They Sold All Daughters at Auction—Only One Was Left…Until a Widower Offered His Name
Chapter 2
Declan spent that night drawing a map from Maggie’s letter; by first light two horses stood ready. Rose had never ridden alone, so he gave her a patient hour on the gentle mare.
They rode two days to Bricktown, Texas opening around them like a green endless ocean. They talked as they rode — her mother’s Bible, the ocean she dreamed of, the Missouri hills where he’d grown up. “Maybe we’ll see it together someday,” he said as they made camp, and Rose’s heart stumbled at the way he said “we.”
Colleen was sweeping the steps of Poole’s store when they arrived, moving like every step cost her. When she saw Rose she dropped the broom and nearly fell. “We’ve come to take you home.” The bruises stood out on her cheeks and arms. Poole came out squinting, a thin man with small mean eyes. “That girl belongs to me, fair and square. I got papers.” Declan offered to buy her contract. Poole refused. “I got uses for her.” “I can see that,” Declan said coldly. “The question is whether you want paid to let her go, or whether you want to explain to the sheriff why you’ve been beating a woman half to death.” The crowd on the boardwalk went very still. Poole measured Declan’s shoulders, licked his lips, and caved — thirty dollars, more than he’d paid, less than he’d have liked.
Gunpowder Creek was harder. Vance Harlow’s saloon squatted on the bad end of town — violent, unpredictable, ringed by guns. Declan watched the place for a day, learning the routines. The twins were kept upstairs, brought down at night for cowboys with money. “We can’t just walk in there,” he told Rose and Colleen. “We need timing. And the law.”
Harlow left for the bank every Tuesday with his two best gunmen. So on Tuesday, Colleen — still bruised, refusing to wait in the hotel — fainted dead away on the boardwalk in front of the saloon. While the bartender and half a dozen men rushed out to help her, Rose and Declan slipped in the back door and up the stairs. Cara and Erin were locked in a small filthy room at the end of the hall, thin and hollow-eyed. When they saw Rose they fell into her arms, sobbing so loudly it nearly gave them away. “Quickly,” Declan whispered, and they made it down, out the back, onto the horses —
And then the shouting started. Harlow had come back early.
“Ride!” Declan roared, and they drove the horses into a gallop, out of town, across the open prairie, pursuit thundering at their backs. The horses strained under double loads. Colleen was too weak. Rose could feel the gap closing, feel it all about to be torn away —
And then, ahead, a bugle call split the heat, and a line of blue-coated riders crested the ridge, blocking the road.