The Bridegroom

by Linda Lael Miller

  Gideon had considered wiring Rowdy and Wyatt, asking for their help; he knew they’d ride hard for Phoenix if he did, without requiring an explanation beforehand. But they couldn’t possibly get there on time, not on horseback anyhow, and the train didn’t head south until 3:10 in the afternoon. The stagecoach routes had been cut to almost nothing, now that everybody traveled by rail, and it would be too slow anyhow.

  Besides, Gideon doubted his brothers would be willing to break up somebody else’s wedding just on his say-so. No, they’d go straight to Lydia and ask her what she wanted to do, and she’d answer that she wanted to go through with the ceremony, because that was what she’d made up her mind to do. Rowdy and Wyatt would take her at her word.

  Gideon couldn’t do that, because of the letter.

  Resigned, he changed his shirt, brushed his hair, and left his room, taking his satchel with him. He checked out of the hotel, walked down the street, and bought a buckboard and a team at the first livery stable he came to. Then he headed for Lydia’s place on foot.

  The day before, he’d strode right up onto the front porch and rung the bell.

  Today, he went around back. If Fitch had managed to put those thugs on his payroll, none of them were in evidence.

  The housekeeper answered his knock, a hefty woman with salt-and-pepper hair and blue eyes that seemed somehow faded, as though they’d been worn down by seeing too many hard things.

  Her face lit up when she recognized him, though.

  “I knew you’d come back,” she said, putting a hand to her ample bosom.

  Gideon put a finger to his lips. “Where is Lydia?” he asked quietly.

  The woman stepped back, gestured for him to come inside. “In the parlor,” she said, “arranging flowers. The poor thing is determined to make this stupid plan work—she’s stubborn, our Lydia.”

  Gideon grinned at that, but not with much spirit. “The aunts—are they around?”

  “Miss Mittie and Miss Millie are in their room,” the housekeeper told him. “This is their time for correspondence, though heaven only knows who’s left for them to write to.”

  “Would you mind getting them for me, please?” Gideon asked. Then, with another grin, he added, “And keeping Lydia busy for a few minutes?”

  The housekeeper beamed. “Best you wait in the library. Lydia won’t go near it today—with all that’s on her mind, she won’t be doing any reading.”

  Gideon nodded. “Thank you, Miss—?”

  “Helga,” the woman insisted. “Call me Helga.”

  Gideon shoved his left hand into his pants pocket, so he wouldn’t shove it through his hair and show how nervous he was. “I’m much obliged, Helga,” he said.

  She showed him to the library, a long room jammed with volumes, and he paced after she left, too agitated to thumb through some of the books, the way he would have done on any other day of his life.

  He could see why leaving this house would be a wrench for the old ladies, and for Lydia herself. There probably wasn’t another one like it in all of Arizona, though he’d seen grander ones back East. Not many, though.

  Presently, Helga returned, shooing Lydia’s aunts before her and hushing them every step of the way. Gideon was struck, once again, by their diminutive size—they reminded him of little birds perched on a ridgepole in a high wind and about to be blown away.

  Still, he saw intelligence in their eyes, dignity in the way they held their snow-capped heads. They stuck close to Helga, though, and watched him with frank and wary curiosity.

  Gideon kept his distance, lest he frighten them away.

  At his urging, they sat down, side by side on a small settee, shoulders touching, gazes intent. They folded their hands in their laps, after smoothing the skirts of their worn black dresses.

  “Have you come to kiss Lydia again?” one of them asked.

  Although Helga had introduced them to him by name, Gideon could not have said which was which. The sisters were so alike that they might have been two versions of the same person. Or, of course, twins.

  “No,” Gideon answered solemnly, after forcing back a grin.

  Both ladies looked genuinely disappointed by his reply.

  “Miss Mittie, Miss Millie,” he went on, bowing slightly and hoping he’d addressed them in the correct order, “I’m here to ruin Lydia’s wedding, and I’ll need your help to do it.”

  Their eyes widened. Helga, standing watch at the library doors, smiled to herself.

  “You’d better explain yourself, Mr. Yarbro,” said Millie. Or Mittie. “Ruining a wedding is serious business.”

  Gideon suppressed another smile. “Indeed it is,” he agreed. And then he proceeded to outline his plan.

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU can’t find the aunts?” Lydia demanded, at one-fifty-five that afternoon, again seated at her vanity table. Helga had helped her into the gown, and was now tucking tiny rosebuds into her hair, since there was no veil. “Where could they possibly have gone?”

  Helga tried to look innocent as she shrugged. “Today was correspondence day,” she said, avoiding Lydia’s mirrored gaze. “Perhaps they went to the post office.”

  Lydia whirled and stood in one fluid motion, causing the skirts of the dress to rustle around her. “Today is my wedding day,” she said. “Guests have been arriving for the last hour, Mr. Fitch and his mother are waiting downstairs, with the justice of the peace, and the aunts—who never leave this house except to go to church—have gone to the post office?”

  “I’m sure they’ll be back in plenty of time for the ceremony,” Helga said, backing up a step or two.

  Lydia set her hands on her hips and advanced. “What is going on here?” she demanded.

  “A wedding,” Helga answered, with just the faintest snip in her tone. “More’s the pity.”

  “You’ve spirited them off somewhere,” Lydia accused, almost beside herself now. The aunts were virtually recluses—that was why she’d insisted that the ceremony be held in the parlor, over Jacob’s mother’s objections, instead of in the church. “Helga Riley, you’d better tell me where they are—this instant!”

  “They left with Gideon,” Helga admitted, though her eyes snapped with a sort of smug defiance. “Packed up their old love letters and their best jewelry and walked right out of this house without even looking back.”

  “What?” A thrill of anger went through Lydia—anger and something else that wasn’t so easy to define. “They wouldn’t have gone willingly—he must have—have abducted them!”

  “Oh, they were quite willing,” Helga insisted, stiffly triumphant. “And it’s you Gideon Yarbro means to abduct. Assuming he can get past the toughs Jacob Fitch has stationed at both the doors, that is.”

  “I’ll have the law on him!” Lydia raged. “This is outrageous!”

  Helga arched one eyebrow, and a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Don’t be a ninny—it’s wonderful and you know it. Get out of that dress and into something fit to travel in, and climb down the oak tree outside that window, like you used to do when you were a little girl. Fitch’s men will be too shocked to try and stop you and—”

  “Helga,” Lydia broke in, still barely able to credit that her aunts, of all people, had lit out with Gideon. “Have you gone mad? Has everyone gone mad?”

  Helga ignored the question of sanity and marched over to the wardrobe, rifled through it until she found the divided riding skirt Lydia hadn’t worn since she used to range over the desert on horseback with Nell.

  “Put this on,” Helga commanded, thrusting the garment at Lydia, along with the matching jacket and a long-sleeved white shirtwaist with a ruffled collar. “Hurry! If you won’t climb out the window, then I’ll see what I can do to keep that criminal watching the back door busy for a few minutes—”

  “Helga, listen to me,” Lydia blurted. “I don’t know what’s come over the aunts, but they’re bound to come to their senses by nightfall, if not before, and when they do, they’re going to be incons
olable—”

  “You’ll be the one who’s inconsolable by nightfall if you go through with this wedding, Lydia Fairmont,” Helga said, thrusting the garments into Lydia’s hands.

  Downstairs, the enormous longcase clock tripped through a ponderous sequence of chimes, then bonged loudly, once. Twice. Before Lydia had fully accepted that the hour of her doom had arrived, she heard shouting, some sort of scuffle below, on the ground floor.

  Alarmed, she rushed out of her room and down the corridor to the top of the stairs, and looked down to see Gideon standing halfway up. His hair was mussed, and his lower lip was bleeding. Seeing Lydia, he blinked once, shook his head, and then extended a hand to her, a broad grin spreading across his face.

  Lydia could barely tear her gaze from him, she was so stricken by the mere fact of his presence, but when Jacob stumbled out of the parlor, even more mussed and bloody than Gideon, she gasped.

  “You will lose everything,” Jacob vowed, very slowly and precisely, glaring at her. The look of fury in his eyes was terrifying. “Everything.”

  Lydia looked back at Gideon again. He was still holding his hand out to her.

  She took a step toward him, and then another.

  “Everything!” Jacob roared. “This house, your good name, everything!”

  By then, she was only a step or two above Gideon. “You’re hurt,” she said, dazed, reaching out to touch his lip.

  “Not as hurt as I’m going to be if we don’t get out of here before the guards come to,” Gideon said easily, still grinning. With that, he suddenly hoisted Lydia off her feet, flung her over his right shoulder and bolted down the stairs.

  Lydia was too stunned to protest; in truth, she was certain she must be dreaming; such a thing simply could not be happening.

  But it was.

  Jacob’s mother appeared behind her son in the parlor doorway, her long, narrow face pinched with disapproval. Even lying over Gideon’s shoulder like a sack of chicken feed, Lydia caught a glimpse of something else in the woman’s eyes as they passed.

  It was a sort of triumphant relief.

  Jacob shouted invective and started forward, surely intending to block Gideon’s way, but Mrs. Fitch restrained him simply by laying a hand on his arm.

  “Let her go, Jacob,” she said. “Let the trollop go.”

  The trollop? Suddenly furious, Lydia began to kick and struggle, not because she didn’t want, with all her heart and soul, to escape this curse of a marriage, but because she did want to tear into that vicious old woman like a she-cat with its claws out.

  Gideon, swinging around in an arch toward the kitchen, gave Lydia a swat on her upended, lace-covered bottom, not hard enough to hurt, but no light tap, either.

  If Lydia had been furious before, she was enraged now. “Put—me—down!” she sputtered.

  Gideon didn’t even slow his pace, much less do as he’d been told. “If I do,” he said, sounding slightly breathless now, “we’re both going to be in a lot more trouble than we are now.” They’d reached the kitchen, and Lydia tried in vain to grab at the doorframe as they went out.

  A man lay sprawled on the back porch, raising himself to his hands and knees as they passed, shaking his head as if befogged. Helga, carrying a handbag and a small reticule and wearing a hat, waited at the bottom of the steps.

  Looking down at the man on the porch, Helga put a foot to the middle of his back and flattened him again.

  Gideon’s strides lengthened, increasing Lydia’s discomfort and her ire. Helga, keeping pace, gave her a look of reprimand.

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this!” Lydia cried.

  Gideon all but flung her into the back of a buckboard. “Believe it,” he said, helping Helga up into the wagon with considerably more courtesy and then scrambling up in the box to take the reins.

  Lydia heard the brakes squeak as Gideon released the lever, probably with a hard thrust of his foot, and the rig lurched forward as he yelled to the horses.

  The ride through that alley was so rough that Lydia had to make three attempts before she managed to sit up.

  The man from the porch was running behind them; he caught hold of the tailgate with hands the size of Easter hams and started to climb inside.

  Helga fell back onto her elbows and kicked with both feet, as hard as she could, and the man screamed and let go, falling to the ground, bellowing curses after the rapidly departing wagon.

  The buckboard careened around a corner, onto a side street, throwing Lydia hard against the side. She tried several times to climb up into the box beside Gideon, but each time there was another corner, and she fell back again, bruising herself.

  If this was a dream, it was entirely too realistic for Lydia’s tastes.

  Hauling herself onto her knees, grasping the side of the wagon to keep from being hurled down again, Lydia watched in disbelief as they came abreast of the train depot. Steam belched from the stack of the huge engine, and the whistle blew, shrill enough to make her let go and cover her ears with both hands.

  Through a haze of shock and utter confusion, she thought she caught a glimpse of her aunts, smiling down at her from one of the passenger car windows. They were both wearing enormous hats, bedecked in flowers and feathers.

  Surely, Lydia thought distractedly, she was mistaken. Seeing things. Millie and Mittie hadn’t ridden a train, let alone bought new hats, since Lincoln was president.

  But she had no time to consider the matter further, because Gideon brought the wagon to a lurching stop, jumped from the box, raced around to wrench open the tailgate, and hauled Lydia out, flinging her over his shoulder again.

  This time, she was too exhausted to fight back.

  “Hurry!” Helga yelled to him, over the whistle and the rising chug of the train engine. “They’re coming!”

  The next thing Lydia knew, she and Gideon and Helga were onboard the afternoon train, Gideon carrying her down the aisle between the rows of seats as easily as if she weighed no more than his saddlebags.

  Passengers observed the scene with amused interest, to Lydia’s everlasting mortification.

  The train was already moving, quickly picking up speed, when he finally plopped her into a seat, then stood there glaring down at her, his breath coming hard.

  Across the aisle, Mittie and Millie, clad in bright blue silk dresses to match their hats, smiled winningly.

  “This is so romantic,” Mittie said. “Don’t you think so, sister?”

  Millie nodded. “It’s almost as if Major Bentley Alexander Willmington the Third had come back to life,” she replied. Then, with a wistful sigh, she added, “Major Willmington was so very dashing, you know.”

  Lydia returned Gideon’s glare. “I will never forgive you for—for—”

  Gideon leaned until his nose was almost touching hers. His lip, she noticed, had stopped bleeding. “For what?” he demanded, through his teeth.

  “For striking me!” Lydia whispered, well aware that she and Gideon were the center of attention and so embarrassed that she thought she might actually die of it.

  Gideon straightened.

  His eyes widened slightly.

  And then he threw back his head and shouted with laughter.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ROWDY BOARDED THE TRAIN the moment it pulled into the depot at Stone Creek, his face chiseled into angry lines as he stormed along the aisle toward Gideon, paying no mind at all to greetings from other passengers as he passed.

  “Have you completely lost your mind?” he rasped, reaching Gideon’s seat and looming over him.

  Gideon, who had been dozing for the past couple of hours, exhausted from a sleepless night and the rigors of stealing a bride over the considerable objections of the groom and his hired henchmen, grinned up at his older brother, just to piss him off further.

  “I guess the law down in Phoenix must have sent you a telegram,” he said cheerfully. “Reckon it said you ought to be on the lookout for a kidnapper.”

  Rowdy’s
ice-blue eyes sliced to Lydia, sound asleep in her rumpled wedding dress, her head resting on Helga’s shoulder. A faint smile touched the marshal’s mouth. “Is that who I think it is?”

  Gideon nodded, stretched. “Lydia Fairmont,” he confirmed. “All grown up.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Rowdy said. A decade before, as the new town marshal, he’d been the one to go out looking for Lydia’s father, in the middle of a blizzard. He’d found Dr. Fairmont sitting frozen in his buggy, along a lonely road, and brought the body back to Stone Creek after spending a long night standing between two horses to keep his own blood from turning to ice.

  “Are we under arrest?” one of Lydia’s aunts piped up, from the row of seats just behind Gideon’s, having spotted Rowdy’s badge, most likely. He’d be damned if he could say whether she was Millie or Mittie—the two swore they weren’t identical twins, but as far as he was concerned, they might as well have been, because he sure as hell couldn’t tell them apart.

  Rowdy, ever the gentleman, at least in the presence of a lady, whatever age she might be, smiled winningly and swept off his hat. “No, ma’am,” he said. “You are most definitely not under arrest.” But when that sharp blue gaze swung Gideon’s way again, another chill had set in. “You, on the other hand—”

  By then, the other passengers had disembarked, some heading to one end of the car and some to the other, but none trying to get past Rowdy, blocking the aisle like an oak tree sprung up through the floorboards. Lydia was sitting up, blinking away sleep, yawning prettily, looking confused and warm and so delectable she made Gideon’s mouth water.

  “Rowdy?” she asked, looking pleased to see Gideon’s brother again. Doubtless, she remembered him as some kind of hero, which was galling to Gideon. “Is that you?”