A Stone Creek Collection Volume 1

by Linda Lael Miller

  Lark blinked, at once thrilled and alarmed by the sight of him. “You do?”

  He chuckled, lifted the covers and got into bed beside her. He felt hard and solid and blessedly warm, and she resisted an urge to draw closer to him, slip into his arms.

  Had the time come?

  Was he going to make love to her?

  Or was he there simply because he was exhausted and there wasn’t another bed?

  As if in answer, Rowdy rolled from his back onto his side. Laid a hand boldly over Lark’s left breast. She was wearing only a camisole and a pair of drawers—left from when he’d undressed her earlier.

  “This is the day, Lark,” he said, caressing her, chafing at her nipple with the side of his thumb until it jutted against the thin fabric of her camisole and she groaned. “You can still say no. I swear I won’t touch you again, if you do, but if you want me as much as I want you, then I’ll have you.”

  She couldn’t speak. So she simply nodded.

  Rowdy sighed, a deep, masculine sound, and worked the tiny buttons on her camisole until her breasts were bared to him.

  Her breath was already fast and shallow. “She’ll hear,” she fretted. “Mai Lee will hear—”

  “She’s asleep,” Rowdy said, and bent to suckle at her nipple even as he hooked a thumb under the top of her drawers and began pulling them down. “There’ll be plenty to hear, though, if she isn’t.”

  Lark moaned again.

  And then Rowdy’s hand slipped between her legs, and he found the tear in her bloomers, chuckled as he worked his fingers through to play with her. “So you wanted to be ready for me,” he said.

  Lark whimpered as he teased her most sensitive spot. Shook her head. “I must have put them back on by mistake—” she protested, but even that much was so hard to say, given what he was doing to her, that she couldn’t go on.

  “Liar,” he said. He went back to suckling at her breast, and she gasped softly and started when he thrust his fingers inside her. Her hips surged up off the mattress, seeking more.

  He brought her quickly to that first release, sharp and keen, but not assuaging her terrible need. Instead she wanted him more.

  He shifted onto his knees, removed her drawers, tossed them aside, along with the camisole. He spread her hair out around her head on the pillows and then, gently, he guided her hands to the rails in the headboard, closed her fingers around them.

  Confused, feeling deliciously vulnerable, Lark tightened her grip.

  “I’m not a whore,” she said again.

  “I wouldn’t do this if I thought you were,” he answered, and kissed his way down her belly until he reached the place where his fingers played. He parted her, took her into his mouth.

  Perspiration slickened Lark’s palms as she gripped the headboard railings. She moaned his name, pleading.

  He took his time with her, took his pleasure, now feasting upon her, now barely flicking at her with the tip of his tongue.

  Finally, when the need was beyond bearing, Lark exploded, her entire body convulsing in a spasm so sweetly violent that she couldn’t hold in a long, lusty wail of release.

  Mai Lee must surely have heard, she thought, but then Rowdy was on top of her, lying between her spread legs, prodding at her, causing her to open for him, and she couldn’t think of anything else but the way it felt.

  He entered her with one swift motion of his hips. Went deep.

  Lark’s eyes rolled back in her head, and her grip on the headboard felt slippery. She dared not let go, though, because she needed anchoring, needed some way to keep her mind tethered to her body—her quivering, anxious, seeking body.

  Rowdy pressed his hands into the mattress on either side of Lark, and paused, his head thrown back. She felt him restraining himself, knew he was savoring the feel of her around him, even exulting, in some elemental male way, in possessing her.

  She began to move beneath him, very slightly and very slowly, and the power shifted. Rowdy groaned hoarsely, whispered her name.

  They found a rhythm then, moving in concert, with a savage grace.

  He brought her to the brink, brought himself to the brink.

  Then he stopped again. Without withdrawing from her, he lowered himself to kiss her, conquering her as thoroughly with his tongue as with his manhood. She was breathless when their mouths parted, and could only make a low, guttural sound when he began to take her in earnest.

  He moved more and more quickly, though each stroke was as smooth as a sword thrust into a scabbard. Lark drew up her knees and thrashed under Rowdy, pummeled him wildly with her body, let go of the headboard at the final moment—and soared.

  She felt Rowdy stiffen, long moments after her own climax, and spill himself into her, moaning her name, over and over again, as he gave himself up.

  He fell to her, and they lay entwined for a long, silent while, breathing raggedly, and as one.

  “Do you think Mai Lee heard?” Lark asked, worried.

  “No,” Rowdy said. “But she might hear this.” And then he turned her onto her stomach, and set her hands back on the rails above her head, and glided into her from behind, one hand cupping her right breast, the other under her, stroking the nubbin of flesh between her legs. She felt the walls of her femininity convulse around him.

  Lark climaxed, hard, within three thrusts, and buried her face in Rowdy’s pillow to muffle her throaty cries. She was still reeling from that when Rowdy, who hadn’t given in to pleasure yet, raised her onto her hands and knees. After pausing, kissing her shoulders, her spine, the back of her neck, he rammed into her, like a stallion taking a mare, catapulting her into a daze of new and wholly unexpected ecstasy.

  This time, there was no muffling her cries.

  And no muffling his.

  Half the town must have known what they were doing, let alone Mai Lee, Lark thought, in some small, lucid part of her mind, as she quivered at the peak of a shattering surrender. And she didn’t give a damn.

  Let them know.

  Let them know Rowdy Rhodes was having the schoolmarm in a squeaky bed in the house behind the jailhouse, having her thoroughly. And she was loving it.

  CHAPTER 17

  ROWDY WAS GONE LONG before Lark awakened in a strange bed much later, confused and a little disoriented. Then, remembering what had transpired there, she felt her cheeks burn, even as she set aside her own embarrassment, by force of will, to consider more pressing matters.

  Gideon. Was he alive? Had Hon Sing’s surgery succeeded?

  She sat bolt upright, desperate to know.

  And Lydia. How was she faring? Lark had not seen the child since before she left Mrs. Porter’s to follow Gideon to the Cattleman’s Hall, and though she’d been on the mend, a relapse was certainly possible.

  Finally, there was Autry. He could be on his way to Stone Creek even at that moment, or, worse, he might already have arrived. Suppose he’d installed himself at the Territorial Hotel, bent on harrying Sam and the major to pursue the train robbers with every available resource?

  He might see her, at any time, or hear her name by chance. Most people addressed her as “Miss Morgan”—Autry wouldn’t recognize that, because she’d made it up out of whole cloth—but someone might refer to her as “Lark,” and that would be disastrous.

  Why hadn’t she called herself Susan or Mary, names common enough to escape notice?

  But she knew the answer, of course. She’d given up so much of herself, running and lying and dying her hair. She’d kept the name her mother had given her because she hadn’t wanted to abandon herself completely—because she was Lark.

  Filled with sudden urgency, she looked frantically about for her clothes, but they were missing. Everything was gone—the dress stained with Gideon’s blood when she’d knelt beside him after the shooting, and when she’d held him in her arms in the bed of a wagon as he was being transported to Rowdy’s house. The drawers and camisole had vanished, too. Everything had been taken away except her shoes, which stil
l lay oddly askew where Rowdy had tossed them when he took them off her feet.

  Lark snatched the quilt off the bed, wrapped it around herself like a coronation robe, and opened the bedroom door just a crack. Peered out.

  Gideon lay sleeping on his cot. Lark squinted, examining him from a distance. His shoulder was bandaged, seeping a little, but his color was good, and he seemed to be breathing normally, and with relative ease, considering what he’d been through.

  There was no sign of Mai Lee or of Hon Sing, but Rowdy sat near the stove, reading a book, fully clad, one booted foot braced against the chrome rail, and Pardner was stretched out on the floor, midway between him and Gideon, keeping his canine vigil.

  “Where are my clothes?” Lark whispered anxiously, and with a peevish note in her voice.

  Rowdy grinned, closed the book. “I burned them,” he said, as though it were a perfectly reasonable thing to do. “They were pretty well ruined.”

  “You burned—What am I supposed to wear? I can’t leave this house in a quilt!”

  He smiled a private little smile, as though relishing the thought of Lark parading through Stone Creek clad only in the covering from his bed, then nodded toward the table, where a bundle waited, wrapped in brown paper and neatly tied up with twine. “Mai Lee fetched some things for you from the rooming house. Shall I bring them to you?”

  “No!” Lark replied quickly, and rushed out to snatch the package off the table, nearly losing her grasp on the quilt in the process.

  Rowdy smiled. “Bathing room’s that way,” he said, nodding toward a nearby door. “I lit a fire under the boiler a while ago, so the water ought to be hot.”

  The very thought of a real bath restored Lark considerably. She took her fresh clothes, the edge of the quilt dragging behind her with a homespun kind of elegance, and scurried in the direction Rowdy indicated.

  The tub was a thing of gleaming splendor, the likes of which Lark had not seen since before she’d fled Denver. There was a flush commode, too, and a pedestal sink made of real porcelain, though it only had one spigot. Even at Mrs. Porter’s, surely the best-appointed house in Stone Creek, she had used chamber pots and the privy, and taken shivering baths in her room, with only a basin, a cloth and a towel.

  After closing the bathing room door carefully behind her, Lark set the clean clothes Mai Lee had brought her on the lid of the commode, still in their parcel, put the plug in place in the bathtub and turned on the spigots.

  Gloriously plentiful, steaming water poured out of the faucet, thundering into the tub, and Lark was so overcome with gratitude and joy that she nearly wept.

  She let go of the quilt, letting it fall into a pool of faded color at her feet, stuck a toe in to test the water. It was perfect—hot, but not scalding—and best of all, it soon filled the tub nearly to the brim.

  Settling in, Lark soaked awhile, then used the soap and washcloth Rowdy must have set out for her, scrubbing herself squeaky-clean from head to foot. The feeling was so heavenly that she almost forgot that Autry was bound to come to Stone Creek, if he hadn’t already, and discover her there. Even if she hid out, which she fully intended to do, she couldn’t remain entirely invisible. She still had to teach school, after all, and she would need to look in on Gideon often, while he recovered.

  She slipped down into the water until it reached her chin, frowning.

  Common sense argued for leaving. She could enlist someone, surely, to escort her as far as Phoenix in a wagon or a buggy—she couldn’t risk getting aboard the stagecoach, because its arrival and departure were events in Stone Creek, and her going would arouse considerable notice. Once she’d reached Phoenix, which seemed an impossible feat in itself, even if Autry didn’t send riders after her, she could…what?

  Board a train? Autry could have agents on all of them, looking for her.

  Buy a stagecoach ticket? Where would she go, and what would she do when she got there—wherever “there” was? She had no friends, no family and no money.

  All these things compounded the problem, of course, but they weren’t the real reasons she couldn’t leave Stone Creek.

  She was bound to the place by ties of caring—for Gideon, for Lydia and all her students. The school term wouldn’t be over until early June, and honor required her to complete her contract, informal though it was.

  And there was a still greater reason.

  It would mean leaving Rowdy.

  Before he’d made love to her, she could have gone somewhere else, given herself a new name and started over, entrusting Gideon and Lydia to others. Sam O’Ballivan, busy as he was, had worked as a schoolmaster in Haven—he could have finished out the term for her or found someone else. But from the first moment of intimacy—not in Rowdy’s bed just hours before, but on the way out to Sam and Maddie’s place, when he’d made her shout his name to the sky—she’d been lost to any plan that didn’t include him.

  Rowdy might well vanish one of these days, she knew, because he had dangerous secrets of his own. If that happened, assuming she managed to deal with Autry and hold on to her job after the truth came out—she’d been married and divorced, and those things were considered unacceptable in a teacher—she’d stay on in Stone Creek, she decided, and live out her best years as a spinster schoolmarm. But at least she would have known passion, and the memory would sustain her through otherwise lonely nights.

  She would find a way to survive, even to thrive, with or without Rowdy.

  What she would not do was run away again.

  She meant to stand and face Autry, if it came to that. She knew Rowdy would help her, and in the event that he’d already gone, she would seek Sam O’Ballivan’s assistance.

  Having come to terms with these things, Lark felt renewed, though her fears certainly hadn’t diminished. She completed her bath, dried herself off with a flour-sack towel and donned her clothes, smiling when she found her hairbrush, toothbrush and powder tucked in the folds of her green woolen skirt.

  Silently she blessed Mai Lee for her thoughtfulness.

  She brushed out her hair—it wanted washing, but that was an undertaking that required several hours—plaited it into a single braid and tied it with a bit of the twine Mai Lee had used to bind the parcel closed.

  She must have looked quite presentable when she stepped out of the bathing room, because something sparked in Rowdy’s eyes as he watched her. She looked away, embarrassed to remember just how completely she’d surrendered to him.

  She stood over Gideon’s cot, leaned a little to touch the boy’s forehead.

  He opened his eyes, looked up at her in bafflement. “Miss Morgan?” he ground out. “What are you doing here?”

  Rowdy all but overturned his chair getting to his feet, coming to stand beside Lark. While he’d seemed calm, at his reading, he’d been waiting for Gideon to wake up, and probably fearing that he never would.

  Lark watched, smiling through tears, as remembrance dawned in Gideon’s face. “I was shot,” he said, very slowly.

  “Yes,” Lark answered. “But you’re going to be all right. Hon Sing took very good care of you.”

  “Did he stick a bunch of needles in me?” Gideon asked, grinning wanly.

  “He did,” said Lark with a nod. “And he performed surgery on you, too. That’s why you have bandages. The bullet came very close to your heart.”

  He shifted on the cot, sought and found Rowdy’s face, where a lecture was brewing, his expression both obstinate and chagrined. “I was only trying to be a good deputy,” Gideon said.

  Rowdy’s voice was hoarse when he answered. “It was a damn fool thing, what you did. But it was brave as hell, too. Do anything like it again, though, and I’ll shoot you myself.”

  Gideon tried to sit up, fell back down onto the cot again. Pardner stepped up to lick his cheek, and he chuckled and reached out, shakily, to ruffle the dog’s ears.

  Lark remembered the fierce way Pardner had guarded Gideon after he was shot, and smiled. When Gideon felt bette
r, she’d tell him all about it. Tell him how she’d had to spend long minutes calming the dog before he’d allow anyone besides Lark to get close, and how Pardner had jumped into the back of the wagon, with her and Gideon, to make the ride with them.

  “Are you hurting?” Rowdy asked his brother. “Hon Sing left some stuff here—to take for pain. Powder, folded up in a piece of paper.”

  Gideon shook his head. “I just feel numb, pretty much everywhere.” He looked at Lark again, searched her face. “You followed me to the dance, didn’t you?”

  Lark drew up a chair, took Gideon’s hand in both of hers. He’d been unconscious, from the time of the shooting until just a few minutes before. If he’d awakened at any point, she would have known, because she’d been watching him so closely. “How did you know that?”

  “I saw you,” he said. He glanced sheepishly at Rowdy, but his eyes were clear and solemn when he turned back to Lark. “I saw Rose, too.” Gideon paused, swallowed. Rowdy went to get him some water. He drank from the ladle, then nodded, as if to confirm his own words to himself. “I saw Rose. You were kneeling beside me, Lark, and Rose was standing right behind you. She was wearing the dress she died in.”

  “Who is Rose?” Lark asked, moved.

  “My sister,” Gideon said. “She died when she was four years old.”

  Lark was confounded, her emotions stirred in some deep and inexplicable way, and Rowdy remained silent.

  “You don’t believe me,” Gideon accused, looking from one of them to the other. “You don’t think I really saw Rose. But I did…I did.”

  “I do believe you, Gideon,” Lark said.

  “You only thought you saw her,” Rowdy said. “You were shot, Gideon, and you had some kind of dream. Drink some more water.”

  “Be quiet,” Lark told Rowdy, holding Gideon’s hand tightly now. “Did you speak with…with Rose?” she asked softly.

  Gideon shook his head. “I wanted to,” he said sadly, “but there wasn’t time. She was there, and she said some things I can’t remember now, and I wanted to go with her when she left, but she shook her head. Then she was gone.”