CAROLINE AND THE RAIDER Read online

“A bath?” Caroline echoed, confused. The marshal had sworn on his mother’s grave that he wouldn’t let her step out of that cell again unless the jailhouse caught fire.

  Amy nodded. “Mr. Stone is bringing our own tub down here, and I’ll heat the water on the stove out front and keep watch for you.”

  The sheer generosity of the act tightened Caroline’s throat and brought the sting of tears to her eyes. She looked down at the starched calico dress in her arms, and the soft muslin underthings, to hide her emotion. “Why are you being so kind?” she asked.

  “Because I don’t believe you’re guilty of anything, that’s why. You wouldn’t have let Mr. Seaton Flynn go if you hadn’t truly thought he was innocent.” Amy reached through the bars to pat Caroline on the hand. “Don’t you worry, now. After you’ve had your bath, and brushed out your hair, you and I will have a nice cup of tea and play a game of hearts.”

  And so it was that Caroline had her hot, luxurious bath, changed into fresh clothing, brushed and braided her hair, and sipped tea from a delicate china cup. She smiled once or twice as she pondered her cards to think what a picture she and Amy must make, conducting their tea party with a wall of iron bars between them.

  Chapter

  It was just like old times, Guthrie thought, as he sat at a corner table in the Red Duck Saloon, a cigar clamped between his teeth, four aces and a queen in his hand, and Tob lapping up whiskey from a dish on the sawdust floor. If he had a lick of sense, Guthrie told himself, he’d take tonight’s winnings and head straight for Cheyenne.

  Trouble was, he’d given the Wildcat his word, and he knew if he went back on it, he’d be haunted by the image of those velvety brown eyes for the rest of his life.

  He’d just taken another pot, much to the disappointment of the other four players at the table, when he saw Marshal Stone approaching. Guthrie thought he and the peace officer might have become friends, given the time.

  Stone pulled a chair away from another table, turned it backwards, and sat astraddle of it, his arms draped over the back.

  “What’s she done now?” Guthrie asked, counting his money as the other men at the table made their excuses and vanished.

  The marshal smiled ruefully. “Actually, Miss Caroline’s been behaving herself. Makes me wonder what she’s up to.”

  Guthrie grinned and took a puff on his cigar. “If I were you, I’d check for a secret stash of dynamite.” He regarded the lawman solemnly for a moment. “You’re a busy man, Stone—not the type for an idle chat. What is it?”

  “The circuit judge came through this afternoon,” Stone answered uneasily. “He set bail for Mrs. Hayes.”

  Guthrie didn’t correct the improper reference to Caroline as his wife. Mrs. Hayes. He liked the sound of it. “How much?”

  “One hundred dollars.”

  The money was lying in Guthrie’s palm, thanks to the string of poker games he’d won that night, but the decision wasn’t quite that easy. Up to this moment, he’d believed the Laramie jailhouse was the best place for Caroline, until Flynn was caught again, at least. But now he was forced to consider his true feelings.

  He didn’t want to leave Caroline behind; that was the real reason he was still hanging around town instead of out picking up Flynn’s trail again. If he was to be entirely honest with himself, he had to admit he had the same uneasy feeling he’d had the day he rode away and left Annie alone on their small homestead in Kansas. When he’d returned, she was dead.

  On the other hand, the trail was no place for a hellcat like Caroline Chalmers. Guthrie just flat out didn’t need the aggravation.

  The marshal seemed to understand Guthrie’s quandary all too well. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” he said.

  Guthrie laughed. The statement summed up the way things had been between him and Caroline ever since their first meeting back in Bolton. Although that had taken place only a few weeks before, it seemed like a century had passed since those simple days when everything was so clear cut.

  “I guess I’d better take her with me,” Guthrie said, tamping out his cigar and pushing back his chair.

  Marshal Stone stood, realigned his hat, and led the way out of the saloon.

  Caroline looked amazed when Charlie brought her out of her cell She bunked at Guthrie as though she thought she might be hallucinating and shifted her tattered valise from one hand to the other.

  The sight of her filled Guthrie with an aching tenderness the likes of which he hoped he’d never feel again. It was too poignant, and it made him far too vulnerable. “The marshal and I have decided that the taxpayers of Laramie have enough trouble without you on their hands,” he said, in an effort to hide the fact that she mattered to him.

  “Mr. Hayes has posted your bail,” the marshal explained. “You’re free to go, but you’ve got to be back in Laramie in sixty days so a judge can decide what’s to be done with you.”

  Caroline’s throat moved visibly as she swallowed. “I could still go to federal prison,” she said.

  Glumly, Stone nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” His gaze linked with Guthrie’s. “Unless, of course, you manage to bring Flynn back. That would weigh pretty heavy in your favor. In fact, I might just drop all the charges if you did that.”

  As simply as that, without so much as a handshake, the agreement was made. Guthrie would bring in the prisoner, and the marshal would forget that Caroline had been instrumental in his escape.

  Guthrie took the valise from Caroline’s hand, spread his fingers at the small of her back, and propelled her toward the door. “Come on, Wildcat. We’ve got some tracking to do.”

  It was the strangest thing, Caroline reflected, as she walked along the dark street with Guthrie, how sometimes God would answer a person’s prayer before it had left their lips and sometimes He would ignore the prettiest pleas and reasonings.

  “You’re actually taking me along? I’m going to help you find Flynn?”

  Guthrie chuckled humorlessly. “I don’t know how much help you’ll be,” he answered, “but at least I’ll be able to keep an eye on you.”

  Tob was trotting along at Caroline’s side, and she touched his furry head just to reassure herself that she was really out of jail. Maybe she’d never have to go back. “Are we leaving tonight?”

  Guthrie nodded. “We’ll ride back to the place we lost Flynn and start from there.”

  Caroline’s cheeks heated at the memory Guthrie’s words brought to mind. It was generous of him to say “the place we lost Flynn” when in truth Caroline had been the one to bungle the situation. “That’ll take all night, won’t it?”

  “Probably,” Guthrie agreed. He glanced up at the sky. “But there’s a moon tonight, so we should make good time.”

  They reached the livery stable, where Guthrie reclaimed their horses. The attendant knew Caroline as the illustrious woman prisoner who had helped Seaton Flynn escape, and then climbed out of a privy and made a run for it herself, so he had to be shown a release paper signed by Marshal Stone.

  The sense of freedom Caroline felt as she rode along beside Guthrie through the moonlight was so trenchant that she very nearly couldn’t bear it. And she certainly didn’t trust herself to speak.

  Guthrie seemed content with just the night sounds himself, though occasionally he whistled tunelessly through his teeth for a few minutes. Even when they stopped to rest the horses Guthrie didn’t speak; he appeared to be in a state of deep concentration.

  Finally, just as the moon and stars were beginning to fade in the first glimmers of daylight, they reached the waterfall where Guthrie had had his last confrontation with Mr. Flynn.

  “I’m sorry,” Caroline said hoarsely, as she climbed down out of the saddle and stood watching the sun rise over the peaks of the mountains.

  Guthrie was already busy leading the horses downstream, away from the small waterfall, so they could drink. “For what?” he asked, in an offhand tone of voice, when he realized Caroline had followed him.

  “It was m
y fault Seaton got away.” She came around to face Guthrie, reached up tentatively to touch the healing wound on the side of his head with gentle fingers. “And I’m to blame for this, too.”

  Guthrie treated her to one of his crooked grins. “You do have a gift for showing up at the wrong time,” he conceded, spreading his hands in a magnanimous gesture. “But I’m willing to forgive you as long as you promise not to try to help me again.”

  Caroline laughed. “You are generous.”

  He touched her cheek with one hand, then thought better of the action and withdrew. “Gather up some firewood,” he said, breaking off a stick and testing it between his hands for flexibility. “I’ll see if I can’t catch us a few fish.”

  Although it hurt, the way he’d distanced himself from her all of the sudden, Caroline understood. There was something very volatile in their relationship, something treacherous. The flames could leap up and consume them both at any moment, marking their souls with scars that might never heal.

  She and Guthrie would be going their separate ways soon, Caroline reflected sadly. He would have his mine, and that fancy house he planned to build—and Adabelle.

  She turned and walked blindly away, in a pretense of searching for firewood. She still hoped to find her sisters, of course, but the West was a big place and she knew her chances of success were puny at best. At that weary, discouraged moment, it seemed to Caroline that there would be nothing for her but a lifetime of spinsterhood, spent teaching other people’s children.

  She bent and picked up a good-size chunk of wood, having noticed it only because she’d stumbled over it. Her longing to find her sisters, always running beneath the surface of her thoughts like an underground river, rose up to pierce her heart.

  She gathered wood until she had an armload, then returned to the campsite next to the stream. Guthrie had already garnered four sizable trout with his makeshift spear, and he looked pleased with himself as he started a little pile of dried twigs burning.

  Caroline let her burden fall from her arms with a clatter, and Guthrie looked up at her in concern. His voice was so gentle that it made Caroline want to cry.

  “What’s wrong, Wildcat?”

  She knelt beside the fledgling fire, the splayed fingers of both hands spread across her abdomen. Only a split second before, the true implications of her situation had come home to her. “Suppose I’m—suppose I’m expecting, Guthrie?”

  He regarded her steadily. “We’d get married.”

  “But we don’t love each other. And there’s Adabelle—”

  Guthrie’s jawline tightened for a moment. “If you’re carrying my baby, we’ll take the matter up with a preacher. And that’s the end of it, Caroline.”

  “I won’t marry a man who doesn’t love me!”

  “And I won’t see a child of mine raised as a bastard. Your woman-time—is it late?”

  Caroline swallowed hard and tried to calculate, but in the end she was so confused she couldn’t remember the last time she’d flowed. She knew it hadn’t happened since she met Guthrie. “I don’t know,” she said pitiably.

  Guthrie got his small, lightweight frying pan from his gear and set it in the fire, unceremoniously adding the freshly cleaned fish.

  “What would Adabelle say? If you had to marry me, I mean?”

  He didn’t look at her. “Wouldn’t be much she could say, it seems to me. At least, not much that was ladylike.”

  “But you’d never be happy. You’d always be thinking about how it would have been with her.”

  At last, Guthrie lifted his eyes, and Caroline was stunned to see a glint of mischief in their depths. “I figure just keeping you out of dutch would take up most of my time. What was left over we could spend making love.”

  Caroline’s cheeks burned. “Oh, but we’ve got to stop doing that.”

  He grinned. “I saw a brushfire once up in Kansas—wiped out about fifty acres of grass in half an hour. I figure putting that fire out by spitting on it and stopping our lovemaking are in about the same category. As long as the flames have something to feed on, they’re going to keep right on burning.”

  Caroline climbed awkwardly to her feet and stepped back a little way. “That’s ail well and good—for you. But I’m the one who would have to bear the shame of conceiving a child out of wedlock. Things like this are very different for women, you know.

  “Men are secretly admired for making a conquest, as though it were some kind of spectacular accomplishment, but women are looked down upon and even ostracized.”

  A delicious aroma began to rise from the fish, causing Caroline’s mouth to water and her stomach to grumble.

  “People will base their opinions of you on what you think of yourself,” Guthrie answered quietly. He stood, his gaze solemn and direct. “You’re not like your mother, Caroline.”

  She lifted her chin a notch. “What makes you so sure of that? You never knew her.”

  “Maybe not, but I know you. You’ve never willingly abandoned anybody in your life—not even that sorry excuse for a man you thought you wanted to marry. And it still tears at you that you had to get off that train and let your little sisters go on without you.” He stepped close and took her shoulders gently into his hands. “They’re all right, Wildcat. Wherever your sisters are, they’re just fine.”

  “How can you possibly know that?” Caroline fretted, but she wanted to believe he was right.

  Guthrie grinned. “Because they’re your sisters. My guess is, they’re both looking for you, and each of them is driving some man crazy.”

  “The fish is burning,” Caroline said, to distract him from the fact that her eyes were watering.

  He went back and pulled the pan expertly from the fire. They ate off metal plates from Guthrie’s gear and then Caroline washed the utensils in the stream. When she’d finished that, she turned and saw her traveling companion stretched out on his stomach in the sweet grass beyond the reach of the waterfall’s mist.

  Caroline felt herself being drawn toward him just as surely as if there was a rope tied around her waist and he was pulling at the other end. “Guthrie?”

  He didn’t lift his head from its resting place on his arms. “What?”

  “Aren’t we going on?”

  “Later. We’ll rest a while first.” At that, Guthrie rolled onto his side and looked up at her. “All I want to do is hold you,” he said, in answer to a question Caroline hadn’t had the courage to ask.

  “Promise?”

  “Yes.”

  She believed Guthrie and lay down beside him in the bruised grass, drawing in its clean, summery scent. He draped one arm around her waist and pulled her close, and they fitted together like two spoons in Miss Phoebe’s chest of silverware. “What if Mr. Flynn comes back to wreak vengeance?”

  Guthrie chuckled. “Damn, but I wish he would, Wildcat. Then I could grab him by the short hairs and take him back to Laramie to hang. Unfortunately, he’s probably halfway to Mexico City by now.”

  “You wouldn’t actually chase Mr. Flynn into Mexico?” Caroline marveled.

  “I’d chase him into hell,” Guthrie replied. “Now close your eyes—not to mention your mouth—and try to sleep.”

  Sleeping was easy, since Caroline was exhausted. When she awakened hours later, the sun was low in the sky and Guthrie was crouched by the fire again, cooking something that smelled wonderful.

  She sat up, yawning, feeling strangely safe. It was as though this isolated, mystical place belonged only to the two of them. “What is that?” she asked, sniffling the air.

  Guthrie smiled. “Rabbit.”

  Caroline took herself off to the woods, then came back to the stream to wash her hands and brush and rebraid her hair. She sat on a dry rock, her feet bare, watching Guthrie turn their dinner on an improvised spit. “Are we staying here tonight?”

  He turned to look at her, and an expression of enchantment flickered in his eyes, though it was gone so quickly that Caroline decided she’d imagined
it. “Yes. Flynn’s so far ahead of us by now, another day isn’t going to matter.”

  Caroline frowned. “I’m not so sure,” she said thoughtfully, wriggling her toes in the icy water of the stream. “That he’s all that far ahead of us, I mean. Seaton meant it when he said he was going to kill you and take me to Mexico with him, Guthrie.”

  Guthrie paused to study her somberly for a long time. “You may be right,” he said, and his tone was low and grave. “Caroline, if anything happens, don’t worry about me. Just get the hell away from him, any way you can.”

  A shudder passed through Caroline as she thought of how close she’d come to marrying Seaton Flynn. To think she’d actually looked forward to sharing his bed and bearing his children. “You said it yourself,” she answered, forcing herself to smile. “I’ve never deliberately abandoned anyone. And I’m not going to start with you, Guthrie Hayes.”

  “Damn it, woman, if I tell you to leave, you’ll leave!” He picked up a stick from the wood he’d gathered to replenish the fire and flung it angrily. Tob went bounding after the twig, barking in delight. In that moment Guthrie looked so much like a small, obstinate boy that Caroline had to smile.

  “Did you hear me?” Guthrie demanded, advancing on her.

  Caroline looked up at him, batted her eyelashes, and did her best to imitate his southern drawl. “Yes, sir, Mr. Hayes, I heard you,” she said sweetly.

  He glowered at her, his expression as ominous as a bank of storm clouds gathering in a summer sky, then suddenly laughed. “I swear when a Yankee mama takes her baby on her knee, the first thing she teaches him is how to talk through his nose.”

  Pretending offense, Caroline rose from the rock. “Northerners, sir, do not speak through their noses.”

  He laughed again, clamped a thumb and forefinger over both his nostrils, and mimicked what she’d said.

  Haughtily, Caroline swept around him, as though she were wearing a ball gown instead of trousers and a man’s shirt, and opened her valise. “You’re just put out because you lost the war,” she said, taking out her calico dress.