Nan Ryan Read Online Free Page A

she’d learned only that afternoon. One that the talented piano man LeRoy had taught her.
    Hands going to her hips, Nevada bent one knee slightly—just as Lilly had showed her—and belted out the show-stopping lyrics:
    Frankie and Johnnie were sweethearts,
    Oh, Lordy, how they could love …
    In the small salon where he was losing at poker, Johnny Roulette, picking up the cards that were being dealt him, abruptly turned his dark head to listen. Above the din he heard an unfamiliar female voice singing an unfamiliar song.
    “Pops hire a new girl?” he asked, looked at his hand. Discarding, he added, “Give me three, Cap’n Henley.”
    “So I hear. Pops says he found a real little beauty, a young girl that looks like an angel,” said the riverboat pilot as he shot Johnny three new cards.
    Johnny laughed, as did the others. The Gambler girls were hardly angels, but then angels were not what a man was looking for when he stayed the night on board. It was unspoken knowledge that for a handsome price any one of the friendly beautiful women would, after entertaining onstage, willingly entertain an amorous gentleman in one of the fancy upstairs suites.
    Johnny looked at his three new cards, shoved all five together, and tossed them in. Rising, he said, “Looks like I can’t beat you gentlemen this evening. Give me a chance to get my money back tomorrow night.”
    Nodding good night, he made his way out into the big gaming hall and looked at the girl onstage. From his vantage point at the far back of the room, he could see little save the fact that she was tiny and dark-haired.
    Intrigued, Johnny Roulette, carefully balancing a nearly full glass of bourbon in his big right hand, unsteadily weaved among the crowded tables, making his way toward the stage. He didn’t stop until, happily ignoring shouts of “down in front,” he stood directly below the stage, not ten feet from Nevada.
    Johnny was drunk but not too drunk to appreciate Nevada’s youthful beauty. Blinking to clear his liquor-clouded vision, he studied the little girl with the big voice and decided then and there that he wanted her.
    Gleaming hair, the color of his own, was artfully arranged in shiny curls atop her head. In a delicate oval face with high dramatic cheekbones were the bluest pair of eyes and the cutest turned-up nose and the reddest, softest lips he’d ever seen.
    Swallowing a drink of the bourbon, Johnny allowed his eyes to move with lazy appreciation from the bare ivory shoulders and the pale tempting bosom to the waist so small he knew he’d have little trouble spanning it with his big hands.
    The ice-blue satin of her evening gown was molded tightly over a flat stomach and flaring feminine hips that made his throat go dry. He turned up the whiskey again as his gaze climbed reluctantly back to her beautiful face. Nevada’s heavily painted eyes, cheeks, and lips, coupled with the fact that Johnny was uncharacteristically inebriated, caused him to badly misjudge her age.
    He surmised she was somewhere on the green side of twenty-five, young enough to still be blessed with a ripe lush beauty, old enough to know how to use her charms.
    Feeling the first pleasant stirrings of physical desire, Johnny unbuttoned his black evening jacket, pushed back one side, shoved a big hand down into his pants pocket, and stood there, feet apart, looking up at Nevada, allowing his black eyes to caress her. Lazily looking forward to when his hands would.
    Nevada had momentarily lost her place, forgotten the words to the new song, when she saw the tall, broad-shouldered, dark-complexioned man making his sure, purposeful way toward the stage. He’d emerged from the smoke and noise like a mysterious masculine apparition emerging from the mists of her girlish dreams.
    Stumbling over the words, repeating one entire line of the lyrics, Nevada felt her breath catch in her throat when she saw the approaching man stop directly before the stage, unbutton his jacket,