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Michelle gazed around the town as Luther hitched Clara to the post outside the livery. Ranford appeared the same as she remembered, drab and gray. Had it already been a month since she’d gotten off the coach?
“I’ll fetch the supplies I ordered last time,” Luther said. “Why don’t you go to the store and see if there’s any mail?”
“All right.” Luther was worried that the papers from the mail-order bride company wouldn’t arrive and he’d have to send her back. It was a genuine concern of his, no matter how many times she told him papers didn’t mean anything. It was futile to check, but she had to pretend.
She entered the store and stopped short. Jed stood near the display counter. A blond man leaned next to him.
“Well, look who’s back,” Jed commented as his gaze flickered across her breasts.
Her skin prickled, and her instincts flared a warning to leave, now. She inched backward, feeling for the door behind her.
“Had enough of that half-breed, Missy? Are you ready for a real man?” Jed chuckled. “Get her, Pete.”
Michelle spun and fumbled with the door handle. The blond man grabbed her by the back of her neck and squeezed hard.
“Think you’re goin’ somewhere? Don’t leave now, sweetheart. We’re just getting started with you.”
“Let me go!” Michelle twisted and tried to wriggle free as Pete dragged her away from the door. Jed squeezed her right breast, and she kicked him hard in the shin.
“Bitch! I’ll make you pay for that.” Jed backhanded her across the mouth and she crumpled to the wooden floor.
Jed crawled on top of her, pinning her beneath him. His rough hands slid up her skirt, and she screamed as loud as she could.
The next thing she knew, Jed’s weight was thrown off her. She glanced up in time to see Luther punch Jed in the face. Pete grabbed Luther from behind and tackled him to the floor. The two men took turns hitting and kicking Luther as he desperately tried to fight them off.
“Get away from him!” Michelle spotted an iron skillet on a nearby shelf. She scrambled to her feet and snatched up the skillet as Jed and Pete fought with Luther. As soon as she got a clear shot, she swung the skillet at Jed as hard as she could. It cracked against the side of his skull and he dropped like a stone. Pete looked up and she threatened him with the skillet. “Get off him or I’ll—”
“That’s enough, dammit,” a deep voice boomed from the doorway. “What the hell is going on in here?”
Pete rolled off Luther and checked on Jed, muttering curses under his breath.
She dropped the skillet and knelt at Luther’s side, ignoring the burly man blocking the door. “Luther, are you all right?”
“Luther? Should’ve known.” The man nudged Luther’s leg with the toe of his brown leather boot. “Git up and git yourself to jail. Take the whore with ya. Ain’t even noon and I gotta deal with the likesa you.” He spat tobacco juice next to Luther’s crumpled body.
Michelle noticed a silver badge pinned to the man’s vest. “Sheriff, those men tried—”
“Do like I say, now,” he growled.
She helped Luther stand, and he curled an arm around her waist. “Come on, Michelle. Let’s go.”
Jed struggled to his feet and wiped his bloody nose on his sleeve. “Next time we won’t get interrupted, I promise.”
“Over my dead body,” Luther spat.
Michelle guided Luther outside. The sun warmed her face, yet she was frozen inside. Her stomach had twisted into a knot and she felt like throwing up. What would she have done if Luther hadn’t been there to rescue her in time?
“That way.” Luther pointed to a small gray building across the street. “Karl at the livery told me Pete was at the store, talking with Jed. I shoulda known better than to leave you alone with them.”
They entered the one-room jail and Luther flopped into a chair near a rickety desk. “I’m sorry, darling.”
Michelle knelt at Luther’s feet and examined his scraped and bloody face. “Is anything broken? You poor thing, look at you.” Tears welled in her eyes. “You’re all beat up.”
She pulled a lace-trimmed handkerchief from her dress pocket and dabbed at the blood on Luther’s bottom lip. “You got hurt because of me.”
“No, not because of you, because of them.” Luther stroked her right cheek with one finger. “You’re gonna have a bruise.”
“If you hadn’t gotten there in time, he would have... He was going to...”
“Shh, don’t think about it. It’s over.”
The door slammed behind them and the sheriff stomped to the battered wooden desk. “Get off my floor, trollop.”
Michelle jumped to her feet as the sheriff pointed at Luther.
“You stupid son of a bitch, I told ya a thousand times, if ya come to town, leave ’em alone. I’m tired of you causing trouble. I warned you last time, if you get in another fight, you get locked up.”
“But I—”
“Quiet.” The sheriff gestured at her. “And you, get back to Clyde’s. I don’t care if Luther paid for ya or not.” He furrowed his brows. “You new here? I ain’t seen ya before.”
“Paid for me?” she exclaimed. “Sheriff, those men tried to accost me.”
The sheriff scowled and picked an empty glass jar off his cluttered desk. “Huh?”
“You’ve got this all wrong. Luther was protecting me. I was attacked. Why don’t you lock those cretins up instead of him?”
“I’ve warned him about fighting. Besides, it seems to me a woman like you would be used to men takin’ ya rough.” He rubbed his crooked nose. “They woulda tossed ya some money after.”
Luther bounded off the chair in a flash. “You son of a—”
“Don’t.” She pressed her palms against Luther’s chest and pushed him back. The last thing they needed was to make the situation worse.
“Let me go, Michelle. I swear I’ll tear his skin off for saying you’re a—”
She glared at the sheriff. “For your information, I happen to be Luther’s wife.”
The sheriff spit tobacco juice into the glass jar. “His what?”
“Wife,” she snarled. “You’re saying I should have let them have their way with me and Luther’s supposed to... do what? Watch? Maybe you’d like it if we invited the whole damn town. We could have sold tickets!”
The sheriff looked her up and down. “You ain’t one of Clyde’s girls, is ya?”
Luther brushed past her and leaned on the sheriff’s desk. “No. She ain’t. She’s my wife, and dammit, I won’t let anything happen to her. Tell me, sheriff, what should I have done? I ain’t gonna sit back and let them have at her.”
The sheriff spit into the jar again. “No matter. You were warned after what happened at Clyde’s. I told you I’d lock you up,” he said, taking a set of keys off his belt.
She broke out in a cold sweat. The sheriff didn’t mean it, did he? What would she do without Luther? How would she survive? “You’re going to lock him up for rescuing me and you call yourself a sheriff?”
“Save it, sister. You’re lucky I don’t let Jed and Pete finish what they started.”
She gasped. How could the sheriff act so crude?
“Go ahead, keep protecting them,” Luther snapped. “But just remember, Bill, you got a daughter. She’s what, fourteen or so? Near ripe enough so one night after those bastards have had enough whiskey at the saloon, they’ll find her. When they do, you come and tell me who you’d lock up for fighting.”
The sheriff took a step back and his shoulders sagged. Luther’s words had struck a nerve in him.
“Fine.” He gestured toward the door. “Git to wherever the hell you were going. Next fight, you’ll do time. I swear it.”
“You’re not going to arrest them for what they tried to do?” she asked.
Luther pulled her to the door. “We don’t rate law here, Michelle. Let’s go.”
“What do you mean, we don’t rate law? He can’t let them go after they—”
“We’re getting the supplies and heading home, that’s it.” He pushed her outside and into the sunlight. “No lollygagging, no nothing. I’m lucky I ain’t in jail again.”
* * *
LUTHER REINED CLARA to a stop half a mile into the woods. He dismounted and walked to the nearest tree, clutching his necklace in one hand. His blood still boiled over what had happened in town, but being angry wouldn’t help. Right now he had to focus and think of Michelle’s well-being.
He inhaled fresh forest air and relaxed. The danger had passed, for now. Nobody from town ever dared follow him into the woods. He bent down and unstrapped a hunting knife from under his left pant leg.
Michelle dismounted and stood next to him. “You had a knife the whole time? Why didn’t you use it on Jed? You could’ve—”
“I coulda what? Stabbed Jed? Then what? I’d be hung for murder.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Not if you were defending me.”
He shot her a skeptical look. “You really believe that, Michelle? After what you saw today? I told you I don’t go into town much, and now you know why. The sheriff would never take my side over Jed, or anyone else, no matter what happened.” He paused. “Do you know how to get home from here?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m gonna show you.” He began carving into the maple tree in front of him. “I’ve held off marking the trail until now because I don’t want any of those creeps in town to know where I live, but you need to know the way home. It might be important one day.”
“Why? You’re here. And after today I sure as hell won’t go into town by myself.”
“There might be a time when I’m not around,” he replied. “You know how to follow a trail?”
Michelle shook her head, and her golden hair shimmered in the sunlight.
“I’ll mark every fifth tree on the right like this.” He pointed out the crescent moon he’d scraped into the trunk. It wouldn’t hurt the tree, but it stood out enough so Michelle could find it again. “You follow these and you’ll get home, understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He walked back to Clara. “You climb on and I’ll count trees.”
Luther mulled over their situation as he blazed the trail. Town wasn’t safe for them anymore. Only by the grace of God had he been able to prevent Jed and Pete from hurting Michelle. If he’d gotten there five minutes later, or if the door had been locked...
“Why do the men in town hate you so much?”
“It’s a long story and it’s complicated,” he answered as he carved his mark into the tree. He didn’t want to explain his past right now. He had hoped to put it behind him forever.
“Oh. All right then. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
He frowned. Michelle deserved an explanation. How could he expect her to tell him about her past when he held back his own secrets?
“They’ve always hated me. They’re nasty and cruel, sort of like that Roger fellow.” Michelle nodded, and he continued. “I used to go into town a lot. I’d go to Clyde’s, have a few drinks, whatever.”
He cleared his throat and continued. “About two years ago, I got drunk and they started in on me. We exchanged words...” He pushed back the memories. The fight, the blood, the laughter. He wouldn’t tell Michelle the details, not now, maybe not ever.
“I got drunk and there was a big fight. The sheriff blamed it on me and threw me in jail. He said if I ever got into another fight I’d get locked up again. That’s why he’s so hard on me.” He paused. “I ain’t exactly welcome in town.”
“But if the other people saw the fight, why didn’t they tell the sheriff you didn’t start it?”
“’Cause they all joined in. I got drunk, real drunk.” He emphasized the words. “I took on nine men.”
“My God! Were you hurt?”
“Hell yeah.” He chuckled. “I got my ass whooped. They almost killed me. I had broken ribs, a cracked nose, mashed lips, and my head hurt for two weeks from the bottle they broke over it. I didn’t get no doctoring, and the sheriff locked me up for a month.”
“That’s terrible.”
He took the reins and led Clara to another tree. “Since then, I realized getting drunk in town is a waste of my money and time. I ain’t allowed in Clyde’s no more neither.” He carved the next batch of trees and moved on. He hadn’t meant to talk about Clyde’s. It wasn’t something he liked to remember.
“Where is Clyde’s? I’ve never seen it.”
“About half a mile behind the saloon. It’s hidden from the main street, but folks know it’s there.”
“Did you go there a lot?”
He pretended to study a moss-covered log, unwilling to meet Michelle’s gaze. It was an honest question. She was his wife, and she had the right to know. Why not admit it?
“Yeah.” He started scraping bark off the tree in front of him. “When I was in town I’d stop in, have a drink... and so forth.” He didn’t want to confess bedding the women there, but Michelle must know a man had needs.
“What’s it like?”
The knife almost slipped from his fingers, and he spun around. “What’s what like?” Michelle didn’t mean what happened in bed, did she?
“Clyde’s. On the inside.”
“What do you wanna know that for?”
“I’m just curious if they’re all the same. The last place like that I was in had cream-colored walls, powder-blue sofas, and ruffled curtains.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Excuse me? The last one you were in? And where was that?”
“New Orleans. They have lots of those places down there.”
He cocked his head to the side and looked at her. Was this some kind of joke? “What were you doing in New Orleans?”
“I worked at a place with cream-colored walls, powder-blue sofas, and ruffled curtains.”
His skin prickled. “What?” After a second, he chuckled. “You’re funny. Real cute.” He turned and resumed carving the tree.
“You don’t believe me?”
The insistence in Michelle’s voice made him turn. “You’re telling me you worked in a cathouse?”
“Yes, I did.”
He frowned. Michelle wasn’t serious, was she? He decided to play along with her game. After all, he knew more about the subject than she did. He kept carving the tree. “How much money did you make?”
“Half a dollar a week.”
“That’s it? I’d expect they’d pay girls better down there. What was it like inside, you know, upstairs?” That would fix her, he reasoned.
“There were six small bedrooms upstairs and one main room downstairs, like a parlor. That’s where everyone met. They had a room reserved for special things. At first, it took some getting used to. But after a while, it didn’t bother me that much.”
He took the canteen out of his satchel and gulped down cool water. “If you’re trying to get even on me because I said I went to Clyde’s, then enough’s enough with the joke.”
“It’s no joke. Wanna know the best part?”
He braced himself.
“The best part was that since I did the laundry, I never had to go upstairs when all the other stuff was going on.”
“The laundry?”
“Yes. When I went there looking for work, I had no idea what kind of place it was. The woman who ran it wanted me to start that night. When she told me what I’d have to do, I almost fainted,” she said. “I asked her if she had a job that required a woman to stay upright.”
He laughed. “That sounds like what you’d say.”
He led Clara up the trail, pleased that Michelle had confessed something about her past to him. There was a lot more to her than he’d realized. Why had she been in New Orleans looking for work? He didn’t want to pry. She’d tell him in her own time.
“You still following this trail, or are you too busy telling me about your life in the cathouse?” he teased.
“Yes, Luther, I am.”
“Good. I wanna make sure nothing happens to you.” He licked his bruised lips and prayed Michelle would never need to find the trail. If she did, it meant they were separated.
“I’m sorry you got beat up because of me.”
“I’ll fight for you anytime. Oh, here.” He pulled a piece of waxed paper from his shirt pocket. “Karl had candy in the livery.” He handed her the paper.
Michelle unwrapped the candy. “Peppermints! I love these. Thank you.” She popped two in her mouth.
“Hey, you gotta share.” He took a few candies from her hand and moved to the next tree.
A minute later, Michelle dismounted and leaned against the tree. “I feel bad that you got hurt protecting me. I don’t know how to make it up to you.”
Luther grinned. He knew a thousand ways she could make it up to him, and most of them involved them being naked. He pushed the thought away. Although they had shared passionate kisses at the cabin, Michelle never expressed an interest in doing anything more. Every night he lay in bed, aching and praying that she’d ask him to cuddle with her.
“Well, I could think of one or two things,” he finally replied.
“Like what?”
He smiled. Was she playing with him again? “I think a kiss for your husband would be a good start.”
“You want me to kiss you? I’m not supposed to do things like that.”
“Who said so?”
“My mother and my aunts,” Michelle answered as she fussed with her skirt. “They told me it’s not proper for a girl to think about kissing... or to like it... or to want any of those other things.” She shook her head. “A woman never kisses a man first. She has to wait for him to kiss her.”
He burst out laughing. “That’s the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard. You’re hundreds of miles from home, you think she’ll know?” He snickered. “So, even if you want to kiss me, or do those other things, you won’t unless I start?”
Now he understood why Michelle hadn’t seemed interested in him. She was waiting for him to make the first move. “You liked the kissing we did outside the cabin the other day, didn’t you?”
“Yes, and last night, it was nice.”
He stroked her cheek. “Good, because I did, too. I don’t want to pressure you or scare you off, but I ache for you, darling. And anytime you want to kiss or touch me, or do anything, all you gotta do is ask.”
“Anytime?”
“Yes.” He held his breath, hoping he had gotten through to her.
“Well...” Michelle twirled her hair around her index finger. “If you wanted to kiss me now... I wouldn’t mind. In fact, I’d like it.”
He cupped her chin in his hand. “No, darling, it’s not going to work that way. I want you to kiss me.”
Michelle pulled back. “I can’t go first. I’m not sure...”
“Yes, you can. You know how.” He closed his eyes. “I’ve got all day.”
He waited, longing for her to break out of her shell and kiss him. A few seconds later, Michelle’s minty-tasting lips covered his. His heart pounded faster and he kissed her back.
All too soon, Michelle broke the kiss. “Was that good? I’ve never kissed first before.”
“That was perfect.” He gathered her into his arms. “You want more? Don’t be bashful, you can tell me.”
“Yes, I would,” she admitted.
“Good, I’m glad to hear it,” he said, bending in for another kiss. The instant his lips touched hers, Michelle wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him closer. Eyes closed, he let his long-denied urges take over.
He kissed her slow, delighting in the tingling sensations flooding his body. He wanted her, needed her. After a minute, he slid his tongue into her mouth. Michelle made a soft mewing noise and arched her back, pressing her breasts against his chest.
Her hot tongue entwined with his, sending a rush of blood to his groin. His cock sprang to life, and he groaned as she kissed him down to his soul. He slid his hands around Michelle’s waist and cupped her buttocks, drawing their lower bodies closer together. She gasped and pulled away.
“I think that’s enough for now.”
Every inch of him ached for her, and he reluctantly let her go. Rushing her would only scare her off. “All right. Besides, we gotta get home.” He gave Michelle a quick kiss on the lips. “Otherwise, we’ll be in the woods all night fooling around under every tree.”
He resumed marking the trail, satisfied that he’d made progress. Michelle’s hungry response to his kiss was just a hint of the passion hidden beneath her shell. Michelle rested her hand on his shoulder and he turned.
“I’m sorry I stopped you. I liked it, Luther, but I got nervous.” She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Maybe tonight we can try again.”
He slipped his arm around her waist and kissed her forehead. “Anytime, darling. You just say the word, and I’ll be more than ready.”
