Mending his wounded hear.., p.1
Mending His Wounded Heart, page 1
Mending His Wounded Heart
A WESTERN ROMANCE NOVEL
ELAINE SHIELDS
Copyright © 2021 by Elaine Shields
All Rights Reserved.
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Table of Contents
Mending His Wounded Heart
Table of Contents
Mending His Wounded Heart
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Her Unexpected Soulmate
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 2
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Mending His Wounded Heart
Introduction
Marcia Cooper is not your ordinary doctor’s daughter and she has never claimed to be. She works alongside her father, taking care of patients and other tasks that most people don’t approve of. If there’s one thing about Marcia though, it’s that she speaks her mind and fights for what she believes in. Little does she realize what awaits her though when an injured bounty hunter suddenly arrives at their doorstep. As she tends to his wounds she becomes fascinated by him, much to her father’s chagrin. Yet she fears he will put himself in harm’s way again all too soon… Feeling truly alive for the first time in her life, will she find the courage to show him what lies deep in her heart?
When Dale McCandless finds himself wounded by the outlaws he’s trailing, he ends up under Marcia Cooper’s care. He’s bound and determined to get back on the trail while the feisty young doctor’s daughter fights him every step of the way. Dale, a man who’s sworn to never settle down in one place for too long, soon becomes aware of his increasing attraction to Marcia. The more he gets to know her, the more he begins to feel like she could be the one to save his aching heart. But troubles left behind, have a way of returning… For a man who has spent his life fighting, can there ever be peace and maybe a chance to love?
Dale worries that he’s put Marcia in peril and Marcia worries that Dale is going to get himself killed due to his obsession with capturing his enemies. When Dale comes close to losing everything that he never knew he wanted he will have to decide what truly matters to him. Can their electrifying connection withstand the danger coming their way and turn into a true love they never imagined?
Prologue
Outskirts of Cooper’s Rest, Nevada 1890
Bounty hunter Dale McCandless edged along the tree line, carefully avoiding dry pinecones and loose pebbles in the gritty soil as he crept along the gradual downslope of a hill through the wooded area on the western edge of Washoe Lake. He’d left his horse tied to a tree twenty yards back in the woods. Rifle in hand, he slowly crept forward, following the sounds of voices near the edge of the lake.
Finally, he’d found his prey. Blake “Aldie” Aldrin and his outlaw gang had made a temporary camp near the lake’s shore. The aroma of frying fish and low conversation wafted toward him on the early morning breeze. The sun had just risen over the horizon, the sky turning ever-changing shades of orange and pink as the stars faded.
The lake still looked dark and foreboding as the sun rose incrementally higher, casting deep purple shadows across the valley floor behind the lake. At his back, the tree-studded foothills of the Carson Range of the Sierra Nevada Mountains stood dark and still, only the occasional sound of a skittering of a squirrel scrambling up a tree trunk breaking the silence.
His heart thudding with excitement, he continued forward, his eyes constantly sweeping the terrain, his ears attuned to the sounds of the morning. Though he couldn’t pick up the words that he heard floating on the breeze, he did recognize that harsh bark of laughter that broke the silence—definitely Blake Aldrin.
Dale couldn’t hold back a grin. After tracking the outlaw gang nearly six hundred miles from Colorado City in Arizona, through southwestern Utah, and into Nevada, his journey was at its end and his reward in sight. With a thousand-dollar bounty on each of the gang and a two-thousand dollar bounty on Blake Aldrin, plus a reward for recovering any of the bank money they’d stolen in Arizona, he was not about to give up the chase.
Blake ”Aldie” Aldrin was a man with a very bad temper and no self-control. Nearly forty years of age, the man had no conscience. He pulled his gun without a second thought, and though intelligent, rarely thought things through, which had prompted Dale to start trailing him in Arizona after their semi-successful bank robbery there.
If Dale were asked to describe the huge, dour-looking man with the scar running along the left side of his jaw, he would describe him as a bully. He not only intimidated everyone he met but his own gang members too.
Dale didn’t know much about Aldrin’s past other than he was the illegitimate son of a Texas saloon girl. He’d been pretty much left to himself growing up, hence his early experiences being a town bully. He got used to taking what he wanted, and without any discipline or guidance from any adults in his life, had become quite the pickpocket and burglar by the time he reached his twelfth birthday.
At fifteen, he’d graduated to armed robbery. He robbed small stores and businesses back then, but since his early twenties had focused his efforts on robbing banks, traveling from town to town, spending the money as fast as he stole it.
In Colorado City, Blake had grown impatient with the bank teller, who was “taking his own sweet time” gathering the money the outlaw had demanded. So Blake shot him and three other bank hostages before he’d escaped with nearly five-thousand dollars in cash with his fellow gang members.
Dale had wanted posters folded up in his jacket pocket for every one of them. First, there was Benjamin “Benny” O’Reilly, who had hooked up with Blake three years ago. Dale didn’t know much about him other than he was the only person who ever managed to get what you could call close to a friendship with Blake.
From what the sheriff in Arizona told him, Benny O’Reilly had a bit of medical training that he had learned during the War Between the States. If he’d put his mind to it, he could’ve been a doctor by now. Instead, he was running with Blake’s gang.
Dale edged closer, trying to keep the trunks of pine trees between him and the group seated around the small campfire. He recognized Danny Jepson and his younger brother, Sullivan, “Solly” Jepson. The brothers had joined Blake’s gang down in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They both seemed to be impatiently eyeing the two fish frying in the skillet over the small campfire.
Dale turned his gaze to the tall man standing by the lakeshore, staring out over the water, hands on his hips, his right hand never far from his Colt, hanging low on his right hip. That was Alan Norris, the most recent member of the gang, apparently joining the crew just before they reached Colorado City.
Just in time to join in on the bank robbery that had gone bad, with innocent blood on their hands. While Dale knew that Blake Aldrin probably didn’t much care about that, perhaps Norris, maybe even the Jepson brothers, would.
Five against one. Dale, woefully outnumbered, wasn’t too concerned. He had the element of surprise. For a couple of weeks after the robbery in Colorado City, he had only been able to track the gang by the faint trail they left behind and the witnesses that had commented on the unfriendly gang as they passed through one town after another, making their way westward and then northward toward Salt Lake City and then west into Nevada. At first, Dale had thought maybe they were heading for Stockton or Sacramento in California, but then they had turned northward again. That left Carson City, Reno, or maybe even Virginia City as their ultimate destinations.
He watched the group for several more minutes. The horses were tethered to the left, between the lakeshore and a copse of young alders. The horses stood calmly, their ears still, heads down. They hadn’t caught his scent or heard his approach. Good.
Dale had a reputation himself, one that seemed to precede him wherever he went. He was known to be fast with a gun, and once he was on someone’s trail, he never gave up. He was good with his fists and not afraid to use them.
Of course, there were plenty of lawmen who didn’t like him or his kind, many of his fellow bounty hunters gaining a negative reputation of taking the law into their own hands, especially when the bounty said ‘Dead or Alive.’ Sometimes, dead was just easier. Most people thought Dale was more concerned about the money he received for chasing down outlaws, but he was just as concerned w ith justice. But the money didn’t hurt. He had to make a living.
In most cases, Dale wouldn’t have tracked an outlaw gang as far or as long, but the bounty on each of the gang members for bringing them in either dead or alive, plus the reward offered by the bank in Colorado City would amount to a tidy bundle of money that he just couldn’t turn down. Though only in his mid-thirties, Dale didn’t plan on being a bounty hunter forever.
Although he didn’t have much formal education, he was intelligent, quick-witted, and stubborn. All he needed was a stake, and then he could finally buy his own land and raise some cattle. Somewhere. Maybe even back in Colorado. Fiercely independent, he had left northern Colorado years ago, where he lived with his family until he was in his mid-twenties. He—
“I say we go to Virginia City,” the youngest member of the group, Solly Jepson, commented. “Maybe we could hit the bank there.”
“Naw,” Danny Jepson grumbled. He scowled at his brother, shaking his head as if he should know better. “The silver mines played out their loads about ten years ago. There will be no money there.”
Blake Aldrin spoke in a deep, gravelly voice. “He’s right.” He turned to glare at each of them, and then his gaze riveted on the back of Alan Norris, still standing by the water. “Al! What you doing over there? We got enough fish. Get over here and eat and then let’s get out of here.”
Al turned around, his expression bland as he began to slowly walk back toward the campfire.
“What’s the hurry?” Benny O’Reilly asked. He made a wide, sweeping gesture with his hand. “There’s nobody out here, nothing ‘cept snakes and rabbits. We gave that bounty hunter the slip days ago.”
Dale’s heart skipped a beat. Though he had known that the gang was aware of his presence, especially when he got within a day’s ride of them, his dust trail impossible to hide out on the open flatlands, he had hoped that they wouldn’t know it was him. But word traveled fast along the trail and had apparently gotten ahead of the gang as they headed toward Reno and then down toward Carson City.
By now, Blake Aldrin probably knew as much about Dale as he cared to know. Dale’s father had been the town sheriff near Fort Collins, Colorado. His two older brothers had followed in their father’s footsteps as deputies. When his father hung up his guns and retired his badge, his brothers would take his place, which would have left Dale with no job prospects in law enforcement there, nor down in Denver, which was growing a bit too civilized for his taste.
As far as he was concerned, he only had one choice. At seventeen years of age, he had tracked down and wounded the man who had shot his father one night as he patrolled the town. When the posse had given up, his brothers had returned to town to look after their father, and Dale had kept going.
For three days he had tracked the man who had shot his father, a short gunfight ensued, and two days later, Dale rode into town, the outlaw tied to the saddle, moaning and groaning over the non-fatal bullet wound in his shoulder, complaining about ‘the young ‘un who didn’t know when to quit.’
It was then that Dale had realized that there was no room for him in the organized law-enforcement environment in larger cities like Denver or the growing Colorado Springs to the south. So he’d made up his mind. Though he hated to leave, he decided on a life as a bounty hunter. While not exactly condoned by his father and brothers, Dale realized that at least for the time being, it was as close as he was going to get to wearing a sheriff or deputy’s badge, at least for the time being.
What he had meant to be a temporary job had turned into a fifteen-year-long career of sorts. Dale had earned a reputation throughout the mountain states and down into Arizona and New Mexico as a relentless tracker with a spine of steel and an intense need to not only hunt down his prey but to capture them and bring them to justice.
He brought back most of his bounties alive, but there were times over the years where he had brought them back to the local sheriff draped face-down over a saddle. Sometimes, he didn’t much care as long as he received his reward at the end.
It was a living, but truth be told, he yearned to settle down. Someplace. He wasn’t sure where yet, but he had time to figure that out. Bounty hunting was a hard life, and though he was up to the task, he knew he wouldn’t be up for it forever. He already had more scars than he could count, and on some mornings when the weather was especially damp and chilly, he felt his hard life in his bones. So much so that he wondered what his future would bring.
“I said knock it off!”
Dale focused on the group, all five of them now sitting around the campfire eating fried fish and what looked to be cornbread cakes with their fingers. Now was as good a time as any. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and stood. He reached for his revolver, wrapped his palm around the smooth walnut grip, pulled the Colt .45 from its smooth and well-used holster, and stepped forward, half his torso hidden behind the trunk of a Ponderosa pine.
He spoke in a non-threatening, casual tone. “You boys might want to hurry up and finish that meal because it’s the last decent one you’re going to get for quite some time.”
Chaos ensued. All five men gathered around the campfire startled and glanced wildly around, not sure where his voice had come from. Three of them scrambled upward to their feet, grabbing for their guns. Shouting and gunshots ensued. While Dale tried to keep his eyes on Blake, the man he considered the most dangerous, he also kept the others in his line of sight as best he could.
A gunshot ricocheted against the pine tree three feet above his head. He fired and saw Benny O’Reilly stumble, but he didn’t go down. Another bullet ricocheted off the tree next to Dale, and he turned his gaze back to the campfire. He saw Blake squinting in a half-crouch, firing his gun quickly, one hand brushing back the hammer, the finger of his right hand pulling the trigger just as fast. Dale fired his gun at Blake and saw him go down with a wound in his thigh. Cursing, Blake shouted at the others.
“It’s McCandless! Bring him down, boys!”
The gunfight seemed to go on forever, although Dale knew it probably only lasted seconds. Solly Jepson was down on the ground, not moving. Al Norris lay moaning on the ground, one hand clasping his side. Suddenly, Dale was struck by something against his forehead, and he half-fell, a nearby sapling halting his crash to the ground. He had barely regained his footing when something hard hit him low in his left shoulder, and then he felt the bite of something in his outer right thigh.
Before he even hit the ground, he heard the sound of the horse’s hooves and knew that any surviving members of the gang were hightailing it away from the campfire. He swore under his breath, berating himself for his failure. Then, though he struggled mightily against it, darkness hovered on the edges of his vision, pain bloomed through his body, and a growing darkness consumed him.
