Double Chance Claim [Badlands 3] (Siren Publishing Menage Amour) (15 page)

They dozed in each other’s arms. Woke and made love again and again throughout the afternoon.

After a third such foray into carnal pleasures, Maggie released a long sigh, slipped next to Wyatt’s side and hugged him tight. “I think it’s been longer than two hours since we started this honeymoon.”

Wyatt laughed and planted a soft kiss on her cheek and whispered, “But so worth it. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Maggie was about to ask if she could take him up on the previously mentioned hot bath down the street, but the sound of breaking glass made them both sit up in bed. A few moments later, a muffled clatter came from inside the saloon.

Someone had just broken in and intruded on their wedded bliss.

* * * *

“Lucky we identified this poor soul as being Sadie’s partner, Henry, before we had to uncover the entire body,” Sheriff Vanguard remarked. He stood straight, and Wade heard his knees crack twice before he backed away from the pile. Wade hefted the final stone back in place on the recently uncovered grave and straightened, too.

“Yeah. We’re
lucky
all right.” Wade didn’t hide the sarcasm in his tone. He wiped the accumulated sweat off his brow with one swipe of his forearm and stepped away from the pile of odious rocks concealing the unfortunate person still resting there.

Vanguard took the identifying piece of evidence and secured it in the knapsack strapped to his saddle.

“You want to offer any thoughts as to who might have done this horrible thing?”

Wade threw his hands in the air. “How should I know? I’ve only lived here for three months. This poor guy’s been dead for at least six.”

Vanguard shook his head. “I still can’t believe you’ve traveled by this place so many times and never saw the rocks before now.”

“Like I said before, it’s my first time in the light of day. I only went past this spot in the pre-dawn morning every other time.”

“Why were you sneaking out of Campbell’s Valley again?”

“Because I have a confidential mission I don’t want to reveal.”

“And the secret isn’t that you murdered some poor man for wandering too close to your property?”

Wade rolled his eyes. “No. It’s something else entirely.”

Vanguard raised his gaze to the leafy trees above and released a long sigh. “You’ll have to accompany me back to Campbell’s Valley. At best as a witness to the discovery of this crime, and at worst, as a suspect.”

“I’m neither a witness nor a criminal. I didn’t see anyone get shot nor did I shoot anyone.”

“Well, that remains to be seen.” Vanguard pulled his weapon from the holster on his hip. “I don’t want to have to use this, but I will.”

“Christ. This is ridiculous.”

Vanguard waved his gun. “Maybe so, but we aren’t leaving here until either you explain yourself or agree to come back to town with me.”

“If I come back, everyone in town will know Wyatt and I are twins. It will breed distrust. Distrust will lead to folks coming up here to see what we are doing. We don’t want anyone to know. Seems like a man has a right to privacy on his own land.”

“Maybe, but we aren’t on your land yet, are we? Now what has you sneaking off to the north of town in such an all fired hurry.”

Wyatt was going to kill him, but he spoke anyway. “We found gold on our property. We’re mining it discreetly. At least until you showed up and made me talk.”

Vanguard squinted. “Gold? Around here? Show me.”

Yep. Wyatt would string him up by his heels and leave him for the buzzards.

Chapter Twelve

“Did you hear that?” Maggie whispered and brought the sheets up quickly to cover her breasts.

“Yes.” Wyatt shot out of bed as quick as a scalded dog and searched for his weapon in the wardrobe next to the door. “I believe someone just broke in,” he whispered back as his fingers wrapped around the butt of his gun.

He released it from the holster, searched the clothing strewn about the floor for his pants and pulled them on one-handed. Stepping quietly to the door, he pressed his ear against it in time to hear someone speaking in low tones out in the main part of the saloon, likely near the polished wooden bar.

The voice was too muffled to reveal whether it belonged to a male or a female. Wyatt suspected the intruder had to be Sadie. No one else was as intent on getting access to his place, but it sounded like more than one voice. A chair suddenly scraped across the wood-planked floor.

The note on the front of the saloon apparently made the intruders think they’d gone to the hotel for their wedding night. Wyatt realized if they hadn’t been so impatient to get into bed, they would have been at the bathhouse right now. The trespassers would have had free rein to ransack and destroy everything.

Maggie being here made him reluctant to go out there guns-a-blazing, but he wasn’t about to let anyone ruin his saloon.

The sound of glass shattering from the other side of the wall made Wyatt grimace. He turned back to Maggie and motioned her to stay put before putting a hand on the door knob. He twisted the handle and exited the room on silent bare feet.

Gun at his side, cocked and ready to fire, he traveled carefully along the narrow hallway leading to the sounds of burglary. Wyatt knew there were no candles burning out here before he and Maggie went to bed.

Even in the brightest part of the day, the large room was gloomy without light as there were no windows in the main part of the saloon. The previous brothel owners apparently had wanted privacy in the front parlor and the only meager light came from around the covering of the swinging doors they’d installed when making this their saloon.

The glow from an unseen candle bounced off of the walls and ceiling of the saloon, casting light and shadows around the tall room.

Once at the entry, he peeked around the corner and saw a man with his back to the hall. The man looked familiar, but Wyatt couldn’t put a name to him without seeing his face. A candle flickered in its holder on the bar’s flat surface.

The scent of whiskey permeated the air, and Wyatt suspected the stranger had knocked over a bottle in his search behind the bar.

Just then, the intruder turned sideways to rummage through the space beneath the bar next to where he kept the cash register. There wasn’t any money anywhere in the bar area currently, but Wyatt didn’t want the man to break anything else.

Gun comfortably in his hand, Wyatt crossed the room, silently lifted his arm, and aimed at the back of the intruder’s head. “Stop what you’re doing, or I’ll blow your head off.”

The man stilled and raised his hands to his shoulder. “Don’t shoot, mister. I ain’t even armed.”

“Come out from behind there.”

Hands still in the air, the man stepped sideways, crunching broken glass beneath his boots as he sidled out onto the main floor. He turned, and Wyatt recognized him as a local stable hand. Looking down, he also remembered those boots from the earlier intruder. Why would a stable hand break into his saloon?

“What are you doing here? And why were you spying on me earlier?”

“He’s with me.” Sadie’s voice carried down from the second story open hallway. Wyatt turned his head and looked up to watch her descend the staircase with a shotgun pointed in his general direction. He didn’t know if she was a good shot, but decided not to test her. Her weapon of choice allowed for a wide margin of error.

“Put your gun away, Wyatt. Ronald can’t hurt you.”

Wyatt lowered his gun arm, but kept his finger alongside the trigger. “But you can. Why are you stealing from me?”

“I’m
not
stealing!” The furious tone of her strident voice made him reconsider his own poor attitude at having his bar invaded. Sadie sounded crazy. “That money is rightfully mine!”

“What money are you talking about?”

She exhaled a long breath, traversed the final few steps of the stairway, and crossed the room to shove the barrel of her rifle in his chest. “My partner stole money from me and then ran off somewhere. I got a letter a month ago that said he hid the money in the saloon somewhere before he left.”

“Who sent you a letter? Who would know where your partner hid stolen money?”

“That don’t matter. What matters is that I need time to look around and find out where my thievin’ partner hid the money I worked so hard for.”

“Why would he hide it here if he ran off? Wouldn’t he take it with him?”

Sadie’s red lips pressed into a straight line. “Never you mind.” She turned to Ronald and sneered. “Put your fool hands down and get back to searching. It’s got to be here somewhere.”

Wyatt finally understood why Sadie wanted to be his business partner so insistently. “So I guess you’ve already checked his house.”

“If you could call it that. It was a tiny shack at the edge of the woods. I didn’t even know he had it until a piece of mail came for him and the telegraph man asked me where to forward it. Most of the time, he lived in the downstairs room at the back of the saloon. Trust me, I turned that room upside down for over a week after he left and found nothing. The week after that we all got evicted for failure to pay the bank note.”

“Even if you find anything, what makes you think it isn’t mine now? I own this saloon now.”

Her thickly painted kohl-black eyelids narrowed, and she stared a furious hole through him. “Did you find my money?” The gun’s aim rose to his head.

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Wyatt shrugged. “How much was it?”

Her generously painted red lips opened, but then closed. “You tell me. How much did you find?”

Ronald, still rummaging behind the bar’s counter, knocked another bottle to the floor with a clink and a crash. Wyatt turned toward the noise. “Damn it, stop breaking bottles.”

When he turned back, Sadie had an odd look on her face. “You have a very nice upper body, Mr. Chance. Do you have a huge cock to go with it?”

What was she up to?

Wyatt shrugged again. “Why do you need to know?”

“Well, it’s smack dab in the middle of the late afternoon, your bar is closed for the first time since you opened it up three months ago, and I wondered what prompted you to sleep in today of all days.”

“No reason in particular.”

 
“I don’t believe you. You’re shirtless and barefoot, which begs the question, what have you been doing and with whom have you been doing it?”

Damn it.
Wyatt didn’t want Maggie in the middle of this battle.

“Ronald, go see if Maggie Altman is in the back room in the hallway where Mr. Chance just came from and interrupted you.”

“No!” Wyatt lunged forward only to find Sadie’s big gun pressing a dent in his chest. His heart pounded loud enough to be heard.

“I’ll shoot you dead, Wyatt. Don’t underestimate me.”

Wyatt took a deep breath and exhaled, trying to calm his rioting fury at dragging his new wife into this intrusion. “I swear to you that Maggie Altman is not in this building.”
It wasn’t a lie because her name was Maggie Chance as of several hours ago.

Ronald crunched through the shattered glass and alcohol behind the bar and headed straight for the back hallway.

“Wait a minute.” Ronald paused halfway across the room. Wyatt considered his options and found he had little in the way of negotiations—with the exception of one thing. “Leave now and I’ll partner with you in your brothel business.”