Shotgun Grooms

by Susan Mallery

Chair legs scraped along the floor and Molly looked at Lucas as he took a seat beside her. So much like her husband and yet so different, she thought. Their eyes were much the same, though it appeared to her that Lucas’s clear blue gaze seemed less troubled than in the past. Less shadow-filled. She only wished she could say the same for Jackson’s.

  “So,” he said, his voice low and friendly, assuming rightly that she’d long since forgiven him for his trickery in bringing her to Colorado. After all, if he hadn’t, she’d have never met the man she loved so much. “Is my brother to blame for putting that sorrowful gleam in your eyes?”

  She swallowed hard, took a breath and then folded her hands on top of the table. Guilt pooled in the pit of her stomach, but she fought it down. This is why she’d come here today, she reminded herself. It was no time to be feeling squeamish about wringing information out of Lucas.

  “Why won’t he love me?” she murmured, feeling a hot flush of shame creep up her neck to fill her cheeks.

  Lucas sighed. “That stupid son of a bitch.”

  “He’s not stupid!”

  Chuckling, he asked, “But son of a bitch fits?”

  Now she sighed and shook her head. “He cares for me. I know he does. But he won’t admit it, won’t let himself love.”

  “He does love you, Molly. I can see it in him. He nearly killed those men for bothering you.” Lucas shook his head, leaned forward and covered her hands with his. She clung to him. “It’s just—”

  “Just what? How can I fight what I don’t know? Tell me, Lucas. Help me.”

  He looked at her for a long, silent moment. She heard the muted sounds of Defiance filtering through the shuttered windows, but her attention was focused on the man who held the secrets she so needed to know. Indecision flickered across his face and was gone again in an instant.

  “He should have told you this himself,” he said finally, and started talking. As she listened, Molly felt the world slip out from beneath her feet.

  Molly was packed and waiting by the door when Jackson came home. She watched him walk up the path toward the cabin, sunlight splashing on his head and shoulders. Outlined against the trees, he stood as tall as the mountain he claimed as his home and Molly knew she would always see him like this. This one moment stolen out of time would live in her mind forever.

  And then he crossed the yard, opened the door and stopped dead on the threshold. Snatching his hat off, he looked from her to the stuffed carpetbag at her feet and back again. Scowling, he demanded, “What’s this about?”

  “This is about the end of us,” she said sadly. “You should have told me about your wife, Jackson. About your son.”

  He drew his head back as though she’d slapped him. And the hurt in his eyes stabbed at her, reflecting her own. Molly’s heart ached and she felt as though there were a crushing weight on her soul. Her hopes and dreams lay shattered around her and all she had left was this one last chance to hear the truth from her husband’s own lips.

  “Who told you?” he asked, the tight, harsh words scraping the air like a razor blade.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said with a slow shake of her head. “It wasn’t you and it should have been.”

  “Lucas,” he said to himself. “Had to be.”

  “Will ya leave it alone, man?” Molly snapped. “All that counts is that you lied to me.”

  “How do you figure that?” he asked, clearly stunned.

  “You let me think—” She stopped, took a breath and said, “Tell me about her. Tell me now.”

  Jackson looked down at her, into the green eyes that swam with tears she refused to spill. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. Hadn’t meant to care—or to make her care. How in the hell had this all gotten so out of his control? He tossed his hat onto the table and it landed beside a small canning jar filled with flowers. He sighed to himself, ran one hand through his hair and wished he were anywhere but there.

  “You already know the story,” he said, and heard the low growl of remembered pain shimmering in his own voice.

  “Tell me,” she said again. “This much, at least, you owe me.”

  Did he? he wondered, then acknowledged silently that she was right. If he couldn’t allow himself to love her, she at least deserved to know why.

  “I was away,” he said, before he could change his mind, “fighting on some battlefield…doesn’t matter which one. They were all alike. Dark. Bloody.” He sighed and scraped his face with both hands. Shooting Molly a quick look, he walked to the window and stared out at the gathering night. “Eliza and me, we had a small place in Missouri. She’d grown up around there. Wanted to move back when we got married.” He flashed Molly another slanting look in time to see her wince, and her pain slashed at him.

  “Anyway…Eliza got sick. Influenza, they said.” The view stretched out the window, shifted, blurred and became another place in another time. He stared down the path of memory and waited for the ghosts to rise. “She died. She’d been dead almost six months by the time I got word. Our boy was only about a year old.”

  “Jackson…”

  He cut her off. He didn’t know what she might have said, but he was too caught up in the past now to let it go without looking at all of it. “The Hartsfields, our neighbors, they took Jesse in to care for him until I could get back.” His hands curled around the windowsill and squeezed until he thought the wood might snap, and still he didn’t let go. “Two years later, the war was over and I went to collect my son.” He turned his head to look at her. “Jesse didn’t know me,” Jackson said, feeling the stab of that ancient pain as if it was freshly given. “No reason why he should, I guess. But he cried, Molly. He cried when I picked him up.”

  “Ah, Jackson…” Sympathy rang in her voice and he steeled himself against it.

  “So I left. The Hartsfields loved him. He was happy there.” A shudder passed through him and was gone again. “I haven’t seen him since.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I don’t need your pity,” Jackson told her stiffly. “It was over and done ten years ago. It’s in the past.”

  “No, it’s not.” Molly stared up at him and, though her heart broke for the misery and pain he’d suffered so long ago, a part of her wanted to shake him. “You’re still there, Jackson. In the past. With Eliza. With your son.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He whirled away from the window, stalked across the room, turned around and came right back again, looming over her like an avenging angel.

  She didn’t flinch. “I do, to my own regret, I do know. You’re so busy living in your past, mourning what you lost, you can’t see what you have…or could have.”

  “I didn’t want a wife, remember?” he shouted, giving in to the age-old rage frothing inside him. “All I wanted was to live out my life. Alone.”

  Furious, Molly planted both hands on his chest and shoved. But it was like trying to push a mountain. He didn’t move an inch, just glared down at her.

  “You’re not living, Jackson!” she yelled at him, trying one last time to reach him. Before it was too late. Before she left him forever and whatever they might have had was lost. “You’re existing. You’re…taking up space in a world you no longer want and doin’ nothin’ with it. The sad truth is, you’re buried as deep as your past. You just don’t know it yet.”

  His jaw worked, his eyes narrowed and he swallowed hard before saying, “You don’t understand. You don’t know.”

  The wind went out of her sails, as Uncle Michael would have said. Her heart reached out to him, but he didn’t want it. Or her.

  Snatching up her carpetbag, she clutched it and the secret of their child close and looked into his blue eyes for one last time. Lifting one hand, she cupped his cheek and tried not to care that he winced as if her touch burned. “Ah, Jackson,” she said softly, tiredly, “until you can put the past where it belongs, you’ll never really be alive.” Her thumb stroked his cheek. “I know you desire me, I can see it in your
eyes. But you don’t love me as I’d hoped you would.”

  “Molly—”

  “But I love you, Jackson,” she interrupted.

  His whole body jerked as if he’d been shot. Air wheezed in and out of his lungs.

  “And that’s why I’m leaving,” she continued, her tone brisk now in an effort to keep the tears at bay. “I can’t share a house and a bed with a man who doesn’t love me.”

  She stepped around him, walked to the door and opened it. Captain Blood flew to her shoulder and perched there. Pausing on the threshold, she looked back at him one last time, but he didn’t turn. “Take care of yourself, Jackson. For me.”

  Then she was gone and emptiness crashed down on him.

  Chapter Twelve

  He’d never known a night to last so long.

  Jackson moved through the cabin, restlessly pacing as he had been since Molly had walked out the door yesterday. The damn place felt huge. And empty. Only the day before, he might have said the cabin was too crowded, with Molly’s relentlessly cheerful chattering and the goddamned bird’s cursing.

  But now…he glanced at his gun rack and found himself wishing Captain Blood was sitting there glaring at him out of beady little eyes. “Stupid,” he muttered fiercely. “I hate that bird.” And yet, his brain taunted, wouldn’t another voice in this place sound good about now?

  “No,” he said aloud, and only worried a bit that he seemed to be arguing with himself. A man alone was bound to be a little peculiar from time to time. And alone wasn’t an entirely bad thing to be. He’d been alone before she came. And he’d been happy…well, content anyway. He sucked in a gulp of air and said, “I will be again, too.” As soon as he could forget the sound of her laughter, the quick spark of temper in her green eyes and the feel of her body wrapped around his during the night.

  Shouldn’t take more than a hundred years or so.

  “Damn it!” he hollered. There was no one to challenge him. She was gone and yet, somehow, she was still here, too. In the flowers on the table. The quilt on the bed. The half-finished sock dangling from the knitting needles she’d left behind.

  That’s what was making this so hard, he told himself. She’d left so much behind, it was bound to remind him of her. And though that sounded like a good enough argument, he knew it wasn’t the truth. Not all of it.

  Disgusted, he crossed to the door, opened it and stepped out into the night, looking for the peace he couldn’t find in the cabin. The wind sighed through the trees. Sunrise streaked the sky with slices of pink and yellow and a deep, full red that reminded him too closely of Molly’s hair. His first day without her, he told himself, and flinched as a black, empty hole opened up inside him at the thought. How would he do it? he wondered. How would he ever survive the rest of his life, knowing he’d never be with her again? He dropped to the porch and sat down, forearms braced on his knees as he stared out blankly at the tree line and the forest beyond.

  His mind raced, though, refusing to let him rest. Refusing to let him ignore what was right in front of him. Image after image of Molly rose up in his brain, forcing him to remember. That wide smile of hers, which had taken his breath the first time he saw it. Her laughter. Her off-key singing. Her temper and dogged determination to drag him back into life.

  “So much,” he whispered, his voice instantly swallowed by the emptiness around him. “She gave me so much and now she’s taken it back.” Knowing that he’d deserved nothing less didn’t make him feel any better.

  A rustle of sound from the flower bed had Jackson scowling more fiercely. The dog. No doubt Bear wanted his shot at chewing on Jackson’s hide. Well, perfect. A dog bite would just about complete this miserable night.

  Bear slunk out of the flower bed, and stopped, looking up at him. Jackson held his breath, waiting for the up-curled lip. The sharp little teeth. The deep-throated growl of dislike.

  But instead, the tiny dog walked slowly forward, keeping its ears cocked as if expecting to be kicked and wanting a good chance at escape just in case. When it reached the steps, it lay down in the dirt and slowly rested its head on the toe of Jackson’s worn boot.

  Something cold and hard gripped his heart and Jackson stared into two soulful brown eyes that seemed to be asking, Where is she? Why did you let her go?

  “She saved you, too, didn’t she?” he asked, and carefully reached down to stroke the dog’s head. “Just like she saved me,” he admitted at last. And with that acknowledgement, his heart started beating again—a loud, hard pounding in his chest—and Jackson felt a rush of blood through his veins and drew his first easy breath all night.

  “She was right,” he said, needing to hear the words aloud. Needing to say them. “Damn it, she was right about everything. Hell, I’ve lived more in the past month than I have in the past ten years.”

  The dog’s ears quirked and Jackson nodded. “You were right, too,” he said. “And I’m gonna go get her and bring her back. Where she belongs. With us.”

  Bear barked once when Jackson stood up, but he paid no attention. There was one last thing to do. Tilting his head back, he stared up at the morning sky and whispered, “Goodbye, Eliza. Look after Jesse for both of us.”

  Then leaving his past behind, he raced to catch up with his future.

  “The stage left early,” Lucas said, disgust clear in his tone.

  “Early?” Jackson gripped the saddle horn and twisted one way, then the other, checking the street as if still expecting the stage to be there. Somewhere. “Why the hell did it leave early?”

  “Does it matter?” Emily asked pointedly. She stared at him with both hands at her hips and a no-nonsense gleam in her eye.

  “Yes, it matters,” Jackson said. “I’ve got to talk to Molly.”

  “Haven’t you said enough already?” his sister-in-law demanded. “What could you possibly add?”

  “That I’m an idiot,” he snapped. Then giving the reins a sharp jerk, he turned the horse toward the road out of town and took off like a shot.

  “Well,” Emily mused as her grinning husband dropped one arm around her shoulders, “at least he knows what to say.”

  The stagecoach hit yet another rut in the road and Molly’s head snapped back, smacking into the wood and knocking her hat forward, over her eyes. “For pity’s sake,” she mumbled, pushing the hat up again.

  “Yep,” the older man opposite her commented, “these roads are a disgrace to the stage company. Ought to get someone out here to fix ’em.”

  The tall, thin bespectacled woman beside her nodded agreement and launched into a detailed explanation of just why the East was so much better than the West.

  “Rocky shores, rocky shores,” Captain Blood called out from the inside of his rocking cage.

  But Molly didn’t care about the condition of the road. She didn’t care about the blossoming knot on the back of her head. The screaming pain in her heart dominated everything. Turning her head, she stared out the narrow, paneless window and said a silent goodbye to Colorado and the man she loved.

  “Hey there!” a voice shouted from somewhere behind the stage. “Hold up! Hold up, damn it!”

  “What is that?” the woman beside her whispered, her hand at her throat. “A holdup? Did he say this is a holdup? Are we to be robbed?”

  “That’s what I heard, too,” the man said, and leaned out the window for a look. Drawing back inside the coach, he said, “There’s a rider back there. Comin’ hell for leather, ’scuse me, ladies, and he looks almighty big and mean.”

  The driver bellowed suddenly, “Hang on, folks! We’ll make a run for it!”

  And the stage lurched forward, throwing all three passengers into each other and off their seats. Captain Blood batted his wings against the cage, screeching curses. The ladies struggled back into their seats while the older man rummaged in his carpetbag and came up with a pistol. Spinning the chamber, he smiled to himself and leaned out the window again.

  “You damn thief!” he shouted, and fired of
f a round. “There’s ladies present, damn you!”

  Molly clutched at the door frame, eyes wide, and listened as that voice called out again, closer this time.

  “Damn it, quit shootin’ at me! Hold up there!”

  “Jackson?” Stunned, she leaned out her side of the coach and, even from a distance, she recognized the big man hunched low over his horse’s neck, waving his hat in the air like a madman. He had come after her! Drawing back inside the coach, she noticed her fellow passenger preparing for another shot and dove at him, pushing his arm, ruining—she hoped—his aim.

  “Lord love us, lady,” the man exclaimed, “you made me drop my gun!”

  “That’s my husband!” she shouted in her own defense, then reached up to pound on the roof of the coach. “Driver, stop the coach!” She had no idea what Jackson was up to, but a part of her was already quickening with hope.

  The stage rolled to a stop, its leather hinges creaking in the suddenly still air. Jackson reined his horse in right beside the blasted thing and shot the driver a venomous glare as he swung down. But he wasn’t here to yell at fools. He was here to collect his wife.

  Yanking open the stage door, Jackson leaned inside and was met by a chorus of complaints.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” sputtered the angry man who’d shot at him.

  “You can’t have my jewelry,” shrieked the woman, who looked at him as if he was the devil himself.

  And Jackson ignored both of them, locking his gaze on Molly. God, she looked wonderful. Hat askew, hair tumbling around her shoulders from her wild ride, cheeks flushed and those golden freckles of hers damn near sparkling at him. He’d never seen anything more beautiful in his entire life. “I have to talk to you,” he said, staring into her forest-green eyes.

  She shook her head. “We’ve said all there is to say.”

  “Not by a long shot,” he muttered, and, despite her protest, reached into the stage, grabbed her around the waist and dragged her outside.

  But once she was on her feet again, she pushed away from him, tipped her head back and said, “You’ve no right to stop me, Jackson. I’m leavin’ and that’s the end of it.”