Then he’d met her.
Ada Baxter.
He closed his eyes and smiled past the pain at the memory of her beautiful smile, but the image wavered and twisted like a bad dream. He opened his eyes but the image remained fixed in his mind.
Pa’s retaliation had been swift and ugly. He’d robbed the Granger bank and killed a man. The sheriff had caught and hanged him, but not before Delroy had claimed Levi had been a part of it. He’d been lucky enough not to hang, but they still sent Levi up the river with a sentence that’d put him close to middle age by the time he got out.
And while he wrestled with the new fate that had destroyed the future he’d intended, Ada had turned her back on him and married another man.
It made no sense why he wanted to see her again. Vindication? To prove to her she’d been wrong? He shook his head.
What did it matter now?
Except that it did. Which likely made him the biggest fool in the state.
* * *
“Ma?”
Ada turned from the pot of stew she was stirring to glance at her son, who had climbed up on the sofa to peer out the window. Frost covered its edges and immigrated inward. Micah placed a hand over it and let his body heat melt it away.
“What is it, honey?”
“Rider comin’.” He met her gaze. Fear lodged in her throat. She tried to hide her concern, but failed. “You want me to get the gun?”
She swallowed and stopped stirring, setting the spoon on the counter. “No, sweetie. Come away from the window.” The last thing she needed was an eight-year-old playing defender of the castle. Not that the small two-room cabin was much of a castle, but it was all she had.
In truth, she didn’t even have that. Like everything else Harlan had owned, he’d left it to his mother upon his death.
She shooed Micah back and took his place at the window. In the distance, a dark form dotted the white horizon where the snow on the ground meshed with the fat flakes falling from above. The rider had hunched over the horse, likely to blunt the cold. What in heaven’s name brought someone out in such weather? Not that it mattered now. She judged him a few minutes away and heading straight for them. She didn’t have much time. She pushed away from the window. “Go to your room, Micah.”
“But Ma—”
She cut him off with a glare. “Go to your room. And stay there until I tell you to come out. Don’t light a candle and if you hear me open the door, get under the bed. You know what to do after that, right?”
Micah let out a huff of breath and rolled his eyes. “If anything happens to you, I take Moony and ride to Grandma’s. I go as fast as I can and I don’t look back.”
She hated the lessons she’d had to teach her son, but since Harlan’s death two years ago and her exile to this cabin in the middle of nowhere, she’d had little choice. Anything could happen and she needed him to know what to do, to be prepared. She’d learned the hard way what could happen if you weren’t.
“Go.” She waited until his bedroom door closed, then removed the stew from the stove and grabbed the rifle from the rack next to the door. She kept it loaded, ready to shoot. Just in case.
The frost on the window made it difficult to see. The rider grew closer. His image wavered in and out of the squalls of snow that kicked up with each gust of wind. Maybe the fool would freeze to death before he reached the cabin. Her fingers flexed against the rifle and she ignored the fear rippling in her stomach. She glanced toward Micah’s door. She couldn’t afford fear.
“Just breathe,” she whispered. “You can do this.”
She’d never killed a man before, though there had been a few times when she’d have liked to. The rider drew closer and Ada scurried off the sofa and away from the window. It was too late to smother the fire. If the rider sought shelter, he would have seen the smoke drifting up from the chimney and known someone resided inside.
She jumped back as the door reverberated from a loud pounding on the other side. Her heart leaped into her throat. She wanted to scream but knew she couldn’t.
“Who’s there?” she shouted, but the wind’s howl whisked away any response.
The door shook again. A squall buffeted the cabin, causing the glass windowpanes to rattle in their frames.
Her hands shook where they gripped the rifle, her palms slick. What should she do? If she left him outside, he likely would die. The temperature had dropped considerably and the snow and wind had picked up. It was at least a three-hour ride into town over rough terrain in the dark. It would be suicide to attempt such a thing.
The latch on the door lifted. She’d forgotten to throw the bolt. She took a fortifying breath and lifted the rifle butt to rest against her shoulder, sending a quick prayer to anyone who cared to listen and perhaps offer a bit of help.
The door edged open and her finger twitched near the trigger. Instinct made her step back as cold invaded the room. The fire in the hearth billowed from the influx of air as the door opened wide, revealing the rider.
She froze. It couldn’t be. Fear must have addled her brain.
“Hey, there, darlin’.”
He smiled at her, that half lift at the corner of his mouth. The smile she remembered. The one that had made her fall in love with him in a fast minute. The one that had haunted her dreams every night for the past eight years.
“Levi.” She hadn’t spoken his name since the day she’d left him. She had buried the sound and taste of it deep down inside where she wouldn’t be tempted to go looking for it.
“Fancy meeting you here.”
His words washed over her and filled in all the cold spots with lingering warmth. She closed her eyes for just a moment and wallowed in the sensation. Then did the only thing she could think to do.
She lowered the gun and strode forward, determination in each step.
Then she slammed the door in his face.
* * *
That had gone well. At least she hadn’t shot him, though for a second or two he had thought she might. Funny, since he was the injured party. In more ways than one. He tried to resurrect the pool of anger that had fueled his journey from prison through Glennis Creek and up onto this godforsaken mountain, but he couldn’t find it.
Turned out his mind was too fixated on the fact she was a far sight prettier than he remembered. And he’d had a lot of time to ruminate on those memories. Years of imagining her soft skin and full lips. Day upon endless day of reliving every slope and curve of her delicious body, each one that made a man happy to be alive so that he could witness such beauty.
Although happy wasn’t a good description of her expression when he’d opened the door. A door he now stared at from the outside. A bitter wind blew down the collar of his jacket and through the openings cut into it by the bear. His body shuddered. At least if she’d shot him it would have been a quicker death than turning into a block of ice on her front step.
He looked to his left. He could see the faint outline of the barn hiding behind the heavily falling snow. It wasn’t too far off. Maybe he could bunk there for the night. It wasn’t ideal, but he had to get out of the cold. The sooner the better. He could barely feel his legs. Or anything, for that matter, save for the wound in his side, where the life continued to leak out of him.
He tried to turn but his legs refused to move. And his arms...they weren’t exactly cooperating, either. The fuzziness in his brain grew, dulling the edges of his mind. He felt...strange. Light and heavy at the same time. He glanced up. It sure had gotten darker in the past few minutes, too. He squinted into the blowing snow, except then his eyes closed and they didn’t want to open.
Was he dying? Didn’t that just beat all? He made it all the way here through the cold and snow, got up close and personal with a bear that insisted on leaving its calling card on his side, only to die on her doorstep. What did they call that? Poetic justice? Irony?
The snow spun around him. Or was that just in his head? Maybe if it stopped he could get his bearings. Make it
to the barn and—
His kneecaps thudded against the small doorstep. He hadn’t even felt his legs give way. Was this God’s way of trying to get him to pray? He wondered if he should tell him he’d given up praying shortly after he got locked up for a crime he hadn’t committed.
He fell backward, unable to stop his body’s momentum. Snow sprayed around him as he sank into a low drift. The bundle beneath his coat squirmed and a head poked out. He managed to fumble with his arm enough to shove the head back in. No point in both of them freezing to death.
“Ada...” Her name escaped from him like an accusation. And a benediction. She had been his savior and his destruction.
Blackness crept into the edges of his vision, bled through him, then stole him away.
Chapter Two
“Mama?”
Ada’s heart pounded in her chest. The rough wood dug into her hand where it still rested on the door. She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t get her mind to work. It couldn’t be him.
Levi MacAllistair was serving time for robbing the Granger Bank. He could not be standing on her doorstep. She shook her head but kept her hand in place, afraid to remove it, afraid the memories of her past would rush in with the storm and she’d be lost to them forever.
“Mama!”
The urgency in Micah’s voice punched through the mess in her mind. She looked to his bedroom door, but he had returned to his perch on the sofa. Did the boy never listen to her?
“Get away from the window.”
He stayed put and for a brief moment anger cut through the miasma of emotions choking her. It had only been a vision. A ghost from years gone by. But Micah’s next words ruined that notion.
“There’s a dead man on our step.” Micah’s dark blue eyes grew wide and he looked at her. “Did you shoot him?”
She shook her head, in answer to both his question and his claim. Levi MacAllistair had stood on the other side of that door alive and well, wearing the same smile he’d worn when he’d run into her as he stumbled out of the Broken Deuce Saloon nine years earlier. She would have fallen had he not caught her in his arms. They had done an impromptu dance in the middle of the street until he’d found his balance. Then he’d looked down at her and smiled.
And she’d been lost.
In one swift second, that smile had made her forget all about Harlan Baxter. All about the debt she’d owed his family when his mother had taken Ada in years earlier, after her own parents had died within months of each other, leaving her alone. And all about the expectation that she would marry Harlan and make her position in the Baxter family a permanent one.
The minute Levi entered her life, he’d turned it upside down, and she’d never quite figured out how to right it once he’d left.
“We ain’t gonna leave him there, are we?”
“Aren’t,” she corrected Micah. As to his question, she didn’t have an answer. She crossed to the window, cleared the frost and peered out. Micah had the right of it. Levi’s tall, lean form lay on its side on the ground, unmoving save for the shock of dark hair pulled to and fro by the wind. His Stetson had blown off and was stuck in the drift next to him.
Micah turned to her in all seriousness. “Ma, we can’t leave a dead man on our doorstep. It’s Christmas.”
Ada wasn’t sure what one had to do with the other, but Micah was right. She couldn’t leave him there. She set the gun down and moved to the door. With a deep breath, she opened it wide and let the storm blow in as she rushed out.
The cold stole her breath away and a strong gust knocked her to her knees next to his prone body.
Levi.
Denial fled. Any hope that he’d been an unwanted figment of her imagination retreated.
Why wasn’t he in prison? Had he broken out? Come all this way to demand an explanation? And what would she tell him? What could she tell him?
Micah’s head poked through the open door. “Is he dead?”
She pressed her fingers against Levi’s neck. His skin held little warmth, but a pulse beat beneath her fingertips. “No. He isn’t dead.”
His chest rose and fell. She tilted her head. In truth, his chest did more than that. It...moved.
A lot.
She pulled her hands away and he rolled onto his back. Her eyes widened as the front of his coat shifted and a small furry head popped out of the opening just beneath Levi’s bare neck. The man didn’t even have the good sense to wear a proper scarf.
“It’s a dog!” Micah ran from his perch on the doorstep and dropped to his knees next to Levi, reaching for the small animal. He pulled it out and cuddled the squirming pup against his chest. “You think he’s got a name?” He laughed as the dog lifted its head and licked the snowflakes as they landed upon Micah’s face.
Perfect. Micah had been bothering her for a puppy since last summer, but their limited funds hardly allowed for another mouth to feed. “I don’t know. Now set the pup down and help me get him inside.”
Micah reluctantly did as he was told, but not before shooing the dog inside first.
They wrestled with Levi’s large form, dragging him with great effort. By the time they managed to pull him inside next to the fire, Ada’s muscles quivered and sweat trickled down her back. She crouched by his hip and tapped his face, the bristle of unshaven skin tickling her hand.
“Levi? Levi, can you hear me?”
Micah stopped playing with the dog that tugged at the sleeve of his shirt as if it were a life-and-death struggle. “You know him?”
She didn’t meet her son’s gaze. “I used to.” Once upon a time.
“Can we keep him?”
Her head shot up. “Levi?”
Micah wrinkled his freckled nose. “The dog.”
Her face flushed. “No. The dog belongs to Levi and neither of them will be staying long. Don’t go getting attached, you hear me?”
She wished someone had given her the same advice years earlier. It would have saved her a world of hurt.
Micah huffed and shot her an angry look. She’d been getting a lot of that lately.
“Take his horse down to the barn and see that he’s brushed and fed. Make sure you use the rope to guide your way. Weather’s kicking up in earnest now.” She’d tied a rope from the corner of the house that led to the outhouse and then on to the barn. It had proven a godsend on more than one occasion.
“Can I take the dog?”
“Fine, but don’t lose him in the snowdrifts.” The dog was the size of a large barn cat and though it bounded around as if it had springs on its feet, the drifts were deep. She didn’t want to have to explain to Levi that she’d lost his dog in one of them when he came to.
If he came to.
She waited until Micah closed the door behind him before she unbuttoned Levi’s sheepskin coat. Dark stains were dotted around the tears on his left side. Blood? She shook her head and pushed the coat open. He had filled out since the last time she’d seen him. His body hardened and defined by the years and his circumstances. She glanced at his face, at features honed by the passage of time. Though some softness remained. In his lips, and the thick dark lashes that cast a crescent shadow against sharp cheekbones.
Time had only made those more prominent. More tempting. “You stop that right now,” she admonished. “You don’t need to be walking that road again.”
She’d been down it once already. Only heartbreak and misery waited at its end.
She reached for the buttons on Levi’s red flannel shirt. Firelight danced shadows across him, but not enough to hide the fact the shirt had met the same fate as his coat, though the dark stains were more prominent here, stretching down the length of his shirt to pool at the waistband of his denims. White poked out beneath the shirt where he’d tried to bandage the wound, but it had not been sufficient to keep the blood from oozing out.
Her hands shook as she hovered over the tattered remains of his shirt, unsure of what to do. For the first time since he’d collapsed on her doorstep, fear crept in and
whispered the possibility that he could die here, on her floor. She gave herself a mental shake and pushed the whispers away.
The buttons of his shirt and undershirt gave way beneath her hands until the broad expanse of his chest and the defined ridges of his abdomen glowed in the firelight.
“What in heaven’s name did you run into?” A mountain cat? A bear?
She had no answers and Levi was in no condition to provide them. Might never be if she didn’t do something to stanch the seeping wounds and keep them from becoming inflamed. She pushed herself to her feet and fetched a bottle of whiskey, a washcloth and basin of water. She needed to get him fixed up before Micah returned. This wasn’t something a child needed to see.
She struggled to get him out of his coat and shirt, then cut away the makeshift bandage. Steeling herself, she dragged the damp cloth across his chest and down his hard belly. The ridges of muscles tensed beneath her ministrations, then relaxed.
Memories assaulted her, pulled and grabbed and tried to tangle their roots into every dusty corner of her mind. She braced against them, pushed them back. A low groan emanated from his lips and strain etched into the bones of his face, stretching the skin taut as she drew closer to the wounds. Three gashes cut through the skin of his biceps and across his rib cage. The two outer ones were ugly, but not deep. The middle one, however, gave her concern. Blood trickled from its edges and it stretched across his ribs to stop at the upper point of his abdomen. Its edges were inflamed, red and ugly.
She brushed her fingers over his brow, down his cheek, over the several days’ growth of beard. His skin had warmed, though whether from fever or the fire she couldn’t say. She had never thought to see him again, had tried to tell herself it was for the best. But telling wasn’t the same as convincing. Many a night she had stared up at the night sky and wondered if he looked at the same stars. She wondered if he had forgiven her for what she’d done—not that she’d had much of a choice—or if he hated her for it.
Still, the guilt of it bit into her and cut as deep as the wounds gashed across his flesh.
Dreaming of a Western Christmas: His Christmas BelleThe Cowboy of Christmas PastSnowbound with the Cowboy Page 12
