The Bride Lottery

by Tatiana March

  “What do you want, Princess?” he asked roughly and wedged his boot deeper, emphasizing the intimate intrusion. “Is this what you want?”

  Alarm flashed in Miranda’s eyes, just the way Jamie had intended. He feared he might not have enough strength to resist her, and he wanted to make sure she would stop him if he tried to go too far.

  “Apologize,” Miranda demanded. Her tone was petulant, full of hurt, not angry or indignant, as Jamie had expected.

  “What for?” he replied. “I haven’t done anything...yet.”

  “I want you to apologize for what you said about me riding astride. It was crude and mean and nasty.”

  “Oh, Princess... Miranda.” Jamie lowered his head and let his forehead come to rest against hers. The tone of her voice spoke of a long-nursed grievance. How much had that one callous comment been niggling in her mind?

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I was angry with you, and...”

  He wanted to roll onto his back, wanted to avert his face, but he owed it to Miranda to let her see his expression while he talked. If revealing his feelings was the price he had to pay to make his apology complete, so be it.

  “That’s the way it has always been for me...with women. Perhaps not crude...but functional...efficient. I’ve never been with a woman in a way that involved anything more than just satisfying the demands of my body.”

  “And me?” she said. “What is involved when you are with me?”

  Jamie met her gaze and held it, allowing Miranda to see into his thoughts. “With you, everything is involved, Princess. My body, my mind, my heart. Everything that I am. Everything that I hope to be.”

  Miranda lifted a hand and touched his cheeks, his chin, his lips, in much the same way he had traced her features earlier while they danced under the stars in the clearing. Her fingers were gentle, her touch as soft as a spring breeze.

  “You are forgiven,” she whispered.

  “Thank you.” Jamie dropped one final kiss on her mouth, light and tender now. “Go to sleep, Miranda. This is not the time or place.”

  Even if she hadn’t been drunk on champagne, her recollection of his callous comment had spoiled the moment, reminding Jamie of how far apart their worlds were. Part-Indian bounty hunter and an educated Eastern princess. He was becoming dangerously close to thinking it would be possible to bridge that gap.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Jamie got up in the moonlight to take his turn for a two-hour watch. When the first glimmer of dawn painted the sky pink, he lifted the tent flap and peeked inside. He found Miranda awake, pale and bleary-eyed. She sent him a grimace of nausea and discomfort.

  “I’m thirsty,” she croaked. “My head hurts.”

  With a grunt of sympathy, Jamie straightened on his feet and fetched her a cup of coffee. By the time Miranda had drunk the thick black brew and freshened up in a secluded spot by the riverside, she appeared more alert.

  As they moved around the campsite, preparing for their departure, it seemed clear to Jamie that Miranda was avoiding meeting his eyes. He got the impression that she wished to forget the intimacy of the night, and he chose not to remind her.

  With routine born of three weeks of traveling, they folded down the tent and packed their belongings and loaded the mules and saddled their horses. After saying goodbye to Stella and Seth—the others were still asleep—they resumed their journey south.

  During each rest stop, Miranda seemed a little livelier. The awkwardness of the morning faded, like the autumn sunshine dispersed the chill of the night. Jamie was relieved. It had crossed his mind that if Miranda was looking for a reason to be angry with him, she could choose between construing his reticence as a rejection and claiming that he had been taking liberties.

  In the evening, as they struck camp, it became evident to Jamie that although Miranda might not wish to acknowledge what had happened between them, a subtle change had taken place in their relationship. Up to now, Miranda had worked hard, but her efforts had been tense, as if she were being tested. Now she seemed to relax. Instead of dividing up the tasks, they worked side by side. There was nothing said or done to declare that they had become more than traveling companions, and yet things felt different between them.

  Miranda declined the shelter of the tent, telling him she preferred sleeping under the stars while the weather remained mild. After supper, when they sat by the fire, Miranda bombarded him with questions, as if she had acquired a right to probe into his mind.

  To his surprise, Jamie found he was not only allowing Miranda to pull aside the veil that shielded his privacy, he was letting her knock down the walls that protected it.

  “How did you learn to track outlaws?” she asked.

  Jamie adjusted the soot-black coffeepot on the flames. “An old man taught me. He was a full-blood Cheyenne. He turned up at my mother’s house one day when I was around eight. My mother let him take me out for the afternoon, and he kept coming back. He never spoke about himself. Only about nature. How everything had a spirit. Not just animals, but every rock and tree and flower, and every grain of sand.”

  Leaning forward, Jamie lifted the scalding coffeepot from the circle of stones and poured the thick brew into the mugs Miranda held out. “He had long straggly hair and skin more wrinkled than the leather on my glove. He must have been some relation from my father’s Indian side. My mother had never seen him before, but her instincts told her she could trust him. Then, when I was around ten, he stopped coming round. He must have died, although we didn’t know for sure. There was no one we could ask.”

  “What happened to your sister when you went on the road, bounty hunting?”

  “Louise tried to continue my mother’s business of sewing dresses, but she didn’t have the skill for fine work. Women wouldn’t pay her as much. She couldn’t pay the rent on the house, not even with what I could bring in. When she was eighteen, she got interested in her Indian heritage. She went to live on the reservation and met her husband there.”

  Jamie tossed the dregs of his coffee into the flames and listened to the hiss they made. He glanced at Miranda. She was sitting on the ground, her legs tucked under her. Firelight played on her features, reminding him of the passion she’d shown him last night. Regardless of the consequences, she’d offered herself to him. With others present, she had shared a tent with him, making it difficult to claim they were married in name only.

  Once before, she had suggested they might make their marriage real. At that time, it had seemed to Jamie she regretted her words almost as soon as they were out, but now he’d discovered it was the encounter with her cousin that had caused her anxiety to flare.

  In his mind, Jamie went through every incarnation he’d witnessed of Miranda. She’d adapted herself to every situation, met every challenge with valor and determination. Bride to a stranger. Mother to an Indian child. Saloon singer. Bereaved parent. Pioneer on the trail. His wife in the eyes of the world, a social outcast according to many.

  She was a woman of courage. One prepared to take risks. Perhaps even on him—a quarter-Cheyenne bounty hunter who owned nothing but a horse, a saddle and a pair of well-used guns.

  Jamie spoke slowly, hesitating over each word. “I stayed in Wyoming because I wanted to be close to Louise and Nora. There are a lot more outlaws in Arizona and New Mexico. Big bounties. I’ve been thinking...after we get to Gold Crossing, I’ll stay down south... Now that I don’t have doctor’s bills and other expenses to worry about, I can start putting money aside. I’d like to get some land eventually...raise horses...”

  “I thought you liked bounty hunting.”

  He was silent for a moment, then allowed another crack in his armor. “It’s a dangerous job and it keeps a man on the road. If he wants to take on the responsibility for a family, he needs to find a safer occupation that allows him to settle down.”
>
  “I see.” Miranda looked pensive.

  “It might take some time to build up a stake. Maybe a couple of years.”

  “So you’ll remain a bounty hunter for now, and when you’ve saved up enough money, you’ll retire, buy a piece of land and raise horses?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “I think it’s a good plan,” Miranda said quietly.

  Jamie gathered his courage. Miranda had asked him to kiss her. She had asked him to sleep in the tent with her. She had taken the first step to bring them together. She had laid herself open for rejection. He owed it to her to do the same.

  “What I’m saying, Princess, is that I’d like us to stay married... I’m asking you to stay married to me. You don’t have to decide now,” he hastened to add. “It will be another two weeks before we get to Gold Crossing. And if you’re not sure, you can stay with your sister and think about it while I get the money together for a piece of land.”

  Miranda gave him a secretive, feminine smile that made Jamie think of a cat with a bowl of cream. “I’ll think about it,” she said with laughter in her tone.

  Jamie breathed a sigh of relief. If proposing marriage to a woman was so daunting when they were already legally wed, he pitied any man who had to do it without the comfort of a marriage certificate in his pocket.

  For another few moments, they talked about his plan to raise horses. When it came time to settle down for the night, Miranda arranged their bedrolls side by side in the lee of the rocks that bordered the riverbank.

  Jamie watched her in the firelight. He wished he were a man with fancy words, capable of giving a woman a pretty speech, but perhaps it didn’t matter. He had managed to say everything that needed to be said.

  * * *

  Day after day, Miranda rode at the end of their small convoy, happy despite the monotony and hard work of traveling. At night, they slept side by side. Sometimes Jamie kissed her and held her in his arms, but as he had to stand guard, intimate moments were infrequent and brief. Miranda did not mind. She wanted her wedding night to be in a comfortable bed behind closed doors.

  * * *

  Ahead on the riverside trail, Jamie called for a halt. Miranda reined Alfie to a stop. Dark clouds were rolling across the sky, threatening a storm. Although it was only afternoon, daylight was already fading.

  Miranda watched Jamie dismount and take Sirius by the bridle and lead him along the riverbank, studying the horse’s gait. Pausing, Jamie leaned down, curled his hand over one hind leg and pushed against the flank until Sirius allowed him to lift up the hoof.

  “The shoe is loose,” Jamie called out. “It won’t last much longer.”

  He climbed back into the saddle and rode over to Miranda, turning the pack mules around to face north again. “We passed a town a couple of miles back. Didn’t look like much of a place but I expect they’ll have a blacksmith.”

  The town was called Three Guns and it did have a blacksmith—a huge, swarthy man with a broken nose and a completely bald head. According to the sign above the entrance to his forge, he also pulled teeth, offered an antidote to snakebites and cured all manner of aches and pains. Miranda suspected that anyone who purchased his treatments would claim an instant improvement because they would be too afraid to say anything else.

  Jamie twisted around in the saddle and pointed along the dusty street. “There’s a telegraph office. Why don’t you send your sister a telegram? You ought to warn her that your cousin might be turning up.”

  Accepting the advice, Miranda rode to the general store that housed the post office and the telegraph. She hopped down outside the weathered timber building and tied Alfie to the hitching rail. Her footsteps clattered on the boardwalk but came to an abrupt halt outside the open door as she spotted the row of wanted posters tacked to the wall.

  She paused to study the fuzzy images printed on yellow paper. Some were barely more than sketches, but one poster had two photographs. Alvin and Alonzo Hardin. She recalled hearing those two names before. Seth Stevens had been talking about them. The men had robbed a gold shipment from the mines in Gold Hill, killing two express messengers.

  And the bounty was four thousand dollars.

  Her eyes fixed on the amount on the poster. Settling down to raise horses was a fine idea, but it worried her Jamie couldn’t do it right away. She recalled the fear she’d felt when he rode after the whiskey wagon, vanishing out of her sights. Could she tolerate two years of such fear while he went out on the road, bounty hunting?

  No, she could not. And perhaps she was staring at a solution.

  Miranda leaned closer, read the small print on the poster: “Wanted alive by the Gold Hill Mining Company.” Tempted to rip the poster from the wall, she looked around. Two men loitered outside the saloon, and a third one sat smoking on the hotel steps. It might be unwise to reveal her interest. She pulled her hand back, adjusted her deerskin coat and marched into the post office.

  The clerk, a pretty young woman with chestnut hair coiled on top of her head, sat reading a penny dreadful behind the counter. Crammed into a corset that almost cut her curvy figure in half, she wore a dress too revealing for daywear.

  “Do you have copies of the wanted posters?” Miranda asked.

  The woman ducked beneath the counter, straightened and slammed a poster on top. She’d only produced one—the one with the Hardin brothers. Her gesture was defiant, as if daring anyone to catch the criminals.

  “Do you have any other posters?” Miranda asked.

  “Only that one.” The clerk twisted a chestnut curl around her forefinger, eyeing Miranda with disdain, smirking at the unladylike outfit of denim and deerskin.

  Miranda picked up the poster. “Can I keep this?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  We are bounty hunters, Miranda was about to blurt out but curbed her tongue just in time. Her stream of prattle to Aggie Nugget while Cousin Gareth was listening had taught her about the dangers of loose talk.

  “Merely curious,” she said. “They seem to be worth more than anyone else.”

  “That’s because Alvin Hardin is more of a man than all the others put together. No one will catch him alive, and they won’t shoot him either, because he ain’t worth a single dollar dead.”

  “Why is he wanted alive even though he murdered two men?”

  “He stole a gold shipment. If someone kills him, the mining company will never get their gold back. Nobody knows where he has hidden it. He hasn’t even told—” The girl cut off her tirade and bit her lip, then went on petulantly, “What is it you came in for?”

  “I’d like to send a telegram.”

  With an arrogant flick of her wrist, the girl tore a sheet from a telegram pad and slid the piece of paper across the counter. “Print the message here. Twenty cents a word.”

  “That’s too much!”

  “That’s our price. The law allows up to thirty cents per word. Take it or leave it.” She gave Miranda a condescending look. “Can you write, or do you need me to do it for you?”

  Miranda clamped down on a burst of temper. “I’ll guess I might manage to scratch down a few words.”

  The girl flustered. Her fingers went back to twirling her hair.

  From the back of the shop came an angry bellow. “Rose!”

  The girl rolled her eyes. “That’s my pa. More ornery than a donkey with a burr in his tail. I’ll be back in a minute. Pa will have to send your telegram anyway. I’ve only just started learning the code.”

  Miranda attempted a friendly tone. “That must be difficult.”

  “It sure is, but I’ve got to learn. I promised—”

  Again, an abrupt silence. Miranda got the impression that Rose harbored important secrets she longed to share with a female confidante but did not dare to disclose.

 
If she wanted to help Jamie to go after the Hardin brothers, Miranda realized, she would have to learn to gather information, lure people into confiding in her. The thought made her uncomfortable. Betrayal was betrayal, even between strangers.

  But four thousand dollars would be enough to buy a piece of land, she reminded herself. It would mean Jamie would never have to place himself in danger again. And because the Hardin brothers must be captured alive, there would be no killing.

  Brushing the moral dilemmas aside, Miranda focused on composing her telegram. At the high cost, she did not wish to waste words.

  Journey going well. Cousin Gareth maybe coming. Lost his memory. Not know his name. Goes under Gareth Wolfson. Accidentally revealed your location. Sorry. Be careful. Love. Miranda.

  “Amnesia” instead of “lost his memory” might have saved two words but it didn’t make the point as well. Miranda would have liked to have mentioned that Cousin Gareth seemed a nicer person now, more like he had been when they were small, but she couldn’t justify the added expense.

  She waited for Rose to return. It took the girl three attempts to count twenty-seven words, and even longer to work out the cost, including the address. Miranda waited patiently by the counter, then watched the girl disappear into the back and listened until the telegraph key started clicking.

  * * *

  Back at the blacksmith’s forge, Sirius was prancing about, unhappy with all the poking and prodding about his hooves. After leading the horse by the bridle in a circle to calm him down, Jamie stepped into the saddle and rode over to join Miranda.

  “There’s going to be a storm,” he told her, peering up into the sky, now blanketed with angry clouds. “We’d better stay in a hotel tonight.”

  They made their way down the street. As they dismounted and tied their animals to the hitching rail outside the hotel, the man who had been sitting on the steps rose. He stubbed out his cheroot and settled to wait in the open doorway. Tall and lanky, he had a sharply pointed chin and nervous, darting eyes. Miranda could smell the sweet, cloying scent of the greasy pomade he had used to slick back his hair.