The Bridegroom. Linda Lael Miller

in a church ceremony with all the trimmings—flowers, a cake, an emerald-studded band for her finger. And on that sunlit day, so long ago, Nell had walked down the aisle on the Judge’s arm, wearing this very dress.

      Nell had been a mere babe-in-arms, her one sibling, Lydia’s father, barely a year old, when the Judge had fled Virginia with his daughters and two orphaned grandchildren. Nell and Herbert’s mother, Louisa, had died only a few months after the war began; it was said she simply hadn’t been able to bear being separated from her husband, Andrew Fairmont, gone for a soldier. Andrew, Mittie and Millie’s younger brother, had been wounded early on, spent months in a Union hospital, and finally, after an exchange of prisoners, made his slow and painful way home, only to be told that Louisa had perished. He’d stood over her grave for hours, as Nell told the story, and then gone into an outbuilding and hanged himself from one of the rafters.

      Nell had been raised in Phoenix, along with her brother, and she’d grown up strong and single-minded, a true child of the frontier. Herbert—nicknamed Johnny by his grandfather, aunts and sister—would one day become a doctor, marry, and sire Lydia. Johnny Fairmont, as the only male member of the family, other than the Judge of course, had been, in Helga’s readily offered opinion, “overindulged.”

      Lydia did not recall her mother, who had died when she was very small.

      Thinking of her aunt, missing her with an intensity that was almost physically painful, Lydia laid the fingertips of her right hand to the fragile lace of the skirt. “I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I, Aunt Nell?” she asked, very softly. “Making sure the aunts always have a home?”

      There was, of course, no answer.

      Nell Fairmont Baker had been a spirited woman, widowed young and childless, and bearing up admirably under her private disappointments. When she’d learned of Lydia’s father’s death, she’d traveled to Stone Creek immediately, and taken charge.

      She’d always done whatever needed doing, Nell had. She’d prided herself on that. In the same circumstances, wouldn’t she have done her duty for the sake of the family and married Mr. Fitch, just as Lydia was about to do?

      Or would she have cut her losses and run—loaded the aunts and Helga into a stagecoach or onto a train and found a place, found a way, to start over?

      Lydia had been over this same ground so many times, she was weary of it. She turned from the dress and left her room, set on pretending to eat the roll and drink the coffee Helga was preparing, then gathering flowers from the garden. She would fill the parlor with colorful, fragrant blossoms, she decided, and wear Aunt Nell’s lovely dress, and play the part of a happy bride.

      Even if it killed her.

      GIDEON HAD PROWLED THE STREETS and alleys and saloons of that lively desert town for most of the night, asking questions about Jacob Fitch. And he liked what he’d heard in response even less than he’d liked the man himself.

      Fitch was wealthy in the extreme—no surprise there—though his only evident extravagance was the automobile he’d special-ordered from Henry Ford’s factory. He lived in rooms above the bank with his elderly mother and had never, to anyone’s knowledge, been married or even kept public company with a woman, before Lydia.

      Back in his room, watching the sun rise, Gideon went over the plan—the only one he’d been able to come up with—for the hundredth time. It was drastic, it was desperate, and if the rumors he’d gathered the night before had any validity at all, it was dangerous, too. Now that he knew Gideon intended to stop the ceremony any way he could, Fitch was allegedly trying to hire thugs to guard the doors at the Fairmont house.

      Gideon had considered wiring Rowdy and Wyatt, asking for their help; he knew they’d ride hard for Phoenix if he did, without requiring an explanation beforehand. But they couldn’t possibly get there on time, not on horseback anyhow, and the train didn’t head south until 3:10 in the afternoon. The stagecoach routes had been cut to almost nothing, now that everybody traveled by rail, and it would be too slow anyhow.

      Besides, Gideon doubted his brothers would be willing to break up somebody else’s wedding just on his say-so. No, they’d go straight to Lydia and ask her what she wanted to do, and she’d answer that she wanted to go through with the ceremony, because that was what she’d made up her mind to do. Rowdy and Wyatt would take her at her word.

      Gideon couldn’t do that, because of the letter.

      Resigned, he changed his shirt, brushed his hair, and left his room, taking his satchel with him. He checked out of the hotel, walked down the street, and bought a buckboard and a team at the first livery stable he came to. Then he headed for Lydia’s place on foot.

      The day before, he’d strode right up onto the front porch and rung the bell.

      Today, he went around back. If Fitch had managed to put those thugs on his payroll, none of them were in evidence.

      The housekeeper answered his knock, a hefty woman with salt-and-pepper hair and blue eyes that seemed somehow faded, as though they’d been worn down by seeing too many hard things.

      Her face lit up when she recognized him, though.

      “I knew you’d come back,” she said, putting a hand to her ample bosom.

      Gideon put a finger to his lips. “Where is Lydia?” he asked quietly.

      The woman stepped back, gestured for him to come inside. “In the parlor,” she said, “arranging flowers. The poor thing is determined to make this stupid plan work—she’s stubborn, our Lydia.”

      Gideon grinned at that, but not with much spirit. “The aunts—are they around?”

      “Miss Mittie and Miss Millie are in their room,” the housekeeper told him. “This is their time for correspondence, though heaven only knows who’s left for them to write to.”

      “Would you mind getting them for me, please?” Gideon asked. Then, with another grin, he added, “And keeping Lydia busy for a few minutes?”

      The housekeeper beamed. “Best you wait in the library. Lydia won’t go near it today—with all that’s on her mind, she won’t be doing any reading.”

      Gideon nodded. “Thank you, Miss—?”

      “Helga,” the woman insisted. “Call me Helga.”

      Gideon shoved his left hand into his pants pocket, so he wouldn’t shove it through his hair and show how nervous he was. “I’m much obliged, Helga,” he said.

      She showed him to the library, a long room jammed with volumes, and he paced after she left, too agitated to thumb through some of the books, the way he would have done on any other day of his life.

      He could see why leaving this house would be a wrench for the old ladies, and for Lydia herself. There probably wasn’t another one like it in all of Arizona, though he’d seen grander ones back East. Not many, though.

      Presently, Helga returned, shooing Lydia’s aunts before her and hushing them every step of the way. Gideon was struck, once again, by their diminutive size—they reminded him of little birds perched on a ridgepole in a high wind and about to be blown away.

      Still, he saw intelligence in their eyes, dignity in the way they held their snow-capped heads. They stuck close to Helga, though, and watched him with frank and wary curiosity.

      Gideon kept his distance, lest he frighten them away.

      At his urging, they sat down, side by side on a small settee, shoulders touching, gazes intent. They folded their hands in their laps, after smoothing the skirts of their worn black dresses.

      “Have you come to kiss Lydia again?” one of them asked.

      Although Helga had introduced them to him by name, Gideon could not have said which was which. The sisters were so alike that they might have been two versions of the same person. Or, of course, twins.

      “No,” Gideon answered solemnly,