Autumn Sage

by Genevieve Turner

  She braced herself for the gasp she knew was coming, the one she always hated.

  The spectators gave her exactly what she expected. She knew that they wouldn’t be gasping when she came to Joaquin’s shooting and her own attack. Not if they’d read the graphic details the papers had printed.

  She paused. This next bit was rather damaging to Joaquin, but there was no way to avoid it. “Sheriff Obregon shot both the Carey brothers. Then Mr. McCade shot him.”

  The prosecutor hadn’t looked up once.

  What was the point of telling all this if he wasn’t even paying attention? The muscles around her spine tightened another notch and she used an old schoolteacher trick to get his attention.

  She kept silent.

  Finally, blinking like he’d just awoken, the prosecutor turned to her.

  “Uh, what happened after that?” he asked.

  “After what?” she said, letting anger color her question.

  “Uh—” He tapped the stack of papers against his palm. “After Obregon shot McCade.”

  “You must mean after McCade shot Obregon.”

  “Oh, yes. After that,” he muttered.

  “Mr. McCade pulled me off the seat of the buggy and carried me to the brush.” Her heart thudded heavily in her chest and her head began to ache in time with it. She plunged forward despite the foul taste flooding her mouth. “He threatened…”

  She faltered, her view of the prosecutor’s back no help.

  Sebastian. She wanted to see him.

  Her gaze found him, still and solemn as always, sitting among the sea of spectators. Still, solemn, and reassuring.

  Yet there was torment in his eyes. He’d worn that same expression when she’d told him this story the first time, on that terrible stretch of road where it had happened.

  He at least was listening. He at least cared. She pulled her shoulders back, set her jaw. If she could tell Sebastian the entire story there, she could tell it now, here.

  “Mr. McCade threatened my virtue. In vulgar detail.” Nothing about those words was soft or yielding. And neither was she.

  “Did he—”

  “No.” She cut off the prosecutor before he could finish asking if McCade had been successful. That was all anyone ever wanted to know of her story—if she’d been thoroughly ruined. Well, they weren’t getting that satisfaction from her. “He began to strangle me, my wits going black under the force. I found a rifle on the ground next to me. I shot him in the shoulder and he clubbed me in the head with his pistol. I remember nothing after.”

  She sat back without losing a bit of the steel in her spine. She was finished; it was done. And every word had been the truth.

  She looked to the jurors. A few—the ones who would meet her gaze—looked sympathetic. Pitying.

  Perhaps they had believed her.

  Perhaps there was still hope.

  She glanced at McCade. His gaze was ruthless, unblinking. He hadn’t liked that she’d told the truth, had he?

  “No further questions,” the prosecutor said to his papers.

  McCade’s attorney leapt up, clasping his hands as though he’d like to rub them together in anticipation. The steel in her spine went cold at the sight.

  “You were out for a drive, you say?” His oily tone made her ears itch with the drip of it.

  She nearly nodded before catching herself. Everything here must be spoken for the record.

  “We were.”

  “Obregon had announced his intention to harass Mr. McCade before that, had he not?”

  “Harass?” Her entire mouth went tight, jaw and teeth and tongue turning to iron. “Sheriff Obregon suspected the man of murdering someone in the valley. Simple prudence dictated he keep a close watch on Mr. McCade, not harass him.”

  “Yet there was no real evidence Mr. McCade had done such a thing, was there?” He cocked an eyebrow for the jury, displaying his skepticism to them. “Only rumors.”

  She knew what he was trying to do, but couldn’t see a clear way to defeat him. “No,” she said, “the sheriff found no evidence of a crime, as far as I knew. But it was his duty to investigate such matters.”

  “If he found nothing, why keep harassing my client?” The attorney went on before she could answer. “The sheriff also had a vendetta against the Carey brothers, did he not?”

  He was putting this all on Joaquin then, painting him as some obsessed lunatic who’d randomly opened fire on three innocent men.

  But she could certainly speak to the true character of the Carey brothers. “There was no vendetta,” she said, contempt sharp on her lips. “Those brothers were worthless through and through.”

  The attorney raised his eyebrows as if he’d never before heard of young men being shiftless. “How were they worthless? What could they have possibly done to deserve being shot down?”

  She’d heard a lifetime of the Careys’ foolishness: drunken pranks, fights with the neighbor boys, and manhandling of girls at dances—and heard again her sister’s scream as Billy pinched her.

  She supposed it truly was all inconsequential next to the finality of murder.

  But they had meant to commit murder that day, she was certain of it. How could she convince the jury of that?

  “They drank to excess.” The titters from the jurors made her shoulders snap back. They might think it was amusing, but it was a serious matter. “When they did so, they fought with anything that moved. They were... too familiar with the ladies.”

  The lawyer leered at her. “Were they familiar with you?”

  She drew back in shock. “Certainly not.”

  He turned to the jurors and raised an eyebrow.

  She nearly closed her eyes in frustration. Her story was slipping away from her, this stupid, mugging lawyer turning everything around. She was smarter than this, smarter than him—she ought to be able to outwit him.

  “Miss Moreno, what dealings did you have with Judge Bannister before this?” the lawyer asked.

  She blinked, almost shaking her head. “None. I have never met Judge Bannister.”

  “Never met him?” The contrived surprise in his voice grated on her. “Isn’t his son married to your sister?”

  Sebastian had warned her the judge’s vendetta was at the heart of this. But to have it brought up during her testimony… she’d never expected this.

  “Yes, his son is married to my sister.” She was as careful as a mule picking its way up a steep trail. “But Judge Bannister did not attend the wedding, nor has he ever visited, as far as I’m aware.”

  “Hmm.” The lawyer scratched at the few wisps of hair he’d obviously very carefully coaxed from his upper lip. “Such an… intimate connection between your families, yet you’ve never met him.”

  “No.” Firm, ringing. She’d rather discuss the attack than this probing of familial connections. She certainly wished to make no claim of kinship to Judge Bannister. “He and his son are estranged.”

  “Interesting. Yet, Judge Bannister sent a marshal to Cabrillo at his son’s request. That doesn’t sound estranged to me.” The lawyer didn’t wait for her protest. “So you had no idea Judge Bannister is currently engaged in a battle with Mr. McCade’s father over the city’s water supply? No idea the judge has stooped before to using slander in an attempt to win this battle?”

  “I—” She knew now, thanks to Sebastian telling her, but she hadn’t known before the attack. “Marshal Spencer mentioned something to me about the water supply, yes.”

  The lawyer was staring at the floor, one hand behind his back, and the ease of his stance scared her more than his leers had. “What dealings did you have with Marshal Spencer before this?”

  He looked up then, and the triumph in his eyes made her stomach turn inside out.

  He knew.

  So this was the trap they’d set for her. Nothing so inelegant as a random shooting—oh no, they had laid a cunning snare and she and Sebastian had walked right in and pulled it tight round their ankles.

>   No one here cared what had happened to her, or what had happened to Joaquin.

  Her role wasn’t to tell the truth. It was to be too intimately linked to a man who had a political stake in all this, no matter how she might claim she’d never met Judge Bannister. Her word was suspect before she’d even opened her mouth.

  And now she was much too intimately linked with the man sent to bring in Edwin McCade’s son.

  They’d used the newspapers to lay the trail and then sent that man to watch her. What that man might have seen from the library window—it would have been taken as evidence that she and Sebastian were… well, were in cahoots. Evidence that proved she was nothing more than a lying Jezebel.

  “Before when?” She didn’t know if she could successfully bluff her way out of this, but she had to try. Sebastian was wrong—it was a chess game, but she feared she was already too close to checkmate to escape.

  The lawyer turned to face her fully, his mouth twitching with self-satisfaction. “Well, let us start before the supposed attack, and we can work forward from there.”

  Their chairs creaked as the jurors leaned toward her, their gazes intent, hard. Every eye drilled on her, stuck in this chair, and if she squinted, she could see their ears twitching.

  “Before the attack, I didn’t know Marshal Spencer at all,” she declared.

  The lawyer sent a sardonic glance skyward. “Just like Judge Bannister. And after the attack?”

  “After, he was sent by the judge to apprehend Mr. McCade.” Her heart began to race, because it sounded so damning, even to her own ears.

  If not for Mr. Merrill’s request to his father, Sebastian would never have come. If not for the judge’s vendetta, he would never have sent Sebastian.

  Power and the governor’s mansion. That’s what this had always been about. Never justice.

  You don’t matter. Your suffering, Joaquin’s suffering—it is nothing to people like these.

  “You helped him track down Mr. McCade, did you not?” the lawyer was asking.

  She nodded.

  “Miss Moreno, you must speak your answer,” the judge reminded her.

  “Yes,” she said, louder than she might have liked.

  “If you aided him in his capture of Mr. McCade, wouldn’t that make you more than passing acquaintances?” the lawyer asked. “In fact, Marshal Spencer visited you the day you arrived in Los Angeles. You’re residing with him now, are you not?”

  All those questions from the lawyer, when he already knew the answers, dragging her into his performance for the jury.

  Although it was the worst kind of folly, she could resist no longer.

  She searched out Sebastian.

  He was furious.

  He knew exactly what the lawyer was doing, and the darkness within him wasn’t just peeping out—it was glaring at that lawyer. Violence lurked in the set of his jaw, the tension in his shoulders.

  For the first time, she was afraid of the darkness within him. Not for herself, but for what he might do if it were unleashed.

  “Miss Moreno?” the judge prompted. “Can you answer the question?”

  She remembered Sebastian’s words of last night. Supple. Pliant. The smooth sweeps of his hand down her bared back.

  Supple and pliant could not save this—nothing could. But she could keep Sebastian from doing something he would regret, like knocking out this lawyer’s teeth. He liked her fierce. Well, she would be all tooth and claw, for the both of them.

  She stared straight at McCade, who looked back with murder in his eyes. Exactly how he’d looked just after she’d shot him.

  “Yes, I am residing with the marshal while I am staying in Los Angeles. Someone attempted to murder me.”

  The outlaw gave her a half smile. A conspiracy between them, that smile—one that would end badly for her.

  He would punish her for telling the truth, if he were free. That’s what that smile promised.

  “Miss Moreno,” the lawyer said condescendingly, “Los Angeles is a large city and occasionally dangerous. What makes you think the shooter wasn’t some common drunk? You might not be used to such things in your little town.”

  “Not used to such things?” She kept staring at McCade, until the corner of his mouth dropped. “I remind you I was pistol-whipped and nearly strangled to death in my little town.”

  The lawyer halted before the witness stand, placing one hand upon it to steady himself, puzzlement crossing his face. He wasn’t expecting this from her.

  “Yet we only have your word on it,” he said, a shadow of uncertainty darkening the words.

  “I have a scar at my temple,” she reminded him.

  “Which could be from anything,” the lawyer countered, regaining his composure.

  She nodded toward McCade. “You only have his word on it as well.” She sent him her best schoolteacher glare, the same one that had wrung innumerable confessions from her pupils. “Whose word would you believe?”

  “Well,” the lawyer sputtered, “likely not the word of a woman who claims to have no relationship with the men known to have a vendetta against Mr. McCade, yet is related by marriage to one and is residing with the other!” He puffed his chest out and paced before the jury box. “I don’t know about your people, but decent folks consider an unmarried lady residing with an unmarried man to be immoral.”

  He made it sound as if she were something he’d cross the street to avoid stepping in.

  She was as indignant as he pretended to be. “My mother is there as well,” she insisted. “There’s nothing improper about it.”

  And then her memory—her foolish, tricky memory—brought forth an image of just how improper she and Sebastian had been. And then her body—her foolish, tricky body—betrayed her, as guilty heat flooded her cheeks and buzzed in her ears.

  The lawyer, catching the blush spreading over her, let a small smirk play at his mouth. “Your mother, hmm? Yet you’re blushing like—”

  The judge snapped down his gavel. “That’s enough.”

  The lawyer stared at her for a moment more, then waved a dismissive hand. “No further questions.”

  She didn’t dare to look at the jury as she walked back to her seat, her face still aflame and her eyes burning. But she did allow herself a look at Sebastian.

  He wasn’t watching her—his gaze was for the jurors. A grim gaze too, with those narrowed eyes and a tight jaw.

  She had written that blackness upon his expression with her poor performance.

  She had failed.

  Her head throbbed as she sank down into her seat in the gallery, utterly alone. Eyes open. Spine straight. To sit here was all she had to do now, and even so, she could hardly accomplish it. Thank goodness the judge was dismissing them for the day.

  Tomorrow would be the day of reckoning, the day the verdict was returned.

  She rose mechanically, following the spectators as they filed out of the courtroom, ignoring everyone’s stares. Despair wrapped its tight hand round her chest.

  No, no, she must remain upright and not give in. She could collapse when she found the privacy of her room, but not a moment before.

  She sensed Sebastian at her elbow, just behind her. Her entire self yearned to reach out for him, to seek the comfort of his touch, but to do so would give truth to those claims in the courtroom.

  She didn’t dare even speak to him in public now.

  Instead, she kept her head down, blindly following the crowd while her every sense was trained on the man behind her, the man she could not turn to, no matter what.

  So intent was she, she failed to notice the man blocking her path until she’d almost smashed into him.

  She jerked her head up when he didn’t move aside, only to find an older version of her brother-in-law staring her down, a man as ruthless looking as she’d always imagined.

  Judge Bannister.

  He simply stared, never saying a word.

  At least she thought he was silent, because her ears had stopped
working for some reason, the pain constricting about her head all she could hear, see, taste—

  Sebastian was there, lifting the judge clear off the ground as he growled something, but the pain wouldn’t allow her to translate. Was he speaking Spanish or English? She could no longer tell.

  The pain receded for a brief moment, and a devastating clarity came over her as she took in the entirety of the scene before her.

  She had to stop Sebastian. Striking McCade was one thing—striking the judge was quite another. Seeing the open mouths of everyone watching, she realized that was exactly what they were waiting for. No one was inclined to step in, not even the bailiff.

  She sighed deeply before condemning them both to scandal.

  “Marshal Spencer.” She laid her hand on his forearm, stark white against the black of his suit.

  He gave no indication he’d heard her. Instead, his fists tightened on the judge’s lapels until his knuckles were as pale as the scars covering them.

  “Sebastian,” she said, a little louder this time, loud enough for everyone to hear. It was too late to worry about exposing herself.

  The muscles of his arm tensed, gathering up their strength. She pressed her fingers deeper, reminding him that she was here, to come back to himself.

  The tautness under her hand slipped, then eased, Sebastian finally releasing the judge. The spectators stared at her as if she’d charmed a grizzly into eating from her hand. Slowly, every one of their expressions hardened, and she knew what they were thinking.

  That she’d lied on the stand.

  That she was nothing more than a pawn in Judge Bannister’s hands and a whore in Sebastian’s bed.

  A knife twist to her gut and a hammer blow to her aching head, those condemning expressions. Somehow, she found the strength to speak to Sebastian.

  “We should leave now.”

  His jaw was clenched tight, the muscles standing in stark relief, but he managed to nod.

  Isabel pulled him away, as Judge Bannister’s stupefied gaze followed them. She ignored him, thinking only to escape.

  It had all gone so terribly, spectacularly wrong, but at least she could still flee the wreckage.