Mary McBride - Forever And A Day

A sharp rap sounded on the door just then. Honey jerked upright, and the cuff clicked closed.

“Miss Honey,” Kenneth Crane called through the door. “I must speak with you. Now.”

“I’ll be right out.” Honey tugged at the steel bracelet. Damn! All she needed now was for Kenneth to see what a fool thing she’d done. He’d promptly tell her father, and then she’d be lucky if Race Logan didn’t clamp the other half of the wrist cuffs to a doddering old dueña, a chaperon who would never let Honey out of her sight. Or worse, to his own thick wrist.

She tried unsuccessfully to slide the steel over her hand.

“Miss Honey,” the teller called again, rapping once more for emphasis.

“Just one confounded minute, Kenneth.”

Honey could hear his footsteps retreating to his post behind the teller’s window as she glared at the shackle on her right wrist. If looks alone could melt steel, the metal would have dissolved right then. But it didn’t. She was stuck and she knew it. Like a rat in a trap.

As she rose from the swivel chair, the empty cuff clanked against the desk. “Damnation!” she muttered. She’d just have to keep her hand behind her back until she could find somebody with a hacksaw to get her out of this fool thing. Maybe she could bribe her brother, Zack, to... No. Zack could keep a secret about as well as a parrot, and nothing would delight him more than seeing his trouble-prone sister cuffed like a common thief. She’d just have to seek elsewhere for help. In the meantime, though, she was going to carry on with her plan to be right here, hard at work, when her father returned from lunch.

The lobby was still empty, thank heaven, when she sidled up behind Kenneth, her right hand concealed in the pocket of her skirt, her lips forcing a cheerful grin.

“I’ll help you count those greenbacks, Kenneth.”

The elderly teller spun around at the sound of her voice. He threw up his hands helplessly, and suddenly greenbacks were everywhere—sliding off the counter, slithering along the floor, settling under Honey’s skirts.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, she thought. The man was as skittish as a colt in a storm. He had just tossed about a thousand dollars like a handful of confetti, but if her father walked in now, Honey knew very well just who would get the blame.

“Get a grip on yourself, Kenneth,” she snapped, crooking her knees and lowering herself to the floor to gather as much currency as she could one-handed.

The aged teller seemed to melt beside her. “You...you’re not supposed to be here, Miss Honey. Please. Nobody else is supposed to be...”

Boot heels clomped on the opposite side of the counter, followed by the distinct sound of iron clearing leather. And then a deep, whiskey-rich drawl.

“The name’s Summerfield.”

What little color remained in Kenneth Crane’s face drained away. His Adam’s apple somersaulted in his throat as he mumbled something unintelligible, then crumpled into a dead faint on the floor beside Honey’s knees.

* * *

“ Gideon Summerfield?” she exclaimed.

Gideon contemplated the pretty face that had bobbed up from behind the counter like a windflower after a warm spring rain. The blue-green eyes that bloomed big and round with surprise. The moist petaled lips that forgot to close completely after speech. The dark tendrils of hair that framed her face, then spilled over her shoulders and couldn’t quite conceal a breathless, ample bosom.

After five years in prison, the sight of a female—pretty or otherwise—windflower or weed—was enough to snap every nerve in his body. And the sight of this particular female jolted him like white-hot lightning. For a dizzying second, he didn’t know where he was...or why.

“ The Gideon Summerfield?” The blue-green eyes blinked and the petaled lips quivered.

He wrenched himself from the empty-headed bewilderment. For crissake! If he wasn’t careful, Gideon thought, he’d be on his way back to Jefferson City in leg irons and steel bracelets. No woman in the world was worth that.

“That’s right, sweetheart. And now that you know who, let’s move on to why.” He leaned against the counter, edging the barrel of his pistol between the brass bars. “Hand it over.”

Honey wasn’t sure which terrified her more—the Colt or the deadly, gunmetal gray of the eyes that were narrowed on her face. Gideon Summerfield! If what she had read in the papers was true, this man wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. Frank and Jesse James. Cole Younger. Gideon Summerfield. Dwight Samuel. The names rolled through her mind like a funeral march. They were cold-blooded killers, all.

Her knees were knocking together beneath the counter as Honey raised her hand, still clutching some of the bills she had gathered from the floor. “Here.” She shoved them beneath the brass grille. “Take these.”

The gunmetal gaze dipped to the crumpled banknotes, then swung back to Honey’s face. A tiny grin played at the corners of his mouth as Gideon Summerfield tipped back the brim of his hat with the muzzle of his gun.

“Must be all of twenty dollars there,” he drawled.

That amused expression only chilled her more. “Just...just take it and get out. I won’t scream. I promise. I won’t even tell anyone you were here.”

His grin flashed wider. “Hard to make a living robbing banks at twenty bucks a throw, wouldn’t you say?”

She stood there just staring at him now, her turquoise eyes big and bright with fear, her lips pressed together to still the trembling, her chin tilted that defiant little notch.

Something twisted in Gideon Summerfield’s gut then. What the hell kind of a man was Race Logan to leave a windflower to face this situation alone? The girl was terrified, and rightly so with the cold barrel of a Colt pointed at her young heart. Logan no doubt had figured a defenseless flower would cause the least trouble, provoke the least amount of violence from the jailbird. But, dammit, didn’t the banker have any inkling how frightened this little teller would be? Didn’t he care?

Gideon cursed himself for his own misguided sympathy. What good would it do anyway? Most likely just land him back in a dank five-by-eight cell in Missouri. Hell, the little bank clerk would survive this fine, even wind up with a doozy of a tale to tell her grandchildren one day.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said brusquely. “Let’s just get this over with. Hand over the money.”

“No.”

He stared at her in disbelief, not certain he had heard her right. “This isn’t a Presbyterian social, darlin’. I wasn’t asking you to dance. I said hand over the money.”

Her chin came up another notch. “No.”

“You’re playing this out for all it’s worth, aren’t you, sweetheart?” He thumbed back the hammer of his gun as his eyes narrowed to steely slits. “The money. Now.”

Honey was about to tell him no again when Kenneth Crane rose shakily behind her.

“I—I’ll get it for you,” he stammered.

“Much obliged.” Gideon’s eyes remained on the windflower, whose pretty face had puckered indignantly at the old man’s words. There was as much fire in her eyes now as fear.

“Kenneth, don’t you dare...” she began, then fell silent when the tip of Gideon’s pistol touched her chin.

His words were directed to the teller, who was heading for the paneled oak door of the office, but his gaze skewered Honey. “I appreciate your compliance, mister. I’ll appreciate your speed even more.”

“Kenneth!” Honey wailed.

“Shh. Hush up, sweetheart. It’ll all be over within a minute or two. Nobody’ll blame you for this.”

Honey glared at him. “A lot you know, you... you...”