His Wicked Dream (Velvet Lies, Book 2) (44 page)

Truitt's doubtful gaze darted between Collie and Chance. Michael noticed that Kit's neck had reddened.

"Is that true, son?" Truitt demanded.

Collie's chest heaved. For an unsettling moment, he scowled at his only alibi.

"I reckon," he said tersely.

"Michael, isn't Yellow Ridge about a half hour's ride from here?" Eden interjected hastily. "Jamie and I have been in this clearing since at least eight o'clock. And we heard the gun blast a good ten minutes before that."

Michael jumped on Eden's cue. "Collie travels on foot," he reminded the sheriff. "Even if he was smoking with Chance as early as 7:15, he would have needed a horse to get here and kill Gunther before Eden arrived."

"If
he was smoking with Chance," Truitt repeated darkly. "I ain't convinced. Chance, hand me your holster. You, too, Kit. I got more questions, but you're gonna want a lawyer before you answer 'em."

Kit shot his older cousin a daggerlike glare.

"Collie, you're riding back to town with me and the deputies," Truitt continued. If he'd noticed the tension between the two McCoys, he didn't let on. "Jones, you, Jamie, and the missus are free to go."

A wide-eyed, shivering Jamie slid under Eden's arm. She glanced uneasily at Michael. "Sheriff, we want to come with Collie. We... well, we feel responsible for him."

Michael shook his head at her. "You, madam, are likely to collapse before you set foot in a stirrup. I'm taking you home. Jamie, too."

Her chin shot up, and her eyes flashed green fire, but he cut her off before she could assert her independence and insist, as she had in her letter, that she was leaving him.

"The sooner I'm convinced you and Jamie are safe," he said in a fierce undertone, "the sooner I can hire Luke Frothingale to represent Collie in court."

She hesitated, and he pressed his advantage. "Do me this favor, Eden. I would speak with you further but"—his gaze flickered to Collie—"this isn't the time."

She pressed her lips together. Reluctance was etched into every line of her face. As exhausted as she was, she still had the gumption to fight. He suspected he was going to have a devil of a time convincing her to come home to him again—unless he threw her over his shoulder and carried her there.

The prospect was appealingly primitive.

He caught her elbow and turned her toward Brutus.

"I'm perfectly capable of riding my own horse," she whispered hotly.

"As much as you like to contest the issue, I'm still your husband. Your doctor, too. Might we call a truce long enough to clear Collie of this murder charge?"

Impossibly long lashes fanned down over rebellious jade eyes. "He didn't do it, Michael."

"I know," he said more gently. He watched as a deputy removed the firearms from Kit McCoy's horse. "The trouble is, we have to prove it."

Chapter 16

Two weeks had passed since the fire. Fourteen days of bed rest and pampering, as ordained by her husband.

Eden was going nuts.

Thank God for small miracles. With the echo of the doorbell still chiming through the hall, Eden threw back her quilt and eased a furtive foot off the bed. Much to her consternation, Stazzie woke up on the nightstand, sweeping her tail across the tray of medicines that Michael had abandoned to greet their visitor. A bottle of horse-sized pills clattered to the floor.

"Shh!"
Eden hissed as her furry jailor leaped to the creaking mattress. Stazzie had been Michael's ammunition for the bed-rest order. That he conveniently believed now, after months of skepticism, that Stazzie really did have the uncanny ability to sniff out sick people, annoyed Eden to no end. The pirate in him had all but marooned her on their four-poster bed. She'd been limited to ten-minute visits from relatives—to rest her voice, he'd claimed—and he'd insisted on preparing all her meals himself. She wouldn't have minded if his chicken broth weren't so bland. Michael, bless his heart, was a better doctor than a cook.

Fortunately Sera had stashed a box of saltwater taffy under the cushions of the windowseat. Claudia had brought it as a get-well gift; little had Auntie realized that Michael the Marshal would confiscate it at the door.

When Rafe had returned from the railroad station with his one-way pass to Colorado, he'd overheard Claudia and Michael arguing about the taffy. Deciding to join Sera in some sibling mischief, Rafe had developed a make-believe pain. He'd distracted Michael with it while Sera had sneaked the candy upstairs.

Eden smirked, tiptoeing to the windowseat to rummage behind its pillows.

If Michael ever found out about her secret stash of taffy, he would spin her horror stories about tooth decay. Honestly, the way that man fussed over her health, one would have thought she was riddled with disease. Michael had somehow lost sight of the fact that
he
was the one in need of a cure. She'd had to threaten to lace Talking Raven's Echinacea recipe with turnip juice just to make him crawl in bed and rest.

But thanks to the blood-cleansing herbs, his symptoms had disappeared within three days. He'd confessed he felt more vigorous than he had in months. And he'd used this admission as his excuse to ignore her bed-rest order. Maybe it was too much to hope that her triumphant tick-fever diagnosis would make Michael completely embrace her medical opinions.

Then again, while they'd hotly debated the cures for dyspepsia the previous night, he'd stopped himself, cleared his throat, and gruffly conceded that under certain conditions, peppermint or valerian might prove as effective as citrate of magnesia. Surprised by this about-face, she'd demanded to know what had made him change his position. To her amusement—and her complete mystification—he'd muttered something about billy goats and changed the subject.

Grinning at the memory, Eden unwrapped a piece of taffy. It was nice to know that her doctor husband no longer considered her a quack who tossed herbal salads. It was even nicer to know that the use of her intuition didn't make her a medical menace, as she'd once thought.

Of course, adopting some of Michael's methods to complement her hunches and herbs hadn't hurt any. He'd taught her a thing or two about ointment rubbing that would go down in medical infamy. She was almost sorry his burns were healing—hers, too. Her husband could make the application of salve almost as erotic as... well, a certain memory she cherished about whipping cream.

A wistful sigh escaped her lips.

Vandy scrambled out of Michael's footlocker. Apparently the coon had spied a human playmate, one who was handling food in neutral territory. Vandy had learned to suffer Stazzie's company, and vice versa, as long as they avoided each other's space. The coon had claimed the pantry. The cat had claimed the bed.

Now Vandy, reeking of pennyroyal, galloped across the carpet in a ripple of silvery brown. Eden didn't have long to slam down the lid of the taffy box and stuff a piece of candy into her mouth before the coon heaved himself onto the windowseat.

"Why don't you see who our visitor is?" she mumbled between chews.

Vandy whickered indignantly as she shoved him back to the carpet.

"Maybe it's Collie," she added as much for his benefit as her own. It still galled her that the boy had spent a week in jail.

With the county judge riding the court circuit, no authority in town could keep Truitt from doing his inquiry the way he liked to do it: leisurely. He'd thrown his three suspects in three separate holding cells rather than risk releasing a murderer on the streets. Luke Frothingale, along with the McCoys' attorney, had all screamed until they were blue in the face about their clients' Constitutional rights. Truitt had only threatened to lock up the lawyers, too.

Eden had to admit, Truitt the Tyrant, as Kit McCoy had publically lambasted him in the
Blue Thunder Trumpeter
, had impressed her with his concern for his constituents' safety. Silverton's sheriff hadn't been half as interested in justice. Even so, Truitt had no right to act above the law. And he certainly had no right to act out his prejudices at Collie's expense.

Eden and Michael both suspected that the sheriff had locked up Collie not because Truitt believed he'd committed murder, but because Truitt believed Collie would follow in his father's footsteps if some tinstar didn't put the fear of God in the boy. Rustling, Truitt had pointed out grimly, was a hanging offense in some states.

So Collie had been punished with a week in prison, even though Gunther wasn't alive and had no heirs to press charges. Luke had protested vociferously, pointing to Collie's sworn statement that he'd overheard Kit McCoy threatening to "rough him up" because McCoy thought Collie knew something about some "cockamamie payroll loot" that Black Bart had supposedly stolen.

Collie's affidavit had also revealed that Gunther had cheated Kit at cards. Luke had insisted that this sworn testimony provided a credible alibi for Kit's culpability in Gunther's murder. Truitt had remained skeptical—until Kit and Chance had mysteriously disappeared from jail two nights ago.

Eden sighed, unwrapping another piece of candy. As disturbing as it was to know that the McCoys had escaped, she wasn't surprised that they'd found some way to flee during the dark of the moon. According to rumor, they had more cousins scattered throughout Kentucky than an anthill had ants. Why, even their lawyer had been related to them! Any number of distant cousins or uncles could have sneaked into town during the wee hours of the night and busted Kit and Chance out of jail. That's why it galled Eden to know that Truitt had started suspecting Collie all over again.

Eden wondered how many times Collie would have to swear—on a Bible, yet—that he wasn't related to "any dang McCoys." Chance's haste to provide him with an alibi for Gunther's murder had raised the sheriff's doubts, even though Kit, ironically, had been just as quick to throw Collie to the wolves.

When Eden had suggested, privately, that Sera access her clairvoyant skills to find some truth that might exonerate Collie once and for all, Sera had flown into a panic at the prospect of suffering one of her Episodes. Eden had feared that the younger woman would faint. Hastily, she'd begged Sera's forgiveness and had asked her sister-in-law to forget that she'd ever brought the matter up.

Apparently, Sera dreaded her Episodes so much that she'd never learned how to control the rocking, chattering, and garbled language that sometimes punctuated her visions. She'd simply spent the last eighteen years, hoping to outgrow them. And who could blame her, considering that her preacher father had convinced her that she was possessed by demons, and her doctor brother had seeded in her the doubt that she might be going insane? Poor Sera had never been trained, as Talking Raven had, to control her visions.

Unfortunately, Eden was no Seer. She didn't know how to help Sera.

Uh-oh.
The front door slammed. Eden peered over her shoulder through the window pane. She glimpsed a derbyed gentleman descending the porch steps and strolling toward the street. Gulping, she plumped the windowseat's pillows and dashed on silent feet across the room. Unfortunately, she tripped over the hem of her bridal nightdress and dropped one of the taffy wrappers under Vandy's nose.

"No!" she whispered fiercely, lunging after the coon.

Undaunted, he snatched up the prize and dashed under the armoire.

Meanwhile, Michael's footfalls echoed in the stairwell.

She muttered an oath and dived into bed. She barely had time to smooth the coverlets and flip open the
Godey's Lady's Book
that Rafe had so thoughtfully purchased for her. The door swung open, and she was greeted by her husband.

He folded his muscular arms and propped his shoulder against the jamb. He was a breathtaking sight, the man she'd married. Her heart still did a dizzy little dance whenever she gazed on his ruggedly handsome face, on his powerful chest and corded thighs, and the perfectly flat abdomen that stretched between the two. He wore no coat or vest today, just a linen shirt, unbuttoned at the throat so that the coal-black hairs peeked through. His sleeves were rolled to display his bunching biceps. She had to admit, she liked looking at her husband almost as much as she liked undressing him. But nothing,
nothing,
could compare to Michael's touch.

I suppose convalescing does have that advantage.