Bride Gone Bad by Sabine Starr

Author:Sabine Starr [Starr, Sabine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Published: 2013-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Lucky clenched his fists. He wanted to beat the hell out of Haig Colbert. The scoundrel deserved anything he got for causing Tempest and her family one moment of trouble. But he couldn’t go off half-cocked any more than she could, not with so much on the line.

Even as he fumed, he wove his way around trees and shrubs to get in a better position to monitor the men on the other side of the creek. Tempest stayed right behind him, hardly making a noise. He didn’t often trust somebody at his back, but she was earning that type of respect.

He finally found a place that suited their needs behind a huge downed tree trunk overgrown by thorny blackberry vines. He crouched down behind it and reached up to her. She sat beside him. They couldn’t see much from their position, but they could hear fine. He clasped her hand and settled on the ground, prepared to wait.

He didn’t hear much at first except mule stomping, harness jingling, and wagon creaking.

“Consternation! Rusty, don’t piss upstream. We’re drinking water down here.”

Lucky felt Tempest squeeze his hand. When he glanced at her, she nodded in the direction of the speaker.

Now he knew Haig’s voice. He focused on the man and reached out with his senses. He was surprised when he picked up the same sensation that he’d gotten from the three men as they’d left the Bend. Something about the connection, or the spiderweb, still felt familiar, but he couldn’t get a handle on it. He didn’t like the fact that they’d run across it again. He didn’t much believe in coincidence. The web was either unusually large or connected to him in some way. Maybe both. Either way, it couldn’t be good.

“Shut your piehole, Haig. I gotta mind to piss, I’m gonna do it.”

“You’re still riled ’cause you don’t like working for a boss.”

“I’m dad-blame mad! You got no cause shooting a man for not selling you his whiskey.”

“If I told you once, I told you a thousand times, Crawdaddy won’t allow independent whiskey dealers in Indian Territory. I had to make an example to keep folks in line.”

“And I say again, that was a decent man. And who the hell is Crawdaddy? What makes him think he can send gunslingers in here and steal folks’ whiskey if they don’t kowtow to him?”

A chill crawled up Lucky’s spine. Crawdaddy was supposed to be dead. How could he have survived the fire that had turned the building that had housed his cottonseed-oil business into a raging inferno? Deputy U.S. Marshals in Fort Smith, Arkansas, had combed through the debris and concluded that the body had burned so badly it couldn’t be found or recognized. He’d hoped that was the truth, but he’d suspected otherwise.

Now he knew Crawdaddy, or General Burl Crawford in polite society, was alive. Crawdaddy often said that he was a bottom feeder like his namesake because everything eventually fell to the river bottom where it was ripest and easiest to pluck.

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