The Gunman's Bride

by Catherine Palmer

  Her admonitions trailed off as he slid his hand down her arm. Oh, but she smelled good, he thought as he pressed his lips lightly into her palm.

  With a squeak of dismay, she snatched her hand away. “What are you doing here, Bart? Nobody passes through Raton, New Mexico, but miners and homesteaders. And how did you come to climb in my window and hide under my bed?”

  Eyes shut, he forced down deep breaths. “I came looking for you, Rosie. I tracked you here.”

  “But I changed my name!”

  “Kingsley?”

  “It was all I could think of when I applied for the Harvey job. I was scared about running away. I had planned everything down to the last detail, but when the recruiter asked my name, I went blank and just blurted it out.”

  “It is your name. Laura Rose Kingsley.”

  “Stop that!” She pushed him away and stood with her arms crossed. “I have a good mind to call for the sheriff this minute.”

  “No, Rosie! They’ll haul me back to Missouri and hang me.”

  “The law should hang you if you’ve done all the wicked things Sheriff Bowman told Etta and me tonight. You rode with Jesse James. You robbed banks and trains, stole cattle and horses, killed people.”

  “I’m no stock rustler.”

  “Oh, that’s a relief!” She glared down at him. “You don’t look a thing like you used to.”

  “It’s been six years. I grew up.”

  “You grew up into a gunman. An outlaw.”

  He closed his eyes. Rosie was right, of course. He’d grown into a man, and he’d done everything he was accused of—except rustling livestock.

  The James brothers had a policy against that. Their grievance wasn’t with small-time Southern farmers and ranchers. No, Jesse, Frank, and the others set their sights on northern banks and trains. Trained by Charley Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, they had served as guerrilla raiders until the end of the war.

  But when the rest of the Confederate guerrillas returned to their homes and farms, the James brothers and their pals, the Youngers, elected to continue raiding. Others joined along the way, men who came and went as part of the gang during its sixteen-year reign.

  Bart swallowed against the knot of regret in his throat. He had known every one of the fringe members of the James-Younger gang—most of them killed by lawmen or captured and lynched. Others were serving time in prison or, like him, hoping to escape the law.

  The men had accepted a half-breed homeless boy when no one else would. They fed him, boarded down with him at night, saw to it that he had clothes and boots…and guns. They taught him to shoot and let him join them playing checkers, swimming in the river, hunting deer and squirrels. Oh, they had a fine time, Bart and the boys.

  Until the day that was burned into his memory like none other: October 7, 1879. Glendale, Missouri. The Chicago & Alton train.

  Bart opened his eyes, knowing that light always erased the haunting blackness of his past. And there was his Rosie, gazing down on him with her velvet eyes.

  “Rosie,” he whispered, hardly able to believe he had found her at last. Porcelain skin, delicate cheekbones, lips the color of roses. Rosie, his prim-and-proper, educated, high-society lady. Rosie, his tree-climbing, pond-wading, horse-riding love. His Rosie.

  “You’re going to have to leave,” she said abruptly. “I’ll help you to the window.”

  But she didn’t move, and he couldn’t stop staring at her.

  “If I leave, the detective will find me,” he murmured.

  “I suppose he will.”

  “He’ll take me back to Missouri. I won’t get a fair trial. Not a half breed like me.”

  Her brown eyes deepened. “If you did, would you be cleared? You robbed trains.”

  “I was following orders. Jesse’s plan, his guns, his horses.”

  “You killed people.”

  “People who were trying to kill me first.”

  “Bart, how could you? You used to be so kind.”

  “Rosie.” He reached for her arm, grasped her hand. “Let me stay here tonight. I’ll leave tomorrow.”

  “You can’t stay in my room.” She jerked away. “Etta fetches me in the morning, and she’ll know at once. Mrs. Jensen will faint if she hears even a rumor of you. I’ll lose my job.”

  “Please, Rosie. Don’t turn me out.”

  Opening the heavy lid of her trunk, Rosie took out the bag of pills, lotions and cures she had brought from her home in Kansas City. Pappy always kept an ample supply of medicines on hand in case he had to leave the house to tend someone in the middle of the night. She had decided the medicines might be of use in Raton—though she hadn’t needed them until this night.

  Don’t turn me out. If Bart had said anything else, she would have forced him to the window at gunpoint and made him climb right out into the cold. But how could she turn him out? The Bart Kingsley she knew had been turned out far too often in his life.

  Taunted by the farmhands. Beaten, whipped and burned by his stepfather. Neglected by his own mother. He wore ragged clothes and boots that pinched his toes and rubbed blisters on his heels. In the winter he had no coat. In the summer he had no hat. The schoolmarm refused to allow him into her classroom. The preacher made him sit outside on the church steps to hear the sermon.

  No, Rosie knew she couldn’t turn him out. Not tonight. Once the decision had been made, there was nothing left but to treat the awful wound in his side.

  “You’d better take one of these liver pills,” Rosie said, carrying her stash of Dr. Vermillion’s medicines to the bedside. “Only the good Lord knows where that bullet is.”

  Though Dr. Lowell had been her fiancé for three long years, Rosie recalled, she had never gotten past calling the man by his formal title. He kept daytime office hours and never saw patients at home. It was the new way of practicing medicine, he had told her.

  She helped Bart lift his head to swallow the tiny brown pill, followed by a teaspoon of Dr. Hathaway’s Blood Builder.

  “Where did you get this nasty stuff, Rosie?” he asked with a grimace as she poured a spoonful of something black. He swallowed and nearly gagged. “I’ll be horse-whipped if that doesn’t taste like a—”

  “Don’t you swear, Bart. I mean it.” She drew back the edge of his jacket and caught her breath. “You need a doctor!”

  “No, I can’t do that.”

  “It’s a mess, and I don’t know the first thing about nursing. I’ve got to get this jacket off. I’ll fetch my scissors.”

  “Don’t cut it!” He grabbed a handful of nightgown to stop her. “This is all I’ve got, Rosie. I’ll work it off, just give me a minute.” Releasing her gown, he began to shrug his shoulders and arms out of the buckskin jacket.

  His face was beaded with perspiration from the effort, and she bent over him to help pull away the garment. The scent of woodsmoke and leather clung to his skin. She wished it were unpleasant, but the smell stirred something deep inside her. A memory. A trace of pleasure. Although she tried to keep from touching him, the effort was hopeless, and she ended up wrestling his big shoulders and long arms out of the sleeves.

  “There!” she said, letting out a breath as he collapsed. “You don’t even have on a shirt! Oh, good heavens, when was the last time you took this off?”

  With two fingers she carried the bloody jacket across the room and dropped it into a basket in the corner. It would likely fall apart after a good scrubbing with lye soap. At least the hole ought to be mended. There wouldn’t be time for any of that, of course, not with Bart leaving first thing in the morning.

  She glanced over her shoulder to find him breathing deeply, his eyes shut and his huge chest filling her narrow bed from one side to the other. When did he get to be so big?

  She poured water into her basin and carried it to the bed. When she sat down beside him, his green eyes opened—reminding her that even though he didn’t look like her Bart or act like her Bart, he was her Bart.

  “Now bite your
tongue,” she told him. “And don’t you dare start cussing at me.”

  She dipped a towel in the water and blotted his skin.

  Dear Lord, she breathed up in prayer as she studied the damage, don’t let him die on me. Much as I’ve wanted to kill this man, please keep him alive.

  “How’s it look?” he grunted.

  “Terrible.”

  “Can you feel the bullet?”

  “Feel it? I’m not sticking my finger in there!”

  “Rosie, it’s not coming out unless someone takes it out. And if you don’t patch up the hole, I’m liable to bleed to death. I reckon if you’d do that for me, I wouldn’t ever ask another thing of you.”

  “Why should I trust a murdering outlaw?” she asked.

  “Especially one who ran off two weeks after he married her,” Bart finished.

  “We never were married,” she said softly as she rummaged through the bag. “You said so yourself.”

  “You found the note?”

  “Of course I did.” Wishing he hadn’t brought up their impetuous wedding, she set the lamp on a table near the bed. If only he hadn’t tracked her down. If only he hadn’t crawled into her bedroom all shot up. Now she was stuck with him. But only until morning.

  Before she could begin, he caught her hand and held it to his chest. “Rosie,” he whispered, his eyes depthless. “Thank you, Rosie-girl.”

  “You won’t be thanking me in a minute.” She focused on the tweezers in her bag. How could it be that his gaze drew her back through time with an ache that wouldn’t go away—in spite of everything she knew about him?

  She had to concentrate. Bart had lost so much blood. As she dipped the tweezers into the wound, she felt his hand slide into her hair. Eyes squeezed shut, he arched back in pain. His hand closed over a hank of her hair and she could feel him working it between his fingers.

  Running a dry tongue over her lips, Rosie centered her attention on the wound again. She moved the tweezers deeper, then wiped the blood with a towel. Nothing. Where could the bullet be? She worked the tool farther in. Suddenly his hand clamped over hers, squeezing hard.

  “Bart!” she gasped, jerking out the tweezers.

  “Rosie, we were married,” he murmured. “We were.”

  “I can’t find the bullet.”

  “You were my Rosie,” he whispered, relaxing his hand. His fingers moved through the hair at her temple. “Once you were my Rosie-girl.”

  She closed her eyes, fighting tears. His fingertips stroked across the down on her cheek, feathering her skin. A finger traced the arch of her eyebrow. Another found her eyelid and rested lightly there a moment before fanning down to her lashes and cheek.

  “Remember how you shinnied down the oak tree by your bedroom window that night?” he was saying, his voice almost inaudible. “We ran through the fields to Reverend Russell’s place? You wore a white dress and lilacs in your hair. The reverend was drunk as usual, but we hardly noticed because we were so scared and excited to get married and—”

  “No!” She pushed his hand away. “It was only a game, Bart. We were children. You said so yourself.”

  Leaving him, she hurried to the wash stand, rinsed the tweezers and fumbled the medicines into the bag. Six years ago she had convinced herself that she had never married Bart Kingsley. No one knew except her pappy—and neither of them had ever mentioned his name again.

  The disaster had been put away like one of Pappy’s old textbooks. Hidden on a back shelf. Forgotten. Denied so completely that Pappy had arranged for Rosie to marry Dr. William Lowell. Denied so totally that she had silently submitted, as she always did, to Pappy. Denied so thoroughly, that every night when she lay in Dr. Lowell’s bed in his big fancy house, she didn’t give Bart Kingsley a thought.

  She didn’t remember the way he had held her hand, gently weaving his fingers through hers. She didn’t remember how he had touched her face, his green eyes memorizing every feature as though it were precious beyond belief. She didn’t remember his mouth moving against hers, his lips tender and his breath ragged.

  “Rosie,” he said from the bed.

  She stiffened, unable to look at him.

  “I don’t play games, Rosie. You know I never have.”

  “You’d better get some sleep, Bart. You’ll need it to climb out that window in the morning.”

  She rinsed her hands in clean water, then she stepped to the wardrobe for a cotton petticoat she had brought from Kansas City. The strips of clean white fabric would make a good bandage. As she ripped the cloth, she resolved that Bart was part of her past and he must stay that way. Come sunup, he would be back in the past where he belonged.

  She laid the bandages across his stomach. “I didn’t find the bullet, and you’re still bleeding. I’m going to put this around you until you can get to a doctor.”

  “I reckon you’ve done me such a good turn I won’t need to see a doctor, Rosie.”

  “You can’t go around with a bullet inside you for the rest of your life.”

  “Most of the men I know have been shot so full of holes you’d think they’d leak every time they took a drink. They carry a few lead souvenirs just to make their stories ring true.”

  “That’s a fine bunch of friends you have, Bart.” As she smoothed the cloth bandage over his skin she could feel his eyes on her. Watching her. “Men walking around with bullets inside. Great ghosts, who ever heard of such a thing?”

  “Cole Younger’s been wounded upwards of twenty times. He reckons he’s got a good fifteen bullets buried in him.”

  “Cole Younger!” she snapped, straightening suddenly. “So you really are in leagues with those outlaws, just like the sheriff said. Oh, Bart, how could you?”

  “Rosie, it’s not like you think.” He reached for her, but she had already swung away.

  A blanket bundled in her arms, she knelt to pull her pink hooked rug into the center of the room. One glimpse of the blood-soaked wool and she let out a gasp of horror.

  “Bart Kingsley, you have ruined my rug! I brought it all the way from Kansas City on the train because it was the only thing I ever liked out of that ugly house my fiancé bought for us last—”

  Catching herself, she clamped a hand over her mouth. Her eyes met Bart’s.

  “You and I weren’t married,” she whispered. “We never were married. Not really, were we?”

  When he didn’t answer, she spread her blanket on the bare wood floor. Then she curled up and pulled the edges of it over herself. Bart lay nearby, his breathing easier now. In the darkness she wondered if he could hear her crying.

  Chapter Three

  Rosie woke to find Bart sprawled half on and half off her bed, a sheen of feverish perspiration covering his body. He writhed in the agony of a dream, and she feared his moans would bring someone to investigate.

  “Bart, wake up!” she pleaded, placing her hand on his damp shoulder. “Bart!”

  At once he sat straight up and grabbed her arms in a powerful grip. His green eyes were bright with fever. “Rosie, don’t let them get me! Don’t let…don’t…”

  He winced in pain, then sagged back onto the bed. “Ah, blast that good-for-nothing sheriff—”

  “Hush, now!” Rosie ordered. She glanced at the door and wondered if the voice of a fevered man would carry down the hall. Brushing her hair back from her face, she studied the massive figure on the bed.

  What on earth was she going to do with him? In the light of day, she felt foolish not to have sent for Sheriff Bowman immediately. It wouldn’t be long before someone would hear—or maybe smell—the intruder. She ought to head down the hall to Mrs. Jensen’s suite and confess the whole thing.

  The truth of the matter was, Rosie didn’t owe Bart Kingsley one shred of kindness. He had wooed her, misled her, tricked her, abandoned her. And now he had endangered the one sure thing in life—her job as a Harvey Girl. If anyone discovered an outlaw in her room, her dream of teaching in one of the local schools would end. She would neve
r have a home of her own, a classroom filled with eager children, freedom from her past.

  “Rosie?” he murmured as his head tossed from side to side, his black hair a tangle on the white pillow. “Rosie, where are you, girl?”

  Fingers knotted together, she fretted over her dilemma. She couldn’t let Bart stay in her room, but he was too ill to climb out the window and escape. If she called the sheriff, everyone would wonder why she had let the fugitive renegade sleep in her bed all night. Her bloody sheets would bear witness to the fact that he hadn’t been hiding under her bed forever.

  “Oh, dear Lord, please show me what to do!” she whispered in prayer as she checked the gold pocket watch she had inherited from her mother.

  Six-thirty! The uniform inspection bell would ring in half an hour. Then she would have to rush downstairs, eat a roll, sip some coffee and prepare the dining room for the eight o’clock train. Dare she go off and leave a feverish, groaning man in her bed?

  As she turned away in search of her apron, Rosie decided Bart could stay through the first shift. She would return to her room before the lunch train came through and check on him. If he was the slightest bit better, she would insist that he leave.

  “Rosie.” His voice startled her as he struggled to sit up. “I promised I’d go this morning. I’ll need my jacket.”

  Her shoulders sagged. “Oh, Bart, you’re in no shape to go anywhere.”

  “No, Rosie-girl. I made you a promise.” For a moment he sat hunched over, breathing heavily. Then he hauled himself to his feet.

  Rosie watched him sway like a great tree about to topple. He means to do it, she thought. He actually means to keep his promise to me. One of his long legs started to crumple, but he grabbed the iron footboard to steady himself.

  His guns and cartridge belts weighed him down as he shuffled across the room toward the corner where she had tossed his jacket. His bandage was stained with a dark red blotch. He propped one big brown hand on the windowsill and bent to pick up the torn buckskin.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry I messed up your sheets and rug. Sorry about when we were young and how much I hurt you. I’m sorry I made you cry last night, too, and—”