CHAPTER 20
IT WAS GIDEON who let Rowdy out of the cell, when the blast of a shotgun disturbed the peace of that Stone Creek morning, threw the door open wide and stood back. Gideon, with a sling supporting his left arm and a look of hollow desolation in his eyes.
“Ride, Rowdy,” he said. “Paint’s saddled and ready out back.”
Rowdy stared at him. “Did you—?”
Gideon shook his head. “I didn’t fire the shot,” he said. A wan, Pappylike grin stretched his mouth. “I just took advantage of the opportunity.”
Rowdy laid a hand on Gideon’s good shoulder, in no hurry to grab his chance and leave. “If you didn’t shoot that gun,” he asked, “who did?”
The Yarbro muscle bunched in Gideon’s jaw. “It came from somewhere around Mrs. Porter’s place,” he said. “At least, that’s where everybody headed. Get out of here, Rowdy. I’ll see to Pardner and look after Miss Morgan, too, as best I can.”
It came from somewhere around Mrs. Porter’s place.
Rowdy rasped a curse and bolted. Autry Whitman. Good God, with Pappy dying and all the rest of it, he’d forgotten all about him and the threat he represented to Lark.
“Not that way!” Gideon yelled. “Out the back!”
Ignoring his brother’s protests, Rowdy hit the sidewalk at a dead run. Pardner, lying a few feet to the side of the door, leaped up and streaked ahead.
The rooming house looked as though it were under siege when Rowdy reached it, what with all the horses outside.
Lark, Rowdy thought, vaulting over the picket fence after Pardner, who had bunched his haunches and made the jump without so much as a pause.
Reston was blocking the doorway, Sam just inside.
“What the—?” Reston gasped, when Pardner shot between them, closely followed by Rowdy.
Lark sat in a chair in the kitchen, staring blankly at nothing.
Rowdy stepped over Whitman’s body with no more than a downward glance and went to her. Crouched in front of her chair, took her hands in his.
“What happened?” he asked.
She blinked, evidently startled to see him there.
“Mrs. Porter shot him,” she said. “She shot Autry. She thought he was Mr. Porter—”
Rowdy looked around, his gaze briefly connecting with Sam’s before swinging back to Lark’s face. “Were you hurt?”
“Autry was going to kill me,” she told him. “Mrs. Porter saved my life. And now she’s…she’s…” Tears rose in her eyes, eyes that were already red-rimmed and swollen. Of all the things he regretted, and there were many, giving Lark reason to cry was the greatest. If he could take back only one thing, of all the things he’d done, it would be that. “She collapsed, Rowdy. Mai Lee and Hon Sing are with her, but I think…I think—”
He stood, pulled Lark into his arms, held her with the fierce closeness of those who must soon let go. “It’ll be all right,” he murmured into her mussed, fragrant hair. “Everything will be all right.”
She clung to him, shook her head against his chest. “Not without you,” she said. “Not without you.” She stopped then, looked up into his face. “How did you get out of jail?”
“I was about to ask that same question myself,” Sam put in, from somewhere nearby, “though I’m pretty sure I know the answer.”
Gideon.
He’d been willing to risk his own freedom, risk college and possibly years of his life, just to turn Rowdy loose.
“I’m right here, Sam,” Rowdy said, still holding tightly to Lark. “No harm done.”
“We’d better move this body,” Reston put in. He was one of those restless sorts, the kind who always had to be doing something, setting things right. No doubt he’d rather have thrown Rowdy back in the cell, personally, with Gideon for company, but failing that, he’d settle for loading a bloody corpse in the back of a wagon.
Sam ignored Reston, spoke to Rowdy instead. Rowdy and, by proximity, Lark. “The major sent for a territorial judge,” he said. “He’ll decide your fate when he gets here, after consulting with the governor, but meanwhile you’ve got to stay behind bars.”
Rowdy sighed. Nodded.
There was no undoing his past. It was as real and as deeply carved as letters chiseled into a tombstone.
“You could have been clear of Stone Creek by now,” Sam went on quietly, speaking to Rowdy though his gaze touched on Lark once or twice, pondering. “I guess I don’t need to ask why you stayed.”
Lark gripped the front of Rowdy’s shirt as if she was never going to let go. “Rowdy saved your life, Sam O’Ballivan,” she said, with sudden spirit. “I heard you say so to Mr. Reston, just a few minutes ago.”
Sam nodded. “That’s true,” he replied. “Under the circumstances Mr. Robert Yarbro here might have shot me himself, out there at the Franks’ place. Thrown in with the outlaws, instead of the rangers, and ridden out with the others. A lot of men in his position would have done just that.”
Lark sagged a little, pressed her cheek into Rowdy’s chest.
He eased her into a chair, prepared to go willingly back to jail now that he knew what he’d come to find out—that she was safe. Still whole. Still Lark.
“Stay right here where I can keep an eye on you,” Sam told Rowdy, waving Reston away when he came forward with his trusty handcuffs. “I’ve got enough to think about, with a dead man on the floor and another one buried in the cellar. I can’t be chasing after you on top of it.”
Rowdy grinned slightly. The matter of Levi’s escape still lay between them, perhaps never to be resolved. He hadn’t tried to stop his brother from getting away, he’d even encouraged him to run. He’d been wrong to do that and he knew it, but short of shooting Levi, he hadn’t had a choice. And much as he hated the idea of doing a stretch in Yuma, maybe it was a chance to do penance not only for himself, but for Levi, too.
Gideon appeared in the open doorway just then, swallowed hard after assessing the scene. Stepped over Autry Whitman’s body to come inside, weaving his way between a half-dozen milling rangers and townsmen.
He came face-to-face with Sam O’Ballivan, almost first thing.
Sam thumped a forefinger in the middle of Gideon’s chest. “Don’t you ever do a damn fool thing like releasing a prisoner again, boy. Even if he is your brother.”
Gideon swallowed visibly, but stiffened his Yarbro backbone. His chin jutted out. “I’d do it again,” he said stubbornly, with all the conviction of youth. It was because of that, because of his inherent strength, that he was up and around so soon after taking Willie Moran’s bullet. Just looking at him gave Rowdy a strange, throbbing hope that one Yarbro, at least, might amount to something. Might serve as the living answer to all those prayers their ma had offered, always believing, against all evidence. “If I had my way, Rowdy would be a long ways from here by now.”
Sam simply shook his head, gave a rueful chuckle and went back to the bloody business of rangering.
“Where’s Mrs. Porter?” Gideon asked, drawing near the table. In the short time Rowdy had been acquainted with his younger brother, Rowdy had sized him up for an attendance taker, among other things. He liked everybody accounted for, and if somebody was missing, he’d probably turn over the whole territory looking for them.
Lark answered the question. “Mai Lee and Hon Sing took her upstairs,” she said. “She’s…she’s not well, Gideon.”
It was then that Hon Sing appeared on the back stairway. He paused, midway down, looked at Lark and shook his head.
She began to cry.
And Rowdy, not giving a damn that half the population of Stone Creek seemed to have crowded into that kitchen, pulled her onto his lap and pressed her head gently to his shoulder. She trembled in his arms, and he grieved for the parting that would surely come.
* * *
One Week Later
A BITTER WIND HOWLED through the streets of Stone Creek, as well as Lark’s own raw and wounded heart, heralding the imminent arrival of another snowstorm.
The schoolhouse was temporarily closed.
Autry’s body, accompanied by Esau, had been placed in a pine box the day before and freighted to Flagstaff in the back of a wagon, there to board a train bound for Denver.
Ruby Hollister had come, in grand style, to retrieve Payton Yarbro’s remains, and Gideon had gone with her when she left, though he vowed to return, finish the school year and take up his duties as deputy again. He did not seem to register that Rowdy would be going away, no longer the marshal of Stone Creek.
That very morning, Lark had received a long telegram from Autry’s lawyers—“Darned if you don’t own a railroad, Miss Morgan!” the clerk had beamed, upon delivering the message—but sudden wealth was the furthest thing from her mind as she waited, with Mai Lee and Hon Sing, in front of a blazing fire in Mr. Porter’s study.
She couldn’t even think about Mrs. Porter’s funeral, from which the three of them had just returned. Mr. Porter had been laid to rest beside her, a skeleton stacked and sealed into a wooden box, hastily constructed by the undertaker’s son, almost as an afterthought.
No, there was no room in Lark’s mind for anyone or anything, save Rowdy. He was still in jail, and Sam and the major and the territorial judge, just arrived from Phoenix, were meeting at that very hour, at the Cattleman’s Hall, to decide what would happen to him.
Lark listened to the ponderous ticking of the mantel clock, felt her heartbeat adjust itself to the rhythm. Pardner lay at her feet, or more properly, on them. He hadn’t been far from her side since the day Mrs. Porter had shot Autry. Every time she looked into his eyes, she saw the same question.
Where is he?
“I get you tea?” Mai Lee asked, breaking the silence.
Lark smiled, shook her head. “You’re the mistress of the house now,” she reminded the other woman. “You don’t have to wait on anyone.”
Incomprehensibly, considering her blithe prejudice, Mrs. Porter, having no living relatives, had left her house and property to Mai Lee and Hon Sing. They’d probably made plans—to sell out and move away on the proceeds, or stay and take in boarders, as Mrs. Porter had done—but they had yet to share them with Lark.
“I get tea,” Mai Lee insisted, and hurried off to the kitchen.
A moment later she was back.
Pardner was instantly on his feet. He gave an uncertain woof.
“Someone to see you,” Mai Lee said to Lark, a smile shining in her eyes. “In kitchen.”
Lark stood slowly, her heart outstripping the pace of the mantel clock now, racing.
Pardner barked and ran for the back of the house.
Lark followed, wringing her hands. She dared not hope—the price of disappointment was too high.
And he was there.
Rowdy stood in the kitchen. He’d hung his hat and coat on the pegs beside the back door, bent to ruffle Pardner’s ears in greeting.
He straightened at Lark’s entrance, and his gaze caressed her, summer-sky blue.
She stopped, afraid to go any closer. Afraid he wasn’t real.
She’d had so many dreams in which he came to her, and awakening to reality was like dying, over and over again.
“Did you escape?” she finally asked, befuddled.
He chuckled. “No,” he said. “I’ve been pardoned, thanks to Sam O’Ballivan and the governor of the territory.”
“P-pardoned?”
“And I can keep the marshal’s job, if I want it,” Rowdy said.
Lark started toward him, stopped again. If I want it. Had he come to get Pardner, and say goodbye?
“Do you?” she dared to ask, because everything depended on the answer. “Do you want to stay?”
“That depends, Miss Morgan.”
Lark could barely hear, for the pounding in her ears. For the silent hope clambering and scrambling in her heart, groping its way into her mind. “On what?”
“On whether or not you’d be willing to marry a former outlaw, live in a house behind the jail and be called Mrs. Yarbro.”
Lark swallowed painfully. For a moment the kitchen floor seemed to tilt beneath her feet. She fully expected to awaken in her bed upstairs, rummy from the rigors of her dreams. “Oh, Rowdy—”
He waited, hooked his thumbs under his gun belt.
“Or is it Rob?”
He chuckled, shook his head once. “I’ve always been called Rowdy,” he said. Sadness rested briefly in his clear eyes. “Pa figured it suited me.”
“Yes,” Lark said.
“Yes, it suits me, or yes, you’ll marry me?”
She let out a joyous sob. “Yes, I’ll marry you.” She laughed. “And yes, it suits you.”
He still didn’t close the space between them, but there was a tender watchfulness in his eyes. “Right now? Today? Because I’m bound to bed you, well and truly, before the sun goes down. And I want it to be honorable this time. I want it to be right. And that means we have to be hitched first.”
Lark flung herself into his arms then—barely touched the floor but flew to him, threw her arms around his neck and held on. “Right now,” she agreed, weeping and laughing at the same time. “Today.”
He kissed her, a deep, celebratory kiss, full of all that had so nearly been lost. “Good,” he said, when he let her go, and she stood, breathless, within the circle of his embrace. “Because the major is right behind me, with a Bible in one hand and a marriage license in the other. Sam’ll be a witness, and Mai Lee and Hon Sing, too.”
Lark smiled up at him. “You were pretty certain of my answer, weren’t you, Mr. Yarbro?”
He grinned. “Pretty certain,” he admitted. “But you never can tell with a woman. I figured you might have changed your mind about me, with all that time to think.”
She stood on tiptoe and touched her mouth to his. “I thought about you, and nothing else.”
Rowdy tasted her lips, made them tingle. “I’ll be a good husband to you, Lark,” he said gravely. “And if you ever have cause to shed tears again, it won’t be on my account.”
They were still standing there, exchanging a covenant too deep for words to express, when Sam and the major arrived a few minutes later, and Maddie, too.
Mai Lee and Hon Sing were summoned, and the marriage took place right there in the kitchen, where so much had happened. Lydia had been brought there, sick unto death. Autry had died there, and violently.
But it was also where Lark and Rowdy had met and looked into each other’s eyes for the first time. It was where Rowdy had taken Lark on his lap, that night, and held her until she slept.
She’d been in the worst danger of her life there.
And felt safest.
Oh, yes. It was fitting indeed that the ceremony was held in the Porter kitchen, with Pardner standing between the bride and groom, listening raptly to the solemn and holy words Major Blackstone read from the Good Book.
Lark wouldn’t have swapped it for the finest cathedral in the world.
* * *
LARK CROONED HOARSELY, her body straining under Rowdy’s as she gave herself to him, fully and without reserve, in the bed where they had every right, before God and man, to make love. To make babies. To share secrets they’d kept even from themselves.
His eyes burned, even as he struggled to keep from joining her in the sweet maelstrom of release. Lark.
She stilled, sighing, and looked up at him. “Let go, Rowdy,” she whispered. “Let go.”
And he did, with a groaning shout, throwing his head back, emptying himself into her. All of himself, not just his seed, but his spirit and his mind and everything he’d never dared hope for.
She soothed him, during and in the sacred aftermath, her fingers playing in his hair. Murmured gentle, nonsensical words. Granted him a solace he’d never known he was seeking.
“I love you, Lark Yarbro,” he said, much later when he had the breath for it. He moved in her, hard again, and she gave a soft gasp of pleasure and arched her back to receive him more deeply.
“Prove it,” she teased.
“Our bathwater’s getting cold,” he said, enjoying the way her eyes widened. “You’re going to have to wait.”
“I don’t want to wait. I want you now, because you’re mine, and I can have you. I can have all I want of you.”
He chuckled, withdrew from her, delighted in the look of rebellious disappointment on her face.
He got out of bed, and scooped his wife—his wife—into his arms. Carried her into the bathing room and lowered her carefully into the lukewarm water he’d run earlier, right after they’d come back to the marshal’s house as Mr. and Mrs. Robert Yarbro.
He’d needed a bath, having been in jail for a week, where he’d had to be content with a basin and a rag, when he wanted to wash. But Lark hadn’t been willing to wait, and he hadn’t been able to resist her.
Now he joined her in the water, and they sat cross-legged, facing each other, like a couple of naked Indians at a powwow.
She pouted.
He rubbed soap between his hands and lathered her breasts.
She moaned.
He lifted her onto her knees, lathered another part of her, playing with her until she tilted her head back and closed her eyes, the temptress, surrendering.
He rinsed her, and that was almost as much fun as the washing had been.
She began to quiver, whimpering his name.
He bathed himself, got out of the tub and left her kneeling there, staring up at him in baffled defiance.
“If you want what I’m about to give you, Mrs. Yarbro,” he said, “you’d better get yourself back to bed.”
She flushed, stubborn and flushed with arousal, but she got out of the tub. Let him dry her off with a towel, watched as he dried himself. Saw just how much he wanted her.
Biting her lower lip, Lark ducked out through the doorway, and he swatted her lightly as she passed.
He took his time getting back to the bedroom, and the wait was excruciating, but when he got there, Lark was lying in the middle of the mattress, in a tangle of covers, wearing a pair of bloomers with a tear in just the right place, and nothing else.
She grinned mischievously.
He laughed and shook his head.
And then he went to her, and in a slow, smooth tumbling roll, turned her, so that she was kneeling on the pillows, clutching the top of the headboard in both hands.
Rowdy slid between her legs, parted the ripped in the bloomers, and grasped her hips to lower her onto his waiting mouth. She groaned and rocked and, finally, pleaded.
He teased her.
She ground herself against him.
He suckled hard, brought her to the edge of satisfaction. But when she tensed to let loose, he turned her again, laid her down, and entered her with a hard thrust. Watched as her eyes rolled back and she came unwound slowly and silently, a thousand different expressions flitting across her face in the space of a few moments.
In the next instant Rowdy’s own release came, consuming him in a silver fire, blinding him to everything but her.
* * *
“DID I MENTION that I own a railroad?” Lark asked her husband—her husband—the next morning, while she fiddled with the stove, trying to figure out how one went about cooking, exactly. Snow drifted past the windows, and the world seemed blanketed by peace.
Rowdy, who had been admiring the way she looked wearing only his shirt, and idly sipping coffee he’d brewed himself before she was even awake, shook his head. “No,” he said mildly. “I don’t think you did.”
She smiled at him, over one shoulder. Stepped over Pardner to take a skillet from a shelf. “It’s ironic, isn’t it?” she asked, testing him a little. Would it matter to him, the money and the railroad? “Autry was so busy trying to find and kill me, he forgot to change his will.”
“Imagine that,” Rowdy said, glowering a little.
“I’m very, very rich,” she told him. And she was rich, but not because she’d inherited a fortune from Autry Whitman. She was rich because Rowdy Yarbro loved her.
He frowned.
“I have a mansion in Denver.”
He shifted uncomfortably.
“We could live there,” she said, watching his face. “You’d never have to work again. Instead of robbing trains, you could send them here and there, at a whim.”
“Wherever there were tracks,” he pointed out, still looking serious. And then he said precisely what she’d hoped he would. “I don’t want to live in Denver, Lark. And I sure as hell don’t want to run a railroad.”
She went to him, sat astraddle of his lap.
Kissed the sides of his strained mouth. “You mean you didn’t marry me for my money, Marshal?”
He began unbuttoning the shirt she’d thrown on after getting out of bed.
“Last I knew,” he said, looking thoughtful as he concentrated on the task at hand, “you were a schoolmarm, without two nickels to your name. And you intended to keep on teaching as long as the town council would allow.”
She was bared to him. Goose bumps rippled over her flesh in anticipation of his touch.
He cupped her breasts in his hands, looked into her eyes.
She squirmed slightly, gasped as he chafed her nipples with the sides of his thumbs. “Well,” she murmured, between little catches in her breathing, “maybe our sons will want to run a railroad.”
He tilted his head to one side, nibbled at her. “Sons,” he said, clearly not listening.
“Or even…our…daughters,” Lark gasped.
He suckled, even as he moved to open his pants.
Paused long enough to ask, in a low, rumbling rasp, “Do you want children, Mrs. Yarbro?”
“Yes,” Lark managed.
“Then be quiet, so we can get one started.”
She bit her lower lip, nodded.
He lunged inside her, claiming her so fully that she cried out in shameless welcome.
And then she was instantly, utterly, deliciously lost.
* * *
ROWDY YARBRO WALKED the streets of Stone Creek that night, with his badge pinned on the outside of his coat and Pardner trotting happily at his side.
He tested shop doors, to make sure they were locked.
He counted the horses in front of the saloons.
He checked on the schoolhouse.
He stood awhile outside the Porter house, and thought what a fine thing it was that Mai Lee and Hon Sing owned it now.
Passing the only church in town, a small, white clapboard structure, he stopped and looked up at the steeple, with its plain wooden cross stark against the night sky, trimmed in soft-falling snow.
For a brief moment he was a boy again.
Bless my boy Rob, he heard his mother say.
He knew she’d asked for a lot of things on his behalf—a loving wife, a home and an honest road to travel from one day to the next.
Those things had been a long time coming, but here he was, a marshal, sworn to uphold the law, with a strong, smart woman to partner with. He had a clear conscience, friends like Sam O’Ballivan and Major John Blackstone, Mai Lee and Hon Sing. He had a good dog and a fine horse.
He reckoned his ma would count all those things as answers to her prayers, and who could say if she’d be wrong?
Standing there in the silent, drifting snow of a February night, looking up at that cross, Rowdy lifted his hat.
“Much obliged,” he said.
* * * * *