the idea of her drawing the Donaghers’ attention, taunting them with her suspicions. It was akin to stirring a hornet’s nest with a chunk of firewood.
“You probably ought to stay in town tonight. I’d be obliged, though, for the loan of your wagon.”
To his surprise, and cautious delight, she favored him with a soft smile and a shake of her head. The subtle scent of her lush hair teased his senses. “I guess the team and buckboard would be safe in your keeping,” she said, “and I do appreciate your kind concern. But I’ve looked after myself for a long time, and anyway, the Donaghers wouldn’t dare bother me in Mungo’s presence.” Humor flickered in her brown eyes. “Besides, there is the question of your safety, Mr. O’Ballivan.”
He straightened his spine. “I’m not afraid of any of the Donaghers, or all of them put together,” he said.
“I know that,” Maddie replied. “But there’s one Donagher you’d be wise to look out for, and that’s Undine.”
They were passing out of town, and Sam gave up on the hope that Maddie would change her mind and go back to her quarters above the mercantile, instead of venturing into the snakes’ den, with him. “Undine,” he repeated, confused. Unless the lady had a derringer tucked up the sleeve of her dress, he couldn’t imagine how she’d do him any harm.
“She’s set her sights on you,” Maddie said. “Mungo won’t take kindly to that. He’s mean jealous, and he’d as soon kill any man she takes a fancy to as look at him.”
Sam pondered that bit of information, then took a risk. “Did she ‘take a fancy’ to Warren Debney?” he asked. “Or maybe John Perkins?”
“Warren was dead and buried long before Mungo brought Undine to Haven as his bride,” Maddie said, and her eyes took on a haunted expression. “As for Mr. Perkins, she wouldn’t have given him a second look. But she has taken a liking to you. If you ignore that, it will be at your peril.”
Sam rubbed his chin with one hand, as he often did when he was thinking. He’d shaved for the occasion, and his skin still felt raw from the stroke of the new razor. His new white shirt itched, too, so he shrugged inside it, in a vain attempt to find relief. “You sound mighty certain,” he said at some length, “about Undine’s flirtations being potentially fatal for the object of her attentions, that is. Something must have happened to convince you.”
“It’s just a feeling,” Maddie said, narrowing her wondrous eyes a little upon the darkening road. “Woman’s intuition.”
“I think there’s more to it than that,” Sam persisted.
She met his eyes. “Haven is small. There are plenty of stories going around, and I hear most of them because just about everybody in this part of the territory makes their way to the mercantile on a regular basis. Mungo’s temper is legendary—they say he once beat Landry, the middle son by his first wife, nearly to death for leaving a gate open. Ben—the little one—is a friend of Terran’s, and sometimes passes the night with us if the weather is bad enough that he can’t get home. That boy is terrified of his father—and his brothers, too. I always get the feeling, whenever I’m around him, that there are things he wants to tell me—tell anybody—but he’s afraid to speak up.”
“He was in on dangling Singleton down the well,” Sam said. For the sake of the peace, he didn’t add along with your brother. “I’ve been keeping an eye on Ben, trying to size him up. He’s smart as hell, but he’s skittish, too. Yesterday in class somebody dropped the dictionary and he about jumped out of his hide.”
Maddie bit her lower lip. “I worry about Ben, out there alone with those rowdy men,” she confessed. “Undine seems fond of him, though. If it weren’t for her, I don’t think I’d close my eyes at night for fretting about it. If she were to leave—”
It was all but dark by then, and Sam laid a hand over Maddie’s, where she gripped the reins. “Better pull up,” he said, “so I can light those lamps.”
She complied ably, and he got down to attend to the lanterns. When he climbed back into the wagon box, she surprised him by handing over the reins.
“What else can you tell me about Mungo and his boys?” he asked mildly when they’d traveled a ways. The river twisted and wound alongside the narrow track, whispering stories of its own.
“They own just about everything in Haven, save Oralee Pringle’s saloon,” she said, sighing. Then, with reluctance, she reminded him, and maybe herself, “Including the general store.”
In the beginning, Sam had believed the store was Maddie’s, taken comfort in the idea that she had a way to get along, to provide for herself and Terran. Singleton had said, that first day, that they didn’t have any other family, and he’d assumed she must have inherited the mercantile from her father. Then she’d said she ran the place for somebody else and had to account to Mr. James, the banker. It hadn’t occurred to Sam that that “somebody else” might be a Donagher.
“I work for Mungo Donagher,” Maddie affirmed, sounding as if she’d just awakened from a bad dream only to find out it was real. “Mr. James, over at the bank, oversees the accounts, like I told you, but it’s Mungo who pays my wages.”
“I don’t suppose you can afford to offend him by accusing his boys of gunning down Warren Debney,” he said when he’d considered for a while.
“I’m not so sure he didn’t do it himself,” Maddie admitted softly, and when she looked up at Sam, he saw bleak resignation in her eyes. He’d have done or said just about anything, right then, to give her ease, but nothing came to mind.
“What makes you say that?” Sam asked when he’d absorbed the statement.
Maddie was silent for a long time and Sam was beginning to think he’d asked one question too many when she finally answered. “Until he brought Undine home from Phoenix,” she said, “Mungo was courting me. He told me if I went ahead and married Warren, I’d have to give up managing the mercantile.”
Something elemental and dark rose up within Sam, and he was a while putting it right. He felt as protective and as possessive of Maddie as if he’d been the one about to put a ring on her finger instead of Warren Debney. “And if you’d given in? Married Mungo instead of Debney?”
“He’d have signed the store over as a wedding gift,” Maddie recalled, frowning. “A plaything, as he put it.”
It made Sam’s gorge rise, to think of Mungo Donagher touching Maddie, let alone bedding her. “Some women,” he said in his own good time, “would have taken the old coot up on the bargain.”
Maddie pulled her shawl up around her shoulders, against the chill of the evening, and Sam thought she moved a fraction of an inch closer to him. “I’d sooner take up residence upstairs at the Rattlesnake Saloon. It amounts to the same thing.”
Sam hadn’t thought any image could be worse than Maddie throwing in with the head of the Donagher clan, but sure enough, she’d come up with one. He set his jaw and tightened his hold on the reins. At the rate these horses were traveling, they might be on time for breakfast.
* * *
THE LIGHTS of Mungo Donagher’s long, rustic house winked in the thick purplish gloom of the night. Normally, Maddie would sooner have been thrown to the lions than set foot in that place a second time, but
