When The Heart Beckons Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the suite’s golden lamplight as he lifted the
goblet to his lips and drank.
    It was a stupid question, he thought in
contempt. The answer was obvious to anyone but the most
jelly-spined little worm. Derrickson was good at sneaking around
between the pages of his ledger books, but he was worthless in the
larger arena of this private little war where any tactic was
acceptable. Any tactic at all.
    “If the investigator gets in the way,” Lucas
Johnson murmured, his eyes electrifyingly blue above his starched
white linen cravat, “then that will be too damned bad for the
investigator, won’t it? Cobb has his orders. He won’t let anything
get in his way.”
    Evil
, Derrickson thought again,
quelling the instinct to rise and flee the room.
Pure
evil
.
    But he had to stay now and dance with the
devil. There was no turning back. Not for him, or Johnson, or Cobb,
or McCallum. Not for any of them.
    It was going to be a fight to the death.

Chapter 3
    Arizona Territory
    “W atch your step,
miss,” the curly-bearded stagecoach driver warned Annabel as he
helped her to descend the rusty steps and then gave the coach door
a slam. Annabel gripped her floral carpetbag and stepped down into
the dust. “Welcome to Justice,” the driver muttered drily, and as
she glanced swiftly around at her surroundings, she had to stifle
an involuntary groan of dismay.
    She found herself in a small, dirty hovel of
a town lined with a dozen crudely constructed buildings:
false-fronted stores, saloons, a livery stable, a lodging house,
and two hotels. It was a beaten-up-looking town, dreary and
dilapidated, a place of grit and tumbleweed, groveling beneath the
flower-splashed foothills and mountains to the north.
    Well, what did you expect
, she
chided herself, as her fingers closed more tightly around the strap
of her carpetbag.
You knew you weren’t heading for Paris or New
Orleans or New York City
. But if Brett wanted to lose himself
out here in this great big towering Arizona territory, and more
specifically, within this tiny little flea-bitten town, it surely
would be a good place for him to do it.
    She had been the only passenger on the
stagecoach to alight at the mournful little town called Justice,
and she couldn’t blame the others for wanting to travel on. Not a
soul was visible in the street in either direction, unless one
counted the grizzled ancient rocking and humming to himself on the
broken-down porch outside the mercantile. Tumbleweed blew like torn
brown lace across the road, the sky glowed a sickly rose and
greenish gray hue as the May sun melted toward the horizon, and
everywhere were heat, dust, unpainted wooden shacks, and horse
dung.
    Justice.
    Despite the dismal aspect of the town, and
her weariness and hunger after days of jolting stagecoach travel, a
tingle of anticipation raced through her, Brett had been here in
this town only a few weeks ago—he had sent his father a letter from
here. And because of that, thank God, she had a place to start.
    A fresh urgency had overtaken her need to
find him after she had studied the file. According to Everett
Stevenson’s report, Ross McCallum had told him that his son was in
danger—he believed a gunfighter named Red Cobb was tracking Brett
to kill him. A business acquaintance passing through Kansas City
had heard local gossip that the West’s newest, youngest, deadliest
gunfighter was hunting down an easterner named Brett McCallum—but
no one knew why.
    Those words had filled Annabel with icy
dread. Why would this gunman be after Brett? He was the most
affable, easygoing of men. The file had contained no further
answers to that question, so Annabel had been left to worry and to
wonder. As she had traveled by train and by stagecoach across the
country, she’d speculated about whether Red Cobb might have some
connection to whatever trouble had caused Brett’s running away from
home.
    Annabel dimly remembered that Brett’s older
brother had run away from home when he was