into a bun on her head stood on the threshold, holding a tray. With the morning light in his eyes, he couldn’t make out her features, but there was something strangely familiar about the size and shape of her.
When she spoke, her tone was anything but friendly. “So you’re awake. Good. After you drink this coffee, I’ve got some questions for you. And you’d better have some answers ready, Joe Dollarhide.”
Joe’s pulse lurched as she stepped out of the light, into the room, and he recognized her. Lord help him, it was Sarah!
CHAPTER NINE
THUNDERSTRUCK, JOE STARED AT HER. HE’D REMEMBERED SARAH AS a pretty, spirited girl. The Sarah walking toward him now, balancing a tray in her hands, was a beautiful woman who moved with an air of strength and confidence—a woman with the look of someone who’d struggled and survived.
What was she doing here—wherever here was? Where was her great-uncle, the doctor? Was he the one who’d treated the bullet wounds?
Joe’s questions evaporated in the sheer joy of seeing her. Sarah, the angel who’d blessed his dreams, the girl he’d given up on ever finding again. She was here. She was real.
But she wasn’t smiling.
As she bent close and placed the tray on his lap, Joe ached to reach out and touch her, if only to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. But he checked the impulse when her stern glance warned him not to try.
Clearly, she wasn’t ready to take up their friendship where they’d left it two years ago. After disappearing from her life for two years, he couldn’t say he blamed her. How much did she know about him? What had Rusty told her?
On the tray, resting in a saucer, was a mug of steaming, black coffee. “It’s hot, but drink it all,” she said. “You need all the fluids you can get down. I’ve got soup on the stove. You’ll want plenty of that when it’s ready. Meanwhile, I’ll bring you some water and fix you some breakfast.”
“Thank you, Sarah.” The words, which rasped from his parched throat, were the first he’d spoken since before he was shot.
“Just drink your coffee.” He caught the moist glimmer in her eyes as she turned away and walked toward the door, her head high, her spine ramrod straight. At the last moment, she paused, turned back, moved a wooden chair to the side of the bed, and sat down. She took a deep breath, as if pulling herself together.
“Lorna Calder came to the house to tell me you’d been killed in a stampede,” she said. “I cried myself to sleep that night, imagining the moment you’d died, thinking what an awful waste it was and how I would never know what we might have meant to each other.
“Now I find out you were alive the whole time.” The wetness in her eyes had turned to fire. “And you never even had the decency to let me know. What was I supposed to think? What am I supposed to think now?”
The coffee, which he’d been sipping, had moistened his dry throat, making it easier for him to talk. But what could he say to her? How could he even begin to explain? He cleared his throat and tried.
“Before that stampede, the one you heard about, I was counting every day, every mile, that brought me closer to seeing you again. But afterward, when I was lying in that wash and Calder had given me up for dead and left me behind, it was all I could do to stay alive. I kept wanting to get back and find you, but the things that happened—things I had to do to survive—made that impossible. As time passed, I figured you’d probably moved on, maybe even married . . .”
Joe’s voice trailed off. How could he tell her the rest of the story—being part of an outlaw gang, stealing stock with the McCracken brothers and then, after he’d escaped to live an honest life, going back to ride with them again? What would she think of him?
She frowned, her forehead forming a little furrow above her violet eyes. “But from what Rusty told me, I gathered you were back with the Calders. You could have sent me a letter, or even asked Lorna to let me know. Joe, I’m still in shock. I thought you were dead! I didn’t even know you were alive until Rusty brought you here and told me your name.” Her voice broke slightly. “After all this time, missing