“I do no such—.” Blair stopped because what he said was true. “How did you get shot?” she asked meekly.
“I went with Dad to Colorado Springs when I was about fourteen. He had to talk to a witness for a client of his, and he was to meet the man at a hotel not far north of the bank. We’d just eaten dinner and were leaving the hotel when suddenly guns started firing and somebody yelled that the bank’d been robbed. I looked down the street and saw half a dozen men with bandannas over their faces riding toward us.
“I guess I didn’t think, I just acted. There was a buckboard in the alley, hitched with four horses and loaded with feedbags. I jumped into the seat, yelled at the horses and drove the wagon into the street and blocked the outlaws’ exit.”
“And they shot you.”
“I couldn’t very well jump off the wagon. The horses would have run ahead and left the street clear.”
“So you just sat there and held the horses,” Blair said with some awe.
“I stayed there until the sheriff caught up with the bank robbers.”
“And then what?”
He smiled. “And then my dad pulled me off the wagon and carried me to a doctor who gouged one bullet out—the other one went through my arm. He also let me get drunk, and I swear the hangover was worse than the holes in me.”
“But, thanks to you, the robbers were caught.”
“And spent years in jail. They’re out now. You even met one of them.”
“When?” she asked.
“The night we went to the reception. Remember when we went to the house on River Street? The suicide case? Remember the man outside? I don’t think you liked him very much.”
“The gambler,” she said, thinking of the way the man’d looked at her.
“Among other things. LeGault spent ten years in prison after that robbery in Colorado Springs.”
“Because of you,” she said. “He must hate you, since you’re the one who caught him.”
“Probably,” Lee said, without much interest. He opened his eyes and looked at her. “But then, I believe you used to hate me, too.”
“Not exactly hate…,” she began, then smiled. “Where did you go on our wedding night?”
“Want to see my bullet scars?”
She started to say something about his refusal to answer her, but she compressed her mouth into a tight little line and said no more.
He put his fingertip under her chin. “Honeymoons aren’t the place for anger, or for sulky looks. How about if I tell you about the time I delivered triplets?”
She didn’t say a word to him.
“One of them was breech.”
Still nothing.
“And they were a month early, and they were each born an hour apart, and to keep them alive we had to…”
“To what?” she asked after several minutes of silence.
“Oh, nothing. It wasn’t very interesting. It was only written about in three journals. Or was it four?” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Why was it written about?”
“Because our method of saving them was…But you probably wouldn’t be interested.” With a yawn, he lay back against the log.
Blair leaped on him, her hands clenched into fists. “Tell me, tell me, tell me,” she shouted at him while Lee, laughing, began to roll across the grass with her. He stopped when she was on the bottom.