She laughed and put her arms around his neck, drew him close for her kiss. “You’re right, Marshal. Let’s not take any chances.”
“Ummm-hmmm,” he agreed, with a look of sober concentration. “Can’t be too careful.” He moved over her, and it all began again, the kissing, the stroking, the teasing, the slow heating of the blood. Stretching forth one arm, Shay turned the lamp down until the flame winked out.
—Rendezvous
“LINDA LAEL MILLER’S TALENT KNOWS NO BOUNDS…EACH STORY SHE CREATES IS…SUPERB.”
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
LINDA LAEL MILLER
is “one of the hottest romance authors writing today….Her love scenes sizzle and smolder with sensuality” (Romantic Times).
—Affaire de Coeur
“Every novel Linda Lael Miller writes seems even better than the previous….She stirs your soul and makes you yearn along with her characters….encompassing every emotion and leaving you breathless.”
MORE THAN SIX MILLION COPIES OF HER BOOKS IN PRINT!
Two Brothers
For years, bestselling author Linda Lael Miller has delighted readers with her passionate, evocative stories of life and love in the Old West. Now, with this innovative pair of novels, she creates two gripping stories of identical twin brothers, separated at birth, but drawn to each other’s side….
The Gunslinger
Now that he’s finally found his twin brother, all Tristan Saint-Laurent wants is to be a peaceful rancher. What he gets is Miss Emily Starbuck, a determined package of trouble from back East. Tristan knows he should tell Emily and her aggravating sheep to move along, but he doesn’t have the heart. Suddenly this man of danger is dreaming of weddings and babies. But the life he’s left behind may yet come between him and the woman he’s growing to love.
Emily Starbuck is making a fresh start by raising the sheep she’s bought with a meager inheritance. She’s willing to fight every cattleman in the West, but she can’t resist Tristan. His handsome face and lean, strong body make her knees buckle, and her thoughts move to sharing a blissful ranch life with the man. But what Emily doesn’t know about Tristan could jeopardize their dream of happiness.
The Gunslinger
1884
Tristan
Chapter 1
JUNE 1884
HE OUGHT TO MOVE ON, that was all. Bid Shay and his sweet, enterprising wife a fond farewell, saddle up his horse, and ride out of Prominence without looking back. There were a thousand places he might go—up to Montana, where he’d left a thriving cattle operation in the care of hired men, southward to San Francisco and certain women who professed to find him fair. Maybe even back East, to Chicago or Boston or New York—a man with funds to spend and invest might further himself in any of those cities, while enjoying the singular pleasures and graces of civilization.
He sighed and heaved another bag of oats up into the bed of his wagon, a small but sturdy buckboard acquired as part of the bargain when he’d purchased a local ranch nearly a year before. His brother stood watching as he worked, arms folded, one side of his mouth slanted upward in a self-satisfied grin. Shay’s badge, a silver star, gleamed with all the splendor of something netted from a night sky. Shay’d been married for some time now, and the match was a contented one. He’d be a father at any time. He was proud as a rooster, and although Tristan usually found his twin’s blatant good cheer cause for shared celebration, on that particular day, it chafed some tender and previously unrecognized place inside him almost raw.
“You might lend a hand,” he groused, hoisting up another sack of feed from the pile of bags on the sidewalk, “instead of just standing there, watching me sweat.”
Shay didn’t flick an eyelash or twitch a muscle; right down to that grin—which was all the more irritating for the fact that he’d worn it on his own face often enough—he stayed the same. He didn’t point out that he’d spent many an hour on Tristan’s land, roping and branding calves, rounding up strays, digging post holes, stringing lines of barbed wire, driving nails into shingles on the roof of the ranch house. He didn’t say anything at all.
Tristan shoved past his brother and hurled the oats into the buckboard with such force that the springs bounced and the horses, a mismatched pair of roans better suited to sod-busting, pranced and nickered and tossed their heads.
“Aislinn wants you to come to supper,” Shay announced. The expression of quiet understanding in his eyes was harder to take than most any other emotion would have been, save outright pity, that is. “She’s frying up a couple of chickens. You know how those brothers of hers eat. No doubt, there’ll be gravy and biscuits. Mashed potatoes, too. Green beans, I reckon, boiled up with bacon and onion.”
Tristan’s mouth watered; he swallowed. He was tired of the food at the hotel dining room, passable though it was, and wearier still of his own sorry bachelor cooking. While he didn’t lack for invitations to take evening meals and Sunday dinners in various households thereabouts, he was reluctant to accept, since such doings generally occasioned the presentation of a marriageable daughter, niece or sister. Although he fully intended to take a wife, when he found the right woman, he did not enjoy being pursued, maneuvered, manipulated and arranged. “Biscuits?” he echoed, weakening.
Knowing he’d won the skirmish, Shay pushed away from the frame of the door, took up a bag of feed and flung it into the wagon. “Biscuits,” he confirmed.
Tristan swept off his hat momentarily and thrust a hand through his hair, which felt damp and gritty. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and he probably smelled of sweat and horse manure. “I’m not fit to dine at a lady’s table,” he said, and he heard a woeful note in his voice that shamed him not a little. He wasn’t about to start sympathizing with himself at this late date.
Shay arched an eyebrow as he assessed the sad state of his brother’s grooming. Then he glanced up at the sun, squinting against the glare. When his gaze returned to Tristan’s face, he’d sobered some. “You have time enough to get yourself bathed and barbered, and I can lend you a suit of clothes.”
Tristan pulled off his hat again and slapped his thigh with it. There was something about this situation he didn’t care for, though he couldn’t say precisely what it was. He narrowed his eyes as the nebulous sense of trouble tightened into plain suspicion. “You aren’t planning to include some female in this little do, are you?”
Shay laughed. “Well, Aislinn will be there,” he said. “Dorrie, too, probably. And maybe Eugenie.”
“You know what I mean, damn it. Just because marriage agrees with you and Aislinn, you believe, the pair of you, that everyone else ought to be hitched to somebody, too.”
Shay shook his head, made a clucking sound with his tongue and put a curled fist to his chest, as though to pull out a still-quavering dagger. “To think my own brother, the only real kin I have, doesn’t trust me.”
“You’re damn right I don’t.”
After consulting the sun again, Shay lifted the last of the feed bags into the rig. “You’re getting prickly in your old age,” he commented mildly. “If you don’t have a care, you might turn into one of those crusty codgers who spit tobacco in the churchyard and go around with egg in their beards. See you at seven o’clock. You need a clean shirt and a pair of pants, you know where to find them.”
“Thanks,” Tristan said, in a tone that might have been counted surly if it hadn’t been entirely justified. He climbed into the wagon box and took up the reins, setting his face toward home. His ranch house was about three miles out of town, on a high bank overlooking Powder Creek, surrounded by a thousand acres of good grassland. To the north was the Kyle property, a vast spread that he coveted with an unholy longing.
Upon his arrival, he drove the rig into the barn, climbed into the back, and unloaded the oats before jumping down to unhitch the lamentable team and settle the animals in their stalls. After feeding those broken-down creatures and the gelding, then filling all the water troughs, he ma
de for the house, a rambling log structure, with a good rock fireplace at either end. The kitchen, dining room and parlor were all one large room, but there were four bedrooms upstairs, good, spacious ones, with lace curtains at the windows and rugs on the wide pine-plank floors. He’d taken the best and biggest for himself; it had a good wood-burning stove and a nice view of the mountains, but it was a lonely place, for all its creature comforts and uncommon size, and he passed as little time there as he could.
He carried water in from the pump in the dooryard and filled the reservoir on the stove, then built up the fire. He looked around him and sighed, wondering when he’d developed this aversion to his own company. He’d spent much of his adult life on the trail, often traveling for days with no other companion than his horse, and it had never bothered him, but instead afforded him welcome opportunity to order his thoughts. Now, even though he had work to do, hard, outdoor labor that used all there was of him, body, mind and spirit, and that he loved, now that he had money, even a family of sorts again, and should have been satisfied with his lot, he felt instead like Cain, marked and condemned to wander footloose until the end of his days.
Taking up the buckets, he went outside to pump more water, and as he walked, he whistled under his breath, grinning a little. Like as not, he was taking too solemn a view of things. He’d wash up, shave, put on clean clothes, and ride back to town. A dose of Aislinn’s fried chicken would raise his spirits.
In time, he had a good bit of water heated, enough to fill the copper washtub, and he stripped down until he was naked as God’s truth and gave himself a good scouring right there in the kitchen end of the house. Figuring he needed rinsing, he wrapped a sheet of toweling around his middle and headed for the yard again, meaning to douse himself with a bucket or two at the pump.
That was when he first heard the sheep.
Head dripping, one hand clasping the towel in place, Tristan stood absolutely still and listened. Yes. That bleating sound, growing ever nearer, was unmistakable.
He looked around and saw dust rising against the eastern sky in great, surging billows, like the aftermath of some apocalyptic eruption. The din was louder now, and he made out the barking of a dog, woven through in uneven stitches of noise.
The flock came over the rise behind his house then, a great, greasy-gray mob of complaining wool, heading hell-bent for the creek. Before Tristan could deal with his indignation at the intrusion, they were all around him, carrying on fit to rouse the mummies of Egypt, brushing past, raising enough grit to ruin the effects of his bath.
He watched, hot-eyed, as the sheepherder came toward him, mounted on a little spotted pony. He was a small man clad in a battered slouch hat, butternut shirt, dirty serape, indigo denim pants and scuffed boots, about as unprepossessing as he could be. The dog, some type of long-haired mix, paid Tristan no mind at all, but continued driving the sheep toward water. God knew, the beasts were probably too stupid to find it on their own.
“I guess you didn’t notice the fence,” Tristan said moderately, taking a hold on the pony’s bridle, when the shepherd would have ridden right past him.
The trespasser’s face was hidden by the shadow of his hat brim. The sheep were still spilling over the rise, and raising such a cacophony that Tristan thought his head would split. That was probably why it took a moment for the soft timbre of the stranger’s voice to register on his senses.
“Let go of my horse. It’s thirsty and so am I.”
Tristan held on, frowning. Took a tighter grasp on the towel. “That fence—”
The slouch hat fell back on its ties at a toss of the shepherd’s head, revealing a head of honey-colored hair, wound into a single plait, a pair of brown eyes, thickly lashed and snapping with furious bravado, and a wide, womanly mouth. She was perhaps twenty years old, and about as ill-suited to the task she’d undertaken as it was possible to be, by his reckoning at least. Her features were refined, her bone structure was delicate; no, indeed, she was not fitted for the occupation she had chosen.
“I pulled down the fence,” she said, without apology, patting a coil of frayed rope affixed to her saddle. “I won’t be kept off my own land.”
Tristan, still dealing with the fact that the shepherd was a woman, and the finest he’d ever seen into the account, for all that she was in sore need of tidying up, was a beat behind. The towel around his waist had taken on a whole new significance, now that his perception of the circumstances had been so drastically altered.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
He grinned, standing there in his dooryard, covered in goose bumps and sheep dust and damn little else. “That is an audacious question,” he said, “given the situation. My name is Tristan Saint-Laurent, and this is my land.”
The change in her face was barely noticeable, just a slight faltering of an otherwise resolute countenance. “You are mistaken, sir,” she said. Her gaze strayed over his bare chest, took in the loincloth arrangement, and careened back up to his face. A flush stained the smooth skin beneath all that trail dirt. “Or perhaps you are simply a squatter.”
“I have papers to prove I’m neither,” Tristan answered, not unkindly. He was beginning to feel a little sorry for the woman, which was a laudable change from feeling sorry for himself. Of course, if she’d been a man, he might have shot her by now.
He took in the sheep, still trampling the grass in their migration to the creek, and then looked up at her again. “This is cattle country, Miss—?”
“Starbuck,” she said, grudgingly. “Emily Starbuck.”
He scanned the horizon, now a ragged scallop of lingering dust. The dog had gone back to collect the stragglers, but there was no sign of another horse, a wagon, or a herder on foot. Still up to his ass in sheep, Tristan was nonetheless distracted from the immediate problem. “You’re not traveling all by yourself, are you?” he asked, bemused.
“Of course not,” she answered, with a brittle, impatient little smile. “I’ve got Spud with me.” With a toss of her head, she indicated the hardworking dog, then leaned forward slightly to pat the pony’s gritty neck. “And Walter, here. Now, if you wouldn’t mind getting out of my way, I’d like to water my horse at my stream.”
Issues of ownership aside, Walter was a mare, Tristan had observed that right off, but he concluded that maybe it gave Miss Starbuck comfort to call the animal by a masculine name. “Go ahead and attend to your mount,” he said. “Then you’d better come inside, where we can talk this out.”
She eyed him, letting her gaze stray no lower than his breastbone this time, and blushed again. “I’m not stepping foot over that threshold or any other in the company of a near-naked man,” she said with conviction, casting a glance back over one slender shoulder at the house. “Have you got a wife in there? Or a sister, at least? Somebody to serve for a chaperone?”
“No,” Tristan answered, “but you’re perfectly safe all the same. I am a gentleman.”
Her glance was skeptical. His hold having slackened on the bridle, she reined the horse away and rode past him, through what must have been four acres of bawling woollies, toward the water.
He might have been amused by the whole situation, if it hadn’t been for those blasted sheep; if they got onto his range, they’d crop the grass off flush with the ground, leaving nothing but stubble for his cattle. Those he hadn’t already lost through the gap in the fence, that is. He had to get rid of Miss Starbuck and her flock, soon, whether he liked the prospect or not.
Suddenly self-conscious, Tristan hurried into the house and up the stairs to his room, where he dressed hastily. His bathwater was still sitting near the kitchen floor, and he was almost as dirty as if he’d never taken a bar of soap to his hide at all, but expediency precluded all other considerations.
He nearly collided with the Starbuck woman when he wrenched open the front door and burst through it with the full momentum of urgency behind him. He gripped her shoulders, lest she fall, and in that tiny fraction of time, the merest s
hadow of a moment, something eternal happened. He released her as instantly as if she were made of hot metal, but it was too late. He knew he wasn’t the same man who’d taken hold.
“Come inside,” he said.
She seemed as shaken as he was, and he wondered if she’d felt the same strange, elemental tumult he had. “All—all right.” She looked a lot smaller, now that she was down off that horse. Tristan figured she’d feel as fragile and fine-boned as a bird, if he were to touch her again. Which, of course, he wasn’t about to do. Not yet, anyway.
There were no makings for tea in his bachelor’s cupboard, but he did produce coffee, in fairly short order, while Miss Starbuck—he already thought of her as Emily, though he supposed that was presumptuous of him—sat primly at his plain pine table, her hands folded in her lap, her outsized hat resting on the floor beside her. The infernal babble of her sheep seeped through the chinking in the sturdy log walls of the house, serving as an irritating reminder that women were women and business was business. And sheep sure as hell were sheep.
“This is the Eustace Cummings place, isn’t it?” Emily inquired, at some length, when Tristan set a mug of steaming coffee before her.
“It was,” he answered. “I bought it from him a year ago. Are you hungry? You look a little peaky.”
Great tears swelled and glistened in her eyes, but she blinked them away, simultaneously shaking her head. Although she sat with her head high and her backbone rigidly straight, her despair was evident. Her hands trembled as she pulled off her leather gloves and shoved them into a pocket of the serape. “I have a marker here,” she said, and stood a moment to pull a folded document from the pocket of her denims. Intrigued by the concept of a woman in pants, Tristan started wishing she’d remove the serape, and had to bring himself back to the moment by force of will. “Mr. Cummings put this place up as collateral for a debt,” she went on, handing him the paper. “He defaulted, as you can see by this paper, and ownership was transferred to my uncle—”
Two Brothers Page 17
