When a Texan Gambles (2 page)

He thought he heard her sniffle. If she didn’t show some sense, they would both catch pneumonia. The room offered little warmth, only a block from the icy wind. The owner downstairs had laughed when Sam asked if the room had a fireplace or a tub.

He wished suddenly that he’d been able to take her to a good hotel, but this had been the shortest way to his land, and he wanted to get home before trouble caught up with him.

“Come out and tell me what’s the matter,” Sam said as if he wasn’t too tired to care. He already knew the problem. The lady figured out she married him and would have to look at him every day for the rest of her life. All six-feet-three, two hundred pounds of him. If his size didn’t frighten her, wait until she found out what he did for a living. He figured
bounty hunter
ranked right below
undertaker
in most women’s minds.

He pulled his wet shirt back on, hoping to cover a few of the scars across his chest before she noticed them.

“You are not going to touch me” came a whisper from beneath the bed.

“Well, of course I’m going to touch you. That’s what husbands and wives do. They touch each other. Everyone knows that, lady.” Maybe she was simpleminded. Sam remembered old man Harris’s daughters, who’d grown up down the road from him. They were all fine-looking girls who developed early and fully, but there wasn’t a complete brain among them. Their pa’s only hope of getting them married off was to encourage it while the girls were too young and shy to say more than a few words.

Sam hadn’t thought about his bride being turned that way when he decided to marry. He just thought about how much like an angel she looked, with her pale blond hair and light blue eyes, and how loneliness weighed down on him like a rain-soaked greatcoat. It had been so long since he’d said more than a few words to anyone, or ate a meal across from another person. He wasn’t sure he knew how to act. Half the people in Texas thought him the devil, so why not marry an angel?

He tried again. “Look, miss, if you don’t want me to touch you, I won’t for tonight. I give you my word. Come on out from under the bed.” He thought of adding that he wasn’t all that interested in anything but sleep, but he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

She didn’t move.

“You could keep the Colt if you like. Just for tonight, of course.”

The shadow shifted. “What’s my name?”

He’d been afraid she might ask that question at some point. “Mrs. Sam Gatlin.” He smiled, proud of himself.

“My first name?”

He didn’t answer. There was nothing he could say that would hide the fact he’d been only half-listening to the sheriff who married them. He’d been staring at her, and that had taken most of his attention.

Sam walked over to the chair and started putting on his trousers, since it didn’t look as if they would be crawling beneath the covers anytime soon. He might be just guessing, but he figured wives didn’t warm up to husbands who couldn’t remember their names. They might be married, but it didn’t look as if there was going to be any wedding bed tonight.

The wet wool of his trousers had grown cold and stiff. He tossed them back over the chair and grabbed one of the blankets from the bed.

Sam wrapped it around his waist. The barrel of the Colt shook. He knew she was as cold as he. “Come on out, Mrs. Gatlin, and get under the covers. I won’t come near you, if that’s what you want.” His new bride made no sense. Why would she marry and leave town with him if she didn’t plan to be his wife? She acted as if he had abducted her and forced her here.

As he pulled the blanket up over his shoulders, she slipped out from beneath the far side of the bed.

“Sarah,” she said. “My name’s Sarah and I won’t hesitate to kill you if you come closer, Mr. Gatlin.”

Sam sat down on the chair and folded his arms, locking the ends of the blanket around him. “You’ve killed before, have you?”

“That’s right.” She lifted her chin. “A man my friends and I met on the way to Cedar Point.” She took a deep breath, as though she’d said what she was about to say one too many times in this lifetime. “Because we were three women, Zeb Whitaker tried to steal our wagon and take my friend Lacy away with him. We all three clubbed him with a board Bailee brought to Texas for protection. So we all killed him.” She stared at him. “I’m a cold-blooded murderer, that’s a fact.”

Sam fought down a grin. The angel lady fascinated him with her sunshine hair and her soft southern voice. She was so beautiful, even now, damp and tired and barely able to stand while she confessed. He found it hard to believe such a creature could swing a board hard enough to hurt anyone.

“Why didn’t you shoot him?” he asked more to keep her talking than out of interest.

She slipped into the bed, covered herself, then wiggled out of her wet dress. “I would have if I’d had a gun, but the wagon master took all our weapons when he threw us off the wagon train. I guess he figured we’d be dead soon and didn’t want to waste a rifle.”

Her dress hit the floor with a wet plop.

She was good, he thought. Her story became more unbelievable by the second, but she wasn’t backing down. He’d hunted outlaws who were like that, so good at telling lies they made people want to believe them even when proven false.

“What wagon train?” It wouldn’t take him long to trip her up and find the truth.

“The last one to leave Independence for California last summer. They called it the Roland Train with a wagon master by the name of Broken-Hand Harrison. I don’t remember much more; first my husband got the fever a few weeks out, then my baby. They both died while we were moving across Kansas.” A tear rolled down her pale china face. “If Bailee and Lacy hadn’t saved me, I would have died, too. I had a fever so bad, I didn’t care one way or the other if I woke up every morning.”

“Bailee and Lacy?”

“The two women kicked off the wagon train with me. Broken-Hand thought I had a fever that would spread, so he didn’t want anyone around me, but Bailee let me ride in her wagon after people from the train burned mine.” Her words slowed as she warmed beneath the blankets. “Everyone figured Lacy for a witch just because all the folks she nursed died, except me. Some said she danced with the moon, but I never saw her do that. She is little more than a child, but when they left Bailee and me, they left her, also.”

Sam watched his wife lean her head against the pillow and close her eyes. The sheriff mentioned something about her feeling better since she’d had regular meals, but she looked as fragile as cottonwood seed blowing in the wind.

“What about the one named Bailee?” he said louder than he’d intended. “Why did Broken-Hand Harrison kick her off with you?

Sarah jerked, as if in the moment while she paused, she’d fallen asleep. “The wagon master thought Bailee killed someone back East. But she’s a real nice person, even if she does have this habit of clubbing men when she’s angry. Maybe whoever she killed needed killing as bad as Zeb Whitaker did.”

The angel closed her eyes again. Sam watched her grip on the gun relax. He waited a few minutes, then stood and carefully lifted the weapon from her hand and pulled the covers over her shoulder.

For a moment, he thought of returning to the chair. But the empty space beside her invited him.

He spread his blanket atop her and moved to the other side of the bed. When he slipped beneath the covers, he smiled for the first time in a long while.

Come morning, he would probably face the wrath of Sarah for taking up half of her bed. He almost looked forward to the clash. But right now, in the cold dampness of the tiny room with music filtering from the saloon across the street, he felt almost at peace lying by her side.

Sam turned his head and studied her in the shadows. She was too beautiful to be real. The lady had no idea yet that she didn’t have a chance of bending him around her finger. No woman ever had, no woman ever would. Within a few days he would let her know how their marriage was going to be. He would set the rules and she’d follow. She’d give him a home to come to, a place to rest between battles, and he’d keep her safe. She’d do his cooking and cleaning, and he’d see that she had enough to eat. What more could either of them want from the other?

Sarah shifted, moving toward his warmth. In sleep she laid her hand atop his heart.

All thought drained from his mind as frail, slender fingers slid through the hair on his chest and then relaxed as though her touch had found a home.

Breathe, he reminded himself. Breathe.

TWO

SARAH ANDREWS STRETCHED BENEATH THE LAYERS OF blankets and opened her eyes to sunshine filtered through ragged curtains. For a moment she had no idea where she was. Shadows dominated the room. The air smelled musty and damp, as though the place had been shut away for a time.

She listened as she had all her life. Listened for the day’s approach. “Be still,” she told herself. “Don’t move. Don’t make a sound and you might hear dawn tiptoe in.”

Granny Vee, an old woman who finished raising her, used to whisper that if Sarah sat still long enough, she could hear the changes in the world, the changes in her life. And Sarah tried. She always tried, yet she could never hear them. She sensed change coming, sometimes she swore she almost tasted it, but she never heard anything. Not dawn tiptoeing, or spring yawning, or age lurking.

Granny Vee was a crazy old fool for believing such things. She’d made her living helping with the birthing of babies and watching the dying pass on to the hereafter. She always told Sarah she knew things other folks would never know, just because she paid attention. Sarah wasn’t sure she always believed Granny, but listening became a habit just the same.

She stretched, enjoying the silence. Yesterday had been endless. First, she endured being raffled off in the sheriff’s lottery. Then a strange man with dark hair and black eyes swept her away. The sheriff, her friends, even the town melted in the rain.

Sarah glanced around the room, just in case the dark haired man hid somewhere in the shadowy corners. “No,” she said to herself. “I’m alone. Probably abandoned again.”

It had become a way of life for her. When she was only a few days old, someone left her on Harriet Rainy’s steps. Sarah imagined her mother had been the one and how she must have held her close one last time before she disappeared. Her mother might have prayed that whoever lived inside the farmhouse would open their hearts to a child, not knowing that Harriet Rainy didn’t have a heart.

By Sarah’s sixth year Harriet had defined her as “too frail to bother to feed” and passed her along to a neighbor everyone called Granny Vee. The old woman was kind, but so poor Sarah often said she wasn’t hungry because she knew there was not enough food for two. Granny Vee never made Sarah feel like family, but more like a stray cat she let live with her.

Years later Sarah thought she finally found a place to belong when she married Mitchell Andrews. She dreamed of a family and the possibility of a home of her own. Within a year he sold his farm for the adventure of heading west.

Sarah fought back a tear. Mitchell hadn’t even asked her. After all, he’d said, it wasn’t her place.

Once on the trail Mitchell succumbed to a fever before they reached the Rockies.

Even the baby she delivered shortly before his death hadn’t stayed with her on this earth. Her tiny daughter died before Sarah had the strength to give her child a name.

A few weeks later Broken-Hand Harrison deposited her, and two other women, in the middle of the wagon trail to find their way back to civilization. However, after being in Texas several weeks, Sarah felt sure she was nowhere near finding a civilized world.

Now her new husband, a man named Sam Gatlin, had abandoned her in a shabby hotel room.

It had been raining when they stopped last night, but she’d seen what little there was to see of the town. A few stores, a two-story hotel, a saloon, and a livery. When she asked the clerk the name of the place, he’d said no one had bothered with a name. The local resident added that the mercantile had once been a trading post for buffalo hunters and the first cattle drives. Back then everyone called it the Scot’s Stash, but no one thought that was a proper name.

Slipping from the bed, Sarah searched the room. Her husband had taken everything, even the wet dress she’d dropped on the floor beside the bed. Only her tattered, muddy shoes remained and her small bundle of “necessities” she kept tightly wrapped in an old handkerchief of Mitchell’s. A sliver of honeysuckle soap. A comb. A pack of herbs Granny always claimed would lessen pain.

It wasn’t much, she realized, but all the things in the bundle were hers. She tied her belongings to a string sewn to the waist of her undergarments.

Sarah didn’t have to be still and listen to life’s changes. They shouted at her this morning. Her situation would have to get better before she could die. She wasn’t about to be buried in her worn petticoat with so many patched holes the hem looked like cheap lace.