Just This Once (2 page)

All right, mister. That’s it. You’re not
getting away so easily. Josephine Cooper always gets her man.

A grim smile curled her lips as she started
forward in the hazy sunshine, her gingham skirt rustling. She’d
dressed “respectable” for the occasion—her plain blue gingham gown
buttoned up to the throat, tiny dangly jet earrings, her unruly
mane of brown hair tamed in a neat, prim coil with not a wisp out
of place. On her feet were her good sturdy shoes, not the wicked
rhinestone-studded slippers she wore onstage whenever she filled in
for one of the dance hall girls who couldn’t perform. She was
certain no one would recognize the Golden Pistol’s practically
invisible cook or the sometime dance hall girl with the wild brown
curls as the demure, respectable creature making her way through
the crowded street.

The necessity of leaving Abilene tomorrow
weighed heavily on her mind. Instinct told her Snake and his boys
were closing in. Her skin had been prickling all day each time she
looked out the window. Josie’s “feelings” about such things were
never wrong. Snake would be here soon. If she stayed, he’d catch
her and then...

Then she’d be as good as dead. Because if
her dear outlaw husband and his cutthroat gang got their hands on
her, they’d show her no more mercy than these townsfolk would show
Rusty Innes, who was going to be hanged today from the gallows in
the center of town. Innes had killed a teller and a customer when
he’d robbed the bank a month ago, and now he was going to pay for
what he’d done.

If Snake and the boys catch up with me,
I’ll pay, too,
Josie thought, swallowing down the metallic
taste of fear.
I’ll pay dear for what I did to them.

But she didn’t regret it one whit.

* * *

All of Abilene seemed to have gathered in
the street—farmers and ranchers and merchants and gamblers and
miners and drifters mingling elbow to elbow. Women called to one
another, men smoked cigars and squinted through the sun, dogs
barked and horses stamped at their tethering posts.

It was a beautiful day for a hanging.

The stranger remained on the fringes of the
murmuring, restless crowd. He seemed oblivious to the heat and
nervous energy vibrating all around him. Though heat poured down
from a molten July sun, and women fanned themselves furiously, he
looked cool and unperturbed.

Josie, on the other hand, felt sweat beading
on her delicate brow as she slipped nimbly past a farmer in a
checkered shirt, two boys tussling over a stick of licorice, a
woman nudging forward for a better view. She spotted Judd Stickley,
the slender, mustachioed owner of the Golden Pistol, standing on
the boardwalk, studying his gold pocket watch, and as he glanced up
she hunched her shoulders and ducked into the crowd.

It wouldn’t do for Judd to spot her. Not at
all. Her boss was none too happy that she’d befriended Penny
Callahan, one of the other dance hall girls she’d met since coming
to Abilene. He didn’t like Josie’s fearless attitude, the way she’d
taken Penny under her wing. Stickley wanted to keep poor snub-nosed
Penny in his bed—he was like a vulture that preyed on all those he
sensed were weaker than he. And Penny had feared him too much to
refuse.

Unable to bear watching Stickley keep Penny
under his thumb, Josie had only today persuaded the girl to take
the last of Josie’s own stash of money and had sneaked her onto the
noon stage bound for Missouri. Stickley would be livid when he
found out she’d left town for good.

But Josie was leaving too, quick as she
could. And she wasn’t nearly as afraid of Stickley as she was of
Snake. So now, though she hated pickpocketing, she’d have to do it
to raise some quick cash and get out of town before all hell caught
up with her.

Too bad all the stolen loot she’d taken from
Snake and the gang when she ran away was gone. Of course, she still
had her “treasure,” but she wouldn’t sell that. Never. Josie
averted her face as she slipped past fat, balding Elmer Mills, who
owned the general store, and peppery Sally Klemp, who ran the
apothecary with her husband, Fred. Jo knew that money always just
seemed to slip through her fingers. She’d never had more than a
dollar or two to her name at any one time—until the night she ran
out on Snake Barker, the night he’d beaten her senseless.

Her face bloody and bruised, she’d come to
on the floor, every limb aching as if she’d been knocked over a
cliff. She’d crawled to her knees and found Snake passed out beside
the stove with the empty whiskey bottle next to him.

Her mind was blurred with pain and shock,
but Josie’d known one thing. Snake had nearly killed her. First
he’d forced her to marry him, imagining in a liquored haze of
infatuation after he’d first set eyes on her that he wanted to
settle down, have a passel of kids, and have someone cook and clean
for him when he wasn’t holding up stagecoaches or banks—and then,
as if that hadn’t been bad enough, he’d nearly killed her. If the
liquor hadn’t rendered him unconscious when it had, he probably
would have beaten her to death.

She’d staggered across the room, grabbed up
his saddlebag containing the loot from the most recent stage
holdup, taken his fastest horse, and hightailed it out of
there.

He and the boys had been hot on her trail
ever since.

The crowd in Abilene was growing restless.
“Bring ’im out, Sheriff.”

“It’s noon. Let’s hang him and git back to
work.”

Josie threw one quick pitying glance at the
gray-faced man being led to the gallows by Sheriff Mills. What he’d
done was wrong, and he deserved to die for it, but she had no
intention of watching. While everyone else was immersed in the
process of justice being served, she would dip her fingers into
that gunslinger’s pocket and, with any luck, come up with enough
money to buy a ticket on tomorrow’s eastbound train.

The stranger was less than ten feet away,
his hat pulled low across his eyes to block the sun. Josie sidled
closer, ignoring the flutter of nervousness in the pit of her
stomach.

Don’t let him catch you, Jo,
she
warned herself, wishing she could turn back somehow, but knowing it
was impossible at this point. She needed that money a damned sight
more than he did at this moment.

Growing up in orphanages and foster homes,
Josie had been taught over and over that you had to look out for
yourself. She always seemed to end up worrying more about others
who seemed somehow more unfortunate than she—people like Penny
Callahan, or the other children at the Magnolia Sisters Orphanage,
the ones who had nightmares and stomachaches and trouble learning
to spell.

Old Pete Thompson and his gray-haired stick
of a wife, Em, had tried to break her of this habit when they’d
adopted her at the age of twelve, not because they’d wanted a child
to love and care for, but because they’d desired an extra pair of
hands to do chores on their Kansas farm.

They’d taken turns shouting at her whenever
she sneaked extra scraps of table food to the dogs, or put a
blanket out in the barn for the cats during the winter.

“The Lord helps those who help themselves!”
they’d yelled, and slapped her hands, and pinched her arms, and
sent her off to bed without supper. But Josie had never seemed able
to get this idea into her head.

She had a feeling that Pete and Em, who
worked their barren little Kansas farm from dawn till dusk, never
smiled or spoke a kind word to anyone, who attended church and
sneaked coins from the collection plate when no one was looking,
didn’t know as much as they thought they did about the Lord.

Anyway, she couldn’t help herself. In the
orphanage the younger children, whose clothes she mended and whose
tears she’d wiped with the hem of her own ragged dress, had called
her Ma. She’d been touched by this, since her own mother must have
died shortly after she was born and she’d never known her, at
least, not as she could remember.

Josie knew almost nothing about her own
background, except that since the first orphanage she could
remember was the Magnolia Sisters United Orphanage in Savannah, she
guessed she was from the South. And she knew she’d been wrapped in
a satin blanket when she’d come there, and most importantly, right
from the beginning, she had the brooch.

The brooch had been pinned to her swaddling
clothes—along with a note that had the words
Baby Josephine
scrawled upon it—and nothing else. The rest had been torn off, lost
forever. Mrs. Guntherson, the kindly and honest woman who’d run the
Magnolia Sisters United Orphanage, where Josie had lived until the
age of seven, had kept it for her until the day she left, when her
first family, the Coopers, had adopted her. On that day, Mrs.
Guntherson had shown Josie the brooch, and advised her to keep it
close.

From that moment on, Josie kept the brooch
with her at all times—it was her one link with her past, the main
clue she hoped would eventually help her discover her real name,
and who she really was. It was exquisite. The centerpiece was the
opal, a great pale, shimmering stone that flashed with blue fire.
It was set in lustrous gold, surrounded by four creamy pearls. It
looked to be an heirloom, a magnificent, treasured heirloom.

A family heirloom.

Josie had grown up wondering how it had come
to belong to her. Who had pinned it to her swaddling clothes?
Perhaps her true family had never wanted her, perhaps they might
all be dead by now, or wish never to be found by the child they’d
given up to strangers. Whatever the answer, she needed to know.

Knowing would be enough, she’d told herself
many times over as she clasped the brooch in her palm, eyes closed,
trying to conjure up an image from the heat and shape of it, trying
to discern the dark curtain of her origin, the secret of her
past.

She’d been trying for years to find out
who’d brought her—and the brooch—to the orphanage, who her family
had been, where they’d lived, and why they had abandoned her. She’d
searched near and far, written letters, asked questions, studied
the faces and jewelry worn by strangers. Always she scanned for
resemblances, wondering if she’d “know” her mother or father if
they came face-to-face in a chance encounter, and dreaming
endlessly of a joyous, glorious reunion.

All to no avail.

But now, thanks to Snake, in addition to the
brooch there was the ring. The ring had given her new hope. It had
suggested a place to look.

And that place was England.

So don’t let that scowl the man’s wearing
scare you off,
she urged herself. She straightened her spine.
If there’s one thing you learned from Pop Watson, it was how to
pick pockets and not get caught, so just go ahead and do
it.

The crowd was jostling, moving. Perfect. She
reached his side, turned toward the gallows, but kept her eyes
lowered so she would not see the men standing on the platform, what
they were doing with Innes and the rope.

She peeked quickly up at the tall man beside
her. The top of her head just reached his shoulder. His wavy hair
was the color of midnight, worn long beneath his dusty black hat.
Close up, she saw that he hadn’t shaved in at least a day, perhaps
several; coarse black stubble added to the harshness of his
uncompromisingly masculine face, a handsome face of hard planes and
shadows, the face of a dangerous man.

The crowd was starting to shout. To jeer.
They were probably coiling the rope around Innes’s neck. Then the
moment she’d been waiting for, the slight surge as people inched
forward as one, the jostling.

Josie swayed against the gunslinger.

“Ohhhh...!” she whispered, hoping she
sounded faint. A hand caught her elbow, steadied her. She leaned
into him, her body staggering against his, her free hand brushing
with seeming haphazardness against his torso. For an instant she
clung weakly, then her hand fell away.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, blinking dizzily.
“For a moment I felt so strange...”

She let her voice trail weakly off. She had
it. She had the wallet, she was nestling it securely in her
pocket—but suddenly the tall man moved so swiftly, she didn’t even
have time to flinch. Iron fingers clamped over her wrist as he
yanked it into the air, the wallet still clenched between her
fingers.

“Ouch!” Josie squeaked.

A slight gasp, and then a cheer went up as
the hanging commenced. But she was paying no attention to the crowd
or to Innes’s fate. Josie’s gaze was locked onto the coolest,
deadliest pair of gray eyes she’d ever seen.

Her stomach tumbled down to her
kneecaps.

“Mister,” she tried, as firmly as she could,
“let me go!”

“The hell I will.”

“How dare you! Let me go this instant!” She
yanked her wrist back, trying to break free, but succeeded only in
inducing him to dig his fingers in even tighter. Josie braced
herself against the pain—and against a rising panic. “You’re
hurting me!”

“That’s what you get, lady, for trying to
pick my pocket.”

“I didn’t! Why, I never...!”

“Then why is my wallet clasped in your
pretty little fingers?”

“Your wallet?” All around them rose the
chatter of the crowd as it began to disperse and people returned to
their homes or businesses. For the moment no one had noticed them,
but Josie knew someone would soon, and then her goose would be
cooked.

“Your wallet?” she repeated desperately.
Somehow, with her eyes still locked on the gunslinger’s fierce gray
gaze, she managed to unclench her fingers. The wallet slipped from
her grasp and hit the dirt with a solid plop.

“You mean that thing lying there on the
ground?”

“Nice try.” He hauled her toward him, one
long arm snaking around her to imprison her waist, his other hand
still crushing her wrist. But Josie scarcely noticed for as she
hurtled forward into his chest, hitting a wall of solid muscle, she
caught a glimpse over his shoulder of the grotesque vision hanging
from the gallows.