A Wanted Man: A Stone Creek Novel. Linda Lael Miller

path and follow it, despite all contradictory evidence.

      She’d called it faith.

      Payton called it foolish sentiment.

      How she’d ever fallen in love with and married the likes of him—and borne him six sons into the bargain—was a mystery to be solved by better minds than his.

      She’d stayed with him, too, Miranda had, even with another man ready to offer for her, if she’d been free. She’d died wearing his narrow gold wedding band and honoring the vows they’d made in front of a circuit preacher nine months and five minutes before Wyatt had come along.

      Pity he hadn’t lived up to her example.

      He shifted in his chair, wished he could shut the window against the bitter chill of that Sunday afternoon, shut his mind against his thoughts, too, but Ruby was a stickler for fresh air, and the memories clung to him like stall muck to a boot heel.

      Ruby didn’t countenance pipes, cigars or cheroots in her private quarters, for all that the saloon and card room were always roiling with a blue-gray cloud of tobacco smoke. She was a complex woman, Ruby—she’d joined a brothel when she was Gideon’s age, and now she was a former madam, retaining an interest in the sinful enterprises of gambling and the purveyance of strong spirits.

      For all her hard history, she was still beautiful and, ironic as it seemed, as fine a woman, in her own way, as Miranda Wyatt Yarbro had ever been.

      Both of them had had the remarkable misfortune of crossing paths with him. He and Ruby had never married, but she’d given him a child, too. Ten years back, she’d been delivered of a daughter. Little Rose.

      Payton’s throat tightened at the recollection of the child. Redheaded, like her mother, she’d been smart and energetic and sweet, too, for all her bent to mischief. She’d been run down by a wagon when she was just four, chasing a kitten into the street out in front of the saloon, and they’d had to bury her outside the churchyard fence, in unsanctified ground.

      Innocent as the flower she was named for, Rose had, after all, been a whore’s daughter.

      Behind him the door creaked open. Instinctively Payton stiffened and went for his gun, though a part of him knew who was there. In the end, he didn’t draw.

      “I told you not to smoke in here, Jack Payton,” Ruby said. “It makes the place smell like—”

      He flipped the cheroot out through the window, stood and shoved down the sash. Turned, grinning, to face the second of the two women he’d loved in his fifty-seven years of life. “Like a saloon?” he finished for her.

      She pulled a face. “Don’t go wasting your charming smiles on me,” she warned. “I see right through them. And besides, I know full well you’ll light up again, as soon as I turn my back.”

      Come evening, Ruby would be resplendent in one of her trademark silk gowns, all of them some shade of crimson or scarlet. She’d paint up her face and deck herself out in jewels she’d earned the hard way. For now, though, she wore practical calico, and around her scrubbed face her dark auburn hair billowed, soft and fragrant with the lilac water she always brushed through it before pinning it up in the morning.

      Looking at her, Payton felt a familiar pinch in some deep, unexplored region of his heart. She deserved a better man than he was, just as Miranda had.

      “There’s a young fella out front, asking after you,” Ruby said.

      Payton raised an eyebrow, instantly wary. “He didn’t offer his name?”

      “Didn’t have to,” Ruby answered, with a slight sigh. “He’s one of your boys. I knew that by looking at him.”

      Something quickened inside Payton, a combination of hope and alarm. “I reckon you’d better send him in,” he said.

      Ruby nodded, but she looked thoughtful. “How do you suppose he knew where to find you, Jack?”

      Payton spread his hands. “No idea,” he answered, wondering which one of his elder sons was about to walk through that doorway. “Did Gideon see him?”

      “No,” Ruby replied, still frowning. “I sent him to fetch the mail a little while ago. I could say you’re not here—”

      Payton shook his head. “No,” he said.

      Ruby took a last long, worried look at him, then opened the door and went out, closing it crisply behind her.

      Payton drew a deep breath, let it out slow and easy, and straightened his string tie. Tugged at the bottom of his gray silk vest, too.

      There was a light rap at the door, and then it swung inward on its hinges.

      Payton squared his shoulders, regretted that he hadn’t taken the time to throw back a slug of whiskey, just to steady himself.

      “Well, Rob,” he said, when his next-youngest son stood on the threshold, “it’s good to see you again.”

      * * *

      “I’LL JUST BET IT IS,” Rowdy replied dryly, setting his hat aside on a table just inside the room. “It’s been a few years.” He’d left Pardner back in Stone Creek, in Mrs. Porter’s care, and bought new clothes for the occasion.

      Fact was, though, he’d looked forward to several funerals more than he had to this meeting.

      “Come in and sit down,” Payton Yarbro said, as if he meant it. But his ice-blue eyes were shrewd and watchful, and a muscle ticked in his jaw, under the stubble of a new beard. He still cut a fine figure, Pa did. He must have been pushing sixty, but he looked younger, despite the gray in his hair and the meager promise of an expanding middle.

      And he still wore a .45 on his right hip.

      Rowdy hesitated a moment, then steeled himself and walked full into the room, waited until his pa sat down in one of the chairs facing the cold brick fireplace before taking the other.

      “What are you doing in this part of the country?” Payton asked, settling back and resting the side of one foot on the opposite knee. “Last I knew, there was a price on your head. You still wanted?”

      “Still wanted,” Rowdy said. “Thanks to you.”

      “I didn’t force you to help rob those trains,” the old man argued, taking a cheroot from a silver box on a side table, clamping it between his teeth and striking a match on the sole of his boot to light it. “You were hell-bent to join up, as I recall.”

      Rowdy didn’t reply.

      “How’d you find me?” Payton wanted to know, and though he put the question casually, the look in his eyes belied his easy tone. Shaking out the match, he leaned forward to toss it into the grate.

      “I had a letter from Wyatt while I was still down in Haven. That’s—”

      “I know where Haven is,” Payton said, sounding exasperated. “Little shit hole of a place just this side of the Mexican border. And what the hell was Wyatt thinking, to put news like that down on paper for anybody to see?”

      “He didn’t use your real name, nor his. And he wrote to say he was in prison. He mentioned that someone he knew had seen you in Flagstaff, running a faro table at Ruby’s Saloon.” Rowdy paused, solemn at the mention of Wyatt. He’d been the brother Rowdy’d looked up to, the one he’d wanted to be like. “The letter must have been forwarded four or five times before it caught up to me.”

      “What were you doing in Haven?”

      “Passing through,” Rowdy said, reining in his temper. Whenever he got within shouting distance of his pa, he always wanted to fight.

      “Wyatt’s in prison?”

      “Last I heard,” Rowdy replied. “The letter was dated two years back, so he might be out by now.”

      “Or dead,” Payton mused, and he had the decency