Bride On The Run (Historical Romance)

“I’m so damned cold and tired that I couldn’t take advantage of you even if I wanted to!”

Anna went rigid in his arms. He could feel the rage pulsing through her body as she groped for a retort that would hurt him as much as he had just hurt her. “What was it I called you earlier?” she asked in a raw-edged whisper.

“As I recall, you called me a cold-blooded, self-righteous prig,” Malachi said.

“So I did.” Anna’s eyes glinted like an angry bobcat’s. “Well, I was wrong, and I would like to apologize.”

“Apologize?” Malachi raised his guard.

“Yes.” She spoke in brittle phrases, veiling the sentiment that if she’d had a knife, she would have cheerfully buried it to the hilt in his gut. “I feel I was guilty of gross understatement!”

Dear Reader,

With the passing of the true millennium, Harlequin Historicals is putting on a fresh face! We hope you enjoyed our special inside front cover art from recent months. We plan to bring this wonderful “extra” to you every month! You may also have noticed our new branding—a maroon stripe that runs along the right side of the front cover. Hopefully, this will help you find our books more easily in the crowded marketplace. And thanks to those of you who participated in our reader survey. We truly appreciate the feedback you provided, which enables us to bring you more of the stories and authors that you like!

We have four terrific books for you this month. The talented Carolyn Davidson returns with a new Western,
Maggie’s Beau
, a tender tale of love between experienced rancher Beau Jackson—whom you might recognize from
The Wedding Promise
—and the young woman he finds hiding in his barn. Catherine Archer brings us her third medieval SEASONS’ BRIDES story,
Summer’s Bride
, an engaging romance about two willful nobles who finally succumb to a love they’ve long denied.

The Sea Nymph
by bestselling author Ruth Langan marks the second book in the SIRENS OF THE SEA series. Here, a proper English lady, who is secretly a privateer, falls in love with a highwayman—only to learn he is really an earl
and
the richest man in Cornwall! And don’t miss
Bride on the Run
, an awesome new Western by Elizabeth Lane. True to the title, a woman fleeing from crooked lawmen becomes the mail-order bride of a sexy widower with two kids.

Enjoy! And come back again next month for four more choices of the best in historical romance.

Sincerely,

Tracy Farrell

Senior Editor

Wind River
#28

Birds of Passage
#92

Moonfire
#150

MacKenna’s Promise
#216

Lydia
#302

Apache Fire
#436

Shawnee Bride
#492

Bride on the Run
#546

Other works include:

Silhouette Romance

Hometown Wedding
#1194

The Tycoon and the Townie
#1250

Silhouette Special Edition

Wild Wings, Wild Heart
#936

For my parents,
who gave me a love for rocky canyons and rushing rivers,
and for Tanya.

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Epilogue

Author Note

St. Joseph, Missouri

January 4, 1889

A
nna DeCarlo sat on the edge of the tiny stage in a cross-legged pose that offered her audience a tantalizing glimpse of silk-stockinged ankle. Lamplight gleamed on her tawny, upswept hair and glittered on the paste-diamond choker that encircled her creamy throat. Her low, velvety voice flowed like dark honey through the smoky haze that filled the grand salon of the Jack of Diamonds, rising above the piano to mingle with the clink of crystal, the whir of roulette wheels and the low murmur of men’s voices.

From the ring of tables that surrounded the stage, she could feel hungry eyes on her, feel them devouring
her small, voluptuous body through the clinging peacock satin gown.
Go ahead and look
, Anna thought fiercely.
You’ll
never get another chance!

“Love, oh, love, oh, careless love…”

Did she love Harry Solomon? Anna was not prepared to answer that question. She had stopped believing in love a long time ago. But she liked the dapper, silver-haired owner of the Jack of Diamonds. He was kind and generous and treated her like the lady she had always longed to be. Last week he had asked her to be his wife. Tonight he would get his answer. It would be yes.

“Just see what careless love has done…”

Anna lowered her gaze as the song ended, letting her head fall forward like a wilted blossom. For a long moment silence filled the lamplit circle. Then, as she lifted her face the audience burst into cheers. Smiling radiantly now, she took her bows. It was all over—the smoke-filled rooms, the leering eyes and pawing hands, the haggling over contracts and payment, the endless packing and unpacking. As Mrs. Harry Solomon, she would have a home. She would have the respect and security she had hungered for all her life.

As the applause died away she slipped backstage, pausing only to take up her white merino shawl from its hook on the wall. Wrapping the shawl around her bare shoulders, she hurried through the draughty corridor and up the back stairs. Harry would be in his sumptuous second-floor office now, waiting for her answer. She had kept him on tenterhooks long enough.

For all Anna’s resolve, doubts gnawed at her as she
mounted the dark stairway. Harry Solomon was old enough to be her father. Was she doing the right thing by him and by herself? Could she be a loving wife to him? Share his bed? Even give him children?

But she was being foolish now, Anna lectured herself. Harry was the best thing that had ever come into her rough, miserable life. He had offered her the world of her dreams, and she would be generous with her gratitude. She would make him proud, and she would make him happy. Harry Solomon would never be sorry he had married her.

Lost in thought, Anna climbed upward. From the salon, the lusty chords of the grand piano, playing “Beautiful Dreamer,” echoed eerily up the stairwell. Above her, on the landing, she could see the thin crack of light beneath Harry’s door. He would be waiting for her, she knew, with iced champagne and two crystal goblets on the sideboard. Minutes from now they would be toasting their future together.

She was a half dozen steps short of the top when the door flew open and two dark figures burst out onto the landing. They were cloaked against the winter night, their low-brimmed hats shadowing their faces, but she recognized them both. The shorter of the two was Louis Caswell, chief of police in the riverfront precinct and a frequent patron of the Jack of Diamonds. Yes—she could see the black high-heeled boots he wore, custom-made to increase his height. The taller, darker man was little more than a stranger, a shadowy man known to her only as The Russian.

What business would Caswell have with Harry at this hour of the night? Anna was weighing the wisdom of asking when the two men pushed past her
without a word and hurried on. Only the startled flash of Caswell’s eyes in his sharp little weasel face indicated that he had seen her at all.

Partway down the stairs she saw The Russian hesitate, glancing up at her. For an instant the light from the open doorway fell on his long, pockmarked face, and Anna felt her heart contract with a sudden, nameless fear. He turned, as if to start back toward her, but then Caswell seized his arm, said something in a low voice, and the two of them vanished into the dark corridor.

“Harry?” Anna’s elegant kidskin boots clicked across the landing as she hurried toward the open door. “Harry, what on earth—”

The words died in her throat as she stepped into the room. Harry Solomon was lying facedown in a spreading pool of blood, among the papers that had spilled from his open safe. A large, bone-handled butcher knife protruded from his back, right over the spot where his heart would be.

Arizona Territory, May, 1889

T
hey would never find her here.

Anna’s lips moved in silent reassurance of that fact as the buckboard creaked down the narrow dugway that had been blasted into the sun-colored sandstone cliff. The silent man who sat beside her, his massive fists keeping a tight rein on the mules, probably thought she was praying. She wasn’t. Anna had given up on God at roughly the same time God had given up on her. By what she judged to be mutual consent, she no longer asked heaven for favors. Not even at times like this.

Above the towering canyon walls, the sky was a blinding turquoise gash. Two great, dark birds, which Anna guessed to be vultures, drifted back and forth, circling and descending on the hot spirals of air. Infinitely patient, they seemed to be waiting for a misstep. For the man. For the mules. For her.

The man glanced coldly at Anna. His name was
Malachi, like the last book in the Old Testament. Malachi Stone—a hard-hewn, righteous-sounding name if she’d ever heard one. Malachi’s lead-colored eyes flickered upward in the direction of her gaze. “Ravens,” he said. “You’ll see a lot of them here.”

Anna nodded, twisting the unfamiliar gold band that encircled her left ring finger. This was nothing but a bizarre and frightening dream, she told herself. Any minute now, she would wake up in St. Joseph, warm and secure in her cozy hotel suite. Harry would still be alive, and she would be planning their wedding, not fleeing from town to town in a constant state of terror.

Louis Caswell had known what he was doing that January night when he’d stopped his sinister cohort from killing her. By the time she’d realized her mistake, her clothes, shoes and hands were streaked with Harry’s blood. She had left bloody footprints all over the Persian rug, bloody fingerprints on the knife handle and on Harry’s once immaculate pearl-gray suit. She had wiped her hands on the papers that lay scattered on the rug. She had even left her bloodstained merino shawl at the scene as she fled, panic-stricken, from the room. No jury on earth, she knew, would believe her version of what had happened. She’d had no choice except to run or hang.

Anna had snatched up what little money and valuables she could lay her hands on, packed a few necessities and hired a driver to take her to the railway station. Omaha…Denver…no place was safe for more than a few weeks. She had planned to head for California or perhaps Mexico where no one had ever heard of Anna DeCarlo. But in Salt Lake City her
money had run out. She’d been scanning the
Salt Lake Tribune
, looking for any kind of employment she could find, when she’d spotted the advertisement one Mr. Stuart Wilkinson, Attorney at Law, had placed on behalf of his widowed cousin: “Wife Wanted: Remote ferry location on Colorado River. Must get on well with children and be accustomed to hard work….”

The front wheel of the buckboard lurched over a rock, jarring Anna’s thoughts back to the present. From hundreds of feet below, hidden by rocky ledges, she could hear the rushing sound of the Colorado. Spring was high-water time. Malachi Stone had told her that while they were still trying to make polite conversation. Swollen with runoff from melting mountain snows, the current was too dangerous for any kind of crossing. Having planned for such a time, he had lashed the ferry to the bank, hitched up the mules and turned the buckboard toward the ranch where his nearest neighbors lived. All night he had hunched over the reins, arriving at dawn to meet the stranger who, by virtue of proxy marriage, was already his legal wife.

Anna studied him furtively from under her parasol. Malachi Stone was a big man. Big shoulders, big arms, hands like sledgehammers and, beneath the dusty felt hat, a face that could have been hewn from hickory with the blade of an ax. She liked big men. Always had. Not that it made any difference in this case. The contract she’d signed in Salt Lake City did not include marital duties. She was hired help, plain and simple. The so-called marriage existed only to suit Malachi Stone’s rigid sense of propriety.

That arrangement was fine with her, Anna reminded herself as the buckboard swayed around a stomach-twisting curve. She was not looking for love or permanence, only safety. And Malachi Stone looked as if he could fend off an army of Caswell’s thugs with his big, bare fists.

She ran the tip of her tongue across her front teeth, tasting gritty sand. “How much farther?”

“Not far.” He did not look at her.

“You left your children alone at the ferry?”

His hard gaze flickered in her direction, then returned to the road. “Didn’t have much choice. Not that they can’t look after themselves if need be. Carrie’s eleven, old enough to see to the boy for a couple of days. And the dog’s with them. Good protection in case a cougar or bobcat comes sniffing around. All the same, it’ll be a relief to get home.”

“How long has it been since their mother passed away?”

The silence that followed Anna’s question was broken only by the sound of plodding hooves and the low hiss of the river far below. “A year come this summer,” he said in a flat voice. “We’ve gotten by as well as you might expect. But the two young ones need more care than I can give them on my own. That’s why you’re here.”

“Of course.” Anna gazed past him toward the next bend in the road, where the long, thorny spears of an ocotillo, each one tipped with a bloodred blossom, rose from behind a clump of prickly pear.

Yes, it was all about the children. She had known that from the beginning, but now, hearing his words, she felt the truth sink home and settle in like a spell
of gray weather. A man like Malachi Stone could live alone on the moon without wanting for love or companionship. But his two young children were different. They needed a mother.

And what did she know about mothering? Her own mother had died of typhoid when Anna was still in diapers; and there’d been nothing motherly about the rod-wielding women who’d run the orphanage where she’d lived until the age of fifteen. She knew more about faro and five-card stud than she did about children, a fact that wouldn’t buy her much with a man like Malachi Stone.

The buckboard lurched through a flooded spot in the road, its wheels splattering water that was the color of cheap Mexican pottery. The Colorado would be the same—too thick to drink and too thin to plow, the locals said of it. A river of mud, sunk into a canyon as deep as the mouth of hell itself.

Would she be safe here? Even now, a shudder passed through her body as she thought of Louis Caswell and his pockmarked companion. For a time she had hoped that, having blamed her for Harry’s murder, the police chief would allow her to disappear. By now she knew better. Caswell would not rest as long as she was free. He wanted her dead.

Anna’s eyes ranged up and down the sheer, rocky walls. No, she decided, feeling better, Caswell’s hired thugs would never find her here. She could lose herself in the great, twisting canyon and its maze of arroyos and tributaries. She could vanish from the earth as the wife of an unknown ferryman, safe and secure until she was ready to move on to California and start a new life.

As for the children, she would manage somehow. After all, how difficult could her job be? When they were hungry, you fed them. When they were dirty, you washed them. When they were tired, you sent them to bed. What could be simpler? Now, their father, on the other hand…

Anna shot another sidelong glance at her companion’s rough-hewn profile. The straitlaced Mr. Stone would give her no trouble, she reassured herself. The man was no more open to entanglements than she was. Theirs was a business arrangement, with a contract that could be canceled at any time by either party. That, too, was all for the best. It would make things that much easier when the time came for her to leave.

What the bloody hell had Stuart been thinking
?

Malachi stared at the dust-caked rumps of the mules, his spirits growing darker with each turn of the wheels. He should have known better than to trust his city-bred cousin to find the kind of wife he needed—a strong, plain, practical woman who would take to the rigors of running the ferry and managing two active youngsters. A woman of impeccable moral character. Stuart Wilkinson may have studied law, but that was no substitute for common sense. The fool had succumbed to the first pretty face that came along, and now there would be the devil to pay.

He glanced furtively at her hands, which were clasped tensely around the handle of her lace-trimmed parasol. They were like creamy bisque porcelain, each fingernail a perfect, ivory-rimmed oval. He could see no sign of a scratch or callus on those hands. Not a
mark to show that she had ever done a lick of work in her pampered life.

But that wasn’t the worst of his concerns—not by a damned sight. A woman that pretty and self-assured could get any man she wanted. Why should she settle for a mail-order marriage to a stranger with nothing to offer except solitude and hard work?

Why, indeed—unless she was running away from something?

He remembered his first sight of her, standing on the porch of the Jepsons’ ranch house where the freight wagon had left her, wearing a demure lavender gown that, for all its modest cut, clung to the curves of her lush little body in a way that made his breath stop. She had watched him in silence as he swung out of the wagon and hitched the mules to the rail. He remembered the tilt of her small head as her gaze swept upward from his muddy boots to his sweat-soaked shirt, then paused to linger on his face. He had stood there clutching his hat, feeling big and awkward and dirty, desperately hoping there had been a mistake and she was waiting for someone else.

Her hair, gathered into a crocheted snood at the back of her neck, was like a swirl of molasses taffy, each strand a different shade of gold. Her eyes, set in a square, sharp-boned face, were a rich, startling shade of amber, flecked with bits of gold and brown. They had regarded him boldly, as if he were a prize hog she had just won at a church raffle. “Well,” she had said in a husky contralto voice that seemed much too big for the rest of her. “Well, well, so it’s Mr. Stone, is it?”

Malachi’s heart had dropped like a plumb bob.

He should have turned away right then and there, he lashed himself as he leaned hard into the brake to slow the careening wheels. He should have tossed her a few dollars for fare back to Salt Lake, climbed into the buckboard and driven off without a backward glance. Instead here he was, wondering how he was going to make do with the last kind of female he wanted on his hands.

Malachi’s inner grumblings were cut short by the crack of splintering wood. His bride gave a little yelp as the wagon lurched sideways, its momentum pitching her out of her seat. The parasol flew from her hands and vanished into the wide, rocky void of the canyon. She might have gone the same way if he had not grabbed her arm and wrenched her back toward him.

“What on earth—?” Her eyes were as wide as a startled fawn’s, her arm taut through the thin fabric of her sleeve.

“It’s all right,” he growled, “I’ve got you.”

“I can see that, but it doesn’t explain what happened.” Annoyance formed a furrow between the golden wings of her eyebrows. Close up, she smelled of clean sweat and cheap hotel soap.

“Broken axle.” Malachi bit back a curse as he released her. “Happens now and again on this road.”

“So what do we do now?”

“We unhitch the mules and ride them down to the ferry. Unless you’d rather walk, that is.”

“What—about my things?” Her eyes flickered uncertainly toward her leather-bound trunk. It was of modest size as trunks go, but Malachi was in no frame
of mind to lug the woman’s useless finery down six miles of rough road.

He scowled at her. “No reason it shouldn’t be safe where it is. Nobody comes this way when the river’s in flood.”

“We can’t take it with us?” The eyes she turned on him would have reduced a lot of men to quivering putty, and probably had.

“There are two mules,” Malachi swung out of the seat and dropped to the ground. “I plan to ride one of them. The other one can carry you or the trunk. Not both. Take your pick.”

Still she seemed to hesitate. Resolving to ignore her, he strode to the front of the rig and began unbuckling the double harness from the traces. One of the mules raised its tail and dropped a steaming pile of manure in the orange dust. Yes, that about summed things up, Malachi reflected dourly. Stuck on the road with a useless city female, an hour from darkness, with the children alone and waiting for him. He hoped to blazes the woman could ride a mule.

“Aren’t you going to help me down?” Her raspy little voice, as mellow as southern bourbon, penetrated Malachi’s awareness. He glanced back to see her watching him with eyes as bright and curious as a wren’s. There was a birdlike quality about her small frame, the quickness of her movements and the way she sat forward on the wagon seat, as if she were about to spread her wings and take flight. Anna. A good, simple name. But something told him there was nothing simple about this woman.

“Well, Mr. Stone?” Was she demanding or only teasing him? Malachi was tempted to ignore her, forcing
her to climb down on her own, but then he noticed the narrowness of her skirt and realized she could not get down except, perhaps, by jumping. How in blazes was she supposed to ride a mule? He hadn’t brought along a damned sidesaddle.

With a sigh of resignation, he walked back to the side of the wagon and extended his arms. The corners of her mouth lifted in a tight little smile as she leaned toward him, letting his big hands encircle her ridiculously tiny waist. He lifted her without effort, bracing his senses against the onslaught of her nearness as he swung her over the edge. This was a business arrangement, Malachi reminded himself. It would remain just that until she got tired of the sand, the bugs, the isolation and the unending work, and lit out for greener pastures. That wouldn’t take long, he reckoned. A week, a month, surely no more, and he would be faced with the dismal prospect of starting over—if it wasn’t already too late by then.

Anna.

Her hands lingered on his shoulders as he lowered her to the dusty roadway. Close up, her skin was warm apricot in tone, luminous beneath the smudges of rust-colored dirt. Her eyes were the color of aged brandy, her body warm through the fabric of her dress and soft, he sensed, beneath the tightly laced corset. Malachi felt the all too familiar tightening in the hollow of his groin. He cursed silently. No, this wasn’t going to work out. Not for a week. Not for a day. Not for a damn-blasted minute. He’d have been better off alone.