A Stone Creek Collection Volume 1

by Linda Lael Miller

  “You’ll find it sound,” she assured them. Then she crossed the room and opened the door beside the one leading into her father’s office. The safe was inside, the finest to be had, standing almost six feet high and taking up most of the space. The door was solid iron, seven inches thick, and only Sarah and her father knew the combination, which changed weekly. Delivering and installing the monstrosity had required the help of four strong men, several mules, and a variety of pulleys and ramps.

  At the same moment Mr. Smith approached to take a closer look, the door of the bank opened and Rowdy came in, the picture of affable goodwill.

  “Morning, boys,” he said to Mr. Smith and the other man. “I haven’t seen you around here before, so I thought I’d stop in and say howdy.”

  The man called Josh reddened slightly around the jowls, and his right hand twitched, as though it wanted to rise to the handle of his pistol.

  “I reckon the safe is sturdy enough,” Mr. Smith said, not as ruffled as his partner, but watchful.

  Sarah, after closing the door to the closet containing the safe, introduced the men to Rowdy. Nods were exchanged, but no more words.

  Mr. Smith and Josh left the bank.

  Rowdy lingered, standing at the counter now, his head turned to watch the two men through the broad window. They mounted their horses and reined them away, rode off at a trot.

  “Where’s Wyatt?” Rowdy asked when he finally spoke, and his eyes were serious as they met and held Sarah’s gaze.

  “Out at the new place, building a roof,” Sarah said. “Why?”

  Rowdy’s grin was so sudden, it almost dazzled Sarah. “I guess I figured the two of you would still be honeymooning,” he said.

  “We both have things to do,” Sarah said, coloring up.

  Rowdy didn’t comment. Not on that, at least. “Lark and Gideon and the baby will be coming in on the train today,” he said. “Pardner, too. Lark wired me last night, said she hoped you and Wyatt and the boy would join us for supper tonight. Sort of a celebration. She’s been wanting a sister-in-law. Told me to tell you that, and that she’s glad it turned out to be you.”

  Sarah was pleased. She’d known Lark Yarbro for some time, of course, and liked her very much. But now they were family, and that made a difference. For so long, she’d had no one but her father. “We’d like that,” she said.

  “Good,” Rowdy replied. “Lark will probably come by the bank before then, to give you her regards in person, if she’s not too tired from riding the train all that time and wrangling a fractious baby the whole way.”

  Sarah nodded.

  As quickly as it had come, Rowdy’s grin vanished again. “Sarah, you shouldn’t be working in this bank all by yourself. I didn’t like the looks of those yahoos—Mr. ‘Smith’ and the other fella. Why did you show them the safe?”

  “They asked to see it. It’s not uncommon, Rowdy. I store deeds and other documents in that safe, as well as our cash on hand, and people like to see where their money is being kept. Make sure it’s secure.”

  “Where’s Thomas?” Rowdy asked. “Not that he’d be much help if there was trouble.”

  “He’s sick today,” Sarah said, mildly affronted. First Wyatt had thought she couldn’t protect her own bank, and now Rowdy was echoing his concerns. She drew herself up. “I have a shotgun, and I know how to use it.”

  Rowdy’s grin was wry, a mere twitch at the corner of his mouth. “If ‘Smith’ and his friend come back, Sarah, call somebody in off the street and send them to fetch me. I’ll be around town somewhere, and I’m working out of the house until the new jail gets built.”

  Sarah nodded. “You keep putting an emphasis on the name ‘Smith,’” she said. “Why is that?”

  Rowdy sighed. “Well, sister Sarah,” he said, “if ever there was a name that gets used for an alias right along, it’s ‘Smith.’ Followed closely by ‘Jones.’”

  While she was still a little annoyed, Sarah liked being called “sister.”

  “Remember,” Rowdy said, turning to head for the door. “If anybody bothers you, even just makes you feel a little nervous, send for me.”

  “I will,” Sarah said, with no real intention of doing so. If she sent for the marshal every time someone disturbed her nerves, he’d be a permanent fixture in the bank.

  They both went on about their normal business.

  It wasn’t just Lark and Maddie, Gideon and Pardner and the babies who came in on the morning train, unfortunately. Charles Langstreet came, too, wearing a black armband on one sleeve of his tailored coat and looking coldly, dangerously furious.

  He strode into the bank and scared Miss Tillie Robbins—who was making a fifty-cent deposit to her Christmas fund—so badly that she fled without a receipt.

  Sarah simply stood there, stunned. How could Charles have covered the distance between Philadelphia and Stone Creek in such a short time?

  But, of course, she realized in the next dizzying moment, he hadn’t gone to Philadelphia in the first place. He’d only pretended to make that journey, hoping to catch Sarah off guard perhaps. He’d probably been in Flagstaff, or Phoenix, the whole time. He could have sent the telegrams from there, or routed them through his office back East.

  “How dare you flout my orders?” he demanded. His face was white with rage and exhaustion, and as he approached the counter, Sarah actually retreated a step, not entirely certain he wouldn’t vault over it and throttle her. “Owen is my son!”

  “He’s my son, too,” Sarah managed bravely. “And I won’t send him halfway across the continent by himself!”

  Charles seemed almost apoplectic, despite his pallor. Was he ill?

  Sarah was too alarmed to be sympathetic.

  “Where is he?” he demanded, his voice a venomous hiss.

  “In school,” Sarah said. “Where he belongs.” Her gaze strayed to the armband. “Is someone—did someone—?”

  “Die?” Charles rasped. “Yes. Marjory did.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah said, and she was.

  “You married that outlaw,” Charles accused, startling Sarah again.

  She raised her chin, straightened her spine. “Yes,” she answered.

  “Divorce him,” Charles said.

  Sarah’s mouth dropped open. She closed it firmly.

  “Divorce him and marry me, Sarah. That’s the only way—the only way you’re going to raise Owen. We’ll go back to Philadelphia, together. The three of us. Start over—”

  Sarah clung to the edge of the counter, her knuckles white with the effort. “Charles, have you gone insane? I wouldn’t marry you even if I were free to do it!”

  “I’ll take him away, Sarah. Owen, I mean. Send him to school in Europe, and you’ll never see him again. I’ll fill his head so full of stories about you that he wouldn’t stoop to spit on you.”

  She knew he meant it. Knew he would carry out the threat. A terrible dread rose up inside her, fairly shutting down her breath and stopping her heart. “Why?” she whispered. “Why are you doing this?”

  Charles, his hands braced against the counter, used them to straighten up. His face was ghastly, ugly and twisted with hatred. “That bitch,” he breathed. “I’d dance on her grave if I could. I wanted to marry you, Sarah. I loved you. But Marjory wouldn’t give me a divorce. She’s made my life hell since the day she found out about you. I am glad—so goddammed glad—she finally had the decency to die!”

  Sarah did not know what to say. She felt sick, even faint.

  The door of the bank opened again.

  Let it be Wyatt, Sarah prayed silently.

  But it wasn’t Wyatt, or even Rowdy.

  The newcomer was Doc.

  “You have twenty-four hours, Sarah,” Charles said evenly. “Twenty-four hours. I’ll be at the hotel, awaiting your de
cision. Oh, and by the way, I have all the evidence I need to shut this bank down. And I will.”

  With that, Charles left, not even glancing at Doc as he passed him.

  “Sarah?” Doc said. His voice came from far away, and it echoed, as though he were calling to her from the other end of a long culvert, far underground. “Sarah?”

  She couldn’t answer. The room went dark, and she collapsed, sinking, sinking, into nothing at all.

  * * *

  “I’M FINE,” SARAH said, but she looked like her own ghost to Wyatt, lying there on her bed at the Tamlin house. Doc and Rowdy had brought her there, and then Rowdy had ridden out to fetch him. He’d been so desperate to get to her that he’d left the dog and the buckboard for his brother to manage and streaked into town on Rowdy’s horse.

  He sat on the edge of the mattress, holding one of her cold hands in both of his. “What happened?” he asked, though he had an idea of what had gone on, thanks to Doc, who’d been waiting here at the house when he rode in.

  “Charles is back,” Sarah told him. Tears welled in her eyes. “If I marry him, I can raise Owen.”

  “Sarah,” Wyatt said, his throat thick. “You’re married to me.”

  “But we don’t love each other, do we?”

  “I don’t know,” Wyatt answered, as windless as if he’d been sucker punched in the belly. “I sure as hell feel something, and it’s powerful.”

  She turned her head to one side. A tear slid down onto the pillow. “Owen is my child, Wyatt. My baby.”

  “I won’t let you do this, Sarah. Not even for the boy.”

  “You can’t stop me,” she replied, with mourning in her voice. “If I tell Judge Harvey we didn’t—we didn’t consummate the marriage, he’ll believe me. He’ll annul it. Tear up the license. And I can marry Charles.”

  “No. We did consummate the marriage. For all we know, you’re already carrying a child—our child—”

  She turned her head, looked at him. The depth of her sorrow wounded him. “I don’t love you, Wyatt,” she said, with no inflection at all. Doc had dosed her with something, she’d been so upset after her fainting spell, but her words were cold and matter-of-fact, as if she’d been rehearsing them in her mind. “You’re an outlaw—nothing but a ranch hand. Charles is rich. He can arrange for Papa to have the best possible care. None of us will ever lack for anything.”

  Wyatt’s throat thickened, and his eyes burned. He leaned down, kissed Sarah once on the forehead, and got up to leave the room, moving like a man in a trance. He knew she’d made the only choice she could, but that didn’t lessen his grief.

  If he’d looked back, he’d have seen Sarah reach for that little book of hers, and scribble something into it with a pencil before collapsing back onto her pillows, her face wet with tears.

  * * *

  SHE’D GET OVER Wyatt Yarbro, Sarah told herself when she’d recovered her composure. She loved him, she knew that for sure, but she loved Owen, too, with the deep and elemental passion of a mother. She could not turn her back on the boy, not again.

  Owen would be helpless in Charles’s care, neglected and perhaps even abused.

  Wyatt was a grown man, the strongest she’d ever known. He would brood a while, and then he’d marry someone like Davina Wynngate, and get on with his life.

  Sarah would have to tear her heart in two—one part for Owen, one part forever in Wyatt’s keeping. If that left her with nothing, well, it was the lot of women. Had been since time immemorial.

  Still rummy from the sedative Doc had given her, she rose from her bed, washed her face at the basin, tidied her hair and slipped Wyatt’s thin gold wedding band off her finger, placing it in a little china box on top of her bureau.

  Doc and Kitty were sitting in the kitchen when she went downstairs, both of them looking as glum as if they’d just lost their last friend.

  “I’m going back to the bank,” Sarah told them. “It can’t be closed in the middle of the day like this. People will think we’re insolvent, and there’ll be a run of withdrawals.”

  Kitty simply stared at her.

  Doc rose from his chair. “Sarah, you’re in no state to go anywhere. I must insist that you lie down again.”

  She shook her head. “I have work to do,” she said. “Everything has to be in order before Charles and Owen and Papa and I leave for Philadelphia.”

  “Before you do what?”

  “Charles loves me. We’re getting married. Raising Owen together.” Even in Sarah’s own ears, the words sounded impossible, but there was no going back now. She’d said cruel things to Wyatt, out of stark necessity. Sent him away. Written in her book of lies, Today I told the greatest lie of all. I told Wyatt I didn’t love him, didn’t want to be his wife.

  “So that’s why Wyatt left here looking like somebody ran over him with a hay wagon,” Kitty marveled. “My God, Sarah, what have you done?”

  “The only thing I could do,” Sarah said, wondering even then how she’d bear Charles’s touch, after what she and Wyatt had shared. How she’d survive the days and weeks and months and years ahead, never looking into those dark eyes and reading secrets there. Never laughing with Wyatt, never feeling his hands on her.

  But survive she would. Because of—and for—Owen.

  She walked out of the house then, and neither Doc nor Kitty tried to stop her. Maybe they knew she would shatter into pieces if they touched her, and never be able to put herself back together again.

  * * *

  “WYATT?”

  He ignored Rowdy. Climbed up into the buckboard, parked in front of the livery stable. Lonesome, the poor old critter, was still sitting in the back.

  Slapping down the reins, Wyatt drove the buckboard team hard back to the place he’d hoped to call home, someday. Poor old Lonesome had no choice but to go along, sitting in the back of the wagon like he was, enduring the axle-breaking pace.

  He’d have burned the shack to the ground if he’d had the wherewithal to do it, but he didn’t. He should have stopped at the mercantile, bought some matches and some kerosene.

  Since he hadn’t had the foresight to do that, in the shape he was in, he just sat there, staring at the ruins of some long-gone settler’s dreams—and of his own. He could protest the dissolution of his marriage to Judge Harvey, say he and Sarah had made love, not once, but half a dozen times. But it would be his word against Sarah’s, and the judge would believe her—or pretend he did.

  Wyatt had been aware all along that Rowdy had mounted his horse and followed him out from town. Now, his brother rode up alongside the wagon.

  “Wyatt,” he said, “what the hell happened?”

  “It’s too hard to say,” Wyatt told him. He couldn’t look right at Rowdy, but he could see him out of the corner of his eye, and as broken up as he was, he was glad of his presence.

  “Sarah?” Rowdy asked, very quietly, shifting in the saddle, resettling his hat, pretending an interest in the far horizon.

  “She’s come to her senses,” Wyatt said, after a very long time.

  Rowdy swung down off the horse. Rescued Lonesome from the back of the buckboard. The two of them walked around in the deep grass littered with old wagon wheels, barrel staves, and empty bottles. Lonesome lifted his hind leg against the corner of what had once been a barn.

  “How’s that?” Rowdy asked, at considerable length. “How, exactly, has Sarah ‘come to her senses’?”

  “You were right in the beginning, Rowdy.” Wyatt’s voice came out sounding hoarse. His eyes felt as though he’d splashed them with handfuls of acid, and his throat hurt like sin. Maybe he’d contracted the diphtheria. Maybe he’d die.

  He sure as hell felt like dying.

  “When I said you were an outlaw and she was a lady and you ought to leave her alone?”

  W
yatt merely nodded.

  “I was wrong about that, Wyatt,” Rowdy said.

  “There ought to be a parade,” Wyatt croaked. “One of Payton Yarbro’s sons just admitted he was wrong about something.”

  Rowdy gave a hoarse laugh. “What’s really happening here, Wyatt?” he asked. “Sarah loves you. She glows with it, like she swallowed a lamp with the wick lit.”

  “She wants the boy,” Wyatt said. “And this is the only way to get him.”

  Rowdy absorbed that. Waited a few moments. “I think I saw Billy Justice today,” he said.

  If he’d thrown a bucket of cold creek water all over Wyatt, he couldn’t have brought him out of his sorry melancholy the way those words did.

  Wyatt let go of his death grip on the reins, looked down at Rowdy, who was standing by the buckboard now, with his hat pushed to the back of his head. “What?”

  Rowdy described the man he’d seen that morning, in the bank.

  It had to be Billy.

  And he’d been alone within killing distance of Sarah, even persuaded her to show him the safe.

  Reflecting on that, Wyatt’s whole perspective shifted. He set aside thoughts of Charles Langstreet, and Owen, and how Sarah had run him off. How she’d tried to run him off, that was.

  “You going to fight for her, Wyatt?” Rowdy asked quietly, mounting up again. “Fight for the boy?”

  Wyatt nodded, released the brake lever, his jaw set so tight that it threatened to snap in two. “Hold on, Lonesome,” he told the dog. “There’s a rough ride ahead.”

  * * *

  WHEN OWEN CAME OUT of the schoolhouse, a stack of new books under one arm, Sarah was waiting for him on the other side of the picket fence. Grinning and shoving with the other boys as they flowed out into the yard, he spotted Sarah and looked delighted at first, then, as he read her face, frightened.

  He hurried toward her, through the open gate. “Is something wrong with my grandfather?” he asked.

  Sarah shook her head. “No, sweetheart,” she said. It was the first time she’d dared to address him with an endearment. “Your—your father is back. And he has something to tell you—”