Merline Lovelace (22 page)

“And I told you I ride alone, Suzanne. I always
have. I’m not dragging a posse strung out behind me when I leave Fort Meade.”

“Good! Fine! Ride out alone.”

His jaw worked. He felt trapped, caught between the single, all-consuming need to avenge his parents that had driven him for so many years and the insidious thought that he could take another road.

Suzanne was driving him to it, just as she’d tried to drive her friend to go back East and study with that doctor in Philadelphia. Bright Water had enough sense to recognize she couldn’t walk in anyone’s moccasins but her own. And when it came right down to it, Jack couldn’t, either.

“Do you really think a piece of tin changes anything?” he asked gruffly.

“Do you think your money does?”

“It’s all I have to give you, dammit!”

The fight went out of her. Expelling a ragged breath, she shook her head.

“No, Jack, it’s not, but you’re not ready to give me the only thing I want from you.”

It would be so simple to say the words she wanted to hear. Hell, they might even be true. He’d never loved before, never wanted any woman the way he wanted Suzanne. The tangled mix of lust and longing she stirred in him was as close to love as he’d ever expected to come.

“I’ll think about the badge, Suzanne. That’s all I’ll promise.”

“Fair enough.”

She tossed it to him. Jack caught it one-handed, smothering a curse when the sharp pin on the back jabbed into his thumb.

“As the colonel said, it won’t make you any less of a target. In fact, it might just provide a nice, shiny bull’s-eye. But whatever you decide, you’re going to have to tell him yourself.”

She started for the stairs, only to pause on the second step. “By the way, Charlie Dawes is in Deadwood.”

M
att’s wedding day dawned bright and cold and dusted with frost. He dragged himself out of the monstrous bed and righted his long johns. Shoving his feet into his boots, he stumbled to the wooden slop bucket. Ying Li was already up and huddled by the small cast-iron stove set on bricks, sipping green tea. The widow sat beside her, ensconced in several layers of shawls and nattering on about the day’s festivities.

Apparently, Matt divined through the pounding in his head, the two women had temporarily bridged their differences. What was it about a wedding that got females so feathered up?

Leaning a hand against a tent pole, he let his fuzzy thoughts wander. If he’d been getting hitched back home in Ohio, his mam would have baked up a storm. His pa would have slaughtered a couple of hogs for roasting. They would have
invited all the neighbors and cleared out the barn for dancin’. His older brothers would have planned a shivaree for sure. Becky would be decked out in white, not heathenish red, and…

He jerked upright, yanking in his wandering thoughts, but he couldn’t block the wave of homesickness that crashed over him. Memories crowded into his aching skull, along with a searing awareness of how different this day would have been if he hadn’t been so all-fired set to try his luck in the gold fields.

Shivering in the cold air, he glanced over at his bride. To save his soul, he couldn’t tell whether she was any happier trotting along with him than scrubbing floors and…and doing the dragon dance at Mother Featherlegs Shephard’s Saloon and Hurdy-Gurdy Parlor. The only time he’d glimpsed anything approaching joy or excitement in her face was when she caught sight of that blasted bed.

If asked, he couldn’t have explained his feelings for her. He wanted her. All he had to do was think about what they did in the dark and his twig sprouted straight up into a tree. And he wanted to do right by her. She didn’t have anyone else who cared about her. Her own father had sold her off, just like Matt’s own pa sold his hogs to market. Yet every time he envisioned strolling the streets of San Francisco in a fancy coat and top hat, the
woman on his arm looked more like Becky than Ying Li.

With a little wrench of his heart, Matt put Becky out of his mind forever. Ying Li would soon be his wife. She… She deserved a husband who wasn’t thinking thoughts of another woman.

Sighing, he dropped his hand. He’d better get dressed. He could put in four or five hours’ work for the quartermaster this morning, add to his slowly re-building roll. With what he was paying the Widow Overton and the cost of supplies at the sutler’s store, he couldn’t afford to take a whole day off. Not if he was going to make it to the diggings before the gold ran out.

Ying Li rose to bring him a cup of tea. “Matt Butts come back, soon soon, burn incense, make offerings to honorable ancestors?”

Hiding a grimace, he gulped down the brew. It tasted like warmed-over tree bark. Lord, what he wouldn’t give for a mug of thick, black coffee!

“Is most important,” she insisted. “Must do, make luck.”

“All right.” He managed a smile. “Matt Butts come back, soon soon.”

Finishing his tea, he grabbed his clothes. On his way to the quartermaster’s, he stopped in his tracks, then decided on a quick detour. He’d swing by the commander’s house, ask for Miss Bon
neaux, have her scribble down the lines. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it right.

Across the post, Jack was in a similar mood as he struggled with the starched collar of the shirt he’d bought at the sutler’s store. Damned ridiculous things, collars. Why the hell did a man want to button himself into something that scratched his neck?

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gussied up in a store-bought suit. They were all right for dandies like Bill Hickok and Bat Masterson, who never appeared in public without their watch fobs and bowler, but not for a man who packed everything he owned in a pair of saddlebags.

Hunching over, he glared into the round mirror set atop the bureau and finally got his collar to lie in decent folds over his tie. That done, he reached for the ruby-red brocade vest he’d purchased along with the black wool suit. Wincing at the pull in his chest, he eased into the vest. His countenance was grim by the time he tugged at the lapels of the coat to settle it over his shoulders.

Scowling, Jack studied the slicked-up buck in the wavy mirror. He knew damned well what was rubbing him the wrong way this morning, and it wasn’t his new suit. His glance dropped to the star lying next to his hat on the bureau scarf.

He didn’t like the obligations that bit of tin car
ried with it any more than he liked having his hand forced by a man who’d as soon skin him whole as spit. Jack had gone his own way for so long, traveled so many miles with one, driving purpose. If it wasn’t for Suzanne…

Flattening both palms on the dresser, he blew out a long breath. There you had it. If it wasn’t for Suzanne, none of them would be at Fort Meade. The kid, the Chinese girl, Jack himself. At least the Arapaho woman had shown sense enough to go back to her own kind. She understood, if that mule-headed female down the hall didn’t, that wanting something so fierce it hurt didn’t make it right.

Still scowling, he straightened and reached for the Colt. The familiar weight had settled around his hips before he remembered he’d be standing up with Matt in church in a few hours. Carefully, he rolled the leather belt around the holster and stuffed the Colt into the saddlebags he’d brought upstairs to pack his gear in.

“Shall I help you put up your hair,
ma petite?
”

Suzanne swung around on the dressing stool and gave her mother a grateful smile. “Yes, please. I seem to be all thumbs this morning. You’d think I was the bride, not Ying Li.”

Gliding into the room with a rustle of skirts, Julia gathered the heavy, silken mass. She was
wearing her lavender wool in honor of the occasion, Suzanne saw on a rush of affection, the one that matched her eyes. Bustled and nip-waisted, with a row of satin bows trailing from her neck to her hem, Julia Bonneaux Garrett looked more like the New Orleans belle she was than a senior officer’s wife.

“You’ll be a bride soon enough, Suzanne.” Deftly, she twisted her daughter’s hair into a series of intricate whorls. “Sooner, it appears, than later.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just passed your Mr. Sloan on the stairs. I must say he looked quite handsome, if rather disgruntled. He asked where the colonel was. Pass me a comb,
ma petite.
”

Suzanne’s heart knocked against her ribs as she handed her mother one of the tortoiseshell combs. “Did you happen to notice whether Jack was wearing a U.S. Marshal’s badge?”

Julia’s hands stilled. She was already gone from her, this child who’d grown into a woman almost overnight. It seemed only months ago Julia had dressed her daughter’s dolls, mere weeks since she’d watched Andrew lift a wary, wide-eyed girl onto her first pony. She’d wanted so much for Suzanne. A home. Children. A husband who’d cherish her as Andrew cherished Julia.

Swallowing a sigh, she nodded. “Yes, darling, he was.”

“Oh, Mama!”

The unbridled joy in her daughter’s voice vanquished Julia’s doubts. Deftly, she set another comb. “We don’t have much time. Can you think of anything we’ve left undone?”

“What?”

“Your friends’ wedding. Have we left anything undone?”

“Oh.” Blinking, Suzanne dragged her whirling thoughts from the personal to the practical. “What about the paper lanterns?”

“Sam and young Robert McCormack promised to string them this morning. They also begged fifty cents from me to purchase a supply of firecrackers,” she warned. “The boys are taking this business of scaring away the evil spirits to heart.”

“And the rice cakes? Ying Li insisted all kinds of disaster might befall if the wedding guests aren’t offered traditional rice cakes.”

“Mrs. McCormack sent her husband’s orderly on a scavenging expedition at first light.” Ruefully, Julia anchored the last comb in place. “Poor Elizabeth. She couldn’t know what she was letting herself in for when she took us all in. We shall have to restock her larder and send her a particularly fine gift when we return to Cheyenne.”

Teasing a few silky brown strands free to curl about her daughter’s face, she smiled down at her.

“There, you look quite ravishing.”

A quick glance in the mirror on the dressing table confirmed her mother’s assessment. She
did
look ravishing. Thank goodness her mother had raided Suzanne’s new wardrobe before rushing up to Fort Meade. This moss-green wool gown with its ruched skirt and matching cape lavishly bordered with fox was warm as well as striking. Leaving the bonnet on the dressing table, she rose and tucked her arm in her mother’s.

“Shall we go downstairs now and have breakfast with our men?”

The rough pine building that housed Fort Meade’s chapel had witnessed many weddings. In the mind of Chaplain Sergeant Renquist, the ceremony that joined Mr. Mathias Butts, of Ohio, and Miss Ying Li, of Canton, China, certainly numbered among the strangest.

The wedding party was relatively small, for one thing. Troopers bored with the endless round of fatigue duties usually snatched at any break in the routine as an excuse to celebrate. Ordinarily, friends of the bride and groom gathered in such crowds that they spilled out of the chapel. They also indulged in far too much hooch both before and after the ceremony, and played ribald pranks
on the newly married couple in the form of a shivaree…sometimes with disastrous consequences. Only last year, the poor corporal who’d won the hand of a squint-eyed Norwegian laundress had spent his wedding night in the guardhouse after bashing in the skull of another trooper who’d stolen away his wife, reportedly as a joke.

Unlike those riotous wedding parties, however, the one that gathered in the post chapel that frosty October afternoon consisted only of the bride, groom and a mere half dozen or so of their associates. To be sure, those friends included Colonel Andrew Garrett, rigged out in full dress uniform, with his wife and son. The Widow Overton was there, too, as well as Fort Meade’s commanding officer and various members of his family.

The groom, Renquist decided, looked nervous and somewhat the worse for wear. The great, oversize boy stood at the front of the chapel, his round-brimmed hat crushed in his hands, his hair bright as a new-minted gold coin. Beneath that shock of unruly curls, his blue eyes showed spiderwebs of red.

But it was the man standing beside the groom who held the chaplain’s fascinated gaze while they waited for the bride to make her appearance. Black Jack Sloan looked just as the penny presses had described him—tall, lean, dangerous. Even the walking stick he leaned on couldn’t detract from
the aura that came part and parcel with the man. His unsmiling face might have been carved from granite…until the bridal party entered the room, that is.

If Chaplain Sergeant Renquist hadn’t been studying the notorious shootist with such secret awe, he might have missed the almost imperceptible softening in the hard, uncompromising planes of Sloan’s face. A look of longing came into his sleet-gray eyes, so intense, so fierce, so swift, that the chaplain blinked.

The awful suspicion that the gunfighter might lust for the bride darted into Renquist’s mind. After all, the girl was rumored to have sold her favors to any number of men. For a horrid moment, the chaplain feared this big, gawky groom might suffer far worse than a bashed-in skull should Sloan take it in his mind to steal away the bride during the post-wedding revelries.

Then he noted how Sloan watched not the girl robed from head to toe in shocking, cherry-red silk, but the woman accompanying her. Renquist was just about to release a sigh of relief when he guessed the identity of that dainty, elegant young woman in a moss-green gown and fashionable bonnet trimmed with matching green ribbons. She had to be Colonel Garrett’s daughter, the one kidnapped by Big Nose George Parrott. The one who,
if the rumors were true, had spent a week or more in the company of Black Jack Sloan!

Renquist’s glance darted to the colonel, standing stiff as a flagpole beside his beautiful wife. Garrett, too, was watching Sloan, and from the grim expression on his face, he wasn’t real happy with what he saw.

As nervous now as the groom, the chaplain waited only until the bride and her attendant had taken their places to flip his worn Bible open to the marked pages. It was a German edition, carried from the old country by Dietrich Renquist when he emigrated to the United States after serving almost ten years in the Prussian Army, but he’d long since memorized the English translation. He recited the familiar words by rote, having said them so many times for so many couples.

Nothing in his previous experience, however, prepared him for what followed the traditional “You can kiss your bride, Mr. Butts.”

The groom turned pale as a winter moon, then blushed an even brighter crimson than his wife’s wedding dress.

“Kin I say something first?”

“Yes, of course.”

Beet-red, he tugged a scrap of paper from his pocket.

“Miss Bonneaux told me a man who wants to court a woman should recite lines from this fellow,
Shakespeare. I mashed them up a bit the first time I said ’em to Ying Li. Thought I’d get ’em right this time.” Clearing his throat, he read from the scrap of paper.

“The brightness in her cheek

Would shame the stars

As daylight does a lamp…”

In the small silence that followed, he stooped down and dropped a kiss on Ying Li’s bright, smooth cheek. Smiles wreathed the faces of the assembled guests when he straightened and thrust a hand out to the chaplain.

“Well, uh, thank you.”

Renquist returned his hearty shake and prepared to step aside, but the bride stayed him with a worried exclamation.

“No, no! Must tie red string, drink wine!”

Renquist looked to the groom, who in turn looked to his wife. She turned to the colonel’s daughter. With a nod, the elegant young woman stepped into the breach.