Read Online The Bridegroom by Linda Lael Miller - Free Book Online

planning on staying with Rowdy and Lark himself, since they had plenty of room, until he could find a boardinghouse.
    Rising from the train seat, Gideon chuckled. From the look on his brother the marshal’s face, lodgings might not be a problem, for him, at least. Maybe he could talk Rowdy into putting the ladies up in adjoining cells.
    “I guess we’d best get off this train,” Rowdy joked, for the benefit of the women, “before we find ourselves rolling on toward Flagstaff.”
    Lydia smiled and stood, studiously ignoring Gideon.
    Helga and the aunts rose, too.
    Since nobody had any baggage, including Gideon, who had left his suitcase behind in the rush to leave Phoenix, there was nothing much to gather. Both the aunts had a small valise, containing what they’d referred to as their “necessities,” and Helga had packed a carpetbag with a few things of her own and Lydia’s. Taking the bag and one of the valises and shoving the second satchel into Gideon’s hands with unnecessary force, Rowdy assured the womenthat it was a short walk to his place, and his wife, Lark, would be pleased to serve them tea and refreshments and provide whatever else they might need. At this last, his gaze lingered a moment or two on Lydia’s wedding gown.
    “Maybe you’d like to wait for me in my office,” he told Gideon, and while his tone was cordial, the expression in his eyes was razor-sharp. “While I get the ladies settled and all.”
    Since there would be a yelling match at best, and an arrest at worst, and Gideon figured the Fairmont women and their housekeeper had been through enough for one day, he didn’t argue. He just carried the valise as far as the end of Main Street, and didn’t protest when Helga took it out of his grasp.
    Rowdy’s office and the jail were housed in a rambling brick structure, on the site of the original one-cell hole in the wall. Wyatt had gotten the first jail blown up during his brief tenure as deputy marshal, and Gideon felt a little nostalgic for the old place. As a boy, he’d slept in that lone cell often, not because he’d been locked up, but because Rowdy and Lark, newlyweds back then, still living in the tiny house provided for the marshal, hadn’t had an extra bed.
    Pardner, the old yellow dog, was long gone, a fact that made something catch in Gideon’s throat as he wandered over the threshold into Rowdy’s spacious office. He was pleasantly surprised to find another dog curled up on the rug in front of the woodstove, just the way Pardner used to do, way back when. The mutt was the same color as his predecessor, and Gideon’s eyes smarted a little as he crouched to say howdy.
    Pardner’s double licked his hand and looked up into his face with a doleful little whimper of sympathy.
    “Yep,” Gideon told him. “I’m in trouble.”
    “His name’s Pardner, too,” a familiar voice said. “Guess Rowdy just couldn’t bring himself to call a dog anything else.”
    Gideon stood, turned to see his other brother, Wyatt, towering in the doorway leading outside. Taller than Rowdy and leaner than Gideon, Wyatt was the eldest of the Yarbro brood, and his hair was dark, rather than fair like theirs. His eyes were an intense blue, and they could penetrate a man’s hide, just the way Rowdy’s lighter ones did.
    “You back to working as a deputy?” Gideon asked. In his day, Wyatt had been an outlaw, like Rowdy, rustling cattle and robbing trains. All that had changed, though, when he met up with Sarah Tamlin, the banker’s daughter.
    Wyatt stepped inside, shut the office door against the noise and dust of the street. “I’m still ranching,” he answered. “I help out once in a while when Rowdy’s shorthanded—since that copper mine started up, Stone Creek’s been right lively. I just came by today because Rowdy rode out and told me about that wire he got from the U.S. Marshal down in Phoenix. What you just told that dog, boy, was truer than you probably know. You are in