Read Online Wildfire in His Arms by Johanna Lindsey - Free Book Online

So why don’t you keep your skepticism to yourself, fancy man.”
    â€œYou toss out a word like skepticism , yet you butcher the English language. Where’d you grow up?”
    â€œTexas, and if you send me back there, it will be to die. Will your conscience survive that?”
    â€œI’m not sure I have one.”
    He leaned forward and untied their feet, then stood up. With her hands still tied behind her back and the rope still tied around her arms and torso, she couldn’t stand, not without a lot of wiggling, so she stayed where she was. He grabbed her bandanna from the wall and tossed it in her lap, implying he’d be untying her hands so she could put it back on. But he didn’t. He stepped outside instead.
    She got to her feet as fast as she could and moved to the doorway. He wasn’t in sight. Her knives weren’t either. His horse was there, but he’d unsaddled it last night, so she couldn’t get on its back without first getting her hands loose. And that coil of rope was still around her. She tried to stretch the rope at her wrists so she could get one hand out of it.
    â€œWhy the assumed name, Max Dawson?”
    She sighed in disappointment. He’d only gone off to relieve himself. “I didn’t assume nothing. I got named after my pa, Maxwell Dawson, since I was his firstborn and there was no guarantee he’d get a son, though he did a few years later. My name’s actually Maxine, but my family always called me Max, and the folks in Bingham Hills where we lived only knew me as Max, so that’d be my guess why that name was put on the wanted posters.”
    â€œAnd that’s why you’re dressing the part? You didn’t once think that wearing a dress would conceal your identity better than any hideout could?”
    â€œYeah, I thought of it. But if it ain’t obvious to you, it’s actually more dangerous to be a woman alone out here than a man on his own who resembles an outlaw. ’Sides, no one takes a girl who wears a gun seriously. And I like to wear my gun. I’m damn good with it, you know. You’re lucky yours was already drawn.”
    â€œWhat about your hair? The poster depicts you with short hair.”
    â€œI had it cut short long before I had to leave Texas, but Gran cut it better’n I do. Thought it would make me less appealing so the boys in town would stop sniffing around. But it didn’t work.”
    He nodded as if he agreed that short hair wouldn’t have made her less attractive to men. It was a bane to have a face like hers when she didn’t want to be noticed. But ever since she’d left home, taking her brother’s clothes with her instead of her own, she usually only had to wear her wide-brimmed hat, keep her face smudged with dirt, and introduce herself as Max for people to take her for a pretty-faced boy. Even Luella hadn’t guessed and had had to be told on their second meeting.
    As if he’d read her mind, her captor asked, “All things considered, how would you meet someone like Luella?”
    Max actually grinned. “Obviously not in the usual way. I rescued her the night I first passed through Helena. She doesn’t usually leave that brothel, at least not at night and not alone, but one of the girls was sick. She’d been sent to fetch a doctor, and a trio of rowdy drifters thought they could have their way with her in a back alley. I’d been avoiding the main street m’self, skirting around the backs of the buildings. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have heard her crying.”
    He raised a black brow. “You ran off three men? Or you shot them?”
    She snorted. “Didn’t need to shoot. I might look like a kid, but I’m as dangerous as anyone with a drawn gun. They took off and I escorted Luella back to her brothel. It was the first time I’d ever been in one, so I was curious enough to follow her up to her room when