The Bridegroom. Linda Lael Miller

the bag and one of the valises and shoving the second satchel into Gideon’s hands with unnecessary force, Rowdy assured the women that it was a short walk to his place, and his wife, Lark, would be pleased to serve them tea and refreshments and provide whatever else they might need. At this last, his gaze lingered a moment or two on Lydia’s wedding gown.

      “Maybe you’d like to wait for me in my office,” he told Gideon, and while his tone was cordial, the expression in his eyes was razor-sharp. “While I get the ladies settled and all.”

      Since there would be a yelling match at best, and an arrest at worst, and Gideon figured the Fairmont women and their housekeeper had been through enough for one day, he didn’t argue. He just carried the valise as far as the end of Main Street, and didn’t protest when Helga took it out of his grasp.

      Rowdy’s office and the jail were housed in a rambling brick structure, on the site of the original one-cell hole in the wall. Wyatt had gotten the first jail blown up during his brief tenure as deputy marshal, and Gideon felt a little nostalgic for the old place. As a boy, he’d slept in that lone cell often, not because he’d been locked up, but because Rowdy and Lark, newlyweds back then, still living in the tiny house provided for the marshal, hadn’t had an extra bed.

      Pardner, the old yellow dog, was long gone, a fact that made something catch in Gideon’s throat as he wandered over the threshold into Rowdy’s spacious office. He was pleasantly surprised to find another dog curled up on the rug in front of the woodstove, just the way Pardner used to do, way back when. The mutt was the same color as his predecessor, and Gideon’s eyes smarted a little as he crouched to say howdy.

      Pardner’s double licked his hand and looked up into his face with a doleful little whimper of sympathy.

      “Yep,” Gideon told him. “I’m in trouble.”

      “His name’s Pardner, too,” a familiar voice said. “Guess Rowdy just couldn’t bring himself to call a dog anything else.”

      Gideon stood, turned to see his other brother, Wyatt, towering in the doorway leading outside. Taller than Rowdy and leaner than Gideon, Wyatt was the eldest of the Yarbro brood, and his hair was dark, rather than fair like theirs. His eyes were an intense blue, and they could penetrate a man’s hide, just the way Rowdy’s lighter ones did.

      “You back to working as a deputy?” Gideon asked. In his day, Wyatt had been an outlaw, like Rowdy, rustling cattle and robbing trains. All that had changed, though, when he met up with Sarah Tamlin, the banker’s daughter.

      Wyatt stepped inside, shut the office door against the noise and dust of the street. “I’m still ranching,” he answered. “I help out once in a while when Rowdy’s shorthanded—since that copper mine started up, Stone Creek’s been right lively. I just came by today because Rowdy rode out and told me about that wire he got from the U.S. Marshal down in Phoenix. What you just told that dog, boy, was truer than you probably know. You are in trouble.”

      To show he wasn’t intimidated, and he wasn’t the little brother Wyatt and Rowdy remembered him as, either, Gideon took a seat behind the biggest desk—there were two others in the room, accommodating Rowdy’s regular deputies, probably—leaned back and kicked his feet up. “I did what I had to do,” he said easily.

      Wyatt went to the stove, picked up the blue enamel coffeepot, gave it a shake and frowned. “You might be a big Wells Fargo agent now,” he drawled, carrying the pot to a nearby sink and pumping water into it to brew up another batch, “but you’re not above the law. And the law says you can’t carry a woman out of her own home against her will and haul her away on a train.”

      “Lydia didn’t want to marry Jacob Fitch anyhow,” Gideon said, trying not to sound defensive. “She as much as said so—yesterday.”

      “‘As much as’?” Wyatt repeated skeptically. “And just because a woman says something, that’s no guarantee she means it.” He paused a moment to reflect on some private thought, shook his head. “No, sir, that is no guarantee.”

      “Got on the wrong side of your Sarah, did you?” Gideon teased.

      “Sarah doesn’t have a wrong side,” Wyatt replied. “And don’t try to change the subject. There’s a warrant out for your arrest, Gideon, and it’s federal.”

      Gideon considered his outlaw blood and wondered if it had gotten the best of him after all. “Soon as she’s had time to calm down a little,” he said, with a confidence he didn’t really feel, “Lydia will put an end to that. Like I told you, she didn’t want to go through with that wedding.”

      Wyatt did not look convinced. “According to the bridegroom’s report to the marshal down in Phoenix, she was kicking and clawing to get away from you.”

      “She was just mad because I whacked her one on the backside,” Gideon said. “She’ll be fine as soon as Lark lends her a dress so she can get out of that wedding gown. I think it was that, more than anything—traveling in a bride’s dress and everybody looking at her—that got under Lydia’s hide.”

      Although Wyatt was in profile, Gideon saw the twitch of amusement flicker across his mouth before sobriety set in again. “If Miss Lydia Fairmont presses charges,” Wyatt said, concentrating on brewing that new pot of coffee, “you could go to prison. Kidnapping is a federal offense, in case they didn’t teach you that in detective school.”

      “She won’t,” Gideon said, but he wasn’t as sure as he sounded, and Wyatt probably knew that. Lydia had been plenty mad when he swatted her on the bustle to get her to stop wriggling so he could carry her out of that house before the hired muscle was on them.

      “Even if she doesn’t throw the book at you,” Wyatt replied, “Jacob Fitch probably will. If he hasn’t already.”

      “He can’t do that.”

      “Maybe back East, he couldn’t. But this is Arizona, little brother. It’s still the Wild West. The man was as good as married to Lydia, and that will carry some weight.”

      Gideon had no time to waste lolling around in one of Rowdy’s cells. He had a job to start, at the Copper Crown Mine, bright and early the next morning, and Wyatt knew that as well as Rowdy did. What Gideon’s brothers didn’t know was that his taking up a shovel was a ruse to get inside, win the miners’ trust, and do whatever he had to to subvert any plans they might be making to go out on strike.

      The mine’s owners stood to lose a fortune if that happened, and Gideon was being paid—well paid—to prevent that from happening.

      With the coffee started, Wyatt left the stove, walked over to the chair facing Rowdy’s desk, and sat himself down.

      “If I were you,” he said, “I’d have my feet on the floor when the marshal comes back. Rowdy’s mad enough to horsewhip you from one end of Main Street to the other as it is—and his temper is shorter than usual, what with all the trouble coming out of the mining camp.”

      “I’m not afraid of Rowdy,” Gideon replied, and that was true—so far as it went. He’d never had any reason to be afraid of his brother, and therefore had never tested the theory.

      “That’s the curse of theYarbros,” Wyatt said, mock-somber. “None of us has the sense to be scared when we ought to be.”

      “Once I explain—” Gideon began, and then stopped himself, because he didn’t want to sound like he was apologizing for what he’d done. If he hadn’t wooed the aunts away and then taken Lydia out of that house, she’d be Mrs. Jacob Fitch by now.

      And this would be her wedding night.

      The thought of Fitch or anybody else stripping Lydia to the skin and having his way with her made Gideon shudder. God knew, she’d grown into the kind of woman a man would want to handle, but another part of Gideon, a big part, still saw that lost, terrified little girl he’d known a decade before, whenever he looked at Lydia.

      “I’m not sorry,” he avowed, lest there be any misunderstanding