A Wanted Man by Linda Lael Miller Read Free Book Online

Morgan.
    Pardner slipped past them both but waited in the yard, turning in a circle or two in his impatience to be gone, until they caught up.
    “Your name isn’t Rowdy Rhodes,” Lark said, in a rush of whispered words, the moment they all reached the wooden sidewalk.
    Pardner proceeded to lift his leg against a lamppost up ahead, while Rowdy adjusted his hat. “And yours isn’t Lark Morgan,” he replied easily.
    Lark reddened slightly under her high cheekbones. Lord, she was a beauty. Wasted as a small-town schoolmarm. She ought to be the queen of some country, he reckoned, or appear on a stage. “Lark is my name,” she argued.
    “Maybe so,” he answered. “But ‘Morgan’ isn’t. You’re running from something—or somebody—aren’t you?”
    She hesitated just long enough to convince Rowdy that his hunch was correct. “Why are you here, Mr. Rhodes?” she asked. “What brings you to a place like Stone Creek?”
    “Business,” he said.
    She stopped, right in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing Rowdy to stop, too, and look back at her. “Am I that business, Mr. Rhodes? If…if someone hired you to find me—”
    “Find you?” Rowdy asked, momentarily baffled. In the next moment it all came clear. “You think I came here looking for you?”
    She gazed at him, at once stricken and defiant. She had the look of a woman fixing to lift her skirts, spin on one dainty heel and run for her life. At the same time, her chin jutted out, bespeaking stubbornness and pride and a fierce desire to mark out some ground for herself and hold it against all comers. “Did you?”
    Rowdy shook his head. “No, ma’am,” he said quietly. “I did not.”
    Lark still didn’t move. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
    “You don’t,” Rowdy answered, keeping a little distance between them, so she wouldn’t spook. “But consider this. If I’d come to Stone Creek to fetch you away, Miss Morgan, you and me and Pardner, we’d be a ways down the trail by now, whether you wanted to go along or not.”
    Her eyes flashed with indignation, but the slackening in her shoulders and the slight lowering of her chin said she was relieved, too. “You are insufferably confident, Mr. Rhodes,” she said.
    He grinned, tugged at the brim of his hat. “Call me Rowdy,” he said. “I don’t commonly answer to ‘Mr. Rhodes.’”
    “I’d wager that you don’t,” Lark said. “Because it isn’t your name. I’m sure of that much, at least.”
    “You’re sure of a lot of things, I reckon,” Rowdy countered. “Miss Morgan.”
    “Very well,” she retorted. “I’ll address you as Rowdy. It probably suits you. You’ve fooled Mrs. Porter with your fine manners and your flattery, that’s obvious, but you do not fool me.”
    “You don’t fool me, either—Lark.” He waited for her to protest his use of her given name—it was a bold familiarity, according to convention—but she didn’t.
    She came to walk at his side, between him and Mrs. Porter’s next-door neighbor’s picket fence. The glow of the streetlamps fell softly over her, catching in her hair, resting in the graceful folds of her cloak, fading as they passed into the pools of darkness in between light posts.
    “Did your mother call you Rowdy?” she asked casually, while Pardner sniffed at a spot on the sidewalk.
    “Yes,” Rowdy said, remembering. Miranda Yarbro had always used his nickname—except when she was angry. On those rare occasions, her lips would tighten, and she’d address him as Robert. When she was proud of him, she’d call him Rob.
    “Bless my boy, Rob,” she’d prayed, beside his bed, every night until he left home with his pa, at fourteen.
    “Make a godly man of him.”
    Guilt ambushed him. He reckoned the good Lord had attempted to answer that gentle woman’s prayer, but he, Rowdy, hadn’t cooperated.
    “Where do you hail from, Mr.—Rowdy?”
    Grateful for the reprieve from his regrets, Rowdy smiled. “A farm in