The Lawman Takes A Wife

Molly peeped out of her hiding place. The man hadn’t moved an inch.

He made a compelling figure standing there, his big, powerful body cast half in golden lamplight, half in shadow. She still couldn’t see his face, but she remembered with disconcerting clarity the strong lines of cheek and jaw, the piercing clarity of those blue-gray eyes that seemed to take in everything at a glance.

From the look of him, he might have been a thousand miles away.

Was he thinking of his wife? she wondered. Or of another woman, perhaps? A woman he’d loved so much that his wife had chosen to divorce him rather than live with the constant reminder that he had set another before her?

It had to have been another woman. She’d scarcely met the man, but she couldn’t imagine anything else he might have done that would have driven a woman to the scandal of divorcing him.

Yet if he’d loved another, why hadn’t he remarried the instant he was free of his first marriage?

Whatever it was that haunted him, he evidently found no solace in those cold, distant stars for he straightened suddenly and, without a glance to either side, turned and stepped into the building. An instant later, the door clapped shut behind him, throwing the street back into darkness.

Molly sank into her own shadows, heart pounding, fighting against a sudden urge to knock on the door and ask if she could help, if there weren’t something she could do to fill his yearning silence.

The thought was utter madness.

She forced herself to wait a minute, then two, to be sure he wouldn’t return. When she could stand the wait no longer, she tugged her shawl more closely about her and hurried across the street, turned toward home and walked as fast as her feet could carry her.

Witt picked up the oil lamp he’d left on his desk and carried it back to the single, windowless cell that served as Elk City’s jail. His first guest was a great deal too large for the lumpy, metal-framed bed. Crazy Mike’s big feet, still clad in their heavy miner’s boots—no one had been the least inclined to make him more comfortable by removing them—stuck out over the end by a good eight inches. His head was propped at the other end with only the single thin pillow to cushion the steel frame.

He looked like hell, but his broken nose had stopped bleeding long ago. One of his friends, an unprepossessing gentleman rejoicing in the name of Gimpy Joe, had washed off the worst of the blood, but that was as far as anyone had been willing to go.

Mike hadn’t roused to any of it. Having at last yielded to the influence of all the whiskey he’d consumed at Jackson’s, he’d gone from a faint to a dead sleep from which the angels would have a hard time rousing him before he’d slept it off.

Witt made sure the cell’s chamber pot was within Mike’s reach if he did wake up, checked the lock on the cell door one last time, then retreated to his own small room beside the cell. The only real differences between the two spaces were that the walls of his room were painted wood, not raw metal bars, and he had a window and a door that wasn’t anywhere near thick enough to shut out the sound of Mike’s snoring.

Eventually, he’d have to find a proper place to live, but for right now, this would serve. So long as he didn’t end up with too many guests like Crazy Mike, that is.

Slowly, he undressed. Hat, vest, gun belt he hung from nails driven into the wall beside the bed. His boots, side by side, claimed the floor at the foot. With every movement, the soft rustle of the paper bag in his shirt pocket reminded him that there were other things in life besides barren rooms and drunken miners.

Slowly, he pulled the small bag of chocolates out, then set it on the rickety table beside his bed. In the lamplight, he could see the stains where the oil of the chocolate had seeped through the paper.

He’d already eaten three of them, and with every slight rustle of the paper, with ever sweet bite of the chocolate, he’d found himself thinking of Mrs. Calhan.

She’d laughed at him, there in the store. He’d felt it, even though she’d clearly taken pains to cover her amusement beneath that sweet, friendly smile of hers.

The thought made him droop. He did that to women, made them laugh. A big man like him, clumsy and hulking and likely as not to get his tongue tangled around every other word, at least when pretty women like Mrs. Calhan were around. He’d often wondered why Clara had married him, knowing how she liked everything around her to be just so. But, then, they’d grown up together and she hadn’t had much to choose from, so maybe he’d just been the best of a bad lot.

The thought never brought much comfort, but it was better than admitting she had used him until she had a better offer, then discarded him as easily as she’d have tossed out an old shoe.

Strange how he never felt a fool when he was with men. Not that he’d ever been what you could call talkative, but at least he didn’t mumble and stumble, and God forbid, turn red at every other word. Not when he was with men.

And not when he was around children, either. He liked children and he usually found, once they’d gotten over their dismay at his sheer size, that they liked him and were comfortable around him. Kids never expected much of a man except that he be a man. But a woman, now…

Witt frowned, then picked up the bag of chocolates, turning it in his hands, remembering.

Women like Clara—pretty, marriageable women—seemed to think a man should have a tongue that worked slick as silk and always had just the right words on the tip of it. His tongue had never worked that way and he didn’t expect it ever would.

He knew he’d made a fool of himself in Calhan’s this afternoon.

He’d been staring at Mrs. Calhan and thinking how smooth her skin looked, and how pretty her hair was—brown like a thrush’s wing, with a dozen colors all mixed in so subtly that you couldn’t really say it was brown, but you couldn’t say exactly what it was, either. Maybe if he saw it in the sun, free of that neat little twist she kept it in—

Witt bit his lower lip, cutting off the thought, and gently set the bag of chocolates back.

The thought of that drift of hair on her cheek and nape had plagued him something fierce. Even as he’d gone about his business, introducing himself to the businessfolk up and down Main Street and getting the lay of the land, he’d been thinking about those wayward strands of hair and how soft they’d feel, brushing against his fingers.

The thought of Gordon Hancock’s fingers sifting through her unbound hair had been enough to make him grind his teeth.

But there was no sense thinking thoughts like that. It wasn’t right, and all it would do would be to lead him into trouble.