Just After Midnight: Historical Romance

by Lori Handeland

  “When I woke up and you weren’t there I was so afraid,” Megan whispered against his lips.

  “I knew you’d be safe with the men and Damon.” He kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry I frightened you.”

  Megan pulled back and looked into his eyes. As she gazed into their cool, blue depths she knew she loved him. She had fought the emotion, telling herself she didn’t need a man in her life, didn’t need to endure the inevitable pain he would bring her. But the only pain she could not endure would be the pain of living her life without Alex Carson. They had come so close to losing each other, losing any chance of a life together, she had to take whatever time they had together and live it to the fullest.

  “Don’t ever leave me alone again, Alex,” she said quietly.

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Does that mean you’ll marry me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if we have to leave Dawson? I won’t be stationed here forever.”

  She leaned her head against his shoulder, snuggling into his warmth. “Wherever you are is my home. I’ve made The Celebration a success, and that’s what I wanted. I can do the same again in any town in the world.”

  “You want to open another dance hall?” he asked warily.

  She smiled against his coat. “Dance hall, hotel, restaurant, whatever.”

  Alex was silent for a moment, then he sighed. “I should have known you wouldn’t be content to stay at home.”

  She pulled back to look into his face. “Would you?”

  Alex laughed. “All right, I see your point.”

  “Lieutenant?”

  They both turned to find that the Mounties who had gone in pursuit of Queen had returned. Alex left her for a moment to meet with them. After a short discussion, the Mounties turned toward Dawson and Alex returned to her side.

  “Queen?” Megan asked.

  “She got away,” Alex said in disgust. “She had too much of a lead and a faster team.”

  “At least she’s out of our lives.” Megan shook her head sadly. “I can’t believe I considered her a friend.”

  “You couldn’t have known what she was really like. No one did.”

  “Not even Ian.”

  Alex shook his head, then led her toward the dog sled. Once she was settled, he climbed on behind her and took up the reins.

  “It’s Christmas day, Megan,” Alex leaned down to whisper in her ear. “Marry me as soon as we get back to town. We can start the new year with a new life.”

  Megan craned her head around to smile up at him. She had forgotten Christmas—a day to celebrate the birth of hope.

  The wind picked up and swirled snow against their already cold faces, but within her heart hope grew as warm as the flames that had nearly killed them. A ray of sunlight pierced the midnight that had been lodged in her heart for so long. Alex had brought that brightness into her life. She never wanted to return to the darkness of her lonely existence again. With a smile, Megan nodded and Alex called to the dogs. The team lurched forward while Damon ran alongside as they began the trip back to Dawson City and their future.

  About the author:

  Lori Handeland is a Waldenbooks, Bookscan, USA Today and New York Times best-selling author, as well as a two-time recipient of the Romance Writers of America’s RITA award.

  For more information on Lori or her books, please go to:

  http://www.lorihandeland.com

  Lori also writes under the name Lori Austin. Please scroll for an excerpt of the first book in the Once Upon a Time in the West series, the RITA nominated

  BEAUTY AND THE BOUNTY HUNTER,

  Available Now

  followed by an excerpt from the second book, named one of the Top Five Best Romances of the Summer by Publishers’ Weekly

  AN OUTLAW IN WONDERLAND

  Available Now

  and an excerpt of the final book in the trilogy, which earned a starred review from Library Journal

  THE LONE WARRIOR.

  Available Now

  BEAUTY AND THE BOUNTY HUNTER

  Lori Austin

  Alexi cursed. French? Spanish? Italian? Cat wasn’t certain, but whatever language, the words, the tone, the cadence were both beautiful and brutal. Kind of like Alexi himself.

  She brushed her fingertips across his face. “Why did you let him hurt you?”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “the hurt just happens.”

  She narrowed her eyes. She didn’t think he was talking about Langston anymore.

  Cat paced in front of the window. The urge to peer from it again was nearly overwhelming. What was out there that was bothering her? If there was a rifle, and considering the prickling of her skin, there might be, she should stay away from the window.

  She sat. First on the bed. Then on the chair. Then on the bed again. Alexi ignored her, seemingly captivated with the cards.

  Cat went to the door, put her hand on the knob. Alexi “tsked,” and she turned away. Her gaze went again to the window, and from this angle, with the horizon framed like a picture, she saw what was wrong. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it before, but she’d been Meg, and Meg wouldn’t recognize that vista. Only Cathleen would.

  She had not been back to the farm since she had left it nearly two years ago. It only took Cat an instant to decide that she was going back now. Or at least as soon as she could get away from Alexi.

  “Deal,” she said. Alexi glanced up, expression curious, hands still shuffling, shuffling, shuffling .“If we have to stay in here, we can at least make it interesting.”

  His lips curved. “Faro?”

  Cat took a chair at the table. “You know better.”

  Cat loathed Faro, known by many as “Bucking the Tiger.” Every saloon between St. Louis and San Francisco offered the game, and most of them cheated. Stacked decks, with many paired cards that allowed the dealer, or banker, to collect half the bets, as well as shaved decks and razored aces were common.

  Alexi wouldn’t stoop to such tactics; he’d consider mundane cheats beneath him. Besides, he’d already taught her how to spot them, so why bother? Certainly he cheated, but with Faro, Cat had never been able to discover just how.

  He’d swindle her at poker too if she wasn’t paying attention, but at least with that game she had a better than average chance of catching him.

  Alexi laid out five cards for each of them. “Stakes?”

  “We can’t play just to pass the time?”

  He didn’t even bother to dignify that foolishness with an answer.

  For an instant Cat considered foregoing the wayward nature of the cards and, instead, getting him drunk. But she’d attempted that before. Alexi had remained annoyingly sober, and she had been rewarded with a three-day headache, which Alexi had found beyond amusing.

  She had more tolerance now—Cat O’Banyon had drunk many a bounty beneath the table—but she still doubted she could drink this man into a stupor. Sometimes she wondered if he sipped on watered wine daily just to ascertain no one ever could.

  Which meant her only other choice was this.

  Cat lifted her cards. She gave away nothing; neither did Alexi. After pulling her purse from her pocket, she tossed a few coins onto the table. With a lift of his brow, he did the same.

  They played in silence as the day waned. The room grew hot. In the way of cards, first Alexi was ahead then Cat. She watched him as closely as he watched her. Neither one of them cheated.

  Much.

  There was something in his face she’d never seen before. Was he scared? Had coming a hair from a hanging frightened him at last? Or was she merely seeing in Alexi a reflection of herself?

  Cat bit her lip to keep from looking at the window. Instead she continued with the game. When the sun began to slant toward dusk, and the pile of coins on both sides of the table lay about even, Cat lifted her eyes. “Wanna make this interesting?”

  “Khriso mou,” Alexi murmured. “When you say things like that … ” He moved a card from the ri
ght side of his hand to the left. “I get excited.”

  “How about we raise the stakes to … ” She drew out the moment, and even though he knew exactly what she was doing, as he was the one who had taught her to do it, eventually his anticipation caused him to lean forward. Only then did Cat give him what he sought. “Anything.”

  “Anything?” he repeated.

  “Oui.” He cast her an exasperated glance as she purposely mangled one of his favorite words. “I win this hand, you give me anything I ask. You win—”

  “I get anything I ask.” “You’ve played this before.” “Not with you.” She doubted he’d played it with anyone. What moron would promise anything? Only someone with little left to lose or …

  Cat considered her cards without so much as a flicker of an eyelash. Someone with a hand like hers.

  “All right,” he agreed. “Who am I to turn down anything?”

  Not the man she knew and—

  Cat brought up short. Not the man she knew and what?

  Well, not the man she knew.

  Alexi turned his cards face up. Cat kept her face blank as she placed hers face down.

  “You win.”

  AN OUTLAW IN WONDERLAND

  Lori Austin

  “Beth?” Ethan stepped into the room. Hands open to show he held nothing in them, he stared at her as if she was a wild thing. “What are you doing?”

  “What you should have done.” She tightened her grip. “Long ago.”

  “Honey,” he began. “Shut. Up.” Annabeth swung the axe. The crib shattered into several large chunks.

  She continued to hack away at it until the thing lay in several dozen small ones. When she finished, she tossed the blade in the center and peered out the window. She needed to leave—this room, this house, this town, this life—but right now it was all she could do to stay on her feet.

  “Why did you keep it?” she whispered. “I … ” he began, then sighed. “I don’t know.” On the street below, a few people still paused and pointed, but most of Freedom had gone about their business. No doubt the doctor and his no-longer-dead wife would be a topic of conversation on street corners for weeks to come, but folks had work to do and only so much time to do it in.

  Annabeth’s gaze went to Lewis’s Sewing and Sundry. The sun glanced off the windows bright enough to blind. Ethan came up beside her. He didn’t speak; she had told him to shut up. Annabeth still couldn’t look at him.

  “Why?” he murmured. She wasn’t sure which why he meant. Why was she here? Why had she left? Why had she lied, spied? Why had they even tried?

  Or maybe just why had she used his axe on their dead child’s crib? At least for that question she had an answer.

  “You might have put Cora Lewis in our bed,” she said, “but you aren’t putting her child in the one you made for ours.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he began.

  She had no idea anymore what he would or wouldn’t do, but she knew one thing for certain. “Now you can’t.”

  They continued to peer outside. Did Ethan see the streets, the buildings, the people? Or had his vision blurred with memories too?

  Standing in this room all those years ago, the town below them dustier and smaller, but back then wasn’t everything? Laughing together, her belly round and taut. When he’d laid his palm against it everything in the world had seemed so right. How could it have gone so quickly, and so totally, wrong?

  Lies.

  His. Hers. She still wasn’t sure where one began and the other ended. She probably never would be.

  A flash of light near the edge of town drew her attention. She’d seen sparkles like it before.

  Annabeth shoved Ethan aside as the window shattered all over them. They bounced off the wall, landing on the floor in a heap of limbs and glass and crib chunks as the echo of a gunshot rang in her ears.

  Ignoring the spike of glass and wood against her knees and palms, the tiny cuts across her face and throat, Annabeth crawled to the door where she’d dropped her possessions. She slid her Colt from the holster, muttering a few curses that she’d left the rifle in her saddle’s scabbard. A pistol was going to be of no use unless whoever was shooting at them decided to approach the house. And if they were going to do that, they would have done it in the first place rather than snipe at them from afar.

  Annabeth thought about what she’d seen in that instant before she’d pushed Ethan out of the way. A glint of sun off metal at the edge of Freedom, where few people roamed, in a place where whoever wanted them dead could slip back into town during the commotion, or jump on a horse and disappear during the same. Although, around here, there wasn’t much cover.

  She doubted the culprit was still out there. Nevertheless, she peeked over the edge of a window that now matched the empty one in Ethan’s room— very quick, just in case—but no more shots were fired.

  A cloud of dust had marred the horizon. A horse and rider? Or just dust? She couldn’t tell.

  “I think they’re gone, but … ” She paused. The words stay away from the window—one never knew just how gone “gone” was—remained unspoken.

  Ethan didn’t move, didn’t speak. She considered he might be frightened, but as he’d once spent time as a field surgeon in the middle of a war shots had come closer to him than this.

  “Ethan?” She sat on her heels and glanced over her shoulder.

  She’d been wrong. No shot had ever come closer than this.

  THE LONE WARRIOR

  Lori Austin

  Rose Varner needed a man. And not just any man, but the one the Cheyenne called the White Ghost With Hair of Fire.

  “Folks go into the Smoky Hills,” said a barkeep in one of the endless supply of tiny towns in north central Kansas, “and none of ’em come out.” He lowered his voice as if imparting a secret. “He done killed ’em and buried ’em up there.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He lived with the Cheyenne once. Crazy, murderin’ bastards. Done turned the ghost plumb crazy. They say he talks to the spirits.”

  “If everyone who’s ever gone into the hills hasn’t come back, then who’s saying this?”

  The barkeep’s forehead furrowed. “Huh?”

  Rose gave up and moved on. Everywhere she went she heard tales of the White Ghost. He was tall; he was strong; he was brave, bold, and daring. Everyone agreed he’d been a soldier, but some insisted he’d worn blue, while others swore he’d worn gray. He had lived with the Indians. However, opinions varied as to whether he’d been captured and enslaved or joined them willingly.

  She tried to hire a guide to take her into the Smoky Hills, an area of strange, chalk-shaded rock formations that folks had started to call “badlands,” but she could not entice a single soul to accompany her there. The legends terrified everyone.

  Except Rose. She was too terrified of what would happen if she didn’t go.

  The Smoky Hills were visible for miles. She couldn’t miss them if she tried. She didn’t need a guide. She would ride to them alone. Once she was there, she wouldn’t leave until she found him.

  As her funds were dwindling, Rose purchased a small number of provisions. She wasn’t certain what she would do when she ran out. Her split riding skirt and loose man’s shirt had been torn and mended and washed so many times they appeared older than she was. Her boots and her slouch hat were the same. She should have brought her coat, but she hadn’t thought she’d still be riding when winter came round again. She’d been forced to buy another from an undertaker several months back. Hadn’t wanted to—the garment had previously belonged to a dead woman—but the price was right and the snow had been falling.

  She reached the hills about midafternoon and urged her horse through the brush and scrub, then into the shade of the towering rock formations. Shadows flickered, cool and navy blue. Spring in Kansas could go either way. She’d seen patches of snow on the prairie and ice floating on the rivers, which had made the sunshine today seem like pure heaven.

&nbs
p; The rumors of precisely where the White Ghost lived had been as plentiful as the rumors of his origins. Another amazing wealth of information considering that no one had ever returned from the region alive.

  Rose patted her mare’s neck. “Do you think he resides in a cave on the east side or a dugout near the western creek?”

  The horse blew air through loose lips. The sound echoed through a sudden stillness, and Rose bit her own lip, held her breath, listened. Nothing answered but the wind across the plains.

  She found the creek, but no dugouts, no caves, no ghost, unless she counted the bones of a buffalo that decorated the bank. As night hovered, she made camp. The flames of her fire danced with the shadows, making it seem as if a hundred devils approached. But no matter how hard or how long she looked, she didn’t see a single ghost.

  He came silently, knife drawn. The mare snored, nose nearly brushing the ground. She never sensed his approach.

  Neither did the woman. He was upon her, blade to her throat before she drew breath to cry out. Not that crying out would help her.

  For an instant the perfection of her cheek—smooth and white—distracted him. He caught the scent of lilies. Her hair, which she’d kept stuffed beneath a man’s hat all day, would have glowed like the sun if she’d set it free. It was free now, shimmering silver beneath the moon. A lock brushed the back of his hand as she stirred.

  He jerked in surprise and blood welled under his blade. He expected her to buck and scream. Instead her eyes opened—blue, like his—and she smiled.

  “I found you,” she said, as if he weren’t straddling her waist in the dead of night, blade to her throat, a trickle of blood tracing the long, graceful column of her throat.

  Something equally sharp pressed against the inside of his thigh, high up and far too close to parts he’d had no use for in years but still did not wish to lose. His breath caught as he realized she hadn’t been asleep; she’d merely been waiting for him.

  “Can you speak?” she asked.

  He lifted an eyebrow, shifted his gaze to where her knife pricked his … prick.