by Lynda J. Cox
Why did her heart thump even harder with his smile and her skin tingle where his fingers had held her wrist? She dropped the washrag into the basin, her gaze on the fabric sinking into the porcelain bowl. “I don’t know. Dr. Archer said—”
“Well, you don’t have to tell him, do you? I could smell that bread you’re baking all the way in here, and it’s torture telling me I can’t have any of it.”
Amelia glanced down at him again, her resolve fading before his deep, entreating voice.
“I can just about taste it, dripping with hot, melted butter and drowning in some jam.” His grin widened, and his brow lifted in another slow arch. “Or are you going to tell me you like making a man suffer?”
Amelia opened her mouth, cocked her head, and just as quickly snapped her mouth closed. “No, I don’t like seeing any creature suffer. I’ll bring some broth in here, and I’ll bring you a piece of hot, buttered bread with jam. I only have blackberry. Will that be all right?”
“I haven’t had blackberry jam since I was a kid.” His expression softened, taking the edge from his features. Amelia was taken aback by the youthfulness and vulnerability of his face in that moment. Something deep inside of her lurched and tightened in an odd, new sensation.
She walked to the doorway, needing to put distance between herself and this man who stirred her emotions and fired strange, new sensations in her. “I’ll be back with something for you to eat, Mr. Evans.”
“You think the sawbones would mind if you brought me a cup of coffee too?”
Amelia paused in the doorway. “I’m sorry. I don’t have any coffee here. I never learned to like the taste of it, or the knack of brewing it right. I never could make a horseshoe float in it.”
“No coffee?” A decidedly wicked gleam danced in the depth of his eyes and a rogue’s smile curled the corners of his mouth. “How about some whiskey, then?”
Amelia’s heart hammered. She shook her head. “I should say not.”
His dark chuckle escorted her through the doorway. Amelia fled to the kitchen of the small cabin. She gripped the edge of the table so tightly her knuckles whitened.
He was impossible. This was impossible. Dr. Archer was wrong. She couldn’t do this. Colt Evans was going to have to go to the doctor’s house. Let Rebecca deal with this. Rebecca was married to the doctor and that man was the doctor’s patient.
Amelia straightened her shoulders. No, she would manage to get through. Rebecca didn’t deserve to have this placed on her doorstep. After all, she and Dr. Archer were newlyweds.
Just a few days more and then she could send him on his way. Send him away from Saul, who saw him as some kind of hero and away from Jenny who was terrified of guns and thunder and any loud noise. Send him away from her too, so her body would stop reacting to his smile, to his deep, velvety voice and his agate eyes. She didn’t need his kind in her home, and she certainly didn’t need his temperament. Did all gunmen have such mercurial moods?
“Whiskey,” she muttered under her breath. She poured simmering chicken broth into a bowl, and then sliced a thick chunk from the cooling loaf of bread. She slathered butter onto it, and slapped a large spoonful of thick jam over the butter. Lastly, she poured him a glass of freshly made lemonade. “Whiskey. I should say not. Not in this house.”
Returning to her bedroom, she set the tray on the nightstand. “I’ll help you sit up, so you can eat.”
He pulled his gaze from the meal. “La—Amelia, that looks better than it smelled. I think I can sit up on my own.”
“I’ll help. You couldn’t stand a moment ago.” Not allowing him a chance to argue, she slid one arm around his waist and slipped the other under his uninjured shoulder. He grunted when she raised him into a sitting position.
Amelia felt that strange sensation again when his arm tightened around her. Butterflies swirled in her stomach and an unfamiliar ache invaded her. He inhaled deeply, murmuring when she straightened, “You smell good…like rainwater and vanilla.”
She had no idea how to respond. Instead, she reached for the tray. In her discomfort, she knocked the tray to the floor, shattering both the glass and the bowl. Another of her mother’s dishes shattered, and she could hear her father scolding her for her clumsiness even as she mumbled, “Oh, no. Momma’s china…”
Without another word, she fled the room, mortified. When she returned a few moments later, she was carrying another bowl of broth and a new glass of lemonade. She couldn’t look at him, afraid of the mockery she would see there—or worse yet, pity for her clumsiness. She carefully set the glass on the nightstand and handed him the bowl. “I’ll be right back with another piece of bread.”
Before Colt could answer her, she disappeared again. A moment later, she brought in a piece of bread on a small plate. She handed the plate to him and set about cleaning up the shattered glass. Keeping her back to him, she stood, the ruined meal on the tray.
“Amelia, how old are you?”
His voice caressed her like sun-warmed velvet. She turned to him, puzzled by this question. He set the empty glass on the nightstand.
“I’ll be nineteen in a week.”
His brows lowered. “Where is your husband?”
“I’m not married.” Amelia laughed, her cheeks flooding with bright color. Daddy had been so careful of the boys he allowed to court her. His rules had been so intimidating most of the young men had never gotten past him to even talk to her.
“Where are your parents?”
The question forced a bright lance of pain through her and she wondered for a moment if that pain would ever stop being so sharp. “They’re both dead.”
He reared back, and his brow shot up. “You’re raising your brother all by yourself?”
“My brother and my sister. You’ve met Saul, but you haven’t met Jenny yet.” She gripped the tray tightly. “They are all the family I have left, Mr. Evans. I was not about to relinquish them to an orphanage, as a few of the finer citizens of Federal suggested I do. I’m managing.”
“Soothe your ruffled feathers.” His mouth twisted in a parody of a smile. “I wish someone had cared as much about me. An orphanage would have been preferable to living with my stepfather. It was a blessing when he finally threw me out.”
Amelia’s throat tightened. “How old were you when he did that?”
“Thirteen.” His gaze moved to the small window in the room. “I’m kind of tired right now. I guess I’ll go back to sleep.”
Understanding she had been told he wanted to be left alone, Amelia nodded and pulled the door shut behind her.
Thirteen? Saul was only twelve. Thirteen and thrown into the world to fend for himself? No wonder Colt Evans had such hard mannerisms. No wonder he had picked up a gun. It had been for survival.
Amelia wrapped the still-warm bread in a towel to keep it fresh and placed it in the breadbox. Her heart had finally stopped its frantic pounding and the strange ache in her body was easing. She glanced over her shoulder at the closed door to her bedroom.
When he had been unconscious, she hadn’t felt any of these things. Now that he was conscious, she had the oddest sensation she was harboring some kind of feral, dangerous thing. Perhaps it was the way he arched his brow, or the black hair combined with those gray eyes. That gray could change from warm to brutally cold in a blink. Or maybe it was the week’s worth of stubble covering his hard jaw and lean cheeks that made her think of him as dangerous.
She supposed he wasn’t terribly hard on the eyes. Other than the bullet hole in his shoulder, there had been nothing else to disfigure his lean, muscular form. She had been fascinated by the ridges and hollows his muscles created on his frame. He had the most interesting eyes, and his face was made all the more remarkable by the slant of his cheekbones and the strength in his sculpted, nearly square jaw. Heat flushed her face and Amelia pressed her hands to her cheeks, trying to cool them. That odd, not-quite-unpleasant ache began to gnaw at her insides again. No, he certainly wasn’t hard on the
eyes.
Why did he have the power to make her heart hammer and her throat tighten? No boy she knew ever made her feel those things. But Colt Evans was far from a boy. Even she with her limited experience knew that.
****
Colt stared out the window. God, had it been fifteen years since the cold, rainy night his stepfather had thrown him out the door?
You’ll never amount to anything.
The words still held their crippling intensity.
You know what most people do with a colt in their barnyard, don’t you, boy? They either geld him or get rid of him. I can’t geld you, but I sure as hell can get rid of you. Get out of this house and out of my life. I’m getting rid of the colt in my barnyard.
“Burn in hell, old man. Burn in hell.” Colt recognized the warning signs he was going to have a screaming headache if he didn’t force his thoughts away from Jackson Hayward. He eased his clenched fists and drew several deep breaths. Hayward was dead, and he was still alive.
He veered his thoughts from his stepfather to Amelia. Saul had called her Amy.
Pretty name for a beautiful lady. He would have doubted she had enough strength in her reed-slender body to pick him up from the floor, but she’d surprised him. She was a lot stronger than her appearance would allow. And come to think of it, she wasn’t reed slender. She had all the right, soft curves a woman needed. He’d felt some of them twice in less than half an hour. She smelled good, clean, of rainwater and vanilla. Things that made him think of a safe place.
He grinned. Despite the soft curves, there was an iron will hiding in her. He knew he wouldn’t have argued with her if she had ordered him from the room as she’d ordered Saul earlier.
They were similar, Saul and Amy. Both had the same pert nose and the same blue eyes, like Texas bluebonnets in May. But that was where the similarities ended. Amy’s brows were delicately arched, adding openness to her heart-shaped face.
So what did Jenny look like? Another version of her sister? Did Jenny have Amy’s hair color, a color that reminded him of strawberry wine? Would Jenny be just a younger version of her older sister?
With a sudden insight, he realized who the angel was he had dreamed in his fevered state. It was Amelia. She had been the figure bending over him, pressing cooling rags to his burning body, holding his head up to give him drinks of water, and murmuring promises of safety, her face wreathed with a halo of red-gold hair.
Amelia wasn’t married. Good Lord, were the men in these parts blind? And no wonder he rattled her. He wasn’t the damn best-looking thing, but he knew he could throw off a woman’s balance. He’d learned at a very young age how to melt the hardest heart with a winsome smile and a slow arching of his right brow. He’d practiced it on every dance-hall girl and saloon whore from the Rio Grande to the mighty Missouri.
Colt shook his head.
She was neither dance-hall girl nor saloon whore. She was probably a virgin, and an unkissed one at that. And she was a lady, through and through. He’d bet a small fortune on that one. Lady to the core and it showed in the way she walked, the way she held her head, even the way she kept her voice moderated.
He clenched his jaw, staring a hole through the door. Even when she broke that second bowl she hadn’t lost her ladylike demeanor. He could read the thoughts on her face as if he were reading a book, and he knew she was calling herself clumsy. Hell, clumsy wasn’t the word that came to mind when he saw her. She flowed like a gentle spring breeze over the prairie, graceful and ethereal. He wondered if someone had told her she was clumsy.
Colt shook his head again, disgusted. He knew how deeply words could wound and how tightly they clung on like cockleburs in a hound’s coat. He still carried Jackson Hayward’s words around with him. They were deep in his hide, no matter how he tried to dig them out. Hayward had been right. He hadn’t amounted to much. A gunman wasn’t much of anything, except a dead man walking.
And he sure as hell didn’t have time to be filling his dance card with sweet, young virgins, no matter how tempting she might seem, or how big the challenge involved.
Chapter Five
Amelia paused in front of the closed door to the room where Colt Evans slept. Even though she had moved into it shortly after her parents died, she still had difficulty thinking of it as her room. She lowered the wick on the lamp she carried and plunged the small home into a gray-shrouded gloom. Quietly, she worked the latch and pushed the door open.
Colt lay on his back, snoring softly, sprawled across the width of the bed. In sleep, all the hard edges he seemed determined to keep around himself were gone, and the pale gray light of dawn removed much of the coldness and menace from him. She paused, startled. He didn’t look much older than she was.
His muscled chest rose and fell in a level rhythm, one arm stretched out to the side. She crept closer to the bed. His lashes were a dark smudge over his cheeks. She knew girls who would kill to have eyelashes that long and that thick. His silver-shot, jet-black wavy hair was tousled, and Amelia curled her fingers into her palms to quell the sudden desire to smooth a shock of it from his brow.
As if sensing her presence, his eyes snapped open and a hard, predatory expression slid across his face. Amelia leaped back from the bed. Faster than a rattler striking, he rolled onto his side and reached for the nightstand.
“It’s only Amelia, Mr. Evans.” She forced her heart from her throat. “Go back to sleep. I just need to empty the chamber pot.”
He rolled onto his back, clutched his injured shoulder and groaned. The wildness faded from the depths of his eyes. He dragged his hand down his face, and drew a yawning breath. He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and then stretched, raising his uninjured arm above his head. “What time is it?” he asked, his voice roughened with sleep.
“It’s not even dawn. Go back to sleep for a while.” She picked up the pot. She detested this part of housekeeping, but it had to be done. “No one else is up.”
“Amelia, if no one else is awake, why are you up before the dawn?”
“I get up this early every morning. The chickens need fed, eggs collected, and the cows need milked before I can do anything else. And I need to have breakfast ready for Saul and Jenny before they wake up.”
He pushed himself into a sitting position. The sheet dropped lower over his hips, barely covering him. Dark curls wisped lightly over his chest and wedged down his trim, flat stomach. The white bandage contrasted starkly against his ebony hair and sun-darkened skin.
Amelia averted her eyes. Unable to breathe for the sudden constriction of her throat, feeling her heart hammering madly and heat creeping up her face again, she fled the room and the house, dumping the pot in the outhouse.
Dropping the chamber pot to the floor Amelia shoved the door shut and leaned back against the rough wood of the outhouse. What were these things he did to her? She had never struggled to breathe, felt her heart race so, or felt that ache deep inside around any other man. What was the matter with her?
She surveyed the familiar landscape and took a moment to restore her equilibrium. The sun broke over the horizon, flooding the vista with a brilliant, golden glow. Dew glittered on the tall, sun-burnt grasses and the birds sang their melody of welcome for the new day. The Medicine Bow range rose into the rapidly brightening sky. Glaciers cradled by the quartzite peaks caught the early sunlight, glittering and sparkling. Tableau Mesa dominated the nearest horizon. She had been awed by those mountains when she had first seen them, but now they were as familiar as her own reflection. At times she hated them. If Daddy hadn’t come here, hadn’t needed to see mountains like his native Scotland, he and Momma would still be alive.
Her heart stirred again with the memory of her father singing a lullaby to Jenny that was a call to return to the mountains. The recollection of his gentle, hushed voice lulling Jenny to sleep, the words carrying through the house with their soothing melody, brought a smile to her face.
The chickens scurried around her feet and Captain c
rowed lustily from a fence rail. Amelia smiled at the cock. “You are such a silly bird. Do you know that, Captain?”
The rooster hopped off the fence and strutted over to her. Amelia bent and scooped the black-and-white-speckled bird in her arms. “Such a silly bird,” she crooned. He preened in her arms, cackling deep in his throat. Amelia took a small handful of cracked corn from the pocket of her apron and offered it to him.
Captain daintily ate from her hand. His comb bobbed with the motion of his head as he dipped repeatedly into her palm. When he had finished his treat, Amelia set him on the ground. “I’m going to collect the eggs now. I promise, if any have your babies in them, I’ll give them back.”
The rooster strutted at her side to the small henhouse. Amelia collected the eggs and carried them in the basket made of her gathered apron. Captain paused at the doorway of the cabin, and then strolled with supreme arrogance back to the henhouse. Amelia chuckled. Daddy had been right. Captain was definitely the cock of the walk. Of course, it didn’t hurt he was the only cock of the walk.
Amelia sat at the table, lit a candle, and peered at each egg in the egg candler. Two she set aside to be returned to the henhouse. The rest she placed in a towel-lined basket. They would have eggs for breakfast, and there was still a side of bacon in the smokehouse.
Amelia returned the fertilized eggs to a nesting box in the coop and went to the small barn. Colt’s horse whickered at her as his head emerged over the stall. He shook his head, ears flicking back and forth.
“You are the hungriest horse I have ever met,” she said while pouring a mixture of corn and oats into his trough. The horse shoved his nose into the wooden box and crunched contentedly. “You are also the most beautiful animal I think I have ever seen. You weren’t very happy when Saul and I scrubbed all that dried blood off you, were you?”
He blinked large, black, white-lashed eyes. Amelia patted his neck once more, and then picked up a bucket and a stool and approached the first cow. “Good morning, Buttercup.”
