“Thank you, Miss Catherine. I keep telling my deputies no one on earth makes a better pot of coffee than you do.”

“Thank you, marshal.”

O’Connell didn’t miss the blush staining her cheeks. For a moment, he had to struggle to breathe. How dare she blush at another man. So what if he had been gone five years, it still didn’t give her the right to do that for someone else.

She was his wife, not the marshal’s.

The marshal nodded, then took his coffee and left.

O’Connell wasted no time sneaking to the doorway to see the marshal sitting in the parlor with a paper, sipping his coffee as if everything were right in the world.

“What the hell is a marshal doing here?” he asked Catherine in a low voice.

She gave him a haughty glare. “He lives here.”

“Lives here?” he repeated.

“I run a boardinghouse, remember? He’s one of my regular tenants.”

“Why would you let him live here?”

“I don’t know,” she said sarcastically. “Maybe I like having him here because it keeps out the riff-raff,” she said with a pointed stare, “and he pays two months’ rent in advance.”

Catherine didn’t miss the heated glare Michael gave her. Licking her lips, she felt a wave of misgiving run up her spine. Michael was entirely too interested in the marshal.

Something was wrong.

“Are you wanted?” she asked all of a sudden.

He stared at her with those clear silver-gray eyes. “It depends,” he said in a serious voice. “I was hoping you’d want me.”

Her breath caught. Did she dare hope that he might actually be able to settle down with her and Diana?

“And if I did?” she asked.

He looked back at the marshal. “This is a bad time. I really need to leave.”

“Leave?” she gasped. “You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you just got here. You can’t just show up on my doorstep, roll around in my bed, and then take flight as soon as the sun comes up. I thought we had shared something special last night. Or were they all lies again?”

He winced as if she’d struck him. “I’ve never lied to you, Catherine.”

“No. But you lied to my boarder and housekeeper. Is that not true, Mr. Tyler Burdette?”

“I—”

“Miss Catherine, Miss Catherine?” An excited boy came bursting through the kitchen with Pete’s saddlebags in his hands. The blond head bobbed as the kid jumped up and down. “I just found these outside by the front door, and look,” he said, flipping one open. “They’re filled with money! Can I keep it?”

O’Connell went cold as everything came together in his mind.

“I found this little orphanage in a town called Redwood,” Pete had said. “You’d probably like it a lot, Kid. It had a real homey feel to it.”