Reese Read Free

ache, deep down, where it hurt the most.
    When he'd touched her, just one finger on her chin, the softness of her skin had made him remember everything he had spent years trying to forget. Because Mary was a woman straight out of his secret past—a past so far gone that not even the five men who chose to ride at his side knew of it.
    Oh, they supposed, and they guessed, and they even placed bets on just who and what he had been before the war made him what he was. But they didn't know, and they never would.
    So he'd go to Rock Creek, and he'd help Miss McKendrick, and he'd take everything, but he wouldn't touch the one thing he wanted to the most.
    This woman who had never been touched before.
    * * *
    Two weeks to the day after Mary had climbed back on the blasted stage and retraced her route home, dust billowed on the eastern horizon. The church bells rang once—a Rock Creek warning to herd your innocents out of sight. Thus far the bad men had taken only things, not people, but that didn't mean times weren't going to change.
    The children had gone home an hour ago, and Mary was just leaving the schoolhouse, where she'd been contemplating her fingernails and cursing Reese. He wasn't coming, and not only had she wasted two weeks believing he was, but hiring him had been her idea. If he didn't arrive, she doubted she'd be allowed to go hunting another man like him, even if she knew where to find one.
    Her friend, Josephine Clancy, daughter of the Right Reverend Clancy, joined her. They stared at the dust cloud approaching town. The thunder of hooves filled the air, making the suddenly deserted streets seem even more ghostly.
    "We'd better get inside." Jo tugged at Mary's arm.
    "Just a minute."
    Mary squinted at the cloud, which had drifted close enough to distinguish the shapes of men on horses. Six men to be exact, and the one in the middle wore black from the tip of his hat to the toe of his boot.
    "Reese," she whispered, and in that one word she heard too many things.
    The group pulled up as they neared town, and Mary got a glimpse at what she'd paid everything for. They looked rougher than the outlaws they'd come to drive away, these six men of various ages and sizes with an arsenal attached to their saddles and hips. Mary hadn't seen that many guns since she rode out of Missouri.
    "That's them?" Jo asked.
    "Yes."
    Jo's hand slipped from Mary's arm, and she laced their fingers together. "I only have one question."
    "What's that?"
    "Did things just get better, or did they get worse?"

 
     
     
    Chapter 2

     
    Reese and his men had been on their horses for days when they reached Rock Creek, but they weren't tired. They'd gotten used to riding during the war. Riding and fighting, that was what they did, and in the five years since surrender, they'd honed those skills to bayonet sharpness.
    Each man had a story to tell of how he'd come to follow Reese. If they knew how woefully inadequate he was as a leader, they'd probably kill him. But no matter how hard Reese tried to get someone else to lead the way, they all just laughed and told him to do his damn job.
    Each man had a past life too, though Reese chose to know as little as possible about their lives before they wore the gray. Since he didn't plan to tell them about his past, he thought it only fair he did not collect theirs.
    As a result, the five were a close-knit crew, which left Reese on the outside, and that sat fine with him. He didn't deserve friends, family, or a life better than the one he had. Being alive at all was more than he deserved, an opinion most folks down home in Georgia—including the woman he should have married—would have agreed with wholeheartedly.
    Reese and the others pulled their horses to a stop at the outskirts of town and contemplated Rock Creek. The place resembled a hundred other Texas hamlets—small, rough, with a single main street of crude buildings and a few homes straggling into the land beyond. There was a church and steeple,