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liked to read, still do, and you’re a good pool player, at least early in the day. Course, the way your hands shake, we’ll be lucky if you don’t get yourself killed in a shoot-out before this is over.”
    Shay ignored the reference to his unsteady hands—mostly because it was true—and studied his brother with calm amazement. Tristan’s assessment had been uncannily apt. “How did you know all that?”
    “Simple. Except for the pool playing—poker’s my game—and the liquor palsy, I could have been describing myself. You’ve got a callus between the first and secondfingers of your left hand, the kind left by the slide of a cue stick. Tell me about your sisters.”
    It was Shay’s turn to grin. “They hate me,” he said. “Or, at least, Cornelia does.”
    When the mosquitoes came out and the sun was going down, Aislinn reluctantly made her way toward the hotel. It was early evening, and bawdy music spilled out the back door of the saloon as she passed, but there was no sign of the marshal. She didn’t attempt to convince herself that the disappointment she felt was really relief.
    For her, twilight was the loneliest part of the day. Folks were locking up their places of business and heading home to supper, and in the lull before the night’s revelry would begin at the Yellow Garter, she could hear the voices of women on the doorsteps of the town’s bare-wood houses, calling their children in.
    She bit her lower lip, remembering her own gentle, harried mother, her hardworking father, a country doctor. They’d both perished in a hotel fire, during a rare visit to the city, where they’d gone to celebrate an anniversary.
    Aislinn and her small brothers, Thomas and Mark, had been at home when the news came. She could still see the expression on the constable’s kindly face, when he’d stopped by, first thing one bright summer morning, carrying the weight of the news in his eyes as well as upon his shoulders.
    They’d had no kin, she and her brothers, and there was very little money. The house was mortgaged, and even though Aislinn managed to sell it right away, it took all but a few dollars of the profits to pay their debts. Several men had come forward with offers of marriage, and she supposed accepting would have been the simplest solution, but something in her had rebelled against a loveless union, undertaken for the sake of expediency. Too, being a doctor’s daughter, she’d known what was expected of awife, and being just sixteen at the time, she hadn’t felt ready to give that.
    In the end, she had enrolled her brothers in a boarding school in Portland, Maine, using most of the remaining funds to pay for their room and board, and then gone to an agency, seeking employment in the West. She planned to save her wages, buy a little piece of land, and send for Thomas and Mark as soon as she could put a proper roof over their heads.
    She’d found work immediately, serving food in a railroad dining hall in Kansas City, and she’d left there only when a certain unwanted suitor had become too persistent. She’d been moving from one town to another ever since, traveling farther west each time.
    She was nineteen now, with a fair sum saved, and she’d found an abandoned homestead a few miles out of town, and hoped to make an offer of purchase very soon. Once the transaction was complete, she would send for her brothers, who waited anxiously to join her.
    She hoped to marry one day, and have children of her own, but life had made her wary, and the more independent she grew, the less willing she was to settle for anything less than precisely the right man.
    Nearing the entrance to the hotel’s kitchen, she heard the clatter of stove lids and kettles and heavy china plates, the brisk, busy conversation between the cook and the serving girls, and, beneath it all, the bedrock of Eugenie’s authority. It was, in a small way, a homecoming, and Aislinn found herself smiling a little as she went inside, toward