Colorado Dawn

by Kaki Warner

  Good heavens! What was he doing here?

  Her heart started beating so hard she felt suddenly light-­headed and half nauseated. Then seeing the blood from the cut on the man’s temple, she got herself in hand and inched forward again. “Oh dear, Mr. Satterwhite. Have you killed him?”

  The old man nudged the prone figure with the toe of his crusty boot. “Probably not.”

  “Probably?”

  “I think his chest is moving.”

  “You think?”

  Satterwhite reared back, his crooked eyes round beneath his white brows. “Don’t go hysterical on me, missy. The dirty letch was spying on you. He deserved what he got.” The bushy brows lowered. A speculative look came into his bristly face. “Why do you care? You know him? Is this another of your suitors?” He said that last word with noticeable disgust.

  Maddie studied the familiar face that she had never expected to see again. She had a hard time catching her breath. Nothing seemed to be working right. Her head felt like it was spinning off her neck. “I th-­think he’s my h-­husband.”

  “Your husband? The dead one?”

  Maddie nodded, unable to take her eyes off the man lying so still at her feet. He looked like her husband. The same strong nose and uncompromising chin. Deep-­set eyes. She resisted the impulse to pry up a lid to check the color. No one had eyes the same bright mossy green as Angus Wallace. But that scar cutting through one dark brow and giving it an upward, almost quizzical slant, was new. And this man was turning gray, although his brows and lashes and the stubble of beard shadowing his sun-­browned face remained dark brown. And yet, that widow’s peak was the same…​and those strong hands, and the long line of his neck…

  Dizziness assailed her. Why was he here? What had possessed him to come looking for her after all this time? Her chest tightened. She opened her mouth and gulped in air but still couldn’t seem to fill her lungs.

  “Best sit down, missy. You’re looking right pale.”

  Moving on wobbly knees, she allowed Mr. Satterwhite to lead her around the back of the wagon to the single ladder-­back chair that stood beside the coals of that morning’s fire. As she sagged onto the cushioned seat, she grabbed at the gnarly hand on her arm. “Do please check, Mr. Satterwhite. I m-­must know if you’ve killed him.”

  “By the bones of Saint Andrew! Of course he dinna kill me!”

  Maddie gaped at the figure staggering around the back of the wagon, one hand braced against the ladder support, the other pressing a red-­stained handkerchief to his brow. Lifting a foot, he shook it furiously, trying to dislodge her snarling dog from his boot. “And call off your rat before I snap his bluidy neck!”

  “Angus, hush!”

  “The hell I will, madam!”

  “No, the other one.”

  “The other one?” Mr. Satterwhite looked around. “How many husbands you got?”

  “Oh, dear. I-­I think I’m going to faint.”

  “Not until I get some answers, madam!”

  But everything was already swirling away.

  Bollocks.

  Ash lunged, catching her just before she toppled into the fire. Fending off the yapping rat, he lowered her to the ground. “Tie up that bluidy dog,” he ordered the old man. “And get some water!”

  “Is she dead?”

  “No, she’s not dead! She fainted.” Or so he hoped. Uneasy with the old man hovering somewhere behind him with a loaded gun in his hands, Ash glanced over his shoulder. “Scatterwell, is it?”

  “Wilfred Satterwhite. Some call me Wall-­eyed Willy, but if you do, I’ll shoot you. Maybe fifteen times, since this here’s a repeater.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Satterwhite blinked in surprise. “You don’t know?”

  “Her name!” Ash had to be certain. With her eyes closed, it was hard to tell. Yet every part of his being had recognized her instantly.

  “Missus Wallace. Who are you? You really her husband?”

  Ash wasna sure. The woman had apparently touted it about that he was dead. Maybe she’d contracted herself to someone else. The thought made his hands shake. “I’m Angus Wallace. No, Ashby.”

  “Which?”

  “Both.”

  “Named her dog after you. Makes sense to me.”

  “Get the water. And either lock up that yapping dog or shoot it.”

  The old man snatched up the wad of fur and stomped off, muttering under his breath.

  Ash blotted at the cut on his head, checked the handkerchief, and was relieved to see the bleeding had stopped. But the pain was just beginning. He felt it closing in, pressing against the edges of his vision, building with every pulse beat. He calculated he had about an hour before it drove him to his knees.

  He studied the figure on the ground. His wife. The woman he had tried so hard to forget yet had crossed an ocean to find. He recognized her…​but she seemed different from the woman he’d married. Older. Prettier. More…​rounded. He sank back on his heels, distancing himself from both the woman and the disconcerting realization that even as angry as he was with her, he could still feel an attraction. But she’d always had that effect on him. Just being in the same room with her had robbed him of reason.

  He remembered her as being sweet and pretty. Tractable. Always smiling, with round pink cheeks, and good teeth, and a cheerful aspect even when his father had given her his best scowl.

  And passionate. So passionate it had been like a drug to him.

  Shoving that thought aside, he continued his assessment. He could see time had aged her, replacing those round girlish cheeks with clearly defined cheekbones and sculpting a stronger line to her jaw. Stubborn, almost. The wide mouth was the same—­he remembered that well enough—­and that arch in her brows that always gave her the look of a wide-­eyed innocent.

  Innocent? Ash snorted, then winced when pain exploded behind his eyes as if a battery of twelve pounders had gone off inside his head. How innocent could a woman be if she would willingly desert her husband, toss her marriage aside, and run off to some foreign country just to make tintype pictures?

  Well…​That might not be fair of him. He had seen her work. It was more art than photograph. The woman had an eye, so she did. And a way of looking at the world that transformed the mundane into the beautiful.

  But that was no excuse for deserting her husband.

  “Here’s the water, Your Majesty.” The old man stomped toward him, dribbling a trail of liquid from the long-­handled ladle he held in his outstretched hand. “But I’d advise you not to throw it on her.”

  Ash took the ladle, realized he couldn’t force an unconscious person to drink, debated disregarding Satterwhite’s advice and throwing it in her face, then drank it himself. It was cold going down, but seemed to ease the pounding in his head. He handed back the ladle. “Get my horse.”

  “Get him yourself.”

  “And you’ll tend her while I’m gone?”

  Satterwhite went to get his horse.

  “Mind the dog,” Ash called after him, then turned back to the woman, uncertain what to do. He wanted her to wake up so he could yell at her. He wanted her to stop lying there so pale and still. He wanted to stop wanting her.

  Reaching out, he tapped her cheek with his index finger. “Wake up.”

  She ignored him. Typical female tactic.

  He tried to see in her features the young woman who had caught his eye six years ago when the Tenth Hussars had bivouacked in her village en route to their new deployment in Ireland. She’d become a beautiful woman since then. Older, but better. Unlike him, she showed no gray in her dark auburn hair, and her face wasna marked by seventeen years of hard soldiering. Granted, he was thirty-­four now, and quite a bit older than she was. Nine or ten years, if he remembered right, which would make her somewhere in her mid twenties. Still young enough to produce heirs, which, after all, was why he was here.

  Duty. Would he ever be free of it?

  “Is—­is it truly you, A
ngus?”

  Looking down, he saw that his wife had awakened and was gawking up at him. “Aye. But ’tis Ashby now.” He was still having trouble getting accustomed to that change.

  “Where’s your mustache?”

  On reflex, he fingered his bare upper lip, which had once sported the flaring mustache that was the mark of the Tenth Hussars. “I shaved it off.”

  She slapped him hard across the cheek.

  Rearing back onto his heels, he blinked at her in shock. “What was that for?”

  “For deserting me, among other things.” Laboriously, she pushed herself into a half-­reclining posture, her elbows braced behind her.

  He tried not to notice how that pulled the fabric of her dress tight across her breasts, which seemed fuller than—­Wait. He deserted her?

  “I see you’re still the vexing, high-­handed man you were when you ran off like the dog you are. Oh, do move away, Angus, or Ashby, or whatever you call yourself now. You’re crowding me.”

  “I ran off?” He stood too quickly and almost lost his balance before the spinning stopped. “If you’ll recall, madam, I returned to my regiment. As ordered. And because of you, late. What might your excuse be?”

  “You left me. I had no choice. Where’s Mr. Satterwhite?”

  “Choking the dog, I hope.”

  “Then you’ll have to do.” She extended a hand in his direction.

  He could see it was shaking, and was gratified that she seemed as unsettled by this meeting as he was. He also noticed she wore the signet ring he had given her to mark her as his. It looked incongruous on her delicate hand and had a thick cord wrapped around the back to keep it from slipping off her slender finger. But even after all this time, she still wore it, and he took that as a good sign.

  “Well? Are you going to help me up? Or have you forgotten how to be a gentleman?”

  He refrained from flinging her into the trees. “I dinna desert you,” he said with rigid calmness once she was settled in her chair and had finished fussing with her skirts. “I left you in the care of my family at our ancestral home.”

  She shot him a look. “Ancestral home? That pile of rubbish?”

  “Rubbish? Northbridge has been the seat of the Earls of Kirkwell for nigh onto five generations. It is not a pile of rubbish.”

  “They’ve repaired the skirt wall, then?”

  He was momentarily struck dumb by how much he wanted to shake her, throttle her, wipe that smirk off her face. Get his hands on her any way he could.

  She dismissed his silence with a wave of her hand. “As I said. A pile of rubbish. Have you come for a divorce?”

  Caught off guard by the abrupt change in subject, it took him a moment to find an appropriate answer. She had always had a talent for making him lose track of his thoughts. To cover his lapse, he returned to the rigid role of military officer. “As appealing as that notion might be, madam,” he snapped, “I have come to take you back.”

  “Back? In a casket, I assume?” She smiled sweetly. “For I assure you that is the only way I will return to the loving bosom of your family.”

  Ash clasped his hands behind his back before he used them on her. “My family is greatly reduced, madam. You will find them scant bother.”

  She blinked up at him, her deep, brown eyes no longer flashing anger. “Reduced?”

  He cleared his throat of a sudden tightness. “My father died of a seizure a while back, and my mother, as well as Neil and his wife, were taken in the fevers of sixty-­nine.”

  “Taken?”

  “Died.” What was she—­a bluidy parrot?

  “Oh, dear.” She reached up.

  He tensed, wondering where the blow would land.

  But this time she only rested her fingertips on the sleeve of his coat above his bent elbow. “I’m so sorry, Angus. Truly.”

  And suddenly there she was, the woman he remembered, her expressive eyes filled with tears, her face softened by emotion. She had looked at him that same way the last time he’d seen her, when he had ridden off to rejoin his regiment after a night he would never forget.

  He looked down at the fingers so pale against the dark fabric of his coat. It was just a hand. Slim and fine and small next to the thickness of his arm. But he remembered it well, and how soft it had felt sliding up his bare back, and he fought a troubling urge to cover it now with his own hand—­to anchor her to him, to reassure her, or maybe to keep her from hitting him again—­he wasna sure which. “They dinna suffer long.”

  “Your older brother and your sister? How did they fare?”

  He cleared his throat and looked away. “Donnan and Glynnis survived, although when I left, Donnan had yet to regain his full strength.” Deciding to press on while she seemed in a receptive mood, he stiffened his spine and braced his legs. “Which is why I have come.”

  Her hand dropped away. “Oh?”

  “Neil had no sons. Nor does Donnan, you see.”

  She waited.

  “And considering his age and the poor state of his health, it’s unlikely that he will.”

  “Which leaves you.”

  “Aye.”

  For a moment, silence. Then she burst into laughter. “And you think—­you and I—­we—­should continue the prestigious family line?”

  He felt his face grow warm. “Aye. ’Tis our duty.”

  “Duty!” Laughter faded. “Back up before I strike you again.”

  He inched back—­as a courtesy, of course, not in retreat.

  “Do you honestly think that after completely ignoring me for almost six years—­six years, Angus—­all you have to do is show up and issue your orders and I will happily jump to do your bidding?”

  He had hoped so. It worked that way with the men under his command. And besides, he hadna completely ignored her. He’d come home that one time…​and risked much to do so. Most officers went much longer between visits with their wives.

  Luckily, Satterwhite’s arrival prevented him from mentioning that before he had time to think it through.

  “Here’s your horse,” the old man called as he led Lurch toward the wagon. “Spookiest animal I ever saw. Jumps at everything he sees.”

  “He’s deaf. Give him water and unsaddle him, then tie him where he can see me.”

  “Mr. Satterwhite is not your flunky.”

  “What about the dog?” Ash asked, ignoring the muttered comment.

  “I didn’t see any dog.”

  “Isn’t that Lurch?” his wife asked, studying the horse as the old man tied him to the side of the wagon. “You brought him from Scotland?”

  Surprised that she would remember after so long a time, Ash nodded.

  “He wasn’t always deaf, was he?”

  “No.” Sensing questions coming that he dinna want to answer, he tried to divert her. “There are things we need to discuss—­”

  “What happened to him?”

  Bollocks. “He was injured in an explosion.”

  “When?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “Were you with him?”

  “Aye.”

  “Were you injured?”

  “Aye.”

  Her cheeks seemed to lose color. “Badly?”

  Realizing that he had pressed the heel of his palm against his throbbing temple, he lowered his arm and once more clasped his hands behind his back. “Badly enough to end my military career,” he said curtly, needing no reminders of that senseless, blood-­soaked afternoon. “As I was saying, madam, there are things we need to—­”

  “Ah. Now I understand.” She leveled her gaze at him.

  It was disconcertingly direct. That artist’s eye again. Intrusive. As if she saw past all his carefully erected barriers to the doubt and confusion he always felt when she was near. Charging at a full gallop toward a line of armed infantry soldiers made him less nervous than did his own wife.

  “Now that you can no longer follow the drum, you have come to me to amuse you. Is that the right of it, Angus
?”

  “I assure you, madam, at this moment I am anything but amused.” He glowered at her to prove it.

  She laughed, apparently unfazed by a look that had caused more than one raw recruit to soil himself. “I wonder, Angus—­or Ashby, as you now fashion yourself—­why you persist in calling me ‘madam.’ Have you forgotten my name, perchance?”

  Another wave of heat rushed up his neck. Of course he remembered her name. But it helped him keep his distance if he dinna speak it aloud.

  “You have, haven’t you? How utterly like you.”

  Yet he had glimpsed tears in her eyes before she’d looked away, and sensed the hurt behind her brittle smile. Bluidy hell. He hadn’t intended to make her cry. He hadn’t intended for this meeting to go so badly. But she addled him, being so different from the woman he had expected to find—­all prickly, and outspoken, and…​independent. The change unsettled him.

  And repelled him.

  And in some odd way he dinna understand, it also pulled him closer.

  “Of course, I remember your—­”

  “It’s Madeline,” she cut in, still not looking at him. “Maddie, to my friends. Alexandra Madeline Gresham Wallace.”

  “Not anymore. Madam. Madeline.”

  She blinked at him, that shadow of hurt still reflected in her eyes. “So you’ve divorced me, after all?”

  “Not yet.” He softened that with a smile, not sure if he was joking. “But since the passing of my father and Neil, our status has changed. Donnan is now Earl of Kirkwell, and as his heir, I am now Viscount Ashby.” He punctuated that with a curt bow. “My fellow officers have—­had, that is—­shortened it to Ash, happy to remind me of the gray in my hair. And you are now Lady Madeline, my viscountess.”

  “Your vi-­viscountess?”

  “My viscountess.”

  “But I do not want to be a viscountess, yours or anyone else’s. I am perfectly happy being a tintypist.”

  “I’m afraid you have no choice, madam. Madeline.”

  “Oh, dear. I never—­” Abruptly the air went out of her. Her eyes rounded. A look of terror came over her face as she stared past his shoulder. “Duck!” she screamed just as something slammed into his back and drove him to the ground.