McKettrick's Choice (2 page)

He nodded, still choked up. Lizzie's mother, Olivia, was part of the unfinished business waiting for him in
Texas. He needed to say a proper goodbye to her, put her to rest in his mind and his heart, even though it was too late for her to hear the words.

“Will you take her flowers—the best you can find—for me?”

Holt's throat still wouldn't open. He nodded again.

Lizzie stared into his face, looking, perhaps, for the half-truths people tell to children, or even a bold-faced lie. Finding only truth, she straightened her shoulders and hoisted her chin.

“All right, then,” she said. “I guess you'd better ride while there's still enough daylight to see the trail.”

He smiled, cupped her chin in one hand. “Don't eat too much cake,” he said.

Her eyes glistened with tears. “Don't get yourself shot,” she countered.

And that was their farewell.

Lizzie was a woman-child, with the run of one of the biggest ranches in the Arizona Territory. She could already ride like a pony soldier, and Kade's wife, Mandy, a sharpshooter, had taught her niece to handle a shotgun as well as a side arm. Lizzie had lost her mother to a fever and seen her aunt murdered in cold blood alongside a stagecoach. She knew only too well that life was fragile, the world was a dangerous place and that some partings were permanent.

This one wouldn't be, Holt promised himself as he rode out, Lizzie's ribbon in his pocket.

San Antonio, Texas, August 25

T
HE WEDDING DRESS
was a voluminous cloud of silk and tulle, billowing in Lorelei Fellows's arms as she marched into the center of the square and dumped it in a heap next to the fountain.

She did not look at the crowd, gathered on all sides, their silence as still and heavy as the hot, humid afternoon. With a flourish, she took a small metal box from the waistband of her skirt, extracted a match and struck it against the bottom of one high-button shoe.

The acrid smell of sulphur wavered in the thick air, and the flame leaped to life. Lorelei stared at it for a moment, then dropped the match into the folds of the dress.

It went up with a satisfying
whoosh,
and Lorelei stepped back, a fraction of a moment before her skirt would have caught fire.

The crowd was silent, except for the man behind the barred window of the stockade overlooking the square. His grin flashed white in the gloom. He put his brown hands between the bars and applauded—once, twice, a third time.

Bits of flaming lace rose from the pyre of Lorelei's dreams and shriveled into wafting embers. Her throat caught, and she almost put a hand to her mouth.

I will not cry,
she vowed silently.

She was about to walk away, counting on her pride to hold her up despite her buckling knees, when she heard the click of a horse's hooves on the paving stones.

Beside her, a tall man swung down from the saddle, covered in trail dust and sweating through his clothes, and proceeded to stomp out the conflagration with both feet. Lorelei stared at him, amazed at his interference. Once the fire was out, he had the effrontery to take hold of her arm.

“Are you crazy?” he demanded, and his hazel eyes blazed like the flames he'd just squelched.

The question touched a nerve, though she couldn't have said why. Blood surged up her neck, and she tried to wrench free, but the stranger's grasp only tightened. “Release me immediately,” she heard herself say.

Instead, he held on, glaring at her. The anger in his eyes turned to puzzlement, then back to anger.

“Holt?” called the man in the stockade, the one who'd clapped earlier. “Holt Cavanagh? Is that you?”

A grin spread over Cavanagh's beard-stubbled face, and he turned his head, though his grip on Lorelei's arm was as tight as ever.

“Gabe?” he called back.

“You'd best let go of Judge Fellows's daughter, Holt,” Gabe replied, still grinning like a jackal. For a man sentenced to hang in a little more than a month, he was certainly cheerful—not to mention bold. “She might just gnaw off your arm if you don't.”

Lorelei blushed again.

Holt turned to look down into her face. He tried to
assume a serious expression, but his mouth quirked at one corner. “A judge's daughter,” he said. “My, my. That makes you an important personage.”

“Let—me—
go,
” Lorelei ordered.

He waited a beat, then released her so abruptly that she nearly tripped over her hem and fell.

“You must be an outlaw,” she said, brushing ashes from her clothes and wondering why she didn't just walk away, “if you're on friendly terms with a horse thief and a killer.”

“And you must be a fool,” Holt replied, in acid reciprocation, “if you'd set a fire in the middle of town and then stand there like Joan of Arc bound to the stake.”

Gabe Navarro laughed, and then a cautious titter spread through the gathering of spectators.

At last, the starch came back into Lorelei's knees, and she was able to turn and walk away, holding her head high and her shoulders straight. She looked neither left nor right, and the crowd wisely parted for her, though they stared after her, she knew that much. She felt their gazes like a faint tremor along the length of her spine. Felt Holt Cavanagh's, too.

She lengthened her stride and, as soon as she'd turned a corner, leaving the square behind, she hoisted her singed skirts and stepped up her pace, wishing she could just keep on going until she'd left the whole state of Texas behind.

By the time she reached her father's front gate, Lorelei was sure Holt Cavanagh—whoever
he
was—had heard all the salient details of her scandalous story.

Today was to have been her wedding day.

The cake was baked, and gifts had been arriving for weeks.

The honeymoon was planned, the tickets bought.

Every church bell in San Antonio was poised to ring out the glad tidings.

It would have been carried out, too, the whole glorious celebration—if the bride hadn't just found her groom rolling on a featherbed with one of the housemaids.

 

“W
HAT THE HELL HAPPENED?”
Holt demanded of his old friend when he'd bribed his way past a reluctant deputy and followed a warren of narrow hallways to find Gabe's cell. The place was hardly bigger than a holding pen for a hog marked for slaughter; a prisoner could stand in the center and put a palm to each of the side walls, and the board floor was so warped that the few furnishings—a cot, a rusted enamel commode and a single chair—tilted at a disconcerting variety of angles. The stench made Holt's eyes water.

“Damned if I rightly understand it.” Gabe gripped the bars as if to pry them apart and step through to freedom. The jovial grin he'd displayed during the burning wedding dress spectacle in the square below his one window was gone, replaced by a grim expression. Being locked up like that would be an ordeal of the soul for most men, but Holt reckoned it as a special torture for Gabe; he'd lived all his life in the open. Even as a boy, if the stories could be believed, Navarro wouldn't sleep under a roof if he could help it. “How'd you know I was here?”

“Frank sent a rider up to the Triple M with a message.”

Gabe let go of the bars, poised to prowl back and forth like a half-starved wolf on display in a circus wagon, but there wasn't room. His jawline tightened, and his eyes narrowed. “You've seen Frank?”

Holt frowned. “Not yet. I just rode in.”

Gabe shook his head like a man bestirring himself from a grim vision. “Maybe he's alive after all, then.”

“What do you mean, ‘Maybe he's alive'? You been thinking he might be otherwise?”

Gabe's broad shoulders sagged. “Hell if I know,” he said. “I haven't seen him since the night I was brought in. A month ago, maybe, just after sundown, a dozen men jumped us in an arroyo, where we'd made camp. Beat the hell out of me with rifle butts and whatever else they had handy, and just before I blacked out, I heard a shot. I figured they'd killed Frank.”

Holt cursed. The pit of his belly seized with the force of a greased bear trap springing shut, and his hands knotted into fists. “You know who they were?”

Gabe gave a mirthless laugh. “Way they snuck up on us, I figured they had to be Comanches, or at least Tejanos. I didn't see much, but up close, I reckoned them for white men. My guess is they were hired guns, or maybe drifters.”

“Hired by whom?”

At last, the grin was back. It steadied Holt, seeing the old insolence, the old defiance, in his friend's face and bearing. “‘Whom'?” Gabe taunted. “Well, now, Holt, it seems you must have fallen in with some fancy folks since you left Texas, if you're using words like ‘whom.'”

“Answer the question,” Holt retorted. “Which brand were they riding for?”

Gabe let out his breath. His long hair, black as jet, was tangled and probably crawling with lice; his buckskin trousers and flour-sack shirt were stiff with dirt and rancid sweat. Once as robust as a prize bull pastured with a harem of prime heifers, Gabe was gaunt, with deep shadows under his eyes.

“I can't say for sure,” he said at last. “But if I was laying a wager, I'd put my chips on the Templeton outfit. They're the ones been devilin' John Cavanagh and some of the other ranchers, too.”

“Templeton?” the name was unfamiliar to Holt, even though he'd run cattle around San Antonio himself, once upon a time, and thought he knew everybody.

“Isaac Templeton,” Gabe said, gripping the bars again, giving them a futile wrench with both hands. “He bought out T. S. Parker a couple of years ago.” Navarro paused, squinting as he studied Holt's face. “I know what you're thinking,” he said. “You mean to ride out there and ask a lot of questions. Don't do it, Holt. The place is a snake pit.”

“Whatever happened to ‘one riot, one Ranger'?” Holt asked.

Gabe looked him over. “You're not a Ranger anymore,” he said quietly. “You've been up North, living like a rich man. I can tell by your clothes, and that horse you rode into the square just now.” Navarro tried to smile but failed. “Besides, with Frank dead or holed up someplace nursing a bullet wound, you're the only hope I have of getting out of here before Judge Fellows puts a noose around my neck. Can't have you getting yourself gunned down in the meantime.”

Gabe's assessment stung a little, but Holt reckoned there might be some truth in it. He worked hard on his corner of the Triple M, but he'd been eating three squares and sleeping in featherbeds for a few years. When he was a Ranger, then an independent cattleman, things had been different.

“Maybe you've gone soft, Navarro,” he said, “but I'm still meaner than a scalded bear. If you met my old man,
you'd see just what kind of rawhide-tough, nail-chewing son of a bitch I'm cut out to be.”

Gabe seemed pleased by this remark, and Holt had the feeling he'd just passed some kind of test. “I'd like to meet your old man,” Navarro said. “'Cause that would mean I was a long ways from this hellhole.”

Holt reached between the bars, laid a hand on Gabe's shoulder. “If I have to dynamite this place, I'll get you out. And I'll find Frank.”

“I believe you,” Gabe said simply. “Make it quick, will you? These walls are beginning to feel a lot like the sides of a coffin.” A bleak expression filled his eyes. “I can't see but a little patch of sky, and I can hardly recall how it felt to walk on solid ground.”

Holt felt a constriction in his throat. Briefly, he tightened his grip on his friend's shoulder. “Remember what the Cap'n used to say. This fight will be won or lost in the territory between your ears.”

Gabe chuckled, albeit grimly. “You suppose he's still out there someplace—old Cap'n Jack, I mean?”

“Hell, yes,” Holt replied, without hesitation. “He's too damn ornery to die, just like my old man.”

A door creaked open at the far end of the winding corridor.

“Time's up,” the deputy called.

Holt ignored him. “Anything I can bring you?”

“Yeah,” Gabe said. “A chunk of meat the size of Kansas. All I get in here is beans.”

“Accounts for the smell,” Holt replied.

“You comin'?” the deputy demanded. “I don't want to get into no trouble for lettin' you stay too long.”

“I'll see that you get the best dinner in this town,” Holt said.

“I'll be right here to eat it,” Gabe quipped. Then he
sobered, and a plea took shape in his proud dark eyes. “Thanks for making the ride, Holt.”

Holt swallowed, nodded. Gabe reached through the bars, and the two men clasped hands, Indian style.

There was no need to say anything more.

“L
ORELEI,”
J
UDGE
F
ELLOWS SAID,
leaning forward in the chair behind the desk in his study, “be reasonable. I've spent a fortune on this wedding. There are guests in every hotel room in town. The food can't be sent back. And Creighton is a good man—he can't be blamed for wanting to make the most of his last hours of freedom.”

Lorelei flushed with indignation. It was like her father to take Creighton Bannings's part, not to mention bemoaning the money he'd spent to make his daughter's ceremony the grandest spectacle Texas had ever seen. “I will not marry that reprehensible scoundrel,” she said flatly. “Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not if all the angels in heaven come down and beg me to forgive and forget!”

The judge sighed a martyr's sigh, but his eyes were canny, taking her measure. Creighton Bannings was a lawyer, and a wealthy man in his own right. He had powerful connections in Austin, as well as Washington. He was, in short, the proverbial good catch—and a fish her father would not willingly let off the hook.

“Must I remind you, my dear, that you'll be thirty next month? You're a beautiful woman, and you have a
good mind, but you've been on the shelf for a good long while, and with your disposition…”

Lorelei, leaning against the thick door of the study, stiffened. Glancing at her reflection in the glass of the tall gun cabinet behind her father's desk, she took a distracted inventory. Dark hair, upswept. A long neck. Blue eyes, high cheekbones, a slender but womanly figure. Yes, she supposed she could be called beautiful, but the knowledge gave her no satisfaction. It hadn't been enough to keep her fiancé from straying, had it?

“What's wrong with my disposition?” she demanded, after relaxing her clenched jaw by force of will.

The judge arched his bushy white eyebrows, ran a hand over his balding pate. “Please, Lorelei,” he said, with a mild note of disdain. “Do you think I haven't heard that you burned your wedding dress—which cost plenty, mind you, coming all the way from that fancy place in Dallas like it did—in front of the whole city of San Antonio? Was that the act of a sensible, gracious, sweet-tempered woman?”

“It was the act,” Lorelei said pointedly, “of a woman who just found her intended husband
in bed with a housemaid
on her wedding day!”

“I'm sure Creighton could explain everything to your satisfaction, if you would only give him the chance.”

Lorelei rolled her eyes. “What excuse could he possibly give? I
saw
him with another woman!”

The judge tried again, saturating his words with saintly patience. “A man of Creighton's sophistication—”

“To hell with sophistication!” Lorelei burst out. “What about loyalty, Father? What about common decency? How can you expect me to bind myself to a man who would betray me so brazenly on our wedding day—or any other?”

Her father sat back in his chair, tenting his chubby fingers under his chin. She'd seen that expression on his face a hundred times—in a courtroom, it meant a death sentence was about to be handed down. “Do you know what I think, Lorelei? I think you
want
to be a spinster. How many suitors have you rejected in the last ten years?”

Sudden tears throbbed behind Lorelei's eyes, but she would not shed them. Not in her father's presence. She braced herself for what she knew was coming and held her tongue. He wasn't expecting an answer anyway, and wouldn't leave space for one.

“Michael Chandler has been in his grave for almost a decade,” he said. “It's time you stopped waiting for him to come back.”

One tear escaped and trickled down Lorelei's over-heated cheek. Dropped to her bodice. “You hated Michael,” she whispered. “You were relieved that he died.”

“He was weak,” the judge said, quietly relentless. “You would have tired of him within a year and come weeping to me to get you out of the marriage.”

“When,” Lorelei countered, “have I ever ‘come weeping' to you over anything?”

A muscle twitched in the judge's jaw. “Creighton is your chance to have a home of your own, and a family. I know you want those things. If you persist in this—this
tantrum
of yours, you will be alone for the rest of your life.”

A chill quivered in the pit of Lorelei's stomach. “Better alone, with my self-respect intact, than alone in a marriage with a man who doesn't love me enough to be faithful.”

The judge gave a derisive snort. “Love? Come now,
Lorelei. You aren't a stupid woman. Love is for story-books and road-show melodramas. Marriage is an alliance, and sentiment has no place in it. Pull yourself together. Put on one of your ball gowns and let's get on with this.”

Lorelei shook her head, momentarily unable to speak.

“Then I guess I have no choice,” the judge said, with a dolorous shake of his own head. “If you persist in this foolishness, I will have to send you away. Perhaps even to an asylum.” He frowned, studying her pensively. “I fear you are not quite sane.”

Lorelei's knees threatened to give out. Though she'd never heard this particular threat before, she knew it wasn't an idle one. Her father had the power and the means to lock her up in some sanitarium; it would be a matter of signing a few documents. He'd sent Jim Mason's troublesome wife off to one of those places with the air of a man doing a simple favor for a friend, and there had been others, too.

“I see I've gotten your attention,” the judge said, a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes. Then, more gently, he added, “Go to Creighton now. Make things right. I shall expect you at the church at six o'clock, as planned, ready to go through with the wedding.”

Lorelei pushed away from the door, stiffening her spine once again. “Then you will be disappointed,” she said calmly. She turned the knob, pulled the great panel open.

“If you step over that threshold,” her father warned, “there will be no turning back. Just remember that.”

Lorelei hesitated a moment, then rushed out. She was so intent on packing her things and laying plans to escape before the judge sent her away to some madhouse that
she didn't see the man standing in the entryway until she collided with him.

“Lorelei!” her father roared, from inside his study.

“Looks like I came at a bad time,” said Holt Cavanagh.

 

H
OLT STEADIED
the hellcat by gripping her slender shoulders in his hands. She'd changed clothes since their encounter, as he had, but her ebony hair still smelled faintly of burning wedding dress.

“Holt McKettrick,” he said by way of introduction when she looked up at him, blinking cornflower-blue eyes in a vain effort to hide a sheen of tears. Her lashes were thick, even darker than her hair, and her lips…

Well, never mind her lips.

“I thought your name was Cavanagh,” she said.

“I didn't say that, Gabe did. I went by it once.”

She raised a finely shaped eyebrow. “Neither here nor there,” she said crisply. Then, in a demanding tone of voice, “What do
you
want?”

She didn't try to pull away, though. Nor, he reflected, with detached interest, was he particularly interested in releasing her. Curious, he thought.

“Actually,” Holt said, reluctantly letting his hands fall to his sides, “I came to see your father.”

“God help you,” Lorelei said, and, pushing past him, rushed up the broad, curving stairway.

This, Holt thought idly, was some hacienda.

“I don't believe I've made your acquaintance, Mr. McKettrick,” observed a masculine voice from somewhere on Holt's right. “Are you a friend of my daughter's? If so, perhaps you can reason with her.”

Judge Fellows stood in the doorway of what was probably his office. He was around sixty, with shrewd eyes,
mutton-chop whiskers and a well-fitted suit. Somewhere upstairs a door slammed, and Fellows flinched.

Holt didn't bother to put out his hand. “I never met your daughter before today,” he said forthrightly. “I'm here about Gabe Navarro.”

Fellows's mouth tightened. “The Indian.”

Holt did some tightening of his own, but it was all inside, out of the judge's sight. “The Texas Ranger,” he said.

The other man shrugged. “I'm afraid Mr. Navarro's past glories, whatever they might be, were rendered meaningless by the murder of a settler and his wife. He butchered them with a Bowie knife and then stole their horses.”

“He didn't kill anybody,” Holt maintained. “Or steal any horses.”

“You're entitled to your opinion, Mr. McKettrick,” Fellows said, with false regret. “However, as I said, your friend has determined his own fate. The knife used to cut those poor souls to ribbons was his, and the horses were found penned up outside that lean-to he calls a home.”

Holt didn't bother to argue. He knew conviction when he butted heads with it. Evidently, Judge Fellows was as unreasonable and ill-tempered as his daughter. “Who represented him? During the trial, I mean?”

“Creighton Bannings,” the judge said, nodding toward the front walk, visible through the long leaded-glass window beside the front door. “Here he is now.”

Holt turned, frowning thoughtfully. Bannings. Where had he heard that name before? The answer tugged at the edge of his mind, staying just out of reach.

There was a brief, obligatory knock, then Bannings strolled in, fidgeting with his tie. He was tall, as tall as Holt, but leaner, and his clothes, though expensive,
were rumpled. The face, fine-boned and too pretty, was as familiar as the name, but Holt still couldn't place the man.

“Holt McKettrick,” Holt said.

“I remember you as Cavanagh,” Bannings replied. He put out a hand, hail fellow well met, and Holt hesitated a moment before shaking it.

“I guess I ought to remember you, too,” Holt allowed, “but I can't say as I do.”

Bannings smiled, showing white but crooked teeth. “We got into a fight once, at a dance, over a girl. I believe we were sixteen or seventeen at the time. John Cavanagh hauled you off me by the scruff of your neck.”

It all came back to Holt then, clear as high-country creek water. So did the enmity he'd felt that night, when he'd found Mary Sue Kenton crying behind her pa's buckboard because Bannings, down from Austin to visit his country cousins, had torn her sky-blue party dress.

Holt felt a rush of primitive satisfaction, recalling the punch he'd landed in the middle of Bannings's smug face five minutes after he'd turned Mary Sue over to the care of a rancher's wife. For a reason he couldn't define, he glanced toward the stairs, where he'd last seen Lorelei.

“I understand you defended Gabe Navarro,” he said, after wrenching his brain back to the business at hand.

Bannings grimaced, resigned. “I fear I wasn't successful,” he admitted.

Holt's gaze strayed to the judge, shot back to Bannings. “You a friend of the family?” he asked.

“I'm about to marry the judge's daughter, Lorelei,” Bannings said.

Holt gave him credit for confidence. “Given the fact that she set fire to her wedding dress in a public square
this afternoon,” he ventured, “it would seem there's been a change in plans.”

Bannings looked pained, but the expression in his eyes was watchful. “Lorelei has a temper,” he admitted. “But she'll come around.”

Having been a witness to the burning of all that lace and silk, Holt had his doubts, but he hadn't come here to discuss what he considered a private matter. “Gabe Navarro,” he said, “is an old friend of mine. We were Rangers together. He's innocent, and he's being treated like a dog. Just now, I'm wondering why you didn't file an appeal.”

“How do you know I didn't?”

“I read the paperwork over at the courthouse,” Holt said. “Along with the clerk's notes. Seems to me, you didn't put up much of an argument.”

Bannings glanced questioningly at the judge, which confirmed a few suspicions on Holt's part. Gabe's trial had been a monkey show, as sorry as the case against him.

“I did my best,” Bannings said, a little defensively.

“I'm thinking your best is pretty sorry,” Holt replied.

Bannings flushed. Holt suspected the lawyer would have liked to land a haymaker, but apparently his memory was better than his ethics. He clearly remembered the set-to over Mary Sue and her torn dress well enough to think better of the idea, which showed he was prudent, as well as spineless.

“Navarro was tried and found guilty,” Fellows put in. “He won't be missed around here.”

Holt set his back teeth, pulled hard on the reins of his temper. Gabe was behind bars, and if he, Holt, got Fellows's back up, Gabe would suffer for it. He'd sent
a wire to the governor after leaving the courthouse, but there was no telling how long it would be before he got an answer.

“I won't take up any more of your time,” he said.

The judge nodded.

Holt reclaimed his hat from its hook on the coat tree, where the maid had hung it after admitting him, and opened the door. There were still several hours of daylight left; he could reach the Cavanagh ranch before sunset if he rode hard. In the morning, he would return to San Antonio, look in on Gabe and find a lawyer with some backbone.

Deep in these thoughts, he was taken by surprise when Bannings followed him onto the porch.

“Leave this alone,” the lawyer said, in an anxious whisper, after glancing back at the closed door. He must have seen the judge looking out at him through that long window, because he paled a little. “You've got no idea what kind of man you're dealing with.”

“Neither have you,” Holt said, and kept walking.