Morrow Creek Marshal

She couldn’t do that. Hudson was approximately as menacing as a gamboling puppy. He was probably inebriated, what’s more. That was the cost of having her brother at Murphy’s saloon to watch over her. He drank. He gambled, smoked and caroused, too. But he didn’t exactly terrorize bystanders, even with his size and his strength. He would greet Coyle like a long-lost friend.

Caught, Marielle swallowed hard. She looked away.

“I told you, I don’t need anybody’s help!”

She never had. She refused to now. Period. But her outburst was as good as an admission of defeat. Her erstwhile “protector” didn’t let it pass unnoticed, either. His expression hardened.

“You are confusing obduracy with strength,” Coyle told her in an unyielding tone. “Everybody needs help sometimes.”

Exasperated and hurting, Marielle glowered at him. “I also don’t need some drifter with a ten-dollar vocabulary and a gun belt telling me what to do and how to do it. If you’re too skint to make good on the trouble you’ve caused, just own up to it.”

“This isn’t about money, and you know it.” His gaze wandered to her face. Held. “It’s about getting what’s coming to you. Having the ledger squared. We’re the same in that way. Trouble is, we’re going about it from opposite directions.”

The same. Could they be? All Marielle knew was that at those words, the raucous saloon fell away, pushed like daytime before night. She frowned at Coyle, struck by his perspicacity.

She did want fairness to prevail. She didn’t want to be disadvantaged. If he was speaking truthfully, he felt the same way. No one had ever truly understood her. Yet here he was...

...Trying to manipulate her into granting him his wishes. Which she didn’t need to do. Doc Finney would deal with her ankle, very soon now. Letting a stranger tend to it—especially now—felt like surrendering. Marielle refused to be cowed.

For Hudson’s sake and her own, she’d always been strong.

“We’re not alike,” she objected in no uncertain terms, vexed at his nerve. “You’re nothing but a drifter, and I’m—”

“Allergic to a man with a wandering foot?” Coyle guessed. His eyes sparkled again, making him seem absolutely unlike someone who would start a saloon brawl with a cowboy. “You say drifter as if it’s poisonous. I like traveling man better. It sounds jaunty. Nobody can object to that.”

“Whatever you call it, it means leaving someone behind.”

His smile dimmed. Thankfully for her. Because seeing its brilliance had made Marielle feel...captivated. Also, disinclined to press the issue of her fair compensation for lost work with him. But she was the one who charmed people into forgetting themselves and their goals. Not him. It couldn’t be him.

“Not putting down roots isn’t a crime. It’s freedom.”

“It’s selfishness,” she disagreed. “And it’s cruel.”

“Cruel? Look here, Miss Miller, this is getting a mite too personal for my taste. Whatever somebody did to you, you can’t pin it on me. Like you said, we’ve never met before tonight.”

“And yet you claim to know me so well.”

“I—” On the verge of disagreeing, Coyle stopped. He squinted at her with far more astuteness than she liked. “I am letting myself be diverted by you, just like you were by me.” He seemed oddly impressed. “You don’t want me to look at your ankle again, so you’re concocting a cockamamie theory to dissuade me.”

She had been. But she’d gotten carried away with her own hyperbole. A flair for the dramatic did run in her family, but Marielle saw life lightly—much more lightly than she’d let on just now. Coyle didn’t know that about her, though. “Aha.” She nodded. “There’s another one of those pricy words of yours.”

“You understand them all, and you know it,” Coyle told her. “You’re a dancing girl on the outside, but you’re a damn poet on the inside. That’s why you keep watch up there onstage.”

“I ‘keep watch’ because men like you start fights!”

“You keep watch because you want more. Why wouldn’t you?” He aimed another knowing look at her. “You can’t very well let it sneak on by when you’re not on the lookout. So you watch.”

He was right. Of course he was. Because after all, the other dance hall girls were grown women who could take care of themselves without her. Even Etta. But she refused to say so.

Marielle wasn’t even sure what more she wanted. Only that it felt hazy and essential...and eternally out of her grasp.

For a heartbeat, they only looked at one another—two people pulled together in a boisterous, plain-hewn saloon in a faraway, lonesome territory. Two people who were surprisingly the same.

Marielle liked that even less than her ankle injury.

“You want a husband and a passel of babies,” Coyle went on, “which would be only fitting and natural for an older woman.”

Argh. He was, quite possibly, the worst know-it-all she had ever encountered. Why had she even entertained the notion that he understood her? Commiserated with her? Needed...like her?

He was a blowhard and a tyrant, born to boss people around and take charge. She was through inveigling him. She would find another way to support herself until her injury healed.

But Coyle wasn’t done deciding her future for her yet. Musingly, he studied the saloon. “I reckon there are several men here who’d suit you. You look like the settling down type. You should pick one of them, retire from dancing and start having babies.”

That sounded like heaven. Except coming from him.

Marielle cast him a scathing look, only to see him grin unrepentantly in response. He was enjoying baiting her.

“Oh, why won’t you just go away?” she grumped.

“Because you’re a woman who won’t admit she’s wrong, and I’m a man who won’t leave his responsibilities behind him.” Coyle stood. He held out his arms as though entertaining every expectation she’d jump into them. “Come to the back room. I’ll look at your ankle in private. We’ll see what can be done.”

Marielle was hurt. She was tired. She was confused and worried and unsure how far her nest egg of savings would go.

Given all that, she wanted to concede—to give up trying to make him settle with her and just let him tend to her ankle the way he wanted to. On the verge of doing so, though, she spied more movement from the saloon’s floor. Doc Finney was headed her way, having evidently spoken with a few of the men around him to discern her location. He was accompanied by Jack Murphy, Daniel McCabe, Owen Cooper and several other leaders of the town.

Wearing a frown on his lined and weary face, Morrow Creek’s longtime physician scanned the crowd. He spied Marielle. He walked faster, carrying his hat and physician’s bag.

Finally. She was about to be well quit of Dylan Coyle.

Alertly, Marielle sat straighter in her chair. She thought she could make it to the saloon’s back room, if she had a little help. Since several of the town’s burliest men had accompanied Doc Finney to the saloon, she could ask someone she knew to help her. Then she could see the back of Mr. Coyle. For good.

Unexpectedly, the notion made her feel...almost wistful.

Her melancholy didn’t last long, though. Because to Marielle’s surprise, even as she prepared to make that arduous journey to the saloon’s back room, Doc Finney did not rush to her side. He did not open his physician’s bag, extract a miracle cure and fix her. He didn’t even try to do those things.

Instead, he spied Dylan Coyle—who stood with his back to the room and thus couldn’t see Doc Finney approaching—and hurried nearer. He raised his arm. “Coyle! There you are!”

Coyle turned. “Doc!” His jovial greeting extended to the other men. “McCabe. Cooper.” They all shook hands. Heartily. The others—men Marielle had known for years now—gazed at the drifter through respectful eyes. “Murphy, you owe me a new hat,” Coyle teased. “One that’s not soaked clean through with whiskey.”

“The hell I do!” Marielle’s boss returned. “When you drink in my place, you can’t expect to come out looking like a dandy.”

They went on joshing with one another, trading back slaps and jokes. Taken aback by their good-humored meeting, Marielle frowned. She adjusted her feathered headpiece, then pointedly smoothed her skirts. Any second now, they would come to their senses and properly tend to her injury. Surely they would.

She cleared her throat, attempting to make sure of that.

“We thought we might miss you, Coyle,” Daniel McCabe, the town blacksmith, was saying. “I’m glad to see we didn’t.”

Cooper agreed. “You were supposed to come to the Morrow Creek Men’s Club meeting. We needed you there. There’s been a certifiable emergency in town.” The livery stable owner eyed his friends. “I told you we should’ve hog-tied him and brought him.”