Dorothy Garlock - [Wyoming Frontier]

 

 

WARNER BOOKS EDITION

Copyright © 1989 by Dorothy Garlock

All rights reserved.

Cover illustration by Sharon Spiak

Warner Books, Inc.

Hachette Book Group,

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ISBN: 978-0-7595-2297-8

First eBook edition: April 2001

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“I don’t want to go back to that lonely bed downstairs. I want to sleep with you in my arms every night for the rest of my life.”

“You just want to hold me?” Mara asked.

“Hold you, kiss you, make you mine forever.”

“But . . . I am yours.”

“Not the way I want you to be,” he whispered hoarsely. “I want us to be man and woman in all the ways there are. I want to share my life and dreams with you. If I stay now, there’ll be no going back. It’ll be this way from now on.”

She pressed against him as innocently as any young female animal that responds by instinct to the male. She lifted her face to meet his kiss, her lips parting as his mouth possessed hers. His hand slid down her back, holding her hips more tightly against him. She pressed warm lips to his cheek. “I want you to touch me,” she said.

♠    ♠    ♠

“The rarest of all gifts . . . Dorothy Garlock brings an obvious love and understanding to the men and women whose courage and spirit opened the frontier.”

—“Ann’s World,” Hearst Cablevision

“You’ll find yourself actually there, right in the picture. You can feel the heat of the campfire, you can hear the wagon creaking and the slice and slap of the bullwhip. . . . There’s good reason why Dorothy has been called the ‘Louis L’Amour of the romance novelists.’ ”

—Beverly Hills California Courier

Books by Dorothy Garlock

A
lmost
E
den

A
nnie
L
ash

D
ream
R
iver

F
orever
V
ictoria

A G
entle
G
iving

G
lorious
D
awn

H
omeplace

L
onesome
R
iver

L
ove and
C
herish

L
arkspur

M
idnight
B
lue

N
ightrose

R
estless
W
ind

R
ibbon in the
S
ky

R
iver of
T
omorrow

T
he
S
earching
H
earts

S
ins of
S
ummer

S
weetwater

T
enderness

T
he
L
istening
S
ky

T
his
L
oving
L
and

W
ayward
W
ind

W
ild
S
weet
W
ilderness

W
ind of
P
romise

W
ith
H
ope

Y
esteryear

Published by

WARNER BOOKS

For my grandsons,

Adam and Amos Mix

who give me love and, at times,

a pain in the neck

ONE

“H’yaw! H’yaw! Move, ya bastards! Hightail it, ya dang-busted, mangy, worthless, sonsabitches! Yore lazy meat ain’t fit fer buzzard bait!”

The long, thin leather cracked over the backs of the straining team, and insults spewed from the mouth of the stage driver on the box. He whipped the horses into a full gallop as they raced toward a group of small, weathered buildings nesting amid a grove of aspens. Above the steady sound of wheels and iron-shod hooves, a stream of profanity came from the man wielding the whip.

“He always does that.” The traveling salesman with the side whiskers slapped his chubby palms on his knees and smiled at the young woman facing him on the opposite seat.

“Why?” she asked with a questioning lift of her brows.

“I think it’s called making an entrance. Sometimes passengers are waiting to go to Cheyenne. You should hear him when he gets to Cheyenne. He puts on such a show that everyone in town comes out to see the stage come in.” He made an airy gesture toward the window, but his admiring glance stayed on the girl’s face.

She merely regarded him, not answering; then, deliberately, she turned her head and gave her attention to the ramshackle buildings they were approaching.

“Do you live near here, miss?”

The question got the drummer no more than a cold stare from emerald green eyes; but, for whatever the reason, it was by now all he had come to expect. He could count on one hand the number of words she had spoken since he had boarded the stage at the mid-morning stop. She wasn’t the type of woman who usually traveled alone. He looked her over, a deliberate inspection that she chose to ignore.

She was pretty—kind of, the drummer decided. Of course, he was comparing her to the painted women who served the spirits he sold to the saloon owners. She was much too prim for his taste, but he had to admit there was something about her that brought out the protective nature in a man. She sat as straight on the seat as if she were sitting in a church pew. At the last stop, when she had gotten out of the coach for a few minutes, he noticed that she was of medium height for a woman and had a small waist, generous breasts, and rounded hips. The drummer had seen the yard man look at them. Behind her back he had held out his hands, palms up, and had drawn up his fingers while giving the drummer a knowing, wolfish grin.

No, she was not beautiful, but she had something more than beauty. The fat man watched as a worried frown drew her dark brows closer together. She brushed the hair back from her face before she straightened the straw hat on her head and jabbed the hatpin in place to hold it there. Damp from the humidity, her thick dark auburn hair curled and escaped in springy tendrils from the pins that held it coiled to the back of her head. She mopped her face, looked with disgust at the dirt left on the wisp of white handkerchief, tucked it into her sleeve at her wrist, and pulled on her soft white gloves that showed a slight soil on the fingertips.

The drummer concluded that she was fastidious, and not suited to this rough country. Her skin was very white and soft. The heat inside the coach had brought a touch of pink to her cheeks and moisture to her temples, but her emerald green eyes could turn the air frosty, as they had done when he tried to start a conversation. They had shown anger at the profanity used by the driver and laughter when a bird had flown alongside the window of the coach. Since the whiskey salesman considered himself an authority on women, he marveled that this one could be so distant and so seductive at the same time. She had a body made for love! Just looking at her affected him in such a way that he removed his hat and placed it on his lap to hide the sudden bulge that appeared there.

What was this innocent, proper miss doing traveling alone and stopping off at a remote, run-down place like Sheffield Station? She caught him looking at her and lifted her small pointed chin haughtily while pressing her mouth into a line of disapproval at his close scrutiny.

“Shef . . . field Sta . . . tion!”

The driver expressed his displeasure with the team by issuing another stream of obscenities and tramped on his brake. The coach rocked as the split reins curbed the horses to a stand. He swung easily down from his box, opened the door and waited to help the woman take the long step to the ground.

“Ten minutes,” he said curtly to the drummer.

Mara Shannon McCall graciously accepted the driver’s help, then quickly removed her hand. She looked anxiously around. Not a buckboard or a wagon was in sight. A feeling of uneasiness began to close in on her.

The old man bringing up the fresh team gave her the briefest of glances as she stood waiting for the driver to unload her trunks. Her knees shook and her breath locked in her chest. In all her nineteen years she had never seemed so alone. She fought nervousness and tried to settle her breathing. Feeling vulnerable and scared, she slid her hand down the side of her dress to touch the comforting shape of the little pistol in her pocket, and silently thanked her friend, Lars, for insisting that she bring it. No sign of her stress showed on the face she presented to the stage driver when he piled her trunk and carpetbags on the ground at her feet.

“Somebody meetin’ ya, miss?” The driver was a string-bean of a man with straggling whiskers and a tremendous wad of tobacco that seemed permanently lodged in one cheek.

“Oh, yes. They’ll be along.” She turned away, then back to the driver. “I was told the McCall holdings are five miles north of this place.”