A Mail-Order Christmas Bride Read online

  “I’ll get him,” she went on as she went to the hook where her coat hung near the door.

  “All right,” Shawn said grudgingly. “But wrap up good before you go out. That wind sounds like it’s really starting to kick up out there.”

  Abby put on the coat and wrapped a scarf around her head. As soon as she opened the door and stepped onto the porch, she knew the pleasant weather of the past few days was long gone. The wind howled like hungry wolves, and it was cold enough that it took her breath away as she hurried across the open space between the house and the barn. Just enough gray light was left in the sky for her to see where she was going.

  Wes hadn’t lit the lantern inside the barn. It was dark in there, Abby saw as she pulled one side of the double doors open.

  “Wes?” she called. “Wes, it’s time to come in the house now!”

  There was no answer. She stepped through the opening and said again, “Wes!”

  This time she got a response, but it wasn’t the one she wanted. Chester came out of the shadows, squawking and flapping. Abby said, “Oh!” and jumped aside. The goose rushed past her and charged off into the gloom.

  “Chester!” she cried. “Come back here!”

  That was no use, and she knew it immediately. The goose never did what he was told, even under the best of circumstances. She didn’t want anything to happen to him, but she was more worried about Wes right now.

  That worry turned to fear in the next few minutes as she searched the barn, calling his name, but found no sign of him.

  If he wasn’t in the barn, that meant he was outside somewhere, in his shirtsleeves, in the middle of a blue norther. An unprotected child might freeze to death in weather like that.

  Unless he had seen her looking for him and had gotten back to the house somehow, she told herself. She clung to that hope, but fear gnawed at her anyway as she hurried toward the house.

  She burst in and asked, “Did Wes come back in here?”

  Shawn was standing by the fireplace. He looked sharply at her and frowned.

  “What do you mean, did he come back in here? You went to get him.”

  “He’s not in the barn,” Abby said with the ragged edge of hysteria in her voice. “I can’t find him! He’s not around here anywhere!”

  “He’s got to be around,” Shawn said as he took a long-legged stride away from the fire. “He wouldn’t run off. Not in this weather.”

  “He was so upset that there’s no telling what he might do.”

  He yanked his jacket off the peg and shrugged into it, saying, “I reckon I know my boy better than you do.”

  “I’m not disputing that, but you really jerked his hopes out from under him, Shawn.”

  “False hopes,” he said as he jammed his Stetson down on his head.

  “They didn’t have to be.”

  But maybe they did now. If anything happened to Wes, then Shawn was right: what might have been, never could be.

  Think about that later, she told herself. Right now, they both had to concentrate on finding Wes.

  “I’m coming with you,” she said.

  Shawn paused with his hand on the doorknob.

  “No, stay here,” he told her. “I’ll find him.”

  “We’ll double our chances if we both look.”

  “You’ll just stand there and argue with me until the New Year, won’t you?”

  “I will as long as I’m right.”

  He sighed and jerked his head as he opened the door.

  “Come on, then. Just don’t wander off. I don’t need two lost souls to be looking for tonight.”

  He ought to be counting his own as well, she thought. That would make three.

  She tightened the scarf around her head and followed him onto the porch.

  “I’ll go that way,” she said, pointing.

  “All right. No more than a couple of hundred yards, though. It’s started to snow, and you don’t know how fast and thick it can come down during a norther. It’s easy to get turned around, even when you’re close to shelter.”

  “All the more reason to find Wes as quickly as we can.”

  He just grunted and set off in the other direction. Abby held the coat closed tightly around her as she headed the opposite way.

  The snow was light so far, tiny flakes that tapped against her cheeks and gathered on her eyelashes. She blinked them away and called Wes’s name again and again. Once or twice she thought she heard Shawn shouting, too, but the gusts snatched the words away before she could make them out.

  She was going into the wind. It pushed against her like a giant hand trying to hold her back. The snow began to fall hard enough that it stung. When she had gone what she judged to be a hundred yards, she looked down and saw that the ground was turning white as the stuff collected. That wasn’t possible, was it? Not so soon?

  Shawn knew these northers better than she did. This one was brutal, all right, no doubt about that, and her fear for Wes’s safety grew stronger as the storm did. It pushed her onward.

  A man shouted somewhere ahead of her. Shawn? No, that couldn’t be, she thought with a shake of her head. He’d been behind her. She supposed he could have circled around...or maybe she had lost her way in the snow and the shadows and had been going in circles herself. She cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “Wes!”

  “Abby!”

  Her heart leaped. That was his voice. She started forward in a stumbling run, crying, “Wes! Wes! Here! Come to me!”

  He came out of the wind-swirled snow, running toward her, and she fell to her knees to gather him into her arms. He had to be half-frozen by now.

  Instead of welcoming her embrace, he struggled against it and said, “No, no! We’ve got to run—”

  Three large, dark shapes loomed up around them without warning. Abby felt a surge of terror. They were like monsters coming out of the snow.

  They were human, though. A man’s voice said, “You’re not going anywhere, boy. We’ve got you now.”

  “Abby, run!” Wes screamed as one of the men reached down and grabbed him, pulling him out of Abby’s grip. As she started to her feet, a hand closed on her arm as well and jerked her around.

  Horror filled her as Jake Banning put his leering face close to her and said, “You’re gonna freeze out here, honey. You better let me warm you up.”

  “That’s enough, Banning,” snapped the man who was holding Wes. “We’ve got the boy. He’s the one we came for.”

  “What about Killian?” Frank Dobbs asked. He was the third man, along with Banning and the stranger. “You want him, too, don’t you?”

  “I’d like to take him back with me if I could, but it’s actually the boy I’m after.”

  Wes was still struggling in the man’s grip. He tightened it until Wes cried out in pain.

  “Stop fighting,” the man said harshly. “I’m going to take you home.”

  “Hudson!”

  That furious bellow came from Shawn as he plunged out of the darkness. Maybe he had heard the voices, or maybe some other instinct had led him here. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was going to fight for his son. He slammed a fist into the stranger’s face and knocked him backward.

  The man hung on to Wes and shouted, “Get him!”

  Abby tried to break free from Banning, but he forced her cruelly to her knees.

  “You’re stayin’ out of it, lady,” he grated at her.

  Shawn whirled around as Dobbs leaped at him. Dobbs had his gun out, and terror stabbed deep into Abby as she thought the man was going to shoot Shawn.

  Instead, the revolver rose and fell with brutal force against Shawn’s head, knocking his hat off and driving him to the ground. Dobbs leaned over and hit him again as Abby sobbed in fear and futile rage.

  Hudson had recovered his balance and still had a hand clamped around Wes’s arm.

  “I hope you didn’t kill him,” Hudson said to Dobbs, “because he’s got a lot worse coming to him than that.
Let’s get them all back to the house.” He turned his head and nodded to Abby. “And thank you for your help, Miss Demarest. Perhaps your employer will give you a bonus for all your excellent work.”

  Chapter 10

  The inside of Shawn’s head felt like a blacksmith hammering on an anvil. It took him a while to figure out that every miserable bang of pain was his blood pulsing through his brain.

  Since he was already hurting so bad anyway, he figured he might as well go ahead and open his eyes and wake up the rest of the way.

  When he did, his vision wouldn’t focus for a few seconds. Blurry shapes were all he saw. A couple of pale blobs floated in front of him.

  Then his vision cleared and he realized he was looking at the strained faces of Abby and Wes. An incoherent cry bolted from his mouth before he could stop it.

  “It’s all right, Keller,” a smooth, hateful voice said. “I already knew you were awake.”

  Shawn’s muscles spasmed instinctively. He wanted to throw himself at Cecil Hudson so badly that he shuddered.

  But he couldn’t move, and after a second, he realized that was because he was tied to one of the chairs that normally sat by the table. A couple of them had been pulled into the center of the room.

  Abby was sitting in the other chair, with Wes in her lap. Shawn breathed a prayer of thanks that they appeared to be all right. As far as he could tell, neither of them was tied, but Banning and Dobbs were standing nearby, hands resting on gun butts.

  With a self-satisfied smirk on his face, the tall, potbellied, pasty-faced Hudson stood to one side of Shawn. He said, “I’ll bet you’re wondering how I found you, aren’t you, Keller?”

  “My name,” Shawn said hoarsely, “is Shawn Killian.”

  “Nonsense.” Hudson’s reply was brisk. “You’re Stephen Keller, and the boy is your son William. You forget, I’ve seen both of you on numerous occasions.”

  “At their house,” Shawn said, unable to keep the loathing out of his voice.

  “At the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Chandler, yes, of course. I don’t believe you ever spoke to me, though.” Hudson’s lip curled even more. “I’m just the hired help, after all.”

  “Yeah, I heard all about you. Lily was afraid of you.”

  “Miss Lillian never had any reason to be frightened of me.”

  “She said there were rumors you’d killed people,” Shawn forged on. “Gotten rid of them on Abner Chandler’s orders. Rivals of his, so you always made it look like an accident, or a burglary, or some other crime that didn’t have anything to do with Chandler’s business.”

  He didn’t want Wes hearing these terrible things about his grandfather. He’d hoped to be able to keep the truth from the boy from now on. But Abby needed to know what sort of ruthless men they were dealing with.

  “You’re insane,” Hudson said calmly. “Those are just rumors. I’ve never been in trouble with the law.”

  “That’s because you’re good at what you do.”

  Hudson cocked his head to the side, smiled, and said, “Indeed, I am.” He clasped his hands together in front of him. “But you still haven’t answered my question. Don’t you wonder how I was able to find you?”

  Shawn didn’t answer. He didn’t want to listen to anything Hudson had to say.

  “You have Miss Demarest to thank for that.”

  Shawn’s head snapped up involuntarily.

  “Abby?” he exclaimed. He looked across at her. “Abby, what’s he talking about?”

  She looked like somebody was carving her guts out with a dull knife. When she didn’t say anything, Hudson continued, “You see, Miss Demarest was sent here by an agency, all right, but not a matrimonial agency. She’s an operative for one of the leading private detective agencies in the country.”

  Shawn stared at her and after a handful of seconds forced out a question.

  “Is that true?”

  Abby still didn’t answer, but he could tell by the look on her face that it was.

  “She was sent here with that story about some sort of mail-order bride mix-up,” Hudson went on, “but her real task was to confirm that Shawn Killian of Briar Hill, Texas, was actually Stephen Keller, late of Fort Worth. I realize that Texas is a very large state, but really, you should have run further. To California, perhaps, although I would have found you there as well. You couldn’t have expected to get away, not after stealing a young boy from his loving grandparents. His legal guardians.”

  “Loving, hell,” Shawn growled. “They don’t give a hoot about him. Abner Chandler just can’t stand for anybody to beat him at anything. That’s why he sends you after anybody who does!”

  “That’s not what the court said.”

  “Only because Chandler paid off that crooked judge to take Wes away from me!”

  Abby finally spoke up, saying, “Shawn, you have to believe me. I didn’t know about any of that when I was given this job. All I knew was what I was told: that you had taken Wes away from his grandparents illegally, and they wanted him back.”

  His voice was as cold as the wind keening outside as he said, “That letter you sent...”

  “It was to an agency operative in San Antonio. I didn’t know that he was already here in Texas when I sent it.”

  The loathing with which she looked at Hudson as she spoke equaled Shawn’s own. But it didn’t change anything, he thought grimly.

  Hudson laughed and said, “I was just waiting for confirmation that you were the right one, Keller, and when I got it, I ‘rode like the wind’, as they put it in the dime novels, to get here. I was asking in the settlement for directions to your ranch when I ran into these two gentlemen.” He nodded toward Banning and Dobbs. “It quickly developed that they have grudges of their own against you, and they were only too willing to assist me in recovering the lad...albeit for a price.”

  “I’d almost take care o’ you for free, Killian,” Banning said. “Almost.”

  Abby’s gaze bored into Shawn’s with such intensity that it seemed for a moment they were alone here, that all the forces threatening them had gone away somehow. She said, “Shawn, I’m begging you to forgive me. I didn’t know the truth...but I could see it all along in the way you act. I can see how much you love Wes. I can see what a good man you are.”

  “Oh, please,” Hudson said, rolling his eyes.

  Abby ignored him and went on, “I...I thought about writing to the operative in San Antonio and telling him that we had it all wrong, that you were really Shawn Killian, not this man Stephen Keller. I came so close to doing that. I thought...I dreamed...that maybe you and I might...that we could be a family, like in Wes’s drawing...but I had my duty...” She drew in a deep breath, and her back stiffened. “We’ll go back and fight them, Shawn. I’ll help you, and so will everyone else at the agency. Now that we know the judge was bribed, we’ll find the proof of that. We won’t let them take Wes away from you.”

  “That’s enough!” Hudson said. “It’s already going to be a long enough ride back to the settlement in this terrible weather. I’ll take the boy now.”

  He stepped toward the chair where Abby and Wes sat, holding out his hand. Wes flinched away from him, and Abby tightened her arms around him.

  “My patience is exhausted,” Hudson muttered. His arm swung out suddenly. The back of his hand smashed against Abby’s cheek and knocked her off the chair to the floor. That jolted Wes out of her arms. Hudson grabbed the boy before he could try to get away and started dragging him toward the door.

  “What do you want us to do?” Dobbs asked.

  “Take care of things, of course,” Hudson said.

  He stalked out, forcing the struggling youngster with him. Cold air whipped through the room while the door was open, but then it slammed shut.

  The inside of Shawn’s belly was even colder, because he knew that Cecil Hudson had just ordered these two hardcases to kill him and Abby.

  Chapter 11

  Abby had been in a few dangerous situations during he
r career as a detective, but she knew she had never been as close to death as she was right now. Clearly, Hudson was as ruthless as Shawn claimed, and the man didn’t want to leave any witnesses behind. He could claim that she and Shawn were still alive when he left with Wes, which was true as far as it went, and speculate that Shawn had killed her for betraying him, then turned the gun on himself.

  She might deserve such a fate, but Shawn didn’t. As Hudson left the house with Wes, Abby moaned and pushed herself up into a sitting position on the floor. She acted more groggy from Hudson’s blow than she actually was.

  “Ohhh,” she moaned. “I...I feel like I’m...going to pass out.”

  “That ain’t gonna matter,” Dobbs said. “You won’t be feeling much of anything soon.”

  “Shoot, Dobbsy,” Banning said with his usual lecherous grin. “Let the lady get her wits about her. I thought we’d have a little fun before we take care o’ business.”

  “Forget it,” Dobbs snapped. He rested his hand on the butt of his gun and muttered, “Soon as that kid’s outta earshot...”

  “Please,” Abby begged. “There are smelling salts in my bag, over there on the table. I...I’d rather have a clear head, no matter what’s going to happen to me.”

  She glanced over at Shawn. He was watching her with a peculiar look on his face. A look of...could it be admiration? He couldn’t know what she was trying to do, but he seemed to realize she was up to something.

  Don’t give it away, she begged him silently. Please don’t give it away.

  Banning sauntered over to the table and picked up the bag.

  “Jake, what are you doing?” Dobbs asked.

  “A lady’s got a right to a last request, don’t she? Even one who belongs to the great stone face.” Banning grinned. “Hey, let’s take care o’ her first. That might get rid of that blank look on Killian’s face. Or Keller, or whatever his name is.”

  “All right, go ahead and give her the bag, then check and see if Hudson and the boy are gone.”

  Banning picked up the bag and walked toward Abby. She said a silent prayer that he wouldn’t decide to paw through it himself, looking for the non-existent smelling salts.