Montana Man

“He’s the one after you?” A muscle jumped in Trey’s jaw, and there was no longer even a glimmer of humor. His gaze was as harsh as any bounty hunter’s and twice as determined.

She shook her head. “My father. He’s a powerful man. He’s dead set on this marriage. Lewis is his protégé, a young doctor he’s groomed in his own image. He wants him for a son-in-law.”

“Your father thinks so little of you, his own daughter?” Trey’s words came low, but his anger boomed.

“My father is a man just like you.” She lifted one brow and waited. “Charming, debonair…”

“Aw, but he obviously lacks my kinder nature toward the fairer sex.”

“Obviously.” She almost smiled, their gazes latching together.

She felt it like light to her soul. She saw past the dark brown of his eyes into a deeper place, where his concern gathered with a quiet strength she’d known in no other man. A strength of character and heart, not of brawn and force. Her hand trembled, and she was glad she wasn’t holding the spoon, because she would have dropped it.

The train jerked, breaking the motion, and the renewed howl of the storm slammed into the north side of the car with inhuman force. Josie cried out, tears rising, the trauma of the wreck and losing her parents stark against the other passengers’ gasps of concern.

The brief smile was gone, the fears of an orphaned and injured girl returned. Trey wrapped his arms around the girl, holding her close, reassuring her. The door at the end of the car banged open and the bounty hunter strolled in.

Fear ran like ice water through her veins, and Miranda eased from her chair. She knew Trey was armed, but he was holding a child. There would be no confrontation, no risk to Josie or anyone else in the car. There would be no gunfight, no bullets firing wild.

The hired gun’s gaze fastened on her and she felt the impact, cold and lethal, as cutting as a blizzard’s wind. The train shuddered again, doubling the sound of Josie’s cries. Trey, busy with the child, hadn’t noticed the man behind him, and maybe it would stay that way.

She took a quick breath, gathered her courage and stood from the seat.

“I need to excuse myself,” she whispered, so he would think she was headed to the water closet. It was better to repay him this way for his kindness. She wanted him safe. After all, he had Josie to protect.

She’d never wanted her freedom to come at the price of anyone else coming to harm. Her days of dreaming dreams and wishing on first-stars-of-the-night were past. There was no sense in running. She would give herself up before the bounty hunter decided to fire his gun again.

As if reading her mind, the ruffian slipped one gun from his holster, the smooth glide of steel against leather lost in the noisy car. Cocked, then aimed.

Her chest felt so tight, it was impossible to breathe. She couldn’t let Trey face down an armed man. She couldn’t! Her knees wobbled and her throat was dry, but she managed to keep breathing and put one uncertain foot in front of the other.

“Hold on a minute.” A man’s voice—it wasn’t Trey’s—boomed with heated fury and cold threat. The well-dressed man seated at the adjacent table now towered behind her, gun drawn, his aim steady on the threatening man. “I’m a Pinkerton agent, and she is my quarry. Back down, bounty hunter, if you value your life.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Miranda saw Trey set Josie in a vacant seat. He rose, a man of might who stole her breath and made her heart stammer. He wrapped his hand around the Colt’s handle and drew, standing between her and the bounty hunter, as strong as legend, as powerful as myth.

She did not doubt that he would protect her. But it wasn’t protection she needed.

It was her freedom.

It was all she wanted.

“Put down the gun, bounty hunter.” Trey nodded toward a neighboring table, where diners turned with gasps and exclamations. This was not the kind of behavior they expected to see in their first-class dining car.

Miranda took one step toward the door, afraid to draw attention to herself but longing—how she longed—to escape.

“We’re being robbed!” one woman cried, her hand flying to cover the flickering diamonds at her throat, more gemstones flashing on her fingers.

Cries of fear and outrage exploded like dynamite in a tunnel. Miranda ran. Chaos reigned as the men in the car banded together against the bounty hunter, whose shouts for her to stop were drowned by the cries of outraged women. Above it all Trey’s voice lifted, in control, determined to keep his word.

At the threshold, Miranda risked one glance back. Josie sat at the table, hugging Baby Beth tight, tears glimmering like stars. There was no time to say goodbye, not if she wanted to escape. And it tore at her heart that all she could offer the girl now was a wink and a wave. Then she was gone, dashing through the door.

A flimsy roof overhead hardly protected her from the force of the blizzard as she pushed open the door that led into the first-class cars.

She hurried through them, not knowing if another Pinkerton agent could be watching. Heart pounding, she hurried down the aisle as the train bucked and groaned. The blizzard outside was worsening.

Where should she go? She couldn’t jump. They were in the middle of the Rockies and there were no more stops, not with the way the train was creeping along, at least not for a long while.

As she pushed open the door at the front of the car, a man in the back stood, pulling his well-cut jacket over the gleaming handle of a revolver. Heavens, there were more of them.

She slammed the door shut and stood facing the sleeping cars. No, she wasn’t likely to escape in here. Besides, she’d rather not be captured by an armed man within reach of an empty bed. Not after what she’d learned of human nature.

She faced the ice-cold wind that sliced right through her. Sandlike pellets of ice scoured her, stinging her face and unprotected hands as she gasped for breath. The bitter, vicious wind drove the air right out of her lungs. Lord, if she jumped she wouldn’t survive ten minutes in this.

But the door behind her was kicked open and a man filled the threshold, dark and deadly, the nose of his gun swinging toward her. She would not go back, not on her life.

But what should she do? She wouldn’t let him catch her. She wouldn’t. She climbed up the waist-high steel barrier. The wind battered her face and the snowy banks whipped by at an alarming rate.

Jump? No, it was far too dangerous. But surely there was a way…

Inspiration struck. As fast as she could, she swept off her bonnet and, on a prayer, leaped out into the storm.

“Miranda! Come back.” Josie’s wail brought Trey around as he tried to stop the Pinkerton agent from taking off after Miranda.

“I’m in my perfect legal rights,” the man bit out as he shoved past Trey.

“Did that young lady do something wrong?” the woman with the diamonds wondered, as the security guard barreled into the car and Trey scooped Josie out of her seat.

“Miranda left. And w-we d-didn’t even get to f-finish the crackers.” The girl buried her face in his neck, holding on with all her strength.

Trey could feel her need, and he knew all that Miranda had done for them, for no reason other than her caring heart. She loved children—it had shone in her eyes as bright as the apology when she’d fled the car.

She’d made the decision to leave his side, when he could have protected her, damn it. He kicked open the door and bounded down the aisle of the next car, the news of the supposed robber buzzing in the air. He didn’t see Miranda, so he kept going. She wasn’t in the next car, but up ahead, the door slammed shut. A bad, bad feeling curled around his spine, and he started to run.

“I’m scared, Uncle Trey,” Josie whispered against his neck. “Where’s Miranda?”

Alone and afraid and needing my help. He couldn’t explain why, but he knew she had no one else. It was his job, he’d spent many years helping women who slipped into his clinic on the run from their husbands, unable to pay for the broken bones he set and splinted or the lacerations to their head and face he stitched.

Maybe it was because as a very small boy he’d seen his own mother treated this way during her second marriage. Finally his stepfather had had enough of Trey and sent him to an orphanage. The horror and shame still lived with him, that his mother had endured a hellish existence in order to provide a home and meals for her children. As if by helping a woman with fear in her eyes and a man on her trail, he could make a difference now.

No, it was more than that this time. Miranda wasn’t a stranger who’d knocked at his office door. She’d shown him a part of her he’d forgotten existed in this world sometimes without hope and mercy. In a world where a little girl as sweet as Josie could lose her parents. In a world where people grew ill and died and he could do nothing to save them.

He wanted to know he could make a difference somehow, make a small piece of the world right again for a woman with gentle eyes and a smile as bright as an angel’s. It didn’t hurt that she’d been the first woman in a long time to make him feel every inch a man and forget his profession, to feel need and excitement and warmth.

He knocked the door open and nearly collided with a man in the small passageway between the first-class cars. The Pinkerton agent.

“She jumped. I saw her hit the snowbank.” The same agent he’d overpowered in the dining car shouted to be heard above the howling wind. “That’s why we were quietly following her. Why we didn’t want a scene. Now she’s dead, and there goes my damn bonus.”

She’d jumped? She’d been so desperate that she’d choose death? I failed her. Trey’s stomach turned, and he laid a hand on Josie’s back, keeping her safe in the shelter beneath his chin.