Mary McBride - The Marriage Knot

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The Marriage Knot

Mary McBride

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MARY McBRIDE is a former special education teacher who lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband and two young sons. She loves to correspond with readers, and invites them to write to her at: P.O. Box 4J1202, St. Louis, MO 63141.

For Joan C. Gunter

with affection and deep appreciation.

Prologue

Kansas, 1880

Until the morning Ezra Dancer shot himself, not much had happened in Newton. The railroad had come through in 1871, and for one wild summer the town was full of cowboys and longhorns, gamblers and quacks and whores. Newton was as sinful then as any Sodom or Gomorrah, but that honor—along with the cowboys and longhorns, the gamblers, quacks and whores—had long since passed west with the railroad to Dodge City.

Newton’s makeshift tents and rickety shacks had been replaced with painted clapboard and solid brick. Most of the saloons had given way to drier businesses—Kelleher’s Feed and Grain, the Merchant’s Bank, the First Methodist Church—and where Madam Lola’s canvas and cardboard brothel once had been, the citizens had built themselves a school.

As in most law-abiding towns, there was a jail for anyone who crossed the line, and there was a sheriff with a tough reputation to insure that nobody did.

Delaney.

His name was rarely spoken solo. Likely as not, it was mentioned in the same sentence as the Earps—Wyatt and Virgil and Morgan—and that reprobate dentist, Doc Holliday. But when the Earps and Holliday departed Kansas for the warmer clime and hotter prospects of Arizona in the autumn of ’79, Delaney stood alone.

Or, to be more exact, he lay alone on a cot in a back room of the U.S. Marshall’s office in Dodge City.

“Too bad you can’t come with us,” Morgan Earp had said in all sincerity, his eyes deliberately averted from Delaney’s wounded arm.

“He will, I expect, as soon as he mends,” Doc had said. “Isn’t that so, Delaney?”

Although he had nodded a grim yes to Doc, Delaney hadn’t followed them to Arizona after all, but had come—bad arm and a worse disposition—to Newton instead. And not a lot had happened in the six months since he’d taken the job of sheriff. There had been a brawl or two, and one domestic dispute that involved a horsewhip and a kitchen knife. But there hadn’t been a shooting until the morning Ezra Dancer put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

When his deputy awoke him with the news, Delaney’s first thought—like a searing bolt of lightning through his brain—was not about the deceased, but rather about the man’s wife.

No. Not a wife anymore.

Hannah Dancer was a widow now.

That notion shook Delaney to his core.

Chapter One

It was seven-thirty in the morning, already warm and promising pure Kansas heat, when Delaney walked the half mile out to Moccasin Creek where Ezra Dancer’s body had been discovered. A small group of men had already gathered under a big cottonwood, casting sidelong glances at the corpse, shrugging, pointing here and there before jamming their hands helplessly in their pockets and toeing the ground with their boots.

“Mornin’, Sheriff,” several of them murmured when Delaney joined their midst. He merely nodded in reply, his gaze immediately taking in the welltrodden terrain around the deceased. These old boys had probably been out here, shrugging and scratching their heads and feeling glad to be alive, since dawn, and while they were speculating on life in general and Dancer’s death in particular, their big boots had been crushing the grass and stomping out whatever possible footprints or evidence of foul play there might have been.

“Damned shame if you ask me,” Hub Watson said, swatting his hat against his leg. “Damned shame. What do you think, Sheriff?”

Delaney squatted down beside Ezra Dancer’s body, his sawed-off shotgun balanced across his knees. What did he think? He thought he’d seen enough death to last him several lifetimes and enough bloodshed to color his disposition, and even his soul, a deep crimson. He thought he was getting very tired of death, particularly the notion of his own, especially now that his arm had failed him. Bone tired. And he thought Ezra Dancer must’ve been ten kinds of fool and a coward to boot to stick a pistol in his mouth and fire it.

There was no question that it was Dancer—half his face was still intact—and not a doubt that the man had killed himself deliberately while he reclined against the rough trunk of the cottonwood. His pose seemed quite relaxed even now while his finger was stiff around the trigger. And damned if Delaney didn’t perceive half a hint of a smile on the man’s still lips.

“Ezra’s been very sick,” somebody said. “He took a turn for the worse just yesterday.”

Delaney glanced up to see Abel Fairfax, one of the boarders at the Dancers’ house, a man in his early fifties, about the same age as the deceased.

“Sick? I didn’t know that,” Delaney said, but even as he spoke the words he envisioned the difference six months had made in Dancer.

When Delaney had first come to town last December, Dancer—bushy—haired and barrel-chested—had come up to him at the Methodist lemonade social and pumped his wounded arm with such gusto that Delaney had had to grit his teeth to keep from screaming. And then there’d been that day in January when Dancer had taken a tumble on the icy street and Delaney just happened by in time to haul his bulky body out of the way of a wagon.

He studied the corpse now and realized that Dancer had probably dropped forty or fifty pounds in the past six months. There wasn’t so much blood on him that he couldn’t discern that Ezra’s belt was buckled two notches tighter than usual. The man’s hair appeared much grayer than Delaney recalled. It was pretty obvious that Dancer had been ill. But, of course, Delaney knew he hadn’t noticed that because, all truth to tell, he’d spent the last few months going out of his way to avoid Ezra Dancer.

No. Not Ezra.

Ezra’s wife.

“Somebody’ll have to tell Hannah.”

Whoever made that somber declaration, though, obviously wasn’t volunteering.

Delaney pried the pistol from Dancer’s cold grasp, checked to make sure the chambers were empty, then stood up.

“I guess that’s my job,” he said. “One of you men want to tell the undertaker to come out here and retrieve the body?”

“Sure, Sheriff.” Hub Watson spun on his heel, slapped his hat on and trotted back to town.

Delaney stood there a moment longer, wishing he were somewhere, someone else. He didn’t much relish telling women their men were dead. He’d always thought that the day would come when he’d be the bearer of that lethal news to Mattie about Wyatt, or to Lou when Morgan’s number was up. He suspected sometime in the future he still might have to do just that.

It was one of the reasons he’d never remarried or even gotten all that close to any woman. Not since he’d come back from the war to discover that the sweet girl he’d wed on the eve of his departure had hanged herself on hearing the news—wrong, as it turned out—that every soldier in Company H had been killed at Chickamauga. It wasn’t fair, not in the soldiering business or in the job of carrying out the law, to put a woman in that kind of jeopardy.

Hell, maybe he’d just never loved anybody the way that Wyatt and Morgan did, he thought. Maybe to them it was worth the risk. But once he joined up with the Earps again, Delaney knew he’d still probably be bringing bad news to Mattie or Lou one of these years.