Kit Gardner by Twilight

son. No, but she wouldn’t allow her eyes to even alight upon him. Damned proud woman. He wondered if she had any idea how beautiful she looked with that ribbon fluttering like wings about her and her hair ablaze with prairie fire.
    She kept the reins all the way to Twilight, smack down the center of Main Street, and even managed to haul back on them with a bit too much fervor when they pulled before Ledbetter’s General Store. Perhaps because of all those curious stares they’d drawn since the moment the buggy rolled into town, stares that seemed to force Jessica’s nose up another notch. But Rance had far more to occupy his thoughts at the moment. Far more, in the form of his own Wanted handbills, fluttering in the hot midmorning breeze upon nearly every storefront, amid all the other handbills. Twenty-five hundred to the man who could bring him in alive. A thousand for his dead body.
    Spotz must be itching to watch him die to offer bounty like that.
    He’d purposely cropped his hair short to fall over his forehead, and he’d shaved and pulled his hat well over his eyes. Had even chosen a light-colored shirt and kerchief, the better to go unrecognized. No, he looked nothing like some artist’s rendering of the long-haired, black-garbed, bearded outlaw Rance Logan. Yet his own bleak stare seemed to taunt him from every handbill as he alighted from the buggy and attempted to assist Jessica. But she’d already hopped down, obviously spurning his attempt at gallantry. Surely this was not in deference to his shoulder.
    She barely glanced at him, her eyes instead straying past him, toward Ledbetter’s. He saw the flicker of something cross her face, a momentary dissolving of all those barriers, when her wide gaze finally met with his. An unseen fist slammed into his middle. No, she couldn’t possibly recognize him. Or could she?
    He saw uncertainty there, so fleeting, yet so profound, all his worry fled him. She was, without doubt, primly lifted nose and all, entirely uncomfortable here in Twilight. Perhaps even more than he.
    “Here.” She shoved the straw purse at him. “This is all I can spare at the moment for supplies you might need to begin work, though I don’t know if your shoulder is well enough to—”
    “I can manage, ma’am.”
    She tilted her head up at him, and sunlight spilled over the sprinkling of freckles upon her cheeks and nose. “Of course you can. You did manage to—” One white glove waved toward the buggy. Her eyes again strayed away from him, northward, down the row of establishments lining the street. “I don’t suppose I thanked you. I—” Her mouth snapped closed, and she blinked. “Good heavens, there’s Sadie McGlue. I can’t possibly...not now...with you...” Her hand fluttered at her hat brim, then at her neck, before she grabbed Christian’s hand and brushed past Rance. “You’ll find all you need—though I don’t quite know what all that might be—in Ledbetter’s. I...we...I’ve need of a few things at the clothiers. This way, Christian.”
    “But, Mama, you’re walking too fast.”
    Indeed she was, her heavy heels clomping upon the wooden boardwalk, south, away from whoever it was she had wished to avoid. Rance stuffed the purse into his pocket and watched the furious swishing of her skirts. He then glanced northward. Ah, there it was, the telltale bobbing of feathered hats and satin parasols. Two of them, as his luck would have it, their wide, much-flounced and beribboned skirts sashaying along with all the pomposity of a naval frigate. And a matching set of imperious, entirely unlikable female faces to add the finishing touch.
    Both sets of their glittering little eyes had fastened upon him. Like a full-fledged cavalry, with colors flying and weapons braced, they descended upon him. At the moment, he’d rather take on a battalion of Rebel soldiers. After all, he’d had considerably more success on the battlefield than on female turf. Particularly when a