“A walk?” scoffed another of the serving girls. “You’re not even wearing any shoes. Besides, you’ve been on your feet all day.”
Aislinn didn’t pause to explain that she never wore shoes if she could help it. She and her brothers had grown up wild as renegade Apaches, back in Maine, and they’d gone barefoot from the day school let out until the first hard frost. She still loved the feel of green grass and good dirt under her feet better than most anything else, and when she was outside, she could be that other, younger Aislinn, with parents and at home.
She left the hotel by a rear door, and followed a narrow alley that ran parallel to Prominence’s main street, gnawing on an apple snatched from the pantry as she passed.
Dorrie McQuillan, the marshal’s sister, was sitting on the little porch behind the general store, calmly smoking a long, slim cigar. Miss Dorrie, with her dishwater-blond hair and thin-lashed brown eyes, was not a handsome woman, being tall and thin and somewhat dour of expression, but it was rumored that she’d once run away with a peddler. Her father, Shamus the elder, had caught up with them just in time, folks said. He’d beat the daylights out of the rascal, had him jailed and dragged his daughter home by the hair.
Aislinn nodded cordially, and Miss Dorrie returned the favor, blowing out a shifting cloud of blue smoke. You didn’t have to live in Prominence too long to learn that Miss Dorrie was a great trial to her sister. Miss Cornelia, who had a head for figures and had never eloped, taken strong spirits or smoked a cigar. No doubt having the marshal in the family circle was an additional cross for Cornelia, who was a very beautiful woman, for all her coldness of manner, with clouds of auburn hair and bright green eyes.
Aislinn smiled to herself and picked up her pace. She passed the feed store, the telegraph office, and the doctor’s, and then there was nothing between her and the open countryside but the saloon. She moved to the farthest side of the alley and walked purposefully, with squared shoulders, her eyes fixed straight ahead.
She had cause to give the place a wide berth—once, she’d seen a man relieving himself through the open door, and another time, she’d been forced to fend off the advances of a drunkard. Still, it was better to pass behind the saloon, because the front was far more perilous, with cowboys and drifters and gamblers constantly trailing in and out in various states of temper and inebriation. The very men who treated her politely in the dining room could turn into fiends, whether filled with drink or just the prospect of it.
“Probably not the best place to take a stroll, ma’am,” observed a familiar voice, just when she thought she’d passed by unnoticed. She didn’t need to look at the marshal to know he was the one talking to her. She turned her head, a quelling glance at the ready, but at the mere sight of him, it seemed that her heart slammed itself into her throat. His badge shone in the sunlight and his clothes were clean, if well worn. How could a bath and barbering change a man so much?
“I appreciate your concern, Marshal,” she said. “Of course, if you would do something about the criminal element in this town, a woman could walk safely anywhere.”
He grinned that grin—he should have had a license for it, in her opinion, because it was unquestionably as lethal as the gun on his hip. “You’re right,” he said, with a touch to the brim of his hat. “I’ve been remiss in my peacekeeping.” He was chewing on a matchstick, and he rolled it from one side of his mouth to the other as he pushed away from the saloon doorway to approach. “I’ll escort you wherever you’re going. Make sure you get there all right.”
Aislinn felt her neck heat up, and hoped the flush wouldn’t climb into her face. “No, thank you,” she said. “I’m fine on my own.”
“I’m afraid I can’t take no for an answer, ma’am,” he replied, with a note of genial regret. “Why, how could I sleep at night, knowing I’d let a poor, helpless little thing like you walk past a saloon without the full protection of the law?”
She expelled a sigh. “Helpless? Believe me, Marshal, I can look after myself.” If he only knew, she thought, and was tempted to enlighten him, as to all she’d survived in her life. All she’d overcome.
“I reckon if that were the case,” he said, showing no inclination to retreat, “you wouldn’t have felt compelled to mention your concern about the safety of our female citizens.”
The end of the alleyway was in sight; the graveyard next to the Presbyterian church was just ahead, set apart from the scourge of commerce by a split-rail fence. Beyond the church was a spring-fed pond, and a big, sunbathed rock where Aislinn loved to sit, dreaming and dangling her feet in the water.
Her patience was hard-won, but she managed to speak calmly, and with dignity. She turned and looked up into McQuillan’s face. “You have made your point,” she said firmly, and she knew her eyes were flashing. “Now, kindly let me go my way. There are those of us who work for a living, and our free time is precious.”
He laughed, swept off his hat and struck himself in the chest with it, as if to stanch a bleeding wound. His hair was the palest gold and at once ruffled and sleek, though in need of trimming. It glinted in the sunshine, like stuff spun from a sorcerer’s spindle, while his eyes were so dark a blue as to seem almost purple. She’d been serving him meals most every day for a year. Why hadn’t she noticed, in all that time, just how devastatingly, dangerously good-looking he was?
“I can see I’m going to have my work cut out for me, ma’am,” he said, “but I’m determined to win your confidence. Yes, indeed, I am determined.”
Aislinn turned, hoisted her skirts as far as she dared, and started up the cemetery fence. “Please don’t trouble yourself,” she said, perched astride the top rail. “Good day, Marshal.” Having so spoken, she made to jump down on the other side, caught her dress on a splinter or some such, and landed in the grass in an ungainly heap, her skirts over her head.
Face aflame, heart pounding with humiliation, Aislinn scrambled to her feet, just as the lawman vaulted over the fence. He was making a downright heroic effort not to laugh, but she was in no position to appreciate the sacrifice. “Are you all right?” he asked, touching her cheek with the backs of his fingers in a curiously gentle way.
Aislinn busied herself, brushing off her skirts and smoothing her hair, which had begun to come loose from its careful braid. When she looked at him, her eyes were full of angry tears, and she would have choked if she’d tried to speak.
“You are hurt,” he said, and he sounded genuinely worried. He shifted, so that they were very close, and she felt the heat and easy, restrained power of him. For one wonderful, dreadful moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. Then, in the next instant, he stepped back. “Guess it’s mostly your pride that’s smarting right now.” He put his hat on, and she saw a wicked humor in his eyes, though he had the decency not to grin. “I’d best be getting back, I suppose.”
Back to the saloon, Aislinn thought ungenerously, but at the same time she was feeling a tenderness toward this man that she couldn’t account for, even to herself. Maybe Eugenie was right, and Shay McQuillan really was a good man, through the worst of his grieving and ready to go on.
“Did you love her?” She had never planned to ask such a bold and impertinent question; the words came out by themselves. “Grace, I mean?”
He turned, thumbs hooked into his gunbelt, eyes hidden in the shadow cast by his hat brim. “Yes,” he answered, seriously and without hesitation. “Very much.”
Aislinn stood for a moment, taking a new measure of Shay McQuillan. She’d been so certain, until he’d spoken those few telling words, that she understood the workings of his mind and the substance of his spirit. While she watched him, he climbed over the fence and walked away, headed toward Main Street.
When she reached the pond, she found it peaceful, dappled with sunlight and windblown leaves. As she climbed onto the favored rock and settled herself there, she saw a deer approach the water’s edge on the opposite side. After studying her intently, the animal lowered its graceful
head to drink, sending delicate, silvery ripples fanning out over the surface.
Aislinn slid to the stone’s edge and slipped her feet into the water, and the sensation was so delicious that she let her head fall back and gave a long sigh. Then she unraveled her braid and combed her hair with her fingers, letting it tumble down past her shoulders to reach her waist.
The moment might in fact have been perfect, had it not been for the disturbing, persistent awareness that by changing something in himself. Shay McQuillan had changed something in her as well.
Chapter 2
FOR SOMEBODY WHO’D BEEN SO concerned about keeping his presence in Prominence a secret until the right moment came, Saint-Laurent wasn’t making much of an effort to stay out of sight. When Shay got back to his office, following the encounter with Aislinn, he found his twin sitting in the best chair in the place, flipping through a pile of wanted posters. His feet were propped on the desk.
The usurper assessed him thoughtfully, then broke into a grin that belonged on Shay’s own face. Damn, but it was peculiar, looking at Saint-Laurent, like being haunted by his own ghost. “Anybody ever tell you you’re a handsome devil?” Tristan asked, sober as St. Peter guarding the Gates.
Shay glared at him, stormed over to the coffeepot, and poured himself a dose. He’d been sober less than twenty-four hours, he was still trying to make sense of what he’d felt, seeing Aislinn, touching her, and he’d been confronted with a long-lost brother who might have been peeled off the surface of a mirror. By God, there should be a limit to what one man was expected to deal with in the course of a single day.
“You happen to have another badge lying around here someplace?” Tristan asked. He didn’t stand on ceremony, you had to say that for him.
Shay slammed his cup down on top of a bookcase crammed full of ancient volumes, papers, and clippings from half the newspapers published west of the Mississippi. “If I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t hand it over to you. For all I know, you’re an outlaw.”
Saint-Laurent swung his feet to the floor and stood. “If I were, I’d have put a bullet through your head last night, when I had the drop on you. It would have been an easy matter to pin on that star and step right into your boots.” The slight stress he put on the word “easy” did not go unnoticed.
Still, Shay had to admit, it was true that Tristan could have killed him, if that had been his intention. He’d been chewing on the fact, in one corner of his mind or another, since the night before, when he’d woken up with a gun at his throat. On the other hand, though Saint-Laurent was clearly a blood relation, that didn’t mean his story was true, or that he could be trusted. He could be a distant relative, instead of a brother, or just a man who happened to bear an uncanny resemblance to Shay himself.
“If that’s what you’re figuring on doing, you’d better shoot me right here and now,” Shay said. “If you can.”
Tristan perched on the edge of the desk, arms folded. He rolled his eyes and glanced at the .45 riding low on Shay’s hip. “Relax, Marshal. I may not be your friend, but I’m not your enemy, either. I just want to recover the money from that robbery and ride out of here. That’s all.”
“Fair enough, but I’ve got one question. What do you need me for?”
“I guess I must be the smart one, as well as the firstborn. I told you before. Marshal—you make it possible for me to be in two places at once. I like that idea; it ought to keep everybody off balance.”
“Maybe I’ll agree to cooperate, and maybe I won’t,” Shay replied. He had a headache, and his nerves were raw. He wondered if Aislinn would have slapped him, if he’d kissed her. “Why should I?”
“You’re a lawman. It’s your job to bring in those outlaws. Besides, something in my gut tells me you’ve got another stake in seeing them hang. I can find out what it is easily enough, if you don’t feel inclined to tell me.”
Shay turned his back on this brother he had never known, never even imagined, and wondered for a fraction of a second what it would have been like if they’d grown up together. For a moment, he felt the loss of those years spent apart. “The driver of that coach was a friend of mine,” he said gruffly. “A fine, decent man, with a family.”
“No doubt he was,” Tristan said mildly, “but you’ll have to do better than that if you want me off your back. A thing like that’s a tragedy, any way you look at it, but it wouldn’t undo a man like you.”
It felt like every word was torn from his throat, a separate strip of hide. “There was a woman on board—Grace Warfield was her name. She and I planned to be married.”
Tristan was silent for a long time. Then he laid a hand on Shay’s right shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Shay turned around, unable and unwilling to say more about Grace. “What makes you think we could find those desperadoes, after all this time? It isn’t like we didn’t look, me and that posse—we did. We turned out every hayloft, every rat-hole saloon and whore’s nest for fifty miles around.”
“So did I,” Tristan said gravely. “They’re not out there, whoever they are. And that means they’ve got to be around here someplace. Think, damn it. Who do you know who might figure they had cause to blow a bridge out from under a coach full of innocent people? Why do that instead of just holding up the stage and riding off with the loot?”
Tristan’s reference to the innocence of the victims was calculated to get under his skin, he knew that, but the ploy was effective all the same. Shay’s right hand knotted into a fist at his side, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to smash a face that looked so much like his own.
“Go ahead,” Tristan said quietly. “Hit me, if it’ll make you feel better. Then maybe we can get on with what we’ve got to do.”
Shay uncurled his fingers.
Tristan folded his arms and grinned. Again. “Maybe you’re smarter than I’ve given you credit for, up to now,” he said. “If you’d blacked my eye, and then seen the sense in what I’m proposing—which you inevitably would have—I’d have had to give you a shiner to match mine. For the sake of appearances, you understand. I’d have been happy to oblige, of course.”
Shay huffed out a heavy sigh. “It would almost be worth it. What do you have in mind?”
“Have a seat, Marshal,” Tristan answered, with a grand gesture toward the desk and, presumably, the chair behind it, “and I’ll explain.”
Shay sat down, barely resisting the urge to swing his feet up onto the desktop, as Tristan had done. As he himself had done, ever since the day he was sworn in as the marshal. He folded his hands instead and waited.
Tristan began to talk, pacing back and forth before the desk like a big-town lawyer in front of a jury box, and damned if his ideas didn’t make a certain amount of sense. Folks would soon guess that there were two of them, but the resultant confusion was sure to provide certain advantages.
When the speech was over. Shay opened a drawer and reluctantly took out a badge that had been worn by his predecessor. Big Dan Collins. He’d been Dan’s deputy for five years, until the older man was killed breaking up a brawl down at the Yellow Garter Saloon, and he’d never admired anyone as much, before or since.
He polished the nickel star against his shirtfront before handing it over. “If you’re going to get yourself shot,” he said, a little hoarse all of the sudden, “make sure you get hit someplace where this badge won’t be marked up. I want it back looking just like new.”
Tristan pinned the star to his chest in precisely the same place Shay wore his, without looking. “I’ll need some practice at being you,” he said, letting Shay’s warning go unremarked, as usual. He cocked a thumb toward the far end of the street. “You’re clearly a man who likes his whiskey. What brand do I drink?”
“You don’t,” Shay said, with a grin that was all his own. He leaned back in the chair, his hands cupped behind his head. “You’ve decided to redeem yourself. Why, you might even want to go forward during Sunday’s church meeting and give your heart to Jesus.”
Tristan let that pass, drawing a cheroot from his shirt pocket, along with a match, which he struck against the outer edge of Shay’s desktop.
“I don’t use tobacco, either,” Shay pointed out. He paused, considering Tristan’s several allusions to his status as the elder brother. “What makes you so sure you were born first?”
None too cheerfully, Tristan shook out the match and tossed it, put the cheroot away. “I’ve got a birthmark on my right thigh. You don’t. According to my mother—the woman who raised me, that is—the midwife on the wagon train took note of the fact.”
Shay put his feet on the floor and leaned forward as a thought struck him. “Where’s your horse? Somebody must have seen you ride in.”
Tristan laughed grimly. “I hope it doesn’t take much longer for your head to clear, because, God help me, I’ve got to depend on you. It was pitch black outside when I got to town, and I was wearing a hat and a long coat. You’ll remember that I had a beard, too.” He made to stroke the absent whiskers with one hand, obviously a habit of long-standing, then glanced ruefully toward the stove, where the sleep-addled barber had disposed of a pile of walnut-colored hair early that morning. “I told the man at the livery stable that the horse was yours, a gift from an old friend.”
“He must have been drunk, half asleep, or both.”
“He did say I put him in mind of somebody, though he couldn’t rightly think who it was.” Tristan smiled at the memory, then cast a glance toward the window. “It’ll be dark in a couple of hours. Start talking. Marshal. Who am I going to meet when I walk out of this place, and what will they expect from me? Are you a chatty sort, or a man of few words?”
“What do you think?” Shay challenged. He was hung-over, he couldn’t chase Aislinn Lethaby out of his head, and he was still getting used to the fact that Saint-Laurent existed at all. And then there was the implication that he, Shay, wouldn’t be able to bring the robbers to justice without his brother’s help. He didn’t have the patience to be cordial on top of all that.
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