The Renegades: Cole (19 page)

It seemed forever, but the men finally reached them.

“Hello, the Slash A,” one of them called.

“Hello,” Cole answered.

Aurora noticed that he dropped his hand to the handle of his six-shooter and left it there. They looked pretty respectable, though, as they rode up and stopped their horses facing her and Cole. They all had an honest air about them.

“Milo Thomas of the Circle T,” said the oldest man, the one in the middle.

“Cole McCord.”

Milo Thomas introduced his men by name as two of his top hands and then fixed his direct, gray gaze on Aurora.

Cole deliberately did not introduce her.

“You know who we are,” he said. “What can we do for you?”

“I’m interested in buying your herd,” Milo said. “My information has it that the lady’s the owner.”

Aurora rode forward so her horse was even with Cole’s.

“I’m Aurora Benton. I
am
the owner. But I’m not interested in selling.”

“Sorry to hear that, ma’am,” Milo Thomas said, with a tip of his hat. “I’m looking for some stockers, and it’d sure be handy to find ‘em right here. I’d give top dollar.”

“I’m sorry I can’t accommodate you, Mr. Thomas, but it’s completely impossible.”

Her tone rang so strong and final that Thomas didn’t argue. He and his men stayed visiting just long enough to be polite, then turned and rode back the way they had come.

As soon as she saw their backs, Aurora started pushing the ten or so head that they’d gathered toward the big herd. She could see it in the distance, and the sooner they reached it, the sooner she could get away from this stupid conversation with Cole.

Then, to her complete shock, it became even more insane.

“You should’ve at least thought it over,” he
said. “That was a good chance to save yourself a whole lot of miles chasing Old Snarly.”

She ignored him, wouldn’t even look at him. Damn him for patronizing her.

“I’ll be glad to ride after Milo Thomas and say that you’ll think it over until tomorrow.”

And damn him for knowing her so little that he took her silence for consent.

She turned on him viciously.

“Why don’t you mind your own business? And why don’t you come right out and say to my face that you don’t think I can get these cattle through to Texas? Why don’t you just admit that you are exactly like all the other men who think women can’t do anything on their own?”

His face flushed with anger.

“That isn’t true! You’re such a stubborn-hearted she-wolf I know you can do
whatever
the hell you set out to do. I’m trying to save you a world of grief, that’s all.”

“Well, don’t bother yourself! And don’t lie. What you’re doing is trying to get this drive over with fast so you won’t have to deal with an
emotional
woman jumping into your bed every night because she can’t resist you and then begging you to marry her every morning after!”

The expression on his face would have made her laugh if she hadn’t been so completely furious.

“Well, dream on,” she said, “because it ain’t
gonna happen. I wouldn’t touch you again with a ten-foot pole, Cole McCord!”

She held his gaze with a hot, sharp stare.

“You better not be laughing at me inside,” she said dangerously. “You could not have stopped that stampede without my help, you know that, don’t you? I did a man’s job and just as well, maybe better.”

“I know that. You may recall that I said as much.”

There was no laughter in his voice, so she finally, disdainfully, swept her gaze away from his and got back to her work.

“You’re my
employee
, for goodness sake,” she said, “and that’s all. You have no more loyalty to me than any other hired gun would have, and that’s fine. The only thing that matters in my life is that I’m going to have a ranch of my own or die trying.”

And she would hold last night as a precious memory for her old age, because it’d be that long before she could bear to think about it. She could never live with Cole McCord, and he was right about one thing: making love with him again would only make her want more, so from this moment on she’d be sticking tight to her promise never to go near him anymore.

Yep. From now on, Aurora Benton, owner of the Slash A Ranch, wherever in the Panhandle that ranch might be, would be all business.

All the time.

C
ole filled his lungs with the new, storm-washed morning air and set his gaze firmly on the plains stretching out ahead. During the endless time since they had made love—and war—he had made great progress. He could ride beside Aurora now without being so constantly aware of her that he couldn’t think about something else at the same time. Today he was going to prove that to himself beyond question: he was going to fix all his instincts on discovering the whereabouts of the disappearing cows. He wasn’t going to think of Aurora as a woman, not once.

Maybe that would ease the pain in his gut.

Hadn’t part of it gone away when he’d learned to bear the cross of her constant physical allure? That was now a given in his life, since she lived and breathed right beside him or within a stone’s throw of him night and day. No, the misery inside him wasn’t desire for her any more.

Now the powerful pain in his gut was himself.

That and the fact that some two-bit lowlifes were stealing cows out from under his nose. How embarrassing was that for the most dangerous man in Colorado?

With a wry shake of his head, he scanned the plains in every direction, searching for a glimpse of long horns shining in the sun or a white-spotted hide almost hidden in the tall, lush graze. Or a spiral of smoke rising from a branding fire. Or the crowns of the hats of men on horseback out to the side of the herd somewhere, riding the coulees so as not to throw their silhouettes on the horizon.

“Do you think I’ve gotten good enough with a gun to go up against them?”

The sound of her low, husky voice after a long silence affected him like her warm hand on his skin. But the words struck him with cold fear.

He whipped around in the saddle to look at her, fighting the quick, blunt answer that sprang to his lips. Three. Count to three and then speak. Don’t destroy her confidence, because she might need it bad.

“You’re a lot better,” he said, unable to resist a glance at her trim waist and rounded hips, both emphasized by the heavy gunbelt she’d insisted on wearing since the first loss of cows.

“But …? I can hear the ‘but’ in your voice.”

“But you shooting at empty airtights and
men shooting back at you are two entirely different things.”

“I know that.”

“Not until you’ve been there.”

“I have been shot at!”

“But you haven’t shot back. And you felt sorry for the mewling, whining sidewinders when
I
shot them.”

“
Anything
is pathetic when it’s screaming in pain.”

“In a gunfight, forget pathetic. Think, ‘Him or me, who would I rather see dead?’ ”

She nodded, her eyes solemn and fixed on his.

“I can do that. Every time I remember waking up to another dozen head missing.”

He laughed.

“That gets your dander up more than remembering Gates trying to kill you when you walked in front of the fire in your own camp?”

She laughed, too. “Makes me sound as money-hungry as he is, doesn’t it?”

“Yep. And crazy enough to risk your life for the sake of greed. If you’re dead, it doesn’t matter who has your cows, Aurora. Let me take the lead if we scare ‘em up today.”

“Oh,” she said, “so you
don’t
think I can shoot well enough to …”

“Now, I didn’t say that,” he interrupted irritably. “What I’m saying is that we might get the drop on them and not have to do any shooting at all.”

“So first you worry that I won’t shoot because
I feel sorry for them and now you worry that I’d shoot them in the back.”

He turned on her.

“
Aurora!
Hush! You’re gonna have my spurs so tangled up I can’t even talk at all.”

She was grinning her most mischievous grin.

They both laughed, then, and things felt easier between them than they had at any time since the blowup.

“One small detail,” he said. “We have to find them before we can shoot or not shoot them.”

“I think it’s Gates,” she said, for the thousandth time.

“You never know,” he said, also for the thousandth time. “Thomas may have got his back up when you refused to sell and decided to take your cattle any old way he could get ‘em. Or it could be brand blotters from parts unknown.”

“It’s been a week exactly since the stampede,” she said thoughtfully.

“Seems like a year,” he muttered. “Matter of fact, seems like a lifetime.”

And that was the God’s truth. He had never lived through such a stretch of misery in all his life, and he had been through some hell in his time. What was she
doing
to him? All the damned soul-searching he’d been falling into was because of her somehow, and he didn’t even understand why.

He dragged his scattered thoughts together and forced them back to the problem at hand.

“
Whoever
it is, they didn’t cause the stampede, though,” he said.

She turned in the saddle to face him so suddenly that it nearly made him jump. “We’ve said all this so many times we’re getting as predictable as Cookie,” she cried, pounding her fist on her thigh. “We have to
do
something, and fast, or we’ll have no cattle at all by the time we cross the Texas line.
What
can we do to stop them?”

For a minute he didn’t even take in what she’d said. Her mouth was so sweet that all he wanted was to taste it again, reach across the narrow space between their horses and pull her into his arms.

But that was what had got him into this predicament in the first place, wasn’t it? This weird state of mind where his sins haunted him and he longed to bury them all forever? Where he wanted, dear Lord, to make things right somehow so he’d be good enough for her?

A protesting shiver ran down his spine. So that was it. For the first time in all these wild, wolf-howling years, he was regretting the truth of his old line that always saved him from a woman’s clutches and kept him moving on: “I’m bad for you, darlin’, someday you’ll know that. I’m not good enough for a woman like you.”

He gave a great sigh. Well, at least now he knew what it was that had been keeping him awake at night—besides the rustlers. Besides his body longing for Aurora in his bed, if he was going to tell the whole truth.

“Cole,”
she said. “What are you thinking about?”

Her husky voice that never failed to surprise him somehow broke a little on the last word. He tried to steel himself against its magic.

“You,” he said.

He had not meant to say that out loud.

She straightened her back and leaned a little away from him. She was stronger than she looked, actually stronger than he was, because her startled gaze immediately got lost in his, and her blue eyes plainly said that she wanted him to reach for her as much as he did, but she made no move.

Every fiber of his body gathered to reach for her. He wanted her so much, she wanted him, too. They could forget all about shootings and cattle and rustlers and danger. They could spend all day in a wonderful world of their own, a world of sweet-smelling grasses and huge, blue skies and bright sunlight and hot kisses and dizzying caresses on their skins.

No, they couldn’t. Because her honest face had filled with yearning. With caring. For him.

He couldn’t let that happen to her. Or to him. She touched him in too many places—like his heart and his loins and his head.

She saw the exact moment that he recovered control, and she put her guard up right then.

“Don’t be thinking about
me
,” she said. “I need you to do the job I hired you for, Cole.”

“I’m guarding your body at this exact instant,” he said, but lightly, not seductively.

He was never going to seduce her again. He was bad enough for going ahead with making love to her, even if she
was
the one who had come to him, because she was far more inexperienced in every way—except managing cowhands and cattle—than he had thought that day in Pueblo City.

She laughed a little.

“My mind’s part of my body and you have to guard it, too, because it’s going crazy over this rustling.”

Her tone was as light as his, her wonderful voice only a little bit strained. It was best for both of them to keep the distance between them. It wouldn’t be
too
hard to do.

“We’ll find ‘em,” he said. “I’ve decided that I won’t sleep until we do.”

A sudden mischievous grin lit her face. That was one thing that made it so hard for him—she fascinated him, for he never knew what she’d do or say next.

“Great! I won’t, either! We’ll lie in wait!”

“N-o-o,” he said firmly, unable to resist grinning back at her. “This isn’t one of your famous adventures. And why lie in wait all night when there’s never any tracks in the morning? That’s not what I meant.”

“Well, whatever you meant, I’m going with you.”

He lifted Border Crossing into a short lope for a change of pace.

“Nope.”

Then he bit his lip. The one thing he
could
predict about her was that telling her she couldn’t do something was sure to make her do it.

“Look,” he said quickly, “this is nothing but an augurin’ match. What we’re gonna do is whatever we
have
to do when we figure out who’s thinning our herd and how.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I forgot to tell you that it’s your twenty head that they took so far.”

He looked at her and laughed.

“Last I heard from ol’ Monte’s count, we’ve lost around sixty head, all told. Some of ‘em’s bound to be yours.”

“You’re right! So that means I ride beside you to get them back.”

He shook his head.

“Tricky,” he said. “Tricky woman. I have to watch you like a hawk.”

“As if
you
can be trusted,” she said. “Nearly drowning me in the cold river when the bet was that I’d get dunked only once.”

“I’m not getting into
that
argument again,” he said, chuckling, giving her a teasing glance. “What’s done is done. You’ve already been dunked twice.”

She made a face at him.

“You look about six years old,” he said, as she stuck out her tongue.

He tried to imagine her as a child. Had she been a little tomboy? Or a pretty little lady?

“Aurora, what did you mean that time you said you had to grow up fast?”

She stared at him.

“When did I say that?”

“When Nate was getting attached to your dog. I said he had to get tough.”

“I’m amazed you even remember that.”

I remember everything about you. Probably every word we ever said to each other. Every look we ever exchanged
.

“I remember. That’s always been a big help in Rangering.”

She nodded.

“I meant that I’ve had to take care of myself almost since I could walk and talk. Mama died when I was ten, but she was sick in bed a lot before that and Papa was always caught up in ranching. Cookie tried to look after me and I rode with Papa some, but mostly I did as I pleased.”

Loneliness from the past echoed in her voice.

“I reckon that explains it, then,” he drawled.

“Explains what?”

“You still think you ought to do as you please. No questions asked.”

Her laughter rewarded him.

“
You
should talk, Cole McCord.”

After a moment’s comfortable silence moving across the fresh, new country, she turned to him again.

“What about you? Did your mother take good care of you?”

“She tried, in between working in the fields and cooking and trying to make do. When the work was done every fall, she took me to see her Chickasaw people. But she died when I was
sixteen, and, since I never got along with my pa, that’s when I joined the Rangers.”

“Any brothers and sisters?”

The question shot a lump into his throat.

“One brother who died young,” he said gruffly. “And a partner who was more than a brother to me.”

All the old pain slammed into him like a wall of water roaring down a dry gulch. Helpless. God Almighty, he had never been so helpless as he’d been that hellish day. His limbs felt paralyzed just thinking about it.

It was sure too late now. There was nothing he could do to redeem himself.

“Tell me about him,” she said, so softly he almost didn’t hear.

“Travis,” he said. “Trav Henderson. He was one to ride the river with.”

“Was?”

“Shot to pieces,” he said, and nearly choked on the words. “Last year. On the Nueces.”

“I’m so sorry, Cole.”

He couldn’t look at her for a while. When he finally did, her blue gaze caught his and comforted him, told him she understood. She didn’t ask any more, she didn’t say everything would be all right.

Because it wouldn’t, and she could see that. Because she was hurting because he was hurting.

He wanted to be in her arms. He wanted his head on her breast.

“I was goin’ back to Texas anyhow,” he said,
tearing his eyes away and staring straight ahead, “to see a woman.”

He told it as a lie to throw up a barrier between them. But as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew he couldn’t let it stand.

It made him feel hollowed out so much he could blow right off his horse and away in the wind. He couldn’t do it. Aurora needed to know he was bad, all right, but he couldn’t do that to himself—let her think that he’d made love with her while he was riding hundreds of miles to see another woman.

Besides, suddenly he knew that it was the truth. This
was
one reason he was going back to Texas.

“Travis’s widow. I want to see if she needs anything.”

“That’s good of you,” Aurora said quietly.

She waited, sensing something more. From the very minute they met, she could read his mind. She knew him, or she was beginning to. Nobody else but Travis ever had.

He couldn’t say any more, though, he
wouldn’t
say more. And that was all right with her, too.

They rode on in silence, watching the horizon, while he tried to calm the turmoil in his heart. It wasn’t all guilt and regret over Travis, either.

Layered over all those old feelings was one that was brand new. Was he really going to see Ellie to keep Aurora at a distance, to have a reason to leave her at the end of the trail, to
keep her from thinking she was important enough or persuasive enough to him to have brought him on this upside-down and backwards, north-to-south trail drive?