An Outlaw's Christmas. Linda Miller Lael

weighed less than his saddlebags. “I couldn’t just leave you lying out there in the snow,” she said, with a sort of puckish modesty.

      From her tone, Sawyer concluded that she’d considered doing just that, though, fortunately for him, her conscience must have overruled the idea.

      “You’d have had to step over me every time you went out,” he teased, “and that would have been awkward.”

      He thought she smiled then, though he couldn’t be sure because the light fell forward from the lantern and left her mostly in shadow.

      “What is this place?” he asked presently, when she didn’t speak.

      “You’re in the Blue River schoolhouse,” Miss St. James informed him. “I teach here.”

      “I see,” Sawyer said, wearying, though he was almost as much in the dark, literally and figuratively, as before he’d asked the question. “Was Clay here?” he threw out. “Or did I imagine that part?”

      “He was here,” Miss St. James confirmed. “He’s gone home now—his wife is expecting a baby soon, and he didn’t like leaving her alone—but he’ll be back as soon as the weather allows.”

      Sawyer was quiet for a while, gathering scraps of strength, trying to breathe his way past a sudden swell of pain. “You don’t have to be scared of me,” he told her, after a long time.

      “I’m not,” she lied, still cautious. Still keeping her distance.

      “I reckon I can’t blame you,” Sawyer said, closing his eyes to regain his equilibrium. The pain rose to a new crescendo, and the room had begun to pitch and sway.

      “The laudanum is there on the nightstand,” she informed him helpfully, evidently seeing more than he’d wanted her to. “And the chamber pot is under the bed.”

      He felt his lips twitch. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

      “You’re certain you don’t want something to eat?”

      “Maybe later,” he managed to reply.

      He thought she’d go away then, but she hesitated. “You were asking for someone named Josie,” she said. “Perhaps when the weather is better, we could send word to her, that you’ve been hurt, I mean.”

      Sawyer opened his eyes again, swiftly enough to set the little room to spinning again. “That won’t be necessary,” he bit out, but he felt a certain bitter amusement imagining what would happen if word of his misfortune were to reach her. Josie was his last employer’s very fetching wife, and she’d made it clear that she wanted more from Sawyer than protection and cordial conversation. He’d had the same problem before, with other wives of men he worked for, along with their sisters and daughters in some instances, and he’d always managed to sidestep any romantic entanglements, be they physical or emotional—until Josie.

      He’d wanted Josie, and that was why he’d agreed to come to Blue River and fill in for Clay, as temporary marshal—to put some distance between himself and the sweet temptation to bed his boss’s wife, to burn in her fire, let lust consume him.

      He’d left in the nick of time.

      Or had he?

      Had the shooter been one of Henry Vandenburg’s hirelings, one of his own former colleagues, sent to make sure Sawyer stayed away from the old man’s wife—forever?

      It was possible, of course. Vandenburg was rich, and he was powerful, and he probably wasn’t above having a rival dispensed with, but even for him, ordering the murder of one of Angus McKettrick’s grandsons would have been pretty risky. His and Clay’s granddad, even at his advanced age, was a force of nature in his own right, owning half of Arizona as he did, and so were his four sons. Holt, Rafe, Kade—Sawyer’s father—and Jeb, who’d sired Clay, were all law-abiding citizens, happily married men with children and even a few grandchildren, money in the bank and a prosperous ranch to run. Still, the untimely death of any member of the clan would rouse them to Earp-like fury, and Vandenburg surely knew that. In fact, it was that dogged quality that had caused the old reprobate to hire Sawyer as a bodyguard in the first place.

      “Mr. McKettrick?” Miss Piper St. James was standing right beside the bed now, holding the lantern high. There was concern in her voice—enough to draw her to his bedside, thereby risking some nefarious assault on her virtue. “Are you all right? For a moment, you looked—I thought…”

      She lapsed awkwardly into silence.

      He might have reminded her, if he’d had the strength, that, no, actually, he wasn’t “all right,” because he’d been shot. Instead, he asked slowly, measuring out each word like a storekeeper dispensing sugar or flour, “Do you happen to have any whiskey on hand?”

      CHAPTER 3

      “Of course I don’t have any whiskey,” Piper replied, with a little more sharpness in her tone than she’d intended to exercise. “This is a school, not a roadhouse.”

      “Well, damn,” Sawyer said, affably gruff and clearly still in pain. “I could sure use a shot of good old-fashioned rotgut right about now. Might take the edge off.”

      Having set the kerosene lantern on the nightstand so she wouldn’t drop it and set the whole place on fire, Piper took a step back. Rotgut, indeed. “Then I guess it’s too bad you fell off your horse here instead of in front of the Bitter Gulch Saloon.”

      He favored her with a squinty frown at this, and she wondered distractedly what he’d look like in the daylight, cleaned up and wearing something besides bandages, her quilts and the dish-towel sling Dr. Howard had put on his left arm. “Are you one of those hatchet-swinging types?” he asked, with a note of benign disapproval. “The kind who go around hacking perfectly good bars to splinters, shattering mirrors and breaking every bottle on the shelves?”

      Piper stiffened slightly, offended, though she couldn’t think why she ought to give a pin about this man’s—this stranger’s—opinion of her. “No,” she said tersely. “If some people choose to pollute their systems with poison, to the detriment of their wives and children and society in general, it’s none of my concern.”

      He laughed then, a hoarse bark of a sound, brittle with pain. “If you say so,” he said, leaving his meaning ambiguous.

      Annoyed, Piper was anxious to be gone from that too-small room. She wished she hadn’t approached the bed, if only because she could see so much of his bare chest. It was disturbing—though it did remind her of the gods and heroes she’d read about in Greek mythology.

      She gathered her dignity, an effort of unsettling significance, reached out to reclaim the lantern. “If you don’t need anything, I’ll leave you to get some rest,” she said, speaking as charitably as she could.

      “I do need something,” he told her quietly.

      Piper took another step back. The lantern light wavered slightly, and she renewed her grip on the handle. “What?” she asked cautiously.

      “Company,” Sawyer replied. “Somebody to talk to while I wait for this bullet hole in my shoulder to settle down a little—it feels like somebody dropped a hot coal into it. Why don’t you take a chair—if there is one—and tell me what brings a proper lady like you to a rough town like Blue River.”

      Was he making fun of her, using the term “a proper lady” ironically?

      Or was she being not only harsh, but priggish, too?

      She set the lantern back on the night table and drew her rocking chair into the faint circle of light, sat down and folded her hands in her lap. For the moment, that was all the concession she could bring herself to make. And it seemed like plenty.

      “Well?” Sawyer McKettrick prompted. “I can tell by the way you talk and carry yourself that you’re an Easterner. What are you doing way out here in the wilds of Texas?”