Read Beauty and the Bounty Hunter for Free Online Page A

mud or the heat or the filth, Alexi always managed to smell as if he’d just danced in a rainstorm.
    Glass clinked as he poured another drink. The shade of the liquid hinted at brandy, but it could be anything. Alexi drank whatever could be had for free.
    “Why do you insist on spending your life on the back of a horse, dressed like a peasant boy when, with very little effort, you could be one of the wealthiest women west of the Mississippi? No.” He lifted his glass to the ceiling. “In the entire country.”
    “Don’t bother,” Cat said. “I’m not coming back.”
    Alexi considered her as he sipped, his throat flexing, then releasing as he swallowed. “Even if I can give you what you’ve been searching years to find?”
    Her skin prickled, and she said again what she seemed to say a lot whenever she came near Alexi Romanov. “Say what you mean.”
    “Why do you think I came to Abilene?”
    “Because you regretted selling me out?”
    He lifted a dark, slim brow. “You know I never waste time with regrets.”
    Did that mean he’d sold her out or didn’t it?
    “I sold nothing to no one,” Alexi snapped. “Least of all a woman I’d prefer in my—” He paused at her sharp glance, and the corner of his mouth quirked. “Life. If you were dead, whatever would I do?”
    “The same thing you’ve been doing since I left,” Cat muttered, thoughts on the redhead who’d recently fled the room.
    “Nothing could entice me to hurt you,” Alexi said.
    Cat didn’t believe him. For a price, Alexi would do anything.
    He sighed, obviously reading her eyes, her face, her mind. “I came to you because there’s a bounty.”
    Now they were getting somewhere. “On who and how much?”
    “On you,
Liebchen
. For more money than even I can count.”
    “Me?” Cat laughed, but the sound held no humor. When did it anymore? “What the hell did I do?”
    “I told you in Abilene. You’ve become a legend.”
    “Half of those stories aren’t even about me.”
    “It doesn’t matter. Someone wants you dead. Or at least unavailable.”
    “I haven’t broken the law.”
Not really.
“No one’s going to pay a huge bounty on me.”
    “The law has nothing to do with it.” He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “I misspoke. Not a bounty per se. More of an…incentive.”
    “To kill me?”
    “The bounty is dead or alive.” He spread his hands. “But you know what happens in those cases.”
    Cat did.
Most
bounty hunters, when given the choice, chose dead. Less trouble that way.
    “You need to ask yourself,
mi corazón,
who might wish to see you in the grave?”
    Cat considered and came to the disturbing conclusion that a better question might be,
Who didn’t?

C HAPTER 4
    A lexi watched Cat’s face. As usual, he could divine none of her thoughts. She’d learned from him well. Too well, he often thought, when he had occasion to think of such things. Perhaps she would have been better served to scream and cry for all she had lost. Maybe then she wouldn’t have become this.
    But Alexi didn’t believe crying changed anything, and raving against death…He gave a mental shrug. What good did that do?
    When she’d come to him and asked that he teach her all that he knew, Alexi had believed Cat merely wanted to get away from her past. Didn’t everyone? He’d never suspected what she was really up to.
    The creation of Cat O’Banyon. Would he have refused to help if he’d guessed the truth?
    Alexi released a short, amused puff of air. There’d never been any question of leaving her behind. From the first instant he’d seen her, he’d yearned.
    Standing in the rain, which traced like tears down her agonizingly pale face, the pain she had not yet learned to conceal stark in her brilliant green eyes. He’d wanted to make that pain go away, and he’d gone about it the only way he knew how.
    Alexi shook off the memory and murmured, “
Mo chridhe
, is the list so very long?”
    She glanced up. He was captured