Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Prologue
Colorado Territory
January, 1866
GUILT WEIGHED like an anvil on his heart.
He should have insisted that Emma wait until he could accompany her from Kansas to Denver. He should have been with her.
Now she was dead, and he was responsible.
Just like before.
“You know her, Marshal?”
Jared Evans heard the question but didn’t answer. Instead he picked up the body of the young woman from the inside of the coach and carried her into the office he sometimes shared with Denver’s sheriff. He wanted her away from the prying eyes of curious onlookers.
He gently laid her down on the bench and knelt beside her, choking off the growl that started deep in his chest.
Emma. Pretty, smart Emma lay still, her dress stained with blood from a gunshot to the heart. She’d been all he had left of his wife, Sarah, who’d also died from an outlaw’s bullet three years earlier. Sisters.
She looked so much like Sarah. The same soft, pretty features and golden hair and blue eyes.
Jared hadn’t seen her since he’d returned after the war, only to find his wife, young daughter and brother dead, killed months earlier by Quantrill’s bloody murderers. Emma had taken him to the graves. Watched as he’d knelt down and howled in grief.
Emma was engaged then, and he’d left to track down the men who’d killed his family….
He closed his eyes. Sarah’s face replaced Emma’s in his mind’s eye.
“Marshal?”
He turned around.
“You know her, Marshal?” The driver, who’d followed them inside, asked again.
He nodded.
“Wasn’t no need to kill her,” the driver said. “Wasn’t no need for anyone to git killed. I stopped. But one of them bushwhackers tried to kiss her after he took her purse, and she bit him. He just plain shot her, then turned the gun on me. I dropped when it hit my shoulder. Heard someone use the name Thornton.”
Thornton. He knew the name. Knew it too damned well. He’d been chasing the Thornton gang for more than eight months. Confederates who didn’t know the damn war was over. Been robbing mostly military payrolls all over the territory. The jobs had been meticulously planned.
No one had been killed until now.
He touched Emma’s hair and closed her eyes. Rage and a terrible grief warred in his heart. For the second time in his life, he was too late to save someone close to his heart. “I’ll get them for you,” he said to her. “If it’s the last thing I ever do, every one of them will hang.”
1
Colorado, 1876
SHOOT HIM!
Samantha Blair’s fingers flexed as she watched the tall, lean man approach with an easy, graceful stride. The man she intended to stop at any cost.
She had stepped off the crumbling porch of the saloon just seconds earlier and stood in the middle of the rutted street in a stance that was all challenge.
Her long duster coat was confining and hot on this unusually warm day, but it disguised her sex. So did her loose shirt and worn pants. A hat covered her short hair, and she’d pulled the brim down over her forehead to cut the glare from the afternoon sun.
Sweat dampened her leather gloves as she stared across the forty feet that separated her from the man with a hard face and a star on his vest. His skin was deeply browned by the sun, his hair black and his eyes deep set. He looked like a hawk to her, dark and predatory. His grim expression did nothing to allay the impression of deadly competence. He moved with a grace that persisted even as he halted.
She pushed her coat back on the right side. He stopped, stiffened when he saw the gun. The intent.
The dry wind kicked up dust, and a hot sun bore down on her and the man who had hunted Mac, one of the three people in the world she loved, for years. She was a healer, not a killer. But now Mac was helpless. Critically wounded. Defenseless.
Except for her.
Mac didn’t know she was here. The sign over the saloon—one of only a few structures left in the small mining town of Gideon’s Hope after a disastrous fire—hung drunkenly by a chain, while the rest of the building looked as if it were about to fall in.
In the distance she heard Dawg yowl, as if he knew something was terribly wrong. The old hound would be clawing at the door, desperate to come to her aid.
“Go home,” the lanky man said in a soft drawl. “I don’t shoot kids.”
She stiffened. “I’m not a kid,” she retorted. She’d hoped her height would offset the impression of youth. “I’ve killed before,” she added, willing him not to see the lie in her eyes. She hadn’t killed, but she was good with targets. Very good. And fast.
She could do this, she reassured herself. She had to do it. She wouldn’t let doubt rock her. She didn’t want to kill the man. Blue blazes, she didn’t want to kill anyone. Just stop him. A bullet in the leg would do. Or arm.
Always go for the heart or head. Hit anything else and your opponent will kill you.
How many times had Mac told her that when he’d taught her to shoot? To protect herself. Don’t ever expect a gunman to give you an advantage. He won’t. And the marshal was a gunman. She knew his reputation. Had dreaded it for years.
The lawman took a step toward her. “I don’t want trouble. I’m looking for an outlaw.”
“There’s no outlaw here,” she said.
His mouth curved into a half smile. “Then I’ll look and be on my way.”
“We don’t like strangers, and we especially don’t like the law,” she said.
“Who is we?” he asked, his voice controlled. No fear. But then he was a lawman, and there was something very sure, very competent in every small movement.
“Don’t matter,” she replied, trying to keep her voice husky. Her heart pounded. Only the conviction that she alone stood between this man and Mac kept her from turning away.
