How could Bart escape in broad daylight?

He’d be spotted immediately. But how could he stay in her room for the rest of the day?

Someone would find out for sure.

What if his fever grew worse? She listened for moans. But the silence was almost worse than the anticipation of noise.

What if Bart died? She wrung her clasped hands.

If he died, she would never have the chance to chew him out the way she’d always intended!

She’d never learn why he had followed her from Kansas City, or how he had fallen in with Jesse James and his gang.

More important, she wouldn’t be able to tell him how miserable her life had been after he went away….

CATHERINE PALMER

The author of more than fifty novels with more than two million copies sold, Catherine Palmer is a Christy Award-winner for outstanding Christian romance fiction. Catherine’s numerous awards include Best Historical Romance, Best Contemporary Romance, Best of Romance from Southwest Writers Workshop and Most Exotic Historical Romance Novel from RT Book Reviews. She is also an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award winner.

Catherine grew up in Bangladesh and Kenya, and she now makes her home in Georgia. She and her husband of thirty years have two sons. A graduate of Southwest Baptist University, she also holds a master’s degree from Baylor University.

The Gunman’s Bride
Catherine Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

—Philippians 4:6-7

To my faithful readers who bring me such joy.

I thank you for all your years of loyalty.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Author’s Note

Letter to Reader

Questions for Discussion

Chapter One

April 1883

Raton, New Mexico Territory

Keeping his six-shooter aimed at the sheriff, Bart Kingsley crouched at the corner of a white picket fence. He was bleeding bad. The bullet that caught him in the side hurt something awful. But Bart knew he couldn’t let pain overcome him. He was on a mission to find the woman he loved.

Laura Rose Vermillion’s window stood out as a black patch on the dull gray wall of the dormitory just over the fence. Bart knew it was Rosie’s window because he had caught sight of her shaking out a pink rug that morning. His Rosie…his beautiful Rosie.

“Kingsley!” a voice echoed through the darkness. “Kingsley, I know I winged you, boy. Come on out like a man and maybe the doc can save your sorry hide.”

Bart gritted his teeth. He was too close. Too near Rosie now to let a bullet stop him. Hiding in some shrubs near the depot, he had waited all day until the sun went down and the last train left town. But when he made his move, Sheriff Mason T. Bowman had appeared out of nowhere.

“I’ve got help, Kingsley,” the lawman called out now. “The Pinkerton National Detective Agency out of New York City sent their best man after you. You ain’t never going to get away. Not with a Pinkerton detective on your trail. You know that, boy. So, put your hands up nice and slow, and we’ll hold our fire.”

Bart grimaced. A Pinkerton man? Now that was serious business. Those fellows could track outlaws better than a pack of hound dogs. The damp blood on his buckskin jacket told Bart he was leaving a trail nobody could miss.

But he couldn’t be captured now. Not this close to his Rosie. Bart tugged the kerchief loose from his neck and pressed it against the bullet wound. He set his gun on the ground and worked his jacket’s buttons into place to hold the kerchief tight.

Taking up his pistol, he began to creep along the boards of the fence. The dormitory housed young women who worked as waitresses for Fred Harvey’s famous railway restaurant. Bart surmised that a fence built to keep eager young bucks away from the pretty females inside it would have a gap or two.

“Kingsley, we’ve got every street blocked!” Bowman barked. “You’ll never leave Raton alive unless you surrender now. Come on out, boy!”

Bart pushed against the pickets as he inched toward Rosie’s window. Aha. A loose board swung outward, leaving just enough room for a man to slip through the fence. Bart edged himself between the securely nailed pickets, then reached back and eased the loose board back into place.

“Look at this!” a deep voice called out. “You plugged him all right, sheriff. There’s blood right here by this fence. Good shot. He won’t get far.”

The Pinkerton detective, Bart guessed. He touched his jacket and prayed the kerchief would hold. Slinking across the grass, Bart tried to think about Rosie. Beautiful Rosie with long brown hair and pretty little ankles. Six years had passed since he’d seen her, but Bart knew he would always love her.

“The blood trail stops at the corner,” the Pinkerton man announced. “He’s close.”

Bowman shouted into the night. “Men, search under every woodpile and behind every fence. Shoot him if he runs.”

Bart pushed himself up against the rough stone wall of the dormitory until he was standing. Dark mists swirled before his eyes. Don’t faint. Not now.

He reached up and caught the edge of a protruding stone. Then he lifted one leg and found a foothold. Rosie, he reminded himself. Overhead was Rosie’s window.

“’Spose he could have gotten over the Harvey girls’ fence?” someone asked.

Bart pulled himself upward until he found another stone ledge to grab.

“Nah, the sheriff pegged him good,” came the response. “If he ain’t dead already, it won’t be long.”

Now Bart ran his fingertips along Rosie’s wood windowsill. He set his foot on a protruding metal pipe. As he placed his weight on it, the pipe cracked.

“You hear that?”

“Sounded like it came from the dormitory!”

“Who’s got a light? Sheriff, over here! Bring a lantern!”

Bart had slipped down a good two feet, scraping the skin on his palms. Now he found another foothold, this one of stone, and he heaved himself up again.

Coming up in line with the sill, he lifted a prayer. God, let this window open.

He gripped the lower edge of the casement and pushed. The window slid up. The scent of lavender and roses drifted out into the night. With a grunt, Bart dragged his body over the sill and tumbled to the floor of Rosie’s room. A wave of dizziness came over him as he fought to stay conscious.

“Hey, here’s a place where a picket is loose on the fence! Bring that lantern over here!”

“You see any blood?”

Without waiting to hear the response, Bart reached up and pulled the window shut. For a moment, he sat on the floor, head bent as he sucked in air. At the sound of girlish voices outside the room, he stretched out flat. Then, with the last of his strength, he scooted his big body under the bed.

Lying in the darkness, Bart anticipated the moment Rosie would enter the room. Or would it be the Pinkerton man who had finally cornered him? Or the sheriff, gun drawn, ready to blast the fugitive?

Bart closed his eyes. He was close now. So close. He had spent the past two months tracking a runaway woman who didn’t want to be found. Trailing her halfway across the frontier. Spotting her at last in this two-bit mountain town.

“Oh, my,” a light voice sang out as the door opened and a shaft of light sliced the darkness. “I don’t know about you, Etta, but I am just whipped. Good night.”

Rosie!

Another girl spoke. “I’m so tired I could fall asleep right where I’m standing. Morning’s going to come early. Sleep well.”

Rosie shut the door to her dormitory room and sat down on the bed. Beneath the hem of her black skirt, Bart caught sight of those pretty little ankles he remembered so well—worth every drop of blood he had shed.

Until Sheriff Bowman shot him, no one had ever spilled a drop of Bart’s mixed Apache and White Eye blood. Not his stepfather, who’d sure tried enough times. Not Laura Rose’s pappy, who would have liked to, whether he had the guts to pull the trigger. Not any of the string of lawmen and bounty hunters who had tried to gun down Bart and had found themselves eating cold lead for supper.

But here he lay, his blood soaking into the edge of Rosie’s pink hooked rug. All this because of a woman he’d tried to forget for six long years.

Laura Rose. From underneath the bed, Bart studied those ankles as she unlaced her leather shoes and worked her stocking feet around in tiny circles. God didn’t make many ankles that slim, that fragile, that downright luscious. Rosie had ankles worth fighting for.

Not that Bart had ever fought for them.

No, sir, there was no way he could deny that when push had come to shove, he had skedaddled out of Kansas City as if a scorpion was crawling down his neck. He’d been only seventeen at the time, but strong as an ox and twice as stubborn.

He could have stayed in Missouri and challenged Rosie’s pappy for her. He could have pulled out the marriage license he still carried with him everywhere. He could have argued his case in court as her pappy had threatened to make him do. But Rosie’s father wasn’t a highfalutin doctor for nothing. After the shouting, warnings and threats had failed to make Bart give in, Dr. Vermillion had resorted to the only weapon left in his arsenal—the truth.

Under the bed, Bart grimaced as he probed the seeping wound in his side. The physical pain seemed almost easier to bear than the memory of Dr. Vermillion’s accusations. He shut his eyes for a moment, fighting the self-contempt that had made him silent and withdrawn as a boy, the shame that inflamed his angry loneliness as a man.

Breathing steadily, he willed a wall of iron around the hurt inside and watched Rosie’s feet moving around the room—small feet for a woman so tall. A ragged hole in the heel of one dark cotton stocking revealed tender pink skin.

“Etta, come in here, would you?” She had opened the door to her room and was calling down the hallway. Bart wished he could shrink farther into the space beneath her bed, but it was mighty hard to fit a six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-pound man under a brass bedstead.

“Do you smell anything odd in here?” Rosie was asking her slipper-footed neighbor. “The minute I came in from the restaurant, I noticed the scent of leather and dust—as if the outside air had gotten into my room.”

Beneath the bed, Bart bent his head and took a whiff of his buckskin jacket. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a good wash. Come to think of it, his hair probably needed combing in the worst way—maybe a cut, too—and his boots hadn’t been polished since he took them off that horse thief in Little Rock.

“Phew!” Etta exclaimed. “I hate to say it, but the smell’s probably coming from your own shoes, Laurie. These laced boots Mr. Harvey makes us wear cause all kinds of problems for a girl in a busy restaurant. I’ve gone through two pairs of stockings a month since I started here.”

Bart saw Rosie lift one foot and heard her little gasp. “Would you just look at this, Etta? An awful blister right on my heel!”

“What did I tell you? You’ll have calluses in a month and corns before you know it. Someone should write a letter to Mr. Harvey and tell him how we suffer. You soak your foot in a basin of water, and I’ll fetch some vanilla from my room.”

“Vanilla?”

“Put a drop in each shoe and set them in the hall all night. By morning that scent will be gone, you’ll see.” Etta paused a moment. “Although I must admit your shoes really do have the oddest odor I’ve ever smelled.”

As her friend shut the door, Rosie hurried to the window. Bart heard the sash drawn up and felt a blast of chilly air. The sound of male voices drifted into the room from the street below, and Bart stiffened.

Etta breezed back into the room. “What on earth are you doing, Laura Kingsley? You’ll catch your death!”

Turning his head with some difficulty in the tight space, Bart watched as Rosie stood on tiptoe to lean out the open window of the second-floor room. Laura Kingsley, Etta had called her. The name Rosie had chosen for herself sent a warm thrill down Bart’s spine.

“What’s going on outside, Etta?” she asked. “Look at all those men and horses right under my window.”

“Ma’am?” someone shouted from below. “Excuse me, ma’am, but have you seen a wounded man about these parts?”

“Shut the window!” Etta hissed. “Quick! Shut the—”

“I’ll have you know men aren’t allowed near our dormitory,” Rosie called out. “It’s against Mr. Harvey’s regulations. You’d better take your horses out of this yard before the sheriff arrests you.”

“I’m the sheriff of Colfax County, miss. Sheriff Mason T. Bowman. This fellow with me is a detective from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency out of New York City.”

“Oh, my!”

“I told you to shut the window,” Etta whispered.

“Don’t mean to frighten you ladies, but we’re in search of a desperate outlaw. He was wounded about an hour ago in a gun battle just outside of town—shot two or three times. He’s lost a lot of blood, and we’ve tracked him as far as this backyard.” Shot once, Bart corrected silently under the bed. He might have needed an excuse to get close to Rosie, but he wasn’t fool enough to let two bullets plug him.

“This man is armed and dangerous. He’s a hardened criminal with a price on his head in Missouri. You ladies had better keep your windows shut tight and your doors locked.”

“Yes, Sheriff Bowman.” Rosie’s voice quavered. “I’ll tell the other women.”

“What has this man done?” Etta called down.

“You name it. Robbed banks, trains, stagecoaches. He’s a horse thief and a cattle rustler. And he’s wanted for murder.”

Under the bed, Bart frowned. He was not a horse thief and cattle rustler.

“What’s his name?” Etta asked.

“Goes by two or three aliases—Injun Jack, Savage Jack, Jack King. His legal name is Bart Kingsley. He ran with Frank and Jesse James before Jesse got killed last year. The detective is after him for three train robberies in Missouri. Been trailing Kingsley all the way from Kansas City.”

Kansas City? Bart frowned. The Pinkerton detective had been tracing him since Kansas City? Rosie had left a trail a mile wide, but Bart didn’t think he had given any clues to his own whereabouts. Maybe he was a chuckleheaded fool after all. No wonder the sheriff had plugged him.

“If we see anything suspicious, we’ll send for you right away,” Etta assured the sheriff as she shut the window. “A murderer! Can you imagine, Laurie? Right outside the dormitory, too. The other girls will be scared out of their wits at the thought. I’m going to tell Annie and Mae right away. Won’t they just swoon? Laurie? Are you all right? You’re trembling!”

“Oh, Etta.”

“Don’t be scared of that outlaw. The sheriff will have him rounded up by morning.”

“Etta, I want you to open my wardrobe door right this minute and look inside. Wait—take this!”

Rosie knelt by the bed, and Bart prayed she wouldn’t see him in the shadow as she fished a pistol out from under the mattress. He let out a stifled sigh when she stood and gave the weapon to her friend.

“Laurie! You’re not supposed to have a gun,” Etta squealed. “It’s against regulations!”

“If he’s in there, shoot him! Just shoot him right through the heart.”

Bart scowled. Well, that was a fine attitude.

“Take your gun, Laurie. The wardrobe’s empty.”

“Don’t leave me here alone. Please, I beg you!”

“That man’s not going to get in here. I locked your window, and you can bolt the door after I’m gone. I never expected you to be so—”

“Etta…” Her breath was shallow. “Etta…I know that man. The outlaw. The killer. I know him. Or I used to know someone by that name.”

“Injun Jack?”

For a moment the room was silent. Then Rosie let out a ragged breath. “Bart Kingsley,” she whispered. “I was married to him.”

A knock on the door by one of the girls who had come to investigate the shouting had taken Etta out of the room for a moment. As soon as she informed everyone about the sheriff’s warnings, she hurried back into Rosie’s room and sat down on the bed beside her friend.

“I swear my heart is about to pound right out of my chest! I could barely hold my tongue after what you told me, Laurie. You think you were married to the outlaw?”

“Etta, please,” Rosie pleaded, trying to still her own heartbeat. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s all in the past.”

“Oh, Laurie, how can you just up and say you were married to a murderous outlaw and then not tell the story to me—your very best friend in all the world?”

“I wasn’t married to an outlaw, Etta. The Bart Kingsley I knew in Kansas City was no killer. He was a boy. Seventeen. And I was only fifteen. It happened a long time ago.”

“You got married when you were fifteen years old?” Etta’s blue eyes sparkled as bright pink spots lit up her cheeks. Her hair had escaped its roll to form a wildly frizzy blond spray across her forehead.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Rosie repeated. She felt hot, miserable and suddenly close to tears as a flood of memories washed through her. All she had ever wanted was to teach children. How she loved little ones with their wide eyes and fertile minds! She longed to open those minds and pour in knowledge that would create successful, happy adults who could change the world into a better place.

But schoolteachers were working women, Pappy always said, and far beneath her social rank. She would never be allowed to stand in a classroom, he informed her, with chalky fingers and eyes tired from reading late by candlelight. No, she was to marry—marry someone well situated—and forget her schoolmarm notions.

Then Bart Kingsley came along.

“Laurie, please tell me,” Etta begged.

“It’s not romantic like you think. It was all a mistake.”

“Was he cruel? Did you know he was going to become a killer?”

“Of course not. In fact…I couldn’t have known the Bart Kingsley they’re hunting. At least…I don’t think it could be the same man.”

“But it might be,” Etta stressed. “Remember how scared you were when you first heard his name—same as yours.”

With a sigh Rosie smoothed down her black cotton skirt. Right now she wanted nothing more than to untie her soiled white apron, slip off her stockings and soak her sore feet in a basin of water. She didn’t want to think about the past. She didn’t want to remember Bart Kingsley.

“He was handsome,” she murmured, unable to look at Etta. “My Bart Kingsley had green eyes…strange green eyes with threads of gold. And straight hair, black as midnight. He was skinny—rail thin—but strong. Oh, my Bart was so strong. He was kind, too. Always soft-spoken and polite to everyone. He loved animals. Stray dogs and cats followed him around the farm. When he sat down to rest, there’d be one cat on his shoulder and another on his lap.”

“He worked on your father’s farm?”

“In the stables. He was wonderful with horses. He broke and trained them with such gentleness. It was like magic the way they obeyed him. And you should have seen my Bart ride.”

“What do you suppose turned him into a cattle rustler and a murderer?”

“It couldn’t be the same man,” Laura Rose retorted. “The Bart Kingsley I married never hurt anybody. He wouldn’t even say a harsh word if someone was cruel to him.”

“If he was so kind, why would anyone be cruel to him?”

“The other farmhands taunted him because…well, because he was part Indian. His father was an Apache.”

“Apache!” Etta cried. “The sheriff just told us that outlaw they’re hunting for goes by the name of Injun Jack. I’ll bet it’s him, Laurie. How many men could fit that description?”

“A lot,” she shot back with more defiance than she felt.

“So you married him when you were fifteen. Did you actually keep house together?”

“No, of course not. We weren’t even…we didn’t sleep together like married people. We were just children really—children with such beautiful hopes and dreams.”

“I don’t see how you could bring yourself to marry a savage even if he was nice to you,” Etta rattled on.

“Did you get a…a divorce? Harvey Girls aren’t supposed to be married—it’s against regulations. You could be fired.”

“We were married two weeks before my father found out,” Rosie explained. “He was furious. The two of them had a long talk, and Bart left the farm that afternoon.”

“He left you? Just like that?”

“There was a note.” Her voice grew thin and wistful as she thought of the special place in the woods where they had first kissed each other. The place where she had found the note. “Bart wrote that he realized the marriage had been a mistake. He said we were too young to know what we were doing, and he’d begun to realize it right away after we got married. He said…he said he didn’t really love me after all, and I should forget about him. I was to consider that nothing had ever happened between us.”

“Nothing?”

Rosie focused on her friend. “Nothing. So there…I wasn’t really married to him at all. Not in the Bible way. Our marriage didn’t count. And that’s the end of the story, so if you’d please just leave me alone now, Etta, I want to go to bed. I have the early shift tomorrow.”

“You’ve got that blister, too,” Etta added, her voice sympathetic as she gave her friend a quick hug.

Pulling out of the embrace, Rosie stood and smoothed the rumples in the pink quilt on her bed. There were probably lots of Bart Kingsleys in the world. Besides, she was about as far as she could be from Kansas City and the life she had shared with him. No one was going to find her in Raton, New Mexico. Not her pappy. Not the man who had been her fiancé for the past two years. And certainly not Bart Kingsley.

“Lock up now, Laurie,” Etta said from the doorway.

“I’ve put your shoes out in the hall. You’ll see how much better everything will be in the morning.”

Under the bed, Bart watched as Rosie bolted her door and set a chair under the knob. He knew she was afraid. But afraid of Bart, the murdering outlaw? Or afraid of him, the Bart who had married her and then had run off and left her high and dry?

It wasn’t going to matter much either way if he up and died right under her bed. He needed to slide out from under this bed, wash his wound with some clean water and try to take a look at the damage. He needed ointment and bandages. He needed water. His mouth felt like the inside of an old shoe.

But he couldn’t risk scaring Rosie by edging out into the open. She’d holler, her friends would come running and that would be that. The sheriff would cart him off to jail, the Pinkerton agent would haul him back to Missouri and the law would hang him high. A half-breed Indian who had robbed trains and banks with Jesse James wouldn’t stand a chance in court.

Bart swallowed against the bitter gall of memory as he recalled the years he’d squandered. And now, after all this time, he’d found his Rosie again. She had been the one bright spot in his life, and once again she was his only hope.

He studied her feet as she peeled away her stockings. There had been a time when she would let him hold those feet, rub away their tiredness, kiss each tender pink toe. Her black dress puddled to the floor and a soft white ruffle-hemmed gown took its place, skimming over her pretty ankles.

She began to hum, and Bart worked his shoulders across the hard floor in hope of a better look. The thought of dying this close to his Rosie without ever really seeing her face again sent an ache through him. He tilted his head so the pink quilt covered just one eye and left the other exposed.

Her back turned to him, she sat on a chair, let down her hair and began to pull a brush from the dark chocolate roots to the sun-lightened cascade that fell past her waist and over her hips. “Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty,” she counted in a soft voice.

She swung the mass of hair across her shoulders and began to brush the other side. “Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three…”

She had put her feet into a basin of water while she worked on her hair, and Bart could see those bare ankles again. He shut his eyes, swallowing the lump that rose in his throat at the memory of the first time he’d caught a glimpse of Rosie’s feet.

They had been down at the swimming hole where he and his stepbrothers liked to fool around. But this was a chilly autumn afternoon, and Bart’s stepbrothers were nowhere in sight. Rosie had agreed to meet him at the swimming hole, and he’d been waiting for her like a horse champing at the bit.

When she finally came, she was full of silliness and laughter, her head tilted back and her brown eyes shining at him with all the love in the world. She had dropped down onto the grassy bank, unlaced her boots and taken off her stockings. Then, while he held his breath, she had lifted the hem of her skirt and waded right into the icy pool.

Hoo-ee, how he had stared at those pale curvy legs and those thin little ankles. She hadn’t known, of course, what havoc her childlike impulse wreaked in his heart. His prim, sweet Rosie was the essence of innocence.

Under the bed, Bart suppressed the urge to chuckle at the memory of her sauntering back onto the bank, pulling up her stockings and lacing her boots—annoyed that he had not joined her in the water, and unaware of the reasons why he couldn’t trust himself.

They had sat together in silence for such a long time that Bart had begun to fear she really was mad at him. So he did the only thing he could think of—he grabbed her, kissed her right on the mouth, and then ran off lickety-split like the devil was after him.

“Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred,” Rosie said now from the chair. She lifted her feet out of the water and dried them with a cotton towel. She checked the bolt on her door and tested the window latch before crossing to the wardrobe. Breathing heavily, she jerked open the door. After a moment she shut it again and let out yet another sigh.

“Dear God,” she said, dropping to her knees beside the bed, “please watch over me tonight. I’m so scared. Don’t let Bart be out there, dear Lord. Please don’t let that horrible killer be my Bart.”

She was silent for a long time, and under the bed Bart held his breath. Eyes squeezed shut, he found himself praying along with her, as if he could will away the truth: Don’t let me be that Bart, dear Lord. Please don’t let me be that killer they’re after.

“Dear God, please help me to like Etta as much as she likes me,” Rosie prayed on. “Give me patience, and please don’t let her blabber the things I told her tonight. Bless Pappy, but don’t let him find me—not until I’ve started teaching school and gotten myself established here in town with a house and enough money so I can keep him from hauling me back to Kansas City. Bless…bless Dr. Lowell and help him to understand why I never could be a good wife to him.”

Bart’s eyes flew open. Dr. Lowell’s wife? But she was married to Bart Kingsley! Could she have married another man, too? Or been engaged to him? She was Rosie—his Rosie!

“Forgive me, Father, for my sins. My many sins,” she murmured in a voice so low that Bart could hardly hear it. She sniffled as she spoke, her voice tight with suppressed tears. “And please take care of Bart. Amen.”

The bed creaked as she climbed into it. Lying underneath, Bart heard her sniffling. She hadn’t yet blown out the lamp on her dressing table, and Bart studied her shadow on the opposite wall as she twisted the coverlet in her hands.

He felt sick. Dizzy with loss of blood. And knotted up inside like a tangled vine. Had Rosie promised to marry someone else? Had she actually gone through with it? How long had it been? Why hadn’t his half brother told him?

Some other man had touched his Rosie! How could she have gone and gotten engaged or married to another man when she knew good and well she was already married to him? He had the license to prove it! He wanted to shake it in front of her face and shout, Why? Why, Rosie?

But she could simply throw his question back. Why, Bart? Why did you run off and leave me? Why is the sheriff hunting for you? Why did you kill and rob and throw in with a gang of outlaws? Why, Bart?

He heard her breathing grow steady, her tossing ease and the bed cease to groan. He touched his side and found that blood had finally begun to clot over the ragged, burned hole in his skin. He had to get out from under the bed, and soon. He couldn’t go much longer without water.

Should he slip out the window and hope the posse had given up hunting for the night? Should he leave Rosie sleeping, never to know the cause of the bloodstain on her pink hooked rug?

He ran a dry tongue over his lower lip. Quietly, he began to shrug his shoulders across the wood floor and out from under the bed. The pain in his side flared, movement relighting a fire inside his gut. Clenching his teeth, he scooted his hips clear of the iron bed, then dragged his legs out into the open.

The world swung like a bucking bronco as he rose onto his elbows. Dizzy, he shook his head, but the fog refused to roll back. Fighting to keep silent, he rolled up onto his knees. His breath came in hoarse gasps.

There she was! His beautiful Rosie, sleeping like an innocent babe in her bed of pink. She was prettier than ever. Rounded cheekbones, delicate nose, full lips barely parted.

Grabbing his side, he tried to haul himself to his feet. The floor swayed out from under him, the lamplight tilting crazily. He groaned, caught the bed rail, felt the iron frame jolt at his weight. Rosie’s eyes drifted open, focused and jerked wide. She sucked in a breath just as he clamped his hand over her mouth.

“Don’t scream, Rosie,” he croaked as the bed seemed to turn on its side and his feet began to drift on cotton clouds. “Don’t scream, Rosie, Please. It’s me. Bart.”

Her skin and lips melted under his palm as black curtains fell across his vision.

“Bart!” he heard her gasp. Then the curtains wrapped over his head, and his feet floated out from under him. He tumbled like a falling oak tree across his Rosie’s soft body.

Chapter Two

Faster than a cat with its tail afire, Rosie pulled herself out from under the deadweight of the unconscious man. She grabbed the oil lamp from the dressing table across the room and nearly doused its flame as she swung back to the bed to take a closer look.

Clamping a trembling hand over her open mouth to keep from crying out, she studied the intruder. He wore leather boots caked with dried mud. Two six-shooters and an arsenal of cartridges hung on belts at his waist. He lay face down, his nose pressed into a rumple of pink quilt. Every breath he took sounded like a distant train engine as the air struggled in and out of his lungs.

Eyes focused on him, Rosie reached for the pistol Etta had held earlier that evening. The heavy metal felt reassuring, and she hugged it close. Bart, the man had called himself. And he had known her name—her real name!

But this shaggy bear draped over her bed couldn’t possibly be the Bart she once knew. She lifted the lamp until its yellow glow spread down his entire length. No, she thought with relief, this certainly wasn’t her Bart. Her Bart had been much shorter. This man more than filled up the bed. Her Bart had been as lanky as a colt, but the stranger’s weight made the metal bed frame bend toward the middle.

Certainly her Bart would never have let his shiny black hair get into such a state as this. The tangled mop that covered his broad shoulders couldn’t have been washed in months. His bloodstained buckskin jacket and faded trousers looked as though the man never took them off. No wonder her room had smelled so odd. Who knew how long this great malodorous hulk of an outlaw had been hiding under her bed?

Shivering, Rosie wondered what on earth she was going to do with him. If he regained consciousness, she wouldn’t stand a chance against such a brute.

“Okay, mister,” she said, jamming the pistol barrel against his skull. “I’ve got you now, you hear?”

He didn’t budge.

What if he were dead? A dead man, right on her very own bed! Swallowing, she bent toward him to listen for the ragged breathing that had sounded so loud only moments before.

“Rosie…” The moan came from deep inside his chest.

“Don’t move!” she cried out. “I have a gun, and I’ll use it.”

A muffled groan welled out of him. “Rosie? Rosie…help me.”

Her hand shook as she brushed a hank of hair from his face. “Oh, dear God, please don’t let this be happening,” she mouthed in a desperate prayer.

But there was no mistaking the angle of the man’s high cheekbone or the smooth plane of golden skin that sheered down from it. Rosie knew those lips, that jutted chin. No doubt about it. The man on her bed was Bart Kingsley. And yet he couldn’t be. This was a huge shaggy outlaw with a bullet in his side. This man was wanted for murder.

Then he opened his eyes. Green eyes, shot with golden threads, just as she remembered. “Bart?”

“Where are you, girl?” Grimacing, he lifted his head. “Rosie, I think I’m gonna die.”

Rosie carried a glass of water from the washstand and knelt at Bart’s side. His mouth felt like a dry creek bed, parched and sandy. Somehow she had known.

“I gotta turn over,” he whispered. “Help me, Rosie.”

She let out a breath. “Raise your shoulders if you can.”

“Tarnation,” he muttered through clenched teeth as she helped him up onto one elbow. He grabbed at his side. “Hurts like the devil.”

“Hush your cussing and drink this.” She sat on the bed beside him.

Pain ripping through his gut, Bart took a sip and then fell back. “Blast that Pinkerton son of a—”

Rosie clamped a hand over his mouth. “You stop swearing this minute, Bart Kingsley!” she snapped. “You’re turning the air in my room blue. You never used to talk like this.”

No, he hadn’t always cussed. There had been a time when he hardly said a word, bottling his frustration, anger and rage deep inside. But if he hadn’t allowed himself to swear, neither had he permitted the good words inside to come out. Now all he could think about was how much he wanted to tell Rosie what it meant to see her again. How beautiful she looked. How black the years without her had been. How soft her long hair was as it brushed against his hand.

“Bad enough you had to sneak in here and bleed all over everything, and stink like a pair of old leather shoes and scare me half out of my wits…”

Her admonitions trailed off as he slid his hand down her arm. Oh, but she smelled good, he thought as he pressed his lips lightly into her palm.

With a squeak of dismay, she snatched her hand away. “What are you doing here, Bart? Nobody passes through Raton, New Mexico, but miners and homesteaders. And how did you come to climb in my window and hide under my bed?”

Eyes shut, he forced down deep breaths. “I came looking for you, Rosie. I tracked you here.”

“But I changed my name!”

“Kingsley?”

“It was all I could think of when I applied for the Harvey job. I was scared about running away. I had planned everything down to the last detail, but when the recruiter asked my name, I went blank and just blurted it out.”

“It is your name. Laura Rose Kingsley.”

“Stop that!” She pushed him away and stood with her arms crossed. “I have a good mind to call for the sheriff this minute.”

“No, Rosie! They’ll haul me back to Missouri and hang me.”

“The law should hang you if you’ve done all the wicked things Sheriff Bowman told Etta and me tonight. You rode with Jesse James. You robbed banks and trains, stole cattle and horses, killed people.”

“I’m no stock rustler.”

“Oh, that’s a relief!” She glared down at him. “You don’t look a thing like you used to.”

“It’s been six years. I grew up.”

“You grew up into a gunman. An outlaw.”

He closed his eyes. Rosie was right, of course. He’d grown into a man, and he’d done everything he was accused of—except rustling livestock.

The James brothers had a policy against that. Their grievance wasn’t with small-time Southern farmers and ranchers. No, Jesse, Frank, and the others set their sights on northern banks and trains. Trained by Charley Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, they had served as guerrilla raiders until the end of the war.

But when the rest of the Confederate guerrillas returned to their homes and farms, the James brothers and their pals, the Youngers, elected to continue raiding. Others joined along the way, men who came and went as part of the gang during its sixteen-year reign.

Bart swallowed against the knot of regret in his throat. He had known every one of the fringe members of the James-Younger gang—most of them killed by lawmen or captured and lynched. Others were serving time in prison or, like him, hoping to escape the law.

The men had accepted a half-breed homeless boy when no one else would. They fed him, boarded down with him at night, saw to it that he had clothes and boots…and guns. They taught him to shoot and let him join them playing checkers, swimming in the river, hunting deer and squirrels. Oh, they had a fine time, Bart and the boys.

Until the day that was burned into his memory like none other: October 7, 1879. Glendale, Missouri. The Chicago & Alton train.

Bart opened his eyes, knowing that light always erased the haunting blackness of his past. And there was his Rosie, gazing down on him with her velvet eyes.

“Rosie,” he whispered, hardly able to believe he had found her at last. Porcelain skin, delicate cheekbones, lips the color of roses. Rosie, his prim-and-proper, educated, high-society lady. Rosie, his tree-climbing, pond-wading, horse-riding love. His Rosie.

“You’re going to have to leave,” she said abruptly. “I’ll help you to the window.”

But she didn’t move, and he couldn’t stop staring at her.

“If I leave, the detective will find me,” he murmured.

“I suppose he will.”

“He’ll take me back to Missouri. I won’t get a fair trial. Not a half breed like me.”

Her brown eyes deepened. “If you did, would you be cleared? You robbed trains.”

“I was following orders. Jesse’s plan, his guns, his horses.”

“You killed people.”

“People who were trying to kill me first.”

“Bart, how could you? You used to be so kind.”

“Rosie.” He reached for her arm, grasped her hand. “Let me stay here tonight. I’ll leave tomorrow.”

“You can’t stay in my room.” She jerked away. “Etta fetches me in the morning, and she’ll know at once. Mrs. Jensen will faint if she hears even a rumor of you. I’ll lose my job.”

“Please, Rosie. Don’t turn me out.”

Opening the heavy lid of her trunk, Rosie took out the bag of pills, lotions and cures she had brought from her home in Kansas City. Pappy always kept an ample supply of medicines on hand in case he had to leave the house to tend someone in the middle of the night. She had decided the medicines might be of use in Raton—though she hadn’t needed them until this night.

Don’t turn me out. If Bart had said anything else, she would have forced him to the window at gunpoint and made him climb right out into the cold. But how could she turn him out? The Bart Kingsley she knew had been turned out far too often in his life.

Taunted by the farmhands. Beaten, whipped and burned by his stepfather. Neglected by his own mother. He wore ragged clothes and boots that pinched his toes and rubbed blisters on his heels. In the winter he had no coat. In the summer he had no hat. The schoolmarm refused to allow him into her classroom. The preacher made him sit outside on the church steps to hear the sermon.

No, Rosie knew she couldn’t turn him out. Not tonight. Once the decision had been made, there was nothing left but to treat the awful wound in his side.

“You’d better take one of these liver pills,” Rosie said, carrying her stash of Dr. Vermillion’s medicines to the bedside. “Only the good Lord knows where that bullet is.”

Though Dr. Lowell had been her fiancé for three long years, Rosie recalled, she had never gotten past calling the man by his formal title. He kept daytime office hours and never saw patients at home. It was the new way of practicing medicine, he had told her.

She helped Bart lift his head to swallow the tiny brown pill, followed by a teaspoon of Dr. Hathaway’s Blood Builder.

“Where did you get this nasty stuff, Rosie?” he asked with a grimace as she poured a spoonful of something black. He swallowed and nearly gagged. “I’ll be horse-whipped if that doesn’t taste like a—”

“Don’t you swear, Bart. I mean it.” She drew back the edge of his jacket and caught her breath. “You need a doctor!”

“No, I can’t do that.”

“It’s a mess, and I don’t know the first thing about nursing. I’ve got to get this jacket off. I’ll fetch my scissors.”

“Don’t cut it!” He grabbed a handful of nightgown to stop her. “This is all I’ve got, Rosie. I’ll work it off, just give me a minute.” Releasing her gown, he began to shrug his shoulders and arms out of the buckskin jacket.

His face was beaded with perspiration from the effort, and she bent over him to help pull away the garment. The scent of woodsmoke and leather clung to his skin. She wished it were unpleasant, but the smell stirred something deep inside her. A memory. A trace of pleasure. Although she tried to keep from touching him, the effort was hopeless, and she ended up wrestling his big shoulders and long arms out of the sleeves.

“There!” she said, letting out a breath as he collapsed. “You don’t even have on a shirt! Oh, good heavens, when was the last time you took this off?”

With two fingers she carried the bloody jacket across the room and dropped it into a basket in the corner. It would likely fall apart after a good scrubbing with lye soap. At least the hole ought to be mended. There wouldn’t be time for any of that, of course, not with Bart leaving first thing in the morning.

She glanced over her shoulder to find him breathing deeply, his eyes shut and his huge chest filling her narrow bed from one side to the other. When did he get to be so big?

She poured water into her basin and carried it to the bed. When she sat down beside him, his green eyes opened—reminding her that even though he didn’t look like her Bart or act like her Bart, he was her Bart.

“Now bite your tongue,” she told him. “And don’t you dare start cussing at me.”

She dipped a towel in the water and blotted his skin.

Dear Lord, she breathed up in prayer as she studied the damage, don’t let him die on me. Much as I’ve wanted to kill this man, please keep him alive.

“How’s it look?” he grunted.

“Terrible.”

“Can you feel the bullet?”

“Feel it? I’m not sticking my finger in there!”

“Rosie, it’s not coming out unless someone takes it out. And if you don’t patch up the hole, I’m liable to bleed to death. I reckon if you’d do that for me, I wouldn’t ever ask another thing of you.”

“Why should I trust a murdering outlaw?” she asked.

“Especially one who ran off two weeks after he married her,” Bart finished.

“We never were married,” she said softly as she rummaged through the bag. “You said so yourself.”

“You found the note?”

“Of course I did.” Wishing he hadn’t brought up their impetuous wedding, she set the lamp on a table near the bed. If only he hadn’t tracked her down. If only he hadn’t crawled into her bedroom all shot up. Now she was stuck with him. But only until morning.

Before she could begin, he caught her hand and held it to his chest. “Rosie,” he whispered, his eyes depthless. “Thank you, Rosie-girl.”

“You won’t be thanking me in a minute.” She focused on the tweezers in her bag. How could it be that his gaze drew her back through time with an ache that wouldn’t go away—in spite of everything she knew about him?

She had to concentrate. Bart had lost so much blood. As she dipped the tweezers into the wound, she felt his hand slide into her hair. Eyes squeezed shut, he arched back in pain. His hand closed over a hank of her hair and she could feel him working it between his fingers.

Running a dry tongue over her lips, Rosie centered her attention on the wound again. She moved the tweezers deeper, then wiped the blood with a towel. Nothing. Where could the bullet be? She worked the tool farther in. Suddenly his hand clamped over hers, squeezing hard.

“Bart!” she gasped, jerking out the tweezers.

“Rosie, we were married,” he murmured. “We were.”

“I can’t find the bullet.”

“You were my Rosie,” he whispered, relaxing his hand. His fingers moved through the hair at her temple. “Once you were my Rosie-girl.”

She closed her eyes, fighting tears. His fingertips stroked across the down on her cheek, feathering her skin. A finger traced the arch of her eyebrow. Another found her eyelid and rested lightly there a moment before fanning down to her lashes and cheek.

“Remember how you shinnied down the oak tree by your bedroom window that night?” he was saying, his voice almost inaudible. “We ran through the fields to Reverend Russell’s place? You wore a white dress and lilacs in your hair. The reverend was drunk as usual, but we hardly noticed because we were so scared and excited to get married and—”

“No!” She pushed his hand away. “It was only a game, Bart. We were children. You said so yourself.”

Leaving him, she hurried to the wash stand, rinsed the tweezers and fumbled the medicines into the bag. Six years ago she had convinced herself that she had never married Bart Kingsley. No one knew except her pappy—and neither of them had ever mentioned his name again.

The disaster had been put away like one of Pappy’s old textbooks. Hidden on a back shelf. Forgotten. Denied so completely that Pappy had arranged for Rosie to marry Dr. William Lowell. Denied so totally that she had silently submitted, as she always did, to Pappy. Denied so thoroughly, that every night when she lay in Dr. Lowell’s bed in his big fancy house, she didn’t give Bart Kingsley a thought.

She didn’t remember the way he had held her hand, gently weaving his fingers through hers. She didn’t remember how he had touched her face, his green eyes memorizing every feature as though it were precious beyond belief. She didn’t remember his mouth moving against hers, his lips tender and his breath ragged.

“Rosie,” he said from the bed.

She stiffened, unable to look at him.

“I don’t play games, Rosie. You know I never have.”

“You’d better get some sleep, Bart. You’ll need it to climb out that window in the morning.”

She rinsed her hands in clean water, then she stepped to the wardrobe for a cotton petticoat she had brought from Kansas City. The strips of clean white fabric would make a good bandage. As she ripped the cloth, she resolved that Bart was part of her past and he must stay that way. Come sunup, he would be back in the past where he belonged.

She laid the bandages across his stomach. “I didn’t find the bullet, and you’re still bleeding. I’m going to put this around you until you can get to a doctor.”

“I reckon you’ve done me such a good turn I won’t need to see a doctor, Rosie.”

“You can’t go around with a bullet inside you for the rest of your life.”

“Most of the men I know have been shot so full of holes you’d think they’d leak every time they took a drink. They carry a few lead souvenirs just to make their stories ring true.”

“That’s a fine bunch of friends you have, Bart.” As she smoothed the cloth bandage over his skin she could feel his eyes on her. Watching her. “Men walking around with bullets inside. Great ghosts, who ever heard of such a thing?”

“Cole Younger’s been wounded upwards of twenty times. He reckons he’s got a good fifteen bullets buried in him.”

“Cole Younger!” she snapped, straightening suddenly. “So you really are in leagues with those outlaws, just like the sheriff said. Oh, Bart, how could you?”

“Rosie, it’s not like you think.” He reached for her, but she had already swung away.

A blanket bundled in her arms, she knelt to pull her pink hooked rug into the center of the room. One glimpse of the blood-soaked wool and she let out a gasp of horror.

“Bart Kingsley, you have ruined my rug! I brought it all the way from Kansas City on the train because it was the only thing I ever liked out of that ugly house my fiancé bought for us last—”

Catching herself, she clamped a hand over her mouth. Her eyes met Bart’s.

“You and I weren’t married,” she whispered. “We never were married. Not really, were we?”

When he didn’t answer, she spread her blanket on the bare wood floor. Then she curled up and pulled the edges of it over herself. Bart lay nearby, his breathing easier now. In the darkness she wondered if he could hear her crying.

Chapter Three

Rosie woke to find Bart sprawled half on and half off her bed, a sheen of feverish perspiration covering his body. He writhed in the agony of a dream, and she feared his moans would bring someone to investigate.

“Bart, wake up!” she pleaded, placing her hand on his damp shoulder. “Bart!”

At once he sat straight up and grabbed her arms in a powerful grip. His green eyes were bright with fever. “Rosie, don’t let them get me! Don’t let…don’t…”

He winced in pain, then sagged back onto the bed. “Ah, blast that good-for-nothing sheriff—”

“Hush, now!” Rosie ordered. She glanced at the door and wondered if the voice of a fevered man would carry down the hall. Brushing her hair back from her face, she studied the massive figure on the bed.

What on earth was she going to do with him? In the light of day, she felt foolish not to have sent for Sheriff Bowman immediately. It wouldn’t be long before someone would hear—or maybe smell—the intruder. She ought to head down the hall to Mrs. Jensen’s suite and confess the whole thing.

The truth of the matter was, Rosie didn’t owe Bart Kingsley one shred of kindness. He had wooed her, misled her, tricked her, abandoned her. And now he had endangered the one sure thing in life—her job as a Harvey Girl. If anyone discovered an outlaw in her room, her dream of teaching in one of the local schools would end. She would never have a home of her own, a classroom filled with eager children, freedom from her past.

“Rosie?” he murmured as his head tossed from side to side, his black hair a tangle on the white pillow. “Rosie, where are you, girl?”

Fingers knotted together, she fretted over her dilemma. She couldn’t let Bart stay in her room, but he was too ill to climb out the window and escape. If she called the sheriff, everyone would wonder why she had let the fugitive renegade sleep in her bed all night. Her bloody sheets would bear witness to the fact that he hadn’t been hiding under her bed forever.

“Oh, dear Lord, please show me what to do!” she whispered in prayer as she checked the gold pocket watch she had inherited from her mother.

Six-thirty! The uniform inspection bell would ring in half an hour. Then she would have to rush downstairs, eat a roll, sip some coffee and prepare the dining room for the eight o’clock train. Dare she go off and leave a feverish, groaning man in her bed?

As she turned away in search of her apron, Rosie decided Bart could stay through the first shift. She would return to her room before the lunch train came through and check on him. If he was the slightest bit better, she would insist that he leave.

“Rosie.” His voice startled her as he struggled to sit up. “I promised I’d go this morning. I’ll need my jacket.”

Her shoulders sagged. “Oh, Bart, you’re in no shape to go anywhere.”

“No, Rosie-girl. I made you a promise.” For a moment he sat hunched over, breathing heavily. Then he hauled himself to his feet.

Rosie watched him sway like a great tree about to topple. He means to do it, she thought. He actually means to keep his promise to me. One of his long legs started to crumple, but he grabbed the iron footboard to steady himself.

His guns and cartridge belts weighed him down as he shuffled across the room toward the corner where she had tossed his jacket. His bandage was stained with a dark red blotch. He propped one big brown hand on the windowsill and bent to pick up the torn buckskin.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry I messed up your sheets and rug. Sorry about when we were young and how much I hurt you. I’m sorry I made you cry last night, too, and—”

“For mercy’s sake, Bart!” She snatched the jacket out of his hands. “You’re delirious, plain and simple. Now get back to bed this instant. I’ll check on you after the breakfast shift.”

“No, Rosie, I—”

“Let go of that windowsill and grab on to me before you fall down with a crash and bring Mrs. Jensen running.”

Rosie clenched her teeth and heaved Bart against her. This man could drive me to drink, she thought. All those ridiculous apologies. If he weren’t so sick, she’d give him what for. She didn’t need anyone’s apologies for the way her life had turned out. She had made her own choices and now she would live with them.

“Get in this bed,” she ordered, shoving him down. “And don’t get up until I say. You’re going to make me late for inspection, and then where will I be?”

Working quickly, she tugged off his boots and set them on the floor. My, but they needed a good polishing. She pulled the sheets and blankets over his chest and tucked the edges under the mattress.

Opening the window to freshen the room, she didn’t take her usual time to pray and gaze out over the little town of Raton and its encircling range of snow-capped mesas. Instead, she quickly washed and then stepped behind the changing screen to put on her uniform. Black stockings. Chemise. Corset—oh, she had to hurry! Black skirt. Black shirt buttoned up to the neck.

Rushing to the hook by the door, she grabbed a fresh white apron, tied it around her waist and buttoned the bib. In two short months she had worked her way almost up to head waitress, but one moan from Bart Kingsley could undo everything.

Nerves jangling, she laced her boots and pinned her hair up in a thick, glossy knot. There had been a time when a lady’s maid had helped her dress in silk and velvet gowns, pretty slippers and kid gloves. Necklaces and bracelets that sparkled with gems had adorned her as she called on ladies of her social circle.

Now she wouldn’t trade her black-and-white Harvey Girl uniform for all the lace, ruffles and taffeta in Kansas City.

“Uniform inspection!” Mrs. Jensen called in the hallway.

Heart thumping, Rosie flew to the bed where Bart lay. “Now don’t do anything foolish,” she whispered, smoothing the sheet over his chest as though he were a sick child and not a gunslinger. “I’ll come back after the last breakfast train, so just—”

“My beautiful Rosie-girl,” he murmured as he caught her hand and brought it to his lips. With a gasp, she pulled away and hurried out into the hall.

Filling silver-plated urns with Fred Harvey’s famous coffee, Rosie tried not to think about the possibility that any moment Mrs. Jensen would storm into the restaurant screaming about the outlaw in Laura Kingsley’s room.

“Did you sleep all right?” Etta called from her station near a wall of windows. “I reckon that outlaw will be long gone by now.”

“If he’s smart, he will.” Rosie fretted as she folded napkins for her four assigned tables. “Of course, if he was smart, he never would have gotten himself shot in the first place. We’ll find out from Mr. Adams.”

Charles Adams, editor of The Raton Comet, boasted that his eight-page weekly never missed a good story. How shocked he would be to know that the scoop of the year lay just overhead in room seven.

“Twenty-two omelets are coming in on the eight-o’clock!” Tom Gable, the Harvey House manager, called out the food order that had been wired ahead. “Fourteen hotcakes, six biscuits and gravy, thirty-three coffees and nine milks. The train’ll be here in seven minutes!”

With a collective gasp, the five Harvey Girls rushed to finish their preparations. Rosie loved her work. Respected, protected, well paid, she couldn’t have found a better place to make a new life for herself. Once she had saved enough money, she would apply for a teaching position and buy a little house. It was a hope she had cherished for years. But she knew that at any moment, her past might catch up to her and snuff it out. A deafening whooo, and the dining-room floor began to shake. Glasses rattled. Cups wobbled. Spoons tinkled against knives. Steam billowed across the platform as the enormous black-and-silver engine of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe train rolled into the depot. As the brakeman set the brakes, the train squealed in protest. Chunks of red-hot coal spilled from the firebox. Railway men rushed to stomp them out. The smell of oil and smoke enveloped the Harvey House.

Like wraiths, the passengers descended through the steam onto the platform. Their hats askew and coats not quite settled, they stretched, waved and stared at the blue sky after the long ride. Children scampered to the rails to inspect the big engine. Tails wagging, a pair of dogs known to the whole town as Tom and Griff trotted through the crowd.

Then one of the busboys stepped into the crowd and raised his large brass gong.

“Breakfast is served,” he called, giving the gong a hard whack with a stick. “Breakfast is served!” Rosie stood silently, hands behind her back, as the passengers walked into the dining room and took their seats.

The moment one table had been settled, she started around it.

“What do you care to drink this morning?” she asked. “We have coffee, milk or orange juice.”

As each patron stated a selection, Rosie quickly arranged the cups according to the code she had been taught. She hurried off to fetch the food while another girl poured beverages. Rosie could almost hear the customers marveling that the drink girl knew exactly what they had requested. It was all part of the Fred Harvey mystique, an air of magic that delighted patrons and filled the staff with pride.

While the diners were munching on apple wedges, oranges and grapes, Rosie went around her station taking orders for omelets, hotcakes or biscuits and gravy. The dining room filled with the spicy-sweet aroma that seemed to rouse the passengers even more effectively than the famous Harvey coffee did.

Standing motionless, hands behind her back and the required smile on her face, Rosie kept her eyes constantly roving her station for the slightest possible indication that she was needed by a diner. On most mornings she was so absorbed in her work that she never gave anything outside it a second thought. But knowing Bart lay upstairs in her bed, Rosie found her concentration wandering. What if he took it into his head to try to climb out the window? What if he lost his balance and fell out? She glanced uneasily through the long side windows, suddenly fully aware of the impossible situation she was in.

Outside the front of the red board-and-batten Harvey House lay a long porch, a row of widely spaced trees and the depot and train tracks. Behind the building was the small, fenced private yard for the House’s female employees, and beyond that stretched the town of Raton. Now that Rosie thought about it, how on earth could Bart ever hope to escape in broad daylight? He’d be spotted immediately.

But how could he stay in her room for the rest of the day? Someone would find out for sure. And what if his fever grew worse? She lifted her head, listening for thumps, bumps and moans.

The silence was almost worse than the anticipation of noise. What if Bart had died? She wrung her clasped hands behind her skirt. If Bart died, she would never have the chance to chew him out the way she’d always intended. On the other hand, she’d never learn exactly why he had followed her all the way from Kansas City, or how he had fallen in with Jesse James and his gang.

More important, she wouldn’t be able to tell him how miserable her life had been after he went away…how awful the prospect of marriage to Dr. Lowell had made her feel…

“All aboard!” The cry startled Rosie. Her passengers were hurrying off, leaving the table littered with coins and dirty dishes.

The moment the train pulled away, Mr. Gable bounded into the dining room. “Sixteen omelets coming in on the eight forty-five!”

Rosie scrambled to clear her tables. There was no time for worry. And no time for longing.

Along about ten o’clock, Bart felt his fever break. Bathed in sweat, his body suddenly began to cool. The hammering in his head eased. The room stopped spinning.

He could hear the sounds of clinking glasses and chatter from a dining room somewhere. The tantalizing aromas of cinnamon, bacon and freshly brewed coffee drifted up through the floorboards and swirled around his head.

Rosie was downstairs, he remembered suddenly, and this was her room. Her hairbrush lay on the table. Her clean, starched aprons hung by the door. He had found her!

But as the truth set in, Bart closed his eyes. Rosie didn’t want him. She had made him promise to leave. And all he had done was bloody up her rug and sheets, smell up her room with his old leather jacket and dusty boots and put her in a position to lose her job. Rosie would be hoping he was gone by the time she returned to her room.

No surprise there. Who would want a no-good half-breed gunman like him around anyhow?

With a grunt he pushed himself to his feet and lifted the lace curtain at her window. The town was twice as big as it had looked the night before. From Rosie’s bedroom he could see a shoe shop, a bakery, an undertaking parlor and enough saloons to keep the whole town drunk as hillbillies at a rooster fight. There was the Five-Cent Beer Saloon, the 1883 Saloon, the Mountain Monarch, the Bank Exchange, the Progressive Saloon, the Cowboy’s Exchange Saloon, the El Dorado, the Green Light, the Lone Star, the Dobe Saloon and O’Reilly’s. And those were just the ones Bart could make out.

A church or two had elbowed out some holy ground amid the saloons. A meeting hall, a hotel, a bank and a water tower near the bank showed that the town of Raton, New Mexico, meant business. The whole place swarmed with people—folks heading in and out of the hardware stores and mercentiles, a milkman stopping off at every house in town, men loading wagons with lumber from Hughes Brothers Carpenter and Building Supply and women carrying bundles out of D. W. Stevens, Dealers in General Merchandise. Wagons, carriages and horses filled the packed-dirt streets.

Bart brushed a hand across his forehead. He would never be able to climb out a second-story window unnoticed. He let the curtain drop and sagged against the sill. He would have to wait until dark to try an escape.

Before he did, he would make up for the trouble he had caused Rosie. Some of it anyhow.

“See you at one o’clock!” Rosie called to Etta, who was chatting with the new cook.

Heart thundering, Rosie swung into the kitchen and filled a plate with food. What if Bart had already gone? she wondered as she climbed the stairs. Worse—what if he was still there?

She pushed open the door. The bare-chested man leaning against her window frame looked nothing like the pale invalid she had tucked away at dawn. In the sunlight, his bronze skin gleamed. A towel hung around his neck. His hair, still damp, had been washed and combed away from his face.

For the first time Rosie fully saw what time had done to the gawky boy she once loved. From the raven eyebrows that slashed across his forehead to his burning emerald eyes, from the squared turn of his chin to the solid breadth of his chest, Bart Kingsley was all man.

Disconcerted, she focused on a makeshift clothesline that stretched across the room. Denim trousers, a torn cotton shirt and a couple of white sheets hung dripping.

“You washed,” she blurted out.

“Everything but the rug.” He straightened, and she realized that he had tucked her blanket around his waist.

“Cold water. All I had.”

“Cold water’s the best thing there is for bloodstains.” Steadying her breath, she held out the plate. “I brought you something to eat.”

“Thanks. I’m hungry. The fever broke a while back. I’d be much obliged if you’d allow me to stay until dark, Rosie.”

At that moment she would have allowed him to do almost anything he wanted. If she hadn’t known his veins ran with both white and Indian blood, Rosie might have mistaken Bart for a pure Apache. With his copper skin and long, black hair, he could pass for a mighty warrior straight out of a dime novel. But he was too tall, and his eyes were too green to deny the heritage of his English mother.

“You’d better stay put,” she said, busying herself by straightening her dressing table. “Unless you want Sheriff Bowman nabbing you first thing.”

“You reckon I should hang for my crimes, Rosie?”

“You’d have to answer that one.”

“I can tell you this. It’ll be a cold day in—” He caught himself. “I’m sorry, Rosie. Cussing’s a hard habit to break.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of new habits these days.”

“I did some things I’m not proud of, but I can’t just turn myself in. The law would just as soon shoot a man dead as let him try to make a new life for himself.”

Rosie set her brush on the table and turned to face him. “Do you want a new life, Bart?”

“I didn’t come all the way here to rob trains—you can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

“Why did you come?”

Bart let out a breath. “About the time Bob Ford shot Jesse James in the back of the head, I was doing some thinking. I looked back over the years of my life and all I saw was a long tunnel. A black, cold tunnel. There was only one bright sliver. One spot of light.”

“Is that right?” she asked. He was staring at her with a look she couldn’t read, a look that sent her pulse skimming.

“That light was you, Rosie,” Bart said. “It was you. And that’s why I came to Raton, New Mexico. I came to find that light again, to see if I could touch it, to see if it could shine away some of that darkness in the stinking black pit I’ve made of my life.”

Oh, Bart, she wanted to say, I forgive you. I forgive you! But the one-o’clock lunch train pulled into the depot with a whistle and a rush of steam that obliterated every sound in the tiny room. Rosie felt the floor shake and heard the window rattle. And she was thankful—so thankful—she hadn’t said anything to Bart.

As she left her room and hurried down the stairs to the lunchroom, Rosie saw the faces of her disappointed father and her angry fiancé. She saw the wreath of rosebuds and lilacs she’d worn in her hair the night she married Bart Kingsley, the glade where she had cried her eyes out over him, the parlor where William Lowell had knelt to ask for her hand and her heart—the heart she had promised to another man.

Rosie realized that with all these things, a blackness had crept into her own life. A blackness so intense she had fled it on a midnight train to a frontier town where no one could ever find her again. A blackness so dark she was not at all sure that even a flicker of light remained—the light that had been Laura Rose Vermillion. The light Bart had come seeking.

Chapter Four

Minutes after the last lunch train pulled out of Raton, Sheriff Bowman and the local pastor strolled into the lunchroom looking for a bite to eat.

“I’ll have a ham sandwich, Miss Laura,” Reverend Cullen said as he seated himself at her table. “And a dish of that wonderful Harvey ice cream.”

“I’ll take the same,” the sheriff said. “Been out all night and most of the morning chasing that outlaw. I’m hungry enough to eat my own horse.”

Rosie tried to smile as she hurried to the kitchen. When she returned and began setting out the meals, the two men were deep in conversation.

“Bart Kingsley is a skunk,” the sheriff said. “Nothing but a no-good half breed.”

“Now, only the Lord knows a man’s heart,” Reverend Cullen reminded him. “This Kingsley fellow may not be bad through and through.”

“You didn’t hear what the Pinkerton man told me before he left for Kansas City this morning,” the sheriff insisted. “The gunslinger’s got a file as thick as this sandwich. The things he’s done would make your hair curl.”

“Did the detective think Kingsley got away last night?” the preacher asked.

“Not sure. We lost track of him right here at the depot. I figured he hopped a train, but the Pinkerton man wanted to search the girls’ rooms. I set him straight on that real quick. Tom Gable would have a fit if I let any man set foot upstairs. Ain’t that right, Miss Laura?”

Rosie swallowed. “I believe it’s Mrs. Jensen who would have the fit.”

“Ain’t that the truth! Anyhow, I figured the minute a stinkin’ outlaw set foot in one of the girls’ rooms, there’d come a hollerin’ and bawlin’ like you never heard.”

The elderly preacher smiled at Rosie, his blue eyes warm. “But I’m sure our fugitive is long gone.”

“The gals will do well to be cautious. Bart Kingsley ain’t got proper parentage. The mother’s said to be a…” The sheriff glanced at Rosie. “A woman of the evening.”

At that the preacher thumped his hand on the counter the way Rosie had seen him do in church. “I’ve heard enough. A man can’t be held responsible for his lineage.”

“Kingsley ain’t responsible for his family tree, but he’s sure accountable for them three trains he robbed over in Missouri. Two men was killed during one holdup. No half-breed gunman is gonna get away with nothing while I’m sheriff. There’s a price on his head. Fifty dollars. If I have to, I’ll shoot him on sight.”

“Fifty dollars would go a long way toward the new house you’re building,” Reverend Cullen said. “But you don’t even know what the man looks like.”

“I saw him well enough to shoot him, didn’t I? Besides, he’s half Apache. He’ll have black hair and a chest like a barn door. He’ll be packin’ guns and wearin’ some kind of buckskin getup like the one he had on last night. If he’s anywhere around here, it won’t be long before I put a window in his skull.”

The sheriff stood and palmed a nickel onto the counter. “Afternoon, preacher,” he said, settling his hat on his head. He nodded at Rosie and strode out of the lunchroom.

Hands trembling, Rosie began gathering up plates and glasses as fast as she could.

“Now, don’t give the sheriff much heed,” Reverend Cullen told her as he stood. “He’s fit to be boiled because he lost the outlaw’s trail last night. Will I see you in church as usual this Sunday, Miss Laura?”

“I imagine so, sir.” Rosie was fairly scrubbing the varnish off the counter as he made his farewell and stepped outside.

Oh, but she felt ill! Bart was an outlaw and a killer. He had admitted as much himself. Now she realized that he was the cause of every trouble in her life.

If Bart hadn’t asked her to get married, she never would have disobeyed her father. She might have learned to like Dr. Lowell and been a good wife to him. And if she had cared for her husband, he might not have been as cruel as rumors insisted. After all, her pappy had liked the man and admired his medical skill. Maybe if Rosie had been a quiet and gentle wife, Dr. Lowell might never have felt the need to hurt or shame her, as her friends so often predicted he would.

If she had been more sure of Dr. Lowell’s temperament, she might not have run away from him a mere two weeks before their wedding. And she wouldn’t be fighting for her future with such slender hopes. Bart was the reason she was shaking like a leaf. Now he had followed her to Raton, he was up in her room and the sheriff intended to kill him!

Rosie wrung out her washrag and scrubbed the same patch of counter for the third time. Bart had told her she was the only light in his life. But she felt more like a snuffed-out oil lamp—black, empty and cold. Bart himself had turned down the bright wick of her dreams, doused her flame and blown away the final sparks.

She picked up her tray of empty plates and started for the kitchen, determination growing with every step. She hadn’t come all this way and worked this hard to let some gunslinging outlaw ruin her hopes—no matter how his green eyes beckoned.

In a mere three years, Raton had grown from four ragged tents to a row of inhabited boxcars to a full-fledged bustling town. As Rosie marched down First Street, she felt a surge of hope. Her black-and-white uniform set her in crisp contrast to the ragged coal miners and rough-hewn cowboys on the street, and she held her head high. Maybe she did have an outlaw in her bedroom, Rosie thought. And maybe she had taken some unhappy paths in life. But none of that doomed her to failure.

Ever since she could remember, Rosie had loved children and had wanted to teach them. Pappy, of course, wouldn’t hear of such an absurd notion. Schoolteachers were working women and therefore far beneath her in social status. She could almost see his face, his dark eyes snapping as he lectured her from behind his huge desk.

“Working women are socially suspicious,” he had informed his stubborn daughter more than once. “They’re just one step away from the very cellar of society—prostitution. My dream for you, Laura Rose, is marriage to a prominent man, a bevy of healthy children and success as a full-time homemaker.”

Rosie had to smile as she crossed Rio Grande Avenue onto Second Street. Pappy would be downright apoplectic if he knew she had taken a job as a waitress. Women who worked in eating houses were at the bottom rung of the job ladder. Considered coarse, hard and “easy,” they were usually believed to be doubling as women of ill repute.

One look at Fred Harvey’s establishments, however, had convinced Rosie otherwise. Here in Raton she was held in as high esteem as any other reputable female. Men tipped their hats, women greeted her with genuine smiles. Rosie and the other Harvey Girls were invited to every community picnic, baseball game, dance and opera show in town. The fact of the matter was, in the two short months she had lived here, she had had more wholesome, refreshing fun than she could ever remember in her twenty-one years of life.

Never mind about Bart Kingsley, Rosie thought as she climbed the wooden steps to a small one-room structure at the corner of Clark Avenue and North Second Street. Rosie had come to Raton to build a new identity. Fred Harvey had laid her foundation, and Mr. Thomas A. Kilgore would build the platform on which she would at last find freedom.

She knocked on the door of the local schoolhouse. A middle-aged man with a walrus mustache and round spectacles greeted her. “May I help you?”

“Mr. Kilgore?” Rosie asked. At his nod, she continued. “I’m Laura Kingsley, sir. Recently of Kansas City. I work at the Harvey House, but I’ve come to speak to you about a teaching position.”

His eyebrows lifted. “We’re in class, Miss Kingsley. But come inside.”

She entered a dimly lit room filled with children, each one standing at attention beside a chair.

“Students, I’m pleased to introduce Miss Kingsley,” Kilgore said.

“Good afternoon, Miss Kingsley,” the children chimed.

“I’m pleased to meet you. All of you.” Rosie caught her breath at the realization that she was standing in the place she had dreamed of for so many years. A schoolroom, desks and flags, slates and readers, inkwells and chalk dust. How she had longed to teach—guiding small hands to form letters, listening to recitation, drying eyes and bandaging knees. The children looked exactly as she had pictured them—some clean and neat, others ragged and dirty; some bright with intelligence, others more dimly visaged; some giggly and mischievous, others solemn.

What would it be like to stand before them and open doors in their young lives? Rosie could hardly wait to find out.

“Students, you may be seated,” Mr. Kilgore stated as he gave the children a quick scan through his spectacles.

“Grade three, continue your history recitation without me for the moment. Lucy, you may lead the group. The rest of you carry on as you were.”

As young heads bent to work, he led Rosie to his desk at the front of the room. “Now, Miss Kingsley, may I ask your teaching qualifications?”

“My father is a physician in Kansas City. I attended Park College, in Platte County, to study Latin, art, music and science. My marks were excellent, and I’m confident I can pass the examination of any school board.”

“Miss Kingsley, I founded this school with the intent of forming a much larger institution. My wife and I have high hopes of establishing an independent school district in Raton according to territorial law. As you can see, we suffer from overcrowding here, and I fear my students are lagging behind other pupils of like age who have enjoyed better school privileges. At my request the school commission recently voted to extend our school term in order to give the students better preparation as they continue in their education. A good many of these boys and girls will one day attend high school, and some will even want to go on to college. We intend for them to be able to compete with their peers.”

“Wonderful,” Rosie said, impressed with the man’s dedication.

“The voters of Precinct Six have petitioned an election for this purpose, and it will take place the last Saturday of the month. If it passes, the school term will continue through July.”

“July! That should allow plenty of time for the students to make up what they’ve missed.”

“Should the election turn out favorably, however, I’m afraid I will be without a teacher. My regular instructor has…” Here he paused to survey the room, then he leaned closer toward Rosie. “The primary school teacher has elected to return to Chicago as the bride of a young lawyer of her acquaintance.”

Rosie’s heart swelled with hope. “I would be honored to fill the teaching position your difficult situation has made available.”

He pulled at his mustache for a moment before responding. “Return tomorrow morning, Miss Kingsley, after I’ve had time to ponder this.”

“Yes, Mr. Kilgore. Thank you for considering me.”

Light-headed with optimism, she shook his hand firmly before making her way to the door.

As she raced back to the restaurant, Rosie laid out a plan. If she were to get Bart Kingsley safely out of her room and on his way, he would need something decent to wear. Her Harvey Girl salary of seventeen dollars and fifty cents a month plus tips, room, board, laundry and travel expenses left plenty of spending money. She had saved nearly all her income toward her goal to buy a small house. But she was more than willing to spend a dollar or two on a new shirt if it meant she could send Bart away. Far, far away.

After the evening trains had pulled away and the dining room had been set in order, the Harvey Girls climbed the long stairway to their dormitory hall. Even though it was well after ten, Rosie was wide-awake as she clutched the shirt she had purchased and opened her bedroom door.

“Bart?” she called softly.

“Over here, Rosie.” His deep voice came from the corner by the window. “I waited for you. I wanted to say goodbye.”

She lifted the glass globe of her lamp and lit the wick. Bart was dressed in his buckskin jacket and denim trousers. But the warrior with shining black hair and bright green eyes was not the wounded wreck who had crawled out from under her bed.

She looked away. “The sooner you leave, the more of a head start you’ll have on the sheriff. He’s still after you. He was in the restaurant talking about how wicked you are.”

“I reckon I am, Rosie.”

She shrugged. “As the Bible says, sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. If Sheriff Bowman gets his hands on you, he’s going to shoot you dead. He wants the fifty-dollar reward.”

“Then I reckon I’d better not let him find me.” With a gentle smile on his face, he walked toward her.

Rosie winced at the thud of his boots on the hollow wood floor, but it was the nearness of the man that made her face go hot. “W-what are you going to do?” she stammered.

“Right now I’m planning to say goodbye to the only woman I’ve ever loved.”

“I…I mean after you leave. Where are you going?”

“I’m glad you care about me, Rosie.”

“I don’t care. Not a bit. But I think I should know where you’ll be, just in case.”

He stopped a mere two feet in front of her. “In case what?”

“In case…” She moistened her lips. “In case I should ever need to know what became of you. Last time you went off without leaving a clue. Now I know you were running with an outlaw gang. Is that what you’re planning to do again?”

His eyes searched her face. “I reckon a man who truly loves a woman ought to think of something better to do than robbing banks.”

He lifted his hand to touch her cheek, but she caught her breath and pushed it away.

“You made that same sound the first time I kissed you,” he said in a low voice. “Remember, Rosie-girl? We were at our special place by the stream. I grabbed your hand and kissed it. You gasped…but you didn’t pull away from me.”

Her eyes trained on the lamp, she shook her head. “I’m a different woman now, Bart, and you’d better leave my room right this minute.”

“You’re no different, Rosie. Not really. You’re the same girl I married six years ago.”

“No, I’m not.” She whirled on him. “I’ve been engaged to Dr. William Lowell for three years and—”

“And you’ve never forgotten me. We loved each other back then, Rosie.”

“We were children! We didn’t even know what love was.”

“And you’re telling me that you do now? If you love your rich fiancé so much, how come you ran off and left him? Why are you hiding out in New Mexico?”

“Stop it, Bart! You don’t know one thing!” Her eyes stung with unshed tears.

“I know one thing. I know I aim to make a new life for myself. And finding you is the beginning of it.”

She crossed her arms and stared at the ceiling in hope that he could read nothing on her face. Oh, why couldn’t this confusing man just leave her as he had before—with no farewells, no speeches, no tenderness?

Why was he standing so close, smelling so good and looking like the man in her dreams? Why did her heart have to hammer and her throat swell up in a lump? And why, oh, why did she long to feel his arms around her just one more time?

“We’re both trying to start over, Bart,” she said when she trusted herself to speak. “If finding me is the beginning of your new life, it could be the end of mine. I don’t want any reminders of the past. I want to be a new person. I want to be alone, Bart. Alone!”

“Rosie,” he murmured, unlocking her arms and letting his big hands slide down to take hers. “Rosie, don’t push me away. Give me a chance.”

“I’ve always done what people told me to—my pappy, Dr. Lowell, you. I don’t have to live that way anymore.”

“But I’m not telling you to do anything, Rosie-girl. I’m asking. Please…give me a chance.”

She studied the design on her pressed-tin ceiling. “A chance to what?”

“To touch your face, Rosie.” He ran the tip of one finger down her cheek. “Remember how I used to pull the ribbons from your braids? I’d untwist your hair until it hung loose around your shoulders. You used to laugh and scold me because I could never put your braids back the right way, and you worried that your pappy would find out we’d been together. But I knew you didn’t really care, because you always leaned against my shoulder and let me slide my fingers through your hair.”

As he spoke, he slipped his fingers through the bun she had so carefully knotted that morning. Oh, how she tingled at his touch! The desert in her heart came to life for the first time in six years, and Rosie closed her eyes as a powerful yearning washed through her.

When he drew her closer, she sighed and moved against him. But she remembered too well the pain a broken heart could bring. At the sudden realization of her peril, her eyes flew open.

“Bart, you’d better leave,” she breathed out. “Just go!”

“Rosie?” Confusion darkened his eyes.

“I—I have to work the early shift tomorrow.”

“I’ve scared you, haven’t I?”

“I’ll be tired if I don’t get a good night’s sleep. You ought to head out while the moon’s up.”

She looked into his face. She longed for this man and she loathed him. She feared the feelings he evoked in her, and she craved them. She hungered for his touch, yet the thought of it terrified her.

“Goodbye, Bart.” She forced the words out. “It was good to see you again, and I sure hope your wound heals up.”

Before he could see the quiver in her lower lip, she turned away from him and hurried to the hook where her aprons hung.

Chapter Five

Bart studied Rosie in the lamp’s glow. With shaking fingers, she fumbled to release the buttons on her bib. Unable to watch her in such distress, he stepped behind her and set his hands on her shoulders.

“Rosie,” he murmured against her ear. “Rosie, I don’t mean to upset you. I just want you to know that a day hasn’t gone by without my thoughts going over and over those times we spent together. I want you to understand how I felt while we were apart. Rosie?”

His hands circled her waist and he turned her to face him. Her fingers kept working at the bib buttons as she trained her focus on her uniform.

“You’re all atremble,” Bart whispered as he covered her hands with his own and began sliding each tiny button out of its hole. “Did I ever tell you how crazy I am about your ankles, Rosie?” he asked.

As he let the bib fall, she shook her head. “My ankles?”

“When you were fifteen, you used to take off your stockings and wade in the swimming hole. You were so prim, but seeing you that way just about killed me.” His focus lifted to her face. “Once you slipped on a mossy rock and fell in the water, remember?”

She shook her head and shrugged. “Anyhow, I bought you a shirt today. I decided against a collar. They cost twenty cents each.”

“I remember everything about us. You’ve changed a lot in six years. You’re more beautiful than ever. I’ve been half loco missing you, girl.”

He wouldn’t hurt or frighten his Rosie for anything in the world. But he couldn’t abide the thought of leaving without saying the things he’d needed to say for six long years.

Even though she had told him to go away, she was having trouble meeting his eyes. In spite of what she said, maybe she had missed him just a little, and maybe she’d thought about him now and then. But she was still trembling and her hands were locked behind her back as though they’d been handcuffed. Was he scaring her?

“Rosie,” he whispered. Her eyes, dark brown and liquid, focused on him at last. “Rosie-girl, will you put your arms around me the way you used to? Will you hold me just once before I go?”

“Oh, Bart, I can’t.”

“Because your pappy made you promise to marry another man? Or do you love your rich Dr. Lowell? Is that what holds you back?”

“Bart, it’s not like you think. I don’t love him and I don’t want to be attached to a man again. Not ever.”

“How come?”

She squared her shoulders. “You might as well know I can’t have children, Bart. After you left me, I was sick a long time. Months and months. I couldn’t eat, I didn’t sleep much at all. My normal functions…well, everything stopped working right. My father took me to several doctors, friends he trusted, and they said I was barren. All of them agreed I’ll be childless. Since having children is the only reason I can think of for…for going through all that rigmarole, I’ve decided to be a spinster for the rest of my life.”

He couldn’t hide a grin. “Rigmarole?”

“You know very well what I mean.” Pulling out of his arms, she walked across her room, sat on the edge of her bed and began unlacing her boots. “As far as I’m concerned, God made beds for sleeping in, and I don’t intend to put my arms around you or anyone else.”

Bart hunkered down on one knee beside her. Taking her blistered foot, he set it on his thigh and began rubbing her reddened heel and each sore toe. It bothered him that Rosie had spent time with another man. But it bothered him a lot more to realize that maybe he himself had killed the spark he had once loved so much.

Maybe not quite killed it. Squelched it.

“Rosie, you reckon I could get a job here in Raton?”

“Not a chance. The sheriff would recognize you. He said he saw you before he shot you.”

“How well could he see me in the dark?”

“Well enough to shoot you again.”

“What if I wore that new shirt you gave me? Would you cut my hair, Rosie?”

She shivered. “It wouldn’t do you a bit of good. Your skin is as brown as a berry, Bart. The sheriff said he’d be on the lookout for a man with a face like yours.”

“Would you cut my hair anyway, Rosie? I want to give the straight life a chance.”

“But here in Raton? Why, Bart?”

Raising his head, he covered her fingers with his big hands. “Once upon a time, all it took was a few harsh words to send me scampering. But I’ve changed in six years. I learned to do things. If I set out to break a horse, I’ll have him gentle as a kitten in no time flat. If I aim to rob a train, I’ll rob it plumb dry.”

“Bart!”

“That’s the facts. I came to Raton to find you and make a new life. So if you’ll give me a haircut, darlin’, I’ll get on with it.”

As she combed and snipped away at Bart’s coal-black mane, Rosie berated herself over and over again. Crazy. She was just crazy, that’s all! She should have sent him off long ago. Instead, she’d let him hold her hand, whisper in her ear, rub her foot. And now she was actually cutting the man’s hair so he could stay in Raton and make her miserable!

“Reckon there’s any chance I could pass for a gentleman dandy just off the train from Chicago?” He studied himself in her silver hand mirror.

“Bart, you look just like what you are—an outlaw. A big, brawny gunslinger.”

“I’d better leave my six-shooter and holster with you.”

“Don’t you dare! Bad enough I have to hide a bloody rug and a pile of chopped-off black hair.”

He chuckled. “You’ve done me a good turn, Rosie. Much as my side still hurts, I wouldn’t have made it this far without your kindness.”

Softening, she ran her brush through his hair. Now that it stopped just above his collar, she could see the tremendous breadth of his shoulders. “In spite of the haircut, you still look like an Apache to me.”

“Does my blood make a difference to you now, Rosie?”

“I always told you to be proud of who you are, Bart. It’s what’s inside a man—what he chooses to do with himself—that makes him who he is.”

“And I chose to be an outlaw. I’m a no-good half-breed outlaw.”

Rosie stepped around his chair. As she gazed into his green eyes, she saw that he had become the little boy again, wounded by the cruelty of others. “When I knew you on the farm, you never hurt anything. What happened to you? What changed you?”

He stood suddenly. “Aw, why does it matter anyhow? I can’t turn back time. I’ve dug myself a grave and I’m just one foot out of it. All my life I’ve been searching for something, but I don’t know what. The only thing I’m sure of, Rosie, is that when I’m near you, I’m close to the answer.”

“Oh, Bart, I can’t mean so much to you! I have to get on with my own life and find what I’m searching for.”

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