Elizabeth Lane Read Online Free PDF Page B

Parker.
    Over and over, he ground out each phrase of what he would say to her and how he would say it. He would be calm, he resolved, but he would give the woman no quarter. And heaven help her if she tried to charm her way around him. A granite boulder would be more easily softened than his heart.
    As the trees opened up, Donovan could see the town below him—a ramshackle spatter of wooden buildings, sprouting from the land like ugly, reddish toadstools. Hastily built on shallow foundations, they tilted rakishly along both sides of the muddy street. Many of them were boarded up, or had been pillaged for their glass windows. Even the places that were still occupied looked as if they would buckle in a heavy wind.
    Pity Varina was so set on staying here, Donovan mused as he rounded the last bend in the trail. Otherwise, Sarah Parker would be welcome to this miserable town. She could set herself up as its queen, for all he cared, with a goldplated spittoon for a throne. She could-But he was getting emotional, Donovan cautioned himself, and that would not do. He had resolved to remain cold and implacable. His plan was to state his terms in a way that the woman could not possibly misunderstand, then leave her to make the only sensible decision. He had no wish to be cruel. He only wanted her gone.
    He walked faster, steeling his emotions against the hot rage that boiled up inside him every time he thought of her. Laughing, lying Lydia, the very essence of treachery. Even last night-But last night counted for nothing. It was prim, shy Sarah Parker who had attracted him. A phantom. A stage role—no more real than Lydia Taggart herself had been.
    He broke into a sweat as the question penetrated his mind. Who was this woman? Was she Lydia Taggart? Was she Sarah Parker?
    Or was she someone he did not even know?
    He had reached the outskirts of town. Slowing his pace to a deliberate walk, he tried to calm himself by studying each building he passed. The two-story hotel had been boarded up for years, its faded green paint peeling like a bad sunburn. The assay office, too, was closed, but Varina had mentioned that Satterlee, the storekeeper, did assay work at the rare times it was needed. The barbershop was open only on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and the barber, a Mr. Watson, doubled as official undertaker and set an occasional broken limb. Sarah Parker doctored the few women and children.
    Even the sheriff’s office was empty, except for dust and pack rats. There seemed to be no laws worth breaking in this town, nor anyone who cared one way or the other.
    The street was a quagmire of slush and mud. In front of the saloon, stepping boards had been laid from the hitching rail to the door. The saloon, in fact, was the only establishment in Miner’s Gulch that still appeared to be thriving. Even at midday, idlers were meandering in, drawn by the lure of whiskey, the tuneless tinkle of the piano, and the shopworn women who lounged in the overhead rooms, framed like jaded portraits in the second-story windows.
    Donovan avoided raising his eyes as he passed. Ordinarily, he didn’t mind the company of whores. Some of thempossessed a warmth and honesty that he found lacking in so-called decent women. But this town was his sister’s home, and people were bound to talk. Neither he nor Varina needed that kind of trouble. Besides, right now, he had a very different kind of whore on his mind.
    Satterlee’s General Store was two doors down from the saloon. Three upstairs windows, curtained to eye level with flour sacking, faced the street. Donovan risked a tentative upward glance, hoping for some indication that Sarah was there, but he could see little more than the reflected glare of the bright spring sky. Swiftly he turned away. It wouldn’t do at all for her to look down and see him standing in the street, gazing up at her windows.
    He was wondering what to do next when a motley gaggle of children came trooping around the store through the