Watching Sheriff Campbell lead Chase off in handcuffs was almost unbearable for Claire. What she really wanted to do was bowl the sheriff over, confiscate his forty-five and his prisoner, and head for the hills with Chase.
And then Chase looked back at her. Not the way Frank looked at her with fondness and a hint of knowing bemusement. Not the way her father looked at her with stern pride. Not even the way Yoema had looked at her, beaming with motherly adoration. No, his eyes called to something inside of her, quickening her heart, stealing her breath, igniting her senses. They penetrated her very soul with love and loyalty and honor, as if in his gaze alone he communicated to her a lifetime of devotion.
Her father said something to her, but she didn’t hear, didn’t move until he grasped her by the shoulder and turned her toward him. It took every ounce of strength for her to put one foot in front of the other. An invisible cord seemed to bind her to Chase Wolf now, and every step that separated them strained that cord like the sinew of a drawn bow, increasing its tension.
All the way to the ranch, she was haunted by doubt.
Had Chase won money off of the sheriff? Had he cheated at cards? She didn’t want to believe it. But she didn’t know what he’d been up to before coming to kidnap her. If he possessed stolen winnings, he certainly didn’t have them with him.
Maybe that was why he’d gone with the sheriff willingly. Maybe he foolishly thought he’d be exonerated when they didn’t find the stash.
They were at the gates of the Parker Ranch when Frank spat, “I have half a mind to go back and plug that Injun bastard full of lead.”
“Frank!” she scolded.
Frank’s body was wound tight as a clock spring, his mouth was working, and his fisted knuckles were white with strain. He looked like he wanted to hit something…badly.
“Won’t do any good to get worked up about it,” her father said.
The tension hissed from Frank like a hot poker plunged into cold water, and he vented his ire by taking off his hat to whack it against his thigh a couple of times before ramming it back on his head.
“He’s got to pay for what he’s done,” Frank muttered.
“He’ll get a fair trial.” Her father shook his head. “You can’t go around shooting unarmed men. I won’t have any rumors of cowardice bandied about regarding the man my daughter’s to wed."
Claire’s breath caught. The man she was to wed? Did he mean Frank? But she’d broken off the engagement. She’d said so in her letter. He must have seen it. "Father, my note… Didn’t you read… I need to talk to you about—"
"Nothing to talk about," he declared. His gaze, focused on the path ahead, was as hard and unbending as cold steel.
And then Claire realized why she should never have returned.
Nothing had changed. Her father still expected her to conform to his wishes, to move back into the house, to marry Frank, and to forget all about Yoema…and her grandson. Just as when her mother had died, he wanted to carry on as if nothing had happened.
She wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t marry Frank. She wouldn’t stay at the Parker Ranch. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to forget about Chase Wolf.
As they passed through the gates and along the drive toward the big white house that now looked like a prison to Claire, she vowed that the next time she left, it would be forever.
Her father had promised Chase a fair trial, but she knew better. She knew the people of this town. For the most part, they were good folk, decent folk. But there was no way a brooding half-breed who’d crossed the town sheriff was going to get a fair trial.
Somehow, some way, she had to rescue Chase Wolf. That look he’d given her as he’d been led away had altered something inside her forever. It was the gaze of a man who loved her beyond reason, beyond life, beyond time. She would never again be the same Claire—Samuel Parker’s daughter, Frank Sullivan’s fiancée, the daydreaming little girl who hid dime novels under her bed. She felt changed, the way Oleli, Coyote, shifted shapes in Yoema’s stories.
But until an opportunity for rescue arose, she’d pretend nothing was wrong. Part of that meant biting her tongue when her father suggested ways she might hide her shorn hair from the gossips. Part of it meant enduring an awkward goodnight kiss from Frank, who obviously felt it was his right, now that she’d given that—and more—to another man. And part of it meant putting up with the delay of having a maid attend to her—drawing her a bath, combing her tangled hair, and dressing her in her nightclothes.
Her father must have had the servants clean her room while she was missing. Her scissors and shorn hair were gone, and her things were unpacked and put away. That was all right. She’d do fine without baggage.
And this time she wouldn’t bother leaving a note. It wouldn’t be necessary. Frank and her father would know where she’d gone.
Once in bed, she lay awake for what seemed hours, waiting for the sound of her father’s pacing in the study below stairs to cease.
Finally, she heard the squeak of his footfall on the steps, and then, at the soft chiming of the mantel clock, the door of his bedroom clicked shut. After a moment, she slipped quietly from her bed to sit cross-legged on the floor, setting her oil lamp beside her. The match hissed and flared when she lit the wick, and she hoped no one saw the glow from her window as she dragged the stack of dog-eared novels from under the bed and began perusing the pages.
There had to be an answer here, somewhere among the bold escapades and wild adventures in these books. Somewhere there had to be an account of a jailbreak.
But by the time the clock below had chimed two more quarter hours, all she’d turned up was a story about a pack of Red-Skin savages who had massacred a whole town of decent folk to spring their chief out of jail. Of course, the savages were subsequently hunted down and shot by the avenging hero, one by one.
She swallowed hard and ran weary fingers through her hair. Even the authors of the dime novels had no solution for her. It wasn’t surprising, not really. After all, in most of the stories, Indians were savages. They belonged behind bars. No one in their right mind would try to free them.
She slumped against the bed in defeat, rubbing her eyes, letting the most recent Beadle issue slide from her lap onto the rug. There had to be an answer. There had to.
Yoema had taught her long ago to believe in the will of the Creator. Everything happened for a purpose. You were like an oak leaf in the stream, she had said. If you fought against the stream, you would go nowhere, but if you let go, if you trusted the current, it would take you where you belonged. Yoema believed that was why she had been sent to be Claire’s mother, that the Creator intended it.
Surely it was the will of the Creator that she and Chase Wolf live together. Why else would Yoema have talked so emphatically about the return of the Two-Sons? Why else would Chase have come to steal her away, and so soon after Yoema’s death? Why else would she have fallen in love with him so completely, so deeply, that she had given him the gift of her innocence? And why else would she feel a pain akin to heartache now that he was parted from her?
They were meant to be together. She knew it. This was what Yoema meant by the mending of the broken circle. If only she could find the way...
Her gaze drifted down to the book sprawling on the floor and caught on a phrase in the midst of a spate of rustic dialogue.
"‘Ef I ain’t mistaken, that big b’ar left b’hind twin cubs...’" she read softly.
Twin. Chase had a twin. Yoema had said the Two-Sons would return—both of them.
His brother had come with him. He’d told her so. In fact, he must be in town right now.
Claire bit her lip. Of course! Chase had mentioned his brother was a gambler. It wasn't Chase who had taken the sheriff's gold. It was Drew. It all made sense.
If she could find his brother, she could straighten everything out. Once she found Drew and explained Chase’s situation, she was sure he’d help her.
She flipped the book closed so quic
kly that the flame of the lamp flickered, in unison with the hopeful fluttering of her heart.
It took her little more than a minute to slip into her brown day dress and her sturdiest boots. She didn’t bother with all the buttons—there wasn’t time—just snagged her shawl from the wardrobe and wrapped it around her to cover the gaps.
If she hadn’t been so desperate, if her mind hadn’t been reeling with intrepid plots and brash scheming, she might have been more careful in her dress. After all, she was meeting a stranger, a stranger whom she had to convince of three things: that she knew his brother, that she loved his brother, and that getting his brother out of jail in the middle of the night so that she could run away with him was worth his getting out of bed and risking his life.
She hardly spared a glance of farewell to the room where she’d been born and raised, the room she was leaving forever. There was nothing here of value to the new Claire Parker, nothing she needed for her escape except the clothes on her back…and her favorite dime novel, which she snatched up and tucked into her bodice. But she knew that once she freed Chase Wolf, love would sustain her.
She crept down the stairs, confident that her father wouldn’t hear her. After all, he’d slept through her kidnapping before.
She let herself out the window, over the same sill where she’d once scrabbled for purchase from Chase’s abduction, and found herself wishing she’d never resisted.
The moon seemed to smile from the west as she stole along the drive toward the road to Paradise, and she wondered if it encouraged or mocked her, for she was about to embark on an escapade so audacious that neither Beadle nor Starr would have thought it fit to publish.
The last thing Drew Hawk expected to come through the door at midnight as he flattened himself against the papered wall of his room at the Parlor—his eyes narrowed to slits and a makeshift weapon in his grip—was a straw-haired waif who hadn’t even bothered knocking.
Wondering where his trusty Colt forty-five had gone, he had to satisfy himself with brandishing a fireplace poker as she stepped into his room.
Her gasp could have awakened the dead. With his free hand, he hauled her all the way in by the scruff of her neck, then checked down the hall to make sure nobody had heard her, most especially the dark-haired beauty who had become as addicting as whiskey to him of late. Satisfied, he leaned back against the door, closing it with a quiet click, blocking out the lamplight from the hallway.
He turned the woman toward the moonlight filtering in through the curtains. She wasn’t one of the regular girls.
"Who are you, and what do you want?" he murmured, unwilling to lower the poker until he got some answers.
The woman hesitated, and Drew got the idea she was thinking up a good lie.
"Don’t tell me," he drawled. "You’re Campbell’s woman, and you’ve come to get back that cash I won off of him. Ma’am, I won that lot fair and square, and if Campbell has a bone to pick with me, he knows where I’m stayin’. Don’t you go stickin’ your pretty little nose into it, or it’s likely to get busted."
Her eyes widened, and he lowered the poker, grimacing at his choice of words. Normally he was far more charming. Then again, normally he wasn’t forced to make polite conversation in the dead of night. And, he thought, frowning irritably, normally he didn’t spend his nights so...unsatisfied. Damn that coffee-eyed, chocolate-haired, cherry-lipped confection he’d fallen for—she’d be the death of him yet.
"Claire...Claire Parker."
Her reply startled him from his mental ramblings. "Hmm?"
"My name is Claire Parker."
Something about that name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it.
"And I’m not Campbell’s woman," she added.
"Oh."
"I’m...I’m..."
"Yeah?" Ordinarily, he could coax honey from a bee, but tonight he had no patience. "Look, ma’am, I’m in no mood for—”
"I’m Chase Wolf’s woman," she blurted. "At least—”
"What?" he boomed, forgetting where they were and what time of night it was.
"That is, I was. We...he..."
"Now just hold your horses," Drew told her, groping the night table for matches. He’d get to the bottom of this, but to do it, he needed to see the woman’s face, so he could tell when she was lying. He found a match, struck it, and lit the wick of the room’s lamp. A split second later, he remembered he was wearing nothing but his drawers.
Her second gasp, however, had nothing to do with his lack of clothing.
"You look so..." she choked, her big green eyes moist, "...so much like him."
"Naw, Chase is the pretty one." The line was a jest between the two brothers. He’d said it so many times that he did so now out of habit.
Most people giggled at the joke. But the forlorn woman looked like she’d succumb to tears any minute. And he couldn’t have that. If there was anything Drew couldn’t handle, it was a woman’s tears.
Against his better judgment, he set the poker beside the hearth and draped a comforting arm around the woman’s shoulders. Instead of helping, it made her begin shaking with soft weeping.
"Oh, there, there, ma’am," he said, patting her back, letting her sniffle against his chest. "Don’t you go workin’ yourself up into a tizzy now." Her tears melted his common sense like whiskey dissolving a lemon drop. It wasn’t long before he was saying things he shouldn’t, making pledges he wasn’t sure he could keep. "Don’t you worry. We’ll sort this all out."
She turned her hopeful face up toward him. She was sort of pretty, in a pale, delicate way, like a dogwood flower. "We will?"
"You bet." He had no idea what he was promising, but he’d promise a woman just about anything to get her to smile.
"Then you’ll break into the jail?"
That woke him right up. "Whoa!" The explosion was less potent this time, but he knew if he kept making outbursts like that, he’d wake up the whole town. "What?" he hissed, grasping her by the shoulders.
Her face was frozen in an expression of hope mingled with fear, and, like a bolt from the blue, he finally remembered where he’d heard her name before. Samuel Parker. The rancher. He’d been looking for his little girl.
He perused her once from head to toe. Claire Parker might be little, but she was no girl. Her shawl had slipped askew, and he could see the slight curve of her bosom where she’d skipped the buttons on her dress.
Hell. He smelled trouble. For both of them.
She shouldn’t be here. Not with a stranger. Not with a half-breed. And especially not with a gambler who had just won a haul of cash off of a local lawman.
"Look," he said, pressing her down until she perched on the edge of his bed. "We’re gonna sit here, and you’re gonna tell me everything, beginnin’ to end."
It took a quarter of an hour, but she did, and try as he might to spot the holes in her story, there weren’t any, aside from the careful omission of what sort of mischief she and his brother had been caught at by her father. And that was pretty obvious. As unlikely as it seemed, his brother had fallen for the woman he’d kidnapped for revenge. And gotten himself into a nasty predicament for it.
Now he knew why their father had insisted the brothers travel together. He’d thought it was so Chase could keep him out of trouble. Never had he considered it would be the other way around.
Of course, he’d have to help his brother escape. He wouldn’t let Chase take a bullet for him. Besides, he wasn’t about to trust the justice system of this town, not when its lawmen got so drunk they couldn’t tell a pair of Kings from a pair of Jacks. He’d have to bust Chase out of jail—now, tonight—before Campbell had a chance to try him. It was risky as hell, but what choice did he have?
He retrieved his trousers from the bed and stepped into them, then yanked his shirt from the bedpost.
"Then you’ll help?" the lady asked breathlessly.
"Course I’ll help," he said, flashing her a reassuring smile.
He trusted it wou
ldn’t take too long. He wanted to be back before dawn. After all, there was a beautiful woman waiting for him here, and he didn’t want her filling up her dance card with anyone else.
After he was dressed, he absently reached for his gun belt and suddenly remembered where his Colt was. He’d left it in her room.
He didn’t dare go for it. Even if she didn’t shoot him with it when he walked into her room, he’d have to explain where he was going and what he was doing and why he was in the company of a sweet little blonde in the middle of the night.
He sighed and threw on his duster. He hoped he could manage without the Colt.
Chapter 20
Claire’s heart raced. She felt lightheaded and elated, as if she’d drunk too much Madeira, as they wordlessly crossed the dusty road. She'd done it. She'd found Chase’s brother. And he was going to help her.
It hadn’t been easy finding him. She’d asked at all the hotels. It finally occurred to her to look for him at the Parlor.
It had offended her sensibilities to set foot in such an establishment. It had further offended her when the woman who ran the place gave her a thorough looking-over as if she were applying for a position there.
Once Claire explained that she had to speak to Drew Hawk about an urgent family matter, the woman glanced down at her belly and shook her head. Muttering something about a gambler’s true colors, she led her up the stairs and pointed out Drew’s room.
To be honest, Claire had been surprised he was alone. Chase had painted Drew as a philanderer, a wild firebrand as handy with the ladies as he was with a weapon. His facility with a fireplace poker she’d quickly discovered, but she wasn’t sure about his charm, which was why she’d needed to turn on the tears a bit to convince him to help her.
Now that she had a notorious gunslinger by her side, all they had to do was figure out how to get inside the jailhouse.
"I’m sure there’s just one guard," Claire volunteered. "You could probably get him with a single shot, right?"
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