“I was thinking perhaps Garrett for your father.”
“Then Michael Garrett Sinclair?”
Tears burned behind her eyes. She still missed her father. His stories. His capacity to love. She nodded.
Reluctantly, Seth handed young Michael to Dillon, who had followed them inside and was watching with great interest. He looked startled at first, as if he were being handed a box of dynamite, but then a wide smile creased his hard face.
Seth took her in his arms again and showered her face with tender kisses. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for my son.”
Her heart trembled as her gaze went from his face to her son’s. Her cowboy. Her two cowboys.
“Welcome home,” she murmured just before his lips sealed hers and the enchantment began all over again.
Tombstone Tess by Emily Carmichael
Chapter One
TOMBSTONE, ARIZONA 1889
TESS ANN MCCABE brushed the trail dust from her jeans and slapped her weatherbeaten hat against the hitching post before stepping into the Bird Cage Saloon. The warm, dusky interior washed over her with comforting familiarity, but the scowl on her face didn’t ease. She had to do what she had to do, Tess told herself. But dadgummit, she didn’t have to like it. Life could sometimes be downright unreasonable.
Heads turned when the clunk of her boots on the plank floor announced her presence, but the men enjoying their liquor, cards, and the attentions of the saloon girls didn’t pay her much mind. The newcomer was just Tess from the Diamond T. Nothing to get stirred up about.
But when she brought down her fist upon the polished top of the long bar, eyes turned her way.
“I need a man!” Tess announced. A shameful confession, but there it was. “Now. Today. I need a goddamned man.”
All activity in the bar ceased. Silence as heavy as the pall of cigar smoke answered her. She stood rigid and proudly upright under the curious regard, refusing to lower her eyes, refusing to give in to cowardice and run from the saloon.
Then a throaty feminine chuckle broke the silence. “Honey girl, don’t we all! Join the line.”
Tension broke in a wave of laughter. Tess didn’t smile.
“Hey, Tessie,” came a hoarse shout from Joe Daniel, who sat at a poker table near the back of the room. “I’m your man, sweetie! I could use me a nice little ranch down on the river and a sweet little gal to go with it.”
Laughter greeted his offer.
“Gettin’ mighty brave, Joe,” a man at the bar said.
Another shouted. “You take some sweet little gal onto Tessie’s ranch and Tess’ll likely hogtie her, brand her, and sell her to the Injuns like a side of beef. Ain’t it so, Tess?”
Tess felt her face heat. True, she had threatened her brother, Sean, with such a fate once, but that had been in fun. Besides, he had deserved it. Her father had never tired of jawing and guffawing about the incident to anyone who would listen. And of course nobody believed that she, Colin McCabe’s “wild” daughter, might be the one Joe meant by “a sweet little gal.”
Glory Gilda, one of the Bird Cage’s most popular whores, strolled up to stand by Tess’s side. “You jackasses shut your yaps. Ain’t a one of you in here such a catch that you can make fun of Tess. Besides, she could whup every one of you in a brawl.”
“That ain’t exactly true,” Tess admitted to Glory. “But I could outlast any one of them in the saddle.”
“Course you could.” Glory guided her toward an empty table. “Given half a chance, a woman can outlast a man at just about anything you can think of. Whiskey?”
“You know I don’t hold with strong drink.”
“You look like you could use a strong drink, though. The stronger, the better.” The woman plunked herself down at the table with a sigh. “So you’re finally up against it, are you?”
“Between a rock and you know what.” Tess heaved a disconsolate sigh and pulled up a chair to straddle.
Everyone in the bar knew her problem. Hell, everyone in Tombstone knew that Colin McCabe had reached up from the grave to twist his daughter’s tail. Many a man laughed out loud to think that Tess Ann McCabe, one of Arizona’s most ineligible females, had to find a husband or lose her ranch to her runty little brother, as worthless a piece of flesh and bone that ever God allowed to breathe the world’s air.
Okay, maybe Sean wasn’t totally worthless. He was her brother, after all, and he probably did have good qualities somewhere, if a person looked hard enough.
Gilda commiserated. “That was a bum thing your daddy did to you, Tess, honey. Have you talked to a lawyer?”
“Hell yes. But the only lawyer in town is Harvey Bartlett, the skunk who wrote up Daddy’s will. Fat lot of help he is. Maybe I will have a whiskey. What’s it taste like?”
“Damned good, most times.”
When Tess took her first sip of the amber liquid Glory set in front of her, she disagreed with a grimace. “Uck!”
“It grows on you,” Glory assured her.
It would have to, Tess mused. The whiskey burned all the way down her gullet into her stomach. Fine comfort that was! But she took another sip, just to be sure that she hadn’t missed something.
“So how long has it been since the old man bit the dirt?” Glory asked.
“Five months, two weeks.”
“And he gave you six months to find yourself a husband?”
“Six months,” Tess confirmed. “The rat. All my life I was my daddy’s righthand man. Hell, when I was five years old he had me driving cattle and riding halfbroke horses. I’m the best damned cowboy on the Diamond T, probably the best damned cowboy in all of Arizona, but that crazy old man kept expecting me to bring home a husband along with the cows.”
Glory nodded sympathetically.
“A husband is harder to rope than an ornery bull,” Tess said with a morose sigh.
“That’s a fact. But, honey, it’s not like you ain’t got nothing to offer a man. The Diamond T is a nice little ranch, with plenty of water and a good crew.”
Tess took another sip of whiskey, which began to send warm streamers into her veins. “That’s the rub, Glory. No husband is going to move in on my territory, boss my crew, or run my ranch. Hell, he might even expect me to cook and mend and all that nonsense.” She brought a fist down on the table with force enough to make her shot glass jump. “What I need is a lazy, worthless sonuvabitch who’ll run out on me after a few days’ time. Me and Miguel and Rosie have it all figured out.”
Glory laughed her throaty laugh. “Well, honey, the world is crawling with worthless men. It’s the good ones that are hard to come by. I might even be able to help you out.”
A twinkle of mischief lit Glory’s eye as the amiable whore surveyed the room. “How about old Jack Campbell? He hasn’t done a lick of work in the last two years as far as anybody can tell. Feed him a meal or two and he’d most likely do anything you say.”
“Too old. Yellow teeth. Smells bad.”
“You said you wanted someone worthless.”
“Yeah, but if I’ve gotta actually marry the fella, he’d better be at least a couple of steps above a goat, or no one’s going to believe it.”
Glory screwed up her face in concentration, creasing her thick makeup. Then she smiled. “I have it!”
“You have it?”
“I have it!”
Hope rose in Tess’s chest. Or was that the liquor?
“Tess, honey, look at the fellow drowning in his glass at that corner table. He’s been drinking for two days, that one has, too wed to his whiskey to even take me up on the offer of a tumble. He might clean up right nice if you took a scrub brush to him and poured strong coffee down his gullet.”
Tess looked at the cowboy in the corner. He looked worthless enough. Hell. She might as well give him a try.
JOSHUA Ransom looked drunkenness straight in its ugly face, and he welcomed it. The drunker he got, the more chance he could forget his goddamned brother, David, forget the Double R Ranch-once the finest ranch north of the Mexican border-and forget that a rancher with no cattle was a rancher with no future. If Josh got fallingdown, blind, drooling swacked, maybe he could forget that two days ago he had sat at this very table, in this same saloon, and listened to his last hope in the world tell him the bank wouldn’t loan him the money he needed.