The Ranger's Bride

Rede had been so intent on the sweet curves of her body, he hadn’t noticed she was dressed in half-mourning, a gray dress banded in black. Such shades indicated the death had been some time ago, didn’t it? Several months, or was it a year or more?

He wondered how she had felt about her husband. Had she been devastated by his death? Did she still grieve? A man couldn’t judge by her answer to the big smelly man—most women would have used any excuse not to have that one come calling.

Rede felt a flare of anger, not only that the man had been such an insensitive idiot, but also, he recognized, because the man had made overtures to the very woman Rede wanted himself. A part of him already thought of the woman as his.

If only things had been different. Idiot.

But not as bad an idiot as the big man. He couldn’t imagine the green-eyed woman would have consented to let the malodorous big man call on her even if he’d been the only gent left in Texas.

“Sorry, ma’am,” said the other man. “I jes’ saw you were wearin’ half-mournin’, and I thought maybe it’d been long e…” His voice trailed off, as Rede purposefully intercepted his gaze and narrowed his eyes in warning. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Ain’t this the road the Fogarty Gang used to rob the stage along, back before the war?” the drummer asked just then.

The woman’s eyes widened with alarm, and her face paled. Rede longed to slam his elbow into the skinny drummer’s ribs hard enough to make him lose his dinner, just for frightening her.

“But I heard they hadn’t been robbing stages around here for years,” she said. “Ever since—”

“They haven’t,” Rede said flatly, wanting to banish the furrow of worry from her forehead. “Not since m—since Jim Fogarty was hanged.” My father. My father died at the end of a choking rope—years ago.

James Fogarty’s execution for the killing of a stagecoach driver should have taught the rest of the gang a lesson, and it had—for a while. They had lit out to the wild Pecos country for several years. But recently they’d been inching back to their old locale, the limestone-studded hills of central Texas.

“Harrumph. They better keep their eyes peeled and the shotgun ready,” the drummer said, jerking his head to indicate the driver and the stagecoach guard riding up on top.

A lot of good that would do, if the Fogartys wanted to rob this stage, Rede thought, watching the color slowly ebb back into the woman’s face.

He wondered what her name was. Something prim and fancy, he thought. Not harsh, like Harriet, or dowdy-sounding, like Ethel.

Elizabeth, he decided. He wondered if she went by Beth or Liza.

Then all hell broke loose.

Chapter Two

A rifle cracked suddenly from somewhere behind the stoop, followed closely by a sharp cry from the stagecoach driver. Addy heard a thud, then suddenly the team of horses was plunging off the road at a full gallop.

The thin woman with the migraine screamed.

“Bandits! The driver’s shot!” cried the shotgun guard. Addy could hear him scrambling around on top. No doubt he was struggling to grab the dropped reins while still holding the shotgun. Had the thud she’d heard been the sound of the driver’s body hitting the road?

The drummer yanked up the leather flap. “We’re ’bout to be held up!” he shouted.

Many things happened at once. The stranger grabbed for his saddlebags, thrusting a hand into one and coming out with the Colt revolver Addy had suspected was there. The older woman on Addy’s left began to whimper in chorus with the other woman across from her.

Addy was sick with fear. She felt a scream bubbling up inside herself, but the knot of terror in her throat wouldn’t let it out. She wanted to look out the window, but bullets whizzed past and she knew it wouldn’t be wise.

“Get down on the floor!” the stranger ordered Addy and the old women. Then, when the old woman seemed frozen to her seat, he yelled, “Do it! Right now!”

Addy heard him cock his gun, and for a single panicked second, she thought he was in league with the outlaws. Then she decided it was more likely he was trying to get a clear shot at the robbers and didn’t want the two women in the line of fire.

“Get down with me, ma’am!” she cried, pulling at the resisting old woman’s hands. “He’s just trying to help us!” But the woman yanked her hands out of Addy’s, clenched them into a fist at each ear and screamed.

“Whip up those horses there!” she heard the big man yell to the man on top. “We can outrun—”

He never finished his sentence. There was another loud crack, and suddenly he slumped over across Addy. She couldn’t tell where he was hit, but a warm crimson fountain instantly bathed Addy, running down her cheek in a warm, sickening flow.

It was too much. She felt a black mist descend over her, and suddenly there was nothing.

The buzzing of flies at her ear woke her, how much later Addy had no idea. She only knew there was an enormous weight lying against her back, hampering her breathing so that she couldn’t take a full breath. Her nostrils were full of the horrible coppery stench of blood.

She could feel no rise and fall of breathing from the body lying against her, but just to be sure, she took hold of the wrist dangling over her back and felt for a heartbeat. None. The big man who had leered down at her so recently was dead.

Struggling against the horror that was welling up into a scream—which might put her in danger if the outlaws were still around—Addy forced herself to listen, to concentrate on something else besides the corpse partially pinning her down on the stagecoach floor. None of the other passengers remained inside. Where were they? Were the outlaws still outside?

She could hear no voices, neither outlaws calling out orders nor those of the passengers. Nothing but the humming of the flies and the endless soughing of the hot summer wind as it echoed around the limestone hills. Holding her breath so she could hear better, though, she could hear the soft tearing sound horses made as they cropped grass.

Where was everyone else? Were they all dead, too? Would someone shoot her the moment she showed her face outside the coach?

Determinedly, she pushed and wiggled until she had worked herself out from under the dead man and stealthily lifted the flap, pushing herself up just enough to see over the edge.

The hem of a fluttering skirt on the grass was all she could see.

Pushing open the door, she stood at the door for a minute, peering out at the scene before her.

The outlaws were gone. Five bodies lay in the dusty road—the shotgun guard, flat on his back, the old woman, lying on her side as if napping, the drummer, sprawled in an ungainly heap as if he had been kneeling, the thin middle-aged woman who’d had the migraine, looking like a puppet whose strings had been cut, and finally and most horribly, the man who had been sitting opposite her in the stagecoach. He lay prone, his arms outflung in the dirt.

Stifling a moan of anguish, she ran to each of them in turn, finding in each a fatal bullet wound either in the chest or the head.

Addy left the stranger’s body until last, knowing that when she proved to herself he was as lifeless as the others, she would very likely succumb to hysterics. For then she would be truly alone.

She was so shaky she couldn’t be sure if his chest was rising or not. The back of his shirt was streaked with blood. What would she see when she turned him over?

When she took hold of his shoulder and pulled him gently back toward her though, she lost all hope. Blood spread over his shirtfront like a horrible scarlet blossom. No one lived after being shot through the heart.

And then he groaned.

Addy, who had been crouched over him, fell back on her extended elbows.

He groaned again. He was alive! But for how long?

“Mister! Can you talk to me? Wake up! Where are you hit?” Addy cried. His eyes flew open even as he tried to wrench away from her, then settled back with a grunt.

“Easy, now, easy!” she soothed him. “I’m not one of the outlaws! Seems like they’re gone now. I need to know where you’re hit,” she said as she pushed back his rawhide vest and began to unfasten his shirt.

She saw him relax fractionally at her words.

“F-Fogartys,” he muttered.

“You mean you think it was the Fogarty Gang that did this?” she questioned him, as she reached the last button. “Weren’t you the one who said they hadn’t been operating around here since their leader was hanged, years ago?”