An Outlaw's Christmas by Linda Lael Miller

you saying that you’ve been shot before?”
    He had to chuckle. “No,” he said. “I was referring to the nature of my work, that’s all.”
    “What kind of ‘work’ involves getting shot?”
    Sawyer said nothing.
    “Are you an outlaw, Mr. McKettrick?” Piper persisted.
    “Would you believe me if I said I wasn’t?”
    She made a muffled sound, like a scream of anger, held captive in her throat. It made him smile again. “I think you owe me an answer,” she said, after a few moments.
    “You do, do you?” he teased.
    “Are you an outlaw?”
    He thought it over. He’d killed a man once, though he’d been defending Henry Vandenburg, his former employer, at the time. Vandenburg’s attacker, one of those wild-eyed anarchist types, had shoved his way through a crowd, in a busy railway station, and thrust the business end of a gun barrel into the boss’s ample belly. Sawyer had stepped in, there was a struggle, and the pistol went off. The would-be killer bled out on the floor before the municipal police arrived in their paddy wagons.
    “No,” he answered, feigning offense at the question. “Would Clay have asked me to serve as town marshal if I were?”
    “Possibly,” she replied, after some thought. “You’re his cousin, and the two of you grew up together. It might be that he’s just giving you the benefit of the doubt by assuming that you are still the person he knew as a boy.”
    “Could be,” Sawyer said, amused. She hadn’t been this talkative before, and he wondered if that meant anything. Then he decided she felt safer speaking her mind because they were under cover of darkness, and she couldn’t see him, or he her.
    In a way, it reminded him of the old days on the Triple M, when he and Clay used to spend the night at their grandparents’ house sometimes. The room they’d shared had two beds in it, and the dark of a country night had been like a curtain between them, making it possible to tell each other things they’d have choked on in the daylight.
    “That,” Piper said, “is a most unsatisfactory answer.”
    “Clay trusts me because I’ve never given him any reason not to,” Sawyer said, relenting. Now that he wasn’t in Vandenburg’s employ any longer, he figured he didn’t have to be so secretive, but he still wasn’t inclined to spill his whole history. “I’m not an outlaw,” he added.
    “Then what are you? Only outlaws carry guns.”
    “Clay carries one. Is he an outlaw?”
    “Well, no, ” Piper admitted. “But he’s the marshal.”
    There was a silence.
    He waited.
    “Are you a lawman?” she asked.
    “Not exactly,” Sawyer replied. He wondered if she’d warmed up yet, and if she was still scared—in need of a little manly protection. Being nobody’s fool, he didn’t ask. “How did you become acquainted with a lady of the evening?” he inquired instead, recalling that morning’s visit from Bess Turner.
    Piper sounded impatient. “You heard what she said—her daughter, Ginny-Sue, is one of my pupils. And if you’re ‘not exactly’ a lawman, what are you?”
    “I was paid to protect a man and his family,” Sawyer said. “And that’s all you need to know.” He barely paused before giving her a dose of her own medicine by barging right into her private business. “Generally, respectable women don’t befriend people like Ginny-Sue’s mother, no matter what the circumstances.”
    Her tone was huffy. “Maybe I’m not a respectable woman. Did you ever think of that?”
    Sawyer laughed. “Oh, you’re respectable, all right. You wouldn’t be so worried about my seeing you in a nightgown, not to mention our sharing a bedroom, if you weren’t.”
    Piper was quiet for so long that Sawyer began to think she’d fallen asleep. Finally, though, she spoke again, and there was a note of gentle sorrow in her voice. “Bess loves her child, just like anybody else, and besides, however misguided she might be, she’s a human being. I see no earthly