Free Secondhand Bride by Linda Lael Miller Page A

lowered the .45—she’d needed both hands to hold it— and worked the latch on the door. “If you hurt me, my papa will skin you,” she said, climbing down the steps.
    “What happened here?” Sam wanted to know.
    “What’s your name?” Jeb asked, talking right over the marshal.
    “Lizzie,” she said, and her gaze dropped to the dead woman on the ground, then shot back to Jeb’s face. “What’s yours?”
    “Jeb McKettrick. This is Sam Fee.”
    “He shot my aunt,” Lizzie said. A tear trickled down her cheek.
    “Who?” Sam asked.
    “The outlaw, of course,” Lizzie answered, a little testily. “He took all our money, too.”
    Sam and Jeb exchanged glances.
    “We’re going to look after you,” Jeb said. “Find your papa. Everything will be all right.”
    She didn’t look convinced and kept her distance. Little wonder, after what she’d been through.
    “You must be cold and hungry,” Jeb went on.
    “Scared, mostly,” the child answered.
    “How old are you?” Jeb asked, while Sam went to unhitch the team from the stagecoach.
    “Ten,” Lizzie answered, with a sniffle, squaring her small shoulders. “How old are you?”
    Under any other circumstances, he would have laughed, but there were two people dead, and a little girl had seen the whole thing. She’d spent the night by herself, most likely expecting the gunman to come back. “Twenty-eight,” he said, and took a careful step toward her.
    She looked him up and down, but when he fetched a lap robe from inside the coach, she let him put it around her. Sam, leaving the freed horses to forage for grass alongside the road, took the bedroll from behind his saddle and covered the woman’s body with it.
    “I’ve got some jerky in my saddlebags,” Jeb said, to distract her from the process. “You want some?”
    “I reckon I do,” Lizzie allowed. “I wouldn’t mind a little water, either, if you’ve got it.”
    Jeb fetched the jerky, along with his canteen, and brought them to her. “You mentioned your papa a little while ago,” he said, sitting on the running board of the stagecoach beside her. “We’re going to need his name.”
    She had a mouthful of jerky and chewed it thoroughly before swallowing. Washed it down with some water, too. Finally, she replied. “Holt Cavanagh.”
    Jeb’s mouth dropped open. He closed it again. Waited.
    Tears welled in the child’s eyes, and he was hard put not to lay an arm around her shoulders, but she was a bristly little thing, full of pride, and he didn’t want to scare her, either. “He didn’t know we were coming,” she said staunchly. “He might not even want me.”
    Jeb felt his gut grind. “Where’s your mama?” he asked, after a quiet interval had passed. Now that he was getting over the shock, he noticed her resemblance to Holt.
    “She’s dead,” Lizzie said, without looking at him. “She caught a fever last winter, in San Antonio. Aunt Geneva brought me here, soon as she could.”
    “You’ve had a hard time,” Jeb said, but his brain was reeling. If Cavanagh was Lizzie’s father, then she was flesh and blood, a niece. A McKettrick. Damned if the old man hadn’t gotten his grandchild after all, and God knew what the ramifications of that would be.
    She gave him a disdainful look. Of course she’d had a hard time, her expression said. She’d lost her mother and seen her aunt and the stagecoach driver shot down. She’d spent the night hiding in the stagecoach, cold, hungry, and scared.
    “If you saw the man—the outlaw—again, could you recognize him?”
    Her expression was doubtful, and her lower lip wobbled forlornly. “It was nighttime, and he had a bandanna over his face.”
    Sam had rolled the bodies up in blankets. “We’d best get the child and these poor folks to town,” he said.
    Jeb nodded, rose with a sigh, and he and Sam caught a couple of the team horses. They rigged halters and lead ropes from the stagecoach reins, laid the bodies over the animals’