King of the Mountain Read Free Page A

Reardon.” She lifted her chin a notch, answering his challenge with one of her own. “And yours?”
    Before he could answer, the sheriff opened the driver’s door and peered inside. The overhead light beamed down, startlingly bright and starkly revealing.
    “Somethin’ wrong, Mr. Cooper?” the lawman asked, his languid cadence fairly oozing solicitude.
    “Cooper?” Kitty felt the sickening kick of recognition as she stared into the silver and steel eyes of the most powerful man in these parts.
    The coal baron’s feral smile made her blood run cold. “Benjamin Cooper.”

Two
    Kitty felt as if she’d lost her power of speech, which might have been to her benefit. After all, the only time she’d had her foot out of her mouth these past few minutes was when she’d been changing feet!
    “Very funny, Mr. Cooper,” she choked out when she finally found her voice, wishing to high heaven she had something more scathing to say.
    “Call me Ben,” he encouraged her, his smile widening across his deeply tanned face. “I’ll even answer to ‘Simon’ in an emergency.”
    Kitty recalled all too well the insulting comparison she’d drawn between the infamous slave driver and the coal baron. Now she burned at the memory.
    “Sheriff—.” She shucked off the cashmere coatand scrambled out of the Cadillac. “Arrest that man!”
    The sheriff, whose Groucho Marx eyebrows compensated for what he lacked in hair, looked at her over the roof of the car. “On what grounds?”
    “Attempted murder,” she declared self-righteously.
    “Attempted murder?” Ben roared from the driver’s seat.
    “That’s a pretty serious charge,” the sheriff pointed out as he scratched his balding pate.
    “You’re damn right it is!” Ben shot out of the car, towering over the lawman and glowering menacingly at Kitty. “Are you forgetting I saved your life?”
    Her nostrils narrowed haughtily and she drew herself up to her full five foot five inch height. “Only after you tried to kill me.”
    Their eyes, his an icy gray and hers an irate blue, clashed and held over the car roof. A nearby streetlight flickered forebodingly. The sheriff headed for safer ground, waiting on the otherwise deserted sidewalk outside his office to see who would win this battle of wills.
    Ben was fighting mad over her trumped-up charge, yet the longer he studied the bristling little hillbilly who’d made it, the more intrigued he became with her.
    Not that she was much to look at right now. Her black hair was plastered to her head, partly from the rain and partly from having been mashedunder a helmet all day. Coal dust had sketched dark streaks on her pale heart-shaped face, and that dirty coverall hid a figure he remembered as being slim and shapely and honed by hard work.
    But it wasn’t her good looks—or the subtlety of them at the moment—that kept his attention riveted on her. She had a grit that the women of his experience rarely exhibited and a grace that he found enchanting. And it was those characteristics coupled with the secret sadness that emanated from her big blue eyes that piqued his interest.
    His curiosity was so powerful, so palpable that Kitty could feel it radiating through the two thousand pounds of steel and glass that separated them. It took great fortitude on her part not to turn and run from the probing stare that seemed to read her so clearly. But she stood her ground.
    “What do you say we go inside and settle this,” the sheriff suggested when it seemed that neither one of them was going to give.
    “Good idea,” Ben agreed grudgingly.
    “
Excellent
idea.” Kitty barely topped the roof of the car, but she was determined to top the coal baron’s remark.
    Ben held the door open for Kitty. Head high and shoulders squared, she swept past him like a queen. But her heart leapt when their bodies brushed. And the scent of his bay rum lingering on her collar reminded her that he had done her as much good as harm.
    The thought took