Lynna Banning - The Lone Sheriff

“Okay. Okay, Mrs. O’Donnell. You win.”

Her head snapped up and she glared at him.

“Madison,” she amended. “My given name is Madison but I prefer Maddie.”

More glaring. Hell’s half acre, now her eyes looked like chips of green ice.

“Okay, okay.” He wrapped her nickname around his tongue. “Maddie.”

She looked into his face for a long moment, and when she opened her mouth to let words fall out, her voice was so quiet it was like snow drifting onto a meadow.

“Damn right,” she said.

Jericho clenched his jaw. She had guts, he’d say that for her. She had other things, too, but he was trying like the devil not to notice.

He dragged his attention away from her soft-looking mouth. “Tomorrow’s train to Portland, with the gold shipment aboard, leaves at eight o’clock sharp. In the morning,” he said with emphasis.

“Thank you, Jericho.” She tried a thin smile, but it wavered out of her control. “I will be aboard.”

Chapter Four

At ten o’clock that night, Jericho crawled into his bed cold sober. He’d be up and bushy-tailed at dawn, and by seven o’clock he’d be on the train to Portland with forty thousand dollars in gold from Wells Fargo stashed in the mail car. Miners from all over Oregon and even Idaho brought their diggings to the Smoke River Bank, trusting they would safely ship it to the vault in Portland. And Jericho would be on board that train to make sure their diggings stayed safe.

Alone.

He hated to lie. It was one of the things he’d sworn he’d never do. Lying made him less of the man he’d wanted to be ever since he was twelve years old and on the run from the Sisters of Hope. Back then, he’d resolved he would always face up to the truth.

He lay on his narrow cot behind the sheriff’s office and tried not to flinch at the deception he’d laid for Mrs. Detective, telling her the train departed at eight o’clock when it actually departed at seven. First, he’d stopped in at the hotel and found that Mrs. O’Donnell had left a wake-up reminder at the desk. He’d suspected as much; she was the type who planned all her moves ahead. In exchange for agreeing not to arrest the hotel manager’s seventeen-year-old son for peeking in sixteen-year-old Lavonne Cargill’s bedroom window, the manager obligingly tore up Mrs. O’Donnell’s wake-up reminder note.

Next. He’d visited the mercantile for some painkiller. A skinny kid he’d never seen before lounged against the cash register, studying Jericho’s sling. “For yer arm, huh?”

“Yeah. Not too much laudanum—makes me drowsy. Where’s Mr. Ness?”

“Home, I guess. I’m his cousin from Idaho. Name’s Orion.”

Jericho nodded. He didn’t look much like Carl. “Been here long?”

“’Bout two weeks. Stopped here on my way to strike it rich.”

“Gold mining?”

“Nah. Selling Red Eye to the miners up in Idaho.” He scrabbled on the shelf behind the counter and produced a small bottle of dark liquid. “This stuff is mostly alcohol. How much of it do you want?”

“All of it.” He needed to start exercising his stiff wrist and limbering up his gun hand, and he knew it would hurt some.

The kid wrapped up the bottle and Jericho stuffed it into the inside pocket of his deerskin vest. Funny the way Orion handled the bottle—with his pinkie in the air like a lady lifting a teacup.

The last thing Jericho did before crawling onto his cot that night was slip off his sling and stretch his arm out straight. Made his wrist hurt like hell, but he managed eight stretches in a row.

* * *

Before first light, he rolled off the cot, downed a cup of Sandy’s gritty, cold coffee, and grabbed his gun belt. His deputy slept in the concrete-block jail in whatever cell was vacant. Jericho felt fine leaving the kid in charge; the jail was empty.

On his way to the train station he studied the second-floor windows of the hotel; dark as the inside of a barrel. He felt a stab of guilt, but he squashed it down and smiled instead. Mrs. Detective would sleep right on past train time. Kinda mean to trick her, but he knew he couldn’t tolerate sitting next to her for six hours.

And, he admitted, there was more to it than that. He couldn’t stand to see a woman get hurt, especially not one he felt responsible for. The Tucker gang could be vicious.

The train was already puffing smoke out the stack as he swung himself aboard and entered the passenger car.

What the—

Maddie O’Donnell sat in the first seat, smiling at him like a self-satisfied fox with a chicken in its belly.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

She patted the faded red velvet cushion next to her with a gloved hand. “We settled all that yesterday, Sheriff. There is no need to go through it again.”

He couldn’t help staring at her. She wore a different hat, yellow ribbons with flowers and a veil rucked up on top. A crisp yellow ruffled skirt boiled around her ankles and a lacy yellow shirtwaist was tucked into as trim a waist as he’d ever seen. She looked like one of those daffodils that poked up each spring in the orphanage garden.

Her outfit looked brand-new. He wondered if her underclothes were new as well. He forced his gaze away.

The train lurched forward and Jericho grabbed onto the upholstered seat back. Maddie swept her skirt aside to make room for the sheriff beside her. He did not sit down for the longest time, just stood swaying in the aisle, staring at her. What on earth was he looking at? Oh, of course—her new hat. True, it was too gaudy, but it added to her disguise. Besides, once Mrs. Forester, the dressmaker, had warmed to the idea of the flowers, it was hard to stop her. The woman had grumbled at being roused at such an early hour, but Maddie had purchased enough clothing to make it well worth her while.

Carefully, she unpinned the creation, ripped off all but three daisies, and resettled it atop her pinned-up hair. She secured it with her longest hatpin; it was also the sharpest of her collection. In a pinch, it made an effective weapon.

“Why do you not sit down, Sheriff? I promise not to talk.”

He frowned down at her. “Don’t want to muss up your skirt, Mrs. O’Donnell.”

“You won’t. It’s made of seersucker. Wonderful fabric for traveling on an assignment—it never wrinkles, no matter what I do.”

The train picked up speed and swung around a sharp curve, and the sheriff edged onto the seat as far away from her as he could get.

Maddie huffed out a breath. “You do not like me much, do you?”

His eyes—a dark, inky blue—flicked to hers for an instant, then dropped to the boots he’d stretched out and crossed in front of him. “Not much, no.”

She pursed her lips. “Tell me something, Sheriff.”

He did not answer.

“Why are you so unfriendly?”

The sheriff gave an almost imperceptible jerk, and then he turned those eyes on her. Now they looked angry. Almost feral.

After a long silence he started talking, his voice so low she could hardly hear him. “Don’t really like most people.”

“But whyever not? What has happened to make you so...well, surly?”

“I watched a friend die in my place,” he gritted. “After that, I didn’t like being close to anyone.”

Maddie blinked. “Who was he?”

He looked past her, out the train window, and she watched his gaze grow unfocused.

“She.”

“She? Your...?” Maddie hesitated. He was so rough around the edges she doubted he’d ever been married. A lover, perhaps? She was keen to know, but it would be highly improper to ask. She said nothing, just noted the tightness around his mouth.

“She, uh, died for something I did.”

“Why, that is perfectly awful! How old were you then?”