McKettrick's Choice

Holt’s throat still wouldn’t open. He nodded again.

Lizzie stared into his face, looking, perhaps, for the half-truths people tell to children, or even a bold-faced lie. Finding only truth, she straightened her shoulders and hoisted her chin.

“All right, then,” she said. “I guess you’d better ride while there’s still enough daylight to see the trail.”

He smiled, cupped her chin in one hand. “Don’t eat too much cake,” he said.

Her eyes glistened with tears. “Don’t get yourself shot,” she countered.

And that was their farewell.

Lizzie was a woman-child, with the run of one of the biggest ranches in the Arizona Territory. She could already ride like a pony soldier, and Kade’s wife, Mandy, a sharpshooter, had taught her niece to handle a shotgun as well as a side arm. Lizzie had lost her mother to a fever and seen her aunt murdered in cold blood alongside a stagecoach. She knew only too well that life was fragile, the world was a dangerous place and that some partings were permanent.

This one wouldn’t be, Holt promised himself as he rode out, Lizzie’s ribbon in his pocket.

CHAPTER 2

San Antonio, Texas, August 25

THE WEDDING DRESS was a voluminous cloud of silk and tulle, billowing in Lorelei Fellows’s arms as she marched into the center of the square and dumped it in a heap next to the fountain.

She did not look at the crowd, gathered on all sides, their silence as still and heavy as the hot, humid afternoon. With a flourish, she took a small metal box from the waistband of her skirt, extracted a match and struck it against the bottom of one high-button shoe.

The acrid smell of sulphur wavered in the thick air, and the flame leaped to life. Lorelei stared at it for a moment, then dropped the match into the folds of the dress.

It went up with a satisfying whoosh, and Lorelei stepped back, a fraction of a moment before her skirt would have caught fire.

The crowd was silent, except for the man behind the barred window of the stockade overlooking the square. His grin flashed white in the gloom. He put his brown hands between the bars and applauded—once, twice, a third time.

Bits of flaming lace rose from the pyre of Lorelei’s dreams and shriveled into wafting embers. Her throat caught, and she almost put a hand to her mouth.

I will not cry, she vowed silently.

She was about to walk away, counting on her pride to hold her up despite her buckling knees, when she heard the click of a horse’s hooves on the paving stones.

Beside her, a tall man swung down from the saddle, covered in trail dust and sweating through his clothes, and proceeded to stomp out the conflagration with both feet. Lorelei stared at him, amazed at his interference. Once the fire was out, he had the effrontery to take hold of her arm.

“Are you crazy?” he demanded, and his hazel eyes blazed like the flames he’d just squelched.

The question touched a nerve, though she couldn’t have said why. Blood surged up her neck, and she tried to wrench free, but the stranger’s grasp only tightened. “Release me immediately,” she heard herself say.

Instead, he held on, glaring at her. The anger in his eyes turned to puzzlement, then back to anger.

“Holt?” called the man in the stockade, the one who’d clapped earlier. “Holt Cavanagh? Is that you?”

A grin spread over Cavanagh’s beard-stubbled face, and he turned his head, though his grip on Lorelei’s arm was as tight as ever.

“Gabe?” he called back.

“You’d best let go of Judge Fellows’s daughter, Holt,” Gabe replied, still grinning like a jackal. For a man sentenced to hang in a little more than a month, he was certainly cheerful—not to mention bold. “She might just gnaw off your arm if you don’t.”

Lorelei blushed again.

Holt turned to look down into her face. He tried to assume a serious expression, but his mouth quirked at one corner. “A judge’s daughter,” he said. “My, my. That makes you an important personage.”

“Let—me—go,” Lorelei ordered.

He waited a beat, then released her so abruptly that she nearly tripped over her hem and fell.

“You must be an outlaw,” she said, brushing ashes from her clothes and wondering why she didn’t just walk away, “if you’re on friendly terms with a horse thief and a killer.”

“And you must be a fool,” Holt replied, in acid reciprocation, “if you’d set a fire in the middle of town and then stand there like Joan of Arc bound to the stake.”

Gabe Navarro laughed, and then a cautious titter spread through the gathering of spectators.

At last, the starch came back into Lorelei’s knees, and she was able to turn and walk away, holding her head high and her shoulders straight. She looked neither left nor right, and the crowd wisely parted for her, though they stared after her, she knew that much. She felt their gazes like a faint tremor along the length of her spine. Felt Holt Cavanagh’s, too.

She lengthened her stride and, as soon as she’d turned a corner, leaving the square behind, she hoisted her singed skirts and stepped up her pace, wishing she could just keep on going until she’d left the whole state of Texas behind.

By the time she reached her father’s front gate, Lorelei was sure Holt Cavanagh—whoever he was—had heard all the salient details of her scandalous story.

Today was to have been her wedding day.

The cake was baked, and gifts had been arriving for weeks.

The honeymoon was planned, the tickets bought.

Every church bell in San Antonio was poised to ring out the glad tidings.

It would have been carried out, too, the whole glorious celebration—if the bride hadn’t just found her groom rolling on a featherbed with one of the housemaids.

“WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?” Holt demanded of his old friend when he’d bribed his way past a reluctant deputy and followed a warren of narrow hallways to find Gabe’s cell. The place was hardly bigger than a holding pen for a hog marked for slaughter; a prisoner could stand in the center and put a palm to each of the side walls, and the board floor was so warped that the few furnishings—a cot, a rusted enamel commode and a single chair—tilted at a disconcerting variety of angles. The stench made Holt’s eyes water.

“Damned if I rightly understand it.” Gabe gripped the bars as if to pry them apart and step through to freedom. The jovial grin he’d displayed during the burning wedding dress spectacle in the square below his one window was gone, replaced by a grim expression. Being locked up like that would be an ordeal of the soul for most men, but Holt reckoned it as a special torture for Gabe; he’d lived all his life in the open. Even as a boy, if the stories could be believed, Navarro wouldn’t sleep under a roof if he could help it. “How’d you know I was here?”

“Frank sent a rider up to the Triple M with a message.”

Gabe let go of the bars, poised to prowl back and forth like a half-starved wolf on display in a circus wagon, but there wasn’t room. His jawline tightened, and his eyes narrowed. “You’ve seen Frank?”

Holt frowned. “Not yet. I just rode in.”

Gabe shook his head like a man bestirring himself from a grim vision. “Maybe he’s alive after all, then.”

“What do you mean, ‘Maybe he’s alive’? You been thinking he might be otherwise?”

Gabe’s broad shoulders sagged. “Hell if I know,” he said. “I haven’t seen him since the night I was brought in. A month ago, maybe, just after sundown, a dozen men jumped us in an arroyo, where we’d made camp. Beat the hell out of me with rifle butts and whatever else they had handy, and just before I blacked out, I heard a shot. I figured they’d killed Frank.”

Holt cursed. The pit of his belly seized with the force of a greased bear trap springing shut, and his hands knotted into fists. “You know who they were?”