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The man possessed an enigmatic edge and an even more dangerous touch. Through the haze of last night, the memory of her body pressed against his survived in her memory. The touch of his hand against her face had almost been enough to rouse her from the darkness she’d fallen into.
None of which answered the critical question: What would happen to her family now? The ranch hands—Len, Stump and Everett—could find work on another spread. No doubt Shamus would take them on if Mr. Beckett didn’t see fit to. Maybe she could even convince Shamus to hang on to Foster, though he had grown too old to do more than load up the chuck wagon and be a general nuisance.
And Freedom. Well, no doubt she’d pack it in and follow Rachel wherever she went with the boys. Question was, where would they go? She didn’t have a cent to call her own without the land. She had no family left to turn to. She owed money all over town, and even if the stores were willing to float her for a little while longer out of respect for her current situation, they wouldn’t do it forever. Eventually she’d have to pay the piper.
But how?
There were few ways a woman could make an income in this town and, short of marrying, fewer still were respectable. Her mother had taught her that.
“Can we go home?”
Rachel hugged Ethan tighter and kissed his tawny hair. “Sure, sweetheart. I have some business to take care of first and then we’ll go home.”
Unless Caleb Beckett had other ideas on the matter.
Rachel looked across the room to the chair where Brody still slept. He’d come rushing into the room a few minutes after she’d come to. She didn’t know where he’d been and he hadn’t offered up the information. She would deal with him later.
“Where’d the man go?”
Rachel pulled her attention away from Brody’s quietly snoring form. “What man?”
“The man that brung you upstairs when you fainted. He was nice. I liked him.”
“Brought me upstairs,” she corrected. “And you like everybody.” The poor boy had spent the first four years of his life in a brothel. By the time Rachel took him in, he’d been starved for male influence.
“Is he comin’ back?”
“I’m not sure where Mr. Beckett is, Ethan. I expect he’s going about his business.” Or her business.
Resentment toward her situation and the man who had turned her life upside down boiled in her veins. She pushed it away. She needed to conserve her energy for what was to come.
“He told me you weren’t bad sick.” Ethan smiled up at her with an innocence she didn’t remember possessing at his age. “He was right, too. You’re all better now, right?”
She hugged him close. “I’m all better now.”
At least for the moment.
* * *
“Mr. Beckett? A moment of your time?” On the planked sidewalk outside of his office, Sheriff Donovan stood, hands on his hips. The fact that he used Caleb’s name, the one he’d given to Mrs. Sutter, made him wary.
He halted and looked toward the livery at the end of the street. The day was just getting started and the sun had barely had time to creep up from the horizon. What was the sheriff doing up so early? Did he sleep in his office?
“I won’t keep you long,” the sheriff promised, as if sensing Caleb’s hesitation.
Caleb scowled. He didn’t know what the sheriff wanted and he didn’t like walking into things blind. It made his stomach work itself into knots and raised his guard. But he guessed there was no avoiding the conversation. Donovan struck him as the determined type. Letting out a sigh, he stepped out of the street and up onto the dryer sidewalk. It had rained overnight and the streets had turned to muck.
The sheriff motioned to his office and Caleb followed. Probably better to not have this conversation outside, even though only a few souls had started milling about. Inside, warmth radiated from the potbellied stove, hitting him full force. The sheriff went over to it and stirred at a pot of beans and bacon.
Caleb hadn’t eaten since sunrise the day before. With all the commotion of yesterday, he’d simply not had the time to find a decent meal and Mrs. Beckett’s fainting kept him from his supper. The scent of the bacon made the knots in his stomach twist tighter. Hunger gnawed at his backbone.
Sheriff Donovan scooped a helping onto his plate. “You hungry?” He didn’t sound enamored of the prospect of sharing his breakfast.
Caleb lied and shook his head. He wasn’t sure breaking bread with a lawman would start his day off on the right foot, and given the run of bad luck he’d had of late, he didn’t want to do anything to keep the string going.
The sheriff appeared relieved. He walked back to his scarred oak desk and dropped down into the chair behind it, motioning for Caleb to take an empty seat in front. Then he reached inside his desk drawer and produced a basket covered with a checkered napkin. Beneath it, the comforting smell of freshly baked biscuits rose up and assaulted Caleb’s senses.
Donovan shrugged. “Minnie from the bakery brings these over every mornin’, but if I leave them out my deputy makes short work of them. You sure you don’t want one?”
Caleb shook his head, clenching his back teeth. He wondered what the penalty was for knocking a sheriff out cold and stealing his meal. “You want something in particular?”
Donovan tucked the cloth napkin into his collar and glanced across the desk. “Got your name off the hotel register,” he said, explaining how he knew Caleb’s name. “Signed it yourself, so I take it you can read and write?”
“You takin’ a survey?”
The sheriff shrugged and spoke around a mouthful of beans. “I find it a bit curious, is all. Not many drifters can.”
“What makes you so sure I’m a drifter?”
Donovan glanced up from plate. “Got that look about you.”
“That a fact?” Caleb couldn’t fault the sheriff for his powers of observation, though they hardly told the whole story. But looking at the surface of a man rarely did. Most of what he was lived deeper than that, hiding out in the places people couldn’t see.
“I believe so. But given you can read and write, I’m guessin’ there’s more to you than meets the eye.”
“Glad to have satisfied your curiosity.” Caleb’s grandfather had made sure he could read and write. He wanted his grandson to be able to recite verbatim every passage in the Bible pertaining to sin and damnation. All these years later, and Caleb was still trying to scour the words from his mind. He pushed his chair back. “If that’s all...?”
The sheriff held out a hand and motioned for him to stay put. “Not quite. You’ll forgive me, Mr. Beckett, but it isn’t every day we get a stranger riding into town with a body in the back of his buckboard. Rachel’s important to us. We want to make sure there’s nothing we need to worry about.”
We. As if the town as a collective had decided to take her under their wing, and he as the outsider was considered a threat. But where were these people when Sutter was gambling his family out of house and home? Where were they when Kirkpatrick started pressuring Sutter in the hopes of getting his land?
The threat to Rachel didn’t come from an outsider like him, it came from the inside.
“Do we need to worry?” the sheriff asked outright.
Caleb gave his head a slow shake, his eyes never leaving the sheriff, who returned the silent perusal, his beans and bacon forgotten.
“Then I expect you’re on your way out of town, Mr. Beckett?”
“Currently I’m on my way to the end of the street. Beyond that, I can’t say it’s anyone’s business but my own where I go or when I get there.”
The hard look on the sheriff’s face indicated he was not satisfied with the answer, but the man’s satisfaction, or lack thereof, was the least of Caleb’s concerns this morning.
“What were you doing in Laramie, Mr. Beckett?”
Caution invaded Caleb’s veins.
“Just passing through,” he said, searching the sheriff’s face for clues as to what the man was fishing for.
“How’d it be you came to bring Robert’s body home?”
“I was there when he was killed.” He kept his tone even, gave nothing more away.
“Who killed him?”
“Man by the name of Sinjin Drake.”
Something in the lawman’s face altered. “Sinjin Drake?”
“You know him?”
“By reputation only. Not a lawman north of Tucson who doesn’t, I expect. Man’s said to be one of the fastest draws in the west with a body count to prove it.”
“That so?”
“Did you meet the man?”
“We sat at the same table. Can’t say we shared much conversation.”
“Did they arrest him?”
“Drake? No. The law said it was self-defense. Sutter went for his gun.”
The sheriff’s gaze sharpened. “His guns weren’t on the body.”
“I said he went for his guns. I didn’t say he was wearing them at the time.”
Shock registered on Sheriff Donovan’s face. “What do you mean he wasn’t wearing them?”
“A man needed at least fifty dollars to sit at the table. Word was Sutter sold everything but the clothes on his back to raise the capital.”
“And Drake shot him anyway?”
Caleb didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Robert Sutter had come home in the back of a wagon with a hole through his heart. That was all the confirmation needed as far as he was concerned.
“We done here?”
“For now.”
Caleb headed for the door but the sheriff’s voice stopped him cold.
“You won’t mind if I wire out to Laramie and verify your story?”
Every fiber in Caleb’s body stilled. He glanced at the sheriff out of the corner of his eye. “Don’t matter none to me.”
Chances were he’d be nothing more than a fading memory in the minds of Salvation Falls residents by the time the sheriff got news back from Laramie. And that suited him just fine.
* * *
After Rachel managed to get the boys fed and Freedom tracked down, she arranged to send them back home in the wagon. She’d get back on her own after she conducted her business with Mr. Beckett and figured out where things stood. She would need the time to formulate a plan, determine what to do.
Did the man plan on kicking them off their land—his land, now? A sick sense of displacement filled her, followed by burning frustration. Her entire world had been pulled out from under her and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.
Rachel took a deep breath and smoothed a hand over her skirt. She still wore her widow’s weeds, but she didn’t plan on making it a habit. She didn’t have time to dye her meager wardrobe black to mourn a man who didn’t deserve her tears.
She made her way down Main Street. When she’d inquired about Mr. Beckett this morning, Cletus at the front desk told her he’d left for the livery thirty minutes earlier. She picked up her skirts and hurried her steps. The last thing she needed was him showing up at the ranch ahead of her, announcing his ownership before she had a chance to explain it to her family herself.
She needed to talk to him, to settle this thing. She couldn’t live in a sickening limbo land wondering what would happen. She had to keeping moving. If she stopped...
Well, if she stopped everything would catch up with her and she’d end up passing out again from the weight of it all.
Her skin burned anew with the humiliation of succumbing to such weakness, a luxury she could not afford. Muriel, the waitress who’d brought her breakfast, had told her Mr. Beckett moved with lightning speed, shoving the table out of the way to get to her before she hit the floor.
The woman all but swooned retelling the story, as if it were some romantic tale from a dime novel and not the most embarrassing thing to happen to Rachel since...well, since she didn’t know when. Last night’s debacle left her mortified. One minute she was standing to leave and the next...
The next she was swooped up in a pair of strong arms.
The memory came unbidden. She tried to remember specifics, but the entire episode was hazy, save for the sensations his touch had conjured. The strong arms carrying her, the solid chest where she’d rested her head. The rapid beat of his heart as he rushed her upstairs. And the gentle way he had laid her upon the mattress, his palm touching her cheek. She’d tried to answer him when he called her name, but she’d been too weak to respond.
She shook her head. No doubt her state of mind tainted the truth. She sincerely doubted a man like Caleb Beckett could be considered a romantic hero in any way, shape or form. He had the edge of an outlaw rather than a shining knight.
Not that Rachel believed in shining knights. She had disabused herself of their existence a long time ago.
Taking a deep breath, she straightened her shoulders and marched into the livery.
She stopped inside the door, letting her eyes adjust to the dim light. The scent of hay, horses and manure mingled in the air around her, but she had spent too much time in her own barn to pay it much heed.
She found Mr. Beckett brushing long strokes down his horse’s back in one of the stalls. The horse, a beautiful paint, nipped playfully at the brim of his hat. He chuckled and spoke in low tones. She couldn’t make out the words, but the sound surprised her, drew her in. She stood silently for a moment and watched. He’d removed his sheepskin jacket and tossed it over the edge of the stall door. His broad back shifted with each stroke of the brush, mesmerizing her. There was a fluidity to his movements, and while one hand brushed in a rhythmic pattern, the other rested on the animal’s neck, petting it. The horse nickered in response to the sound of its owner’s voice.
The unguarded moment surprised her. She had expected to arrive to find him glaring down at her, arms crossed, impatience stamped into every ruggedly handsome feature while he counted the hours before he could toss them off the ranch. This hint of good humor threw her.
Then again, who wouldn’t be in good humor after the boon of winning a prime piece of land through no more effort than the turn of a card?
The muscles in her neck tightened.
“You gonna stand there all day?”
She jumped. “I...I...how did you know I was here?”
He peered over his shoulder. Whiskers shadowed his square jaw. The brim of his hat hid his eyes, and still she could feel the force of his gaze through every inch of her body. There was something about this man. Something beyond the rugged face and strong body. He had a presence, commanding and vibrant. No doubt she could have walked into a room blindfolded and known instantly if he occupied the same space. The awareness irritated her.
“I could sense you there.”
Rachel swallowed. A shivery tremor swept through her veins as his answer echoed her own thoughts.
She fought to get her voice out without trembling. “I wanted to talk to you. About last night.”
“Figured.” He rested an arm on the short stable wall and stared at her. Hot liquid poured through her veins from the strength of his full attention.
