Outlaw Wife

With thanks to Tracy Farrell for buying my first book five years ago… and to the excellent Harlequin Historical editors I’ve worked with since— Elizabeth Bass, Joyce Mulvaney, Don D’Auria, Margaret O’Neill Marbury and Karen Kosztolnyik. I’ve learned from each one of you.

Prologue (#ulink_de681839-091b-52d0-baf0-6c60e973e200)

Wyoming Territory, 1882

Somehow Simon Grant had known that it was not going to be a good day. He’d awakened with a damn crick in his neck from sleeping cockeyed on his saddlebag pillow. The stream that had looked inviting when he’d camped out the previous night had been so alkaline that not even his pinto mare, Rain Cloud, would drink from it this morning. He’d set out toward Bramble with an empty canteen and a morning mouth that felt as if it had been stuffed with someone’s old sock. And now this.

There were six of them.

Rain Cloud eased to a stop in instinctive response to her master’s unease.

Their guns were shiny and close at hand. Ready for business. Simon felt his heart slow to a steady deep throb. Six. If it were half that number he might consider resisting. His reputation as the strongest rancher in the territory was not undeserved. He’d run the Saddle Ridge Ranch practically by himself since he was a boy. And his work-honed body had had to serve his own needs and his pa’s, as well.

But he couldn’t take on six of them. Even if it meant losing the entire bankroll he’d just earned selling off thirty prime yearlings at the railhead in Laramie. He laid one hand gently on the pommel of his horse and placed the other on his thigh, inches away from his own gun.

The lead rider approached, stooped over in his saddle. An old man, and not too healthy from the look of his sallow complexion. Though his eyes were sharp enough. They were fixed on Simon’s gun hand.

Simon looked past him to survey the rest of the group. One toward the back looked scrawny enough to be immediately discounted. But that still left four able-bodied opponents. Too many. None had drawn their guns yet.

Simon turned his attention to the man approaching him and said calmly, “Good morning.”

The old man smiled. “We’ve got ourselves a cool one, boys,” he said over his shoulder.

Simon reflected that it was probably a bad sign that the outlaws had not bothered to cover their faces, except for the puny one at the rear, whose oversize neckerchief rode up to hide most of his features.

He considered making a run for it. When she was fresh, Rain Cloud was unmatched in a cross-country race. But they’d ridden hard from Laramie. And she’d had no water since yesterday. Plus, Simon wasn’t interested in a bullet in the back. Especially not in the back. He knew firsthand what back injuries could lead to. He’d rather face head-on whatever was coming.

“Is there something I can do for you gentlemen?” he asked.

The old man’s grin grew wider. “Polite young feller, aren’t you? Well, my boy, since you’re so polite, I expect you’d be more than willing to make a contribution of sorts to a worthy cause.”

“And that cause would be…?” Simon kept his voice pleasant.

The outlaw on the old man’s right side drew his pistol, a six-shooter with a wicked twelve-inch barrel. “Let’s just kill him and get it over with, Seth,” he growled.

The older man looked annoyed. “Would you like to introduce the whole gang? Write down our names for the man to take in to the sheriff?”

The man shrugged. “He’s seen our faces. We’ll have to kill him anyway.”

Simon shifted slightly in his saddle. His father’s weathered face flashed through his mind. It would be hard for Harvey Grant without Simon. Damn hard. “I’m not interested in trouble,” he told the outlaws. “You can have my money. Whatever you want.” Slowly he reached toward a saddlebag, unbuckled it and took out a leather pouch.

“Throw that over here. Gentle like,” the old man said. “And then I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to get down off that pretty little filly of yours.”

Simon gave a pat to Rain Cloud’s neck and dismounted, keeping his hands up as he reached the ground.

By now, all except the old man and the boy had their weapons drawn. “So, shall I shoot him?” the outlaw who had spoken before asked.

The old man appeared to be considering. Simon didn’t move. He felt in complete control of every muscle, and his mind was functioning with a crystal clarity that took in every detail of the scene before him. But he saw no way out. One nod from the old outlaw and Simon was a dead man.

“Take his gun belt and his boots. We’ll leave him tied up.” The old man sat back in his saddle and squinted upward at the cloudless August sky. “More than likely the buzzards’ll do our work for us.”

With obvious reluctance the younger outlaw got off his horse and came toward Simon. “You’re turning soft in your old age, Seth,” he told the older man.

“Shut up, Jake,” the man barked. “I still run things in this outfit. And if you don’t like it, we’ll truss you up for buzzard meat right alongside him.”

Jake grumbled and shook his head, but reached for a coil of twine hanging from his saddle. Sheathing his own gun, he walked over to Simon. “I guess this is your lucky day, cowboy,” he taunted, signaling Simon to put his hands behind his back. He tied them with a brutal tightening of the cord, then reached around Simon to unfasten his gun belt. As his arms brushed against Simon’s sides, he stopped and exclaimed, “He’s wearing a money belt.”

He grabbed Simon’s shoulder and whirled him around, knocking him to the ground, then bent over him and ripped open the front of the shirt. “The bastard was holding out on us,” he said in disbelief.

Wrenching the belt from around Simon’s waist, he held it up in triumph. “It’s nice and heavy,” he said with a smile. Simon struggled to sit up, but the outlaw shoved him to the ground with his heavy boot. He shifted the money belt to his left hand and drew his gun, holding it inches from Simon’s face. “Let me kill the son of a bitch, Seth,” he pleaded.

The old man again seemed to hesitate. He looked back at the young lad in the rear of the outlaws, then turned once again to the man he had called Jake. “I said to leave him. Come on. We’ve got a long way to ride.”

Jake’s eyes had followed the old man as he glanced back at the boy. Simon felt a sudden, fierce gratitude for the young outlaw’s presence. He was almost certain his fate would be different if the boy was not there to witness it. Jake seemed to have come to the same conclusion, but did not appear to share Simon’s gratitude. With an ugly twist of his mouth, he gave Simon another savage kick, caving in the entire lower left side of his rib cage.

Simon fell back in a haze of pain. The outlaw aimed a third blow toward Simon’s head, but the kick was misdirected and glanced off Simon’s jaw instead, almost knocking the outlaw to his feet. In a fury, he pulled back his foot and kicked twice more—sharp, sickening jabs. The second was the one that did it, Simon decided, as he felt himself descending into oblivion. His father had always said that Simon had a head harder than an old maid’s heart. But this time it wasn’t proving hard enough.

It was funny. The blackness came slowly, not all at once as he would have imagined. And through it, he was still aware of what was happening, though it was as if he were watching from a distance. He realized that his boots were being stripped from him, that they’d rolled him over. His side didn’t hurt anymore. Nothing did. And the oddest thing was that just before he let the void swallow him, he saw a vision. The face of a beautiful girl with hair the color of a prairie sunrise. Must be an angel, he thought, finally losing the battle for consciousness. Maybe death wouldn’t be such a bad place after all.

Chapter One (#ulink_3db1e625-d03c-5831-9493-3969b9aae57b)

Most weeks not much happened in Bramble, Wyoming Territory. Sheriff John Walker spent his time chasing the truant Mahoney brothers back across the slough to his daughter Cissy’s schoolhouse. Or hauling Frank Clooney out of the Blue Chip Saloon.

When he’d first become sheriff over twenty years ago, John had locked Frank up to sleep off his drunks in the town’s one jail cell. But the jail was part of John’s office, and Frank’s snores were louder than a wounded grizzly. Eventually the two men had come to an understanding. John would put Frank to bed in Frank’s own shack behind the general store, and Frank would consider himself under house arrest there until he was sober enough to walk a straight line out to the privy and back. The arrangement seemed to work.

It did, however, cut down on the town’s jail time. John could hardly remember the last time he’d had an actual criminal behind bars. Bramble was a peaceable kind of town. Of course, the sheriff liked things that way.

He finished his third cup of coffee and sat with his hands on his desk, trying to convince himself to get up out of his brand-new fancy swivel chair and go see Felix Koenig’s milk cow. For want of a better candidate, John had been proclaimed the town’s veterinarian, though he didn’t do much more than read a few books he’d sent for back East and administer a paregoric now and then to ease the pain of the bloat. Animals in Bramble tended pretty much to themselves, just like the people.

The thump against his front door had him lifting his bushy white eyebrows in surprise and crossing the room at a faster pace than he’d have used on his way to Koenig’s cow.

He opened the door wide, then drew in a breath of genuine alarm when he saw the slumped body of Simon Grant. Blood covered his face and stained the entire side of his buckskin jacket. “Good Lord, Simon. What’s happened to you?”

He went down on his knees beside the younger man’s inert body and put a finger alongside his neck, feeling for a pulse. It was reassuringly strong. “Can you hear me, Simon?”

When there was no response, he dragged his friend’s body over to the cot where John slept when he wasn’t in the mood to deal with his landlady’s motherly scoldings.

Simon may be alive, but it didn’t take John long to see that he was badly hurt. The sheriff’s first thought was that he’d been stomped by a horse. But he dismissed the notion as unlikely. There wasn’t a better horseman in all Wyoming than Simon Grant.

“What happened to you, son?” he asked again, his voice cracking with distress. Simon had indeed been like a son to him over the years. He would have been one in fact if things had worked out differently between him and Cissy. He’d better go fetch his daughter now. There was no doctor in Bramble, and whatever had happened to Simon, his injuries were beyond John’s veterinary skills.

He straightened up and started to leave, but a moan brought him back to Simon’s bedside. “Beaten… and…robbed,” Simon gasped.

John’s face tightened. “Someone did this to you?”

Simon gave a barely perceptible nod. “Took… all…the money. Took…Rain Cloud.”

“Never mind the money and the horse, lad. What did they do to you? They’ve beaten you half to death.”