The Rustler by Linda Lael Miller Page A

on her hips, and shattered Sarah’s world with a single sentence. “I’m Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third,” she said, the words slicing through Sarah with the stinging force of a sharp sword.
    Then, as now, Sarah had been unable to stand. She’d dropped into a chair, blind with confusion, pain and fear. Unconsciously, she’d rested a hand on her abdomen.
    â€œPack your things, dear,” Mrs. Langstreet had said. “As of tomorrow morning, you won’t be living here any longer. A backstreet whore belongs, you see, on a backstreet. If Charles wants to continue this dalliance, that’s his business, but I won’t be footing the bill.”
    With that, she’d gone, leaving the suite door standing open to the hall beyond.
    Sarah had been too numb to move at first. She simply sat, waiting for Charles to come and say it was all a mistake. That she, Sarah, would be the only Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third.
    All day she waited.
    But he didn’t come.
    Sarah had finally closed the door, gone to bed and lain staring up at the ceiling throughout the very long night to come.
    In the morning, a tentative knock sent a surge of hope rushing through her. She rushed to the door, opened it to find, not a smiling Charles, with a credible explanation at the ready, but one of the hotel’s porters. The fellow stood in the corridor, clearly uncomfortable.
    He’d offered an anxious smile as two maids and another porter collected themselves behind him. “I’m sorry to hear you’re leaving us,” he’d said. “Mrs. Langstreet asked that we help you gather your belongings. There’ll be a carriage waiting to take you to your new residence at ten o’clock.”
    Sarah had not protested.
    She’d simply watched, stricken, as her clothes were folded into trunks and boxes, her books taken from the shelves, her jewelry stuffed into valises Marjory Langstreet had evidently provided for the purpose.
    By noon, she’d been settled in a seedy rooming house, one door of her tiny room opening onto a rat-infested alley.
    And still there had been no word, no visit, from Charles.
    Sarah waited a week, then began pawning jewelry, a piece at a time, to buy food. Twice, she wrote long letters to her unsuspecting father, telling the shattering truth, but she’d never mailed them.
    She was too ashamed.
    Too heartbroken.
    Several times, when hunger forced her out into the narrow, filthy streets, she’d considered standing on the tracks when the trolley came. It would be over, that way.
    In the end, she couldn’t do that to the baby, or to herself.
    She finally sent a wire to her father, reading simply, I am in trouble, and listing her address at the boardinghouse.
    Within ten days, he’d arrived, bent on taking her home to Stone Creek. She’d told him everything but the name of the man who’d sired her child, and patently refused to return to Arizona Territory. As much as she yearned for her own room, the sound of her mother’s voice, the soothing touch of her hand, Sarah simply hadn’t been able to face the inevitable gossip and speculation.
    Resigned, Ephriam had enrolled her in another college, a small, private one where secrets were kept, and moved her into the dormitory.
    She hadn’t seen Charles again until a week before Owen’s birth, in the college infirmary. They met in the library, Charles and Sarah and Charles’s lawyer. Charles had stiffly informed her that he meant to raise the child as a legitimate heir, with Marjory listed as the legal mother.
    Sarah had had no choice but to comply.
    She’d long since sold the last of her jewelry, her rich clothes and the books. Even the Chinese fan. And she’d promised her clearly disenchanted father she would finish college, no matter what.
    So when her baby boy was born, she’d handed him over to Charles’s lawyer. The loss had been keen, brutal, as though she’d