Free Two Brothers by Linda Lael Miller

was peeking through the fronds of an enormous potted palm, looking on while the fiddlers played, and men and women in their best clothes waltzed round and round, smiling. It was some consolation,at least, that there was no sign of Marshal McQuillan.
    Soon, the room grew stuffy, and Aislinn left Liza Sue to her watching, passing quickly through the lobby and out onto the porch. The night air was heavy and hot, but here Aislinn could breathe.
    She had been standing at the porch rail for some time, looking up at the spill of stars littering a blue-black sky, when she became aware of a creaking sound behind her, in the shadows. She stiffened, but did not turn around and look, for her senses had already told her who was there.
    “Evening,” the marshal said.
    His voice, his presence, made Aislinn aware of her loneliness, an affliction she could usually outrun, and she did not like him for it. “Why aren’t you inside, with the others?”
    The creaking stopped; he was out of the porch chair and beside her at the railing. Very close beside her. “Now, why would I want to be there,” he countered, “when I can be here instead?”
    Aislinn didn’t, couldn’t, answer. Inside, the fiddles took up a new and poignantly sweet tune, and she thought her heart would break, just from being young and having so many dreams and hopes and secrets. She had thought herself immune to this man earlier in the day but now she knew with bittersweet certainty that she was not.
    He turned her gently to face him and for one jubilant, terrifying moment, apart from all the rest of time, she believed he meant to kiss her. Instead, he took her into his arms, and they moved slowly around in a small, graceful circle, a private waltz, draped in shadow. It might have been better, kinder, she thought, with a sort of frantic joy, if he had kissed her. That would have been a mere touch of the lips, but the dancing—the dancing was intimate, infinitely tender, almost a form of lovemaking.
    Shay rested his chin on top of her head, and she couldfeel the warmth of him, the hard strength of his chest and arms. He smelled of soap and summer and very cold water.
    Aislinn found her voice, but just barely. “I’m scared,” she said, to him, to herself. She could not credit the tumult she felt; the change was as sudden and profound as an earthquake, and it would leave her forever altered.
    His laugh was low and throaty and utterly masculine. “Me, too,” he replied. “Me, too.” Then, without another word, he sought her lips with his own, found them, claimed them.
    A fiery response shot through Aislinn’s system, searing away a great many false perceptions of what it would be like to be held and kissed by a man. She felt her knees weaken and might even have swooned, if Marshal Shay McQuillan had not been holding her upright.

Chapter 4

    S HE TURNED FROM HIM , at last, out of desperation, dazed and profoundly shaken. Shay made Aislinn face him again and raised her chin with a curved finger—his trigger finger, she reminded herself, though it didn’t do a lot of good. Pragmatism, normally her most stellar quality, was quite beyond her. Her earlier conviction that she’d somehow grown immune to Shay’s very questionable charms was nothing but a mockery now; she was ablaze with a welter of sweet, frightening feelings and vast, unchartable needs. The music from the dance inside the hotel seemed to roll out through the windows and the doors, pounding in her veins, a blood spell cast by some mischievous wizard.
    “Are you spoken for, Aislinn Lethaby?” he asked gruffly. “If there’s a husband or a beau tucked away somewhere, or a man headed out West to join you one of these days, you’d better say so now.”
    Color stung her face. She might have stepped back, since he wasn’t holding her, and yet she could not make herself move away. “A husband? Of course not! Why, what sort of woman do you take me for, Marshal?”
    He laughed, and the low, rumbling