Free The Rustler's Bride by Tatiana March

imitating Declan’s lazy drawl. She put out her hand to Lenny, who was digging in the pockets of his coat.
    “Damn,” he said. “I’m out of bullets.” He looked up at her. “Miss Ria, can you run into the house and get a box of forty-five shells?”
    She hesitated. The light was going. There was a chill in the air.
    “Please, Miss Ria,” Lenny said, humor and cockiness mixing in his tone. “It scares me to walk around with an unloaded gun.”
    Stan cackled with laughter. “You think one of them husband’s might come after you?”
    Lenny got his swagger back. At least as a ladies’ man he was the undisputed champion. “It’s the women that frighten me more,” he said with a wink. “Some of them is greedier for me than pigs at a bucketful of corn.”
    “All right,” Victoria said. “Don’t go anywhere.” She raced back to the house, into her father’s office. Beneath the gun rack mounted on the wall stood a locked cabinet. She fished out the key from a desk drawer, unlocked the cabinet—and stared. Instead of rows and rows of ammunition, there were barely a dozen boxes of rifle cartridges, and a handful of shotgun shells, and six boxes of bullets for a forty-five caliber revolver.
    Alarmed, she locked the cabinet and rose. Her father must be getting absent minded. Until they got a new order in, they couldn’t afford to waste ammunition on amusement. Her movements were reluctant as she returned to the men in the clearing. How could she explain the situation without embarrassing her father?
    “I...” she began.
    Loud clanking sounds drowned out her hesitation. It was Cookie’s dinner gong. He’d suspended a row of tin plates from the beams that formed the flat roof of the cookhouse. To announce the meals, he beat on them with a big iron ladle.
    “Sorry, Miss Ria, we’ll do it another time.” Lenny was already headed toward the cookhouse where the glow of lanterns cut vertical stripes into the twilight. “I’m starving.”
    “Me too,” Hank said, and touched the brim of his hat. “Good night, Miss Ria.”
    Victoria turned to Declan. “My father wants you to join us for dinner again tonight.” She did not care if the others heard the stiff formality of her invitation. Cookie had told her that both her father and Declan had made the nature of her marriage clear to the men.
    His gaze lingered on her. From the moment Victoria came out to join the shooting, she had felt Declan watching her. It made her skin tingle and her body tremble. Recollections of the kiss they had shared flooded her, and she was grateful for the encroaching darkness that hid her reaction.
    “No,” Declan said. “Tell him I’ll eat with the men tonight.”
    I’ll eat with the men. Victoria swallowed. Afterward, Declan would be alone in his room. It was the prompt she had been waiting for. It was the sign to proceed. She buried the last trace of doubt, the last ounce of hesitation. Her plan was unfolding, step by step by step.
    ****
     
    Late into the night, Declan lay awake on his straw mattress, clad in nothing but his long underwear. A single candle flickered on the nightstand. Arms crossed beneath his head, he stared at the whitewashed ceiling where he could just about make out the shape of a tiny spider slowly crawling its way across.
    The storm that had been brewing for days had finally arrived. Rain pelted against the window glass. Wind howled across the plateau in fierce gusts that slammed into the side of the building. There was no lightning or thunder, just the solid blackness beyond the unshuttered window.
    The wild weather suited his restless mood.
    Just like the day before, he had seen little of Victoria during working hours. There’d been none of her earlier skulking about. She was planning something. He knew it in his gut. She wanted to toy with temptation, as a child might toy with fire. He’d seen it in her eyes when she came to watch the shooting, had felt it in the air between them.
    If he lacked the