ground, surrounded by pine-covered hills instead of the red, dusty desert of his nightmares.
He’d taken the train as far as Holbrook, a lawless Arizona ranching town, where he’d bought a horse from the livery stable and ridden the remaining thirty miles south. Preferring to arrive in the morning, he’d camped overnight outside town.
Like always, his legs ached after a day on horseback. He didn’t walk with a limp, for after he’d been injured in the gunfight to break away from the outlaw gang, the best surgeons in the country had pieced together the broken bones. Even more important, his arms had healed well enough for him to draw a gun or throw a punch with the same skill and accuracy as before. When fully clothed, the only visible legacy of his lawless past was the crescent-shaped scar on his left cheek and the slightly uneven sound of his footsteps.
Sheriff Macklin scrambled to his feet behind his battered desk. “No time like the present.”
Dale hesitated. Although he no longer wore his jet-black hair down to his shoulders, it could do with a cut. He ran the palm of one hand along his jaw and felt the roughness of stubble. A lady, Marshal Arnold had told him. He brushed aside his scruples. A disreputable look might be helpful in persuading a gently bred female to provide answers.
“Is there a medical report on the victim?” Dale asked.
The sheriff extracted a bunch of iron keys from his desk, shut the drawer with a bang and halted, eyebrows raised, keys dangling in his hand. “You don’t know the details?”
“Only that you have a female prisoner who goes by the name Rowena McKenzie indicted for murder.”
The burly sheriff nodded. “That’s the gist of it. There is no medical report on the victim, for the body can’t be retrieved. Miss Rowena shot a conman who was trying to flee after being caught selling shares in a phony mining claim. The conman, Elroy Revery, was whipping his wagon horse into speed when Miss Rowena fired a pistol at him. The horse bolted and the wagon took off with the body.”
“Didn’t anyone give chase?”
“Not right away. One of the men who’d lost money in the swindle suffered a mental fit, screaming and yelling, scaring the women. By the time we’d dealt with him and rode after Revery, we found his wagon tracks leading to the edge of Dead Man’s Gully. It’s a ravine a mile outside town, too steep to climb down. With a pair of field glasses you can see the smashed-up wagon and the dead horse at the bottom.”
“And the body?”
“Can’t pinpoint the location. Must be beneath the wagon, or thrown off and fallen between the boulders at the bottom of the gully. But there’s no doubt Miss Rowena killed him. She snatched Kurt Lonergan’s pistol from the holster and fired. Elroy Revery clutched his chest and toppled into the wagon. Before he fell, a dozen people saw blood spurting out between his fingers, staining the front of his shirt.”
With each word, Dale’s skepticism grew. He’d seen it before, a staged killing to facilitate a getaway after a swindle. He expected the ladylike qualities of the prisoner to be as phony as the mining claim her partners had been peddling.
“Is this Miss Rowena new in town?” he asked.
Sheriff Macklin shook his head, looking troubled. “I know what you’re thinking, but it can’t be. Miss Rowena came into Pinares two years ago and she’s been working in Alice Meek’s café ever since. Whatever her reasons, she shot Revery. I had to arrest her.” The sheriff jangled the bunch of keys in his hand and jerked his head toward the jail. “I’m counting on you to straighten this out. No one wants to see Miss Rowena hang.”
* * *
Dale’s first glimpse of the prisoner was her back. She was seated on the narrow cot in the nearest of the three jail cells, gazing up at the patch of overcast sky visible between the iron bars that covered the small window high up on the far wall. Dale halted midstep, nearly stumbled. Memories of his sister, Laurel, flooded his mind.
It wasn’t so much the slender body, or the glossy dark brown hair, the color of polished mahogany, although they were the same. It was the elegant line of her neck, exposed by the simple upsweep. It was the way she wore the faded blue cotton dress, as if it had been made for a queen. Instantly, Dale recognized the stamp of an expensive academy for young ladies, the kind that put emphasis on deportment and etiquette instead of practical skills.
Sheriff Macklin unlocked the iron grille and rattled it aside. “Miss Rowena, you have a visitor.”
The girl—she looked barely over twenty—rose to her feet and whirled around, every motion graceful. Dale felt his breath catch. He had to clench his hands into fists to hide the impact she had on him. He wanted to ignore her beauty, wanted to treat her just like any other prisoner, but he couldn’t help the way his eyes swept over her features, taking in every detail.
Her face was not dainty, like Laurel’s had been. Her features were fuller, with a square chin and a bold line of dark, almost straight eyebrows. From this distance, Dale guessed her eyes were a deep blue, an unusual combination with the dark hair.
As he stared at the girl, he could see a blush fan across her cheeks. If possible, her posture grew even straighter. He wondered if she could feel the pull of attraction, the way he did, and was reacting to him as a man, or if her discomfort was due to a guilty conscience and the fear of consequences of her criminal acts, or if she was merely embarrassed by the boldness of his inspection.
Dale stepped into the cell, oddly reluctant to get anywhere near her, to expose himself to the power of that beauty. “How are you, Miss McKenzie?”
She inclined her head to acknowledge his greeting.
Dale turned to the sheriff. “I’ll take it from here.”
He waited for the man to lumber down the corridor. When Dale was alone with the lady, he turned toward her and sought refuge in his experience, relying on a hundred similar situations. And yet no other situation of stepping into a prisoner’s cell had ever been the same as this.
“My name is Dale Hunter, and I’m a deputy US Marshal. I’ve been tasked with…helping you to prepare for your defense.” He’d been planning to say tasked with finding out if you’re guilty or not, but somehow the words came out different.
Again, she gave him that regal nod. Dale felt irritation join the mix of his confused emotions. As foolish as it might sound, he wanted Rowena McKenzie to seek help from him. But it was clear that instead of seeing him as a white knight, she regarded him as the enemy.
“Why did you shoot Elroy Revery?” he asked.
“I have nothing to say.”
Dale nodded, as if to accept the challenge. “Why don’t we sit down?”
Miss McKenzie’s eyes flickered to the cot covered with a rumpled blanket.
“Well?” Dale gestured. “Please, be seated.”
Her mouth flattened into a line before easing back to its plump fullness again. “If you want both of us to sit down, you’ll have to get a chair.”
A lady. No doubt about it. Even while locked up in a jail cell, she clung to the constraints of her upbringing and she would refuse to sit on a bed beside a man, for it had been drilled into her that such behavior might taint her reputation beyond
