Chasing Rainbows Read online

  Once the sheriff reached Outlaw Annie and his deputy, he turned to face the citizens of Stony Gulch. “It’s finished,” he stated flatly. “Judge Carter ordered a hanging at noon, and that’s what you got. You folks can all go home now.”

  Howls of protest instantly rose from the crowd.

  Sheriff Cayne greeted the noise with a fierce scowl. “I said, the hanging’s over. Go home, all of you.”

  The court had ordered a hanging, and the sheriff had given it to them. But Jake knew that if Sheriff Roy Cayne had really wanted the woman dead, he’d have tied the noose himself. Instead he’d depended on the incompetence of his deputy, and the bumbling fool hadn’t let him down. Jake’s respect for the sheriff’s cunning doubled; he had obviously been planning this from the beginning.

  The townsfolk, however, clearly had a different feeling on the matter.

  “A hanging means killing, Sheriff, and she’s got it coming!”

  “String her up!”

  “You don’t want to do it, we will!”

  The sheriff stared down the mob for a long minute. “That a fact?” he drawled. He spit out a long stream of tobacco juice, then unpinned the battered tin badge from his vest and held it up. “In that case, you can have this too. I want nothing to do with a town that goes vigilante.”

  The townsfolk fell silent, weighing the threat. Before Roy Cayne had taken the job of sheriff, Stony Gulch had been a haven for rustlers, thieves, outlaws, and renegade Indians. With Cayne gone, it would be only a matter of weeks before the town slid right back into the same lawless morass. Faced with that possibility, the righteous steam that had driven the mob quickly evaporated into the bitter gloom of petulant defeat.

  “If we let her go,” a voice demanded, “what’s to stop her from bringing the whole gang back to town looking for revenge?”

  “She says she has property out in Cooperton,” the sheriff answered. “That’s a good hundred miles from Blackwater Canyon, and a hundred miles again from here.”

  “How do we know that’s where she aims to go? How do we know she ain’t lying?”

  Sheriff Cayne frowned. He tipped back his hat and scratched his head, mulling the problem over as though he hadn’t considered it before. “Now, there’s a good point,” he said. “Appears to me the only way to see that she gets there is to take her there personally.” He paused and surveyed the crowd. “Who’s gonna volunteer to do that?”

  “That’s your job, Sheriff,” a voice answered immediately. “You and your men oughta go.”

  “Fine. We’ll just do that. Then you all can go against the Pete Mundy Gang by yourselves if they do come to town looking trouble.”

  “We got families of our own to protect,” answered a voice from the crowd. “We can’t go off halfway across the territory, risking our skins for the likes of her.”

  The sheriff stared at the citizens of Stony Gulch for a long, shameful minute. “So that’s how it is,” he said. “There’s not one man here willing to see this woman as far as Cooperton.”

  Jake Moran hesitated only briefly. He had learned long ago that the secret to winning wasn’t luck but knowing how to play the cards that he was dealt. This might just be the break that he had been looking for. He had already wasted three months on the trail of the Mundy Gang. Not once had he been able to get close to them. Riding side by side with Outlaw Annie might finally give him the edge he needed to close that gap.

  He paused, considering the task he was about to volunteer for. In all likelihood, it would be nothing but a lengthy ordeal and a major pain in the ass, but even a pair of deuces was better than a handful of nothing. In any event, how much trouble could one woman cause?

  With that thought in mind, he nudged Weed forward. “I’ll see that she gets to Cooperton.”

  A shocked buzz swept through the crowd as all heads immediately swung toward him. Jake ignored the townsfolk’s excited voices and prying eyes, focusing instead on the prisoner.

  Hostile. There was no other word to describe her. Annie’s gaze snapped toward him, responding to his words like the play of gunfire. Her hands dropped to her hips and balled into tight fists, as though she’d been seeking her revolvers and came up instead with only empty air. Undeterred by her lack of weapons, she boldly gave him the once-over, surveying him from head to toe. Her lip curled in naked contempt as she finished her appraisal.

  Jake dismounted and returned her stare. The woman’s clothes were filthy, her face smudged with dirt, her hair lank and flat. Her brown eyes burned with scorn. She was young, just as the sheriff had said, probably not much older than twenty. Despite her relative youth, she exuded a cool confidence that she could handle anything or anybody. A confidence that was ridiculously unfounded, Jake thought, given her present circumstances.

  So this was Outlaw Annie.

  He had heard that she was six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds. He had heard that she had once wrestled a grizzly with nothing but her bare hands — and won. He had heard that she once swam up the Niagara Falls. But the truth belied every rumor he had ever heard. The legendary female gunslinger looked neither immense nor intimidating. She looked like a scrawny pup who had been kicked around one time too many and was determined to fight back.

  He watched as she lifted her hand to brush her hair from her face. Her fingers, he noted, were surprisingly long and sculpted; her wrist was fine and delicately molded. It was difficult to get a read on the rest of her body. She was about average height for a woman, that was all he could tell. There may have been curves beneath her baggy clothes, there may not have been. Not that he gave a damn one way or another.

  The bottom line for him was that she looked manageable. Rough, stubborn, and pure hellion through and through, but manageable.

  “I’ll see that she gets to Cooperton,” he repeated.

  The sheriff studied Jake, as though weighing his words, then looked to the crowd. “Any man here object to Jake Moran seeing Outlaw Annie out of town? Speak up now if you do.”

  Uneasy silence answered him. “It’s done then,” he pronounced decisively.

  Sheriff Cayne reached for his rope. As he pulled it from her throat, Annie flinched and closed her eyes. Then, as though shamed by her show of weakness, she opened her eyes and threw back her shoulders.

  The sheriff gave no sign of noticing either her fear or her bravado. Instead he towered over her, saying in a tone capable of intimidating even the toughest outlaw, “I’m giving you a second chance, missy, but this is the last one you’ll get. I ever hear you’re in trouble with the law again and I’ll hunt you down and hang you myself. Is that clear?”

  Annie simply stared at him, her expression mutinous.

  Sheriff Cayne waited. “You can thank me if you want to.”

  She swallowed hard and, in a raw voice, choked out, “Go to hell, lawman.”

  The sheriff studied her for a long moment, then let out a weary sigh. He turned and drew Jake forward. “Jake Moran, meet Miss Annabel Lee Foster.” He gave Jake a hearty clap on the shoulder. “Congratulations, Jake, she’s all yours.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Annabel Lee Foster shook her head in stunned disbelief. It had to be a trick. They were just trying to fill her mind with hope, to make her believe them, then they were going to string her up again. The fact that they had left the hanging tree and returned to town did little to ease her fear. That was nothing but a low-down, dirty lawman’s trick. She was going to be hanged again, no doubt about it.

  Annie swallowed hard and forced the thought out of her mind. Her stomach was tied in a thousand tight knots, and her knees shook so badly she could barely stand up, but she’d be damned before she would disgrace herself and let her fear show. If it was time for her to leave this earth, she would go the way Doc Mundy had taught her: proud and tall, not cowering and begging for mercy.

  But no matter how hard she tried to turn her thoughts away from the hanging she couldn’t ignore the burning ache that filled her throat. With each breath s
he took, it felt as though a nest of angry hornets was buzzing around inside her neck. The painful sensation served as an inescapable reminder of the dry, searing sting of jute. As if she could ever forget the feel of a rope digging into her neck. With shaking fingers, Annie touched the tender, swollen flesh. No real damage there, she supposed. Not yet, anyway.

  Realizing that her thoughts were only serving to fuel her panic, she turned her attention to the goings-on in the sheriff’s office.

  Sheriff Cayne stood a few feet away, speaking with his deputies. Although she did her best to eavesdrop, their discussion was carried on in tones too low for her to hear. Occasionally they glanced her way, but mostly they ignored her. That was just jim-dandy with her. She’d had more than enough of their attention for one day.

  Standing slightly apart from the others was the stranger who had volunteered to escort her to Cooperton. He stood with one broad shoulder propped against the window frame, his long legs firmly planted, his arms crossed over his chest. He gazed out the window, looking bored and removed from the business going on around him. And though he didn’t appear to be paying the slightest bit of attention to either her or the sheriff and his men, Annie’s instinct told her that he was alert to even the smallest movement in the room.

  Jake Moran. That’s what Sheriff Cayne had called him. Annie searched her memory, but the name meant nothing to her.

  He was a gambler, that much she could tell. He was dressed in black, like a minister, but without any of the shoddy sacrifice so often seen in men of the cloth. His jacket and pants were cut from fine wool serge and emphasized the broadness of his shoulders, his narrowly tapered waist, and his long, powerful legs. Beneath the jacket, he wore a vest of gray silk brocade, with a perfectly starched white linen shirt and narrow black string tie. On his head, he wore the finest silver conch band that she had ever laid eyes on.

  The men Annie had known never wore anything so clean or new, but Jake Moran wore his clothing casually, like a man used to the finer things in life.

  Annie frowned as she studied him. The man had more money on his back in wearing apparel than she had ever spent on clothing in her entire life. That fact alone should have made him the most dandified city-slicker to ever to fall out of a stage and trip over a pile of mule dung. But, despite the fancy trappings he wore, the gambler was lean, muscular, and all male, no doubt about it.

  Her grudging appraisal of his body finished, she turned her attention to his profile. Beautiful. That was the first word that came to mind. Annie qualified it immediately. Fact was, he was too good-looking, she decided. His cheekbones were high and lean, his lips smoothly sensual, his skin bronzed from the sun. He had a firm chin and a straight nose with a bump or two that might have come from gambling with the wrong hombres. His hair was thick and curled slightly about his collar; the color reminded her of the rich brown-black hue of a strong cup of coffee.

  But it was his eyes that captivated Annie the most. She stared at him and thought before finally deciding on a color. Framed by impossibly thick, spiky black lashes, his eyes were the color of a frosty winter sky just before snowfall. They charged his gaze with a hint of danger and the promise of storms to come.

  Annie considered him carefully. The man had been given the kind of looks that would only lead to trouble, she decided. And Annabel Lee Foster had already seen enough trouble to take her to the end of her days. The last thing she needed now was to get tangled up with the likes of him.

  As if reading her thoughts, Jake turned toward her, moving too abruptly for her to avert her eyes. It wouldn’t have mattered even if she had. His expression told her plainly that he’d been aware of — perhaps even slightly amused by — her scrutiny.

  A wave of embarrassed heat spread through her body as his satisfied gaze locked on hers. The gambler studied her in silence, looking as pleased as a hog that had fallen into a mud puddle. Obviously the man was well aware of his appeal and expected women to just fall to pieces if he so much as glanced their way. Well, he had another think coming if he expected her to act like a goose-brained ninny just because God gave him more than his fair share of good looks.

  Refusing to give him an edge of any kind, she immediately took the offensive. Using a tone that the boys in the Mundy Gang would have instantly recognized as a danger signal, she demanded, “What are you looking at, Mr. Fancy-Pants?”

  “I’m looking at you,” he replied, completely unaffected by her barb. He shook his head, not bothering to hide his amusement. “Outlaw Annie.”

  Annie let out a snort of disgust. “Figures.”

  He lifted one dark brow in silent question.

  “Your voice,” she clarified. “Sounds just how I reckoned it would: smoother than a baby’s butt.”

  He smiled, revealing a set of perfectly straight pearly-white teeth. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Suit yourself. I damned sure didn’t mean it as one.”

  His smile widened. “You don’t waste your bullets, do you, darlin’?”

  Annie eyed him levelly, her fists planted firmly on her hips. “Never,” she answered. “And I don’t miss, neither. ’Specially when I aim for the heart.”

  “Then we ought to get along just fine.” Although his expression didn’t change, an icy frost returned to his eyes. “I believe you’ll find that’s my least vulnerable spot.”

  In that instant, Annie knew why his eyes had looked so familiar, and felt like a fool for not recognizing it earlier. Jake Moran had killer eyes. She’d run with the gang long enough to recognize eyes like that when she saw them: charming one minute, hollow and deadly the next. The eyes of a man who had killed before and would kill again.

  Bearing that in mind, Annie regarded him in silence, sizing him up. He talked like a Southerner, she noted, catching a slight, lazy drawl that clung to his words. Interesting. The information didn’t serve any immediate purpose, but it might come in handy later. Despite the man’s relaxed posture, there was a predatory feel about him, a shadowy darkness that reminded her of a hungry cougar lurking in a cave. He was hunting for something, she’d bet her best pair of buckskins on it.

  Their standoff was finally broken by Sheriff Cayne. “Listen here, missy, you oughta be grateful to Jake,” he interjected. “He’s the only man in town who volunteered to take you. If it weren’t for him, you’d be swinging from that old oak right now.”

  Annie spun around to glare at the sheriff. “So?”

  “So maybe you shouldn’t go looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “Why not?” she shot back immediately. Her attention returning to Jake, her gaze moved over him in cool disdain, then her eyes locked deliberately on his. “What do I want with a stable full of useless, fancy-footed mealy-mouthed old nags — even if they are all free?”

  Jake gracefully inclined his head, apparently not the least bit offended by her words. “That’s mighty flattering, darlin’.”

  The sheriff sighed and shook his head, tacitly admitting defeat by changing the subject “Here they are,” he said, tossing a burlap sack on his desk. “All your worldly goods.”

  Annie reluctantly shifted her attention from Jake to the bag. “Less what you and your men stole,” she muttered beneath her breath, moving to inspect her belongings. Meager though they were, everything appeared to be in order. With one major exception.

  “My guns, Sheriff. What’d you do with my guns?”

  “Ah, that’s right,” Sheriff Cayne exclaimed with a smile. “I can’t forget those, now, can I?” He passed her an empty set of holsters.

  Annie slung them around her hips and waited impatiently. Without her guns to fill them, the holsters were about as useless as a milk bucket under a bull. When the sheriff still didn’t move, she prompted, “Colt .45’s, walnut grip, snub-nosed barrel, and the initials A.F. carved into the stock.”

  “The way I figure it,” the sheriff replied, “Outlaw Annie wore guns, not Miss Annabel Foster. You’re turning over a new leaf, don’t forget. Besides, wi
th Jake along to protect you, you won’t be needing those guns.”

  So that’s where this was heading. Annie took a deep breath, barely managing to hold on to her temper. “I don’t want protection, Sheriff. I want my guns.”

  The sheriff frowned as he considered her statement. “Tell you what I’ll do,” he said, withdrawing her Colts from a locked cabinet. “I’ll let Jake hold your guns. He’s a reasonable fella. If you’re a real good girl and don’t cause him no trouble, I’m sure he’ll give ’em back to you. Ain’t that right, Jake?”

  Jake shrugged.

  Annie clenched her fists. She was as angry over the gambler’s cool disinterest as she was at Sheriff Cayne for his high-handedness. Without her guns, she felt as naked and defenseless as a newborn cub. “That’s my property, you hear me?” she said tightly.

  “Appears to me,” Jake said slowly, “that’s my decision now. You planning on acting like a real lady?”

  “What the hell would you know about real ladies, you no-account, thieving, hustling—”

  “You can keep the guns, Sheriff.”

  “No!”

  Jake slowly smiled. “Does that mean I have your word that you’ll be good, darlin’?”

  He held the upper hand in the argument and they both knew it. Any more words from her would just strain her throat, and Lord knew that had already had enough wear for one day. Annie swallowed her rage and choked out an answer.

  “Yes.”

  She watched in impotent fury as the sheriff passed Jake her guns.

  “Don’t worry, darlin’. I’ll keep them warm for you,” he said as he tucked them into his belt.

  He was deliberately goading her now. The smartest thing for her to do would be to shut up. But Annie had never been one to back down from a fight, even when she was on the losing end. “That’s about all you’ll do,” she spit out. “Bet you can’t even fire them. You look like a palm-gun man to me.”