Once A Gambler

2

IT TOOK ELLIE most of the next day to get to Deadwood, with plane changes, car rentals and having to use a detour through the Black Hills for the better part of an hour. When she finally pulled into her grandmother’s driveway it was dark. Really dark.

It seemed crazy that South Dakota and Los Angeles shared the same sky. Because this one had a vast, starry splatter of lights arching over it against a velvety black, the likes of which was never seen in California. Too many houses. Too many lights. And even if there weren’t, who ever looks up in L.A.?

The cold night air smelled impossibly sweet from the roses that hugged her grandmother’s house and from the distant tang of snow sliding down off the jagged mountains. Winter came early here and lasted forever. Hugging herself from the cold, she surrendered to her need for warmth and went inside.

The house smelled musty when she opened it. Ellie flipped on light switches, grateful she hadn’t turned the electricity off. It had been months since she’d been here last, and whoever was trying to sell it clearly hadn’t been here much, either. There were white cloths covering the furniture and someone had begun gathering things together in the living room, probably for the auctioneer. She triple locked the door and took a deep breath.

With a frown she dragged her suitcase up the stairs toward the bedroom she had always slept in. It was small, with faded striped wallpaper and the twin bed she’d slept on as a girl when they’d come to visit. Made of mahogany with little pinecone finials on top, the bed still bore the signature handmade quilt from their grandmother’s hand.

She sat down on the bed and ran her fingers across the patchwork fabric. It was soft and worn with time and love. It smelled like her grandmother in here. She dropped back and rubbed her cheek against the old cotton, feeling tears prick her eyes. As infrequently as they’d managed to see her, Grandma Lily had been a force in her life and Reese’s. The only person to see past the photo ops, the trust funds and the Hollywood hype of their lives. Here they were just themselves. Just girls no one knew. Here she and Reese would dream of their futures late at night with the lights out and share secrets they would tell no one else. Here they’d felt loved.

SHE AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING, still wearing the clothes from the night before. Light was pouring in through the undraped window and Ellie sat up, disoriented. God, she’d been exhausted. She didn’t even remember falling asleep.

Downstairs she made some coffee in the stove-top antique of a coffeemaker and took a mug with her as she climbed the squeaky stairs to the attic. Swallowing thickly, she opened the door at the top of the stairs and pushed the little button in to turn on the overhead light.

There was a window at the far end, in the eve, and piles of stuff her grandmother had hoarded up here. It was like a yearbook of her life. Little signatures of her friendships and triumphs, and a few of her failures. There was the wide bedstead she’d shared with the grandfather Ellie had never met. He’d died before she was born. There was an old crib and a bassinet, rocking chairs and hat racks. A pair of old wooden crutches and piles of National Geographic her grandmother wouldn’t part with. But draped across all of these, like spiderwebs, was yellow crime-scene tape.

It was this that made the coffee in Ellie’s hands shake as she approached the trunk that sat smack in the middle of the chaos. Morning light struck it with a pinpoint ray, as if it were announcing itself as different from the rest. Dust motes swam in the light above it. Ellie knelt down and set her coffee on the floor.

For six months they’d searched for Reese. No stone went unturned, no parolee unquestioned. But in the end, there were simply no clues. No ransom note. No indication according to the police that she had done anything but vanish into thin air.

“You must go back to the beginning,” that man had said. “To the trunk. That’s how you’ll find her.”

There was no doubt in her mind it was this trunk he meant. This was the last place Reese had been. This was the trunk she’d been exploring when Ellie had run out for coffee, leaving her alone. She’d left the door unlocked behind her. Everyone in Deadwood did. And that was the last time she’d seen her sister alive. She had vanished without a trace.

Ellie opened the lid on the trunk and tilted it back. It appeared to be the same as any of the other dozen weathered trunks piled in the attic. This one, still smudged black with fingerprinting dust, was stamped tin with leather straps and a crinkling wall-papered interior. She began to unload it: there were ribbon-wrapped letter collections and photos and pieces of lace, pressed flowers and hat pins and a velvet crazy quilt that was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Halfway down, she found an antique tintype camera and lifted it out of the trunk.

Sunlight glinted off the large lens as she uncovered it. It was a beauty in mint condition and she couldn’t believe they had missed this before. It must be over a hundred and thirty years old. She turned it upside down, examining it from all angles. The initials E.K. were engraved on the underside of it in beautiful scroll lettering. Who was E.K. and how had his camera ended up in her grandmother’s trunk? She wondered if it would still work and decided to take it with her when she went back to L.A.

She sat down and placed the camera beside her. She then dug into the trunk again. By the time she’d emptied it, her cell rang. She checked the caller ID and answered the call.

“Okay, are you really back in Deadwood?”

Bridget Meeks’s voice made her smile. Bridget, her best friend since high school and unofficial partner in more zany exploits than she could remember, had tracked her down via satellite. Probably in between feedings of her twin baby boys, Lucca and Isaac.

“Yeah,” Ellie said. “Nuts, huh?”

“Dane called me this morning as I was wiping the oatmeal off my face, whining about it.” She sighed. “He said you two had a fight.”

Why Dane felt that he needed to go to her best friend when things were going wrong, she couldn’t guess. “That’s right. News at six…”

“Everything okay with you two? I mean besides the fact that you’re there and he’s here?”

Were things okay? She didn’t think so anymore. “Do you think I made a mistake, Bridge?” Ellie picked up an old book of historical photography and opened it.

“What? Going to Deadwood?”

“No, agreeing to marry him.” That thought hadn’t fully coalesced until just now.

An I-don’t-want-to-say-what-I-really-think hesitation ensued. “It’s how you feel that matters, El.”

Good answer. How did she feel? Right now confusion was the only emotion she could pinpoint. It swirled inside her like the dust in the sunlight spilling across the pages of the old book in her hands. “I don’t know,” she murmured, “maybe I’m expecting too much.”

“Maybe,” Bridget suggested gently, “it’s time you expected something of somebody other than yourself.”

And there it was. Except for Reese, she wasn’t sure she had ever been able to trust anyone. Not Dane, not even his feelings for her. She thumbed through the old book of photographs. Photos of people who had lived more than a hundred years ago stared back at her from the porches of schoolhouses and walkways.

“Do you love him?”

She thought she did. But if this was it—this feeling like there was something big she was missing, could it be the real thing? “Maybe I wouldn’t know it if I saw it.”

“Oh, I think you would. Maybe you just haven’t seen it yet.” In the background, Bridget’s babies started howling. “Hear that sound? Now that’s true love.” She laughed like she always did, taking the edge off the seriousness of what she was trying to say. “I’d better go before there’s a riot in my kitchen. We’ll talk when you get back. Okay?”

“Okay, hon. Thanks. I’ll be back tomorrow or day after.” They hung up. Ellie tucked the phone in her back pocket and stared at the book in her hands, suddenly wishing she could make sense of this whole trip to Deadwood. That man’s words had sent her running here. But was she running toward something or away from it?

She flipped the pages absently until she came across a loose tintype photo tucked into the book of a couple standing in front of an arbor, gazing into each other’s eyes. He was tall and good-looking—for the 1800s. Now, if that wasn’t love, she thought…

But the pose seemed so unusual for a photo in a time when people had to freeze for minutes to get a good shot. And there was something about it…something about the woman in the picture…It was grainy and faded, but she could swear it sort of resembled…In fact, it looked almost exactly like—

Oh, my God! Like Reese!

Ellie blinked hard, rubbed her eyes, but the woman still looked like Reese. Clutching the photo tighter, she wondered if it was some great-great-relative who had merely looked just like her. But no. There was Reese’s dimple, the little mole on her neck. Even her hands…If it wasn’t Reese, it was her exact double. But how could someone so long ago look exactly like someone from now?

And then without so much as a warning, the woman in the photo swiveled her head—

—and looked directly at Ellie!

Ellie shrieked and accidentally kicked the camera sitting beside her in her scramble to get up.

As she did, there flashed a brilliant white light. It consumed the air in her grandmother’s attic and she felt herself tumbling, falling, as the ground disappeared beneath her.

Until there was nothing at all around her but the white, white light that finally faded into blackness.

ELLIE OPENED HER EYES slowly, feeling muzzy and a little nauseous, as if she’d downed several too many Long Island Iced Teas…and mixed them with a few glasses of Bordeaux. But she hadn’t been drinking. Had she? She was having trouble remembering.

A pitchy dark surrounded her, broken only by a hint of moonlight spilling through some kind of slatted wood louvers inches beyond her nose. Even worse, she was flat on her back with her feet in the air, scrunched in some small, cramped place. Something was jammed painfully into her back and she shifted against it.

It felt like…footwear?

None of that made any sense. She backed up mentally, trying again. Okay, a second ago, she’d been in her grandmother’s attic, then…then what? Think, Ellie. Think.

A flash of light echoed in her memory and a feeling that she was falling. Had she been knocked out? Electrocuted?

Died? Had she gone toward the light?

She lifted her hand to her face and felt around. Okay…okay. That feels right. Solid. So…good. Alive.

She felt around the confines of her space. Some kind of a box? Her senses returned to her one at a time: the smell of old wood and musty leather and another smell—like that sharp tang of ozone in the air following a storm; the low rumbling sound of her neighbor’s Harley engine idling in the driveway below her grandmother’s attic.

She frowned. Wait, not a motorcycle. It was too rhythmic. Too…human.

She clapped a hand over her mouth. Someone on the other side of those slats was snoring.

From that deep, dark part of her—that part that had always, since her sister’s disappearance, been waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for that same brush of darkness to sweep over her, as well—came the awful rush of terror she had known would find her. Whoever had taken Reese had come back for her! And stuffed her in this…this box!

Oh, God, why the hell hadn’t she listened to Dane and stayed safely in L.A.? But why couldn’t she remember being taken? She had absolutely no memory after going through that trunk looking at old photographs of—

That photo of Reese. In her mind, she watched the woman in the picture swivel a look at her. Maybe she was crazy! Maybe she’d finally lost it. Because that made absolutely no sense. None. Photos do not animate.

Now, an odd calmness filtered through her, spreading a tingling rush of knowledge to the tips of her fingers. Of course. Of course!

She was dreaming. This was all a dream. A lame dream. And now, she was dreaming she was in this box. Dreaming there was a man on the other side of this door, snoring.

Of course! All she had to do was wake up.

In the room beyond the louvers, a shadow moved. She shifted her head sideways to get a better look. A woman standing in front of a small, round window lifted a piece of clothing off a chair and rifled through its pockets. Something shiny glinted in her hand for a moment before she pocketed it.

What Ellie did next was totally uncalled-for and—truth be told—unintentional.

Bracing herself, she pressed her hand against the wood slats and pushed. In the next instant, she tumbled ungracefully out onto floor to the sound of the pickpocket’s gasp of surprise.

“Hey!” Ellie shouted, but the woman dropped the piece of clothing and, silent as a bat, flitted out the door.

As she quickly struggled to untangle her legs from the stuff in the box, she heard what sounded like a cocking gun.

“Get up,” ordered a deep male voice from close by. “Slowly. Don’t make me shoot you.”

“Whoa, whoa! There’s no shooting in dreams,” she told him, throwing her hands up in surrender.

“Get up,” he repeated darkly, motioning with the tip of that cannon in his hand toward the tall piece of furniture out of which she’d tumbled.

It was prudent to oblige, she decided, and she got to her feet slowly with her hands spread wide. “Okay, fine. But don’t point that thing at me.”

With his gun still on her, he removed a glass hurricane cover from an old-fashioned kerosene lamp beside the bed, struck a match and lit it. A thin, watery light spilled from the lamp, washing the walls in soft gold.

Ellie’s eyes widened. Except for the gun in his hand, and the sheet he was clutching in front of him, he was naked as the day he was born. Against her will and good sense, she stared at him. All of him. He returned the favor, his unfriendly gaze sweeping down the length of her slowly and back up.

He was tall and strongly built. The lean musculature of his chest and arms born of a life lived hard. He seemed tightly strung as if, given provocation, he could just go off like that gun he was holding.

The gaslight carved his arrogance with shadows and fatigue. He wasn’t pretty the way so many Hollywood men were. His face had a ruggedness to it, accentuated by the scar that ran along his jawline. His mouth was wide and turned up a little at the corners without trying, but even that perpetual half smile of friendliness couldn’t mitigate the bruised look in his eyes.

“What the hell are you doing in my cabin?”

That voice. It sent a shiver down her. “Fair question. But on the subject of who’s supposed to be where,” she pointed out, “what are you doing in my dream?”

“Your what?”

She pointed to his clothing strewn across the floor. “Oh, and you’d better check your things. That little underdressed petunia who was in here a minute ago? She was rifling through them.”

He looked confused. What petunia? “The only one I see in this room is you.” He narrowed a look at her, then glanced around at his clothes. “You think I can’t spot a panel thief when I see one?”

“Panel what?”

“Hand it over.”

“Hand what over?”

“The money. And whatever else you took.”

Ellie was outraged. “Whatever I took? You’ve been robbed, pal, but it wasn’t by me. And—as if I owe you anything considering that minibazooka you have pointed my way—I believe it was a watch she took. Out of your coat pocket.”

Some of the color drained from his face. Keeping his gun trained on her, he shuffled to the other side of the bed to pick up his jacket, exposing—she had to admit—a very nice-looking behind.

One-handed, he went through the pockets until he came up with a little leather pouch filled with what sounded like coins. Next he reached under the mattress and recovered a small leather satchel chock-full of what seemed like play money. Relief flickered briefly over his face, but he kept searching nonetheless.

“Like I said, the watch went that way,” Ellie reminded him, pointing at the doorway and the now-vanished pickpocket.

He held out his hand.

She pursed her lips. “Don’t have it.”

A slow, wicked smile crossed his face. “Well, then, you leave me no choice. I’ll just have to search you.”

3

“OH, I THINK NOT.” Folding her arms, Ellie knew she’d sounded a whole lot more certain than she felt.

He wrapped the sheet low around his hips and tucked in the edge as he moved closer, eyeing her jeans suspiciously. “For a woman who dresses in miner’s britches and breaks into strange men’s berths in the middle of the night, and makes up stories about phantom thieves, your sudden concern with propriety, madam, is ill timed. Put your hands up.”

Ellie scowled at him. “Well, you have one thing right. You are a strange man. But I still didn’t take your watch. Feel free to search me, though. I have nothing to hide. Besides, this is my dream. And…well,” she admitted, raising her hands, “you’re not exactly trollish.”

He didn’t spend long trying to puzzle that word out, but shimmied closer in his sheet and nudged her arms up in the air with the end of his pistol. “I suggest you hold very still. I’m surprisingly good with this gun.”

“Sure, sure. Nobody really gets shot in dreams.”

He muttered something to himself about nightmares, then, he touched her. A slow, one-handed slide down the length of her rib cage, past her hip and around her back.

She inhaled sharply.

From the tips of his fingers to the center of her being, something akin to an electrical charge zipped through her body.

Which was strange because he seemed immune, more intent on what she might be concealing beneath her jersey top. When his fingers reached the clasp on her bra, they stopped and explored for a moment.

“What’s this?” he asked, fingering the hooks and eyes.

“Not a watch,” she explained.

A droll smile quirked his mouth as he followed the outline of her bra around her rib cage, finding the underwire that ran up the side of her breast. His palm fell naturally against the soft cup and lingered there, testing the weight of her breast in his hand.

His gaze lifted to hers. A bead of sweat had broken out in that little cleft between his nose and upper lip. Hmm. Perhaps not so immune, after all. The steely cold barrel of his gun rested warningly against her throat. “Who are you?”

“You first.”

“Apparently, you already have the advantage. It was you who broke into my cabin, remember?” The tip of his gun traversed her chest and rested against her belly.

Ellie was too distracted by what the other hand was doing to mind much. “I didn’t break in.” She leaned close and whispered, “I’m not even really here.”

That elicited another grudging smile. “Oh,” he said, sliding a palm down the front of her leg, “you’re here. You just don’t belong here.”

She gave him a solemn nod. “Exactly. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

What had she been thinking to agree to this? Even in a dream. His touch was not rough or even angry. It was a slow perusal. A lazy exploration of a foreign object. It was as if he had never touched a woman before. But the expertness of his exploration made it clear that couldn’t be true. He rubbed the jersey fabric of her top between his fingers, frowning at it. Then he moved lower, his hand making the trip over her hip bone and down the back pockets of her jeans.

His search missed nothing. Not the square shape of the credit card she’d left in her back pocket, which he glanced at curiously, front and back, before asking, “Your name is Visa?” She replied with a snort. Nor the topstitched seam that ran up the inside of her thigh, which he explored with thorough fascination.

Ellie held her breath. She’d had some vivid dreams before but this one had them all beat, hands down. Her breath quickened and she held herself rigidly, eyeing his weapon. His touch triggered a wick of tiny explosions of pleasure under her skin—and completely against her will, she found herself beginning to sweat. Had Dane ever deliberately touched her this way? Ever taken more than a second to really look at her? She couldn’t remember now.

“I will admit,” he murmured, scanning the hem near her ankle with his fingertips, “you’d be hard-pressed to hide a toothpick under these.”

“You,” she began, clearing the frog from her throat, “act like you’ve never seen a pair of skinny True Religions before.”

That disconcerted frown appeared again. “I never talk of religion when I have my hands on a woman, skinny or not,” he replied, examining the tiny buckle on her strappy sandal. “And these are…shoes?”

“Very funny.”

He straightened, and with his face only inches from hers, she wondered suddenly, and with a hopeful perversity, if he was going to kiss her.

It was her fantasy, after all.

His eyes were fixed on her. Hazel, but for the solitary spot of clear, emerald green in the iris of his left eye. The fringe of lashes—dark and unfairly long—hemmed in the heat of his look. She would have to remember this dream and those eyes for the next time she—

A knock on the door rudely halted the fantasy. Without taking his gaze off her, he spoke to the intruder. “Yeah?”