The Rustler. Linda Miller Lael

so sudden and so intense that it was actually painful. She would surely have slapped Charles Langstreet the Third across the face if she hadn’t known the crack of flesh meeting flesh would carry into the nearby dining room.

      “Good night, Mr. Langstreet,” she said.

      He grinned, turned, and strolled, whistling merrily, down the porch steps, along the walk, through the gate.

      Sarah watched him until he was out of sight, then turned and nearly collided with Wyatt, who was standing directly behind her.

      Her heart fluttered painfully. How much had he heard? Had he seen Charles kiss her?

      She could tell nothing by his expression.

      “I’d best be leaving, too,” he said. “I’ve got to count horses in front of saloons.”

      “What?” Sarah asked, confused.

      He chuckled. “Rowdy’s way of watching out for trouble,” he said, taking his hat from the coat tree. “Thank you, Miss Tamlin, for a fine evening and the best meal I’ve had in a long time.”

      Something tightened in Sarah’s throat. “If I’m to call you Wyatt,” she heard herself say, “then you must call me Sarah.”

      His smile was as dazzling as the starched shirt he’d put on to come to supper. “Sarah, then,” he said. The smile faded. “That Langstreet fella,” he began. “Is he...? Do you—?”

      “He’s a business associate,” Sarah said. It was a partial truth, and she wondered if she ought to record it in her book of lies.

      “That’s good,” Wyatt said. His dark eyes were almost liquid, there in the dim light of the entryway. “Because if I stay on in Stone Creek, I mean to set about courting you in earnest.”

      “If you stay?” She’d known he was a drifter, an outlaw, that he’d be moving on at some point. So why did she feel as though a deep, dark precipice had just opened at her feet?

      “Reckon I’ll be deciding on that further along,” he said. “Good night, Sarah.”

      For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her, just as Charles had—his face was so very close to hers—but he didn’t. And she was stunned by the depths of her disappointment.

      She watched until he passed through the front gate, turned toward the main part of town, moving in and out of the lamplight. Then she closed the door quietly and went back to the dining room.

      Doc and Owen were busy clearing the table.

      “Is Papa leaving me here?” Owen asked hopefully.

      “Yes,” Sarah said, taken aback, exchanging quick glances with Doc, who’d paused in his plate-gathering like a man listening for some sound in the distance. “But only for a few days. I thought you’d be—well—surprised—”

      “Papa’s always leaving me places,” Owen said. His manner was nonchalant, though there was a slight stoop to his shoulders that hadn’t been there before.

      Doc shook his head, though the boy didn’t see.

      Sarah contrived to smile and moved to help with the work. “What sort of places?” she asked, in a tone meant to sound cheerful, as though abandoning a child with people who were virtual strangers to him was a common occurrence, and wholly acceptable.

      “Once, I lived at a hotel all by myself for a whole week,” Owen told her. “It was scary at night, but I got to have whatever I wanted to eat, and Papa gave me lots of spending money.”

      Sarah could not look at him. He might see what she was thinking. “Why did he do that?” she asked lightly, when she could trust herself to speak. Again, her gaze met Doc’s, but this time, the look held.

      “He had meetings with a lady. She wore a big hat with pink feathers on it and rode in a carriage with six white horses pulling it.”

      Sarah drew back a chair and sank into it, breathless.

      “Are you sick, Aunt Sarah?” Owen asked, clearly frightened.

      “I’m f-fine,” Sarah muttered. She wouldn’t have to write that lie in the book to remember it.

      “Let’s wash up these dishes,” Doc told the boy, his voice a little too hearty. “Since your aunt Sarah went to all the trouble to cook it and all.”

      Owen nodded, but his eyes were still on Sarah. “I’ll be quiet,” he said. “If you have a headache—”

      Sarah longed to gather the child in her arms, but she didn’t dare. She’d weep if she did, and never let go of him again. “You don’t have to be quiet,” she told him softly.

      Doc put a hand on Owen’s shoulder and steered him in the direction of the kitchen. “I’ll wash and you dry,” he said.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      WHILE OWEN AND DOC WERE washing dishes, Sarah went upstairs, looked in on her father, who was sleeping soundly, then opened the door to the room across from her own. It contained a brass bed, a washstand and a bureau, and soft moonlight flowed in through the lace curtains.

      The mattress was bare, since no one had used the room in months, with a faded quilt folded at its foot. Briskly, Sarah fetched sheets from the top drawer of the bureau and made up a bed for Owen.

      The process was bittersweet. Tonight, her son would sleep in this room, dreaming, she hoped, little-boy dreams. But there was a disturbing truth in Wyatt and Doc’s teasing—young as he was, Owen was more man than child. He’d lived in hotel rooms by himself, and God knew what other places.

      She yearned to keep him, raise him openly as her son. She wouldn’t mind the scandal that would surely ensue, the extra expense, the inevitable work of bringing up a child. But she must not allow herself to think such thoughts, she knew, because Charles would come back and take him away again.

      Under the law, she had no rights. On his birth certificate, Marjory Langstreet was listed as his mother.

      Some of the starch went out of Sarah’s knees.

      She sat down on the edge of the freshly made bed, fighting back tears of hopelessness.

      She’d been so young and foolish—only seventeen and far from home—when she’d given birth to Owen, in an anonymous infirmary room, a decade before. Charles, fifteen years her senior and sophisticated, a friend of her father’s, had been her “protector,” met her at the train when she arrived in the City of Brotherly Love, taken her by carriage to the women’s college in the rolling green Pennsylvania countryside.

      Homesick, regarded as a bumpkin by the other pupils in residence, most of whom had been raised in cities and not crude frontier towns, she’d quickly become besotted with Charles. She’d studied hard at school, majoring in music, but on weekends, he often came to collect her in his elegant carriage. It was all innocent at first; he escorted her to museums, to concerts, to fine restaurants.

      And then he took advantage.

      He said college was a waste for a woman, and suggested she leave school so they could spend more time together. He’d set her up in a fancy hotel, persuaded her not to tell her father that she’d dropped all her classes.

      That was when the lying had begun. She’d written weekly letters to her parents, describing books she hadn’t read, lectures she hadn’t attended, field trips she hadn’t taken. Someone Charles knew in the college office mailed the missives, and forwarded the replies. Sarah returned the funds her father sent for tuition and textbooks, claiming she’d won a scholarship. Her grades were forged, with the help of Charles’s friend, and for a long, blissful time, the deception passed as truth.

      Sitting there in Owen’s moonlit room, Sarah blushed. Charles had been right earlier when he’d taunted her about enjoying his attentions in bed. Just sixteen, her body in full flower, she’d lived for his visits, reveled