Diana Palmer - Noelle

“I am.”

“Not the way you handle that gun. Can you walk?”

“I’m only shot, not killed,” Jared said curtly. His blue eyes met the other man’s, still cold from the confrontation. “I’ve been shot before.”

“A lawyer should expect to be.”

“Ah. An anarchist, I presume.”

The doctor was motioning to the cowboy’s friends, somewhat subdued now, to bring him along. “No, I’m not an anarchist,” the doctor replied. “But I don’t believe a handful of men should own the world.”

“Believe it or not, neither do I.” Jared walked on his own, even when a sympathetic bystander offered him a hand. He looked neither right nor left, following the doctor and the victim into the office. It amused him when the man’s friends quickly withdrew into the waiting room with nervous glances in his direction. Over the years, that reaction had become familiar.

When he’d left Texas to practice law in New York ten years ago, he’d thought that the days of cold steel and hot lead were over forever. But most of his cases took him West. And the frontier might be closed these days, but there were plenty of men around who grew up in wild times and still thought a gun was the way to settle a dispute.

Shootings even occurred in such civilized places as Fort Worth, because he read about them in the local paper his grandmother sent to him in New York. There was an ordinance against weapons there, in Fort Worth, but apparently few people obeyed it, despite the city’s large police force. Here in Terrell, the sheriff wanted to be reelected, so he didn’t encourage unpopular gun control ordinances. Such a lawman wouldn’t have been tolerated back in Texas.

Jared sat down heavily in a chair while the doctor worked on the wounded cowboy, with some assistance from a younger man who worked with him.

His mind was on the case, not his wound. He’d learned in his wild young days to ignore pain. He was thirty-six now, and the lesson had stood him in good stead.

He’d been tricked into thinking that the landowner was the victim in this town. It was only at the end of the case that he’d realized how untrue that was. His loyalty was to his client, and he’d researched the deeds well enough to know that the small ranchers had no real claim on the land at all. That didn’t make him feel any better when the judge ruled that they must be evicted from homesteads where they’d planted crops and had cattle grazing for five years before the absentee rancher even knew they were on the place.

But there was no such thing as squatters’ rights under the law. The fact that they’d been sold the land by an unscrupulous speculator, without legal counsel, was beside the point. The seller had long since skipped and couldn’t be found.

“I said, let’s have a look at that leg,” the doctor repeated testily.

He looked up blankly and realized that he and the doctor were alone in the room, the assistant having helped the other wounded man, now bandaged, out into the embrace of his friends.

Jared climbed onto the table and watched as the doctor cut his pant leg to give him access to the wound. He examined it carefully, applying antiseptic before he probed it with a long instrument. He found the bullet and began to withdraw it. He glanced up to see if he was hurting his patient and found the man’s steely blue eyes as calm as if he’d been reading a newspaper.

“Tough character, aren’t you?” the doctor murmured when he’d withdrawn the bullet and tossed it into a metal pan.

“I grew up in wild times,” Jared said quietly.

“So did I.” He applied more antiseptic and began to bandage the wound. “You’ve got some damage there. No bones broken, but a few torn ligaments at the least. Try to stay off it as much as possible and have your own doctor take a look when you get home. I don’t think there will be any permanent damage, but you’ll have a hard time walking for a few weeks. Leave that bandage on until your own doctor sees the leg. You’ll have some fever. Have your doctor check it for infection when you get back to New York. Gangrene is still a very real possibility.”

“I’ll keep an eye on it.”

“Sorry about your trousers.”

Jared shrugged. “Fortunes of war.” His eyes fixed on the doctor’s face. “I’ll take care of both bills—for myself and the man I wounded. For two bits, I’d call out Hughes and make a clean sweep of this. He lied to me. I thought the trespassing had been recent.”

The doctor’s eyebrows went up. “You didn’t know that those men had homesteaded the land for five years?”

“Not until today.”

He whistled through his teeth.

Jared got to his feet and reached for his wallet. He peeled off several large bills and handed them to the doctor. “If you have any contact with the man I shot, tell him that he’s got a good case against the man who sold him the land. Anybody can be found. I know an ex-Pinkerton man who lives in Chicago—Matt Davis, by name.” He took a pencil and pad from his pocket, scribbled a name and an address. “He’s a good man, and he’s a sucker for a just cause. I’ve worked with him frequently over the past ten years.”

The doctor fingered the slip of paper. “Ed Barkley will be grateful. He’s not a bad man, but he lived on the border for years before he married and tried to settle down. Sank every penny he had into that land, and now he’s lost everything.” He shrugged and smiled faintly. “In the old days, there would have been quick justice, right or wrong. Civilization is hard work.”

Jared’s eyebrow quirked. “Tell me about it.”

He left the doctor’s office and started toward his hotel. He hadn’t taken off the gun belt.

The sheriff came toward him, clearing his throat. “I believe we should discuss this gunplay…”

Jared, in pain and furious that the official hadn’t even tried to do his duty, swept the jacket back again with cold, insolent challenge.

“By all means, let’s discuss it,” he invited curtly.

The sheriff, unlike Ed Barkley, knew what the angle of that holster and the worn butt meant. He cleared his throat again and smiled nervously.

“Self-defense, of course,” he muttered. “Sad thing, these bad-tempered men…Fair trial. You, uh, leaving town?”

“Yes.” Jared gave the man a cold glare. “Someone could have been killed out here today. You were elected to protect these townspeople, and you ran like a yellow dog. I’ve been in places in Texas where they’d have shot you down in the street for what you did today.”

“I was otherwise occupied at the time! And what do you know about being a lawman, a city feller like you?” the man asked.

Jared’s thin mouth tugged up at the corner, but his eyes were blazing. “More than you’ll have time to learn.”

He whipped the jacket back over his pistol and kept walking, the limp more pronounced with every step he took. But even with that impairment, he looked threatening.

He went to his hotel, packed and checked out, and caught the next train east to St. Louis, where he could make connections to return to New York. People were still watching when the train pulled out of town. Imagine, a real gunfight right there in the street, two boys were remarking excitedly, and they’d seen it!

“Damn!”

The expletive resounded through the elegant law office. Alistair Brooks, the senior partner of the firm of Brooks and Dunn, looked up from the brief he was painstakingly writing by hand at his oak rolltop desk. “What?” he asked.

Jared Dunn threw down the letter he’d received from his grandmother in Fort Worth, Texas, with a flourish of his long, darkly tanned hand. “Damn,” he repeated under his breath, and sat brooding, his reading glasses perched on his straight, elegant nose—over eyes that could run the blue spectrum from sky blue all the way to gunmetal gray.