“Shot,” Sam corrected. “And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make an announcement. I took one in the arm, two in the leg. But I think those bullets just passed through muscle.”
His dark eyes stared down at her, and she saw the all-too-familiar pain. “Sarah ...” Sweat formed across his forehead as he fought to remain standing.
“I know,” she answered, aggravation blending with panic in her voice. “Better get you out of town before you fall.”
He nodded slightly and slipped his arm around her waist.
They moved slowly through the back room of the store. Sarah acted as if she were showing him something when the storekeeper hurriedly passed with another load.
“Oh!” Sarah yelled to the round little man’s back as she tried to keep him too busy to notice them. “Could you add six more cans of peaches and three blankets?” They crossed the cluttered storage room, Sam leaning more heavily against her shoulder with each step. “And”—she fought to keep her voice even—“I forgot potatoes.” They made it to the opening when she added, “And, Mr. Moon, Sam just reminded me, he’d like a couple of pairs of your best longhandles. Winter’s coming on.”
They could hear the shopkeeper groan. He’d obviously rather be out bragging about waiting on Sam Gatlin than actually doing so.
Moving as fast as Sam could, they crossed to the wagon. Sarah noticed it was the same old rented buckboard and the same two horses, but Sam had tied a saddled mount to the back. This black stallion was not like any she’d seen for rent at a livery, but there was no time for questions.
Five minutes later, when Mr. Moon finally collected all the extra things Sarah asked for, she and Sam were already in the wagon, their laps covered with one of the new blankets.
When the store owner shoved the last box in the back with an oath, Sam seemed to be forcing his voice to sound calm. “I shot one of Reed’s gang when they stormed the room at the hotel. He had a price on his head.” Sam took a breath and continued, “Tell the sheriff to take the man’s burial expenses out of the reward and deposit the rest of the money with you. I’ll pick it up in a month or so.”
Mr. Moon brightened. “Yes, sir. You know I’ll keep it in the safe for you. Same agreement as always, a five percent charge for handling.”
“One more thing.” Sam gripped the side of the wagon and straightened so the shopkeeper wouldn’t know he was hurt. “The next time my wife comes in here, you’d better be damn sure I’m dead before you turn her down. Understand?”
Mr. Moon looked too frightened to answer.
“And don’t go calling her my woman. She’s my wife. Anything that belongs to me belongs to her. She can take my entire stash out of your safe if she feels the need.”
Sarah glanced at the shopkeeper. He nodded and she knew the next time she came into his store she’d be treated differently.
Lifting the reins, Sarah maneuvered the horses along the back of the stores toward open country. After a few minutes Sam pointed at a path veering off the main road and not north in the direction they’d entered town.
“Take that trail as far as you can,” he whispered under his breath. “I want to make sure we’re not followed.”
She didn’t question, guessing he had his reasons and she’d find out soon enough. He might be bleeding, but there was still a power about him. A wounded lion was still a lion.
They traveled half a mile down the path before she turned to him and asked, “So, what did you do before I came along, just die every time you went to town?”
Sam didn’t laugh.
Sarah knew the pain must be bad. “We need to stop and let me take a look at those wounds.”
“Not yet,” Sam said with clenched teeth. “Not until we’re out of sight of the town. I’ll show you a place. Try to miss as least one of the mud holes between now and then.”
“I was driving a team before I could walk,” Sarah lied. In truth she had only learned to drive a team when they started out on the wagon train. There, every wife drove, everyone walked from time to time.
Sam grunted at her claim as she managed to roll over another mud hole.
Ten minutes later Sarah turned a bend in the road and pulled the wagon off to the side onto a grassy area near a stream. She spread one of the new blankets over grass already brown and helped Sam down. Blood coated one side of his leg like thick paint.
“I hate blood,” she whispered more to herself than him.
“I’m not too fond of it myself.” He smiled. “I don’t mind other people‘s, but the sight of my own doesn’t sit well with me.”
“Take off your clothes and let me count the wounds this time.”
Sam hesitated.
Sarah collected supplies. “Take them off, Sam Gatlin. I’ll not be seeing anything I haven’t seen before.”
He pulled off his once white shirt slowly, trying not to raise his left arm more than a few inches. He stumbled when he stepped out of his pants while trying to hold a blanket up to allow a bit of privacy. Sarah hurried to steady him, but ended up tumbling with him. He twisted as they fell, taking the blow of the ground while she landed atop him.
For a moment Sarah didn’t move. She lay atop the wall of his chest, listening to his heart pound beneath her ear.
“Are you all right?” she whispered as she struggled to sit up.
He didn’t move. His eyes were closed. The corner of his forehead looked purple.
She stood and circled him. The blanket he still held by one corner lay across his waist, barely covering his private parts. “Sam?” Even without his gun belt or clothes he still looked like a mighty warrior. “Sam!”
He didn’t answer. He was one bloody, magnificent creature, she thought, even out cold. Not one ounce of pretty or even handsome on him, but two hundred pounds of solid muscle and power.
Tripping over the new tin sewing box, she found what his head must have hit when it fell. “You dented my sewing box,” she complained as if he could hear her ... as if it mattered.
Sarah pulled their canteen from beneath the seat, thankful she’d refilled it when they’d left the river yesterday. Looking back at him, she shook her head, not knowing where to start.
“You are doing your best to turn me into a widow again, Sam Gatlin, but I’ve got news for you, I’m not going to make it easy on you. If I learned anything from living with Granny Vee, it was how to patch up folks. She always told me doctoring was easier than picking cotton, so that’s why she learned it. But then, she never ran across the likes of you.”
She jerked the linsey-woolsey dress from her bundle. He’d bought her the dress the morning after they’d married, and she was running out of places to cut strips along the skirt. “I’ve made up my mind that I don’t have any place to go, so I might as well stay here with you and be your wife.” Sarah washed away blood so she could see how much damage he’d done to himself getting into a gunfight. “Devote my life to patching your already beat-up body.”
She smiled, remembering what the women in the store had said. “I guess I’m the one woman in the state who’ll stay married to you. But I’m giving you fair warning, you need to think about changing your habits.”
Sarah let her fingers slide along the unharmed muscle of his thigh. Touching him was like brushing over fine mahogany; she could feel the solidness with her fingertips. The scars only added character to him.
“All my life, all I’ve ever wanted was someone to love, and it looks like you’re the only one who applied.” She continued to touch him, hoping he’d know that someone cared. “So I’m going to love all six foot of no-good, drunken, worthless inch of you. I’ve heard folks say not to try to make a man over when you marry him, but they never met you.”
She dusted a little of her herbs and wrapped his leg where one bullet must have slid along his thigh. He’d been right, the bullets had passed clean through.
“You see”—she pointed her knife at him as she moved to the next wound—“I figure anything I do is an improvement ‘cau
se you’re about the most low-down, mean, worthless man I could ever hope to run into. You’re less than not-much-of-a-father to those kids, you got people trying to kill you at every turn. Even respectable ladies gossip about the mean things you’ve done. Far as I know, not a soul cares if you live or die.”
Sarah smiled. “Except me, Sam Gatlin. There’s something good left in you or you wouldn’t have bought me a dress or told that shopkeeper I was your wife. So I’ve made up my mind, and there isn’t anything you can do to change it. I love you.” She knew she made no sense, but Sarah had to start somewhere. If she was afraid of him, or hated him, she’d just be standing in the crowd. For some reason he’d married her, and he hadn’t forced himself on her. It wasn’t exactly a long list of good traits, but it was a start.
She cleaned the next wound while noticing his back had healed nicely. None of the bullet holes were as bad as she’d feared. The lead only grazed his arm deep enough to cause bleeding. His legs would heal as soon as scabs formed.
Finally all the blood was removed and the damaged skin doused with whiskey, sprinkled with Granny Vee’s herbs, and wrapped. She flattened her hand against his heart and felt the warmth of his skin along with the steady pounding. She’d done the best she could do. Maybe, if they ever made it into town again, she’d buy a medicine box.
Looking up, she found dark eyes staring at her. Pain still clung to the edges, but his gaze was clear.
His eyes were brown, she thought, deep chocolate brown.
Neither of them moved. They just looked at each other as if they had never seen the other before. She left her hand resting against his chest as she lifted her chin, slightly challenging her right to touch him.
“I’m not dying, Sarah.” He rubbed the bump on his forehead. “These were no more than scratches.” Bracing himself, he sat up slowly, nursing his bandaged arm.
“You can’t promise that.” She let her hand fall away, brushing against scars as she moved. “We’ve been married less than a week, and you’ve been attacked twice. I’d say you were accident prone, but none of these wounds are accidents.”
Sam stared at the bend where they’d turned off the road, then checked to make sure his Colt was within reach. “I’m not dealing with anything new here, Sarah.” He closed his eyes, as if dreading what he had to say. “I was ten when my father was killed in the War Between the States. I was big for my age, so I went along with my uncle and grandfather to bring his body home. My mother had died a few years before in childbirth. I guess the Yankee scouts thought we hauled supplies when they ambushed us. Within minutes the fighting was over. All my family, except my baby sister, died that day.”
His voice remained flat as if the memory had grown too old to stir emotion. “A Confederate scout found me a few days later on the road, a bullet wound in my chest. I told him I was walking home.”
Sarah’s fingers brushed over the scar on his chest. The twisted flesh lay only an inch from where she’d felt his heart pounding.
“The Reb took me to a doctor working behind the lines. The doc just glanced my direction and asked me to rest outside the hospital tent. I heard him say that with the amount of blood covering me, it wouldn’t be long. There was no use wasting time patching me up.”
Sarah felt a chill. “What are you saying?”
He continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “I fought along the frontier line near Fort Griffin soon as I got old enough to sign up. Twice I was left for dead by war parties, the only survivor in a scouting company. The first time the men welcomed me back to the fort, thinking I escaped death, but the second time they avoided me as if I’d somehow cheated it. The blessing became a curse.”
“Maybe you were just lucky.”
“No, if I’d been lucky, I wouldn’t have been shot in the first place. A few years after the army, an old doctor in San Antonio patched me up after a gunfight. He told me that I heal faster than most. He said some men get a scratch and die of poisoning in the blood, but with me it’s going to have to be a straight shot to the heart before I drop.”
“So, what are you trying to tell me?”
Sam frowned. He looked down at her hand resting on the blanket only a few inches away. “It seems I’ve been trying to die for years, Sarah. For a long time after I saw my family die, I wanted to go with them. Then when I grew up and watched my friends shot while I stood right beside them, I thought nothing made sense.”
“So you became a bounty hunter?”
He laid his fingers over hers. “Life lost all reason. I didn’t really care if I lived or died.”
“And now?”
His dark eyes met hers. “You gave me a reason to care.”
NINE
SAM SAT ON THE BACK OF THE WAGON AND WATCHED his new wife as she walked down the creek’s bank. Eventually she’d turn around and come back. Then she would have to talk to him no matter how much she hated the idea.
He seemed to have found the one thing that would make her think less of him. In truth, if he had any good traits, he might have told her about them. But he was a loner who had few friends. And the good he’d done, he couldn’t tell anyone about, not even Sarah. Lives depended on his silence. He’d buried more than one coffin filled with rocks to give an outlaw a second chance. Now he only wished he had another chance with her.
She knew all of it now. He was a bounty hunter.
Hell, he thought, he would settle for a first chance. She hadn’t liked him from the start. The silence right after they married had been their best time together. Now that she knew half the outlaws in the state would gladly kill him, conditions between Sarah and him were not likely to improve.
But in his line of work, every year he made a few more enemies who thought they would be doing the world a favor if they killed him. Every year more tried. Sometimes he thought he was the one with his picture on a Wanted poster. Folks thought the bad guys should be brought to justice, only no one wanted to get too friendly with the man who did the job.
He’d lived the life of a bounty hunter for so long he hardly knew how to talk to normal folks. Maybe he should have tried to visit with her the night they married. If she’d learned about him then, she might not look so angry now.
But she seemed so frail and frightened, he decided to wait. Then there had been no time to explain why a man like him would even want a wife.
“One question?”
Sam hadn’t noticed Sarah turning around and walking back to the wagon. Now she stood eye level to him almost bumping his knees as she leaned toward him.
“Just one?” he asked, trying to act as if the sight of her standing so close didn’t bother him. People usually made a point not to get within reach of him.
“Why’d you marry me?” She narrowed her eyes as if she planned to evaluate his answer carefully.
Sam wasn’t sure he knew the answer. Maybe because she looked so helpless in that jail. Maybe he was sick of being alone. Maybe the thought of her going home with one of the farmers rubbed him the wrong way. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted. “Maybe I thought I was doing you a favor. I had this idea life with me might be a little easier than jail.” He almost laughed.
“Well, I know.” She paced in front of him with her hands locked behind her back like a tiny general before troops. “You wanted someone to nurse you through all your ‘accidents.’ You wanted a mother for your children....”
“I haven’t got any children,” he reminded her.
She ignored him. “You wanted someone to keep your house, only you don’t have a house. And cook your meals and sleep in your bed.”
She looked like a top going faster and faster in the wind. “You wanted someone who would be at your beck and call but who wouldn’t mind being dropped from a window or two if the need arose. Well, Sam Gatlin, I—”
“I never said I didn’t have a house.”
Sarah whirled around. “Yes, you did!”
“I said I didn’t have a cabin. I have a house.”
She looked
confused. “Tell me true: Do you have a house the way you don’t have children?”
He raised an eyebrow, having no idea how to answer her.
When he didn’t say anything, she added, “Maybe I should hit you on the other side with my sewing box.”
To his surprise, she drew closer. With him seated on the wagon’s gate, they were eye to eye. “I forgot to check that bruise,” she whispered as she brushed against his leg, leaning in to look at his forehead. “A bruise can be as bad as a cut sometimes.”
Her face was so close he almost bumped noses with her. Her fingers shoved the hair away from his forehead, then remained in his hair to hold it away so she could finish her examination.
Sam remained perfectly still while her other hand brushed across his forehead.
“Does this hurt?” she asked as her fingers pushed against his tender skin.
Sam felt her words fan across his face. Her left breast pushed against his arm so slightly he wasn’t even sure if they touched or he just felt the warmth of her body so close.
She moved between his knees to look closer. “Now, you tell me if I’m hurting you,” she said as she tested the skin of his forehead.
She was killing him, Sam thought. With every breath he filled his lungs with the fresh honeysuckle smell of her. He fought the urge to pull her closer. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t touch her until she asked him to, and if nothing else in this world he was a man of his word, no matter how she tempted him.
She treated him like a head of livestock she was examining for barbed-wire cuts, but he didn’t care. He enjoyed it anyway. He liked the feel of her fist tugging at his hair and the way she leaned close.
“I have a house,” he finally whispered when she didn’t go away. “It’s north of here on a small farm. I haven’t been there in a long time, but I think I can still find it. It’s got trees running along one side to hold the wind at bay and a well out back with the sweetest water in it.”
Her laughter touched his cheek.
“I wish you did have a farm. I’ve always wanted a place to call home. My first husband promised me that dream. He told me he had a farm when we married, but I soon learned the bank owned most of it. I’ll not fall into believing it a second time.”
Jodi Thomas Page 8