Читать книгу The Lawman Takes A Wife - Anne Avery - Страница 11

It was nearing ten when Molly called good-night to the last of her friends. This late, most of the town had settled peaceably behind their doors. Lamps shone through windows, but here and there the houses were dark, their inhabitants long since tucked into bed.

A few people strolled past her—a man alone, head down and hurrying home; two men laughing; a couple, arms entwined, oblivious to anything outside their world of two.

The sight of them only reinforced her sense of isolation.

Four years. That’s how long she’d been a widow.

Sometimes, especially whenever she glanced at the photograph of Richard that hung in her small parlor, it seemed like only yesterday that he’d gone out to work and never come back. There were still times, usually when she was tired and her thoughts had wandered, when she would hear a sound and look up, expecting to see him walk in the door. And sometimes, in the night, she’d turn in her sleep and reach for him, wanting his warmth and his strength, needing to feel his lean, angular body curled around her, shielding her from the world outside their door.

There were even times when she was wide-awake, without the distraction of wandering thoughts or a weary body, when she would find herself physically aching for his touch and the glory of what they’d shared in bed.

Especially what they’d shared in bed.

She had never been one of those simpering misses who blushed at the mere thought of kissing a man, but she knew, now, that she had been fortunate in her choice of husband, for Richard had been kind and more than willing to teach her the secrets of what was possible between a man and a woman who loved each other. She’d never asked him where he’d learned his secrets, and he had never told her. She’d never thought it mattered, for once he’d married her, he had given everything to her—his heart and soul; his dreams. Eventually, even his life.

It was his dying that made her angry. He had gone into the mines because he wanted to earn more money to pay off the debt they’d incurred to start the store and a little extra to put aside for the future. Richard had always been impatient, eager to move ahead, and he’d seen the mines as the fastest way to get what he’d wanted. They’d quarreled about it horribly.

She regretted the quarrels. She regretted even more that, in the end, she’d been proven right.

Immediately after Richard’s death, when creditors were pressing her to close the store and sell off the inventory, she’d spent long, sleepless nights scheming how to save Richard’s dream and her children’s future.

Calhan’s would be different from all the other dry goods stores, she’d decided. Better. Bigger, someday, when she could manage it.

Richard hadn’t been buried a week before she began changing things. At first, the changes were more for distraction from her grief than for the work itself. Eventually, however, the new ways had taken on a life of their own, challenging her and helping to make the long hours and sometimes exhausting routine more bearable.

She’d started with a few eye-catching displays on the counters and tabletops. Gradually, as her confidence in herself and her ideas had grown, she’d ordered more merchandise that her competitors didn’t carry and tried more adventurous approaches to displaying what she had.

The man mannequin had been the talk of the town. People had wandered in just to have a look at the thing, and often as not they’d wandered out again with something else they hadn’t planned on buying. She’d paid for it in three months with the profits from the extra sales.

What she had realized, and none of her male competitors had yet understood, was that women were the ones who controlled the money in most households, not the men.

Oh, men were quick enough to buy tools and hardware and an occasional pouch of tobacco—they were, she’d found, particularly fond of fancy patent tools—but they were generally happy to pass responsibility for everything else to their wives. Women bought the family’s food and shoes, chose their clothes or the cloth to make them, and decided which medicines and tonics to stock to keep them well. It was the women who selected the furniture and decorated the home, then bought all the supplies to keep that home swept and polished and functioning as it ought.

It was an insight that had changed her life because once a woman was in her store, Molly knew how to hold her attention long enough to tempt her to open her pocketbook.

She hadn’t looked back since.

Sometimes she thought she didn’t dare. Though four years of hard work had paid off the debts and allowed her to put a little money aside, she couldn’t help worrying about the future. She still needed an occasional loan to finance her expansion. Was, in fact, considering her largest loan yet for a move that would increase the size of Calhan’s by half again. But what if the state was hit with another panic like the one in ’93, when the price of silver plummeted and nobody had any money for anything, even sometimes the essentials? What if the coal ran out and the mines had to close? What if something happened to her?

What if, what if, what if. There were so many things that could go wrong and so little she could do to stop them if they did. And, oh! how much easier it would be if only there was someone to share the worries and responsibilities with her, someone on whom she could depend, no matter what.

Molly drew her shawl closer about her shoulders, shivering a little in the cool night air. She didn’t usually waste time thinking about such things, but tonight, somehow, she couldn’t stop.

When she reached Main Street, rather than crossing it as she usually did, then walking down Elm Street to get home, she turned to the right. She’d pass the store on the way.

And the jail, a small voice inside her said.

She stifled the voice and kept walking.

This time of night, even Main Street was quiet, the buildings dark except at either end of the street where Elk City’s three saloons were lighted and open for business.

A burst of masculine laughter coming from somewhere ahead of her made her stop. When the jail door opened, spilling the faint light of an oil lamp across the walk, she muttered a word she would have washed Dickie’s mouth out for using and shrank into the shadowed doorway of Dincler’s Barbershop.

A moment later, half a dozen men stepped out, laughing and joking among themselves. They clumped off the boardwalk and into the street, clustered like reluctant partygoers leaving the fun.

“You take good care of your guest, now, Sheriff, you hear?” one of the men called.

“Don’t let his snoring keep you up!”

The attempt at humor brought more laughter from the men, but not a word from the sheriff. He stood, a silent presence in the faint wash of lamplight, watching them, neither friendly nor distant. Simply…there.

The laughter died. A couple of the men shuffled their feet.

“You did good, Gavin,” someone said at last. “Just want you to know that. You did good.”

The others murmured agreement. They would, she knew, have been more comfortable if the sheriff had laughed or joked right back at them, or made one of those vulgar comments men were prone to when they thought ladies weren’t present.

One among them broke the spell by clapping a companion on the back.

“Come on, boys. The night’s still young. Wouldn’t want to upset the missus by comin’ home too soon, now, would we?”

To Molly’s relief, they headed away from her, down toward the other end of town and the two saloons whose lights shone in the distance. She hadn’t worried that any of them would bother her if they did discover her huddling in the shadows, but men were as gossipy as women, no matter how much they denied it. The last thing she needed was word going round that she’d been hiding in the shadows outside the jail at an hour when a sensible woman would have been home and in bed.

To her dismay, the sheriff lingered in the open doorway.

He propped his shoulder against the frame, crossed his arms over his chest, and tilted his head to stare at the star-swept sky. The light behind him outlined the broad shoulders, deep chest and long, powerful legs, but left his face in shadow.

Why didn’t he just go in?

Why didn’t she just walk past? a mocking little voice inside her head demanded. A polite nod, a friendly greeting. Good evening, maybe. Or maybe just, Sheriff. And he’d say, Ma’am, or, Evening, and that would be it.

And if he did say something, she’d just explain that she’d been startled by the men suddenly emerging onto the street, which would be true. He’d nod, and maybe he’d apologize for having startled her, and then she’d say she had to get home, and he’d say, Of course, and maybe, Good night, and then maybe he’d go in and shut the door and forget all about it. Forget all about her.

Her stomach twisted, just at the thought.

Molly peeped out of her hiding place. The man hadn’t moved an inch.

He made a compelling figure standing there, his big, powerful body cast half in golden lamplight, half in shadow. She still couldn’t see his face, but she remembered with disconcerting clarity the strong lines of cheek and jaw, the piercing clarity of those blue-gray eyes that seemed to take in everything at a glance.

From the look of him, he might have been a thousand miles away.

Was he thinking of his wife? she wondered. Or of another woman, perhaps? A woman he’d loved so much that his wife had chosen to divorce him rather than live with the constant reminder that he had set another before her?

It had to have been another woman. She’d scarcely met the man, but she couldn’t imagine anything else he might have done that would have driven a woman to the scandal of divorcing him.

Yet if he’d loved another, why hadn’t he remarried the instant he was free of his first marriage?

Whatever it was that haunted him, he evidently found no solace in those cold, distant stars for he straightened suddenly and, without a glance to either side, turned and stepped into the building. An instant later, the door clapped shut behind him, throwing the street back into darkness.

Molly sank into her own shadows, heart pounding, fighting against a sudden urge to knock on the door and ask if she could help, if there weren’t something she could do to fill his yearning silence.

The thought was utter madness.

She forced herself to wait a minute, then two, to be sure he wouldn’t return. When she could stand the wait no longer, she tugged her shawl more closely about her and hurried across the street, turned toward home and walked as fast as her feet could carry her.

Witt picked up the oil lamp he’d left on his desk and carried it back to the single, windowless cell that served as Elk City’s jail. His first guest was a great deal too large for the lumpy, metal-framed bed. Crazy Mike’s big feet, still clad in their heavy miner’s boots—no one had been the least inclined to make him more comfortable by removing them—stuck out over the end by a good eight inches. His head was propped at the other end with only the single thin pillow to cushion the steel frame.

He looked like hell, but his broken nose had stopped bleeding long ago. One of his friends, an unprepossessing gentleman rejoicing in the name of Gimpy Joe, had washed off the worst of the blood, but that was as far as anyone had been willing to go.

Mike hadn’t roused to any of it. Having at last yielded to the influence of all the whiskey he’d consumed at Jackson’s, he’d gone from a faint to a dead sleep from which the angels would have a hard time rousing him before he’d slept it off.

Witt made sure the cell’s chamber pot was within Mike’s reach if he did wake up, checked the lock on the cell door one last time, then retreated to his own small room beside the cell. The only real differences between the two spaces were that the walls of his room were painted wood, not raw metal bars, and he had a window and a door that wasn’t anywhere near thick enough to shut out the sound of Mike’s snoring.

Eventually, he’d have to find a proper place to live, but for right now, this would serve. So long as he didn’t end up with too many guests like Crazy Mike, that is.

Slowly, he undressed. Hat, vest, gun belt he hung from nails driven into the wall beside the bed. His boots, side by side, claimed the floor at the foot. With every movement, the soft rustle of the paper bag in his shirt pocket reminded him that there were other things in life besides barren rooms and drunken miners.

Slowly, he pulled the small bag of chocolates out, then set it on the rickety table beside his bed. In the lamplight, he could see the stains where the oil of the chocolate had seeped through the paper.

He’d already eaten three of them, and with every slight rustle of the paper, with ever sweet bite of the chocolate, he’d found himself thinking of Mrs. Calhan.

She’d laughed at him, there in the store. He’d felt it, even though she’d clearly taken pains to cover her amusement beneath that sweet, friendly smile of hers.

The thought made him droop. He did that to women, made them laugh. A big man like him, clumsy and hulking and likely as not to get his tongue tangled around every other word, at least when pretty women like Mrs. Calhan were around. He’d often wondered why Clara had married him, knowing how she liked everything around her to be just so. But, then, they’d grown up together and she hadn’t had much to choose from, so maybe he’d just been the best of a bad lot.

The thought never brought much comfort, but it was better than admitting she had used him until she had a better offer, then discarded him as easily as she’d have tossed out an old shoe.

Strange how he never felt a fool when he was with men. Not that he’d ever been what you could call talkative, but at least he didn’t mumble and stumble, and God forbid, turn red at every other word. Not when he was with men.

And not when he was around children, either. He liked children and he usually found, once they’d gotten over their dismay at his sheer size, that they liked him and were comfortable around him. Kids never expected much of a man except that he be a man. But a woman, now…

Witt frowned, then picked up the bag of chocolates, turning it in his hands, remembering.

Women like Clara—pretty, marriageable women—seemed to think a man should have a tongue that worked slick as silk and always had just the right words on the tip of it. His tongue had never worked that way and he didn’t expect it ever would.

He knew he’d made a fool of himself in Calhan’s this afternoon.

He’d been staring at Mrs. Calhan and thinking how smooth her skin looked, and how pretty her hair was—brown like a thrush’s wing, with a dozen colors all mixed in so subtly that you couldn’t really say it was brown, but you couldn’t say exactly what it was, either. Maybe if he saw it in the sun, free of that neat little twist she kept it in—

Witt bit his lower lip, cutting off the thought, and gently set the bag of chocolates back.

The thought of that drift of hair on her cheek and nape had plagued him something fierce. Even as he’d gone about his business, introducing himself to the businessfolk up and down Main Street and getting the lay of the land, he’d been thinking about those wayward strands of hair and how soft they’d feel, brushing against his fingers.

The thought of Gordon Hancock’s fingers sifting through her unbound hair had been enough to make him grind his teeth.

But there was no sense thinking thoughts like that. It wasn’t right, and all it would do would be to lead him into trouble.