his throat.
He’d purposely taken the long way to the dry goods store so that Emma and Lucy wouldn’t see the gallows that had been erected overnight. He’d seen this kind of thing happen often enough to know that the distant hammering was a coffin being built. Some poor soul was gazing through the jail bars, looking at his last afternoon.
If it hadn’t been for Emma’s quick thinking yesterday, there might have been a double hanging. Matt’s employer would have purchased his own justice as quick as a lick.
Pendragon figured that in Dodge, money powered the gavel, and he knew how to spend his cash.
Just when he was about to usher Emma and Lucy into the general store, the marshal stepped out of the Long Branch one door up. He gave Matt a sizing up that made him wonder if he’d shouted those thoughts about getting hanged.
“‘Rath and Wright, Dealers in Everything.’” Emma read the sign over the door, then snapped her parasol closed. “Do you suppose they have something cheerful to cover the dugout walls?”
“They have candy.” Lucy tugged on Emma’s skirt and looked up at her with hopeful eyes. “Can I have some? Please, Mama?”
The marshal seemed too interested in what went on between the three of them. If Emma declared that she wasn’t Lucy’s mother, he might get more suspicious than he already was.
Emma glanced at Lucy and opened her mouth to say something, but she must have caught sight of the lawman, because she pinched her mouth closed.
She patted Lucy’s head and smiled lovingly at her.
“You go on along inside and pick out what you want. Papa and I will be along shortly.”
“Sugar lump,” Emma said with a sigh as soon as Lucy was out of sight. She swaggered up to Matt, so close that her calico-clad bosom brushed his buckskin vest. She stood up on her toes. Her fingertips traced curly hearts on his shirtsleeve. She whispered in his ear, but the secret was loud enough for the marshal to overhear.
“You know how long I’ve dreamed of being mama to that little girl, but I’ll purely die if we can’t sneak away by ourselves for the rest of the afternoon.”
Emma’s teeth nipped his earlobe. Heat flashed up and down his body. He turned his face. The long kiss that he sipped from her lips felt too hot to have been for the marshal’s benefit alone.
She knocked back his hat and feathered his hair through her fingers from scalp to collar, all the while keeping up with his kiss. She didn’t take a breath until he heard the marshal’s boots stomp down the boardwalk.
At last she let loose of him, sliding down until her boot heels clicked on the sidewalk. Her lashes lay like sable against her pink cheeks. Her chest heaved as if she had just danced the length of Front Street.
All at once she shook herself and opened her eyes. She spun about and followed the path that Lucy had taken.
“Surely there’s something inside to cover up that dirt on the dugout floor.”
The hell with the dugout floor! How could she be thinking of coverings after the moment they’d just shared?
It might have begun for the benefit of the marshal, but that’s not how it had ended. He could hardly walk a straight line into Rath and Wright’s with all the goings-on beneath his jeans.
By the time Matt’s eyes adjusted to the dim interior of the store, his insides had settled enough to focus on the reason they had come to town. Shopping was no more than a chore to him, but Emma and Lucy looked happy as butterflies in a meadow.
For a woman who spurned mothering, Emma appeared to take right to it. She kept hold of Lucy’s plump hand while she pointed out this and that object of purchase.
Lucy wanted ribbon for her hair. Emma pulled three colors from the shelf. She knelt on the floor, eye to eye with the child.
“I think pink is your color.” Emma dangled a length of pink beside Lucy’s face. “Which one do you like on me Lucy, yellow or blue?”
His little girl sparkled. She had been asking for a mother since she’d learned to talk. There were some things that a pa couldn’t do as well as a ma. He was of no use at all picking out frilly notions.
His heart took a warm turn but came up short when he thought about California. Lucy would become attached to Emma over the summer. The inevitable separation