The Renegades: Cole (11 page)

But in his guts, the turmoil raged. He made himself ignore it and think.

He had overreacted to someone nearing the camp unannounced, that was all. He hadn’t even had a prickling along his scalp or a chill down his spine before Virgil and his mule-back brigade had appeared, so now he was making too much out of this.

She came out of her wagon; he heard the scrape of her feet on the tailboard and the soft thud when she hit the ground. He turned his head so he could see her as she went toward the fire.

Aha! She had dressed. At least, perhaps, he’d gotten one commonsense lesson through her head.

He needed to follow through on his plan to seduce her soon, very soon, so he could quit thinking of her so much. However, since this was Aurora, she’d probably interest him even more, instead of boring him, after he’d had her in his bed. He could not think of one woman he’d ever known who could affect his emotions the way she could, who could have him acting crazy in a heartbeat and thinking about her all the time.

But desire was all it was. That Aurora was the most intriguing, as well as the most beautiful, woman he’d ever been around for any length of time had nothing to do with the way he felt.

Terrence led his horses in close, and Aurora went to him. They talked in low tones Cole
couldn’t hear. Then he unloaded what seemed a ton of stuff off the one horse and his saddle off the other.

Dear Lord, was he moving in? Surely he hadn’t come with the idea of staying with the drive to the end? From the description Aurora had given of him, he didn’t sound like the trail hand kind. But maybe he wanted to write poems about the drive.

That preposterous thought made him flop over onto his stomach so he couldn’t see them any more. Terrence obviously had
thoughtfully
ridden all the way out here to press his suit and beg Aurora to change her mind about marrying him. And she had said that she liked him, that he wasn’t one of the men she couldn’t abide.

So that’s what she ought to do: marry Terrence. Give up this insane drive and marry the man, go home with him and turn the cattle loose on his ranch and have a dozen babies.

He forced himself to think about that as long as he could. To try to visualize it.

No, that wouldn’t work, after all. Little spitfire Aurora would clobber thoughtful Terrence, and that would be that. Terrence might know that she was a bear when waked up suddenly in the middle of the night, but he, Cole, knew that she had to have this trail drive of her own, had to run that new ranch at the end of it, no matter what she had to go through to get it.

Because
of what she had to go through to get it. Aurora had been determined to get her herd through Virgil’s blockade. No matter how
scared she’d been, her stubbornness was greater. She’d hidden her fear, she had stayed cool and quick, and next time she’d be much more confident about what to do. He grinned, remembering.

Don’t ever snatch my reins from me again
.

Yes, poor Terrence had risked his life sneaking up on Aurora’s camp for nothing. No matter how thoughtful he was, he didn’t have a chance.

The next afternoon, however, by the time the sun had climbed down toward two o’clock, Cole was beginning to think that he might be wrong about Aurora’s response to her old beau. Terrence and Aurora had ridden off to the west at sunrise to make some photographs, promising that they would be back to the wagons by noon. They had not appeared.

Most of the packs Terrence had taken off his horses the previous night were filled with cameras and all sorts of equipment and supplies to go with them, that and books, but he and Aurora had been gone long enough to use every bit of it and take pictures of the scenery for miles around. Perhaps they were doing something else entirely.

The thought made him grouchier, even, than his scanty sleep of the night before had done. Where the hell had they got to? It wasn’t like Aurora to let someone else choose the nooning site and now, by golly, he’d be choosing the night’s bedgrounds if she didn’t hurry up and
come back. He had scouted alone all day.

“Whoa,” he said, and Border Crossing stopped.

He wasn’t going on down the trail another step. He was going to find Aurora, and if he rode up on the two of them in a private moment, that was just too bad.

Turning the horse, he headed straight west. They would work their way southeast as they made the pictures, Aurora had said, and, by noon would catch up with the wagons or, at the very least, with the herd.

Peck wore a six-shooter, but he’d been slow as Christmas trying to draw when Cole had crept up on him in the dark. What if Gates had some men prowling around out there west of the trail?

The picture
that
thought brought to his mind twisted his gut for sure. He stopped the horse at the top of a rise and stood in the stirrups to scan the country ahead.

Patches of wildflowers—purple and yellow and a deep, deep blue that reminded him of Aurora’s eyes—grew in great patches spreading through the greening grass, but he saw no sign of two horses with riders in spite of the fact that this was probably the highest rise for fifteen or twenty miles. His heart gave a lurch, and he reached back to take his binoculars from his saddlebag without taking his gaze from the land. If that idiot Peck had gotten them off somewhere trapped in a box canyon or lost …
but Aurora had a good sense of direction, even if he didn’t …

He raised the glasses and looked through them, adjusted them, looked again. Two horses broke out of a stand of trees at the base of the next hill and started east at a short lope. They were a long way away, too far for him to have seen with the naked eye.

His heart plummeted. One was a tall, rangy sorrel, sure to be Shy Boy, and the other was a gray like Peck’s. The only bad thing was that both saddles were empty.

He saw no one in the trees behind them. Dropping the binoculars into the bag again, but keeping it open against his leg, he loosened his gun in its holster and started toward them. That act, for some reason, reminded him of Travis.

Travis would have loved this, he’d always loved riding into the unknown—until that last time.

Then the guilt sliced him right through. Last night he hadn’t thought about Travis, not once during all those sleepless hours. Aurora had driven Travis right out of his head. Somehow, that made him feel guiltier than ever.

The loose horses came to his own and they let him catch them, so he set out on their backtrail, leading them. He’d noticed before they met that Shy Boy was limping from a swollen hock, but he didn’t take time to get off and see about it. He circled toward the edge of the meadow, trying to get closer to cover, but he
wasn’t moving too fast for the horse to keep up. If need be, he’d leave him behind.

Silently praying that Gates wasn’t behind the trouble that had set Aurora and Peck both afoot, he smooched to Border Crossing and finally rode alongside the trees until he came to the place where the horses had come out. He entered, rode through the trees and out onto the bank of a rushing creek. The track the horses had beaten down in the grass showed on both sides of the water.

Then he lifted his gaze and saw them, Peck and Aurora, trudging down the hill and toward the creek, Terrence’s arms filled with camera equipment and Aurora’s with two fat books. Cole took a deep, full breath of relief.

“If you’d only told us you wanted to walk to Texas, we would’ve let you do that on the trail,” he called, sending Border into the creek with the other horses at his heels to splash across and meet them. “Looks like we need to get you two some pushcarts to put your plunder in.”

“It’s not funny!” Aurora yelled back at him.

“I wish you could see your sulky face,” he said.

That made her laugh. The treacherous feeling of fascination bloomed full-grown in Cole’s gut again.

“I’m glad you caught the horses,” she said, stopping to put her burden down on the grass. “Shadow can carry these books from here on out.”

“Yes, thank you, Cole,” Peck said. “We knew you’d find us, but we were afraid the horses would go the wrong way to try to find the remuda.”

Cole threw Peck the reins to the gray and stood in the stirrup to dismount.

“Your horse has hurt his hock, Aurora, so you’ll have to ride with me.”

Shut his mouth, he was getting as bad as Cookie to say what didn’t need saying! That was perfectly obvious, since Peck had bags of every size hanging off his saddle and enough junk to put in them to weigh down a pack mule.

Aurora ran to Shy Boy and hugged his neck, then went around him to examine his hocks. Cole went to her.

“I think he cut it on a rock coming down off the hill,” she said. “He made me so mad taking off like that—just because Terry’s horse spooked, Shy Boy had to rim off, too, and he never does that.”

“What spooked them?”

Aurora didn’t answer.

“I shot at a rattlesnake,” Peck said, busily filling the bags on his saddle. “My horse likes any excuse.”

“Shot
at
it?”

“Yes.”

“Slow as they are this time of year, you might’ve got ‘im on the second try.”

“I was afraid of hitting Aurora,” he said. “It slithered right at her.”

Cole stared at him incredulously.

“Tell me,” he said, from between clenched teeth. “What happened?”

“I jumped up and got out of there,” Aurora said. “I’m fast, so no harm done.”

She touched Cole’s arm to make him look at her. He tore his gaze from Peck’s worried face.

“He feels bad enough already,” she whispered. “And I’m fine.

“Let’s get this hock into the creek for a few minutes,” she said, loud enough for Peck to hear. “The cold water’ll take the swelling down, and then we’ll not push him on the way back to the herd.”

“It’ll take us ‘til dark to
catch
the herd,” Cole muttered sourly.

Aurora flashed him a warning look.

“I’ll be down to the creek in just a minute,” Peck said. “I want to get this load balanced, although I shouldn’t do one nice thing for this obnoxious animal.”

He was stroking the horse’s neck as he spoke.

“Terry, you spoil all your animals, and that’s why they don’t obey you,” Aurora said.

Cole bit back the same sentiment that he’d been about to put into much stronger words.

“Terry’s good as gold,” Aurora said quietly as they led Shy Boy to the creek. “I cannot bear to see him with hurt feelings—he takes everything so to heart.”

Cole rolled his eyes.

“I mean it,” she said, and gave him a little jab in the side for emphasis.

“All right, all right! Haven’t I been biting my tongue?”

“Yes, and I thank you for it.”

“How come you never worry about
my
tender feelings?” he said. “Not only do you not protect me from anyone else, your own tongue has been known to flay the skin off me in long, thin strips.”

She laughed.

“Because you are tough as whit-leather.”

They soaked the hock for as long as it took Peck to get his stuff packed, which was about fifteen minutes. Then, when Peck mounted and started toward them, Cole set his hands on Aurora’s waist. He could span it with his two hands.

She felt light as air as he set her up into his saddle, still clinging to her horse’s reins. She gave a small scream of surprise.

“You could’ve just told me to mount up!”

“Not with the way you follow orders,” he said, letting his hands stay there, clasping her warm body far longer than was necessary. “I don’t have time to argue.”

“You just have to be the boss every chance you get.”

He ignored that.

“You lead him,” he said dryly, pushing Shy Boy over to follow on Border’s off side so he could mount. “That way I’ll have my gun hand free in case of a snake attack.”

She glanced over her shoulder at Peck to see if he had heard that.

“You be nice,” she hissed.

He stuck the toe of his boot into the stirrup and swung up to sit behind her.

The sweet curve of her hip pressed against his crotch, and the perfect shape of her breast brushed the inside of his arm as he picked up his reins. A deep thrill of desire rose in his blood.

He bent his head and pressed his cheek against her fragrant hair, smelled her soap and the light sweat on her skin. He wanted to turn her face and kiss her more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life.

Instead, he set his lips against her ear and growled into it.

“Don’t be running off alone with that ignorant tenderfoot again if you want me to stay hooked as your bodyguard.”

“The devil you say,” she snapped, quick and fierce as some hardened old trail driver. “I don’t have to get your permission to go
anywhere
I want.”

She tried to turn her head, but he kept his face against hers. She gritted her teeth.

“Terrence is no danger to me, Mr.
Bodyguard
,” she said, her stubborn chin stuck out in front of her. “He would never snatch me off my feet and throw me onto his horse like a side of beef, for example.”

“No,” he drawled. “
Terrence
wouldn’t, would he?”

Her skin smelled like flowers, too, but he lifted his head then, and let hers fit into the hollow
at the base of his throat. She sat up straight and leaned away from him.

“You’ve squished my hat,” she said, and pulled it up from where it hung on her back to jam it onto her head.

The breeze picked up a strand of her hair anyway, and blew it across Cole’s lips. She wasn’t thinking about the hat, he knew that from the absent tone of her voice. She was thinking about what he’d just said, and well she might.

In a moment, she twisted in his arms to look back at Terrence.

“Slow down, Cole,” she said. “That horse is really loaded, and we’re being rude to leave him behind.”

All he really heard was the sound of his name on her lips. Even in that tart tone she’d used, it struck him like taking a step out of the shadows into sunlight. Inside, he felt a surging sensation like a river on a rampage.

The next instant she changed it into a torrent.

“Cole, will you teach me to shoot? I’ve decided I really need to wear a gun.”