The Texan's Bride (21 page)

But worry she did. She worried when she read the first sentence of the document: “Be it known that we, Branch Kincaid and Kathleen Gallagher Starr, of lawful age of Nacogdoches County, wish to unite ourselves in the bonds of Matrimony, and there being no Buddhist Monk in the county to celebrate the same …”

“Buddhist Monk!” she exclaimed.

Branch grimaced. “Well, the bond I copied had ‘priest,’ and I couldn’t very well use that. There’s at least four priests in town today that I know of, and well, I don’t like to be messin’ around with the Church. Sort of tempts fate, to my mind.”

Shaking her head, Katie continued to worry when she read further and saw the words: “We mutually bind ourselves to each other in the sum of five thousand dollars to have our marriage celebrated by a monk when the opportunity offers.”

“Five thousand dollars?”

He shrugged. “Round number.”

She worried as she lifted the pen from the inkwell and signed her name to the document. She worried when he scratched Branch Kincaid below hers and when Martha made her mark as a witness.

All that worry paled in comparison to the anxiety she felt when one of the boarders spoke from the parlor doorway, “Well done, Kincaid. Now you can kiss your bride,” and Branch kissed her cheek.

Just her cheek.

So much for worrying about love. Now she had gone and lost his lust.

CHAPTER 11

BRANCH AND HIS BRIDE rode double on Striker along the dusty red road leading southeast out of Nacogdoches. Pretty Girl, having thrown a shoe an hour from town, trailed riderless behind them. Lack of space in the saddle had dictated that Katie remove all but one of the petticoats she wore beneath her long, full riding skirt before mounting her husband’s horse. After that, the usually loquacious Branch had held conversation to a minimum, throwing terse, one-word replies over his shoulder in answer to Katie’s infrequent questions. Their bodies, however, maintained a constant dialogue.

And Branch didn’t like it.

He set an arduous pace, determined to ignore any tingles or tautness or tensions below his neck. His brain had resumed control of his reasoning, and he was busy trying to figure out why in the hell he’d spent those critical hours early this morning letting his pecker do his thinking for him. Hellfire, it wasn’t like he was eighteen and constantly on point.
No
, he scolded himself,
you’re thirty-four, and one woman keeps your blood too busy in your lower half to ever make it to your top half
.

He felt like wash-water scum. He’d given John Gallagher his word, but he’d not given John Gallagher’s daughter his name. Not his real name, that is.

Not Britton Kincaid Garrett.

There was no way he could have used that name on the bond, what with half the gossips in town dropping by to confirm the end of the year’s most delicious scandal. Besides, if he had used his legal name, he might have really ended up married! It would be just his luck for Katie to be right about marrying by bond, and there was no way in hell he intended to allow himself to be shackled by a name on a piece of paper. He had but a single purpose in East Texas, and marrying a beautiful, passionate, squirrel-swinging spitfire wasn’t it.

He was here to find out who had murdered his brother.

His back burned where Katie’s breasts pushed against him, and he remembered how they’d looked, how they’d felt, how they’d tasted. Damn, how much farther to Gallagher’s? She was beautiful, provocative. And the most wanton bit of woman he’d had in years.

She truly believed she was his wife—he knew it just as sure as a Comanche rides a horse. Undoubtedly, she’d be expecting him to pick up where they’d left off that morning. The thought created a surge of heat in his loins, and he shifted in the saddle, trying to find a comfortable position.

He snapped his attention back to the road. He couldn’t allow himself to love her again. There was no going back to before that phony reverend’s shout. The differences between that time and this might be subtle, but they did exist. Sure, he’d given John Gallagher his word that he’d see after Katie, and true, the first thing he’d done was sleep with her. But during the whole of that luscious night, the word “marriage” had never once hovered between them. Comfort had been a part of it, pride, certainly on his part, and from what he could figure, for Katie, reaffirmation of life. Neither of them had thought that there was any more to it. Signatures on a single sheet of paper had changed all that.

Now she believed they were married and he couldn’t convince her otherwise. But he would never take advantage of her by bedding her under false pretenses. He may not have his name anymore, but he damn well still had his honor.

Since Branch had failed in his efforts to convince the Widow Craig that he and Katie didn’t need a honeymoon, Rowdy Payne and his son wouldn’t be bringing Martha to Gallagher’s for two weeks. Katie’s fingers tightened at his waist as she shifted her weight, and he realized that getting through the next fourteen days would be trickier than eating red beans with a pitchfork.

He felt her gentle breath at the back of his neck and muttered to himself, “Fourteen days. Three hundred thirty-six hours. Twenty thousand one hundred sixty minutes.”
Oh Lord, it would be a long two weeks
.

Katie hugged Branch securely as he increased their speed. His scent—musky, heavy, uniquely his own— penetrated her senses. She suffered the seductive harmony of his muscles flexing and relaxing in tune with Striker and thought that she just might not survive the ride. Branch Kincaid confused her. She confused herself. How dare she even think such thoughts at a time like this?

The afternoon was warm and wind-wisped with cottony clouds on high blue air. It was a day for banter and lightness of heart, not for awkwardness and suffocating grief. She wanted to be home, she needed to be home, and as the time of their travel neared the three-hour mark, she listened almost desperately for the familiar bells that would tell her they’d reached the inn.

The wind chimes in the design of a four-leaf clover indicated the turnoff from the main road to Gallagher’s Inn. A few years earlier, Da had traded two nights’ accommodations for the work of a smithy establishing a new business in a nearby town. From the beginning Katie had loved the hollow music played so furiously on occasion by strong winds or, at other times, the lone note exposed by an errant breeze.

But today all was silent

They didn’t speak as Striker carried them the last few miles to the inn. The closer they came to her home, the less attention she paid to the way her breasts tingled as they brushed his back. Striker made the final turn beside, the wind chimes. Home, she thought joyfully.
Thank you, Lord
. Her home, her security, her strength.

Unconsciously she leaned forward, waiting for that first glimpse of Gallagher’s. She hardly noticed the caustic odor of smoldering timber and burned hair.

Branch did. The stench was filed right next to horror in his mind. He pulled Striker to a halt just beyond sight of the inn. “Wait here,” he said, swinging to the ground and grabbing his guns from his saddle. “I mean it, Katie. Stay right where you are.”

“What is it, Branch?” Her eyes widened with worry and she nibbled her lower lip.

“Probably nothing. Just let me check, all right?”

She folded her arms, hugging herself, and nodded. Branch paused at the edge of the stand of pines that blocked their vision of Gallagher’s. “Promise me, Kate, you’ll stay here this time?”

“Yes.”

He walked through the woods. “Damn the bastards,” he breathed as he saw the destruction. “Damn them to the lowest pit of hell.”

It was only a warning, but oh, what an ungodly threat. The outhouses had been burned to the ground. Two charred carcasses, a milk cow and her calf, hung suspended from the upper porch above the steps leading to the front door. Blood had pooled on the whitewashed step and painted a garish streak down each stair to the ground. An R drawn with blood defiled the front door. “Oh, Sprite, I wish I could have spared you this.”

A pitiful whimper, like a puppy caught in the steel jaws of a trap, reached his ears. He knew as he turned that Katie once again had disregarded instructions. She stared at the dead calf, her skin drained of color, her blue eyes glazed.

He clenched his jaw and lifted her from Striker’s back. “Woman, you haven’t the sense God gave green apples,” Branch said gently as he turned her head away from the inn and folded her into his arms.

Katie held him like a lifeline, her tears falling relentlessly down her face as she sobbed out her pain. She cried for Da and Daniel, she cried for Shaddoe, she cried for herself. She even cried for Finian Trahern. Branch discovered he was hoping to hear his own name in there somewhere, but she never mentioned him.

He held her for the longest time, the tension in his body making his arms tremble. What he wouldn’t give to wrap his hands around a Regulator’s neck right then. It’d be a pleasure kill, and he wouldn’t feel an ounce of guilt about it. The agony Katie was living wrenched at him, and he ached to give her ease.

But this time he wouldn’t ease her body. He would, however, do his level best to ease her soul. Her tears spent, she eased away from him, and dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief he’d removed from around his neck.

“Come on, Sprite. Your kitchen looks like it’s just as you left it. Let’s settle in over there, and while you’re cooking me some supper, I can tidy things up here. Cornbread and beans’ll be fine.” As he led her away, he looked back over her shoulder and added, “I’m not rightly in the mood for meat tonight.”

KATIE WASHED up, changed from her riding skirt into a serviceable blue homespun, put on a pot of beans, and mixed a batch of cornbread. Then she crawled into bed for a nap. A limit existed to the amount of turmoil with which a mind could deal in a single day, and she had reached it. She slept deeply and without dreams, awaking at dusk to the sound of Branch moving about in the outer room.

Dinner was an awkward affair, with conversation stilted and limited to a discussion concerning proper seasonings for pinto beans cooked meatless. The argument centered on garlic. While Katie had slept, Branch had taken it upon himself to add a full clove to the pot bubbling over the fire. While she appreciated his help—he did, after all, save the cornbread from burning—she couldn’t abide the taste of garlic in her beans.

Especially considering the fact that this was her wedding night.

A thunderstorm hit just after dark. Lightning split the sky while rain pounded the earth, and Katie watched the downpour, praying that her family was safely sheltered from the storm’s fury. As long as Da, Daniel, and Shaddoe were protected, the torrent was a welcome one. It would wash away the stains on Gallagher’s front porch and clear the air of that vile scent of destruction. Too, the intensity—the tension, the electricity—of the storm fit her mood.

Tonight Branch would join her in their marriage bed.

He put on a slicker and left the cabin to see to the horses. Katie lit the lamp in her bedroom, poured water from a ceramic pitcher into a bowl, and washed. Anticipation filled her as she loosened the buttons of her dress. Last night had left her feeling ashamed—she’d given herself outside of marriage. No, she thought ruefully, actually she’d taken a man outside of marriage. Tonight would be different; it was a beginning for her and this hunter who had preyed upon her emotions for so long now. Perhaps tonight could be the beginning of love.

Wearing only her chemise and drawers, Katie reached into her bureau for a night rail. Holding the soft batiste shift trimmed in lace and embroidered with flowers, she hesitated. It was a beautiful gown, her prettiest. But she had worn the same gown on another wedding night. She had worn this gown for Steven.

Quietly and decisively, she shut her dresser drawer. Stripping off her underclothes, Katie slipped naked into bed. She waited.

And waited, and waited even more. Finally she heard his footsteps on the stoop. He entered the outer room, and she listened as first one, then the other, boot hit the floor. She caught a glimpse of white through the half-open door when he tossed his shirt onto a chair. The rustle of his trousers made her swallow.

Then she heard an unexpected sound, an unbelievable, disconcerting, completely frustrating noise. They had not moved the bunk John Gallagher had used in the kitchen up to the new inn, and Katie’s chin dropped when the bed ropes creaked as Branch settled himself onto the mattress. “Good night, Sprite,” he called.

Two minutes later, his snores bounced off the walls and pounded Katie’s heart.

BRANCH NEVER realized cast-iron pots could make so much noise. But then, he’d never before heard someone sling them around the kitchen with quite so much fervor. Recalling the events of the previous night, he reluctantly opened his eyes to the sight of a violent Texas thunderstorm dressed in blue homespun right there in the kitchen.

Slamming cook pots supplied the thunder, bacon sizzled and popped like lightning, wind whipped through the room in the tempest’s wake, and a veil of rain pooled in the black thunderclouds of her eyes. Yep, Kate was a might unhappy.

May as well face the fury now and get it over with
, he thought. Storms such as this tend to make a man’s afternoon miserable. In his most pleasant tone he said, “What’cha cookin’ Katie? Sure smells good.”

She turned on him like a twister. “Certainly a peccary like yourself can recognize the smell of griddled ham.”

He frowned. “If I understand what you’re saying, it’s my butt you like to think you’re fryin’ up, huh, Katie?”

“Precisely.” The sun peaked through the storm clouds.

Damn, but she’s beautiful
. No matter how good the intentions, some habits were hard to change. Knowing he shouldn’t, but unable to stop, he drawled, “I can hardly wait for you to eat your breakfast.”

The Dutch-oven lid she’d held in her hand clanged against the floor, and by the looks of her, he knew he was lucky she hadn’t aimed it at his head. Hastily, Branch added, “Look, I know we’ve got some talkin’ to do. We’ll feel better if we have a bit of that meal you’ve gone to the trouble to fix before we get serious.”