A Wanted Man Read Online Free Page A

her grave. She’d been a good, churchgoing woman, hardworking and faithful—at least, so far as Payton knew—with a Bible verse at the ready to suit just about any situation. She’d never given up hope that her sons would find the straight-and-narrow path and follow it, despite all contradictory evidence.
    She’d called it faith.
    Payton called it foolish sentiment.
    How she’d ever fallen in love with and married the likes of him—and borne him six sons into the bargain—was a mystery to be solved by better minds than his.
    She’d stayed with him, too, Miranda had, even with another man ready to offer for her, if she’d been free. She’d died wearing his narrow gold wedding band and honoring the vows they’d made in front of a circuit preacher nine months and five minutes before Wyatt had come along.
    Pity he hadn’t lived up to her example.
    He shifted in his chair, wished he could shut the window against the bitter chill of that Sunday afternoon, shut his mind against his thoughts, too, but Ruby was a stickler for fresh air, and the memories clung to him like stall muck to a boot heel.
    Ruby didn’t countenance pipes, cigars or cheroots in her private quarters, for all that the saloon and card room were always roiling with a blue-gray cloud of tobacco smoke. She was a complex woman, Ruby—she’d joined a brothel when she was Gideon’s age, and now she was a former madam, retaining an interest in the sinful enterprises of gambling and the purveyance of strong spirits.
    For all her hard history, she was still beautiful and, ironic as it seemed, as fine a woman, in her own way, as Miranda Wyatt Yarbro had ever been.
    Both of them had had the remarkable misfortune of crossing paths with him. He and Ruby had never married, but she’d given him a child, too. Ten years back, she’d been delivered of a daughter. Little Rose.
    Payton’s throat tightened at the recollection of the child. Redheaded, like her mother, she’d been smart and energetic and sweet, too, for all her bent to mischief. She’d been run down by a wagon when she was just four, chasing a kitten into the street out in front of the saloon, and they’d had to bury her outside the churchyard fence, in unsanctified ground.
    Innocent as the flower she was named for, Rose had, after all, been a whore’s daughter.
    Behind him the door creaked open. Instinctively Payton stiffened and went for his gun, though a part of him knew who was there. In the end, he didn’t draw.
    “I told you not to smoke in here, Jack Payton,” Ruby said. “It makes the place smell like—”
    He flipped the cheroot out through the window, stood and shoved down the sash. Turned, grinning, to face the second of the two women he’d loved in his fifty-seven years of life. “Like a saloon?” he finished for her.
    She pulled a face. “Don’t go wasting your charming smiles on me,” she warned. “I see right through them. And besides, I know full well you’ll light up again, as soon as I turn my back.”
    Come evening, Ruby would be resplendent in one of her trademark silk gowns, all of them some shade of crimson or scarlet. She’d paint up her face and deck herself out in jewels she’d earned the hard way. For now, though, she wore practical calico, and around her scrubbed face her dark-auburn hair billowed, soft and fragrant with the lilac water she always brushed through it before pinning it up in the morning.
    Looking at her, Payton felt a familiar pinch in some deep, unexplored region of his heart. She deserved a better man than he was, just as Miranda had.
    “There’s a young fella out front, asking after you,” Ruby said.
    Payton raised an eyebrow, instantly wary. “He didn’t offer his name?”
    “Didn’t have to,” Ruby answered, with a slight sigh.
    “He’s one of your boys. I knew that by looking at him.”
    Something quickened inside Payton, a combination of hope and alarm. “I reckon you’d better send him in,” he said.
    Ruby nodded, but