by Debra Cowan
She shot to her feet. “I had no choice. Someone had to—the Indians were coming—”
Matt stared at her. She was babbling, making no sense. Then she began waving her arms, pointing behind her, and her face shaded from raspberry into rose-red. He took a second, more appreciative look. Damn fine-looking woman, all six feet of her.
She was tall, all right. Willowy and plenty womanly, and her movements were graceful as a gazelle. Strands of dark hair poked out of a bun at the creamy nape of her neck.
Against his will, he moved a step closer. She had eyes the color of a noon sky and a face a sculptor might have chiseled out of pink-and-cream marble—even features and a lush-looking mouth. A man could imagine uses for those full lips that would make a lady blush.
The sudden flood of desire made him angry. He had no time for a woman, even one as pretty as this one in starched blue ruffles. His mission didn’t include dalliance along the way.
“Just who are you, anyway?” He barked the question out of a dry throat.
She straightened her spine and dropped the reins. “My name is Eleanora Stevenson.” Her voice was a clear, cold ripple on a dark river; the sound sent the hunger, and the anger, up a notch. “With a V,” she added. “And just who might you be?”
“Name’s Matt Johnson,” he snapped. “With a J. What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?”
She climbed down from the wagon with the calm grace of a queen and jumped lightly to the ground, her blue skirt fluttering. “I am traveling to Gillette Springs, Mr. Johnson.”
“Alone?”
“Yes. I mean, no.” She tipped her head toward the wagon bed. “With these children.”
He studied her flushed cheeks, let his gaze drift to the curve of her breasts and the slim waist. “Why?”
“For their safety, of course.” She marched to within two arms’ lengths of him and he judged she was just a hair shorter than he was, maybe five foot nine or ten.
The blue-blue eyes looked directly into his. “What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“Hunting,” he said shortly.
“Hunting what?”
“None of your business, Miss Stevenson-with-a-V.”
She sent him a look that would fry flapjacks. “There is no reason to be rude, Mr. Johnson-with-a-J.”
“It’s a private matter.”
She surveyed him with narrowing eyes. “Ah. Then you are hunting a man. Or perhaps you are hiding from one, here in this clump of trees?”
“Hell, no, I’m not hiding. He’s the one who’s hiding. All I’m doing is camping here till morning.”
Her eyes clouded. “So are we. I can drive this horse no farther, and the children are tired.”
“And hungry” came a small voice from the wagon.
“Mr. Johnson, I trust we can share this campsite.”
It wasn’t a question, and Matt gritted his teeth. She’d want a campfire, and a campfire could be seen from the mountain ridge. “Looks like I don’t have a choice,” he growled.
“Thank you. Children? Let’s unload the wagon.”
Children? He detested children. They cried. They whined. They got sick. His heart stuttered. They got killed.
Five small figures burst from the wagon, four girls and a boy of about seven. For an instant Matt’s eyes burned. The kid was dark-haired, like Luke, and about the same age and size. Matt wondered if this boy was afraid.
Sure he was. But if he was anything like Matt’s own younger brother, he was hiding it under a veneer of bravado. Matt’s breath stopped. Luke had been brave; but in the end it hadn’t mattered.
The old bitterness rose in his throat. He’d catch that bastard Royce and plant a slug in his heart if it was the last thing he ever did on this earth. Maybe two slugs.
The children tossed out the wagon contents and a haphazard pile of blankets and tin cans rose in front of him. Looked like enough food for an army detail on patrol. Now what would a young woman as good-looking as she was be doing with that much food? To say nothing of four—no, five—young children.
“These kids yours?”
“Only in a manner of speaking. I’m their teacher.”
“Looks like you’re planning to be here awhile,” he said, eyeing the tin cans.
“Oh, no, Mr. Johnson. Just overnight. We are only halfway to our destination.”
Good. She would be moving on, too; she and her students weren’t going to slow him down a single hour. She bent forward, separating the cans into two piles—beans and peaches.
“That’s one fine backside,” he murmured to himself. But he wouldn’t get too excited about it; he’d be riding out at sunup. Probably never see her or her backside again.
The thought of riding out didn’t make him as happy as he’d thought it would. He pivoted, putting his back to her, unable to watch the way she moved any longer. Instead, he moved toward his horse, scrabbled in his saddlebag for the bottle of red-eye. He uncorked it and had just tipped his head back to swig down a gulp when something tugged on his pant leg.
“I’m thirsty,” said a small voice. “What are you drinking?”
Matt gazed down into a pair of pale-blue eyes squinting up at him. Oh, hell. “Thirsty, huh?”
The girl nodded. She wore a rumpled white pinafore over a blue gingham dress. Gazing at the bottle in his hand, she licked her lips.
“What you need is water, not whiskey,” he grumbled.
The girl grinned up at him. “My name is Manette.” She slipped her tiny hand into his, and Matt blinked in surprise.
Ellie looked up from the stack of blankets next to the wagon to see five-year-old Manette Nicolet grasp Mr. Johnson’s large hand. She let the quilt clutched in her fingers drop, propped her hands on her hips and watched Manette lead the disreputable stranger to the shallow pond.
All her nerves went on alert. Manette could charm anyone, but was this man safe? What if he were an outlaw? He said he was hunting—what was he hunting? Or whom?
A shiver crawled up her spine and she started forward. The craggy-faced man and Manette were kneeling side by side at the small spring, out of which bubbled a steady trickle of clear water. Mr. Johnson scooped water up into his cupped palm, swallowed it down and gestured for Manette to do the same.
The amount of water the girl’s small hand could hold barely wet her lips. Johnson scooped again and held the water under Manette’s chin. She dipped her head and noisily slurped it down, then turned her head and grinned up at him. She grabbed his still-cupped hand and plunged it into the stream again and studied the resulting pocket of drinking water. Next, she tried her own hand again, and voilà! A palm full of water. Now Mr. Johnson was grinning at Manette.
A hiccup of laughter bubbled past Ellie’s lips. Little Manette always wanted to know how adults did things.
Johnson was now patiently demonstrating the pond-dipping maneuver once more. The man still looked like an outlaw, his face tanned to the color of hot cocoa and his cheeks and chin darkened with a shadowy growth of whiskers. His features were regular, but his dark hair was overlong and straggled over his eyes. Could he be an outlaw on the run?
Ellie resumed folding the blankets for the children to sleep in, but her thoughts lingered on the stranger. When Johnson and Manette returned, Noralee and Edith were selecting canned food for their supper.
“I know how to make a hand-cup to drink from!” Manette crowed.
The twins dropped the tins of beans and crowded around her. “Show me! Show me!” The three girls tore past Johnson and sprinted for the pond.
Ellie shot another glance at the rough-looking man. He wore a battered black hat, the brim pulled down so far his face was mostly hidden except for his mouth and chin. The glimmer of a smile appeared and then evaporated in an instant. He didn’t seem much like an outlaw right now.
“Kids!” he growled.
Ellie stiffened. She must have imagined the smile; now he was grumpy as an old bear. “You do not like children, Mr.
Johnson?”
He didn’t answer, just stalked away toward his horse. She watched him unsaddle the animal and give it a handful of oats. Then he unhitched her mare and fed her, as well.
Matt retrieved a hunk of hardtack from his saddlebag for his supper, swallowed another mouthful of red-eye and surveyed the area for a level place to spread out his bedroll. Somewhere away from those children and definitely away from the blue-eyed Miss Stevenson.
He rolled out his pallet as far from the wagon as he could get, but before he could even get his boots off, a quilt blossomed on either side of him. The young boy sought his approval with a quick questioning look; Matt groaned, then nodded and was rewarded with a shy, gap-toothed smile.
Manette didn’t ask; she just spread out her blanket and flopped down onto it. She rolled her small body up in her quilt and scooched over closer to him. “I—I’m c-cold,” she whispered.
Wasn’t his problem, he told himself. But before he knew what he was doing, he’d pulled his boots back on, gathered an armload of pine branches and twigs, and started a fire. A thin spiral of blue-gray smoke wound into the surrounding trees.
Whoa! What was he doing? If Royce was anywhere within fifty miles, he’d see the smoke and Matt’s cover would be blown before he even saddled up tomorrow.
Miss Stevenson paced a slow circle around the now-crackling blaze. “Oh, good. Now we can have a hot meal.”
She was going to cook something? From what he’d observed she scarcely knew her way around a campsite, let alone how to cook over an open fire.
“Have you a pocketknife, Mr. Johnson?”
With a grunt, Matt fished in his pocket and tossed his pearl-handled jackknife to her. When she snaked out her arm and caught the knife with one hand, his eyebrows went up. She looked too back-east-citified to be much use out west but, well, he guessed looks could be deceiving. And when she jimmied open three cans of pinto beans and two of sliced peaches without cutting herself, his surprise quadrupled. Interesting woman.
He watched her settle the cans of beans close to the flames. The paper labels turned brown and curled up, but before the three other girls had finished laying out their blankets, the beans were steaming hot. She reached for the can closest to her, but Matt knocked her hand away.
“It’s hot,” he warned.
“Well,” she huffed. “I know that.”
“Then keep your hands off it!”
“I wasn’t going to—” Her blue eyes widened and grew shiny.
Oh, hell, was she going to cry?
“Just like a woman,” he muttered. “Weeps over every little thing!” He blurted it out without thinking, then braced himself. She’d probably throw the hot beans in his face.
She glared at him good and hard for a full minute. “I weep only over important things.” In icy silence she handed back his knife.
“Get some twigs,” he ordered. “Use two to make a holder.”
While she scrabbled for a few fallen pine branches, the three young girls crept close to the fire, warmed their hands and toasted their backsides, then snuggled into their folded-over quilts. It was obvious how unprepared Miss Blue and her students were for camping out like this. So why were they?
“Lemme see your twigs,” he said, his voice rough. She dropped six or eight small branches at his feet and waited, hands on her hips.
Quickly Matt hollowed out the thicker ends and carved three crude spoons.
“Use two small twigs to lift your beans away from the fire,” he instructed.
She bent over, a twig in each hand, giving him another view of her nicely rounded bottom. She managed to jockey the first can away from what were now coals and hot ashes. “Like this?”
“Yeah, just like that. Now…” He handed over the spoons. “Dig in.”
“Would you care to share our meal, Mr. Johnson?”
“No thanks. Hardtack and red— Hardtack is plenty filling.”
She gave a short nod. “Share the spoons, children.”
Between the five of them, they polished off all the beans and then attacked the two opened cans of peaches. It was quiet except for the slurping and lip-smacking.
Matt heaved a tired sigh. All he wanted was for his manhunt to be over. Been way too long since he’d seen a pretty woman, at least one as pretty and refined-looking as Miss Blue. And, she had a backside he’d not soon forget.
An evening song sparrow began warbling in the cottonwood overhead. Matt shucked his boots again, laid them beneath his head for a pillow and stretched full-length on his pallet. He closed his eyes, thinking of his little brother as he had every night for the past four years. Had he lived, Luke would have been thirteen come June. He was only nine years old when he was killed.
His throat felt as if it was full of blackberry brambles. He wondered if Luke had a pony up in heaven.
Rustling sounds told him Miss Blue and her students were rolling themselves up into their blankets for the night. He heard a whispered nighttime prayer from Manette, on his left. In Latin, so she must be Catholic. On his right lay the young boy who reminded him of Luke. Under his lids, Matt’s eyes burned.
Ellie lay back on the crocheted afghan, watching the firelight flicker and die down into glowing coals. She had waited until the children had selected their blankets, then had taken the one left over and hidden the wilting but still fragrant bunch of lilacs underneath.
Her back ached. Her head pounded as if a hammer were smashing into her temples. But, she thought with an inner smile, they had made it through the day. She had managed to keep the children safe through the roughest, bounciest wagon ride she ever hoped to take. She’d fed them and tucked them all into their blankets. Teddy MacAllister had insisted on removing his boots to use as a pillow like Mr. Johnson did, and dear little Manette had shared the last of her canned peaches with the man.
She wondered why the children seemed to like this sun-bronzed stranger. Why would they trust a rough man who looked like a criminal, with his unruly black hair and those calculating eyes he kept hidden under the brim of his hat?
She glanced around at the bedrolls spread in a semicircle, toes pointing toward the still-glowing fire. Evenings like these, with the air mild and still and the scent of lilacs, made her insides feel odd, flooded with an unnamable longing. The sparrow above them sang and sang. The sound cut into her soul.
Would she ever find someone to love? Would she ever be loved in return? Oh, God, she wanted to belong to someone fine and upstanding. She wanted her life to be connected to another’s. She wanted to share everything, great and small.
And a child…she ached to hold a child of her own. But she was twenty-six years old. All her life she had felt sorry for old maids, and now, she guessed she was one of them.
Had Mama been right? Was she too tall, too outspoken, too…?
She couldn’t finish the thought.
Chapter Three
A sparrow overhead trilled an earsplitting warble and Matt opened his eyes. Wasn’t even sunup yet; what had wakened the bird? He raised his head half an inch and spied the cause.
Miss Blue was trying to back up the dappled mare to hitch it to the wagon; her legs braced, she leaned forward, pushing against the horse’s chest. Maybe he shouldn’t have unhitched the animal last night, but he never figured she was so green she didn’t know that horses don’t back up too willingly.
She stuffed an escaped tendril of mahogany-colored hair back into her bun but apparently didn’t notice that the gathered knot at the back of her neck was coming undone. As he watched, four or five tortoise-shell hairpins worked themselves free and skittered onto the bed of pine needles, which meant the mass of shiny hair came tumbling past her shoulders.
Matt’s mouth went dry. A woman with her hair down did odd things to his insides. Things he didn’t have time for. She swiped the shower of dark waves off her face with one hand and kept pushing the horse.
The horse tossed its head and sidestepped away from her. She stomped her foot, muttered somethi
ng he couldn’t hear and dropped to her knees to scrabble in the pine needles for her missing hairpins.
When she found them, she combed her fingers through the heavy fall of dark hair, lifted her arms to twist a fistful around and around into a knot, poked in the pins and secured the bundle at the base of her neck. With her arms up, her blue dress pulled taut over her breasts.
Matt swallowed back a groan. He hadn’t seen hair like that since he’d left Texas, and it sure sent his pulse up a few notches. And then there were her breasts…
Miss Blue brushed off her hands, rolled the sleeves of her ruffly shirtwaist up to her elbows and stalked after the horse.
For a full minute he watched her struggle to push the gray mare backward.
“Lady, I never saw a more citified way of trying to move a horse. Why’d you come out west, anyway?”
“Because,” she snapped. “That’s what old maids from Boston do!”
He jerked upright. “Is that so?”
“That is so,” she blurted. “If I had not escaped my mother’s nitpicking criticism I would have shriveled up and died. ‘Eleanora, lower your voice, the neighbors will hear. Eleanora, that is the wrong fork for shrimp. Eleanora this. Eleanora that.’”
She snapped her mouth shut. Heavens, what was she thinking, babbling these bottled-up feelings to a complete stranger! And a man, at that.
“Sounds like you’ve had a double dose of mother-smothering. Man, that would shrivel anybody up.”
She stared at him, unable to speak.
“You want me to hitch up your horse?”
“No!” she shot. “I need to learn how to do this.”
But before she finished the sentence, Matt was on his feet beside her.
“Stay away from me!” she snapped. “I can figure it out by myself.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He padded back to his bedroll and pulled on his boots. The rosy tint of the sky was giving way to golden sunshine. Time to head out.
But he couldn’t, not yet. He wanted to see whether the stubborn Miss Blue could get her mare hitched up proper. Making sure she saw him, he strode over to his gelding, slipped the bridle over his muzzle and tightened the cinch on the saddle. Then he spoke to the animal. “Back up, now.” With ease, he purposely stepped the horse backward so she could see how it was done.
