle her at poker too if she wasn’t paying attention, but at least with that game she had a better-than-average chance of catching him.
    Alexi laid out five cards for each of them. “Stakes?”
    “We can’t play just to pass the time?”
    He didn’t even bother to dignify that foolishness with an answer.
    For an instant Cat considered forgoing the wayward nature of the cards and, instead, getting him drunk. But she’d attempted that before. Alexi had remained annoyingly sober, and she had been rewarded with a three-day headache, which Alexi had found beyond amusing.
    She had more tolerance now—Cat O’Banyon had drunk many a bounty beneath the table—but she still doubted she could drink this man into a stupor. Sometimes she wondered if he sipped on watered wine daily