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“Red, you awake?”
There was no question of whose voice that was.
“Just a minute, Ty, baby,” Red called. “You come with me,” she said, taking Chris’s arm in her hand as she opened a closet door. “This is a place for men that can’t but like to watch. You stay in here and listen. I’ll find out how much Ty does or doesn’t like you. You game?”
It was on the tip of Chris’s tongue to ask questions about the closet, but she suppressed herself. “Yes,” she whispered, then Red half shoved her into a chair and closed the door.
“I’m just comin’, Ty honey,” she called and went across the room to open the door.
Chapter Eight
Ty’s hair was wet and he was just buttoning his shirt.
“Don’t even put it back on,” Red said, holding the door open for him. “I want to look at that back of yours.”
“It’s fine,” Tynan said but removed his shirt obediently.
Red ran her hands over his skin, turned him toward the light—and the closet—so she could see better. “It’s all right but it’ll be weeks before it’s fully healed. And you’re skin and bones. We need to fatten you up.”
He put his shirt back on. “You sound like Chris.”
“She that little blonde rode in with you? The one everybody’s sayin’ is Nola Dallas?”
Ty poured himself a whiskey and sat down on the sofa. “God, that’s good. The thing you miss most in prison isn’t freedom but the small pleasures of life like good food and drink, a clean bed,”—he grinned—“and women. You ought to pay that Leora more. Whatever you’re paying her, it’s not enough.”
“You’re not answerin’ my question. Is that little blonde Nola Dallas?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking at his whiskey. “Tell me what’s been going on the last couple of years. Business good? You seem to have more girls than usual.”
“I think some of the girls in the tub with you weren’t mine,” Red said heavily. “Tynan, stop dancin’ around me. What are you doin’ back here? Are you free from jail permanently or what?”
He smiled at her. “With a few hitches, I am more or less free.”
“Hitches? Such as what?”
“One pretty little blonde that’s about to send me back, that’s what.”
“Oh?” Red asked, eyebrows raised.
“Don’t play innocent with me. Even in the tub the girls were giggling about this famous Nola Dallas being here. Is she really all that famous? I mean I know what she’s done, her father gave me a stack of newspaper articles to read about her or by her, but I thought that out here…”
“Honey, she’s what every woman dreams of being: brave, courageous, a fighter, and she’s made it in a man’s profession.”
“More than I’ve done,” Tynan muttered.
“Was it really bad in jail?” Red asked, sitting across from him.
“I think old man Dickerson had friends. I guess he figured that if he couldn’t kill me with a rope, he’d have it done with whip and chains.”
Red reached out, caressed his cheek and Ty kissed her palm. “But you’re out now,” she said.
“If I keep my hands off that pretty little daughter of Del Mathison’s. And I’ve had easier jobs.”
“You like her, huh?”
“Well enough, I guess. Any man would like a woman who put herself in his path the way she does. The first few times I met her she didn’t even have her clothes on.”
Red leaned back against the sofa. “Really? I can’t imagine that someone of Nola Dallas’s fame would have to pursue a man.”
