Shotgun Bride Read Online Free Page B

Saloon and swilling down as much whiskey as the bartender could pour. He figured he would have swooned dead away, right there in front of his brothers and half the hands from the Triple M, if Becky Fairmont hadn’t glided into the dining room just when she did, cutting a path between those women like the Lord parting the waters of the Red Sea so the Israelites might pass.
    Emmeline’s mother and the primary owner of the Arizona Hotel, Becky was a force to be reckoned with by anybody’s account, and though the brides didn’t look any too happy about it, they subsided all right, grumbling among themselves.
    “Kade McKettrick,” Becky said with brisk finality, putting her arm through his and steering him toward the lobby door, “just the man I wanted to see.”
    The brides erupted into chattering complaint behind him, and the cowboys were having a good laugh at his expense, but Kade would have followed the devil himself out of that room, if it meant escaping.
    He didn’t let out his breath until he and Becky were closeted away together in her office, behind the registration desk. Clad in smart traveling clothes and wearing a feathered bonnet, the former madam went straight to the liquor table and poured them each a double shot of whiskey.
    Kade threw his back in one burning, restorative gulp, then collapsed into the chair Becky pushed into place behind him. He thought of the brides and considered shoving something heavy in front of the door.
    “I’ve got a proposition for you,” Becky announced, sipping her own whiskey and taking a seat at her desk. She was dark-haired, and still beautiful, but fragile, too. Like Kade’s pa, Angus, she had a temperamental ticker, though it didn’t seem to slow her down much.
    “What?” he managed to ask, after a hopeless glance at the whiskey decanter on the other side of the room. Those people at the Happy Home Matrimonial Service, back in Kansas City, were a mite too zealous about filling orders, as far as he was concerned. He might have asked for two wives, or even three, since he tended to be absentminded, but six?
    “John Lewis and I want to get married and go on a proper honeymoon,” she informed him, hands folded, all business. “Trouble is, this town is about to go off like a Chinese rocket over the trouble between the Triple M and the Circle C, among other things, and John says he can’t leave it unattended. How’d you like to pin on his badge for a while and call yourself Marshal McKettrick?”

Chapter 4
     
     
    N ever one to decide weighty matters on the spur of the moment, Kade didn’t give Becky an answer right away. They each had another whiskey, and he stewed over the offer through the evening and most of the night.
    For all his deliberating, he was no closer to a decision the next morning. On the one hand, he belonged on the Triple M the way stones belong to a creek bed, and he knew it. On the other, he was fascinated with the law, having studied it for as long as he could remember, and the chance to exercise some of that knowledge had a certain appeal.
    He took his breakfast with Becky and John in the hotel dining room, and promised to settle on a course soon.
    The journey to the ranch was tedious, and when Kade and Jeb finally rode across the creek and up to the house, Angus was waiting on the front porch, as if he’d been expecting them. The old man looked like the scrapings from last week’s batch of pinto beans, dry and gray and oddly concave, as if he were shrinking away from his own hide. He sat in a rocker with a robe draped over his legs, but a spark gleamed in his blue eyes as he watched his sons approach. It was pure cussedness, that spark, and not to be mistaken for fatherly affection, but seeing it reassured Kade a little, all the same. Angus McKettrick still had some fight in him, which meant the earth still revolved around the sun and summer still came after spring.
    For most of the ride out from town, Kade had wrangled with the idea of