Gabriel's Lady

“Mind that you don’t,” Mattie Smith said. She turned back to Amelia. “Don’t let him bother you none, Miss Prescott. Gabe’s usually not a bad sort, but today he’s got a head on him, as you can see.”

Gabe glowered. “Which is why I should be back sleeping peacefully in my hotel room, where I would be, Mattie, if you hadn’t insisted on hauling me out of there…”

Amelia blinked in confusion. Mrs. Smith gave every appearance of being a proper, decent woman. She rather reminded Amelia of her aunt Sophie, the one who brought her sweetmeats every Christmas. But the description of her marriage was certainly odd. And for the life of her, Amelia couldn’t determine what could be the relationship between Mrs. Smith and the dissolute Mr. Hatch.

“Go back to sleep, Gabe, and let me talk with Miss Prescott in peace,” Mrs. Smith interrupted him good-naturedly.

It looked as if Gabe was about to protest when the coach suddenly gave a lurch to the right, then bolted forward, throwing Amelia into his lap. His hands closed firmly around her arms and kept her from being thrown against the side of the coach. The cab gave four bounces, each slower than the last, and finally came to a stop, tilted crazily toward front right.

Amelia looked up at Gabe Hatch. His expression was one of annoyance, not alarm. His hands loosened their grip on her arms and slipped behind her back to pull her more securely on to his leg. Her left breast was pressed tightly up against his paisley silk vest. The smell of whiskey was overpowering.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She twisted her body, her rear end sliding intimately along the smooth serge of his trousers. Finally with a shove against his chest, she pushed herself back to her own seat. “Let go of me!” she said belatedly.

Gabe held up his empty hands and gave her an amused smile.

“Is it a broken wheel?” Mrs. Smith asked without concern.

Gabe leaned his head out the tiny coach window. “Looks like we’ve gone off the road into a coulee.” He pushed the coach door open with one booted foot, then, hanging on to the listing doorframe, swung himself to the ground. “You’ll have to get out,” he said to Amelia.

Amelia looked over the edge of the doorsill. The drop to the floor of the dry creek bed was a good four feet. There was no way Morgan could maneuver over her to get out first and give her a hand, and she would rather fall flat on her face than touch Hatch again. Carefully she gathered her skirts in one hand, then held on to the coach with the other and gingerly lowered herself. Gabe stood watching, arms folded.

Morgan followed Amelia, his legs reaching the ground with hardly a stretch. Mrs. Smith slid along the seat toward the door and reached toward Morgan with one tiny hand. He leaned into the coach and plucked her off the seat, then set her safely down on her feet outside.

“Oh, my,” Mrs. Smith said with a little intake of breath. Her eyes went to the bulges underneath the sleeves of Morgan’s linen shirt.

The driver, the man Mrs. Smith had called Charlie, had climbed down from his seat and was flat on his back looking at the underside of the carriage. “Don’t look good,” he said.

With a sigh of exasperation, Gabe dropped to the ground and pulled himself under the coach. Heedless of the smears of dust on his black suit, he slid back out again and sat up with a look of disgust. “The axle’s cracked. This rig’s not going anywhere.”

Amelia’s mouth dropped open. “What do you mean, ‘not going anywhere’?”

Gabe stood and brushed off his hands. “I mean, Miss Prescott, that you might as well go and sit yourself down over in that soft buffalo grass, because we’re going to be here a spell.”

She looked around at the barren terrain in disbelief. “Can’t you fix it?” she asked the driver, who was sitting on his haunches and shaking his head at the disabled coach. His greasy gray hair brushed the shoulders of his buckskin jacket.

“No, ma’am,” he said mournfully without looking up.

“Well…” Amelia turned around in her tracks as if searching the horizon for a rescue party. “Someone will have to ride for help,” she said finally, looking doubtfully at the four swaybacked horses hitched to the coach.

Gabe reached up to the luggage rack and pulled down a bedroll. “Feel free to give it a try, Miss Prescott. Through Candle Rock Canyon without a saddle or bridle—that would be some mighty fine riding.”

“I didn’t mean that I should go,” she said to his back as he sauntered across the dry creek and climbed up the other side to a grassy bank.

Mattie Smith leaned over and patted her on the arm. “Don’t worry, dear. Someone will come along before too long. In the meantime, we’ll just make ourselves up a comfortable little campsite.”

“Campsite!”

“It would be silly for us to keep sitting in that stuffy old cab.”

“But…” Amelia’s voice faltered. “How long will we be out here?”

Charlie stood and gave a frustrated kick to the broken vehicle. “The mail stage should be coming through about this time tomorrow,” he said, punctuating the remark with a stream of brown tobacco juice that landed precariously close to Amelia’s skirt.

“Tomorrow…” she repeated, her voice dazed.

Gabe forced himself to take another hot swallow of Charlie Wilson’s coffee. He needed an antidote for his hangover. The sleep and fresh air had not been enough. He swatted idly at the insects that swarmed around his head. Pesky little creatures, but not vicious. Not like the blackflies farther out on the prairie that could engulf an animal in minutes and suck it dry. Kind of like some women he could name.

He looked across the campfire toward Amelia Prescott. She was a dyed-in-the wool New Yorker, not at all like her brother, who had taken to the West like a duck to water. When he’d tried to strike up a conversation with her, she’d backed away from him like a pup facing a rattler. It was just as well. He was in no mood for females, particularly not prickly Easterners with high-falutin ways. Even if this one did have hair the color of polished mahogany and a tantalizing figure that, under normal circumstances, would have caused more than his brain to come to attention.

“Are you feeling any better, Gabe?” Mattie’s mellow, sympathetic voice broke into his reverie. She stood next to him, only a head taller than he was, sitting.

Gabe gave up on the coffee and poured the remainder into the ground at his side. “I’m all right,” he said with a frown.

“You ought to be thanking me, you know.”

“Is that right?”

“That trollop was after your money. I saw her watching you all night at the tables. And when you started in drinking like a damned fool, she went over to have a cozy little chat with the bartender. They might even have slipped something in your drink.”

“Trollop?” Gabe asked with a lazy smile.

“Darn right. I saved your purse, dragging you out of there. Your worthless hide, too, likely. And I ask myself, why did I even bother?”

“’Cause I’m the only tinhorn in Deadwood you can trust, Mattie, m’love. And without me you’d never be able to get your accounts straight.”

Mattie sighed and dropped to sit beside him. “What were you trying to do, anyway, Gabe? I never saw you drink like that in Deadwood.”

“If you must know, you interrupted my anniversary celebration.”

“Anniversary of what?”

“What else? Of my wedding.”

Mattie’s jaw dropped. “You’re married?”

“I was. My wife’s dead.”

Mattie shook her head. “Who’d have figured? I always took you for the confirmed-bachelor type.”

“Yeah, well, we all make mistakes.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Gabe flopped back on the grass and looked up at the stars that were growing brighter in the night sky. “No. But that probably won’t stop your asking. Let’s just say that once a year I make it a habit to get stinking drunk in tender memory of the idealistic fool I once was. If there’s a friendly…‘trollop’ available, I might invite her to share my celebration. And that’s the end of it. The other 364 days of the year I try to live a moral and upstanding life relieving cowboys and miners of their excess cash, which, if left in their hands, would in all probability lead them down the path of degradation and sin.”

Mattie grinned. “I hadn’t realized that your motives were so lofty, Gabe.”