Kate shook her head and closed her eyes. “Oh, Luke, I was going crazy with worry, and my heart was breaking. I thought, if you were alive, you’d gone on to California and I’d never see you again.” She reached up and touched his face. “You shouldn’t have doubted me, Luke Bowden. I’m not young and petulant like Bonnie was. I’m not a kid who thinks she needs taking care of and who would turn to any man for it. When I love a man, Luke, I love him in every way possible and with my whole heart, and not just any man will do. When we made love, it was so much more special than just satisfying baser needs.”
Another kiss.
“It seemed like we were sharing souls,” Kate told him, “sharing our spirits, even sharing all the bad memories, both of us trying to erase them through each other. A woman can’t throw that aside and just turn to another man for those things. That kind of lovemaking is special, Luke, and in my heart I wanted you to feel special. I wanted to relieve the pain of bad memories, and I needed the same.”
Luke took hold of her wrists and kissed her hands. “You should be furious with me for putting you through the worry of these last couple of months. I could at least have sent someone with a message—some kind of excuse for not coming back yet—but I knew if I did, you’d for sure wait. I wanted to see what you would do not knowing, and that was mean of me. It’s just an example of how I can be a real ass sometimes, Kate.”
She couldn’t help a smile. “All men can be real asses sometimes,” she told him. “You think I don’t know that? Look what I’ve been through. Look around you in Lander.”
Luke grinned. “They took good care of you, though, didn’t they?”
“Yes, they did.” Kate turned and nodded toward the cabin. “They built that for me, alarm bell and all.”
Luke put an arm around her and began walking her toward the house. “I came in the back way. I wanted to see you before I went into town. But back before I left for Atlantic City, I talked to Big Jim about investing in the livery and expanding it. We’ll raise horses and cattle and herd them down to Cheyenne to meet the train. Now that the Union Pacific is finished, we can ship cattle all the way to Omaha and Chicago.” His arm tightened around her. “I want to stay right here in Lander, Kate. We’ve both made some pretty good friends here. Why should we go any farther when we already have people here who care about us? And we would both have jobs and do okay.”
Kate stopped walking and looked up at him, folding her arms. “Would you mind explaining why I should just accept that and stay here because you say so?”
Luke put his hands on his hips. “Because wives generally stay with their husbands, don’t they? If the husband says, This is where I’m going to live and work, the wife usually accepts that and sets up housekeeping.” He glanced at the cabin. “And we already have a house, it seems.”
Kate frowned. “Is that your way of proposing? It’s not very romantic.”
Luke laughed lightly. “Another sign of me being an ass.” He took a deep breath and removed his wide-brimmed hat, then bent down on one knee, and with his free hand, he took hold of Kate’s right hand. He looked up at her. “Kate Winters. Will you accept the name Kate Bowden and marry me?”
Kate couldn’t help the tears that came to her eyes. “Luke, what if I can’t have children?”
He only grinned. “If we have babies, that’s fine with me. If we don’t, I’m okay with that, too. All I care about is how much fun it will be trying to make those babies. In fact, answer me quick, because I hope that, like me, you want to catch up on a few things as soon as we go inside that cabin. And tomorrow, we’re getting married, come hell or high water. Can you think of a better way to do it than during the spring dance?”
Kate studied his handsome smile and the way the wind blew his shaggy hair in ten directions. She’d often wondered if the wind ever stopped blowing in high country. She answered him through tears. “No, I can’t think of a better time to get married.”
Luke’s grin widened as he rose. “I love you, Kate.” He leaned down and met her lips again, sharing a salty kiss. Kate remembered cutting him down from that hanging rope, struggling through the snow with him, waking up in that cave to find herself half naked under a blanket, the way he’d kissed her in the middle of the night in that cave, the first time they made love in the tall grass under a big sky, and the wild night of sex they’d shared in that old cabin, and the way he’d risked his life to protect her. She couldn’t imagine a better man to protect and provide for her, or a better man to lie with in the night. Luke Bowden might be good at a lot of things, but making love to a woman had to be right at the top of the list.
Luke picked her up in his arms then. “Show me your cabin, woman.”
Kate pulled the combs and ribbons from her hair and let it fall out long, the way he liked it. “What about Red? You haven’t unsaddled him yet.”
“That poor horse has been through hell with me. He’ll understand.”
Kate laughed through her tears and put her head on his shoulder as Luke carried her inside and to her bed. He dropped her onto the bed and crawled onto it himself, his big frame covering her. “May I take your clothes off, ma’am?”
Kate smiled and reached over her head to grasp the brass bars of the headboard. “You may do anything you want, sir.”
Luke leaned down and tasted her mouth in a kiss that told her this was going to be a long, delicious day…and night.
Epilogue
It was a double wedding. Luke and Kate. Sienna and Bill. A traveling preacher performed the ceremony, and no wilder celebration ever took place than that day in May in Lander, Wyoming Territory, Outlaw Country. And no wedding reception anywhere could possibly have involved more drinking, more dancing, more screams and laughter, more shots fired into the air, more gambling, more drunken fist fights or more business for the prostitutes than the marriage of Luke Bowden and Kate Winters.
Beyond all the yelling and piano music lay the silence of the high, lonesome country beyond the remote little town of Lander—the silence around a lonely, dead tree where a piece of frayed rope still dangled—the silence of a small cave where coyotes were digging through the bits of food someone had left there…before winter.
Author’s Note
I hope you have enjoyed my story. If you want to read more about the outlaw Jake Harkner, be sure to pick up my Outlaw Hearts series of books—Outlaw Hearts, Do Not Forsake Me, Love’s Sweet Revenge, and The Last Outlaw.
In all of my Men of the Outlaw Trail books, I will be mentioning characters from several of my older books, and you will then be able to read about them and their own stories. There is nothing I love more than writing about the “bad man with a good heart.” Every story I write is based on real historical events and locations and is a story of pure, beautiful love set against the challenges of settling America’s “Old West.”
About the Author
USA Today bestseller Rosanne Bittner has written and published seventy novels over the past forty years. Rosanne’s first love is American history, the Old West, and Native Americans. Her well-researched books cover real events and locations from all facets of the birth and growth of America. She has won numerous writing awards, including a RITA nomination from Romance Writers of America for Song of the Wolf and a WILLA award from Women Writing the West for Where Heaven Begins. She was named “Queen of Western Romance” by Romantic Times Reviews, who nominated her second Outlaw Hearts book, Do Not Forsake Me, for Best Western Romance for 2015. Most of Rosanne’s novels have garnered over 95 percent five-star reviews from Amazon readers and great reviews from Publishers Weekly. Rosanne belongs to several historical societies and is an active volunteer in a home-town charity organization. She and her husband of fifty-four years live in southwest Michigan.
Connect online:
rosannebittner.com
rosannebittner.blogspot.com
[email protected]
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