The Man from Stone Creek by Linda Lael Miller Page A

alone with those rowdy men,” she confessed. “Undine seems fond of him, though. If it weren’t for her, I don’t think I’d close my eyes at night for fretting about it. If she were to leave—”
    It was all but dark by then, and Sam laid a hand over Maddie’s, where she gripped the reins. “Better pull up,” he said, “so I can light those lamps.”
    She complied ably, and he got down to attend to the lanterns. When he climbed back into the wagon box, she surprised him by handing over the reins.
    â€œWhat else can you tell me about Mungo and his boys?” he asked mildly when they’d traveled a ways. The river twisted and wound alongside the narrow track, whispering stories of its own.
    â€œThey own just about everything in Haven, save Oralee Pringle’s saloon,” she said, sighing. Then, with reluctance, she reminded him, and maybe herself, “Including the general store.”
    In the beginning, Sam had believed the store was Maddie’s, taken comfort in the idea that she had a way to get along, to provide for herself and Terran. Singleton had said, that first day, that they didn’t have any other family, and he’d assumed she must have inherited the mercantile from her father. Then she’d said she ran the place for somebody else and had to account to Mr. James, the banker. It hadn’t occurred to Sam that that “somebody else” might be a Donagher.
    â€œI work for Mungo Donagher,” Maddie affirmed, sounding as if she’d just awakened from a bad dream only to find out it was real. “Mr. James, over at the bank, oversees the accounts, like I told you, but it’s Mungo who pays my wages.”
    â€œI don’t suppose you can afford to offend him by accusing his boys of gunning down Warren Debney,” he said when he’d considered for a while.
    â€œI’m not so sure he didn’t do it himself,” Maddie admitted softly, and when she looked up at Sam, he saw bleak resignation in her eyes. He’d have done or said just about anything, right then, to give her ease, but nothing came to mind.
    â€œWhat makes you say that?” Sam asked when he’d absorbed the statement.
    Maddie was silent for a long time and Sam was beginning to think he’d asked one question too many when she finally answered. “Until he brought Undine home from Phoenix,” she said, “Mungo was courting me. He told me if I went ahead and married Warren, I’d have to give up managing the mercantile.”
    Something elemental and dark rose up within Sam, and he was a while putting it right. He felt as protective and as possessive of Maddie as if he’d been the one about to put a ring on her finger instead of Warren Debney. “And if you’d given in? Married Mungo instead of Debney?”
    â€œHe’d have signed the store over as a wedding gift,” Maddie recalled, frowning. “A plaything, as he put it.”
    It made Sam’s gorge rise, to think of Mungo Donagher touching Maddie, let alone bedding her. “Some women,” he said in his own good time, “would have taken the old coot up on the bargain.”
    Maddie pulled her shawl up around her shoulders, against the chill of the evening, and Sam thought she moved a fraction of an inch closer to him. “I’d sooner take up residence upstairs at the Rattlesnake Saloon. It amounts to the same thing.”
    Sam hadn’t thought any image could be worse than Maddie throwing in with the head of the Donagher clan, but sure enough, she’d come up with one. He set his jaw and tightened his hold on the reins. At the rate these horses were traveling, they might be on time for breakfast.
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    T HE LIGHTS of Mungo Donagher’s long, rustic house winked in the thick purplish gloom of the night. Normally, Maddie would sooner have been thrown to the lions than set foot in that place a second time, but with Sam