Nobody's Darling

Billy returned to his breakfast as if the entire incident had never happened.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Esmerelda asked. “To hear your mother speak so unkindly?”

“She’s entitled,” he said, biting off a chunk of biscuit and chewing with relish. “Besides, that’s the most I’ve heard her say in fourteen years.” He chased the biscuit with a gulp of milk. Esmerelda couldn’t help but notice how his tongue snaked out to lick away the froth of cream on his upper lip. “When I told her I was heading back to Missouri to join up with Bloody Bill and the rest of the boys, she didn’t say a word. Since I was the only one to come out to New Mexico with her to see her settled, I guess she’d taken it into her head that I’d be staying. When I walked out that door, she didn’t pitch a fit or even ask me not to go.” He shook his head ruefully. “I’d have felt better if she’d have hauled off and walloped me one. But I guess she’d done al the crying and begging she was going to do back in Missouri the night they hanged Pa.” He ducked his head to snap off a bite of bacon, but not before Esmerelda saw the shadow move through his eyes. “I never could abide; woman’s tears. I had to go after them. They made my ma cry.”

“You were there,” she breathed, stunned. “The nigh your father died.”

He gave a curt nod. “I wasn’t no more than a scrawny kid of thirteen, but I tried to stop them anyway. The soldiers held me back. By the time they left and I cut him down, it was too late.”

Such simple words. Such a vivid scene. Even with he: eyes squeezed shut, Esmerelda could still see it.

“I knew then that if I’d have had a gun in my hand, I could have stopped them. That’s when I vowed never to be without one again.”

Esmerelda could not let the icy glint in his eyes gc unchallenged. “If you’d have had a gun in your hand, they’d have probably shot you dead and your mother would have spent the past fourteen years mourning you as well as your father.”

“I reckon she did that anyway.” After a moment, he went on. “I can’t really blame her for taking my leaving sc hard. I was her last hope. She always dreamed of us boy making something better of ourselves than dirt farmer: or outlaws. Her favorite brother was a lawman back in Springfield.”

The keen attention Billy suddenly devoted to his breakfast betrayed more than he intended.

“She must have loved you very much,” Esmerelda said softly.

He flashed her a sheepish grin. “Jasper was right, you know. Ma always was partial to me. Hell, I’m lucky the boys didn’t toss me down a well and sell me to some passing Midianites.”

It was Esmerelda’s turn to blink innocently at him. “Now, Mr. Darling, where would a self-professed heathen such as yourself learn such a story?”

“Must have stumbled on it somewhere,” he mumbled, taking another hearty bite of biscuit.

Esmerelda knew exactly where he’d stumbled on it— between the cracked leather binding of that ancient family Bible. But if she pressed, she knew he would deny it. Just as he had denied owning all those books celebrating the courageous exploits of famous lawmen. Just as he would deny how natural that deputy U.S. marshal’s badge had looked in his hand.

“Ma used to save me the choicest morsels of everything she cooked.” He chuckled. “I used to plague her something fierce on baking day. She’d pretend to get all riled and shoo me out of the kitchen with her apron, but when I snuck back in, there’d be that bowl just sitting there unguarded on the table, waiting to be licked. Yeah,” he said softly. “She loved me.”

How could she not?

The thought rose unbidden to Esmerelda’s mind, ringing so clear that for a moment she was terrified she’d spoken it aloud.

How could Zoe Darling not love a sunny-haired child with a hunger for learning so sharp he risked humiliation and physical torment to satisfy it? How could she not love a slender, handsome boy clever enough to use his wits to survive the brutish bullying of his brothers? How could she not love a boy who’d seen and done things no boy should ever have to see or do, yet had grown into a man so tenderhearted that he hadn’t hesitated to champion a sad-eyed, flea-bitten basset hound whose hunting days were long over?

How could she not love him?

Time dwindled to nothing more significant than the dreamy waltz of dust motes around Billy’s head as Esmerelda realized that she was no longer talking about Zoe.

She stood up abruptly, nearly overturning her chair.

Billy frowned at her. “What’s wrong, honey? You’re white as a bedsheet.” He sniffed gingerly at his empty glass “Was the milk curdled?”

Esmerelda shoved the chair aside, making a dreadful racket, and began to back out of the room. “Uh, no. This milk was just fine. Something else must have disagreed with me.”

Something tall and lanky with a lazy grin and deceptively sleepy eyes that were even now narrowing to seek th thread of truth within her clumsily stitched quilt of lies.

Esmerelda turned to leave, but the blanket coiled around her ankles. Billy lurched around the table and caught he arm to steady her, his casual touch scorching her skin. She gazed up into his smoky green eyes with a helpless mixture of wonder and despair. He was too late. Not even his gun slinger’s reflexes could stop her from falling. She’d already fallen.

Hard.

And it had knocked the breath clear out of her.

Wrenching her arm from Billy’s grasp, Esmerelda fled the room as if Zoe Darling and a horde of ax-wielding giantesses were thundering at her heels.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Death was stalking Bartholomew Fine.

Dressed all in black, he camped outside the canyon cave where Bartholomew had been hiding since fleeing the bank in Eulalie. He was more handsome than Bart had imagined—a smooth-talker with a lazy drawl and a ready grin. A constant companion and a pleasant conversationalist. Although his manner was friendly, Bart would never have thought to address him by his first name, but respectfully referred to him as Mister.

Mr. Death wore his gunbelt low on his hips. A broad-brimmed slouch hat shadowed his face. Bartholomew lived in fear of the inevitable moment when he would reach up with one graceful finger and tip it back, revealing the hellfire in his eyes.

Whenever he could no longer bear the suspense, he would turn his face away from the mouth of the cave and take another long swig from the whiskey bottle. He’d never been much of a drinker, yet empty bottles Uttered the cavern floor around him. Although he would have died before admitting it to the men who had so briefly called him leader, the taste of alcohol made him a little sick. But not as sick as the prospect of facing the specter lurking outside that cave stone-cold sober.

He spent his days huddled against the cavern wall, paralyzed by his own fear. He’d shuffled into a dank corner of the cave to pee one morning only to come face-to-face with his own reflection in the fragment of mirror he’d used to trim his beard when the cave had been his gang’s hideout. He’d recoiled with a high-pitched yelp, barely recognizing the feral creature gawking back at him with its wild, red-rimmed eyes and bushy beard. He’d buried that face in his hands and stumbled back to the wall, Mr. Death’s laughter ringing in his ears.

Night was the worst. Although the chill that came creeping out of the desert after the sun sank was enough to make a man’s fingers and toes tingle and ache, Mr. Death never lit a fire. He preferred the cold.

Bartholomew would fight sleep, his exhausted body twitching with the effort, but his eyes would always betray him by drifting shut, leaving him alone in the darkness.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw blood. Welling from the blackened edges of a fresh wound. Pooling on the floor. Soaking the chaste white of his sister’s gloves. But worse than the blood was the look in Esmerelda’s eyes, a look he almost hadn’t recognized the first time he saw it because it had been so foreign to him. Shame.

His sister—who had glowed with pride every time he trotted home from school with a clumsily written story clutched in his plump fist; who had fussed and crowed over even his most humble efforts at badly rhymed poetry; who had held him while he wept out his disappointment, her own eyes burning with indignation, when a less talented classmate had won the annual essay contest sponsored by the Gazette—was ashamed of him.