Two Brothers

by Linda Lael Miller

  He acknowledged Kyle’s henchmen with a cordial nod. “Billy and I have things to say to each other,” he said. “You boys go on about your business.”

  A flush climbed Billy’s neck and pulsed behind his spindly beard. His eyes flashed with venom, and his hand made a fidgety move toward the hogleg shoved through his belt. When he spoke, his voice was tight with bravado and hatred. “Head on down to the Garter and make a place for me at the poker table,” he told the others. “I’ll be there shortly.”

  With barely disguised relief, the riders guided their horses around Shay, moving at a cautious pace. Shay reached up, grabbed Billy by the shirtfront, and wrenched him out of the saddle. “Go ahead and draw,” he said, through his teeth, when Billy made an abortive move for his pistol. “Nothing would make me happier than shooting you.”

  The kid’s hat flew off into the dust; he didn’t try to recover it or to break Shay’s hold on his shirt, but he looked mad enough to turn himself inside out. “My daddy ain’t gonna like this,” he said.

  Shay backed him out of the street, leaving the gelding behind. “We’re not talking about your daddy,” he drawled, hoisting Billy onto the balls of his feet and letting him dangle there like a scarecrow in a brisk wind. “I hear you took some hide off one of Jake’s girls yesterday evening. I don’t want to believe such a thing of a fine, upstanding citizen like you, Billy-boy. Say it isn’t true, so I can sleep nights.”

  “This is about that whore?” Billy went from crimson to the bluish white of strained milk, but his eyes were hot as acid. “Hell, McQuillan, I paid good money for what I done to her.”

  “You haven’t paid,” Shay answered. “Not yet.” He kicked Billy’s feet out from under him and watched as he sank into the slimy water of a horse trough out in front of the undertaker’s.

  Billy’s temper, admirably restrained until then, finally gave way, and as he flailed in the water, splashing and spitting, he drew the hogleg and raised it, barrel dripping. Shay’s own pistol was already out and pressed into the indentation between Billy’s nose and upper lip. For a long moment, they just stared at each other, he and the Kyle brat, both of them a heartbeat, a hair’s breadth, from firing.

  Shay was under no illusion that it made a difference, Billy’s gun being full of horse spit and rainwater. At that range, a bullet would shred his insides. He didn’t give a damn about that, either.

  “You ready to dance for the devil, Billy?” he asked, his thumb on the hammer.

  Billy gulped spasmodically and lowered the hogleg. “She was just a whore,” he whined.

  “Shut up,” Shay breathed. He jerked the iron out of Billy’s hand, flipped open the chamber, and let the shells fall into the mud surrounding the trough. “I’m talking to you. You lay a hand on a woman, whether she’s a whore or a saint, I’ll hurt you, Billy. Real bad.”

  With that, he shoved the confiscated pistol into his belt and strode off down the street, fury thrumming in his head like a drumbeat.

  “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!” Billy shrilled after him. “Do you hear me? I’ll kill you!”

  Shay just kept walking, because he knew if he turned around, if he spoke at all, he’d wind up handing back Kyle’s gun and facing the little weasel down, right there in the middle of the street. And that would be nothing short of murder.

  The music rose through the floorboards of the hotel like sweet smoke, and Aislinn, usually content to spend such evenings writing to Thomas and Mark, or reading a book obtained from the small lending library at the general store, yearned to put on dancing slippers and lacy petticoats and a silken gown.

  She and Liza Sue were alone in the dormitory, since the other girls were either working or watching the dancers from the rear hallway, and Liza Sue was pacing. She kept going to the window, pushing the curtain aside, peering out into the sultry summer night.

  “What is the matter?” Aislinn asked, with some impatience, wondering at the same time if Shay McQuillan was downstairs, holding some woman in his arms. Wondering why she cared what he was doing in the first place.

  “He’ll find me,” she said. “He won’t stop until he finds me.”

  “Who?”

  “Billy Kyle, that’s who,” Liza Sue snapped. Her bruises were beginning to fade, turning pale green at the edges, but she looked very small and fragile in the black sateen dress Eugenie had given her, and even younger than Aislinn had feared she was.

  Aislinn set aside her half-finished letter, which gave yet another glowing account of what a wonderful life she and Thomas and Mark would have together, once the boys got to Prominence. She felt shaken and sick. “How old are you?” she asked.

  Liza Sue was silent, gnawing at her lower lip. “What does it matter?”

  “It matters,” Aislinn insisted softly.

  “Fifteen,” Liza Sue confessed. “I was thirteen when I came to Prominence.”

  Aislinn thought, briefly, that she would be violently ill. “Dear God.”

  The girl’s eyes gleamed with desolate pride. “Don’t you go feeling sorry for me! I ain’t pretty like you, nor smart. I had to make my way as best I could.”

  “Of course,” Aislinn said gently. She wanted to embrace Liza Sue, hold her the way she might have held Thomas or Mark, when they were smaller, and frightened or hurt, but she didn’t dare.

  “I’d like to go down there and dance and dance until my feet were wore out,” Liza Sue burst out suddenly. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Aislinn sighed. “Yes,” she said. She felt like weeping, for a multitude of reasons—because her mother and father were dead, her brothers far away. Because her feet hurt from wearing shoes, and because now that she was up close to her dream, she could see the cracks in it. She wasn’t at all sure that she could fix up the homestead cabin and grow enough food to keep starvation at bay. Because there were young girls like Liza Sue in the world, lost souls who had to sell themselves to survive.

  “Let’s go down there and watch for a while.” Liza Sue spoke dreamily, as though being at the fringe of gaiety could appease their longings. “We can’t be sent away for just watching, can we?”

  “No,” Aislinn admitted, “probably not.”

  Five minutes later, she was peeking through the fronds of an enormous potted palm, looking on while the fiddlers played, and men and women in their best clothes waltzed round and round, smiling. It was some consolation, at least, that there was no sign of Marshal McQuillan.

  Soon, the room grew stuffy, and Aislinn left Liza Sue to her watching, passing quickly through the lobby and out onto the porch. The night air was heavy and hot, but here Aislinn could breathe.

  She had been standing at the porch rail for some time, looking up at the spill of stars littering a blue-black sky, when she became aware of a creaking sound behind her, in the shadows. She stiffened, but did not turn around and look, for her senses had already told her who was there.

  “Evening,” the marshal said.

  His voice, his presence, made Aislinn aware of her loneliness, an affliction she could usually outrun, and she did not like him for it. “Why aren’t you inside, with the others?”

  The creaking stopped; he was out of the porch chair and beside her at the railing. Very close beside her. “Now, why would I want to be there,” he countered, “when I can be here instead?”

  Aislinn didn’t, couldn’t, answer. Inside, the fiddles took up a new and poignantly sweet tune, and she thought her heart would break, just from being young and having so many dreams and hopes and secrets. She had thought herself immune to this man earlier in the day but now she knew with bittersweet certainty that she was not.

  He turned her gently to face him and for one jubilant, terrifying moment, apart from all the rest of time, she believed he meant to kiss her. Instead, he took her into his arms, and they moved slowly around in a small, graceful circle, a private waltz, draped in shadow. It might have been better, kinder, she thought, with a sort of frantic joy, if he had kissed her. That would have been a mere
touch of the lips, but the dancing—the dancing was intimate, infinitely tender, almost a form of lovemaking.

  Shay rested his chin on top of her head, and she could feel the warmth of him, the hard strength of his chest and arms. He smelled of soap and summer and very cold water.

  Aislinn found her voice, but just barely. “I’m scared,” she said, to him, to herself. She could not credit the tumult she felt; the change was as sudden and profound as an earthquake, and it would leave her forever altered.

  His laugh was low and throaty and utterly masculine. “Me, too,” he replied. “Me, too.” Then, without another word, he sought her lips with his own, found them, claimed them.

  A fiery response shot through Aislinn’s system, searing away a great many false perceptions of what it would be like to be held and kissed by a man. She felt her knees weaken and might even have swooned, if Marshal Shay McQuillan had not been holding her upright.

  Chapter 4

  SHE TURNED FROM HIM, at last, out of desperation, dazed and profoundly shaken. Shay made Aislinn face him again and raised her chin with a curved finger—his trigger finger, she reminded herself, though it didn’t do a lot of good. Pragmatism, normally her most stellar quality, was quite beyond her. Her earlier conviction that she’d somehow grown immune to Shay’s very questionable charms was nothing but a mockery now; she was ablaze with a welter of sweet, frightening feelings and vast, unchartable needs. The music from the dance inside the hotel seemed to roll out through the windows and the doors, pounding in her veins, a blood spell cast by some mischievous wizard.

  “Are you spoken for, Aislinn Lethaby?” he asked gruffly. “If there’s a husband or a beau tucked away somewhere, or a man headed out West to join you one of these days, you’d better say so now.”

  Color stung her face. She might have stepped back, since he wasn’t holding her, and yet she could not make herself move away. “A husband? Of course not! Why, what sort of woman do you take me for, Marshal?”

  He laughed, and the low, rumbling sound mingled with the music in her blood, became the breath in her lungs, formed a swift counterbeat to the pounding of her heart. As simply, as quickly, as deeply as that, he was a part of her, like a fever or a memory or an inherited trait. “Now don’t take offense, darlin’,” he said. “I meant the question honorably.” Having so spoken, he bent his head and touched his lips to hers once more.

  Aislinn had been kissed before that night, mostly by shy boys back at home, though once when she was serving coffee in Kansas City, a cattleman with a waxed mustache had jumped up, declared himself to be an ardent admirer, thrown his arms around her while she was still staring at him, dumbfounded, and planted a big smack on her mouth.

  None of those kisses had been anything like the ones Shay McQuillan gave her that evening on the shadowy veranda of the town’s only hotel, with music flowing around them like an unseen river. None of them had bolted through her like hot lightning, taken the starch out of her knees, rendered her light-headed, left her breathless and blinking and utterly mystified.

  “My goodness,” she gasped, when the faculty of speech returned.

  He laughed again and, holding her shoulders in those strong hands, kissed her forehead. “I guess you’d better get back inside, Aislinn, before Eugenie comes out here with that shotgun of hers.”

  “I reckon that’s good advice,” Eugenie put in. The light in the open doorway framed her ample figure, but her features were in shadow and her voice gave away nothing of what she was thinking.

  Aislinn’s lungs deflated instantly and took their time filling up again. If Eugenie let her go now, she’d have no hope of bringing her brothers west anytime soon. She cast a frantic look up into Shay’s eyes, then turned to flee.

  He caught hold of her arm, and the motion, though fast, was gentle. “Good night, Aislinn,” he said calmly. “Sleep well.”

  Sleep well? She probably wouldn’t close her eyes before dawn, whether Eugenie allowed her to stay on at the hotel or ordered her to leave as soon as she’d made suitable arrangements for herself. She nodded hastily and made her escape, slipping past the other woman as she hurried over the threshold.

  Shay watched Aislinn vanish, feeling as hot and hard as a desert rock, and waited, bemused, for the lecture that was surely forthcoming. Everybody in Prominence knew how fiercely Eugenie guarded her “gals,” and close observation during recent meals in the dining room had convinced him that Aislinn was a particular favorite of the clientele.

  “Where’s your shotgun?” he asked, when Eugenie did not follow Aislinn inside, but instead came to stand beside him at the porch railing.

  She was about as gracious as a mama grizzly with a snout full of wasps, but she had always treated Shay with a certain rough kindness, and he liked her. “Don’t think I wouldn’t shoot you, just because you’re wearin’ that star,” she barked.

  Shay chuckled. “I’m not expecting any special treatment,” he said.

  “Good,” Eugenie retorted, with a huff, “’cause you ain’t about to get any such thing from me. You want to court that girl, you do so proper-like, and come callin’ for her at the kitchen door, between suppertime and eight o’clock, or on Sunday afternoon.” She paused and searched his face, her eyes bright even in the gloom. “Aislinn’s worth ten of any of the others, and even though she’s had some grief and made her way in the world alone, she’s an innocent little thing. Sees things in the light of her own high principles. She’ll believe what you tell her, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll either behave in a manner befittin’ that kind of trust or head the other way, fast. If you’ve a mind to entertain yourself at cost to her, I’ll advise you to take your devilment someplace else.”

  Shay regarded his old friend with respect and a certain tenderness, too, though the latter was well and wisely hidden. “I can’t tell you what I feel for Aislinn, exactly, because I don’t really understand it myself,” he said. “There’s something happening here, though, and believe me, I’m not taking it lightly. I never expected to care about anybody again, including myself, after Grace was killed, but all of the sudden …”

  Eugenie offered one of her rare, flinty smiles, a mere twitch of the lips, gone as quickly as it appeared. “I figured you’d be ready to get on with things in time, and I was right. But you remember my warnin’. If all you want is a tussle in the hay, you just stick with that widow-woman of yours, and leave this girl alone. There’s an old homestead she wants to buy and prove up on, and she’s got two brothers to raise as well. She needs a man who’s willing to take hold and make good on his bargain.”

  He hadn’t known about the brothers or the land, but there was no sense in getting ahead of himself. He’d worry about them when and if they became his concern. His attraction to Aislinn was sudden, and it was strong, and for the time being, he had all he could do to grapple with that. And then there was Tristan. “You don’t think I’m a good man?” he asked mildly. He wasn’t looking for flattery or pretty reassurances, not from Eugenie. He just wondered.

  “You’re all right,” she said, and gave him a punch in the upper arm that would probably leave a welt. “For a while there, though, I was scairt the Irish Curse had got hold of you.”

  He’d been afraid of that himself, on more than one morning, when he’d awakened with spasms in the pit of his stomach, drenched in cold sweat and feeling as though somebody had dropped one end of a pool table on his head. He might or might not be cursed, but he wasn’t at all sure he was Irish, though he supposed Killigrew was a name sprung from the old sod. He hadn’t thought to ask Tristan about such things as that, taken by surprise that way. “The drink doesn’t seem to hold much appeal,” he said. “I’m not sure why.” Privately, he suspected that his brother had shocked the craving right out of him, looking the way he did and introducing himself with the tip of a pistol barrel in the middle of the night.

  “Maybe it don’t matter why,” Eugenie said, squinting at him. The noise at the Yellow Garter was rising a
nd getting wilder, like a creek swollen with melted snow and spring rains. Had been for several minutes. “You know,” she mused, “if it weren’t a crazy notion, I’d think there was two of you.”

  Shay had been on his way to retrieve his hat from the porch bench, where he’d left it when Aislinn came outside, but Eugenie’s comment stopped him in midstep. He repressed a grin. “What?”

  She sounded pensive. “It was odd, your comin’ in twice for breakfast this mornin’. And the second time, well, there was something real different about you.”

  Shay grasped his hat and let out a long breath. He was on the verge of explaining when shots sounded from the direction of the Yellow Garter. “Hell,” he said, automatically checking the cylinder of his .45. “I’d better get down there and find out what’s going on.”

  “You take care,” Eugenie commanded, as he sprinted past her.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he promised, without looking back.

  Aislinn sat alone in the kitchen, her chin propped in one hand, watching the light of a single kerosene lantern flicker over the checkered oilcloth covering the table. She would have been the first to admit that she should have been thinking about the possible consequences of being caught breaking Eugenie’s rules, but she could not seem to get beyond the impact of Shay McQuillan’s kisses. She was startled when Eugenie spoke, for she hadn’t heard her enter the room.

  “You’d best get to bed, miss. Breakfast time comes around early.”

  Turning on the bench, Aislinn looked up into the older woman’s face. “You’re not sending me away, then?” She held her breath, waiting for the answer.

  Eugenie got a mug and poured some cold coffee, left over from the supper trade. “I don’t turn my girls out into the street,” she said, in her own good time, after several unself-conscious slurps. She was looking out the window over the cast-iron sink, and that was a mercy from Aislinn’s standpoint, because she needed some time to recover her composure.