Hannah was willing to surrender to Wyatt Earp himself if only she could first set foot on solid ground and breathe some fresh air. She held out her hand for the driver to help her down, then swayed dizzily a moment as she straightened her back. A man sat on a roan horse at the side of the road. The horse was blowing and sweat-foamed as if it had been ridden long and hard.
Hannah raised her head high enough to meet the man's eyes. They had always been the coldest, hardest eyes she'd ever seen.
Marshal Drew Scully kept a tight rein on his horse and his mouth while the driver climbed back on the box and sent the stagecoach along on its journey west without her. The great iron wheels squelched and sucked through the red gumbo, leaving deep ruts in the road, and still he said nothing.
Finally he stretched his legs out in the stirrups and half rose in the saddle as if taking a look at the countryside. "Turned out it wasn't as hard to find you as I thought it would be," he finally said.
Hannah thrust her chin into the air so fast and so high her neck cracked. "Yeah, well, now that you've found me and said howdy, you can just turn right around and ride on back to Rainbow Springs."
He pushed out a slow breath like a sigh and rubbed at his unshaven jaw. "The thing is, Mrs. Yorke, I was prepared to spend years looking."
"You were?" She swallowed hard and tried to quell the shaking that was going on inside her. She didn't want to hope, and knew already that the hope was in her so bad she hurt with it. "The thing is, Marshal Scully, there's something you ought to know before you start laying down conditions or... or making offers: I'm pregnant."
His eyes crinkled faintly at the corners, as if he was thinking about smiling. "That's good, because I've always wanted to be a da. A little girl might be nice, if you could arrange it, Hannah. A little redhead with dimpled cheeks."
A gust of prairie wind buffeted her, whipping at her widow's weeds and clutching at the black net veil of her hat. "I'm forty years old. When you're forty, I'll be fifty-three."
"Aye, and our daughter will be thirteen. Close to being a woman." He drew his eyebrows together in a frown as if at a sudden thought. "Bloody hell. I suppose I'll have to be practicing my quick draw between now and then. I'll put up with no riffraff sniffing around the skirts of my little girl."
The hope was in her now, roaring and gusting like the Montana wind. She wanted to shout to the skies with it. "I've been with dozens of men. Hundreds, maybe."
"So I've heard. And how many men is it, then, that you've been with in the last seven years?"
"Damn you, Drew Scully. You know there's never been anyone but you since that day you took me on my bearskin rug and without even a by-your-leave."
He grinned down at her. "My point exactly."
"I wasn't only a whore. There was a time—I'm not proud of it, mind you. Truth is, I'm bitterly shamed. But there was a time in my life when I was a drunk and a..." She squared her shoulders and lifted her head as high as it would go. "And an opium eater."
"Aye? Well, you've nothing on me, Hannah Yorke. Since we're confessing our sins, I'll be telling you plain—I'm probably the sorriest coward you'll ever live to meet. Near most every day I spewed up my guts and sweated buckets when I went down the shafts, I was that scared."
She stared at him in utter wonderment. "All those years... you worked down in that mine for all those years feeling like that?"
His mouth tightened and his gaze shifted away from hers. "I knew hearing it would give you the disgust of me."
There was this lump of sadness and joy all knotted up in her throat as big as a turkey's egg. "Oh, Lord, you men... always thinking you have to be so tough all the time. It would be a fine thing for y'all if we women didn't love you in spite of your foolishness."
He turned his head back around and looked at her, and something swelled within her, something sweet and scary and precious. "Do you love me, Hannah?"
She couldn't say it just yet. She was doing it again, dragging out the moment, holding on to the hope of it. She did smile at him, though.
"You told that stagecoach driver you had a warrant for my arrest, Marshal Scully. Just what is it I'm supposed to have done?"
"You broke my heart, Hannah. Leaving me like you did."
The lump in her throat was definitely going to choke her. "I only left you 'cause I loved you. And it's gonna be too bad for you, now that you've come after me, because I reckon you're stuck with me." She gripped his stirrup iron, giving it a rough shake. "Get on down from there, you. If I'm going to accept a man's proposal of marriage, I'll be doing it eye to eye."
He swung off the horse with as much grace as she'd ever seen in any cowboy. He removed his hat with one hand, took her own hand with the other, and got down on one knee in the middle of the Montana prairie. "Hannah Yorke," he said. His mouth was set serious, but those gray eyes of his were as warm as a summer sun. "Would you be doing me the honor of becoming my lawful wedded wife?"
She thought she was going to start crying if she wasn't careful. Land, she was crying. "Oh, Lordy... oh, yes," she said.
He kept hold of her hand while he stood up, dusted off the knees of his britches, resettled his hat, and fished something out of his vest pocket. "This is to keep things looking respectable and permanent until we can round up a preacher," he said. "I'll not be having you forget that I've asked you to marry me and that you've said yes."
Hannah looked down at her hand, where it lay trembling and looking so small in his. And she had to blink hard, so dazzled were her eyes by the sunlight flashing off the gold ring he'd put on her finger.
The oil lamp cast a warm glow over the kitchen where they sat together at the round oak table, a little uncomfortable in the rush-seat chairs but reluctant to move just yet. The night had settled deep and still around them.
She had poured coffee into her blue-and-white-patterned china. He held his cup cradled in his palms, blowing on it, his gaze caressing her face. "I love you," he said.
"Say it again."
"I love you, Clementine."
She felt shy of a sudden and she looked away. A bowl of her chokecherry jam, which they'd spread on her supper's biscuits, still sat on the table. She toyed with the spoon, making patterns in the thick pureed fruit.
"That first summer I was married," she said, making talk, delaying what was coming because the anticipation was so sweet, "I swear it was a pure mystery to me how berries could end up in jars to be spread on bread. Now I could put up a whole pantryful of preserves in my sleep."
"You remember the day you upturned a bucket of strawberries over Gus's head?" he said. "Lord, I don't know when I ever saw that brother of mine more surprised."
She pressed her fingers against her lips. "I don't know when I ever laughed so hard."
She looked up. His gaze was fastened hard on her mouth in that fierce, intense way of his. It made her lips soften and part and grow warm, as if he were already kissing her. But she saw a darkness in the shifting depths of his eyes, and a hurting. She didn't want this—there was no place for Gus between them anymore.
"He never knew," she said. "I'm certain he never knew. Oh, he always suspected there was a part of me he could never have. But he never knew it was the part of me that belonged to you."
His cup made a small clink in the quiet room as he set it down. He ran his finger along the rim of the saucer, his gaze still on her face. "There were times when I thought of him dying. I stopped short of wishing it, but I thought of it."
His words shocked her some. But the lawlessness in his nature that had always so fascinated her meant that not all of God's commandments were always going to be kept. And there was nothing he could ever say or do that would make her stop loving him.
His hand lay on the white oilcloth, dark, with long strong fingers that could swing a rope and break a horse. And love a woman. She closed the space between them and covered his hand with her own. "Come, my love," she said. "Come to bed."
He looked down at their entwined hands and then back
up to her face, and he smiled.
They left the kitchen hand in hand like an old married couple. His boots made no sound on the striped stair carpeting. But when he took them off and dropped them by the bed, they made a soft creak and clunk, like settling wood in a beloved old house.
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