Emmy (Gold Rush Brides Book 2) Read online

  CONTENTS

  About This Book

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  EMMY

  Gold Rush Brides

  Book 2

  Cassie Hayes

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  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  When a debutante and a rough and tumble sheriff collide, it’s not just bullets that fly, it’s sparks!

  Emmy Gibson is a spoiled brat of epic proportions. Destitute after her father’s passing, she’s given one last chance to maintain her lavish lifestyle but she’d rather risk death. Hoping to start a new life, she becomes a mail order bride and traipses off to California, never suspecting she’ll soon be staring down the business end of a shotgun.

  As the sheriff of a county that’s as dangerous as it is beautiful, Mason Wilder has seen just about everything. But all of the drunken prospectors and murderous highwaymen in Gold Country can’t prepare him for Emmy. The high-falootin’ city girl turns his life upside down when she storms through his door, demanding justice after her stagecoach is robbed.

  When he and his posse hit the trail to hunt down the outlaws, Mason thinks he’s left the pampered belle behind. Except the darned woman tags along, and he can’t decide whether he wants to strangle her or kiss her. Little do they know, there’s a bullet out there with Mason’s name on it. Will they manage to become more than friends or will the villain succeed in ending their relationship before it has a chance to start?

  Emmy is the second book in the Gold Rush Brides series, mail order bride historical western romances with no cliffhangers. Did you miss Gold Rush Brides: The Beginning? Find it on Amazon!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Nevada County, California — May, 1851

  Emmy Gibson had never looked down the barrel of a shotgun before, and if she lived through this ordeal, she hoped she never would again.

  When her stagecoach had come to an abrupt stop after rounding a corner, her first instinct was to become irritated at yet another delay. She was about to give the driver of the beastly conveyance an earful when a man with a shotgun stepped up to the door.

  Her irritation turned to a deep fear that clamped her throat shut, which was probably not a bad thing because otherwise she was certain she would be screaming her head off at the moment. Then the lead road agent’s words nearly curdled her blood: “Any of ya scream, I’ll shoot ya dead.”

  In all of her twenty short years, she’d never experienced this kind of terror — the animal will to live rising above everything else and the realization that her fate was no longer in her own hands. As a result, her senses were heightened to a point where colors were brighter, smells sharper and noises louder.

  She could smell the gun oil the robber had used to clean his weapon and could see flecks of dirt and lint sticking to the black hole that could end her life at any moment. One of his heels crunched a rock as he shifted his weight to open the stagecoach’s door to let out the passengers. She even noticed a star-shaped scar peeking out from between the man’s faded red flannel shirt and worn leather gloves.

  Two of his cohorts herded the four passengers and the stage’s driver into a huddle at the side of the narrow road, guarding them with shotguns that looked as deadly as their leader’s. Emmy had an absurd urge to laugh at their height difference. It was ridiculous under the circumstances but hysteria must have taken hold.

  One was very tall and gangly, while the other matched her own small height and stature. If it wasn’t for the tufts of a bushy black beard puffing out from the bandana he wore around his face, he could easily have been mistaken for a young boy or a woman in men’s clothes. Any amusement she might have felt evaporated in the face of the steely glares they leveled on her.

  The road agents spoke very few words between them as they set about their tasks. They worked together fluidly, one merely motioning at another to communicate his needs. They all wore similar clothing, with bandanas covering their faces and their hats pulled low to keep their eyes in shadow, making them nearly impossible to identify. This was most definitely not their first stagecoach robbery. They were professionals, that much was clear.

  One robber was atop the stage, tossing cases and mail bags down to the ground, while another rifled through them in search of valuables. When Emmy realized he was pawing through her trunk with grimy hands, the fear of death vanished and she became incensed. Her late father’s words of warning about her temper tantrums barely echoed in her memory.

  “You there! Stop that!”

  The short man guarding her leveled his gun at her. “Shaddup,” he rasped.

  “But that’s my trousseau! He can’t molest my trousseau like that! I’m to be married tomorrow and my new husband will be sorely disappointed if I arrive with another man’s filthy handprints all over my wedding dress.”

  Every highwayman stopped what they were doing to watch the scene. Despite the gun trained on her, she set her shoulders and tossed her perfect yellow curls back defiantly, heedless of the other passengers’ hisses to quiet down. The leader hopped lithely down from the stage but didn’t approach her. He simply looked at her, then the trunk, and back at her again. She could barely see a shadow of his eyes from beneath the brim of his sweat-stained hat.

  “You’re heading to Nevada City to get hitched?” he asked, his voice hoarse like the short man’s. She felt his gaze rake up and down her body, causing goosebumps to bristle on her arms and the back of her neck. Still, they had no right to go through her things like that. They were her things! Who did they think they were?

  “Yes, I’m meeting my betrothed tomorrow. My father recently passed and left me destitute. I own nothing of value except a few toiletries and the dress in that trunk, and even then it’s only sentimental value. It was my mother’s. She died giving birth to me. Could you please be so kind as to instruct your man to refrain from further defiling it?”

  Her fury had chased away any remaining fear of the men holding her hostage, and the haughty look she gave the leader left no doubt she held nothing but the utmost contempt for them. Everyone was either gawking at her or the leader, and all — criminals and victims alike — seemed to be holding their breath.

  Finally, he let out a great guffaw and slapped a hand to his knee as he doubled over in laughter. Wiping a tear from his eye, he nodded at the man with her trunk, who then closed it up and shoved it off to the side.

  “Thank you,” she said, nodding at the man, but he’d already turned his attention back to the express box, where money was usually carried. The small guard’s gaze shifted between her and the leader, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just witnessed. Then his gaze grew blacker than ever, and whitened knuckles were evidence of how tightly he was gripping his shotgun. Emmy may have been accustomed to getting her way, but she was smart enough to know she’d won
that little battle against all odds, so she ducked her head and acted as meek as she could.

  Not another word was spoken as the men chiseled the strongbox from the body of the stagecoach and collected any other valuables they could find and easily carry. After loading up their horses, the men unhitched the stage’s horse team and tied them to their own. Emmy opened her mouth to object, to ask how were they supposed to get to Nevada City without horses, but her father’s voice finally made it through the fog of her stubbornness and she kept her mouth shut.

  Less than ten minutes after stopping the stage, the gang of road agents were mounted and ready to ride off into the verdant foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The leader turned around in his saddle and tipped a nod toward Emmy.

  “Till we meet again,” he rasped, then dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and left the hostages standing in a plume of rust-colored dust.

  “Never would be too soon for me,” she muttered to his retreating figure.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sheriff Mason Wilder had just kicked back with his second cup of mud — his lead deputy, Fred Merchant, kept trying to convince him it was coffee but the sheriff was suspicious by nature — when his door burst open and five dusty, sweaty people stumbled into his small office in Nevada City.

  With a population of 3,000 souls, the town had exploded in size since being settled two years earlier. News of gold in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains had brought a flood of hopeful — and often hopeless — miners to the area, but law enforcement was all but non-existent, especially in the mining camps.

  Outraged at the rapid growth in crime that came along with the growth in population, law-abiding folk took matters into their own hands. It didn’t take long for angry mobs to form at the mere whiff of wrongdoing but the men who appointed themselves responsible for upholding the law were often worse than the criminals.

  Justice was swift and severe in the camps and settlements in Mother Lode Country, where those ‘convicted’ by a slap-dash miner’s jury were sentenced to lashings or hangings or sometimes both by ‘Judge Lynch’. The hangman’s noose, affectionately nicknamed the ‘California collar’, became the favorite form of execution for those meting out their own form of justice. It was a crazy time.

  Mason took the job of constable in the new settlement a year and a half earlier, not long after arriving in California. Having been a deputy in St. Louis County in Missouri before moving west to seek his own gold fortune, he had the most experience of any man to apply.

  It wasn’t exactly what he’d envisioned for his future when he left Missouri but having seen how many miners failed and shambled back home with their tails between their legs made him happy to have a stable income. Besides, the rewards from catching wanted criminals or recovering gold and goods stolen from express companies were more than enough to keep him quite comfortable.

  Mason’s cool temper and innate sense of fairness made him popular with prospectors who got a little too rowdy in the town’s saloons, while his take-no-guff attitude and intimidating build made law-abiding folk feel well-protected. Naturally, when the state created Nevada County earlier that month, he’d been quickly elected sheriff.

  His office was housed in Nevada City’s only jail, a rough-hewn log cabin with a leaky roof and rusty bars. The two cells could hold six men comfortably, if they sat bolt upright, and often housed ten or more each on mail days, when miners would receive money from loved ones ‘investing’ in their venture. They’d use the money to blow off some steam in town, often getting into fights or worse and landing themselves in jail. Even if they didn’t end up in the calaboose, their money would almost certainly be spent before dawn, enriching the coffers of the town’s saloons, gambling hells and dance halls.

  As rough and wild as Nevada City was, Mason loved his adopted home. California was everything he’d dreamed it would be — and a few things he should have had the good sense to have nightmares about, if he’d only known — and Nevada City’s bustling chaos energized him. Nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the town was surrounded by a massive pine tree forest that was easy to get lost in, and the rainy winter months helped keep the trees green during the hot summers.

  The place was as close to heaven on earth as he could imagine, which was one reason why he couldn’t understand why it attracted so many deeply evil men. It wasn’t so long ago that a faro dealer cut out a gambler’s heart — or did his best before he was stopped — because the man had dared to accuse him of being a cheat. A trio of thieves convicted by a lynch mob of stealing a butcher’s hidden cache of gold were lashed so severely that one later died of his wounds. And just two months earlier, on March 11, someone deliberately set fire to the town’s bowling alley, causing most of the city to burn to the ground.

  But Nevada City also attracted good and resolute people, as evidenced by the fact that the town was almost completely rebuilt within a month of the devastating fire that destroyed more than one hundred houses and most of the businesses on Main, Coyote and Pine Streets. More people and goods arrived every day, and many of the businesses that were crippled by the fire were already turning a profit again. That kind of pluck and stubborn ingenuity was found in anybody who made a go of it out west, and it was why Mason was so devoted to his new home.

  It wasn’t unheard of for the new folks in town to stop by the sheriff’s office to ask directions or advice. But they were almost always men, Johnny Newcomes — new miners — with donkeys burdened by hundreds of pounds of equipment. So when three well-dressed, if disheveled, ladies and two men who were obviously not prospectors walked through his door, he knew trouble had arrived.

  “You the sheriff?” asked one of the men. He was rougher than the other man, definitely dirtier. In fact, he was covered in dust from head to toe. Very few professions got a man so filthy.

  Mason glanced at the clock on the wall and chided himself for not realizing he’d never heard the eight o’clock stagecoach roll by. It was now eleven o’clock. It wasn’t too hard to put two and two together.

  “Well, shoot,” he grumbled, dropping his big boots back to the floor and sitting upright. “Where’d they get you, Whip?”

  The driver did a double-take. “Pardon?”

  “The road agents. Where’d they stop you? I’m not wrong that y’all are from the morning stage that never arrived, am I? You’re the driver, right? The whip?”

  The driver rubbed the back of his grimy neck. “Well, I’ll be hanged. Yup, you got it right, Sheriff. We was an hour outta town when a band of five highwaymen stopped us. They got the express box and some of the passengers’ valuables. Didn’t hurt nobody…but maybe they shoulda.”

  The driver glared at one of the ladies, a young woman who nearly took Mason’s breath away with her beauty. He hadn’t noticed her at first because everyone else had crowded in front of the petite creature, but now he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  Porcelain skin and hair so yellow it reminded him of blooming daffodils. Her ringlets were a little limp and her skin sported reddish-brown dust smudges, but that did little to detract from her charm. She was stunning and he was powerless to stop his heart from speeding up a beat or two in response.

  The young woman squared her shoulders and pushed through the little crowd to face him. Her blue eyes flashed and her pretty pink lips were pursed as she glared right back at her traveling companions. He tried to hide a smile at her feistiness. It was adorable.

  Then she opened her mouth.

  “Sheriff, what kind of lawless pit of vipers are you running here?”

  She peered down her nose at him haughtily, like she was queen of the world or some darned thing. It didn’t matter a hang how fetching she was, it didn’t sit well with him when someone insulted his town and him in a single breath.

  “Watch yourself, Miss…”

  “Gibson. My name is Emmy Gibson, and I demand to know what you intend to do about this terrible affront to human decency!”

  “First I need to know w
hat happened, Miss Gibson,” he replied as calmly as he could manage. He’d had countless drunks and fools scream in his face and had never lost his temper with them, but this little bit of a thing was setting his teeth on edge.

  She rolled her eyes at him, further inflaming him. “The driver just told you. We were robbed at gunpoint. Our things were rifled through, belongings stolen. Then we were forced to walk the remaining five miles into town.”

  Mason looked at the clock again and double-checked his math. “It took you four hours to walk five miles?” he asked the driver. “That walk shouldn’t have taken more than two hours.”

  The driver cocked his head at Miss Gibson and grimaced. “She wouldn’t leave without it,” he said. That was when Mason noticed a large trunk on the floor.

  “It’s my trousseau,” she said, tossing her ringlets around for emphasis. “I’m to be wed tomorrow and I didn’t dare leave my only belongings on the road for the other barbarians who populate your little settlement to plunder.”

  Mason scrubbed his chin with a meaty hand in frustration. “You mean to tell me that you wasted four hours in getting here for the sake of one trunk? A trunk that has, what? Your wedding dress in it? Maybe a few trinkets? Do you have any idea how far away those road agents are by now? By the time I get out there, their trail will be as cold as the Rockies in January. ”

  Miss Gibson blinked at his admonishment. “How dare you speak to me that way! I’m a bride—”

  Mason was on his feet in a flash, looming over the tiny woman. “Enough,” he barked. He was done with her foolishness. It was time to get to work.

  “Whip, come tell me everything. The rest of you can take a seat wherever you can until I get to you.”

  “But there’s nowhere civilized to sit in this filthy sty,” insisted the irritating Miss Gibson, looking around her in disgust.