Kelly Boyce - Salvation in the Rancher's Arms

Rachel pulled her mind away from the dark memories. She was not her mother. Every decision she made, every action she took was painstakingly made to ensure that.

But what could she do now to improve her perilous situation? Her land, the land her father had left her, belonged to a man she didn’t know. Who knew what he would decide to do with it? She’d had no time to ask and he’d given no indication.

The man possessed an enigmatic edge and an even more dangerous touch. Through the haze of last night, the memory of her body pressed against his survived in her memory. The touch of his hand against her face had almost been enough to rouse her from the darkness she’d fallen into.

None of which answered the critical question: What would happen to her family now? The ranch hands—Len, Stump and Everett—could find work on another spread. No doubt Shamus would take them on if Mr. Beckett didn’t see fit to. Maybe she could even convince Shamus to hang on to Foster, though he had grown too old to do more than load up the chuck wagon and be a general nuisance.

And Freedom. Well, no doubt she’d pack it in and follow Rachel wherever she went with the boys. Question was, where would they go? She didn’t have a cent to call her own without the land. She had no family left to turn to. She owed money all over town, and even if the stores were willing to float her for a little while longer out of respect for her current situation, they wouldn’t do it forever. Eventually she’d have to pay the piper.

But how?

There were few ways a woman could make an income in this town and, short of marrying, fewer still were respectable. Her mother had taught her that.

“Can we go home?”

Rachel hugged Ethan tighter and kissed his tawny hair. “Sure, sweetheart. I have some business to take care of first and then we’ll go home.”

Unless Caleb Beckett had other ideas on the matter.

Rachel looked across the room to the chair where Brody still slept. He’d come rushing into the room a few minutes after she’d come to. She didn’t know where he’d been and he hadn’t offered up the information. She would deal with him later.

“Where’d the man go?”

Rachel pulled her attention away from Brody’s quietly snoring form. “What man?”

“The man that brung you upstairs when you fainted. He was nice. I liked him.”

“Brought me upstairs,” she corrected. “And you like everybody.” The poor boy had spent the first four years of his life in a brothel. By the time Rachel took him in, he’d been starved for male influence.

“Is he comin’ back?”

“I’m not sure where Mr. Beckett is, Ethan. I expect he’s going about his business.” Or her business.

Resentment toward her situation and the man who had turned her life upside down boiled in her veins. She pushed it away. She needed to conserve her energy for what was to come.

“He told me you weren’t bad sick.” Ethan smiled up at her with an innocence she didn’t remember possessing at his age. “He was right, too. You’re all better now, right?”

She hugged him close. “I’m all better now.”

At least for the moment.

* * *

“Mr. Beckett? A moment of your time?” On the planked sidewalk outside of his office, Sheriff Donovan stood, hands on his hips. The fact that he used Caleb’s name, the one he’d given to Mrs. Sutter, made him wary.

He halted and looked toward the livery at the end of the street. The day was just getting started and the sun had barely had time to creep up from the horizon. What was the sheriff doing up so early? Did he sleep in his office?

“I won’t keep you long,” the sheriff promised, as if sensing Caleb’s hesitation.

Caleb scowled. He didn’t know what the sheriff wanted and he didn’t like walking into things blind. It made his stomach work itself into knots and raised his guard. But he guessed there was no avoiding the conversation. Donovan struck him as the determined type. Letting out a sigh, he stepped out of the street and up onto the dryer sidewalk. It had rained overnight and the streets had turned to muck.

The sheriff motioned to his office and Caleb followed. Probably better to not have this conversation outside, even though only a few souls had started milling about. Inside, warmth radiated from the potbellied stove, hitting him full force. The sheriff went over to it and stirred at a pot of beans and bacon.

Caleb hadn’t eaten since sunrise the day before. With all the commotion of yesterday, he’d simply not had the time to find a decent meal and Mrs. Beckett’s fainting kept him from his supper. The scent of the bacon made the knots in his stomach twist tighter. Hunger gnawed at his backbone.

Sheriff Donovan scooped a helping onto his plate. “You hungry?” He didn’t sound enamored of the prospect of sharing his breakfast.

Caleb lied and shook his head. He wasn’t sure breaking bread with a lawman would start his day off on the right foot, and given the run of bad luck he’d had of late, he didn’t want to do anything to keep the string going.

The sheriff appeared relieved. He walked back to his scarred oak desk and dropped down into the chair behind it, motioning for Caleb to take an empty seat in front. Then he reached inside his desk drawer and produced a basket covered with a checkered napkin. Beneath it, the comforting smell of freshly baked biscuits rose up and assaulted Caleb’s senses.

Donovan shrugged. “Minnie from the bakery brings these over every mornin’, but if I leave them out my deputy makes short work of them. You sure you don’t want one?”

Caleb shook his head, clenching his back teeth. He wondered what the penalty was for knocking a sheriff out cold and stealing his meal. “You want something in particular?”

Donovan tucked the cloth napkin into his collar and glanced across the desk. “Got your name off the hotel register,” he said, explaining how he knew Caleb’s name. “Signed it yourself, so I take it you can read and write?”

“You takin’ a survey?”

The sheriff shrugged and spoke around a mouthful of beans. “I find it a bit curious, is all. Not many drifters can.”

“What makes you so sure I’m a drifter?”

Donovan glanced up from plate. “Got that look about you.”

“That a fact?” Caleb couldn’t fault the sheriff for his powers of observation, though they hardly told the whole story. But looking at the surface of a man rarely did. Most of what he was lived deeper than that, hiding out in the places people couldn’t see.

“I believe so. But given you can read and write, I’m guessin’ there’s more to you than meets the eye.”

“Glad to have satisfied your curiosity.” Caleb’s grandfather had made sure he could read and write. He wanted his grandson to be able to recite verbatim every passage in the Bible pertaining to sin and damnation. All these years later, and Caleb was still trying to scour the words from his mind. He pushed his chair back. “If that’s all...?”

The sheriff held out a hand and motioned for him to stay put. “Not quite. You’ll forgive me, Mr. Beckett, but it isn’t every day we get a stranger riding into town with a body in the back of his buckboard. Rachel’s important to us. We want to make sure there’s nothing we need to worry about.”

We. As if the town as a collective had decided to take her under their wing, and he as the outsider was considered a threat. But where were these people when Sutter was gambling his family out of house and home? Where were they when Kirkpatrick started pressuring Sutter in the hopes of getting his land?

The threat to Rachel didn’t come from an outsider like him, it came from the inside.

“Do we need to worry?” the sheriff asked outright.