Read Shotgun Bride for Free Online Page A

voice in the back of his mind, the one he’d learned to disregard only at his peril.
    “The hell I will,” he said aloud. Leaving now, however well advised, would feel too much like running from a fight. Trouble was, he couldn’t seem to make himself wade in, either. The situation put him in mind of a mule up to its nostrils in mud.
    There were horses grazing in front of Rafe’s place, and a couple of wagons, too. The strains of a fiddle spun lively over the silvery grass, interspersed with an occasional burst of laughter. They grated on Holt, those sounds, pulling at him and driving him back, both at once. He wondered what they’d do, the high and mighty McKettricks, if he knocked on the front door, just like he was one of them, and joined in the celebration, whatever it was.
    He sat awhile longer, resting one forearm on the pommel of his saddle, and then, no closer to making a choice than before, he turned his mount toward the log ranch house just five miles north of the Triple M, where there was no need for knocking at doors.

Chapter 7
     
     
    “W ho are you?” Kade asked quietly when he caught Sister Mandy alone on Rafe and Emmeline’s front porch, toward the end of the evening. She sat huddled in a wooden rocker, a plate of food in her lap, and she barely made up a shadow, swaddled in all that dark wool. She was going to be in misery when the hot weather came, he reflected, as sure as if she’d wrapped herself in an army blanket.
    She started, evidently lost in thought, and barely caught Emmeline’s piece of prized wedding china before it could slip off her knees to shatter on the floor. Light from the window spilled over her face, glinting in a wisp of golden brown hair escaping from the wimple.
    “I’m Sister Amanda Rose,” she said with a little thrust of her chin.
    Kade leaned against the porch railing, a too dainty plate of his own in hand, and stabbed up a chunk of roast beef. “Like hell you are,” he said easily.
    She had backbone, he had to give her that. She wanted to run, he could tell by the way she stiffened, perched there on the edge of her seat, but she kept a tight hold on the reins. “Think what you like,” she said with a sniff. “You will, anyhow.”
    He chuckled, helped himself to another mouthful of food, and enjoyed chewing and swallowing before offering a reply. “I reckon that’s true enough. You on the run from somebody? The law, maybe?” He would have bet she was, wearing that imaginative but pitiful disguise. Her watchfulness gave her away, too; there was something tightly wound about her, as if she might lift her skirts and sprint up the road at any moment. Lord, he’d like to see her do that, if only to catch a glimpse of her ankles.
    Her nervousness was palpable, but she didn’t bend: “You planning to arrest me if I am?” Word that he was considering pinning on John Lewis’s badge had apparently gotten around fast—no surprise in a town the size of Indian Rock. Around those parts, folks flapped their jaws over a lot less.
    “Should I?” he countered.
    She hesitated, as if she wanted to tell him something, but she didn’t stumble. “I haven’t broken any laws.”
    He considered the man he’d seen talking to her the day before, in the alleyway, the one she’d been so glad to get away from. “Might be I could help you, if you’d give me a chance,” he ventured, feeling kindly disposed toward her, though against his better judgment. She wasspunky, but she was also a woman, and the Arizona Territory was brimming with outlaws, renegade Indians, rattlesnakes, and sundry other perils.
    “Might be you couldn’t,” she countered, determined to be contrary, and, after gazing at him steadily all that while, finally glanced away.
    Inside the house, Denver Jack, a longtime fixture in the Triple M bunkhouse and an able cowpuncher, was giving his fiddle a workout. Feet shuffled on the bare wood floors, and Angus let out a roar of merriment, sounding almost like his