Beautiful Bad Man by Ellen O'Connell Read Free Book Online

recklessly, holding off the early darkness for long hours, darning stockings and mending clothes Joe would never need again. Maybe someday she could get to town with them. Maybe someone else could use them.
    Catching herself making plans for the future, however tentative and vague, Norah accepted defeat. She was alive and probably going to stay that way for some time. Wallowing in misery had only left her vulnerable to contempt from a man lower than a bug’s belly. Blaming him and nursing anger could only disguise the truth for so long.
    He still couldn’t be the Boy. He’d all but admitted to meeting the good man who had been the Boy somewhere and stealing the story. Then how did he recognize me? I never told him my name. Maybe the real Boy heard my name and told him.
    She’d never see him again anyway except as one of the crowd of Van Cleve’s killers, so it didn’t matter, but if he was the Boy, he had repaid her for saving his life by saving hers.
    Of course the Boy had been willing to be saved, more than willing, eager, and she’d wanted to be left alone, but it was done now. She needed to start thinking about tomorrow. All the tomorrows.
    On the first tomorrow, Norah wrapped up several layers deep from head to toe. In her mind she heard him again. “Don’t you have a coat that fits?”
    Today, she answered cleverly, “Of course, I have six others, all custom made, but I chose this one today.” In fact, all she had was a much-mended old thing that even new hadn’t kept her half as warm as Joe’s coat.
    She hiked past one deserted farmstead after another, all Van Cleve’s now. The burned out hulks of wood frame houses on two of the places attested to one of the ways Van Cleve convinced people to sell.
    Norah knew all about sudden fire in the night. The blackened remains of the house Joe had loved so much sat on her property.
    In the past she’d never paid attention to how far the Carburys lived from her. Today she calculated the distance by the quarter-sections of land she crossed, half a mile for each one. The Carburys were five miles away as crows flew.
    Each of those empty quarter-sections represented neighbors who had wilted under Van Cleve’s onslaught, sold their land to him, and moved on. Most had been friends she and Joe had helped and been helped by, gathered with at christenings, funerals, weddings, barn raisings, and picnics.
    So few were left now, no one from the wagon train except her. The families holding out were almost all like the Carburys, with enough menfolk to defend against Van Cleve’s killers. Occasionally the Carburys divided forces, half staying on guard at home and half making a trip to town for supplies — or to her house to urge her to accept the help she had refused.
    Norah walked without fear, long past worrying about Preston and Van Cleve’s other men catching her in the open. They could just as easily come to the house again. Had she made Sutton as angry as he’d made her? If so, had he revoked whatever protection he’d granted her? She hoped so. She wanted nothing from him. Nothing.
    Relieved in a way she didn’t want to admit to see Carburys’ comfortable house still standing and smoke rising from the stovepipe, Norah quickened her pace toward their door. One of the sons stepped out of the barn with a rifle cradled in his arms. He watched her for a moment, waved, and moved back out of sight again.
    “Norah!” Mabel Carbury’s hug felt like everything safe in the world, and Norah hugged back fiercely.
    “Oh, my girl,” Mabel said pushing Norah away by the shoulders, “you look so much better than last time I saw you. I should have visited again. I should have....”
    “Don’t say that,” Norah begged. “Please don’t say that and make me feel any worse. I was inexcusably rude to you. You did everything you could. You were kind, and I was beyond awful.”
    “You were grieving. Too many losses too fast. A person can die of a broken heart, you know. I’ve