A Western Christmas Homecoming. Lynna Banning

and offered the seat next to Rooney on the swing.

      “A pink garter, huh?” Rooney muttered. “Just what are ya thinkin’ of doin’ with a pink garter?”

      She grinned and slid closer to him. “Rooney, I don’t think I should explain in front of Mark.”

      Rand, however, very much wanted to hear the explanation.

      Rooney draped his arm around Alice’s shoulders. “Honey-girl, I don’t mind tellin’ ya that I don’t like this idea one bit. Not one bit.”

      Alice sent him a smile. “I know, Rooney. You’ve been saying that since six o’clock this morning.”

      Mark hunched his thin frame closer to her knees and gazed up at her. “Golly, Alice, it sounds real neat, ’specially if Rooney doesn’t like it. Kin I come along?”

      At noon, Rand picked up Alice’s travel bag and walked her over to the livery stable, then to the mercantile and the dressmaker to pick up her parcels. The dressmaker package was bulky, and Rand noticed a sprinkling of tiny sparkly circles escaping from one corner where the twine tie had slipped off-center. Saloon girl sequins, he gathered. Red ones. Another niggle of apprehension crawled up his spine.

      They loaded the saddlebags on his bay gelding and her chestnut mare and then on their way out of town they stopped at Rose Cottage.

      The porch was empty. Alice dismounted and went inside, and after a long ten minutes she came out red-eyed and stiff-lipped, climbed back on her mare and reined away without a word.

      They rode side by side in silence until the town dwindled off into the occasional house and wide meadows of yellow dandelions and lavender desert parsley. The air smelled of pine trees and smoke.

      They followed the slow-moving river bordered by cottonwoods and gray-green willows, and when the river split, they followed the branch flowing north and headed for the hazy purple mountains looming in the distance. The sun overhead was hot, even for October.

      Alice hadn’t said a single word since leaving town, and Rand was starting to wonder why. He slowed his bay until she caught up.

      “Alice, are you all right?”

      “Yes. At least I think so. I had to leave the key to the library with Sarah. This is the first time since the library was built six years ago that I won’t be there in the morning to open it up. It feels strange.”

      Rand did a quick calculation. If her sister Dorothy was the “little” sister at twenty, that meant Alice was probably around twenty-two. Had she been in Smoke River all her life?

      “You been a librarian a long time?”

      “Ever since I turned eighteen. It’s all I ever wanted to do, be around books.”

      Aha. That would make her maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. Before he could ask, she volunteered a piece of information about herself he hadn’t expected.

      “I am a spinster, Marshal. I have nothing in my life but my library, so I have nothing to lose by going with you to a mining camp in Idaho to find my sister’s killer.”

      “Forgive me for saying so, but that’s not smart thinking. I’m a lot older than you, and I figure I’ve got a helluva lot to lose.”

      “How much older?”

      “I’m thirty-four.”

      “What will you lose if you don’t live through this trip?”

      Rand blinked. She sure kept surprising him with her questions.

      “You mean besides my life?” he said drily. “Well...” He waved an arm at the field of white clover and dogbane they were riding through. “I’d miss seeing meadows like this one. And I’d miss the smell of woodsmoke and mint. And roses. By the way, what kind of scent did you buy at the mercantile?”

      She gave a soft laugh. “Why, I don’t even know! I didn’t smell it. I just picked out a pretty-shaped bottle.”

      “Not very ‘saloon girlie’ of you, Miss Montgomery.”

      “No, I suppose it isn’t. I’m going to need some practice in the ‘saloon girl’ area.”

      Rand kept his face impassive. Was it possible she was unaware of how attractive she was? Nah. No girl as pretty as Alice would be blind to her effect on the male population. But her remark made him wonder.

      Something else puzzled him, too. She hadn’t asked one question about the journey to Silver City, how many miles away it was. How many days of travel it would take. And nights.

      Maybe she didn’t care. But if that was true, he wondered why didn’t she care?

      “Alice, do you know anything about Idaho?”

      “Oh, yes. When Dottie first married Jim, her husband, and went away to Silver City, I read all about Idaho. I learned about mining camps and silver assaying. The library has lots of information on such subjects.”

      He chuckled. “Then you probably know more than I do. I’ve never set foot in Idaho Territory.”

      She turned toward him, a surprised look on her face. He couldn’t see her eyes under that black Stetson she wore, but her lips rounded into a soft, raspberry-tinted O. “You mean you’ve never been where we are going?”

      “Nope. Does that make you uneasy?”

      “Nope,” she shot back.

      Rand laughed. He liked her quick humor. He liked a lot of things about Alice Montgomery.

      But he didn’t plan to pay much attention to them. This was a damned dangerous mission, so he’d best keep his mind on the problem at hand.

       Chapter Five

      The campsite Rand chose for their first night was nestled in a grove of pine trees and protected by a half circle of large gray boulders. A shallow, gurgling stream meandered nearby.

      After more than eight hours in the saddle, Alice’s derriere was numb and her thigh muscles felt hot and jumpy. Never in her life had she ridden a horse for more than an hour at a time; she never dreamed she could be this tired. She slid off the chestnut mare and had to grab on to the saddle to keep her legs from collapsing.

      The marshal surveyed her from the fire pit he was digging. “You’ve had a long ride,” he remarked. “Want some of my liniment?”

      When she nodded, he rummaged in his saddlebag and thrust a bottle of brown liquid into her hand. It smelled like the furniture polish Sarah used on the dining table at the boardinghouse. Maybe it was furniture polish.

      She stumbled down to the stream, dropped her skirt and her under-drawers and sloshed some of the smelly stuff onto her aching backside. When she returned he had built a campfire and was digging a frying pan and some bacon out of his saddlebag.

      “Hungry?” he asked without looking up.

      “That is a rhetorical question, Marshal. Of course I am hungry.”

      “And tired, too, I bet.”

      “And crabby,” she admitted.

      He didn’t answer, just sliced off some bacon and laid it in the pan. When the bacon was crisp he dumped in a can of chili beans, and that was supper. She wasn’t complaining. She was so tired and hungry she would eat anything, even a bear if it lumbered into camp. She shivered at the thought.

      He dished up the mess into two tin plates and handed her a spoon, and for the next half hour they ate without talking. Whatever he called this concoction, it tasted wonderful! She gobbled it down, and when her plate was empty she unrolled