Shotgun Bride (32 page)

K
ade watched, baffled, as his younger brother rode toward the barn, hell-bent for yesterday, looking as though the devil himself were on his tail. He even glanced in the direction Jeb had come from, just to make sure old Slewfoot wasn’t riding behind him.

Jeb was off his horse while it was still moving, the critter heading, reins dangling, for the open doors and the shelter of its stall.

“What the hell?” Kade muttered. Rafe, just riding in from his place across the creek, watched in puzzlement.

Jeb threw his arms wide. “You’ve got to hide me!” he yelled, and he looked and sounded dead serious, for all the comical picture he made.

Kade and Rafe looked at each other, then back at Jeb, both of them confounded. Rafe swung down from Chief’s back and ambled over, pulling off his gloves as he came.

“Hide you?” Kade asked, bewildered. “From who?”

“Her!” Jeb yelled, and he’d gone white in the past two seconds.

“Who?” Rafe insisted, but a grin was taking shape in his eyes.

Jeb started to pace, throwing the occasional anxious glance in the general direction of town. “The she-cat who’s after me, that’s who!” No sign of the patented Jeb McKettrick arrogance now, no easy rhetoric, no smart-ass grin. Just one rattled cowboy.

Rafe chuckled and shook his head. “Maybe it’s just me,” he drawled, making a show of taking in the landscape, “but I don’t see any she-cat. You running a temperature, little brother?”

Just then, a horse and buggy came charging over the grassy knoll on the other side of the creek. Kade squinted, saw a woman in a fancy bonnet and a blue-and-white-striped dress at the reins.

“That her?” he asked, curious, cocking his thumb.

Jeb all but jumped out of his skin. “Tell her I’m gone. Tell her I’m dead. Tell her anything.” With that, he fled, rounding the bunkhouse at full gallop, just as he used to do when he was a kid and had earned himself a proper thrashing from one of his brothers.

Rafe let out a long, low whistle of exclamation, purely delighted.

Kade laughed.

Bold as Ben-Hur in his chariot, the lady in the striped dress drove that horse and buggy across the creek as if it were dry ground, making good use of the reins and raising a six-foot spray of sun-glinting water on either side.

“This,” Kade said, “is gonna be good.”

Rafe’s grin was as wide as the mouth of Horse Thief Canyon. “Let’s go and say hello to the lady. It’s the gentlemanly thing to do.”

She pulled up when she saw them, horse and rig dripping water, and Kade was taken aback when he got a good look at the woman’s face. For some reason, he’d been expecting a clock-stopper, but she was breathtakingly beautiful, her dark blue eyes shooting flames, her wild and coppery hair doing its best to escape the bonnet. As if in capitulation, she wrenched the thing off her head and threw it to the floor of the buggy.

“Where is that lying, scum-sucking, yellow-bellied devil spawn?” she demanded.

Rafe and Kade exchanged glances.

“Which lying, scum-sucking, yellow-bellied devil spawn would that be?” Kade inquired cordially, tugging belatedly at his hat brim.

“Jeb McKettrick, that’s who.” She was flushed, but it only made her more fetching. “Where is he?”

Rafe grinned. “Hiding behind the bunkhouse,” he said with an utter lack of conscience.

She was about to slap down the reins again when Kade caught hold of the harness. “Just one thing, ma’am. If you’re going to kill our little brother, and it looks like you mean to directly, we’d appreciate knowing your name first.”

“Chloe Wakefield,” she said grudgingly, “and if you don’t let go of that harness, right now, I might just run you over.”

John Lewis’s daughter. Kade stepped back, delighted, hands spread wide in a gesture of peaceful concession. He pointed helpfully. “That’s the bunkhouse over there.”

She was off, traveling at all the speed the poor horse could manage. Kade hoped she hadn’t driven the hapless beast that hard all the way out from Indian Rock.

“Think we ought to go back there and save Jeb?” Rafe asked idly, straightening his hat.

Kade gave the matter due and leisurely consideration, rubbing his chin with one hand. “Nah,” he said after a moment.

Rafe slapped him on the back. “You think she’s the wife he’s been bragging about?”

Kade shrugged, and the two of them started toward the main house. They had ranch business to discuss, there was fresh coffee brewed, unless Kade missed his guess, and Mandy and Concepcion had been baking pies all afternoon.

“I reckon so.” he said.