Three Men and a Bounty

by Three Men

  THREE MEN AND A BOUNTY

  The ManLove Collection

  Gigi Moore

  MENAGE EVERLASTING

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

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  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  IMPRINT: Ménage Everlasting

  THREE MEN AND A BOUNTY

  Copyright © 2010 by Gigi Moore

  E-book ISBN: 1-60601-891-4

  First E-book Publication: May 2010

  Cover design by Les Byerley

  All art and logo copyright © 2010 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  PUBLISHER

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  Letter to Readers

  Dear Readers,

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  DEDICATION

  This is dedicated to all the unsung heroes--men and women alike--who tamed the Wild West.

  THREE MEN AND A BOUNTY

  GIGI MOORE

  Copyright © 2010

  Prologue

  Barrow Homestead, Utah Territory – 1860

  The acrid aroma of smoke tickled Troy Barrow’s nostrils before he opened his eyes and sat up in a panic.

  The house was on fire!

  The thought registered in his mind the same instant that Troy’s bedroom door burst open and a tall, broad shadow filled the doorway.

  “Pa!”

  “I’m here, boy.” His father rushed across the bare wood floor, trailing a blinding cloud into the room as he approached Troy’s bed. And even though he was thirteen, considered a man in most circles, his Pa draped a large damp towel around Troy before lifting him up into his arms and carrying him through the house toward the back door like a nipper. Pa had taken over where Troy’s Ma had left off.

  Alien chants drifted to Troy’s ears from outside. The melodious chords penetrated the roar of surrounding flames and almost hypnotized him. He pressed his face close to his father’s chest, the coolness of Pa’s damp nightshirt grounding Troy as he held tight. The next moment, his father burst through the door onto the back porch and into the dawning day.

  Pa lowered him to the ground, kneeling in front of Troy and grasping his arms. “You all right, boy?”

  Troy nodded, his smarting eyes tearing. His throat felt like he had swallowed a cup of sand, but he was okay.

  Pa pulled him close, hugged him tight, and brought his lips near Troy’s ear. “Run, boy. Run as far as you can and don’t look back, no matter what happens, no matter what you hear. Understand me, boy?” He pulled away, caught Troy around the biceps, and stared at him.

  Two painted Indians rounding the house caught Troy’s attention, and when he didn’t answer quickly enough, his father shook him. “Understand?”

  “But, Pa—”

  “You run and don’t look back!” He roughly pushed Troy away.

  Troy stumbled back and watched as his father turned and charged the two Indians. He caught them off-guard, flinging his body at them horizontally, and Troy watched them stagger beneath his father’s weight.

  “Run, Troy!”

  Heart pounding in his ears, he listened to his father and took off in the opposite direction, barely hearing the struggles behind him before a shot rang out.

  Troy froze and turned to see his father slump to the ground, blood staining his shirtfront as the two Indians stood over him. “Pa! No!”

  “Run, boy...”

  His father’s weak rasp barely reached him, but Troy saw his lips form the words, still torn between running to and from Pa.

  The Indians turned their sights on him, shouting at him in their foreign tongue, and took the decision out of his hands.

  Troy turned and ran, fear and the sound of rifle fire making his legs churn.

  “Skinwalker, die!”

  The accented, guttural words stirred a memory in him that, until now, he had thought only the product of his wild imagination.

  Had the Indians killed his father because of the wolf? Had his father died because of him?

  Heart thundering and tears streaming, Troy heard footsteps gaining on him as he ran through the forest bordering his home.

  Not his home anymore. And, with his mother a year in the ground from consumption and now, he reckoned, his father dead, too, he had no family neither.

  Troy swallowed a sob as he stopped and leaned a palm against the trunk of a towering aspen. His lungs burned, and he tried to catch his breath.

  What he wouldn’t do to be the wolf now, to run free as he had so many nights before.

  He’d thought them dreams or that he’d been sleepwalking in the brambles and that’s why his nightshirt had been so dirty and shredded.

  What about the blood? It hadn’t been his.

  Another shot rang out, and the bullet took a chunk out of the tree an inch above Troy’s head. He ducked down. His skin tightened, becoming too small for the rest of his body while he broke out in a cold sweat.

  Something happened to him. He didn’t know whether to be plumb scared of the approaching change or glad for it. Maybe if he became the wolf the Indians would let him be.

  Skinwalker, die!

  He thought of the blood the other night, hoped it had been an animal’s, maybe a rabbit or a stray sheep. If it hadn’t been…maybe he deserved to die. Maybe the Indians were right to come after him.

  Did they have to kill his father, though?

  The beast inside raged at Troy’s loss, making his skin t
ingle with the shift. He hadn’t recognized the changes in his body the other occasions, hadn’t known what they meant, but he understood them now and knew that he could control it if he wanted to.

  He didn’t want to.

  He wanted to be wild.

  He wanted to escape.

  He wanted revenge.

  Troy growled deep in his throat as the wolf clawed at his insides for release. He turned as the Indians burst through the brush in front of him, rifles and bows and arrows raised.

  Bones stretched and popped out of place into a new arrangement, shredding his nightshirt from his body. Troy howled as he went down on all fours. Another bullet pierced the air, whizzing past his pointed ear. His muscles rippled with new definition as fur sprouted all over his body and his jaws elongated.

  Intense pain washed over him, but Troy welcomed it. It took his mind off of what had happened to his father, his home. It took his mind off his new station, his aloneness.

  He bared his lengthening and sharpening teeth, body completely shifted by the time he charged at the Indians the way his father had charged at them only a short time ago. It seemed like a lifetime.

  Troy felt no pain as another shot rang out and an arrow flew through the air, both hitting their target before he took down his prey in a veil of torn flesh and spilled blood.

  Chapter 1

  Wolf Creek, Oklahoma Territory – 1877

  A flash of lightning lit up the sky above Christopher Michaels, and several heartbeats later, a crack of thunder shook the deserted area around him.

  He was bone-tired and in too much pain to notice or care about Mother Nature’s brazen show. He just wanted shelter.

  Cradling his ribs with one hand, Chris shambled forward, continuing on the path he had started on miles and miles ago after he had been dry-gulched and left for dead. He had but one destination in mind where he knew he would find refuge and maybe a hot meal and work.

  Six months ago, he’d visited the town fresh from a cattle drive. When he’d stopped into Barrow’s to celebrate and spend his money with the rest of the drive cowhands he’d instantly cottoned to the saloon owner.

  He’d come across Troy Barrow’s kind of compassion in his life few and far between, so he learned to value it whenever he did come across it.

  Chris tried to tell himself that just because Troy treated him with a modicum of kindness didn’t mean the saloon owner cottoned to him the same way he cottoned to Troy. From what Chris had seen, Troy treated everyone with kindness, and Chris didn’t want to be treated like just everyone.

  He wanted to be special to Troy, despite knowing how offensive that desire was. There were laws against buggering, and desires like that could get a body hurt real bad around here—or dead. And Chris ought to know since he’d gotten a world of the former right before being let go from his most recent stint as a cowhand.

  He’d tried to keep to himself as much as possible and had learned his lesson after watching his mentor Cooper Houston get shot down for cheating at a game of poker, at least that’s the way the story had gone. Chris knew the real reason Cooper had been killed, though. And, as Cooper’s partner, he knew he would have been next had he stayed in town a minute longer, so he’d hightailed it out of there.

  Christ, he was so tired of running. He felt like he had been running all his life.

  At Whitfield Ranch, he thought he had found a home. The owner liked him without wanting him and respected a man who knew his job and could do it well. It hadn’t stopped him from letting Chris go the minute trouble had broken out between Chris and some other hands who’d wanted to teach him a lesson.

  Chris straightened now as much as he could before pushing in the swinging doors of Barrow’s. He paused just inside and took in his surroundings as the doors flapped behind him.

  The atmosphere proved a drastic change of pace from the outside. Most of the change was pleasant, especially the lack of water. Chris still shivered, the chill afflicting him bone deep.

  He took a yawning breath, and his bruised lungs instantly reacted to the smoke-filled room, which had him fitfully coughing. He haltingly made his way toward the bar, but one of the young painted ladies of the establishment hooked an arm through one of his and waylaid him.

  She steered him toward a corner table where she pushed him down into one of the bar’s few empty chairs. When Chris tried to rise, she straddled his thighs, showing a healthy bit of leg as she lifted her ruffled skirts.

  Chris felt his cheeks heat at the sight of her colorfully hued petticoats beneath.

  He had been away so long he’d forgotten how plumb brazen some of the saloon girls could be. He understood the necessity, though the girl’s womanly wiles didn’t affect him the way they might another man in his situation. Chris was more embarrassed for her than stimulated. He was much more taken with his view of the saloon’s owner wiping down the mahogany bar with a dingy white cloth several feet away than he was by what was under the saloon girl’s petticoats.

  Chris licked his cracked lips as Troy pierced him with a look. His shaft hardened in his pants, and his balls grew heavy and tight.

  The saloon girl took his chin in one hand and turned his head to face her. “I’m Hannah, and you look like you could use some tender loving care, cowboy.” With her other hand, she slyly fondled his bulge and made him gasp.

  Hannah smiled, obviously believing his condition a response to her attentions and not the man tending bar behind her. And this was good, because no one needed to know about his hopeless infatuation, his dangerous infatuation.

  “Tell me where it hurts, and I’ll kiss it and make it all better.”

  Chris winced as he caught the girl beneath the arms and lifted her up off his lap to stand on her feet in front of him. He stood then, trying to soften the blow of rejection when he tenderly cupped her face. She wasn’t peddling something he wanted, but he saw no reason to hurt the little filly’s feelings.

  “Just a drink will do me fine, ma’am.” He left her gaping like a fish on land and once more headed for the bar.

  A large hand landed on Chris’ shoulder and spun him around before another hand fisted the front of his already crumpled and weather-beaten shirt.

  “I think you owe the little lady an apology.”

  Chris stiffened at the sight of the big, ruddy-faced owner of the hands as the unfamiliar cowpuncher teetered in front of him. He didn’t think he could handle the puncher on a normal day when he wasn’t all beaten up and sore, so he certainly didn’t think he could do it now. The man outweighed him by at least a hundred pounds.

  “Bart, don’t you be starting no trouble. You know what kind of establishment I run here,” Troy said from behind the bar, fists on his hips.

  “That’s why I’m conversing with the varmint. He mistreated my Hannah.”

  “I’m not yours, Bart. And the kid ain’t done nothing of the sort.”

  “So it’s settled,” Troy said. “Pull in your horns, go back to your little card game, and call it a day.”

  “Well, I’m begging to differ,” Bart said.

  “Are we having some difficulty here?”

  Chris turned at the sound of the deep, commanding voice coming from the table adjacent the bar. He saw the tall, dark man standing there with a black Stetson worn low over his brow and a matching trail duster covering most of the rest of him. He cut a powerful, imposing figure.

  Slowly, the man lifted his head and separated the folds of his coat to reveal a shiny U.S. Deputy Marshal’s badge pinned to his vest as well as a holstered Colt pistol, butt forward.

  The sound of several men scrambling to their feet and backing away from the numerous tables on the barroom floor echoed throughout the room. The saloon’s piano player abandoned his instrument to join Barrow’s other denizens running for cover.

  Chris had lead feet, though. He didn’t know whether he was more entranced by the fact that the lawman was a Negro or that he was the most beautiful man Chris had ever seen in his life—colored o
r white.

  Chris caught himself staring and closed his mouth before anyone else noticed.

  Of course everyone else stared themselves so they probably wouldn’t notice him staring.

  Towering over most of the men in the saloon except the owner, the marshal had to be at least a few inches over six feet. And, with the wide breadth of his shoulders, he would stand out anywhere, even among his own people, but he especially stood out at Barrow’s.

  “Ain’t no difficulty. I’m just settling a disagreement with the shorthorn here,” Bart said.

  “From what I can see, the young’un’s not heeled and doesn’t look like he wants any trouble, so why don’t you back off and leave him be?”

  “And why don’t you mind your business, lawman?”

  The marshal didn’t flinch as Bart turned on him with a sneer, one hand on the butt of his holstered Dewey. The marshal had already drawn and cocked his own weapon, though.

  Thanks to Cooper, Chris demonstrated pretty good skills with a firearm, but nowhere near as fast as the marshal. He’d wager not many gunslingers in this town were much faster, either, then he glanced back at the bar and saw that Troy had soundlessly drawn his rifle, too.

  Bart looked from each man, glowering as he turned to Chris and motioned to draw his weapon.

  Chris didn’t move. He didn’t have a chance to move before a shot rang out, the bullet striking Bart’s hand and forcing him to drop his gun.

  “Next one’s in your head, and I won’t miss.”

  “No, marshal, please. He’s just roostered. He didn’t mean no harm.” Hannah came to the cowpuncher’s rescue, catching the marshal around the arm to make her plea.