Texas Moon TH4 by Patricia Rice

her how to speak with authority, but to cover up what wasn't being said with a firmness that left her audience completely convinced she'd answered their question. She'd covered many gaps in her education that way. It served her well tonight.
    Powell took off his hat and offered his arm to the girl standing in the shadows of the porch. "Come along, Miz Ellen. Let's get you on home. Your fella will be wondering where you are."
    As they walked away, Janice could hear Ellen rhapsodizing over how hard Bobby had worked today and telling the sheriff that her husband was no doubt sound asleep in bed already. If that was true love, Janice wanted no part of it. If she were Ellen Fairweather, she'd have the sheriff out looking for her drunken sot of a husband and hauling him off to jail for criminal neglect, at the very least.
    But she would never be as naive as Ellen Fairweather, so the point was moot. She entered the house and latched the door behind her. It was time to call it a night. Just because she had taken to staying up late, filling the empty nights with work, didn't mean she ought to be entertaining a man like Peter Mulloney while doing it. She marched promptly to the tiny front bedroom.
    And found Peter Mulloney sound asleep on Betsy's narrow cot.
    She stared at him in perplexity. He was too large for the cot. His boots hung over the edge. He was lying flat on his back with his hands crossed over his chest as if he had just been lying there contemplating the ceiling while waiting for Ellen to leave. If he turned over, he would fall off the bed and flat on his face. But he must have been exhausted to fall asleep so quickly, and she really didn't have the heart to wake him and throw him out. She'd heard the rumbling of thunder when she was outside. It didn't seem quite fair to send him to sleep on the porch again.
    The sheriff thought he was sleeping in the lean-to. Knowing Powell's regular habits, he'd head on to his own house now that he'd made his rounds. Who was to know or care if Mulloney fell asleep in Betsy's bed? Common sense told her he wasn't harming anyone.
    It wasn't common sense making her nervous as a June bug when Janice went to her own room to prepare for bed. She didn't like the idea of a man sleeping in the other room. That's all it was, she told herself. But she couldn't get the image of Peter Mulloney's sprawling length out of her mind as she pulled on her nightgown. What if he got up in the middle of the night?
    He wouldn't do that. He was a gentleman. He wasn't a crude youth to take advantage of a helpless woman. And she was far from helpless, anyway. She'd been helpless at fifteen, but she wasn't now. Grimly she shoved a chair under her doorknob and checked the shotgun under her bed. She'd never had to use it, but Jason had shown her how.
    Oddly enough, she didn't have any difficulty going to sleep this time. The knowledge that Mulloney slept in the next room was somehow comforting, providing a security she hadn't felt in years. She drifted off to sleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
    She shot right out of that pillow the moment the fire bell began its excited clamor.
    Running to the window, she checked the partially finished schoolhouse first. No flames leapt from the rafters, and she breathed a momentary sigh of relief. The rain the other night had made the possibility of a flash fire less likely, but the wind from the approaching storm didn't bode well. She reached for the gown she had discarded a few hours before. This time, she meant to go out properly attired.
    She heard Mulloney's boots hitting the floor in the other room. She had almost forgotten about him. She hurriedly buttoned her bodice over her nightgown and pulled the chair from under the doorknob. He was already heading for the front door when she caught him.
    "Out the back!" she whispered, as if someone would hear her. "I told the sheriff you were in the lean-to."
    He nodded curtly and turned in the other direction. Seeing her