Improper Gentlemen by Mia Marlowe, Diane Whiteside, Maggie Robinson Page B

cover everything I lost in the ’73 Panic.”
    “But—”
    “I was doing well before then, beating the damn Yankees at their own moneygrubbing games. Taking back everything and more than they cost me when they burned my farm.” He laughed bitterly. “From now on, maybe I’ll use your tactics—kill them in their tracks wherever I can.”
    “Johnson, you know damn well that’s not what I do!”
    “You’re fucking efficient at killing, Talbot, just like everything else.”
    Shit, what did Johnson think he was?
    Justin pulled his temper back and tried for sanity.
    “You know there are too many Yankees to kill them all. You can’t turn a wave by yourself. You have to make peace with it.” The way he laid flowers at a church every year on his mother’s birthday, in honor of everyone he’d left behind in South Carolina. Or drinking sherry every Christmas, in hopes one day he’d be respectable enough to celebrate it again with his mother’s cousins at Chillington Castle. Keeping the present alive and building for the future was more important than taking revenge for the past.
    “I want to use the bastards like manure, Talbot. Spread them like shit over my fields.” Johnson splashed more whiskey into his glass.
    Justin went back to cash, his saddle-partner’s favorite subject.
    “Everything you lost in the Great Panic? Look, you know we’ve shared the shirts off our backs before. Let me give you the money to cover that and you won’t have to worry about repaying strangers.”
    Johnson told him the amount.
    Justin gaped at him. “That’s enough to buy half of Denver.”
    “Certainly all of its saloons.”
    “I can still give you the cash.” He’d have to sell—Christ, what wouldn’t he have to sell? But Johnson had been more of a big brother to him than his long-dead blood kin had ever bothered to be.
    “No, I don’t have to make payments on the loan until next year. Just shut up and listen to me, will you?”
    Justin glared at him. Inside, he kept on calculating how to pay off his friend’s debts.
    “Talbot, you’re always so damn conservative.”
    “Am not!” He slapped his thigh for emphasis.
    “Are so—at least when it comes to making sure no fool can ruin your property.”
    Justin flung up his hand in agreement.
    “We invested our money separately and I put mine with the fancy folks on Wall Street. Bragged, too, about how well it was doing—until the Panic hit. And every penny vanished.”
    Justin couldn’t deny that. He was still glad he’d kept quiet back then, too.
    “Didn’t know what I was going to do until after we’d been here a few months.” Johnson broke the awkward silence. “A delegation from the town council offered me the job of mayor with the loan to clear my mind. Said they wanted somebody who’d stick around for a while and I said yes.”
    “You never told me.”
    “Didn’t think you’d like me making a deal that I could get out of just by watching the town melt into the hillside when the ore gave out.”
    “No, I wouldn’t have.” He’d have done his best to wring Johnson’s neck.
    “Yeah, sometimes that Palmetto Aristocracy upbringing gets in the way of your common sense.”
    Justin took another small sip of whiskey. Did the glass’s jagged pattern reflect his old friend’s true personality? “What did your new pals think I’d say to the deal?” he asked when he could trust his voice again.
    “Why would they worry about that?” Johnson stared at him over a fresh drink. “We’ve always worked together. I do the talking and you help carry the deals out. You’re more valuable than dudes like Isham because you frighten people better.”
    Shit. Justin closed his eyes. His reputation yawned before him, more appalling than an ice fall’s thousand-foot drop.
    “What about our talk of retiring someplace where guns are not necessities?” he asked, when he could trust his voice better.
    “That silly daydream? I always told you that if you stuck with