CAROLINE AND THE RAIDER Page 11

  Guthrie grinned, slowing his pace as they came abreast of the marshal’s office. “He had half a dozen hard-boiled eggs while we were in the saloon.”

  Caroline shook her head. “And I suppose he’s sleeping in your room?”

  “After six hard-boiled eggs? Are you kidding? He’s on the outside stairs.” Guthrie pushed the marshal’s door open and stepped back so Caroline could enter in front of him.

  “How can I help you folks?” the marshal asked cordially. He was an older man, substantially built, with a bristly gray mustache.

  “We’d like to ask a few questions about a stagecoach robbery,” Guthrie said, opening the gate in the thigh-high railing that set the cells and the marshal’s desk off from the entrance. Again, he let Caroline go through ahead of him.

  “The one Mr. Seaton Flynn is accused of committing,” she said.

  Even while he was taking off his hat and smiling companionably at the well-fed lawman, Guthrie somehow managed to nudge Caroline in the ribs. The message he wanted to convey was clear enough.

  Quiet.

  “You members of Flynn’s family?” the marshal inquired, studying them closely from beneath eyebrows as bushy and gray as his mustache.

  “Miss Flynn here is his sister,” Guthrie replied, before Caroline could explain her identity. “And I’m his cousin, Jeffrey Mason.”

  Guthrie and the marshal shook hands while Caroline bit her tongue to keep from protesting the lies Guthrie was telling.

  “My name’s John Teemo,” the lawman said. Clearly, he’d sized Guthrie up and decided he was all right. Which showed what he knew. “The case against your cousin is pretty well settled, Mr. Mason, as you probably know. He’s been convicted of murder, besides robbery, and sentenced to hang.” His blue eyes stopped briefly on Caroline’s face. “Sorry, ma’am.”

  Guthrie folded his arms and narrowed his eyes in an expression of friendly thoughtfulness. “I wonder if there’s anybody around here who could show us exactly where the crime happened? We’d just like to see the place for ourselves.”

  “I understand,” Mr. Teemo replied, with polite sympathy. “I could take you out there myself, come morning. You might want to talk with Rafe Binchly while you’re here, too. He was on the stage when it was robbed and poor old Cal Waiden was gunned down. Saw the whole thing.” Again, he looked apologetically at Caroline. “Testified to it in court.”

  Caroline fought down the aching uneasiness inside her. She mustn’t start losing faith in Mr. Flynn now, not when she’d come so far. She could no longer deny, at least to herself, that her feelings toward him had changed irrevocably, because of Mr. Hayes, but that didn’t excuse her from her vow to see that justice was served. “My … cousin and I are convinced he was mistaken,” she said evenly. “Seaton would never do such a thing.”

  “Seems like he went ahead and did, though, ma’am,” Marshal Teemo said solemnly.

  Guthrie took her arm in a grip that was firm enough to leave minor bruises, though he was turning a mannerly face toward the marshal. “Miss Flynn and I will be leaving now,” he said. “We’ll come back around nine tomorrow, if that’s convenient for you.”

  The marshal nodded. “And don’t forget about ol’ Rafe Binchly. He could tell you just what happened.”

  “Where would we find him, please?” Caroline blurted. She knew Guthrie would have asked the same question, but she’d wanted to show him that he couldn’t tell her when to speak and when to keep her silence. His say-so only went so far.

  “This time of day,” the marshal said, consulting the watch that hung from a chain stretched across his broad belly, “Rafe’s usually down at the Golden Garter—begging your pardon, ma’am—bending his elbow at the bar.”

  Guthrie moved his hand from Caroline’s arm to the small of her back. Somehow, he managed to propel her out of the marshal’s office without revealing the fact that he was using force.

  “I want to go to this Golden Garter place with you,” Caroline hissed, once they’d reached the sidewalk again, “and I don’t care whether you’re for or against, Mr. Hayes!”

  “I’m against,” Guthrie said tautly. “And we’re doing this my way or I’m putting you on the next stage back to Bolton and heading for Cheyenne.”

  Mr. Flynn was being held in Laramie, and Adabelle lived in Cheyenne. The message was not lost on Caroline. “As long as you help Seaton,” she replied, “I don’t care if you marry Tob’s mother!” That last part was a lie, of course. Caroline had tender feelings for Mr. Hayes, much as she would have liked to squelch them. It followed quite naturally that she couldn’t marry Mr. Flynn, of course, but following through on her plan to set the man free so he could prove his innocence was the least she could do.

  Guthrie grinned, making Caroline wonder if he was somehow divining her thoughts again. “In order to help your—friend—I need your help, Teacher. And getting yourself thrown out of a saloon on your pretty little bustle isn’t going to aid our cause any.”

  Caroline could see the establishment in the distance, at the end of the darkening street. Across the top of the facade, someone had painted the words Golden Garter in garish gilt. Light flowed through dirty windows, along with noise and music and raucous laughter.

  “Just remember,” she said, thinking of the saucy girls inside who liked to sit on a man’s lap and whisper in his ear, “I’m not paying you to carouse.”

  “You’re not paying me at all,” Guthrie reminded her, “because I haven’t agreed to take this job. So just go back to your room and wait for me. I’ll come to you when I know something.”

  Caroline hated being shunted aside that way, like some worrisome child, but she knew she would accomplish nothing by storming into a place where ladies weren’t welcome. So she nodded tersely and turned back toward the hotel.

  She couldn’t resist glancing over her shoulder, and when she did, she saw Guthrie grinning at her. He winked, then ambled through the double doors of the saloon.

  Along the way, Caroline paused to admire a green velvet traveling suit and a matching feathered hat in a store window. She took her time returning to the hotel.

  Too restless to wait in her room, she climbed the stairs behind the hotel instead and sat beside Tob, who was lying quietly on the landing, his long muzzle resting on his paws. He greeted her with a companionable whine.

  She patted his head. The poor beast was probably exhausted, having kept pace with Guthrie’s horse for so many hours. “One of these days soon,” she told the animal, “Mr. Hayes will build that house of his, and you’ll have a nice barn to sleep in. Maybe Mrs. Hayes will even let you inside to lie on the hearth, though I wouldn’t depend on that. I have an idea the woman isn’t so wonderful as your master would like us to believe.”

  Tob whimpered forlornly, and Caroline took immediate pity on him.

  “Don’t listen to me,” she said, ruffling his loose hide. “Just because I don’t expect to take to the woman, I shouldn’t be trying to influence you.”

  “You’re right,” put in a familiar masculine voice. “You shouldn’t.”

  Caroline peered down through the spaces between the wooden steps and saw Guthrie standing there, gazing up at her with that insufferable grin on his face.

  She ignored his needling words, moved to stand, and then reconsidered. Purposefully, she tucked her skirts in around her legs and cleared her throat. “That certainly didn’t take long,” she observed.

  Guthrie was climbing the stairs. “How much time did you expect me to spend in the Golden Garter, Teacher?” he asked, arching one eyebrow.

  Caroline’s cheeks throbbed, but she lifted her chin and squared her shoulders. “Long enough to play poker, get yourself intoxicated, and—well—long enough, that’s all.”

  He sat down on the step below hers with a sigh and gazed off toward the blazing sunset visible over the shoddy roofs of the ramshackle frontier town. The sky boiled with crimson, apricot, and gold.

  It took a great deal of self-control on Carol
ine’s part to keep herself from reaching out to massage Mr. Hayes’s shoulders, the way a wife might do. She couldn’t imagine where such an improper desire might have come from.

  “I found Binchly right away,” he said, after a few moments of rich silence had passed. “He’ll show us the site of the robbery and shooting tomorrow, and tell us all about it, so we won’t have to trouble the marshal.”

  “Good,” Caroline agreed, because she didn’t know what else to say. She was dreading visiting that place of death and greed, even though she was certain she would find proof of Seaton’s innocence there.

  Guthrie looked back at her over one shoulder. Evidently, he wasn’t going to let what he’d overheard earlier pass unchallenged. “Adabelle wouldn’t be mean to my dog,” he said flatly.

  His defense of the woman was unnecessary and, for that reason, it only made Caroline angrier. “I’m sure she’s an absolute saint,” she replied. She stood, but Guthrie grasped her skirt and pulled her back down. Her bottom struck the landing hard.

  “How come you hate Adabelle so much, when you don’t even know her?” he demanded.

  “I don’t hate her,” Caroline insisted miserably. She couldn’t admit to her true sentiments, of course. Mr. Hayes would surely laugh if he knew the schoolteacher was falling in love with him.

  Guthrie’s eyes narrowed for a moment, then went wide and filled with laughter. “You’re jealous,” he accused.

  Caroline slapped her knees with the palms of both hands in her ire. “I most certainly am not.”

  He chuckled, full of masculine arrogance, then moved up to sit on the step beside her. She was sharply aware of his scent, his substance, his strength. “Yes, you are.” He went right on talking to her after that, but something was different. He spoke in a low, mesmerizing voice, uttering magical words that seemed to fade from her mind like mirages an instant after they were spoken. His voice caressed her, doing the work of his hands, making her breathing quicken and her heart pound.

  Caroline made a soft, despairing sound and still, with his mind, with those words that left no imprint on her memory, he stripped her of all resistance.

  It was, in fact, as though he’d peeled away her clothes, garment by garment, kissing each patch of pale skin as he bared it. Caroline had never read about, or even imagined, that such intimacy was possible, and she feared what would happen if she didn’t regain control of her senses.

  She might as well have been intoxicated, so powerless were her muscles, while inwardly her body thrummed and pulsed with an acceleration of life. She let her head rest against Guthrie’s shoulder, but both his hands still lay lightly on his knees. She could see them.

  And yet she could feel them, too, moving over her flesh. Smoothing and shaping, teasing and tormenting.

  He continued to speak, in that low voice only she could hear, and the sweet pressure inside Caroline rose like floodwaters. Still the phrases flowed, like a silvery river, and they might have been woven of another language, so indecipherable did she find them. They were like magical smoke curling around her, making its way inside.

  “Oh,” Caroline gasped, clutching the rough wooden step with both hands as a delicious explosion rocked her, unfolding into one violent tremor after another. Guthrie put his arm around her then, and held her lightly until the quaking stopped.

  Chapter

  Caroline closed her eyes and wrapped her arms tightly around her trembling knees, struggling to regain her perspective. Somehow, this man had bewitched her, cast some spell that had changed her feelings for Seaton Flynn forever. Dear God how she despised Guthrie for taking away her dreams and offering nothing in return but heartache and shame!

  “Caroline.”

  She didn’t open her eyes. “What?”

  “Look at me.”

  She lifted one eyelid. The darkness had thickened to the point where she could barely see Guthrie’s form in the stray light from a rear window below the stairs. “What?” she repeated, this time with a distinct note of impatience.

  “What just happened here doesn’t make you a bad person.”

  Caroline was still a bit dazed, and more confused than she’d ever been in her life. She leaned forward, glaring at Guthrie. “It’s generous of you to say so, Mr. Hayes, considering that you were the instigator and I was, if anything, your hapless quarry.”

  He gave a chortling laugh, rose to his feet, and offered Caroline a hand to rise after him. “If you’d wanted me to stop,” he pointed out reasonably, “all you would have had to do was tell me so.”

  “How could I tell you to stop when you weren’t actually touching me?” she blurted. After that, Caroline made a great business of smoothing her skirts, stalling while she searched her thoughts vainly for an acceptable reason. The sad truth was, she’d been swept up in the pleasure of Guthrie’s words and it hadn’t even occurred to her to protest.

  Behind her, on the landing, Tob hinted to be invited inside the hotel.

  Guthrie took Caroline’s hand and led her down the stairs, and the dog followed, panting happily, his toenails making a rhythmic click on the wood.

  “I could put you on a stagecoach back to Bolton first thing tomorrow morning,” Guthrie offered, and desolation crushed Caroline as she realized how eager he was to get rid of her. “You’d be back with Miss Phoebe and Miss Ethel, safe and sound, in a couple of days.”

  Resolutely, Caroline shook her head. “I can’t go home without freeing Mr. Flynn,” she said.

  Guthrie sighed. “You might have to, darlin’,” he said gently, leading her through the little space between the hotel and the noisy saloon next door. Caroline hadn’t noticed the name of the place. “After all, so far there’s still no reason to believe that judge and jury were wrong about what happened.”

  Caroline shuddered, caught by a chill she attributed to the night breeze, as they reached the sidewalk and approached the door of the hotel. Tob still trotted along behind them, confident of his acceptance inside the building. “Have you ever been to a hanging, Mr. Hayes?”

  “Guthrie,” he corrected hoarsely. “And, yes, I saw a man hanged once for deserting. It wasn’t a sight you or any other lady should be allowed to see.”

  Caroline felt like anything but a lady; her knees were still weak from that scandalous little episode on the back stairway when nothing and yet everything had happened. She lifted one hand unconsciously to her throat and swallowed hard as Guthrie pushed open the door for her.

  “Good night, Mr. Hayes,” she said, pausing at the foot of the stairs. She certainly hoped none of the people chatting and smoking in the lobby had guessed what she’d been up to. But then, she didn’t really know that herself, so how could they?

  Guthrie released her hand, but in some strange way his gaze held her just as effectively. “I hope you’ll think over what I said about going home,” he told her quietly. “Your guardians probably believe i kidnapped you.”

  Caroline didn’t need to consider; she’d been over the problem from every angle, beginning on the dreadful day when word had reached her that Mr. Flynn had been arrested and thrown into jail. “I made my decision long since,” she said. “And I left a note for Miss Phoebe and Miss Ethel.”

  He sighed and rested one elbow on the newel post at the foot of the banister. In his other hand, he held his battered hat. “They’re probably convinced that I forced you to write the note, and you damn well know it. And as for your decision, it’s the wrong one.”

  Caroline shrugged nonchalantly, even though she was weary inside, and full of fear and confusion. “Right or wrong, I’m standing by it. Wouldn’t you want your Adabelle to believe in you if you’d been accused of a crime you didn’t commit?”

  Guthrie looked around uneasily, and there was anger in his eyes when he finally turned them to Caroline. He spoke in a low voice. “Unless you want to end up in Marshal Teemo’s jail, charged with conspiracy, you’d better watch what you say!”

  Properly chagrined, Caroline lowered her eyes for a moment.
Guthrie took advantage of the fact that she was off-guard and gripped her arm, steering her up the stairs beside him. His faithful dog came along behind, unimpeded and apparently unnoticed.

  Mr. Hayes waited, like the gentleman he most certainly wasn’t, while Caroline unlocked the door to her room. The day had been a long and trying one, and her bumpy bed beneath the eaves looked inviting.

  For a moment, it seemed as though Guthrie meant to say something. In the end, however, he just turned and walked away, slapping his hat against his thigh once in exasperation. But Tob skulked into Caroline’s room, his belly brushing the floor as he crept along, and curled up at the foot of her bed with a low whine.

  “I don’t blame you,” Caroline said, closing and latching the door. “I wouldn’t want to sleep with him either.”

  With that, she began to undress. That night, she had the luxury of sleeping in a nightgown, instead of her clothes, and she took her time performing her evening ablutions. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, brushing her hair, when there was a knock at the door.

  Caroline had heard stories about the misfortunes that could befall unwary women far from home and hearth, and she was grateful for Tob’s presence, however ineffectual the animal might be. “Who’s there?” she called, in a shaky voice meant to be firm.

  “I want my dog back,” came Guthrie’s unmistakable drawl.

  Caroline went to the door and opened it just a crack, peering around the edge. “He seems to prefer staying with me,” she replied politely.

  A muscle went taut in Guthrie’s jawline, then relaxed again. He gave a soft whistle, and the dog whimpered, then rose to his feet and obeyed his master’s summons.

  Disappointed, Caroline closed the door after the feckless dog and turned the key in the lock. Then, hearing noise from the saloon next door, she put a chair under the knob.

  She slept well that night, despite a confused state of mind that would have kept her awake if she’d been at home. Her adventures with Guthrie had exhausted her.