Free A Texan's Luck by Jodi Thomas Page A

her on him. At the rate he was going, it would only be a matter of hours.
    When she spoke, her voice was little more than a whisper. "Before I was ten, I lived with my mother on a little farm a half mile outside of town. We mostly raised chickens and sold the eggs to anyone passing."
    He leaned forward as she continued, "My mother's mother was from Hungary, and even though my mom was born in Louisiana, she didn't speak English until she was almost grown, so her words sounded foreign to most folks. My father left the day I was born."
    She stopped as if expecting him to say something. When he didn't, she continued. "Because my mother talked different and dressed as her mother had, everyone in the county thought she was a witch, so no one visited with us much. She died when I was ten."
    She relaxed a little and took a bite of apple. "I guess you got a right to know, folks have a way of dying around me. All my family's gone." She looked so serious, he almost laughed.
    "So is mine, Lacy, but I don't consider it a curse following me. Tell me about how your mother talked."
    She sat still, considering his request.
    Walker waited.
    "I saw nothing strange in the way she talked, but sometimes folks said some mean things to us. Once a man found blood in an egg we'd sold him. He said my mother had cursed him." Lacy glanced up, meeting Walker's eyes as she remembered. "I couldn't tell anything happened to him, except he got drunk and killed most of our chickens that night."
    Walker imagined Lacy as a child trying to understand. "Did you mother press charges? I've been reading about the law, and I think she could have."
    Lacy nodded. "The sheriff said since he didn't steal the hens, he couldn't be found guilty. We didn't know anyone else to turn to. The man went free, but we almost starved that winter."
    She looked at him now with her big dark eyes liquid with unshed tears, and he fought the urge to touch her. He remembered the way he'd been drawn to her the first time he saw her, even before he knew she was his wife on paper.
    Lacy lifted her chin slightly. "About me, my mother would have said, a nightmare breathes in the shadows of my world."
    Without another word, she left the room.
    An hour later Walker stood on the tiny back porch landing off the kitchen and smoked the last of his thin cigars. He tried to figure out what she'd been trying to tell him. He told himself he didn't like her, didn't care if he ever saw her again, but he'd never in his life felt so protective toward someone.
    The icy wind whirled down the alleyway from the livery to the north. Walker turned his collar up to the chill, feeling bad weather riding full speed toward Cedar Point. He was used to cold. Used to the weather. Even used to being shot at from time to time. But he wasn't sure he'd ever get used to Lacy. Her frightened stare had turned his gut over with a shovel. All the anger he'd felt toward her had vanished when he realized someone just beyond the window took aim at her. And when she'd told him the story of her mother, he wished he could have gone back in time and protected her.
    After not eating enough to keep a bird alive, she went to bed, closing her bedroom door, though he'd told her not to. He'd even heard the scrape of what must have been her dresser, blocking him out.
    Not that he would cross into her room after swearing he wouldn't. But she didn't trust him, and that bothered him even more than the fact that she was afraid of him.
    "Captain?" Sheriff Riley's call rattled from the bottom of the stairs. "Your wife kick you out along with the cats?"
    Walker smiled. He liked the old sheriff despite his meddlesome ways. Part of Riley still thought him a boy. "I didn't think she'd take much to my smoking in the house." Walker walked down the stairs.
    Riley laughed. "Last I heard, she didn't take much to you at all. I just dropped by to see if she's killed you yet."
    "Not yet," Walker answered, as if not sure he had long to wait. "We did manage to have