by Pam Crooks
He hauled her out of the chair with both hands. “Let’s get out of here!”
But she pushed against him. “My hatbox, Jack!”
She broke from his grasp and lunged toward the burning table. He could barely discern the shape of the thing through the thickening smoke, but she seemed to know right where it was and grabbed it fast, whirling back toward him. He hooked his arm around her shoulders and dragged her out of the cabin, far enough away that the fire and smoke couldn’t touch them anymore.
Grace didn’t need to explain how that damn box ended up on the table, in this squalid hideout, all the way out here on the mountain. Charles and Boone had known the papers inside would be evidence against them, and they’d set out to destroy every piece. Right along with Grace. Shutting her up. For good.
They’d almost succeeded.
She dragged in air, coughed and coughed again. Jack opened his coat and held her hard against him, warming her, holding her until she quieted and sank against his chest.
He closed his eyes and let the fear of losing her seep out of him. He pressed his scarred cheek into her hair.
“I love you, Grace. I love you,” he said.
Her head lifted with a tiny gasp, and her wide gaze met his. She seemed about to say something until footsteps crunched in the snow.
“Excuse me, Jack.” The police chief looked grim, but his expression revealed his concern, too. “Doing all right, young lady?” he asked.
She stood a little taller and kept one arm clutched around the scorched hatbox, the other around Jack’s waist. “Much better than I was a few minutes ago, thank you.”
“We spied you out here with him, you know. Taking pictures by the stream. Jack had a hunch Boone or Alexandre or whatever the hell he calls himself would come back to his old stomping grounds.”
“It was the safest and farthest place he could take her,” Jack said, glad his instincts hadn’t failed him. “After smoking us out of the restaurant, he had to disappear in a hurry. Grace didn’t even have a coat.”
“Well, they’re not going to disappear now.” The lawman nodded in somber satisfaction. “We’ve got ’em where we want ’em.”
He turned toward the tree line, and Jack spied Charles sitting on a bed of fallen ponderosa pine needles, handcuffed to the tree’s trunk with his knees pulled up and his head hanging down. Tethered with him, the horses that would’ve helped him escape.
“How sad that he brought this all on himself,” Grace said. “Without a care to the scores of people he hurt back in Minneapolis.”
“He’s paying the price for it.” George seemed far less affected. “That one, though, isn’t going to make it.” He indicated Boone, lying in crimson-stained snow.
Mick stood over him, his rifle loose in his hand, guarding him against any moves he wasn’t likely to make.
“He needs a doctor,” she said quietly.
“Won’t do him any good,” George said. “He’s already knocking on Hell’s door, I’m afraid.”
Jack shrugged out of his coat and draped it over Grace’s shoulders. He strode toward the outlaw. For a moment, he stood over him, too, like Mick, looking down at the man who had too long lived on the wrong side of the law.
Boone could’ve been Sam Ketchum laying there, shot half-dead from Jack’s gun. The similarities, the irony, were too strong to ignore.
I gotta know… who set me up. Find him for me, y’hear? Will you do that… for your ol’ man, Jack?
Knowing he had, finally, Jack hunkered down and gently rolled Boone toward him. Pale, ashen, his breathing rattled, Boone didn’t have much time left.
But still, Jack had to hear it.
“It was you that night, wasn’t it?” he asked. “Down in New Mexico.”
Glazed with pain, the black eyes fluttered over him. “You always thought you were better than him… didn’t you?”
“Not better.” Far from it. Still, the words stung. Even now. Even from Boone. “We just made different mistakes, that’s all.”
“Knew… you’d go after him. Jus’ like I told you to.”
“It had to be done.”
And if Jack hadn’t, if Boone had never tracked him down in the Sierra Grande Mountains to reveal the Ketchum gang’s hideout, where would they all be now? Who would have died? Who’d still be alive?
Jack would give anything to change that night.
But then, if not for Boone and his greed, Jack would never have met Grace.
Setting the hatbox aside, out of reach, she knelt beside him, her skirts a vibrant blue against the crystalline snow. “When you betrayed Sam Ketchum, Alexandre, you betrayed my mother, too.”
Boone grimaced, as if on a wave of pain. Physical or otherwise, Jack couldn’t be sure. “She was… nothing like you.”
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter anymore.” Grace leaned forward, and his dark gaze clung to her as if her presence helped him breathe. To survive a little while longer. “You have a chance to redeem yourself before it’s too late.”
“Not… too late.”
“Oh, but it is.” She bit her lip, as if to rein in her desperation. “Tell us where you hid the Society’s money. Please, Alexandre.”
He choked out a bitter laugh. “You are consumed by it, my love.”
“Just as you are.”
“For my… people.”
“It was never theirs. It wasn’t.”
His black eyes closed, then opened again. He coughed, grimaced, and eased back. A trickle of blood slid out the corner of his mouth.
“No one… knows where I hid it.” He halted, dragged in air. “Not even Louis… David.”
“Alexandre, please. While you still can, tell me,” Grace pleaded.
Gurgling sounds slid from the outlaw’s throat. His eyes rolled back. He didn’t move, didn’t breathe, for too long, and Jack knew then, he was gone.
“We’ve lost him, honey,” he said, grimly.
She pressed her fingers to her mouth in dismay.
Mick shook out a blanket and covered him. “I’m sorry, Grace. He didn’t have a thing to lose in telling you where that money was. Wasn’t fair to you.”
She sighed, so damned dejected Jack’s heart hurt for her.
“Did he pass on?” George asked, joining them.
“He did.” Jack stuck a thumb in his hip pocket and pondered their chances of finding the missing loot. Ever.
“Damned shame, for sure.” The police chief gestured to Mick. “Give me a hand, will you?”
“Sure thing.”
Jack stepped aside, taking Grace with him. She didn’t need to see the macabre nature of their work, the indignity of a man strapped to his horse with his toes pointing down.
“Hold me, Jack,” Grace said.
She slipped out of his coat, and he put it on again, then pulled her against him; she slid her arms around to his back, helping herself to his warmth, and laid her head on his chest. He pulled the edges of his coat as snugly around her as he could.
“The money could be anywhere in the territory,” she said, sounding sad. Frustrated.
“There’s ways to track it down, Grace.” He rested his chin on the top of her ebony head. For her sake, he tried to stay positive, to give her hope. “The investigation is far from over. We’re learning more about those two all the time.” He recalled the information Paris had wanted to share with them about Charles Renner over dinner. Before they’d been attacked with the smoke bombs. “We’ll track down every lead, clear into Canada if we have to.”
She sighed again. “It’s all so bizarre. Just yesterday, it was as if Boone lived in the dregs of the earth.”
As far as Jack knew, Boone had been just like that. The dregs of the earth. For years. From the time he’d been a part of the Ketchum gang.
“Today, he looked as rich as anyone could be,” Grace finished.
Jack frowned. Wouldn’t have been cheap for a man to transform himself like that. From his head to his toes. From the inside out.
“Maybe he dipped into the till,” he mused.
Her head lifted in surprise. “Do you think so?”
“The money had to come from somewhere.”
“Yes.” She drew back. “Somewhere close.”
“He wouldn’t carry it with him, and he didn’t keep it in the hideout. Leastways, he didn’t act like it when the fire started.”
“No.” Deep in thought, she nibbled on her lip.
“He wouldn’t have put it in an account somewhere, either.” Jack’s thoughts came, rapid-fire. “Too risky. And there’s been no evidence of an accomplice around town, except for Carl.”
Jack knew for sure the kid didn’t have a dime on him when he died. Besides, if Boone had any sense at all—and Jack knew he did—Boone wouldn’t have trusted Carl as far as he could spit.
“Maybe he buried it somewhere,” Grace said.
“Would’ve been the safest thing,” Jack concurred.
“Somewhere out of the way, but not too hard to find.”
“So he could get to it quick, if he had to.”
His mind worked over an image he’d all but forgotten until now. A memory from yesterday afternoon, when Boone had hunkered along the stream, doing something Jack couldn’t see….
At the time, he’d wondered about it. But his concern had been focused more on Grace, boldly off her horse and talking to the outlaw with his rifle trained right over her. Then Carl came riding out, all hell had broken loose, and Jack had forgotten about it.
Until now.
Suddenly Grace pushed away from him with a loud gasp. “Yesterday afternoon, Boone was—”
“I know,” Jack said, taking her hand.
“I think he buried it—”
“In the water.” He started to run.
She lifted her skirts and ran with him, her steps light and graceful over the snow. “Oh, Jack, I know right where he was.”
Adrenaline coursed through his veins. They sprinted toward the crisp, glittering stream and rounded the outcropping of rock, past the spot where Carl had dropped from his horse and died, and headed right to the water’s edge.
Automatically Jack shrugged out of his coat, tossing it over Grace’s shoulders for the second time in a matter of minutes, but she didn’t seem to notice. She stared at the prints in the snow, same as he did. Jack found the spot where Boone had knelt, even the one where his rifle had been, set aside while he worked.
And there, wrapped around a smooth, glistening rock, so incongruous no one would’ve seen it, not in a million years, was one end of a narrow strip of rawhide, extending down into the water, where the other end held its treasure in place.
“Merciful saints,” Grace breathed. “There it is.”
Jack hunkered down and tugged on the rawhide. The weight gave, and he lifted a parcel snugly encased in india rubber out of the water. “Isn’t that about the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen, honey?”
She squealed. “Open it, Jack. Hurry! We have to be sure.”
But Jack was. As sure as flowers in May.
He made short work of untying the rawhide and opening the rubber. A tattered envelope appeared, as tattered as it had been that fateful day when Allie tore it open, discovering the crime planted against her while she traveled on the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway train, headed to Great Falls.
Moments later, an outlaw named Reggie had plucked the envelope bulging with cash right out of her hands. Boone and Carl had been with him, and all three men escaped with the loot, leaving her behind to deal with the consequences.
Hell of an ordeal they’d put Allie and Grace through.
But now, today, the money would be returned to the Ladies Literary Aid Society, where it belonged.
“Is it all there, Jack?” Grace asked, leaning into him while her fingers riffled through the cash.
“Seems so.” A corner of his mouth lifted. “Minus the cost of a good haircut and an even better suit.”
George and Mick hustled toward them.
“Everything okay over here?” Mick asked.
The police chief almost slipped and fell in his haste. “We heard a ruckus.”
Jack pulled Grace against him. “A happy ruckus, George. And that’s a promise.”
A carriage rumbled up the mountain. Paris sat in the driver’s seat with Allie next to him. Along with the private investigator, Kerrigan, one of George’s deputies escorted them up.
Grace squealed again, jumped up and down and waved her arms.
“We found the money, Allie. We found it!” she shouted.
“You did?” Allie shouted back. She half stood in her surprise. “Oh, Grace, truly?”
“Yes, yes!”
Allie jumped out of the rig before her father braked to a full stop. Grace ran toward her, and the two women hugged and danced, leaving the rest of them grinning at their glee.
“A fine piece of investigative work you did, Jack.” George shook his head in amazement. “You solved the case for us.”
“Yeah, well.” His gaze lingered over Grace. He soaked in the sight of her happiness and took pleasure in knowing he had a part in it. “I had help.”
“Not much, and you know it.” He extended his hand, and Jack clasped it in his own. “I appreciate everything you did. Anytime you want a job, let me know. I’ll have one waiting for you.” He thumped Jack on the shoulder. “You’re a fine lawman. I’d be proud to have you on the force.”
Heady words, for sure, and they took root deep in Jack’s chest, swelling his heart with pride. He figured he’d come full circle since his father’s death. Sam Ketchum wouldn’t know how Jack had fallen into punishing grief, but it was Sam’s need to avenge his betrayer that pulled Jack up and out of the guilt by his bootstraps.
The old man had done him a favor. He’d forced Jack to realize his dream had never died.
Being a lawman was who he was meant to be.
“Thanks, George,” he said. “Means a lot that you think so.” They clasped hands. “We’ll talk soon.”
Paris approached. “It’s true, then. The two hooligans responsible for the embezzling scheme have been caught?”
Jack nodded. “For good.”
“Charles Renner was an alias, you know. Just like Boone was for Alexandre Thibault.”
“I figured as much.”
“Kerrigan dug up information that proved Louis David Riel is Renner’s real name. He’s a political revolutionist who’s been working to overthrow the Canadian government in favor of his own people.”
Jack recalled all Boone had claimed. “The Métis people.”
“That’s right. There are some who call Riel a fanatic. Others call him a prophet. Still others claim he’s a lunatic who needs to be committed to an asylum.” Paris grunted, as if the man was more than he could comprehend. “Regardless, he’ll be going back to Canada. Likely tried for treason.”
Jack could only shake his head at the shame of it all.
Paris regarded him with a fatherly expression. A wise one, too. “Go on, take Grace back to Lindell’s.” He winked. “Warm her up. It’s cold as a witch’s tits out here.”
In spite of himself, Jack chuckled. “I like the way you think, Paris.”
He turned and headed across the snow to do just that.
Later that night, much later, Jack couldn’t sleep.
A warm fire crackled in the block, filling Grace’s room with golden light. The incessant ticking of the bedside clock served as a constant reminder of how fast time could speed by when a man wanted it to stop.
He wished the night would never end so he could keep on holding Grace in his arms, both of them naked and curled around one another like puppies in a basket. If Jack could find a way to keep the sun from rising again, he would. If he never had to leave this room, this bed, he wouldn’t.
The hell of it was… none of those things would ever happen, and that meant he couldn’t stop Grace from leaving him.
And she would, he knew. She had to. She had responsibiliti
es back in Minneapolis, her commitment to the community, and the Ladies Literary Aid Society. As president, she had to carry on her grandmother’s work and see the library done, once and for all.
Besides, Grace wasn’t cut out for life in Montana’s rough, barely-settled territory. She wasn’t near used to it. Bess Reilly saw to it that her daughter was raised in a gentler way, surrounded by society’s rich and the privileges that came with it.
Jack held Grace a little tighter and thought of how he was as ill-suited to big-city life as she was to the one here. After his father’s death, Montana had been Jack’s salvation. The people of Great Falls, Mick and Trey and the rest of the outfit at the Wells Cattle Company… they’d helped him heal. To start over in anonymity.
He owed it to them all to stay and give back some of what they’d given him. He had to do what he could to police the lawless and keep the citizens safe, to help the territory settle and thrive.
Would Grace understand how he could do nothing less?
Or would she even care what he did? Their time together had been so damned short. No courtship, no wooing, no playing by society rules… and yet their coupling seemed like he meant something to her. From the moment they’d stepped into this room and fallen together on the bed, Grace was a fireball of passion and tenderness, wildly giving and taking until she damn near wore him out from their loving.
How would he ever let her go?
A quivery little sigh scooted over his chest, and surprised, he drew back a little to see her.
“I thought you were sleeping,” he murmured, sliding his fingers through her hair, brushing the strands off her temple.
“I can’t.”
“Me, neither.” He pressed a kiss to her dark head and debated the merits of making love to her again. To help them both forget the time and how fast it marched them through the night.
“Jack. I have something to tell you.”
He sensed her hesitation, her dread, and his stomach clenched.
“I suspect you do,” he said.
She took a breath, let it out again. He imagined how hard it was for her to say what she was about to say. What he knew was coming.
“I’m taking the morning train back to Minneapolis,” she blurted.
