“Of course not. There’s a pillow and blanket on the chaise, but if you’d rather sleep on a real bed, the other rooms are empty and, as you know, the linens are freshly laundered.”
“Thank you. For everything.”
She cherished Gideon’s presence in her life. He was the only family she had outside of Papa. Beyond that, the steadiness of his friendship helped her more than she could say.
But the person she longed for most as she sat in Papa’s room, so alone, so overwhelmed, was Cade. He was supportive without being pitying. He smiled at her in a way that melted her from the inside, but he could get under her skin like no one else. Hearing him call her “love” the way he did and seeing the twinkle in his eyes did wonders for her every time. Sometimes he would hold her and everything in the world felt right, but then he’d act as though nothing had occurred.
She had been mistaken about a man’s affections before. This time, she meant to be far, far more cautious.
Cade stood in the parlor of Ellis Lewis’s house, waiting for the start of a social gathering. Gideon had dragged him there. He’d rather be cleaning the outhouse behind the jail. Still, coming meant he could watch Delancey make a spectacle of himself. That would make for an evening well spent.
“It is pretty,” Paisley said to Delancey, once again attempting to return something he’d given her. “But I cannot accept such an expensive gift.”
“Don’t let the cost bother you,” Delancey answered, setting his hand on Paisley’s arm. Cade didn’t indulge in the urge to snatch Delancey’s hand away; he didn’t have to. Paisley pulled her arm back. Again. “I am not a pauper. I have all the things I need and money enough. I paid off your debt at the smithy and the mercantile.”
“You did what?”
It was a good thing Paisley wasn’t wearing her gun. Based on the look she gave Delancey, Cade would’ve been cleaning up a murder scene.
“It was not your place to do that,” she whispered urgently.
His brows pulled down in immediate confusion. “But I care for you. We were once engaged.”
“I have allowed you to be my friend again,” Paisley answered curtly. “But paying my debts is far too personal and presumptuous a task for a friend to undertake.”
His features softened. “Please don’t worry that I resent it. I was happy to fix the problem.”
Her jaw clenched. “That is not what I said.”
Gun or no, Cade could see he needed to step in before Paisley broke Delancey’s nose. As much as he’d enjoy that, Miss Dunkle would probably faint and expect him to catch her.
He strode the rest of the way to Paisley and Delancey. “I’ve not seen you around lately, Paisley.”
Delancey eyed him up and down. “We were having a conversation.”
“Yes. So everyone heard.” He pulled a folded bit of paper from his vest pocket and held it out to Paisley. “Hawk sent this to you inside his last report.”
“Did he?” She eagerly unfolded it.
“Who is Hawk?” Delancey asked.
“He’s a federal marshal.” Paisley didn’t look up from her letter.
“Why is a federal marshal writing to Paisley?”
“Believe it or not, there are a great many men who do write to women rather than simply saying they will,” Cade said.
Delancey didn’t try to defend himself but watched Cade with a hard stare. But what could he possibly have said? A man who truly loved a woman would have dug deep into the mystery that Delancey had faced all those years ago. He, however, had simply shrugged it off after a single unanswered letter.
“Oh, heavens.” Paisley stared at the paper in her hands. “He’s recommended me for a deputy federal marshal.”
Cade hadn’t heard such unmistakable excitement in her voice in weeks, not since they’d been knee-deep in the sheriffing competition. He knew she’d had her heart set on being sheriff but perhaps hadn’t realized just how much it had meant to her.
She faced Cade directly. “Do you think Hawk is serious in his offer?”
“Completely.”
Her eyes unfocused a bit as her thoughts wandered. “I’ve missed wearing a badge.”
“You’d have one again with this job.” Cade didn’t like the idea of her living away from Savage Wells for long stretches of time, but he couldn’t deny her the moment of pondering. And deputy marshal was a far sight better than bounty hunter. “You’d be deucedly good at marshaling.”
“You are actually considering this?” Delancey reentered the conversation. “It sounds dangerous.”
Says the man who abandoned her in Abilene, arguably the most dangerous town in the West.
“I’ve seen her shoot,” Cade said. “She ain’t the one likely to end up dead.”
Delancey pierced him with a glare. “I, for one, am not willing to take that risk.”
“You aren’t the one who’d be taking the risk,” Cade tossed back. “Paisley can make her own decisions.”
“I’ll need more information to make this one,” she said. “And a lot would depend on Papa. I can’t leave him here alone while I’m off deputying.”
Cade’s smile pulled wide. “‘Deputying’ ain’t a word, love.”
“I am making it a word.” She inched up to him, eyeing him with a laughable bit of false pompousness. “Are you wanting to argue over it?”
“Argue? No. I ain’t wanting to argue.” He laid the flirtatious tone on thick and heavy.
“Good, because as a deputy marshal, I’d have the authority to boss you around.”
He leaned in close. “I’d like to see you try.”
Delancey cleared his throat loudly. Cade didn’t step back. He liked being as near to her as he was, and she wasn’t objecting. Delancey’s opinion on the matter was of little concern to him.
“Congratulations on the offer,” Cade said. “You’ve been wishing someone would give a woman a chance at proving her worth in this line of work. Whether or not you accept the offer, there’s pride in knowing you earned the right to try.”
He raised her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to the backs of her fingers. She didn’t snatch it away like she so often did with Delancey.
In the background, Lewis drawled on about the two-thousand-dollar delivery the bank had just received, about the accolades he was receiving from Omaha. Mrs. Endicott was somewhere nearby telling whoever would listen about everything she’d heard that week from the many people she’d visited.
Delancey didn’t have anything to say. Cade preferred it that way.
A loud knock woke Cade from a light sleep. He opened a single eye. Another knock sounded. He slid from his bed, snatching his pistol from the bedside table. He moved quickly to the side of the doorway, having learned long ago that bullets can cut through doors like a hot knife through butter.
“Who’s ’at?” he barked out.
“Santa Claus,” was the dry answer.
Paisley. He unlocked and opened the door. “Are you plumb out of your skull? Do you know what time it is?”
“You can lecture me later. This is important.”
He motioned her inside. “Give me a moment to light the lantern.”
She closed the door while he pulled down the box of matches. He lit the wick and set the glass cover back on the lantern. The room went from black to dim.
“You don’t have a shirt on.” Paisley sounded almost shocked.
“I was asleep, you madwoman.” He pulled open a bureau drawer and snatched out a shirt. “I might have shot you, you know.”
“Nonsense. You’re not reckless.”
“Not when I’m awake.” He slipped the shirt over his head but didn’t bother tucking it in.
“I need you to help me do something.” She held his gaze. “Something extremely important.”
“What?”
Wit
hout the slightest hint of guilt or discomfort, she said, “I’m going to break into the bank.”
Break into the bank? “I may have learned to turn a blind eye to our moonshiner friend, but I’ve strong objections to bank robbers.”
“Hear me out.” She set her hand on his arm, her gaze steady. “I have a hunch.”
As odd as her notion sounded, he trusted her judgment. “Tell me.” He jerked his head in the direction of his table and chairs.
She sat, facing him. “How much money did the bank receive during the last delivery?”
“Twenty-two hundred.”
She nodded. “Mr. Lewis must have mentioned the delivery a dozen times tonight, but he said, repeatedly, that the bank received ‘two thousand dollars.’”
Cade sat on the trunk at the end of his bed. “The numbers are close.”
“Perhaps there’s nothing to it,” she admitted. “But I doubt a man as proud as he is of the money he’s responsible for, would accept two hundred dollars less credit for his achievement.”
She was absolutely right. How had he not caught on to that?
He held up his hand. She’d made her point well. “What do we need to do after we break in?”
Her brows lifted in a quick look of surprise. Her lips turned up in a smile. “I need to look at the bank account book and make certain he recorded a delivery of two thousand two hundred dollars.”
“You think Lewis is falsifying his records.”
“That’s one possibility. The other, of course, is that someone stole the money before it was recorded, and Mr. Lewis really did receive only two thousand dollars.”
“That’d be hard to manage. The box is locked in Omaha, and only Lewis has matching keys.”
She thought on that a moment. “Like I said, there may be nothing to this. But we won’t know if we don’t find out exactly how much he recorded in the bank ledger.”
She had a point. If the ledger said two thousand two hundred dollars, then Lewis was little more than an inaccurate braggart. If the account books showed only two thousand, then there was a matter of two hundred missing dollars. Simply asking Lewis would tip their hand. Secrecy was their best option at the moment.
He grabbed a pair of stockings from a drawer and slipped them on, then pulled his boots on as well. “Your father looked worn out by the time you left dinner tonight.”
“He was quite tired,” she said. “But he fell asleep easily and is resting well.”
“Sleeping the sleep of the righteous whose daughter is about to break into a bank.” Cade snatched his coat off its hook and buttoned it up all the way.
“What Papa doesn’t know…” She let the sentence dangle unfinished.
He grabbed the lantern then motioned her through the door. They slipped through the dark behind the jail and mercantile, all the way to the bank. Cade set the lantern on the ground by the back door. It’d be locked. Cade knew the habits of every business in Savage Wells. “If we shoot open the lock, the damage’ll be obvious come morning.”
“Not necessary,” Paisley said. She reached into her pocket and pulled out what looked like a small shaving kit. “Hold the lantern up here so I can see.”
She opened her kit and pulled out several long, narrow bits of metal. With an ease that spoke of experience, Paisley slid the implements into the lock.
“I’d forgotten you’re a picklock.”
“I don’t remember telling you that I was.” She kept at her efforts.
“You didn’t. Gideon spilled your secret.”
She closed her eyes as she worked. “My brother and I taught ourselves how when we were children.”
He could easily picture her as a troublemaker sort of child. “If you end up becoming a deputy marshal, that’ll be a useful skill.”
The more he thought about her accepting that job, the more uncertain he was. She’d be good at it, and heaven knew she’d be happier working as a deputy than as a maid or waitress. But the job meant she would be in danger. While she could handle it better than almost anyone he knew, he still worried.
Her mouth twisted in concentration as she worked at the lock with all the elegance of an artist. She turned her pick the tiniest bit.
“There we are.” With a satisfied nod, she turned the knob and pushed open the door.
She was a wonder. “Just when I thought I couldn’t like you more.”
“Oh, yes. Nothing secures a man’s good opinion like a woman who can pick a lock.”
He heard the dryness in her tone and knew the self-doubt for what it was.
“I don’t say things I don’t mean, darlin’. I like that you can pick a lock and wear a gun and shoot as well as I do.”
“Better than you do,” she corrected with a laugh.
“And I even like that you’ve dragged me into bein’ a blasted criminal, breaking into a bank in the dead of night.”
“I love a good break-in.” She wiggled her eyebrows teasingly. At times the temptation to kiss her was almost too much. But he couldn’t yet say if she would welcome the attention, so he held off. He ought to win medals for his self-control.
She stepped past him into the dark bank. Cade followed, holding the lantern aloft. Mr. Lewis’s office door wasn’t locked.
“If he follows the same methods as Papa, the current account book will be in the top drawer of his desk.”
Cade set the lantern on the desk and sat in Mr. Lewis’s deep-green leather chair. He pulled open the top drawer. Just as Paisley had predicted, a thick, hardbound book sat alone. He took it out and set it on the desktop.
“I’ve never read one of these.” He thumbed the pages.
She sat on the arm of his chair and pulled the book closer to her. “I have. I ran the bank during the last few months my father was still in charge.”
She’d taken over for the last sheriff. Ran a bank for a time. Was there anything she couldn’t do?
“This is your seat, then,” he said.
But she shook her head. “This’ll do.”
He leaned against the opposite chair arm. Paisley flipped through the account book, her eyes scanning the pages. She grew more beautiful every time he was with her. It didn’t seem to matter what she was doing or wearing. He drank in the sight of her.
She paused a moment. Her eyes darted over the page, and she made a “thinking” sound.
“Did you discover something?”
“Mm-hmm. I discovered Lewis shouldn’t do mathematics in ink.”
He laughed silently. “I’d wager you do all your ciphering in ink.”
She met his gaze with an adorable smirk. “Of course.”
He added that to his list. He liked that she was smart and wasn’t ashamed to be.
“Here’s the entry for the delivery.” Paisley tapped a page in the account book. She leaned over the book. So did he.
“Two thousand dollars,” she read aloud. “So the question remains, did Mr. Lewis keep the missing two hundred dollars and only record two thousand, or did he only receive two thousand?”
“And,” Cade jumped in, “if he only received two thousand, where is the rest of it?”
She closed the book. “If the box is locked in Omaha and unlocked here, then the money likely disappeared sometime after arriving at the bank. Unless the deliveryman has had keys made.”
“It’s possible, but not something we’re likely to have a chance to look into.” Cade tapped his fingers on the desk as he thought through the situation. “We’d do better to find out if the money’s going missing after it gets here. Of course, that’d mean our culprit’d have to be Lewis or Delancey.”
He watched for any reaction to the possibility of her former fiancé being a thief. Other than a look of pondering, he saw none.
She carefully slipped the account book back in its drawer. “So, what’s our battle plan?�
�
“First, we cover our tracks here.”
Paisley pretended to be surprised by the suggestion.
“Second, we go back to the jailhouse and put a pot of coffee on.”
“Step three?” Paisley asked.
Cade shrugged. “We’ll sort that out during step two.”
They left no trace in the bank. Under a cloud of darkness, they returned to the jailhouse. Paisley offered to start the fire in the corner stove while Cade filled the coffeepot.
“Joshua had a conniption when I built the fire a few days ago,” Paisley said when Cade returned. “We had a girl-of-all-work in Abilene. Joshua can’t seem to wrap his mind around my new circumstances.”
“Have I called him an imbecile often enough since his arrival?” He set the pot on the stovetop.
She laughed. “I do realize what a bad match we were. You don’t have to convince me of it.”
“Happy to hear it.” And he was. “I hope you aren’t too disappointed.”
“Any hopes I had for Joshua died years ago. Besides, I’m a different person than I was in Abilene.” She stood up, having started a fine fire. “Those were hard years. But, then, things aren’t exactly easy now.”
“Life ain’t easy, is it?”
“Things have been over between Joshua and me for years,” she said, “but I still hope he isn’t our thief.”
He could understand that. “We won’t know anything until we talk to the two of them. But we’d best not tip our hand.”
She nodded slowly. “I’ll see if I can glean anything from Joshua.”
He slipped his arm around her. She didn’t object. So he slid his other one around as well and linked his hands together behind her back. “I’ll work on Lewis. I have ways of getting secrets out of people.”
“Somehow I don’t, though.” The mischief in her eyes was more alluring than the most flirtatious look most women could produce. “You told me once your name isn’t actually ‘Cade.’”
The Sheriffs of Savage Wells Page 23
