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He glanced down at the creamy swell of cleavage and pulled her even closer. "Not a chance, darlin'," he whispered against her small, soft ear. "Not a chance. "
Chapter One
WASHINGTON STATE SEPTEMBER
Mad Dog leaned back against the shuddering wall of the box car. The article he was writing about homeless-ness lay beside him, forgotten for the moment. Wind clawed his face and raked his hair, curling the papery edges of his notebook. The metallic clackety-clack of the iron wheels vibrated up and down his spine.
Two short blasts of sound rose above the clattering of the train. The piercing wail hovered momentarily in the air, then melted into the puffing chugs of steam and disappeared. Wheels locked with a clanging screech.
Another town. The words carried with them the familiar magic, the se
ductive allure of unopened gifts.
He reached for his clothes bag. It was slumped in the corner of the boxcar, the patched, grayed fabric caved in on itself. There was next to nothing inside—just a faded change of clothes, a bedroll, and a few notebooks—but it was everything Mad Dog had. Everything he needed.
Except food and money.
He shook his head. It was too bad he hadn't saved something from that last fight.
Just enough to get him a place in Mexico, a few bottles of tequila, and a willing woman to keep him warm through the winter . . .
Winter.
He thumped his head back against the corrugated metal wall and closed his eyes.
Christ, he hated that word. It was one of the few things that actually depressed him.
It was still autumn; almost an Indian summer, in fact. But yesterday's warm sun didn't fool him. He'd been drifting across this country for too long to be fooled by Mother Nature.
Winter was coming. Winter, when the world was cold, the fields were fallow, and work was impossible to find. Winter. The season when homeless, unemployed vagrants like Mad Dog were found dead by the side of the road and thrown in markerless paupers' graves by lawmen who didn't know what it felt like to be footloose and carefree . . . or alone and hungry and filled with despair.
He had to find work now, during harvest, while there was work to be found. There would be no more fairs until late spring, no way for his fists to earn the money he needed. He had no choice but to get a real job.
Shit . . .
The train whistle blew again, three short, sharp blasts.
Mad Dog stuffed a half-finished editorial into his canvas bag and staggered to his feet. Standing in the open doorway, he stared at the blurred brown landscape.
Particles of wind-driven dirt stung his eyes, turned into a gritty paste on his tongue.
He rammed his battered Stetson on his head and jumped. r He landed hard. Pain ricocheted up his legs and throbbed in his knees. He groaned and staggered to his feet, brushing the dust from his Levi's.
Goddamn, sometimes it hurt to be free.
He walked to the fringe of a town called Lonesome Creek and stopped. Green fields fanned toward the horizon like a huge patchwork quilt, the color grafted by irrigation to a brown prairie that rolled into forever. In the distance, bluish gray hills rose into a sky so blue, it hurt the eyes.
A cold, early morning draft buffeted his stubbly cheeks and pulled at his long, unkempt mustache. He crammed his hands in his pockets, trying to find some meager warmth in the holey interiors.
The town was practically empty this early in the morning, which was just as well.
He'd learned long ago that respectable citizens didn't cotton to vagrants like him.
They didn't understand a man who didn't want a white picket fence to trap him in or a steady job to pay his bills.
They wanted the world to be clean, respectable, predictable.
He didn't blame them or judge them. Fact was, he didn't even think about them. He just walked past them, saying nothing, and slipped into the rum-soaked, lively part of town they denied existed. The part wreathed in shadows, punctuated by laughter and drowned in rotgut whiskey. The part where people had fun.
