by Multiple
“What’s it like to be a Marshal?”
It was as unexpected as it was a difficult question. Sam frowned into the darkness, judging their position by the stars overhead and the flattening landscape. Kane land nestled amongst the hills, with a plethora of ponds, shallow creeks and a runoff that swelled every spring, bringing water out to the parched areas. Where there were springs, his father had dug wells. They were running parallel to the runoff, a bare trickle of water skipping over the rock bottom. They would turn east where the runoff met fresh water, but it would be a good place to break and let her stretch her legs.
“Marshal?” Her soft voice pulled him back to the present.
“Sam.” He corrected her absently, inviting even more familiarity into the already increasingly difficult situation. But he really wanted to hear that breathy little voice whisper his name.
Cry out his name.
Scream his name.
He cleared his throat. “Please call me Sam.”
“Okay.” Apparently she was just as bewildered by his sudden deviation as he was. Good. “Sam?”
Yes, it sounded every bit as sweet as he’d thought it would.
“Sam?” She repeated when he still said nothing, twisting in the saddle to look back at him in the dark. Her body whipped his into a frenzy with one slow grind.
“Sit still.” He growled, clamping a hand on her thigh and giving it a squeeze.
She froze against him. That wasn’t what he intended either. His body was nearly weeping with the ridiculous need to pull her down off the horse and plunder her. Sam barely recognized the desire for what it was, he’d long since sown his wild oats, pillaring every woman in Miss Pontfour’s establishment and traveling as far as San Antonio for other possibilities.
He was an upstanding man of the community and he treated women with respect. Even thieving hellions with mouths made for kissing and flame red hair he longed to see spread against a pillow. Or the ground. Or his chest.
Dammit.
He growled. “What?”
“You didn’t answer my question.” The small voice admonished him, stripped of the gentle teasing and good humor. Sam dropped his head, his nose just brushing her shoulder, a torment of her sweet scent filling his lungs.
“My apologies.” He brought his raging need back into line, forcing his mind to consider the rapping his father would deliver if he brought the girl in, despoiled and used. His father’s fierce features were the antidote he needed. Thief or not, prisoner or not, one just didn’t take advantage of a lady.
No matter how badly his body wanted too.
“It’s a fair job,” he answered slowly, pulling his head up and peeling his hand off her thigh. He lifted it to his Stetson, adjusting it to let the breeze wash against his face. The cooler air couldn’t alleviate the fire raging in his belly, but it brought some clarity.
“Most of the time it means I just have to listen to the townsfolk, sort out the arguments and occasionally give some hand on a mean drunk a thumping.”
“It doesn’t sound very exciting.”
He bristled at the disappointment in her words.
“A Marshal’s job is to keep the excitement to a minimum. If it’s tame then I’m doing my job, keeping the peace. Trouble stirs people up and gets them killed. Like beautiful little bank thieves riling the town up.”
“Oh.” The swift intake of breath pushed her back against him again and he leaned forward, shifting her once more to a safer position. Not that her wanton little bottom didn’t provide as much allure rubbing on his thighs as it had his groin, but he was trying.
“What?”
“You think I’m beautiful?”
This was a bad topic. He cleared his throat. “It wasn’t your turn to ask a question.”
“Yes it was.”
“No.” Patiently. “It wasn’t.”
“You asked me what. That was your question. So that made it my turn.”
Sam smiled, in spite of himself. It was going to be a long ride.
Chapter Four
The rising sun was a thin ribbon of light across the horizon as Sam turned them down a fork in the trail she would never have noticed. She’d dozed periodically during their conversation, lulled by the gentle thud of his heart. Leaning against him was unseemly, but five hours of riding, hands bound, pressed up against him had erased any concern she might have for how it looked.
The first half-hour on the trail, Scarlett kept looking for her brothers. By the third hour, she’d given up. By the fifth, she was convinced they weren’t coming at all. They might have headed back to the town for her, but they didn’t know she was out here.
Alone.
With the marshal.
She sighed, shifting her numb bottom. Even her legs were aching now and her shirt rasped against her skin. Thin trickles of dried sweat between her breasts itched. Not even the warm, masculine scent of Sam drenching her was enough to dull the discomfort that urged her to stretch and scratch.
“You should sleep.” It was the fourth time he’d uttered that phrase and Scarlett laughed, a whispery sound that choked off into a half sob that had him shifting in the saddle around her. The sweet little mare they rode hadn’t issued a complaint, particularly as they’d paused only once in the entire trek to water the horse and to let Sam relieve himself.
Not that he’d afforded her a similar opportunity. She hadn’t been able to see his face in the shadows of the night, but she’d felt the bland disapproval radiate off him when she’d asked. He’d stared at her until she’d withdrawn the request. She could only hope that an outhouse was the first place he let her go when they arrived or she was likely to embarrass herself. Her britches rubbed her in all the wrong places and what wasn’t numb, tingled.
Corona broke into a trot that slapped the last vestiges of sleep away. Their trail had meandered through foothills, but gave way to a rutted lane sided by spruce, pine and scrub. The sun’s rapid ascent expanded the ribbon of the sunrise into shattering brightness that rippled across the landscape, filling in the palette with rich colors of yellow and green speckled by swales of blue, red and orange. Wildflowers jutted out in profusion amongst the half-rocky, half-sloping green.
The trickle of water in the wash near the trail swelled to a creek, carrying the scent of moisture and coolness. The first building she’d glimpsed since town squatted at the head of the creek where it was fed by a huge pond. The hills gave way to a rich basin of green, decorated by roaming horses, cattle and more ponds, each linked by a stream.
It was a landscape rich with possibilities, the water providing life to the nearby landscape, suckling it with refreshment. The sun warmed her face as she leaned forward, the gentle mare’s backbreaking trot jouncing her as she fought with numb legs to secure herself.
The marshal’s arm snaked around her middle, fastening her with a pillow of security. A languid heat rolled through her where he touched her and Scarlett closed her eyes, shunting the sensation away to avoid a more combustible response. Her curse could be activated by high emotion. Breathing techniques helped. Inhaling through the nose, exhaling through the mouth and pushing all the unwanted emotions with it.
Unfortunately, her proximity to the marshal made it harder to push away all the unwanted feelings, because the firm press of his arm nestled under her breasts conjured a new set of images.
Ones she probably shouldn’t be thinking about at all. Her mind shied away from the urge to rub herself against any part of him, but the fire kindling in her belly flamed at the brief image.
“Welcome to the Flying K,” Sam’s gruff voice in her ear dragged her away from the lecherous thoughts to see the sprawling spread of outbuildings, fencing and land that had been revealed when they cleared the last foothill.
The streams created a ribbon that wound through the center of the basin. Along the river stood a series of log cabins. The structures nestled amidst groves of trees that would provide shelter from the su
mmer heat and the winter winds. Scarlett studied the layout, corral like areas were scattered amidst the cabins, but instead of horses, they were a patchwork of vegetables tamed to the wild landscape and growing thick and green.
Further along the streambed, a pair of squat, square buildings that looked like the bunkhouse at Quanto’s were backed onto a huge barn where activity stirred in the form of young horses being shuttled from the building into adjoining paddocks. A brace of men leaned against the fences, their voices a soft whisper on the wind, carrying only a lighthearted tone, but not the words.
“They’re picking out the mares they’ll work with and the stallions that need to be gelded before they can be brought under saddle. Every one, man, woman, child or beast, has to earn their keep here at the Flying K and every animal is put to saddle, plow or buckboard.”
“And if they can’t?” She was almost frightened to ask the question.
“Oh, they can.” His confidence stroked her with comfort. “Everything can be put to a purpose, the key is to find what they are suited for. My father doesn’t believe that anyone or any animal is useless.”
A seed of hope bloomed in Scarlett’s chest. Quanto espoused a similar belief. That no matter how destructive their abilities might seem, there was a positive use for them. They just had to find out what it was. Scarlett wasn’t entirely certain what good purpose her destructive ability could serve, but she practiced what Quanto taught and held onto the fragile hope that someday she would find her answer.
As the rutted road dipped across the stream, cool water splashed Scarlett’s legs, kicked up by Corona’s passage. The languid heat spreading through her body should have sent the dampness up in a shower of steam, but focusing on her breathing banked the firestorm inside her to warm embers.
They were getting closer to the barn and the men working around it took notice of them. A whistle cut across the early dawn. Sam lifted his arm from her to wave. His sigh stirred the hair along her neck as one of the men darted from the railing and hopped, bareback, onto a horse standing idle on the paddock’s exterior.
“And here comes Micah.” Sam’s words were low, but she understood the tone. Micah had to be a brother. Only brothers could make a person sigh with such a wild mixture of affection and irritation.
“Heyo Sam!” The man’s warm voice rolled out to greet them. Scarlett would have picked him for Sam’s brother without the half-whispered caveat. Like Sam, his hair was the color of winter wheat, his eyes a warm brown of loamy, rich soil and his broad cheekbones and strong jaw were enough like Sam’s that they were nearly the spitting image of each other.
“Heyo Micah.” Sam’s dry greeting was answered with an easy grin, one she’d never seen on the marshal’s face, but reminded her of the younger brother, Kid, that she’d met at the bank. Micah’s gaze swooped appreciatively over her, but paused with a frown on her hands where they were bound to the saddle horn.
“You taking up kidnapping, Marshal?” The man’s horse fell into step with his brothers'. This close, she could see they were nearly the same height with Sam just barely inching him out.
“She’s a prisoner.” Three simple words cut the legs out from under her. She was a prisoner. She wasn’t a guest, a friend or a lady to be courted. She was under arrest for robbing a bank.
Which, to be fair, she had actually done.
But she didn’t like being described as a prisoner and the enforced intimacy of their night ride together had almost helped her forget that fact.
Almost.
“Really?” Micah edged forward, his warm brown gaze seeking hers. “And what did you do, pretty lady? Turn him down for some church social?”
“Stop trying to spark her.” Sam admonished. “She robbed a bank.”
“Really?” Micah repeated the word, his interest seeming to only heighten at the truth. “Well now, I always pictured bank robbers as toothless, feckless and smelly. I am terribly pleased to see you are none of the those, ma’am.”
Sam stiffened around her, the shift of his muscles just barely perceptible.
“Thank you, I think.” Scarlett’s lips turned up into a small smile that grew when Micah grinned in response.
He snatched the Stetson off his head and pressed it to his chest. “Micah Kane, ma’am. Foreman and ranch manager for the Flying K’s horse stock. And you are?”
“None of your business,” Sam replied before she could. Scarlett frowned, her nose wrinkling up. She didn’t care for other people speaking for her, not her brothers and certainly not the marshal in that surly tone of voice.
“I’m Scarlett.” Impudence had her sitting up straighter in the saddle and flexing her numb fingers.
“It’s a pure pleasure to meet you, Scarlett. Welcome to the Flying K. When Sam gets his a—er, his backside handed to him by our Pa, I’ll be happy to show you around and help you get settled in. Do you ride?”
Scarlett giggled. Sam stiffened against her further, his arm clamping around her middle and all but sealing the distance between them. His chest was a hard wall of muscle on her back, but she kept her attention on his brother.
His nicer brother.
“What part of she’s a prisoner did you not listen to, Micah?” Threat edged Sam’s words. “We’ll be locking her up and she won’t be touring the property or doing any riding—of any kind—with you.”
Micah laughed, parking his Stetson back on his head. His cheerful expression expanded the seed of hope into a full bloom in her chest. “Don’t mind him, Miss Scarlett. The marshal affixed that star on his chest with a stick up his backside. “
Scarlett couldn’t help it. She laughed again. Micah’s grin grew brighter.
“Don’t you have horses to train?” Sam’s tone practically scowled, not that Scarlett dared to turn and look, not pressed this closely together.
“And miss out on you explaining this to Pa? Nah. The men can handle it and my mares are all gentled. I’ll be starting with the uncut stallions tomorrow or the next day. Hey,” Micah’s bright gaze danced over Scarlett’s face. “Would you like to come down and watch? The stallions are always a bit more of a challenge than the mares and I wouldn’t mind the audience.”
“I—” Scarlett’s agreement cut off when Sam reached over and thumped his brother in the back of the head, sending his Stetson flying and nearly knocking the younger man off the saddle. The mare he was riding paused as Micah scrambled for safe purchase on the sleek, brown back. In the same motion, Sam nudged Corona up into that ground-eating trot and that jarred her bones, leaving Micah to his fate.
“That wasn’t very nice.” She admonished the marshal. Not that she was too worried about it. Her brothers did a lot worse to each other, but her insides panged with regret that she was the source of Sam’s irritation with Micah.
“Huh.” Sam grunted. “Micah’s got a nose for trouble and a talent for landing square in the middle of it. You steer clear of him.”
“And if I don’t want to?” Why did the men in her life always insist on telling her what to do? The churlish, childish thought was followed by a far more pragmatic: because you’re tied to a saddle and facing a hangman’s noose for not listening.
The ring of truth in the latter thought increased the sting of the former. By the time they followed the sprawl of gardens, tree groves and cabin clusters, they found a new trail, bearing fresh ruts that ran straight up to the largest house Scarlett had ever seen.
Her arguments died a swift death on her tongue as she gaped at it. It was at least three stories high with white columns and a sweeping veranda. It was bright white against the green backdrop. Trees lined the path leading up to the circular drive around a center of grass, flowers and stone benches.
“Welcome to Molly’s,” Sam whispered the words against her ear. Excitement dimpled her cheeks.
“It’s beautiful.”
“That it is.”
“But it’s so big.”
“Our mother was from Virgin
ia,” Micah explained having caught them up. His expression promised his brother retribution, but Scarlett was grateful they didn’t start that tussle with her right there in the middle. “Our Pa met her on a horse trading visit. Sparked her. Courted her and then brought her west after he married her.”
“He built this house for her.” A soft spot grew between her ribs. What a terrifically romantic and thoughtful gesture.
“Yes.” Even Sam’s gruffness was tempered by affection. “He didn’t want her to miss her home, so he sent word ahead with some riders. They had the frame up and the first floor done by the time he brought her home. The second floor was finished by the time I was born.”
“And the third just in time for my birth,” Micah flashed that easy grin again. The morning sun dappled the ground under the shade trees, giving it an almost mystical quality. Scarlett’s gaze traveled from the house to the trees to the buoyant spray of color that made up the flowers around the stone benches in the center of the circular drive.
Between two trees she glimpsed a white tombstone. It sat right at the edge of the stream that paralleled the main path, just below a giant weeping willow whose dipping branches touched the top of the water, like fingers, gently stirring the stream up.
She knew without asking that was where Miss Molly was buried, nestled safe under the shade of a tree, at the edge of a stream with a grand view of the home built for her and the rich landscape that rolled out around it.
A knot tightened her throat and Scarlett sighed. Their father must have really loved their mother, because Scarlett had never before seen anything so grand, elegant and beautiful. They rode out from beneath the trees and circled the green garden, careful never to put horse hoof to the rich, virgin grass. A wide pair of double doors opened before the horses even came to a stop.
Scarlett sucked in a breath at the man who stepped out to greet them. He was Sam in twenty or thirty years. Tall, broad-shouldered and square jawed. His face, leathery from years in the sun, was clean-shaven and his hair was close cropped silver and white. His shirt was expensive cotton, off white and tucked loosely into a pair of well-worn denim britches. Ancient boots showed their polished age on his feet. He strode out across the veranda, descending the three steps to the drive without pause.
