Dear Friends,

In The Bridegroom, the fourth Stone Creek Western, you’ll meet Gideon, the youngest of the famed Yarbro outlaw brothers. He’s out to save Lydia Fairmont from entering into a bad marriage—and since he’s a hardheaded Yarbro, it doesn’t seem to matter whether Lydia wants to be saved or not! It’s going to be a wild ride, so saddle up and come prepared for a lot of romance and adventure.

I also wanted to write today to tell you about a special group of people with whom I’ve recently become involved. It is The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), specifically their Pets for Life program.

The Pets for Life program is one of the best ways to help your local shelter: that is to help keep animals out of shelters in the first place. Something as basic as keeping a collar and tag on your pet all the time, so if he gets out and gets lost, he can be returned home. Being a responsible pet owner. Spaying or neutering your pet. And not giving up when things don’t go perfectly. If your dog digs in the yard, or your cat scratches the furniture, know that these are problems that can be addressed. You can find all the information about these and many other common problems at www.petsforlife.org. This campaign is focused on keeping pets and their people together for a lifetime.

As many of you know, my own household includes two dogs, two cats and four horses, so this is a cause that is near and dear to my heart. I hope you’ll get involved along with me.

May you be blessed.

With love,

Praise for the novels of Linda Lael Miller

“As hot as the noontime desert.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Rustler

“This story creates lasting memories of soul-searing redemption and the belief in goodness and hope.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on The Rustler

“Loaded with hot lead, steamy sex and surprising plot twists.”

—Publishers Weekly on A Wanted Man

“Miller’s prose is smart, and her tough Eastwoodian cowboy cuts a sharp, unexpectedly funny figure in a classroom full of rambunctious frontier kids.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Man from Stone Creek

“[Miller] paints a brilliant portrait of the good, the bad and the ugly, the lost and the lonely, and the power of love to bring light into the darkest of souls. This is western romance at its finest.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

on The Man from Stone Creek

“Sweet, homespun, and touched with angelic Christmas magic, this holiday romance reprises characters from Miller’s popular McKettrick series and is a perfect stocking stuffer for her fans.”

—Library Journal on A McKettrick Christmas

“An engrossing, contemporary western romance…”

—Publishers Weekly on McKettrick’s Pride (starred review)

“Linda Lael Miller creates vibrant characters and stories I defy you to forget.”

—New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

LINDA LAEL MILLER
THE
BRIDEGROOM

A Stone Creek Novel

For my Rebel cousins,

Doris Parker Brooks and Jim and Gladys Lael.

Thank you from the bottom of this ole Yankee heart.

THE
BRIDEGROOM

A Stone Creek Novel

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

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

Phoenix, Arizona, summer 1915

EXCEPT FOR THE OLD CODGER huddled on the stool at the far end of the bar and the barkeep, who looked vaguely familiar, Gideon Yarbro had the Golden Horseshoe Saloon to himself, and he liked it that way. Just wanted to drink his beer in peace, wash some of the inevitable sooty grit from the long train ride from Chicago to Phoenix out of his gullet, and gear himself up to travel on to Stone Creek come morning.

His brothers, Rowdy and Wyatt, would be after him to stay on once he got home, settle down, pin on a badge like Rowdy had, or start a ranch, like Wyatt. Get himself married, too, probably, and sire a pack of kids. Both considerably older than Gideon, who was the baby of the family, the former outlaws had left the urge to wander far behind them, long ago. They were happy in their new lives, and for them the lure of the trail was a distant memory.

Not so for Gideon.

One of the things he loved best about his work was that it took him to places he’d never been before. This time, though, it was taking him home.

He sighed, reminded himself that Wyatt and Rowdy meant well. It was just that, being Yarbros, they tended to come on strong with their opinions, and they treated him like a kid brother—emphasis on “kid.”

He was twenty-six, damn it. A man, not a boy.

Gideon reined his musings back in, corralled them in the right-now. Distractions could be lethal for someone in his line of work, and of course trouble tended to strike when a person was thinking about something other than the immediate situation.

Against the far wall, up to its clawed crystal feet in dirty sawdust and peanut shells, the piano gave a ghostly twang, as if one of the wires had snapped. Gideon spared enough of a grin for one corner of his mouth to quirk up, but the face he saw reflected in the streaked and dusty mirror behind the long bar barely registered the change. His dark blond hair was in need of barbering, he noticed, and he’d need a shave, too, if he didn’t want a lot of hectoring from his sisters-in-law, Lark and Sarah, when he showed up in Stone Creek tomorrow.

Again, the piano sounded just the echo of a note, a sort of woeful vibration that trembled in the air for a few moments, along with the tinge of stale cigar smoke and sour beer.

“Damn place is haunted,” the barkeep said, either to everybody in general or nobody in particular. He was a bulky type, balding, with a belly that strained at the buttons of his stained shirt and a marked tendency to sweat, and watching him wipe down glasses with a rag made Gideon wish beer came in bottles. “I swear it’s that piano player that got himself shot in the back last year. Never had no trouble until ole Bill Jessup bit the dust.”

Gideon didn’t acknowledge the remark—he placed little or no stock in tales of spooks and specters—but he recalled the shooting well enough. Rowdy followed such things, being a lawman, and he’d mentioned the incident, in passing, in one of his letters. Mail from home—Stone Creek being the only place Gideon ever thought of in that particular context, and then not with any great degree of sentimentality—was infrequent, and since he moved around a lot in his profession, it generally took some time to catch up to him.

“You want another whiskey there, Horace?” the barkeep asked the old man. He sounded nervous, like he didn’t want to offer, but feared dire consequences if he failed to make the gesture. Not that the leprechaun represented any threat to the bartender; Gideon would bet the shriveled-up little old man wouldn’t have weighed in at more than a hundred pounds if he’d been sopping wet and wearing granite shit-kickers.

And from the looks—and smell—of Horace, he’d gone past “enough” a long time ago, but he grunted, without looking up, and shoved his glass out to be filled again.

The barkeep poured the whiskey, standing back farther than seemed sensible and sweating harder. Gideon took all this in, not because he was interested, but because it was what he did. Working for the Pinkerton Agency after college, and then for Wells Fargo, he’d learned to pay attention to everything going on around him, even in the most ordinary circumstances.

Especially then.

He’d have bet that barkeep hadn’t washed his hands in weeks, let alone taken a bath. Gideon frowned and studied his beer mug more closely, but except for a few smudges and a thumbprint or two, it looked passably clean. He wasn’t back East anymore, he reminded himself, with another slight contortion of his face that might have been accepted as a smile in some quarters. Best get over being so fastidious.

He felt the slight shift in the air even before the doors to the street swung open, a sort of quiver, similar to the throb of the piano strings, but soundless.

Setting his beer mug down, he watched in the mirror as two men came in from the street, single file, both of them the size of grizzly bears raised up on their hind feet.

No, Gideon corrected himself silently, these yahoos would dwarf the average grizzly. Despite the heat—he’d left his own suit coat at the train station, with his bags—they wore the long canvas coats common to gunslingers as well as ordinary ranchers, and both of them carried sidearms, the butts of long-barreled pistols jutting out of the waistbands of their dark woolen pants. Their gazes tracked and found the old man, sliced over to Gideon, sharp as honed knives, then swung back and bored into their target again.

“Monty,” one of them ground out, presumably greeting the barkeep. They’d paused just inside the doors, which were still swinging on their rusted hinges.

Monty gulped audibly, set down the bottle he’d poured the old coot’s drink out of, and took a couple of steps backward. Came up hard against the shelf behind him, with its rows of bottles and glasses. The front of his shirt, damp before, was nearly saturated now, he was perspiring so heavily.

“I only give ole Horace more whiskey ’cause he asked me to,” Monty spouted, as if he’d been challenged on the matter, working up a grimace of a smile that wouldn’t stay put on his face.

Entertained, Gideon suppressed a smile, along with the sigh that came along behind it. When he got to Stone Creek and started his new job—the one he’d lied to Rowdy and Wyatt about in his last letter—such amusements as this one would be few and far between.

He was in the Golden Horseshoe Saloon, he reminded himself, to have a beer, not watch a melodrama—or to participate in one. Still, the fine hairs were standing up on the nape of his neck, and the sixth sense he’d developed working as a detective was in fine form.

“You’d better go on back to the storeroom or the office and check on whatever needs checking on,” the taller of the two men told the barkeep. His voice had a thick, stuffy sound, as if at some point he’d had his head held under water for too long, or hadn’t gotten enough air in the first few minutes after he was born.

It was hard to imagine him as a baby, Gideon thought, amused.

His mama must have been a big woman—or else she’d have split wide-open giving birth to the likes of him.

Monty was only too glad to check on whatever needed checking on—he gave Gideon a look, part warning and part pity, and skedaddled.

Gideon felt no need to reach for the Colt .45 riding low on his left hip, but he did take some comfort in its presence. Straightening, he rolled his shirtsleeves down and fastened the cuffs; and though he knew he appeared to be mainly concerned with emptying his mug, he had a full mirror-reflected view of the room through his eyelashes.

One of the men cleared his throat, though the pair still hadn’t moved from their post just over the threshold. “Ma says supper’s gonna be ready early tonight,” he announced, not exactly cautious in relaying this news, but definitely tentative. “She wants to be at the church on time for the pie social.”

So she had survived childbirth, Gideon thought. Either that or the woman in question was a stepmother. Out West, a lot of men ran through a whole slew of wives, wearing them out with hard work and childbearing and all the rest of it.

Gideon’s own mother had perished giving birth to him.

The old man grunted once more, that being his primary means of communication, apparently, but didn’t turn around or speak an intelligible word. He just drained his glass, made a satisfied sound as the firewater went down and reached for the bottle poor old Monty had left behind on the bar when he fled.

At last, the giants moved again, as one, like Siamese twins with no visible attachment. Strange for sure, that was Gideon’s involuntary assessment.

There were times when he’d rather just ignore goings-on, and this was one of them, but it wasn’t in his nature. He pondered everything, weighed and considered and sorted.

The taller fellow snagged Gideon’s gaze in the saloon mirror. “We don’t want no trouble now, friend,” he said. “We’ve come to take Dad home for supper, that’s all, so we’d be obliged if you didn’t mix in.”

Gideon gave a disinterested nod, waited to see if the old whiskey-swiller would raise an objection to what he’d no doubt regard as a premature departure.

There wasn’t much to him, for all that his sons were big as trees.

Like as not, he’d go along peaceable. Then Gideon would finish his beer, leave payment on the bar, and go on about his business—checking in to the hotel across the street, having some of his gear brought over from the train depot, getting himself shaved and sheared and bathed. He’d stop by the post office, too, in case some mail had straggled in since the last time he’d passed through Phoenix.

The brothers positioned themselves on either side of the bar stool, set their feet as if they meant to put down roots right through the sawdust and the plank floor beneath, exchanged wary glances, and simultaneously cleared their throats.

“Get on home,” the old man croaked, thereby proving he possessed a vocabulary after all, however limited, though he didn’t look at either one of them. All his attention seemed to be fixed on the bottom of that whiskey glass, Gideon observed, as if there was some kind of scene being played out there. “Tell your ma I’ll be along when I’m damn good and ready, and not before.”

“She said we’d better not come home without you if we know what’s good for us,” the smaller brother said gravely. “And you know we’ve got to mind, lest Ma lose her temper.”

With that, and another glance at each other, the brothers closed in and took hold of the old man’s arms.

And that was when all hell broke loose.

Dear old Dad turned into a human buzz saw, all jagged edges, ripping into the air itself, and practically throwing off blue sparks. He kicked and twisted and punched, spitting out oaths and cusswords that even Gideon, raised in the back of a saloon in Flagstaff, had never heard.

The brothers had all they could do to contain their pa, and the three of them tangled all the way across the saloon floor to the doors, a blur of fists and flying coattails and swearwords that sizzled like water flung onto a hot griddle.

Gideon pushed back from the bar, walked to the swinging doors, stopped their wild swaying with both hands. Watched over the top as old Horace’s sons flung him into the back of a buckboard by his suspenders, like a bale of hay by the twine. One of them scrambled up to take the reins, while the other climbed into the wagon-bed to hold the old man down with both hands.

And that took some doing, all by itself.

“Are they gone?” Monty asked tentatively, from somewhere behind Gideon.

Gideon turned, saw the bartender back at his post, but poised to hit the floor or make another dash for safety if Dad and the boys chanced to return.

“On their way home to supper,” Gideon said. “Looks like Ma will be right on time for the pie social.”

With that, he plucked a coin from the pocket of his tailored vest, walked over to the bar and laid it down.

“I don’t believe I caught your name,” Monty said, after swiping the coin off the bar with one paw.

“I don’t believe I gave it,” Gideon replied.

Monty narrowed his eyes, and recognition dawned, though Gideon had hoped it wouldn’t. His kinfolk were well-known in Phoenix, since it was only about a day’s ride from Stone Creek, and Rowdy, along with his best friend, Sam O’Ballivan, often had business there. As a boy, Gideon had accompanied them once or twice.

“You’re that Yarbro kid, aren’t you? The marshal’s little brother. I used to work in one of the saloons up there in Stone Creek, and I recollect that you took a bullet at a dance one night, trying to catch hold of some fool that rode a horse right into the Cattlemen’s Meeting Hall.”

As always, the word kid made Gideon bristle, way down deep where it didn’t show, and being over six feet tall, he didn’t consider himself anybody’s “little” anything, but he was feeling charitable after the beer, and somewhat resigned, so he let the comment pass.

“Yep,” he said simply, turning to leave.

“That Chink sawbones fixed you up,” Monty prattled on. Maybe it was nerves, considering the scuffle just past, but he’d sure turned talkative. “Wouldn’t have given spit for your chances, but he pulled you through with his needles and poultices.”

That Chink. The term stuck under Gideon’s hide like a cactus needle.

“He saved my life,” Gideon said stiffly, “and the life of somebody I cared about.” Lydia Fairmont had been the other patient, he recalled, eight years old and one of Lark’s students. Rowdy’s wife had been the schoolmarm up at Stone Creek back then, and had taken the neglected child under her wing. Where was Lydia now? Maybe Lark would know. “And his name was Hon Sing.”

Monty hastened after him, came all the way to the sidewalk. “I didn’t mean no disrespect, Mr. Yarbro,” he prattled. “I truly did not set out to offend.”

Hon Sing, along with his wife, Mai Lei, had gone back to China, after inheriting the old Porter house and eventually selling it at a high profit, once copper was discovered in the foothills rimming the still-small town.

And that copper mine was the reason Gideon had been sent to Stone Creek. There was a strike brewing, and his job was to see that it didn’t happen.

He made no response to the bartender’s apology, beyond a cursory nod. Turning his mind to other things, he crossed the street, wending his way between horses and buggies and slow-moving wagons headed in opposite directions. The Desert Oasis Hotel offered some attractive amenities, including hot and cold running water, a decent restaurant and its own barbershop.

The lobby was opulent by Western standards, with carpets on the floors, leather sofas and copious potted palms.

Gideon registered for a room on the second floor and sent the hotel’s sweep-up man—a boy, really—back to the depot for his suitcase. Climbing the broad staircase, intending to put the tub in his room to immediate use, he wondered again, now that she’d staked out a place in his thoughts, how little Lydia Fairmont was faring. She’d be an adult now, since ten years had passed, and maybe not so little anymore, either, he reflected with a smile. She was probably married—even at eight, with her silvery-fair hair and violet-blue eyes, she’d shown the promise of growing into a very fetching woman one day.

Gideon’s smile slipped a little as he took out his key and let himself into the room. Lydia, grown up, with a husband and children? For some reason, the idea didn’t set well with him.

It was because she was delicate, he told himself. Too fragile, surely, to be bearing some man’s babies, or chopping wood, or any of the thousand other hard tasks a wife was called upon to do.

He pushed the recollection of Lydia Fairmont to the back of his mind.

In Stone Creek, he’d have plenty to occupy his thoughts, between Rowdy and Wyatt and their families and the work he’d be doing at the Copper Crown Mine. He’d told plenty of lies as it was, and he’d have to tell more before it was over. Keeping track of them, so his story stayed straight and his brothers didn’t figure out his real reason for coming back home, would be as much as he could manage.

Anyhow, there was no place in his plans for a woman—at least, not the kind Lydia had surely turned out to be.

LYDIA’S TWO GREAT-AUNTS, Mittie and Millie, spinsters the pair of them and both in their late sixties, twittered like schoolgirls as they peered through the tall, narrow windows on either side of the front door.

A loud chugging sound came from the street, along with an ominous bang that caused Lydia, lurking unnoticed in the doorway to the main parlor, to start slightly.

“Here he comes now,” Mittie enthused, under her breath.

“Too bad he’s so fat and old and homely,” Millie lamented. “Our Lydia requires a handsome husband, one who’ll give her lots of children.”

“Hush,” Mittie scolded, in a whisper. “Lydia will hear you! And for the life of me, I can’t think why she would turn up her nose at a man like Jacob Fitch. He might be portly and of a certain age, and I’ll even concede that he’s not much to look at. But he’s rich and he owns an automobile.”

Lydia, carefully trained, since she’d been brought to this imposing house as an eight-year-old orphan, in many things, not the least of which was the wholesale impropriety of eavesdropping, cleared her throat delicately in order to make her presence known.

Both aunts blushed prettily when they turned to face her.

“Mr. Fitch has arrived,” Millie announced, recovering first. Like Mittie, she was small, almost doll-like, with the near-purple eyes that were the pride of the Fairmont line. As young women, the sisters had been breathtakingly beautiful, as their portraits attested. According to Helga, the housekeeper, Millie had loved a Confederate major, Mittie, a Union captain. Both men had been killed in the line of duty.

Word of the deaths had arrived on the same day, the legend went, and the aunts had worn mourning gowns ever since. Now, they contented themselves with the ups and downs of other people’s romances, especially their only niece’s.

If indeed the arrangement between Lydia and Mr. Fitch could be called a romance. It certainly didn’t feel like one to her.

“Let’s go and make tea,” Mittie said, snatching Millie by the puffed sleeve of her sad black dress and dragging her past Lydia, in the direction of the kitchen.

Lydia suppressed an urge to flee, or beg her aunts to tell Mr. Fitch she was indisposed—anything to avoid receiving the man and passing an interminable hour of “courting” in the parlor.

But, like eavesdropping, lying to evade one’s social obligations was not considered proper—and Lydia placed a great deal of importance on propriety.

As always, Fitch pounded at the front door, foregoing the bell, with its pleasant, jingly little ring.

Lydia smoothed her lavender dress, laid out for her that morning by Helga, because it matched her eyes. That, of course, had been before Mr. Fitch had sent his calling card ahead to announce an impending visit.

She dredged up another smile—it took considerably more effort this time—and went to open the door.

The man Lydia was to marry the following afternoon stood impatiently on the verandah, his motoring goggles pushed up onto his forehead in a way that was probably meant to appear jaunty, but instead gave him the look of a very plump bullfrog. He was covered in road dust—Mr. Fitch did love his automobile and was constantly racing along the dry and rutted roads of Phoenix at speeds of up to twenty miles an hour.

Often, he insisted that Lydia accompany him.

Now, he clutched a bouquet of wilting flowers, probably purloined from some neighbor’s water-starved garden, in his left hand. “Good afternoon, Lydia,” he said.

“Mr. Fitch,” Lydia acknowledged, with a coolness she couldn’t quite hide.

His small, too-watchful eyes swept over her. “You’re not dressed for the road,” he pointed out, his tone mildly critical. “Any wife of mine will always be prepared to go driving.”

Any wife of mine…

Lydia managed not to shudder, though the smile she’d put on—if it was a smile and not the death grimace it felt like—wobbled on her mouth. “It’s such a hot day,” she said. “I was hoping we could stay inside.” And I’m not your wife, Jacob Fitch. Not yet, anyway. Not until tomorrow.

Mr. Fitch trundled past her, into the house, nearly stomping on her toes. “Honestly, Lydia, this delicacy of yours is bothersome. Any wife—”

Lydia closed the door smartly behind him, cutting off the rest of his sentence. She was not delicate, had not been seriously ill since she was a child, though admittedly her appearance made her seem fragile. Like her great-aunts, she was small-boned, though at five feet two inches, she was taller than Mittie and Millie, and she did have a nice bosom.

Protesting that she was as healthy as anyone, however much she wanted to do just that, would serve no purpose. Jacob Fitch did not listen to anything she said, unless, of course, it was precisely what he wanted to hear.

He fairly shoved the flowers at her.

Lydia took them, and her heart turned over at their thirsty state. “I’ll just put these in water,” she said brightly. “Do sit down in the parlor, Mr. Fitch, and make yourself at home. I’ll only be a minute.”

Fitch tilted his head back, admired the high, frescoed ceilings, fading now, but still finely crafted. The huge crystal chandelier glittered, though unlit—at night, powered by gas, it glowed, and even after all these years, it seemed magical to Lydia.

A faint smile touched Mr. Fitch’s narrow lips. “The old place could use a man’s touch,” he said huskily, letting his gaze drift slowly to Lydia, then over her, like a spill of something viscous. No doubt he was anticipating their wedding night. “And so could you.”

Again, Lydia managed not to shudder, but just barely.

The thought of Jacob Fitch putting his hands to that lovely old house, much less to her naked body, made the pit of her stomach drop, as if from a great height.

Overcome with a flash of pure dread, she turned on one heel, biting her lower lip, and fled to the kitchen. Oh, to go right on through, out the back door, down the alley to—

To where?

She had no place to go.

No one to turn to.

Months ago, in a fit of panic, she’d sent off the letter, the one Gideon Yarbro had written to himself in case she ever needed to send it—Please come and get me right away, was all it said—when she was a little girl, recovering from pneumonia and the loss of her father. But there had been no reply, of course.

There wouldn’t have been, though, would there? Gideon, a mere boy at the time, anxious to reassure her, had scratched out that single line in penciled letters, sealed the envelope, addressed it to: Gideon Rhodes, Deputy Marshal, General Delivery, Stone Creek, Arizona Territory. Heaven knew where he was now, after a decade—he’d been bound for college that year, so it was unlikely that he was still the deputy marshal up at Stone Creek. And Arizona wasn’t even a territory anymore, it was the forty-eighth state.

These and other equally hopeless thoughts tumbled in Lydia’s mind as she ignored Helga’s penetrating gaze and filled a vase with cool water for the fading flowers. Now, she simply felt foolish for adding postage to that very old letter and dropping it through the slot down at the post office. She blushed to imagine it actually reaching Gideon—especially at this late date—and silently prayed that it had gone astray.

And yet it was her one hope, that letter.

“Why don’t you just tell Jacob Fitch to get back into that smoke-belching horseless carriage of his,” Helga, never one to withhold advice, asked intractably, “and drive himself straight off the nearest mesa?”

Helga’s disapproval of Mr. Fitch was of long standing, and so was her opinion of the automobile. One of the first such machines to appear in Phoenix, a point of pride with Jacob, the vehicle, with its constant sputtering and backfiring, frightened old Mrs. Riley’s chickens so badly they wouldn’t lay. Helga had laid the fault for more than one skimpy breakfast at Mr. Fitch’s door.

“You know I can’t,” Lydia said softly, taking longer than necessary to attend to the flowers.

Helga had been running the household for years—only Mr. Evans, the late butler and sometime carriage driver, had worked for the family longer—and she felt free to express herself on any and all matters concerning the Fairmonts. “Miss Nell,” the sturdy middle-aged woman said implacably, “must be rolling over in her grave. You, the last hope of the family, marrying that old—”

Tears stung Lydia’s eyes, and she sniffled once, raised her chin, the way she always did when a weeping spell threatened. Nell Baker, her father’s only sister, had come to fetch her up at Stone Creek after Papa’s death in a blizzard, thereby saving her from two equally frightening alternatives: being sent to an orphanage, or left in the care of her selfish, slatternly stepmother, Mabel. Nell had raised Lydia, with help from Helga, Evans and the great-aunts, hired private tutors because the local schools did not meet her standards, clothed and fed Lydia, allowed her to keep stray cats, bought her watercolor paints and fine brushes at the first indication of talent.

Most of all, Nell, a childless widow herself, had loved her.

Aunt Nell had passed on suddenly, the previous year, and Lydia still felt the loss like a nerve laid bare to a winter chill.

“I’ll tell him for you,” Helga said, in an almost desperate whisper, when Lydia didn’t reply to her suggestion. “I’ll send him packing, once and for all, and good riddance!”

Lydia, having forced herself to start toward the parlor, where Mr. Fitch was waiting, closed her eyes. They’d had this discussion before—Helga knew full well that most of the Fairmont money was gone. The house would soon follow, since it was heavily mortgaged. And while both Lydia and Helga would be fine if that occurred—eventually, anyway—what would happen to the great-aunts?

Phoenix had been a mere crossroads when Mittie and Millie had come to the Arizona Territory with their widowed father, Judge William Fairmont, after Union troops had burned their Virginia plantation, fields, house and outbuildings, during the war. This house, originally only three rooms, but enlarged as the Judge prospered and then grew even richer than he’d been in Virginia, was their haven, a sanctuary in a world that had already proved itself violent and harsh. Every corner, every nook, held some precious memory.

Except for church services on Sundays, the aunts never ventured farther than the garden out back.

“You must stay out of this, Helga,” Lydia said, after swallowing and without turning around.

“You could marry any man in this town!” Helga argued.

There was some truth in that assertion, Lydia supposed, but none of the men who’d offered for her had Jacob Fitch’s money, or his power. None of them could save the big stone house and its cherished furnishings, each one with a story attached. And none of them would be willing to provide houseroom to two very old ladies who still suffered from fiery nightmares and woke up screaming that the Yankees had come.

Mr. Fitch, the only son of an elderly mother, had already promised that Lydia, the aunts and Helga could all stay right here under this roof. On their wedding day—dear God, tomorrow—he would pay off any outstanding debts and declare the mortgage, held by his bank, paid in full—he had given Lydia his word on that. Even had documents prepared, so stating.

All Lydia had to do was marry him.

When she could sign “Lydia Fairmont Fitch” on the appropriate lines of the papers Jacob’s lawyers had drawn up, the aunts and their memories would be safe.

Again, Lydia thought of the letter she’d mailed off to Gideon in a fit of panic, and something rose into her throat and fluttered there, like a trapped bird.

Even supposing Gideon would be willing to help her, what could he possibly do?

Nothing, that was what.

She had to stop this incessant spinning back and forth between hope and despair.

Gideon wasn’t coming to her rescue, like some prince in a storybook.

No one was.

Tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock, wearing Aunt Nell’s altered wedding gown, she would stand up beside Jacob Fitch in front of the cold fireplace in the formal parlor in that burden of a house and vow to love, honor and obey the husband she didn’t want.

“Lydia?” Helga whispered miserably. “Please. You mustn’t be hasty—”

“The decision,” Lydia said, for Helga’s benefit and for her own, “has been made, Helga, and there will be no further discussion.”

With that, Lydia left the kitchen, the vase containing Jacob’s flowers shaking in her hands, fit to slip and shatter into a million fragments.

BECAUSE GIDEON PASSED THROUGH Phoenix at least once a year, he kept a postal box there, as he did in several cities around the country. That afternoon, shaven and barbered and bathed, he stuck the appropriate key in the lock and opened the heavy brass door, stooped a little to peer inside. Straightened as he removed the usual printed sales fliers and outdated periodicals.

Throwing these things away in a small barrel provided for the purpose, he nearly missed the thin, time-tattered envelope tucked in among them.

The letter had been forwarded numerous times, but beneath the cross-outs and travel stains, Gideon saw his own youthful handwriting, nearly faded to invisibility.

Gideon Rhodes, Deputy Marshal

General Delivery

Stone Creek, Arizona Territory

For a few moments, Gideon’s surroundings faded away, and he was back in Mrs. Porter’s kitchen up in Stone Creek, handing the letter to a wide-eyed, frightened child.

He heard his own voice, as if he’d just spoken the words of the promise he’d made that long-ago winter day.

“…if you ever have any trouble with anybody, all you’ll have to do is mail the letter. Soon as I get it, I’ll be coming for you….”

CHAPTER TWO

HAVING COME DOWN WITH A SICK headache five minutes after joining Mr. Fitch in the parlor, Lydia had nonetheless soldiered through the ordeal. The instant her future husband had departed, however, she’d retreated to her room upstairs and collapsed onto the bed without even removing her shoes.

She was still lying there, staring up at the shifting ceiling-shadows cast by the branches of the white oak outside her window, when a light rap sounded at the door, and Mittie poked her head in without waiting for a “Come in.”

This in itself was highly unusual; although they were window-peekers, the aunts never entered Lydia’s “bedchamber,” as they called it, without permission. Given their old-fashioned sensibilities, they were probably terrified of accidentally catching her in a state of undress.

But here was Mittie, with her aureole of snow-white hair gleaming fit to hurt Lydia’s eyes in the dazzle of late-afternoon sunshine, and her faced glowed with something very like wonder. She looked downright…transfigured.

An aftereffect of the headache, Lydia thought, sitting up. They often affected her vision. Now, however, the worst of her malady had passed, and Aunt Nell’s kindly but firm voice echoed in her mind. Mustn’t shirk our duties, Lydia. After all, we are Fairmonts.

Was it already time to help Helga set the table for supper?

Mittie, fairly bursting with news, continued to shine as brightly as if she’d climbed a ladder into a night sky and gobbled the moon down whole, like one of the small, sweet biscuits she enjoyed every afternoon with her tea.

Finally, breathless with excitement, the old woman could not contain the announcement any longer. “You have a caller!” she bubbled. “A gentleman caller.”

Lydia frowned as the faint pounding beneath her temples began again. “Mr. Fitch is back?”

“No,” Millie blurted, appearing just behind Mittie, popping her head up over her taller sister’s right shoulder, then her left. “This man is handsome!”

“He doesn’t have an automobile, however,” Mittie pointed out, sobering a little. “And while his clothes are certainly well fitted, I doubt he’s at all rich.”

“Who on earth—?” Lydia muttered, stooping to glance into the mirror on her vanity table and assess the state of her hair.

A few pats of her hands set it right.

And neither Mittie nor Millie said a word.

They simply stood there, in the doorway, gaping at her as though she’d changed somehow, since they’d seen her last.

“Is there a calling card?” Lydia prodded, staring back.

Neither answered.

Lydia tried again. “Did he at least give his name, then?”

“He did,” Millie said, her nearly translucent cheeks blushing pink, “but I’m afraid I was so taken aback by his resemblance to dear Major Bentley Alexander Willmington the Third that it has completely escaped me.”

At this, Mittie bristled. “He does not resemble the major, sister. He is the image of my own Captain Phillip Stanhope.”

Millie straightened her narrow shoulders. “You refer, of course,” she replied stiffly, “to that traitor to the Southern cause?”

“Captain Stanhope was not a traitor, Millicent Fairmont! He was a man of principle who could not abide the Peculiar Institution—”

“Ladies,” Lydia interceded, hoping to head off another of the sisters’ rare but spirited battles. The term Peculiar Institution referred to slavery, and with her marriage to Mr. Fitch fast approaching, Lydia found the subject even more abhorrent than usual. “Whoever this man is, I’m sure he looks exactly like himself and no one else.”

As she swept toward the door, forcing her aunts to part for her like small waves on a sea of time-faded ebony bombazine, Lydia’s response echoed uncomfortably in her fogged brain.

She was only eighteen, and already she was starting to sound just like Mittie and Millie.

If the mysterious caller turned out to be a bill collector, as she suspected he would, she would simply inform him that, as of tomorrow, all claims should be referred to her husband, founder and president of the First Territorial Bank. There were, after all, a few consolations attached to her forthcoming marriage.

The aunts crept along behind Lydia as she descended the stairs, calling upon all the dignity she possessed. After today, she would not have to deal with visits like this one.

“He’s in the parlor!” Mittie piped, in a voice sure to carry far and wide. Like Millie, she was midway down the stairs, clinging to the rail, as eager-faced as a child about to open gifts on Christmas morning.

Lydia put a finger to her lips and tried to look just stern enough to silence them, but not so stern as to make them cry.

She could not bear it when the aunts cried.

Reaching the entryway, Lydia drew a deep breath. Then, after straightening her skirts and squaring her shoulders, she marched through the wide doorway and into the parlor—and nearly fainted dead away.

Gideon rose out of the Judge’s leather chair—no one, not even Jacob, sat in that chair—and regarded her with a pensive smile, his handsome head cocked slightly to one side.

“You look all right to me,” he said.

Lydia was so stunned, she could not manage a single word.

Gideon pulled an all-too-familiar envelope from the pocket of his shirt, held it up. Her letter.

“It finally reached me,” he told her quietly. “I don’t go by ‘Rhodes’ anymore—that was my brother Rowdy’s alias, and I borrowed it for a while. But my last name is ‘Yarbro.’”

He seemed to be waiting for some reaction to that.

Flustered, Lydia croaked out, “Do sit down, Gid—Mr. Yarbro.”

He grinned. She remembered that grin, slanted and spare. It had made her eight-year-old heart flitter, and that hadn’t changed, except that now the reaction was stronger, and ventured beyond her chest.

“Not until you do,” Gideon said, his green eyes twinkling a little for all their serious regard.

Lydia crossed the room and sank into her aunt Nell’s reading chair, grateful that her wobbly knees had carried her even that far.

Once she was seated, Gideon sat, too.

“The letter?” Gideon prompted, when Lydia didn’t speak right away.

Lydia felt her neck heat, and then her face. If only the floor would open and Aunt Nell’s chair would drop right through, and her with it. “It must have been sent by accident, Mr. Yarbro, and you must pay it no heed,” she said, in a rush of words. “No heed at all—”

Lydia stopped herself from prattling with a determined gulp. What was the matter with her? First, she hadn’t been able to utter a syllable, she’d been so thunderstruck, and now she was inclined to chatter senselessly.

“Gideon,” he said, very solemnly, his eyes still watchful.

“I beg your pardon?” It took all the force of will Lydia possessed not to squirm in her chair.

“Call me Gideon, not Mr. Yarbro.” He leaned forward, easy in the imposing chair, easy in his skin. Rested his elbows on his thighs and looked deep inside Lydia, or so it seemed. His probing gaze made her feel uncomfortable, intrigued, and almost naked, all of a piece. “You sent the letter, Lydia,” he reminded her, “and I don’t believe it was an accident.”

“She’s getting married tomorrow,” Helga proclaimed loudly from the parlor doorway, a herald in a plain dress, apron and mobcap. All she lacked, in Lydia’s fitfully distracted opinion, was a long brass horn with a banner hanging from it and velvet shoes with curled toes. “To a man she hates.”

Lydia’s face throbbed with mortification. “Helga,” she said firmly, “I do not hate Jacob Fitch, and you are overstepping—again. Kindly return to the kitchen and attend to your own affairs.”

Helga didn’t obey—she never did—and the aunts stayed, too, hovering behind the housekeeper, all aflutter.

“All right,” Helga conceded, “perhaps you don’t actually hate Fitch, but you certainly aren’t in love with him, either!”

Lydia’s humiliation was now complete.

Gideon rose from his chair, crossed the room, and spoke so quietly to the women clustered in the doorway that Lydia couldn’t make out his words. Miraculously, the avid trio subsided, and Gideon closed the great doors in their faces.

Lydia sat rigid, and squeezed her eyes shut.

She didn’t hear Gideon approaching her, and when his hand came to rest on her shoulder, she started, gave a little gasp. It wasn’t so much surprise that had made her jump, she realized, horrified, but the strange, sultry charge Gideon’s touch sent coursing through her entire system.

“Open your eyes, Lydia,” he said. “Look at me.”

He was crouched beside her chair now, his green gaze searching her face, missing nothing, uncovering secrets she’d kept even from herself.

Or so it seemed.

“It’s really a misunderstanding,” she whispered, trying to smile.

Gideon took her hand. Squeezed it gently. “Stop lying to me,” he said, his voice husky and very quiet. “Who is this Jacob Fitch yahoo, and why are you getting married to him if you don’t love the man?”

Lydia swallowed, made herself look directly at Gideon. She forced out her answer. “I have my reasons.”

“And those reasons are…?”

Tears blurred Lydia’s vision; she tried to blink them away. “What does it matter, Gideon? I have no choice—that’s all the explanation I can give you.”

He straightened, reluctantly let go of her hand, went to stand facing the marble fireplace, his back turned to her. Looked up at the life-size portrait of the Judge looming above the mantel, dominating the entire room, big as it was.

At least, Lydia’s great-grandfather’s painted countenance had dominated the room, seeming so real that she’d swear she’d seen it breathing—until Gideon Yarbro’s arrival.

“There are always choices, Lydia,” Gideon said gruffly. “Always.”

He turned around, leaned back against the intricately chiseled face of the fireplace, folded his arms. His shoulders were broad, under his fresh white shirt, and his butternut-colored hair, though still slightly too long, had been cut recently…

She gave herself a little shake. Why was she noticing these things?

Lydia sat up a little straighter in her chair. Maybe there were “always choices,” as Gideon maintained, but in her case, all the alternatives were even worse than the prospect of becoming Mrs. Jacob Fitch.

The aunts, fashionably impoverished now, would become charity cases. Their cherished belongings would be sold at auction, pawed through and carried away by strangers.

And she herself, with no means of earning a living, might be reduced to serving drinks in one of Phoenix’s overabundance of saloons—or worse.

No, she would marry Mr. Fitch.

The following afternoon, at two o’clock, she’d be standing, swathed in silk and antique lace, almost where Gideon was standing now, with Jacob beside her and his termagant of a mother looking on from nearby, while a justice of the peace mumbled the words that would bind Lydia like ropes, for the rest of her life.

“Lydia,” Gideon said firmly, sending her thoughts scattering like chickens suddenly overshadowed by the wingspan of a diving hawk. “Talk to me.”

“I’ll lose this house if I don’t marry Mr. Fitch,” Lydia heard herself say. “The aunts—you saw them, they’re ancient—will be displaced—no, destitute. It doesn’t—it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Gideon tilted his head back, scanning the high ceiling, with its hand-carved moldings and thousands of tiny inlaid seashells imported from some faraway ocean.

Lydia wished she could magically transport herself to that ocean. Jump in and sink beneath its waves and never be seen again.

But, alas, there she remained, in that august parlor, in the middle of dry and dusty Phoenix, with no handy place to drown.

“It’s a fine house,” Gideon allowed. “But it’s only a house. And your aunts would adapt to new surroundings. People do, you know—adapt, I mean.”

Lydia stood up abruptly, found that her knees were still quite unreliable, and dropped back into her chair again. “You don’t understand,” she protested weakly.

Gideon’s handsome face hardened a little. “I’m afraid I do,” he answered. “You’re willing to sell yourself, Lydia. And the price is a house. It’s a bad bargain—you’re worth so much more.”

His statement stung its way through Lydia, a dose of harsh medicine.

But then a strange, twittering little laugh escaped her, as she remembered just how hopeless her situation truly was.

Would the embarrassment never end? Again, she found that she could not look at Gideon, could not expose herself to the expression she’d surely catch on his face if she did. “Just forget the letter, Gideon,” she said. “I’m sorry if I inconvenienced you, made you go out of your way, but, really, truly, I—”

“I can’t,” Gideon broke in. “I can’t ‘just forget the letter,’ Lydia. Our agreement was that you’d send it if you were in trouble, and I know you are. In trouble, that is.” He paused. “And I just accused you of selling yourself. Did you miss that? Most women would have slapped my face, but you didn’t even get out of your chair.”

Lydia didn’t trust herself to answer.

Gideon strode across the room again, bent over her, his hands gripping the arms of her chair, effectively trapping her between his arms.

“There’s nothing you can do to help,” Lydia nearly whispered. She simply couldn’t lie anymore. Nor could she meet his eyes, though the sunlight-and-shaving-cream scent of him filled her nose, and invaded all her other senses, too, and made her dizzy. “Please, Gideon—just go.”

He didn’t move. His voice was a rumble, low and rough, like thunder on the distant horizon. “I’m not going anywhere—except maybe to find your bridegroom and tell him the wedding is off.”

Lydia flinched, her gaze rising to collide with Gideon’s now. “You mustn’t do that!” she cried, aghast at the prospect. “Gideon, you mustn’t! This house, my aunts—”

“Damn this house,” Gideon growled, backing up now, but just far enough to take hold of Lydia’s shoulders and pull her to her feet. “You are not marrying a man you don’t love!”

At last, Lydia dredged up some pride. Lies hadn’t worked. Neither had the truth. Bravado was all that was left to her. “You can’t stop me,” she said fiercely.

She saw his eyes narrow, and his jawline harden.

“Yes, I can,” he ground out.

“How?” Lydia challenged.

And that was when he did the unthinkable.

He kissed her, and not gently, the way a friend might do. No, Gideon Yarbro kissed her hard, as a lover would, slamming his mouth down on hers—and instinctively, she parted her lips. Felt the kiss deepen in ways she’d only been able to imagine before that moment.

That dreadful, wonderful, life-altering moment.

Gideon drew back too soon, and Lydia stood there trembling, as shaken as if he’d taken her, actually made her his own, right there in the parlor, both of them standing up and fully clothed.

“It won’t be like that when he kisses you,” Gideon said, after a very long time. Then he let go of her shoulders, he turned, and he walked away. He opened the parlor doors and strode through to the foyer, then banged out of the house.

Lydia couldn’t move, not to follow, not to sit down, not even to collapse. She simply could not move.

Damn Gideon Yarbro, she thought. Damn him to the depths of perdition. He’d ruined everything—by being right.

Jacob Fitch would never kiss her the way Gideon had, never send thrills of terrible, spectacular need jolting through her like stray shards of lightning. No, never again would she feel what she had before, during and after Gideon’s mouth landed on hers. In some inexplicable way, it was as though he’d claimed her, conquered her so completely and so thoroughly that she could never belong to Jacob, or any other man, as long as she lived.

Gideon had aroused a consuming desire within Lydia, simply by kissing her, and simultaneously satisfied that desire. But—and this was the cruelest part of all—that sweet, brief, soul-drenching satisfaction had shown her what a man’s attentions—one certain man’s attentions—could be like.

He’d left her wanting more of what she could never have—and for that, she very nearly hated him.

The aunts and Helga rushed into the room, like a talcum-scented wind, pressing in around Lydia, so close she nearly flailed her arms at them, the way she would at a flock of frenzied, pecking crows.

“You look ghastly!” one of the aunts cried, sounding delighted.

“Do sit down,” begged the other.

“Glory be,” Helga exalted, throwing up her hands like someone who’d just found religion. “That man kissed you like a woman ought to be kissed!”

Lydia recovered enough to sweep all three women up in one scathing glance. “Were you peeking through the keyhole?” she demanded. It was as if another, stronger self had surged to the fore, pushed aside the old, beleaguered Lydia, taken over.

That self was a wanton hussy, mad enough to spit fire.

And not about to sit down, whether she looked “ghastly” or not.

“Helga was,” Mittie said righteously. “Millie and I would never do any such thing. It wouldn’t be genteel.”

“To hell with ‘genteel,’” Helga said joyously. “He might as well have laid you down and had you good and proper as to kiss you like that!”

Mittie and Millie gasped and put their hands to their mouths.

Even the wanton hussy was a little shocked.

“Helga!” Lydia erupted, her face on fire.

“Such talk,” Mittie clucked, shaking her head.

“Major Bentley Alexander Willmington the Third used to whisper naughty things in my ear,” Millie confessed, succumbing to a dreamy reverie, “while we were rocking on the porch swing of an evening. Papa would have had him horsewhipped if he’d known.”

“Millicent!” Mittie scolded.

Helga laughed out loud. “Glory be,” she repeated, turning to leave the room. “Glory be!”

“You don’t understand,” Lydia said, for the second time that afternoon. The wanton hussy had suddenly vanished, leaving the fearful, reluctant bride in her place, virginal and wobbly lipped and tearful. “Gideon accused me of—he left here in a rage—” She began to cry. “He’s never coming back.”

“You’re a damn fool if you think that,” Helga answered, from the doorway. “He’ll be back here, all right, and in plenty of time to put a stop to this wedding foolishness, too.”

“You didn’t see—he was furious—”

“I saw him,” Helga countered, more circumspectly now that the glory bes had subsided. “He nearly knocked me down, storming through this doorway like he did. No denying that he’s fighting mad, either. But he’ll be back just the same. You mark my words, Lydia Fairmont. He’ll be back.”

The prospect made Lydia feel both hope and fear, as hopelessly tangled as the mess of embroidery floss in the bottom of her sewing basket.

Mittie, now solicitous, patted her arm. “Has your headache returned, dear?” she asked. “You really do look dreadful. Perhaps you should lie down, and Helga will bring you your supper in bed—”

“I will not serve Miss Lydia’s supper in bed!” Helga shouted, already halfway to the kitchen, from the sound of her voice. “She’s not an invalid—so just forget that nonsense, all of you!”

Mittie, Millie and Lydia all looked at each other.

“I think Helga has grown a mite obstinate,” Mittie confided, wide-eyed.

“Papa would never have tolerated such insolence,” Millie observed, but her expression was fond as she gazed toward the space Helga had occupied in the parlor doorway.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Lydia snapped. “Have neither of you noticed, in all these years, that Helga not only manages the household, she manages us?”

“Perhaps we should send her packing,” Mittie said, tears forming in her eyes at the very idea.

“Show her the road,” Millie agreed, crying, too.

“She’s not going anywhere,” Lydia told her aunts, softening at their obvious dismay. “You’re not, either, and neither am I.”

Mittie sniffled. “We’re not?”

“No,” Lydia assured her, slipping an arm around each of her aunts’ shoulders.

No, echoed a voice deep within her heart, with sorrow and certainty. Because Gideon Yarbro or no Gideon Yarbro, tomorrow afternoon, at two o’clock sharp, you’re going to do your duty as a Fairmont and marry Jacob Fitch.

Lydia lifted her eyes to the Judge’s portrait, glaring down at her from above the fireplace.

Sure as sunrise, he was breathing.

THE FIRST THING GIDEON had to do was talk himself out of going back to the Golden Horseshoe Saloon and swilling whiskey—forget beer—until he stopped thinking about Lydia Fairmont.

The second thing was track down Jacob Fitch.

That was easier. He asked about Fitch on the street, and was directed to the First Territorial Bank, right on Main Street.

Still full of that strange fury Lydia had stirred in him, Gideon strode into that bank as though he meant to hold it up at gunpoint, and the few customers inside actually fled as he approached the counter.

The clerk, apparently alone in the place, looked as though he might drop right to the floor and cover his head with both hands.

Gideon slapped his palms down on the counter top. “I want to see Jacob Fitch,” he said. “Now.”

The clerk, a small man with a twitch under his right eye and a nose that wriggled like a rabbit’s, blinked behind his thick spectacles. “Well,” he said tremulously, “you can’t.”

“Why not?” Gideon demanded, not to be put off.

“Because he’s not here,” the clerk retorted, getting braver. “He’s at the tailor’s, being fitted for his wedding suit.”

“And which tailor would Mr. Jacob Fitch be patronizing?” Gideon asked.

“I don’t have to tell you that,” the clerk said.

Gideon reached over the counter, got the little man by his shirt front, and pulled him clear off his no doubt tiny feet. He didn’t normally handle people, at least not ones that were smaller than he was, but he was in a state and nothing would do him but finding Jacob Fitch. “Which tailor?” he repeated. Then, realizing the man couldn’t answer because he was being choked, Gideon slackened his grip just enough to allow the fellow to suck in some wind.

“Feinstein’s,” the clerk sputtered. “On Third Street.”

Gideon allowed the man to slide back to his feet. “Thank you,” he said moderately, and left the bank.

He found the tailoring establishment right where the clerk had said it would be. Mindful of the stir he’d caused in the bank—and regretting it a little—Gideon paused on the sidewalk out front to draw a deep, slow breath. He read and reread the golden script printed on the pristine display window—Arthur Feinstein, Purveyor of Fine Men’s Wear—even examined the three-piece suit gracing a faceless mannequin, as though he might be in the market for new duds.

When he thought he could behave himself, Gideon pushed open the door and went into the shop.

A little bell jingled overhead.

The place seemed deserted, a development that threatened Gideon’s carefully cultivated equanimity.

“Anybody home?” he called. You could take the boy out of Stone Creek, he reflected, but you couldn’t take Stone Creek out of the boy.

A bald head appeared between two curtains at the back of the store. “I’ll be with you right away, sir,” the man said, speaking clearly despite the row of pins glimmering between his lips.

Mr. Feinstein, no doubt. Purveyor of fine men’s wear.

“I’m looking for Jacob Fitch,” Gideon said, raising his voice a little.

Another head appeared beside Feinstein’s, also balding. The face beneath the pate was sin-ugly, and none too pleased at having the fitting interrupted.

“I’m Fitch,” the second man said. “Who are you and what do you want?”

Lydia, Gideon answered silently. I want Lydia.

“My name is Gideon Yarbro,” he said aloud, nodding to the tailor. “And I think you’d prefer it if we had this discussion in private.”

“Feinstein has been my tailor for years,” Fitch said. “I’ve got no secrets from him.”

Gideon did not remark on the oddness of that statement. “All right, then,” he said. “I want to talk to you about Lydia Fairmont.”

Fitch’s face broke into a broad and somewhat lecherous smile, which did nothing to improve Gideon’s mood. “My little bride,” he said. “The wedding is tomorrow.”

“The wedding,” Gideon said, amazed at his own audacity even as he spoke, “is postponed. Maybe even cancelled.”

Fitch stared at him, finally came out from behind the curtains. He was wearing a fancy suit, with the cuffs of the trousers pinned up, but no shirt. Whorls of thick hair covered his chest. “Is Lydia sick?” he asked.

“No,” Gideon said. “She just needs a little time to think.”

What was he doing? Had he gone crazy?

Lydia had told him, straight-out, that she meant to go ahead with the marriage. He had no earthly right, interfering this way.

And yet, she’d sent that letter.

Kept it all those years, and then mailed it.

That, he couldn’t ignore.

Fitch reddened, clearly displeased. Mr. Feinstein ducked back behind the curtains, looking as though he might swallow the pins in the process.

“Time to think?” Fitch thundered. “What is there to think about?”

“Well, sir,” Gideon said diplomatically, “she’s not sure she loves you.”

“What?”

“Things like this happen. Women get the jitters. What with the wedding night and all—”

“Who the hell are you?” Fitch shouted, knotting his banker’s fists at his sides, but not advancing.

A prudent choice, Gideon thought.

“I told you. My name is Gideon Yarbro.”

Fitch, still seething, drew both eyebrows together into one long, bushy streak of hair. “And what have you to do with Lydia?”

“I’m an old friend,” Gideon said.

Fitch glowered. “Before Almighty God, if you’ve tampered with her—”

“‘Tampered’ with her?” Gideon asked.

“You know damn well what I mean!”

Gideon was prepared to go to almost any length to prevent this wedding, but not quite so far as besmirching Lydia’s reputation. “No,” he said. “But I did kiss her this afternoon.”

“You kissed my fiancée? And she allowed that?” Now, Fitch looked as though he might blow a vessel, which would be an unfortunate solution to the whole problem.

“I can’t say as I gave her much opportunity to decide whether to allow it or not,” Gideon admitted affably. He’d said too much already, he knew that. Adding that Lydia had responded to his kiss, nearly melted under it, would be over the line. “She needs time, that’s all I’m saying. A week. A month. A year?”

Fitch practically spat his answer. “Until two o’clock tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “That’s how much time I’ll give her.”

With that, Lydia’s unlikely intended disappeared behind the curtains again. Short of going back there and hauling the man out by the scruff—and then doing what?—Gideon was out of ideas.

Except one, that is.

And the contingency plan had to do with Lydia herself, not Jacob Fitch.

CHAPTER THREE

LYDIA DID NOT SLEEP A WINK that night, and little wonder, with her wedding scheduled for the very next day and the memory of Gideon’s unexpected visit to plague her thoughts.

At the first crow of the neighbor’s rooster, Lydia arose from her bed, washed and dressed and replaited her hair, pinning the braid into a heavy knot at her nape.

Just the way Jacob liked it. She was to wear it just so once they were married, he’d declared on more than one occasion. Modesty befitted a banker’s wife.

Lydia stared miserably at her own reflection, pale in the mirror above her vanity table. Her eyes were hollow, the color of bruises, not violets, and her mouth pinched.

Gideon, she thought, knowing she was torturing herself and unable to stop, would prefer her hair down, tumbling in curls to her waist.

Behind her, the bedroom door opened.

Helga, who never knocked, appeared in the gap, looking troubled. She’d been so sure Gideon would return—now, it seemed, reality was setting in. “Will you be coming down for breakfast?” she asked, keeping her voice low so she wouldn’t wake the aunts, who shared a room across the hall from Lydia’s.

Lydia shook her head. If she tried to swallow so much as a morsel, she would surely gag.

Helga hesitated, then stepped into the room. Crossed to stand behind Lydia and lay a hand on her shoulder. Her gaze strayed to Nell’s wedding dress, hanging like a burial shroud from a hook on the inside of the wardrobe door, came back to Lydia’s wan face, reflected in the vanity mirror. “You don’t have to do this,” the housekeeper said awkwardly. “You mustn’t do this. Lydia, please don’t sacrifice yourself to save a lot of musty old keepsakes and dented silver—”

“Are the aunts ‘musty old keepsakes,’ Helga?” Lydia retorted quietly. “They won’t survive without the roof and walls of this house to shelter them. It’s their entire world.”

Helga gave a disgusted little snort, but her eyes were sad, and her mouth drooped at the corners. “They survived a war, Lydia,” she insisted. “They survived seeing their first home ransacked and then burned to the ground, losing the men they loved, traveling all the way out here to Arizona with the Judge and starting over from scratch. Their father pampered them, treated them like a pair of china figurines that would break if anyone breathed on them. Then Nell did the same, God rest her generous soul, and now you’re carrying on the tradition. Don’t you see, Lydia? No one ever gave Miss Mittie and Miss Millie a chance to show how strong they really are.”

“They were young when all those things happened,” Lydia countered, very softly. “The war and the rest of it, I mean.” She’d tried to imagine what the raid on the plantation back in Virginia must have been like—flames everywhere, consuming all but a few portraits, some jewelry, a small sterling vase that had been a gift from George and Martha Washington, presented to a Fairmont ancestor in appreciation for flour and dried beans sent to Valley Forge during that desperate winter—but she knew such trauma was beyond imagining. Mittie had suffered severe burns, saving the letters Captain Stanhope had written her after accepting a commission in the Army of the Potomac, and Millie had nearly been raped by one of the raiders. A former slave called Old Billy had intervened, according to Nell’s rare and whispered accounts—shared with Helga, not Lydia—and died for his chivalry, shot through the throat.

“Give them a chance,” Helga pleaded. “You’ll see what those old aunts of yours are made of, if you’ll just ask them how they’d truly feel about leaving here.”

Lydia considered the idea, and then shook her head. Mittie and Millie were old now, too old to change. For her sake, they might try to make the best of things, but it was simply too much to ask of them, so late in life.

Swallowing, she made herself meet Helga’s gaze, there in the mirror glass. “There’s been no word from Gideon, then?” she asked, tentatively and at considerable cost to her pride.

“Not yet,” Helga answered solemnly, but there was a faint glint of hope in her pale blue eyes. “Not just yet.”

“He won’t come,” Lydia said, almost whispering.

But he had come when he’d received the letter, hadn’t he?

And he’d kissed her.

“I think you’re wrong about that,” Helga replied, turning, starting for the door. “I’ll bring you some coffee and a roll. You have to eat something, Lydia—whatever happens today, you’ll need your strength.”

There was no point in arguing. Helga would do what Helga would do.

And Lydia would do what Lydia would do: pour the coffee out the window, and leave the roll on the sill for the birds. Because unless a miracle happened, and Lydia had never personally encountered one of those, she would be Jacob’s wife in a few hours—with all the attendant responsibilities, including the conjugal ones.

With that prospect ahead of her, food was out of the question.

“Thank you,” she murmured. “But I’d rather come down to the kitchen to eat, like everyone else.”

Helga nodded, resigned, and remained her usual salty self. “Just don’t go getting the idea I’m going to be waiting on you hand and foot like some servant,” the other woman warned, “because I’m not.”

Lydia laughed, in spite of all she would have to endure in the coming hours, days, months and years. Helga kept that huge house clean, and prepared three meals a day, but she didn’t wait on anybody unless they were about to be buried—or married.

When Helga had gone, Lydia forced some starch into her spine, sat up straight, and regarded her image directly.

“You have got to marry Jacob Fitch,” she told herself, “whether you want to or not. So stop whining about it and carry on.”

The short lecture strengthened Lydia; she rose from her seat in front of the vanity table, made up her bed as neatly as she would have done on any ordinary day, and approached Aunt Nell’s wedding dress, where it hung on her wardrobe door. Although yellowed in places, with brownish crinkles where it had been folded for so many years—said crinkles had thwarted even Helga’s efforts to press them away with an iron heated on the kitchen stove—the gown was still a confection of silk, hand-knotted German lace, seed pearls mellowed by age, and faded but intricately woven ivory ribbon in the bodice.

Regarding that remarkable dress, Lydia couldn’t help thinking about how different things had been the last time a bride donned it. Nell Fairmont had been even younger than Lydia was now—only sixteen—when she’d married Mr. Baker, a newspaper man twice her age, in a church ceremony with all the trimmings—flowers, a cake, an emerald-studded band for her finger. And on that sunlit day, so long ago, Nell had walked down the aisle on the Judge’s arm, wearing this very dress.

Nell had been a mere babe-in-arms, her one sibling, Lydia’s father, barely a year old, when the Judge had fled Virginia with his daughters and two orphaned grandchildren. Nell and Herbert’s mother, Louisa, had died only a few months after the war began; it was said she simply hadn’t been able to bear being separated from her husband, Andrew Fairmont, gone for a soldier. Andrew, Mittie and Millie’s younger brother, had been wounded early on, spent months in a Union hospital, and finally, after an exchange of prisoners, made his slow and painful way home, only to be told that Louisa had perished. He’d stood over her grave for hours, as Nell told the story, and then gone into an outbuilding and hanged himself from one of the rafters.

Nell had been raised in Phoenix, along with her brother, and she’d grown up strong and single-minded, a true child of the frontier. Herbert—nicknamed Johnny by his grandfather, aunts and sister—would one day become a doctor, marry, and sire Lydia. Johnny Fairmont, as the only male member of the family, other than the Judge of course, had been, in Helga’s readily offered opinion, “overindulged.”

Lydia did not recall her mother, who had died when she was very small.

Thinking of her aunt, missing her with an intensity that was almost physically painful, Lydia laid the fingertips of her right hand to the fragile lace of the skirt. “I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I, Aunt Nell?” she asked, very softly. “Making sure the aunts always have a home?”

There was, of course, no answer.

Nell Fairmont Baker had been a spirited woman, widowed young and childless, and bearing up admirably under her private disappointments. When she’d learned of Lydia’s father’s death, she’d traveled to Stone Creek immediately, and taken charge.

She’d always done whatever needed doing, Nell had. She’d prided herself on that. In the same circumstances, wouldn’t she have done her duty for the sake of the family and married Mr. Fitch, just as Lydia was about to do?

Or would she have cut her losses and run—loaded the aunts and Helga into a stagecoach or onto a train and found a place, found a way, to start over?

Lydia had been over this same ground so many times, she was weary of it. She turned from the dress and left her room, set on pretending to eat the roll and drink the coffee Helga was preparing, then gathering flowers from the garden. She would fill the parlor with colorful, fragrant blossoms, she decided, and wear Aunt Nell’s lovely dress, and play the part of a happy bride.

Even if it killed her.

GIDEON HAD PROWLED THE STREETS and alleys and saloons of that lively desert town for most of the night, asking questions about Jacob Fitch. And he liked what he’d heard in response even less than he’d liked the man himself.

Fitch was wealthy in the extreme—no surprise there—though his only evident extravagance was the automobile he’d special-ordered from Henry Ford’s factory. He lived in rooms above the bank with his elderly mother and had never, to anyone’s knowledge, been married or even kept public company with a woman, before Lydia.

Back in his room, watching the sun rise, Gideon went over the plan—the only one he’d been able to come up with—for the hundredth time. It was drastic, it was desperate, and if the rumors he’d gathered the night before had any validity at all, it was dangerous, too. Now that he knew Gideon intended to stop the ceremony any way he could, Fitch was allegedly trying to hire thugs to guard the doors at the Fairmont house.

Gideon had considered wiring Rowdy and Wyatt, asking for their help; he knew they’d ride hard for Phoenix if he did, without requiring an explanation beforehand. But they couldn’t possibly get there on time, not on horseback anyhow, and the train didn’t head south until 3:10 in the afternoon. The stagecoach routes had been cut to almost nothing, now that everybody traveled by rail, and it would be too slow anyhow.

Besides, Gideon doubted his brothers would be willing to break up somebody else’s wedding just on his say-so. No, they’d go straight to Lydia and ask her what she wanted to do, and she’d answer that she wanted to go through with the ceremony, because that was what she’d made up her mind to do. Rowdy and Wyatt would take her at her word.

Gideon couldn’t do that, because of the letter.

Resigned, he changed his shirt, brushed his hair, and left his room, taking his satchel with him. He checked out of the hotel, walked down the street, and bought a buckboard and a team at the first livery stable he came to. Then he headed for Lydia’s place on foot.

The day before, he’d strode right up onto the front porch and rung the bell.

Today, he went around back. If Fitch had managed to put those thugs on his payroll, none of them were in evidence.

The housekeeper answered his knock, a hefty woman with salt-and-pepper hair and blue eyes that seemed somehow faded, as though they’d been worn down by seeing too many hard things.

Her face lit up when she recognized him, though.

“I knew you’d come back,” she said, putting a hand to her ample bosom.

Gideon put a finger to his lips. “Where is Lydia?” he asked quietly.

The woman stepped back, gestured for him to come inside. “In the parlor,” she said, “arranging flowers. The poor thing is determined to make this stupid plan work—she’s stubborn, our Lydia.”

Gideon grinned at that, but not with much spirit. “The aunts—are they around?”

“Miss Mittie and Miss Millie are in their room,” the housekeeper told him. “This is their time for correspondence, though heaven only knows who’s left for them to write to.”

“Would you mind getting them for me, please?” Gideon asked. Then, with another grin, he added, “And keeping Lydia busy for a few minutes?”

The housekeeper beamed. “Best you wait in the library. Lydia won’t go near it today—with all that’s on her mind, she won’t be doing any reading.”

Gideon nodded. “Thank you, Miss—?”

“Helga,” the woman insisted. “Call me Helga.”

Gideon shoved his left hand into his pants pocket, so he wouldn’t shove it through his hair and show how nervous he was. “I’m much obliged, Helga,” he said.

She showed him to the library, a long room jammed with volumes, and he paced after she left, too agitated to thumb through some of the books, the way he would have done on any other day of his life.

He could see why leaving this house would be a wrench for the old ladies, and for Lydia herself. There probably wasn’t another one like it in all of Arizona, though he’d seen grander ones back East. Not many, though.

Presently, Helga returned, shooing Lydia’s aunts before her and hushing them every step of the way. Gideon was struck, once again, by their diminutive size—they reminded him of little birds perched on a ridgepole in a high wind and about to be blown away.

Still, he saw intelligence in their eyes, dignity in the way they held their snow-capped heads. They stuck close to Helga, though, and watched him with frank and wary curiosity.

Gideon kept his distance, lest he frighten them away.

At his urging, they sat down, side by side on a small settee, shoulders touching, gazes intent. They folded their hands in their laps, after smoothing the skirts of their worn black dresses.

“Have you come to kiss Lydia again?” one of them asked.

Although Helga had introduced them to him by name, Gideon could not have said which was which. The sisters were so alike that they might have been two versions of the same person. Or, of course, twins.

“No,” Gideon answered solemnly, after forcing back a grin.

Both ladies looked genuinely disappointed by his reply.

“Miss Mittie, Miss Millie,” he went on, bowing slightly and hoping he’d addressed them in the correct order, “I’m here to ruin Lydia’s wedding, and I’ll need your help to do it.”

Their eyes widened. Helga, standing watch at the library doors, smiled to herself.

“You’d better explain yourself, Mr. Yarbro,” said Millie. Or Mittie. “Ruining a wedding is serious business.”

Gideon suppressed another smile. “Indeed it is,” he agreed. And then he proceeded to outline his plan.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU can’t find the aunts?” Lydia demanded, at one-fifty-five that afternoon, again seated at her vanity table. Helga had helped her into the gown, and was now tucking tiny rosebuds into her hair, since there was no veil. “Where could they possibly have gone?”

Helga tried to look innocent as she shrugged. “Today was correspondence day,” she said, avoiding Lydia’s mirrored gaze. “Perhaps they went to the post office.”

Lydia whirled and stood in one fluid motion, causing the skirts of the dress to rustle around her. “Today is my wedding day,” she said. “Guests have been arriving for the last hour, Mr. Fitch and his mother are waiting downstairs, with the justice of the peace, and the aunts—who never leave this house except to go to church—have gone to the post office?”

“I’m sure they’ll be back in plenty of time for the ceremony,” Helga said, backing up a step or two.

Lydia set her hands on her hips and advanced. “What is going on here?” she demanded.

“A wedding,” Helga answered, with just the faintest snip in her tone. “More’s the pity.”

“You’ve spirited them off somewhere,” Lydia accused, almost beside herself now. The aunts were virtually recluses—that was why she’d insisted that the ceremony be held in the parlor, over Jacob’s mother’s objections, instead of in the church. “Helga Riley, you’d better tell me where they are—this instant!”

“They left with Gideon,” Helga admitted, though her eyes snapped with a sort of smug defiance. “Packed up their old love letters and their best jewelry and walked right out of this house without even looking back.”

“What?” A thrill of anger went through Lydia—anger and something else that wasn’t so easy to define. “They wouldn’t have gone willingly—he must have—have abducted them!”

“Oh, they were quite willing,” Helga insisted, stiffly triumphant. “And it’s you Gideon Yarbro means to abduct. Assuming he can get past the toughs Jacob Fitch has stationed at both the doors, that is.”

“I’ll have the law on him!” Lydia raged. “This is outrageous!”

Helga arched one eyebrow, and a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Don’t be a ninny—it’s wonderful and you know it. Get out of that dress and into something fit to travel in, and climb down the oak tree outside that window, like you used to do when you were a little girl. Fitch’s men will be too shocked to try and stop you and—”

“Helga,” Lydia broke in, still barely able to credit that her aunts, of all people, had lit out with Gideon. “Have you gone mad? Has everyone gone mad?”

Helga ignored the question of sanity and marched over to the wardrobe, rifled through it until she found the divided riding skirt Lydia hadn’t worn since she used to range over the desert on horseback with Nell.

“Put this on,” Helga commanded, thrusting the garment at Lydia, along with the matching jacket and a long-sleeved white shirtwaist with a ruffled collar. “Hurry! If you won’t climb out the window, then I’ll see what I can do to keep that criminal watching the back door busy for a few minutes—”

“Helga, listen to me,” Lydia blurted. “I don’t know what’s come over the aunts, but they’re bound to come to their senses by nightfall, if not before, and when they do, they’re going to be inconsolable—”

“You’ll be the one who’s inconsolable by nightfall if you go through with this wedding, Lydia Fairmont,” Helga said, thrusting the garments into Lydia’s hands.

Downstairs, the enormous longcase clock tripped through a ponderous sequence of chimes, then bonged loudly, once. Twice. Before Lydia had fully accepted that the hour of her doom had arrived, she heard shouting, some sort of scuffle below, on the ground floor.

Alarmed, she rushed out of her room and down the corridor to the top of the stairs, and looked down to see Gideon standing halfway up. His hair was mussed, and his lower lip was bleeding. Seeing Lydia, he blinked once, shook his head, and then extended a hand to her, a broad grin spreading across his face.

Lydia could barely tear her gaze from him, she was so stricken by the mere fact of his presence, but when Jacob stumbled out of the parlor, even more mussed and bloody than Gideon, she gasped.

“You will lose everything,” Jacob vowed, very slowly and precisely, glaring at her. The look of fury in his eyes was terrifying. “Everything.”

Lydia looked back at Gideon again. He was still holding his hand out to her.

She took a step toward him, and then another.

“Everything!” Jacob roared. “This house, your good name, everything!”

By then, she was only a step or two above Gideon. “You’re hurt,” she said, dazed, reaching out to touch his lip.

“Not as hurt as I’m going to be if we don’t get out of here before the guards come to,” Gideon said easily, still grinning. With that, he suddenly hoisted Lydia off her feet, flung her over his right shoulder and bolted down the stairs.

Lydia was too stunned to protest; in truth, she was certain she must be dreaming; such a thing simply could not be happening.

But it was.

Jacob’s mother appeared behind her son in the parlor doorway, her long, narrow face pinched with disapproval. Even lying over Gideon’s shoulder like a sack of chicken feed, Lydia caught a glimpse of something else in the woman’s eyes as they passed.

It was a sort of triumphant relief.

Jacob shouted invective and started forward, surely intending to block Gideon’s way, but Mrs. Fitch restrained him simply by laying a hand on his arm.

“Let her go, Jacob,” she said. “Let the trollop go.”

The trollop? Suddenly furious, Lydia began to kick and struggle, not because she didn’t want, with all her heart and soul, to escape this curse of a marriage, but because she did want to tear into that vicious old woman like a she-cat with its claws out.

Gideon, swinging around in an arch toward the kitchen, gave Lydia a swat on her upended, lace-covered bottom, not hard enough to hurt, but no light tap, either.

If Lydia had been furious before, she was enraged now. “Put—me—down!” she sputtered.

Gideon didn’t even slow his pace, much less do as he’d been told. “If I do,” he said, sounding slightly breathless now, “we’re both going to be in a lot more trouble than we are now.” They’d reached the kitchen, and Lydia tried in vain to grab at the doorframe as they went out.

A man lay sprawled on the back porch, raising himself to his hands and knees as they passed, shaking his head as if befogged. Helga, carrying a handbag and a small reticule and wearing a hat, waited at the bottom of the steps.

Looking down at the man on the porch, Helga put a foot to the middle of his back and flattened him again.

Gideon’s strides lengthened, increasing Lydia’s discomfort and her ire. Helga, keeping pace, gave her a look of reprimand.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this!” Lydia cried.

Gideon all but flung her into the back of a buckboard. “Believe it,” he said, helping Helga up into the wagon with considerably more courtesy and then scrambling up in the box to take the reins.

Lydia heard the brakes squeak as Gideon released the lever, probably with a hard thrust of his foot, and the rig lurched forward as he yelled to the horses.

The ride through that alley was so rough that Lydia had to make three attempts before she managed to sit up.

The man from the porch was running behind them; he caught hold of the tailgate with hands the size of Easter hams and started to climb inside.

Helga fell back onto her elbows and kicked with both feet, as hard as she could, and the man screamed and let go, falling to the ground, bellowing curses after the rapidly departing wagon.

The buckboard careened around a corner, onto a side street, throwing Lydia hard against the side. She tried several times to climb up into the box beside Gideon, but each time there was another corner, and she fell back again, bruising herself.

If this was a dream, it was entirely too realistic for Lydia’s tastes.

Hauling herself onto her knees, grasping the side of the wagon to keep from being hurled down again, Lydia watched in disbelief as they came abreast of the train depot. Steam belched from the stack of the huge engine, and the whistle blew, shrill enough to make her let go and cover her ears with both hands.

Through a haze of shock and utter confusion, she thought she caught a glimpse of her aunts, smiling down at her from one of the passenger car windows. They were both wearing enormous hats, bedecked in flowers and feathers.

Surely, Lydia thought distractedly, she was mistaken. Seeing things. Millie and Mittie hadn’t ridden a train, let alone bought new hats, since Lincoln was president.

But she had no time to consider the matter further, because Gideon brought the wagon to a lurching stop, jumped from the box, raced around to wrench open the tailgate, and hauled Lydia out, flinging her over his shoulder again.

This time, she was too exhausted to fight back.

“Hurry!” Helga yelled to him, over the whistle and the rising chug of the train engine. “They’re coming!”

The next thing Lydia knew, she and Gideon and Helga were onboard the afternoon train, Gideon carrying her down the aisle between the rows of seats as easily as if she weighed no more than his saddlebags.

Passengers observed the scene with amused interest, to Lydia’s everlasting mortification.

The train was already moving, quickly picking up speed, when he finally plopped her into a seat, then stood there glaring down at her, his breath coming hard.

Across the aisle, Mittie and Millie, clad in bright blue silk dresses to match their hats, smiled winningly.

“This is so romantic,” Mittie said. “Don’t you think so, sister?”

Millie nodded. “It’s almost as if Major Bentley Alexander Willmington the Third had come back to life,” she replied. Then, with a wistful sigh, she added, “Major Willmington was so very dashing, you know.”

Lydia returned Gideon’s glare. “I will never forgive you for—for—”

Gideon leaned until his nose was almost touching hers. His lip, she noticed, had stopped bleeding. “For what?” he demanded, through his teeth.

“For striking me!” Lydia whispered, well aware that she and Gideon were the center of attention and so embarrassed that she thought she might actually die of it.

Gideon straightened.

His eyes widened slightly.

And then he threw back his head and shouted with laughter.

CHAPTER FOUR

ROWDY BOARDED THE TRAIN the moment it pulled into the depot at Stone Creek, his face chiseled into angry lines as he stormed along the aisle toward Gideon, paying no mind at all to greetings from other passengers as he passed.

“Have you completely lost your mind?” he rasped, reaching Gideon’s seat and looming over him.

Gideon, who had been dozing for the past couple of hours, exhausted from a sleepless night and the rigors of stealing a bride over the considerable objections of the groom and his hired henchmen, grinned up at his older brother, just to piss him off further.

“I guess the law down in Phoenix must have sent you a telegram,” he said cheerfully. “Reckon it said you ought to be on the lookout for a kidnapper.”

Rowdy’s ice-blue eyes sliced to Lydia, sound asleep in her rumpled wedding dress, her head resting on Helga’s shoulder. A faint smile touched the marshal’s mouth. “Is that who I think it is?”

Gideon nodded, stretched. “Lydia Fairmont,” he confirmed. “All grown up.”

“I’ll be damned,” Rowdy said. A decade before, as the new town marshal, he’d been the one to go out looking for Lydia’s father, in the middle of a blizzard. He’d found Dr. Fairmont sitting frozen in his buggy, along a lonely road, and brought the body back to Stone Creek after spending a long night standing between two horses to keep his own blood from turning to ice.

“Are we under arrest?” one of Lydia’s aunts piped up, from the row of seats just behind Gideon’s, having spotted Rowdy’s badge, most likely. He’d be damned if he could say whether she was Millie or Mittie—the two swore they weren’t identical twins, but as far as he was concerned, they might as well have been, because he sure as hell couldn’t tell them apart.

Rowdy, ever the gentleman, at least in the presence of a lady, whatever age she might be, smiled winningly and swept off his hat. “No, ma’am,” he said. “You are most definitely not under arrest.” But when that sharp blue gaze swung Gideon’s way again, another chill had set in. “You, on the other hand—”

By then, the other passengers had disembarked, some heading to one end of the car and some to the other, but none trying to get past Rowdy, blocking the aisle like an oak tree sprung up through the floorboards. Lydia was sitting up, blinking away sleep, yawning prettily, looking confused and warm and so delectable she made Gideon’s mouth water.

“Rowdy?” she asked, looking pleased to see Gideon’s brother again. Doubtless, she remembered him as some kind of hero, which was galling to Gideon. “Is that you?”

Rowdy inclined his head in the cowboy version of a bow. “Miss Lydia,” he said, acknowledging that she’d remembered correctly, “you have grown up to be a beauty.”

She blushed and lowered her eyes.

“How’s Lark these days?” Gideon asked his brother pointedly, annoyed that Rowdy could charm Lydia so easily when he’d been the one to save her from Jacob Fitch and her own pigheaded sense of familial duty.

Rowdy chuckled. “My wife,” he said, “is as lovely as ever.”

Now that they were well away from Phoenix, and effectively out of Fitch’s reach, Gideon wondered what he was going to do with all these women. It had been one thing giving the aunts money, after he’d talked them into leaving home that morning, and turning them loose in the readymade section of the biggest mercantile in town. Feeding and sheltering them on an ongoing basis would be quite another, and there was Lydia, besides. And Helga.

He surely hoped Stone Creek still had a hotel, with rooms enough to house ladies who were used to genteel surroundings—but with the mine bringing in all sorts of people from all parts of the country, it most likely had several. He’d been planning on staying with Rowdy and Lark himself, since they had plenty of room, until he could find a boardinghouse.

Rising from the train seat, Gideon chuckled. From the look on his brother the marshal’s face, lodgings might not be a problem, for him, at least. Maybe he could talk Rowdy into putting the ladies up in adjoining cells.

“I guess we’d best get off this train,” Rowdy joked, for the benefit of the women, “before we find ourselves rolling on toward Flagstaff.”

Lydia smiled and stood, studiously ignoring Gideon.

Helga and the aunts rose, too.

Since nobody had any baggage, including Gideon, who had left his suitcase behind in the rush to leave Phoenix, there was nothing much to gather. Both the aunts had a small valise, containing what they’d referred to as their “necessities,” and Helga had packed a carpetbag with a few things of her own and Lydia’s. Taking the bag and one of the valises and shoving the second satchel into Gideon’s hands with unnecessary force, Rowdy assured the women that it was a short walk to his place, and his wife, Lark, would be pleased to serve them tea and refreshments and provide whatever else they might need. At this last, his gaze lingered a moment or two on Lydia’s wedding gown.

“Maybe you’d like to wait for me in my office,” he told Gideon, and while his tone was cordial, the expression in his eyes was razor-sharp. “While I get the ladies settled and all.”

Since there would be a yelling match at best, and an arrest at worst, and Gideon figured the Fairmont women and their housekeeper had been through enough for one day, he didn’t argue. He just carried the valise as far as the end of Main Street, and didn’t protest when Helga took it out of his grasp.

Rowdy’s office and the jail were housed in a rambling brick structure, on the site of the original one-cell hole in the wall. Wyatt had gotten the first jail blown up during his brief tenure as deputy marshal, and Gideon felt a little nostalgic for the old place. As a boy, he’d slept in that lone cell often, not because he’d been locked up, but because Rowdy and Lark, newlyweds back then, still living in the tiny house provided for the marshal, hadn’t had an extra bed.

Pardner, the old yellow dog, was long gone, a fact that made something catch in Gideon’s throat as he wandered over the threshold into Rowdy’s spacious office. He was pleasantly surprised to find another dog curled up on the rug in front of the woodstove, just the way Pardner used to do, way back when. The mutt was the same color as his predecessor, and Gideon’s eyes smarted a little as he crouched to say howdy.

Pardner’s double licked his hand and looked up into his face with a doleful little whimper of sympathy.

“Yep,” Gideon told him. “I’m in trouble.”

“His name’s Pardner, too,” a familiar voice said. “Guess Rowdy just couldn’t bring himself to call a dog anything else.”

Gideon stood, turned to see his other brother, Wyatt, towering in the doorway leading outside. Taller than Rowdy and leaner than Gideon, Wyatt was the eldest of the Yarbro brood, and his hair was dark, rather than fair like theirs. His eyes were an intense blue, and they could penetrate a man’s hide, just the way Rowdy’s lighter ones did.

“You back to working as a deputy?” Gideon asked. In his day, Wyatt had been an outlaw, like Rowdy, rustling cattle and robbing trains. All that had changed, though, when he met up with Sarah Tamlin, the banker’s daughter.

Wyatt stepped inside, shut the office door against the noise and dust of the street. “I’m still ranching,” he answered. “I help out once in a while when Rowdy’s shorthanded—since that copper mine started up, Stone Creek’s been right lively. I just came by today because Rowdy rode out and told me about that wire he got from the U.S. Marshal down in Phoenix. What you just told that dog, boy, was truer than you probably know. You are in trouble.”

To show he wasn’t intimidated, and he wasn’t the little brother Wyatt and Rowdy remembered him as, either, Gideon took a seat behind the biggest desk—there were two others in the room, accommodating Rowdy’s regular deputies, probably—leaned back and kicked his feet up. “I did what I had to do,” he said easily.

Wyatt went to the stove, picked up the blue enamel coffeepot, gave it a shake and frowned. “You might be a big Wells Fargo agent now,” he drawled, carrying the pot to a nearby sink and pumping water into it to brew up another batch, “but you’re not above the law. And the law says you can’t carry a woman out of her own home against her will and haul her away on a train.”

“Lydia didn’t want to marry Jacob Fitch anyhow,” Gideon said, trying not to sound defensive. “She as much as said so—yesterday.”

“‘As much as’?” Wyatt repeated skeptically. “And just because a woman says something, that’s no guarantee she means it.” He paused a moment to reflect on some private thought, shook his head. “No, sir, that is no guarantee.”

“Got on the wrong side of your Sarah, did you?” Gideon teased.

“Sarah doesn’t have a wrong side,” Wyatt replied. “And don’t try to change the subject. There’s a warrant out for your arrest, Gideon, and it’s federal.”

Gideon considered his outlaw blood and wondered if it had gotten the best of him after all. “Soon as she’s had time to calm down a little,” he said, with a confidence he didn’t really feel, “Lydia will put an end to that. Like I told you, she didn’t want to go through with that wedding.”

Wyatt did not look convinced. “According to the bridegroom’s report to the marshal down in Phoenix, she was kicking and clawing to get away from you.”

“She was just mad because I whacked her one on the backside,” Gideon said. “She’ll be fine as soon as Lark lends her a dress so she can get out of that wedding gown. I think it was that, more than anything—traveling in a bride’s dress and everybody looking at her—that got under Lydia’s hide.”

Although Wyatt was in profile, Gideon saw the twitch of amusement flicker across his mouth before sobriety set in again. “If Miss Lydia Fairmont presses charges,” Wyatt said, concentrating on brewing that new pot of coffee, “you could go to prison. Kidnapping is a federal offense, in case they didn’t teach you that in detective school.”

“She won’t,” Gideon said, but he wasn’t as sure as he sounded, and Wyatt probably knew that. Lydia had been plenty mad when he swatted her on the bustle to get her to stop wriggling so he could carry her out of that house before the hired muscle was on them.

“Even if she doesn’t throw the book at you,” Wyatt replied, “Jacob Fitch probably will. If he hasn’t already.”

“He can’t do that.”

“Maybe back East, he couldn’t. But this is Arizona, little brother. It’s still the Wild West. The man was as good as married to Lydia, and that will carry some weight.”

Gideon had no time to waste lolling around in one of Rowdy’s cells. He had a job to start, at the Copper Crown Mine, bright and early the next morning, and Wyatt knew that as well as Rowdy did. What Gideon’s brothers didn’t know was that his taking up a shovel was a ruse to get inside, win the miners’ trust, and do whatever he had to to subvert any plans they might be making to go out on strike.

The mine’s owners stood to lose a fortune if that happened, and Gideon was being paid—well paid—to prevent that from happening.

With the coffee started, Wyatt left the stove, walked over to the chair facing Rowdy’s desk, and sat himself down.

“If I were you,” he said, “I’d have my feet on the floor when the marshal comes back. Rowdy’s mad enough to horsewhip you from one end of Main Street to the other as it is—and his temper is shorter than usual, what with all the trouble coming out of the mining camp.”

“I’m not afraid of Rowdy,” Gideon replied, and that was true—so far as it went. He’d never had any reason to be afraid of his brother, and therefore had never tested the theory.

“That’s the curse of theYarbros,” Wyatt said, mock-somber. “None of us has the sense to be scared when we ought to be.”

“Once I explain—” Gideon began, and then stopped himself, because he didn’t want to sound like he was apologizing for what he’d done. If he hadn’t wooed the aunts away and then taken Lydia out of that house, she’d be Mrs. Jacob Fitch by now.

And this would be her wedding night.

The thought of Fitch or anybody else stripping Lydia to the skin and having his way with her made Gideon shudder. God knew, she’d grown into the kind of woman a man would want to handle, but another part of Gideon, a big part, still saw that lost, terrified little girl he’d known a decade before, whenever he looked at Lydia.

“I’m not sorry,” he avowed, lest there be any misunderstanding on that score.

“No,” Wyatt agreed easily, “I don’t imagine you are.”

Bristling, Gideon decided it would be best to change the subject. “How are Sarah and the kids?” he asked.

Wyatt gave one of those spare Yarbro grins, as if they were in short supply and thus hard to part with. They’d gotten that trait from their famous train-robbing father, Payton Yarbro. There were three other brothers, too—Ethan, Levi and Nick—but Gideon had never made their acquaintance, so he didn’t know if they had the same way of hoarding a smile.

“Sarah’s fine,” Wyatt said. “The kids are fine. The ranch is fine, since you were probably going to ask about that next. And we’re not through talking about that stunt you pulled down in Phoenix today, Gideon. If it hadn’t been for Rowdy, that train would have been stopped and you’d have been dragged off and handcuffed. That’s how powerful this Jacob Fitch yahoo is.”

The crimson heat of indignation throbbed in Gideon’s neck, and the backs of his ears burned. “Will you stop talking to me like I’m some kid about to be hauled off to the woodshed for a whipping? I’m twenty-six years old, I went to college, and I’ve worked for the Pinkerton Agency and Wells Fargo.”

Wyatt gave a low whistle, causing the dog to perk up its ears and pricking at Gideon’s already flaring temper. “Twenty-six,” he marveled. “You have attained a venerable age, little brother. At the rate you’re going, though, you might not get much older.”

Wyatt, Gideon figured irritably, was around forty-three. Evidently, he thought that made him a wise old man, with the right to preach and pontificate. “Stop calling me ‘little brother,’” he bit out.

Wyatt merely grinned.

And right about then, Rowdy walked in, slammed the door shut behind him. “Get your feet off my desk,” he growled, after raking his gaze from one end of Gideon’s frame to the other.

Gideon took his time, but he did comply, and that nettled him further.

“Lark’s feeding the women supper, and we’ll put them up for the night,” Rowdy said, heading for the coffeepot. He frowned when he realized the stuff was just beginning to perk—both Rowdy and Wyatt liked their coffee, Gideon remembered distractedly. Drank the stuff like tomorrow had been cancelled. “By morning,” he added, “Fitch will probably be here to get them.”

“What?” Gideon shot out of Rowdy’s chair, which might have been exactly what his brother had intended to happen, though by the time that idea came to mind, it was already too late to spite him by staying put.

Wyatt and Rowdy exchanged grim glances.

“There’s only one way out of this one,” Rowdy mused, after a few moments.

“Afraid so,” Wyatt agreed.

Gideon waited, too cussed to ask what that way might be, as badly as he wanted to know. He’d been a sort of lawman himself, until he’d taken a leave of absence from Wells Fargo to work for the mine owners, and yet he hadn’t considered any of the ramifications of his actions, legal or otherwise.

All he’d wanted to do was get Lydia out of Jacob Fitch’s reach.

“You’ll have to marry the girl,” Rowdy said slowly, like he was explaining something that should have been obvious even to an idiot. “Tonight.”

“Of course, there are other choices,” Wyatt allowed thoughtfully.

“Like what?” Gideon snapped.

“Well, you could go to prison for kidnapping,” Wyatt said.

“Or hand Lydia over to Jacob Fitch when he gets here,” Rowdy speculated.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll do either one of those things!”

“Then you’d better get yourself hitched to her,” Wyatt said.

“If she’ll have you,” Rowdy added. “After today, that seems pretty unlikely to me.”

Rowdy and Wyatt were, for all practical intents and purposes, the only blood relatives Gideon had left, not counting his many nieces and nephews. His father had perished in a shoot-out, years before, and his mother had died before he was a day old, so he had no memory at all of her—not even a tone of voice or a scent. He wouldn’t have recognized Ethan, Levi or Nick if he’d met them on the street, and the sibling he’d truly loved—his half sister, Rose, born to his father and a madam who called herself Ruby—had been killed in an accident when she was just four years old, and he was six.

Gideon had witnessed that tragedy—seen Rose run into the street in front of Ruby’s Saloon over in Flagstaff, pursuing a scampering kitten, seen her fall under the hooves of a team of horses and the wheels of the wagon they’d been pulling. He’d grieved so long and so hard for Rose that he’d sworn never to care as much about anyone or anything again.

And he never had.

Still, what his two older brothers thought mattered to him, with or without the sentiment plain folks and poets called love. They’d been outlaws, Wyatt and Rowdy, desperate men with nothing but a hangman’s noose in their future, and yet, somehow, they’d turned their lives around. Married good women, fathered children, earned fine reputations and accumulated property.

It was because of them, and the examples they’d set, both good and bad, that Gideon had gone to college when he would have preferred to stay in Stone Creek, playing at being a lawman. He’d worked hard at his studies, kept his nose clean even though the Yarbro blood ran as hot in his veins as it had in theirs.

For that reason, and a few others he couldn’t have put a name to, he stayed in that office, on the night of the day he’d stolen another man’s bride, and did his best to keep a civil tongue in his head while his brothers basically called him a fool.

“Fitch could take Lydia back to Phoenix and marry her? Even if she didn’t want to go?” Gideon asked, the fight pretty much gone out of him now.

“He couldn’t legally force her to leave with him if she didn’t want to,” Rowdy reasoned quietly. “But there’s no telling if he’d give her a choice in the matter—any more than you did.”

For the first time since he’d carried Lydia out of that mansion, tossed her into the back of the wagon, and forced her onto a departing train, Gideon squared what he’d done with the excuses he’d made for doing it.

“Damn,” he muttered.

“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Damn.”

“You can still make this right, Gideon,” Rowdy said. “I ought to throw you straight into one of those cells back there, keep you in custody until the marshal in Phoenix either gives me leave to release you or sends a deputy to fetch you back to give an accounting to some federal judge. But you’re my lit—you’re my brother, and I don’t want to see you head down the wrong road, especially after you buckled down and got through college and worked a man’s job after that. So I’m giving you a chance, Gideon. You go and talk to Lydia. If she’s willing to throw in with the likes of you—and again, I’ve got my doubts about that, since she seems like the sensible sort—the two of you could be married tonight. That would prevent Fitch from taking her anywhere.” He paused—for Rowdy, this was a lot of talking to do at one time—and huffed out a weary breath before finishing up. “There’s one other thing, Gideon. After what happened today, and never mind that it was through no fault of her own, Lydia will be the subject of some gossip down in Phoenix, thanks to the scandal you started by stealing her that way.”

Since he wasn’t overly concerned with propriety himself, Gideon hadn’t thought about that any more than he’d thought about the possibility of being charged with a crime. But he’d created a scandal even by the standards of a scrappy, boisterous cow-town like Phoenix—which made him wonder if Jacob Fitch still wanted Lydia for a wife, or if he just wanted to punish her for making him look the fool.

Gideon sat down in one of the other chairs, braced his elbows on his thighs, and put his face in his hands. He’d had the best of intentions, and look what had come of it. Still, what could he have done differently? He’d approached Fitch at the tailor’s shop, after talking to Lydia, and asked the man to give her more time.

Fitch had refused adamantly, and without a second thought.

Gideon felt a hand rest briefly on his shoulder, knew it was Rowdy standing by his chair even before he heard his brother’s voice.

“If it’s any consolation, Gideon,” Rowdy said gruffly, “I’d have done the same thing in your place, most likely.”

“Me, too,” Wyatt admitted.

Rowdy spoke again. “I’d tell you to forget this mining job you’ve signed on for—I don’t know why you’d want it anyway, with your education and experience working for Pinkerton Agency and then Wells Fargo—and light out of here, pronto. But I think you did what you did because you have strong feelings for Lydia Fairmont, and that’s something a man should never run away from.”

“Amen,” Wyatt said. “I’d be dead by now, if it hadn’t been for Sarah.”

Gideon raised his head, squared his shoulders. Whatever he felt for Lydia—a desire to protect her, mostly, he supposed—it wasn’t like what Rowdy had with Lark, or what Wyatt had with Sarah.

“I’ll talk to her,” he said, after a long time, getting to his feet.

Rowdy glanced at the clock—it was a little after eight. “Don’t wait too long,” he advised. “Lydia’s had herself quite a day, and she’ll likely want to turn in soon.”

Gideon nodded glumly, started for the door.

Wyatt was fixing to leave, too, while Rowdy banked the fire in the potbellied stove. Neither of them had drunk so much as a drop of that coffee they’d set such store by, Gideon noticed.

“Sarah will be watching the road for me,” Wyatt said. Then he grinned. “If there’s about to be a wedding, though, maybe I ought to stay around and see what happens this time.”

Although nothing was funny to Gideon at that moment, most especially weddings, he still gave a raspy chuckle as he stepped out onto the sidewalk.

Rowdy whistled for the dog and caught up to him in a few strides. Wyatt had a horse waiting, so he swung into the saddle and reined toward home.

As much as he’d jabbered inside the jailhouse, Rowdy didn’t say a thing as he and Gideon and the dog named Pardner headed for the big stone house at the end of a tree-lined lane behind the marshal’s office. Lights glowed in all the windows, and the sight made Gideon yearn to belong in such a place, like Rowdy, to have a wife watching the road for him, the way Sarah watched for Wyatt. Maybe even a few kids and a dog of his own.

Instead, he was about to face a woman who had every reason to want him lynched.

THE YARBRO HOUSE WAS BIG, though not nearly as big as Lydia’s home in Phoenix—her former home, that is. The furnishings were simple, the ornaments few and sturdy, and little wonder with four high-spirited children chasing each other through the spacious, uncluttered rooms—and another little Yarbro on the way, by the looks of Lark’s burgeoning middle.

When Lydia had first known Lark, as her teacher, Lark’s hair had been dark, but now it was almost the color of honey. Even as an eight-year-old, with problems aplenty of her own, Lydia had sensed that “Miss Morgan” was unhappy, and running away from something—or someone. Evidently, Lark had been trying to disguise herself back then—changing the color of her hair had been a drastic measure, one no respectable woman would undertake without good reason.

The dilemma, whatever it was, had apparently been resolved—Lydia wouldn’t have presumed to ask any personal questions in order to find out, though she burned to know—with Lark’s marriage to Rowdy. Lydia had never seen such serenity in a woman’s face and bearing as she did in Lark Yarbro’s, even with a houseful of unexpected company.

Lark had immediately lent Lydia a dress, as well as a nightgown for later, since Helga had packed only her most prized personal mementos. Lark had served them all supper, keeping plates warm in the oven for Rowdy and Gideon, and graciously settled the aunts, both mute with exhaustion and residual excitement, in a guest room on the main floor.

Lydia and Helga would be sharing the double bed in a small chamber behind the kitchen—Helga, like the aunts, had retired immediately after supper, utterly worn out and still defiantly pleased with her part in the disasters of the day.

“You’re so grown up, Lydia,” Lark sighed, as they sat at the kitchen table, having after-supper cups of tea. “It’s wonderful to see you again.”

Lydia blushed. “The circumstances leave something to be desired, you must admit.”

Lark smiled at that, shook her head. Lydia had told her the story of her interrupted wedding—she’d had to, arriving at the woman’s door in a bridal gown the way she had. And what details she’d left out, Helga and the aunts had hurried to provide.

They seemed to think this was all some grandly romantic adventure.

Lydia, apparently the only one still in possession of her senses, knew it for the calamity it was.

“These Yarbro men,” Lark said. “A woman never knows what to expect next.”

“I certainly didn’t expect to be abducted on my wedding day,” Lydia said, but now that some of the panic had subsided, along with the shock, she’d admitted the truth, at least to herself. She was glad Gideon had kept her from marrying Jacob; she’d hoped all along that he would come for her, that was why she’d sent the letter in the first place.

It was purely selfish to be so relieved, given the bleak future she and the aunts and Helga would have to face, but she was relieved. If it hadn’t been for Gideon, Jacob Fitch would be doing unspeakable things to her in his bed by now, with the blessing of God and man. Instead, she was sitting quietly at a kitchen table, in a lovely house at the end of a quiet country lane, sipping tea with her former teacher.

Except for her aunt Nell, Lydia had never admired another woman as much as she did Lark.

She was just about to excuse herself and retire when the screened door opened, and Rowdy came in, with a dog trailing behind him and Gideon following somewhat forlornly behind the dog.

Rowdy approached his wife’s chair, bent to kiss the top of her head. Lark glowed, smiling up at him.

“I’ve kept your supper warm,” she told him.

“I’ll eat later,” Rowdy answered, with a twinkle in his eyes. “Right now, you and me and Pardner are going to make ourselves scarce for a little while.”

Lydia felt a jolt of something very complicated as her gaze skirted Lark and Rowdy and connected with Gideon’s face. What she felt was partly alarm, partly annoyance, and mostly a complete mystery to her.

Gideon, meanwhile, hovered just over the threshold, as if struck dumb, long after Lark and Rowdy had left the kitchen.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” he finally said. “But if you want to go back to Jacob Fitch—if that’s really what you want—I’ll take you to him myself.”

It was too late to go back now, though Gideon probably didn’t realize that. Even if Jacob was willing to take the chance that Lydia hadn’t been “compromised,” as he would undoubtedly have put it, his mother wouldn’t be. The look Lydia had seen on the woman’s face before leaving the house with Gideon was burned into her memory—Malverna Fitch was not the sort to forgive such a disgrace.

Furthermore, without Mr. Fitch to guarantee payment of the family’s many debts, the creditors would close in, possibly as soon as tomorrow morning, since word of the aborted wedding had surely spread from one end of Phoenix to the other within a matter of minutes, like the wildfires that plagued the desert.

“I haven’t the first idea what I’m going to do, Gideon Yarbro,” Lydia said presently, with what sternness she could muster. “But I most certainly won’t be returning to Phoenix.”

Gideon, standing so still for so long, finally moved. He crossed to Lydia, crouched beside her chair, the way he’d done in the parlor at home the day before, took her hand, and looked up into her face. “I’m not a rich man,” he told her solemnly, “but I work hard, and I’ve got a little money put by. I can look after you, Lydia, and your aunts, too. Even Helga, if she doesn’t mind earning her keep.”

Lydia stared at him, dumbfounded—again. She could not think of a single other person who had Gideon’s capacity for surprising her. “Are you proposing to me?” she asked bluntly, because she was simply too spent to arrange her words in any other way.

“I guess I am proposing,” Gideon said, after swallowing visibly. “Rowdy said it was the least I could do, after today.”

If Lydia hadn’t wanted so badly to cry, she would have laughed. No wonder Rowdy had squired Lark out of the kitchen so quickly, leaving the two of them alone. He’d probably ordered Gideon to make things right. “That’s why you’re offering for me, Gideon? Because your brother thinks you ought to?”

Gideon made an obvious attempt to smile, and failed utterly. His expression was one of resignation, not ardor. “He’s right, Lydia,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.”

“The least you can do,” Lydia echoed. She found herself possessed of an almost incomprehensible urge to touch his face, tell him everything would be all right. At the same time, if she’d had the strength to slap Gideon Yarbro silly, she probably would have done it.

“I’m getting this all wrong,” Gideon said, and this time he did smile, though sadly. “It won’t be a real marriage, Lydia. I won’t expect you to share my bed, that is. You’ll have a home, and so will the aunts, and Fitch won’t be able to cause you any trouble because you’ll be my wife. That’s not such a bad bargain, is it?”

It was, in Lydia’s view, a terrible bargain, especially the part about not sharing a bed. Gideon had awakened a formidable hunger in her when he’d kissed her, and now he expected to marry her and still leave that hunger unexplored, unsatisfied?

On the other hand, he made a good case.

The aunts would be safe, with food to eat and a roof over their heads, and they obviously trusted Gideon or they wouldn’t have left the house with him, let alone bought new hats and dresses and traveled all the way to Stone Creek onboard a train at his behest.

As for herself, once she’d exchanged vows with Gideon, she would be part of the Yarbro clan. Lonely all her life, she would have sisters, Lark and Sarah, and a brother, as well, in Rowdy. She would have nieces and nephews and, in time, perhaps even friends, people who liked her for herself and not because she was a Fairmont.

“But what about you, Gideon?” Lydia asked softly, after mulling over all these things. “What could you possibly gain from such an arrangement?” A dreadful thought struck her then. “Suppose you meet another woman someday, and fall in love with her and—”

And I won’t be able to bear it if you do.

A muscle in Gideon’s strong, square jaw bunched, then relaxed again. “I’ll never fall in love with another woman, Lydia,” he said. “I can promise you that.”

“How can you, Gideon?” Lydia asked. “How can you promise such a thing?”

Gideon rose to his full height then, but he still held her hand. “A long time ago,” he answered, looking directly, unflinchingly, into her eyes, “I made up my mind never to love anybody. And so far, I’ve stood by that. That’s not likely to change.”

Looking back at him, Lydia knew Gideon meant what he said.

And even as she made a firm decision of her own—she would accept his proposal, if only to protect herself, the aunts and Helga from the wrath of Jacob Fitch—she felt her heart crumble into dry little fragments, like a very old love letter found in the bottom of a dusty box and handled too roughly.

CHAPTER FIVE

ONCE THE DECISION WAS MADE, Rowdy went to fetch the preacher, and the aunts and Helga were awakened to stand witness to the ceremony in their nightgowns, sleeping caps and wrappers.

Lydia put on her aunt Nell’s wedding gown, for the second time in one day, and Gideon allowed Lark to drape him in Rowdy’s best Sunday coat and knot a string tie at his throat.

It might as well have been a noose, considering his expression, Lydia thought, finding herself in a strange state of happy despair.

“We’ll have to hold a reception as soon as we can,” Lark fretted happily. “Sarah and Maddie will never forgive us if we don’t.”

Lydia knew that Sarah was Wyatt’s wife, though she had yet to meet her second prospective sister-in-law, and vaguely recalled Maddie as Mrs. Sam O’Ballivan. A prosperous rancher and a former Arizona Ranger, Mr. O’Ballivan had been Stone Creek’s leading citizen when Lydia had lived there as a child.

“There’ll be no fuss,” Gideon said to his sister-in-law, sternly alarmed at the prospect of a party to celebrate the marriage. “I mean it, Lark.”

Lark smiled. “I’m sure you do, Gideon, dear,” she replied lightly. “But this time, you’re not going to get your way. Fuss isn’t the word for what’s going to happen when this town finds out you’ve come home and gotten married, all in the same day and without a howdy-do to anybody.”

“I haven’t had time for a howdy-do,” Gideon snapped. “And I’ve got to be at the mine, ready to work, at seven o’clock sharp tomorrow morning. When I’m through there—after a little matter of, oh, ten or twelve hours—I’ll be turning the town upside-down looking for a place to put all these women—”

A place to put all these women.

The phrase echoed in Lydia’s mind, brought a sting of humiliation to her cheeks. Gideon made it sound as though she and the aunts and Helga were a band of unwanted horses in need of stabling.

If she’d had anywhere else to turn, any honorable way to earn a living, she would have told her clearly reluctant bridegroom to go and—well—do something else beside marry her.

The minister arrived, a plump, middle-aged man, looking sleepy and surprised, the fringe of hair around his bald pate still shining with the water he’d used to slick it down in his haste to answer Rowdy’s summons.

A license had been hastily prepared, and Gideon signed it with a bold, harsh flourish. Lydia’s own hand trembled as she penned her much less spectacular signature beneath his.

Probably anxious to get the whole thing over with, so he could return to his bed, the man of God took up his post with his back to the fireplace, and impatiently pointed to where the groom ought to stand. Lydia stood frozen for so long that Helga finally put her hands on her shoulders from behind and pushed her to Gideon’s side.

For an event of such momentous significance—neither Lydia’s life nor Gideon’s would ever be the same, after all—the ceremony went very quickly. In fact, Lydia noted, stealing glances at the mantel clock behind the minister’s right shoulder, the whole thing was finished in under ten minutes.

Lydia responded when she was supposed to—with prompting from Helga, who kept nudging her in the ribs. Gideon, she saw out of the corner of her eye, had to unclamp his jaw before every utterance he made.

Finally, the clergyman, after a nervous glance at Rowdy, who was standing at Gideon’s right side, announced loudly, “I now pronounce you man and wife. Mr. Yarbro, you may kiss your bride.”

Lydia, concentrating on getting through the wedding without fainting or bursting into tears, had not thought about the traditional kiss. She’d barely had a moment to steel herself for it when Gideon turned her to face him and gave her a brief, almost brotherly, peck on the mouth.

“Well, then,” the minister said, all but dusting his hands together. “That’s done.”

The aunts giggled like little girls and clapped their hands together, and Helga muttered, “Thank heaven!”

Lark gave Gideon a scathing look as he left Lydia’s side, without so much as a backward glance, to pay the minister for his services and escort him to the door. Then she hugged Lydia, whispering close to her ear, “Everything will be all right—I promise.”

Rowdy, clearly as annoyed with Gideon as Lark was, smiled and kissed Lydia on the forehead, welcoming her to the Yarbro family.

His words brought tears to her eyes and, seeing them, Rowdy wrapped his strong arms around her and drew her close against his chest for a long moment. “You’ve got brothers now,” he told her. “Wyatt and me. And we’ll look after you, even if that young fool yonder doesn’t.”

Lydia let her forehead rest against Rowdy’s shoulder. She nodded, too overcome to say thank-you.

The celebration, alas, was as short as the ceremony.

The aunts each kissed Lydia on the cheek, and then turned to go back to their room. Helga actually shook her hand, as though they’d completed some business arrangement, and returned to the nook behind the kitchen, yawning as she went.

Rowdy and Lark each skewered Gideon with a look and then vanished, like the others. Rowdy’s supper, evidently, had been delayed long enough.

And so Lydia found herself alone in the parlor with Gideon.

Her husband.

What was she supposed to do now?

Gideon looked as uncertain as she felt.

“I guess that wasn’t the wedding you probably dreamed about, growing up,” he said, smiling for the first time since they’d all assembled in the Yarbros’ front room a mere fifteen minutes before.

He was wrong about that, at least in part, though Lydia would never have told him so. She had dreamed of marrying Gideon many, many times, as a child, as a young girl, as a woman. But in her fancies, he’d always been eager to make her his bride, and there had been church bells, and flowers, and pews full of well-wishers. And a romantic honeymoon afterward.

Speechless, Lydia simply shook her head.

Gideon shoved a hand through his hair, glanced toward the stairs. “I know I said I wouldn’t make you share my bed,” he began, “but—”

Lydia found her voice. She even came up with a shaky little smile, then finished the sentence for him. “But they’ll expect us to sleep in the same room, since it’s our wedding night.”

Gideon nodded. He looked so glum, so tired, that Lydia’s foolish heart went out to him.

She walked over to him, took his hand. “It’s all right, Gideon,” she teased in a mischievous whisper, once again taken over by a bolder, stronger version of herself. “I promise I won’t compromise your virtue.”

He laughed, and the sound heartened Lydia. “Come along, then, Mrs. Yarbro,” he said, squeezing her fingers lightly. “Let’s turn in for the night, like the respectable married couple we are.”

Lydia’s heart sprouted wings and flew up into her throat, fairly choking her, but she allowed Gideon to lead her up the stairs, in that ancient, thrice-worn wedding dress.

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