The Kansas Lawman's Proposal

by Carol Finch

  A U.S. marshal married to a horse-thieving murderess? How would that have worked out for him?

  “As I was saying, we will be married tomorrow,” Nate announced as he bustled her along at a brisk pace.

  “Absolutely not,” she objected strenuously. “I don’t even like you that much right now.”

  He bared his teeth. “I’m not too fond of you at the moment, either. But, be that as it may, I’ve thought it over and I’ve decided you’re right. And thank you so much for your suggestion.”

  “What the blazes are you talking about?” she asked, befuddled.

  “If I marry you, then my manipulative father can’t trot a few more potential brides past me.”

  Rachel could kick herself for accusing him of wanting to marry her to counter his domineering father. Now her comment had ricocheted to bite her in the fanny. Confound it, nothing about her life was working out to her satisfaction.

  It was the family curse at work again, she decided. Too bad she couldn’t concoct a potion to counteract her legacy of bad luck with the male of the species.

  “I’m still not agreeing to this wedding,” she said stubbornly. “You might have something to gain from it, but I don’t.”

  “Sure you do. My undying love and devotion,” he replied in a tone that was anything but affectionate.

  “There is that.” She smirked. “I’ll feed you my potion every night and pretend you like me.”

  When they reached the tethered horses, Nate unhooked the saddle, then thrust her satchels at her. “See if you can sneak these into the back of the wagon without being seen. We wouldn’t want your substitute father and big brother to think you tried to spirit off into the night without a word of explanation, now would we? After all, they worship the ground you float over, angel face.”

  Rachel wasn’t sure she appreciated the sarcastic tone he’d attached to his pet name for her. But she decided this wasn’t the time to bring that up. Already, Nate looked as if he’d bitten into a sour lemon and couldn’t spit it out.

  “Rachel! Damn you! Come here this instant!”

  She grimaced when Doc’s bellowing voice and slurred words echoed in the darkness.

  “Uh-oh,” she mumbled warily.

  “Now what did you do?” Nate rumbled. “The joyful eve of my wedding is turning out to be a damn nightmare. Runaway bride, drunken substitute father-in-law and overprotective substitute brother-in-law.”

  “Get out while you can,” she suggested flippantly.

  “And leave all this melodrama and these misadventures behind?” he scoffed. “Wouldn’t think of it. You’re marrying me because you said you would this afternoon. I’m holding you to it. Besides, Doc and Ludy are demanding it and that’s that.”

  “Damn it, Rachel!” Doc roared again.

  She swallowed hard because she had a pretty good idea why Doc was furious with her. This was turning out to be a hellish night, just like the night before. Except for the part last night when she had been in Nate’s arms, soaring in ecstasy, she amended as she hurried off to confront Doc.

  “Calm down, Doc,” Ludy coaxed.

  Nate jogged around the tree while Rachel tucked her satchels in the back of the wagon. He glanced over his shoulder to make double damn certain she didn’t try to take off again. That sneaky little witch! He ought to put her in shackles to make sure she stayed put.

  Love potion, seduction and withholding vital information? He huffed out an exasperated breath. All in a day’s work for the mysterious Rachel Waggoner. Now she had a new agenda—scaring ten years off his life, and then infuriating him beyond words.

  He shuddered to think what his wedding day would hold. If she stuck around for it—and he didn’t trust her to do that. Given the opportunity, he predicted she would be long gone. Only God would know where to find her.

  “Leave me alone,” Doc grumbled in a slurred voice as he tried to wrest loose from Ludy’s grasp. “Where’s that sneaky little witch?”

  Obviously, Nate and Doc were of the same opinion, but he didn’t know what Rachel had done to infuriate Doc to the extreme.

  “Rachel is with Nate.” Ludy, who was unaware that Nate was walking up behind him, tried to steer Doc away from the edge of the cliff and back to the campfire. “How about some coffee?”

  “Don’t want coffee,” Doc mumbled as he lurched back toward the cliff, trying to locate Rachel. “Damn it, girl, get up here this instant!”

  “She’s coming,” Nate said as he strode up beside the inebriated doctor. “She’s putting her soap and dirty clothes in the wagon after her bath.” Not exactly the truth, but close enough, he mused. “Now what’s the problem, Doc?”

  “She’s the problem,” Doc snarled. “I took her in when she had nowhere to go and this is how she repays me!”

  Nate glanced toward the wagon and frowned suspiciously as Rachel scurried toward them. He wondered what else Rachel had done to facilitate her escape attempt tonight. He knew she’d taken Ludy’s horse. Had she stolen money from Doc, too?

  “She had nothing but the clothes on her back—men’s clothes at that—when I found her and I didn’t ask prying questions!” He lurched around, then glowered when he saw Rachel walking toward him. “There you are! You devious little hellion!” Doc yelled. “Where did you put it, damn it?”

  Bemused, Nate and Ludy watched Rachel halt in front of Doc. She crossed her arms over her chest and stood with her feet askance. Then she tilted her chin, refusing to cower beneath Doc’s harsh tone and mutinous scowl.

  “I poured it all out, and it’s for your own good because this has gone on long enough. It ends tonight, Doc.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Nate’s puzzled frown became an amused smile. Ah, now he got it. She had tampered with the patented medicine Doc used as his liquor supply. He kept the fifty-proof concoctions for himself and, obviously, Rachel had disposed of it.

  “You poured it out?” Doc howled in outrage. “All of it?”

  “Every last drop,” she said unrepentantly. “I replaced it with water. A few bottles at a time every evening when we made camp. You wouldn’t let your patients drink that stuff. You told them to drink fresh water, so I followed your advice.”

  When Doc launched himself toward Rachel in a drunken fury, Nate grabbed him by the nape of his jacket to hold him at bay. Doc tried to take a swing at Nate but he couldn’t land a punishing blow.

  “It was my destiny to drink all those tonics,” Doc railed at Rachel.

  Ludy, Nate and Rachel stared at him, bemused.

  “What the blazes are you talking about?” Rachel demanded. “You are supposed to drink yourself to death?”

  He bobbed his tousled blond head, then swore colorfully.

  Nate hadn’t heard Doc reduce himself to foul oaths—until now. He let loose with a string of off-color epithets that turned the air black. He aimed most of them at Rachel, who defied the verbal thrashing like the strong-willed, defiant woman she was.

  “You can curse me to hell and back, Doc, if it makes you feel better. But I will not allow you to kill yourself on my watch. My mother did it and once was enough. I will not have the people I care about dying on me again. I love you dearly and you need to stop downing those tonics.”

  “I have to!” he shouted angrily. “That’s what she used because I wasn’t there. It killed her. Killed them.”

  Rachel reached out to place her hand on Doc’s shoulder. “You mean Margie? She took the tonics?”

  Doc nodded, then swayed on his feet. Nate propped him up.

  “Who was she?” Rachel asked softly. “I’ve heard you mention her several times before. Why did she need the tonic when you were a doctor?”

  His shoulders slumped and his eyes filled with tears as he leaned heavily against Nate. “She was my wife,” he said brokenly. “We had tried for years to start our family, but she was finally able to carry our first child, almost to full-term. She began having complications one night while I was away, delivering someone else’s bab
y. Margie must have been in acute pain, and she panicked when she began losing our child prematurely. She bought tonics from the former owner of this medicine wagon and she drank too much of those quack potions to ease her pain, hoping to endure until I returned home.”

  His breath hitched, as if his heart had ripped wide-open in his chest. “I should have been there. I could save everyone else but I couldn’t save my wife and my unborn child,” he said desolately.

  “I’m so terribly sorry, Doc,” Rachel whispered. “But killing yourself with those tonics won’t help Margie. You know she wouldn’t want that.”

  “I didn’t want to go on without her because I felt so damn guilty about failing her,” he said miserably. “Then I decided to make it my mission to put as many quacks as I could out of business, and inform the citizens in small towns of the evils of the so-called miracle cure-alls before I joined her in the Hereafter.”

  “You aren’t joining her yet,” Rachel insisted. “You still have a lot of good work to do. You have hundreds of patients to treat with authentic medications, people who will benefit from your skills and experience.”

  “No, I’ve done enough, paid enough penance.” He flung himself away from Nate abruptly—and stumbled.

  “Doc!” Rachel yelled in warning.

  She felt as if she were moving in slow motion when Doc tripped over his own feet and teetered too near the edge of the cliff. She outstretched her hand, but she was six inches away from grabbing his arm when he fell off balance and cartwheeled over the bluff. She heard his muffled groan, heard the sounds of branches snapping as he tumbled head over heels down the steep, rock-strewn slope.

  Panicky, Rachel bounded after him, clutching at every tree branch and bush along the way. She heard Nate and Ludy scrambling behind her while she watched Doc’s body roll and tumble like a felled tree bouncing downhill. She heard a dull thud when his head and shoulder collided with the lopsided ring of boulders that had broken loose from the cliff long ago and rolled to the base of the hill.

  “Doc?” she panted as she thrashed through the weeds to reach him.

  He didn’t respond, just lay motionless, his body contorted at an unnatural angle.

  Rachel brushed her hand over his forehead, noting the egg-size knot. Then she slipped her hand behind his neck and felt the sticky wetness of blood seeping from the wound on his skull.

  “Oh, God.” Horrified, she tried to remember what Doc had instructed her to do when a patient was unconscious. She needed Doc to wake up to prescribe proper treatment.

  “Let me have him, Rachel.” Nate crouched beside her. “Ludy and I will carry him uphill. Go roll out a pallet beside the campfire so we can determine how much damage he’s done to himself.”

  “I did this to him,” she said shakily. “He didn’t mean to fall off the cliff. He wasn’t trying to kill himself.”

  “No, you didn’t cause this,” Nate contradicted. “Doc was letting the tonics and elixirs do him in. Now go, Rachel. You’re the closest thing we have to a doctor right now. Go fetch Doc’s black bag.”

  Rachel skimmed her hand over Doc’s head and bit back a wail of anguish. This was her fault, despite what Nate said to the contrary. He was only trying to make her feel better. If she hadn’t taken it upon herself to remove the fifty-proof tonics from the wagon, Doc wouldn’t have become furious with her. He wouldn’t have decomposed in front of her eyes when she forced him to reveal the torment of losing his beloved wife and his unborn child.

  She might as well have shoved him off the edge of the cliff, because she had brought him to this torment.

  “Rachel, go, damn it!” Nate barked. “Move!”

  “This doesn’t look good,” Ludy said grimly, and then grabbed Doc’s ankles.

  “I know. I hope we don’t cause more damage by hauling him uphill.” Nate hooked his elbows under Doc’s arms and hoisted him off the ground. Doc’s head lolled against his shoulder as Nate sidestepped up the slope. “We can’t leave him down here. He’s going to need to see a doctor.”

  “There isn’t one in thirty miles,” Ludy reminded him.

  Being as careful as possible, Nate and Ludy progressed slowly uphill, shouldering their way through the thicket of weeds and saplings to reach the campsite. As requested, Rachel had rolled out Doc’s pallet beside the fire and lit a lantern to offer a better view of his injuries.

  Nate grimaced when light flickered over Doc’s scratched face. It looked as if he had scraped against every bush and twig on his way downhill. His nose looked as if it had been broken when he’d collided with the boulders. The knot on his forehead had doubled in size. Plus, the wound on the back of Doc’s skull was bleeding profusely.

  “Dear God,” Rachel mumbled as she dipped a cloth in the bucket of water sitting beside her. She placed a cool compress over the knot on his forehead. “His face is alarmingly pale.”

  “I’m not sure if that is the result of his painful fall or the nostrums he consumed before he struck nothing but the water you put in those bottles,” Nate mused aloud.

  “I shouldn’t have tampered with his tonic,” Rachel said, tormented. “He wouldn’t have become furious with me and tried to worm loose from your grasp.”

  “There is no reason for you to shoulder the blame for Doc’s condition. This is not your fault,” he repeated emphatically.

  She tore her anguished gaze away from Doc to scoff at Nate. “You know it is. I decided it was time for him to dry out. He was furious with me. Otherwise, he’d still be conked out in the back of the wagon.”

  “And you’d be—” Nate slammed his mouth shut before he said long gone “—bathing at the creek,” he finished, so Ludy wouldn’t know about the attempted escape.

  She stared straight at him and he stared right back. He still wondered where she had planned to go and whether or not he could have found her if he had gone looking after he’d completed his investigation for Edgar Havern and his silent partner—his father-in-law, Julian St. Raimes.

  “Don’t beat yourself black and blue over this, Rachel,” Ludy insisted as he unbuttoned Doc’s grass-stained jacket, then removed it. “You’re the one who’s always stuck by Doc’s side while I bailed out. You’re the reason he’s lasted this long.”

  The comment suggested Doc didn’t have much time left on earth. Nate knew the prospect of Doc dying, while he was so angry with Rachel, cut her to the core. Seeing all the scrapes and bruises on Doc’s chest and ribs made Nate wonder just how serious Doc’s condition might be. Certainly, Nate had needed several days to recover from his beating—which was the equivalent of tumbling willy-nilly downhill. In addition, Doc might have cracked a rib or punctured a lung…

  “Ah, damn,” Rachel muttered, dragging Nate from his pensive musings.

  He watched her ease Doc’s head to the side to appraise the bloody gash at the base of his skull. The cut was deep and caked with dirt. She went to work immediately, blotting the coagulated blood and cleansing the wound as best she could.

  “Ludy, would you fetch my sewing kit from the wagon?” she requested without taking her eyes off the wound.

  “Sure thing.” He bounded off like a jackrabbit.

  “We are going to have trouble figuring out the extent of internal injuries,” Nate told her grimly. “We need to get him settled comfortably in the wagon and transport him to Dodge City immediately.”

  Her head snapped up. “We can take him somewhere else. Somewhere closer.”

  Nate shook his head. “You know there is no place closer that has a qualified physician. That’s why Doc makes this small-town circuit to treat patients who don’t have the privilege of being examined and treated by a certified doctor.”

  She huffed out her breath and refocused her attention on cleansing the wound.

  Her behavior aroused Nate’s suspicion. “What’s wrong with going to Dodge, Rachel?”

  She compressed her lips, shook her head, then shrugged noncommittally. “I only wish there was someplace closer.”

 
Nate couldn’t read her expression because she was good at masking her private thoughts. However, he had the uneasy feeling that Dodge City wasn’t on her list of favorite places to visit. Now why was that?

  “Here you go, hon.” Ludy handed her the sewing basket.

  “We’ll make a padded bed in the wagon while you’re stitching Doc back together,” Nate said, rising to his feet. “You might want to give him a sedative to keep him knocked out during the ride. Maybe try out the potion you used on me while I was injured.”

  When Rachel looked at him sharply and frowned, he chastised himself for flinging the barb at her while she was upset. But, damn it, he was still agitated about that love potion nonsense.

  What was the matter with the woman? Didn’t she realize how attractive she was and that he didn’t need a stimulating aphrodisiac to be aroused by her? Men lusted after her constantly—before, during and after her performances with the medicine show. Doc had hired Nate to hold the panting hounds at bay…

  The epiphany that Rachel had no point of reference to distinguish the difference between his amorous pursuit and other men’s pawing lust made him swear under his breath. She wrote off his response to her as the result of her potion. Rachel hadn’t had caring lovers. Instead, she had fended off a string of lusty miners, gamblers, cowboys and drifters who saw her as a prize to conquer. Her concept of men was so skewered that it was only natural that she believed it required the powers of a potent love potion to bring out tender feelings in a man.

  “Well, hell,” he grumbled as he strode to the wagon.

  “Well, hell what?” Ludy asked.

  Nate jerked to attention. He’d been so immersed in thought that he’d forgotten he had company. “Just expressing my frustration with Doc’s condition. Not knowing how bad off he is bothers me.”

  “Same here.” Ludy crawled into the back of the wagon. He began pitching out dozens of bottles Rachel had filled with water so they could make more space for their injured patient. “We could drive all night to reach Dodge and it might be all for nothing. Rachel is our only hope of treating him temporarily because she’s the one who works closely with Doc when he treats his patients.”