She felt so dizzy now from lack of oxygen that she didn’t know if she’d heard the urgent voice or only imagined it.
Kick the horse, Ingrid, now!
Somehow she did, jamming her heel into the horse’s side so hard that the animal squealed in pain and reared up, Connor cracking his head on the boards. Suddenly Ingrid could breathe, his hand gone, his body slumped behind her. She kicked the horse again and grabbed its coarse mane as the panicked animal bolted from beneath the bridge, Connor dumped into the dirt.
She heard Cain screaming at her and the report from his gun, something like fire grazing the right side of her body and making her scream, too. Still she clung to the mane as the horse plunged up the hill only to be surrounded by what looked to Ingrid like a dozen horses while more gunshots filled the air.
“Ingrid!”
She saw Joshua’s face in front of her, his eyes stricken as he pulled up on the reins and jumped down to rush toward her…even as she let go of the horse’s mane, no strength at all left in her fingers.
“Ingrid…oh, God, no.”
Her eyelids fluttered, Joshua looking down at her now, his strong arms cradling her and something wet falling upon her cheek.
“Hold on, my love, please hold on. We’re going to get you some help.”
She wanted to reach up and touch his face, but she couldn’t seem to move or even speak as the blue sky above her faded into black.
* * *
“She’s going to be all right, Joshua, I promise you. The bullet glanced off her ribs, thank God—and thanks to her corset. It looked worse than it was, the shock of it all causing her to faint. She’s going to be fine.”
Joshua said nothing, his head in his hands as he sat beside Ingrid’s bed.
Try as he might and no matter Charles Davis’s many reassurances, he couldn’t shake the memory of bright red blood seeping through the right side of Ingrid’s yellow dress. Her face deathly pale. Her blue eyes staring up at him with such love just before she went limp in his arms, Joshua at that moment fearing he might have lost her.
He would have dropped to his knees into the dirt if Caleb hadn’t run over and pressed his hand to her neck, assuring Joshua that he felt a pulse.
After that was a blur of riding hard back to town with Ingrid clasped against his heart, Caleb and Andreas flanking him. Others had stayed behind to retrieve the Sutherland brothers’ bodies, thankfully no one else injured during the brief gunfight that had left Cain shot dead trying to escape, while Connor had succumbed not from a bullet but a fractured skull—or so Luke Braun had reported.
The new sheriff’s theory that Ingrid had somehow managed to unseat Connor and escape on his horse from under that bridge made Joshua lift his head to stare at her…his courageous bride-to-be.
“She should wake soon,” Molly added, laying her hand gently upon his shoulder. “We gave her only a small amount of chloroform to clean the flesh wound. We’ll keep her for the night, but other than a bandage and a twinge now and then of pain, she’ll be as right as rain.”
“Thank you, Molly,” he murmured, while standing in a cluster at the foot of the bed, Kari, Seth, Anita, Andreas, and Caleb looked more than relieved.
“What about the wedding?” Kari asked softly, looking with such compassion at Joshua while Charles stood at the head of the bed checking Ingrid’s pulse.
“Molly and I are looking forward to it. No reason not to go ahead with everything as planned if it’s all right with Ingrid.”
All right with Ingrid? Sighing heavily, Joshua leaned back in his chair, feeling sick and in despair by turns.
How could it be all right with Ingrid? She could have been killed—and why? Because of her association withhim, no matter he was no longer the sheriff but the town mayor. The posse might have passed right over that bridge and ridden on in pursuit if she hadn’t broken loose from her captors, and where would that have left her? His gut clenching painfully, Joshua couldn’t even bear the thought.
“Joshua, what happened to Ingrid isn’t your fault,” Caleb said, clearly guessing his thoughts, though it did nothing to soothe the heart-rending anguish threatening to overwhelm him.
“Not my fault? The Sutherlands didn’t abduct her because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because of what she was tome!”
“And to me,” Andreas added quietly, though his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “If I hadn’t gotten into that fight and ended up in jail, she wouldn’t have come looking for me—”
“Enough!” Caleb’s roar made all of them jump, except for Seth and Joshua, who had seen this side of him many times before. “Ingrid’s alive and safe and that’s all that matters! Why torment yourselves any further? I haven’t paid for a second wedding with all the trimmings to see that money spent for nothing. And it’s going to be one of the happiest days Walker Creek has ever seen!”
For some reason, Joshua, shaking his head, began to laugh. Almost to himself at first as everyone else began to chuckle, too, even Caleb, who looked as if his vehement outburst had taken him by surprise as well.
It was true, his beloved Ingrid was alive and safe, a sudden movement of her fingers making Joshua stop laughing almost as soon as he’d started and lean toward her.
“Joshua?”
