For the Roses (Claybornes' Brides (Rose Hill) 1)

The unsought distinction had cost him his engagement to Lady Edwina Horner, who informed him in a letter that she couldn’t abide being married to a scandal-setter, whatever in God’s name that meant. Men who still called themselves his friend tried to warn him that he had to get over his ridiculous notion that the poor in England should be entitled to the same rights as the rich. Harrison, however, refused to accept such an elitist, self-serving view.

“Maybe them laws in England are different from our laws,” Ghost suggested. He strolled back across the room and gave Harrison a hopeful look. “I’m thinking that maybe I wouldn’t get hanged, if I stole the horse, because Lloyd started the dirt first.”

Harrison shook his head. Ghost, it appeared, wasn’t ready to give up his plan.

“I’ve studied enough American law to know you’ll still be found guilty.”

“Even though he wasn’t on the square and he started the dirt first?”

While Harrison wasn’t familiar with either of those odd expressions, he still felt he was giving sound advice. “Even so.”

Another round of questions followed. All the curious who’d started out watching him from across the saloon had filed over to Harrison’s table and now formed a half circle. None of them seemed to be in any particular hurry to get on with their day.

The doors to the saloon suddenly flew open. “Miss Mary’s coming. Cole’s riding behind her.”

The man who shouted the announcement bounded off at a trot down the walkway.

The reaction to the news was astonishing to witness. Every single one of the men jumped to his feet and ran outside. Dooley was almost knocked to his knees in the stampede. He eventually regained his balance and turned back to Harrison.

“Ain’t you coming along? You ought to at least take a peek at our Miss Mary. She’s worth your time.”

Because Dooley might have thought it peculiar if Harrison hadn’t shown an interest, he got up from the table and followed the old man out the doorway. Harrison wasn’t in any hurry to meet the young woman, however, and Dooley was already down the block and halfway across the street before Harrison reached the hitching post in front of the corner building.

His hunt could very well end in just a few minutes. Harrison was suddenly filled with all sorts of conflicting emotions. He had made a promise to Lord Elliot that this adventure would be his last attempt to solve this puzzle, and if Elliot turned out to be correct, then traveling all this distance had been just another wild-goose chase.

He let out a weary sigh. The facts, Elliot had argued, were indisputable. Mary Rose Clayborne couldn’t possibly be his daughter. Victoria was an only child. Mary Rose had four older brothers. Yet while that information had been verified by the attorney in St. Louis, the man had also included several other comments Harrison found intriguing. Mary Rose had been on her guard throughout the interview and refused to give even the names of her brothers. The attorney reported that although she’d been extremely polite, it was apparent to him that she was afraid. The superior hadn’t been able to persuade the young lady to cooperate.

The headmistress had proven most helpful however. She told the attorney that two of Mary Rose’s brothers had traveled with their sister to the school at the beginning of each term. She hadn’t met either one, hadn’t even seen them at a distance, and, therefore, couldn’t describe the gentlemen. She had heard a disturbing rumor about one of the brothers, but she refused to give the attorney any details.

She declared she wasn’t a gossip and that Mary Rose was a model student, once she’d made the adjustment to life in a boarding school, and the vile rumor one of the girls had started was quickly stopped. No one would ever have believed it anyway, of course. Gossip was for peasants and not for proper young ladies.

She couldn’t be pressed for more.

Harrison shook his head. Gossip couldn’t be relied on, of course. It was probably just as Elliot had predicted it would be. Another case of two women looking somewhat alike. Elliot had urged Harrison to let it go, as the older man himself finally had, and accept the soul-destroying evidence that little Victoria Elliott had died shortly after she’d been taken. In his heart, Harrison knew Elliott was right, but every time he looked at the man who had protected Harrison’s father for so many years, he would become compelled to go on just one more hunt.

Harrison believed he was a realist, yet even so, his gut instinct had told him to go to Montana and find out the truth for himself. He wasn’t completely grasping at rainbows. He had already been in America when he had received the wire regarding the latest sighting, and Chicago was just a day’s ride away from where he’d been staying. It didn’t take him any time at all to go to the outskirts of the city to talk to the woman who believed she’d met Elliott’s daughter. After talking to Mrs. Anna Middleshaw and hearing the report of the attorney he’d then had interview Mary Rose, he decided it would be worth his while to go into the wilderness. Mrs. Middleshaw didn’t appear to be a woman given to theatrics or emotion. She was actually quite level-headed. She believed with all her heart that she had seen Lady Victoria. Her argument was valid. No one, she said, could look that much like another without being related. Harrison wanted to believe she was right.

He braced himself for disappointment and stepped off the wooden walkway. The gleam of metal caught his attention. He half turned to look back down the walkway and saw what looked like a shotgun barrel protruding from an alley about fifteen feet away. Whoever held the weapon had it trained on the group of people standing in front of the general store.

Harrison recognized Henry and Ghost and Dooley, but there were three other men he’d never seen before standing in a circle on the opposite walkway. A man with light yellow hair stood next to Henry, but when he took a step back, the barrel of the rifle came up. Yellow Hair moved again almost immediately, however, and Dooley inadvertently blocked him from ambush. The barrel of the rifle, Harrison noticed, lowered once again.

He decided he would interfere. The group of men filed inside the general store. Harrison removed his coat on his way across the road, tossed it over the hitching post in front of the walkway, and then went inside.

The scent of leather and spices filled the air around him. The store was large, about the size of one of Elliott’s stables back home. There was a wide aisle that ran the length of the store, and two other smaller aisles on either side. Weighted-down, bowed shelves were lined with jars of food, piles of clothing, leather goods, picks and shovels, and so much more the eye could barely take it all in. The entire store was built out of several different kinds of wood, though mostly pine, just like the rest of the buildings in town.

Harrison had never seen such a disorganized, stuffed-to-the-rafters establishment in all his life. His obsession with discipline and order made him mentally blanch at the chaos before him. Bolts of colorful fabric were haphazardly stacked into a lopsided pyramid on top of a round table in one corner of the store, next to three giant-size pickle barrels. He watched an unkempt man reach down and take out a large pickle from the brine, then wipe his wet hand on the edge of a lace fabric that drooped down from a bolt over the side of the table. The material fell to the floor, barring the man’s path, and so he simply stepped over the bolt on his way back to the front of the establishment.

Working amid such chaos would have driven Harrison out of his mind. How in God’s name did the proprietor ever find anything?

Harrison let out a sigh, put the matter out of his mind, then moved to the side of the entrance where he planned to stay until he spotted Yellow Hair in the crowd.

Where in thunder was the man? Harrison was at least a head taller than everyone else inside the store, yet still couldn’t find Yellow Hair. He couldn’t have disappeared into thin air. though in this mess Harrison guessed anything was possible.

Dooley waved to him from the left side of the store. The old man stood in front of a counted, talking in a whisper to a pretty brown-haired young lady. She had to be the owner’s daughter, th

e one named Catherine Morrison. Dooley motioned for him to come over to the counter, but Harrison shook his head and stayed right where he was. He didn’t want to take the chance of missing Yellow Hair. If Dooley thought his behavior was rude, Harrison neither minded nor cared.

A few minutes later he heard Dooley say something about “being shy.” Since Dooley was looking at him when he made the comment, Harrison assumed he was referring to him. The notion was ridiculous.

The Morrison woman caught his attention when she waved at him. She leaned halfway over the countertop and gave him a provocative, come-and-meet-me smile. He didn’t smile back. He wasn’t in the mood to be social right now, for he felt that warning the stranger was more important.

He didn’t normally interfere in another man’s affairs, but he fervently believed in equal treatment and fair play. Ambushing an unsuspecting man was a damned cowardly thing to do, and Harrison could never abide a coward.

He ran out of patience. He decided he was going to have to go find the man, but just as he started to move, Yellow Hair appeared at the end of the main aisle, carrying a sack of wheat or flour he’d hoisted up on one shoulder. While Harrison waited for him to get to the entrance, a young woman skirted her way around Yellow Hair and came hurrying toward Harrison.

Dear God, she was Lady Victoria. The beautiful young woman walking toward him had to be Elliott’s long-lost daughter. She was the spitting image of the man’s late wife. At the first sight of her high cheekbones and her brilliant blue eyes, Harrison took a deep breath and forgot to let it out. Astonishment paralyzed him. His heart started thundering inside his chest until it became painful, and he was finally forced to breathe again.

He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The lovely woman looked as if she had just stepped out of the oil portrait of Lady Agatha that hung above the fireplace in Elliott’s library. The clothes were different, yes; yes, of course they were, but by all that was holy, even the spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose seemed to be identical. Harrison suddenly didn’t care how many brothers she had. It was just as Mrs. Middleshaw had said. No one could look this much like another without being related.

Mary Rose Clayborne. The closer she got to him, the more subtle differences became discernible. Her eyes were a little paler in color than her mother’s in the portrait of her as a young woman. Harrison let out a sigh of frustration. The exotic, almost almond shape of her eyes and her facial bone structure seemed to be the same as her mother’s; yet, now that she was coming closer to him, he couldn’t be absolutely certain. Hell, she even looked a little bit like Yellow Hair. She had the same color of hair. No, the color wasn’t quite the same. Hers was a lighter yellow streaked with honey-colored strands throughout. God, she was beautiful, but she could still be Yellow Hair’s younger sister, and hell and damnation, how could that be possible when she looked so much like Elliott’s wife?

He’d been too young when he’d last seen Lady Agatha to remember significant details now about her physical appearance. He had been only ten when she and her husband left for America to attend the grand opening of their plant near New York City. He remembered foolish little-boy things about her, such as the wonderful way she smelled, like flowers after the rain, and the way she smiled at him, with such love and kindness in her eyes. He remembered the warmth and tenderness of her hug, but all of those memories, treasured though they were by a boy who had lost his own mother, weren’t going to help him.

He had never seen Lady Agatha again. After her return to London, she’d stayed in her bedchamber day and night, clothed in black, he’d been told, and closeted away in darkness while she mourned the disappearance of her fourmonth-old daughter.

Was the woman walking toward him Lady Victoria? God help him, he didn’t know.

His mind frantically sought for a way to find the truth. Then he remembered what Dooley and the other men had told him about Mary Rose Clayborne. She was the champion of the weak. Hadn’t Dooley also told him that she drove her brothers crazy because she was constantly dragging misfits home with her?

Harrison suddenly had a new plan.

He was no longer going to be the meanest son-of-a-bitch who ever hit town. That charade had gotten him the information he needed and acceptance by the men in the saloon. The pretense wouldn’t work now, at least not with Mary Rose Clayborne. She liked odd ducks, and so he decided to become just that. He was going to be a bumbling, naive city boy who didn’t have enough common sense to stay alive. He only hoped he could pull the deception off.

Mary Rose Clayborne noticed the stranger almost immediately. He had his arms crossed in front of his chest and was leaning against the ledge of Morrison’s window. He was a giant of a man, impossible, really, not to notice, with dark brown hair and wonderfully expressive gray eyes. He was handsome, she supposed, in a rugged, outdoors way, but appearances weren’t important to her. He certainly looked unhappy to her. Honest to heaven, he looked pale enough to make her think he’d seen something very distressing.

Like a ghost, she thought to herself. She smiled then, because it was such a silly notion. Only Ghost ever saw spirits from the other world, and only after he’d dipped into his homemade brew that guaranteed visions. A ghost, indeed.

Still, she wished he didn’t look so unhappy. She decided to introduce herself to him. Perhaps he would tell her what was worrying him. She might be able to help.

Just as quickly as the idea to meet him came to her, she decided against it, because she’d finally noticed he was wearing one of those fancy gunbelts around his hips. A six-shooter was neatly tucked into the holster. Mary Rose realized the stranger could very well be just another gunfighter in town for the sole purpose of antagonizing her brother into a gunfight, and, by God, if that was the case, she wasn’t about to be gracious or helpful. Why, she might even shoot him herself.

She knew she was jumping to conclusions. She decided her best course of action was to ignore him. She reached the entrance and tried to open the door for her brother. Cole was right behind her, but his hands were occupied holding the sack on his shoulder.

Harrison quickly moved to block her exit. He leaned against the door and waited for her to look up at him.

She took her sweet time.

“I wouldn’t go outside just yet, ma’am.”

“You wouldn’t?”

He shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t.”

She stared stupidly up at his face. He finally smiled. She almost smiled back. She stopped herself in time. She stood only a foot away from him and, therefore, had to tilt her head all the way back so she could get a close-up look at his eyes. There was a definite sparkle there, she noticed. She couldn’t imagine what he found so amusing. His color was back as well, and he smelled quite nice to her. Like the outdoors and leather, she decided, and because his skin was so bronzed, she knew he spent a good deal of time in the sun.

Mary Rose shook herself out of her stupor. “Why don’t I want to go outside?” she asked.

Harrison knew he was going to have to quit staring at her so he could answer her question. God, she was pretty. He noticed her scent, so light and faint, very like the scent her mother used to wear, and, hell, he knew he was behaving like a schoolboy, but he couldn’t make himself stop. He couldn’t stop smiling down at her either, because she was so damned lovely, of course, but also because it was both possible and impossible for her to be Elliott’s daughter.

Reality was quick to bring him back to the present.

“Open the door, Mary Rose,” Yellow Hair ordered. He was staring at Harrison when he muttered the impatient command.

“This gentleman doesn’t want us to leave just yet,” she answered. She turned to her brother and lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t know why.”

Cole glared at Harrison. His tone was scathing when he said, “Look, mister, there are easier ways of getting an introduction. If you want to meet my sister, wait until I unload this. Then maybe I’ll let you talk to her.”

Mary Rose couldn’t let the stranger be misled. “He won’t let you talk to me though,” she explained. “My brother never lets me talk to strangers. My name’s Mary Rose Clayborne. And who are you, pray tell?”

“Harrison Stanford MacDonald.”

She nodded. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. MacDonald. May I go outside now?”

“I’d like to talk to your brother first,” he said.

She backed up a space and stepped on her brother’s foot. “Are you a gunfighter?”

She made the question sound like an accusation. She didn’t give him time to answer, having obviously concluded that he was. She frowned up at him and shook her head.

“You can just forget about getting my brother into a draw. He isn’t at all interested. I suggest you leave Blue Belle, sir. You aren’t welcome here.”

“For God’s sake, Mary Rose. I can talk for myself. You a gunfighter, mister?”

Harrison shook his head. He was thoroughly bewildered by the turn in the conversation. “No,” he answered. “I’m not a gunfighter.” He turned back to Mary Rose. “Exactly what is it you think I’m here to draw?”

Her eyes widened. “Cole, he doesn’t know what a draw is. Where are you from, Mr. MacDonald?”

“Scotland.”

She frowned over his answer. “Why are you in Blue Belle?”

“I’m looking for a place to settle down.”

“Then you aren’t here to fight my brother?”

She stopped frowning at him, but her voice was still filled with suspicion. It was apparent she wasn’t completely convinced.

He decided to answer her question with one of his own. “Why would I want to do that, ma’am. I don’t even know your brother.”

She let out a happy sigh. “Well, then,” she whispered. She brushed her hair back over her shoulder, in an action he found utterly feminine, and smiled sweetly up at him.

“I didn’t think you were a gunfighter, but I couldn’t be absolutely certain. When I think . . .”