Liz Ireland (18 page)

It wasn’t a request, it was a command. In a daze, Emma allowed the sheriff to lead her to the clearing and stepped stonily into his stiff embrace.

“I wondered what happened to those Wanted posters,” the sheriff said with a bitter laugh.

She couldn’t look at him, and continued to stare at the buttons on his vest.
Lang
, she thought mournfully,
I’m so
sorry!
But aloud she mumbled, “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about, Barton.”

His hands squeezed tight on her hand and waist, causing Emma to stiffen in pain. “Don’t kid me,” the sheriff warned in a low voice. At his gruff tone, she looked up into his blue eyes and marveled that she could ever have found him handsome. “I know who your Mr. Archibald is. I just can’t imagine what you think you’ve been up to.”

She tilted her chin up defiantly but said nothing, admitted nothing.

His eyes narrowed. “You could be in big trouble, lady.”

She tried to stay calm, though her heart was beating wildly.

The sheriff smirked. “I see! The outlaw taking advantage of the old spinster woman.”

She scowled at him. “He didn’t take advantage!” She spat the words out in a low voice, forgetting that she intended to admit nothing. “Besides which, he’s innocent.”

Barton laughed. “Is that what he told you?”

“It’s what I know to be true.”

“Good Lord, you’re even more gullible than I thought you were!” he exclaimed, shaking his head.

Emma felt her cheeks redden with anger. “I was only gullible the day I let you kiss me. I’ve wised up since then. And if you’re thinking you’re going to catch him, it’s too late.”

“Is it?” The sheriff grinned. “Care to take me over to your house and prove how late I am? Care to round up a posse of these fine citizens and scour the countryside with us?”

She glared at him, hating him. She didn’t know what to say or do next. Nowhere in her thoughts had she reckoned on being in this situation. She felt sick with fear.

The sheriff chuckled. “Don’t worry, Miss Colby, your
precious desperado can go free if you play your cards right. I’m not interested in him.”

At first she thought she hadn’t heard him correctly. She tilted a skeptical glance at him. “Then what are you interested in?”

Blue eyes like icy chips glinted down at her. “You.”

Emma froze, but the sheriff tugged her stumbling, leaden feet into a waltz. “What?”

“You’re surprised?” he asked. “You, who own all that fine red soil? Why, if the rest of the men of Midday knew you were sole owner of the Colby homestead, they’d have been flocking to your door for months.” He grinned. “But now it looks like I’m the lucky winner.”

She swallowed, not quite understanding. “But I told you already I have no interest in you.”

He squinted at her. “That was before I picked up a pair of aces in the form of a certain outlaw’s identity.”

Emma’s mouth dropped open as his meaning began to sink in. “You’re blackmailing me….”

“I’m just trying to
persuade
you, using other means where kisses failed.” His smooth grin made her stomach turn.

“You expect me to just sign my land over to you? In exchange for…Mr. Archibald going free?”

“Don’t be an idiot. I expect you to marry me. I don’t want folks around here saying there was anything shady going on in my dealings with you.”

Shady? The man could have invented the word! Not only was he a lawman apparently perfectly complacent with the idea of criminals gallivanting around his countryside, he was willing to stoop to blackmailing a woman into marrying him! For a moment she thought she might be ill.

And then it struck her. If she didn’t take the sheriff up on his corrupt bargain, Barton might round up a posse, just
as he’d threatened. Lang would be caught. It would be the same as her stringing a noose around his neck herself. She might as well have let him die on her front porch that rainy night not so long ago. All her love and good intentions mixed together wouldn’t amount to a hill of flop if Lang fell into the wrong hands.

To her horror, she heard herself speaking in a trembly voice. “You’d have to promise not to go after him.”

“I told you I didn’t give a damn about your Mr. Archibald.”

She nodded, then looked up at him to try to discern whether he was lying. A man who would twist her arm this way and marry her for her money wasn’t exactly trustworthy. “And you promise not to alert any sheriff in another county?”

He shook his head. “Don’t be a little fool, Emma. They’d only ask why I didn’t go after him when he was here.”

That was true. In marrying him, she would also have a tenuous hold over him, she realized. She would be the only one who knew he’d let a notorious outlaw go free.

As much as it sickened her and galled her, she couldn’t conceive of any alternative to the man’s wretched proposal. “When?” She didn’t even bother to state her agreement. He knew she was cornered.

“Today.”

She sucked in her breath. “No!”

He chuckled. “Shy, dear?”

“You have to give me time.”

A blond brow crooked suspiciously. “Time to run away with your desperado?”

She shook her head frantically, suddenly seeing it all slip away from her. Her house, her farm, her hospital. All the control she’d so recently gained over her life. Now it
would all belong to Barton Sealy. Maybe he wouldn’t even allow her to open her hospital. He would take over the management of the land, which she had only so recently discovered she enjoyed. Nothing in the world would belong to her and her alone.

Except her memories, she realized. Those, and the knowledge that by giving up her own freedom, Lang might have his. Maybe he would make it to California and start anew. Maybe he would even find a wife and have children.

“He didn’t want me,” she told Barton. “I offered to go with him, and he said I’d only hold him back, and that I’d regret it. So you can rest assured, I won’t disappear.”

Barton flicked an annoyed gaze toward his brother. “Tomorrow, then. We’ll make it a double wedding.”

Emma also looked at the happy couple and felt her heart shatter. Could she legally seal such a cold-blooded arrangement at the same time those lovebirds tied the knot? The idea seemed almost sacrilegious. Yet tomorrow was better than today, she had to admit. At least it would give her one night to prepare for the inevitable.

She glanced at Barton Sealy and paled at the idea of sharing her life with this man…and sharing her bed. Once, she’d had silly daydreams of being his wife; now the prospect was as welcome as torture.

A second later Barton motioned for Charlie to stop playing. The fiddle broke off in midnote, striking an off-pitch scratch, and Barton began to speak.

“Folks, I, too, have an announcement to make,” he said, keeping an iron grip on Emma’s hand. “To my happy astonishment, Miss Emma Colby has agreed to become my bride.”

At these last words, a series of gasps went through the crowd, then wholehearted applause. Even a few whoops.
Emma hadn’t expected this sort of reaction; then again, she was marrying the sheriff.

He grinned, and looking at Barton just then anyone might have thought it was the happiest moment in his life. And who knows that it wasn’t? All those rich Colby acres… “With my brother’s permission, Miss Emma and I will tie the knot in a double ceremony, and we want y’all to come out. The Sealy men will be throwing a party!”

Hats were tossed in the air, and several bachelors did a little jig in the center of the dance area. People clapped in rhythm and laughed at their antics, and Charlie started up his fiddling again with a jaunty version of “Little Brown Jug.” Emma watched the joyous display in mute amazement as the townspeople celebrated her upcoming nuptials. The whole town was whooping it up, while the bride-to-be was dying inside.

“You’re doing what?”

“I’m marrying the sheriff,” Emma dutifully reported to her sister. “Tomorrow.”

With the exception of the red pox marks, which were almost faded, Rose Ellen’s face went completely pale. “But you can’t!”

“Why not?”

“Emma, you don’t love him. You know you don’t!”

A flush of helplessness seeped over her. “I’ve always liked Barton.”

Her sister answered with a look that indicated that Emma had gone mad. “He’s a fortune hunter!”

Emma lifted her chin. “Don’t other women use money to marry advantageously?”

“What advantage does he have?” Rose Ellen scoffed.

“He’s handsome.”

Rose Ellen rolled her eyes. “
He
would say so, at least.”

“And he’s from a very good family.”

The younger woman jumped on that tidbit like a frog devouring a bug. “I’ve been thinking about that—goodness knows I’ve had little enough else to do—and I’ve concluded that there’s something very suspicious about the way these Sealy men are all suddenly so eager to become penny ante farmers.”

After all the backbreaking labor she’d endured, that was one insult Emma couldn’t let go. “This is not a penny ante farm, Rose Ellen. If tended well, this land could yield thirty-five bushels per acre….” Her words suddenly trailed off as a wave of nausea overtook her when she realized just what she was giving up to that scoundrel. Everything she held dear. Her home, her freedom, her very self. She sank onto the blanket-draped settee and grabbed one of Rose Ellen’s goose-feather pillows for comfort.

Rose Ellen dropped to her side. “Emma, are you all right?”

She swallowed with effort. “Just bridal nerves.”

Rose Ellen, who had looked shocked before, now looked positively stupefied. “Oh, Emma! You haven’t done anything you shouldn’t, have you?”

God forbid! Their one wooden kiss had been uncomfortable enough. Contemplating the marriage bed with that man made her blood run cold.

“I don’t see what the rush is, then,” Rose Ellen said. “If you’d just wait, I’d be feeling a little better, and we could throw you a really nice party, with a cake and a new dress and lots of people.”

“I think a lot of people will come to Reverend Cathcart’s tomorrow, even without a cake. Barton invited the whole town.” In doing so, she suspected he was attempting to make it as difficult as possible for her to back out. Just as, when she’d claimed a headache at the dance and wanted
to leave, he’d insisted on escorting her home himself. Or maybe he’d just wanted to get a look at all the land that would soon be his. Thank heavens he hadn’t argued the point when she hadn’t invited him in. Having him gaze upon her house with a proprietary eye would have sent her over the edge.

Seeing that her sister wasn’t going to relent and at least have a big party to compensate for her disagreeable marriage, Rose Ellen lifted her thin shoulders and sighed. “I shudder to think what Mr. Archibald will say about all this. I think he’s really very taken with you, Emma.”

To hear Lang’s name—even his fake one—made Emma go limp with grief. “At least I won’t have to tell him.”

“Do you think he won’t find out? Why, just five minutes ago the poor man was down here asking me where your favorite places to hide things were.”

Emma sprang to her feet. “Five minutes ago! Mr. Archibald?”

“Yes, Emma.” Her sister looked at her quizzically, then smiled. “I think he wanted to secret away a little present for you.”

Emma felt light-headed. Lang couldn’t be here, he couldn’t be. It was too terrible…too wonderful. There should have been miles and miles between them by this time! She twirled dizzily and ran hell-for-leather toward the stairs, which she almost traversed in a single leap.
Here! Lang is here!
The thought pounded in her head like insistent drumbeats, swelling her heart with both fear and relief. He needed to be gone—but oh, how glad she would be to see him once more!

His door was wide open and she sped inside before skidding to a stop, practically panting. He was sitting in a chair, his long legs stretched out lazily before him and crossed at the ankles. In his lap lay the well-thumbed copy of one
of her father’s favorite books,
Two Years Before the Mast
, which Lang appeared absorbed in. He barely looked up when she appeared in front of him.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, almost idly, as if he had all the time in the world.

Emma nearly shrieked. “What are you doing here?”

He grinned, a warm smile she couldn’t help contrasting with the sheriff’s viciously cold expression. “You know, I was thinking, instead of California, perhaps I should take to the sea for a while.”

He was joking. Unbelievable! “You were supposed to be gone!” Emma reminded him. “You should be halfway to San Antonio by now!”

He shook his head. “It will be safer if I wait till I’ll be closer to having the cover of darkness.”

Emma ran to the window, as if she needed confirmation that it was still daylight. Of course she could see his point. The church meeting would go on past dark, but she wasn’t sure she could withstand the nail-biting hours until he left. Each minute he stayed would make it that much more difficult to let him go.

He stood, still a little stiff in his movement, and smiled at her fondly. “You aren’t making my job much easier, bringing the sheriff around.”

She looked down at her feet. “I had to leave early…and he insisted on escorting me.”

“What happened?”

She glanced up and attempted a negligent shrug. “Nothing.”

His brows drew together in worry. “There
is
something wrong. I should have known it the way you came running in full steam.” He stepped closer. “What’s happened?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Emma…something’s wrong.” His piercing dark eyes looked into hers. “Did the sheriff say something to you?”

Her cheeks burned. She longed to throw herself into his strong, supportive arms and beg him again to let her go with him, but he’d made it clear to her yesterday that he didn’t want her. And she couldn’t tell him the sheriff was blackmailing her, or that she was sacrificing herself for him, because if he knew, Lang might do something foolhardy like turn himself in for her sake. Or he might confront the sheriff, and the last thing he needed was for Barton Sealy to feel any more belligerent toward him.