Good God, she was the most infuriating, most unthinkable, most inappropriate female ever put on this earth- And extraordinary, a small voice interjected. Extraordinary, he admitted with a snarl.

And appealing. Too damned appealing, he growled nastily.

And he kicked his mount into motion again, making for the heart of Rapture at a gallop. He handed his horse over to Uncle Radnor at the smithy's without the usual reminder to rub him down thoroughly, and stalked straight to the tavern without seeing two of his men and Aunt Harriet Delaney scurrying to separate as they made their way back to her farmstead to begin their day's work. He blew through the tavern door and into his small room on the second floor, ripping off his coat and wrestling with his emerging feelings.

She was by turns insolent and innocent, defiant and delectable... but always unpredictable. She wheedled and bargained shamelessly, as if she enjoyed it, and she talked like a cross between a tent preacher and a snake-oil peddler! She was brash and reckless, wore skintight breeches and drank whiskey like a man. She swaggered when she walked and chased about the countryside all night in the company of men.

How many men, he wanted to know. Which men? Who?! And did she kiss them back, her mouth soft and pliant beneath theirs, opening to them, yielding them that lush, spicy heat that clung to their senses long after she was gone?

He groaned and stumbled face down onto the straw-filled ticking of the bed that couldn't quite contain all of his long frame at one time. His mind filled with colors... brilliant sea-green, ripe-cherry red, burnished gold-brown ginger... like the tarnished halo of her hair. A tarnished halo... a perfect image to describe her. There was an odd sense of goodness in her reckless vibrance, a bizarre virtue in the honesty and openness with which she eschewed feminine constraints.

She was the very antithesis of everything a woman should be, and yet he was drawn to plunge himself into the tempestuous warmth of her unthinkable appealing being. She roused the man in him like no other woman ever had-not Amanda, not Chloe- Amanda... Chloe... his very blood stopped. Just thinking those names always pounded his priorities back into their sternly-regulated order and this time it booted his entire being onto harsh new planes of determination. Suddenly the tawdry, pathetic mush of his previous thoughts appalled him. Good God.

He had a duty to perform here; ambition to satisfy. What in hell was he doing rutting about in the woods with some rebellious, half-savage tart?! He was letting her interfere with his clearly defined duty, that's what. He shuddered and turned over onto his back, staring up at the open rafters. Confusion coiled in his stomach again. It was the beast inside him, his fatal weakness.

Twice before, women had wreaked havoc in his life. Twice he'd been tempted and betrayed. Twice he'd been forced to face his family's horror, to bear the intolerable shame of disgracing the Townsend name and honor... in debacles involving women. Only now, after years of harsh, sober diligence and iron-clad propriety, was he on the verge of earning back his family's respect and his rightful place in the distinguished Townsend Companies. And nothing, he vowed grimly, nothing was going to interfere with that.

Chapter Eight.

"If you have any trouble requisitioning those supplies from the locals," Townsend said, referencing the paper he'd shoved into his lieutenant's hands the instant the fellow walked through the door, "then haul Dunbar's arse out to the front of the tavern and lash him, standing up, to that damnable 'liberty pole.' And leave him there under guard all night! I'm through pussyfooting with this lot. They'll soon see I mean business!" He jerked his second glove on and tugged his loose coat front down with an air of finality. "And while you're at it, you can start rounding up those Delbarton dullards for questioning about the source of that pole. It's a damned affront to the nation... a call to treasonous rebellion."

He paused, pressing the corners of his eyes to assuage a low, level throbbing in his head, and saw on the backs of his eyelids the twenty-foot 'liberty pole' that had been raised in the clearing in the dead of the night just past. It was a fresh-peeled pine trunk, sunk three or four feet into the ground to stabilize it, and adorned with a crudely carved: "LIB-R-TE." It was a familiar silent protest against The Act, against the tax, and against the federal presence in Rapture Valley. During their march west, they'd encountered a dozen such poles erected along their route, all appearing mysteriously overnight, on common ground. And no local ever seemed to have the faintest idea where they'd come from.

More infuriating than the pole itself was the fact that not one of his men seemed to have noticed the noise and commotion that must have accompanied raising the hellish thing. It was an alarming indication of just how drastically the grinding adversities of constant hunger and constant antagonism had worn them down.

"Are the men ready for patrol?" the major turned with a dark look at his silent junior officer and found him rather pale... looking quite sickly, in fact.

"I-I hardly think so, sir. There's been..." The haggard lieutenant swallowed hard and screwed his courage to the hilt. "It's that cider, sir. They got into it a-and..."

"Cider? What cid-" Townsend twitched, drawing the only conclusion possible. "The cider we confiscated?"

Brooks nodded warily, stepping back, bracing for a full explosion. The major didn't disappoint him.

"Dammit! Who gave them-how did they-?!" When Brooks spread his palms and braved a shrugging denial, the major tore from the room to see for himself. Shortly he was stalking through the camp, his temper flaring, his shoulder muscles knotted into aching lumps, his hands knotted into itching fists.

The men of the Maryland Ninth were sprawled everywhere, limp as noodles and just about as sensible. The large jugs they'd drained littered the central path. They were obviously empty. The men lay in tangled heaps around their smoky campfires, their tents, and local tree trunks, obviously full. The Iron Major stomped about the camp, bellowing at them and giving their inert bodies furious prods with his boot. A few managed to rouse: one or two to grin drunkenly, one totally insensible wretch to actually offer him a "snort." None made it up past their knees and one poor fellow was actually found face down in the cold-running creek. The major grabbed him by his belt and the scruff of the neck and pulled him back onto the bank, snarling that if he weren't already dead, he'd soon wish he were.

"All this," he turned on Brooks, wild-eyed and quaking with fury, "from a few damned jugs of cider?!"

"They had empty bellies, major," Brooks massaged his own hollow middle, "and they're bone-tired and sore. It went straight to their heads. We hadn't checked it for content, but it must have been strong stuff. Once they got started, they just couldn't... please, Major-" But the dusky rage in his commander's face made him choke back a plea for clemency.

The major towered, black with wrath and burning with frustration. He had a job to do, they all did. They were sent in to uphold the law, to enforce order and stability... and look at them! Drunk as David's sow, the surly, disreputable lot of them! Not only did he have to fight those cursed distillers and the stubborn locals that supported them, but now he had to battle his own men's baser impulses to make them perform their sworn duty. God-if he had only been assigned a gentlemanly troop of dragoons, he'd have had this viper's nest cleared out in three bloody days!

He turned on his heel and strode for the smithy, a painful heat in the bottom of his own empty belly. He saddled his horse himself and rode off at a gallop, following the main road blindly, burning off some of the angry energy that made him feel like he might fly apart at the seams at any moment.

He rode hard, into the dusky evening, freeing his tangled feelings and frustrations, bending low over the powerful animal beneath him. Together they raced and jumped and dodged, merged in escape from the oppression of duty and expectation.

When much of the tension and energy were spent, the major found himself near Little Bear Creek and dismounted to give his horse a drink and a rest. As he stood there, straddling the boulders imbedded in the bottom of the creek, his own fatigue and thirst turned his thoughts back to his men again. They were tired and sore and hungry. Too many of them had been conscripted into an army bent on a cause they neither understood nor cared much about. They'd endured deprivation and hunger and contempt-sometimes even his own. There was probably no true malice in their drunken spree, and no intentional mutiny. They'd simply seized a bit of comfort where they could find it.

He knelt on the rocks and drank from the clear stream himself, then led his mount back to the road that trailed through the heart of Rapture Valley. The evening was quiet and in the lowering light, he walked, absorbing the sounds; the dry-rustle of leaves, the dull thud of hooves, the shooshing of the nearby creek.

Minutes later he found himself standing before a tree stump at the site where a now-familiar path joined the road. His eyes traced the crudely cut "B" in the chiseled stump and his guts tightened. Without conscious effort he'd located the path leading to her home. He was instantly stung by the irony of his force of men laying drunk and disabled from the very brew they'd confiscated as a punishment to her. Even when he won a round with Whiskey Daniels, he never quite seemed to win. He twitched, nettled sharply by the admission. A Townsend, bested in any way by that reckless, flagrant little tart. The sight of the liberty pole flashed into his mind again.

He jammed his boot into the stirrup and bounded up into his saddle, his jaw and shoulders set. And when he applied his heels, his horse sprang into motion... headed straight for the Daniels's farmstead.

Kate Morrison was carrying a basket of potatoes up from the spring house when the sound of hooves pounding up the path halted her on the top step. In the murky evening light, she made out glowing patches of gold braid on a dark spectral form and knew instantly who approached. She suppressed a shiver at the determined wall of his shoulders and the completeness of his command over the huge horse. The great roan pounded to a halt at her feet and she had the distinct impression that the animal had stopped exactly where he'd willed it to... just short of running her down. Her heart began to beat frantically as he dismounted and faced her with a pull at his elegant hat.

"Madam."

"Major," she acknowledged him with a terse nod and raised her chin a notch. "What do you want with us?"

Excellent question, a sardonic little voice in him prodded.

"I want to see your niece, Whiskey." Heaven knew that was the truth. "I have certain... questions to put to her."

"My niece's name is Whitney, sir." Kate Morrison's authority and breeding asserted itself naturally. In the rising light of the full moon, she saw his full mouth quirk up tauntingly, as if to say he knew Whitney's name well enough. And he still chose to call her "Whiskey." The implications of that particular appellation were clear and unnerving. "I cannot think what possible answers she might give you that you are not quite capable of discovering on your own."

The major straightened, his light eyes piercing the dimness. "Still, it may save me precious time to speak with her, Madam. If it would not inconvenience you."

His last words were a veritable goad. Kate felt her face heating at the overpowering aura he exuded; he was so totally, so ruthlessly male that he set even her impervious heart quivering. And it was clear he suspected Whitney's involvement in the local whiskey trade. Why else would he make such a telling play on her name? But what did he know... and, more importantly, what did he intend to do with his knowledge?

"This way, sir," she said releasing the breath she had been holding in as she decided. They entered the fragrant, fire-warmed kitchen and found Whitney lifting a fresh pan of biscuits from the Dutch oven built into the side of the cook-hearth.

"We have a visitor, Whitney," Kate said with meaningful calm as she shed her shawl and relieved the major of his hat.

Whitney turned straight into the major's steely gaze and nearly dropped the full pan of biscuits. Everything in the room stilled temporarily, down to the wheeze of the fire and the beating of Whitney's heart. He filled the kitchen with his male presence, and in a breath, he filled Whitney as well. That soft, curly hair, that sensual set to his mouth, the wide expanse of his shoulders... Lord! What was he doing here?!

The major's eyes drifted from the floury, golden mounds in the pan she held to the pale, creamy mounds that her low-scooped bodice revealed. And his mouth watered violently on both counts. God-she was wearing a dress. It was the first time he'd seen her in womanly guise, with her hair piled up on her head, her waist cinched in by a corset. She had a tiny waist, compared with her full breasts. He swallowed hard, sending the heat that was building in him to his eyes, to keep it from settling in his loins.

Whitney recovered enough to hear the explanation her aunt Kate made about the major wanting to question her. Even through her vibrating senses, she collected the strain in her aunt's voice and the peculiar emphasis of wording that warned of the major's intent. She felt his eyes on her dress, on her liberally bared skin and flushed, embarrassed at being caught looking so "womanly." Somehow she felt it gave him an edge in their covert battle and she vowed that her appearance was all he would find womanly... and susceptible.

By the time they were ready to sit down to eat, Whitney's control was returning and the major's was unraveling. He had watched the womanly sway of her skirts, tortured by the imaginings of the movements of her rounded buttocks and her lithe, muscular legs beneath them. And while he struggled to blunt the effect of the provocative fit of her bulging bodice, the delicious aromas of meat and fresh-baked bread assailed his defenses on another, very vulnerable level. He was in turmoil inside; his mood had gone from cool and taunting to heated and surly. He was mad -stark, raving mad-to have come here!

"If it would not be misconstrued, sir," Kate faced him as Whitney and she sat down to eat, "we would offer you supper with us."

"Oh, Aunt Kate," Whitney exuded that Daniels brand of innocence, "such an offer could be seen as an attempt to compromise the major's ethics. But do be seated, Major. You can question me while I eat." She smiled sweetly as she waved him to a seat across the table from her.

He managed to sit, and Whitney noted with satisfaction that he gripped his thighs tightly with his hands. She spooned the heavenly smelling beef stew into her mouth and, feeling his eyes hard on her, made a subtle spectacle of savoring it. Those light, flaky biscuits were soon spread with pale, creamy butter and layered with sweet fried apples. She bit into them with lurid pleasure, licking some of the melted butter from her glistening lips. The major watched the dart of her tongue with predatory intensity, swallowing hard, feeling his righteous ethos sliding into a cauldron of roiling desires. His face grew dusky, his jaw clamped, and his eyes silvered. Whitney firmly hoped he was squirming inside.

He was. He was also suffering an alarming melting sensation up his spine... that was creeping into his brain. To counter the effect, he sat straighter and tried desperately to recall his reason for coming here. Questions, he recalled. Ask some damned questions, for heaven's sake, any questions!

"To what do you attribute the meager harvest this year, Mrs. Morrison?"

"A plague of vermin," Whitney said before Kate could answer. There was dangerous insolence in her tone as she brazened: "Blue locust. They've been known to strip a valley clean, left unchecked."

The major stared hard at her, fighting the watering in his mouth to answer her challenge. "And would those vermin be the sort that strip the limbs and bark from a pine tree, transport it to the center of a settlement, and sink it four feet into the ground? That sort of vermin?"

"Please, Major-" Kate stiffened, darting a panicky look between Whitney and the handsome federal.

"A liberty pole sprang up in the clearing overnight. What do you know about it?"

"A liberty pole?" Whitney's eyes grew wide. The Delbartons had been talking about making one for almost a week, ever since some of the soldiers started splitting May Donner's wood. "Why, nothing, Major."

"Where were you last night?" he gripped the edge of the table as he collected her response. An involuntary flicker in her crystalline eyes made him know she'd caught the emphasis in his statement... and the taunt behind it.

"Why, here, at home, with Aunt Kate." Whitney flicked an instinctive look at her aunt, betraying a concern the major read too fluently.

"And the night before?"

"Here, as usu-"

"No-" Kate corrected her, "the night before last you were at Aunt Sarah's, remember?" Then she turned on the major to drive home a point. "With some of the men gone and some in chains, the womenfolk don't feel safe... with soldiers prowling about the countryside at night. Charlie Dunbar's mother sometimes asks Whitney to stay with her." Her indignation was so ladylike and so adamant that it was undoubtedly genuine. She obviously knew nothing of Whitney's nightly exploits.

"Of course," Whitney tightened, driving daggers of double meaning at him, "how could I have forgotten?"

"Heavens-" Kate sucked in a breath at the sparks being exchanged across the table. She had to do something! "This is absurd. Major, we've never let a body leave the Daniels table unfilled. Ethics or no, you must have a bite to eat." As she rose anxiously to fetch it, the major's eyes crinkled knowingly at the corners.

"Liar." He hurled it quietly, dredging the bottom of his register and volume.

Whitney felt blood bursting against her liberally exposed skin. How dare he invade her own home to taunt her with their wretched encounter of yesterday morning?! Her womanly feelings were too new, too tender, not to be rasped by his calloused behavior.

"Never mind, Aunt Kate. The major is just leaving!" She pushed up and flung her finger toward the door. He didn't move at first and she strode to the pegs beside the door and held his hat out to him. And a moment later she punctuated her nonverbal command by opening the door and thrusting it wide.

His boots smacked the floor as he rose, and in three long strides he was at the door, jerking his hat from her hands. He stared down at her, his chest heaving, feeling the strange physical pull in his chest that he'd come to associate with her alone. As he pivoted and ducked out the door, he snagged her by the wrist and pulled her outside with him.

"Stop!" she shouted in a raw whisper, digging in her heels as he pulled her across the cold, moonlit yard. Her heart convulsed at the moon-wicked glow of the look he turned on her.

"Come with me, wench," he ordered in a husky voice that lowered meaningfully, "unless you'd rather your aunt heard what I have to say."

A chill went through her as heat was drawn from her limbs to fuel the sparks in her eyes. She allowed herself to be dragged along, toward the barn and the horse she could see tied by the corral railing.

"I want some answers, wench," he halted by the corner of the barn, out of sight of the house, and threw his fancy hat onto the dusty ground beside them.

"Asking questions with your hands, again, Major?" she raised her wrist, still captive in his steely fingers. But she had no time to enjoy the spark she struck in his moon-silvered eyes.

"No hands,"

Even as he dropped her wrist, his body was in motion, looming, crowding her, forcing her back toward the wall of the barn. When she banged into the weathered boards, his fists shot to the wall on either side of her, imprisoning her shoulders. A wordless sputter of protest died on her lips. She was trapped on three sides by his hard-muscled body, surrounded by his heat. And he hadn't touched her, not with his hands.

"You know where the stills are, don't you, wench? That's where you were the other night... out at a still, drinking whiskey."

"N-no," she braced, feeling he invaded the very air she breathed.

"Don't lie to me, wench. I know your man is a distiller. Who is he? Where is he? You can't go on protecting him." He was larger, more dangerous, than she'd ever seen him, and more determined. Despite what had happened between them, or because of it, he still believed she met a buck in the woods at night.

Everything about him screamed for caution: the uncompromising strength of his hard body, the arrogant beauty of his face in the unearthly light, the force of his assault on her reason. And all that fevered warning was doomed by a single shiver of feeling that vibrated in her. For some reason she didn't want him to go on believing that about her.

"It's not my man," she murmured softly, "it's my pa."

"Your pa," he echoed, absorbing it, letting it wash through him with an unexpected wave of relief. "And only your pa?"

She found her throat tightening and simply nodded. The glitter in his eyes muted to a sensual glow and his braced arms on either side of her were bending, bringing him closer by torturous degrees.

"You mean, there's just one still?" He rescued his gaze from her parted lips and found himself losing it again in the shimmering night-pools of her eyes.

"Just one."

"You know I'll find it sooner or later... and him as well." His body tightened in expectation, rebelling against the confirmation of his tight-fitting reason and against the tyranny of duty and ambition. "It'll go easier on him if you cooperate... tell me where he is."

"He's in Pittsburgh. You already know that." Her thoughts were tripping over one another. She couldn't feel her limits anymore, couldn't know whether she was telling him too much- Everything was beginning to blur around her and in her... everything but him.

"Is he really in Pittsburgh?" For some reason, when she nodded with that wondering glow in her eyes, he believed her. "But if he's in Pittsburgh, then someone else has to be running the still..."

Whitney stood very still, scarcely breathing, her body alive to his presence as she watched him draw the only conclusion possible.

Her. He swallowed that bit of information and found it went down hard. Lord- she wore a man's clothes, drank whiskey like a man, stayed out all night, and her pa was the valley's main distiller... why should it surprise him to learn she was a distiller, too? He realized that was the one thing he hadn't wanted to hear. A brief, violent struggle ensued for control of his response... and Garner triumphed over Townsend.

"I don't want to hurt you, wench."

His eyes raked her pale skin, her seductive shape, her delicate features. And the longing he'd suppressed and tried to banish slammed through him with gale force. His fevered body closed on hers as his head lowered and his senses opened. He lifted his hands from the wall beside her, and they hovered briefly at her shoulders. But he smacked his palms back against the rough wall with a fierce murmur.

"No hands."

When he hesitated to join their mouths fully, hovering in that agonizing near-touch, she ran the tip of her tongue over her lips and in the process, stroked his in irresistible invitation. His mouth closed over hers with raw dominion, taking her lips boldly, claiming the sleek wet satin of her mouth as though it were his birthright, his destined possession. And she opened to him, yielding him the response that only he commanded in her.

Her arms slid around his waist and crept up the center pillars of his muscular back as he pressed tight against her. She rose up to meet the urgency of his kiss and to satisfy her tortured need for the feel of his body against her. Her womanly dress constrained her body in ways that mimicked the hard embrace he withheld. The press of her clothes became strangely erotic, like the feel of his hands caressing her.

She rippled against him, rubbing the deliciously imprisoned mounds of her breasts up and down his ribs.

Assured by the molding of her body against him, his mouth gentled, then grew adventuresome, roaming her temples, the line of her jaw, the hollow of her throat. He nuzzled the satiny swell of her breasts and showers of sparks rained through her, lodging in her sensitive nipples and the cleft between her legs, burning, then muting to a tingling warmth. Her hands came up to glide over the intriguing planes of his face, and to savor the broadness, the hardness of his shoulders. They brushed the cool glow of his officers' braid and her eyes opened, fixing on it, getting lost in its sinuous curves. It was cool, unresponsive under the touch of her fingers, unlike the warm vital flesh of his neck beside it.

And yet it was a part of him; the insight chilled and solidified some part of her melted logic. Very much a part of him. She cast that awful onslaught of reason aside, wanting him the way a woman wants the man who awakens her. Tantalized by the memory of his body thrusting rhythmically against her soft womanflesh, she trembled with desire for that as well, and for what she knew would follow. And the realization finally filled her: she wanted the Iron Major just as much as he wanted her.

For the first time in her life, she truly wanted to be a woman. And she wanted a woman's "bargain" with a man. With every pulse of her trader's blood, she knew that with the Iron Major, it would be a paradise bargain.

"What will you take, Major?" she murmured against his neck, sending small molten spirals beneath his skin. A long, bone-melting kiss later, she surfaced again, fighting to regain her meager foothold in sanity. "It has to be a proper bargain... we have to 'settle' first. Tell me what you want."

"You know what I want, wench." He growled from deep in his throat and his body undulated along the length of hers, arching and caressing her. She moaned softly and buried her face in his coat front, meeting his thrusting body, luxuriating in the reined power inside him. Yes, she realized dizzily, she knew what he wanted.

"But we have to agree to a bargain," she whispered into his chest, into his heart.

Bargain. The second time she said it, it registered in his passion-fogged mind. His first reaction was simple confusion. His second, spreading through him like a stain of betrayal, was alarm. A bargain? He went still against her and one ragged breath later the lusty swell of his body, thrust against hers, shocked him. The impact of her words and the driving intent of his body burst through his consciousness, exploding like military flares, illuminating the dark recesses of his unthinkable desires.