Prologue Page 11

  He bristled at the implied comparison between himself and the late Frank Maitland. "You'll get out of it with my free labor."

  At the mention of this inescapable fact, Chloe felt a faint blush creep up to her hairline, then she rallied. "That was our agreement. I don't need to be reminded of it."

  He stared at her unblinkingly for several long seconds until she lowered her eyes. Gripping her chin he forced her to look at him.

  "There's one thing you do need to be reminded of," he said, his voice gritty. "I'm not your father."

  His gaze fell to her lips and held there. His face was so close her breath caught in her throat; she expected to feel the brush of his mouth on hers.

  Instead, he jerked his hand from her chin and stepped back, defiantly tipping up the bottle. Taking a long swallow, he dragged the back of his hand over his mouth, his eyes steady on hers.

  With no rebuttal for this insulting dismissal, Chloe glowered at him. Then she turned on her heel and went back into the house, smarting from the defeat.

  Travis watched her go, forcing his anger to retreat. The sun was down and that frustrating female had stolen the peace of the mellow summer evening. Goddammit, he chafed. Then feeling he had to say it aloud or bust, he roared, "Goddammit!" He stomped to his room in the shop and flopped on the bed.

  Nothing was worth having that nagging pain in the ass tell him what to do and tie him up in knots. He was a free man. He could go or stay as he chose. Not for the first time, he was sorely tempted to leave. To think he'd almost kissed her a minute ago while she was looking up at him with those big green eyes, all pushy and demanding and defenseless.

  This last thought sat him up again. Chloe Maitland, defenseless? That was a harebrained notion. She was tough and thorny and sometimes talking to her was like jumping into a bag full of wet cats. It was a device, he realized, a means of protection, and that was something he understood.

  But he didn't have to like it.

  He relaxed against the straw tick. He would wake up in his clothes again but he was too tired to pull them off. His thoughts blurred as sleep overtook him, that last big pull of whiskey doing its job. Maybe it would work, maybe he wouldn't dream tonight. . . .

  * * *

  Chloe heard Travis swear—the whole town probably did. She went back to the sink, seething with humiliation over his contemptuous demonstration. Who did he think he was to treat her like that? Granted, she didn't pay him in cash but she had taken him in, outlaw that he was, saved his sorry hide, put food in his mouth, a roof over his head, and clean clothes on his back.

  Taking up the towel again, she wiped the dishes with such furious energy the friction warmed them. She'd risked a lot just by letting him stay—if he were caught, she could even be accused of aiding a criminal. He probably had a price on his head, too.

  A big price. . . .

  Her hands fell still. Slowly, she sat at the table, jolted by the prospect.

  There might be a reward involved in the capture of Travis P. McGuire, escaped convict. Maybe enough to pay off the mortgage and have a nice nest egg left over. It was highly possible that Travis would be worth a lot more to her back in prison than he could earn shoeing horses and mending wagons. She put her elbows on the blue-checkered tablecloth and rested her chin on her hands, envisioning a secure future for herself and Evan as well. She would finally get the last word with Travis and be compensated for his insults and those—those embarrassing, restless feelings he stirred up in her.

  But it seemed so weaselly and low, her conscience prodded, to turn him in at this point. He'd been here for weeks now, working hard, and he'd done a couple of nice things for her, like taking care of those whiskey bottles and fixing the chair.

  Yes, she reminded herself, but what about his drinking and that brooding, surly attitude? And the way he managed to pry information from her that she had no intention of revealing? What about his mocking insolence a few moments ago and the fact that he'd almost kissed her out there?

  And her sneaking disappointment that he hadn't?

  Chloe sat up with a jerk and pulled her thoughts back to the matter at hand. It wasn't wrong to turn in a known criminal, especially one who'd escaped from prison. Wasn't it her responsibility to do it?

  She sat drumming her fingers, wondering how she could discover whether money had been offered for his return. Sheriff Winslow would be the person to talk to, although these days he didn't do much beyond sit in front of his office and whittle. Since Misfortune's decline he hadn't had anything else to do besides that and mind Morris Caldwell once in a while, and he enjoyed this unofficial retirement. Still, maybe he received wanted posters or information about outlaws. She knew he was afraid of her but that might work to her advantage.

  Chloe stood and went back to the sink to finish the dishes, her mind made up. She would talk to Fred Winslow first thing tomorrow morning.

  Her conscience reared and shook a finger at her, but she managed to stifle the feeling—sometime late in the night.

  * * *

  Fred Winslow dozed in the mild morning sun, slouching in an old chair outside his office. His hat was angled down over his eyes. Now and then a nice breeze would kick up to keep things from getting too warm. His generous lap and stomach were dusted with curly wood shavings, and a half-finished figure of an owl sat on an upended apple crate next to him. It was a good way to spend a morning, whittling a little, napping a little.

  This comfortable limbo evaporated when he felt a shadow fall between himself and the sun.

  "Good morning, Fred."

  The middle-aged sheriff opened blinking eyes to see Chloe Maitland standing over him, her market basket on her arm. Hastily, he pushed himself back to a sitting position, then lumbered to his feet.

  "Uh, Miss Chloe, howdy." Oh, Lordy-Lord, he groaned inwardly. What could she want? Fred made a point of avoiding Chloe. She had a way of making a man feel like his fly was open and everyone in the world knew it except him. In fact, he was one of the only people in town who didn't hire her to do his laundry. He'd rather go naked first. "What brings you by today?"

  "Well, actually, I was hoping you could do a favor for me." She smiled briefly at him and Fred relaxed his guard a little. At least she wasn't mad.

  "Sure, Miss Chloe, if I can," he replied warily.

  She smiled again and went on. "Since The Observer stopped printing, I've had trouble getting newspaper to line my shelves and drawers, and now I find I don't have any at all. You know, paper is so hard to come by."

  Fred nodded, mystified.

  "So it occurred to me that you might have old wanted posters you don't need. I could use them on the shelves." Her eyes rested on his face a moment, then skittered away. "Of course, the town is so small now, I don't even know if the authorities send them to you anymore."

  Fred shifted his considerable weight to one foot and rubbed his jaw. "Yeah, I get 'em once in a while. They come over from Portland, sometimes Montanny and Idaho. But they ain't a proper thing for a lady to line her shelves with. I mean, they ain't about respectable people."

  For a moment he worried that he'd made some grave mistake when Chloe's face tightened, but the expression passed so quickly he assumed he'd imagined it.

  "I have to make do where I can, Fred. Times are lean. Besides, I can turn over the printed sides of the posters so they don't show. And I suppose the new ones might be cleaner."

  He turned and motioned her into his office. “Well, come on inside, then. I'll give you all the ones I have and you can use what you want. Hell, I never bother to look at 'em anymore. 'Cept for that blacksmith you got working for you, we ain't had any strangers here since I can't remember. What desperado would come to Misfortune?" He huffed out a chuckle or two, but Chloe only got that tight-lipped look again. Damn, but she could give a body the yim-yams.

  He opened desk drawers and pulled out posters going back at least ten years. The dust and cluttered disorder in his office went back that far, too, although he'd been blind to it u
ntil he saw her giving

  it a disapproving eye. He waited for her to say something, and was surprised when she didn't.

  He handed her a sheaf of papers, some yellowed with age. "Here you go, Miss Chloe. I hope they work."

  She put them in her basket and he escorted her back to the sidewalk. "I know they will, Fred. I appreciate your help."

  The grateful smile she turned upon him was so disarming, he forgot his earlier discomfort. "Glad to do it, ma'am, glad to," he replied.

  She headed toward home and as he settled back into his chair, he pondered that it might not be so bad to let her do his washing after all.

  * * *

  Chloe avoided the backyard and hurried up the front steps with her cache, guilt and triumph warring in her thundering heart. Oh, when Fred made that remark about no desperados coming to Misfortune, Chloe felt like she'd swallowed her tongue. But he'd believed her story about lining shelves and hadn't asked any of the questions she'd feared.

  She went straight through the parlor upstairs to her room and shut the door. From her open windows she could hear the sound of Travis shaping a wheel rim for the wagon he'd been working on when she left. He hadn't said one word to her at breakfast. Even though apologies seemed to be beyond his scope, she'd expected some kind of repentance for his outrageous rudeness over that bottle of whiskey. Instead, he'd ignored her.

  Putting the basket on the dresser, she took out the posters with shaking hands. A jumble of feelings bumped around inside her: worry that she wouldn't learn anything and fear that she might. Except for meals, Travis never came into the house, but her nerves made her so jumpy she expected to see him burst through her bedroom door any minute.

  She sat on the bed and began leafing through the grubby, dog-eared pages, reading around the coffee cup rings. Some of them bore rough illustrations of fierce-looking men, but many had no pictures and only physical descriptions. There were rewards for murderers, bank bandits and train robbers, horse thieves and cattle rustlers. Most of the crimes had been committed in other states like Colorado and Wyoming, although she did find one about the Wallowa National Bank robbery up north in Enterprise three years ago.

  But there was no poster about an escaped convict. She let out the breath she'd been holding and pushed a straggling curl back into place. For all she knew, Travis might have broken out of a jail halfway across the country.

  She glanced down at the pages again and rose from the mattress. A whole day's worth of laundry waited for her and she'd wasted enough time on this.

  In the kitchen she lifted one of the stove lids and shoved the posters inside. A whisper of relief brushed her when their edges ignited.

  * * *

  Chloe pulled a sheet from her laundry basket and secured one corner of it to the clothesline. As soon as she anchored the other end, the wind caught it and it billowed like a full-breasted mainsail. She moved down the line of laundry, touching bed linens she'd hung earlier, checking for dampness. The soap and bluing might be hard on her hands, but she took satisfaction from the clean sheets, gleaming white in the sun. Unable to resist, she opened her arms and hugged one to her, inhaling the fresh, windblown fragrance. No perfume was sweeter.

  Travis glanced up from the doubletree he was working on to drag his arm across his sweating forehead. He paused when he saw Chloe embrace the sheet with spontaneous pleasure, her apron ties flapping around her like ribbons. It made it hard to keep his promise to himself.

  This morning he'd rolled off the bed, his shirt twisted around him from sleeping in it, certain he'd thought of the best way, the only way, to deal with her: avoid her as much as possible. He wouldn't argue with her anymore, or warn her away from her fiancé, or defend himself against her complaints. He'd simply pretend she didn't exist. He'd managed it through breakfast and lunch, purposely disregarding her silent demands for an apology. He'd freeze in hell before he'd apologize. He didn't have anything to be sorry for. A free man had the right to take a drink—she wasn't his jailer and he wouldn't let her begin to think she was.

  But now she stood there, her hair fire-gold against a backdrop of endless blue sky, framed by the doorway he watched her through. Suddenly the wind shifted, molding her skirt to her nicely shaped legs and derriere. He should have kissed her tempting pink mouth when he'd had the chance last night. He imagined the moist softness of her lips, the firm curve of her bottom in his hands as he pulled her up against his hips and—

  Travis dropped his gaze back to the doubletree as a suffocating frustration filled him. If he wasn't careful, he warned himself, one of these days he might act on the feelings that were crowding him out of his skin. Then there'd be the devil to pay.

  * * *

  "Howdy, Miss Chloe. I knocked at the front door, then I figured you might be out here."

  Chloe turned to find Fred Winslow opening the gate. His polished badge glared like a mirror in the late afternoon sun. She turned a hasty look in the direction of the shop, but couldn't see Travis. The sheriff carried a package tucked under his arm.

  "Fred," she hailed nervously. "This is a surprise." She hurried to the fence, hoping to keep him from coming too close to the shop. What had possessed him to come here now? "I didn't expect to see you again so soon."

  He cast a lingering, curious look at the smoke rising from the forge chimney. "Is business pretty good?" he asked.

  "Pretty good. What can I do for you, Fred?" she prompted.

  Her question dragged him back to his subject. "Hmm? Oh, well, after you left his morning I went over to DeGroot's and would you believe it?" he said, giving her the bundle. "These come just this week. I thought maybe you could use them, too. 'Course, Albert was right tickled when I told him what you'd be doing with them."

  'Course, Chloe thought. Now the storekeeper knew about this, too. She looked at the wanted posters in her hands, wishing on her soul that she'd never started this. The sound of metal clanking against metal came from the forge. Again, she glanced over her shoulder. "Oh," she answered weakly, "thank you for bringing them by, but really, you shouldn't have bothered."

  "Weren't no bother at all, Miss Chloe," he replied expansively. "Looking at these took me back to the old days when I had some really rough customers in my jail. 'Course mostly they was just miners and cowboys sleeping off a Saturday night, but I remember a few times when—"

  On he droned down a single-minded track, showing no signs of leaving. She shifted restlessly from one foot to the other. In the span of their conversation this morning he seemed to have lost his wariness of her, a fact she regretted heartily.

  After hearing about the time he thought he'd captured Billy the Kid only to find out it was really a dry goods clerk from Albuquerque, Chloe derailed him and led him back toward the gate. It was all she could do to keep herself from pulling on his arm. "Fred, I .don't mean to interrupt, but if I don't get back to this washing I'll be out here till after dark."

  "Yup, you're right. I do tend to run on, given half a chance," he admitted. He loitered at the open gate, surveying her drying laundry. "You know, I was thinking maybe I should hire you to wash my duds. Looks like you do a mighty nice job of it and it would be a real treat to have shirts done right for a change."

  And have him coming by every week? "I'm sorry, Fred, but I've got just about all the work I can handle now." She gestured at the sheets hanging on the line.

  "Guess I should've asked sooner," he lamented. "Well, I'll be running along, Miss Chloe."

  She thanked Fred again and then, leaning out over the fence to make sure he was gone, she watched as he finally headed back down the street to his whittling.

  Just then a sharp gust of wind grabbed the pages from her hands and scattered them across the yard. Chloe chased after them as they whirled in spirals above her and ahead of her. Running and bending, running and bending, she finally cornered the last poster next to the shop wall. She crouched and stretched her hand forward to grab it when suddenly a boot slammed down on the face of the one-eyed cattle rus
tler named there, scarcely missing her fingers. Her gaze shot up the long, denim-covered leg above the foot, and she saw Travis staring down at her, stone-faced and silver-eyed.

  "Let me help you," he offered, his voice deadly quiet.

  "Thank you, no," she said, retreating to the safety of her morning haughtiness. She tugged on the page to pull it free. "If you'll move your foot, I can get on with my work."

  "And what kind of work might that be?" he asked, his boot still planted on the rustler's face. He tucked his hand under his arm to pull off a glove, then reached down and grabbed the offending poster from the dust. He scanned the page in silence.

  "Fred Winslow was kind enough to give me these old posters so I could line my shelves and drawers with them," she answered, taking on an air of injured dignity "I can't afford anything else."

  He snatched the other posters from her hands before she could react, holding them up out of her grasp while he sorted through each one.

  "Give me those," she demanded, jumping to reach them. "Y-you'll get them dirty."

  "All kinds of criminals in here. They're offering nice rewards, too. But there's not one about a runaway state prisoner. Too bad." He jammed the flyers into her hands.

  "I don't know what you're talking about," she protested. Again she had the uncomfortable feeling that he read her thoughts as easily as a newspaper.

  He locked her wrist in a grip from which she could not wriggle free and pulled her face up to his. His hair was damp with sweat and his face was soot-smudged. "What did you have in mind for me? Were you trying to find out if the law wants your disobedient blacksmith bad enough to pay for him? Since the sheriff didn't try to haul me away, I guess you're still thinking about it."

  "No, it's not like that," she squeaked, frightened now. "My shelves—"

  He let go of her arm, disgusted. "You're a really bad liar, Chloe. You shouldn't try it."

  Her temper rallied then, her moment of fear dissolving. "I didn't know it was a virtue to be a good liar. Are rudeness and disrespect talents to be admired? A license to do things someone has told you not to do?"