Page 59 of The Saloon Girl's Only Shot

Owen tied off the horizonal rope and plucked one. It gave a dull thrum.

They began stringing the vertical lines. It was more involved since they had to weave it between the horizontal ones as they went.

Owen didn’t seem to think she was unchaste or tainted, she reminded herself. In fact, he encouraged her to envision a life where she didn’t need to marry because he was giving her a means to support herself.

Was he, though?

“What if you can’t get whiskey?” she asked.

“I’ll get whiskey.” He spoke with confidence. “Cecil Dudley is nothing but a pebble in my boot that I’ll shake out sooner than later.”

“What if the saloon keepers do something worse?” She was recalling Emmett’s remark about a saloon being deliberately set ablaze.

“You can drive yourself crazy with ‘What if.’ What if all the other saloons burn down and mine is the only one standing? Deal with what’s in front of you.” His voice grew strained as he leaned back, pulling the final line taut. “Ignore the rest.”

“That’s not an answer!” She clutched her elbows as she paced restlessly to the other side of the room. “I know I’m not your wife, Owen, but I’m still relying on you.” He didn’t even want the responsibility of a dog, so she knew he wasn’t putting much store in his obligations toward her. “Please don’t be so cavalier about my future.”

“What do you want me to say? That I know what the future holds?” He tied off the rope and pushed the bed frame into place, leaving enough space on the side by the wall for her to get in and out.

When he moved to the rolled mattress standing on end by the door into the parlor, Temperance joined him. They walked it toward the bed then tipped it onto the ropes. From there, it was a small struggle to unroll it and wrangle it into place, but they did it.

He stretched out on the bed with a sigh and patted the spot beside him.

It was too tempting not to see how it felt.

The ropes creaked as she joined him, but even though it was freshly strung, the bed sagged her toward the middle and rolled her into him. She bent her knees to put space between them and pillowed her head on her curled arm.

“This is all you can do,” he said, turning his head to look at her. “Hope for a comfortable place to sleep at the end of a hard day and appreciate it when you get one.”

“I suppose I should be grateful you’re not making false promises.”

“I try not to make any promises at all.”

Make a promise to me, she wanted to urge, unsure why she wanted that so badly. She wasn’t even sure she could believe him that she would have a job next week.

Clarence picked himself up off the floor and padded toward the door right before there was a knock.

Emmett.

Temperance scrambled off the bed and moved to let him in, embarrassed that he’d almost caught her on the bed with Owen, even though it was unmade, and they were fully clothed. Owen stayed exactly where he was.

“I came back to help you with that,” Emmet said as he removed his cap and hung it on a peg by the door.

“Temperance did. We made our bed and now we’re going to lie it in, aren’t we?” he joked, glancing at her.

She supposed she would have to, she thought with a pang of fatalism.

Emmett left the next morning with Owen’s message that the next one of their partners to come to town should bring enough gold to clear his debts and outbid Cecil Dudley for whiskey.

Owen wasn’t letting Cecil’s interference bother him. He spent the morning unloading the wood he and Emmett had collected, then chopped enough to keep the fire going for a few days. When the sun came out in the afternoon, he posted the latest letters Temperance had written for him, then took her out to an empty field where he showed her how to shoot.

“Is that the pistol you took from that outlaw from Horsefly?” she asked with a frown of worry.

“He knows how to get it back if he wants it.” He showed her how to load the Colt.

“What if he doesn’t want to pay you twenty dollars? Do you shoot him with his own gun?”

“I’m not going to hand it to him and let him shoot me, am I?”