A Stone Creek Collection Volume 1

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Oh, Violet,” Maddie said on a sob, and gathered the child close against her. “I thought you must surely have perished!”

  “A man came and got Ma and me, on a big horse,” Violet answered when Maddie released her. “He’s from Tucson. Real strong, too.”

  Maddie smiled wanly. “Have…have you seen Mr. O’Ballivan?”

  Violet shook her head. “I reckon he’ll be along, though.”

  “He’s probably dead,” Terran said flatly. They were the first words he’d uttered since they’d come over the river, and Maddie wanted to slap them right back down his throat. She might have, too, if she hadn’t remembered Warren and how Terran had looked up to him, loved him like a father.

  Terran couldn’t afford even to hope Sam had survived. He was already bracing himself for another cruel loss.

  A priest approached, touched Maddie’s arm. “You rest,” he said in careful English. “Safe here.”

  Maddie was too spent, emotionally and physically, to resist. She let herself be led along a Mexican street, into a little adobe springhouse, where she lay down, in her singed calico dress, and succumbed to sleep.

  When she awakened, it was still dark.

  “Maddie?”

  She opened her eyes. Strained to see.

  Sure enough, Sam O’Ballivan knelt beside her, blackened and blistered, but entirely whole, as far as she could tell. She gave a small, strangled cry and sprang upright to fling both arms around his neck.

  “Shh,” he said, but he held her. Kissed the top of her head and her temple, then her mouth. “Where’s Terran?”

  Maddie nestled close to Sam’s chest. Clung to him. “He’s safe,” she said. The priest had taken Terran and Neptune with him, after seeing Maddie safely settled in the springhouse. She was afraid to think where Ben might be. “Hold me, Sam. Hold me real tight.”

  He chuckled. “Glad to oblige,” he said.

  Something primitive took Maddie over then. Some celebratory impulse, some need she would have sublimated at any other time. She put her hands tight to either side of Sam’s head and pulled him into a feverish kiss, as hot and as hungry as the fire that had swept through Haven that night and finally burned itself out at the edge of the river.

  Sam hesitated, then groaned and deepened the kiss. Their tongues joined and Maddie’s loins sparked.

  He was the one to break away first. “Maddie—”

  She began unfastening his shirt buttons, slipped frantic hands inside to feel his chest, find the drumbeat echoing from his heart. “Please, Sam,” she whispered, but she wasn’t begging. She was demanding.

  “There’ll be no going back, once it’s done,” he warned, his voice low and hoarse from passion and smoke.

  Maddie grasped at his belt buckle for an answer, and he closed his hands over hers.

  “You have to be sure of this,” he said.

  “Damn you, Sam, I’m sure,” Maddie gasped, and pulled free to open the front of her dress. Her breasts pushed at the thin fabric of her camisole, aching, the nipples already straining for his touch.

  His tone was typically pragmatic. “All right, then,” he told her. He unfastened his gun belt and set it aside. Then he caressed Maddie’s breasts, as delicately as if they were holy things, treasures found at the end of some long, difficult pilgrimage. He laid her down and straddled her, on his knees. “All right, then,” he repeated, and bent his head to suckle her, right through her camisole.

  She cried out and arched her back, and their bodies touched where they most wanted to join.

  Sam groaned again and fumbled with the ribbons, laid her camisole aside. “If you want having, Maddie Chancelor,” he said, “I’ll have you.”

  He lowered his head to her breasts then, and made free with them. At the same time, he bunched Maddie’s skirts up, reached inside her drawers to find the moist, tender place.

  Maddie went wild, clawing at his back, his shoulders, his hair.

  He slipped his fingers inside her, while his thumb worked the nubbin of flesh where her womanhood centered. It seemed to Maddie, in those heated, frantic moments, that the whole of creation had shrunk to that one, tiny, pulsing part of her.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Sam—” He played with her. Teased her. “Sam!”

  The pressure built and built, until Maddie thought she couldn’t bear another moment of it. He gave her no choice but to bear it.

  “Next time,” he said, close to her ear, between nibbles at her lobe, “I’ll use my mouth. I’ll part your legs, Maddie, and I’ll put my head between them and I’ll suck on you until you come apart.”

  “I don’t know—what that means—to come—apart—”

  “You’re about to find out,” Sam told her.

  She erupted then. Exploded. Fire shot through her, from her very core. She sobbed with the force of the release, thrust her hips upward for more and still more, and he gave it. He stroked her and plucked at her with his fingertips, until she fell trembling to the floor of that Mexican springhouse.

  He pulled her bloomers down and off, tossed them aside. Opened his trouser buttons.

  “Are you sure, Maddie?” he asked.

  She nodded. The need was already building inside her again.

  “Is it the first time?”

  She shook her head, too needy for shame. All she wanted, in all the world, was Sam O’Ballivan inside her. Deep, deep inside her.

  He touched his member to the entrance of her body and she grasped at him, tried to pull him to her.

  He entered her then, in a hard, swift motion, and Maddie welcomed him with the whole of herself, met his every thrust, writhing fitfully beneath him, seeking. Seeking.

  Finally, Sam took her wrists in his hands and pressed them to the floor, on either side of her head. He drove into her, with all his strength, and she splintered, her throat raw with cries as she rode a fiery sword into shattering, incomprehensible bliss.

  She was drifting down, like a feather caught up in a whirlwind, when suddenly he stiffened, with a gruff moan, and spilled his seed into her.

  Afterward they lay entwined and silent, with no breath to speak, as the world slowly awakened around them.

  A rooster crowed.

  Voices murmured in quiet Spanish.

  Maddie’s head rested on Sam’s shoulder as daylight crept into their small hiding place.

  “Was it Debney?” Sam asked very quietly.

  Maddie had known the question was coming, and she was prepared to answer with the full truth. He’d leave her once he knew, of course, but she’d had him for a part of one night, and she’d be the rest of her life marveling at all she’d felt, all she hadn’t dreamed it was possible to feel.

  She shook her head. “His name was Jimmy,” she said.

  Sam waited. There was no tension in him, as far as Maddie could tell, but that didn’t mean he’d understand.

  Maddie’s throat was dry and she swallowed. It didn’t help. “He came to one of Papa and Mama’s revivals. He was older—I was just fourteen and he was seventeen—and I thought I loved him. He followed us the whole of that summer, from town to town, and one day, in a haystack, in the middle of a field—”

  “He was Terran’s father,” Sam guessed.

  Maddie nodded. “He promised we’d get married, and I was to meet him at the train station in Kansas City. We’d go live with his folks, he said. They had a farm, outside of Independence. So I waited, and the train came and went, but Jimmy never showed up. Finally, around sunset, Papa came and got me in the wagon and took me home.” She paused. “If you can call another camp, beside another river, ‘home.’”

  Sam shifted, and for a moment Maddie thought he was going to put her from him, but he didn’t. He slipped his arm around her and held her loosely against his side. “Go on,” he urged when she struggled to find more words.

  “I stayed out of sight whenever we had a revival, until Terran was born. After that, Mama and Papa claimed him as their own. They never judged or condemned me�
�they were such good people—but it was clear I wasn’t to tell another living soul what happened, and I didn’t, until Warren.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “He was angry at first. Claimed I’d misled him. But Warren was a good man, and he loved me. He said what was past was past, and we’d just go on from there. A few days later, he was shot to death.”

  Sam was silent for a long time, pondering. “Does Terran know the truth?” he asked finally.

  Tears came to Maddie’s eyes. “I can’t imagine how I’ll tell him,” she said. “I’ve always been his sister.”

  “Maybe he’d rather have a mother than a sister,” Sam suggested.

  Maddie raised herself onto one elbow, so she could look down into Sam’s face. He was awfully calm about this. Maybe, she thought, with a stab of despair, because he didn’t care, one way or the other. About any of it.

  About her.

  Sam caressed the side of her cheek with one index finger. Then, with the pad of his thumb, the same thumb he’d used to drive her to sweet distraction only a little while before, he brushed away her tears. “Terran knows you’re not a virgin,” he said. “He heard you and Debney arguing about it. If I were you, Maddie, I’d tell the boy as much of the story as would be fitting.”

  Maddie didn’t answer.

  Sam sat up, began straightening her clothes, methodically, matter-of-factly, like a man putting the table to rights after supper. Maddie permitted it, but her face burned, because now that the passion had ebbed, she knew he’d used her, just the way Jimmy had.

  She kept her head turned away and wouldn’t look at him when he spoke again.

  “I’ve got to go, Maddie,” he said.

  No surprise there.

  “Look at me.”

  She shut her eyes tight, kept her face averted, but she couldn’t help ask the question that swelled up in her heart and tumbled over her tongue. “Where are you going?”

  He’d say back to Stone Creek, she decided.

  There was nothing left of Haven, and Abigail was dead, and whatever he’d come to do, he’d done it.

  “I want to find Vierra,” he said with resignation, “before he does something stupid.”

  Maddie’s eyes flew open and she stared mutely at Sam.

  Sam smiled down at her. He looked weary and filthy and damnably satisfied. Easy in his skin. “What did you think I was going to say?”

  She was almost too proud to tell him. “That you were leaving these parts for good,” she said, her voice small. Leaving me, she added silently.

  “I surely plan to do that,” he answered.

  “Oh,” Maddie responded. Most of the time, she liked being right, but on this occasion, she wished she hadn’t been.

  “You might as well wait for me,” Sam reasoned. He nodded then, as if to approve his own decision. Got to his feet, reached down to help Maddie to hers.

  She stood shakily, unsure of her balance.

  Sam laid a finger to the tip of her nose. “You’d best scout up something to eat,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SAM FELT SHAME, when he left Maddie behind, at the door of that springhouse, along with a curious, desolate exhilaration, but he couldn’t afford to dwell on it.

  God knew, it would catch up with him soon enough, but in the meantime he had things to do.

  He’d turned Mungo Donagher over to the marshal from Tucson during the night, so that was one matter resolved. Most of the outlaw gang was dead, lying blackened and twisted in front of whatever might be left of the jailhouse, but he couldn’t be sure of that, so he’d go across the river and have a look at them.

  Maybe they’d be recognizable and maybe they wouldn’t. Their number would tell him something.

  He mounted the only horse he had—Charlie Wilcox’s old nag—and headed for the far shore.

  He rode past the ruins of the schoolhouse, the pyre where his cherished books had been consumed, and between the smoldering stumps and skeletons of cottonwood trees. Coming up behind the jail, which was nothing but a blackened pile of boards, he was relieved to see that the gelding wasn’t there. He rarely prayed, but in those moments, Sam hoped a benevolent God had taken mercy on that horse.

  Going on past, to the road, he took a few moments to comprehend the destruction all around him. The whole town had been wiped out, reduced to rubble. The mercantile. The Rattlesnake Saloon. The telegraph office.

  Sam dismounted, shaking his head, and went to look at the bodies.

  He counted twelve, and most were barely recognizable as men, let alone individuals. But when he saw a thatch of red hair atop one charred head, he crouched.

  Tom Singleton. The former teacher, the man he’d come to Haven to replace and hauled up out of the schoolyard well. He’d been the leader of the outfit, Sam realized. The one whose voice and countenance had been so familiar, back there in Mexico, beneath that broken trestle.

  He’d been clever, Singleton had. He’d been ruthless in pursuit of that federale gold.

  And it had all come down to this.

  Sam lingered a moment, then got to his feet.

  He didn’t give two hoots in hell about the gold, but he knew Vierra did. Knew, too, that his traveling companion had never crossed the river last night with the others fleeing the ravages of the fire. That meant he was either dead or looking for the gold.

  Vierra was too quick to have burned, Sam concluded, so it must be the latter.

  He patted the bedraggled old horse and was about to mount up when two things happened.

  The gelding appeared at the far end of the street, trotting right down the middle. He was covered in soot, but none the worse for any trials of the night just past, as far as Sam could tell. At the same moment Ben Donagher came riding in from the opposite direction. He, too, was blackened, his eyes wild in his face as he took in the wreckage.

  “Where is everybody?” Ben asked, reining in.

  Between finding his lost horse and seeing the boy alive and well, Sam’s throat was thick with jubilation. His eyes burned, along with the space behind his nose, and for a few moments he couldn’t say a word.

  “Other side of the river,” he finally managed to say. “As far as I know, everybody’s safe.”

  “Maddie?” Ben demanded. “And Terran?”

  Maddie. Sam recalled her, sweet and vibrant and fierce beneath him, and ached. She’d be regretting what she’d done with him, once she came to her senses. She’d been in shock over the fire, that was all. “They’re fine. Neptune, too.”

  Ben let out a sigh that seemed to come from the soles of his boots. “Rex done it,” he said. “He set this fire. I found him up on top of the hill, burned to death.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said, and laid a hand on the boy’s leg. “You get on across to the Mexican side. There are folks over there to look after you.”

  Ben didn’t move. “What about you? What do you mean to do?”

  “I’ve got some business to attend to,” Sam said. “I’d count it as a favor if you’d see that old Dobbin here gets across. Otherwise, he’s likely to stand in front of the Rattlesnake, what’s left of it, till somebody comes to fetch him.”

  “I got things to tell you,” Ben said, but he took Dobbin’s reins when Sam offered them. “Undine was part of the gang.” He sat up a little straighter in the saddle. “I had to hit her in the back of the head with a rock to get away, but I don’t reckon it was hard enough that she’s kilt. She and Mr. Singleton were in it together. He said she was his half sister.”

  Sam nodded. “Where is she, Ben?”

  Ben told him where the camp was, and mentioned the gold, too. Had some of it right in his saddlebags. He finished with, “You don’t need to go after her. Mr. Vierra’s on his way out there right now. I told him what I just told you, not five minutes ago.”

  Sam checked the gelding over, found him sound if singed, and mounted up. “Go on, now,” he told the boy, cocking a thumb toward th
e river. “Marshal Rhodes is on the other side. You give that gold to him for safekeeping.”

  Rhodes could have ridden out during the night, but he and the yellow dog had stayed on to help. In Sam’s mind, that meant he could be trusted.

  Ben nudged his horse into motion, then paused again. His eyes were haunted as he ran them over what remained of the jailhouse. “Did my pa burn up in there?”

  Sam shook his head. “He’s on his way to Tucson, with a U.S. Marshal. Like as not, he’ll be going to the federal prison at Yuma from there.”

  Ben merely nodded, but his relief was plain, along with the kind of bearing up a boy his age shouldn’t have been faced with. After a long while, he asked, “You reckon that old man who come for Miss Blackstone would take me on as a ranch hand?”

  Sam smiled. “I reckon he would for certain,” he said.

  “Guess I’ll go and see to Neptune, then,” Ben decided.

  “Look after Miss Maddie, too,” Sam urged. “She’ll be in a state once she realizes the store is gone. Right now, she’s probably telling herself there’s some hope it was spared.”

  Once again Ben nodded, and they parted.

  * * *

  UNDINE DONAGHER SAT ALONE in the middle of the camp, watching as Vierra rode in. She held a rifle across her knees, but made no move to take aim. The gold lay around her, like stones circling a fire pit, in a score of grimy bags.

  “I guess something must have burned,” she said in an odd, disjointed voice. “The sky looked red, to the south.”

  Vierra kept an eye on the rifle, even as he dismounted. He’d tossed his sling aside, sometime during the night, which he’d spent in a hayloft with Pilar, and his wounded shoulder pained him severely. “The whole town of Haven went up,” he told her. “There’s nothing left.”

  Her purple eyes widened. Approaching cautiously, Vierra noted the blood on her shirt. “The bank?” she asked. “All Mungo’s money was in that bank!”

  Vierra spread his hands, suppressed a wince at the protest in his shoulder. “Gone,” he said.

  She absorbed the word like a blow. Sighed philosophically. “There’s still the gold. When Tom comes back, we’ll make for California.”