The Marshal's Rebellious Bride (2 page)

She closed her eyes to gather her wits.
Ace. Think about Ace.
His youthfully
handsome face flashed into her mind. And, yes, he was still a young man in
comparison to this steal-her-breath-away mature man standing all too close to
her. Did Ace have such impressive…um…man parts? If not now, would he mature
into…

She sucked in an annoyed breath. What was she doing?
Admiring another man was wrong. It made her angry…with this stranger, with
herself.

She inched back into the hallway. “Where is my
brother? Why are you in his room?”

The door slammed in her face. “Both of your brothers
are in town, I reckon. Go away,” he gritted out. Again, he seemed to have
muttered something not suitable for a decent young woman such as herself to
hear.

She curled her hands into fists at the sides of her
riding skirt and stomped a foot. “I want you out of Keno’s room. Out of this
house.” She reached for the doorknob, ready to battle him, as outrageously
stupid as that was since it’d be like taking on an immovable mountain. “I’ll
fetch my gun if I have to,” she added boldly.

“Go away, brat.” To her surprise, it sounded like he
jammed the chair that had been sitting next to the door under the doorknob.

“
Brat
?” She
kicked at the door, winced at the pain in her toes. Sure, her brothers called
her that all the time. But this was a stranger! She would not put up with such
rudeness. “You need to leave.”

She tried to shoulder the door open, only to end up
wincing and rubbing her shoulder. The door hadn’t moved at all. He must be
standing by it or the chair and holding it shut.

“Trust me,
Brat
,
you don’t want to take me on. Now go away!”

He was right; she really didn’t want to take him on.
She would lose and she hated losing. Besides, she’d come here for a reason: to
tell her brothers about Ace proposing today, about her accepting.

Dang it
! She hadn’t thought to check out their saloon before
she left town. She’d been sure they would be here since Taos was getting ready
to leave for Texas again tomorrow. He would be reporting in for a new
assignment as U.S. Marshal. They had argued last night about his leaving again.
She worried every time he put on his badge, every time he rode away from the
ranch. So wasn’t it ironic that she’d agreed to marry Ace, a deputy in Dodge
City.

She sighed, momentarily forgetting the man inside
Keno’s room. She smiled, thinking about Ace. He was so handsome, so absolutely
wonderful. Love was so amazing.

With that marvelous thought lightening her spirit, she
tried to put the confrontation with the irritating stranger aside. Her brothers
could deal with him. She turned toward the stairs.

Wait! Rydell?
She froze.

Now she remembered. He was the big, bad Texan who’d
teamed up with Taos a couple of years back as U.S. Marshal. The man was
legendary. Dangerous. She’d sensed that herself at first glance, yet she hadn’t
been frightened of him. At least his size and his just-dare-me attitude didn’t
have her shaking in her shoes. No, he frightened her in a more basic way. Morgan
Rydell was a man who would love hard and be hard to love. Somehow she just knew
that.

Ace loved her and she loved him. Their love was pure
and simple, nothing hard about it.

She hurried down the stairs determined to get far away
from Marshal Rydell, determined to ride all the way back to town and find her
brothers. She had to share her wonderful news. Now. Right now.

Chapter
One

Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory

April 1878

Morgan shivered against the gust of early spring wind that
circled around him. His partner turned up the collar on his jacket. It wasn’t
the coolness that bothered him. Something prophetic, something ominous rode
within the breeze and whistled through the towering pines that lined the narrow
path snaking between the mountains leading to Sierra Blanca. He couldn’t
explain why, but he somehow knew his life would change today.

Not liking that notion, he went back to studying the
area. Gray shadows on one wall of the mountains seemed to darken as if evil hid
in the dense green underbrush. He tensed and gripped the reins tighter with one
hand. He reached down to undo the safety flap over his Colt with the other
hand.

“You feel it, too, don’t you?” Taos Wakefield asked,
drawing Morgan’s gaze. “I’ve been uneasy ever since we started into this
valley.”

Morgan nodded and looked away. “Trouble ahead. My gut
tells me so.” His instincts were seldom wrong. They were what had kept him
alive this long.

They plodded on another few yards, silently waiting.
When he nudged his horse into a trot, he wondered if it were a poor choice.
Would that take him into danger even sooner? It also made him think about the
poor choices he’d made in his twenty-eight years. Choosing to go on this
particular assignment, as a Marshal was one. Deciding on this route was another.
Yet the choices that most bothered him—ones that haunted him day and
night—had been made years ago. They were choices that still tore at his
soul and were part of what made him such a hard man today.
A stone-cold bastard sometimes
.
At least that’s what Taos told him from time to time.

Birds warbled cries of alarm from within the pines.
Taos’ horse whinnied and sidestepped.

Morgan scanned the area with narrowed eyes. His heart
pounded in dread of what lurked in the darkness surrounding them. All he spotted
was a squirrel scurrying into the underbrush. His senses remained on alert.
Something was out there. Someone watched them. Again he thought about his gut
feeling that his life was about to change for the worse.

“Let’s get the hell out of here.” He kicked at the
sides of his powerful bay horse. Demon’s massive muscles bunched and then he
tore ahead down the valley floor.

“Right behind you,” Taos called out, snapping his
reins.

A bullet whizzed out of the thick forest before they’d
gone more than a hundred yards.

“Damnation!” Taos hissed.

Morgan pulled up on the reins and hazarded a glance
over his shoulder. Taos had slowed and now held a hand to his upper left chest.
They shared a brief look of understanding, of anger and determination.

“Get out of here!” Taos ordered as he struggled to
control his frightened mount.

“Like hell,” Morgan bellowed back. He turned his horse
as he fired into the brush where he thought the shot had come from.

Taos’ buckskin reared on its back legs, toppling him
to the ground. Before Morgan could catch the reins, the horse snorted in fear
and took off at full-speed.

Grimacing against the pain, Taos growled, “Get out!
Now!”

Morgan didn’t even consider the idea. He leaned down
to offer Taos a hand up as a second bullet whistled out of the brush. It
planted itself in Morgan’s gun arm just below the shoulder. His revolver
slipped from his hand and his attempt to pull Taos up ended. “Well, shit.”

“I told you to get out of here,” Taos gritted out.
“You don’t listen worth a damn. Never have.”

Morgan slid from the right side of the saddle and jerked
his Winchester from the scabbard. He ignored the throbbing pain in his arm as
he sought meager protection behind his trembling horse. “We’re partners. We
don’t abandon each other.” He would be pissed if whoever was taking pot shots
at them hit Demon.

The sound of a branch breaking echoed through the
tension-filled air like the roar from a cannon. Demon pawed at the ground and
finally jerked free of Morgan’s tenuous hold on the reins. The horse took off
in a blaze of fright leaving him exposed.

He glanced down and found Taos clutching his chest
with one hand, blood oozing between his fingers. His other hand tenaciously
gripped his Colt. Morgan knew his partner felt—could almost taste—the
same outrage at being bushwhacked that he did. But he refused to accept their
dying in this lonely valley as inevitable.

Hidden somewhere in the trees a horse snorted
impatiently. Hooves stomped on the pine needle covered ground and the rustling
sound carried through the area.

He whirled around to face the spot he determined the
sound had come from and awkwardly aimed just as their attacker rode out of the
bushes.
Rafe Marino
! The heat of
hatred swelled within him.

Rafe sat boldly in a beam of sunlight and faced him.
His thick mustache was curled up at one side in a sneer. Rafe snickered; the
mocking sound evil and crazed. At the sight of the outlaw bounty hunter an acid-like
bitterness churned in Morgan’s stomach.

At his feet, Taos swore a blue streak and managed to
fire his gun. The shot went wide, but jerked Morgan back to action. He raised
his rifle higher and fired. But the shot came too late. Rafe had already
wheeled his mount around and raced out of range.

“Damn idiot! I should have reacted faster.” He lowered
his rifle and focused on his groaning partner. He eased down beside Taos’ long,
lean form. Seeing the blood soaked shirt, he flinched.
Bad. Damn bad
.

“You couldn’t have ducked better?” he grumbled, trying
to distract them both. He would have a hell of a time getting the bullet out.

“I’ll try to…duck better…next time.” The words tumbled
out grimly, painfully.

Morgan gritted his teeth and ripped open the front of
Taos’ shirt. He didn’t want to think about
there
maybe
not
being a next time. He didn’t want
to consider that it would take a damn miracle to get them out of the mountains
alive. What he did think about was how much he wanted another chance to correct
some of the mistakes he’d made in his life. He refused to meet his Maker
without righting some of his wrongs. And he refused to give up on Taos.

What sounded too much like a death rattle came from
Taos’
chest.
Rage and concern made Morgan force aside
thoughts of anything but what needed to be done. Ignoring the burning pain in
his arm, he tugged off his coat and then his shirt. He barely noted the briskness
in the air on his bare chest. Blood trickled down his arm. Damn bullet was
still in the meat of his muscle. Couldn’t have passed on through? Hell, no! No
time for it now.

“Don’t you die on me,” he growled as he worked fast to
rip the shirt up for bandaging.

His face as pale as a sheet, Taos gasped, “Always
ordering people around.”

“I demand obedience, too.”
Especially
now.
He did not—would not—lose his friend today.

As he pressed the makeshift bandage against his wound,
Taos sucked in a breath and squeezed his eyes shut. He grabbed Morgan’s arm
with a blood-covered hand. “I’m not going to order you. I’m asking.” He
grimaced. “Whiskey. My sister. Promise me you’ll marry her.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Morgan blinked
away the moisture stinging his eyes from the thought of losing the only man who
knew all of his secrets. A man who had never questioned what he had done, who
had merely accepted him as a friend. He scowled. “Talking nonsense.”

“Not nonsense.” Taos coughed, the sound knotting
Morgan’s stomach. “It’s time…time for you to settle down…like you’ve talked
about.”

Morgan shook his head.
His comments
over their many campfires together had been nothing but talk, nothing but spouting
off a fool’s dreams.
He had tried settling once and he’d failed. Badly.

“She needs a strong man. You.”

The thought of losing his partner was bad enough. The
notion of getting married again was almost as bad.
And to
Whiskey?
He frowned and snapped, “Hold that in place for a minute.”

As Taos held the bloody rag to his chest, Morgan reached
up and in an awkward motion tied a strip of his shirt around his bleeding arm.
He was getting dizzy from loss of blood. He needed to dig the bullet out.
No time for that
. He had to make a
miracle happen here. He had to find the strength to go after his damn horse.
Demon was well trained. Eventually he would stop running and then he would come
back looking for him. He was counting on that. Both he and Taos were counting
on that.

“Promise me,” Taos prodded, drawing Morgan’s attention
once more.

“I’d sooner you just cut out my heart.” To this day he
remembered that run-in he’d had with the pint-sized brat at the Wakefield ranch.
He’d been damn lucky her brothers hadn’t caught them together in Keno’s room,
with him not even properly dressed. Not that it was
his
fault. She’d barged into the room.

Taos coughed again and then drew in a ragged breath.
“You’re wrong…about marriage.” He paled even more. “Even if I make it…promise
me you will marry Whiskey.”

Morgan envisioned the spirited woman who had been
outraged about him being in her brother’s room. Grass green eyes had sparked
with fire. A braid of warm red hair had hung to her butt. A butt he’d been
sorely tempted to spank.
Brazen little minx.