Free The Grass Widow by Nanci Little Page A

cold sweat prickling hard over her; she was but a week on the well side of death’s door, and between the run and the run-in, her legs had deserted her.
    “You tell her—” he started.
    “If you want her told, Captain, you tell her. You teach me to shoot. It is, if you’ll recall, your duty?”
    “This is a harsh country teeming with savages with four legs or two, not some suburb of Philadelphia with constables you may call on,” he gritted. “God knows she’s crazy as a backhouse rat, but surely you have sense enough to see that two women alone stand no chance here. You’ll die here, probably horribly.”
    And it dawned on her that Argus Slade was himself afraid of the West, of its harshness and its teeming savages, and that he swaggered and postured in a piteous attempt to hide that fear; she had heard his voice rise an octave when he had felt the threat of Joss’s rage. “That’s possible,” she said gently. “I merely doubt that our exflunctication will happen as soon as so many people seem to think. May we begin, sir?” Joss watched from the porch. Aidan’s first attempt went high, wide and handsome of any target; Slade talked, gesturing desultorily. Aidan raised the Colt. Smoke puffed and dirt kicked up in front of the fence—but purely under the post she had been aiming for, Joss noted;her aim was good even if her elevation wasn’t. She had to shake her head in grudging understanding for Slade’s predicament as a teacher when he started to touch her and remembered in time not to get shot. “Good boy,” she murmured, as he folded his arms. “You learn a right smart o’ quick, ol’ son.”
    The Colt came up in Aidan’s two-handed grip.
    A bottle exploded.
    Joss scratched her jaw, wondering if luck or inherent ability should be credited, and was answered when the next three bullets blew three bottles to shards. The captain’s hands implied that
     
    anyone might enjoy a moment of good fortune; he reloaded and offered the revolver. Joss didn’t hear what Aidan said; she only knew she said something before riveting her attention to bottles and fenceposts and the pride of Samuel Colt.
    Four of six bottles disintegrated. The sixth wobbled, its fencepost newly-plugged; finally it toppled. A breath of breeze carried Aidan’s words back to the porch: “I think a man shot there might tip over as well.” Joss laughed out loud; a look like the one her cousin was giving the captain, Brother Ethan would have said, was enough to leave a man pissing straight out for not being able to find enough pecker to hang over the edge of his buttons.
    Slade whistled to his horse. The mare trotted up agreeably, and from his advantage of height on her back he stabbed a finger at Aidan, obviously for some last, rancorous word before he gave the reins a jerk toward the Newtonville trail. Surprised, the mare reared, and got a rake of the spurs for her protest. “Take him under the sweeper at a dead run,” Joss muttered at the bolting horse. “Knock some sense into the damn fool.”
    She stood as Aidan came up the step. “So what was the parting shot?”
    Aidan turned to aim the pistol at Slade’s departing back. Before Joss knew she would do it, she pulled the trigger. The impotent click of the hammer on a spent shell was, to Joss, almost as loud as an explosion of powder would have been. “His prophecy for our mutual and untimely demise,” Aidan spat, and slapped the empty gun into Joss’s belly. “Here. Now I know how to shoot.”
    Joss managed to hang onto the pistol. “Aidan—” She caught her cousin’s arm. “Aidan, wait! Why are you steamed up at me?”
    “Because you—” She turned, looking as angry as her beginning words, and Joss braced herself, but the flare didn’t come; Aidan sagged against the side of the house. “Because I—”
    She put her face into her hands. “Because I wanted you to teach me,” she whispered. “And he just—he just—he just thrust himself between us. And you