McKettrick's Choice Read Free Page A

away, holding her head high and her shoulders straight. She looked neither left nor right, and the crowd wisely parted for her, though they stared after her, she knew that much. She felt their gazes like a faint tremor along the length of her spine. Felt Holt Cavanagh’s, too.
    She lengthened her stride and, as soon as she’d turned a corner, leaving the square behind, she hoisted her singed skirts and stepped up her pace, wishing she could just keep on going until she’d left the whole state of Texas behind.
    By the time she reached her father’s front gate, Lorelei was sure Holt Cavanagh—whoever he was—had heard all the salient details of her scandalous story.
    Today was to have been her wedding day.
    The cake was baked, and gifts had been arriving for weeks.
    The honeymoon was planned, the tickets bought.
    Every church bell in San Antonio was poised to ring out the glad tidings.
    It would have been carried out, too, the whole glorious celebration—if the bride hadn’t just found her groom rolling on a featherbed with one of the housemaids.
    Â 
    â€œW HAT THE HELL HAPPENED?” Holt demanded of his old friend when he’d bribed his way past a reluctant deputy and followed a warren of narrow hallways to find Gabe’s cell. The place was hardly bigger than a holding pen for a hog marked for slaughter; a prisoner could stand in the center and put a palm to each of the side walls, and the board floor was so warped that the few furnishings—a cot, a rusted enamel commode and a single chair—tilted at a disconcerting variety of angles. The stench made Holt’s eyes water.
    â€œDamned if I rightly understand it.” Gabe gripped the bars as if to pry them apart and step through to freedom. The jovial grin he’d displayed during the burning wedding dress spectacle in the square below his one window was gone, replaced by a grim expression. Being locked up like that would be an ordeal of the soul for most men, but Holt reckoned it as a special torture for Gabe; he’d lived all his life in the open. Even as a boy, if the stories could be believed, Navarro wouldn’t sleep under a roof if he could help it. “How’d you know I was here?”
    â€œFrank sent a rider up to the Triple M with a message.”
    Gabe let go of the bars, poised to prowl back and forth like a half-starved wolf on display in a circus wagon, but there wasn’t room. His jawline tightened, and his eyes narrowed. “You’ve seen Frank?”
    Holt frowned. “Not yet. I just rode in.”
    Gabe shook his head like a man bestirring himself from a grim vision. “Maybe he’s alive after all, then.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘Maybe he’s alive’? You been thinking he might be otherwise?”
    Gabe’s broad shoulders sagged. “Hell if I know,” he said. “I haven’t seen him since the night I was brought in. A month ago, maybe, just after sundown, a dozen men jumped us in an arroyo, where we’d made camp. Beat the hell out of me with rifle butts and whatever else they had handy, and just before I blacked out, I heard a shot. I figured they’d killed Frank.”
    Holt cursed. The pit of his belly seized with the force of a greased bear trap springing shut, and his hands knotted into fists. “You know who they were?”
    Gabe gave a mirthless laugh. “Way they snuck up on us, I figured they had to be Comanches, or at least Tejanos. I didn’t see much, but up close, I reckoned them for white men. My guess is they were hired guns, or maybe drifters.”
    â€œHired by whom?”
    At last, the grin was back. It steadied Holt, seeing the old insolence, the old defiance, in his friend’s face and bearing. “‘Whom’?” Gabe taunted. “Well, now, Holt, it seems you must have fallen in with some fancy folks since you left Texas, if you’re using words like