Promise Me Texas (A Whispering Mountain Novel) (3 page)

CHAPTER 3

A
NDREW
M
C
L
AUGHLIN STRUGGLED IN AND OUT OF
consciousness. If it hadn’t been for the pain below his eye, he would have thought he was dreaming or living inside one of the stories he sometimes jotted down in his journal.

A band of robbers. A train wreck. A beautiful lady curled up beside him.

He’d been alone for so long, the nearness of her was well worth the pain. He could feel her breathing as her body rose and fell softly against his side.

“Are you awake?” she whispered.

He felt the brush of her words near his ear but didn’t move.

“Yes,” he managed. He didn’t want to open his eyes and find he’d only been dreaming. He wanted her near so he could memorize how she felt and smelled and moved. One more memory, one more to save.

“Thank you for saving my life.”

“You’re welcome.” He hadn’t given it much thought. He’d been leaning on the corner of the platform preparing to jump before the robbery started when she’d almost bumped into him coming out of a freight car. A moment later the accident occurred, and grabbing her had all been instinct.

His confused mind wanted to ask her whether, if he’d saved her, he could keep her, but she’d only think he was out of his head, and she wouldn’t be wrong.

“I have to know your name.” She nudged him lightly on the shoulder. “They’ll ask me.”

“Andrew,” he answered. “Andrew McLaughlin.” He was floating, feeling like his mind might go underwater and disappear any moment. He wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or simply hallucinating. “What’s your name?”

“Beth McMurray.” Laughter filtered through her words. “And, if you’ve no objection, Andrew, I’ve told people you and I are engaged.”

Hallucinating,
he thought,
definitely hallucinating
. She might be a dream, but the pain in his muscles told him the wreck and the fall from a moving train had been real. “I had a friend with me. He may still be on the train.”

“I’m sorry, Andrew. I saw the body of the man you climbed on the train with.” She touched his chest as if to offer comfort. “He’s dead, along with most of the others. Was he a good friend?”

“No,” Andrew answered, “but he was the only friend I had left.”

Without moving away, she told him of the wreck on the other side of the tracks. He finally looked at her, wondering how long it would be before she left. She had pretty eyes, though, and a voice he could get used to hearing.

Only, she’d leave. Everyone did.

Maybe that was why he’d given her his real name, a name he hadn’t used in years. Not that it mattered. No one knew him by any name. He’d changed it so often he wasn’t even sure sometimes what had been his family name.

His earliest memory was of his mother dancing with a man as he watched from the stairs. She’d stopped when she saw him and laughed saying, “Andrew, this is your new father. We’re changing last names.” And so it went throughout his childhood. Every year or so, she’d change names and he was expected to go along. It really didn’t matter because the names, like the men, were only temporary. They were always older, sometimes double in years to his mother, and all favored the idea of sending him away to school. So he went, studying first one thing and then another. One insisted on banking, another law, one said he had to be a doctor, and the last wanted him to study languages.

Between husbands his mother always went back to McLaughlin, so when she died, he went back to it as he packed his bag and left one of a long list of houses that weren’t home.

“Beth,” he said when she finally stopped talking about all she’d seen, “how long have we been engaged?”

“Since we were children, dear. I’ve always loved you.”

He could hear others moving closer, so he played along. “Oh, yes, I remember.”

Her hand moved along his arm. “Just rest, Andrew. The doctor from town is here to check your wounds.”

Andrew put his fingers over hers. “Don’t leave me too soon,” he whispered as two men knelt down beside him. One, stout in build, wore a badge. The other, older with hard eyes, carried a black bag. Andrew had no doubt who they were.

“I won’t leave,” she promised as she moved behind the men.

Andrew felt the cold air where she’d been pressed against him as the doctor turned him on his back in the wet grass.

“He’s lost a lot of blood, Harris,” the older one said as he checked the bandages Beth had tried to put on. “We need to get him on the wagon fast. I can’t do much for these cuts out here. They’re deep, but once they’re stitched he’ll live.”

“Look, Doc,” the sheriff grumbled. “If he’s not wearing a red bandanna, I don’t much care one way or the other about him. You save the passengers, I’ll round up the gang of train robbers. Only one is still breathing, and he probably won’t make the ride home. If I’m right, this is Chesty Peterson’s gang out of Waco, or what’s left of it. Chesty’s too smart to be among the bodies; he always rides in after the shooting’s over. He’s close, though. I swear I can smell him.”

The doctor opened his bag as the sheriff walked away still complaining about train robbers.

Andrew heard the woman called Beth telling the doctor his name and that they were headed to Dallas to marry. He brushed his thumb over the two rings he wore on his left hand. One ring to remind him he’d once known a real love and a smaller one next to it on his little finger so he’d remember to never fall again.

Watching people in his life leave or die was tolerable, but losing a true love wasn’t something his heart would take a second time. Even the tall woman who’d curled up beside him was just someone passing through.

He could hear her talking to the doc as men loaded him in the wagon, and then she swung up easily on a powerful blue roan. Andrew couldn’t make himself stay awake long enough to know if she was riding along with the wagon. His last thought was that only a crazy woman would pick up an injured stranger and claim him for a fiancé. If she’d seen him and his friend climb onto the train, she must know they were planning to rob it.

When he woke, the day had aged into dusk and she was gone. He didn’t even bother to be surprised that he was lying in a hospital bed.

For the first time since the train wreck, his mind seemed to be clear. He opened his eyes, trying to remember what town he might be in. When he and a young man he’d met on the road decided to travel together, they’d never thought they’d have much more than a few boring hours to share.

At the first trading post, Ryan, his new friend, met up with the gang traveling in the same direction. It didn’t take Andrew long to figure out that the gang was about to rob a train. They’d been somewhere near the Red River that first day. Too far from any town to worry about Andrew or Ryan turning them in to any law.

Andrew found them interesting, but Ryan was fascinated.

When the leader, a big man named Peterson, asked if they’d like to join the gang, Ryan was all out for adventure. He thought talking to the gang of outlaws was exciting. He was only seventeen and everything was new to him. He’d finished his first cattle drive and had no ties to anyone—he claimed.

Andrew agreed to the company and even played along. He thought Ryan knew he was never seriously considering joining up, but all Ryan saw was an easy way to make fast money.

Andrew thought meeting them might be interesting to write about in his journal. He never dreamed that two days later he’d follow Ryan onto the train. The game turned far too real in that moment.

Now he looked around the small hospital ward made up of a dozen beds. He wished the cowboy he’d met were still with him. Sometimes Andrew had the feeling he was cursed. Anyone standing too close to him wasn’t long for this earth.

The ward was empty, except for him and a man bandaged and tied to the bed half the room away. The place looked like it was probably a private ward, which doctors often ran in small towns. Patients were housed here more so the doc wouldn’t have to make daily house calls all over the county than to improve patient care. If Andrew were betting, he’d say the doc’s office was across the hall and his apartment on the second floor.

After a few minutes, Andrew made out a boy about ten sleeping beyond the open ward door on the hallway floor.

Andrew knew why the boy was there. His job was to clean the place and call the doctor if needed, in exchange for a bed and maybe one meal a day.

He knew the kid’s job, because it had been his first employment after he left home. He’d been eighteen and the war had ended. Men were coming home wounded and crippled. Some were half dead from being in prison camps. Andrew had worked in a hospital outside D.C., sleeping in the corner or in a hallway, cleaning up during the day. The smell of that place still lingered in his nose sometimes. The smell of death. But the worst of his memories were the sounds at night. Men crying in pain, sometimes begging to die. Men without limbs or eyes. Men without anyone to take them home and care for them. In the daytime there would be doctors and nurses, but at night they were given drugs and expected to sleep.

He’d told himself he was lucky. If the war had lasted a few more months he would have been in the fight. He’d heard rebel boys were fighting at fifteen, but his last stepfather had sent him to Europe to study and ordered him not to return until he was of age. Only he’d returned in time to bury his mother a week before the end of the war.

His mother, who always danced, and laughed, and loved men with money, had at least been lucky enough to die at home.

Closing his eyes, Andrew remembered his wife. Hannah had suffered her last days in a Boston hospital. The same smell of death was there also, but he’d ignored it to stay by her side.

As he watched her die, he’d sworn that he would never care enough about anyone in his life to cry again. He’d kept his promise. Though he liked people, no one would ever matter to him. He didn’t want to live, he simply wanted to observe and write about it. If he lived a long time, when he was old and too crippled to travel, he planned to read over the journals of where he’d been and all those he’d met. The memories would keep him company.

When he died he wanted no one mourning his passing and no headstone over his grave. Let others live and hurt and want and need. He’d go through alone so that no one felt the hell of being left behind when he passed.

Relaxing, he let the image of Hannah drift in his thoughts. Like a painting left in the sun, she was beginning to fade. He couldn’t remember her voice or the exact color of her eyes. It had been seven years . . . seven years of running from memories.

He heard a woman’s skirts moving toward him and for a moment let his mind pretend that she’d come back to him.

“Andrew.” The woman called Beth pulled him from his thoughts. “Andrew, are you awake?”

He thought of not answering. What difference did it make? He should end this make-believe relationship now since he’d regained his good sense.

But curiosity won out, and he opened his good eye. Thanks to the doc’s stitches just below his left eye, it was almost swollen closed. “Evening, Beth,” he managed, feeling like his mouth had been washed with sand. “We still engaged?” He’d thought her pretty in buckskin and chaps, but in a dress she was stunning. The kind of woman men stop to watch walk down the street.

“No, we’re no longer engaged,” she snapped as if he wasn’t keeping up with the program. “I told the nurse we got married about noon.” She brushed her hair back and he saw the cut over her ear. It had already scabbed over, but the imperfection somehow made her even more beautiful.

When he frowned, she pouted, and he wondered if a man had ever said no to her in her life.

“Well, Andrew, I had to tell her something, and you wouldn’t wake up to offer me advice. I wanted to leave, but I thought I should stay around until you revived. After all, you did save my life. However, I didn’t think it would be all day. Now I’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning to ride out.”

He frowned. Somehow he’d made her mad even while unconscious. “So saving your life amounts to one day of company.”

She was pouting again, and he decided she had to be the most kissable woman he’d ever seen. Being around a woman like her would probably kill the average man within a week, but he told himself he only found her interesting. He had no desire to get involved, even if he was curious about the taste of those lips. One kiss would only make him hunger for more, and he’d promised himself never again.

“Well, Beth, thanks for staying around. It was nice being married to you.”

She waited a few heartbeats, then added, “I do wish there were something I could do to repay you, but the doctor says in a few weeks you’ll be fine. Maybe a few bruises and scars that you didn’t have before, but compared to the others, I’d say you were lucky. You’re not dead or in jail.”

“And you really do have to go,” he said, finishing her thought.

She put her hand on top of his. “It was nice meeting you, Andrew. You seemed an easy man to be almost married to, but I must get out of this town as fast as possible. I have troubles I haven’t had time to burden you with.”