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“What in hell are you doing here, Elly?” Brent growled.
The name landed wrong on Asa’s ear. No one that buttoned-down could ever be an Elly.
“I came for my money.”
“You don’t have anything I don’t give you,” the gambler retorted in a snide voice that just made Asa itch to feed him a few of his own teeth.
The woman didn’t seem to share his irritation. Cool as a cucumber, she replied. “You’re wrong.” Reaching across her husband’s arm, the woman snatched a pile of bills. “This is mine.”
She was halfway through the stack before one of the other players thought to react.
“Hey! We’re playing a game here.”
“Mr. Doyle is cashing out,” she said, not looking up from her counting.
Mr. Doyle apparently had other ideas. “Put the money back, Elizabeth.”
That, Asa thought, was a more fitting name for the lady.
Elizabeth looked up from her counting. “You owe me two hundred dollars more.”
“I don’t owe you anything, woman.” Despite the confidence in his voice, Brent’s hands clamped down on the rest of his winnings. “Put it back, Elly.”
Elizabeth tucked the bills she’d confiscated into her reticule. Not by a flutter of an eyelash did she indicate she heard the warning in her husband’s voice. “You took four hundred dollars from my bank account this morning. Money that rightly belongs to the hands that put in a hard month’s work. Two hundred I just put in my reticule. Hand me two hundred more, and we can both consider this unfortunate circumstance finished.”
“Since when,” Brent asked, pulling out a cheroot from his pocket and scraping a match across his boot sole, “does a man have to account to his wife for anything?”
Elizabeth placed a small circle of gold on the table. “We aren’t married.”
“Like hell.” Brent eyed her steadily over his cupped hand as he touched the tip of the match to his cheroot.
Asa noted the distinctive band around the tip of the cheroot. Elizabeth’s husband had expensive taste.
“The hell would have been if I were truly trapped into a marriage with you,” Elizabeth stated flatly. “Fortunately, I’m not.”
“Oh, we’re married.” Brent shoved his chair back. He tossed the match into the nearby spittoon. At the end of the sharp movement, his hand curled into a fist. With the tip of the cheroot, he indicated the ring on the table. “And as your husband, I’m telling you to put that ring back on and get yourself back home where you belong.”
Elizabeth made no move to take the ring or hit the door. She merely stood for the span of two heartbeats, doing nothing but meeting her husband’s stare with one of her own. The tension between the two was thick enough to chew on.
Around Asa, men started shifting restlessly. No mistaking it, this argument was getting ugly fast. It was easy to tell from the set of Elizabeth’s shoulders that she was a proud woman. Too proud to back down. It was just as easy to tell from Brent’s demeanor that he was more than willing to make the discussion physical. Asa didn’t know about the rest of the men in the saloon, but he’d be hard put to watch a man take his fists to a woman. Wife or not.
With a sigh, Elizabeth, broke the stare-down. “You’re such an egotistical fool.”
Asa wondered if the disgust in Elizabeth’s voice was aimed at Brent or herself, for it was becoming more obvious by the second that, if husbands were apples, Elizabeth’s choice had been core rotten.
Brent growled low in his throat and ground out his cheroot beneath the heel of his boot. With a jerk of his chin, he indicated the remains of his cigar. “I’ll be taking the price of that out of your hide tonight.”
Elizabeth calmly put her gloves and reticule in the pocket of her skirt. “You won’t be doing anything tonight, I imagine, besides crying into the bottom of a liquor bottle. For you see, due to what I suspect is typical ineptness on your part, yesterday’s so-called marriage between us has not been consummated.”
Loud hoots and ribald offers broke through the privacy of the argument to fill the saloon. Brent’s pale face grew red. His gaze ricocheted between the speakers, as if every comment were a blow from an unseen fist. If Elizabeth had been looking to get a bit of her own back, she couldn’t have chosen a better weapon, Asa decided. Attacking a man’s mother or his privates was a guaranteed reaction-getter. Respect was a hard animal to corral here in the territory. Once a man had it roped and fenced, he didn’t just open the gate and let it get away. Especially as respect had a way of turning wily once it slipped a man’s lariat. Wasn’t a man born who didn’t know that or hadn’t learned it the hard way.
