The Bridegroom

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Lydia,” he said impatiently, “you’re the one who climbed into a coal chute. Stop trying to make this my fault. You do understand, don’t you, that if Julia hadn’t told Rowdy where to look for you, you could have died before anyone found you?”

  “I would have screamed,” Lydia allowed, with indignation. “Eventually.”

  “That would have done a lot of good,” Gideon argued, “with everyone except Lark out roaming the countryside, trying to find you. And since my sister-in-law is two floors above this cellar, she wouldn’t have heard a thing.”

  “I was just fine,” Lydia said.

  “You would have run out of air sooner or later,” Gideon told her grimly. “Damn it, Lydia, if I were another kind of man and you didn’t have a big gouge in your backside from that splinter, I swear I’d turn you across my knee right now, and blister you.”

  Lydia tried a different tack. After all, men had been known to change from one kind to another in very short order, hadn’t they?

  “Can’t we just forget this?” she asked, forcing a light tone into her voice. “Act as if it never happened and go on from here?”

  “No, Lydia,” Gideon said, “we can’t. I’m taking you home. I’m going to clean that puncture wound of yours, and apply some iodine or salve, if there is any, and leave you in the care of Helga and her stove poker.”

  “I can put salve on myself,” Lydia protested, too proud to ask about the leaving part.

  Gideon took her firmly by one elbow and steered her toward the cellar stairs. “Yet another brilliant idea, Mrs. Yarbro,” he said, sounding quite put out now that she was in no danger of screaming herself hoarse and then smothering. “I wish you’d do me a favor and stop thinking.”

  Lydia balked, not wanting to go upstairs and face everyone. By now, Julia, if not Rowdy, would have regaled the whole household with the tale of Aunt Lydia getting stuck in the coal chute.

  “They’ll laugh,” she protested helplessly.

  Gideon didn’t answer, didn’t even slow down. He simply propelled Lydia up the steps and into the dazzle of daylight filling the kitchen.

  Lydia blinked, briefly blinded.

  Helga came into focus, but she was apparently alone in the room, and she did not seem inclined to laugh.

  “Give us an hour,” Gideon told Helga, hustling Lydia toward the back door, “and then come home and arm yourself with the poker. I’ve got a meeting later, and it’s one I can’t afford to miss.”

  “A meeting?” Lydia asked, as Gideon jerked open the back door, and Helga, frowning at her and shaking her head, did not make the slightest move to prevent Lydia’s forcible removal from the house.

  “It has to do with my job,” Gideon explained, his tone uncharitable in the extreme. “If I still have one, that is.”

  He made no attempt to avoid the busiest part of town as they headed for home, even though there were surely alternate routes they could have taken. He hustled Lydia up the driveway, around the side of the jailhouse, and right out onto Main Street.

  Her clothes were rumpled and dusty.

  Her hair was tumbling from its pins.

  “What will people think?” Lydia whispered, more to herself than to Gideon.

  “I don’t give a damn what they think,” Gideon growled, and walked faster, his strides gobbling up the ground, dragging her right along with him.

  It seemed an eternity before they reached their own house, and by that time, Lydia had been subjected to numerous speculative stares and, from the men they’d passed, a few snickers to boot.

  Having thus made a public spectacle of her, Gideon fairly thrust her over the threshold and into the quiet kitchen.

  “Why are you acting like this?” Lydia demanded.

  “Because,” Gideon said, after a private but visible struggle of some kind, “you could have smothered in that chute. Because one of Rowdy’s deputies came to the mine to tell me you’d slipped out of the house somehow and nobody could find you and I was sure Fitch had managed to get hold of you, and that scared the hell out of me, Lydia. Because, for the second day in a row, I had to leave the mine on your account.”

  Before he could offer any more becauses, Lydia pulled free of his hold on her arm.

  He immediately took it back again. Squired her up the rear staircase, along the hallway, and into the bathroom. Only then did he release her, and she stood there with her figurative feathers ruffled and quite at a loss for words.

  “Take off your clothes.” Gideon gave the command in an offhand tone, busy pilfering the cabinet as he spoke. He found a dusty bottle of iodine and turned to see Lydia still fully dressed.

  Raised his eyebrows.

  “I’ll attend to my—wound myself,” she said.

  Exasperated, Gideon shook his head, set the iodine aside on the sink, sat down on the lid of the commode, and unceremoniously hauled Lydia stomach-down across his thighs.

  Incensed, she struggled mightily, but he held her with ease, with his left arm hooked around her waist. With his free hand, he threw her skirts up, jerked down her bloomers, and examined the splinter puncture again, prodding gently with his fingers.

  “Hold still,” he said gruffly, when she continued to squirm.

  Lydia hoped her bottom wasn’t blushing, like the rest of her. “Gideon,” she protested miserably, though she’d stopped trying to get away from him, having found that impossible.

  “This is going to sting a little,” he warned, referring to the iodine, she hoped, and not some instantaneous change in his character that would enable him to “blister” her.

  When he applied the medicine, the burning sensation was terrible, and Lydia flinched and gave a howl.

  Gideon patted her bare posterior, stood her on her feet, and rose to his full height. Without another word, and whistling under his breath as though determined to make bad matters worse by mocking her, he walked out of the bathroom and left Lydia to recover her dignity as best she could.

  She righted her bloomers first.

  Then she turned on the cold water tap and splashed her face with water until some of the burning had subsided.

  Retreat would have been the better course, but, as with the coal-chute incident, Lydia found herself advancing instead.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  GIDEON WAS DOWNSTAIRS in the kitchen, when Lydia descended from the second floor. And he wasn’t whistling anymore.

  No, he was pacing, impatiently waiting for Helga to return, so he could finish his shift at the mine and then attend the mysterious meeting he’d mentioned earlier, when they were still in Lark and Rowdy’s cellar.

  Having proven to her satisfaction that a display of temper would get her nowhere with this man, Lydia decided to follow her own ill-received suggestion and pretend that nothing had happened.

  Knowing that Rowdy and Wyatt consumed copious amounts of coffee, she assumed that Gideon did, too, and set about rinsing out the blue enamel pot, lighting the fire in the wood cookstove, and brewing up a batch.

  The action was not conciliatory, but if Gideon wanted to interpret it that way, she would not disabuse him of the notion.

  “Will you be out late tonight?” she asked casually. “At this—meeting?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gideon’s face harden slightly. “Yes,” he said flatly. “I will be out late, Lydia.”

  She stiffened at his tone, set the coffeepot down on the iron stove top with a little clang. “I see.”

  “What’s keeping Helga?” Gideon fretted.

  “You told her to come back in an hour,” Lydia replied coolly. “It hasn’t been that long.”

  “So I did,” Gideon said, with a note of something new in his voice—new and unsettlingly mischievous. “So I did.”

  A wicked little thrill, wholly out of keeping with present circumstances, tingled through Lydia’s system and then gathered in one particularly private place. “But she could return sooner, of course,” she hastened to say.

  “I
’ve been neglecting you,” Gideon said.

  In that moment, the whole kitchen seemed as hot as the inside of the cookstove, at least to Lydia. She couldn’t trust herself to speak—as furious with Gideon Yarbro as she was, she might have said something wanton.

  He stepped up behind her then, drew her back against him.

  She felt his manhood against her lower spine, searing through her clothes like a length of steel pipe, fresh from a blazing furnace. And she trembled with need and hope and pure fury.

  He kissed her right shoulder, brought one of his hands around to cup her breast, rousing the nipple to press hard against the bodice of her dress.

  “Gideon,” she whimpered, hopeless. She knew only too well what would happen next: he would pleasure her into near madness, and then leave her wanting.

  He drew her back from the stove, and she felt her skirts and petticoats rising.

  “Not here,” she gasped, already breathless, already lost. “Gideon, not in the kitchen—”

  His chuckle vibrated through her as he nibbled at the nape of her neck. “Right here,” he murmured. “In the kitchen.”

  His right hand was inside her bloomers now, resting splay-fingered against her bare abdomen.

  Lydia groaned, leaned back against him, the way she might have sagged against a brick wall, even as ordinary horse sense demanded that she make him stop, immediately.

  She tried, though not very hard. “Let’s at least—go upstairs—”

  Gideon’s fingers eased lower. He tasted her left ear. “We have an hour,” he reminded her, his voice low and husky.

  He parted her, began the slow, rhythmic circles he knew would drive her insane.

  A low cry of rising need escaped her.

  Gideon murmured into her ear, between nibbles, soothing her even as he increased the pressure of his fingers.

  Unable to help herself, Lydia set her feet apart, arched her hips against Gideon’s hand, half hated him when he gave a gruff chuckle at her ready surrender.

  “That’s it,” he said.

  Her knees melted, her head went back, pressing into Gideon’s shoulder, and her breathing was quick and shallow.

  Gideon supported her with his left arm, continued to pluck and ply and caress. His manhood was so big, so hot, and so hard, that Lydia dared to hope that this time, he wouldn’t be able to contain his desire. This time, he would have her, and damn the consequences.

  The inexorable climb began; Lydia flexed against her husband, caught in the first wickedly delicious throes of what promised to be a shattering release of all her pent-up energies and emotions.

  When the eruption came, long, frantic minutes later, Lydia shouted at the force of it, and moved wildly against Gideon’s hand, and, like the previous times, he did not cease his ministrations until she was totally satiated and yet still convulsing, every few moments, with the inevitable aftershocks.

  He might have taken her then—she actually felt the struggle to resist her raging inside him, resting against him as she was—but for the creak of the hinges on the side gate and the sound of Helga’s voice, commandeering the aunts up the walk toward the back door.

  “Damn it,” Gideon muttered. Then he withdrew his hand from Lydia’s bloomers, letting her skirts fall back into place, and eased her quickly into a chair.

  Lydia, dazed and still rocking at her core, did not know whether to be grateful to Helga for coming back before she was expected, or to be furious with her.

  “You would have taken me,” she said sorrowfully. Had that happened, Gideon wouldn’t have been able to leave her—his honor wouldn’t have allowed it. The chance was lost—until next time.

  “Yes,” Gideon said, sounding grim, “I would have taken you, God help me.” Moving to stand at the sink, with his back to the room, probably to prevent Helga and the aunts from seeing the bulge at the front of his trousers and guessing what had been going on in the kitchen, he lowered his head and breathed slowly and very deeply.

  Lydia closed her eyes, hoped she wasn’t too flushed.

  The door opened, and Helga herded the aunts inside.

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Oh, dear,” Helga said.

  Lydia’s face flamed.

  Gideon muttered something and dashed out without a word, bent on returning to the mine.

  “Are you coming down with a fever, dear?” Mittie asked, laying a cool and papery hand to Lydia’s forehead.

  “She certainly doesn’t look well,” Millie agreed fretfully.

  “Perhaps,” Mittie theorized, “it was delirium that made her try to climb up the Yarbros’ coal chute. From the fever, you know.”

  Helga gave a mild snort. “Perhaps,” she said, entirely for Lydia’s benefit, surely, though she was addressing the aunts, “we should have stopped by the mercantile for a little while, to look at yard goods, the way you wanted.”

  “I think Lydia ought to lie down,” Mittie persisted.

  “Oh,” Helga agreed, “she should lie down all right.”

  Lydia opened her eyes at last, threw the housekeeper a peevish glance. “That,” she said, “will be quite enough, Helga.”

  Helga chuckled, shook her head once, and then clucked her tongue. “What would you like for lunch, Mrs. Yarbro?” she asked, every bit as cheeky as before. “You must be hungry, after the morning you’ve had.”

  Lydia narrowed her eyes. “I’ll thank you,” she countered, “never to mention the events of this morning again.”

  Unruffled, Helga set aside her handbag, and her calico bonnet, and took her apron down off its peg. Her expression, as she began assembling things for the midday meal, was downright saucy.

  The aunts, blissfully unaware of the charge still pulsing in the air, decided to freshen up, and vanished into their room.

  Helga hummed a little tune as she worked.

  Lydia waited, in silence, until her legs felt solid enough to support her.

  Then she left the kitchen, with as much dignity as she could summon, to find her watercolors and her painting tablet. Upstairs, after filling a glass with water at the bathroom sink, she settled at the desk by the window overlooking the front yard and the street beyond, and dampened her brush.

  By the time Helga called her to the table for lunch, sometime later, Lydia had a rather good likeness of Gideon well under way. It showed just his head and shoulders, since presently she did not wish to consider the rest of his anatomy.

  With his face slightly averted, the painted Gideon looked pensive, almost wistful, and he was gazing off into a distance that seemed to call to him.

  THE MAN SITTING IN THE CHAIR facing Jacob Fitch’s desk at the First Territorial Bank was not of the ilk generally permitted into this most private sanctuary. He bore a long and ragged scar on his lean right cheek, his dark hair hung in stringy, unwashed hanks, and some noxious substance—probably tobacco juice—had hardened in his handlebar mustache. His odd, colorless eyes resembled nothing so much as water, frozen into puddles, and his gaze was level.

  “What can you tell me about Gideon Yarbro, Mr. Bailey?” Jacob finally asked, though it galled him to address the fellow as though he were a gentleman. He wanted the interview over, the task undertaken and promptly completed.

  Bailey took his time answering. Jacob had engaged him soon after his ignoble return from Stone Creek the day before—without Lydia—to dig up whatever information he could, concerning Yarbro’s past.

  The man had to have skeletons in his closet—everyone did.

  “I haven’t had much time,” Bailey said, at last. He reminded Jacob of some sharp-beaked scavenger bird, waiting for the last gasp of a dying creature so he could peck and pull at the carrion. “But I do know that his family name has some luster to it. Have you ever heard of Payton Yarbro, Mr. Fitch?”

  Jacob frowned, searching his memory. Payton Yarbro. It did sound familiar, though only vaguely. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Possibly.”

  For the first time, Bailey smiled, but it did
nothing to warm his eyes, and the show of rotten teeth was unsettling. “Payton Yarbro,” he explained, slowly and with insulting patience, “was the best hand for robbing a train since Jesse and Frank James. His sons rode with him in the early days, and two of them—a pair of identical twins—were still looting vaults and cash boxes until a few years ago. Rumor is, they’re down in Mexico or South America now, spending the proceeds on señoritas.”

  Jacob waved a dismissive hand. “It’s Gideon I’m interested in, not the history of the Yarbro clan.”

  Bailey’s gaze instantly chilled; Jacob felt the drop in temperature from across the wide, gleaming expanse of his mahogany desk, a Fitch heirloom, and wished he’d spoken more prudently. His dealings with Thaddeus Bailey had not been extensive as of yet, but he’d gathered enough to know he’d be safer prodding a coiled rattlesnake with a short stick.

  “I’ve sent some telegrams,” Bailey said. “No answers yet. Investigations take time, Mr. Fitch. Time and money.”

  Jacob leaned back in his chair, tented his hands and braced them under his chin, wanting to seem at ease. He could only imagine what his mother would say if she knew he’d deliberately courted this sorry specimen of humanity, but of course she never would. Jacob would make damn sure of that.

  “Money,” he repeated, musingly. “I gave you a fair amount last night, Mr. Bailey, when you agreed to undertake this…investigation.”

  Bailey leaned forward slightly. “It’s my understanding, Mr. Fitch, that you want Gideon Yarbro dealt with. What we need to be clear on is whether ‘dealt with’ means digging up a scandal or two, breaking some of his bones or something…more permanent.”

  Jacob’s starched white shirt grew damp between his shoulder blades, and his heart kicked over a beat or two before resuming a steady rate. He began to itch everywhere, as though he’d broken out in hives, but he didn’t scratch. He couldn’t afford to show any sort of weakness. “That depends,” he said, at considerable length.

  “On what?” Bailey asked mildly.

  “On whether or not the authorities would come knocking on my door, should Yarbro meet with some sudden and tragic misfortune. I have a reputation to protect. Everything depends on the confidence the public places in me.”