The Outlaw's Bride Read Free Page A

can see the others safely into town.”
    The two conferred a moment before Dr. Ealy cleared his throat. Accustomed to unexpected weddings, funerals and the like, he had agreed to perform the ceremony and wanted to get on with it.
    Isobel barely heard his words. Instead she stared down at the pointed toes of her red boots. What had she done? Minutes ago she had been planning to marry Don Guillermo of Santa Fe. Now this leather-clad cowboy who owned nothing but his horse and gun would be her husband.
    The ceremony ended, and Susan presented her friend with a bundle of folded garments. “Not much of a wedding gift, Isobel. But wear them, please. Those killers will recognize you right away if you stay as you are.”
    As the shaken group set off down the moonlit trail in one party, Noah explained to Isobel the situation in Lincoln Town.
    Jimmie Dolan had profited from his store and vast acreage by keeping the small landowners financially strapped, until the young Englishman John Tunstall had moved to the area. On the advice of his business partner, Alexander McSween, Tunstall had started his own store and ranch.
    Dr. Ealy added that he, along with his wife, two young daughters and Susan Gates, had been summoned to Lincoln by McSween. “It looks as if we’re already in McSween’s war,” he observed, “and we haven’t even arrived in Lincoln.”
    “Just keep quiet about tonight’s business,” Noah instructed the group. “We’ll do the same.”
    As Isobel watched her companions head north in the darkness, she and Noah turned their horses east. Less than an hour later, they arrived at an old cabin witha sagging front porch. With some trepidation, she followed this man who was no more than a stranger up the steps.
    Without speaking, he lit two oil lamps and began to build a fire. She watched him work, appraising biceps that bunched as he placed logs on crackling kindling, brown fingers that set an iron pot he had filled with water on a hook above the blaze. Broad back. Shaggy brown hair and beard. Muddy boots. Leather chaps. Such a common man, this Noah Buchanan.
    “Like to wash up?” He asked the question so abruptly that she took a step backward.
    He dusted his hands on his thighs before pushing open a door and carrying her bag into a small bedroom. She followed, surveying with some dismay the narrow iron bed, the washstand with its chipped white crockery, the window fitted with paper. Noah filled a cracked bowl with heated water, then shut the door behind him.
    Isobel walked to the door and listened to him whistling in the other room. Dare she trust the man? She slid her revolver from her bag and set it on a table near the tub. With another glance at the door, she changed into a nightgown. Then she removed her comb, dipped her hands into the water and finally began to relax.
    Curling onto the narrow bed, she sighed deeply. But as sleep crept over her, a movement rippled behind her eyelids. Horses cantering up a trail. Men shouting. Gunshots.
     
    Noah sat on a three-legged stool before the fire and warmed his hands. A second pot of water had begun to steam. The woman in the next room would beasleep by now. No matter how hotheaded, she must be exhausted.
    He smiled and shook his head as he filled a large basin with hot water and set to shaving his whiskers off with Dick Brewer’s straight razor.
    Good old Dick. As Tunstall’s foreman, he was bound to get into the thick of the trouble. Noah peered into a mirror hung by the iron cookstove. If Dick got hurt, he couldn’t stand by, no matter what he’d promised the señorita .
    Of course, the way she’d acted today, he’d probably have trouble keeping her out of it.
    He dipped his head into a second bowl of fresh water and scrubbed his scalp. She was crazy to come after her father’s killer all by herself. Of course he was just as loco to have married her. John Chisum would take some fancy convincing to swallow that one.
    Trail dust was getting a little old. Noah