An Outlaw's Christmas. Linda Miller Lael

from the pail.

      As she was returning to the shelter of the schoolhouse, holding her skirts up so she wouldn’t trip over the hem, she spotted a rider just approaching the gate at the top of the road and recognized him immediately, even through the falling snow.

      Clay McKettrick.

      Piper’s whole being swelled with relief.

      She waited, saw Clay’s grin flash from beneath the round brim of his hat. His horse high-stepped toward her, across the field of snow, steam puffing from its flared nostrils, its mane and tail spangled with tiny icicles.

      “I told Dara Rose you’d be fine here on your own,” Clay remarked cordially, dismounting a few feet from where Piper stood, all but overwhelmed with gratitude, “but she insisted on finding out for sure.” A pause, a troubled frown as he took in her rumpled calico dress. “Where’s your coat? You’ll catch your death traipsing around without it.”

      She ignored the question, wide-eyed and winded from the hard march through the snow.

      Clay was a tall, lean man, muscular in all the right places, and it wasn’t hard to see why her cousin loved him so much. He was pleasing to look at, certainly, but his best feature, in Piper’s opinion, was his rock-solid character. He exuded quiet strength and confidence in all situations.

      He would know what to do in this crisis, and he would do it.

      “There’s a man inside,” Piper blurted, finding her voice at last and gesturing toward the schoolhouse. By then, the cold was indeed penetrating her thin dress. “He’s been shot. His horse is in the shed and—”

      Clay’s expression turned serious, and he brushed past her, leaving his own mount to stand patiently in the yard.

      Piper hurried into the schoolhouse behind Clay.

      He crouched, laying one hand to the man’s unhurt shoulder. “Sawyer?” he rasped. “Damn it, Sawyer—what happened to you?”

      CHAPTER 2

      Sawyer, Piper thought distractedly—Sawyer McKettrick, Clay’s cousin, the man he’d been expecting for weeks now. That explained the initials on the man’s holster, if not much else.

      Down on one knee beside the other man now, Clay took off his snowy hat and tossed it aside. Piper caught the glint of his nickel-plated badge, a star pinned to the front of his heavy coat. Clay was still Blue River’s town marshal, but it was a job he was ready to hand over to someone else, so he could concentrate on ranching and his growing family.

      “Sawyer!” Clay repeated, his tone brusque with concern.

      Sawyer’s eyes rolled open, and a grin played briefly on his mouth. “I must have died and gone to hell,” he said in a slow, raspy drawl, “because I’d swear I’ve come face-to-face with the devil himself.”

      Clay gave a raucous chuckle at that. “You must be better off than you look,” he commented. “Can you get to your feet?”

      Solemnly amused, Sawyer considered the question for a few moments, moistened his lips, which were dry and cracked despite Piper’s repeated efforts to give him water during the night, and struggled to reply, “I don’t think so.”

      “That’s all right,” Clay said, gruffly gentle, while Piper’s weary mind raced. She’d heard a few things about Sawyer, and some of it was worrisome—for instance, no one, including Clay, seemed to know which side of the law he was on—though Dara Rose had liked him. “I’ll help you.” With that, Clay raised Sawyer to a sitting position, causing him to moan again and his bandages to seep with patches of bright red, draped his cousin’s good arm over his shoulders, and stood, bringing the other man up with him.

      “I’ll put Sawyer on your bed, if that’s all right,” Clay said to Piper, already headed toward her quarters in the back. The schoolhouse was small, and everybody knew how it was laid out, since the building of it had been a community effort.

      When word got around that she’d harbored a man under this roof, bleeding and insensible with pain or not, her reputation would be tarnished, at best.

      At worst? Completely ruined.

      The injustice of that was galling to Piper, but nonetheless binding. Lady teachers in particular were scrutinized for the slightest inclination toward wanton behavior, though their male counterparts sometimes courted and then married one of their students, with impunity. A practice Piper considered reprehensible.

      “Certainly,” she said now, well aware that Clay hadn’t been asking her permission but feeling compelled to offer some kind of response.

      She hovered in the doorway of her room—little more than a lean-to, really—with one tiny window, high up, while Clay wrestled Sawyer out of his coat then eased him down carefully onto the bed, pulled off his boots.

      The effort of going even that far must have been too much for Sawyer, strong as he looked, because he shut his eyes again, and didn’t respond when Clay spoke to him.

      “I’ll get the doc,” Clay said to Piper, as she stepped out of the doorway to let him pass. “Do you have any more blankets? It’s important to keep him warm.”

      Piper thought with a heavy heart of the fine, colorful quilts lying neatly folded in her hope chest. She’d always envisioned them gracing the beds of some lovely house, once she was married, like Dara Rose, with a proper home.

      “Yes,” she said bravely, and though she didn’t begrudge Sawyer McKettrick those quilts, she couldn’t help lamenting their fate. She’d worked hard to assemble them from tiny scraps of fabric, carefully saved, and many of the pieces were all she had to remember friends she’d left behind in Maine.

      She swept over to her bulky cedar chest, raised the lid, and rummaged through the treasured contents—doilies and potholders, tablecloths and dish towels and the like—until she’d found what she was looking for.

      As she spread the first of those exquisitely stitched coverlets over Mr. McKettrick, he stirred again, opened his eyes briefly, and smiled. “Thanks, Josie,” he said, and there was a caress in the way he said the name.

      Briskly, because she was a little hurt, though she couldn’t have pinpointed the reason why such an emotion should afflict her, Piper put another quilt on top of her patient, and then another.

      Then, because it was nearly eight o’clock, she went to the other end of the building, where the bell rope dangled, and gave it a tug. Surely none of her pupils would make it to school on such a day, but Piper believed in maintaining routine, especially during trying times. There was something reassuring about it.

      The silvery bell, high overhead in its little belfry, chimed once, twice, three times, summoning students who would not come.

      Piper’s hands, rope-burned from hauling up well water the night before, stung fiercely, and she was almost glad, because the pain gave her something to think about besides the man sprawled on her spinster’s bed, probably bleeding all over her quilts.

      She retrieved a tin of Wildflower Salve from her bureau, careful not to make too much noise and disturb Mr. McKettrick. Carrying the salve back to her schoolroom, she sat down at her desk and smiled a little as she twisted off the pretty little lid to treat her sore palms.

      There was an abundance of the stuff, since Dara Rose, impoverished after the scandalous death of her first husband, upstairs at the Bitter Gulch Saloon, had once planned to sell the product door-to-door in hopes of making enough money to support herself and her two small daughters, Edrina and Harriet. Instead, Dara Rose had fallen in love with Clay McKettrick, married him, and thus retained what amounted to a lifetime supply of medicinal salve, which she generously shared.

      A half hour passed before Clay returned, with Dr. Jim Howard, the local dentist, riding stalwartly along beside him on the mule that usually pulled his buggy.

      Everybody in Blue River liked Dr. Howard, whose young daughter, Madeline,