The Ranger's Bride. Laurie Grant

so that she couldn’t take a full breath. Her nostrils were full of the horrible coppery stench of blood.

      She could feel no rise and fall of breathing from the body lying against her, but just to be sure, she took hold of the wrist dangling over her back and felt for a heartbeat. None. The big man who had leered down at her so recently was dead.

      Struggling against the horror that was welling up into a scream—which might put her in danger if the outlaws were still around—Addy forced herself to listen, to concentrate on something else besides the corpse partially pinning her down on the stagecoach floor. None of the other passengers remained inside. Where were they? Were the outlaws still outside?

      She could hear no voices, neither outlaws calling out orders nor those of the passengers. Nothing but the humming of the flies and the endless soughing of the hot summer wind as it echoed around the limestone hills. Holding her breath so she could hear better, though, she could hear the soft tearing sound horses made as they cropped grass.

      Where was everyone else? Were they all dead, too? Would someone shoot her the moment she showed her face outside the coach?

      Determinedly, she pushed and wiggled until she had worked herself out from under the dead man and stealthily lifted the flap, pushing herself up just enough to see over the edge.

      The hem of a fluttering skirt on the grass was all she could see.

      Pushing open the door, she stood at the door for a minute, peering out at the scene before her.

      The outlaws were gone. Five bodies lay in the dusty road—the shotgun guard, flat on his back, the old woman, lying on her side as if napping, the drummer, sprawled in an ungainly heap as if he had been kneeling, the thin middle-aged woman who’d had the migraine, looking like a puppet whose strings had been cut, and finally and most horribly, the man who had been sitting opposite her in the stagecoach. He lay prone, his arms outflung in the dirt.

      Stifling a moan of anguish, she ran to each of them in turn, finding in each a fatal bullet wound either in the chest or the head.

      Addy left the stranger’s body until last, knowing that when she proved to herself he was as lifeless as the others, she would very likely succumb to hysterics. For then she would be truly alone.

      She was so shaky she couldn’t be sure if his chest was rising or not. The back of his shirt was streaked with blood. What would she see when she turned him over?

      When she took hold of his shoulder and pulled him gently back toward her though, she lost all hope. Blood spread over his shirtfront like a horrible scarlet blossom. No one lived after being shot through the heart.

      And then he groaned.

      Addy, who had been crouched over him, fell back on her extended elbows.

      He groaned again. He was alive! But for how long?

      “Mister! Can you talk to me? Wake up! Where are you hit?” Addy cried. His eyes flew open even as he tried to wrench away from her, then settled back with a grunt.

      “Easy, now, easy!” she soothed him. “I’m not one of the outlaws! Seems like they’re gone now. I need to know where you’re hit,” she said as she pushed back his rawhide vest and began to unfasten his shirt.

      She saw him relax fractionally at her words.

      “F-Fogartys,” he muttered.

      “You mean you think it was the Fogarty Gang that did this?” she questioned him, as she reached the last button. “Weren’t you the one who said they hadn’t been operating around here since their leader was hanged, years ago?”

      He opened his eyes again and looked at her, but she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She just knew that the eyes she’d thought might be black were brown, but the deepest shade of it she’d ever seen.

      Wrenching her gaze away from those fathomless pools, she pushed aside his shirt.

      The bullet hole was higher than she’d expected, just over his collarbone. It must have gone in higher than the lung. That’s why he still lived, then. But if the bullet was still in him, he could die of blood poisoning. Reaching down his back, though, she felt a larger, bloodier wound in the back of his shoulder, and breathed a sigh of relief. The bullet had apparently exited there.

      He’d shuddered even at her gentle touch, but now the stranger’s eyes drifted shut.

      “We’ve got to get you some help,” she said urgently. Then, when he seemed reluctant to reawaken, Addy shook him by his left upper arm.

      That brought instant results.

      “Judas priest, woman, let go! That hurts like fire!”

      Looking down, she saw a bullet hole she’d missed before in the cloth of his sleeve. Easing the shirt down from his shoulder, she saw another wound in the fleshy part of his upper arm. Probing the muscle with careful fingers, she could not find a second hole. That bullet must still be in there.

      A horse whinnied behind her, and Addy darted a look over her shoulder, half expecting to see the outlaws had returned to finish them off. But it was only one of the team, still hitched to the stagecoach.

      “Fogartys…they’ll come back….” he muttered.

      They had to get out of here, and get him to a doctor, but how? It wasn’t as if she could carry him, and from the pallor beneath his sun-bronzed face, he sure couldn’t walk the two miles to her place.

      There was only the stagecoach—and of course she’d never driven one. The body of the dead man was still inside it. But what other choice did they have?

      Addy touched the man’s other shoulder to rouse him. “Mister, we’ve got to get you out of here, get you to some help,” she said, nervously eyeing the horizon lest the outlaws come galloping over it.

      He didn’t open his eyes. “Everyone’s dead….”

      She nodded, though she knew he couldn’t see her. “Yes, everyone’s dead, except you and me.”

      “Just…witnesses. ’Sposed to be me….”

      She didn’t know what he meant by that, and at the moment, she didn’t care. “Look, we’re going to have to get you into the stage. That big man who was sitting next to me is lying dead in there, but I can’t move him, and neither can you.”

      He shrugged, a movement that instantly made him groan in pain. “I’ve been around dead bodies before.” He opened his eyes, and pierced her with his dark gaze. “You ever driven a stage team?”

      She fought the urge to laugh hysterically. “No, of course not. But looks like I’ll have to try, doesn’t it?”

      His mouth twisted wryly. “Don’t think I could climb up on top if I had to….”

      “No, of course not.” She squared her shoulders. “Well, you’re going to have to help me get you to your feet.”

      He’d closed his eyes again. For a moment he was so still, she thought he’d passed out; and then he reached inside his vest and fumbled at something for the longest time.

      “Whatever you’re trying to find can wait,” she said. “We need to hurry and get you to a doctor.”

      Opening his eyes again, the man shook his head. “No doctor…” He held out his hand, the one that had reached inside his vest. His fingers were folded around something. “Here—put this…on one of the men. The shotgun guard.”

      Her eyes locked with his, Addy allowed him to drop the object into her hand. Its hard coolness told her it was metal before she looked down.

      When she did, Addy was startled to see it was a lawman’s badge. She squinted in the strong afternoon sunlight. It was the badge of a Texas Ranger.

      Her eyes flew to his face. “You’re a Ranger? I thought…” She shut her mouth before she could say, “I thought you were an outlaw or a gunslinger,”