Desperado's Gold

by Linda Jones

  “I told that boy to keep his hands off … ”

  “It’s all right,” Catalina said with a smile. And it was. “I need to get on the road. There’s … something I need to do in Indian Springs.”

  Something that suddenly seemed terribly important.

  Catalina pushed her way through the double glass doors of the Indian Springs Public Library. She had so many things to do, she told herself as she headed for the staircase. Run was first on the list. What explanation could she give her best friend? The truth? Even Kim wouldn’t believe that. How would she explain disappearing for more than two months and coming home pregnant?

  She tried to fill her mind with practical thoughts, plans for the future, so she wouldn’t have to think about Jackson. That hurt too much. He was gone.

  Of course he was gone. It was 1996, after all, and Kid Creede and all of his kind were long dead.

  The stairs seemed incredibly long, winding to the second floor. A young woman with a baby in her arms passed Catalina on the stairs, and the girl smiled and stared at Catalina’s calico dress.

  At the top of the stairs Catalina turned and looked down into the lobby. There was someone new at the main desk. The person they’d hired to replace her, no doubt, watching the desk while Kathy took one of her infamous long, late lunches. Catalina had known all along that she’d have to find a new job, but the money from Wilson’s ring would take the immediacy out of that search. She had time.

  She walked slowly down aisle nine, all the way to the end. Nothing had changed. She could reach out and touch the spines of all these history books. Tell anyone who asked what was in most of them. But what she knew now was that just because it was history, that didn’t mean it was the truth. History had not been kind to Jackson, after all.

  At the end of the row she stopped and laid her hands on the books. Why was she torturing herself like this? Nothing had changed. Kid Creede had died in Baxter — shot a dozen times. In the book he was nothing but a footnote in history; a minor character, she’d called him. But in her heart and her mind he was real. Still with her. Flesh and blood.

  But she had to see. To prove to herself that he was lost in the past.

  She dropped to the floor, sitting cross-legged in front of the section that held the book on Arizona history, and the paragraph on Kid Creede.

  The long skirt of the first Mrs. Booker’s calico pooled around her, reminding her that she was out of place, out of time.

  The book stood on the bottom shelf, and it was almost always there. It was an obscure book, written years ago by a local author, and was usually checked out only when the kids at the elementary school did their year-end reports in the spring. But Catalina had read it, front to back, and she knew right where the paragraph on Jackson was.

  She slid the book from the shelf and held it in her lap for a moment, running her fingers over the paper cover that had been torn and taped. Why was she doing this to herself? Why couldn’t she just convince herself that it had all been a dream? A hallucination? A brief madness?

  She opened the book and flipped the pages to the chapter on the land wars in Baxter. It looked just the same, and she started to read the paragraph at the end of the fifth page. She read it, and then read it again, laying her fingers over the words.

  Disappeared. Not shot a dozen times, not ambushed on the street. The words swam before her eyes as she read the paragraph again. Had Jackson survived? How? She’d seen the mob behind him, had heard the shots.

  Disappeared. Nothing else had changed. The article touched on Jackson’s part in the land wars in Baxter, but instead of the sentence that had coldly recorded his death there were the words — Scheduled to hang, Kid Creede mysteriously disappeared and was never heard from again.

  Catalina couldn’t rest until she knew for certain what had happened to Jackson after she’d left Baxter. She wrapped her fingers around the wulfenite that swung from her neck. She had to go back. Damn it, there had to be a way!

  It was a distant jingle, at first, a familiar sound that broke her concentration as she stared at the page and read the paragraph once more. A jingle, and a heavy step on the stairs. Catalina lifted her head and closed the book. She knew that sound.

  With every heavy and slow step on the stairs, they jangled lightly. Spurs. Silver spurs.

  Catalina didn’t move. She stared at the books on the shelf and held her breath. It wasn’t possible. She was going to look down the aisle and find a fat old man with a pocket full of change, or a woman with a heavy step who was wearing too many gold chains around her neck.

  She covered her face with her hands and took a deep breath. It wasn’t possible.

  The steps were coming closer, down her aisle now, and Catalina dropped her hands slowly. She would have known that step anywhere … any time.

  “Catalina?” He dropped down beside her, and she turned to stare into his face and his pale blue eyes. “Are you all right?”

  Catalina threw her arms around his neck, and Jackson wrapped his arms around her. “You’re here,” she whispered. “How?”

  “I’m not sure.” His voice was low, husky and full of wonder. “I was thinking of you, and I fell with that noose around my neck, and my boots hit a … a hard black road.”

  “They hung you?” Catalina brushed her hand over his neck, saw a small red abrasion there and traced it with her finger.

  “They tried.”

  “How did you find me?”

  Catalina pulled away from him so she could see his face and assure herself that he was real. She laid her hands on his shoulders and ran them slowly down his arms, over the black duster he still wore. He was real, and warm, and somehow he was here with her.

  “The only place I could think to look was this library. A lady picked me up on the road.” He pulled her onto his lap. “They don’t give a man much room to walk these days, do they?” he added. “She almost hit me, so she stopped to make sure I was all right, and she gave me a ride in her … her car. It was like flying, Catalina.” There was real amazement in his voice, and Catalina thought of all the magic she could show him. The fact that he was here was the best magic of all.

  Catalina laid her hands on Jackson’s stubbled face. “I’m glad you found me,” she whispered, laying her lips on his. “I thought … I thought I was going to have to live without you.”

  The clicking of high heels on the wooden floor interrupted her, and reminded her that they weren’t really alone. Catalina lifted her head and saw, standing at the end of the aisle, a hussy with long bare legs, high heels, and a very short skirt beneath a snug blouse. Her dark hair was tossed back artfully, and she was staring at Jackson with a near pout of her full lips. She looked, incredibly, something like Juanita.

  “Did you find your … your wife?” she asked.

  Jackson pulled away from Catalina just slightly and smiled at the scantily dressed woman. “Yes. Thank you, ma’am.”

  “So you don’t, like, need a ride anywhere else?”

  The tramp was so obviously disappointed that Jackson had found his wife that Catalina wanted to strangle the dim-witted, much too attractive hussy who had almost run Jackson down on the highway.

  Jackson shook his head. “I think we’ll just sit here for a while, ma’am. You see, my wife’s had a difficult day, and she’s in the family way, so she needs to take it easy for a bit.”

  The bimbo nodded her head several times as she backed away, her eyes never leaving Jackson. “That’s too bad. I’m headed for San Francisco for a couple of weeks. I coulda used some company.”

  The woman turned and walked away, and Catalina melted against Jackson, folding into him, and then she took his face between her hands and kissed him, and kissed him again. She would never be able to get enough of him.

  “I want to take you to the movies,” she whispered when she pulled away from him, leaving her lips so close to his that they were almost touching. “And show you airplanes and television and … so many wonders. We can get in my Mustang an
d take off. Wherever we want to go.”

  “Will you teach me to drive?” Jackson asked, resting his hand at her back and leaning her backward over his arm. “I think I’d like that.”

  “Yes.”

  Jackson kissed her throat, and Catalina let her head fall back. “Oh, Jackson, I have so many things to show you.”

  He ran his hand under the hem of her dress and rested strong fingers against her calf. “Good,” he whispered huskily. “I still have a few things to show you, myself.”

  Epilogue

  *

  “That doesn’t look like me at all,” Jackson whispered.

  Catalina lifted the paperback book carefully from the shelf. It was just one of many, but she’d waited a long time for this.

  “At least his hair’s the right color,” she said.

  “He’s got no hair on his chest, and there’s not a scar on that body. Dammit, Catalina, I can’t believe you told everything.”

  She smiled at her husband and tugged on a long strand of black hair. This was the Jackson she’d fallen in love with. He’d let his beard grow back, and his hair grow long. “No one will believe that it’s true. It’s a romance, Jackson. Fantasy, remember?”

  “But it is true.” He continued to whisper, even though the bookstore was deserted but for the clerk who sat near the register at the front of the store.

  “Daddy!” Booker screamed, throwing himself at Jackson’s leg and holding on. Jackson lifted his son, swinging the two-year-old effortlessly to his shoulders. “Buy me a story,” Booker demanded. “A doggie one.”

  “You have a hundred doggie stories at home,” Jackson said, but he turned away from the romance section and strolled to the children’s books.

  “I need another one,” Booker whined.

  Catalina stood back and watched as Jackson and Booker carefully examined each and every doggie book. Booker was the picture of his father, black-headed and blue-eyed and stubborn. Smart, too. And beautiful. Of course, all mothers thought their children were smart and beautiful, even when to others they obviously weren’t.

  This one should be a girl, Catalina thought as she unconsciously touched her flat stomach. And maybe this time Jackson wouldn’t freak out in the delivery room and threaten the poor obstetrician.

  Booker decided, very forcefully, on his story. It had a picture of a purple dog with a silly grin on the front, and he clutched it against his chest like a true treasure. At least there was one trait he’d inherited from his mother.

  Jackson paid the clerk and left the store with Booker still perched on his shoulders. Catalina had to take quick steps to keep up with him, but as soon as he realized that she was practically running he slowed down and smiled at her.

  “I still can’t believe you told everything.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  Jackson gave her a devilish grin and offered up his palm. “Not if you let me drive home.”

  Catalina slipped the keys to the Mustang from her pocket and tossed them through the air. Jackson snagged them by the ring and twirled them on one finger. He loved to drive, but he tended to go too fast, and when he was distracted he was all over the road.

  If he was going to drive, then she really should wait until they got home to tell him about the new baby. Nothing fazed Kid Creede, but she never knew how Jackson Cady would take big news.

  Biography

  *

  Linda Jones

  An avid reader all her life, Linda Winstead Jones (also writing under Linda Winstead, Linda Jones, and Linda Devlin) took a long and winding road to publication. She was a full-time wife and mother for many years, as well as a fast-food restaurant manager, a compulsive taker of classes, a real estate saleswoman, and a picture framer with her own business, before sitting down to write that first book. GUARDIAN ANGEL, a western historical romance, was published in August of 1994, and Linda has been publishing steadily ever since, trying her hand at historical, time-travel, and fairy tale romance, as well as contemporary romantic suspense. INTO THE WOODS, a February Faerie Tale Romance from Love Spell, is her twenty-second book. Books to follow INTO THE WOODS include MADIGAN’S WIFE, HOT ON HIS TRAIL, LET DOWN YOUR HAIR, SULLIVAN, and JED. Linda’s September 1996 time-travel, DESPERADO’S GOLD, was the winner of the Colorado Award of Excellence in the paranormal division. She was nominated for a Romantic Times Career Achievement Award for Innovative Historical Romance, and her book SOMEONE’S BEEN SLEEPING IN MY BED was nominated in their Best Historical Love and Laughter category for 1996.

  Linda lives in Alabama with her husband of 28 years and their youngest son. She’s active in her area Romance Writers of America chapter, Heart of Dixie, as a past president and vice-president.