Morrow Creek Marshal

Meaningfully, she let her threatening statement linger.

“You expect your neighbors to force me to pay? Is that it?” Coyle gave a knowing headshake. “I see you looking to them for help, but I promise you, I know most of these men. They know me. They won’t go against me. Not even at your insistence.”

Undoubtedly, he’d scared them into that stance, Marielle guessed. Above all else, Dylan Coyle was intimidating.

“You don’t know my brother, Mr. Hudson Miller. I’m afraid he’ll be very unhappy to hear that you won’t help me.”

Doing her utmost to appear apprehensive over what Hudson might do to assuage his unhappiness, Marielle bit her lip.

Thankfully, Coyle appeared to swallow her pretense.

“Are you suggesting your brother will force me to pay you for your lost work time?” he asked. “Because if you are—”

“Hudson is awfully large. And strong. And very mean.”

Uttering that last outright fib, Marielle all but expected to be struck by lightning. If Hudson ventured closer, her threat would fall apart like crepe paper on a rainy day. Because while Hudson was indeed big and burly, he was anything but malicious.

That’s why Marielle had dedicated herself to caring for him, all by herself, from before they’d arrived in Morrow Creek. Hudson needed her. He was a sweet, softhearted soul who had a sense of fun where his ambition ought to have been. Hudson would have been lost without her. She’d supported them both for years. She didn’t aim to quit now. She’d made promises to that effect.

“Is Hudson ‘mean’ enough to make you agree to have your ankle treated?” Coyle inquired. “Because if he is, bring him over and let him supervise while I tend to it the way I tried to before. That injury is only getting worse the more you dally.”

She couldn’t do that. Hudson was approximately as menacing as a gamboling puppy. He was probably inebriated, what’s more. That was the cost of having her brother at Murphy’s saloon to watch over her. He drank. He gambled, smoked and caroused, too. But he didn’t exactly terrorize bystanders, even with his size and his strength. He would greet Coyle like a long-lost friend.

Caught, Marielle swallowed hard. She looked away.

“I told you, I don’t need anybody’s help!”

She never had. She refused to now. Period. But her outburst was as good as an admission of defeat. Her erstwhile “protector” didn’t let it pass unnoticed, either. His expression hardened.

“You are confusing obduracy with strength,” Coyle told her in an unyielding tone. “Everybody needs help sometimes.”

Exasperated and hurting, Marielle glowered at him. “I also don’t need some drifter with a ten-dollar vocabulary and a gun belt telling me what to do and how to do it. If you’re too skint to make good on the trouble you’ve caused, just own up to it.”

“This isn’t about money, and you know it.” His gaze wandered to her face. Held. “It’s about getting what’s coming to you. Having the ledger squared. We’re the same in that way. Trouble is, we’re going about it from opposite directions.”

The same. Could they be? All Marielle knew was that at those words, the raucous saloon fell away, pushed like daytime before night. She frowned at Coyle, struck by his perspicacity.

She did want fairness to prevail. She didn’t want to be disadvantaged. If he was speaking truthfully, he felt the same way. No one had ever truly understood her. Yet here he was...

...Trying to manipulate her into granting him his wishes. Which she didn’t need to do. Doc Finney would deal with her ankle, very soon now. Letting a stranger tend to it—especially now—felt like surrendering. Marielle refused to be cowed.

For Hudson’s sake and her own, she’d always been strong.

“We’re not alike,” she objected in no uncertain terms, vexed at his nerve. “You’re nothing but a drifter, and I’m—”

“Allergic to a man with a wandering foot?” Coyle guessed. His eyes sparkled again, making him seem absolutely unlike someone who would start a saloon brawl with a cowboy. “You say drifter as if it’s poisonous. I like traveling man better. It sounds jaunty. Nobody can object to that.”

“Whatever you call it, it means leaving someone behind.”

His smile dimmed. Thankfully for her. Because seeing its brilliance had made Marielle feel...captivated. Also, disinclined to press the issue of her fair compensation for lost work with him. But she was the one who charmed people into forgetting themselves and their goals. Not him. It couldn’t be him.

“Not putting down roots isn’t a crime. It’s freedom.”

“It’s selfishness,” she disagreed. “And it’s cruel.”

“Cruel? Look here, Miss Miller, this is getting a mite too personal for my taste. Whatever somebody did to you, you can’t pin it on me. Like you said, we’ve never met before tonight.”

“And yet you claim to know me so well.”

“I—” On the verge of disagreeing, Coyle stopped. He squinted at her with far more astuteness than she liked. “I am letting myself be diverted by you, just like you were by me.” He seemed oddly impressed. “You don’t want me to look at your ankle again, so you’re concocting a cockamamie theory to dissuade me.”

She had been. But she’d gotten carried away with her own hyperbole. A flair for the dramatic did run in her family, but Marielle saw life lightly—much more lightly than she’d let on just now. Coyle didn’t know that about her, though. “Aha.” She nodded. “There’s another one of those pricy words of yours.”

“You understand them all, and you know it,” Coyle told her. “You’re a dancing girl on the outside, but you’re a damn poet on the inside. That’s why you keep watch up there onstage.”

“I ‘keep watch’ because men like you start fights!”

“You keep watch because you want more. Why wouldn’t you?” He aimed another knowing look at her. “You can’t very well let it sneak on by when you’re not on the lookout. So you watch.”

He was right. Of course he was. Because after all, the other dance hall girls were grown women who could take care of themselves without her. Even Etta. But she refused to say so.

Marielle wasn’t even sure what more she wanted. Only that it felt hazy and essential...and eternally out of her grasp.

For a heartbeat, they only looked at one another—two people pulled together in a boisterous, plain-hewn saloon in a faraway, lonesome territory. Two people who were surprisingly the same.

Marielle liked that even less than her ankle injury.

“You want a husband and a passel of babies,” Coyle went on, “which would be only fitting and natural for an older woman.”

Argh. He was, quite possibly, the worst know-it-all she had ever encountered. Why had she even entertained the notion that he understood her? Commiserated with her? Needed...like her?

He was a blowhard and a tyrant, born to boss people around and take charge. She was through inveigling him. She would find another way to support herself until her injury healed.

But Coyle wasn’t done deciding her future for her yet. Musingly, he studied the saloon. “I reckon there are several men here who’d suit you. You look like the settling down type. You should pick one of them, retire from dancing and start having babies.”

That sounded like heaven. Except coming from him.

Marielle cast him a scathing look, only to see him grin unrepentantly in response. He was enjoying baiting her.

“Oh, why won’t you just go away?” she grumped.

“Because you’re a woman who won’t admit she’s wrong, and I’m a man who won’t leave his responsibilities behind him.” Coyle stood. He held out his arms as though entertaining every expectation she’d jump into them. “Come to the back room. I’ll look at your ankle in private. We’ll see what can be done.”

Marielle was hurt. She was tired. She was confused and worried and unsure how far her nest egg of savings would go.

Given all that, she wanted to concede—to give up trying to make him settle with her and just let him tend to her ankle the way he wanted to. On the verge of doing so, though, she spied more movement from the saloon’s floor. Doc Finney was headed her way, having evidently spoken with a few of the men around him to discern her location. He was accompanied by Jack Murphy, Daniel McCabe, Owen Cooper and several other leaders of the town.

Wearing a frown on his lined and weary face, Morrow Creek’s longtime physician scanned the crowd. He spied Marielle. He walked faster, carrying his hat and physician’s bag.

Finally. She was about to be well quit of Dylan Coyle.

Alertly, Marielle sat straighter in her chair. She thought she could make it to the saloon’s back room, if she had a little help. Since several of the town’s burliest men had accompanied Doc Finney to the saloon, she could ask someone she knew to help her. Then she could see the back of Mr. Coyle. For good.

Unexpectedly, the notion made her feel...almost wistful.

Her melancholy didn’t last long, though. Because to Marielle’s surprise, even as she prepared to make that arduous journey to the saloon’s back room, Doc Finney did not rush to her side. He did not open his physician’s bag, extract a miracle cure and fix her. He didn’t even try to do those things.

Instead, he spied Dylan Coyle—who stood with his back to the room and thus couldn’t see Doc Finney approaching—and hurried nearer. He raised his arm. “Coyle! There you are!”

Coyle turned. “Doc!” His jovial greeting extended to the other men. “McCabe. Cooper.” They all shook hands. Heartily. The others—men Marielle had known for years now—gazed at the drifter through respectful eyes. “Murphy, you owe me a new hat,” Coyle teased. “One that’s not soaked clean through with whiskey.”

“The hell I do!” Marielle’s boss returned. “When you drink in my place, you can’t expect to come out looking like a dandy.”

They went on joshing with one another, trading back slaps and jokes. Taken aback by their good-humored meeting, Marielle frowned. She adjusted her feathered headpiece, then pointedly smoothed her skirts. Any second now, they would come to their senses and properly tend to her injury. Surely they would.

She cleared her throat, attempting to make sure of that.

“We thought we might miss you, Coyle,” Daniel McCabe, the town blacksmith, was saying. “I’m glad to see we didn’t.”

Cooper agreed. “You were supposed to come to the Morrow Creek Men’s Club meeting. We needed you there. There’s been a certifiable emergency in town.” The livery stable owner eyed his friends. “I told you we should’ve hog-tied him and brought him.”

They all guffawed. A few more men drifted nearer, drawn by their boisterous conversation. Marielle sat alone, all but hidden behind hotelier Griffin Turner, detective Adam Corwin and lumber mill owner Marcus Copeland, each of whom took their turns greeting Dylan Coyle. At the center of their attention, Coyle ably held his own with handshakes and rough-edged banter.

For a self-professed wandering man, Marielle couldn’t help noticing grumpily from the shadows, Coyle had certainly managed to forge some strong connections in Morrow Creek. Her friends and neighbors seemed to hold him in very high regard.

“Excuse me!” she called. “Doctor Finney? A word, please?”

The town’s curmudgeonly physician didn’t hear her.

Frustrated, Marielle tried again. More loudly.

The only person who heard her was Hudson. He broke through the ring of men surrounding Mr. Coyle, all of them chattering away, then spied Marielle on her chair. Her brother shouted.

“Mari!” Almost six and a half feet tall, possessed of a powerful build and a headful of shoulder-length dark brown hair that matched his coffee-colored eyes, Hudson lumbered forward. He was neither graceful nor formidable, but he was beloved by Marielle. At the sight of her brother, she sagged with relief.

“I heard you were hurt!” He knelt at her chair, looking her over for what he plainly expected to be calamitous bumps and bruises. He grasped her hand. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner. I, uh, stepped outside for a while. The next thing I knew, some cowboy was rushing by, shouting for Doc Finney like a darn fool.” Hudson scoffed, sending ale fumes wafting toward her. He smelled of cheroot smoke, too. “Everybody knows Doc was at the men’s club meeting, but I guess that broke up. Anyway, I—”

“Can you get me out of here, please?”

Hudson balked. “You aren’t done dancing already, are you?”

His disappointment was palpable...and understandable, too. He didn’t want to cut short his evening of fun. While she was dancing onstage, Hudson always promised to linger nearby for her “protection.” In actuality, her brother spent most of his time drinking and carousing. Sometimes gambling. Marielle knew he meant well. After all, if not for her profession, he would not have been exposed to so many objectionable influences at all.

Hudson’s potential ruination was partly her fault.

“I’m afraid,” she admitted, “that I’m done dancing for quite a while.” She didn’t want to worry him by saying how long.

New concern shadowed his face. “You’re hurt bad? Where?”

“My ankle.” Ruefully, Marielle glanced in its direction. That traitorous “feeble” appendage might take weeks to heal. “If you could please just ask Doc Finney to meet us at home—”

“Of course! Of course I will.” Her brother squeezed her hand. “Anything you need, Mari. You know you can count on me.”

“She’d better be able to.” Jack Murphy separated himself from the crowd. Judging by his solemn expression, he’d been informed of Marielle’s situation—and had heard her own gloomy pronouncement of her prognosis, too. He pushed a glass in her hand. “Drink this. I’ll send the doctor to you straightaway.”

“This is a double whiskey!” Marielle objected.

“It’ll help. Trust me.” Jack turned to Hudson, even as the Dylan-Coyle-centered melee went on behind him. “She’ll do better at home, where it’s quiet. Make sure she gets some rest.”

Irked, Marielle cleared her throat. “I’m right here!”

“I’ll listen to you,” Jack informed her with a devilish gleam in his Irish eyes, “after you down that medicinal snort.”

Expeditiously, she did. It burned all the way down. Ugh.

Eyes watering, Marielle persisted. “I already told Hudson to take me home, Jack. You needn’t interfere. I have this well in hand.” A surprising warmth spread through her, kindled by the liquor she’d consumed. “I’ll be back within days. Don’t worry.”

Hudson took away her glass. He nodded at her. “Ready?”

Marielle murmured her assent. She held out her hand, ready for her brother to help her to her feet in a dignified fashion.

Instead, he saved time by scooping her outright into his massive arms, then cradling her to his chest. Marielle couldn’t help whooping in surprise, then clutching him. She gave him a swat, feeling relieved and displeased in equal measure. She loved Hudson. She knew he’d care for her, however inexpertly. But she didn’t like being treated like a helpless child.

“Days,” she promised Jack sternly, desperate to make sure he wouldn’t hire someone to replace her. “I heal quickly.”

“You’ll take as long as you need,” her boss countered.

But Marielle knew she couldn’t do that. “I can’t afford to stay home languishing! You know that. Without a steady income—”

But Jack Murphy had an answer for that, too.

“I’ll give you half pay, for as long as you’re laid up—”

“What?” She was astounded. His offer went above and beyond what any dancer could expect. “That’s so generous of you.”

“—as long as you rest up and follow orders.”

Humph. Marielle wrinkled her nose. Naturally, there were conditions attached to Jack’s munificence. It was almost as if they all expected her to flout doctor’s orders, charge ahead on her own authority and handle this situation however she liked.

It was almost as if they all knew her, Jack included.

Dratted know-it-alls. No adult man would have had to agree to “follow orders” under threat of penury. Why should she?

She could take care of herself and darn well would.

“Making a cranky face,” Jack observed, “is not agreeing.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Marielle asked.

Hudson chuckled. She felt the vibration of his laughter.

“That’s why I’m pressing the issue,” Jack said. “We’ve known each other for years now, remember? My saloon was just a wee upstart when I brought you and your troupe to Morrow Creek.”

Marielle remembered. Daniel McCabe had built the stage she danced on with his own two blacksmithing hands. Catching a glimpse of Jack’s expectant expression, she knew what he wanted.

She wasn’t ready to give him her agreement, though.

“You all think you’re so clever, don’t you?” she groused.

“I don’t.” Holding her in his arms, Hudson shrugged. He gave her an endearing grin. “But I agree with Jack about this.”

“Traitor.” Stubbornly, Marielle frowned at them both. But a second later, her head began swimming with the aftereffects of the whiskey. It was the only explanation for what happened next. “Fine,” she agreed. “I’ll behave myself! I promise. All right?”

“All right.” Jack nodded. So did Hudson.

Then he swept her out of the saloon and into the night.

Chapter Three

At some point, Dylan realized that Doc Finney had left the cluster of men surrounding him. Until that moment, he’d been keeping a firm eye on the reedy physician. It was imperative to get the doctor’s treatment for the dance hall girl. But between one joke and the next—between one urgent statement about the dire emergency facing the town and the next—Dylan lost him.

He hadn’t expected to be swamped by Morrow Creek’s take-charge menfolk, all of them eager to get his attention—and his opinion on the crisis they’d discussed at the men’s club that evening. Truthfully, when Dylan had spied the group of men coming into Murphy’s saloon, he’d thought they were there for Marielle Miller. Especially the doctor. It had certainly looked that way. As one, they’d turned their heads toward the dance hall girl’s position, perked up, then beelined straight there.

It turned out, though, that they’d beelined toward him.

Since that turn of events, Dylan had been unable to avoid all the backslapping, camaraderie, jokes and gossip they’d surrounded him with. He hadn’t invited it. But he also hadn’t been idly jawing to Miss Miller earlier. He did know these men. They knew him. During his short stay in Morrow Creek, he’d taken part in some important goings-on, mostly involving his employer at the Morrow Creek Mutual Society, the conniving brute who’d followed her West and the thugs that reprobate had employed.

In the aftermath of that incident, Dylan and the other men—Murphy, Copeland, McCabe, Corwin and several more, along with his fellow security men Seth Durant and Judah Foster—had assembled a posse and seen that justice was done. Rightly so.

But if they now believed that his onetime participation in a single necessary manhunt meant he wanted to join their damn men’s club and spend his days being gradually nailed down to one place, fenced in by friendship and obligation and belonging...

Well, they needed to think again.

“...Caffey is still on the loose. The bastard got away,” Miles Callaway was telling everyone, explaining the emergency that faced them to those listening saloongoers who, like Dylan, hadn’t been at the meeting that night. The dance hall girls had taken their usual midevening break to change costumes. The saloon had quieted somewhat, even as the faro games and drinking continued. “Deputy Winston wasn’t so lucky,” Callaway went on. “The federal marshals already took him off to Yuma Prison.”

“He deserves it. Caffey deserves worse.” Clayton Davis, the lumberman who said so, made a grim face. There was no love lost between him and the deputy—or the sheriff, for that matter.

As near as Dylan could gather, Caffey had absconded a few days ago under mysterious circumstances. The townspeople were still trying to understand what could have made their longtime sheriff leave his badge and his post. He’d skedaddled just steps ahead of the marshals who’d closed in on his hapless deputy.

None of them, though, would miss Caffey. They were right not to, Dylan knew. The lawman had abused his authority, plain and simple. More than a few of the good men present had themselves been unjustly detained by Caffey at one time or another, under one fabrication or other. Even one woman had spent copious time in the jailhouse for her rabble-rousing and protesting: Grace Murphy, the saloonkeeper’s suffragist wife.

All of which explained Jack Murphy’s particular zeal to attend the men’s club meeting and have the sheriff’s wrongdoings dealt with—whatever they were. In Murphy’s position, Dylan would have done the same thing. Not that he could glimpse Murphy at the moment. He seemed to have disappeared along with Doc Finney.

Maybe they were both tending to the dance hall girl?

Wanting to make sure, Dylan looked for them.

“I don’t expect much integrity from folks, generally speaking,” Cade Foster was saying as Dylan searched. As a renowned gambler, Cade undoubtedly had his reasons for expecting the worst of people. “But a lawman ought to be different.”

“Our lawmen were different,” Adam Corwin said. “Crooked.”

Dylan could have told them that. In fact, he had told Miles Callaway and his enterprising fiancée, Rosamond McGrath Dancy—the proprietress of the Morrow Creek Mutual Society and his most recent employer—that more than once. In no uncertain terms.

Until this latest incident, though, no one had been too riled up. When it came to Caffey, they’d been content to look the other way. Sometimes, in small towns, convention trumped sense. Tradition beat intelligence. Good intentions were no match for longtime connections and established ways of doing things.

As far as Dylan was concerned, those were fair arguments for not getting caught up in a close-knit community like Morrow Creek. The people here were too all-fired busy being cozy to use their heads. They hadn’t wanted to see the problem at all.

Now it was too late. By Dylan’s reckoning, Sheriff Caffey had never earned his job in the first place. There was evidence he’d fixed his election, wrangled himself an undeserved position of authority and gloated for years about doing both of those things. He’d also forcibly impeded the press—including local Pioneer Press newspaperman Thomas Walsh—from reporting on his misconduct. And that had been nothing more than his way of getting the job.

Dylan hadn’t poked his nose too far into what Caffey had done after securing his position, but the man’s penchant for brute force, coercion and dishonesty were known. Widely, now.

“We can’t go on much longer without a sheriff.” Jedediah Hofer, the mercantile owner, jutted his chin. “Already, bad men are coming into town. Damnable drifters and the like—”

Dylan objected. “I take offense to that, Hofer,” he said with a smile. “Not every traveling man is up to no good.”

“Not every traveling man is capable of organizing a posse, taking out Arvid Bouchard’s lackeys and handling protection for a place like the mutual society.” Griffin Turner gave Dylan a nod of recognition. Coming from the infamous “Boston Beast,” that was high praise, indeed. “People around here don’t know what a man like Bouchard is capable of, but I reckon you did.”

“You brought him in anyway,” Marcus Copeland reminded everyone present. As the man who’d built one of Morrow Creek’s first businesses—his successful lumber mill—Marcus was respected in town. So everyone quit nattering to listen. “You took care of it. No hesitation. That’s why you’re the only man for this job.”

Dylan didn’t like where this was going. He was the only man for what job? Tracking down the sheriff? The lawman’s disappearance was none of his business. He was leaving. He should have already been gone. Just then, he wished he was.