The Sheriff whirled around to a wagon parked in front of the General Store. He snatched a long whip from the driver’s seat. He unfurled the supple end and lashed it down hard across the fallen man’s back.
Cici screamed louder than ever, even though those vicious blows weren’t hitting her. They couldn’t hit her. The man protected her with his body. The man on top of her groaned, and his weight slumped to pin her to the ground. His head fell next to hers, and his hat rolled off.
The Sheriff roared through gritted teeth with every cruel lash of the whip. He laid more than a dozen wicked strokes across the man’s back before he flung the whip aside and stormed off down Main Street.
2
Cici stayed where she was for a long time. She dared not move. She ought to have been ashamed or at least dismayed at lying under the body of a strange man on the sidewalk where anybody might come along and see them, but she was too scared to feel any of those things.
The Sheriff’s animal hatred haunted her mind. How could anyone be so hateful and vicious? The man on top of her, whoever he was, tried to help her and protect her from that brute. First he took the punch the Sheriff meant for her. Those lashes would have cut her to ribbons had they fallen on her, and he took them, too.
After a long pause, she nudged the man to get him off her. He didn’t move. She tried again, but his whole weight rested on top of her. She tried to push him off, and he groaned into her ear.
She craned her head up and caught sight of blood stains on his shirt. She gasped out loud. He was bleeding. He must be really hurt. He couldn’t move. She wriggled out from under him, and he collapsed on his side on the sidewalk.
Cici knelt at his side. She hardly dared touch his shoulder. “Are you all right? I am so sorry for getting you into trouble. Let me get the doctor. You’re hurt, and you’re bleeding.”
He groaned even louder. He curled into a ball and clutched his arms across his stomach in pain. “Forget the doctor. I’ll be all right.”
“You’re not all right,” she fired back. “Look at you. You can’t even sit up.”
At her words, he tried to heave himself up. His dark curly hair hung in his face from a thick thatch on top. From where she stood, he looked young. His face showed smooth and unlined under three days’ growth of whiskers. His cheekbones made a clean line down to an angular jaw with nice white teeth between his lips.
“Help me, will you?” he growled. “Christ, it hurts!”
She grabbed him as best she could without touching his back, but he thundered out loud in pain. She broke away. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
He finally sat hunched and wounded on the sidewalk. He shot fierce glances at her through his sweat-soaked hair. “Sorry. I shouldn’t use that kind of language in front of a lady. It just hurts like the devil.”
“I’m going to get the doctor,” she told him. “The Sheriff could have broken your ribs or something.”
“Forget it, I said,” he snapped. He wilted over his arms. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to raise my voice at you. I don’t need a doctor. Just leave me be, and I’ll be okay. I just need to catch my breath.”
She eyed him sidelong. “All right. I’ll leave you alone.”
“Wait!” he called after her. “I didn’t mean that. I just meant I don’t need a doctor. I didn’t mean I wanted you to leave.”
“Oh. All right.”
He cocked his head and shook the hair out of his eyes. Now she got a decent look at him. His bright eyes sparkled behind his hair. He had a nice face with strong features. “Who are you?” he asked. “I don’t recognize you.”
“My name’s Cici Cope. I was supposed to meet a man here at the Hotel today. I was supposed to be a mail order bride. His name’s Kelvin Kirk, but I guess he never got my last letter telling him I was coming. He didn’t show up, so I’m staying at the Hotel until I can send word to him that I’m here.”
He stared at her.
Cici fidgeted. “Well, you don’t have to look at me like that. I know it’s not the most decent thing to do, but I had nowhere else to go. I was out of house and home back in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, so it was come here or sleep under a bridge.”
He shook his head down at the ground. “It’s perfectly decent, Cici, and I’m sorry about the misunderstanding. I’m Kelvin Kirk.”
“What?” she gasped.
“I’m Kelvin Kirk, Cici, and I never knew you were coming today. If I had known, I would have been waiting at the Hotel with bells on and this never would have happened. As it is, I’m sorry about…well, I’m real sorry about falling on you like that. I never meant any disrespect by it.”
She blinked at him. “You’re…. are you seriously apologizing to me for protecting me from the rotten hound of a Sheriff?”
“I just don’t want you to think I would ever disrespect a lady like that,” he went on. “I would never presume to….”
“Oh, drop it,” she interrupted. “You were a hero, and I’m in your debt for it.”
“Forget it,” he replied. “Come on. I hate to ask you to help me up, but if we get on my horse, I’ll take you home to my ranch.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she returned. “I’m staying at the Hotel.”
“Why not?” he asked. “Aren’t I good enough for you?”
“You’re good enough. After what you just did, I don’t know if I’m good enough for you, but that doesn’t matter because I don’t know you from a hole in the ground. I’m not going home with you, and I’m certainly not marrying you—not today, at least. We’ll have to get to know each other better over the next few weeks before I’m ready to decide if I’ll marry you.”
“If!” he bellowed. “Jed and Betsy Wilcox got married the very first day and went home as man and wife within an hour. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.”
“I don’t care what Jed and Betsy Wilcox did,” Cici told him. “I didn’t come out here to marry the first man that showed his face to me. I came out here to get to know you better. Then I’ll decide if I’m going to marry you, and if you carry on like this much longer, I’ll decide I don’t want to. I follow my own mind, Kelvin Kirk, and if you have any hope of marrying me, you’ll learn that right now.”
He glared at her for a moment. Then all the fight drained out of him. He buckled across the middle and hunched over his arms. “Man, it hurts like you wouldn’t believe!”
She couldn’t ignore that voice. She sat down on the sidewalk next to him. “Let me get the doctor for you. Please. I don’t like the look of that blood coming through your shirt. The blows must have been a lot harder than I realized.”
He stole a sidelong glance at her through his hair. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed you would marry me right away. That was stupid. Just ignore it. I’m not thinking right. I better go home to the ranch.”
“How are you going to get there when you can barely sit up?” Cici asked. “You need attention and maybe a place to spend the night. Maybe you should go out to Jed’s forge and ask them to put you up for the night.”
“That’s a good idea.” He looked up and down the street. “You’re right. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Why is the Sheriff so nasty, anyways?” she asked. “I never saw a lawman like him.”
“Oh, he’s no lawman,” Kelvin answered. “He’s just a common thug with a tin star pinned to his chest. No one pays him any mind in this town if they can possibly get away with it. He works for a big-shot land tycoon. As a matter of fact, I work for the same big-shot land tycoon, so I guess I don’t have anything to say about it.”
“Do you mean Merrill Fox, the man you wrote to me about?”
“The very same,” Kelvin replied. “He pays Sheriff Rupert to do his bidding and to use the law to enforce his will. I guess everyone in this town has sort of gotten used to Merrill and the Sheriff’s ways, but it still causes problems more often than you’d like to think—kind of like it did today.”
&
nbsp; “It sounds like trouble,” Cici remarked.
“It is,” he replied. “I’m real sorry for getting you mixed up in this on your first day in town. The same thing happened to Betsy, and she and Jed have had no end of trouble with the Foxes ever since.”
“That’s too bad. I met Betsy just before. She seems like a real nice lady.”
“Oh, she is!” Kelvin replied. “Her and Jed both are the nicest people you could ever meet. She was a mail order bride, too, you know.”
“I know.”
“If you ever want to talk to someone about this stuff, you should talk to her,” Kelvin went on. “They’ve helped me a lot trying to get married.”
“She told me,” Cici replied.
Just then, a man in a clean black suit came out of the Post Office. He crossed to the Hotel. Then he started walking down the sidewalk in front of the General Store. He walked right past Cici and Kelvin. He happened to glance down at Kelvin’s back, and he stopped dead in his tracks.
“That looks pretty nasty, young man,” he told Kelvin.
Kelvin answered over his shoulder. “It is.”
“Do you mind if I take a look?” the man asked.
Kelvin turned away. “By all means, take a look. I’m on display out here, so you might as well.” He spoke aside to Cici. “This is Doctor Noah Kearney, so you see, you didn’t need to go fetch him after all. He’s got the best nose for blood in ten counties.”
The doctor touched his hat brim to Cici. “A pleasure, Ma’am.”
“This is Cici Cope, Doc,” Kelvin told him. “She’s…well, I guess you could say she’s a friend of mine.”
The doctor pulled back Kelvin’s shirt and took a peek at his blood-stained back. Kelvin roared through his clenched jaws. “Aargh!”
“It looks pretty bad, boy,” the doctor told him. “You better come over to my office so I can disinfect the wounds. You don’t want them festering, which is what will happen if you leave them in contact with that shirt for too long.”
Kelvin muttered to Cici. “You see how it is? Doctors! They always want to doctor you.”
“You better go with him,” Cici told Kelvin. “You wouldn’t want to die of a fever when we just met.”
Kelvin’s head shot up, and he grinned at her. “You’re right. That would be rude. All right. I’ll go.”
He dragged himself to his feet, and he faced Cici. “It was a pleasure to meet you, even if the circumstances weren’t what we both had in mind for a romantic first encounter.”
Cici couldn’t stop smiling at him. Now that he started to recover, her heart skipped a beat every time he looked at her with those sparkling clear eyes of his. “It was a pleasure to meet you, too. I hope you’re feeling better real soon.”
“I tell you what would really make me feel better,” he remarked.
“What’s that?”
“If you had supper with me tomorrow evening,” he replied. “Meet me at the Hotel, and I’ll treat you to a nice supper on me. What do you say?”
Cici beamed at him. What a gentleman he turned out to be! She expected him to be a rough sort of cowboy. Now he turned out to be a hero and a gentleman besides. “I would love to meet you for supper at the Hotel tomorrow evening. What time would you like to meet?”
“Say seven o’clock?” he asked.
“Perfect.” Her cheeks glowed. Not even his straggling hair and his hunched posture could reduce him in stature in her eyes.
He nodded and started to turn away. “Great. That will give me a chance to prove to you I know how to be on time for appointments.”
She laughed and started toward the Hotel when he spun around. “Hey, Cici?”
“Yes?”
“What do you say I pick you up tomorrow morning and take you for a drive out to the ranch?” he asked. “I could show you around, and you could get a look at the place—to decide if you like it enough to want to live there, I mean. No obligation, of course—just taking a look. That would give us a chance to get to know each other better. What do you say?”
“I would love to go for a drive out to the ranch with you tomorrow,” she replied. “I would love to see it. Thank you for offering.”
“Wonderful,” he exclaimed. “How about I pick you up at nine o’clock?”
“That would be perfect,” she replied.
The doctor cleared his throat, and Kelvin took a step back to follow him. He still didn’t take his eyes off Cici’s face. Their eyes locked together. Cici didn’t want to leave as long as he was still here.
He took another step back. She waited for him to turn away, but at the last second, he hurried back to where she stood. He peeled one arm off his stomach and took her hand. He gave it a squeeze, and his mouth twitched with a suppressed smile. “See you tomorrow.”
Cici barely managed to whisper, “Bye.”
He backed away. Then he spun on his heel and followed the doctor up Main Street. Cici waited as long as she could before she walked back to the Hotel. Only when she got back to her room did she remember she hadn’t bought the thread.
3
Cici waited for Kelvin on the Hotel porch the next morning. She had to remind herself again and again that it wasn’t yet nine o’clock. He wasn’t late. She was early.
She knit her fingers together so tight her knuckles ached. Her heart fluttered at the thought of seeing him again. Was she really going to marry this man?
He intervened when the Sheriff attacked her. He threw himself between her and the Sheriff’s fist. Then he took those whiplashes for her and got himself injured into the bargain. What more could she ask for in a husband?
He was certainly handsome enough. His square-cut shoulders filled out his shirt, and the armpits of his sleeves puckered when he crossed his arms over his chest. A lifetime of hard work made him into a hardened stack of muscle.
She shook those thoughts out of her head. She was here to investigate him, not to become smitten over a man she didn’t know. She refused to let herself get deceived by appearances. She had to find out if the Kelvin she read about in his letters was really the man himself or if he concocted some façade to lure her here to marry him.
He could be a heartless clod. He could be a cunning manipulator. He could be just about anybody under the sun. Only time would tell, and she was the woman who would uncover his true nature.
While she stood there scolding herself for letting her mind wander, a pristine driving buggy buzzed around the corner. It rolled around the saloon at the far end of town by the church. It purred down Main Street. It came closer and closer in a black blur until she saw the red lines on its wheel spokes.
To her surprise, it stopped in front of the Hotel, and she stared up at Kelvin sitting in the seat. He tipped his hat, and dimples showed in his cheeks when he smiled. “A fine morning for a ride, don’t you think, Ma’am?”
She waved her hand at the buggy. “What’s this? Don’t tell me you drive around the ranch in this to check your cattle herds.”
“This?” he asked. “No, I borrowed this from Jed Wilcox. That guy has all the best. It pays to be his friend at times like these. Now are we going for a drive, or would you like to check the horse’s teeth while you’re at it?”
Cici couldn’t help but laugh. She climbed into the seat next to him, and the buggy sailed away out of town. The wind cooled Cici’s flushed cheeks and blew under her bonnet.
Kelvin handled the reins with expert ease, and she started to relax. She wasn’t here to hold him under a magnifying glass. She was enjoying a ride with him through majestic countryside. What could be so complicated about that?
The bay horse pranced down the road. Once they got out of town, the road didn’t kick up so much dust. The horse’s red mane flowed back from its arched neck. Everything about this experience thrilled Cici’s heart.
When she glanced at Kelvin sitting so close to her, he smiled down at her. He looked more handsome now that he did yesterday. He sat up straight and tall, with no sign of pain, and he wor
e clean clothes.
The scenery he drove through filled her with uncontrollable joy. Nothing could dampen her enthusiasm for this day. He drove a long way out of town and turned under a wooden sign that read, Rocking Horse Ranch. A carved symbol of a horse attached to a curved rocker underneath sat next to the lettering.
Kelvin drove up a long curved road to three long, low buildings. Their grey boards cracked in the summer sun, and their rooves drooped over the gloomy windows. Cici’s heart sank. Her first sight of what might be her new home deflated her enjoyment in an instant.
The three buildings formed a U shape with a circular driveway between them. Fields of pasture ran away to the horizon, with a collection of corrals and pens constructed behind the buildings.
Kelvin climbed down from the buggy, but Cici sat where she was. She didn’t like this ranch at all. Kelvin held up his hand to her. “Come on. I’ll show you around.”
She traveled all the way here. She might as well look around. She took his hand, and a sizzle of excitement ran up her arm. Her heart fluttered. She stepped down to the ground and wound up right in front of him. She looked up into his crystal clear eyes.
For a moment, they both froze and stared at each other. She studied his skin at close range. His eyes and mouth made a perfect frame in his chiseled features. She couldn’t have imagined a man she’d like more to marry, but she had to keep her distance for now.
She lowered her eyes with an effort and took her hand out of his grasp. He waved her to the nearest building. “This is the barn.”
He slid back the big doors and led the horse inside with the buggy still hitched to the shafts. He parked it in a large space just inside the door and scooped a measure of grain into the feedbox to keep the animal happy.
Kelvin waved down a long passage lined with stalls. “That’s the horses’ stalls. I guess you don’t really need to see that. It’s like any other barn in the world.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen a few,” she replied.
The Forgotten Bride (Brides 0f Brimstone Book 2) Page 2