The Barefoot Bride

  “LIKE LaVYRLE SPENCER, MS. JOHNSTON WRITES OF INTENSE EMOTIONS AND TENDER PASSIONS THAT SEEM SO REAL THAT READERS WILL FEEL EACH ONE OF THEM… One of the finest western romance novelists … [she] writes of the very essence of the West: all the rugged harshness, the hard work, the hazards and ultimate triumph.”

  —Rave Reviews

  PRAISE FOR

  JOAN JOHNSTON

  “JOAN JOHNSTON CONTINUALLY GIVES US EVERY THING WE WANT… FABULOUS DETAILS AND ATMOSPHERE, MEMORABLE CHARACTERS, A STORY THAT YOU WISH WOULD NEVER END, AND LOTS OF TENSION AND SENSUALITY.”

  —Romantic Times

  AND

  SWEETWATER SEDUCTION

  “4 1/2 Hearts … A DELECTABLE, HUMOROUS LOVE STORY THAT CLEVERLY INCORPORATES MANY ROMANCES (from first love to long-married love) into the entire picture of small-town life. Her picture of love at all ages proves that love is ageless. Her memorable cast of characters, the sprightly humor, surprise climax, and sensuality make this irresistible… Joan Johnston never fails to give readers an unforgettable, different, and realistic western romance.”

  —Romantic Times

  “4i/2 Stars … SO GOOD, THE REVIEWER COULDN’T PUT IT DOWN… THE CHARACTERS ARE WONDERFUL! A HAPPY AND DELIGHTFUL STORY!”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  “SO DELICIOUSLY TOLD AND SO ENJOYABLE … YOU MUST GET A COPY AND FIND A HIDEAWAY SOMEWHERE AND SIT BACK AND HAVE A HECK OF A GOODTIME.”

  —Rendezvous

  Dell Books by Joan Johnston

  After the Kiss

  The Barefoot Bride

  The Bodyguard

  The Bridegroom

  Captive

  The Cowboy

  The Inheritance

  Kid Calhoun

  Maverick Heart

  Outlaw's Bride

  Sweetwater Seduction

  The Texan

  The Loner

  Texas Woman

  Comanche Woman

  Frontier Woman

  This book is dedicated to my children

  Heather and Blake,

  whom I love very much.

  Love has no reason.

  Love just is.

  Montana Territory

  1868

  “Fight! Fight! It's the doc's brat, Patch! She's whompin’ the tar outta the preacher's middle boy!”

  Fort Benton's rowdiest saloon cleared like a bedroll with a rattler in it. Miners, bullwhackers, and freightmen raced onto the muddy street to surround the two fighting children.

  A ragamuffin twelve-year-old girl had a knee braced on the nape of a ruddy-faced boy. She held his arm twisted high behind his back. Her elfin features contorted as she raged, “You take that back, you varmint! Dang you for a durned pig-faced—”

  “I won't take it back, ‘cause it's true!” the boy bellowed. “Your pa's a yellow-bellied, lily-livered—”

  That was as far as he got before Patch put the full weight of her knee on his neck, shoving his mouth down and filling it with mud.

  A pair of large hands caught Patch by her frayed collar and the seat of her britches, lifting her into the air. “That'll be enough of that, you runty little scapegrace.”

  The crowd laughed as Patch flailed ineffectually against the rough hands that had separated her from her victim. The preacher's middle boy quickly made his escape between a pair of legs at the edge of the circle of men.

  Patch sputtered with fury at her helplessness. “I'll get you, Ferdie Adams! You better watch out you—you—”

  “What's this all about?”

  Patch looked over her shoulder to see who had hold of her. It was Red Dupree, the bartender at the Medicine Bow Saloon. Red must have had hair that color once upon a time, but now Patch winced at the sun's glare off his bald head. He was a huge, intimidating man, and Patch stopped struggling and hung limp in his grasp.

  Nevertheless, she wasn't going to admit in front of all these leering, spite-faced men that she had been defending her pa's honor, because he couldn't—wouldn't—do it for himself. Her lips clamped tight, and her chin took on a mulish tilt.

  Red sighed in disgust. “Let's go find your pa.”

  “Doc Kendrick's takin’ care of some men got shot by Injuns,” someone shouted from the crowd. “Down to the stage depot.”

  “Don't be too hard on her, Red,” a bearded man said. “Kid's got guts—more'n her pa, anyway,” he added with a snicker.

  Patch stiffened in Red's arms.

  Contemplating another attack from the feisty minx, Red tightened his hold. “Hold fast, young'n,” he said in a quiet voice. “Don't take it so personal, what they say.”

  “But my pa ain't what they say,” Patch gritted out through a throat swollen with hurt. “He ain't!”

  Out west a man was judged by whether he stood up to those who challenged him or backed off. Doc Kendrick would as soon step aside as fight. Patch knew her father wasn't afraid, but she had no explanation for why he wouldn't raise his fists to another man or even carry a gun. So she had taken to fighting his battles for him.

  People in Fort Benton knew better than to say a thing against Doc Kendrick. If they did, it was likely their horse might find its tail-hairs cropped, or their zinnias might start looking stark naked, or they might just find themselves locked in the outhouse. Patch had determined to be as ruthless as her father was mild-mannered. No one was going to say a word against her pa without answering to her.

  She tried once again to tear herself from Red's hold. ‘There's no need to bother my pa.”

  “Sorry, kid, but this is the third time this week I've had to rescue some poor—”

  “Dang it, Red! Didn't hit no one that didn't deserve it!” Patch argued.

  Red surveyed the bruised swelling around Patch's right eye. “What was it this time?”

  “He had no right to say what he did. My pa's the bravest, strongest—just ‘cause he don't carry a gun don't mean he's a … a …” Patch couldn't say the word aloud, but it echoed in her head.

  Coward.

  Red snorted. “Can't fight the whole damn town, Patch.”

  “The whole dang town, the whole durned country if I have to. I—”

  Patch shut her mouth as they entered the open-sided tent where her father was hard at work removing a bullet from the fleshy part of a man's calf. The wounded man was lying on a makeshift table created from two sawhorses and a few planks of raw lumber. A second man stood nearby, his arm already resting in a sling. A crowd of freightmen had gathered around to observe the doctor's ministrations.

  “Took my whole poke of gold, them Injuns did,” the man on the table said to the crowd that surrounded him. “Weren't more'n twenty mile south o’ here when the stage was surrounded by shriekin’ redskins.”

  “We'da been stone cold dead right now, if it hadna been for that masked fella,” the man with the sling said.

  Patch couldn't keep still. “Garn! Was it the Masked Marauder?” she asked in an awed voice. “Was it?”

  “ ‘Spect so. Bravest thing I ever saw, how he rode up on that big black horse of his'n and started shooting from them twin pistols. Never missed a shot, that Marauder fella,” the miner with the sling said.

  “Was he wearing a black mask?” Patch asked. “Was he?”

  “Sure ‘nuff was, kid,” the miner said. “With his black hat pulled down low, couldn't tell who it was for beans.”

  “But he must live around here somewhere,” Patch guessed. “ ‘Cause he always arrives in the nick of time. Garn! I wonder who it is?”

  The men looked around at each other. The identity of the Masked Marauder had become a burning question in Fort Benton. The man seemed to know whenever some gold-dust miner on the stage was about to be robbed and rode to the rescue with guns blazing. For some re
ason he had decided to remain anonymous. Over the past six months he must have rescued at least a dozen miners from Blackfoot renegades intent on relieving the men of their gold, which the Indians then traded for rotgut whiskey.

  Patch looked at her father, his tall, broad-shouldered form stooped over the injured man. She wished he could be more like the Masked Marauder, brave and dashing and admired. She imagined he was the Masked Marauder. But her delightful imaginary bubble didn't last long before it burst.

  “Say, Doc,” one of the freightmen said. “These fellas here have offered a reward to anybody who can get their gold back. We're f ormin’ up a posse to hunt down them Black-feet. You wanta come along?”

  Seth Kendrick's lips curved in a smile of self-mockery as he said, “I wouldn't be much use to you men. I'm not a good hand with firearms. Besides, I've got to be around to check on Mrs. Gulliver. Her bowels are acting up again.”

  There were several guffaws and a chuckle or two. While the laughter might have been directed at Mrs. Gulliver's uneasy bowels, Patch couldn't help feeling it was aimed at her father's feeble excuse for avoiding the danger of riding out with the other men. Why, oh why, couldn't he go with them just this once? Why couldn't he prove to them once and for all that he wasn't a—

  Coward.

  Patch mentally backed away from the word and in so doing inadvertently jerked in Red Dupree's grasp.

  “Whoa, there, kid,” Red admonished. “Your pa's about done. Once he's free—”

  “I'm free right now, Red,” Seth said. “You can let her go. Thanks. I'll handle things from here.”

  “You better, Doc,” Red warned with a growl that was more bark than bite. “The kid cleans out the saloon every time she starts one of them fracases.”

  “It won't happen again, Red. I appreciate you taking care of my girl.”

  Seth laid a hand on Patch's shoulder and felt her flinch beneath his touch. He didn't want to start an argument with so many interested ears listening, so he let her go on the pretext of needing to pack up his medical supplies. He avoided his daughter's eyes as he closed up his black bag and left the tent. Patch followed him, feet dragging, as he returned to where he'd left his buggy.

  “Get in,” he said. “We'll talk later.”

  Patch climbed up to sit beside him on the cracked leather seat. Seth whipped the big buckskin gelding into a trot, then headed south toward the ranch he and Patch had called home for the past two years.

  In the distance they could see the High-wood Mountains, an isolated range about thirty miles long. There, in the foothills about twelve miles from town, his ranch was nestled in a stand of cottonwoods along the river.

  Seth spent the better part of the trip home staring at his hands. They weren't the hands of a doctor. They were big and callused and scarred from the calamitous events of long ago that had molded him into the man he was today.

  Seth knew what was said about him in town. He had his suspicions about why Patch got into so many fights. He wanted to explain everything to her, to make her understand why he chose to walk away rather than to face down another man. But he couldn't. All the same, her fighting had to stop.

  Seth wasn't sure how to confront his daughter. It seemed lately he couldn't talk to her without setting up her neckhairs. She was growing up. Soon Patricia Wallis Ken-drick would be a woman. Only, at the rate she was going, Patch Kendrick—hoyden, tomboy, pugnacious brat—would be no lady.

  The frustration Seth felt made his voice harsh when he spoke. “I thought we agreed you weren't going to fight anymore. What was it this time?”

  Patch's lower lip stuck out in a stubborn pout. With the black eye rapidly forcing her right eye shut, it would have been difficult to argue that she hadn't been fighting. Nor could she admit to her father the real reasons she had attacked the preacher's middle boy. So she improvised. “That Ferdie Adams called me a flibbertigibbet, Pa. I couldn't let him get away with that.”

  “You know, Patch,” he began, “the things people say—the words they use—can't hurt you.”

  “But, Pa! How can you stand it when somebody calls you a—a—bad name?”

  There was a long pause before he said, “Words aren't worth fighting over, Patch.” He took another, even longer pause before he added, “When you're older, when you've seen a little more of life, you'll understand why—”

  “I don't understand!” Patch cried in an anguished voice. “And I won't stand for it!”

  Seth stopped the buggy abruptly and turned to grab his daughter by the shoulders. He shook her until her blond hair tumbled over her brow and hid her eyes. “Listen to me,” he said in a hard voice. “This fighting has got to stop. You're getting too old to be wrestling with boys in the mud, coming home with black eyes and torn clothes.”

  He felt a band tighten around his chest at the sight of his daughter's quivering chin. Patch was blinking furiously to stem tears. As abruptly as he had grabbed her, he released her. With a shaking hand he reached out to straighten the bunched material at her shoulder.

  Patch shoved his hand aside and straightened the shirt herself, clamping down on her teeth to still her chin. “Garn, Pa—”

  “And that's another thing,” he interrupted, both frustrated by and furious at her refusal to allow him to express the tenderness he felt for her. “I've heard about all the gams and dangs and durns I want to hear from you. You have to start acting like a lady, Patch. You have to—”

  “I ain't never gonna be a lady, Pa!”

  Seth opened his mouth to contradict his daughter but snapped it shut again. No, not at the rate she was going. Didn't she want to be a lady? Another look revealed that it was despair rather than defiance he saw in his daughter's wretched blue eyes.

  He wanted to pull her into his arms and hug her tight and tell her they would work things out. But he didn't think he could stand it if she pushed him away, as he was certain she would. So he sat without touching her and saw her back stiffen with resolve. No coward, his Patch. She had enough courage for both of them.

  “You need a mother, Patch,” he murmured. “A woman to show you how to be a lady. To comb this mop of hair”—he ruffled her tangled blond hair, which was as close to a caress as she was likely to allow, and tucked it behind a dirty ear—”to sew dresses for you, to teach you to cook and how to act.”

  “Dang it! We don't need anyone, Pa,” Patch protested. “We manage fine by ourselves.”

  Seth didn't argue, just picked up the reins and started the buggy homeward again. He pictured the disorder that reigned at the ranch house they called home. The barren windows and walls, the dirty dishes stacked in the sink, the laundry that grew in piles until Patch finally gathered it all up and boiled it for an hour with homemade lye soap. She was too young to have the kind of responsibility that had necessarily fallen on her shoulders in a bachelor household.

  But Seth had never been able to bring himself to marry again. He had loved Patch's mother in a way he could never love another woman. Nine years after Annarose's death, his memories of her were as vivid as ever. He was yanked from his reverie by an outburst from Patch.

  “Garn!” she exclaimed. “Why on earth do you need a wife, Pa? Haven't I done a good job of taking care of things? Maybe I ain't such a good cook, but we haven't starved, have we? The ranch house is a little messy, but so what? We're hardly ever there. And maybe I do dress in trousers, but with the mud in town, a dress wouldn't be the least bit practical. And I know ding-dang well you see Dora at the Medicine Bow Saloon to satisfy your manly lusts.

  “See, Pa, you don't need a wife. And I don't need a mother,” she added in case he had missed the point she really wanted to make.

  Seth was appalled at Patch's knowledge of his visits to Dora Deveraux. He hadn't imagined she understood enough about what happened between men and women to even suspect what he was doing when he disappeared into town on Saturday nights. Which only served to convince him that something had to be done, and soon, or Patch would be lost beyond redemption.
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  Only, finding a wife wasn't as simple as it sounded. Not many respectable unmarried women traveled up the Missouri River on their own. Whenever one showed her face in Fort Benton, she was as popular as licorice at the mercantile store. Seth ought to know. He had advertised in the St. Louis paper three times in the past two years for a nurse to work with him. Each time, the woman had come up the river by steamboat and ended up being courted and married within a week of her arrival.

  So why don't you advertise for another nurse, and when she arrives here, court her and marry her yourself?

  Seth had no time to examine that astounding idea because they had arrived at the ranch. Patch bolted out of the buggy and raced toward the man who stood beside the corral.

  “Ethan!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “We're home!”

  As if Ethan hadn't seen them driving up the road, Seth thought. He felt that constriction in his chest again as Patch allowed Ethan a quick hug of welcome. Seth quickly repressed the unwanted jab of jealousy. Ethan Hawk was his best friend and for the past six months had been his partner. Still, it hurt to see the way Patch smiled at the younger man as though he hung the moon. That sort of smile ought to be reserved for a girl's father —at least until she found a husband.

  As Seth stepped down from the buggy, Ethan started toward him with Patch tucked under his arm and her arm firmly around his waist. They made slow progress because of Ethan's limp, and Seth met them more than halfway. Ethan's walk—long step, halting step, long step, halting step—was ungainly. But put him on a horse, and the man had all the grace of a centaur. Seth couldn't be sorry for Ethan's limp, tragic as it was, because it had been the cause of their meeting each other and the beginning of their friendship.

  “The Masked Marauder has been at work again,” Seth said. “He saved the bacon for a couple of miners on the stage from Virginia City.”

  “Oh, Ethan, can you just imagine it?” Patch asked in the reverent voice she reserved for anything having to do with the Masked Marauder. “Imagine him dressed all in black, mounted on his black stallion and riding to the rescue. Oh, how I wish I could meet him just once!”