Hudson ventured closer, her threat would fall apart like crepe paper on a rainy day. Because while Hudson was indeed big and burly, he was anything but malicious.
That’s why Marielle had dedicated herself to caring for him, all by herself, from before they’d arrived in Morrow Creek. Hudson needed her. He was a sweet, softhearted soul who had a sense of fun where his ambition ought to have been. Hudson would have been lost without her. She’d supported them both for years. She didn’t aim to quit now. She’d made promises to that effect.
“Is Hudson ‘mean’ enough to make you agree to have your ankle treated?” Coyle inquired. “Because if he is, bring him over and let him supervise while I tend to it the way I tried to before. That injury is only getting worse the more you dally.”
She couldn’t do that. Hudson was approximately as menacing as a gamboling puppy. He was probably inebriated, what’s more. That was the cost of having her brother at Murphy’s saloon to watch over her. He drank. He gambled, smoked and caroused, too. But he didn’t exactly terrorize bystanders, even with his size and his strength. He would greet Coyle like a long-lost friend.
Caught, Marielle swallowed hard. She looked away.
“I told you, I don’t need anybody’s help!”
She never had. She refused to now. Period. But her outburst was as good as an admission of defeat. Her erstwhile “protector” didn’t let it pass unnoticed, either. His expression hardened.
“You are confusing obduracy with strength,” Coyle told her in an unyielding tone. “Everybody needs help sometimes.”
Exasperated and hurting, Marielle glowered at him. “I also don’t need some drifter with a ten-dollar vocabulary and a gun belt telling me what to do and how to do it. If you’re too skint to make good on the trouble you’ve caused, just own up to it.”
“This isn’t about money, and you know it.” His gaze wandered to her face. Held. “It’s about getting what’s coming to you. Having the ledger squared. We’re the same in that way. Trouble is, we’re going about it from opposite directions.”
The same. Could they be? All Marielle knew was that at those words, the raucous saloon fell away, pushed like daytime before night. She frowned at Coyle, struck by his perspicacity.
She did want fairness to prevail. She didn’t want to be disadvantaged. If he was speaking truthfully, he felt the same way. No one had ever truly understood her. Yet here he was...
...Trying to manipulate her into granting him his wishes. Which she didn’t need to do. Doc Finney would deal with her ankle, very soon now. Letting a stranger tend to it—especially now—felt like surrendering. Marielle refused to be cowed.
For Hudson’s sake and her own, she’d always been strong.
“We’re not alike,” she objected in no uncertain terms, vexed at his nerve. “You’re nothing but a drifter, and I’m—”
“Allergic to a man with a wandering foot?” Coyle guessed. His eyes sparkled again, making him seem absolutely unlike someone who would start a saloon brawl with a cowboy. “You say drifter as if it’s poisonous. I like traveling man better. It sounds jaunty. Nobody can object to that.”
“Whatever you call it, it means leaving someone behind.”
His smile dimmed. Thankfully for her. Because seeing its brilliance had made Marielle feel...captivated. Also, disinclined to press the issue of her fair compensation for lost work with him. But she was the one who charmed people into forgetting themselves and their goals. Not him. It couldn’t be him.
“Not putting down roots isn’t a crime. It’s freedom.”
“It’s selfishness,” she disagreed. “And it’s cruel.”
“Cruel? Look here, Miss Miller, this is getting a mite too personal for my taste. Whatever somebody did to you, you can’t pin it on me. Like you said, we’ve never met before tonight.”
“And yet you claim to know me so well.”
“I—” On the verge of disagreeing, Coyle stopped. He squinted at her with far more astuteness than she liked. “I am letting myself be diverted by you, just like you were by me.” He seemed oddly impressed. “You don’t want me to look at your ankle again, so you’re concocting a cockamamie theory to dissuade me.”
She had been. But she’d gotten carried away with her own hyperbole. A flair for the dramatic did run in her family, but Marielle saw life lightly—much more lightly than she’d let on just now. Coyle didn’t know that about her, though. “Aha.” She nodded. “There’s another one of those pricy words of yours.”
“You understand them all, and you know it,” Coyle told her. “You’re a dancing girl on the outside, but you’re a damn poet on the inside. That’s why you keep watch up there onstage.”
“I ‘keep watch’ because men like you start fights!”
“You keep watch because you want more. Why wouldn’t you?” He aimed another knowing look at her. “You can’t very well let it sneak on by when you’re not on the lookout. So you watch.”
He was right. Of course he was. Because after all, the other dance hall girls were grown women who could take care of themselves without her. Even Etta. But she refused to say so.
Marielle wasn’t even sure what more she wanted. Only that it felt hazy and essential...and eternally out of her grasp.
For a heartbeat, they only looked at one another—two people pulled together in a boisterous, plain-hewn saloon in a faraway, lonesome territory. Two people who were surprisingly the same.
Marielle liked that even less than her ankle injury.
“You want a husband and a passel of babies,” Coyle went on, “which would be only fitting and natural for an older woman.”
Argh. He was, quite possibly, the worst know-it-all she had ever encountered. Why had she even entertained the notion that he understood her? Commiserated with her? Needed...like her?
He was a blowhard and a tyrant, born to boss people around and take charge. She was through inveigling him. She would find another way to support herself until her injury healed.
But Coyle wasn’t done deciding her future for her yet. Musingly, he studied the saloon. “I reckon there are several men here who’d suit you. You look like the settling down type. You should pick one of them, retire from dancing and start having babies.”
That sounded like heaven. Except coming from him.
Marielle cast him a scathing look, only to see him grin unrepentantly in response. He was enjoying baiting her.
“Oh, why won’t you just go away?” she grumped.
“Because you’re a woman who won’t admit she’s wrong, and I’m a man who won’t leave his responsibilities behind him.” Coyle stood. He held out his arms as though entertaining every expectation she’d jump into them. “Come to the back room. I’ll look at your ankle in private. We’ll see what can be done.”
Marielle
