The Gunfighter and the Heiress

chapter Twelve



Without daring to breathe, for fear she would wake Crow, Natalie inched off the bed. She rummaged through his saddlebags for the strands of rope he carried to secure prisoners. Working quietly but carefully, she tied one wrist then the other to the bedposts while he lay facedown in the tangle of sheets.

She stopped dead still when he shifted slightly. He didn’t wake—Thank God!—so she staked him out. She didn’t want to be on hand when Crow awoke to discover she had left without his permission and left him a prisoner in his own room.

I don’t need his permission, she reminded herself as she dressed quickly, then borrowed his boot pistol and bowie knife—that lay scattered on the floor like casualties of war. Besides, what I need from him, he can’t give.

After she extinguished the lantern, she plucked up her satchel and carpetbag. On second thought… She quickly switched a few articles of clothing from the carpetbag to the satchel and grabbed traveling money to tide her over. She purposely left behind the tattered bag filled with priceless jewels and most of the bank notes. In case her attempt to lead Marsh, Kimball and the small army of assassins away from Crow ended badly for her, the Robedeaux-Blair jewels would be safe in his hands.

Silently, Natalie exited the bedroom and scurried across the sitting room. She stepped into the hall, then dashed toward the metal fire escape. She wasn’t sure where to find the bastards who were hot on her trail, but she presumed Kimball’s compulsive gambling habit would lure him back to one of the saloons before the night was out. Once Kimball recognized her, he would alert Marsh and she would ride north, drawing the men behind her.

Natalie’s well-laid plans blew up in her face when she stepped onto the elevated outdoor landing of the fire escape to see Marsh and the two men who had knocked her off the boardwalk ascending the metal steps. Exploding into action, she lowered herself like a battering ram and barreled into them.

The tall henchman with a pointed beak and close-set eyes doubled over and cursed when she slammed her satchel into his gun, knocking it loose. Fingers interlocked, she lifted her clasped hands to deliver a teeth-jarring blow to the underside of his chin. When his head snapped backward and he bit his tongue, Natalie shoved him with her shoulder on her way past him. He slammed into the railing and flipped over. He hung on for dear life and tried to anchor his legs to the banister before he finally took the short way down to the ground.

Natalie relied on every tactic Crow had taught her and devised a few of her own to fight her way past the second hired assassin who blocked her path. When he made a grab for her, she bit a chunk out of his hand, then kicked at his pistol with the toe of her boot. She landed a blow to his groin. He covered himself as he went down hard on the step and curled into a tight ball. Natalie used his back as a springboard to launch herself at the stork-legged Marsh, who brought up the rear. It was where he belonged—the ass.

Marsh yelped when she slammed her satchel into his billy goat goatee, sending him stumbling down a step. When they were face-to-face, his soulless gray eyes narrowed on her, then widened in recognition. Swearing foully, he tried to clamp both hands around her throat and choke the life out of her. Natalie hooked her boot heel around his leg and jerked hard. Marsh squawked as he toppled sideways and latched on to the railing to steady himself.

Natalie leaped past him, dodging his outstretched hand when he tried to lunge at her. She flew down the remainder of the steps and raced away from Wildhorse Hotel as fast as her churning legs could carry her. She headed directly for the livery stable and burst inside to toss a bridle on the strawberry roan. She was tempted to “borrow” Durango, but she figured Crow was going to be furious enough with her, without taking his beloved horse—one he loved far more than he would ever love her.

Natalie scooped up the saddle draped over the top rail of the stall and tossed it on her horse. She hurried around the corner to the alley, then fastened the girth. Casting apprehensive glances over her shoulder at irregular intervals, she tied her satchel in place, then mounted the gelding. She skirted through the alley behind the livery stable and Turner Hotel, then veered back to Main Street.

Hunkering over the horse’s neck, she peered through the doorway of one saloon then the next until she spotted Kimball playing poker and puffing on his pipe in the Lookout Saloon.

“Thurston, are you looking for me?” she called out loudly, then removed her cap so he would recognize her.

His blond head snapped up and he bolted to his feet, jarring the table and spilling drinks on the cards. The men at the table cursed him, but he was too intent on glaring at her to pay them any mind.

Natalie bowed mockingly from the saddle and shouted, “Catch me if you can!”

She swatted the strawberry roan on the rump with her hat. The horse raced off as Kimball darted around the tables to burst outside. Natalie made tracks from town, following the road north to Dodge City—wherever that was. She had no idea how far she would have to ride to find shelter, but she had been taught to cover her trail so she veered off the trodden path toward the creek. She reined her horse into the water to make the tracks difficult to follow. Guided only by the light of the moon, she walked the horse upstream until the water became deep. Then she went ashore to weave her way through a thick grove of willow trees.

If she could locate one of the stagecoach stations used to exchange horses she might be able to hitch a ride through no-man’s-land—the strip of land beside the Indian Territory and between Texas and Kansas. Crow had mentioned that the place was jumping alive with outlaws. She could only hope the stagecoach had hired several heavily armed guards to fend off attacks.

Natalie allowed herself a few moments to bid a final fare-thee-well to her husband and sent a prayer winging heavenward that her plan to lure Marsh and company away would protect Crow from harm. If she had to sacrifice herself to ensure he survived this disastrous assignment, then so be it. She loved him, after all….

“Oh, dear God!” she choked out when the realization hit her like a hard slap in the face. “Well, so much for avoiding sentimental attachments during this misadventure.”

Natalie was thankful she hadn’t made that exasperating epiphany while she lay in Crow’s powerful arms. If she had blurted out the confession he didn’t want to hear she would have embarrassed and humiliated herself beyond words. She predicted Crow would have recoiled…and run for his life.

Ah well, she told herself optimistically as she skirted the creek that glowed like a ribbon of silver in the moonlight. She couldn’t complain that she hadn’t had one great adventure already, short-lived though it might be. She had ventured into the wilderness. She had been tested thoroughly. She had faced overwhelming temptation with Crow and she had fallen in love for the first and only time in her life. In addition, she had done more living in the two weeks since she had left New Orleans than she had in twenty-two years.

Natalie drew in a deep breath and expelled it slowly as she zigzagged through another copse of trees. She knew she would never live to see twenty-three, not if Marsh had anything to say about it. Her only hope was that Bart would pursue her suspicions about Marsh poisoning her mother. That bastard should pay dearly for his crime. If she died at his hands, she didn’t want it to be in vain.



Avery Marsh swore viciously as he scraped himself off the metal step at Wildhorse Hotel, then checked himself for serious injury. He put weight on his left leg and rubbed his throbbing ankle.

He glanced up to see Fred Jenson struggling to pull himself back to the landing—and failing. The henchman cursed the air blue when his leg slipped, his arms gave out and he dropped like a rock to the ground. Avery peered over the rail to see Jenson rolling in the dirt, holding his left knee.

Taylor Green climbed onto all fours, still gasping for breath. The blow Natalie had delivered to his groin had made it impossible for him to stagger to his feet. He, too, was swearing colorfully.

“Now you’ve met Natalie Blair,” Avery muttered as he used the railing to steady himself while he hopped down the steps on one foot.

Jenson lifted his head to stare at Avery in astonishment. “That was the heiress? That’s the same brat we plowed into on the boardwalk earlier this evening.”

“You did?” Avery croaked.

“Yeah, but we didn’t know the kid was a female in disguise.”

The walking wounded hobbled down the alley to reach the street. Avery cursed sourly when he saw Kimball sauntering down the boardwalk, puffing on his pipe. The man didn’t have a scratch on him.

Kimball waved his arms in expansive gestures when he noticed Avery and the henchmen hobbling toward him. “You won’t believe who I saw.”

“Natalie in another disguise,” Avery said, scowling.

Kimball looked them up and down. “What the blazes happened to you?”

“Natalie happened to us,” Jenson growled. “She fights dirty.”

Kimball’s eyes popped. “She did this much damage before she galloped out of town, headed north?”

That was not the news Avery wanted to hear. He was tired from the long journey from New Orleans. His ankle pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat. The last thing he wanted was to climb aboard a horse and chase off into the darkness to locate that cunning troublemaker. However, a lot of money was at stake. He couldn’t afford to wait until dawn to hunt her down.

“Go rent four horses from the livery,” he demanded.

“Me?” Kimball crowed. “I’m not a lackey, I’m—”

“The only one who can walk without limping,” Avery snapped in interruption. “Get at it, Kimball. But fetch us a few bottles of whiskey to ease our pain first.”

Annoyed at being bossed around, Kimball put his nose in the air then spun on his well-shod heels. “I should never have agreed to this scheme,” he grumbled. “There are easier ways to marry a fortune in New Orleans, without chasing all over creation for a woman I never wanted in the first place.”

Avery glared at Kimball’s departing back. The man was worthless. Kimball didn’t know it yet, but he would never return to his precious New Orleans to enjoy the social season. He had already outlived his usefulness.

In fact, after Kimball retrieved the whiskey and horses, he wouldn’t be necessary at all.

He fished into his pocket, then handed Jenson several bank notes, compliments of the Blair fortune. “We’ll only need three horses…and just as many riders,” he said with a meaningful glance.

Jenson nodded grimly, then hobbled across the street to wait for Kimball at the livery stable.



Van was spitting mad when he awoke to find his wrists anchored to the bedposts. He was facedown—and naked. “Damn it to hell!” he growled into his pillow. He jerked against the restraints—and received nothing for his efforts.

He managed to turn over onto his back, but his wrists were crisscrossed and he had no leverage whatsoever. He lay there until he exhausted every curse in his repertoire—all of them directed at Natalie. Since she had closed the thick curtains and doused the lantern, he couldn’t see anything—except red.

She had used him again. She had made him a slave to his irrational desire for her, then tethered him like a horse and slipped away to only the devil himself knew where.

Van swore a few more times, not that it helped. He tried to contort his body a dozen different ways but it was a waste of time. He’d save all his energy for the time he got his hands on that sly vixen, he promised himself.

He lay there for what seemed hours, though it was likely only thirty minutes before he heard Bart’s trademark rap at the door of the sitting room.

“You’ll have to kick open the door!” he called out.

“Why?” Bart said from the hallway.

“Just do it!” he barked impatiently.

It took two hard thrusts from Bart’s boot heel for him to gain entrance to the suite. “Where the devil are you?”

In hell. “In bed.” Damn Natalie for leaving him in this embarrassing predicament.

He heard Bart stumbling around in the dark and barely made out his lean form when he reached the doorway.

“Are you feeling all right, Van?” he asked in concern.

“Hell, no! Light the lantern on the table to your left.”

That done, Bart pivoted toward the bed—and burst out laughing when he realized Van was wrapped in the sheet with his arms crossed over his head.

Van swore again.

“Don’t tell me. Let me guess. This is Natalie’s doing, right?”

“Just untie me,” Van demanded sharply.

“Sure. Would you like me to hand over your breeches, too? Oh, here they are on the floor. Hmm, wonder how that happened.”

“You are not funny,” Van grumbled. “When I find her…and I will find her…I’m going to kill her with my bare hands.”

“Better not. I’d have to testify against you in court. Plus, you’ll lose all the fortune in her dowry, if she does turn out to be the real Robedeaux-Blair heiress.”

Van had never been so humiliated in his life. That minx had picked a fine way to celebrate their pending divorce, hadn’t she?

He blew out a relieved breath when Bart had finally had his laugh and untied him. “Get those divorce papers ready and make it snappy,” he demanded curtly as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. “I want—”

He forgot what he intended to say when he noticed that Natalie’s satchel and his bowie knife and boot pistol were missing. The tattered carpetbag lay at the foot of the bed. Clamping the sheet around himself, Van walked over to root around in the bag.

“Holy hell!” Bart croaked when Van lifted a necklace that dripped oversize diamonds and rubies and a fistful of large denomination bank notes.

“Why would she leave this behind?” Van asked Bart.

Bart shrugged uncertainly. “Maybe she left it with you for safekeeping.”

“Or to make sure the legal owners couldn’t take it away from her when they catch up with her…. Oh, hell!”

“Oh, hell what?”

Swearing profusely, Van snatched up his breeches and stepped into them while Bart politely glanced the other way. “Maybe the men who are after Nat arrived in town. Perhaps they hurled the rock through the window. She might have spotted them on the street while she was checking around, dressed in her wayward waif disguise.”

Bart frowned, bemused. “Then why didn’t she say so?”

Van stared somberly at his friend. “Maybe she didn’t want us to know because she was afraid we would confront them and discover her version of the story is a manipulative lie.”

Bart winced. “Which suggests she left you behind while she made tracks out of town. Maybe she plans to circle back to retrieve the money and the jewels when the coast is clear.”

“Still think she’s innocent of wrongdoing?” Van asked as he crammed the carpetbag containing money and jewels inside his saddlebag for safekeeping.

Bart opened his mouth, closed it, then huffed out a breath. “I don’t know what to think.”

Van thought Natalie was a scheming fraud who had used her keen intelligence and her luscious body to lead him—by a certain part of his anatomy located below his belt buckle—exactly where she wanted him to go. Damn it, she had turned him into a dozen kinds of fool and he kept allowing it because he had fallen under her seductive spell.

Outraged with her and himself, Van grabbed his shirt and fastened himself into it. “I’m going to track her down, no matter how long it takes.”

“I better go with you,” Bart insisted. “You are not in a good frame of mind to confront your runaway wife.”

“Ex-wife,” Van corrected as he plopped down on the edge of the bed to pull on his boots.

“Technically she’s still—”

When Bart noticed Van’s venemous glower, he shut up. After a moment he said, “I’ll change clothes and meet you at the livery stable in a few minutes.”

Still smoldering with scorched pride and flaming temper, Van grabbed the weapons—the few his soon-to-be ex-wife had left behind—and scooped up his saddlebags. He strode through the suite and down the hall, taking the steps two at a time to reach the small, unadorned lobby and the boardwalk beyond.

The sound of tinny piano music and drunken guffaws wafted from Rattlesnake Saloon into the street, along with a cloud of cigar and cigarette smoke. Van made a beeline for the livery, wondering if Natalie had stolen Durango for her fast getaway.

That would be the crowning blow to his frustration, he decided. A woman could make a fool of a man ten times over, but she had damn well better not steal his prize horse!

Guided by moonlight and the lantern hanging just inside the entrance, Van entered the stables. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw his shiny black gelding in his stall. However, the strawberry roan was gone. Natalie had skipped town, as he expected. He wondered if she expected him to deal with the supposed stepfather and ex-fiancé while she flitted…

Van’s thoughts evaporated instantly when he walked up beside Durango—then noticed the man sprawled face-down in the empty stall where Natalie’s horse should have been. Sickening dread skittered through him. The cut of the man’s clothing was too stylish for a cowboy fresh from a trail drive. The stovepipe hat was another telltale sign the man was out of his element and that he was accustomed to wearing expensive, tailor-made garments.

When Van heard muffled footsteps, he glanced over his shoulder to see Bart, dressed in a buckskin shirt, dark breeches and riding boots. Bart slowed his step when he noticed the grim expression on Van’s face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Dead body.”

“Uh-oh…”

Van opened the stall gate while Bart grabbed the lantern to get a better look. Blood oozed from the wound in the middle of the man’s back. A stab wound. But there was no dagger in sight. Van had taught Natalie well, hadn’t he? He was surprised she hadn’t left his bowie knife at the scene of the murder to throw suspicion on him.

“Good God,” Bart muttered when Van rolled the dandy onto his back to get a better look at his expensive jacket, cravat and fashionable breeches. The corpse’s light blond hair was filled with straw. His skin was pale, as if he rarely ventured into the sunlight. His hands didn’t have a callus anywhere to be found and his green eyes stared sightlessly into the darkness.

“He looks like the tenderfoot I used to be when I first arrived in Texas from Boston,” Bart remarked.

“You never looked this prissy,” Van insisted.

“Thanks. I’d like to think not. Still, this man doesn’t fit into this rowdy town at all.”

“He won’t have to fret about looking out of place anymore,” Van murmured after he checked for a pulse in the man’s neck—and found none. “This tailored suit will be fine where he’s going.”

“Is he carrying identification?” Bart asked.

Van dug into his pants pockets to find them empty. “He’s been robbed.” He fished into the pocket of the brocade vest to retrieve an engraved pocket watch. “Well, hell. It’s Thurston Kimball III. He’s in no condition to give us a physical description of the real Natalie Blair. How inconvenient.”

Did Natalie think he wouldn’t incarcerate his own wife for theft and murder? Had she played him for a fool from the very beginning? He swore every action and every comment had been designed specifically to lend credence to her convincing performance.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Bart said. “But you could be wrong. This could have been self-defense—”

“A stab in the back with my missing knife?” Van scoffed.

“Someone other than Nat might be involved,” Bart went on quickly. “Maybe robbery was the sole intent and Kimball fought back then turned to run.”

“And maybe pigs fly in Boston, Bartholomew, but they sure as hell don’t in Texas,” Van muttered sarcastically. “Go fetch the city marshal, will you? Jed Dawson has sleeping quarters in the back of his office.”

Bart lurched around and jogged off. Van rose from a crouch to stare at the sophisticated and stylishly dressed Thurston Kimball III. He doubted the man had known what hit him until it was too late. Kimball probably wished he had never become entangled with the dark-eyed beauty that had flitted off into the night.

“You should be thankful I married her before you did,” he told Kimball, though the man was long past listening. “Avoiding wedlock didn’t save you, though, did it? Wonder what wedlock has in store for me?”

Grimly, Van strode off to fetch the livery owner from his quarters to rent a horse for Bart to ride. By the time Bart and Marshal Dawson arrived, Van had saddled Durango and the rented sorrel.

“Any idea who did this?” Dawson hiked up his sagging breeches while he stood over the body. “Wonder if the two men who robbed the stagecoach in no-man’s-land last week hit town to prey on a few more victims.”

“I don’t have a clue,” Van lied so Bart didn’t have to. “Bart and I have an errand to run at a nearby ranch.” That sounded plausible, didn’t it? “We’ll be back tomorrow.”

Dawson arched his thick brows. “You taking a job with one of the ranchers hereabout? They are having fits with trail herders who help themselves to a few calves to take along to sell for extra profit to the meat buyers in Dodge City. Not to mention the report of a few horses being stolen lately.”

“I’m thinking of looking into the situation,” Van mumbled evasively. “Can’t say if I’ll be interested in taking the assignment or not.”

“I sent word to the Rangers about those two stagecoach robbers. But if you come across those bandits, bring them in. The stage line is offering a reward. It’s all yours if you capture them, Crow.”

Van had no interest in doing the Rangers a favor, or capturing the thieves or collecting the reward. All he wanted was to track down Natalie—pronto.

Dawson stared at the sprawled body, heaved a sigh, then pivoted on his heels. “I’ll fetch someone to help me haul this departed soul to the undertaker.”

When the marshal exited, Van and Bart led the horses outside to mount up.

Bart settled himself in the saddle then glanced curiously at Van. “Do you have any idea which way Nat might have gone?”

“My best guess is north because traveling through canyon country at night is too risky.”

“Then let’s go with your best guess.” Bart reined down the street.

Van followed behind him. He wondered how he could restrain from choking the life out of that cunning wife of his when he caught up with her.

That’s why Bart is here, Van reminded himself as he urged Durango into a trot and then a gallop.