Fire and Ice

by Mary Connealy

  “You’ve got how many acres under your control out here?” She cut him off. “Most of it you don’t own. I did exactly what you did. I started using land that wasn’t mine. I claimed water holes and pastureland and the gap into a lush canyon. Turns out you found a way into it, while I lost. Fine. Are you done harassing and insulting me?”

  He was done, but she had to quit yelling at him so he could tell her that.

  “If you’re not, do you mind if I go back to fencing? No reason I have to lose work time just because you’ve got hired men to do all your chores. If you’re still determined to insult me, speak up so I can hear you over the pounding.”

  And the need to make amends was almost driven from his mind, because he had something brand spanking new to worry about. “So if you didn’t set that rockslide to fall on my men, then who did?”

  He saw the concern flash in her eyes, but she fought it off. “Not my problem.” She pulled her hammer out of its loop and turned back to the fence.

  “Let me help.” He could see exactly what she had left. If he pitched in, they could have it done fast. “Fencing is a two-man job.”

  And she wasn’t even close to being a man, despite that close-cropped hair and the britches she wore—and her attitude.

  “Get out of here, Coulter, and unless you’ve decided to turn horse thief, let my mustang go when you get back to my place.”

  “I’m sorry, Bailey.” It had taken him too long to get those words out of his mouth. “When that rockslide came down, I didn’t think you’d done it. It’s not your way. But you were the only person I knew who wanted to keep us out of the canyon. So I came hunting you.”

  “My sisters have gone home with their husbands. If you want to check up and see if the story I told you is true, go and question them. You might decide all the Wilde women are liars and you might even doubt Aaron, as he’s new to the country, but you’ve known Tucker for years. Maybe you’ll decide you can trust his word. Besides, we’d have to be pretty organized to all tell the same story.”

  “I believe you.” Gage sighed. “I’m going to help you with this fence by way of apologizing. And it isn’t close to enough.”

  Bailey glared at him. “You’re right about that.” She shoved the hammer at him so hard, it amounted to a punch in the stomach. He figured he ought to be grateful she didn’t try and outright hammer him. She bent to pick up a sturdy split log about ten feet long and handed him a little pouch. “I’ve got all the work done that can be managed without a hammer and nails. You do the hammering. It’s harder work. You owe me that, too.”

  Gage gave a short, sharp laugh, then took the leather bag of nails and the hammer. “I really am sorry, Bailey. I should have known you wouldn’t do that.” He grabbed the end of the split rail, and as Bailey lifted her end, Gage turned to her. “But someone did.”

  Bailey looked up with a frown on her face. “Which means you’ve got an enemy, Gage. A man like you, I reckon it’s not the first time.”

  He felt his temper snap. “What do you mean a man like me?”

  She rolled her eyes at him and shook her head. “Start nailing.”

  6

  That’s the last of it.” Coulter straightened from the fence.

  Bailey didn’t begrudge admitting he was better at this than her. Bailey was a skilled carpenter and took pride in doing fine work, but when it came to brute strength, well, a man surely qualified as a brute.

  “And now I want you to come back to your place with me and help me usher my cattle into that canyon.”

  He took a step closer. Somehow when he got this close, things changed. Bailey couldn’t quite understand it. Mostly she thought of her life as a battle, a fight to dig a living out of a rough land that, judging by last winter, was trying its best to kill her.

  But when Coulter got close, she noticed the sky was an unusual shade of vivid blue that she’d seen nowhere else, certainly not back east on Pa’s farm. The grass was an emerald green that nearly sparkled. The evergreens bobbed in a breeze that seemed bracing and fresh rather than painfully cold, as it had when she was working here alone.

  She pulled the thin air deep into her lungs and felt her own good health and the strength of her muscles. A bald eagle soared overhead, and its screeching cry was like the music of the wilderness.

  Her cattle, longhorns, looked like wild critters that were noble and strong, as rugged as the mountains, a perfect match for this life. It was a victory that she’d built this herd, and she felt that more with Coulter so near. It surrounded her with beauty and satisfaction.

  She felt it all, let it soak into her soul, and loved her life. And all because a man stood too close. It made no sense to her. She should have been mad enough to chew up those ten-penny nails and spit bullets at this man. And honestly she was. But that didn’t mean she didn’t feel more alive right now than she had since, in a wasted effort to save her sisters, she’d signed up to fight in that horror called the Civil War.

  “Why would I do such a thing?” She even enjoyed fighting with him.

  Gage caught her arm as if he thought she needed saving. “I’m going to be in and out of that canyon every day.”

  “You are?” She swallowed hard.

  “Yes, until the winter keeps me out. Don’t you check your cattle daily?”

  “Of course.”

  “If I’m not there, some of my men will be. And no matter how careful we are, my men are almost certainly going to see you. And because I hire men who are neither stupid nor blind, they’re going to see right away that you’re a woman.”

  “Gage, I don’t want them on my place.”

  “Let’s go together, right now. You can help us get the herd up that trail. Let my men meet you.”

  “No!”

  “Yes! Right now they think you set off the trap that almost killed three of them.”

  “Well, straighten them out.”

  “No matter what I say, some of ’em might still wonder. Look them in the eye, let them know you’re a decent, honest woman. That will put a stop to any hostility they feel toward you. I want to make sure they know I trust you. Whoever set up that rockslide might not be afraid to do harm to you too, Bailey. Good neighbors look out for each other. Come on back to the canyon with me and be a good neighbor.”

  She looked him in the eye. He was too close. Again.

  He was right too, confound it. The word was out that she was female. Nev Bassett knew, Aaron’s old friend from back east who’d come out here, half mad from his war experience, wanting to do harm to Aaron. Nev had come to his senses and stayed. And Nev had probably told Myra, his wife. And Myra’s ma, Erica, ran the diner in Aspen Ridge and was the center of all town news. If Bailey’s name ever came up, she was no doubt spoken of as a woman.

  And Myra’s stepfather, Bo Langley, was the law in these parts. He’d been involved when Shannon and Tucker had caught the man burning out homesteaders, so he knew Tucker and Shannon well. Kylie and Aaron, too. There was no possible way he hadn’t figured out Bailey was a woman.

  Really, Gage’s men were the only ones left who didn’t know, and if they thought she’d tried to kill them, they might be forming a lynch mob right now. Keeping the fact that she was a woman a secret by hiding from them was a good way to get herself hung.

  She needed to face them to convince them that a sneak attack wasn’t her way. And if she did face them, Bailey knew her disguise wouldn’t hold.

  It worked during the war because she’d been passing herself off as a young man. But a homesteader needed to be at least twenty-one, and she’d been out here a year. The numbers didn’t add up to her being a seventeen-year-old boy, as they had in the war. In truth, Bailey was nearing twenty-three. Any men who could do simple arithmetic would see Bailey didn’t add up to a man.

  She hated the weakness of fear, but was unable to control it. “I don’t want to be bothered by your men.”

  Gage watched her, seeing deeper than she wanted him to. And yet she hoped he saw enough to
believe her without asking more. “I’ll make sure they understand that. But western men are loyal to their saddle partners. They’ll only take my word for so much. They like seeing the truth with their own eyes. They’ll cooperate better once they know you had no part in that rockslide.”

  As promises went, it wasn’t much. Gage couldn’t make his men do much of anything if it didn’t suit them. And men could be monsters. Bailey knew that all too well. They weren’t all monsters. She knew that, too. But you couldn’t tell by looking which were and which weren’t. Best to stay away from them all.

  Right now it didn’t look like that was possible.

  She nodded. “I’ll . . .” Her throat didn’t work, so she swallowed and tried again, “I’ll go then. I’ll m-meet your men.”

  There was a roaring in her ears, and for a second the world turned dark around the edges.

  A firm hand on her upper arm steadied her. “You’re white as a sheet. Are you all right?”

  It took her a minute, but Bailey didn’t answer until she could tell the truth. Leaning too heavily on Gage’s firm grip, she waited until her vision cleared and she could hear again.

  Straightening, squaring her shoulders, she pulled away from him. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

  He held on. “Bailey, what’s wrong?”

  Turning, her eyes met his. All that gray, yet nothing cold about them at the moment. His eyes were washed with kindness and concern.

  She managed to say, “I’ve been working too many hours without a drink of water. I just got weak-kneed for a minute.” She’d been working long hours on short rations for a year now, and never for one moment had she gotten weak-kneed.

  Gage looked hard at her. Then, holding her arm, he guided her to her saddle, which straddled a fence rail. He tugged a canteen off the pommel, twisted open the cap, and handed it to her.

  While she leaned against the fence and drank, Gage made short work of catching her mustang, staked out to graze in the pasture with her cattle. It was a blue roan mare wearing a halter. Gage led it over to where Bailey leaned. He saddled and bridled the critter, then handed her the reins.

  She mounted up while he walked to the gate. Her other mustang, the one he’d ridden over, was tied outside the fence, grazing. He let Bailey ride out, closed the gate, then strode over to his horse, tightened the cinch and swung up into the saddle.

  Together they headed for her place, and the canyon.

  “Will your men have the cattle driven in already?” It made her sick to give up that grass, but she’d accepted it. It wasn’t the first hard thing she’d had to take.

  “I doubt it. Rowdy was going back to my place to tell the men to drive the herd over. Two of my men, Manny and Ike, were going to clear the last of the rubble on the trail. The herd will move slow, so even though I was a while working on your fence, I suspect we’ll get there about the same time the herd does. There’ll be plenty of work left to do.”

  Gage smiled at her. “You can help us. We’ll swap work, just like good neighbors ought to. It might be best if you put on a skirt before you meet my men, though.”

  “I don’t own a skirt, so whether that’s best or not doesn’t much matter.”

  He gave her a disgruntled look. “I should have expected that, I reckon.”

  He studied her for a long spell. She knew he wasn’t satisfied with her saying she was dizzy with thirst. But he didn’t goad her about her excuse. She hoped now that he’d started moving toward the canyon, he’d focus on that instead of the fact that his mentioning meeting the men had almost made her swoon.

  “So what is it about meeting a crowd of men that almost made you swoon?” Gage rode close by her side, ready to catch her if she toppled off the horse.

  But he didn’t expect that; what he expected was exactly what he got.

  “I didn’t almost swoon. That makes me sound like a delicate maiden in some parlor somewhere. I’ve never been close to such a thing. Let’s make tracks. We’re burning daylight.”

  Evasions. Distractions. Outright lies. Anything but the simple truth. It was perfect for a woman living as a man. A woman who’d done her best to run when he’d come close to her. A woman who’d pulled a rifle every time he came to her house.

  He should probably just forget it, but they had a long ride ahead of them. “Bailey, I saw your face go pale. I saw your knees buckle. I know when a woman is near collapse.”

  “You don’t know anything about women. You’ve hardly seen a woman out here.”

  She had a point. “All right then. I know when a person is near collapse, and you were. We were talking about you meeting my men.”

  Her knuckles tightened on her saddle horn until they went white.

  “When you saw the right of it, that meeting them might stave off a heap of trouble, you agreed to go and you went white as a ghost.”

  Despite the upset he saw in that grip of hers, she couldn’t just quit fighting, not Bailey Wilde.

  Turning those golden eyes on him, nearly spitting fire, she said, “I’ve had the same thought about you, Coulter—that you’ve got a haunted look in your eyes. What ghosts do you carry around? What haunts you?”

  When evasions, distractions, and outright lies didn’t work, he wasn’t surprised that she attacked. But he was surprised that she picked a weapon that struck quite so sharp.

  “We’re talking about you.”

  “Hah! You don’t mind poking and prodding at me, but you don’t like being poked back. Just shut your mouth and ride, Coulter. Unless you want to tell me every little thing that upsets you, just keep your questions to yourself.”

  “Which means you have a few things that upset you, and I’m absolutely right about you almost swooning.” Gage hadn’t seen her be quite so vulnerable before. He just had trouble letting her get that tough buffalo hide back in place. This was his chance to figure out more about her.

  “Tell me then, Coulter, why you left for the Rockies five years ago when most every other able-bodied young man in Texas signed on to fight in the war?”

  Gage just about gasped out loud.

  If he wanted her to tell him what bothered her so much, admitting his own ghosts might make her talk. Well, he didn’t want to know about her that much.

  Gage saw the rugged ground they’d been covering had finally reached an actual trail. Good excuse. “You’re right, Bailey, we’re burning daylight. Let’s make tracks.” Gage urged the mustang into a trot.

  He thought he heard a low chuckle behind him, but he didn’t turn around to check. He didn’t want to know if she was laughing at him.

  At least she wasn’t threatening to swoon anymore.

  “You really don’t own a single dress.” Coulter wasn’t asking a question; he was making a statement.

  And he sounded tired and resigned. Bailey thought resigned was good. He must be getting used to her.

  “No, I don’t own a dress. Why would I?”

  “At least leave your hat at the house.”

  “No.”

  “You won’t leave your hat?”

  “No, I won’t leave my house. When you get in the canyon, you bring your men to meet me.”

  Coulter looked at the sky with those gray eyes. Bailey wondered if he might be asking the Almighty for patience. She was tempted to punch him. Then he could ask the Almighty for a new set of teeth.

  “I thought you were going to help. I thought we decided to be good neighbors.”

  “I’ve got chores of my own. I don’t have time to help my neighbor do his.”

  That provoked a little smile out of him.

  “Come with me, Bailey. Face this. I’ll make sure my men know Tucker will vouch for you, and I trust you. But cowering here in your house won’t impress them much.”

  Her shoulders slumped, but she rode on through the canyon. It burned to think of what a great setup she’d had in here. She saw where he’d blasted. “You really did it,” she said. “You found a way over that peak.”

  “You doubted me?” />
  “I have to admit, I held out a bit of hope you’d fail, and the peak was a big part of the reason why. I didn’t see how you were going to get a cow to climb it. It never occurred to me you’d just blow the whole thing up.”

  They reached the bottom of the canyon, right below where the giant bite had been taken out of the canyon rim.

  “If you’d known I was going to make it in, would you have just let me cross on your land?”

  “Maybe.” Close to growling at him, Bailey added, “Probably not.”

  Coulter laughed again, then kicked the horse and started up the steep slope. Her horses were mountain-bred mustangs she’d caught wild and broke less than a year ago. This climb was nothing to them.

  Bailey was riding her favorite mare. Coulter had picked the biggest of her brood, a tough stallion she hoped would breed a strong line in her horses. The surefooted pair went up the canyon wall and paused. The blasted-out rim was rough but flat for about ten paces before it dropped off.

  They crested the canyon wall through what looked like a big old bear claw, then headed down where the trail was fairly easy. Even so, they came to spots so narrow that Bailey could brush the rocks with her fingertips as she rode along on one side. At the same time, her other foot dangled out over thin air.

  They were halfway down the gut-twisting trail when a rider appeared at the bottom. From here, Bailey could identify Gage’s C Bar brand. Gage was a ways ahead of her, and seeing the man below, Bailey couldn’t help but slow even more. The distance between her and Coulter stretched out, and he reached the bottom long before she did.

  He sat on his horse, talking with his cowpoke, waiting until Bailey reached him. She saw a young Mexican, whose black eyes flashed with temper when they landed on her.

  “Manny, this is Bailey Wilde. You know Tucker, right?”

  “Sí?” His tone was curt.

  She saw a smear of dried blood on his shirt. He was one of the men who’d been hurt that morning. And he thought that man-trap was her doing.

  “Well, Bailey is Tucker’s wife’s sister.”

  The fire went out of Manny’s eyes, replaced with surprise, then confusion. “Sister?” He spoke decent, if heavily accented English. “Bailey Wilde is an hombre.”