was there to meet Outlaw and me when we got off the train yesterday,” Clay explained quietly, keeping his distance and folding his arms loosely across his chest. “The child has a way with horses.”
Dara Rose heard the girls stirring in the tiny room the three of them shared, just off the kitchen, and such a rush of love for her babies came over her that she almost teared up. “Yes,” she said. “Parnell—my husband—kept a strawberry roan named Gawain. Edrina’s been quite at home in the saddle since she was a tiny thing.”
“What happened to him?” Clay asked.
“Parnell?” Dara Rose asked stupidly, feeling her cheeks go crimson.
“I know what happened to your husband, ma’am,” Clay said quietly. “I was asking about the horse.”
Dara Rose felt dazed, but she straightened her spine and looked Clay McKettrick in the eye. “We had to sell Gawain after my husband died,” she said. It was the simple truth, and almost as much of a sore spot as Parnell’s death. They’d all loved the gelding, but Ezra Maddox had offered a good price for him, and Dara Rose had needed the money for food and firewood and kerosene for the lamps.
Edrina, already mourning the man she’d believed to be her father, had cried for days.
“I see,” Clay said gravely, a bright smile breaking over his handsome face like a sunrise as Edrina and Harriet hopped into the room and hurried to stand by the stove, wearing their calico dresses but no shoes or stockings.
“Do we have to go live in the poorhouse now?” Harriet asked, groping for Edrina’s hand, finding it and evidently forgetting that the floor was cold enough to sting her bare feet. In the dead of winter, the planks sometimes frosted over.
To Dara Rose’s surprise, Clay crouched, putting him self nearly at eye level with both children. He kept his balance easily, still holding his hat, and when his coat opened a ways, she caught an ominous glimpse of the gun belt buckled around his lean hips.
“You don’t have to go anywhere,” he said, very solemnly.
Edrina’s eyes widened. Her unbrushed curls rioted around her face, like gold in motion, and her bow-shaped lips formed a smile. “Really and truly?” she asked. “We can stay here?”
Clay nodded.
“But where will you live?” Harriet wanted to know. Like her sister, she was astute and well-spoken. Dara Rose had never used baby talk with her girls, and she’d been reading aloud to them since before they were born.
“I’ll be fine over at the jailhouse, at least until spring,” Clay replied, rising once again to his full height. He was tall, this man from the Arizona Territory, broad through the shoulders and thick in the chest, but the impression he gave was of leanness and agility. He was probably fast with that pistol he carried, Dara Rose thought, and was disturbed by the knowledge.
It was the twentieth century, after all, and the West was no longer wild. Hardly anyone, save sheriffs and marshals, carried a firearm.
“I’m going to school today,” Edrina announced happily, “and I plan on staying until Miss Krenshaw rings the bell at three o’clock, too.”
Clay crooked a smile, but his gaze, Dara Rose discovered, had found its way back to her. “That’s good,” he said.
“Why don’t you stay for breakfast?” Edrina asked the man wearing her father’s badge pinned to his coat.
“Edrina,” Dara Rose almost whispered, embarrassed.
“I’ve already eaten,” Clay replied. “Had the ham and egg special in the hotel dining room before Mayor Ponder swore me in.”
“Oh,” Edrina said, clearly disappointed.
“That’s a fine horse, mister,” Harriet chimed in, her head tipped way back so she could look up into Clay’s recently shaven face.
Dara Rose was still trying to bring the newest blush in her cheeks under control, and she could only manage that by avoiding Clay McKettrick’s eyes.
“Yes, indeed,” Clay answered the child. “His name’s Outlaw, but you can’t go by that. He’s a good old cay use.”
“I got to ride him yesterday, down by the railroad tracks,” Edrina boasted. Then her face fell a little. “Sort of.”
“If it’s all right with your mother,” Clay offered, “and you go to school like you ought to, you can ride Outlaw again.”
“Me, too?” Harriet asked, breathless with excitement at the prospect.
Clay caught Dara Rose’s gaze again. “That’s your mother’s decision to make, not mine,” he said, so at home in his own skin that she wondered what kind of life he’d led, before his arrival in Blue River. An easy one, most likely.
But something in his eyes refuted that.
“We’ll see,” Dara Rose said.
Both girls groaned, wanting a “yes” instead of a “maybe.”
“I’d best be getting on with my day,” Clay said, with another slow, crooked grin.
And then he was at the door, ducking his head so he wouldn’t bump it, putting on his hat and walking away.
Dara Rose watched through the little window over the sink until he’d gone through the side gate and mounted his horse.
“We don’t have to go to the orphanage!” Harriet crowed, clapping her plump little hands in celebration.
“There will be no more talk of orphanages,” Dara Rose decreed briskly, pumping water at the rusty sink to wash her hands.
“Does Mr. McKettrick have a wife?” Edrina piped up. “Because if he doesn’t, you could marry him. I don’t think he’d send Harriet and me away, like Mr. Maddox wants to do.”
Dara Rose kept her back to her daughters as she began breakfast preparations, using all her considerable willpower to keep her voice calm and even. “That’s none of your business,” she said firmly. “Nor mine, either. And don’t you dare pry into Mr. McKettrick’s private affairs by asking, either one of you.”
Both girls sighed at this.
“Go get your shoes and stockings on,” Dara Rose ordered, setting the cast-iron skillet on the stove, plopping in the last smidgeon of bacon grease to keep the eggs from sticking.
“I need to go to the outhouse,” Harriet said.
“Put your shoes on first,” Dara Rose countered. “It’s a nice day out, but the ground is cold.”
The children obeyed readily, which threw her a little. She was raising her daughters to have minds of their own, but that meant they were often obstinate and sometimes even defiant.
Parnell had accused her of spoiling them, though he’d indulged the girls plenty himself, buying them hair ribbons and peppermint sticks and letting them ride his horse. Edrina, rough and tumble as any
