Read Online My Darling Gunslinger by Lynne Barron - Free Book Online Page B

head tilted back to meet his eyes.
    For the space of three beats of his heart, Ty could only stare at her, his thoughts drifting away on the warm spring breeze.
    Do you want to kiss me?
    Hell, yes. He wanted to lean down and capture the smile flitting around the edges of her pretty pink mouth, to take her breath into his body and hold it there.
    Charlotte looked up at him expectantly, and Ty forced his muddled brain back to reality.
    “Jenna da va de dame brock.” Ty pushed the foreign words past his lips.
    Charlotte blinked in obvious surprise. “Genau das was die Dame braucht,” she corrected, her voice laced with laughter.
    “What was he saying?” Ty demanded gruffly, feeling ten kinds of foolish.
    “Are you quite certain you remember the words, that you are pronouncing them correctly?”
    “They’re stuck in my head,” he assured her, fascinated by the wash of color traveling up her long neck and across her cheeks.
    “Was there a lady playing cards with you?”
    “No.”
    “No?” she repeated doubtfully.
    “There was a whore perched on my knee,” he admitted just to bedevil her.
    “Is that so? I suppose you spoke true when you said nothing distracts you from a winning hand.”
    Ty hid his surprise at her calm acceptance of the words he’d have sworn would send her into a ladylike swoon.
    “Perhaps you didn’t so much win the hand as have it given to you,” she said, her gaze intent upon his face hidden in the shadow of his hat.
    “The thought has crossed my mind,” he admitted.
    “Uncle Jasper is getting up in years.”
    “He might have wanted to be rid of the responsibility.”
    “Oh, no,” she immediately answered with a shake of her head that sent ribbons dancing around her upturned face. Ty watched one settle across her shoulder, the end drifting to rest between her breasts.
    “No?” His fingers itched with the need to trace the path of the ribbon from just below her ear, down the slim column of her neck, and over the swell of her breast to the shadowy valley beneath her bodice.
    “He likely thought he was too old…” Her words drifted off and Ty’s gaze snapped back up to find her looking at him with the same dreamy expression she’d worn the last time they’d talked.
    Do you want to kiss me?
    Jesus, he wasn’t made of stone. If she kept looking at him like that she’d get more than kisses from him. He’d have her ruffled skirts hiked around her hips and his cock buried…
    Something in her words halted his fantasies of bending the lady over the fence.
    “Too old to protect her,” he whispered.
    Charlotte lost the look of a woman begging for kisses. It drifted from her face to be replaced with an odd sort of expectancy.
    “He made me promise Charlie Green and family would always have a home here,” Ty said, suspicions crowding his mind.
    “And you agreed?” The surprise in her voice grated on his already taut nerves.
    “I didn’t know Charlie Green would turn out to be a proper English Lady more suited to some fancy eastern parlor than life on a ranch,” he grumbled.
    “And now?” she asked, her voice little more than a soft whisper.
    Ty looked away, to the hills that spread out for miles beneath a sky nearly as blue as her eyes.
    The Zeppelin Ranch was spread out before him, acres of gently rolling hills dotted with cows and sheep. Tall trees sprouted up here and there along the stream that meandered down from the distant mountains. It was a fine spread, better than any he could have bought no matter how carefully he saved one bounty after another.
    If, in order to claim it, he had to saddle himself with a woman far beyond his reach, so be it.
    “Just what the lady needs.”
    The softly spoken words whispered over his heated flesh like a caress and brought his eyes back to Charlotte.
    “Genau das was die Dame braucht,” she said in that same breathy whisper. “Just what the lady needs.”
    Ty’s gaze collided with Charlotte’s and he had the strangest sensation