The driver’s blood-curdling yell produced one of equal volume from an ordinarily imperturbable Lucien Bourget.
“On the floor!” the shotgun messenger shouted to the passengers. The deafening report of his rifle, the sound of bullets whizzing past the uncovered windows of the coach, the unmistakable whump, whump of slugs lodging in wood made the order unnecessary.
Rhys shoved Justine Blalock, the pretty young lady who shared the Concord coach’s spartan interior, to semi-safety in the lower part of the compartment, with Lucien. The cramped space would not accommodate another. The best Rhys could do to remove himself as a target was to attempt to flatten himself on the short stretch of the leather-covered bench above the crouching pair. The driver had whipped the team to a bone-juggling pace. Rhys could not hope to stay put long. By bracing his feet solidly against one side wall of the bouncing coach, and firmly gripping the swaying loop of cord that held back the hide curtains, he managed to avoid tumbling onto the heads of Lucien and Justine until the brakes locked and the coach skittered to a rocking halt.
“Ruby’s hit!” the driver shouted.
Upside down in the laps of Justine and Lucien, Rhys apologized to the lady as he hurriedly righted himself, and courteously helped Justine get her crushed straw bonnet out of her face. A moment later, with a protesting Justine clutching his sleeve, he flung open the coach door, almost hitting the snorting nose of a skittish horse prancing alongside the waylaid Gamble Line stage.
“Hold it! Don’t git out ’til I tell you,” shouted the rider. He held a cocked pistol in his outstretched arm, and wore a bandana mask. He reined his nervous horse to a standstill. Dark, anxious eyes assayed Rhys Delmar, noting his expensive clothes. “Be a shame to mess up that purty suit.”
The bandit confronting Rhys had two partners. Their faces were also obscured by colored kerchiefs tied tight across the jaws. One spurred his horse nearer the driver’s box and aimed his gun at the man’s head. The shotgun man, one Strong Bill Ash because of his size, had felt the stock of his rifle explode in his grip when it was hit by a bullet. Strong Bill held his bloody, useless hands in the air.
“Throw down that Wells Fargo box,” demanded the man taking aim, unquestionably the one in charge.
“Git it yourself,” the driver bellowed at him. “Lemme down to see about Ruby.” Tom Cribbet’s worried eyes went to one of the lead horses as he tied down the reins. The animal, a sturdy roan mare, stood trembling in the traces as she bled heavily from a gunshot wound to the shoulder.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” the bandit growled, slowly redirecting his weapon. While the driver sat, mouth wide open, momentarily frozen in disbelief, the man leveled his gun at the mare’s head and fired. The animal wheezed once, stumbled, then fell to the ground dead.
The act was too much for the driver. With a whoop of rage he recklessly launched himself from the seat. Before the bandit could aim and fire, the driver’s shoulder hit, knocking him from the saddle and carrying both men to the ground. Knotted together they landed in the hardscrabble beneath the thrashing legs of the saddle horse. For a minute or two the pair struggled, but the driver was at a disadvantage having landed hard beneath the weight of his adversary. The bandit, barely scathed, had not lost his gun in the fall. He got an elbow free, then the whole of his arm. Using his weapon like a club, he struck the brave driver in the center of his sun-browned forehead, splitting the toughened skin, knocking Tom Cribbet unconscious.
Justine Blalock had held on when she saw the horse shot, but the sight of the unconscious driver was unbearable. She screamed, a long piercing wail of terror. It ended only when the bandit who had been unseated lurched to his feet and ordered Rhys to step down from the coach. With the mounted bandit’s gun trained on him, Rhys had no sensible choice but to comply. With his back against the coach, and the steel barrel of one gun almost at his skull, he stood as still as he was told.
The man on foot grabbed Justine’s arm and snatched her out of the coach. She screamed again, louder and longer and shriller than before.
“Shut up!” the man told her. “Shut up or I’ll—”
He didn’t need to continue. Justine choked off her scream and found her voice. “My daddy will hang you for this,” she cried, attempting to jerk her arm free of the bandit’s clamplike hold.
The man jerked her against his chest. “Your daddy and what army, little girl?”
“He won’t need an army!” Justine spat back. “He’s sheriff in Wishbone. He’ll hunt you—”
The man slung her arm free and pushed her with such force that her back struck the wheel rim painfully hard. Justine cried out.
Cursing, the bandit kept his gun pointed at her. “Who is he?”
“My daddy is Sheriff Len Blalock,” she said proudly, righting her misshapen bonnet.
“Shit!” The bandit backed away, grappling for his horse’s reins. Finding them, he led the animal close and mounted. “Git going,” he said to his partners.
“The strong box—” the third man began uncertainly, his voice and eyes years younger than either of the other’s.
“Forget it.” Tugging on the reins he backed his horse a dozen paces then whirled the animal around and galloped off into the cover of scrub and rock near the road.
One bandit spurred his horse and followed immediately. The third, the one who had held his gun to Rhys’s head, was slow to follow. He was slow enough that when he urged his mount to a gallop, Rhys had already scooped a fist-sized rock from the ground and hurled it at the man. The hollow sound of it striking the base of the bandit’s neck brought a gasp from Justine. The stunned rider hit the ground hard. His horse whinnied and loped off without him.
“I will be damned!” said Strong Bill as he tied strips of his handkerchief around his injured hands. He wouldn’t have given two bits’ worth of credence to his French passenger if he hadn’t seen what he did. Usually his kind, those overly refined gents who came West in their high-class clothes, dropped in a dead faint the first time they faced a threat.
“Boyhood games.” Rhys shrugged. “I regret it was not the other one I hit.”
Justine, breathing hard, laid a hand on Rhys’s arm and felt the powerful muscle beneath his sleeve. “You are remarkably brave,” she said softly.
“No, mademoiselle, if anyone is brave it is you.” Rhys took her hand and held it a moment. “Lucien,” he said. “See what aid you can give that man.”
“I’ll help,” Justine offered as Lucien retrieved a canteen from the driver’s box.
With Justine’s assistance Lucien worked to revive the downed driver while Rhys bound the prostrate bandit. When the driver was clearheaded enough to stand and walk, Rhys helped unharness Ruby from the traces. He saw a tear streak the driver’s stoic face, and a sob shake the rangy torso. All the while Rhys Delmar wondered what refuge he was likely to find in this brutal, spare land that seemed made of nothing but cactus and sand and trouble.
He was in an advanced state of indignation when the coach rolled into Wishbone with an injured driver and messenger, short one horse and carrying a complaining bandit strapped to the luggage rack. The harrowing experience on the poorly protected stage capped the impossibility of convincing the Gamble Line’s agent in Phoenix that Rhys Delmar owned almost half the company.
“Take it up with Teddy,” the burly, short-tempered agent had told him. “But right here, right now, if you want passage on the Gamble Line stage to Wishbone you’ll pay for a ticket and so will your ‘manservant.’”
Rhys had been forced to borrow the cost of the two passages from Lucien, in addition to the money for transportation from the port of Boston across the American continent.
Teddy. Zachary Gamble’s brother, he supposed, returning his thoughts to the present. Teddy. Some vulgar corruption of Theodor. Teddy Gamble, who ran the stage line badly if Rhys’s trip had been typical. Passengers had to furnish their own refreshments and provisions or eat the plain fare dished out by the poor cooks at the way stations. From Strong Bill’s words he learned this was not the first attack the line had suffered. Why had Theodor not hired more guards, hired mounted riders to accompany the stage? Teddy. Probably no brighter than his brother Zack Gamble.
Rhys climbed out of the coach. As his feet hit the powder-dry street of Wishbone he noticed that his best shoes were caked with dust. His good silk cravat was now a bandage around Cribbet’s head. His finest bowler hat was no longer in the coach—it had been lost in the confusion of the holdup. And somewhere along the line his most expensive custom-tailored suit had sustained an irreparable rip in the sleeve.
“Look at this ruin, Lucien.” Rhys brushed a cloud of dust from his shoulders, then gave up when he saw he was only rearranging the embedded dirt. He stomped his feet to clean his shoes but found the dust there stubborn as dried flour dough. “I am undone by this Gamble Stage Line,” he grumbled to the servant. “I tell you, Lucien, this damnable land and this company need civilizing.”
“I could not agree more, monsieur,” Lucien said as he helped Justine Blalock out of the coach. The attack had nearly been his undoing. All along the route from Missouri he had expected an attack of Indians, vicious savages with scalping knives and deadly arrows. That of the bandits came close to fulfilling his dire expectations.
Justine, almost as shaken as Lucien, spoke softly to Rhys. “I’ll tell my father what you did,” she said. “Once he’s gotten over being furious that I decided not to stay another term at school he’ll want to thank you.”
Rhys put aside his bad temper long enough to recall the charm that came so easily when he was with a woman. “He could not be furious with you more than a moment, Mademoiselle Justine,” he told her as he took her small hand in his and lifted it to his lips.
Her face flushed, her hand hanging in midair for a few seconds after Rhys released it, Justine smiled adoringly at him, said a quick good-bye to both men, then fled across the street and into the office of Wishbone’s law officer. On her heels, Strong Bill none-too-gently nudged the stunned prisoner in the same direction.
Cribbet threw down Rhys’s valise then climbed down to attend the horses. Rhys saw, to his dismay, that the fine leather casing of his valise was singed by powder burns and shot through, along with its contents, by no less than three bullet holes.
His mood changed swiftly. He gave the bag a vicious kick. “This Gamble Stage Line is evidently run by a half-wit,” he grumbled. “Where is this Teddy Gamble?” he begged of a youngster who was scrambling up the coach to unload the remaining cargo. “I need to tell the man he’ll be required to replace my entire wardrobe. As part owner of the Gamble Stage Line, I—”
The lad nudged his arm. “Right there,” he whispered. “That’s Teddy Gamble.”
Teddy’s back was turned to the passengers, as she listened to Cribbet’s account of the holdup and checked the condition of the worn-out coach team. Teddy also listened, with forced reserve, to the Frenchman’s entire tirade. Her daddy’s policy had been that the customer was right. Teddy followed the same philosophy and she was prepared to soothe and reassure the whimsical, overwrought traveler as soon as he calmed down. But his unfinished last statement sent a shocking jolt through her whole body. Her head snapped up and her spine went rigidly straight.
Teddy Gamble, attired in fringed buckskin trousers and shirt, and with tightly laced leggings that rose to her knees, had her back to him. Rhys looked at the slight form with the masculine clothes and feminine curves and assumed he had discovered the reason for the Gamble Line’s shortcomings. No man with that build was much of a man. He stood and stared. Before he could voice his observations Lucien put them into words.
“N’est-ce pas?” the manservant whispered. “This Monsieur Gamble has the look of an effete, a sissy.”
“At best,” Rhys said moderating his voice too late.
On top of her morning’s experience with Adams and Cabe Northrop and another attack on a stage it was too much. Teddy spun around like a hot desert whirlwind. She had a short staff in her hand that she had been using to unfasten the hard-to-reach harness from the traces.
“At worst,” she said eyes blazing, voice crackling. “I’m a gal who’s got as much use for a pair of tinhorn, foreign, starched-shirts as I have for a pair of buzzards.”
Lucien fell back as the staff she wielded thumped his master’s chest.
Rhys’s gaze went to the swell of her breasts. “You are a woman!” he stammered.
He could not have invited more trouble if he had lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite and tucked it in his pocket.
“Well, thank you for clearing that up.”
The swinging staff telegraphed her anger as the hook on the end of it again thumped Rhys’s chest. Before it gouged his midnight-blue brocade vest he caught hold of it. Aside from the countess, Rhys had never confronted a woman ready to do him harm. A man with his good looks and charm might go a lifetime without such an experience.
Chagrined, anxious to make amends, he gave a cavalier bow to Teddy Gamble. As his eyes swept over her, he saw a glint of silver at her throat, a necklace set with pretty blue-green stones. On her wrist she wore a bracelet of similar design. A belt of black leather and stamped silver medallions cinched her waist. Rhys gave her his best smile and decided all was not lost. The jewelry she wore with her strange garments was his clue. Teddy Gamble might wear the trousers of a man but she was not without a woman’s vanity. “Madam...moiselle Gamble,” he said, with the smooth, deep voice that had weakened many feminine knees. “My apologies. It seems we have gotten off to a bad start.”
Teddy gave him a look so hot he felt it singe his skin. Snatching the staff out of his grasp she stretched herself up to a tall five feet four inches.
“You bet your ass we have!”