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  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1985 by Sandra Brown

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic of mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cover design by Jackie Merri Meyer Cover photography by Photonica

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  First Warner Books Printing: July 1991 Reissued: March 1993, April 2001

  10 9 8

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  Dear Reader,

  Several years ago, my career underwent a transition with my novel, Slow Heat in Heaven. Before then I had written genre romances under several pseudonyms. Because so many of my new readers have expressed an interest in my earlier work, Warner Books is making these books available.

  I feel that Another Down, the sequel to Sunset Embrace, tells a compelling love story while staying within the framework of romance fiction and reflecting the elements that characterize it, such as a high level of sensuality and a happy ending.

  Thank you for your many requests to have these books reprinted, and please enjoy...

  Sandra Brown

  PROLOGUE

  The man lunged to his feet, clumsily drew his pistol, cocked it, and aimed.

  His stocky thighs caught the edge of the table, jarring it and rocking the glasses full of liquor that stood on it. One sloshed over. A cigar rolled from an ashtray and burned a small hole in the green felt top.

  Jake Langston sighed tiredly. He had come in for a game or two of stimulating poker, a glass or two of stinging whiskey, perhaps a satisfying tumble or two in one of the beds upstairs—all to fill the hours until his train pulled out.

  Now here he was involved in an argument over a hand of poker with a sodbuster named Kermit something or other, who he hoped had more talent handling a plow than he had a gun.

  "You calling me a cheater?" the farmer demanded. Unaccustomed to drinking any more than an occasional Saturday night beer, he was none too sober and, though his feet were well planted, he swayed like a sailor on a turbulent sea. His beefy face was perspiring and flushed. The pistol pointed directly at Jake's chest was wavering in an unsteady hand.

  "I only said I'd like to see all those aces you've got in your sleeve at one time rather than having them pop up every other hand.'' With infuriating nonchalance Jake reached for the tumbler of whiskey near his right hand, his gun hand, and took a leisurely sip.

  The fanner's glance nervously bounced around the barroom, suddenly aware of the spectacle he was making of himself. No one else in the cavernous room was moving. Hie music had ceased at the first sign of trouble. The others at the poker table had carefully ebbed away like the ripples from a stone thrown into a still lake.

  The man was trying his best to appear threatening. "You're a liar. I wasn't cheating. Draw on me."

  "All right."

  It all happened so quickly that, later, only those standing closest could testify as to what had actually taken place. In one little move Jake came out of his chair, drew his gun, swept his other hand wide to deflect the farmer's arm and seat the pistol ineffectually clattering to the floor.

  Kermit's Adam's apple elongated to accommodate a knot of stark terror. He looked into eyes as cold and brittle as icicles that cling to the eaves after a frigid, wet January norther. They were much more frightening than the gaping barrel of the pistol pointed at the end of his nose. He faced a body that was leaner man his by forty pounds, but menacing with its taut control.

  "Pick up half the winnings you've stockpiled there. I figure you won that much fairly."

  The farmer's hands fumbled with the coins and bills as he stuffed them into his pants pockets. He exuded the frenzy of a fox prepared to gnaw off his foot to escape a trap.

  "Now pick up your gun real easy-like and get out of here."

  Kermit obeyed. Only a miracle prevented the pistol from firing in his trembling hands as he let down the hammer and reholstered it.

  "And I advise you not to come back until you learn to cheat without getting caught."

  The farmer was humiliated, but vastly relieved that his heart was still beating, that he wasn't bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound, and that he wasn't going home penniless to his harping wife. He left, vowing to himself that he would never return.

  The piano player resumed his jumping, jangling tune. Other patrons of the gambling hall drifted back to their tables, shaking their heads in amusement. Smokes abandoned in ashtrays were relit. The bartender immediately began to refill glasses.

  "Pardon the interruption," Jake said congenially to the other players as he scooped his own pile of winnings off the table. "Divide the rest," he said of the money the farmer had wisely left on the table.

  "Thanks, Jake."

  "See ya."

  "You could've killed him for pullin' a gun on you like that."

  "Damn sure could have. We'd've backed you."

  "Damn sodbusters."

  Jake shrugged, turned away, and left mem talking. Taking a slim cheroot out of his shirt pocket, he bit off the end and spat it on the floor. Striking a match with his thumbnail, he lit the cigar as he weaved his way through the tables toward the oak bar that extended the width of the room. According to rumor it had been shipped piece by piece from St. Louis to Fort Worth and painstakingly assembled. It was ornately carved, bedecked with mirrors, and lined with bottles and glasses that were kept highly polished. The proprietress wouldn't tolerate dust.

  Brass spittoons were strategically placed along the brass rail of the bar. Spitting on the floor was not allowed in Priscilla Watkin's Garden of Eden. Hand-lettered signs posted along the bar at six-foot intervals said so.

  Jake smiled. That floor, waxed to a high gloss, was now desecrated by the tip of his cigar. He also took a perverse pleasure in making sure the spurs on his boots scarred the surface the madam of the establishment took such pride in.

  A grin tugged at the corners of his thin, wide lips. Priscilla. Just as his mind conjured up her name, he spotted her poised on the bottom step of the curving staircase, looking as resplendent as the Queen of Sheba. Clad in bright purple satin with black lace trim, she would catch any man's eye. Always had. When Jake had first met her almost twenty years ago, she had worn well-laundered calico. But she had turned heads even in that.

  Her ash-blond hair was piled on the top of her head and decorated with a single purple ostrich plume that curled down around her cheek and flirted with a dangling jet earring. She held her head at a regal tilt.

  Indeed, this whorehouse was her domain. She
ruled it like a despot. If customers or employees didn't like the way she managed things, they were summarily dismissed and escorted off the premises. But everybody in Texas knew that the Garden of Eden in Fort Worth was in this year of 1890 the best whorehouse in the state.

  Priscilla extended a slipper-shod foot and stepped off the bottom stair. Proudly, leaving behind her a wake of musky scent imported from Paris, she made her way to the bar just as Jake was lifting a glass of whiskey to his mouth.

  "You just cost me a customer, Mr. Langston."

  Jake didn't even turn his head, but nodded toward the bartender to pour him another shot. "I think you can afford to lose one or two, Pris."

  It irritated the hell out of her for him to call her that. He took as much pleasure doing it as he did in scuffing the floor of her saloon. Only an old friend like Jake could get by with either one.

  Were they friends? Or enemies? She was never quite sure.

  "Why is it that things can go fine for months and the minute you come in mere's trouble?"

  "Is there?"

  "Always."

  "The sodbuster drew a gun on me. What did you expect me to do? Turn the other cheek?"

  "You provoked him."

  "He was cheating,"

  "I don't need any more trouble. The sheriff's been here twice already this week."

  "Business or pleasure?"

  "I'm serious, Jake. The town is up in arms again, wanting to shut me down. Every time there's trouble—"

  "All right, I'm sorry."

  She lifted her chin and laughed. "I doubt mat. You either stir up trouble at the gaming tables or cause a ruckus among my girls."

  "How's that?"

  "They fight over you and you damn well know it," she snapped.

  He turned to look at her then, grinning unabashedly. "Do they? Well, I'll be damned."

  She assessed his good looks and that appealing arrogance he had acquired over the years. No longer a gauche boy, this was a man, a man both men and women had to reckon with. She tapped him on the chest with her feather fan. "You're bad for business."

  Leaning down he whispered confidentially, "Then how come you're always so glad to see me?"

  Priscilla's mouth tensed with vexation, but she succumbed to his ingratiating smile. "I've got better whiskey than that in my office." She laid a hand on his sleeve. "Come on."

  Heads turned as the two crossed the room. There wasn't a man alive who could be impervious to Prise ilia. She was attractive in a bawdy, lusty sort of way, and tales of what she was capable of doing'to a man had made her a living legend. Even weighed against a man's bent to exaggerate when recounting his sexual exploits, stories about Priscilla Watkins were too wide-spread not to carry some credibility. Men didn't want their wives to have that sultry, brazen glint in their eyes, but they sure wanted their whore to.

  Most of their desires were borne not of memories, but of curiosity and fantasy. Few had experienced those raunchy sessions with Priscilla firsthand. She was choosy. Even if they could afford the premium price she demanded, most wouldn't be selected to enter that inner chamber behind the door kept perpetually locked. It guarded enthralling secrets. Every man in the room envied Jake Langston at that moment.

  But if the men looked at him jealously, the women looked at him with longing. The whores scattered around the room entertaining the early evening crowd were working women. They knew the value of a dollar. They had to be practical. Their time was money. So they practiced their seductive arts on their customers, but every one of them would have traded the few dollars she would make for a free hour alone with the cowboy Jake Langston.

  He was slim-hipped and lanky, but moved with the feline grace of a mountain cat and was just as tawny. Tight pants fitted taut buttocks and long thighs like a second skin. The gunbelt strapped low around his hips only emphasized his manliness. Men respected his talent with his gun. To women, his reputation with it only heightened the excitement of being around him. It added an element of danger that few respectable women would confess to rinding stimulating.

  His shoulders were broad, as was his chest, but not so much that it detracted from his overall leanness. He didn't merely walk. He sauntered. The girls who had had the good fortune to entertain him in their rooms swore that he was as bold about everything as he was with that swaggering walk and that the rolling action of his hips wasn't a talent limited to walking.

  Priscilla drew a key from her low-dipping bodice and unlocked the door to her private quarters. As soon as she entered, she dropped her fan on a fashionably spindly chair and crossed to a small table to pour Jake a drink from a heavy crystal decanter. He closed the door behind them with a definite click. Priscilla's eyes swung up to meet his. She resented the accelerated beat of her heart.

  Would tonight be the night?

  The parlor could have belonged in any gracious hostess's house, except for the nude of Priscilla painted by a customer who had paid his bill by doing the portrait. He had no doubt been her lover, having captured her on canvas in a pose of indolent satiation. Unapologetically decadent, the portrait in its gilded frame graced the wall behind the satin-covered sofa, which was piled with pillows edged in silk fringe. The draperies on the windows were moiré, but with no more shirring man those found in most fine houses of the period. Tables were draped with doilies as fine as spiderwebs. They could have been crocheted by anyone's grandmother.

  The oil lamps had large round globes with flowers painted on them. Some dripped prisms that tinkled softly when a whiff of air caught them. A thick carpet covered most of the floor. There was a chest-high vase of peacock feathers standing in one corner. A seventeenth-century shepherdess, bare-breasted and saucy, was keeping an ardently admiring shepherd in perpetual distress on its china surface.

  Jake surveyed the room slowly. He had been in here many tiroes. It never ceased to fascinate him. Prisclla had moved up in the world from being the rebellious daughter of a dictatorial mother and a cowed father. Jake—then Bubba to everyone—had taken her in fallow fields and on muddy creekbeds. But when it came right down to it, the place didn't make any difference. A whore was a whore no matter where she practiced her trade.

  Priscilla, unaware of his unflattering thoughts, went to him and handed him the whiskey. She plucked the cheroot from between his lips, carried it to her own and took a long draw, Jetting the smoke curl through her lungs before exhaling it in a long, slow stream. "Thanks. I don't let my girls smoke so I can't be a bad influence. Let's go into the bedroom. I have to change for the evening crowd."

  He followed her into the next room. It was lacy, overtly feminine, and strangely unsuited to her. She was too hard a woman to be ensconced in this frilly, soft room, but Jake guessed that was part of the fantasy she provided for her customers.

  "Help me, please, Jake." She offered him her back. He stuck the cheroot back in his mouth, clamping it with straight white teeth and squinting against the smoke. He set his drink aside. Deftly he unhooked the row of fasteners down her back. When he was done, she glanced over her bare shoulder, said a husky "Thank you, darling," and moved away.

  Jake grinned as he flopped down on the brocaded chaise. He lifted his feet on it, disregarding the spurs, not to mention the caked mud, on his boots.

  "What have you been up to lately?" Priscilla shimmied out of the low-cut dress with a move too effortless not to be rehearsed.

  Jake blew a perfect smoke ring into the air and reached for his whiskey. "Working up in the Panhandle, stringing a fence from there to kingdom come."

  Her brow arched eloquently as she kicked out of the purple slippers. She didn't bother to pick up after herself. Somehow dropping clothes where she took them off added to the wantonness of the act. Men preferred their women not to be too fussy about tidiness, especially when they were coming to bed. Such negligence made this paid sex seem more spontaneous. With mild derision she asked, "You've become a pliers man?"

  That was a name given to cowboys who, after the decline of the long drives,
found themselves hard pressed to find jobs. They often had to string the very barbed-wire fences that had closed the open ranges and put them out of work.

  "Well, I've gotten accustomed to eating, things like that," Jake said easily. His eyes hadn't missed one seductive move she made.

  Her corset was tightly laced. It pushed her bosom up and out until the sheer chemise beneath could barely contain it. She had always been well endowed. Jake remembered those large, firm breasts. Sweeping her petticoats aside, she sat down on a small round stool in front of a vanity table. It had mirrors hinged at the sides of the one she faced, so that she could adjust them and study herself from all angles. With a lamb's-wool puff, she dabbed powder on her neck, shoulders, and breasts.

  "Are you on vacation?"

  A low laugh rumbled out of Jake's chest. "Nope. I just got sick of seeing nothing but tumbleweeds and dust. I quit."

  "What do you plan to do now?"

  What did he plan to do now? Drift until a job turned up. The same thing he'd been doing for most of his adult life. He could earn some prize money in rodeos, enough to keep him and his horse alive, enough to enter a poker game now and men, enough to enjoy the recreation provided in places like Priscilla's Garden of Eden.

  "How many drives did you make, Jake? I lost count of the times you came back to Fort Worth after going north."

  "So did I. I went to Kansas City on several trips. Went all the way to Colorado once. Didn't like it. Pretty country, but too damn cold." He crossed his arms behind his head, enjoying the spectacle of her rouging her nipples. Her finger carried dollops of the colored salve from the tiny glass jar on the vanity to her breasts. She applied it soothingly, almost lovingly. "What about you, Priscilla? How long has it been that you've owned this place?"

  "Five years."

  "What did it cost you?"

  Hours on my back, she wanted to say. Hours with sweating pudgy farmers who complained that their wives didn't want any more children and denied them their rights as husbands, and rough cowboys who brought the stink of the stockyards in with them.

  She had worked in Jefferson first, the last stopping-off place on the frontier. But when the railroad bypassed that town, destroying it commercially, Priscilla had come to Fort Worth, where those tracks converged from all over the state. It was a raucous town full of cowboys who couldn't wait to spend the money they had made on the cattle drives.