The Rustler
The Rustler
Linda Lael Miller
Where does an outlaw go when he's ready to turn straight? For Wyatt Yarbro, reformed rustler and train robber, Stone Creek is his place of redemption. And lovely Sarah Tamlin is the perfect angel to help him clean up his act…. But Sarah keeps a dark secret behind her prim and proper facade, even as her heart is lost to charming, sexy Wyatt.When a vengeful enemy prepares to unleash havoc on the peaceful town, Wyatt and Sarah will discover that they can't hide from the past. To win the fight, they must believe in something they never trusted before–the hope of tomorrow.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller returns to Stone Creek, where secrets have a way of coming to light…
Where does an outlaw go when he’s ready to turn straight? For Wyatt Yarbro, reformed rustler and train robber, Stone Creek is his place of redemption. And lovely Sarah Tamlin is the perfect angel to help him clean up his act.
But Sarah keeps a dark secret behind her prim and proper facade, even as her heart is lost to charming, sexy Wyatt. When a vengeful enemy prepares to unleash havoc on their peaceful town, Wyatt and Sarah will discover that they can’t hide from the past. To win the fight, they must believe in something they never trusted before—the hope of tomorrow.
Praise for The Rustler by #1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller
“Miller’s third Stone Creek novel gets as hot as the noontime desert. Miller’s portrayal of Sarah as a strong, independent woman sets this novel apart from customary tales of the damsel in distress and the rescuing hero. Instead, Miller focuses on Sarah and Wyatt’s shared and separate vulnerabilities and how they find it easier to face the difficulties of everyday life when they’re together. Well-developed, personable characters and a handful of loose ends will leave readers anticipating future installments.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Welcome back, Yarbros, those bad-boy outlaws turned into heroes! But it’s Miller’s intrinsic understanding of the West that is the real hero of her novels. Her characters are true to their nature, the era and the place. This story creates lasting memories of soul-searing redemption and the belief in goodness and hope.”
—RT Book Reviews
“As the attraction between Wyatt and Sarah deepens, the anticipated happy ending veers in an unexpected direction that makes this novel a real page-turner. With vibrant prose, fully realized characters, an engrossing plot set amid the dangers of the Old West, and a dash of Eastern guile thrown in for good measure, Ms. Miller has hit another bull’s-eye.”
—LoveWesternRomances.com
“My, my, there is nothing like a ruggedly handsome cowboy to make good reading. Throw in a feisty heroine, sexual tension and a tale told by bestselling author Linda Lael Miller and you have the best of the best reads. Ms. Miller’s words flow effortlessly weaving a story that captures and holds the reader spellbound. The Rustler is an awesome addition to the Stone Creek novels.”
—SingleTitles.com
“Linda Lael Miller is a good judge of horseflesh, and an astute student of human nature. Miller seems to understand her characters’ thoughts and state of mind while fulfilling her reader’s expectations. She doesn’t disappoint.”
—Armchair Interviews
The Rustler
Linda Lael Miller
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dear Reader,
Those wonderful Yarbro men are back! This time, it’s Wyatt, down on his luck after a lifetime of rustling and robbing trains, and determined to make a fresh start with Sarah Tamlin, the spirited banker’s daughter and a woman with a past.
I invite you to stop by my website, www.lindalaelmiller.com (http://www.lindalaelmiller.com), where you’ll find my blog and information on the Linda Lael Miller Scholarships for Women, a cause near and dear to my heart. As a young, divorced mom, I experienced my share of hard times, so I have a lot of sympathy for women in tough situations—and for their children, as well. I believe education is the best way to improve lives, and the scholarships, awarded annually, are my way of giving back.
I have been tremendously blessed. I’m so grateful to live on a thirty-acre horse property outside of Spokane, Washington, and I really enjoy the country life—though I also love to travel. I get to tell stories for a living—does it get any better?—and have lots of animals around.
I adore animals, obviously, and although I’m not formally associated with any group, I like to encourage people to support the shelters in their own communities first. Spokanimal and SCRAPS are my local favorites, and I know several of the dedicated folks who run them with wisdom and compassion.
My own menagerie currently includes five horses, two cats, and one Yorkie named Bernice. Buck, a gelding, and Sadie, a beagle, both gone now, live on in our hearts. Although I don’t have much time for hobbies, I love to make artist trading cards, raise peonies and read, read, read.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading this historical tale as much as I enjoyed writing it.
May you be blessed.
With love,
For Donna Hayes,
and all cowgirls everywhere.
Contents
PROLOGUE (#u2e48e493-e2b5-54a4-afc1-d8d8d0cf322d)
CHAPTER ONE (#u5823b389-8915-5024-b3fc-28cf61e914eb)
CHAPTER TWO (#u7e8cd316-6dae-5d84-9f58-adee38184c76)
CHAPTER THREE (#uc618a5c6-52a1-5d71-b6a0-268aed54c88e)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u12aee04d-4261-5432-bec1-fd737a7c5916)
CHAPTER FIVE (#ud255c627-81b1-52f7-8874-3b2c793825da)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE
Southern Arizona Territory
August, 1907
A RUSTLER’S MOON GLIMMERED faintly in the sky, a thin curve of light soon obscured by rain-ripe clouds. Wyatt Yarbro sat a little straighter in the saddle and raised the collar of his battered canvas coat, not so much against the threat of bad weather as the intuitive sense that things were about to head south, literally and figuratively. He tugged the brim of his hat lower over his eyes as the kid rode toward him, bearing the unlikely name of Billy Justice, along with a shotgun, bad skin and a contentious attitude.
Skirting the restless herd of soon-to-be-stolen cattle, Billy drew his sorrel up alongside Wyatt’s paint gelding, shifted his slight frame with an easy, soft creak of old leather.
“The boys are ready,” Billy said, in that lazy drawl of his. “You with us, or not?”
Inwardly, Wyatt sighed. Thunder rolled across the darkened sky, like a warning from God. Turn your horse and ride, cowboy, said a still, small voice deep inside him. Go now, while the getting is good.
His younger brother, Rowdy, was up north, in Stone Creek, and he’d offered Wyatt a place to stay. Said he could get him honest work, help him leave the outlaw life behind for good. Still, the town seemed far away, like some fairy-tale place. Wyatt was flat broke, his horse—won in a poker game in Abilene two weeks after he got out of a Texas prison—wasn’t fit for the trip.
He supposed Rowdy would wire him some money, if he could swallow his pride long enough to ask, but stealing would be easier. It was the only trade he’d ever learned.
“I’m with you,” Wyatt said without inflection.
Billy nodded. “Then let’s make for the border.”
Wyatt assessed the sky again, watched as a streak of lightning ripped it open in a jagged, golden gash. “I don’t like this weather,” he admitted.
Billy turned his head and spat. “You turnin’ coward on me, Yarbro?” he demanded coolly.
“Ever seen a stampede, Billy?” Wyatt countered, keeping his voice quiet. Young as Mrs. Justice’s boy was, Wyatt had him pegged for the sort who could draw and shoot without so much as a skip in his heartbeat or a catch in his breath.
The cattle, more than five hundred of them, roiled in the gulch below like water at the base of a high falls, swirling in on each other in dusty, bawling eddies of hide and horns.
“Nope,” Billy said, his tone blithe. Wyatt knew the kid was probably planning to gun him down from behind as soon as they’d delivered the herd and collected the loot. He wasn’t afraid of a pockmarked whelp, even a cold-eyed one like Billy, but the charge in the air itself made his nerves claw and scramble under his skin.
“Let’s get this done,” Wyatt answered, and rode in closer to the herd.
The wind picked up, howling over the bare Arizona desert like a banshee on the prowl for fresh corpses, but the gang, six of them in all, got the critters moving in a southerly direction. Wyatt watched Billy and his four riders even more closely than the cattle, making sure none of them had a clear shot at his back.
They funneled the herd through a narrow wash, raising dust so dense that Wyatt pulled his bandanna up over his nose and mouth and blinked to clear his eyes.
He thought about his brother as he rode. Rowdy, a former member of the infamous Yarbro gang, just as he was, had managed to set his feet on the straight and narrow path. He’d changed his ways, gotten himself a pardon, and now he not only had a wife and a new baby, he wore a star on his vest.
Despite the brewing storm, and his own uneasy feelings, Wyatt grinned wryly behind his bandanna. Rowdy, the erstwhile train robber, a lawman. That just proved what he’d always known: life was unpredictable as hell. Right when a man thought he had it all worked out in his brain, it would twist like a rattler striking from the woodpile.
Wyatt had never known any other way of living than holding up trains. Neither had Rowdy, until they pinned a badge on him and made him marshal of Stone Creek, Arizona. Soon after that, Rowdy had met and married a schoolmarm named Lark Morgan.
While he envied Rowdy a little—what would it be like to settle down with a good woman and a community of friends?—Wyatt wasn’t entirely convinced the change would stick. Once an outlaw, always an outlaw, as Pappy used to say.
And Pappy had been in a position to know.
Wyatt felt a mingling of irritation and sorrow as he thought of his father. If he’d been standing over the old man’s grave at that moment, he wouldn’t have known whether to weep or spit on the headstone.
He was debating the virtues of one approach over the other when a second bolt of lightning struck, this time in the center of the herd. Eerie light illuminated the whole scene—the terrified cattle and the other men stood out in sharp relief against the darkness for a long, bluish-gold moment—and then all hell broke loose, exploding in every direction like dynamite tossed into a campfire.
Wyatt’s horse reared, shrieking with panic, and nearly threw him.
He caught the scent of scorched flesh. Cattle bellowed in fear, and the other riders scattered, fleeing for their lives.
The paint gelding wheeled in the midst of hoof-pounding chaos, and though he fought to stay in the saddle, Wyatt found himself rushing headlong for the ground. The wind knocked out of him by the fall, he lay there in the dirt, blinded by dust, and waited to be trampled to death.
Cattle pounded past him, shaking the earth itself.
He didn’t know where his horse was—he couldn’t see anything—but he supposed the poor critter was already dead. If the horns hadn’t gotten old Reb, the hooves would have.
Wyatt managed to roll onto his belly, raise himself onto his hands and knees. It was a shame he wasn’t going to survive the stampede, because it would have made a hell of a story.
The cattle continued to rush past him, spilling around some shadowy barrier. Amazed at his own calm—the whole thing might have been a yarn spun by some old geezer in a saloon—Wyatt felt his way forward and came up against the side of a dead steer. Ducking low, he felt the sharp edge of a hoof brush his right shoulder, but the crushing pain he’d expected never came.
He huddled close to the dead cow and waited it out, praying his horse hadn’t suffered. Reb was a good old cayuse, deserving of green pastures and peace. He should have died with fresh grass between his teeth, not in the middle of a stampede.
Lightning lit up the landscape again, and then again, and Wyatt saw more dead cattle around him. He began to think he might make it after all, but he didn’t catch a glimpse of Billy or the others, and he was still fretting for the horse.
Gradually, after what seemed like the better part of a politician’s oration at a Fourth-of-July picnic, the din subsided and the ground stopped quaking.
Breathing slowly and deeply, Wyatt waited another few moments before daring to get to his feet. Eyes full of dirt, he wiped his face hard with the bandanna, then threw it aside.
He gave a low whistle, more out of habit than any hope that Reb would come.
But he did. The gelding nudged Wyatt between the shoulder blades, nearly knocking him off his feet, and nickered companionably.
Overjoyed, figuring he must be imagining things, Wyatt turned.
And there was Reb, reins dangling, bleeding where a horn had nicked him on the right side, and coated in red Arizona dust.
His heart swelling in his throat, Wyatt swung up into the saddle.
Pistol shots punctured intermittent rumblings of thunder, now distant, like the cattle.
Maybe Billy and his gang were trying to turn the herd.
Maybe a posse was making its presence known.
One way or the other, Wyatt Yarbro had seen the light.
He reined Reb to the north and made for Stone Creek.
CHAPTER ONE
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN the suffocating heat that had Miss Sarah Tamlin thinking of perdition—though of course three days of endless sermons had to be a factor—and how she’d almost certainly wind up there one day, as she pounded out the wheezing refrain of “Shall We Gather at the River” for a sweltering congregation. Seated at an organ hauled into Brother Hickey’s big revival tent in the bed of a buckboard, Sarah endured, perspiring, longing to fan herself with her sheet music or brush away the damp tendrils of hair clinging to the sides of her neck.
Every year in August, sure as the hay harvest, Brother Hickey and his roustabouts descended on the community like a circus without animals or parades, erected a canvas sanctuary on the grassy banks of Stone Creek, and set about saving the heathen from certain damnation.
A portion of the congregation seemed to deem it necessary to get saved on an annual basis. There wasn’t much to do in a place the size of Stone Creek, after all, and with no doubts about the fate of their immortal souls weighing on their minds, folks would be free to enjoy the picnic that always followed the preaching.
Sarah forced the last few notes of the old hymn through the organ pipes and sighed with relief. The air was heavy and still—a baby gave a brief, fretful squall—and then, remarkably, a breeze swept through the gathering, as soft and cool as the breath of heaven itself.
Startled, Sarah looked up from the cracked and yellowed keys of Brother Hickey’s well-traveled organ, over the turned heads of the salvation-seekers, and saw a man standing at the back of the tent. Tall and clean-shaven, with dark hair and eyes, he carried a dusty round-brimmed hat in one hand. His clothes were trail-worn, and the holster riding low on his right hip, gunslinger fashion, was empty. A grin tilted a corner of his mouth slightly upward.
Brother Hickey, moving behind his portable pulpit, which jolted over country roads and cattle trails right alongside the organ, cleared his throat and opened his Bible. “Have you come to be saved, stranger?” he boomed, employing his preacher voice.
The dark-haired man took a few steps forward. He moved with an easy grace, and for the space of a skipped heartbeat, Sarah wondered if he was some avenging angel, sent to put a stop to the show. “No, sir,” he said. “I don’t reckon I have.” His gaze strayed to Sarah, sitting there in the back of that buckboard, her best calico dress soaked under the armpits. The grin widened to a fleeting smile, as if he somehow knew the stays of her corset were stabbing the underside of her left breast, and all her other secrets, as well. A smile that imprinted itself on some sweet and wholly uncharted place inside her. “That was fine music, ma’am,” he told her directly. “I hope there’ll be more of it.”
Then, affably apologetic for disrupting the proceedings, he sat down next to Marshal Yarbro, who was grinning, and the two of them bumped shoulders.
Brother Hickey lifted his hands heavenward, closed his eyes in earnest and silent prayer, and then slammed a fist down onto the pulpit. Everybody jumped, Sarah noticed, except for the marshal and the stranger sitting beside him.
“Now is the day of Salvation!” Brother Hickey thundered, his copious white whiskers quavering. “Sinners, come forward and be bathed in the Blood of the Lamb!”
Several people rose and approached the makeshift altar, though most of the repenting had been done at previous services. There was dear old Mrs. Elsdon, who’d probably never committed an actual sin, two or three ladies of ill repute from Jolene Bell’s saloon, brothel and bathhouse, though Miss Bell herself was noticeably absent, a handful of cowpunchers from Sam O’Ballivan’s ranch, mostly likely hoping to speed things along so the picnic could get underway.
If Sarah hadn’t been staring at the stranger, she’d have been amused. The revival was in its third and final day, and by now, even the most pious were ready to socialize over fried chicken and apple pie. The children were restless, longing to chase each other under the shady oak trees, wade in the creek, and make noise.
The praying and the saving went on for a long time, but at last Brother Hickey was through gathering in the lost sheep. He signaled Sarah, and she arranged her fingers on the keyboard, tried to put the dark-haired visitor out of her mind, and played a thunderous rendition of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
As soon as she struck the final chord, the benches emptied and the stampede began.
Sarah sat still on the hard stool in front of the organ, almost faint with relief, her eyes closed. It was over for another year. As soon as everyone had left the tent, she would climb down from the bed of the wagon, slip out the back way, and make her way home. She kept a jar of tea cooling in the springhouse, and when she’d drunk her fill, she’d strip, stuff her corset into the stove, and take a sponge bath.
“Miss? It is ‘Miss,’ isn’t it?”
Sarah opened her eyes, saw the stranger standing right beside the buckboard, looking up at her. Again, she felt it, a peculiar jolting sensation that brought a blush to her cheeks, as though he’d read her thoughts and even imagined her shut away in her bedroom, naked, sluicing her flesh with water from a basin. She resisted a humiliating urge to smooth her hair, sit up straighter. “Yes,” she said stiffly.
“Wyatt Yarbro,” the man said, putting out a hand.
Sarah hesitated, then took it, though tentatively. His fingers were strong, calloused, and cool as the breeze he’d blown in on. “Sarah Tamlin,” she allowed, feeling foolish and much younger than her twenty-seven years.
“Would you like some help getting down from there?”
Short of lifting her skirts and leaping to the sawdust floor, as she would normally have done, Sarah had no graceful options. “All right,” she replied shyly. Then she climbed into the buckboard seat, careful not to let her ankles show, and Wyatt Yarbro put his hands on her waist and lifted her down. She stood looking up at him, stunned by the effect of his touch. Light-headed, she swayed slightly, and he steadied her.
His eyes were a deep brown, and they glinted with mischief and something else, too—some private, deep-seated sorrow. “I reckon it would be a sight cooler outside, under those oak trees alongside the creek,” he said.
Sarah merely nodded. Let herself be escorted out of the revival tent on Mr. Yarbro’s arm, in front of God and everybody.
Rowdy approached as Wyatt reclaimed his pistol from the table set aside for the purpose, his old yellow dog, Pardner, at his heels, and tipped his hat to Sarah.
“I didn’t see Mrs. Yarbro in the congregation,” Sarah said. She liked Lark, a former schoolteacher who’d stirred up quite a scandal when she took up with the marshal.
“The baby’s getting teeth, and it makes him fractious,” Rowdy replied. “They’ll be along later, when the heat lets up.” He turned slightly, gave Wyatt an affectionate slap on the shoulder. “I’d introduce my brother properly,” he added, “but it seems you’ve already made his acquaintance.”
“I’m the good-looking one,” Wyatt said.
Just then, Fiona Harvey showed up, holding a plate piled high with fried chicken, potato salad and apple crumble. Fiona, who was thirty if she was a day, wanted a husband. Everybody knew that.
When and if Fiona managed to get married, Sarah would become the town spinster.
“You look hungry,” Fiona told Wyatt, batting her sparse eyelashes.
Sarah, who considered Fiona a friend, simmered behind a cordial smile.
Wyatt tipped his head and flashed a grin at Fiona. “Why, thank you, ma’am,” he said, accepting the plate.
Rowdy rolled his eyes, caught the expression on Sarah’s face, and winked at her.
“You’re welcome to come and sit with us,” Fiona simpered, indicating a cluster of women sitting on a blanket under a nearby tree.
The marshal took the plate from Wyatt’s hands and gave it back to Fiona. “My brother’s much obliged,” he said smoothly, “but we’ve been expecting him, so Lark’s got a big spread on the table at home.”
“Thanks just the same, though,” Wyatt said.
Fiona took the rebuff gracefully, said she hoped Mr. Yarbro would come back for the fireworks and the dance that would take up after sunset, and he replied that he might well do that. With a sidelong glance at Sarah, he allowed as how he enjoyed fireworks.
She blushed again, oddly flustered.
And Fiona pressed the plate into her hands. “Take this to your papa,” she told Sarah. “Heaven knows, he’ll appreciate a decent supper, the way you cook.”
“Why, thank you, Fiona,” Sarah said.
Wyatt and Rowdy exchanged glances, and one of them chuckled.
Fiona smiled and walked away.
“Give my regards to your father,” Rowdy said, as Sarah turned to go, once again at a loss for words. The next time she saw Fiona, she’d have plenty to say, though.
“I’d better see Miss Tamlin home,” Wyatt said, and before Rowdy could protest that Lark had dinner waiting, he’d taken Sarah’s arm and escorted her halfway to the road.
Since it would be rude to tell him she could get home just fine on her own, Sarah bit her lip and marched along, resigned, carrying the plate like a crown on a velvet cushion.
An old spotted horse with a long cut on its side ambled along behind them, bridle jingling, reins wrapped loosely around the saddle horn.
Sarah looked back.
“That’s just Reb,” Wyatt said.
“What happened to his side?”
“He had a run-in with a steer a while back. He’s healing up fine, though.”
Sarah wanted to ask a thousand other questions, but all of them jammed up in the back of her throat. She was sweating, her hair felt as though it would escape its pins at any moment, and she could almost feel the flames of Brother Hickey’s beloved hellfire licking at her hem.
Mr. Yarbro donned his dusty hat, which made him look like a highwayman out of some dime novel. Sarah was painfully conscious of his hand, cupping her elbow, and the way he moved, with a sort of easy prowl.
“Are you really a bad cook?” he asked, visibly restraining a grin.
“Yes,” Sarah admitted, with a heavy sigh.
He chuckled. “Guess that’s why you’re not taken,” he said. “No other explanation for it, with looks like yours.”
Sarah was scandalously pleased, and determined to hide the fact. She didn’t think about her appearance much, given the busy life she led and her naturally practical turn of mind, but she knew she was...passable. Her hair was dark, and she kept it shiny with rainwater shampoos, vinegar rinses and a hundred brushstrokes every night. She had good skin, strong teeth, exceedingly blue eyes and a slender but womanly figure.
For all that, she was an old maid, too plainspoken and too smart to suit most men. Most likely, Mr. Yarbro was merely dallying with her.
“My looks are in no way remarkable, Mr. Yarbro,” she said, “and we both know it.” She paused. Then, ever the banker’s daughter, started adding things up in her brain. “Are you an outlaw, like your brother was?” she inquired bluntly.
“I used to be,” he said, surprising her.
She’d expected another answer, she realized. A lie, falling easily from those expressive lips of his. Faced with the stark truth, she didn’t know what to say.
Wyatt laughed and resettled his hat.
“What did you do?” Sarah asked, once she’d found her voice. They’d entered Stone Creek proper by then, passing Rowdy’s office first, strolling along the sidewalk past the mercantile and her father’s bank. The sun was setting, and old Mr. Shaefer was lighting the gas streetlamps, one by one.
“Robbed a train or two,” Wyatt said.
“My goodness,” Sarah remarked.
“You’re safe with me, Miss Tamlin,” he assured her, grinning again. “I’ve seen the error of my ways and I’m determined to take the high road, like my brother did. Are you planning to head back to the creek for the dancing and the fireworks?”
Sarah shook her head, bemused.
“Then I reckon I won’t bother to, either.”
So he hadn’t been taken with Fiona, then. Inwardly, Sarah gave a deep sigh.
All too soon, and not nearly soon enough, they’d reached the gate in front of Sarah’s house.
He opened the gate for her, stood back politely while she passed through it. When she looked over her shoulder, he touched the brim of his hat.
“Good night, Sarah Tamlin,” he said. The glow of a nearby streetlamp cast his fine features into shadow. The paint horse waited politely on the sidewalk, nibbling at the leaves of Sarah’s favorite peony bush.
Sarah swallowed, rattled again. “Good night, Mr. Yarbro,” she replied. Then she turned and hurried along the walk, up the porch steps, into the house. When she pulled aside a lace curtain to peer out, the train robber was gone, and so was his horse.
* * *
WYATT ATE TWO PLATES full of supper, admired Lark, who was pretty, made the acquaintance of the other younger brother, Gideon, he’d nearly forgotten he had, and dandled the baby on his knee for a while. The little kid was cute, if a mite fractious in temperament. His name was Hank, and he looked just like Rowdy.
The big kid, Gideon, gave Wyatt a suspicious once-over and took off for the festivities down by the creek. It was full dark by then, and fireworks spread like chrysanthemums against the sky. Wyatt, Rowdy and the baby sat on the porch steps in front of Rowdy’s small house, conveniently located in back of the jail, listening to the crickets, the sound of distant merriment, and the tinny tune of some saloon piano. Lark was inside, doing the things women did after they’d served a meal.
“You’ve done well for yourself, Rob,” Wyatt said quietly, using his brother’s given name. “A fine woman, a steady job, a son. I envy you a little.”
Rowdy leaned back on the porch step, resting on his elbows. Silvery light from the fireworks caught in his fair hair. “No reason you can’t have the same,” he said.
“No reason except two years in a Texas prison,” Wyatt replied. He’d told Sarah straight out that he’d robbed trains, but he hadn’t mentioned the stretch behind bars. With a woman, a little honesty went a long way.
“Everybody’s done things they’re not proud of, Wyatt.” Rowdy shifted, looked reluctant. “About Sarah—”
“What about her?” Wyatt asked, too quickly.
Rowdy considered a little longer before answering. “She works in her father’s bank,” he said. “Every cowpoke between here and Tucson has tried to court her, but she’s having none of it. I think she’s one of those—well—career women.”
“Career women?” Wyatt echoed. During supper, he’d learned that Lark had inherited a whole railroad from her first husband, and she ran it from Stone Creek, by mail and telegram, with a baby balanced on one hip. “You mean, like your wife?”
Rowdy colored up a little. “Lark’s different,” he said. “Womanly.”
Wyatt considered the fire he’d glimpsed in Sarah’s blue eyes, her slender waist, her delectable breasts, ripe for holding in a man’s hands. He imagined taking the pins from her ebony-colored hair and watching it fall to her hips in heavy, silken waves. She was “womanly” enough for him, and then some.
“I might as well tell you,” he told Rowdy, “that I intend to marry Sarah Tamlin as soon as I’ve got steady wages coming in.”
Rowdy’s mouth fell open. “Wyatt, you just met her. She’s got a temper, and she plays poker.”
Wyatt chuckled. “Poker? Even better!”
“She smokes cigars,” Rowdy said.
“I might have to break her of that,” Wyatt replied, enjoying the image of delicate little Sarah puffing on a stogy.
Rowdy thrust out a sigh. “Wyatt, what I’m trying to tell you is, she won’t have you. You’re an outlaw. She’s a blue-blooded banker’s daughter with a college education.”
“And I’m not good enough for her?”
Rowdy started to protest.
“Hold on,” Wyatt said, handing Hank over, since he felt a little soggy around the posterior region. “I know I’m not good enough for Sarah. Pappy wasn’t good enough for Ma, either, but she loved him until the day she died.”
Sadness flickered in Rowdy’s eyes. He’d been Miranda’s favorite, her boy Rob, and he was younger than Wyatt. He couldn’t be expected to remember the early days, how she’d laughed and sung under her breath whenever Pappy came home from his travels.
“She wasn’t happy,” Rowdy said.
“She bore Pappy six sons,” Wyatt reminded him. “Ma had plenty of chances to leave, Rowdy. She was a good-looking woman. Even after we were old enough to take care of ourselves, she stayed right on that farm. Why do you think she did that?”
Rowdy relaxed a little. “Ma was Ma. Sarah is Sarah. She’d never throw in with an outlaw, Wyatt. She’d figure you were after her papa’s money, or out to rob his bank.”
Wyatt stood, stretched. Rowdy and Lark’s house was small, so he’d be sharing an empty jail cell with Gideon until he found a bunk someplace. “Where can a man get a bath in this town?” he asked.
Rowdy laughed. “We’ve got a real fancy tub right here in the house—hot running water, the whole works. Talk of the town. You can use that.”
Wyatt didn’t want to disrupt the household, and he felt shy about stripping down under the same roof with a married woman. It was an unfamiliar compunction. “I’d rather not do that,” he said.
“Then I’ll drag a washtub into the jailhouse and you can heat water on the stove,” Rowdy said, rising to his feet, the baby in the curve of his arm. “I’ve got some extra clothes you can wear until we get you some duds.”
“Pump water will do,” Wyatt said. “If it wasn’t for that revival, I’d go down to the creek to bathe.” He swallowed a good-size portion of his pride. “And I’ll pay you back for the new rigging, Rowdy.”
“I know,” Rowdy answered.
An hour later, alone in the jailhouse, Wyatt poured the last bucket of water into an old tin washtub, dented and spotted with rust, peeled off his clothes, and sank into it.
It wasn’t the Blood of the Lamb, but for the time being, it would do.
CHAPTER TWO
GIDEON ALMOST GOT HIMSELF SHOT, banging into the jail like he did, in the middle of the night, with Wyatt sleep-flummoxed and in the altogether and all. He had the .45 cocked and aimed before he realized where he was, and who he was dealing with.
“Shit,” Wyatt said, wrenching the thin blanket up over himself and falling back on his cot with a sigh of relief, the pistol still in his right hand. “You oughtn’t to bust in on a man like that. I nearly put a bullet in you.”
Gideon slouched onto the cot opposite Wyatt’s, illuminated by a beam of moonlight straying in through the barred window, and wrenched off one of his boots. “I live here,” he said, and it was clear from his tone that he was none too pleased to be sharing his quarters. “Except when there’s a prisoner, of course. Anyhow, it wouldn’t have been the first time somebody put a bullet in me.”
Therein lies a tale, Wyatt thought.
“Hell of a place to call home,” he said, grimacing a little at the irony of the whole situation. After two years in the hoosegow, he’d ended up sleeping behind bars again. He reckoned it was God’s idea of a joke. “Where do you sleep when somebody gets themselves arrested?”
“Around,” Gideon said, after a long and studious pause. “I’ll be heading out for college pretty soon. I mean to be a Pinkerton man, or sign on as a Wells Fargo agent.”
The underlying message was clear enough: Don’t go thinking I mean to be an outlaw, like you, just because we’re kin.
“Who’d have thought it,” Wyatt mused, in a wry undertone, staring up at the low, shadowed ceiling of the cell. “Two of Payton Yarbro’s boys turning out to be lawmen. He must be rolling over in his grave.”
The boy stripped to his skivvies and stretched out on the cot. “Pappy died fighting for what was right,” he said. “What are you doing here? In Stone Creek, I mean?”
“Just looking for a place to be,” Wyatt answered. He didn’t expect the kid to trust him, the way Rowdy did. He and Gideon might have the same blood flowing through their veins, but in every other way, they were strangers. In fact, he kind of admired his younger brother’s caution, figuring it must have come from their ma’s side, since Pappy had never—to Wyatt’s knowledge anyway—exhibited the trait. “Who shot you?”
“Happened at a dance,” Gideon answered. “I’ll tell you about it some other time.” For a few minutes after that, he was quiet, except for some creaking of the old rope springs supporting his mattress as he settled his sizable frame for sleep.
The silence, though blessed to Wyatt’s ears, did not endure. “I saw you walking Sarah Tamlin home today,” Gideon remarked. “And I reckon you know her father owns the Stockman’s Bank.”
Wyatt smiled in the darkness, though a wing of sadness brushed the back of his heart. Most likely, he’d never really know Gideon, or be known by him, since the boy was bound for some far-off place. College. It was a thing Wyatt couldn’t imagine, though he’d read every book he could get his hands on. “You figure I’ve switched from holding up trains to robbing banks?”
“I’m just warning you, that’s all. Rowdy takes his job as marshal seriously. Brother or not, if you break the law, he’ll shut that door on you and turn the key. Don’t think he won’t.”
“I appreciate your concern,” Wyatt said dryly.
Another pause descended, long and awkward. The boy was brimming with questions, Wyatt knew, but asking them required some pride-swallowing.
“Tell me about the others,” Gideon murmured.
“The others?” Wyatt hedged.
“You know who I mean—Nicholas and Ethan and Levi. Pa told me their names, but not much else.”
“It’s late,” Wyatt answered. “If you want to know more about the family history, why don’t you ask Rowdy?”
“He won’t talk about them.”
“Maybe he’s got reason, and you ought to accept that and let the matter rest.”
“I’ve got a right to know about my own brothers, don’t I?”
Again, a sigh escaped Wyatt. He cupped his hands behind his head and closed his eyes, but sleep, the delicious, dreamless refuge he’d been enjoying earlier, eluded him. “Did it ever occur to you that it might be better all around if you didn’t? It isn’t always so, but there’s some truth in that old adage about ignorance being bliss.”
“Tell me.”
“Will you shut up and let me sleep if I do? I’ve got things to do in the morning—like find work.”
“I will,” Gideon agreed staunchly.
“I’m the eldest,” Wyatt recited dutifully. “Nick is a year younger. He’s always been a bit on the delicate side, not much for outlawing. Last I heard, he was living in Boston, writing poems and starving. By now, he’s probably contracted consumption—he’d enjoy a disease like that. Then come the twins—Ethan and Levi. Levi’s a little slow—and Ethan is a born killer. Rowdy is next in line, and I figure you probably know as much about him as he wants you to.”
“What was he like—before?”
“Tough. Fast with a gun. Smart as hell. Not much he was ever scared of, as far as I could tell. That’s how he got the nickname. Ma called him by his given name, Rob—she had a soft spot for him.” Wyatt thought he heard the boy swallow hard, over there on his cot. It struck him—with a brief but hard pang—that he probably knew more about Billy Justice and the members of his gang than he did about Gideon, his own brother.
“Pappy said Ma died having me,” Gideon said quietly, revealing a great deal more about himself in that one statement than he’d probably intended.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Wyatt said.
There was a shrug in Gideon’s voice when he answered. “She’d be alive now, if it hadn’t been for me,” he argued.
“You can’t know that for sure,” Wyatt pointed out, feeling sorry for the kid. It was a rung up the ladder, he reckoned, from feeling sorry for himself—he’d done enough of that in prison.
Gideon was quiet again, but just long enough for Wyatt to start hoping the palavering was over, so he could drift back into oblivion. He slept like a dead man, and rarely remembered his dreams, if he had any, and he considered that a blessing. Other men he’d known, back in Texas, hadn’t been so fortunate.
“There are some things a man just has to let go of,” he told Gideon.
“I reckon,” Gideon agreed, but without much conviction.
Wyatt rolled onto his side, with his back to his brother, and punched down his pillow, though it was already flat, figuring his saddle would have served better. Been cleaner, too. “Good night,” he said, with a yawn.
“What was she like?” Gideon asked. “Ma, I mean.”
Wyatt suppressed another sigh. Stayed on his side, eyes wide-open, staring at the splintery, raw-timbered wall. “She was a fine woman,” he said. “Half again too good for Pappy, that’s for certain. She loved him, though.”
At last, Gideon fell silent, though Wyatt knew there would be more questions, right along. With luck, they’d be ones he could answer.
* * *
THE MORNING AFTER Wyatt Yarbro walked her home from the revival picnic, Sarah overslept. She bolted awake, flustered, and scrambled out of bed, groping for her wrapper, wrenching it on, not bothering to shove her bare feet into house slippers.
“Papa?” she called, from the top of the back stairs leading down into the kitchen. “Papa!”
Dear God, suppose he’d wandered off again? The last time, he’d sneaked out wearing only a striped nightshirt and his best beaver top hat; she’d been lucky then, catching up to him at the corner, but Mrs. Madison, their neighbor, had witnessed the spectacle. Sarah had lied, smiling a brittle smile and explaining, perhaps too quickly, that her father had been sleepwalking lately.
The lying hadn’t been the worst part, though—Sarah lied on a daily basis, to such an extent that she made notes in a ledger book in order to be consistent. No, the terrible thing had been seeing her intelligent, affable father looking so bewildered.
The back door was still locked; Sarah rushed to the front.
Ephriam Tamlin, founder, president and holder of majority shares in the Stockman’s Bank, sat on the porch step, spine straight, a shotgun lying across his knees. He’d stuffed himself into a moth-eaten army uniform, Union blue.
Sarah put a hand to her heart. Drew a deep breath. “Papa,” she said, careful to speak softly, so she wouldn’t startle him.
“They’ve come, Nancy Anne,” he said, without turning to look up at her. “The Rebs are here.”
Sarah sat down beside him, tightening the belt of her wrapper and offering a silent prayer that no one would pass on the sidewalk and see them taking the morning air in such inappropriate garb. She reached for the shotgun, but Ephriam gripped it with strong, age-spotted hands.
“I saw their tent,” Ephriam went on. “Bold as Lucifer, those Confederates. Made camp right on the banks of Stone Creek. Heaven help us all if it’s Quantrill.”
Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, swallowed a hard lump of misery before attempting to speak. She laid a gentle hand on the faded blue sleeve of her father’s coat. “Papa,” she whispered. “Look at me.”
He turned, his kindly blue eyes blinking behind the thick, smudged lenses of his spectacles. This was the man who had been her rock, before and after her mother died. He’d protected her, provided for her. Helped her keep a shattering secret. Now, he looked befuddled, as though he knew he ought to be able to place her, but couldn’t quite manage it.
“It’s me, Papa,” she said. “Sarah. And the war has been over for forty-two years.”
He blinked again, rapidly now, and looked down at his ancient uniform and the shotgun resting across his lap. He was sixty-seven, too young for dementia. “I’ve had another spell,” he said, with a look of such mortified regret that Sarah felt bruised inside.
Gently, she took the shotgun from his hands. “No harm done,” she said, her voice hoarse with emotion. It probably wasn’t true, of course. He’d glimpsed Brother Hickey’s tent and mistaken it for a Confederate camp, and unless he’d followed the creek both ways, he must have walked right through town—dressed up in his old uniform, with the shotgun held smartly against his shoulder, like a soldier on patrol. Heaven only knew how many people had seen him, and were even now passing the word over fences and clotheslines.
“I’m sorry, Sarah,” he said, looking so wretched that fresh tears scalded her eyes.
“Come inside and change,” she replied, with an attempt at a reassuring smile. “I’ll make breakfast, and we’ll go to the bank and attend to business, just like we always do.”
Ephriam nodded, rose stiffly from the step. Looked down at his uniform with a rueful shake of his head. “I’m not the man I used to be,” he said sadly.
“Nonsense,” Sarah said briskly, once they were inside the house and out of sight of the neighbors. She set the shotgun aside with caution and straightened his blue coat. “You’re Ephriam Tamlin, head of the Stockman’s Bank. Now, what would you like for breakfast?”
* * *
THE TELEGRAPH OPERATOR showed up just as Rowdy, Gideon, Lark and Wyatt were finishing up their morning meal. Stood panting in the open doorway, skinny and sweating, a sheet of yellow paper clasped in one hand.
Rowdy immediately pushed back his chair and rose.
The baby, perched on Lark’s lap while she spooned oatmeal into his mouth, started at the commotion, and old Pardner gave a questioning bark but didn’t rise from the hooked rug next to the cookstove.
“There’s been a lynching down near Haven,” sputtered the little man on the threshold. He looked like a scarecrow in Sunday clothes. “Bunch of ranchers caught a couple of cattle thieves and strung ’em up. They want you to come. You and Sam O’Ballivan. I sent Zeke Reynolds out to Stone Creek Ranch with the news.”
A chill trickled down Wyatt’s spine. For a moment, he was out there under that rustler’s moon again, in the aftermath of a storm and a stampede he’d been lucky to survive, distant shots echoing in his ears.
Rowdy snatched the telegram from the messenger’s hand and scanned it a couple of times, in the way of a man who hoped it might say something different if he read it enough. Swore under his breath.
“You’re not a Ranger anymore,” Lark said quietly, gazing at her husband with luminous brown eyes. Her hair was fair, like Rowdy’s, and shorter than most women’s, just touching her shoulders. “And you’re the marshal of Stone Creek, not Haven.”
“If Sam goes,” Rowdy told his wife, avoiding her eyes, “I’ll be riding with him.”
“Me, too,” Gideon said.
Wyatt didn’t speak, and that was a hard thing, not offering to help. If there was one place he couldn’t afford to be seen in, it was that little border town, just outside of which he and Billy Justice and the boys had helped themselves to more than five hundred head of cattle.
“You’re staying right here,” Rowdy told Gideon, but his tone lacked conviction. Like as not, Gideon would get his way.
Meanwhile, Wyatt saw his dream of settling down, living under his own name instead of yet another alias, marrying up with a woman like Sarah and raising kids and cattle, scatter into the air like the fluff from a dandelion head. As soon as Rowdy and Sam O’Ballivan rode out, he would, too—heading in the opposite direction.
He should have known he couldn’t live in the open, like ordinary men.
Rowdy handed the telegraph operator a coin and dismissed him with a muttered “Thanks” and a distracted wave of one hand, reading the message again.
“If you’re going to Haven,” Lark said firmly, getting to her feet, swinging the baby onto her hip in the same motion, “so are Hank and I.”
“Who’s going to mind Stone Creek?” Wyatt asked, not because he cared much about the answer, but because he thought Rowdy might get suspicious if he didn’t say something. “Is there a deputy?”
A slow grin broke across Rowdy’s strained, thoughtful face. “Yes,” he said. “I’m looking at him.”
Wyatt felt hot color rush up his neck. “Me?”
Rowdy nodded. “You,” he said.
At last, Wyatt stood. “I don’t know anything about being a lawman,” he protested, but carefully. “Until two years ago, I had a price on my head.”
“So did I, at one time,” Rowdy said, unfazed. He could be like an old dog mauling a soup bone when he wanted something. Changing his mind wouldn’t be easy, if it was possible at all. “Turned out pinning on a badge was my salvation,” he said, catching Lark’s eye as she set the baby down on the rug beside the dog and moved to begin clearing the table. “That and a good woman willing to take a chance on a former train robber.”
Lark blushed prettily. “If you think you’re going to charm me out of going to Haven, Rowdy Yarbro,” she said, “you are sadly mistaken. As soon as I’ve done these dishes, I mean to pack for the trip.”
“Gideon will take care of the dishes,” Rowdy said. He was watching Wyatt again, though, and there was something disconcerting in his eyes, an intent, measuring expression. They hadn’t talked about the months between Wyatt’s release and his arrival in Stone Creek—there hadn’t been time. But Rowdy was a hard man to fool, and he clearly had his suspicions.
Gideon banged the dishes and cutlery around in the sink, but he didn’t protest the washing-up.
“It might be better if I just moved on,” Wyatt said. “I’m not cut out to uphold the law. Hell, it’s all I can do to stay on the right side of it. You know that.”
“Stone Creek is a quiet town,” Rowdy answered easily. “Most you’d run up against would be drunken cowboys, or railroad workers whooping it up on a Saturday night.”
Gideon grumbled something about getting shot at a dance, and did Rowdy call that quiet? But Wyatt was too focused on staring down the marshal of Stone Creek to pursue the matter right then.
“Gideon Yarbro,” Lark called from the bedroom, where she could be heard opening and shutting bureau drawers, “if you break one of my good dishes slamming them around like that, I’ll horsewhip you from one end of Main Street to the other!”
Exasperated, Wyatt shoved his hands into the hip pockets of his borrowed denim pants. Everything he was wearing, save his boots, pistol and gun belt—he’d left that outside out of deference to Lark—belonged to Rowdy. He sure hadn’t counted on adding a badge to the getup. “Why is a lynching in some other town any of your concern, anyhow?” he asked.
“I wrote you about it,” Rowdy said, still watching Wyatt a little too closely for his liking. “Told you what happened there.”
Wyatt’s mouth went dry. “I guess that particular letter didn’t catch up with me,” he said. He and Rowdy had written each other on and off for years, but it was a scattershot sort of thing. He’d ride into a town, stop in at the post office if there happened to be one, and inquire if there was mail for him, sent care of general delivery. Sometimes, there was. More often, there wasn’t.
A month ago, he’d wound up in Tucson, and there was a letter waiting from Rowdy, full of news about Lark and the baby and his job in Stone Creek. He’d related the story of Pappy’s death, and said if Wyatt wanted honest work, a friend of his named Sam O’Ballivan was always looking for cowpokes.
At the time, Wyatt had regarded that letter as a fluke of the postal system.
Now, he figured Rowdy must have figured he’d wind up in the Arizona Territory eventually, maybe looking for Pappy, and wished he’d never set foot in the post office in Tucson. Or, better yet, thrown in with the likes of Billy Justice before Rowdy offered him a fresh start.
“I can’t stay, Rowdy,” he said.
“You’ll stay,” Rowdy said.
“What makes you so damn sure?”
“That old nag of yours is practically dead on his feet. He doesn’t have another long ride in him.”
“He made it here, didn’t he?”
Rowdy didn’t seem to be listening. “I’ve got a spare gelding out there in the barn. You can ride him if you see the need. Name’s Sugarfoot, and he’ll throw you if you try to mount up on the right side.”
“When it comes to riding out, one horse is as good as another,” Wyatt said, but he was thinking of old Reb, the paint gelding, and how sorry he’d be to leave him behind. They’d been partners since that turn of the cards in Abilene, after all, and Wyatt would have been in a fine fix without him.
“You’re a lot of things, Wyatt,” Rowdy reasoned, “but a horse thief isn’t among them. Especially when the horse in question belongs to me.”
Wyatt scowled, said nothing. He was fresh out of arguments, at the moment. Hadn’t kept up on his arguing skills, the way Rowdy had.
Rowdy saw his advantage and pressed it. “And then there’s Sarah Tamlin,” he said.
“What about Sarah Tamlin?” Lark asked, appearing in the bedroom doorway with a fat satchel in one hand.
Wyatt glared at Rowdy.
Rowdy merely grinned.
“She smokes cigars,” Wyatt said lamely. “You told me that yourself, just yesterday. Plays poker, too. Gives a man second thoughts.”
“She does not smoke cigars,” Lark insisted.
“So it’s true about the poker!” Rowdy said, in an ah-ha tone of voice.
“I wouldn’t know,” Lark said, with an indignant sniff.
“I heard she was a member of the Tuesday Afternoon Ladies Only Secret Poker Society,” Gideon said, looking smug. “And she’s not the only one. It might surprise you who goes to those meetings.”
Rowdy chuckled.
“Gideon,” Lark warned.
He turned back to the sink, flushed, and scrubbed industriously at the kettle Lark had used to boil up the morning’s oatmeal.
“It’s just a rumor,” Lark told Rowdy. “Respectable women do not play poker. Or smoke cigars.”
“Whatever you say, dear,” Rowdy replied sweetly.
Wyatt just shook his head, confounded.
“Come on,” Rowdy said to him, beckoning. “I’ll show you around town. Sam can swear you in when he gets here. What I do is, I count the horses in front of the saloons. If there’re more than a dozen, I keep a closer eye on the place—”
Wyatt followed, since that seemed like the only thing to do.
* * *
“THERE,” SAID SARAH, straightening her father’s tie outside the door of his office at the bank, grateful that the place was empty at the moment. Thomas, the only teller, had gone out when they arrived. The train would be pulling in at the new depot within an hour, pausing only long enough to swap mailbags with the postmaster and take on any passengers who might be waiting on the platform—or drop off new arrivals.
It was Thomas’s job, at least in part, to rush back to the bank and report to Sarah if any important visitors showed up. She was always on the lookout for unexpected stockholders.
“I’ll handle things, Papa,” Sarah assured her father, who had turned fretful again after breakfast. She was fairly certain he hadn’t seen her stuff his army uniform behind the wooden barrel of the washing machine on the back porch, but she wasn’t absolutely sure. “If someone comes in to open an account or inquire about a loan, let me do the talking. I’ll say you’re busy. All you have to do is sit at your desk, with your papers—if they insist on greeting you personally, I’ll be careful to call them by name so you know what to—”
“Sarah.” Ephriam looked pained.
“Papa, you know you forget.”
Just then, the street door opened with a crash, and Thomas burst in. Plump, with a constellation of smallpox scars spilling down one side of his face, he seemed on the verge of panic.
“Sarah!” he gasped, from the threshold, one fleshy hand pressed to his chest. “It’s him—the man in the photograph you showed me—”
Sarah’s knees turned to water. “No,” she said, leaning against her father for a moment. “He couldn’t possibly have—”
“It’s him,” Thomas repeated.
“Calm down,” Sarah said hastily. “Remember your asthma.”
Thomas struggled to a wooden chair, in front of the window, and sat there sucking in air like a trout on a creek bank. “S-Sarah, wh-what are we going to d-do—?”
“What,” Ephriam interjected, suddenly forceful, “is happening?”
Even in her agitation, Sarah felt a stab of sorrow, because she knew her father wouldn’t be his old self for more than a few minutes. When the inevitable fog rolled in, shrouding his mind again, she’d miss him more keenly than ever.
“You’re going to take Papa home,” she told Thomas, who had begun a moderate recovery—of sorts. He wasn’t sweating quite as much as he had been when he rushed in, and his breathing had slowed to a slight rasp. “Go out the back way, and stay off Main Street.”
Gamely, Thomas got to his feet again. Lumbered toward them.
When he took Ephriam’s arm, though, the old man pulled free. “Unhand me,” he said. “This is an outrage!”
Sarah’s mind was racing wildly through a series of possibilities, all of which were disastrous, but she’d had a lot of experience dealing with imminent disaster, and she rose to the occasion.
“Papa,” she said, “poor Thomas is feeling very ill. It’s his asthma, you know. If you don’t get him to Doc Venable, quickly, he could—” she paused, laid a hand to her bosom, fingers splayed, and widened her eyes “—perish!”
“Great Scot,” Ephriam boomed, taking Thomas by one arm and dragging him toward the front door, and the busy street outside, “the man needs medical attention! There’s not a moment to spare!”
Thomas cast a pitiable glance back at Sarah.
She closed her eyes, offered a hopeless prayer that Charles Elliott Langstreet the Third would get lost between the depot and the bank, and waited for the Apocalypse.
By the time Charles actually arrived, she was quite composed, at least outwardly, though faintly queasy and probably pale. She might have gotten through the preliminary encounter by claiming she was fighting off a case of the grippe, but as it turned out, Charles didn’t come alone.
He’d brought Owen with him.
Sarah’s heart lurched, caught itself like a running deer about to tumble down a steep hill. Perched on a stool behind the counter, in Thomas’s usual place, a ledger open before her, she nearly swooned.
Owen.
Ten years old now, blond like his imperious father, but with his grandfather’s clear, guileless blue eyes.
The floor seemed to tilt beneath the legs of Sarah’s stool. She gripped the edge of the counter to steady herself.
Charles smiled, enjoying her shock. He was handsome as an archangel, sophisticated and cruel, the cherished—and only—son of a wealthy family. And he owned a thirty percent interest in the Stockman’s Bank.
Owen studied her curiously. “Are you my aunt Sarah?” he asked.
Tears burned in Sarah’s eyes. She managed a nod, but did not trust herself to speak. If she did, she would babble and blither, and scare the child to death.
“Surprised?” Charles asked smoothly, still watching Sarah closely, his chiseled patrician lips taking on a sly curve.
“We came all the way from Philadelphia on a train,” Owen said, wide-eyed over the adventure. “I was supposed to spend the summer at school, but they sent me packing for putting a stupid girl down the laundry chute.”
Sarah blinked, found her voice. “Was she hurt?” she croaked, horrified.
“No,” Owen said, straightening his small shoulders. He was wearing a tweed coat and short pants, and he seemed to be sweltering. “She did the same thing to Mrs. Steenwilder’s cat, so I showed her how it felt.”
“The girl is fine,” Charles said. “And so is the cook’s cat.”
“We’re going to stay at the hotel,” Owen said. “Papa and me. I get to have my own room.”
“Why don’t you go over there right now and make sure the man we hired at the depot takes proper care of our bags?” Charles asked the little boy.
Owen nodded solemnly and left.
Sarah’s heart tripped after him—she had to drag it back. Corral it in her chest, where it pounded in protest.
“Why did you bring him?” she asked.
“I couldn’t leave the boy with Marjory,” Charles answered. “She despises him.”
Sarah squeezed her eyes shut, certain she would swoon.
“You must have known I’d come, Sarah. Someday.”
She opened her eyes again, stared at him in revulsion and no little fear. He’d moved while she wasn’t looking—come to stand just on the other side of the counter.
“If only because of the bank,” he went on softly, reaching out to caress her cheek. “After all, I have a sizable investment to look after.”
Sarah recoiled, but she still needed the stool to support her. “You’ve been receiving dividends every six months, as agreed,” she said coldly. “I know, because I made out the drafts myself.”
Charles frowned elegantly. His voice was as smooth as cream, and laced with poison. “Strange that you’d do that—given that Ephriam holds the controlling interest in this enterprise, not you.”
“It’s not strange at all,” Sarah said, but she was quivering on the inside. “Papa is very busy. He has a lot of other responsibilities.”
“All the more reason to offer my assistance,” Charles replied. He paused, studied her pensively. “Still beautiful,” he said. A smile quickened in his eyes, played on his mouth. “You’d like to run me off with a shotgun, wouldn’t you, Sarah?” he crooned. “But that would never do. Because when I leave, I’ll be taking our son with me.”
CHAPTER THREE
SAM O’BALLIVAN MUST HAVE BEEN an important man, Wyatt concluded, because they held the departing train for him. He arrived driving a wagon, with a boy and a baby and a pretty woman aboard, a string of horses traveling alongside, led by a couple of ranch hands. While all the baggage and mounts were loaded into railroad cars, Lark and Sam’s wife chattered like a couple of magpies on a clothesline.
Rowdy made the introductions, and Sam and Wyatt shook hands, standing there beside the tracks, the locomotive still pumping gusts of white steam. Sam was a big man, clear-eyed and broad-shouldered, with an air of authority about him. He not only owned the biggest ranch within miles of Stone Creek, he was an Arizona Ranger, which was the main reason he and Rowdy had been summoned to Haven.
“I hear you’re a fair hand with horses and cattle,” Sam said, in his deep, quiet voice.
The statement gave Wyatt a bit of a start, until he realized Sam was talking about ranch work, not rustling. “I can manage a herd, all right,” Wyatt confirmed.
Sam gave a spare smile. His gaze penetrated deep, like Rowdy’s, and it was unsettling. “I’m looking for a range foreman,” the rancher said. “Job comes with a cabin and meals in the bunkhouse kitchen. Fifty dollars a month. Would you be interested?”
Rowdy must have seen that Wyatt was surprised by the offer, given that he was a stranger to O’Ballivan, because he explained right away. “I told Sam all about you.”
“All of it?” Wyatt asked, searching his brother’s face.
“I know you did some time down in Texas,” Sam said.
Wyatt stole a glance at the pretty woman laughing and comparing babies with Lark a few yards away. A tall boy stood nearby, waiting impatiently to board the train. “And that doesn’t bother you? Having a jailbird on your place, with your family there and all?”
“Rowdy’s willing to vouch for you,” Sam said. “That’s good enough for me.”
Wyatt looked at Rowdy with new respect. What would it be like to be trusted like that?
“I figure we ought to appoint Wyatt deputy marshal,” Rowdy said. “Being the mayor of Stone Creek, you’d have to swear him in.”
Sam nodded, but he was still looking deep enough to see things Wyatt didn’t want to reveal. “Do you swear to uphold the duties of deputy marshal?” he asked.
“Yes,” Wyatt heard himself say.
Rowdy handed him his badge just as Gideon showed up, a pair of bulging saddlebags over one shoulder, the old yellow dog padding along behind him.
“Pardner’s going, too,” Gideon said, apparently braced for an objection.
Nobody raised one.
Inside the locomotive, the engineer blew the whistle.
“Guess we’d better get going,” Rowdy said, with a grin. “The train’s got a schedule to keep.”
With that, there was some hand-shaking, and some fare-thee-wells, then the whole crowd of them boarded, even the yellow dog. Wyatt stood there, Rowdy’s star-shaped badge heavy in his left hand, and wondered how he’d gotten himself into this situation. It was all well and good to figure on running for it before Sam and Rowdy caught up to what was left of the Justice gang and learned that he, Wyatt, had ridden with the sorry outfit. The trouble was, except for stealing one of his brother’s horses, a thing Rowdy had rightly guessed he could not do, and taking to the trail, he didn’t have any choice but to stay right there in Stone Creek.
Hell, he might as well just shut himself up behind the cell door over there in the jailhouse right now and be done with it.
He watched, feeling a strange combination of misery and anticipation, as the train pulled out of the depot onto a curved spur, Stone Creek being at present the end of the line, and snaked itself around to chug off in the other direction. Steam billowed from the smokestack as it picked up speed.
When he turned to walk away, he almost collided with a small boy in knee pants and a woolen coat.
The kid’s gaze fastened on Rowdy’s star as Wyatt pinned it to his shirt.
“You the law around here?” the boy asked, squinting against the bright August sun as he looked up at Wyatt.
“For the moment,” Wyatt said.
“Owen Langstreet,” the child replied, putting out a small hand with manly solemnity. “I got expelled from school for throwing a girl named Sally Weekins down the laundry chute. Not that you can arrest me or anything, Sheriff—?”
“Name’s Wyatt Yarbro,” Wyatt told young Mr. Langstreet, “and I’m not the sheriff. That’s an elected office, one to a county. Reckon my proper title is ‘deputy marshal.’ Why would you go and dump somebody down a laundry chute?”
“It’s a long story,” Owen answered. “She didn’t get hurt, and you can’t arrest me for it, anyhow. It happened in Philadelphia, and that’s outside your jurisdiction.”
Wyatt frowned. “How old are you?”
“Ten,” Owen said.
“I’d have pegged you for at least forty.” Wyatt started back for the main part of town, one street over, figuring he ought to walk around and look like he was marshaling. He wasn’t looking forward to going back to the jail; it would be a lonely place, with nobody else around.
“There probably aren’t any laundry chutes in Stone Creek,” Owen went on, scrambling to keep up. “Papa says it’s a one-horse, shit-heel town in the middle of nowhere. Even the hotel only has two stories. And no elevator.”
“That so?” Wyatt replied. The kid talked like a brat, using swearwords and bragging about poking a girl down a chute, but there was something engaging about him, too. He wasn’t pestering Wyatt out of devilment; he wanted somebody to talk to.
Wyatt knew the feeling.
“He’s going to take Aunt Sarah’s bank away from her,” Owen said.
Wyatt stopped cold, looked down at the kid, frowning. “What?”
“Papa says there’s something rotten in Denmark.”
“Just who is your papa, anyhow?”
“His name is Charles Langstreet the Third,” Owen replied matter-of-factly. “You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?”
“Can’t say as I have,” Wyatt admitted, setting his course for the Stockman’s Bank, though he had no business there, without a dime to his name. If Sarah was around, he’d tell her he was Rowdy’s deputy now, out making his normal rounds. It made sense for a lawman to keep an eye on the local bank, didn’t it?
“He’s very rich,” Owen said. “I’m going to have to make my own way when I grow up, though. Mother said so. I needn’t plan on getting one nickel of the Langstreet fortune, since I’m a bastard.”
As concerned as he was about Sarah, and the fact that some yahoo called Charles Langstreet the Third was evidently plotting to relieve her of the Stockman’s Bank, Wyatt stopped again and looked down at Owen. “Your mother called you a bastard?”
Owen nodded, unfazed. “It means—”
“I know what it means,” Wyatt interrupted. “Does this papa of yours know you’re running loose in a cow town, all by yourself?”
“I’m not by myself,” Owen reasoned. “I’m with you. And you’re a deputy. What could happen to me when you’re here?”
“The point is,” Wyatt continued, walking again, “he doesn’t know you’re with me, now does he?”
“He knows everything,” Owen said, with certainty. “He’s very clever. People tip their hats to him and call him ‘sir.’”
“Do they, now?”
The bank was in sight now, and Wyatt saw a tall man, dressed Eastern, leaving the establishment, straightening his fancy neck rigging as he crossed the wooden sidewalk, heading for the street.
Spotting Owen walking with Wyatt, the man smiled broadly and approached. “There you are, you little scamp,” he told the boy, ruffling the kid’s hair.
“This is Wyatt Earp,” Owen said. That explained all the chatter.
“Wyatt Yarbro.”
“Charles Langstreet,” said the dandy. He didn’t extend his hand, which was fine with Wyatt.
Wyatt glanced over Langstreet’s shoulder, hoping to catch a glimpse of Sarah through the bank’s front window. He didn’t know much about Owen’s papa—but he figured him for trouble, all right.
“You’re not Wyatt Earp?” Owen asked, looking disappointed.
“No,” Wyatt said. “Sorry.”
“But you’ve got a gun and a badge and everything.”
“Come along,” Langstreet told the boy, though his snake-cold eyes were fixed on Wyatt’s face. “Aunt Sarah has invited us to supper, and we’ll need to have baths and change our clothes.” His gaze sifted over Wyatt’s borrowed duds, which had seen some use, clean though they were. “A good day to you—Deputy.”
With that, the confab ended, and Langstreet shepherded the boy toward the town’s only hotel. Owen looked back, once or twice, curiously, as if trying to put the pieces of a puzzle together.
Wyatt made for the bank. A little bell jingled over the door as he entered.
Sarah, standing behind the counter, looked alarmed, then rallied.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said.
Wyatt took off his round-brimmed black hat and tried for an easy smile, but the truth was, the inside of that bank felt charged, like the floor might suddenly rip wide open, or thunder might shake the ceiling over their heads. “Everything all right, Miss Tamlin?”
She blinked. “Of course everything is fine, Mr. Yarbro. Whyever would you ask such a question?”
“Partly because it’s my job.” He indicated the star on his shirt. “I’ll be looking after Stone Creek while Rowdy’s out of town. And partly because I just met a boy named Owen Langstreet down by the depot.”
She paled. “What did he tell you?”
“Just that his father means to take the bank away from you.”
Sarah tried to lasso a smile, but the rope landed short. “This bank belongs to my father, not to me. Mr. Langstreet is merely a—a shareholder. There is no need to be concerned, Mr. Yarbro, though I do appreciate it.”
Wyatt nodded, went to the door, replaced his hat. “I’m a friend, Sarah,” he said. “Remember that.”
She swallowed visibly, nodded back.
Wyatt opened the door.
“Mr. Yarbro?”
He stopped, waited. Said nothing.
Sarah’s voice trembled. “I wonder if you’d join us for supper tonight? Six o’clock?”
“I’d like that,” Wyatt said.
“We’ll be expecting you, then,” Sarah replied brightly.
Wyatt touched his hat brim again and left.
Walking back along Main Street, toward Rowdy’s office, he was intercepted repeatedly; evidently, word had gotten around town that while Marshal Yarbro was away, he’d be watching the store. Folks were friendly enough, if blatantly curious, and Wyatt offered them no more than a “howdy” and an amicable nod.
Thoughts were churning inside his head like bees trying to get out from under an overturned bucket. He meant to leave Stone Creek. He meant to stay.
He didn’t know what the hell he was going to do.
Distractedly, he counted the horses in front of every saloon he passed—the town had more than its share, considering its size—saw no reason for concern, and went on to the jailhouse. Now that he had a supper invitation from Sarah, his spirits had lifted, though he was under no illusion that she’d asked him over out of any desire to socialize. She didn’t want to be alone with Langstreet, that was all; she was terrified of him, and it was more than the threat of losing control of the bank.
Back at the jail, Wyatt collected his bedroll and saddlebags from the cell where he’d passed the night and headed for the small barn out behind Rowdy’s house. He’d bunk out there in the hayloft, he’d decided, with Reb and the other horses. He’d be behind bars again soon enough, if Rowdy and Sam caught up with Billy Justice. Soon as Billy heard the name Yarbro, he’d put paid to any hope Wyatt had of living as a free man.
He could lie, of course. Say he’d never crossed paths with the gang, let alone helped them rustle cattle. His word against Billy’s. Sam might even believe him—but Rowdy wouldn’t. No, Rowdy’d see right through to the truth.
Inside the barn, Wyatt tossed his few belongings up into the low-hanging loft, and the sweet smell of fresh hay stirred, along with a shower of golden dust.
Reb nickered a greeting, and Wyatt crossed to the stall to stroke the animal’s long face. “You like it here, don’t you, boy?” he asked. “Time you led the easy life.”
Wyatt added hay to Reb’s feeding trough, then to those of the other two horses. He carried water in from the well to fill their troughs.
Rowdy’s spare horse was a buckskin gelding named Sugarfoot. He looked capable of covering a lot of ground—he and Sugarfoot could be a long way from Stone Creek in a short time. Maybe he’d leave a note for Rowdy, on the kitchen table, along with the badge, saying he was sorry and promising to send payment for the horse as soon as he got work.
He closed his eyes against the emotions that rose up in him then—shame, frustration, regret—and a hopeless yearning for the kind of life his younger brother had. Rowdy would understand; he’d been on the run himself. But if he found out about Wyatt’s brief association with Billy’s gang, he might come after him, not as a brother, but as a lawman.
And there was more.
He’d never see Sarah again, or poor old Reb.
He sighed, shoved a hand through his hair.
After a few moments, he made for the house. He’d been kidding himself, thinking he could stop running and put down some roots. Now, he was going to have to cut himself loose, and it would hurt—a lot.
Entering by the kitchen door, Wyatt noticed the envelope propped against the kerosene lamp in the center of the table right away. Took it into his hands.
Rowdy had scrawled his name on the front.
After letting out a long breath, he slid a thumb under the flap, found a single sheet of paper inside, along with three ten-dollar bills.
Thanks, Wyatt. It’s good to know I can count on you. R.
Wyatt swore under his breath. He didn’t doubt Rowdy’s gratitude, but he suspected the marshal had an additional motive—he wanted to make it harder to leave.
He checked the clock on the shelf under the far window—it was nearly noon—and saw another slip of paper, folded tent-style. A rueful grin hitched up one side of his mouth. He hadn’t gotten this much mail in a long time.
The second note was from Lark.
Wyatt—Help yourself to the food, and if you run out of anything, use our account at the mercantile to buy what you need. Make yourself at home.
He folded the note carefully and tucked it under the edge of the clock, his throat strangely tight, his eyes burning a little. He jollied himself out of the melancholies by looking around for a third note, from Gideon, or maybe even Pardner.
Neither of them had written a word, though.
He went to the larder, a wooden box with a metal handle, opened it up, and found cold meat inside. There was half a loaf of bread, too, so he made himself a sandwich and walked through to the little parlor beyond the kitchen. He hadn’t passed much time in a real house since he’d left the homeplace for the last time.
His ma had cried that day. Begged him to stay and work the farm.
He’d ridden out instead. He’d had better things to do, he’d thought back then, than plowing fields and milking cows. No, he’d preferred to rob trains with Pappy.
“Fool,” he said aloud, admiring but not touching the framed photographs set up on a wooden table near the windows. Lark and Rowdy, posing solemnly on either side of a Grecian pillar. Little Hank, bare-ass naked on a fur rug, in the saddle in front of a grinning Rowdy, cradled in Lark’s arms in a rocking chair.
The soreness in Wyatt’s throat got worse, and he had to blink a couple of times. He retreated from the row of pictures, scanned the rest of the room. There were two other doors, one open, one closed.
The open door led to the bathroom, a swanky one with a flush toilet and a copper boiler to heat water, just as Rowdy had said. Wyatt stepped inside the small room and looked into the mirror above the pedestal sink. He needed a shave, he decided, rubbing the dark stubble on his face. Rowdy had left behind a razor and a soap mug, and the tub looked mighty inviting.
Just go, he told himself. Saddle up Sugarfoot, ask some neighbor to look after Reb and Lark’s mare, and go.
He thought about supper at Sarah’s, sitting across a table from her, just for one meal. He’d make sure Langstreet didn’t pose any kind of serious threat to her, and leave in the morning.
First thing in the morning, for sure.
No matter what.
In the meantime, he might as well go into the jailhouse, in case somebody came by needing a lawman.
He was amused to find, when he approached the desk, that Gideon had left a note after all. Scrawled on the back of a Wanted poster and carefully centered in the middle of the blotter.
Don’t steal anything. If you do, I’ll come after you for sure. Gideon Yarbro.
Wyatt chuckled. He had no doubt that the kid was sincere. Two lawmen in the family now, Pappy, he thought. And me wearing a badge, too. Guess you must be wondering where you went wrong.
* * *
THE AFTERNOON, BLESSEDLY quiet in terms of business, passed at an excruciatingly slow pace. Sarah spent the time examining the books—column after column of figures penned in her distinctive handwriting, every cent accounted for—and wondered if Charles would believe the only lie she could come up with on such short notice.
Her father’s eyesight had been very poor before Dr. Venable had arranged for a pair of spectacles to be sent up from Phoenix, and she’d fallen into the habit of managing the ledgers for him.
Flimsy, but it might work.
Carefully, she recorded the statement in her own small book, which she carried in the pocket of her skirt. Ever since lying had become a necessary art, Sarah had taken pains to record the fibs she’d told, both for the sake of continuity in conversations with others and, she supposed, as a form of penance.
God recorded both sins and virtues in the Book of Life, according to the preachers. Maybe He’d understand, on Judgment Day, that writing down the lies she told was a form of honesty in and of itself, convoluted as the idea seemed, even to Sarah herself.
More likely, He’d order her flung into the Lake of Fire, immediately if not sooner. After all, God hated a liar, didn’t He?
Sarah sighed. If the Lord was as cranky and hard to please as Brother Hickey and his ilk made Him out to be, she couldn’t hope to get along with Him anyhow.
When closing time finally came—neither Thomas nor her father had returned from the visit to Dr. Venable, who was probably subjecting poor Thomas to all manner of painful cures—Sarah hung the sign in the door, locked up, and headed for home.
She’d been a fool to invite Wyatt Yarbro to take a meal under her roof—he was an outlaw, badge or no badge—but it would be better than being alone, for all practical intents and purposes, with Charles Langstreet. Owen and her father would also be present, but both of them were children, despite the vast difference in their ages.
A new worry rose up whole in her mind as she approached her front gate and stooped to pat Mehitabel, the three-legged cat, who sometimes came by to lap up a bowl of cream or sleep contentedly behind the cookstove when the weather turned cold.
What might Ephriam say when he saw Owen? Once, she could have depended on her father’s discretion, but given the state of his mind, he might blurt out something the boy wasn’t prepared to hear, or understand.
A chill rippled in the pit of her stomach.
Owen.
She could adapt to almost anything, including losing control of the Stockman’s Bank, if matters came to that pass, but seeing Owen hurt in any way would be beyond toleration.
Charles claimed he’d brought the boy to Stone Creek because he could not remain at school, or at home with Mrs. Langstreet; he’d simply had no other choice. Caught off guard, Sarah had accepted the explanation the way someone at the top of a burning staircase would accept a wet blanket. Now, with the storm of her thoughts abating a little, she knew there had to be another reason. Charles could have left Owen with his aging mother, prevailed upon one of his three married sisters.
Instead, Owen was there, in Stone Creek.
Why?
Certainly not because Charles felt any kindly inclination toward her. She’d begged him for photographs of Owen over the years, receiving only one, sent letter after letter to the child, revealing nothing, always signing the long missives with the spinsterly affection of an aunt. There had been no replies, but given Owen’s tender age, that wasn’t surprising.
Sarah blinked, realizing she was still standing at the gate, Mehitabel curling into her hem, and worked the latch. The hinges creaked as she passed through.
Are you my aunt Sarah? Owen had asked earlier, in the bank, his eyes wide and trusting.
What had Charles—or, more worrisome yet, his wife, Marjory—told the boy about his “aunt”?
The front door opened as Sarah approached, and Doc appeared in the gap. He was a stoutly built man with gentle eyes, and an old friend as well as physician to her father. The two men had met in the army, serving under General Grant, Ephriam as an infantry captain, Jacob Venable as a surgeon. Ephriam had sustained a bayonet wound to his right shoulder during a skirmish with Confederate cavalrymen, and Venable had tended him. Having a number of things in common, but primarily a shared passion for books, they’d swapped whatever rare and treasured volumes they managed to get their hands on. Both men had been at Appomattox when Lee surrendered, and taken off their hats to the living legend as he left Grant’s presence, proud even in defeat. Every winter they sat smoking in front of the fire in the Tamlins’ parlor, reliving that day and the events that led up to it.
Now, looking up at Doc, with his graying beard and dignified bearing, Sarah thought he resembled General Lee, for all that he, like her father, had been a Union man, born and bred.
Doc was also the only person who knew about her book of lies. She’d confided in him, one late night, while keeping a vigil by a dying neighbor’s bedside.
“Is Papa ill?” she asked.
“I dosed him with laudanum and put him to bed,” Doc said matter-of-factly. “He was in another one of his states—asking after your mother.”
Sarah swallowed hard, blinked back tears. She felt relieved that her father wouldn’t be at the supper table, unpredictable as he was. She also felt guilty for being relieved.
Doc took a seat in the porch swing and patted the space beside him. “Sit down, Sarah,” he said gently.
“I’ve got to fix supper for company and—”
“Sit down, please,” Doc repeated.
Sarah sat. Doc and the teller, Thomas, were the only people in Stone Creek who knew for sure that Sarah ran the bank, though there were surely others, like Sam O’Ballivan, who suspected it.
“You’re not going to be able to keep up this charade much longer, Sarah,” Doc told her quietly. “Ephriam’s condition is deteriorating. Heartbeat’s sporadic, and there are other bad signs, too. He’ll need a nurse soon—if the town had a hospital, I’d have him admitted, for an indefinite length of time.”
“Is he dying?” Sarah could barely force the words out. An only child, conceived late in her parents’ lives—they’d both been forty when she was born—she’d never achieved true independence from them. Except when she’d attended college in Philadelphia, she’d never been away from home.
Doc patted her hand, smiled sadly. “We’re all dying. Life is invariably fatal. But to answer your question, Ephriam could live another twenty years, or never awaken from the nap he’s taking right now. The point is, he’s suffering from dementia, and folks are bound to take notice, if they haven’t already.”
Nothing Doc said came as a surprise to Sarah, but she still needed a few choked moments to absorb it. She’d spent so much time and effort hiding and denying the problem that facing the truth was a challenge.
Doc put a fatherly arm around her shoulders. “You’ve fought the good fight, Sarah,” he said. “Run that bank as well as any man could, better than most. But it’s time to let it go.”
“You don’t understand, Doc,” Sarah answered miserably, wringing her hands in her lap. “Papa and I will have nothing to live on, if his salary stops coming in.”
“Ephriam has always been the thrifty sort,” Doc said, a frown puckering the flesh between his bristly eyebrows. “He must have saved a considerable amount, over thirty years.”
Sarah’s eyes burned. “There were bad loans, Doc, a couple of years back, during the worst of the drought. Papa used his own money to cover them, so the Weatherbys and the Connors and the Billinghams wouldn’t lose their ranches—”
A muscle ticked in Doc’s jaw. “And of course they never paid him back.”
“They couldn’t,” Sarah insisted. “Now that the railroad’s come as far as Stone Creek, things are getting better, but you know Mrs. Weatherby’s a widow now, with four young children to feed, and the Connors got burned out and had to go live with their folks up in Montana. They might or might not be able to make a new start. Jim Billingham pays what he can, when he can, but it isn’t much.”
“Oh, Lord,” Doc said. “Is the house mortgaged?”
Sarah shook her head. “The deed’s in my name,” she answered. She looked back over one shoulder at the big house, the only home she’d ever known. There were six bedrooms, in total, because her parents had hoped to have that many children, or more. “I suppose I could take in boarders,” she said. “Give piano lessons.”
Doc lowered his arm from Sarah’s shoulder and took her hand, squeezed it lightly. “You’re the sort who’ll do whatever has to be done,” he said fondly. “Ephriam’s lucky to have a daughter like you.”
Privately, Sarah believed her father would have been better off with a son, instead of a daughter. If she’d been born male, there’d be no question of giving up control of the Stockman’s Bank—a man would be allowed, even expected, to take over the helm.
Sarah didn’t mind hard work, but taking in boarders was one step above beggary, in small, gossipy communities like that one. There were already several women offering piano lessons, so pupils would be hard to come by. She’d be pitied and whispered about, and keeping her spine straight and her chin up in public would take some doing.
“You could always get married,” Doc said. “Any one of several men in this town would put a ring on your finger, if you were agreeable.”
Wyatt Yarbro ambled into Sarah’s mind, grinning.
She blushed. The man was a self-confessed outlaw, despite the badge pinned to his shirt, and for all that he’d walked her home the night before, and stopped by the bank that very day to offer his assistance, should it be required, marriage wouldn’t enter his mind.
Men like Mr. Yarbro didn’t marry, they dallied with foolish women, and then moved on.
“I’d have to love a man before I could marry him,” she told Doc forthrightly. Although she would have married Charles Langstreet the day she met him, and certainly after she discovered she was carrying his child—if he hadn’t admitted, after Owen’s conception, that he already had a wife.
“Love might be a luxury you can’t afford, Sarah Tamlin,” Doc said. “You’re a strong, capable woman, but the reality is, you need a man.” His weary old eyes twinkled. “I’d offer for you, myself, if I were thirty years younger.”
Sarah chuckled, though she was dangerously near tears. “And I’d probably accept,” she said, rising to her feet. She had things to do—look in on her father, start supper for her guests, due to arrive in just under an hour, tidy up the parlor and lay a nice table in the dining room. She said as much, adding, “Will you stay and join us?”
Doc Venable stood, too. “I’d be honored,” he said.
CHAPTER FOUR
OWEN’S FACE WAS SCRUBBED, and someone, probably Charles, had slicked down his hair. Standing on the front porch, gazing earnestly up at Sarah, he held out a bouquet of flowers and bravely announced, “Papa said to tell you he’ll be along as soon as he can. He got a telegram at the hotel, and he’s got to answer it.”
“C-come in,” Sarah said, stricken by the sight, the presence, of this boy. Accepting the flowers with murmured thanks, she stepped back to admit him.
Owen moved solemnly over the threshold, a little gentleman in a woolen suit, taking in the entryway, the long-case clock, the mahogany coat tree. Sarah wondered if he ever wore regular clothes and played in the dirt, like other children his age.
And she wondered a thousand other things, too.
“Let’s put these flowers in water,” she said, and started for the kitchen.
“You have gaslights and everything,” Owen marveled, walking behind her. “I thought you’d live in a log cabin, and there’d be Indians around.”
Sarah smiled to herself. “There are a few Indians,” she said. “But you don’t have to worry about them. They’re friendly.”
“Good,” Owen said, with evident relief, as they passed the dining room table—she’d set it for five, since her father was snoring away in his room—and the plates, glasses and silverware sparkled. “I wouldn’t want to get scalped or anything.”
“Nobody’s going to scalp you,” Sarah said, with certainty.
Owen pulled back a chair at the kitchen table and sat while she found a vase for the wild orange poppies he’d apparently picked for her. “Papa says this is the frontier,” he announced.
Sarah’s spine tightened briefly at the mention of Charles. She hoped Doc Venable would be back from his evening rounds before he or Wyatt Yarbro arrived. “We’re quite civilized, actually,” she said, pumping water into a vase at the sink, dunking the stems of the poppies, and setting the whole shooting match in the center of the table.
“Do you live in this great big house all by yourself?” Owen wanted to know. He was small for his age, Sarah noticed, trying her best not to devour the child with her eyes. His feet swung inches above the floor, but he sat up very straight.
“No,” Sarah said, taking a chair herself. “My father and I live here together. Isn’t your house much bigger than this one?”
Owen allowed that it was, then added, “But I’m not there very much. If I’m not at school, I mostly stay with Grandmama. She’s got all sorts of money, but she lives in a town house. That way, she doesn’t need so many servants.”
“Do you like staying at your grandmama’s town house?” Sarah asked carefully.
“Not much,” Owen said. “You can’t run or make noise or have a dog, because dogs have fleas and they chew things up and make messes.”
Sarah didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Would you like to have a dog?”
“More than anything, except maybe a pony,” Owen answered.
“Do you like school?” A thousand other questions still pounded in Sarah’s mind, but it wouldn’t be appropriate to ask them.
“It’s lonesome,” Owen said. “Especially at Christmas.”
Sarah stomach clenched, but she allowed none of what she felt to show in her face. “You stay at school over Christmas?”
“My mother doesn’t like me very much,” Owen confided. “And Grandmama always goes to stay with friends in the south of France when the weather starts getting cold.”
“Surely your mother loves you,” Sarah managed.
“No,” Owen insisted, shaking his head. “She says I’m a bastard.”
Sarah closed her eyes briefly, struggling with a tangle of emotions—anger, frustration, sorrow, and the most poignant yearning. So Marjory Langstreet did blame Owen for her husband’s indiscretions, as she’d always feared she might.
“My brothers aren’t bastards,” Owen went on, taking no apparent notice of Sarah’s reaction.
“Do you get along with them?” she asked, after biting her lower lip for a few moments, lest she say straight out what she thought of Marjory and all the rest of the Langstreets. “Your brothers, I mean?”
“They’re old,” Owen replied. “Probably as old as you.”
Sarah chuckled. “My goodness,” she said. “They must be doddering.”
“What’s doddering?”
Just then, her father appeared on the rear stairway leading down into the kitchen, clad in a smoking jacket and the military trousers Sarah had hidden earlier. His feet were bare, and his white hair stood out all around his head. He’d forgotten his spectacles, and he peered at Owen.
“Doddering,” he said, “is what I am. An old fool who can’t get around without somebody to hold him up.”
“Papa,” Sarah said, rising, “you’re supposed to be in bed.”
“Balderdash,” Ephriam snapped. “It’s still light out. Who’s the lad?”
“My name is Owen Langstreet, sir,” Owen said, standing respectfully in the presence of an elder. “Who are you?”
Don’t, Papa, Sarah pleaded silently. “This is my father, Ephriam Tamlin,” she said aloud.
“Those pants,” Owen observed, “are peculiar. How come they have yellow stripes down the side?”
“I wore these trousers in the great war,” Ephriam blustered. Then he saluted briskly. “You’re a mite small for a soldier. Reckon you must be a drummer boy.”
“Papa,” Sarah pleaded. “Please.”
“I smell supper cooking,” Ephriam told her. She’d fried chicken earlier; it was on a platter in the warming oven. “I’m hungry.”
“I’ll bring you a plate,” Sarah promised. “Just go back to bed.”
“I’m not a soldier,” Owen said.
A rap sounded at the back door, and Doc Venable let himself in. Spotting Ephriam standing there on the stairs, he tossed Sarah a sympathetic glance, let his eyes rest briefly on Owen, then went to usher his old friend to his room.
“How come Ephriam can’t eat with us?” Owen asked Sarah, when they’d gone. He looked so genuinely concerned that it was all Sarah could do not to reach out and ruffle his neatly brushed hair.
“He’s sick,” Sarah said.
“Why did he call me a drummer boy? I don’t have a drum.”
“Figure of speech,” Sarah answered.
At that instant, for good or ill, someone turned the bell knob at the front door, indicating the arrival of another supper guest.
“I’ll answer the door!” Owen said, and rushed off through the dining room.
Sarah gripped the back of a chair, swayed. She should have told Charles, when he invited himself to supper, that it wasn’t a good time for her to entertain. Her father was indisposed, and she was frantic with worry over the situation at the bank. But she’d wanted so to pass an evening in Owen’s company.
“It’s the deputy!” Owen shouted from the entry hall. “Should I let him in?”
Sarah laughed, though her eyes stung with tears. She hurried out of the kitchen and through the dining room.
Wyatt Yarbro stood smiling and spruced up just over the threshold. He wore a clean white shirt, black trousers, and polished boots, and the holster on his hip was empty. He’d dusted off his black hat, which he held politely in his hands, and his dark eyes danced with a sort of somber amusement.
“Do come in, Mr. Yarbro,” Sarah said. “This is my—nephew. Owen Langstreet.”
“We’ve met,” Mr. Yarbro said, stepping past the boy, who stared up at him in fascination.
“He’s not Wyatt Earp,” Owen said.
“I’m aware of that, Owen,” Sarah replied, gesturing toward the coat tree, with its many brass hooks. “Hang up your hat, Mr. Yarbro.”
Wyatt did as she’d asked.
An awkward silence fell.
“Let’s have a seat in the parlor,” Sarah said, flustered, leading the way.
Owen followed, and so did Wyatt.
“Nice place,” Wyatt said.
“She lives here with her papa,” Owen informed him, gravitating toward Sarah’s piano, which was her most prized possession. “He wears blue pants with yellow stripes on them and thinks I’m a drummer boy.”
“Is that so?” Wyatt asked affably, and when Sarah dared to look back over her shoulder, she saw that he was watching her, not the child.
“Sit down,” Sarah said. “Please. I’ll get some coffee.”
“No need,” Wyatt said, waiting until Sarah sank into her mother’s threadbare slipper chair before taking a seat on the settee. He was leanly built, but the house seemed smaller somehow, with him in it, and warmer.
Much warmer.
Owen perched on the piano stool. “May I spin?” he asked.
Wyatt chuckled.
“Spin all you want,” Sarah said, smiling a wobbly smile.
Owen moved the stool a few more inches from the piano, sat, gripped it with both hands, and used one foot to propel himself into blurry revolutions.
Sarah felt dizzy and had to look away, but her gaze went straight to Wyatt Yarbro, and that made her even dizzier. He’d shaved, and his cologne had a woodsy scent. His white shirt was open at the throat, and it was not only pressed, but starched, too.
Wyatt glanced curiously around the well-appointed, seldom-used room. “Where’s Mr. Langstreet?” he asked.
“He’s been delayed,” Sarah said.
Owen used his foot to stop the piano stool. He looked happily flushed, more like the little boy he was than the miniature man who blithely referred to himself as a “bastard.” “He got a telegram,” Owen said importantly.
“Imagine that,” Wyatt said, though not unkindly.
“In Philadelphia, we have a telephone,” Owen added.
“Don’t hold with telephones myself,” Wyatt replied, mischief sparking in his dark eyes. “I figure if folks have something to say to each other, they ought to write it in a letter or meet up, face-to-face.”
“Papa says someday everybody will have a telephone.”
“Does he, now?” Wyatt asked easily.
As though to speak of the devil was to conjure him, Charles chose that moment to ring the doorbell. Sarah excused herself to answer, and Wyatt stood when she rose from her chair.
He might have been an outlaw, but someone had taught him manners.
Sarah was a little flushed when she opened the front door to Charles.
“Good evening, Sarah,” he said, stepping past her when she hesitated to move out of the way. “I apologize for being late. Business. One can never escape it.”
Doc Venable descended the front stairs, rolling down his shirtsleeves. His hands and forearms still glistened with moisture from the sink upstairs, where he must have washed up for supper.
Sarah made introductions all around, out of deference to the doctor. Wyatt and Charles had already met; Wyatt’s expression thoughtful, Charles’s elegantly aloof.
Charles looked down on Wyatt, Sarah realized, as a ruffian, and she felt a swift sting of fury. Her cheeks throbbed with it.
Supper seemed interminable. Sarah was afraid, every moment, that her father would appear, oddly dressed and confounded.
“I thought you said you couldn’t cook,” Wyatt teased, helping himself to another piece of fried chicken and then adding gravy to his mashed potatoes. “Tastes fine to me.”
“Thank you,” Sarah said, inordinately pleased and not a little embarrassed. By some miracle, she’d managed not to burn the chicken, and the mashed potatoes were thicker than the gravy, as they were supposed to be.
Charles maintained a chilly silence; he clearly resented Wyatt’s presence, tossing a disdainful glance his way every now and then. Finally, he took a sip from his water goblet and condescended to remark, “Very nice.”
“Is Aunt Sarah your sister, Papa?” Owen asked.
“Eat your supper,” Charles told him.
“Is she?”
“No,” Charles snapped.
“Then she must be Mother’s sister. They don’t look anything alike.”
Sarah stiffened in her chair. Wyatt saw the motion, and stared diplomatically down at his plate.
“In Sarah’s case,” Charles said, plainly irritated and red at the jawline, “the title of ‘aunt’ is honorary. She’s—a family friend.”
“Oh,” Owen said, looking dejected. He laid his fork down. He’d been sawing away at a drumstick for the last twenty minutes; Sarah had wanted to tell him it was all right to eat chicken with his fingers, but refrained. “I was thinking maybe I could visit her at Christmas, but if she’s not really my aunt—”
“You may visit me whenever you want,” Sarah told him, aware that she was overstepping, and not caring. When she got Charles alone, she’d have a word with him about this “bastard” business, and leaving a ten-year-old boy at boarding school over the holidays.
Owen’s face brightened, causing his freckles to stand out. “Really?”
“Enough,” Charles said coldly. “Philadelphia is a long way from Stone Creek. Have you forgotten that we just spent a week on a train?”
Owen subsided as suddenly as if he’d been slapped.
Doc Venable cleared his throat and turned the conversation in a new direction. “I understand you’re keeping the peace around town while your brother is away, Mr. Yarbro,” he said.
Wyatt shifted in his chair, oddly uncomfortable with the remark. “Yes, sir,” he said. “And I’d appreciate it if you called me Wyatt.” His gaze moved to Sarah. “You, too, Miss Tamlin.”
Sarah blushed.
“My, but we are a friendly bunch, aren’t we?” Charles asked drily. His nostrils were slightly flared, and the skin around his mouth looked tight.
“I reckon most of us are, anyhow,” Wyatt said quietly.
“Can I call you Wyatt, too?” Owen wanted to know.
“Sure,” Wyatt said. “Long as I don’t have to call you ‘Mr. Langstreet.’”
Charles reddened.
Owen giggled with delight. “Nobody calls me ‘Mr. Langstreet,’” he said. “I’m only ten.”
Wyatt’s lips twitched. “You could have fooled me,” he replied. “Like I said this afternoon, I’d have said you were forty if you were a day. Just a mite short for your age.”
Charles favored Sarah with a pained look. Again, she wondered why he’d brought Owen to Stone Creek, when he seemed, at least at the moment, barely able to tolerate the child’s presence.
“You ever seen a man as short as Owen here, Doc?” Wyatt asked, well aware that he’d gotten under Charles’s skin and clearly enjoying the fact.
“Can’t say as I have,” Doc said, regarding Owen thoughtfully.
Owen beamed.
“Is everyone ready for dessert?” Sarah asked brightly.
She served strawberry preserves on shortbread, and poured coffee for the adults. Earlier, she’d longed for the evening to end. Now, she realized that Charles was the only unwelcome guest. Doc, Wyatt and Owen had lifted her spirits with their banter.
Charles was the first to lay his table napkin aside, push back his chair, and stand. “I’ve got a meeting tomorrow in Flagstaff,” he said. “It came up unexpectedly. Sarah, I wonder if I might speak to you in private.”
Sarah felt a prickle of dread, but she welcomed the chance to talk to him about Owen, out of the boy’s earshot. “Certainly,” she said. “I’ll walk you to the door.”
Owen remained in his chair, his eyes fixed on his plate. He seemed to have shrunk a full size, and his head was bent at an angle that made Sarah’s heart hurt.
She proceeded to the front door, Charles following.
“I can’t leave the boy alone at the hotel,” Charles said, before she had a chance to speak. “Will you keep him while I’m away?”
Sarah nodded, surprised. She’d expected some kind of harangue.
“I might be gone for several days,” Charles warned.
“I’ll look after him,” she promised. “Charles, I—”
Something ominous flickered in Charles’s eyes.
Sarah straightened her spine. “He refers to himself as a bastard. Owen, I mean.”
“He’s precocious,” Charles said, taking out his pocket watch and checking it with a frown. “And he lies constantly.”
“Is he lying about Christmas? Having to stay at school alone while everyone else goes home for the holiday season?”
Charles’s mouth took on a grim tension. “It isn’t always convenient to have a ten-year-old underfoot,” he said. “Marjory’s nerves are—delicate.”
“Convenient? Charles, he’s ten. A child.”
“Marjory—”
“Damn Marjory!” Sarah whispered furiously. She was in no position to anger Charles, given the shares he held in the bank, but her concern for Owen—her son—pushed everything else aside. “What do I care for the state of your wife’s nerves?”
“They’ll hear you,” Charles said anxiously, inclining his head toward the dining room. “Do you want the cowboy to know you gave birth to an illegitimate child when everyone in Stone Creek thought you were getting an education?”
“Oh, I got an education, all right,” Sarah said bitterly.
Charles consulted his watch again. “I have to go,” he said. “I have paperwork to do, before tomorrow’s meeting.”
Good riddance, Sarah thought. She’d gotten a reprieve, as far as the bank was concerned, but another part of her was alarmed. Was this “meeting” with the other shareholders? Several of them lived in Flagstaff, a relatively short train ride from Stone Creek. Suppose Charles had asked around town, heard about some of her father’s recent escapades, and made the decision to take over control? Alone, he couldn’t do it. With the help of the other shareholders, though, he could be sitting behind her father’s desk the morning after next.
With the first smile he’d offered all evening, Charles ran his knuckles lightly down the side of Sarah’s face. “I’ll be back in a few days,” he said, as though he thought she was pining over his departure. “A week at the outside.”
A week with Owen. A week to cover her tracks at the bank.
She tried to look sad. Might even have said, “I’ll miss you,” as he seemed to expect her to do, but since she would have choked on the words, she swallowed them.
He bent his head, kissed her lightly, briefly on the mouth.
She stepped back, secretly furious.
“Still the coquette,” Charles remarked smoothly. “You’re not fooling me, Sarah. I remember how much you liked going to bed with me.”
Sarah’s cheeks pulsed with heat so sudden and so intense that it was actually painful. She would surely have slapped Charles Langstreet the Third across the face if she hadn’t known the crack of flesh meeting flesh would carry into the nearby dining room.
“Good night, Mr. Langstreet,” she said.
He grinned, turned, and strolled, whistling merrily, down the porch steps, along the walk, through the gate.
Sarah watched him until he was out of sight, then turned and nearly collided with Wyatt, who was standing directly behind her.
Her heart fluttered painfully. How much had he heard? Had he seen Charles kiss her?
She could tell nothing by his expression.
“I’d best be leaving, too,” he said. “I’ve got to count horses in front of saloons.”
“What?” Sarah asked, confused.
He chuckled. “Rowdy’s way of watching out for trouble,” he said, taking his hat from the coat tree. “Thank you, Miss Tamlin, for a fine evening and the best meal I’ve had in a long time.”
Something tightened in Sarah’s throat. “If I’m to call you Wyatt,” she heard herself say, “then you must call me Sarah.”
His smile was as dazzling as the starched shirt he’d put on to come to supper. “Sarah, then,” he said. The smile faded. “That Langstreet fella,” he began. “Is he...? Do you—?”
“He’s a business associate,” Sarah said. It was a partial truth, and she wondered if she ought to record it in her book of lies.
“That’s good,” Wyatt said. His dark eyes were almost liquid, there in the dim light of the entryway. “Because if I stay on in Stone Creek, I mean to set about courting you in earnest.”
“If you stay?” She’d known he was a drifter, an outlaw, that he’d be moving on at some point. So why did she feel as though a deep, dark precipice had just opened at her feet?
“Reckon I’ll be deciding on that further along,” he said. “Good night, Sarah.”
For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her, just as Charles had—his face was so very close to hers—but he didn’t. And she was stunned by the depths of her disappointment.
She watched until he passed through the front gate, turned toward the main part of town, moving in and out of the lamplight. Then she closed the door quietly and went back to the dining room.
Doc and Owen were busy clearing the table.
“Is Papa leaving me here?” Owen asked hopefully.
“Yes,” Sarah said, taken aback, exchanging quick glances with Doc, who’d paused in his plate-gathering like a man listening for some sound in the distance. “But only for a few days. I thought you’d be—well—surprised—”
“Papa’s always leaving me places,” Owen said. His manner was nonchalant, though there was a slight stoop to his shoulders that hadn’t been there before.
Doc shook his head, though the boy didn’t see.
Sarah contrived to smile and moved to help with the work. “What sort of places?” she asked, in a tone meant to sound cheerful, as though abandoning a child with people who were virtual strangers to him was a common occurrence, and wholly acceptable.
“Once, I lived at a hotel all by myself for a whole week,” Owen told her. “It was scary at night, but I got to have whatever I wanted to eat, and Papa gave me lots of spending money.”
Sarah could not look at him. He might see what she was thinking. “Why did he do that?” she asked lightly, when she could trust herself to speak. Again, her gaze met Doc’s, but this time, the look held.
“He had meetings with a lady. She wore a big hat with pink feathers on it and rode in a carriage with six white horses pulling it.”
Sarah drew back a chair and sank into it, breathless.
“Are you sick, Aunt Sarah?” Owen asked, clearly frightened.
“I’m f-fine,” Sarah muttered. She wouldn’t have to write that lie in the book to remember it.
“Let’s wash up these dishes,” Doc told the boy, his voice a little too hearty. “Since your aunt Sarah went to all the trouble to cook it and all.”
Owen nodded, but his eyes were still on Sarah. “I’ll be quiet,” he said. “If you have a headache—”
Sarah longed to gather the child in her arms, but she didn’t dare. She’d weep if she did, and never let go of him again. “You don’t have to be quiet,” she told him softly.
Doc put a hand on Owen’s shoulder and steered him in the direction of the kitchen. “I’ll wash and you dry,” he said.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHILE OWEN AND DOC WERE washing dishes, Sarah went upstairs, looked in on her father, who was sleeping soundly, then opened the door to the room across from her own. It contained a brass bed, a washstand and a bureau, and soft moonlight flowed in through the lace curtains.
The mattress was bare, since no one had used the room in months, with a faded quilt folded at its foot. Briskly, Sarah fetched sheets from the top drawer of the bureau and made up a bed for Owen.
The process was bittersweet. Tonight, her son would sleep in this room, dreaming, she hoped, little-boy dreams. But there was a disturbing truth in Wyatt and Doc’s teasing—young as he was, Owen was more man than child. He’d lived in hotel rooms by himself, and God knew what other places.
She yearned to keep him, raise him openly as her son. She wouldn’t mind the scandal that would surely ensue, the extra expense, the inevitable work of bringing up a child. But she must not allow herself to think such thoughts, she knew, because Charles would come back and take him away again.
Under the law, she had no rights. On his birth certificate, Marjory Langstreet was listed as his mother.
Some of the starch went out of Sarah’s knees.
She sat down on the edge of the freshly made bed, fighting back tears of hopelessness.
She’d been so young and foolish—only seventeen and far from home—when she’d given birth to Owen, in an anonymous infirmary room, a decade before. Charles, fifteen years her senior and sophisticated, a friend of her father’s, had been her “protector,” met her at the train when she arrived in the City of Brotherly Love, taken her by carriage to the women’s college in the rolling green Pennsylvania countryside.
Homesick, regarded as a bumpkin by the other pupils in residence, most of whom had been raised in cities and not crude frontier towns, she’d quickly become besotted with Charles. She’d studied hard at school, majoring in music, but on weekends, he often came to collect her in his elegant carriage. It was all innocent at first; he escorted her to museums, to concerts, to fine restaurants.
And then he took advantage.
He said college was a waste for a woman, and suggested she leave school so they could spend more time together. He’d set her up in a fancy hotel, persuaded her not to tell her father that she’d dropped all her classes.
That was when the lying had begun. She’d written weekly letters to her parents, describing books she hadn’t read, lectures she hadn’t attended, field trips she hadn’t taken. Someone Charles knew in the college office mailed the missives, and forwarded the replies. Sarah returned the funds her father sent for tuition and textbooks, claiming she’d won a scholarship. Her grades were forged, with the help of Charles’s friend, and for a long, blissful time, the deception passed as truth.
Sitting there in Owen’s moonlit room, Sarah blushed. Charles had been right earlier when he’d taunted her about enjoying his attentions in bed. Just sixteen, her body in full flower, she’d lived for his visits, reveled like some wild creature in his caresses.
Even when she realized, one eventful day, that she was carrying a child, she hadn’t worried. Charles would be pleased. He would surely marry her, straight away.
She was awaiting his visit, full of her news, when a grand woman in tailored clothes presented herself at the door of Sarah’s suite. She’d been tall, imperious, exuding angry confidence.
“So this is where Charles is keeping his current mistress,” Marjory Langstreet had said, sweeping past a startled Sarah into the sumptuously furnished suite. “And how gracious of him to support you in such style.”
Sarah had stared at the woman. “M-mistress?” she’d echoed stupidly.
“Surely you understand,” Marjory had said, “that you are a kept woman? A bird in a gilded cage?”
Sarah’s mouth had fallen open. This was surely some kind of cruel prank. Charles wasn’t married. He loved her—hadn’t he said so, over and over again? Hadn’t he given her jewelry, bought her trinkets and clothes?
“Who are you?” she’d managed.
Marjory ran a gloved hand along the keyboard of Sarah’s treasured piano. The sound was discordant, and bore no resemblance to music. From there, she proceeded to examine a painted porcelain lamp, a novel bound in Moroccan leather, a delicate Chinese fan with an ivory handle—all gifts from Charles.
“You really don’t know?” she trilled, after several long moments. Then she’d turned, hands resting on her hips, and shattered Sarah’s world with a single sentence. “I’m Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third,” she said, the words slicing through Sarah with the stinging force of a sharp sword.
Then, as now, Sarah had been unable to stand. She’d dropped into a chair, blind with confusion, pain and fear. Unconsciously, she’d rested a hand on her abdomen.
“Pack your things, dear,” Mrs. Langstreet had said. “As of tomorrow morning, you won’t be living here any longer. A backstreet whore belongs, you see, on a backstreet. If Charles wants to continue this dalliance, that’s his business, but I won’t be footing the bill.”
With that, she’d gone, leaving the suite door standing open to the hall beyond.
Sarah had been too numb to move at first. She simply sat, waiting for Charles to come and say it was all a mistake. That she, Sarah, would be the only Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third.
All day she waited.
But he didn’t come.
Sarah had finally closed the door, gone to bed and lain staring up at the ceiling throughout the very long night to come.
In the morning, a tentative knock sent a surge of hope rushing through her. She rushed to the door, opened it to find, not a smiling Charles, with a credible explanation at the ready, but one of the hotel’s porters. The fellow stood in the corridor, clearly uncomfortable.
He’d offered an anxious smile as two maids and another porter collected themselves behind him. “I’m sorry to hear you’re leaving us,” he’d said. “Mrs. Langstreet asked that we help you gather your belongings. There’ll be a carriage waiting to take you to your new residence at ten o’clock.”
Sarah had not protested.
She’d simply watched, stricken, as her clothes were folded into trunks and boxes, her books taken from the shelves, her jewelry stuffed into valises Marjory Langstreet had evidently provided for the purpose.
By noon, she’d been settled in a seedy rooming house, one door of her tiny room opening onto a rat-infested alley.
And still there had been no word, no visit, from Charles.
Sarah waited a week, then began pawning jewelry, a piece at a time, to buy food. Twice, she wrote long letters to her unsuspecting father, telling the shattering truth, but she’d never mailed them.
She was too ashamed.
Too heartbroken.
Several times, when hunger forced her out into the narrow, filthy streets, she’d considered standing on the tracks when the trolley came. It would be over, that way.
In the end, she couldn’t do that to the baby, or to herself.
She finally sent a wire to her father, reading simply, I am in trouble, and listing her address at the boardinghouse.
Within ten days, he’d arrived, bent on taking her home to Stone Creek. She’d told him everything but the name of the man who’d sired her child, and patently refused to return to Arizona Territory. As much as she yearned for her own room, the sound of her mother’s voice, the soothing touch of her hand, Sarah simply hadn’t been able to face the inevitable gossip and speculation.
Resigned, Ephriam had enrolled her in another college, a small, private one where secrets were kept, and moved her into the dormitory.
She hadn’t seen Charles again until a week before Owen’s birth, in the college infirmary. They met in the library, Charles and Sarah and Charles’s lawyer. Charles had stiffly informed her that he meant to raise the child as a legitimate heir, with Marjory listed as the legal mother.
Sarah had had no choice but to comply.
She’d long since sold the last of her jewelry, her rich clothes and the books. Even the Chinese fan. And she’d promised her clearly disenchanted father she would finish college, no matter what.
So when her baby boy was born, she’d handed him over to Charles’s lawyer. The loss had been keen, brutal, as though she’d torn her still-beating heart from her bosom and handed that over, too.
She’d survived, somehow, doggedly arising in the morning, doing what was at hand to do, enduring more than living. She’d worked hard at her lessons, gotten her degree in music, and returned to Stone Creek just in time to attend her mother’s funeral.
Nancy Anne Tamlin had never known she had a grandchild, nor had anyone else in town, except for Ephriam, of course, and possibly his best friend, Doc Venable.
Now, ten years later, miraculously, impossibly, that boy was right downstairs, in her own kitchen, helping with the dishes.
“Sarah?”
She looked up, startled, and saw Ephriam standing in the doorway. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew by the way he’d spoken her name that he was enjoying one of his brief, lucid intervals.
“That boy I saw tonight. Is he—?”
Sarah felt for the book of lies, nesting, as always, in her skirt pocket, clenched it through the fabric. She swallowed, then shook her head. “No, Papa. He’s just visiting.”
“He looks like your mother’s people,” Ephriam said. “What’s his name?”
“Owen,” Sarah allowed, after swallowing again. “He’s Charles Langstreet’s son. You remember Mr. Langstreet, don’t you?”
“Never liked him,” her father replied. “Pompous jackass.”
She saw a change in Ephriam’s bearing, something too subtle to describe, but there nonetheless.
“Great Scot,” Ephriam gasped. “It was Langstreet, wasn’t it? He was the one who led you astray!”
“Papa—”
“And Owen is my grandson,” the old man persisted, sounding thunderstruck. Of all the times he could have recovered his faculties, it had to be now, tonight, when keeping the secret was more important than ever before.
Sarah simply could not summon up another lie. She felt drained, enervated, as though she’d relived her affair with Charles, her sad, scandalous pregnancy, the birth itself, which had been torturous, and, still worse, watched as Charles’s lawyer carried her newborn son out of her room in the college infirmary. She’d been permitted to give him only one thing: his first name.
And she’d never expected to see him again.
“Yes,” she said weakly. “You’re right, Papa. But you mustn’t let on. Owen doesn’t know who I am. He calls me Aunt Sarah.”
Ephriam pondered a while, silent and brooding. “I’d have killed Langstreet if I’d known,” he said. “I suppose that’s why you didn’t tell me.”
Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, summoned her will, and stood. Doc and Owen had probably finished washing the dishes by then, and they’d be wondering what was keeping her.
She stood before her father, still looming in the darkened doorway, straightening the front of his long nightshirt as though it were one of the day coats he wore to the bank.
“Our secret, Papa?” she asked.
“There are too damn many secrets in this house.”
“Papa—”
“All right,” Ephriam said. “But I don’t like it. And I’m taking that boy fishing at the creek tomorrow, with or without your say-so.”
Sarah’s eyes stung, and she smiled. “Fair enough,” she said.
She walked her father back to his room, tucked him in like a child. Kissed his forehead. Still under the effects of the laudanum Doc had given him earlier, he dozed off immediately.
When she descended to the kitchen, via the rear stairway, Doc and Owen were sitting at the pedestal table in the center of the room, playing cards. The pot was a pile of wooden matches.
Interested, Sarah stood behind Owen’s chair and assessed his hand.
“Five card stud,” Doc said. “Care to join us?”
“I never play poker,” Sarah said. The little book in her skirt pocket seemed to pulse in protest.
Doc merely chuckled.
Sarah bent low and whispered in Owen’s ear. “Bet all your matchsticks. You’ve got a straight with ace high.”
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Linda Lael Miller
Where does an outlaw go when he's ready to turn straight? For Wyatt Yarbro, reformed rustler and train robber, Stone Creek is his place of redemption. And lovely Sarah Tamlin is the perfect angel to help him clean up his act…. But Sarah keeps a dark secret behind her prim and proper facade, even as her heart is lost to charming, sexy Wyatt.When a vengeful enemy prepares to unleash havoc on the peaceful town, Wyatt and Sarah will discover that they can't hide from the past. To win the fight, they must believe in something they never trusted before–the hope of tomorrow.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller returns to Stone Creek, where secrets have a way of coming to light…
Where does an outlaw go when he’s ready to turn straight? For Wyatt Yarbro, reformed rustler and train robber, Stone Creek is his place of redemption. And lovely Sarah Tamlin is the perfect angel to help him clean up his act.
But Sarah keeps a dark secret behind her prim and proper facade, even as her heart is lost to charming, sexy Wyatt. When a vengeful enemy prepares to unleash havoc on their peaceful town, Wyatt and Sarah will discover that they can’t hide from the past. To win the fight, they must believe in something they never trusted before—the hope of tomorrow.
Praise for The Rustler by #1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller
“Miller’s third Stone Creek novel gets as hot as the noontime desert. Miller’s portrayal of Sarah as a strong, independent woman sets this novel apart from customary tales of the damsel in distress and the rescuing hero. Instead, Miller focuses on Sarah and Wyatt’s shared and separate vulnerabilities and how they find it easier to face the difficulties of everyday life when they’re together. Well-developed, personable characters and a handful of loose ends will leave readers anticipating future installments.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Welcome back, Yarbros, those bad-boy outlaws turned into heroes! But it’s Miller’s intrinsic understanding of the West that is the real hero of her novels. Her characters are true to their nature, the era and the place. This story creates lasting memories of soul-searing redemption and the belief in goodness and hope.”
—RT Book Reviews
“As the attraction between Wyatt and Sarah deepens, the anticipated happy ending veers in an unexpected direction that makes this novel a real page-turner. With vibrant prose, fully realized characters, an engrossing plot set amid the dangers of the Old West, and a dash of Eastern guile thrown in for good measure, Ms. Miller has hit another bull’s-eye.”
—LoveWesternRomances.com
“My, my, there is nothing like a ruggedly handsome cowboy to make good reading. Throw in a feisty heroine, sexual tension and a tale told by bestselling author Linda Lael Miller and you have the best of the best reads. Ms. Miller’s words flow effortlessly weaving a story that captures and holds the reader spellbound. The Rustler is an awesome addition to the Stone Creek novels.”
—SingleTitles.com
“Linda Lael Miller is a good judge of horseflesh, and an astute student of human nature. Miller seems to understand her characters’ thoughts and state of mind while fulfilling her reader’s expectations. She doesn’t disappoint.”
—Armchair Interviews
The Rustler
Linda Lael Miller
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dear Reader,
Those wonderful Yarbro men are back! This time, it’s Wyatt, down on his luck after a lifetime of rustling and robbing trains, and determined to make a fresh start with Sarah Tamlin, the spirited banker’s daughter and a woman with a past.
I invite you to stop by my website, www.lindalaelmiller.com (http://www.lindalaelmiller.com), where you’ll find my blog and information on the Linda Lael Miller Scholarships for Women, a cause near and dear to my heart. As a young, divorced mom, I experienced my share of hard times, so I have a lot of sympathy for women in tough situations—and for their children, as well. I believe education is the best way to improve lives, and the scholarships, awarded annually, are my way of giving back.
I have been tremendously blessed. I’m so grateful to live on a thirty-acre horse property outside of Spokane, Washington, and I really enjoy the country life—though I also love to travel. I get to tell stories for a living—does it get any better?—and have lots of animals around.
I adore animals, obviously, and although I’m not formally associated with any group, I like to encourage people to support the shelters in their own communities first. Spokanimal and SCRAPS are my local favorites, and I know several of the dedicated folks who run them with wisdom and compassion.
My own menagerie currently includes five horses, two cats, and one Yorkie named Bernice. Buck, a gelding, and Sadie, a beagle, both gone now, live on in our hearts. Although I don’t have much time for hobbies, I love to make artist trading cards, raise peonies and read, read, read.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading this historical tale as much as I enjoyed writing it.
May you be blessed.
With love,
For Donna Hayes,
and all cowgirls everywhere.
Contents
PROLOGUE (#u2e48e493-e2b5-54a4-afc1-d8d8d0cf322d)
CHAPTER ONE (#u5823b389-8915-5024-b3fc-28cf61e914eb)
CHAPTER TWO (#u7e8cd316-6dae-5d84-9f58-adee38184c76)
CHAPTER THREE (#uc618a5c6-52a1-5d71-b6a0-268aed54c88e)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u12aee04d-4261-5432-bec1-fd737a7c5916)
CHAPTER FIVE (#ud255c627-81b1-52f7-8874-3b2c793825da)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE
Southern Arizona Territory
August, 1907
A RUSTLER’S MOON GLIMMERED faintly in the sky, a thin curve of light soon obscured by rain-ripe clouds. Wyatt Yarbro sat a little straighter in the saddle and raised the collar of his battered canvas coat, not so much against the threat of bad weather as the intuitive sense that things were about to head south, literally and figuratively. He tugged the brim of his hat lower over his eyes as the kid rode toward him, bearing the unlikely name of Billy Justice, along with a shotgun, bad skin and a contentious attitude.
Skirting the restless herd of soon-to-be-stolen cattle, Billy drew his sorrel up alongside Wyatt’s paint gelding, shifted his slight frame with an easy, soft creak of old leather.
“The boys are ready,” Billy said, in that lazy drawl of his. “You with us, or not?”
Inwardly, Wyatt sighed. Thunder rolled across the darkened sky, like a warning from God. Turn your horse and ride, cowboy, said a still, small voice deep inside him. Go now, while the getting is good.
His younger brother, Rowdy, was up north, in Stone Creek, and he’d offered Wyatt a place to stay. Said he could get him honest work, help him leave the outlaw life behind for good. Still, the town seemed far away, like some fairy-tale place. Wyatt was flat broke, his horse—won in a poker game in Abilene two weeks after he got out of a Texas prison—wasn’t fit for the trip.
He supposed Rowdy would wire him some money, if he could swallow his pride long enough to ask, but stealing would be easier. It was the only trade he’d ever learned.
“I’m with you,” Wyatt said without inflection.
Billy nodded. “Then let’s make for the border.”
Wyatt assessed the sky again, watched as a streak of lightning ripped it open in a jagged, golden gash. “I don’t like this weather,” he admitted.
Billy turned his head and spat. “You turnin’ coward on me, Yarbro?” he demanded coolly.
“Ever seen a stampede, Billy?” Wyatt countered, keeping his voice quiet. Young as Mrs. Justice’s boy was, Wyatt had him pegged for the sort who could draw and shoot without so much as a skip in his heartbeat or a catch in his breath.
The cattle, more than five hundred of them, roiled in the gulch below like water at the base of a high falls, swirling in on each other in dusty, bawling eddies of hide and horns.
“Nope,” Billy said, his tone blithe. Wyatt knew the kid was probably planning to gun him down from behind as soon as they’d delivered the herd and collected the loot. He wasn’t afraid of a pockmarked whelp, even a cold-eyed one like Billy, but the charge in the air itself made his nerves claw and scramble under his skin.
“Let’s get this done,” Wyatt answered, and rode in closer to the herd.
The wind picked up, howling over the bare Arizona desert like a banshee on the prowl for fresh corpses, but the gang, six of them in all, got the critters moving in a southerly direction. Wyatt watched Billy and his four riders even more closely than the cattle, making sure none of them had a clear shot at his back.
They funneled the herd through a narrow wash, raising dust so dense that Wyatt pulled his bandanna up over his nose and mouth and blinked to clear his eyes.
He thought about his brother as he rode. Rowdy, a former member of the infamous Yarbro gang, just as he was, had managed to set his feet on the straight and narrow path. He’d changed his ways, gotten himself a pardon, and now he not only had a wife and a new baby, he wore a star on his vest.
Despite the brewing storm, and his own uneasy feelings, Wyatt grinned wryly behind his bandanna. Rowdy, the erstwhile train robber, a lawman. That just proved what he’d always known: life was unpredictable as hell. Right when a man thought he had it all worked out in his brain, it would twist like a rattler striking from the woodpile.
Wyatt had never known any other way of living than holding up trains. Neither had Rowdy, until they pinned a badge on him and made him marshal of Stone Creek, Arizona. Soon after that, Rowdy had met and married a schoolmarm named Lark Morgan.
While he envied Rowdy a little—what would it be like to settle down with a good woman and a community of friends?—Wyatt wasn’t entirely convinced the change would stick. Once an outlaw, always an outlaw, as Pappy used to say.
And Pappy had been in a position to know.
Wyatt felt a mingling of irritation and sorrow as he thought of his father. If he’d been standing over the old man’s grave at that moment, he wouldn’t have known whether to weep or spit on the headstone.
He was debating the virtues of one approach over the other when a second bolt of lightning struck, this time in the center of the herd. Eerie light illuminated the whole scene—the terrified cattle and the other men stood out in sharp relief against the darkness for a long, bluish-gold moment—and then all hell broke loose, exploding in every direction like dynamite tossed into a campfire.
Wyatt’s horse reared, shrieking with panic, and nearly threw him.
He caught the scent of scorched flesh. Cattle bellowed in fear, and the other riders scattered, fleeing for their lives.
The paint gelding wheeled in the midst of hoof-pounding chaos, and though he fought to stay in the saddle, Wyatt found himself rushing headlong for the ground. The wind knocked out of him by the fall, he lay there in the dirt, blinded by dust, and waited to be trampled to death.
Cattle pounded past him, shaking the earth itself.
He didn’t know where his horse was—he couldn’t see anything—but he supposed the poor critter was already dead. If the horns hadn’t gotten old Reb, the hooves would have.
Wyatt managed to roll onto his belly, raise himself onto his hands and knees. It was a shame he wasn’t going to survive the stampede, because it would have made a hell of a story.
The cattle continued to rush past him, spilling around some shadowy barrier. Amazed at his own calm—the whole thing might have been a yarn spun by some old geezer in a saloon—Wyatt felt his way forward and came up against the side of a dead steer. Ducking low, he felt the sharp edge of a hoof brush his right shoulder, but the crushing pain he’d expected never came.
He huddled close to the dead cow and waited it out, praying his horse hadn’t suffered. Reb was a good old cayuse, deserving of green pastures and peace. He should have died with fresh grass between his teeth, not in the middle of a stampede.
Lightning lit up the landscape again, and then again, and Wyatt saw more dead cattle around him. He began to think he might make it after all, but he didn’t catch a glimpse of Billy or the others, and he was still fretting for the horse.
Gradually, after what seemed like the better part of a politician’s oration at a Fourth-of-July picnic, the din subsided and the ground stopped quaking.
Breathing slowly and deeply, Wyatt waited another few moments before daring to get to his feet. Eyes full of dirt, he wiped his face hard with the bandanna, then threw it aside.
He gave a low whistle, more out of habit than any hope that Reb would come.
But he did. The gelding nudged Wyatt between the shoulder blades, nearly knocking him off his feet, and nickered companionably.
Overjoyed, figuring he must be imagining things, Wyatt turned.
And there was Reb, reins dangling, bleeding where a horn had nicked him on the right side, and coated in red Arizona dust.
His heart swelling in his throat, Wyatt swung up into the saddle.
Pistol shots punctured intermittent rumblings of thunder, now distant, like the cattle.
Maybe Billy and his gang were trying to turn the herd.
Maybe a posse was making its presence known.
One way or the other, Wyatt Yarbro had seen the light.
He reined Reb to the north and made for Stone Creek.
CHAPTER ONE
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN the suffocating heat that had Miss Sarah Tamlin thinking of perdition—though of course three days of endless sermons had to be a factor—and how she’d almost certainly wind up there one day, as she pounded out the wheezing refrain of “Shall We Gather at the River” for a sweltering congregation. Seated at an organ hauled into Brother Hickey’s big revival tent in the bed of a buckboard, Sarah endured, perspiring, longing to fan herself with her sheet music or brush away the damp tendrils of hair clinging to the sides of her neck.
Every year in August, sure as the hay harvest, Brother Hickey and his roustabouts descended on the community like a circus without animals or parades, erected a canvas sanctuary on the grassy banks of Stone Creek, and set about saving the heathen from certain damnation.
A portion of the congregation seemed to deem it necessary to get saved on an annual basis. There wasn’t much to do in a place the size of Stone Creek, after all, and with no doubts about the fate of their immortal souls weighing on their minds, folks would be free to enjoy the picnic that always followed the preaching.
Sarah forced the last few notes of the old hymn through the organ pipes and sighed with relief. The air was heavy and still—a baby gave a brief, fretful squall—and then, remarkably, a breeze swept through the gathering, as soft and cool as the breath of heaven itself.
Startled, Sarah looked up from the cracked and yellowed keys of Brother Hickey’s well-traveled organ, over the turned heads of the salvation-seekers, and saw a man standing at the back of the tent. Tall and clean-shaven, with dark hair and eyes, he carried a dusty round-brimmed hat in one hand. His clothes were trail-worn, and the holster riding low on his right hip, gunslinger fashion, was empty. A grin tilted a corner of his mouth slightly upward.
Brother Hickey, moving behind his portable pulpit, which jolted over country roads and cattle trails right alongside the organ, cleared his throat and opened his Bible. “Have you come to be saved, stranger?” he boomed, employing his preacher voice.
The dark-haired man took a few steps forward. He moved with an easy grace, and for the space of a skipped heartbeat, Sarah wondered if he was some avenging angel, sent to put a stop to the show. “No, sir,” he said. “I don’t reckon I have.” His gaze strayed to Sarah, sitting there in the back of that buckboard, her best calico dress soaked under the armpits. The grin widened to a fleeting smile, as if he somehow knew the stays of her corset were stabbing the underside of her left breast, and all her other secrets, as well. A smile that imprinted itself on some sweet and wholly uncharted place inside her. “That was fine music, ma’am,” he told her directly. “I hope there’ll be more of it.”
Then, affably apologetic for disrupting the proceedings, he sat down next to Marshal Yarbro, who was grinning, and the two of them bumped shoulders.
Brother Hickey lifted his hands heavenward, closed his eyes in earnest and silent prayer, and then slammed a fist down onto the pulpit. Everybody jumped, Sarah noticed, except for the marshal and the stranger sitting beside him.
“Now is the day of Salvation!” Brother Hickey thundered, his copious white whiskers quavering. “Sinners, come forward and be bathed in the Blood of the Lamb!”
Several people rose and approached the makeshift altar, though most of the repenting had been done at previous services. There was dear old Mrs. Elsdon, who’d probably never committed an actual sin, two or three ladies of ill repute from Jolene Bell’s saloon, brothel and bathhouse, though Miss Bell herself was noticeably absent, a handful of cowpunchers from Sam O’Ballivan’s ranch, mostly likely hoping to speed things along so the picnic could get underway.
If Sarah hadn’t been staring at the stranger, she’d have been amused. The revival was in its third and final day, and by now, even the most pious were ready to socialize over fried chicken and apple pie. The children were restless, longing to chase each other under the shady oak trees, wade in the creek, and make noise.
The praying and the saving went on for a long time, but at last Brother Hickey was through gathering in the lost sheep. He signaled Sarah, and she arranged her fingers on the keyboard, tried to put the dark-haired visitor out of her mind, and played a thunderous rendition of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
As soon as she struck the final chord, the benches emptied and the stampede began.
Sarah sat still on the hard stool in front of the organ, almost faint with relief, her eyes closed. It was over for another year. As soon as everyone had left the tent, she would climb down from the bed of the wagon, slip out the back way, and make her way home. She kept a jar of tea cooling in the springhouse, and when she’d drunk her fill, she’d strip, stuff her corset into the stove, and take a sponge bath.
“Miss? It is ‘Miss,’ isn’t it?”
Sarah opened her eyes, saw the stranger standing right beside the buckboard, looking up at her. Again, she felt it, a peculiar jolting sensation that brought a blush to her cheeks, as though he’d read her thoughts and even imagined her shut away in her bedroom, naked, sluicing her flesh with water from a basin. She resisted a humiliating urge to smooth her hair, sit up straighter. “Yes,” she said stiffly.
“Wyatt Yarbro,” the man said, putting out a hand.
Sarah hesitated, then took it, though tentatively. His fingers were strong, calloused, and cool as the breeze he’d blown in on. “Sarah Tamlin,” she allowed, feeling foolish and much younger than her twenty-seven years.
“Would you like some help getting down from there?”
Short of lifting her skirts and leaping to the sawdust floor, as she would normally have done, Sarah had no graceful options. “All right,” she replied shyly. Then she climbed into the buckboard seat, careful not to let her ankles show, and Wyatt Yarbro put his hands on her waist and lifted her down. She stood looking up at him, stunned by the effect of his touch. Light-headed, she swayed slightly, and he steadied her.
His eyes were a deep brown, and they glinted with mischief and something else, too—some private, deep-seated sorrow. “I reckon it would be a sight cooler outside, under those oak trees alongside the creek,” he said.
Sarah merely nodded. Let herself be escorted out of the revival tent on Mr. Yarbro’s arm, in front of God and everybody.
Rowdy approached as Wyatt reclaimed his pistol from the table set aside for the purpose, his old yellow dog, Pardner, at his heels, and tipped his hat to Sarah.
“I didn’t see Mrs. Yarbro in the congregation,” Sarah said. She liked Lark, a former schoolteacher who’d stirred up quite a scandal when she took up with the marshal.
“The baby’s getting teeth, and it makes him fractious,” Rowdy replied. “They’ll be along later, when the heat lets up.” He turned slightly, gave Wyatt an affectionate slap on the shoulder. “I’d introduce my brother properly,” he added, “but it seems you’ve already made his acquaintance.”
“I’m the good-looking one,” Wyatt said.
Just then, Fiona Harvey showed up, holding a plate piled high with fried chicken, potato salad and apple crumble. Fiona, who was thirty if she was a day, wanted a husband. Everybody knew that.
When and if Fiona managed to get married, Sarah would become the town spinster.
“You look hungry,” Fiona told Wyatt, batting her sparse eyelashes.
Sarah, who considered Fiona a friend, simmered behind a cordial smile.
Wyatt tipped his head and flashed a grin at Fiona. “Why, thank you, ma’am,” he said, accepting the plate.
Rowdy rolled his eyes, caught the expression on Sarah’s face, and winked at her.
“You’re welcome to come and sit with us,” Fiona simpered, indicating a cluster of women sitting on a blanket under a nearby tree.
The marshal took the plate from Wyatt’s hands and gave it back to Fiona. “My brother’s much obliged,” he said smoothly, “but we’ve been expecting him, so Lark’s got a big spread on the table at home.”
“Thanks just the same, though,” Wyatt said.
Fiona took the rebuff gracefully, said she hoped Mr. Yarbro would come back for the fireworks and the dance that would take up after sunset, and he replied that he might well do that. With a sidelong glance at Sarah, he allowed as how he enjoyed fireworks.
She blushed again, oddly flustered.
And Fiona pressed the plate into her hands. “Take this to your papa,” she told Sarah. “Heaven knows, he’ll appreciate a decent supper, the way you cook.”
“Why, thank you, Fiona,” Sarah said.
Wyatt and Rowdy exchanged glances, and one of them chuckled.
Fiona smiled and walked away.
“Give my regards to your father,” Rowdy said, as Sarah turned to go, once again at a loss for words. The next time she saw Fiona, she’d have plenty to say, though.
“I’d better see Miss Tamlin home,” Wyatt said, and before Rowdy could protest that Lark had dinner waiting, he’d taken Sarah’s arm and escorted her halfway to the road.
Since it would be rude to tell him she could get home just fine on her own, Sarah bit her lip and marched along, resigned, carrying the plate like a crown on a velvet cushion.
An old spotted horse with a long cut on its side ambled along behind them, bridle jingling, reins wrapped loosely around the saddle horn.
Sarah looked back.
“That’s just Reb,” Wyatt said.
“What happened to his side?”
“He had a run-in with a steer a while back. He’s healing up fine, though.”
Sarah wanted to ask a thousand other questions, but all of them jammed up in the back of her throat. She was sweating, her hair felt as though it would escape its pins at any moment, and she could almost feel the flames of Brother Hickey’s beloved hellfire licking at her hem.
Mr. Yarbro donned his dusty hat, which made him look like a highwayman out of some dime novel. Sarah was painfully conscious of his hand, cupping her elbow, and the way he moved, with a sort of easy prowl.
“Are you really a bad cook?” he asked, visibly restraining a grin.
“Yes,” Sarah admitted, with a heavy sigh.
He chuckled. “Guess that’s why you’re not taken,” he said. “No other explanation for it, with looks like yours.”
Sarah was scandalously pleased, and determined to hide the fact. She didn’t think about her appearance much, given the busy life she led and her naturally practical turn of mind, but she knew she was...passable. Her hair was dark, and she kept it shiny with rainwater shampoos, vinegar rinses and a hundred brushstrokes every night. She had good skin, strong teeth, exceedingly blue eyes and a slender but womanly figure.
For all that, she was an old maid, too plainspoken and too smart to suit most men. Most likely, Mr. Yarbro was merely dallying with her.
“My looks are in no way remarkable, Mr. Yarbro,” she said, “and we both know it.” She paused. Then, ever the banker’s daughter, started adding things up in her brain. “Are you an outlaw, like your brother was?” she inquired bluntly.
“I used to be,” he said, surprising her.
She’d expected another answer, she realized. A lie, falling easily from those expressive lips of his. Faced with the stark truth, she didn’t know what to say.
Wyatt laughed and resettled his hat.
“What did you do?” Sarah asked, once she’d found her voice. They’d entered Stone Creek proper by then, passing Rowdy’s office first, strolling along the sidewalk past the mercantile and her father’s bank. The sun was setting, and old Mr. Shaefer was lighting the gas streetlamps, one by one.
“Robbed a train or two,” Wyatt said.
“My goodness,” Sarah remarked.
“You’re safe with me, Miss Tamlin,” he assured her, grinning again. “I’ve seen the error of my ways and I’m determined to take the high road, like my brother did. Are you planning to head back to the creek for the dancing and the fireworks?”
Sarah shook her head, bemused.
“Then I reckon I won’t bother to, either.”
So he hadn’t been taken with Fiona, then. Inwardly, Sarah gave a deep sigh.
All too soon, and not nearly soon enough, they’d reached the gate in front of Sarah’s house.
He opened the gate for her, stood back politely while she passed through it. When she looked over her shoulder, he touched the brim of his hat.
“Good night, Sarah Tamlin,” he said. The glow of a nearby streetlamp cast his fine features into shadow. The paint horse waited politely on the sidewalk, nibbling at the leaves of Sarah’s favorite peony bush.
Sarah swallowed, rattled again. “Good night, Mr. Yarbro,” she replied. Then she turned and hurried along the walk, up the porch steps, into the house. When she pulled aside a lace curtain to peer out, the train robber was gone, and so was his horse.
* * *
WYATT ATE TWO PLATES full of supper, admired Lark, who was pretty, made the acquaintance of the other younger brother, Gideon, he’d nearly forgotten he had, and dandled the baby on his knee for a while. The little kid was cute, if a mite fractious in temperament. His name was Hank, and he looked just like Rowdy.
The big kid, Gideon, gave Wyatt a suspicious once-over and took off for the festivities down by the creek. It was full dark by then, and fireworks spread like chrysanthemums against the sky. Wyatt, Rowdy and the baby sat on the porch steps in front of Rowdy’s small house, conveniently located in back of the jail, listening to the crickets, the sound of distant merriment, and the tinny tune of some saloon piano. Lark was inside, doing the things women did after they’d served a meal.
“You’ve done well for yourself, Rob,” Wyatt said quietly, using his brother’s given name. “A fine woman, a steady job, a son. I envy you a little.”
Rowdy leaned back on the porch step, resting on his elbows. Silvery light from the fireworks caught in his fair hair. “No reason you can’t have the same,” he said.
“No reason except two years in a Texas prison,” Wyatt replied. He’d told Sarah straight out that he’d robbed trains, but he hadn’t mentioned the stretch behind bars. With a woman, a little honesty went a long way.
“Everybody’s done things they’re not proud of, Wyatt.” Rowdy shifted, looked reluctant. “About Sarah—”
“What about her?” Wyatt asked, too quickly.
Rowdy considered a little longer before answering. “She works in her father’s bank,” he said. “Every cowpoke between here and Tucson has tried to court her, but she’s having none of it. I think she’s one of those—well—career women.”
“Career women?” Wyatt echoed. During supper, he’d learned that Lark had inherited a whole railroad from her first husband, and she ran it from Stone Creek, by mail and telegram, with a baby balanced on one hip. “You mean, like your wife?”
Rowdy colored up a little. “Lark’s different,” he said. “Womanly.”
Wyatt considered the fire he’d glimpsed in Sarah’s blue eyes, her slender waist, her delectable breasts, ripe for holding in a man’s hands. He imagined taking the pins from her ebony-colored hair and watching it fall to her hips in heavy, silken waves. She was “womanly” enough for him, and then some.
“I might as well tell you,” he told Rowdy, “that I intend to marry Sarah Tamlin as soon as I’ve got steady wages coming in.”
Rowdy’s mouth fell open. “Wyatt, you just met her. She’s got a temper, and she plays poker.”
Wyatt chuckled. “Poker? Even better!”
“She smokes cigars,” Rowdy said.
“I might have to break her of that,” Wyatt replied, enjoying the image of delicate little Sarah puffing on a stogy.
Rowdy thrust out a sigh. “Wyatt, what I’m trying to tell you is, she won’t have you. You’re an outlaw. She’s a blue-blooded banker’s daughter with a college education.”
“And I’m not good enough for her?”
Rowdy started to protest.
“Hold on,” Wyatt said, handing Hank over, since he felt a little soggy around the posterior region. “I know I’m not good enough for Sarah. Pappy wasn’t good enough for Ma, either, but she loved him until the day she died.”
Sadness flickered in Rowdy’s eyes. He’d been Miranda’s favorite, her boy Rob, and he was younger than Wyatt. He couldn’t be expected to remember the early days, how she’d laughed and sung under her breath whenever Pappy came home from his travels.
“She wasn’t happy,” Rowdy said.
“She bore Pappy six sons,” Wyatt reminded him. “Ma had plenty of chances to leave, Rowdy. She was a good-looking woman. Even after we were old enough to take care of ourselves, she stayed right on that farm. Why do you think she did that?”
Rowdy relaxed a little. “Ma was Ma. Sarah is Sarah. She’d never throw in with an outlaw, Wyatt. She’d figure you were after her papa’s money, or out to rob his bank.”
Wyatt stood, stretched. Rowdy and Lark’s house was small, so he’d be sharing an empty jail cell with Gideon until he found a bunk someplace. “Where can a man get a bath in this town?” he asked.
Rowdy laughed. “We’ve got a real fancy tub right here in the house—hot running water, the whole works. Talk of the town. You can use that.”
Wyatt didn’t want to disrupt the household, and he felt shy about stripping down under the same roof with a married woman. It was an unfamiliar compunction. “I’d rather not do that,” he said.
“Then I’ll drag a washtub into the jailhouse and you can heat water on the stove,” Rowdy said, rising to his feet, the baby in the curve of his arm. “I’ve got some extra clothes you can wear until we get you some duds.”
“Pump water will do,” Wyatt said. “If it wasn’t for that revival, I’d go down to the creek to bathe.” He swallowed a good-size portion of his pride. “And I’ll pay you back for the new rigging, Rowdy.”
“I know,” Rowdy answered.
An hour later, alone in the jailhouse, Wyatt poured the last bucket of water into an old tin washtub, dented and spotted with rust, peeled off his clothes, and sank into it.
It wasn’t the Blood of the Lamb, but for the time being, it would do.
CHAPTER TWO
GIDEON ALMOST GOT HIMSELF SHOT, banging into the jail like he did, in the middle of the night, with Wyatt sleep-flummoxed and in the altogether and all. He had the .45 cocked and aimed before he realized where he was, and who he was dealing with.
“Shit,” Wyatt said, wrenching the thin blanket up over himself and falling back on his cot with a sigh of relief, the pistol still in his right hand. “You oughtn’t to bust in on a man like that. I nearly put a bullet in you.”
Gideon slouched onto the cot opposite Wyatt’s, illuminated by a beam of moonlight straying in through the barred window, and wrenched off one of his boots. “I live here,” he said, and it was clear from his tone that he was none too pleased to be sharing his quarters. “Except when there’s a prisoner, of course. Anyhow, it wouldn’t have been the first time somebody put a bullet in me.”
Therein lies a tale, Wyatt thought.
“Hell of a place to call home,” he said, grimacing a little at the irony of the whole situation. After two years in the hoosegow, he’d ended up sleeping behind bars again. He reckoned it was God’s idea of a joke. “Where do you sleep when somebody gets themselves arrested?”
“Around,” Gideon said, after a long and studious pause. “I’ll be heading out for college pretty soon. I mean to be a Pinkerton man, or sign on as a Wells Fargo agent.”
The underlying message was clear enough: Don’t go thinking I mean to be an outlaw, like you, just because we’re kin.
“Who’d have thought it,” Wyatt mused, in a wry undertone, staring up at the low, shadowed ceiling of the cell. “Two of Payton Yarbro’s boys turning out to be lawmen. He must be rolling over in his grave.”
The boy stripped to his skivvies and stretched out on the cot. “Pappy died fighting for what was right,” he said. “What are you doing here? In Stone Creek, I mean?”
“Just looking for a place to be,” Wyatt answered. He didn’t expect the kid to trust him, the way Rowdy did. He and Gideon might have the same blood flowing through their veins, but in every other way, they were strangers. In fact, he kind of admired his younger brother’s caution, figuring it must have come from their ma’s side, since Pappy had never—to Wyatt’s knowledge anyway—exhibited the trait. “Who shot you?”
“Happened at a dance,” Gideon answered. “I’ll tell you about it some other time.” For a few minutes after that, he was quiet, except for some creaking of the old rope springs supporting his mattress as he settled his sizable frame for sleep.
The silence, though blessed to Wyatt’s ears, did not endure. “I saw you walking Sarah Tamlin home today,” Gideon remarked. “And I reckon you know her father owns the Stockman’s Bank.”
Wyatt smiled in the darkness, though a wing of sadness brushed the back of his heart. Most likely, he’d never really know Gideon, or be known by him, since the boy was bound for some far-off place. College. It was a thing Wyatt couldn’t imagine, though he’d read every book he could get his hands on. “You figure I’ve switched from holding up trains to robbing banks?”
“I’m just warning you, that’s all. Rowdy takes his job as marshal seriously. Brother or not, if you break the law, he’ll shut that door on you and turn the key. Don’t think he won’t.”
“I appreciate your concern,” Wyatt said dryly.
Another pause descended, long and awkward. The boy was brimming with questions, Wyatt knew, but asking them required some pride-swallowing.
“Tell me about the others,” Gideon murmured.
“The others?” Wyatt hedged.
“You know who I mean—Nicholas and Ethan and Levi. Pa told me their names, but not much else.”
“It’s late,” Wyatt answered. “If you want to know more about the family history, why don’t you ask Rowdy?”
“He won’t talk about them.”
“Maybe he’s got reason, and you ought to accept that and let the matter rest.”
“I’ve got a right to know about my own brothers, don’t I?”
Again, a sigh escaped Wyatt. He cupped his hands behind his head and closed his eyes, but sleep, the delicious, dreamless refuge he’d been enjoying earlier, eluded him. “Did it ever occur to you that it might be better all around if you didn’t? It isn’t always so, but there’s some truth in that old adage about ignorance being bliss.”
“Tell me.”
“Will you shut up and let me sleep if I do? I’ve got things to do in the morning—like find work.”
“I will,” Gideon agreed staunchly.
“I’m the eldest,” Wyatt recited dutifully. “Nick is a year younger. He’s always been a bit on the delicate side, not much for outlawing. Last I heard, he was living in Boston, writing poems and starving. By now, he’s probably contracted consumption—he’d enjoy a disease like that. Then come the twins—Ethan and Levi. Levi’s a little slow—and Ethan is a born killer. Rowdy is next in line, and I figure you probably know as much about him as he wants you to.”
“What was he like—before?”
“Tough. Fast with a gun. Smart as hell. Not much he was ever scared of, as far as I could tell. That’s how he got the nickname. Ma called him by his given name, Rob—she had a soft spot for him.” Wyatt thought he heard the boy swallow hard, over there on his cot. It struck him—with a brief but hard pang—that he probably knew more about Billy Justice and the members of his gang than he did about Gideon, his own brother.
“Pappy said Ma died having me,” Gideon said quietly, revealing a great deal more about himself in that one statement than he’d probably intended.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Wyatt said.
There was a shrug in Gideon’s voice when he answered. “She’d be alive now, if it hadn’t been for me,” he argued.
“You can’t know that for sure,” Wyatt pointed out, feeling sorry for the kid. It was a rung up the ladder, he reckoned, from feeling sorry for himself—he’d done enough of that in prison.
Gideon was quiet again, but just long enough for Wyatt to start hoping the palavering was over, so he could drift back into oblivion. He slept like a dead man, and rarely remembered his dreams, if he had any, and he considered that a blessing. Other men he’d known, back in Texas, hadn’t been so fortunate.
“There are some things a man just has to let go of,” he told Gideon.
“I reckon,” Gideon agreed, but without much conviction.
Wyatt rolled onto his side, with his back to his brother, and punched down his pillow, though it was already flat, figuring his saddle would have served better. Been cleaner, too. “Good night,” he said, with a yawn.
“What was she like?” Gideon asked. “Ma, I mean.”
Wyatt suppressed another sigh. Stayed on his side, eyes wide-open, staring at the splintery, raw-timbered wall. “She was a fine woman,” he said. “Half again too good for Pappy, that’s for certain. She loved him, though.”
At last, Gideon fell silent, though Wyatt knew there would be more questions, right along. With luck, they’d be ones he could answer.
* * *
THE MORNING AFTER Wyatt Yarbro walked her home from the revival picnic, Sarah overslept. She bolted awake, flustered, and scrambled out of bed, groping for her wrapper, wrenching it on, not bothering to shove her bare feet into house slippers.
“Papa?” she called, from the top of the back stairs leading down into the kitchen. “Papa!”
Dear God, suppose he’d wandered off again? The last time, he’d sneaked out wearing only a striped nightshirt and his best beaver top hat; she’d been lucky then, catching up to him at the corner, but Mrs. Madison, their neighbor, had witnessed the spectacle. Sarah had lied, smiling a brittle smile and explaining, perhaps too quickly, that her father had been sleepwalking lately.
The lying hadn’t been the worst part, though—Sarah lied on a daily basis, to such an extent that she made notes in a ledger book in order to be consistent. No, the terrible thing had been seeing her intelligent, affable father looking so bewildered.
The back door was still locked; Sarah rushed to the front.
Ephriam Tamlin, founder, president and holder of majority shares in the Stockman’s Bank, sat on the porch step, spine straight, a shotgun lying across his knees. He’d stuffed himself into a moth-eaten army uniform, Union blue.
Sarah put a hand to her heart. Drew a deep breath. “Papa,” she said, careful to speak softly, so she wouldn’t startle him.
“They’ve come, Nancy Anne,” he said, without turning to look up at her. “The Rebs are here.”
Sarah sat down beside him, tightening the belt of her wrapper and offering a silent prayer that no one would pass on the sidewalk and see them taking the morning air in such inappropriate garb. She reached for the shotgun, but Ephriam gripped it with strong, age-spotted hands.
“I saw their tent,” Ephriam went on. “Bold as Lucifer, those Confederates. Made camp right on the banks of Stone Creek. Heaven help us all if it’s Quantrill.”
Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, swallowed a hard lump of misery before attempting to speak. She laid a gentle hand on the faded blue sleeve of her father’s coat. “Papa,” she whispered. “Look at me.”
He turned, his kindly blue eyes blinking behind the thick, smudged lenses of his spectacles. This was the man who had been her rock, before and after her mother died. He’d protected her, provided for her. Helped her keep a shattering secret. Now, he looked befuddled, as though he knew he ought to be able to place her, but couldn’t quite manage it.
“It’s me, Papa,” she said. “Sarah. And the war has been over for forty-two years.”
He blinked again, rapidly now, and looked down at his ancient uniform and the shotgun resting across his lap. He was sixty-seven, too young for dementia. “I’ve had another spell,” he said, with a look of such mortified regret that Sarah felt bruised inside.
Gently, she took the shotgun from his hands. “No harm done,” she said, her voice hoarse with emotion. It probably wasn’t true, of course. He’d glimpsed Brother Hickey’s tent and mistaken it for a Confederate camp, and unless he’d followed the creek both ways, he must have walked right through town—dressed up in his old uniform, with the shotgun held smartly against his shoulder, like a soldier on patrol. Heaven only knew how many people had seen him, and were even now passing the word over fences and clotheslines.
“I’m sorry, Sarah,” he said, looking so wretched that fresh tears scalded her eyes.
“Come inside and change,” she replied, with an attempt at a reassuring smile. “I’ll make breakfast, and we’ll go to the bank and attend to business, just like we always do.”
Ephriam nodded, rose stiffly from the step. Looked down at his uniform with a rueful shake of his head. “I’m not the man I used to be,” he said sadly.
“Nonsense,” Sarah said briskly, once they were inside the house and out of sight of the neighbors. She set the shotgun aside with caution and straightened his blue coat. “You’re Ephriam Tamlin, head of the Stockman’s Bank. Now, what would you like for breakfast?”
* * *
THE TELEGRAPH OPERATOR showed up just as Rowdy, Gideon, Lark and Wyatt were finishing up their morning meal. Stood panting in the open doorway, skinny and sweating, a sheet of yellow paper clasped in one hand.
Rowdy immediately pushed back his chair and rose.
The baby, perched on Lark’s lap while she spooned oatmeal into his mouth, started at the commotion, and old Pardner gave a questioning bark but didn’t rise from the hooked rug next to the cookstove.
“There’s been a lynching down near Haven,” sputtered the little man on the threshold. He looked like a scarecrow in Sunday clothes. “Bunch of ranchers caught a couple of cattle thieves and strung ’em up. They want you to come. You and Sam O’Ballivan. I sent Zeke Reynolds out to Stone Creek Ranch with the news.”
A chill trickled down Wyatt’s spine. For a moment, he was out there under that rustler’s moon again, in the aftermath of a storm and a stampede he’d been lucky to survive, distant shots echoing in his ears.
Rowdy snatched the telegram from the messenger’s hand and scanned it a couple of times, in the way of a man who hoped it might say something different if he read it enough. Swore under his breath.
“You’re not a Ranger anymore,” Lark said quietly, gazing at her husband with luminous brown eyes. Her hair was fair, like Rowdy’s, and shorter than most women’s, just touching her shoulders. “And you’re the marshal of Stone Creek, not Haven.”
“If Sam goes,” Rowdy told his wife, avoiding her eyes, “I’ll be riding with him.”
“Me, too,” Gideon said.
Wyatt didn’t speak, and that was a hard thing, not offering to help. If there was one place he couldn’t afford to be seen in, it was that little border town, just outside of which he and Billy Justice and the boys had helped themselves to more than five hundred head of cattle.
“You’re staying right here,” Rowdy told Gideon, but his tone lacked conviction. Like as not, Gideon would get his way.
Meanwhile, Wyatt saw his dream of settling down, living under his own name instead of yet another alias, marrying up with a woman like Sarah and raising kids and cattle, scatter into the air like the fluff from a dandelion head. As soon as Rowdy and Sam O’Ballivan rode out, he would, too—heading in the opposite direction.
He should have known he couldn’t live in the open, like ordinary men.
Rowdy handed the telegraph operator a coin and dismissed him with a muttered “Thanks” and a distracted wave of one hand, reading the message again.
“If you’re going to Haven,” Lark said firmly, getting to her feet, swinging the baby onto her hip in the same motion, “so are Hank and I.”
“Who’s going to mind Stone Creek?” Wyatt asked, not because he cared much about the answer, but because he thought Rowdy might get suspicious if he didn’t say something. “Is there a deputy?”
A slow grin broke across Rowdy’s strained, thoughtful face. “Yes,” he said. “I’m looking at him.”
Wyatt felt hot color rush up his neck. “Me?”
Rowdy nodded. “You,” he said.
At last, Wyatt stood. “I don’t know anything about being a lawman,” he protested, but carefully. “Until two years ago, I had a price on my head.”
“So did I, at one time,” Rowdy said, unfazed. He could be like an old dog mauling a soup bone when he wanted something. Changing his mind wouldn’t be easy, if it was possible at all. “Turned out pinning on a badge was my salvation,” he said, catching Lark’s eye as she set the baby down on the rug beside the dog and moved to begin clearing the table. “That and a good woman willing to take a chance on a former train robber.”
Lark blushed prettily. “If you think you’re going to charm me out of going to Haven, Rowdy Yarbro,” she said, “you are sadly mistaken. As soon as I’ve done these dishes, I mean to pack for the trip.”
“Gideon will take care of the dishes,” Rowdy said. He was watching Wyatt again, though, and there was something disconcerting in his eyes, an intent, measuring expression. They hadn’t talked about the months between Wyatt’s release and his arrival in Stone Creek—there hadn’t been time. But Rowdy was a hard man to fool, and he clearly had his suspicions.
Gideon banged the dishes and cutlery around in the sink, but he didn’t protest the washing-up.
“It might be better if I just moved on,” Wyatt said. “I’m not cut out to uphold the law. Hell, it’s all I can do to stay on the right side of it. You know that.”
“Stone Creek is a quiet town,” Rowdy answered easily. “Most you’d run up against would be drunken cowboys, or railroad workers whooping it up on a Saturday night.”
Gideon grumbled something about getting shot at a dance, and did Rowdy call that quiet? But Wyatt was too focused on staring down the marshal of Stone Creek to pursue the matter right then.
“Gideon Yarbro,” Lark called from the bedroom, where she could be heard opening and shutting bureau drawers, “if you break one of my good dishes slamming them around like that, I’ll horsewhip you from one end of Main Street to the other!”
Exasperated, Wyatt shoved his hands into the hip pockets of his borrowed denim pants. Everything he was wearing, save his boots, pistol and gun belt—he’d left that outside out of deference to Lark—belonged to Rowdy. He sure hadn’t counted on adding a badge to the getup. “Why is a lynching in some other town any of your concern, anyhow?” he asked.
“I wrote you about it,” Rowdy said, still watching Wyatt a little too closely for his liking. “Told you what happened there.”
Wyatt’s mouth went dry. “I guess that particular letter didn’t catch up with me,” he said. He and Rowdy had written each other on and off for years, but it was a scattershot sort of thing. He’d ride into a town, stop in at the post office if there happened to be one, and inquire if there was mail for him, sent care of general delivery. Sometimes, there was. More often, there wasn’t.
A month ago, he’d wound up in Tucson, and there was a letter waiting from Rowdy, full of news about Lark and the baby and his job in Stone Creek. He’d related the story of Pappy’s death, and said if Wyatt wanted honest work, a friend of his named Sam O’Ballivan was always looking for cowpokes.
At the time, Wyatt had regarded that letter as a fluke of the postal system.
Now, he figured Rowdy must have figured he’d wind up in the Arizona Territory eventually, maybe looking for Pappy, and wished he’d never set foot in the post office in Tucson. Or, better yet, thrown in with the likes of Billy Justice before Rowdy offered him a fresh start.
“I can’t stay, Rowdy,” he said.
“You’ll stay,” Rowdy said.
“What makes you so damn sure?”
“That old nag of yours is practically dead on his feet. He doesn’t have another long ride in him.”
“He made it here, didn’t he?”
Rowdy didn’t seem to be listening. “I’ve got a spare gelding out there in the barn. You can ride him if you see the need. Name’s Sugarfoot, and he’ll throw you if you try to mount up on the right side.”
“When it comes to riding out, one horse is as good as another,” Wyatt said, but he was thinking of old Reb, the paint gelding, and how sorry he’d be to leave him behind. They’d been partners since that turn of the cards in Abilene, after all, and Wyatt would have been in a fine fix without him.
“You’re a lot of things, Wyatt,” Rowdy reasoned, “but a horse thief isn’t among them. Especially when the horse in question belongs to me.”
Wyatt scowled, said nothing. He was fresh out of arguments, at the moment. Hadn’t kept up on his arguing skills, the way Rowdy had.
Rowdy saw his advantage and pressed it. “And then there’s Sarah Tamlin,” he said.
“What about Sarah Tamlin?” Lark asked, appearing in the bedroom doorway with a fat satchel in one hand.
Wyatt glared at Rowdy.
Rowdy merely grinned.
“She smokes cigars,” Wyatt said lamely. “You told me that yourself, just yesterday. Plays poker, too. Gives a man second thoughts.”
“She does not smoke cigars,” Lark insisted.
“So it’s true about the poker!” Rowdy said, in an ah-ha tone of voice.
“I wouldn’t know,” Lark said, with an indignant sniff.
“I heard she was a member of the Tuesday Afternoon Ladies Only Secret Poker Society,” Gideon said, looking smug. “And she’s not the only one. It might surprise you who goes to those meetings.”
Rowdy chuckled.
“Gideon,” Lark warned.
He turned back to the sink, flushed, and scrubbed industriously at the kettle Lark had used to boil up the morning’s oatmeal.
“It’s just a rumor,” Lark told Rowdy. “Respectable women do not play poker. Or smoke cigars.”
“Whatever you say, dear,” Rowdy replied sweetly.
Wyatt just shook his head, confounded.
“Come on,” Rowdy said to him, beckoning. “I’ll show you around town. Sam can swear you in when he gets here. What I do is, I count the horses in front of the saloons. If there’re more than a dozen, I keep a closer eye on the place—”
Wyatt followed, since that seemed like the only thing to do.
* * *
“THERE,” SAID SARAH, straightening her father’s tie outside the door of his office at the bank, grateful that the place was empty at the moment. Thomas, the only teller, had gone out when they arrived. The train would be pulling in at the new depot within an hour, pausing only long enough to swap mailbags with the postmaster and take on any passengers who might be waiting on the platform—or drop off new arrivals.
It was Thomas’s job, at least in part, to rush back to the bank and report to Sarah if any important visitors showed up. She was always on the lookout for unexpected stockholders.
“I’ll handle things, Papa,” Sarah assured her father, who had turned fretful again after breakfast. She was fairly certain he hadn’t seen her stuff his army uniform behind the wooden barrel of the washing machine on the back porch, but she wasn’t absolutely sure. “If someone comes in to open an account or inquire about a loan, let me do the talking. I’ll say you’re busy. All you have to do is sit at your desk, with your papers—if they insist on greeting you personally, I’ll be careful to call them by name so you know what to—”
“Sarah.” Ephriam looked pained.
“Papa, you know you forget.”
Just then, the street door opened with a crash, and Thomas burst in. Plump, with a constellation of smallpox scars spilling down one side of his face, he seemed on the verge of panic.
“Sarah!” he gasped, from the threshold, one fleshy hand pressed to his chest. “It’s him—the man in the photograph you showed me—”
Sarah’s knees turned to water. “No,” she said, leaning against her father for a moment. “He couldn’t possibly have—”
“It’s him,” Thomas repeated.
“Calm down,” Sarah said hastily. “Remember your asthma.”
Thomas struggled to a wooden chair, in front of the window, and sat there sucking in air like a trout on a creek bank. “S-Sarah, wh-what are we going to d-do—?”
“What,” Ephriam interjected, suddenly forceful, “is happening?”
Even in her agitation, Sarah felt a stab of sorrow, because she knew her father wouldn’t be his old self for more than a few minutes. When the inevitable fog rolled in, shrouding his mind again, she’d miss him more keenly than ever.
“You’re going to take Papa home,” she told Thomas, who had begun a moderate recovery—of sorts. He wasn’t sweating quite as much as he had been when he rushed in, and his breathing had slowed to a slight rasp. “Go out the back way, and stay off Main Street.”
Gamely, Thomas got to his feet again. Lumbered toward them.
When he took Ephriam’s arm, though, the old man pulled free. “Unhand me,” he said. “This is an outrage!”
Sarah’s mind was racing wildly through a series of possibilities, all of which were disastrous, but she’d had a lot of experience dealing with imminent disaster, and she rose to the occasion.
“Papa,” she said, “poor Thomas is feeling very ill. It’s his asthma, you know. If you don’t get him to Doc Venable, quickly, he could—” she paused, laid a hand to her bosom, fingers splayed, and widened her eyes “—perish!”
“Great Scot,” Ephriam boomed, taking Thomas by one arm and dragging him toward the front door, and the busy street outside, “the man needs medical attention! There’s not a moment to spare!”
Thomas cast a pitiable glance back at Sarah.
She closed her eyes, offered a hopeless prayer that Charles Elliott Langstreet the Third would get lost between the depot and the bank, and waited for the Apocalypse.
By the time Charles actually arrived, she was quite composed, at least outwardly, though faintly queasy and probably pale. She might have gotten through the preliminary encounter by claiming she was fighting off a case of the grippe, but as it turned out, Charles didn’t come alone.
He’d brought Owen with him.
Sarah’s heart lurched, caught itself like a running deer about to tumble down a steep hill. Perched on a stool behind the counter, in Thomas’s usual place, a ledger open before her, she nearly swooned.
Owen.
Ten years old now, blond like his imperious father, but with his grandfather’s clear, guileless blue eyes.
The floor seemed to tilt beneath the legs of Sarah’s stool. She gripped the edge of the counter to steady herself.
Charles smiled, enjoying her shock. He was handsome as an archangel, sophisticated and cruel, the cherished—and only—son of a wealthy family. And he owned a thirty percent interest in the Stockman’s Bank.
Owen studied her curiously. “Are you my aunt Sarah?” he asked.
Tears burned in Sarah’s eyes. She managed a nod, but did not trust herself to speak. If she did, she would babble and blither, and scare the child to death.
“Surprised?” Charles asked smoothly, still watching Sarah closely, his chiseled patrician lips taking on a sly curve.
“We came all the way from Philadelphia on a train,” Owen said, wide-eyed over the adventure. “I was supposed to spend the summer at school, but they sent me packing for putting a stupid girl down the laundry chute.”
Sarah blinked, found her voice. “Was she hurt?” she croaked, horrified.
“No,” Owen said, straightening his small shoulders. He was wearing a tweed coat and short pants, and he seemed to be sweltering. “She did the same thing to Mrs. Steenwilder’s cat, so I showed her how it felt.”
“The girl is fine,” Charles said. “And so is the cook’s cat.”
“We’re going to stay at the hotel,” Owen said. “Papa and me. I get to have my own room.”
“Why don’t you go over there right now and make sure the man we hired at the depot takes proper care of our bags?” Charles asked the little boy.
Owen nodded solemnly and left.
Sarah’s heart tripped after him—she had to drag it back. Corral it in her chest, where it pounded in protest.
“Why did you bring him?” she asked.
“I couldn’t leave the boy with Marjory,” Charles answered. “She despises him.”
Sarah squeezed her eyes shut, certain she would swoon.
“You must have known I’d come, Sarah. Someday.”
She opened her eyes again, stared at him in revulsion and no little fear. He’d moved while she wasn’t looking—come to stand just on the other side of the counter.
“If only because of the bank,” he went on softly, reaching out to caress her cheek. “After all, I have a sizable investment to look after.”
Sarah recoiled, but she still needed the stool to support her. “You’ve been receiving dividends every six months, as agreed,” she said coldly. “I know, because I made out the drafts myself.”
Charles frowned elegantly. His voice was as smooth as cream, and laced with poison. “Strange that you’d do that—given that Ephriam holds the controlling interest in this enterprise, not you.”
“It’s not strange at all,” Sarah said, but she was quivering on the inside. “Papa is very busy. He has a lot of other responsibilities.”
“All the more reason to offer my assistance,” Charles replied. He paused, studied her pensively. “Still beautiful,” he said. A smile quickened in his eyes, played on his mouth. “You’d like to run me off with a shotgun, wouldn’t you, Sarah?” he crooned. “But that would never do. Because when I leave, I’ll be taking our son with me.”
CHAPTER THREE
SAM O’BALLIVAN MUST HAVE BEEN an important man, Wyatt concluded, because they held the departing train for him. He arrived driving a wagon, with a boy and a baby and a pretty woman aboard, a string of horses traveling alongside, led by a couple of ranch hands. While all the baggage and mounts were loaded into railroad cars, Lark and Sam’s wife chattered like a couple of magpies on a clothesline.
Rowdy made the introductions, and Sam and Wyatt shook hands, standing there beside the tracks, the locomotive still pumping gusts of white steam. Sam was a big man, clear-eyed and broad-shouldered, with an air of authority about him. He not only owned the biggest ranch within miles of Stone Creek, he was an Arizona Ranger, which was the main reason he and Rowdy had been summoned to Haven.
“I hear you’re a fair hand with horses and cattle,” Sam said, in his deep, quiet voice.
The statement gave Wyatt a bit of a start, until he realized Sam was talking about ranch work, not rustling. “I can manage a herd, all right,” Wyatt confirmed.
Sam gave a spare smile. His gaze penetrated deep, like Rowdy’s, and it was unsettling. “I’m looking for a range foreman,” the rancher said. “Job comes with a cabin and meals in the bunkhouse kitchen. Fifty dollars a month. Would you be interested?”
Rowdy must have seen that Wyatt was surprised by the offer, given that he was a stranger to O’Ballivan, because he explained right away. “I told Sam all about you.”
“All of it?” Wyatt asked, searching his brother’s face.
“I know you did some time down in Texas,” Sam said.
Wyatt stole a glance at the pretty woman laughing and comparing babies with Lark a few yards away. A tall boy stood nearby, waiting impatiently to board the train. “And that doesn’t bother you? Having a jailbird on your place, with your family there and all?”
“Rowdy’s willing to vouch for you,” Sam said. “That’s good enough for me.”
Wyatt looked at Rowdy with new respect. What would it be like to be trusted like that?
“I figure we ought to appoint Wyatt deputy marshal,” Rowdy said. “Being the mayor of Stone Creek, you’d have to swear him in.”
Sam nodded, but he was still looking deep enough to see things Wyatt didn’t want to reveal. “Do you swear to uphold the duties of deputy marshal?” he asked.
“Yes,” Wyatt heard himself say.
Rowdy handed him his badge just as Gideon showed up, a pair of bulging saddlebags over one shoulder, the old yellow dog padding along behind him.
“Pardner’s going, too,” Gideon said, apparently braced for an objection.
Nobody raised one.
Inside the locomotive, the engineer blew the whistle.
“Guess we’d better get going,” Rowdy said, with a grin. “The train’s got a schedule to keep.”
With that, there was some hand-shaking, and some fare-thee-wells, then the whole crowd of them boarded, even the yellow dog. Wyatt stood there, Rowdy’s star-shaped badge heavy in his left hand, and wondered how he’d gotten himself into this situation. It was all well and good to figure on running for it before Sam and Rowdy caught up to what was left of the Justice gang and learned that he, Wyatt, had ridden with the sorry outfit. The trouble was, except for stealing one of his brother’s horses, a thing Rowdy had rightly guessed he could not do, and taking to the trail, he didn’t have any choice but to stay right there in Stone Creek.
Hell, he might as well just shut himself up behind the cell door over there in the jailhouse right now and be done with it.
He watched, feeling a strange combination of misery and anticipation, as the train pulled out of the depot onto a curved spur, Stone Creek being at present the end of the line, and snaked itself around to chug off in the other direction. Steam billowed from the smokestack as it picked up speed.
When he turned to walk away, he almost collided with a small boy in knee pants and a woolen coat.
The kid’s gaze fastened on Rowdy’s star as Wyatt pinned it to his shirt.
“You the law around here?” the boy asked, squinting against the bright August sun as he looked up at Wyatt.
“For the moment,” Wyatt said.
“Owen Langstreet,” the child replied, putting out a small hand with manly solemnity. “I got expelled from school for throwing a girl named Sally Weekins down the laundry chute. Not that you can arrest me or anything, Sheriff—?”
“Name’s Wyatt Yarbro,” Wyatt told young Mr. Langstreet, “and I’m not the sheriff. That’s an elected office, one to a county. Reckon my proper title is ‘deputy marshal.’ Why would you go and dump somebody down a laundry chute?”
“It’s a long story,” Owen answered. “She didn’t get hurt, and you can’t arrest me for it, anyhow. It happened in Philadelphia, and that’s outside your jurisdiction.”
Wyatt frowned. “How old are you?”
“Ten,” Owen said.
“I’d have pegged you for at least forty.” Wyatt started back for the main part of town, one street over, figuring he ought to walk around and look like he was marshaling. He wasn’t looking forward to going back to the jail; it would be a lonely place, with nobody else around.
“There probably aren’t any laundry chutes in Stone Creek,” Owen went on, scrambling to keep up. “Papa says it’s a one-horse, shit-heel town in the middle of nowhere. Even the hotel only has two stories. And no elevator.”
“That so?” Wyatt replied. The kid talked like a brat, using swearwords and bragging about poking a girl down a chute, but there was something engaging about him, too. He wasn’t pestering Wyatt out of devilment; he wanted somebody to talk to.
Wyatt knew the feeling.
“He’s going to take Aunt Sarah’s bank away from her,” Owen said.
Wyatt stopped cold, looked down at the kid, frowning. “What?”
“Papa says there’s something rotten in Denmark.”
“Just who is your papa, anyhow?”
“His name is Charles Langstreet the Third,” Owen replied matter-of-factly. “You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?”
“Can’t say as I have,” Wyatt admitted, setting his course for the Stockman’s Bank, though he had no business there, without a dime to his name. If Sarah was around, he’d tell her he was Rowdy’s deputy now, out making his normal rounds. It made sense for a lawman to keep an eye on the local bank, didn’t it?
“He’s very rich,” Owen said. “I’m going to have to make my own way when I grow up, though. Mother said so. I needn’t plan on getting one nickel of the Langstreet fortune, since I’m a bastard.”
As concerned as he was about Sarah, and the fact that some yahoo called Charles Langstreet the Third was evidently plotting to relieve her of the Stockman’s Bank, Wyatt stopped again and looked down at Owen. “Your mother called you a bastard?”
Owen nodded, unfazed. “It means—”
“I know what it means,” Wyatt interrupted. “Does this papa of yours know you’re running loose in a cow town, all by yourself?”
“I’m not by myself,” Owen reasoned. “I’m with you. And you’re a deputy. What could happen to me when you’re here?”
“The point is,” Wyatt continued, walking again, “he doesn’t know you’re with me, now does he?”
“He knows everything,” Owen said, with certainty. “He’s very clever. People tip their hats to him and call him ‘sir.’”
“Do they, now?”
The bank was in sight now, and Wyatt saw a tall man, dressed Eastern, leaving the establishment, straightening his fancy neck rigging as he crossed the wooden sidewalk, heading for the street.
Spotting Owen walking with Wyatt, the man smiled broadly and approached. “There you are, you little scamp,” he told the boy, ruffling the kid’s hair.
“This is Wyatt Earp,” Owen said. That explained all the chatter.
“Wyatt Yarbro.”
“Charles Langstreet,” said the dandy. He didn’t extend his hand, which was fine with Wyatt.
Wyatt glanced over Langstreet’s shoulder, hoping to catch a glimpse of Sarah through the bank’s front window. He didn’t know much about Owen’s papa—but he figured him for trouble, all right.
“You’re not Wyatt Earp?” Owen asked, looking disappointed.
“No,” Wyatt said. “Sorry.”
“But you’ve got a gun and a badge and everything.”
“Come along,” Langstreet told the boy, though his snake-cold eyes were fixed on Wyatt’s face. “Aunt Sarah has invited us to supper, and we’ll need to have baths and change our clothes.” His gaze sifted over Wyatt’s borrowed duds, which had seen some use, clean though they were. “A good day to you—Deputy.”
With that, the confab ended, and Langstreet shepherded the boy toward the town’s only hotel. Owen looked back, once or twice, curiously, as if trying to put the pieces of a puzzle together.
Wyatt made for the bank. A little bell jingled over the door as he entered.
Sarah, standing behind the counter, looked alarmed, then rallied.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said.
Wyatt took off his round-brimmed black hat and tried for an easy smile, but the truth was, the inside of that bank felt charged, like the floor might suddenly rip wide open, or thunder might shake the ceiling over their heads. “Everything all right, Miss Tamlin?”
She blinked. “Of course everything is fine, Mr. Yarbro. Whyever would you ask such a question?”
“Partly because it’s my job.” He indicated the star on his shirt. “I’ll be looking after Stone Creek while Rowdy’s out of town. And partly because I just met a boy named Owen Langstreet down by the depot.”
She paled. “What did he tell you?”
“Just that his father means to take the bank away from you.”
Sarah tried to lasso a smile, but the rope landed short. “This bank belongs to my father, not to me. Mr. Langstreet is merely a—a shareholder. There is no need to be concerned, Mr. Yarbro, though I do appreciate it.”
Wyatt nodded, went to the door, replaced his hat. “I’m a friend, Sarah,” he said. “Remember that.”
She swallowed visibly, nodded back.
Wyatt opened the door.
“Mr. Yarbro?”
He stopped, waited. Said nothing.
Sarah’s voice trembled. “I wonder if you’d join us for supper tonight? Six o’clock?”
“I’d like that,” Wyatt said.
“We’ll be expecting you, then,” Sarah replied brightly.
Wyatt touched his hat brim again and left.
Walking back along Main Street, toward Rowdy’s office, he was intercepted repeatedly; evidently, word had gotten around town that while Marshal Yarbro was away, he’d be watching the store. Folks were friendly enough, if blatantly curious, and Wyatt offered them no more than a “howdy” and an amicable nod.
Thoughts were churning inside his head like bees trying to get out from under an overturned bucket. He meant to leave Stone Creek. He meant to stay.
He didn’t know what the hell he was going to do.
Distractedly, he counted the horses in front of every saloon he passed—the town had more than its share, considering its size—saw no reason for concern, and went on to the jailhouse. Now that he had a supper invitation from Sarah, his spirits had lifted, though he was under no illusion that she’d asked him over out of any desire to socialize. She didn’t want to be alone with Langstreet, that was all; she was terrified of him, and it was more than the threat of losing control of the bank.
Back at the jail, Wyatt collected his bedroll and saddlebags from the cell where he’d passed the night and headed for the small barn out behind Rowdy’s house. He’d bunk out there in the hayloft, he’d decided, with Reb and the other horses. He’d be behind bars again soon enough, if Rowdy and Sam caught up with Billy Justice. Soon as Billy heard the name Yarbro, he’d put paid to any hope Wyatt had of living as a free man.
He could lie, of course. Say he’d never crossed paths with the gang, let alone helped them rustle cattle. His word against Billy’s. Sam might even believe him—but Rowdy wouldn’t. No, Rowdy’d see right through to the truth.
Inside the barn, Wyatt tossed his few belongings up into the low-hanging loft, and the sweet smell of fresh hay stirred, along with a shower of golden dust.
Reb nickered a greeting, and Wyatt crossed to the stall to stroke the animal’s long face. “You like it here, don’t you, boy?” he asked. “Time you led the easy life.”
Wyatt added hay to Reb’s feeding trough, then to those of the other two horses. He carried water in from the well to fill their troughs.
Rowdy’s spare horse was a buckskin gelding named Sugarfoot. He looked capable of covering a lot of ground—he and Sugarfoot could be a long way from Stone Creek in a short time. Maybe he’d leave a note for Rowdy, on the kitchen table, along with the badge, saying he was sorry and promising to send payment for the horse as soon as he got work.
He closed his eyes against the emotions that rose up in him then—shame, frustration, regret—and a hopeless yearning for the kind of life his younger brother had. Rowdy would understand; he’d been on the run himself. But if he found out about Wyatt’s brief association with Billy’s gang, he might come after him, not as a brother, but as a lawman.
And there was more.
He’d never see Sarah again, or poor old Reb.
He sighed, shoved a hand through his hair.
After a few moments, he made for the house. He’d been kidding himself, thinking he could stop running and put down some roots. Now, he was going to have to cut himself loose, and it would hurt—a lot.
Entering by the kitchen door, Wyatt noticed the envelope propped against the kerosene lamp in the center of the table right away. Took it into his hands.
Rowdy had scrawled his name on the front.
After letting out a long breath, he slid a thumb under the flap, found a single sheet of paper inside, along with three ten-dollar bills.
Thanks, Wyatt. It’s good to know I can count on you. R.
Wyatt swore under his breath. He didn’t doubt Rowdy’s gratitude, but he suspected the marshal had an additional motive—he wanted to make it harder to leave.
He checked the clock on the shelf under the far window—it was nearly noon—and saw another slip of paper, folded tent-style. A rueful grin hitched up one side of his mouth. He hadn’t gotten this much mail in a long time.
The second note was from Lark.
Wyatt—Help yourself to the food, and if you run out of anything, use our account at the mercantile to buy what you need. Make yourself at home.
He folded the note carefully and tucked it under the edge of the clock, his throat strangely tight, his eyes burning a little. He jollied himself out of the melancholies by looking around for a third note, from Gideon, or maybe even Pardner.
Neither of them had written a word, though.
He went to the larder, a wooden box with a metal handle, opened it up, and found cold meat inside. There was half a loaf of bread, too, so he made himself a sandwich and walked through to the little parlor beyond the kitchen. He hadn’t passed much time in a real house since he’d left the homeplace for the last time.
His ma had cried that day. Begged him to stay and work the farm.
He’d ridden out instead. He’d had better things to do, he’d thought back then, than plowing fields and milking cows. No, he’d preferred to rob trains with Pappy.
“Fool,” he said aloud, admiring but not touching the framed photographs set up on a wooden table near the windows. Lark and Rowdy, posing solemnly on either side of a Grecian pillar. Little Hank, bare-ass naked on a fur rug, in the saddle in front of a grinning Rowdy, cradled in Lark’s arms in a rocking chair.
The soreness in Wyatt’s throat got worse, and he had to blink a couple of times. He retreated from the row of pictures, scanned the rest of the room. There were two other doors, one open, one closed.
The open door led to the bathroom, a swanky one with a flush toilet and a copper boiler to heat water, just as Rowdy had said. Wyatt stepped inside the small room and looked into the mirror above the pedestal sink. He needed a shave, he decided, rubbing the dark stubble on his face. Rowdy had left behind a razor and a soap mug, and the tub looked mighty inviting.
Just go, he told himself. Saddle up Sugarfoot, ask some neighbor to look after Reb and Lark’s mare, and go.
He thought about supper at Sarah’s, sitting across a table from her, just for one meal. He’d make sure Langstreet didn’t pose any kind of serious threat to her, and leave in the morning.
First thing in the morning, for sure.
No matter what.
In the meantime, he might as well go into the jailhouse, in case somebody came by needing a lawman.
He was amused to find, when he approached the desk, that Gideon had left a note after all. Scrawled on the back of a Wanted poster and carefully centered in the middle of the blotter.
Don’t steal anything. If you do, I’ll come after you for sure. Gideon Yarbro.
Wyatt chuckled. He had no doubt that the kid was sincere. Two lawmen in the family now, Pappy, he thought. And me wearing a badge, too. Guess you must be wondering where you went wrong.
* * *
THE AFTERNOON, BLESSEDLY quiet in terms of business, passed at an excruciatingly slow pace. Sarah spent the time examining the books—column after column of figures penned in her distinctive handwriting, every cent accounted for—and wondered if Charles would believe the only lie she could come up with on such short notice.
Her father’s eyesight had been very poor before Dr. Venable had arranged for a pair of spectacles to be sent up from Phoenix, and she’d fallen into the habit of managing the ledgers for him.
Flimsy, but it might work.
Carefully, she recorded the statement in her own small book, which she carried in the pocket of her skirt. Ever since lying had become a necessary art, Sarah had taken pains to record the fibs she’d told, both for the sake of continuity in conversations with others and, she supposed, as a form of penance.
God recorded both sins and virtues in the Book of Life, according to the preachers. Maybe He’d understand, on Judgment Day, that writing down the lies she told was a form of honesty in and of itself, convoluted as the idea seemed, even to Sarah herself.
More likely, He’d order her flung into the Lake of Fire, immediately if not sooner. After all, God hated a liar, didn’t He?
Sarah sighed. If the Lord was as cranky and hard to please as Brother Hickey and his ilk made Him out to be, she couldn’t hope to get along with Him anyhow.
When closing time finally came—neither Thomas nor her father had returned from the visit to Dr. Venable, who was probably subjecting poor Thomas to all manner of painful cures—Sarah hung the sign in the door, locked up, and headed for home.
She’d been a fool to invite Wyatt Yarbro to take a meal under her roof—he was an outlaw, badge or no badge—but it would be better than being alone, for all practical intents and purposes, with Charles Langstreet. Owen and her father would also be present, but both of them were children, despite the vast difference in their ages.
A new worry rose up whole in her mind as she approached her front gate and stooped to pat Mehitabel, the three-legged cat, who sometimes came by to lap up a bowl of cream or sleep contentedly behind the cookstove when the weather turned cold.
What might Ephriam say when he saw Owen? Once, she could have depended on her father’s discretion, but given the state of his mind, he might blurt out something the boy wasn’t prepared to hear, or understand.
A chill rippled in the pit of her stomach.
Owen.
She could adapt to almost anything, including losing control of the Stockman’s Bank, if matters came to that pass, but seeing Owen hurt in any way would be beyond toleration.
Charles claimed he’d brought the boy to Stone Creek because he could not remain at school, or at home with Mrs. Langstreet; he’d simply had no other choice. Caught off guard, Sarah had accepted the explanation the way someone at the top of a burning staircase would accept a wet blanket. Now, with the storm of her thoughts abating a little, she knew there had to be another reason. Charles could have left Owen with his aging mother, prevailed upon one of his three married sisters.
Instead, Owen was there, in Stone Creek.
Why?
Certainly not because Charles felt any kindly inclination toward her. She’d begged him for photographs of Owen over the years, receiving only one, sent letter after letter to the child, revealing nothing, always signing the long missives with the spinsterly affection of an aunt. There had been no replies, but given Owen’s tender age, that wasn’t surprising.
Sarah blinked, realizing she was still standing at the gate, Mehitabel curling into her hem, and worked the latch. The hinges creaked as she passed through.
Are you my aunt Sarah? Owen had asked earlier, in the bank, his eyes wide and trusting.
What had Charles—or, more worrisome yet, his wife, Marjory—told the boy about his “aunt”?
The front door opened as Sarah approached, and Doc appeared in the gap. He was a stoutly built man with gentle eyes, and an old friend as well as physician to her father. The two men had met in the army, serving under General Grant, Ephriam as an infantry captain, Jacob Venable as a surgeon. Ephriam had sustained a bayonet wound to his right shoulder during a skirmish with Confederate cavalrymen, and Venable had tended him. Having a number of things in common, but primarily a shared passion for books, they’d swapped whatever rare and treasured volumes they managed to get their hands on. Both men had been at Appomattox when Lee surrendered, and taken off their hats to the living legend as he left Grant’s presence, proud even in defeat. Every winter they sat smoking in front of the fire in the Tamlins’ parlor, reliving that day and the events that led up to it.
Now, looking up at Doc, with his graying beard and dignified bearing, Sarah thought he resembled General Lee, for all that he, like her father, had been a Union man, born and bred.
Doc was also the only person who knew about her book of lies. She’d confided in him, one late night, while keeping a vigil by a dying neighbor’s bedside.
“Is Papa ill?” she asked.
“I dosed him with laudanum and put him to bed,” Doc said matter-of-factly. “He was in another one of his states—asking after your mother.”
Sarah swallowed hard, blinked back tears. She felt relieved that her father wouldn’t be at the supper table, unpredictable as he was. She also felt guilty for being relieved.
Doc took a seat in the porch swing and patted the space beside him. “Sit down, Sarah,” he said gently.
“I’ve got to fix supper for company and—”
“Sit down, please,” Doc repeated.
Sarah sat. Doc and the teller, Thomas, were the only people in Stone Creek who knew for sure that Sarah ran the bank, though there were surely others, like Sam O’Ballivan, who suspected it.
“You’re not going to be able to keep up this charade much longer, Sarah,” Doc told her quietly. “Ephriam’s condition is deteriorating. Heartbeat’s sporadic, and there are other bad signs, too. He’ll need a nurse soon—if the town had a hospital, I’d have him admitted, for an indefinite length of time.”
“Is he dying?” Sarah could barely force the words out. An only child, conceived late in her parents’ lives—they’d both been forty when she was born—she’d never achieved true independence from them. Except when she’d attended college in Philadelphia, she’d never been away from home.
Doc patted her hand, smiled sadly. “We’re all dying. Life is invariably fatal. But to answer your question, Ephriam could live another twenty years, or never awaken from the nap he’s taking right now. The point is, he’s suffering from dementia, and folks are bound to take notice, if they haven’t already.”
Nothing Doc said came as a surprise to Sarah, but she still needed a few choked moments to absorb it. She’d spent so much time and effort hiding and denying the problem that facing the truth was a challenge.
Doc put a fatherly arm around her shoulders. “You’ve fought the good fight, Sarah,” he said. “Run that bank as well as any man could, better than most. But it’s time to let it go.”
“You don’t understand, Doc,” Sarah answered miserably, wringing her hands in her lap. “Papa and I will have nothing to live on, if his salary stops coming in.”
“Ephriam has always been the thrifty sort,” Doc said, a frown puckering the flesh between his bristly eyebrows. “He must have saved a considerable amount, over thirty years.”
Sarah’s eyes burned. “There were bad loans, Doc, a couple of years back, during the worst of the drought. Papa used his own money to cover them, so the Weatherbys and the Connors and the Billinghams wouldn’t lose their ranches—”
A muscle ticked in Doc’s jaw. “And of course they never paid him back.”
“They couldn’t,” Sarah insisted. “Now that the railroad’s come as far as Stone Creek, things are getting better, but you know Mrs. Weatherby’s a widow now, with four young children to feed, and the Connors got burned out and had to go live with their folks up in Montana. They might or might not be able to make a new start. Jim Billingham pays what he can, when he can, but it isn’t much.”
“Oh, Lord,” Doc said. “Is the house mortgaged?”
Sarah shook her head. “The deed’s in my name,” she answered. She looked back over one shoulder at the big house, the only home she’d ever known. There were six bedrooms, in total, because her parents had hoped to have that many children, or more. “I suppose I could take in boarders,” she said. “Give piano lessons.”
Doc lowered his arm from Sarah’s shoulder and took her hand, squeezed it lightly. “You’re the sort who’ll do whatever has to be done,” he said fondly. “Ephriam’s lucky to have a daughter like you.”
Privately, Sarah believed her father would have been better off with a son, instead of a daughter. If she’d been born male, there’d be no question of giving up control of the Stockman’s Bank—a man would be allowed, even expected, to take over the helm.
Sarah didn’t mind hard work, but taking in boarders was one step above beggary, in small, gossipy communities like that one. There were already several women offering piano lessons, so pupils would be hard to come by. She’d be pitied and whispered about, and keeping her spine straight and her chin up in public would take some doing.
“You could always get married,” Doc said. “Any one of several men in this town would put a ring on your finger, if you were agreeable.”
Wyatt Yarbro ambled into Sarah’s mind, grinning.
She blushed. The man was a self-confessed outlaw, despite the badge pinned to his shirt, and for all that he’d walked her home the night before, and stopped by the bank that very day to offer his assistance, should it be required, marriage wouldn’t enter his mind.
Men like Mr. Yarbro didn’t marry, they dallied with foolish women, and then moved on.
“I’d have to love a man before I could marry him,” she told Doc forthrightly. Although she would have married Charles Langstreet the day she met him, and certainly after she discovered she was carrying his child—if he hadn’t admitted, after Owen’s conception, that he already had a wife.
“Love might be a luxury you can’t afford, Sarah Tamlin,” Doc said. “You’re a strong, capable woman, but the reality is, you need a man.” His weary old eyes twinkled. “I’d offer for you, myself, if I were thirty years younger.”
Sarah chuckled, though she was dangerously near tears. “And I’d probably accept,” she said, rising to her feet. She had things to do—look in on her father, start supper for her guests, due to arrive in just under an hour, tidy up the parlor and lay a nice table in the dining room. She said as much, adding, “Will you stay and join us?”
Doc Venable stood, too. “I’d be honored,” he said.
CHAPTER FOUR
OWEN’S FACE WAS SCRUBBED, and someone, probably Charles, had slicked down his hair. Standing on the front porch, gazing earnestly up at Sarah, he held out a bouquet of flowers and bravely announced, “Papa said to tell you he’ll be along as soon as he can. He got a telegram at the hotel, and he’s got to answer it.”
“C-come in,” Sarah said, stricken by the sight, the presence, of this boy. Accepting the flowers with murmured thanks, she stepped back to admit him.
Owen moved solemnly over the threshold, a little gentleman in a woolen suit, taking in the entryway, the long-case clock, the mahogany coat tree. Sarah wondered if he ever wore regular clothes and played in the dirt, like other children his age.
And she wondered a thousand other things, too.
“Let’s put these flowers in water,” she said, and started for the kitchen.
“You have gaslights and everything,” Owen marveled, walking behind her. “I thought you’d live in a log cabin, and there’d be Indians around.”
Sarah smiled to herself. “There are a few Indians,” she said. “But you don’t have to worry about them. They’re friendly.”
“Good,” Owen said, with evident relief, as they passed the dining room table—she’d set it for five, since her father was snoring away in his room—and the plates, glasses and silverware sparkled. “I wouldn’t want to get scalped or anything.”
“Nobody’s going to scalp you,” Sarah said, with certainty.
Owen pulled back a chair at the kitchen table and sat while she found a vase for the wild orange poppies he’d apparently picked for her. “Papa says this is the frontier,” he announced.
Sarah’s spine tightened briefly at the mention of Charles. She hoped Doc Venable would be back from his evening rounds before he or Wyatt Yarbro arrived. “We’re quite civilized, actually,” she said, pumping water into a vase at the sink, dunking the stems of the poppies, and setting the whole shooting match in the center of the table.
“Do you live in this great big house all by yourself?” Owen wanted to know. He was small for his age, Sarah noticed, trying her best not to devour the child with her eyes. His feet swung inches above the floor, but he sat up very straight.
“No,” Sarah said, taking a chair herself. “My father and I live here together. Isn’t your house much bigger than this one?”
Owen allowed that it was, then added, “But I’m not there very much. If I’m not at school, I mostly stay with Grandmama. She’s got all sorts of money, but she lives in a town house. That way, she doesn’t need so many servants.”
“Do you like staying at your grandmama’s town house?” Sarah asked carefully.
“Not much,” Owen said. “You can’t run or make noise or have a dog, because dogs have fleas and they chew things up and make messes.”
Sarah didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Would you like to have a dog?”
“More than anything, except maybe a pony,” Owen answered.
“Do you like school?” A thousand other questions still pounded in Sarah’s mind, but it wouldn’t be appropriate to ask them.
“It’s lonesome,” Owen said. “Especially at Christmas.”
Sarah stomach clenched, but she allowed none of what she felt to show in her face. “You stay at school over Christmas?”
“My mother doesn’t like me very much,” Owen confided. “And Grandmama always goes to stay with friends in the south of France when the weather starts getting cold.”
“Surely your mother loves you,” Sarah managed.
“No,” Owen insisted, shaking his head. “She says I’m a bastard.”
Sarah closed her eyes briefly, struggling with a tangle of emotions—anger, frustration, sorrow, and the most poignant yearning. So Marjory Langstreet did blame Owen for her husband’s indiscretions, as she’d always feared she might.
“My brothers aren’t bastards,” Owen went on, taking no apparent notice of Sarah’s reaction.
“Do you get along with them?” she asked, after biting her lower lip for a few moments, lest she say straight out what she thought of Marjory and all the rest of the Langstreets. “Your brothers, I mean?”
“They’re old,” Owen replied. “Probably as old as you.”
Sarah chuckled. “My goodness,” she said. “They must be doddering.”
“What’s doddering?”
Just then, her father appeared on the rear stairway leading down into the kitchen, clad in a smoking jacket and the military trousers Sarah had hidden earlier. His feet were bare, and his white hair stood out all around his head. He’d forgotten his spectacles, and he peered at Owen.
“Doddering,” he said, “is what I am. An old fool who can’t get around without somebody to hold him up.”
“Papa,” Sarah said, rising, “you’re supposed to be in bed.”
“Balderdash,” Ephriam snapped. “It’s still light out. Who’s the lad?”
“My name is Owen Langstreet, sir,” Owen said, standing respectfully in the presence of an elder. “Who are you?”
Don’t, Papa, Sarah pleaded silently. “This is my father, Ephriam Tamlin,” she said aloud.
“Those pants,” Owen observed, “are peculiar. How come they have yellow stripes down the side?”
“I wore these trousers in the great war,” Ephriam blustered. Then he saluted briskly. “You’re a mite small for a soldier. Reckon you must be a drummer boy.”
“Papa,” Sarah pleaded. “Please.”
“I smell supper cooking,” Ephriam told her. She’d fried chicken earlier; it was on a platter in the warming oven. “I’m hungry.”
“I’ll bring you a plate,” Sarah promised. “Just go back to bed.”
“I’m not a soldier,” Owen said.
A rap sounded at the back door, and Doc Venable let himself in. Spotting Ephriam standing there on the stairs, he tossed Sarah a sympathetic glance, let his eyes rest briefly on Owen, then went to usher his old friend to his room.
“How come Ephriam can’t eat with us?” Owen asked Sarah, when they’d gone. He looked so genuinely concerned that it was all Sarah could do not to reach out and ruffle his neatly brushed hair.
“He’s sick,” Sarah said.
“Why did he call me a drummer boy? I don’t have a drum.”
“Figure of speech,” Sarah answered.
At that instant, for good or ill, someone turned the bell knob at the front door, indicating the arrival of another supper guest.
“I’ll answer the door!” Owen said, and rushed off through the dining room.
Sarah gripped the back of a chair, swayed. She should have told Charles, when he invited himself to supper, that it wasn’t a good time for her to entertain. Her father was indisposed, and she was frantic with worry over the situation at the bank. But she’d wanted so to pass an evening in Owen’s company.
“It’s the deputy!” Owen shouted from the entry hall. “Should I let him in?”
Sarah laughed, though her eyes stung with tears. She hurried out of the kitchen and through the dining room.
Wyatt Yarbro stood smiling and spruced up just over the threshold. He wore a clean white shirt, black trousers, and polished boots, and the holster on his hip was empty. He’d dusted off his black hat, which he held politely in his hands, and his dark eyes danced with a sort of somber amusement.
“Do come in, Mr. Yarbro,” Sarah said. “This is my—nephew. Owen Langstreet.”
“We’ve met,” Mr. Yarbro said, stepping past the boy, who stared up at him in fascination.
“He’s not Wyatt Earp,” Owen said.
“I’m aware of that, Owen,” Sarah replied, gesturing toward the coat tree, with its many brass hooks. “Hang up your hat, Mr. Yarbro.”
Wyatt did as she’d asked.
An awkward silence fell.
“Let’s have a seat in the parlor,” Sarah said, flustered, leading the way.
Owen followed, and so did Wyatt.
“Nice place,” Wyatt said.
“She lives here with her papa,” Owen informed him, gravitating toward Sarah’s piano, which was her most prized possession. “He wears blue pants with yellow stripes on them and thinks I’m a drummer boy.”
“Is that so?” Wyatt asked affably, and when Sarah dared to look back over her shoulder, she saw that he was watching her, not the child.
“Sit down,” Sarah said. “Please. I’ll get some coffee.”
“No need,” Wyatt said, waiting until Sarah sank into her mother’s threadbare slipper chair before taking a seat on the settee. He was leanly built, but the house seemed smaller somehow, with him in it, and warmer.
Much warmer.
Owen perched on the piano stool. “May I spin?” he asked.
Wyatt chuckled.
“Spin all you want,” Sarah said, smiling a wobbly smile.
Owen moved the stool a few more inches from the piano, sat, gripped it with both hands, and used one foot to propel himself into blurry revolutions.
Sarah felt dizzy and had to look away, but her gaze went straight to Wyatt Yarbro, and that made her even dizzier. He’d shaved, and his cologne had a woodsy scent. His white shirt was open at the throat, and it was not only pressed, but starched, too.
Wyatt glanced curiously around the well-appointed, seldom-used room. “Where’s Mr. Langstreet?” he asked.
“He’s been delayed,” Sarah said.
Owen used his foot to stop the piano stool. He looked happily flushed, more like the little boy he was than the miniature man who blithely referred to himself as a “bastard.” “He got a telegram,” Owen said importantly.
“Imagine that,” Wyatt said, though not unkindly.
“In Philadelphia, we have a telephone,” Owen added.
“Don’t hold with telephones myself,” Wyatt replied, mischief sparking in his dark eyes. “I figure if folks have something to say to each other, they ought to write it in a letter or meet up, face-to-face.”
“Papa says someday everybody will have a telephone.”
“Does he, now?” Wyatt asked easily.
As though to speak of the devil was to conjure him, Charles chose that moment to ring the doorbell. Sarah excused herself to answer, and Wyatt stood when she rose from her chair.
He might have been an outlaw, but someone had taught him manners.
Sarah was a little flushed when she opened the front door to Charles.
“Good evening, Sarah,” he said, stepping past her when she hesitated to move out of the way. “I apologize for being late. Business. One can never escape it.”
Doc Venable descended the front stairs, rolling down his shirtsleeves. His hands and forearms still glistened with moisture from the sink upstairs, where he must have washed up for supper.
Sarah made introductions all around, out of deference to the doctor. Wyatt and Charles had already met; Wyatt’s expression thoughtful, Charles’s elegantly aloof.
Charles looked down on Wyatt, Sarah realized, as a ruffian, and she felt a swift sting of fury. Her cheeks throbbed with it.
Supper seemed interminable. Sarah was afraid, every moment, that her father would appear, oddly dressed and confounded.
“I thought you said you couldn’t cook,” Wyatt teased, helping himself to another piece of fried chicken and then adding gravy to his mashed potatoes. “Tastes fine to me.”
“Thank you,” Sarah said, inordinately pleased and not a little embarrassed. By some miracle, she’d managed not to burn the chicken, and the mashed potatoes were thicker than the gravy, as they were supposed to be.
Charles maintained a chilly silence; he clearly resented Wyatt’s presence, tossing a disdainful glance his way every now and then. Finally, he took a sip from his water goblet and condescended to remark, “Very nice.”
“Is Aunt Sarah your sister, Papa?” Owen asked.
“Eat your supper,” Charles told him.
“Is she?”
“No,” Charles snapped.
“Then she must be Mother’s sister. They don’t look anything alike.”
Sarah stiffened in her chair. Wyatt saw the motion, and stared diplomatically down at his plate.
“In Sarah’s case,” Charles said, plainly irritated and red at the jawline, “the title of ‘aunt’ is honorary. She’s—a family friend.”
“Oh,” Owen said, looking dejected. He laid his fork down. He’d been sawing away at a drumstick for the last twenty minutes; Sarah had wanted to tell him it was all right to eat chicken with his fingers, but refrained. “I was thinking maybe I could visit her at Christmas, but if she’s not really my aunt—”
“You may visit me whenever you want,” Sarah told him, aware that she was overstepping, and not caring. When she got Charles alone, she’d have a word with him about this “bastard” business, and leaving a ten-year-old boy at boarding school over the holidays.
Owen’s face brightened, causing his freckles to stand out. “Really?”
“Enough,” Charles said coldly. “Philadelphia is a long way from Stone Creek. Have you forgotten that we just spent a week on a train?”
Owen subsided as suddenly as if he’d been slapped.
Doc Venable cleared his throat and turned the conversation in a new direction. “I understand you’re keeping the peace around town while your brother is away, Mr. Yarbro,” he said.
Wyatt shifted in his chair, oddly uncomfortable with the remark. “Yes, sir,” he said. “And I’d appreciate it if you called me Wyatt.” His gaze moved to Sarah. “You, too, Miss Tamlin.”
Sarah blushed.
“My, but we are a friendly bunch, aren’t we?” Charles asked drily. His nostrils were slightly flared, and the skin around his mouth looked tight.
“I reckon most of us are, anyhow,” Wyatt said quietly.
“Can I call you Wyatt, too?” Owen wanted to know.
“Sure,” Wyatt said. “Long as I don’t have to call you ‘Mr. Langstreet.’”
Charles reddened.
Owen giggled with delight. “Nobody calls me ‘Mr. Langstreet,’” he said. “I’m only ten.”
Wyatt’s lips twitched. “You could have fooled me,” he replied. “Like I said this afternoon, I’d have said you were forty if you were a day. Just a mite short for your age.”
Charles favored Sarah with a pained look. Again, she wondered why he’d brought Owen to Stone Creek, when he seemed, at least at the moment, barely able to tolerate the child’s presence.
“You ever seen a man as short as Owen here, Doc?” Wyatt asked, well aware that he’d gotten under Charles’s skin and clearly enjoying the fact.
“Can’t say as I have,” Doc said, regarding Owen thoughtfully.
Owen beamed.
“Is everyone ready for dessert?” Sarah asked brightly.
She served strawberry preserves on shortbread, and poured coffee for the adults. Earlier, she’d longed for the evening to end. Now, she realized that Charles was the only unwelcome guest. Doc, Wyatt and Owen had lifted her spirits with their banter.
Charles was the first to lay his table napkin aside, push back his chair, and stand. “I’ve got a meeting tomorrow in Flagstaff,” he said. “It came up unexpectedly. Sarah, I wonder if I might speak to you in private.”
Sarah felt a prickle of dread, but she welcomed the chance to talk to him about Owen, out of the boy’s earshot. “Certainly,” she said. “I’ll walk you to the door.”
Owen remained in his chair, his eyes fixed on his plate. He seemed to have shrunk a full size, and his head was bent at an angle that made Sarah’s heart hurt.
She proceeded to the front door, Charles following.
“I can’t leave the boy alone at the hotel,” Charles said, before she had a chance to speak. “Will you keep him while I’m away?”
Sarah nodded, surprised. She’d expected some kind of harangue.
“I might be gone for several days,” Charles warned.
“I’ll look after him,” she promised. “Charles, I—”
Something ominous flickered in Charles’s eyes.
Sarah straightened her spine. “He refers to himself as a bastard. Owen, I mean.”
“He’s precocious,” Charles said, taking out his pocket watch and checking it with a frown. “And he lies constantly.”
“Is he lying about Christmas? Having to stay at school alone while everyone else goes home for the holiday season?”
Charles’s mouth took on a grim tension. “It isn’t always convenient to have a ten-year-old underfoot,” he said. “Marjory’s nerves are—delicate.”
“Convenient? Charles, he’s ten. A child.”
“Marjory—”
“Damn Marjory!” Sarah whispered furiously. She was in no position to anger Charles, given the shares he held in the bank, but her concern for Owen—her son—pushed everything else aside. “What do I care for the state of your wife’s nerves?”
“They’ll hear you,” Charles said anxiously, inclining his head toward the dining room. “Do you want the cowboy to know you gave birth to an illegitimate child when everyone in Stone Creek thought you were getting an education?”
“Oh, I got an education, all right,” Sarah said bitterly.
Charles consulted his watch again. “I have to go,” he said. “I have paperwork to do, before tomorrow’s meeting.”
Good riddance, Sarah thought. She’d gotten a reprieve, as far as the bank was concerned, but another part of her was alarmed. Was this “meeting” with the other shareholders? Several of them lived in Flagstaff, a relatively short train ride from Stone Creek. Suppose Charles had asked around town, heard about some of her father’s recent escapades, and made the decision to take over control? Alone, he couldn’t do it. With the help of the other shareholders, though, he could be sitting behind her father’s desk the morning after next.
With the first smile he’d offered all evening, Charles ran his knuckles lightly down the side of Sarah’s face. “I’ll be back in a few days,” he said, as though he thought she was pining over his departure. “A week at the outside.”
A week with Owen. A week to cover her tracks at the bank.
She tried to look sad. Might even have said, “I’ll miss you,” as he seemed to expect her to do, but since she would have choked on the words, she swallowed them.
He bent his head, kissed her lightly, briefly on the mouth.
She stepped back, secretly furious.
“Still the coquette,” Charles remarked smoothly. “You’re not fooling me, Sarah. I remember how much you liked going to bed with me.”
Sarah’s cheeks pulsed with heat so sudden and so intense that it was actually painful. She would surely have slapped Charles Langstreet the Third across the face if she hadn’t known the crack of flesh meeting flesh would carry into the nearby dining room.
“Good night, Mr. Langstreet,” she said.
He grinned, turned, and strolled, whistling merrily, down the porch steps, along the walk, through the gate.
Sarah watched him until he was out of sight, then turned and nearly collided with Wyatt, who was standing directly behind her.
Her heart fluttered painfully. How much had he heard? Had he seen Charles kiss her?
She could tell nothing by his expression.
“I’d best be leaving, too,” he said. “I’ve got to count horses in front of saloons.”
“What?” Sarah asked, confused.
He chuckled. “Rowdy’s way of watching out for trouble,” he said, taking his hat from the coat tree. “Thank you, Miss Tamlin, for a fine evening and the best meal I’ve had in a long time.”
Something tightened in Sarah’s throat. “If I’m to call you Wyatt,” she heard herself say, “then you must call me Sarah.”
His smile was as dazzling as the starched shirt he’d put on to come to supper. “Sarah, then,” he said. The smile faded. “That Langstreet fella,” he began. “Is he...? Do you—?”
“He’s a business associate,” Sarah said. It was a partial truth, and she wondered if she ought to record it in her book of lies.
“That’s good,” Wyatt said. His dark eyes were almost liquid, there in the dim light of the entryway. “Because if I stay on in Stone Creek, I mean to set about courting you in earnest.”
“If you stay?” She’d known he was a drifter, an outlaw, that he’d be moving on at some point. So why did she feel as though a deep, dark precipice had just opened at her feet?
“Reckon I’ll be deciding on that further along,” he said. “Good night, Sarah.”
For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her, just as Charles had—his face was so very close to hers—but he didn’t. And she was stunned by the depths of her disappointment.
She watched until he passed through the front gate, turned toward the main part of town, moving in and out of the lamplight. Then she closed the door quietly and went back to the dining room.
Doc and Owen were busy clearing the table.
“Is Papa leaving me here?” Owen asked hopefully.
“Yes,” Sarah said, taken aback, exchanging quick glances with Doc, who’d paused in his plate-gathering like a man listening for some sound in the distance. “But only for a few days. I thought you’d be—well—surprised—”
“Papa’s always leaving me places,” Owen said. His manner was nonchalant, though there was a slight stoop to his shoulders that hadn’t been there before.
Doc shook his head, though the boy didn’t see.
Sarah contrived to smile and moved to help with the work. “What sort of places?” she asked, in a tone meant to sound cheerful, as though abandoning a child with people who were virtual strangers to him was a common occurrence, and wholly acceptable.
“Once, I lived at a hotel all by myself for a whole week,” Owen told her. “It was scary at night, but I got to have whatever I wanted to eat, and Papa gave me lots of spending money.”
Sarah could not look at him. He might see what she was thinking. “Why did he do that?” she asked lightly, when she could trust herself to speak. Again, her gaze met Doc’s, but this time, the look held.
“He had meetings with a lady. She wore a big hat with pink feathers on it and rode in a carriage with six white horses pulling it.”
Sarah drew back a chair and sank into it, breathless.
“Are you sick, Aunt Sarah?” Owen asked, clearly frightened.
“I’m f-fine,” Sarah muttered. She wouldn’t have to write that lie in the book to remember it.
“Let’s wash up these dishes,” Doc told the boy, his voice a little too hearty. “Since your aunt Sarah went to all the trouble to cook it and all.”
Owen nodded, but his eyes were still on Sarah. “I’ll be quiet,” he said. “If you have a headache—”
Sarah longed to gather the child in her arms, but she didn’t dare. She’d weep if she did, and never let go of him again. “You don’t have to be quiet,” she told him softly.
Doc put a hand on Owen’s shoulder and steered him in the direction of the kitchen. “I’ll wash and you dry,” he said.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHILE OWEN AND DOC WERE washing dishes, Sarah went upstairs, looked in on her father, who was sleeping soundly, then opened the door to the room across from her own. It contained a brass bed, a washstand and a bureau, and soft moonlight flowed in through the lace curtains.
The mattress was bare, since no one had used the room in months, with a faded quilt folded at its foot. Briskly, Sarah fetched sheets from the top drawer of the bureau and made up a bed for Owen.
The process was bittersweet. Tonight, her son would sleep in this room, dreaming, she hoped, little-boy dreams. But there was a disturbing truth in Wyatt and Doc’s teasing—young as he was, Owen was more man than child. He’d lived in hotel rooms by himself, and God knew what other places.
She yearned to keep him, raise him openly as her son. She wouldn’t mind the scandal that would surely ensue, the extra expense, the inevitable work of bringing up a child. But she must not allow herself to think such thoughts, she knew, because Charles would come back and take him away again.
Under the law, she had no rights. On his birth certificate, Marjory Langstreet was listed as his mother.
Some of the starch went out of Sarah’s knees.
She sat down on the edge of the freshly made bed, fighting back tears of hopelessness.
She’d been so young and foolish—only seventeen and far from home—when she’d given birth to Owen, in an anonymous infirmary room, a decade before. Charles, fifteen years her senior and sophisticated, a friend of her father’s, had been her “protector,” met her at the train when she arrived in the City of Brotherly Love, taken her by carriage to the women’s college in the rolling green Pennsylvania countryside.
Homesick, regarded as a bumpkin by the other pupils in residence, most of whom had been raised in cities and not crude frontier towns, she’d quickly become besotted with Charles. She’d studied hard at school, majoring in music, but on weekends, he often came to collect her in his elegant carriage. It was all innocent at first; he escorted her to museums, to concerts, to fine restaurants.
And then he took advantage.
He said college was a waste for a woman, and suggested she leave school so they could spend more time together. He’d set her up in a fancy hotel, persuaded her not to tell her father that she’d dropped all her classes.
That was when the lying had begun. She’d written weekly letters to her parents, describing books she hadn’t read, lectures she hadn’t attended, field trips she hadn’t taken. Someone Charles knew in the college office mailed the missives, and forwarded the replies. Sarah returned the funds her father sent for tuition and textbooks, claiming she’d won a scholarship. Her grades were forged, with the help of Charles’s friend, and for a long, blissful time, the deception passed as truth.
Sitting there in Owen’s moonlit room, Sarah blushed. Charles had been right earlier when he’d taunted her about enjoying his attentions in bed. Just sixteen, her body in full flower, she’d lived for his visits, reveled like some wild creature in his caresses.
Even when she realized, one eventful day, that she was carrying a child, she hadn’t worried. Charles would be pleased. He would surely marry her, straight away.
She was awaiting his visit, full of her news, when a grand woman in tailored clothes presented herself at the door of Sarah’s suite. She’d been tall, imperious, exuding angry confidence.
“So this is where Charles is keeping his current mistress,” Marjory Langstreet had said, sweeping past a startled Sarah into the sumptuously furnished suite. “And how gracious of him to support you in such style.”
Sarah had stared at the woman. “M-mistress?” she’d echoed stupidly.
“Surely you understand,” Marjory had said, “that you are a kept woman? A bird in a gilded cage?”
Sarah’s mouth had fallen open. This was surely some kind of cruel prank. Charles wasn’t married. He loved her—hadn’t he said so, over and over again? Hadn’t he given her jewelry, bought her trinkets and clothes?
“Who are you?” she’d managed.
Marjory ran a gloved hand along the keyboard of Sarah’s treasured piano. The sound was discordant, and bore no resemblance to music. From there, she proceeded to examine a painted porcelain lamp, a novel bound in Moroccan leather, a delicate Chinese fan with an ivory handle—all gifts from Charles.
“You really don’t know?” she trilled, after several long moments. Then she’d turned, hands resting on her hips, and shattered Sarah’s world with a single sentence. “I’m Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third,” she said, the words slicing through Sarah with the stinging force of a sharp sword.
Then, as now, Sarah had been unable to stand. She’d dropped into a chair, blind with confusion, pain and fear. Unconsciously, she’d rested a hand on her abdomen.
“Pack your things, dear,” Mrs. Langstreet had said. “As of tomorrow morning, you won’t be living here any longer. A backstreet whore belongs, you see, on a backstreet. If Charles wants to continue this dalliance, that’s his business, but I won’t be footing the bill.”
With that, she’d gone, leaving the suite door standing open to the hall beyond.
Sarah had been too numb to move at first. She simply sat, waiting for Charles to come and say it was all a mistake. That she, Sarah, would be the only Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third.
All day she waited.
But he didn’t come.
Sarah had finally closed the door, gone to bed and lain staring up at the ceiling throughout the very long night to come.
In the morning, a tentative knock sent a surge of hope rushing through her. She rushed to the door, opened it to find, not a smiling Charles, with a credible explanation at the ready, but one of the hotel’s porters. The fellow stood in the corridor, clearly uncomfortable.
He’d offered an anxious smile as two maids and another porter collected themselves behind him. “I’m sorry to hear you’re leaving us,” he’d said. “Mrs. Langstreet asked that we help you gather your belongings. There’ll be a carriage waiting to take you to your new residence at ten o’clock.”
Sarah had not protested.
She’d simply watched, stricken, as her clothes were folded into trunks and boxes, her books taken from the shelves, her jewelry stuffed into valises Marjory Langstreet had evidently provided for the purpose.
By noon, she’d been settled in a seedy rooming house, one door of her tiny room opening onto a rat-infested alley.
And still there had been no word, no visit, from Charles.
Sarah waited a week, then began pawning jewelry, a piece at a time, to buy food. Twice, she wrote long letters to her unsuspecting father, telling the shattering truth, but she’d never mailed them.
She was too ashamed.
Too heartbroken.
Several times, when hunger forced her out into the narrow, filthy streets, she’d considered standing on the tracks when the trolley came. It would be over, that way.
In the end, she couldn’t do that to the baby, or to herself.
She finally sent a wire to her father, reading simply, I am in trouble, and listing her address at the boardinghouse.
Within ten days, he’d arrived, bent on taking her home to Stone Creek. She’d told him everything but the name of the man who’d sired her child, and patently refused to return to Arizona Territory. As much as she yearned for her own room, the sound of her mother’s voice, the soothing touch of her hand, Sarah simply hadn’t been able to face the inevitable gossip and speculation.
Resigned, Ephriam had enrolled her in another college, a small, private one where secrets were kept, and moved her into the dormitory.
She hadn’t seen Charles again until a week before Owen’s birth, in the college infirmary. They met in the library, Charles and Sarah and Charles’s lawyer. Charles had stiffly informed her that he meant to raise the child as a legitimate heir, with Marjory listed as the legal mother.
Sarah had had no choice but to comply.
She’d long since sold the last of her jewelry, her rich clothes and the books. Even the Chinese fan. And she’d promised her clearly disenchanted father she would finish college, no matter what.
So when her baby boy was born, she’d handed him over to Charles’s lawyer. The loss had been keen, brutal, as though she’d torn her still-beating heart from her bosom and handed that over, too.
She’d survived, somehow, doggedly arising in the morning, doing what was at hand to do, enduring more than living. She’d worked hard at her lessons, gotten her degree in music, and returned to Stone Creek just in time to attend her mother’s funeral.
Nancy Anne Tamlin had never known she had a grandchild, nor had anyone else in town, except for Ephriam, of course, and possibly his best friend, Doc Venable.
Now, ten years later, miraculously, impossibly, that boy was right downstairs, in her own kitchen, helping with the dishes.
“Sarah?”
She looked up, startled, and saw Ephriam standing in the doorway. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew by the way he’d spoken her name that he was enjoying one of his brief, lucid intervals.
“That boy I saw tonight. Is he—?”
Sarah felt for the book of lies, nesting, as always, in her skirt pocket, clenched it through the fabric. She swallowed, then shook her head. “No, Papa. He’s just visiting.”
“He looks like your mother’s people,” Ephriam said. “What’s his name?”
“Owen,” Sarah allowed, after swallowing again. “He’s Charles Langstreet’s son. You remember Mr. Langstreet, don’t you?”
“Never liked him,” her father replied. “Pompous jackass.”
She saw a change in Ephriam’s bearing, something too subtle to describe, but there nonetheless.
“Great Scot,” Ephriam gasped. “It was Langstreet, wasn’t it? He was the one who led you astray!”
“Papa—”
“And Owen is my grandson,” the old man persisted, sounding thunderstruck. Of all the times he could have recovered his faculties, it had to be now, tonight, when keeping the secret was more important than ever before.
Sarah simply could not summon up another lie. She felt drained, enervated, as though she’d relived her affair with Charles, her sad, scandalous pregnancy, the birth itself, which had been torturous, and, still worse, watched as Charles’s lawyer carried her newborn son out of her room in the college infirmary. She’d been permitted to give him only one thing: his first name.
And she’d never expected to see him again.
“Yes,” she said weakly. “You’re right, Papa. But you mustn’t let on. Owen doesn’t know who I am. He calls me Aunt Sarah.”
Ephriam pondered a while, silent and brooding. “I’d have killed Langstreet if I’d known,” he said. “I suppose that’s why you didn’t tell me.”
Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, summoned her will, and stood. Doc and Owen had probably finished washing the dishes by then, and they’d be wondering what was keeping her.
She stood before her father, still looming in the darkened doorway, straightening the front of his long nightshirt as though it were one of the day coats he wore to the bank.
“Our secret, Papa?” she asked.
“There are too damn many secrets in this house.”
“Papa—”
“All right,” Ephriam said. “But I don’t like it. And I’m taking that boy fishing at the creek tomorrow, with or without your say-so.”
Sarah’s eyes stung, and she smiled. “Fair enough,” she said.
She walked her father back to his room, tucked him in like a child. Kissed his forehead. Still under the effects of the laudanum Doc had given him earlier, he dozed off immediately.
When she descended to the kitchen, via the rear stairway, Doc and Owen were sitting at the pedestal table in the center of the room, playing cards. The pot was a pile of wooden matches.
Interested, Sarah stood behind Owen’s chair and assessed his hand.
“Five card stud,” Doc said. “Care to join us?”
“I never play poker,” Sarah said. The little book in her skirt pocket seemed to pulse in protest.
Doc merely chuckled.
Sarah bent low and whispered in Owen’s ear. “Bet all your matchsticks. You’ve got a straight with ace high.”
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Linda Miller
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Where does an outlaw go when he′s ready to turn straight? For Wyatt Yarbro, reformed rustler and train robber, Stone Creek is his place of redemption. And lovely Sarah Tamlin is the perfect angel to help him clean up his act…. But Sarah keeps a dark secret behind her prim and proper facade, even as her heart is lost to charming, sexy Wyatt.When a vengeful enemy prepares to unleash havoc on the peaceful town, Wyatt and Sarah will discover that they can′t hide from the past. To win the fight, they must believe in something they never trusted before–the hope of tomorrow.