Shotgun Bride (17 page)

B
ecky recognized the cowhand the moment he stepped into the hotel lobby, which had been cleared of furniture for that night’s dance, and worse, she knew from his impudent grin that he remembered her as well.

He approached her boldly, spurs jingling. Maybe he’d ignored the discreet sign outside that said spurs weren’t allowed inside the hotel, or maybe he flat couldn’t read. “It’s a small world,” he said, taking off his hat and pressing it to his chest in a parody of good manners, “just like folks say.”

She kept her gaze level with his. “Much as we might like it to be otherwise,” she said sweetly, “it surely is.”

He was a good-looking boy, if a little rough around the edges, but a mean light glittered in his eyes. She remembered that he’d raised a hand to one of her girls that night in Kansas City, and she’d promptly had him thrown out of her establishment for good. Plainly, he was still smarting from the perceived injustice of it all.

“Jesse Graves,” he said, as if his name mattered spit to her. When she didn’t answer, he evidently felt called upon to dig himself in deeper. “I hear you’re the marshal’s woman now.”

The lobby was still mostly empty, since the evening was new, but a few eager guests were within earshot. Becky fervently hoped the cacophony of the cowboy band, tuning up their fiddles, washboard, and guitars, would drown out the exchange. “Kade McKettrick’s the marshal,” she said. “He’s a mite young for me.”

Graves smiled, confident as a pup. “From what I’ve seen, you aren’t all that particular about a man’s age, long as he’s got money in his pocket.”

Rage surged through Becky, but she held it in check. She’d known, after all, that her nemesis would ride in one day, and she’d tried to ready herself for the inevitable revelations. Now, face-to-face with her past, she realized some things simply couldn’t be prepared for ahead of time. “I run a respectable business here,” she said, “and I’ll have you tossed into the street, same as I did in Kansas City, if you don’t mind your manners.”

He shook his head and made a tsk-tsk sound. “And I was about to offer you a deal.”

“I’m not interested in any ‘deal’ you might have in mind, cowboy,” she said, relieved to see Rafe and Emmeline coming down the stairs. They were laughing quietly, dressed in their fancy finest, ready for a lively evening. “You can stay and enjoy the festivities, as long as you conduct yourself like a gentleman, or you can go. The choice is yours.”

The cowboy glanced at Rafe and something tightened in his face. Maybe he was having an attack of common sense, though Becky didn’t hold out much hope for that. “You’re acquainted with my son-in-law?” she asked lightly, though the pit of her stomach was clenched like a fist.

“He’s a McKettrick. That’s about all I need to know.”

The brides came in as a group, spiffed up and anxious. Not for the first time, Becky considered taking them aside and explaining that wolves hunted in packs, but smart women did their tracking alone. She wondered how long it would be before they figured out that Kade’s heart was already taken—probably about the time he did.

“You have a bone to pick with the McKettricks?” Becky asked.

“Maybe I do,” Graves allowed. “Some folks just plain have too much of everything.” He’d spotted the brides, and his cocky smile was back. “Those some of your girls?”

Becky’s spine stiffened. “This isn’t a brothel, Mr. Graves. It’s a hotel, and one of the best in the territory. And those ladies are just that—ladies. You will treat them accordingly, or answer to me.”

He smiled, wolflike, as he admired the colorful clutch of young women. “I reckon it depends on your definition of what’s according.”

“Step out of line under this roof,” Becky retorted sweetly, “and you’ll be worried about another definition entirely. Find yourself a dictionary, if you can read, and look up the word
incarcerated.”

Rafe and Emmeline were coming toward them now, which was both a relief and a concern to Becky, though she didn’t let any of that show in her face or bearing.

Jesse Graves registered their approach, as surely as she did, and made for the brides with some haste.

“Who was that?” Emmeline asked, a little frown furrowing her brow. Rafe had stopped to speak with Denver Jack, the leader of the band, probably about ranch business.

“Trouble,” Becky said.

Emmeline stiffened. “Should I get Rafe?”

Becky sighed. “It wouldn’t do any good, sweetheart.” She summoned up a smile. Her store of them was dwindling, now that John was ailing, but she always seemed to have just one more at the ready when she had need of it. “Don’t you look a picture in that new dress.”

“I feel fat.”

Becky laughed. “A small price to pay for bringing a brand-new life into the world.” She felt better for remembering that she’d be a grandmother by the time the snow flew. It was something to hold on to. She straightened her shoulders, turned her gaze to the stairs. “I’d best go and see if John is well enough to come out on the landing. He told me he wants to watch the rest of you cut a rug, even if he can’t join in.” Doc had gotten an invalid’s chair from someplace, and he was with John now, examining him and no doubt warning him not to overdo.

Emmeline caught Becky’s hands in her own when she would have walked away. “Just you remember,” she said, in a low voice, seeking Graves out with her eyes and frowning again, “that whatever happens, you’re my mother, and Rafe and I will stand by you.”

Tears filled Becky’s eyes. Once, they’d been rare for her, but now, with John’s health failing so rapidly, she wept almost daily, though usually privately. She blinked the wetness away and kissed Emmeline’s cheek. “That’s all I need to know,” she said, and hurried up the stairs to the one and only man she’d ever truly loved.

He was waiting for her. He cherished her, even though he knew all her secrets. His soul was twin to hers.

And he was dying.

T
he brides had Kade cornered in the lobby of the Arizona Hotel before he even took off his new hat, bought special for the occasion, and they were loaded for bear. Sue Ellen, arriving with Holt, but a little apart, joined up with them right away.

Kade tried to look past them, scanning the crowded, noisy room for Mandy, but there was no sign of her. By his reckoning, that was both a problem and a mercy.

At his side, Jeb gave him an elbow. “Speak up, Brother.”

Kade swallowed, darted a look at his sibling, and did as he’d been bidden. “This is my brother Jeb,” he said to the brides, seeing them as a flock, just like always. “He’s in the market for a wife himself.”

Jeb’s grin was ready and wicked. Kade sidestepped a second and more forceful jab to the ribs. “I declare you ladies are lovely enough to make a man forget the sacred vows of matrimony,” Jeb said smoothly, showing that damn disappearing ring of his. “I’m sure my patient wife wouldn’t object to a little dancing, though.”

The brides looked every bit as confused as Kade felt, though the redhead accepted Jeb’s hand when he extended it and allowed him to lead her into the swirl of dancers in the middle of the floor. The rest of them backed off a little after that, and seemed amenable when Captain Harvey’s soldiers and a few fancied-up cowboys ventured forward to request a dance.

“If you’ve got a wife,” Kade demanded, when he and Jeb were momentarily alone, fifteen minutes later, with the brides temporarily off their trail, “where is she?”

Jeb looked smug, fiddling with the ring. “That would be my business, wouldn’t it?”

Kade decided it would be unseemly to smack him right there in Becky’s crowded lobby. “I think you’re lying; ring or no ring.”

“Think whatever you like.” With that, Jeb walked away to find himself a dance partner.

If Mandy hadn’t chosen just that moment to come down the stairs, looking grand in the calico dress he’d bought her at the general store as part of the stakes for their horse race, he might have gone after his brother and choked a straight answer out of him, party manners be damned. As it was, he made his way through the crowd like a sleepwalker, all his thoughts centered squarely on Mandy.

“You look—” he began, and it came out sounding so raspy that he had to start over. “You look real nice.”

She smiled. “Thanks,” she said, preening a little under the compliment. “Who’s watching the jail? Not poor little Harry, I hope.”

“Old Billy’s there,” Kade said with a tilted smile that felt unsteady on his mouth, as if it might not hold. “He’s got a rifle, and I’ll be stopping by regularly to check on the situation.”

Mandy sighed and assessed the gathering almost wistfully, as though she couldn’t believe she was really there, and a part of it all. When she looked at Kade again, fretfulness was in her eyes. “You must know that Old Billy won’t be able to handle that gang, if they decide to come for Gig.”

“I almost wish they would,” Kade said. “That way, even if they got away, we’d have somebody to track. Someplace to start.”

“One thing I know about trouble. You don’t have to go out beating the brush for it. It’ll come right to you, sure as sunrise.”

“I’m pretty much counting on that,” he said, relaxing a little. The music was playing, and he wanted to take her into his arms and let the whole town of Indian Rock know that she was there with him and nobody else. “May I have this dance, Amanda Rose?”

She went pink in the face. “I don’t really know much about dancing,” she confided, “since I’ve never had much call for it.”

He smiled and set his hat aside on a table, with a dozen others. He was wearing his best waistcoat and a string tie, and he’d even had his good shirt washed and pressed over at the Chinese laundry. “Just follow my lead,” he said, and pulled her out among the other dancers. It felt powerfully good to hold her.

Mandy was awkward at first, but she soon learned the steps, and the way she smiled up at Kade as they moved to the music made him feel like a much better man than he really was. He decided to enjoy the illusion while it lasted.

When they were both winded after several sets, she excused herself, saying she wanted a word with Emmeline, and Kade, though unwilling, accepted the parting with as much grace as he could summon. Spotting John Lewis up at the top of the stairs, seated in a wheeled chair with a blanket over his legs, he went to pay his respects.

“Did you send that wire?” John asked urgently.

“Yes,” Kade said. “I reckon she’s got it by now.”

“But there’s been no answer?” The ex-marshal looked downcast, and fragile, as if the light of a dim lantern would shine right through him.

“Maybe she’s on her way,” Kade suggested, hoping for his friend’s sake that that was the case. “Could be, she just lit out for here as soon as she got the news, and didn’t take the time to send a telegram.”

“She’d best hurry.” John met Kade’s gaze, swallowed hard. His eyes blazed, the way a fire will just before it goes out.

“Sounds as if you’ve plumb given up on yourself,” Kade remarked, putting on that he was affronted. In reality, he felt lost and more than a little helpless, and he hated that. He was accustomed to taking action,
doing something
about things, though lately he’d been forced to mark time, more than anything.

“A man knows,” John answered quietly, “when things are shutting down inside him. It’s like I’m stepping back from myself somehow.”

Kade was surprised, but he tried not to show it.

“What’s done is done. Maybe this is what I deserve. I was in jail once, a long time ago. Pulled a robbery. Did I ever tell you that?”

Just then there was a stir downstairs, and Kade peered through the rails of the balustrade to see his father and Concepcion walk in, arm in arm and spit-shined. Again, he had the odd sense that he was missing something he ought to have noticed.

John must have been reading his mind, because he chuckled and inclined his head toward the newcomers. “You young people,” he said with a telling sigh. “Think you invented passion, like it’s some brand-new thing, all your own.”

Passion? Kade had never connected the word with Concepcion, let alone his pa. Still, the two of them glowed as if they’d each swallowed a pint jarful of lightning bugs.

“You’d better get back to Mandy,” John counseled with a faded remnant of his old smile. “Seems to me she’s drawing a lot of notice from those young soldiers, and not a few of the cowboys, too.”

Kade sought Mandy with his eyes, found her by the punch bowl, talking with a corporal. He was clear downstairs before he realized he hadn’t told John good-bye, or even that he’d never hold an old mistake against him.

“B
ecky Fairmont is nothing but a whore, Bertha,” said the woman with one eyebrow, a cup of punch raised to her taut lips, having whispered the pertinent word. “I heard it from a reliable source, just five minutes ago.” She paused, obviously enjoying the confirmation of her suspicions. “What do you think of that?”

“I’m not at all surprised,” Bertha replied with lofty distain. “I told you that woman was no better than she should be.”

“Why, you old bats!” Mandy erupted, clean out of patience, and she couldn’t tell who was more shocked, the pair of gossips or the corporal who’d been hinting for a dance.

Bertha leveled a quelling look at her, but Mandy was not quelled. Not by a long shot. “You are as shameless as
she
is,” Bertha said. “I declare. Posing as a nun, of all things, then entering a horse race in pants and fawning over Kade McKettrick for all the world to see!”

Mandy had heard enough. She went for them, heedless of her calico dress and carefully rehearsed manners, set on clawing out their eyeballs. She would have done it, too, if Kade hadn’t caught her around the waist from behind and lifted her clean off her feet. “Excuse us, ladies,” he said cordially, and hauled Mandy away, through the open doors of the hotel, and onto the sidewalk.

Mandy was fit to be tied. “Put me down!” she cried, kicking. The punch cup was still in her hand, though she’d spilled most of the contents, and she was sorely tempted to bonk Kade over the head with it.

He set her on her feet with a great sigh. “All right,” he said a moment after the fact, “but if you start acting up again, I’ll have to douse you in the horse trough.”

This remark made her almost as mad as the comments that had passed between Bertha and her friend. Angry tears sprang to her eyes, and Kade being the one standing with his back to the water, it was all she could do not to turn the tables on him and give him a good push. “Those terrible women!” she cried. “They called Becky a—a—” She couldn’t say the word; it stuck in her throat like a ball of dry thistles.

Kade laid his hands on her shoulders, and the gentleness of his touch was nearly her undoing. “Is this truly about Becky?” he asked quietly.

She let out a wail of fury and sorrow.

He led her over to the bench next to the doors and sat her down. Then he took the place beside her, holding her hand, interlacing his fingers with hers. “Well?” he prompted.

“No,”
she sniffled, taking the handkerchief he handed her and wiping angrily at her face.

“I didn’t think so. Whatever Becky was or is, she can look after herself, and everybody with half a brain knows it.” He paused, squeezed her hand lightly. “What put a match to your fuse, Mandy?”

She could have told him it was what they’d said after that, about her, but that wouldn’t have been the truth, either. She didn’t much care what anybody thought of her—except Kade McKettrick. “My mother,” she said miserably. “She was—she sold herself. She had to, or Cree and I would have gone hungry more often than we did.”

“I reckon lots of women would do that if they had to. As if to illustrate his point, Mamie Sussex came out of the hotel just then, on Doc Boylen’s arm.

The two went right on by, talking quietly, without noticing Mandy and Kade.

“I bet
your
mother wouldn’t have,” Mandy said. “She was a fine lady, I imagine.”

“She was never put in that situation,” Kade said reasonably. A smile warmed his voice, though Mandy couldn’t quite bring herself to look at him. “She was spirited, though. One time, when Rafe was about ten or so, he took it in his head to play matador. Stole a red-and-white checkered tablecloth off the clothesline and headed for the bull pen. Ma took the fence in one leap, skirts and all, and faced off with that critter, all the while telling Rafe to git. The bull came at her, and she grabbed him right by the horns. The way I remember it, she wrestled him to the ground, but that part’s probably my imagination.”

Mandy sniffled again, picturing the scene and certain to the core of her being that her mama would have done the same thing, in the same circumstances. She’d just had one weakness, Dixie had, and that was men like Gig Curry, making pretty promises that were never kept. “Did she whup him afterwards?” she asked.

Kade chuckled. “The bull, or Rafe?” he teased. Then he sighed and stretched his legs out in front of him. They were long and strong, those legs, fit to take him places. “Ma didn’t believe in violence, and that included tanning our hides, much to Pa’s irritation. She made Rafe memorize the Book of Malachi and recite it back to her, word for word. He stayed clear of the bull after that.”

Mandy laughed in spite of herself. “I wish I’d known her.”

“Me, too,” Kade agreed easily. Then, prompted by some inner shift, he sat up straight and tall again. “Mandy, I’ve got something on my mind.”

She turned to him, curious. Everything had pulled tight inside her, all of a sudden, churning up a strange, sweet tension that made her feel vaguely scandalous.

“I was wondering if you’d marry me.”

She stared at him. Blinked. “What did you say?”

“I think you heard me the first time.”

“Why?” she blurted. “Why would you want to marry me, of all people, when you could have any one of those mail-order brides with a crook of your finger?”

“They aren’t you,” he said simply.

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand, either,” Kade admitted with a long expulsion of breath. “And it isn’t like my prospects are all that good. I might inherit the Triple M, if we don’t lose it first, but it seems pretty unlikely, given that Emmeline is in the family way.”

All Mandy could latch onto was his proposal. She might have accepted, if it had been another man asking, just to have a home and regular kin for a little while, but she couldn’t bring herself to deceive Kade. Maybe it was because he seemed to understand about her mama, because he hadn’t judged Dixie harshly and dismissed her as no-account, the way so many other people had. “Kade, there’s a Wild West show coming to town. When it pulls out, I plan on going with it.”

“You’re not Annie Oakley, Mandy,” he said, as if it were going to come as a revelation to her.

“I could be,” she replied, feeling prideful. “I can shoot as well as she can, and I can ride even better.”

“Well, if that doesn’t beat all,” Kade said, and he sounded fractious.

She wanted him to understand, wanted that in the most desolate and hopeless way. “It’s my chance to be somebody, Kade.”

“You’re somebody now.”

“Somebody special,” she clarified. She’d been to just one year of school, during a brief and peaceful stay with her aunt Dora, down in Waco, and gotten the foundations of reading, writing, and ciphering that way, building on her knowledge by happenstance after that, poring over whatever book she could beg, borrow, or steal. She had a lot of making up to do when it came to learning, and to living. She flat-out wasn’t smart enough for a man like Kade, either, and if he didn’t know that, she did.

“You’re that, too. Special, I mean. Give this a chance, Mandy. Marry me, and if you’re not happy, then you can just go your way.”

She digested that. The idea was more attractive than she would have liked. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice, with a penchant to jump. “What if there’s a baby?” she asked when she’d worked up the courage.

“I’d expect you to leave him with me, if you joined the circus.”

“Not the circus,” Mandy said, exasperated and not a little indignant. “Jim Dandy’s Wild West Show.”

“Same thing,” Kade told her flatly. “Either way, it’s no place for a child to grow up.”

Mandy’s thoughts were racing ahead of her, dragging her behind them over rough ground. A child, hers and Kade’s. Tarnation, it would half-kill her to give birth to a baby and then go off and leave the little thing behind. Maybe Kade knew that, was counting on it. “Why should I agree to a crazy idea like this?” she asked.

He turned her face, bent his head, and kissed her, lightly at first, and then with such thoroughness that she expected her stockings to roll down to her ankles.

“That’s why,” he said hoarsely, an eternity later, when he drew back.

She came up out of that kiss like a swimmer, plunged too deep, knowing neither up nor down, desperate to breathe. When she broke the surface, she gasped for air.

“No,” she heard herself say. “No.” But everything within her, every hope and instinct, every image of heaven, shouted
yes.