Two Brothers (4 page)

She had cause to give the place a wide berth—once, she’d seen a man relieving himself through the open door, and another time, she’d been forced to fend off the advances of a drunkard. Still, it was better to pass behind the saloon, because the front was far more perilous, with cowboys and drifters and gamblers constantly trailing in and out in various states of temper and inebriation. The very men who treated her politely in the dining room could turn into fiends, whether filled with drink or just the prospect of it.

“Probably not the best place to take a stroll, ma’am,” observed a familiar voice, just when she thought she’d passed by unnoticed. She didn’t need to look at the marshal to know he was the one talking to her. She turned her head, a quelling glance at the ready, but at the mere sight of him, it seemed that her heart slammed itself into her throat. His badge shone in the sunlight and his clothes were clean, if well worn. How could a bath and barbering change a man so much?

“I appreciate your concern, Marshal,” she said. “Of course, if you would do something about the criminal element in this town, a woman could walk safely anywhere.”

He grinned that grin—he should have had a license for it, in her opinion, because it was unquestionably as lethal as the gun on his hip. “You’re right,” he said, with a touch to the brim of his hat. “I’ve been remiss in my peacekeeping.” He was chewing on a matchstick, and he rolled it from one side of his mouth to the other as he pushed away from the saloon doorway to approach. “I’ll escort you wherever you’re going. Make sure you get there all right.”

Aislinn felt her neck heat up, and hoped the flush wouldn’t climb into her face. “No, thank you,” she said. “I’m fine on my own.”

“I’m afraid I can’t take no for an answer, ma’am,” he
replied, with a note of genial regret. “Why, how could I sleep at night, knowing I’d let a poor, helpless little thing like you walk past a
saloon
without the full protection of the law?”

She expelled a sigh. “Helpless? Believe me, Marshal, I can look after myself.” If he only knew, she thought, and was tempted to enlighten him, as to all she’d survived in her life. All she’d overcome.

“I reckon if that were the case,” he said, showing no inclination to retreat, “you wouldn’t have felt compelled to mention your concern about the safety of our female citizens.”

The end of the alleyway was in sight; the graveyard next to the Presbyterian church was just ahead, set apart from the scourge of commerce by a split-rail fence. Beyond the church was a spring-fed pond, and a big, sunbathed rock where Aislinn loved to sit, dreaming and dangling her feet in the water.

Her patience was hard-won, but she managed to speak calmly, and with dignity. She turned and looked up into McQuillan’s face. “You have made your point,” she said firmly, and she knew her eyes were flashing. “Now, kindly let me go my way. There are those of us who work for a living, and our free time is precious.”

He laughed, swept off his hat and struck himself in the chest with it, as if to stanch a bleeding wound. His hair was the palest gold and at once ruffled and sleek, though in need of trimming. It glinted in the sunshine, like stuff spun from a sorcerer’s spindle, while his eyes were so dark a blue as to seem almost purple. She’d been serving him meals most every day for a year. Why hadn’t she noticed, in all that time, just how devastatingly, dangerously good-looking he was?

“I can see I’m going to have my work cut out for me, ma’am,” he said, “but I’m determined to win your confidence. Yes, indeed, I am determined.”

Aislinn turned, hoisted her skirts as far as she dared,
and started up the cemetery fence. “Please don’t trouble yourself,” she said, perched astride the top rail. “Good day, Marshal.” Having so spoken, she made to jump down on the other side, caught her dress on a splinter or some such, and landed in the grass in an ungainly heap, her skirts over her head.

Face aflame, heart pounding with humiliation, Aislinn scrambled to her feet, just as the lawman vaulted over the fence. He was making a downright heroic effort not to laugh, but she was in no position to appreciate the sacrifice. “Are you all right?” he asked, touching her cheek with the backs of his fingers in a curiously gentle way.

Aislinn busied herself, brushing off her skirts and smoothing her hair, which had begun to come loose from its careful braid. When she looked at him, her eyes were full of angry tears, and she would have choked if she’d tried to speak.

“You
are
hurt,” he said, and he sounded genuinely worried. He shifted, so that they were very close, and she felt the heat and easy, restrained power of him. For one wonderful, dreadful moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. Then, in the next instant, he stepped back. “Guess it’s mostly your pride that’s smarting right now.” He put his hat on, and she saw a wicked humor in his eyes, though he had the decency not to grin. “I’d best be getting back, I suppose.”

Back to the saloon, Aislinn thought ungenerously, but at the same time she was feeling a tenderness toward this man that she couldn’t account for, even to herself. Maybe Eugenie was right, and Shay McQuillan really was a good man, through the worst of his grieving and ready to go on.

“Did you love her?” She had never planned to ask such a bold and impertinent question; the words came out by themselves. “Grace, I mean?”

He turned, thumbs hooked into his gunbelt, eyes hidden in the shadow cast by his hat brim. “Yes,” he answered, seriously and without hesitation. “Very much.”

Aislinn stood for a moment, taking a new measure of Shay McQuillan. She’d been so certain, until he’d spoken those few telling words, that she understood the workings of his mind and the substance of his spirit. While she watched him, he climbed over the fence and walked away, headed toward Main Street.

When she reached the pond, she found it peaceful, dappled with sunlight and windblown leaves. As she climbed onto the favored rock and settled herself there, she saw a deer approach the water’s edge on the opposite side. After studying her intently, the animal lowered its graceful head to drink, sending delicate, silvery ripples fanning out over the surface.

Aislinn slid to the stone’s edge and slipped her feet into the water, and the sensation was so delicious that she let her head fall back and gave a long sigh. Then she unraveled her braid and combed her hair with her fingers, letting it tumble down past her shoulders to reach her waist.

The moment might in fact have been perfect, had it not been for the disturbing, persistent awareness that by changing something in himself. Shay McQuillan had changed something in her as well.

Chapter 2

F
OR SOMEBODY WHO’D BEEN SO
concerned about keeping his presence in Prominence a secret until the right moment came, Saint-Laurent wasn’t making much of an effort to stay out of sight. When Shay got back to his office, following the encounter with Aislinn, he found his twin sitting in the best chair in the place, flipping through a pile of wanted posters. His feet were propped on the desk.

The usurper assessed him thoughtfully, then broke into a grin that belonged on Shay’s own face. Damn, but it was peculiar, looking at Saint-Laurent, like being haunted by his own ghost. “Anybody ever tell you you’re a handsome devil?” Tristan asked, sober as St. Peter guarding the Gates.

Shay glared at him, stormed over to the coffeepot, and poured himself a dose. He’d been sober less than twenty-four hours, he was still trying to make sense of what he’d felt, seeing Aislinn, touching her, and he’d been confronted with a long-lost brother who might have been peeled off the surface of a mirror. By God, there should be a limit to what one man was expected to deal with in the course of a single day.

“You happen to have another badge lying around here
someplace?” Tristan asked. He didn’t stand on ceremony, you had to say that for him.

Shay slammed his cup down on top of a bookcase crammed full of ancient volumes, papers, and clippings from half the newspapers published west of the Mississippi. “If I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t hand it over to you. For all I know, you’re an outlaw.”

Saint-Laurent swung his feet to the floor and stood. “If I were, I’d have put a bullet through your head last night, when I had the drop on you. It would have been an easy matter to pin on that star and step right into your boots.” The slight stress he put on the word “easy” did not go unnoticed.

Still, Shay had to admit, it was true that Tristan could have killed him, if that had been his intention. He’d been chewing on the fact, in one corner of his mind or another, since the night before, when he’d woken up with a gun at his throat. On the other hand, though Saint-Laurent was clearly a blood relation, that didn’t mean his story was true, or that he could be trusted. He could be a distant relative, instead of a brother, or just a man who happened to bear an uncanny resemblance to Shay himself.

“If that’s what you’re figuring on doing, you’d better shoot me right here and now,” Shay said. “If you can.”

Tristan perched on the edge of the desk, arms folded. He rolled his eyes and glanced at the .45 riding low on Shay’s hip. “Relax, Marshal. I may not be your friend, but I’m not your enemy, either. I just want to recover the money from that robbery and ride out of here. That’s all.”

“Fair enough, but I’ve got one question. What do you need me for?”

“I guess I must be the smart one, as well as the firstborn. I told you before. Marshal—you make it possible for me to be in two places at once. I like that idea; it ought to keep everybody off balance.”

“Maybe I’ll agree to cooperate, and maybe I won’t,”
Shay replied. He had a headache, and his nerves were raw. He wondered if Aislinn would have slapped him, if he’d kissed her. “Why should I?”

“You’re a lawman. It’s your job to bring in those outlaws. Besides, something in my gut tells me you’ve got another stake in seeing them hang. I can find out what it is easily enough, if you don’t feel inclined to tell me.”

Shay turned his back on this brother he had never known, never even imagined, and wondered for a fraction of a second what it would have been like if they’d grown up together. For a moment, he felt the loss of those years spent apart. “The driver of that coach was a friend of mine,” he said gruffly. “A fine, decent man, with a family.”

“No doubt he was,” Tristan said mildly, “but you’ll have to do better than that if you want me off your back. A thing like that’s a tragedy, any way you look at it, but it wouldn’t undo a man like you.”

It felt like every word was torn from his throat, a separate strip of hide. “There was a woman on board—Grace Warfield was her name. She and I planned to be married.”

Tristan was silent for a long time. Then he laid a hand on Shay’s right shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Shay turned around, unable and unwilling to say more about Grace. “What makes you think we could find those desperadoes, after all this time? It isn’t like we didn’t look, me and that posse—we did. We turned out every hayloft, every rat-hole saloon and whore’s nest for fifty miles around.”

“So did I,” Tristan said gravely. “They’re not out there, whoever they are. And that means they’ve got to be around here someplace. Think, damn it. Who do you know who might figure they had cause to blow a bridge out from under a coach full of innocent people? Why do that instead of just holding up the stage and riding off with the loot?”

Tristan’s reference to the innocence of the victims was calculated to get under his skin, he knew that, but the ploy was effective all the same. Shay’s right hand knotted into a fist at his side, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to smash a face that looked so much like his own.

“Go ahead,” Tristan said quietly. “Hit me, if it’ll make you feel better. Then maybe we can get on with what we’ve got to do.”

Shay uncurled his fingers.

Tristan folded his arms and grinned. Again. “Maybe you’re smarter than I’ve given you credit for, up to now,” he said. “If you’d blacked my eye, and then seen the sense in what I’m proposing—which you inevitably would have—I’d have had to give you a shiner to match mine. For the sake of appearances, you understand. I’d have been happy to oblige, of course.”

Shay huffed out a heavy sigh. “It would almost be worth it. What do you have in mind?”

“Have a seat, Marshal,” Tristan answered, with a grand gesture toward the desk and, presumably, the chair behind it, “and I’ll explain.”

Shay sat down, barely resisting the urge to swing his feet up onto the desktop, as Tristan had done. As he himself had done, ever since the day he was sworn in as the marshal. He folded his hands instead and waited.

Tristan began to talk, pacing back and forth before the desk like a big-town lawyer in front of a jury box, and damned if his ideas didn’t make a certain amount of sense. Folks would soon guess that there were two of them, but the resultant confusion was sure to provide certain advantages.

When the speech was over. Shay opened a drawer and reluctantly took out a badge that had been worn by his predecessor. Big Dan Collins. He’d been Dan’s deputy for five years, until the older man was killed breaking up a brawl down at the Yellow Garter Saloon, and he’d never admired anyone as much, before or since.