The Gunman's Bride (2 page)

“I swear my heart is about to pound right out of my chest! I could barely hold my tongue after what you told me, Laurie. You think you were married to the outlaw?”

“Etta, please,” Rosie pleaded, trying to still her own heartbeat. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s all in the past.”

“Oh, Laurie, how can you just up and say you were married to a murderous outlaw and then not tell the story to me—your very best friend in all the world?”

“I wasn’t married to an outlaw, Etta. The Bart Kingsley I knew in Kansas City was no killer. He was a boy. Seventeen. And I was only fifteen. It happened a long time ago.”

“You got married when you were fifteen years old?” Etta’s blue eyes sparkled as bright pink spots lit up her cheeks. Her hair had escaped its roll to form a wildly frizzy blond spray across her forehead.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Rosie repeated. She felt hot, miserable and suddenly close to tears as a flood of memories washed through her. All she had ever wanted was to teach children. How she loved little ones with their wide eyes and fertile minds! She longed to open those minds and pour in knowledge that would create successful, happy adults who could change the world into a better place.

But schoolteachers were working women, Pappy always said, and far beneath her social rank. She would never be allowed to stand in a classroom, he informed her, with chalky fingers and eyes tired from reading late by candlelight. No, she was to marry—marry someone well situated—and forget her schoolmarm notions.

Then Bart Kingsley came along.

“Laurie, please tell me,” Etta begged.

“It’s not romantic like you think. It was all a mistake.”

“Was he cruel? Did you know he was going to become a killer?”

“Of course not. In fact…I couldn’t have known the Bart Kingsley they’re hunting. At least…I don’t think it could be the same man.”

“But it
might
be,” Etta stressed. “Remember how scared you were when you first heard his name—same as yours.”

With a sigh Rosie smoothed down her black cotton skirt. Right now she wanted nothing more than to untie her soiled white apron, slip off her stockings and soak her sore feet in a basin of water. She didn’t want to think about the past. She didn’t want to remember Bart Kingsley.

“He was handsome,” she murmured, unable to look at Etta. “My Bart Kingsley had green eyes…strange green eyes with threads of gold. And straight hair, black as midnight. He was skinny—rail thin—but strong. Oh, my Bart was
so
strong. He was kind, too. Always soft-spoken and polite to everyone. He loved animals. Stray dogs and cats followed him around the farm. When he sat down to rest, there’d be one cat on his shoulder and another on his lap.”

“He worked on your father’s farm?”

“In the stables. He was wonderful with horses. He broke and trained them with such gentleness. It was like magic the way they obeyed him. And you should have seen my Bart ride.”

“What do you suppose turned him into a cattle rustler and a murderer?”

“It couldn’t be the same man,” Laura Rose retorted. “The Bart Kingsley I married never hurt anybody. He wouldn’t even say a harsh word if someone was cruel to him.”

“If he was so kind, why would anyone be cruel to him?”

“The other farmhands taunted him because…well, because he was part Indian. His father was an Apache.”

“Apache!” Etta cried. “The sheriff just told us that outlaw they’re hunting for goes by the name of Injun Jack. I’ll bet it’s him, Laurie. How many men could fit that description?”

“A lot,” she shot back with more defiance than she felt.

“So you married him when you were fifteen. Did you actually keep house together?”

“No, of course not. We weren’t even…we didn’t sleep together like married people. We were just children really—children with such beautiful hopes and dreams.”

“I don’t see how you could bring yourself to marry a savage even if he was nice to you,” Etta rattled on.

“Did you get a…a
divorce?
Harvey Girls aren’t supposed to be married—it’s against regulations. You could be fired.”

“We were married two weeks before my father found out,” Rosie explained. “He was furious. The two of them had a long talk, and Bart left the farm that afternoon.”

“He
left
you? Just like that?”

“There was a note.” Her voice grew thin and wistful
as she thought of the special place in the woods where they had first kissed each other. The place where she had found the note. “Bart wrote that he realized the marriage had been a mistake. He said we were too young to know what we were doing, and he’d begun to realize it right away after we got married. He said…he said he didn’t really love me after all, and I should forget about him. I was to consider that nothing had ever happened between us.”

“Nothing?”

Rosie focused on her friend. “
Nothing.
So there…I wasn’t really married to him at all. Not in the Bible way. Our marriage didn’t count. And that’s the end of the story, so if you’d please just leave me alone now, Etta, I want to go to bed. I have the early shift tomorrow.”

“You’ve got that blister, too,” Etta added, her voice sympathetic as she gave her friend a quick hug.

Pulling out of the embrace, Rosie stood and smoothed the rumples in the pink quilt on her bed. There were probably lots of Bart Kingsleys in the world. Besides, she was about as far as she could be from Kansas City and the life she had shared with him. No one was going to find her in Raton, New Mexico. Not her pappy. Not the man who had been her fiancé for the past two years. And certainly not Bart Kingsley.

“Lock up now, Laurie,” Etta said from the doorway.

“I’ve put your shoes out in the hall. You’ll see how much better everything will be in the morning.”

Under the bed, Bart watched as Rosie bolted her door and set a chair under the knob. He knew she was afraid. But afraid of Bart, the murdering outlaw? Or afraid of
him,
the Bart who had married her and then had run off and left her high and dry?

It wasn’t going to matter much either way if he up and died right under her bed. He needed to slide out from under this bed, wash his wound with some clean water and try to take a look at the damage. He needed ointment and bandages. He needed water. His mouth felt like the inside of an old shoe.

But he couldn’t risk scaring Rosie by edging out into the open. She’d holler, her friends would come running and that would be that. The sheriff would cart him off to jail, the Pinkerton agent would haul him back to Missouri and the law would hang him high. A half-breed Indian who had robbed trains and banks with Jesse James wouldn’t stand a chance in court.

Bart swallowed against the bitter gall of memory as he recalled the years he’d squandered. And now, after all this time, he’d found his Rosie again. She had been the one bright spot in his life, and once again she was his only hope.

He studied her feet as she peeled away her stockings. There had been a time when she would let him hold those feet, rub away their tiredness, kiss each tender pink toe. Her black dress puddled to the floor and a soft white ruffle-hemmed gown took its place, skimming over her pretty ankles.

She began to hum, and Bart worked his shoulders across the hard floor in hope of a better look. The thought of dying this close to his Rosie without ever really seeing her face again sent an ache through him. He tilted his head so the pink quilt covered just one eye and left the other exposed.

Her back turned to him, she sat on a chair, let down her hair and began to pull a brush from the dark chocolate roots to the sun-lightened cascade that fell past her waist and over her hips. “Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty,” she counted in a soft voice.

She swung the mass of hair across her shoulders and began to brush the other side. “Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three…”

She had put her feet into a basin of water while she worked on her hair, and Bart could see those bare ankles again. He shut his eyes, swallowing the lump that rose in his throat at the memory of the first time he’d caught a glimpse of Rosie’s feet.

They had been down at the swimming hole where he and his stepbrothers liked to fool around. But this was a chilly autumn afternoon, and Bart’s stepbrothers were nowhere in sight. Rosie had agreed to meet him at the swimming hole, and he’d been waiting for her like a horse champing at the bit.

When she finally came, she was full of silliness and laughter, her head tilted back and her brown eyes shining at him with all the love in the world. She had dropped down onto the grassy bank, unlaced her boots and taken off her stockings. Then, while he held his breath, she had lifted the hem of her skirt and waded right into the icy pool.

Hoo-ee, how he had stared at those pale curvy legs and those thin little ankles. She hadn’t known, of course, what havoc her childlike impulse wreaked in his heart. His prim, sweet Rosie was the essence of innocence.

Under the bed, Bart suppressed the urge to chuckle at the memory of her sauntering back onto the bank,
pulling up her stockings and lacing her boots—annoyed that he had not joined her in the water, and unaware of the reasons why he couldn’t trust himself.

They had sat together in silence for such a long time that Bart had begun to fear she really was mad at him. So he did the only thing he could think of—he grabbed her, kissed her right on the mouth, and then ran off lickety-split like the devil was after him.

“Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred,” Rosie said now from the chair. She lifted her feet out of the water and dried them with a cotton towel. She checked the bolt on her door and tested the window latch before crossing to the wardrobe. Breathing heavily, she jerked open the door. After a moment she shut it again and let out yet another sigh.

“Dear God,” she said, dropping to her knees beside the bed, “please watch over me tonight. I’m so scared. Don’t let Bart be out there, dear Lord. Please don’t let that horrible killer be
my
Bart.”

She was silent for a long time, and under the bed Bart held his breath. Eyes squeezed shut, he found himself praying along with her, as if he could will away the truth:
Don’t let me be that Bart, dear Lord. Please don’t let me be that killer they’re after.

“Dear God, please help me to like Etta as much as she likes me,” Rosie prayed on. “Give me patience, and please don’t let her blabber the things I told her tonight. Bless Pappy, but don’t let him find me—not until I’ve started teaching school and gotten myself established here in town with a house and enough money so I can keep him from hauling me back to Kansas City. Bless…
bless Dr. Lowell and help him to understand why I never could be a good wife to him.”

Bart’s eyes flew open. Dr. Lowell’s
wife?
But she was married to Bart Kingsley! Could she have married another man, too? Or been engaged to him? She was Rosie—
his
Rosie!

“Forgive me, Father, for my sins. My many sins,” she murmured in a voice so low that Bart could hardly hear it. She sniffled as she spoke, her voice tight with suppressed tears. “And please take care of Bart. Amen.”

The bed creaked as she climbed into it. Lying underneath, Bart heard her sniffling. She hadn’t yet blown out the lamp on her dressing table, and Bart studied her shadow on the opposite wall as she twisted the coverlet in her hands.

He felt sick. Dizzy with loss of blood. And knotted up inside like a tangled vine. Had Rosie promised to marry someone else? Had she actually gone through with it? How long had it been? Why hadn’t his half brother told him?

Some other man had touched his Rosie! How could she have gone and gotten engaged or married to another man when she knew good and well she was already married to him? He had the license to prove it! He wanted to shake it in front of her face and shout,
Why? Why, Rosie?

But she could simply throw his question back. Why, Bart? Why did you run off and leave me? Why is the sheriff hunting for you? Why did you kill and rob and throw in with a gang of outlaws? Why, Bart?

He heard her breathing grow steady, her tossing ease and the bed cease to groan. He touched his side
and found that blood had finally begun to clot over the ragged, burned hole in his skin. He had to get out from under the bed, and soon. He couldn’t go much longer without water.

Should he slip out the window and hope the posse had given up hunting for the night? Should he leave Rosie sleeping, never to know the cause of the bloodstain on her pink hooked rug?

He ran a dry tongue over his lower lip. Quietly, he began to shrug his shoulders across the wood floor and out from under the bed. The pain in his side flared, movement relighting a fire inside his gut. Clenching his teeth, he scooted his hips clear of the iron bed, then dragged his legs out into the open.

The world swung like a bucking bronco as he rose onto his elbows. Dizzy, he shook his head, but the fog refused to roll back. Fighting to keep silent, he rolled up onto his knees. His breath came in hoarse gasps.

There she was! His beautiful Rosie, sleeping like an innocent babe in her bed of pink. She was prettier than ever. Rounded cheekbones, delicate nose, full lips barely parted.

Grabbing his side, he tried to haul himself to his feet. The floor swayed out from under him, the lamplight tilting crazily. He groaned, caught the bed rail, felt the iron frame jolt at his weight. Rosie’s eyes drifted open, focused and jerked wide. She sucked in a breath just as he clamped his hand over her mouth.

“Don’t scream, Rosie,” he croaked as the bed seemed to turn on its side and his feet began to drift on cotton clouds. “Don’t scream, Rosie, Please. It’s me. Bart.”

Her skin and lips melted under his palm as black curtains fell across his vision.

“Bart!” he heard her gasp. Then the curtains wrapped over his head, and his feet floated out from under him. He tumbled like a falling oak tree across his Rosie’s soft body.

F
aster than a cat with its tail afire, Rosie pulled herself out from under the deadweight of the unconscious man. She grabbed the oil lamp from the dressing table across the room and nearly doused its flame as she swung back to the bed to take a closer look.

Clamping a trembling hand over her open mouth to keep from crying out, she studied the intruder. He wore leather boots caked with dried mud. Two six-shooters and an arsenal of cartridges hung on belts at his waist. He lay face down, his nose pressed into a rumple of pink quilt. Every breath he took sounded like a distant train engine as the air struggled in and out of his lungs.

Eyes focused on him, Rosie reached for the pistol Etta had held earlier that evening. The heavy metal felt reassuring, and she hugged it close. Bart, the man had called himself. And he had known her name—her real name!

But this shaggy bear draped over her bed couldn’t possibly be the Bart she once knew. She lifted the lamp until its yellow glow spread down his entire length. No, she thought with relief, this certainly wasn’t her Bart.
Her Bart had been much shorter. This man more than filled up the bed. Her Bart had been as lanky as a colt, but the stranger’s weight made the metal bed frame bend toward the middle.

Certainly her Bart would never have let his shiny black hair get into such a state as this. The tangled mop that covered his broad shoulders couldn’t have been washed in months. His bloodstained buckskin jacket and faded trousers looked as though the man never took them off. No wonder her room had smelled so odd. Who knew how long this great malodorous hulk of an outlaw had been hiding under her bed?

Shivering, Rosie wondered what on earth she was going to do with him. If he regained consciousness, she wouldn’t stand a chance against such a brute.

“Okay, mister,” she said, jamming the pistol barrel against his skull. “I’ve got you now, you hear?”

He didn’t budge.

What if he were dead? A dead man, right on her very own bed! Swallowing, she bent toward him to listen for the ragged breathing that had sounded so loud only moments before.

“Rosie…” The moan came from deep inside his chest.

“Don’t move!” she cried out. “I have a gun, and I’ll use it.”

A muffled groan welled out of him. “Rosie? Rosie…help me.”

Her hand shook as she brushed a hank of hair from his face. “Oh, dear God, please don’t let this be happening,” she mouthed in a desperate prayer.

But there was no mistaking the angle of the man’s
high cheekbone or the smooth plane of golden skin that sheered down from it. Rosie knew those lips, that jutted chin. No doubt about it. The man on her bed was Bart Kingsley. And yet he
couldn’t
be. This was a huge shaggy outlaw with a bullet in his side. This man was wanted for murder.

Then he opened his eyes. Green eyes, shot with golden threads, just as she remembered. “Bart?”

“Where are you, girl?” Grimacing, he lifted his head. “Rosie, I think I’m gonna die.”

Rosie carried a glass of water from the washstand and knelt at Bart’s side. His mouth felt like a dry creek bed, parched and sandy. Somehow she had known.

“I gotta turn over,” he whispered. “Help me, Rosie.”

She let out a breath. “Raise your shoulders if you can.”

“Tarnation,” he muttered through clenched teeth as she helped him up onto one elbow. He grabbed at his side. “Hurts like the devil.”

“Hush your cussing and drink this.” She sat on the bed beside him.

Pain ripping through his gut, Bart took a sip and then fell back. “Blast that Pinkerton son of a—”

Rosie clamped a hand over his mouth. “You stop swearing this minute, Bart Kingsley!” she snapped. “You’re turning the air in my room blue. You never used to talk like this.”

No, he hadn’t always cussed. There had been a time when he hardly said a word, bottling his frustration, anger and rage deep inside. But if he hadn’t allowed
himself to swear, neither had he permitted the good words inside to come out. Now all he could think about was how much he wanted to tell Rosie what it meant to see her again. How beautiful she looked. How black the years without her had been. How soft her long hair was as it brushed against his hand.

“Bad enough you had to sneak in here and bleed all over everything, and stink like a pair of old leather shoes and scare me half out of my wits…”

Her admonitions trailed off as he slid his hand down her arm. Oh, but she smelled good, he thought as he pressed his lips lightly into her palm.

With a squeak of dismay, she snatched her hand away. “What are you doing here, Bart? Nobody passes through Raton, New Mexico, but miners and homesteaders. And how did you come to climb in my window and hide under my bed?”

Eyes shut, he forced down deep breaths. “I came looking for you, Rosie. I tracked you here.”

“But I changed my name!”

“Kingsley?”

“It was all I could think of when I applied for the Harvey job. I was scared about running away. I had planned everything down to the last detail, but when the recruiter asked my name, I went blank and just blurted it out.”

“It
is
your name. Laura Rose Kingsley.”

“Stop that!” She pushed him away and stood with her arms crossed. “I have a good mind to call for the sheriff this minute.”

“No, Rosie! They’ll haul me back to Missouri and hang me.”

“The law
should
hang you if you’ve done all the wicked things Sheriff Bowman told Etta and me tonight. You rode with Jesse James. You robbed banks and trains, stole cattle and horses, killed people.”

“I’m no stock rustler.”

“Oh,
that’s
a relief!” She glared down at him. “You don’t look a thing like you used to.”

“It’s been six years. I grew up.”

“You grew up into a gunman. An outlaw.”

He closed his eyes. Rosie was right, of course. He’d grown into a man, and he’d done everything he was accused of—except rustling livestock.

The James brothers had a policy against that. Their grievance wasn’t with small-time Southern farmers and ranchers. No, Jesse, Frank, and the others set their sights on northern banks and trains. Trained by Charley Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, they had served as guerrilla raiders until the end of the war.

But when the rest of the Confederate guerrillas returned to their homes and farms, the James brothers and their pals, the Youngers, elected to continue raiding. Others joined along the way, men who came and went as part of the gang during its sixteen-year reign.

Bart swallowed against the knot of regret in his throat. He had known every one of the fringe members of the James-Younger gang—most of them killed by lawmen or captured and lynched. Others were serving time in prison or, like him, hoping to escape the law.

The men had accepted a half-breed homeless boy when no one else would. They fed him, boarded down with him at night, saw to it that he had clothes and boots…and guns. They taught him to shoot and let him
join them playing checkers, swimming in the river, hunting deer and squirrels. Oh, they had a fine time, Bart and the boys.

Until the day that was burned into his memory like none other: October 7, 1879. Glendale, Missouri. The Chicago & Alton train.

Bart opened his eyes, knowing that light always erased the haunting blackness of his past. And there was his Rosie, gazing down on him with her velvet eyes.

“Rosie,” he whispered, hardly able to believe he had found her at last. Porcelain skin, delicate cheekbones, lips the color of roses. Rosie, his prim-and-proper, educated, high-society lady. Rosie, his tree-climbing, pond-wading, horse-riding love. His Rosie.

“You’re going to have to leave,” she said abruptly. “I’ll help you to the window.”

But she didn’t move, and he couldn’t stop staring at her.

“If I leave, the detective will find me,” he murmured.

“I suppose he will.”

“He’ll take me back to Missouri. I won’t get a fair trial. Not a half breed like me.”

Her brown eyes deepened. “If you did, would you be cleared? You robbed trains.”

“I was following orders. Jesse’s plan, his guns, his horses.”

“You killed people.”

“People who were trying to kill me first.”

“Bart, how could you? You used to be so kind.”

“Rosie.” He reached for her arm, grasped her hand. “Let me stay here tonight. I’ll leave tomorrow.”

“You can’t stay in my room.” She jerked away. “Etta fetches me in the morning, and she’ll know at once. Mrs. Jensen will faint if she hears even a rumor of you. I’ll lose my job.”

“Please, Rosie. Don’t turn me out.”

Opening the heavy lid of her trunk, Rosie took out the bag of pills, lotions and cures she had brought from her home in Kansas City. Pappy always kept an ample supply of medicines on hand in case he had to leave the house to tend someone in the middle of the night. She had decided the medicines might be of use in Raton—though she hadn’t needed them until this night.

Don’t turn me out.
If Bart had said anything else, she would have forced him to the window at gunpoint and made him climb right out into the cold. But how could she turn him out? The Bart Kingsley she knew had been turned out far too often in his life.

Taunted by the farmhands. Beaten, whipped and burned by his stepfather. Neglected by his own mother. He wore ragged clothes and boots that pinched his toes and rubbed blisters on his heels. In the winter he had no coat. In the summer he had no hat. The schoolmarm refused to allow him into her classroom. The preacher made him sit outside on the church steps to hear the sermon.

No, Rosie knew she couldn’t turn him out. Not tonight. Once the decision had been made, there was nothing left but to treat the awful wound in his side.

“You’d better take one of these liver pills,” Rosie said, carrying her stash of Dr. Vermillion’s medicines to
the bedside. “Only the good Lord knows where that bullet is.”

Though Dr. Lowell had been her fiancé for three long years, Rosie recalled, she had never gotten past calling the man by his formal title. He kept daytime office hours and never saw patients at home. It was the new way of practicing medicine, he had told her.

She helped Bart lift his head to swallow the tiny brown pill, followed by a teaspoon of Dr. Hathaway’s Blood Builder.

“Where did you get this nasty stuff, Rosie?” he asked with a grimace as she poured a spoonful of something black. He swallowed and nearly gagged. “I’ll be horse-whipped if that doesn’t taste like a—”

“Don’t you swear, Bart. I mean it.” She drew back the edge of his jacket and caught her breath. “You need a doctor!”

“No, I can’t do that.”

“It’s a mess, and I don’t know the first thing about nursing. I’ve got to get this jacket off. I’ll fetch my scissors.”

“Don’t cut it!” He grabbed a handful of nightgown to stop her. “This is all I’ve got, Rosie. I’ll work it off, just give me a minute.” Releasing her gown, he began to shrug his shoulders and arms out of the buckskin jacket.

His face was beaded with perspiration from the effort, and she bent over him to help pull away the garment. The scent of woodsmoke and leather clung to his skin. She wished it were unpleasant, but the smell stirred something deep inside her. A memory. A trace of pleasure. Although she tried to keep from touching him, the
effort was hopeless, and she ended up wrestling his big shoulders and long arms out of the sleeves.

“There!” she said, letting out a breath as he collapsed. “You don’t even have on a shirt! Oh, good heavens, when was the last time you took this off?”

With two fingers she carried the bloody jacket across the room and dropped it into a basket in the corner. It would likely fall apart after a good scrubbing with lye soap. At least the hole ought to be mended. There wouldn’t be time for any of that, of course, not with Bart leaving first thing in the morning.

She glanced over her shoulder to find him breathing deeply, his eyes shut and his huge chest filling her narrow bed from one side to the other. When did he get to be so big?

She poured water into her basin and carried it to the bed. When she sat down beside him, his green eyes opened—reminding her that even though he didn’t look like her Bart or act like her Bart, he
was
her Bart.

“Now bite your tongue,” she told him. “And don’t you dare start cussing at me.”

She dipped a towel in the water and blotted his skin.

Dear Lord,
she breathed up in prayer as she studied the damage,
don’t let him die on me. Much as I’ve wanted to kill this man, please keep him alive.

“How’s it look?” he grunted.

“Terrible.”

“Can you feel the bullet?”

“Feel it? I’m not sticking my finger in there!”

“Rosie, it’s not coming out unless someone takes it out. And if you don’t patch up the hole, I’m liable
to bleed to death. I reckon if you’d do that for me, I wouldn’t ever ask another thing of you.”

“Why should I trust a murdering outlaw?” she asked.

“Especially one who ran off two weeks after he married her,” Bart finished.

“We never were married,” she said softly as she rummaged through the bag. “You said so yourself.”

“You found the note?”

“Of course I did.” Wishing he hadn’t brought up their impetuous wedding, she set the lamp on a table near the bed. If only he hadn’t tracked her down. If only he hadn’t crawled into her bedroom all shot up. Now she was stuck with him. But only until morning.

Before she could begin, he caught her hand and held it to his chest. “Rosie,” he whispered, his eyes depthless. “Thank you, Rosie-girl.”

“You won’t be thanking me in a minute.” She focused on the tweezers in her bag. How could it be that his gaze drew her back through time with an ache that wouldn’t go away—in spite of everything she knew about him?

She had to concentrate. Bart had lost so much blood. As she dipped the tweezers into the wound, she felt his hand slide into her hair. Eyes squeezed shut, he arched back in pain. His hand closed over a hank of her hair and she could feel him working it between his fingers.

Running a dry tongue over her lips, Rosie centered her attention on the wound again. She moved the tweezers deeper, then wiped the blood with a towel. Nothing. Where could the bullet be? She worked the tool farther in. Suddenly his hand clamped over hers, squeezing hard.