The Bridegroom

by Linda Lael Miller

  Gideon did not respond, did not look away from Lydia’s face, did not move even when Owen appeared behind him, and was blocked from entering the house because his uncle was still standing on the threshold.

  “Guess Owen and I will be going now,” Wyatt said, with a grin in his voice.

  “And that’s enough polishing for one day,” Helga interjected, directing her words to the aunts. She’d been peeling potatoes for a stew, but now she dried her hands quickly on her apron, then removed it. “Miss Mittie, Miss Millie, get your shawls and parasols. We’re going out for a constitutional.”

  The aunts seldom left home, let alone took constitutionals, but they fetched the specified items from their room and promptly vanished just the same, as did Wyatt and Owen.

  Gideon, who had been forced to leave the doorway so they could all get out, closed the door with slightly more force than Lydia deemed necessary.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, after a very long and very uncomfortable silence.

  “Yes,” Lydia said, without moving from her chair. “And you may rest easy, Mr. Yarbro. You will not be arrested for kidnapping me.” She straightened a little. “Even though it would have been just what you deserved.”

  That familiar, maddening grin crooked up one side of his mouth. He hauled back a chair, turned it and Lydia’s chair, as well, with her still in it, so they were face-to-face, with their knees touching.

  “You started this,” he reminded her easily, even lightly. “You sent the letter.”

  “Well, I shouldn’t have.”

  “But you did.” Wisely, Gideon did not touch Lydia, except where their knees met, because if he had, she would surely have slapped his face with enough force to turn his head. “I wrote that letter at this table,” he said, thumping the surface once with the knuckles of his right hand. “Do you remember?”

  Lydia closed her eyes, all of it coming back to her. She’d been small and sick and afraid, grieving for her dead father. Granted, John Fairmont had not been much of a father, but he’d been all she had, until Lark, until Nell.

  Until Gideon.

  “Of course I remember.”

  “I kept my word,” Gideon went on. “I will always keep my word, Lydia.”

  By sheer force of will, Lydia did not give way to the tears scalding the backs of her eyes. Refraining from slapping him with all the strength she had proved still more difficult than before. “You promised to love, honor and cherish me, till death do us part,” she reminded him. “But you don’t love me. And—and you’re leaving. Do you plan to ‘honor and cherish’ from a distance?”

  “I won’t be going away for a while,” Gideon said, almost tenderly.

  “Do you think that makes this easier to bear?” Lydia retorted hotly. “Any of it?”

  “You could have left with Fitch and the deputies,” he said reasonably. “Since we haven’t consummated the marriage, an annulment would be easy to get.”

  “It would be simpler for you if I had gone back to Phoenix, wouldn’t it, Gideon?” Lydia challenged, flushed and trembling a little. “You could have gone right on with your life as if nothing had happened, without troubling yourself over me, or the aunts or Helga.”

  “No, Lydia,” Gideon answered patiently, “it wouldn’t have been simpler for me. Fitch will hurt you, if he gets the chance, and I can’t let that happen.”

  “How do you intend to prevent it?” Lydia asked, sounding far more reasonable than she felt. “When you’re off to—wherever it is you mean to go when you leave here?”

  “My brothers will keep you safe if the need arises, Lydia. Owen, too.” He paused, chuckled, though without amusement. “All three of them will want to peel my hide off in strips, it’s true. But you’re a Yarbro and a woman into the bargain, and that matters to them.”

  “Does it matter to you, Gideon?”

  He flinched slightly at the question. “Believe it or not, yes.”

  “Well, I don’t believe it.”

  Gideon shrugged one shoulder. He was dirty from working in the mine, Lydia finally noticed, and his beard was coming in. “That’s your prerogative, I guess,” he said, with such exasperating equanimity that Lydia couldn’t bear it.

  She did strike him then, hard, with the flat of her palm.

  She was instantly horrified at what she’d done, and yet not one bit sorry.

  Gideon didn’t move. He just sat there, with the mark of her hand flaring red on his cheek, and said nothing at all.

  She pushed back her chair so rapidly, so suddenly, that it toppled over with a loud crash. As she stood and turned to flee, though, Gideon caught hold of her arm and pulled her onto his lap. Encircled her with steel-strong arms when she struggled to get free again.

  Anger would have been far easier to endure than the way he held her, but even after she’d struck him, Gideon hadn’t lost his temper. He propped his chin on the top of her head and murmured to her as though she’d been the one slapped.

  She began to cry then.

  “Shh,” Gideon said, and pressed her head to his shoulder as gently as if she were again the child he’d brought safely through a snowstorm, on the back of a horse, ten years before. “Shh.”

  IT WAS LATE WHEN THE KNOCK sounded at the back door.

  Gideon had been half expecting a visitor all evening—that was why he’d waited up. Lydia, the aunts and Helga had long since retired, vanishing to their various quarters as soon as the supper dishes had been washed and put away.

  The meal would have been unbearable, he supposed, if the aunts hadn’t regaled him with the promised stories about Mrs. Robert E. Lee, whom they’d been personally acquainted with, and the Washingtons, known through family lore.

  Looking out the window before he unlatched the door, Gideon was surprised to see a boy standing on the porch. He’d expected Rowdy, come to lecture him on the duties of a husband, or maybe Wilson, bent on firing him from the mine crew for leaving in the middle of the morning and never going back.

  He opened the door.

  The boy, no older than ten or eleven, barefoot and wearing short pants, his face in shadow because of the brim of his ragged hat, shoved a slip of paper into Gideon’s hand. “A feller paid me to bring this,” he said. And as quickly as that, he was gone.

  Gideon saw no use in pursuing the messenger to ask who the “feller” was—it was stone-dark out, with the moon gone behind the clouds, and the kid would have outrun him easily. He’d had the furtive look of somebody who ran from a lot of things.

  So Gideon stepped back, shut the door, and opened the folded sheet of paper. The handwriting wasn’t familiar, but the cryptic message included the code phrase he’d been told to watch for when he accepted the assignment.

  Sorry to hear of your sister’s passing.

  Services at noon on Sunday.

  Gideon crumpled the note into a wad, found a match and struck it on the sole of his boot, and lit the thing on fire. Watched as it fell into the sink in a blazing ball, and was consumed.

  He’d been expecting a summons like this one, of course, but not so soon.

  Either his employers were expecting miracles, or there had been a change in plans.

  Taking the train to Flagstaff would attract attention. He’d have to borrow a horse from Rowdy or Wyatt—hiring one at the livery stable would arouse comment, too, though not so much as buying one—and either or both of his brothers would have questions when he made the request.

  He wouldn’t have to lie, though—that was the only comfort. He would be visiting Rose’s grave, a place he’d haunted like a ghost until he’d come to Stone Creek to stay with Rowdy, the year he turned sixteen. Even while he was away at college in Philadelphia, and then working, he’d sent money to Rose’s mother, Ruby, on a regular basis, with the tacit understanding that she’d buy some trinket and snug it next to Rose’s headstone.

  Under normal circumstances, Rowdy, already suspicious, might have insisted on coming along, but with Lark recovering from a birth that had
nearly put her in a grave of her own, that wouldn’t be a concern.

  Wyatt would be honor-bound to stay in Stone Creek and make sure Lydia was in no danger from Fitch. As for Owen, well, he had a pretty young wife of his own to look after, plus his younger brothers and sisters and a ranch to run on top of that, with Wyatt and Sarah spending so much time in town. No, Owen would have neither the time nor the inclination to bird-dog Gideon to Flagstaff.

  If there was a blessing to be found in Lark’s recent ordeal, besides the baby, of course, it was that the wedding reception she’d planned to throw for him and Lydia, scheduled for Sunday afternoon, had surely gone by the wayside.

  Explaining to Lydia shouldn’t be difficult—she probably wouldn’t be speaking to him anyhow. Helga and the aunts were another matter, but he’d get by them, too—somehow.

  Thrusting a hand through his hair, Gideon tilted his head back to look up at the ceiling.

  Was Lydia sleeping, or lying awake?

  If he dared to set foot in that bedroom, would he be welcome, or would she greet him with a shotgun?

  He smiled at the thought of Lydia armed and dangerous.

  Oh, she was dangerous, all right. And shooting him might be a mercy, compared to what she was putting him through now.

  He turned down the one gaslight he’d kept burning after the women went to bed, made his way to the back stairs, sat down on the bottom step to pull off his boots, and then climbed.

  Again, he hesitated outside Lydia’s door.

  There was a rim of light beneath it—she was awake then, probably reading.

  The temptation to go in there and do what came naturally was as formidable as any Gideon had ever experienced, but the grim truth was, he’d let things go too far already. Technically, Lydia was still a virgin, and she could seek an annulment with a clear conscience, but she wasn’t the innocent young woman he’d carried out of that mansion in Phoenix, either.

  He’d robbed her of that. Shown her things that should have waited until a real husband came along, some fine day in the future. A man who could love Lydia the way she deserved to be loved.

  Standing in front of the door to that room, Gideon braced his hands on the frame and lowered his head. Thinking of her sharing a bed with another man, giving birth to someone else’s children, had struck him like a fist to the midsection. He needed to catch his breath.

  When that door suddenly swung open, and Lydia was standing there in that nightgown he’d pushed up to her neck, with her hair neatly plaited and a book tucked under one arm, he couldn’t think of a single reason for being where he was.

  She simply stared up at him for a long time, her brow slightly furrowed. Then, sure enough, she found her tongue. “Why are you skulking outside my bedroom door, Gideon Yarbro?” she demanded, without the faintest trace of charity in her voice or her bristly countenance.

  “Just making sure you’re all right,” Gideon said, priding himself on his quick thinking.

  “I’m perfectly fine,” Lydia replied pointedly.

  The braid made her look like a schoolmarm, and Gideon wanted to undo it, but that would get him whacked again for sure, and his face was still smarting a little from the last time Lydia had let him have it.

  “Well,” he said, awkward now, “good night.”

  “Good night,” Lydia answered tersely.

  Right after that, she shut the door in his face.

  He supposed it was better than another slap, but not by much.

  By God, not by much.

  With a sigh, he thrust himself away from the door casing, turned, and went on to his own room.

  HE WAS LATE FOR WORK the next morning because he wasn’t about to leave Lydia, the aunts and Helga home alone until he had it on good authority that Jacob Fitch hadn’t gotten away from those deputies somehow, that he was back in Phoenix. Which meant he had to herd all the females over to Rowdy’s place, with the lot of them fussing, because Lydia was the only one who actually wanted to go.

  Helga and the matched set of old ladies gave him guff the whole way. The aunts wanted to stay home and polish things—they’d hit the mother lode of tarnished silver, to hear them tell it, snooping through an old trunk they’d found in one of the closets, and Helga kept insisting that they’d be fine at home, since she’d take the stove poker to anybody who was up to no good, including Fitch.

  Lydia, for her part, walked well ahead of the group and pretended she hadn’t made their acquaintance—especially Gideon’s.

  “You two are the dangedest pair of newlyweds I’ve ever seen,” Helga commented, noting the ample distance between Gideon and Lydia, as they walked. “What has gotten into her, anyhow?”

  “How should I know?” Gideon grumbled. “I’m only her husband.”

  “Then why don’t you act like one?” Helga immediately retorted.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” He instantly regretted the question, which had been uttered out of frustration and not as an inquiry, because there was a very real danger that Helga would haul off and answer.

  The housekeeper moved a little closer to him, while the aunts did their best to catch up with Lydia. They must have made quite a spectacle, Gideon thought ruefully, straggling through the streets of Stone Creek like four hens and a rooster.

  “I do the tidying up, remember,” Helga informed him, in a scalding whisper, “and there were two beds to make upstairs this morning, instead of one, like there ought to be. And it was the same yesterday, too.”

  Gideon set his jaw. Damned if he’d explain something that personal to Helga or anybody else. Hell, he couldn’t even explain it to himself.

  Rowdy’s place was in sight now, at the end of the tree-lined lane. Gideon stopped and folded his arms, prepared to wait until he’d seen all four women go inside. When he had, he’d head for the mine on the double.

  Wilson, the foreman, was bound to be in a foul mood after the humiliation he’d suffered at Mike O’Hanlon’s hands the morning before, and he’d be looking for somebody to take it out on. As it was, Gideon had walked off the job yesterday, when Owen came to tell him Fitch and the U.S. Marshal’s deputies had been at Rowdy’s place questioning Lydia, and now he’d be showing up when everybody else was already down in the hole.

  His assignment in Stone Creek would quickly become irrelevant if he got fired from the mining crew before he’d found out if there was a strike in the works or not, and taken the necessary steps to avert it.

  Helga glared at him in parting—that was more attention than Lydia had spared him—and trundled along that lane like an overloaded hay wagon on a downhill slope, turning once to call back to Gideon, “Stubborn! That’s what you are, Mr. Yarbro—stubborn!”

  He kept his arms folded, tapped one foot.

  He’d been called worse things than stubborn in his time.

  After what seemed like the passing of a season, instead of just a few minutes, the females were all inside Rowdy’s house.

  Gideon didn’t exactly run to the mine, but his strides were long.

  “’Tis lucky you are, young Yarbro,” Mike informed him, when he set aside his lunch pail and grabbed a shovel. “Wilson’s ailin’ today—somethin’ about his nose—and kept to his bunk this mornin’. If he was around, you’d be headin’ right back down the road, with what little pay you have comin’ and all the free time a man could want.”

  Gideon began shoveling ore into a waiting cart. “You know, O’Hanlon,” he said, “I don’t feel all that lucky.”

  Mike gave a snort at that. “Wife trouble,” he diagnosed. “I’d know that look anywhere.”

  “What look?” Gideon snapped.

  “Peckish,” Mike said, leaning on the handle of his own shovel. “Tight around the mouth, and hollow-eyed, too. The little woman has turned you out of the marriage bed, hasn’t she?”

  Gideon heaved a double-load of ore into the cart. “O’Hanlon?”

  “Aye?”

  “Shut up.”

  Mike laughed at that, a great, b
ooming shout of a laugh, loud enough to bring the support beams down on all their heads. When he’d regained his composure, he proceeded to dispense advice. “What you do, young Yarbro, is you show the little lady who’s boss, and lose no time doing it, or she’ll henpeck you till you bleed.”

  Gideon rolled his eyes, but kept working.

  “It worked with my Mary,” Mike said, joining Gideon at the ore pile and keeping up with him easily. “You go straight to Paddy’s after the shift ends today, and you don’t turn up at home until you’re sure she’s good and sorry for treatin’ you poorly.”

  “Sorry,” Gideon said, tight-jawed and shoveling faster. “I don’t happen to have another twenty-dollar gold piece in my boot, Mike.”

  “Well, we’re not goin’ to Paddy’s to drink, are we?” Mike countered, swelling with pretended indignation.

  “Why else would you go there?” Gideon retorted, sweating. He was starting to get used to the hard physical labor, but he still ached all over.

  Mike paused in his work, stepped closer, and lowered his voice. “Because there’s a meeting,” he said. “In the back room.”

  Gideon stopped, rammed the head of his shovel into the pile of raw copper. “What kind of meeting?” he asked, with suitable impatience. In truth, his heart was beating a little faster, and not because he’d been chucking ore into a mine cart at twice his usual pace.

  This might be the chance he’d been waiting for.

  “If you want to know,” Mike said, every trace of his formerly jovial manner gone, “you’ll just have to join the rest of us at Paddy’s after the whistle blows, now won’t you?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LYDIA MET WITH GOOD NEWS when she entered the Yarbro house that morning, having taken herself firmly in hand on the doorstep and set aside her annoyance with Gideon—for the time being. Rowdy immediately reported that Lark, though still weak, appeared to be out of danger, and baby Miranda, small as she was, thrived. Considerably reassured, the marshal of Stone Creek returned to his duties, though he promptly sent his deputies, one posted at the front and one at the back, in case Mr. Fitch should return.