Riley's Sleeping Beauty

by Sherryl Woods

  “You don’t take your wife with you,” Riley pointed out, desperate for an ally in his bid to make Abby see reason. He had a hunch from the immediate disdain on Manuel’s face that he’d picked the wrong person to try to win over.

  “It is not the same. My wife does not care to go,” Manuel insisted. “It is enough for her to be at home with our children and grandchildren. That is not so of your Abby. She is too much like you, Se;atnor Walker. She has the brave soul of an adventurer. It would be wrong to try to tame her.”

  Riley started to argue, but he could see it was pointless. Manuel was clearly on Abby’s side in the matter, as muddled in his thinking on this as he had been when he’d allowed her to convince him to leave the camp with her. As Jared had said at the very beginning of this disaster, Abby had wound Manuel around her finger.

  “Isn’t it time you were back in your own bed?” Riley asked irritably. “Your wounds aren’t healed yet. I’d hate to see you have a relapse.”

  Manuel shook his head. “My going or staying does not matter,” he said with some amusement at Riley’s blatant attempt to dismiss him. “Your conscience will remain with you.”

  Naturally, because he’d made the declaration with such quiet certainty, Manuel’s words stayed with Riley long after the old man had gone back to his room. Even as Abby continued to stir restlessly, those words haunted him.

  He absently reached for her hand and held it. “It’s Riley,” he murmured, though his thoughts were elsewhere.

  For a time he allowed himself to imagine keeping Abby by his side always. The temptation was huge to do just that. But each time he allowed the image to grow strong, he chided himself that he was merely being selfish again. No matter what Manuel said, it would be wrong to let Abby take such terrible risks with her life.

  As if she could sense his decision, she mumbled what might have been a protest, stirring restlessly.

  “You’re okay,” he said automatically as his own thoughts swirled. “You’re just having a very bad dream. Shh, sweetheart. It’s okay. It’s just a nightmare.”

  * * *

  Just a nightmare, hell! Abigail thought, as she continued to struggle. She wasn’t sure where the reassurance had come from, but it was hogwash. If this were a nightmare, then she could bloody well wake up from it.

  She’d been so certain that her troubles were finally over, that she had been safely home again. She’d been looking forward to seeing her family, getting back into her old routine, boring though it had been.

  She’d been a little less enthusiastic about seeing Martin again, but that was because something inside her had shifted and she knew now that she could never marry him. She wanted more from life than a sense of security. Although, she was forced to admit at the moment, after dealing with the likes of Lord Wilton and Captain Walker, the idea of a bland sameness to her days held a certain appeal.

  But instead of being home, she was trapped in some godforsaken corner of the West, wrapped in the arms of a man who smelled like cow’s breath and mistook her for some saloon songbird or worse. On top of that she was bouncing up and down on a horse with a gait that jarred her teeth. She had a hunch this wasn’t the twentieth century, either.

  There was also some evidence to suggest that her captor was part of a gang of thieves intent on robbing a stagecoach. She found it ironic and a little sad that she almost wished they were aiming to rob a convenience store. Those were the kind of thieves she understood. She’d never even seen a stagecoach in person before, except in a Western museum once, and she had a hunch that wasn’t the one they were after. Nor did it seem likely that she’d stumbled onto the set of some wild Western movie. Surely a director would have stopped the action the moment a stranger appeared in the middle of a scene, especially since she clearly didn’t know her part.

  Up ahead, as the cloud of dust kicked up by the horses settled, she could see the overturned stagecoach, its passengers clambering out to face the two gun-toting robbers. There were two men, one frail and elderly and clearly shaken, the other middle-aged and obviously terrified, but trying to console the hysterical, panic-stricken woman who was more than likely his wife.

  Disgusted by the scene before her, Abigail twisted in the saddle and glared belligerently at the man whose arm was looped tightly around her waist. Though he wasn’t taking part in the debacle up ahead at the moment, he was clearly in it up to his evil eyeballs.

  “Coward.” She spit the word in his face.

  “I wouldn’t go calling names, missy,” he retorted. “You ain’t exactly in the best position right now.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” she challenged, unable to curb her tongue, even though it was likely to get her into even deeper trouble. “Shoot me? Rape me? That would certainly show how tough you are, wouldn’t it? Taking on old men and innocent women certainly qualifies you for a medal of honor, doesn’t it? You make me sick.”

  To her astonishment, he regarded her with a certain amount of approval. “Damn, but you have a mouth on you. Nothing like a little gumption to make a man’s blood run hot. Only one way I ever knew to silence a woman,” he said, yanking off his bandanna and pressing a punishing kiss against her lips. She very nearly gagged.

  Sickened by his touch, Abigail didn’t even hesitate. She bit him. While he yelped, she struggled free, tumbling from the horse, but landing on her feet. One ankle buckled on impact. The pain was excruciating, but she ignored it. If there was no one around to save her, then she would just have to save herself. Wasn’t that the way it had always been? Self-reliant Abigail, with no one to depend on but herself.

  Martin would have been completely at a loss in this fix. He might be brilliant at tax law, but he was definitely not a man of action.

  Riley could have helped, but she didn’t want his brand of help. He would have sailed in and solved the problem in the blink of an eye without hesitating for even an instant to see if she had the matter in hand.

  She supposed there was something a little contradictory in wanting independence and wanting a man to rely on in a particularly tight jam. Maybe all she really needed him for was inspiration. It was true that every time she thought of Riley, she felt a little stronger, a little bolder. Just imagining how he would deal with a situation helped. It was odd how vivid her images of him had grown. Perhaps she was closer to her old life than she had realized.

  She was about to call on her imagination to conjure up another vision of Riley’s ingenuity when a quiet, oddly familiar voice spoke somewhere behind her.

  “I’ll take those guns,” he said, his tone lethal. “Toss them over here, nice and easy, Higgins.”

  Higgins? The name had a strangely familiar ring to it, the kind that made goose bumps rise on her skin. The man holding Abby stiffened.

  Whoever had spoken had approached so silently that Abigail and the others hadn’t heard so much as a sound. She shifted slightly to gaze into glittering green eyes that reminded her of someone...someone she knew...someone she had come to love...someone she could trust.

  Riley. The name came to her like a remembered prayer.

  “Riley,” she said, drawing a startled look from this seemingly unperturbable man who had sorted out good guys from bad in the blink of an eye and had the whole messy situation under control.

  “Riley,” she repeated with more certainty.

  He kept his gun trained on the robbers, but doffed his Stetson to Abby. “At your service, ma’am.”

  The drawl was exaggerated, but the spark of amusement in those bold eyes was familiar and very dear. Reassuring. Abby studied the man’s face, admiring the strong, shadowed jaw, the tiny web of laugh lines around his eyes. She could grow old happily looking into a face like that.

  There was, however, a hint of arrogance about him that worried her. He looked as if he found nothing surprising about coming across her in a near-disastrous situation. In fact, he looked as if he knew her rather well. Her blood raced as she contemplated just how well that might be.

&nb
sp; “How did you happen to find us?” she asked warily.

  “When you went stalking out of the Golden Nugget, I knew you’d be heading straight into trouble. I followed you. You knew damned well I would.”

  “The Golden Nugget,” she repeated softly. There it was again. Apparently her attacker hadn’t been delusional, as she had hoped. “You’re a regular there?”

  He regarded her as if she’d stayed too long under the blazing sun without her bonnet. Abby flinched beneath his scrutiny. She really was getting tired of turning up in the middle of these scenes without a script. It made her appear quite addled, which dimmed her effectiveness at bargaining.

  “Regular enough,” he claimed. “Though to hear you tell it, I have a habit of passing through only when the mood suits me.”

  He shot her a look she couldn’t interpret. “Do you and I have a...” She couldn’t bring herself to complete a question to which she so obviously should know the answer.

  About that time, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of one of the robbers inching his way up behind Riley, a knife in his hand.

  “Behind you,” she shouted.

  Before the phrase was completely out, Riley had whirled and shot the man in the leg. The knife fell uselessly into the dirt as the would-be attacker dropped to his knees and clutched his injured calf.

  With his gaze pinned on the remaining robbers, Riley said, “Abby, I think maybe you and I ought to take off before I am obliged to put a bullet through these other two.” He gave the one called Higgins a regretful look. “Though I wouldn’t mind a bit taking care of this one once and for all. He’s been a pain in my backside for what seems like an eternity.”

  She hesitated. She wasn’t so sure going off with him was such a terrific idea.

  “What about the stagecoach?” she asked, as much for a delaying tactic as out of any sense of compassion. “We can’t just leave those people out here. The driver’s dead.”

  He regarded her impatiently. “With these three out of commission, the passengers can manage to get the stagecoach back to town.”

  Abby gestured toward the panicked trio. None looked capable of standing up much longer, much less of handling a stagecoach. “Please. We can’t leave them here.”

  He sighed heavily and pointed to the guns the thieves had tossed aside. “Get their guns.”

  Sensing victory, Abby hurriedly scrambled to pick up the weapons.

  “Put them in the stagecoach and tell the passengers to get back inside,” he ordered. “Then round up the horses and tie them to the back.”

  Just this once and because she knew the odds were slightly skewed in favor of the three villains, Abby did as she was told. In fact, she rather relished being considered part of a team. She could grow quite accustomed to the feeling.

  Only after she had clambered onto the driver’s seat next to Riley did she fully comprehend that they were about to ride off and leave the robbers to die in the desert.

  “You can’t mean to just leave them here,” she protested to the man next to her.

  He turned a hard, disbelieving look on her. “Why not? They weren’t planning to show you any mercy.”

  “But they’ll die.”

  “I suppose you have a better suggestion.”

  “Let’s take them back to town and let the sheriff deal with them.”

  “And how do you propose we get them there?”

  “They can ride.”

  “And what’s to stop them from taking off once they’re on horseback?”

  She contemplated that problem for some time, then brightened. “I’ll guard them.”

  “How?”

  “With a gun, of course.”

  “Of course,” he said dryly. “You’re forgetting just one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You can’t hit the broad side of a barn.”

  She had to assume that was true since she couldn’t recall ever wielding a gun before in her life. “They don’t know that,” she countered reasonably.

  In the end, she got her way. They formed an odd little parade as they rode back into a town that looked as if no one there had ever heard of paint or pavement. Any hope Abby might have had that they were going to wind up back in civilization died at the sight of that pathetic little accumulation of wooden structures.

  While Riley delivered the prisoners to the sheriff, and the stagecoach passengers headed to the town’s hotel, Abby studied her surroundings.

  The Golden Nugget was the most prosperous looking building on the street. She was startled to see a handbill posted in front announcing her nightly appearances there. Judging from the heavily painted women being escorted in and out by the place’s disreputable looking clientele, it was no wonder that that thief had mistaken her for the sort of easy woman who would welcome his attention.

  It did not, however, explain her relationship with the man who had rescued her. He clearly acted as if he had some claim on her or certainly as if their familiarity went back a long time. She wondered how long it would be before he expected her to thank him properly for turning up out there in the desert.

  Before she could reach any conclusions about that, he was back from the jail.

  “Come on, Miss Abby. I think it’s time you and I finished our discussion.”

  “Which discussion?”

  “The one we were having when you ran out on me.”

  “I thought we’d settled all that,” she said airily.

  He grinned. “I don’t consider your walking out in a huff as any kind of solution. That’s no way to win an argument. If anything, it just proves my point. You know in your heart that you’re wrong.”

  “Wrong?” she said. She didn’t have to manufacture her indignation over the accusation. She really hated being told she was in the wrong about anything. Perhaps if she provoked him enough, he would explain exactly what she had supposedly been wrong about.

  “How dare you suggest such a thing?” she said. “It seems to me you’re just being pigheaded.”

  “Abby, be reasonable. You don’t want to be chasing after gold. It’s a hard life.”

  So that was it, she thought triumphantly. She’d wanted to go with him to look for gold. He’d told her she had to stay behind. Nothing new about that, she thought dryly.

  Apparently this time, though, she’d decided to take matters into her own hands and go off on her own. The fact that she’d landed in trouble only a few miles out of town might be considered ammunition for Riley to make his case against her plan. Clearly this was no time to back down by so much as an inch.

  “I’m going,” she said stubbornly. “With you or on my own.”

  “You can’t go on your own. Just look what happened the minute you tried that,” he retorted, just as she’d anticipated.

  “That was a fluke,” she argued. “It will never happen again. I’ll get a gun.”

  “And do what with it?” he inquired derisively. “You’re too softhearted to shoot a rattler, much less some man who takes it into his head to steal your claim.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  He tucked a finger under her chin and lifted it until her gaze was even with his. “I do know it. There is no one on God’s earth who knows you better.”

  Her pulse skittered wildly at the possessive look in his eyes. She had a feeling there was no arguing the truth of his claim. She truly wished she could recall the times he had possessed her. Instead, she kept the argument alive.

  “Then you must also know that I won’t back down on this,” she said quietly.

  “You have a job,” he said, gesturing toward the Golden Nugget. “Martin Henry might not be much of a boss, but he’s been paying you to sing. You can’t just go off and leave him in the lurch.”

  “I’ll give him notice. He’ll bring in someone else.”

  “I can’t wait for that.”

  She studied him shrewdly. “Is that gold going someplace?”

  “Of course not.”

 
“Then a week or two won’t matter, will it?”

  “More than likely it’ll be a month. Maybe longer.”

  “All the more time to teach me to shoot.”

  “Or for someone else to take over my claim,” he countered.

  Abby thought she detected a weakening in his arguments. “Two weeks. I’ll tell Martin that’s all the time he has.”

  “Abby, I don’t know about this. What if—”

  “You can `what if’ anything to death, Riley Walker. The real issue here is whether or not you want to take me on as a partner. I know you talked to half a dozen other people about going in with you.”

  “All men,” he interjected.

  “Did you trust them?”

  “That’s not the point,” he retorted too quickly to have contemplated the answer.

  “It would be when you found the gold.”

  He sighed heavily.

  “Tell the truth now,” she persisted. “Who would you rather have by your side when you find that gold? Some unscrupulous man? Or a woman you know you can trust with your life?”

  He apparently had no ready answer for that.

  “Just think about it overnight,” she urged. “That’s all I’m asking.”

  “And if I still say no?”

  She grinned at him. “Then you’ll be making the biggest mistake of your life.”

  “But you will stay here?”

  “I never said that.”

  “In other words, you’re going, with me or without me?”

  She nodded cheerfully. “That’s about the size of it.”

  He frowned at her. “Remind me never to get into a poker game with you.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t tell worth a damn whether or not you’re bluffing.”

  She stood on tiptoe and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “I am not bluffing.”

  He groaned. “I was afraid of that.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “I don’t recall saying yes or no. Besides, you gave me till morning to make up my mind. Maybe you’d best be spending that time convincing me,” he said, giving her a speculative look that made her whole body tingle.