The Renegades: Cole (4 page)

How long had it been since he had laughed out loud the way he had today? How long, how many years, since he had taken delight in any trait in anybody the way he had in Aurora’s stubbornness?

How long since he had even
noticed
anybody? People were part of the landscape to him, objects, good or bad, to be dealt with in the course of whatever job he was on. But Miss Aurora was different—
she
meant to be dealing with
him
—and she had put her trust completely in him never knowing how he’d destroyed Travis, who had trusted him, too.

Wearily, he drew his head back into the room and sagged against the window frame, dragging the cold air deeper and more slowly into his lungs while he faced the terrible fact he’d been keeping locked up out of sight for nearly eight months. He was merely existing, with no purpose. Running away from hell day in Texas to the cold mountains of Colorado hadn’t helped him one bit.

It was Aurora Benton who had done this to him, she was the one who’d made him see that he was numb to the heart, no more than a walking dead man, and she’d done it by being so alive, so full of hope, so stubbornly determined to hire him. To Aurora, everything
mattered
. Most of the time, to him, nothing did.

And that was more comfortable, much more comfortable. Why did she ever have to cross his
path, much less trail him everywhere like a bloodhound? Into the
saloon
, no less. Next thing he knew she’d be knocking on his door, ready to nag him for the rest of the night—he’d probably have to tie her to a lamppost and ride out of town at a flat gallop to ever get away from her.

As if the thought had conjured her, a rhythmic rapping sounded at his door. He turned and stared at it for a moment, picturing her on the other side of it all perky and stubborn, dressed in her stylish jacket that matched her eyes. Sudden anger swept through him.
Damn
it, why couldn’t she take “no” for an answer? What did he have to do to make her leave him alone? He crossed to the door and flung it open.

A freckled boy about ten years old stood there, his russet-colored cowlick sticking straight up, his fist lifted to knock again. Stunned, Cole stared and, out of old habit, closed his hand around the butt of his six-gun. Dear God, what had he been thinking? Assuming the identity of the person on the other side of a door was a good way to get killed—the very fact that he had done such an idiotic thing made him mad all over again.

“What?”

The boy didn’t shrink from his bark.

“Here,” he said, thrusting a piece of paper at Cole. “Kid Dolby done give me a nickel to bring you this.”

Cole took it.

“I reckoned you’d likely give me another nickel,” the boy said hopefully.

Cole looked down into bold hazel-colored eyes that snapped and danced.

“Being that you’re famous,” he added.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Cole growled, putting on his fiercest glare.

The boy didn’t budge.

“You wouldn’t want the Kid to outdo you, would you?”

“You’re the second toughest person I’ve been up against all day,” Cole muttered, reaching into his pocket for a nickel.

“Who’s the toughest?”

“Not the Kid,” Cole said and dropped the payment into the dirty palm waiting for it.

The boy completely lost interest in the conversation. He unbuttoned his pocket, dropped the coin into it and turned and ran for the stairs. Cole opened the crumpled paper and read it by the light of the hallway lamps.

“I ain’t quittin’,” it said. “I aim to draw down on you if’n’ I hafta foller you to Canady.” KD

A slow, sick feeling ran deep through Cole’s guts as he stepped back into his room, turning again toward the fresh night air for comfort.

He truly ought to get out of town before the boy got out of jail. He stared into the night again, but this time he saw only Kid Dolby’s young face against the spangled sky. If he did leave now, nobody with a grain of sense would say that Cole McCord had run away from a fight, since it was with such a boy. Besides, he
could live if some called him coward. The only way it’d hurt him was that it was bound to bring more of Kid Dolby’s type out of the woods to try their luck.

And it would hurt his pride. Basically, his reputation was all he had left of his old life—which had been his only life.

Anger so swift it made him nauseous swept through him.
Why
had Travis had to die? Why had
he
lived, when the whole damn thing had been his fault? Now if he killed the boy he would always hate himself for that, too.

“Mr. McCord?”

He whirled on his heel and stepped out of the moonlight, at the same time drawing his gun in a reflex action that he couldn’t stop, but he knew that voice from the first syllable. It startled him, how familiar it sounded.

Aurora Benton stood in the doorway, her small figure limned by the light in the hall behind her, and for an instant, just for that first moment he looked at her, a strange sense of himself came over his anger. He was as lonely as he’d ever been. Lonelier.

“I need to speak with you.”

Here was another human being at his door, a beautiful woman who had eyes like the summer sky, a sweet-smelling woman who fit into his arms like a wonderful gift. A woman who could make him laugh.

He didn’t need that. He didn’t want a woman who could touch him in any way.

“I saw your door open,” she said, and
stepped into the room without waiting for an invitation. “I’ve come to give you one last chance.”

That made him grin.

“Mighty generous of you,” he said wryly. “What this world needs most is one last chance.”

He holstered his gun, went to pick up his shirt. She gave a little gasp of surprise as he passed through the wide shaft of moonlight and she saw that he was half-naked. He felt her gaze touch his skin, then she went to the window to look out while he slipped the shirt on and started buttoning it.

“I suppose I should get dressed,” he muttered, “since I seem to have one visitor after another.”

“Who else?”

“Is that any of your business?” “No.”

They laughed at the same moment, then let a silence fall. Finally, she spoke.

“This is my last chance, too,” she said, and her voice trembled. “Lloyd Gates nearly scared me spitless a while ago.”

He spun on his heel, took a step toward her.

“What’d he do?”

“Came up to me at the bar right after you left and offered to escort me to my room. Asked if I’d been thanking you for saving my life this morning, then implied it wouldn’t be saved for long once I hit the trail for Texas. All in the most charming, concerned way, of course.”

“What’d you say to him?”

“Not one solitary word. I cut him dead, turned my back on him, and walked out the door. That son of a bitch was a big part of the reason my daddy killed himself.”

The expletive sounded so surprising spoken in her soft, sad tones that it made him grin again. She might be sad and scared, but her spirit wasn’t broken.

“I’ll pay you seventy-five a month and twenty head of cattle,” she said, whirling around to look at him. “Cole, it’s as high as I can go.”

Her eyes were huge and bright with hope, and they wouldn’t leave him, wouldn’t turn him loose. In the moonlight, she looked as delicate as the flowers he smelled on the breeze, so he crossed the room to the little table by the wall, struck a match, and lit the lamp.

“Do you know you’re trying to settle in Comanche country?” he said, more harshly than he’d intended. “That there’re still some remnants of free bands here and there?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know it’s dry land and a drought there can last seven or eight years?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know that a woman trying to ranch alone will always be a target for thieves—both kinds, the ones with running irons and the ones with bankbooks and ledgers?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know there’ll never be a whole lot of top hands willing to work for a woman?”

“Yes.”

A weight of worry for her came crashing down on him. She wasn’t about to give up on this foolish, dangerous idea.

“You need to see reason,” he said, pushing the words out of his throat, which had gone dry with fear for her.

“Nothing but a bullet can stop me,” she said. “When Daddy died, I swore to love life and live every minute I have, so I will not sit and wither in some horrid situation. I’m taking those cattle to Texas.”

For a long, solemn moment they looked at each other. He hated this, hated really caring what happened to her. She wasn’t really as brave as she seemed—she was foolish.

“You sound like a child,” he told her, “because you can’t even imagine the obstacles you’ll face.”

To his surprise, she didn’t respond with an angry retort. She only looked into his eyes and saw what he was thinking.

“Cole,” she said, “will you come with me?”

He could barely hear the words for the roaring in his head. No. He ought to say no, he had to say no, because, at that moment, all he wanted was to keep her safe from danger and to break Lloyd Gates’s face.

But that attitude wasn’t personal, it couldn’t be, because he didn’t know her that well. No, it was the same he would feel for any woman,
any weaker person who was being bullied.

And she would entertain him on the way to Texas. He might as well go back there; coming north hadn’t helped him get rid of his demons. She would make the long trail much more tolerable than if he rode only with Trav’s ghost for company. Also, if he did save her life, it might help balance things out for losing Trav’s.

“I have my own reasons for going back to Texas,” he said slowly, “and that’s why I’m telling you ‘yes.’ It’s not because you’ve badgered me all day. Don’t think I can be nagged or manipulated into doing anything I don’t want to do, Aurora.”

She searched his face.

“I won’t.”

She came a step closer, and he caught her light, flowery scent.

“Thank you, Cole.”

A wild urge to reach for her almost overcame him; he had to clench his hands into fists. No way was he starting anything like that, not on a long drive, and not with this woman. This ache of loneliness would pass when they started down the trail—watching for danger would keep him busy and keep his feelings at bay, as action always did.

“I can never tell you how right this feels to me,” she said. “I’ve known since the moment we met that you’re supposed to come with me.”

He gave a bitter, little laugh. “And I’ve known you’re deadlier than the Kid since the moment you took my eyes off him and his gun.
That never happened to me in the middle of a draw before.”

She threw back her head and laughed, a joyous, robust sound that rippled through his blood like wine. Oh, Lord, what had he done? He never should’ve agreed to go with her.

Right then he wanted nothing so much as to kiss her. She smelled of perfume—lilac water or roses or some other flowers—and her eyes had gone so huge and dark blue that he couldn’t look away from them. A man could get lost in her eyes.

“This is all on the condition that I’m boss, of course,” he said.

She bristled furiously, as he had known she would.

“
I’m
the trail boss and
you’re
the bodyguard. You knew that when you signed on.”

She spoke in an infuriating, flat, I’ll-give-no-quarter tone that set his teeth on edge. But no worry touched her eyes. She knew he wasn’t going to go back on his word. She trusted him, she thought he had honor.

“We’ll see,” he said, just as flatly. “You’ll be surprised what decisions belong to the bodyguard on a trail.”

“Yes, we’ll see,” she said, stepping closer and sticking out her chin in that stubborn way of hers. “
You’ll
be surprised what decisions belong to the trail boss, even if she is a woman. They are
my
cattle, this is
my
drive.”

“Yet your life is
my
job. You’ll have to learn reason, Aurora.”

He was glad when the anger finally flared in his belly, relieved when all he wanted to do was grab her and shake some sense into her. This was the way it would have to be, all those miles and miles to Texas.

A
urora sat straight up in bed the instant she woke, clutching the covers to her chest and trembling from the nightmare that had held her captive—an awful dream of Lloyd Gates laughing at her while he butchered one of her calves beside the trail. Pebbles clattered against her window, and she realized that was the sound she’d taken for his laughter.

Thank God it was Cookie instead, thank God Gates had been only a dream.

“I’m awake,” she called, wrapping the blanket around her as she jumped out of bed and ran to throw the curtain back and the window, open. “Thanks, Cookie, I’m up.”

The old man grinned at her in the waning light from the moon and shifted the bedroll he carried over his shoulder.

“ ‘Bout time you rolled outta them soogans, girl. I done saddled your horse and sent him with Skeeter like you wanted,” he said. “Don’t reckon there’s nothin’ more in the barn nor the
bunkhouse that we can take with us.”

The flat finality of his words struck her mute for a moment, sent a stream of sorrow running through her blood. This wasn’t a regular, early morning job he was waking her for. This wasn’t a usual drive from winter pasture to summer pasture. This was leaving for good, a drive of hundreds of miles.

Now, for sure, she had no home.

“All right,” she said, at last. “I’ll go through the house one last time and then I’ll be down to the herd.”

“No hurry. It’ll be a little spell ‘fore I can get the biscuits baked and the bacon fried.”

The scent of the cowboys’ campfire drifted to her on the night breeze, and she heard a faint lowing from the cattle. They were holding the gather within a quarter mile of the house.

“I wish I’d stayed in the camp last night,” she blurted. “Maybe that would’ve made leaving easier this morning.”

He didn’t answer—there was too much raw emotion in her voice. He was afraid, no doubt, that she was about to burst into tears.

“But I thank you for sleeping at the bunkhouse,” she said quickly, “so I could have one last night in my room before we go.”

“Anything for you, Aury girl,” the old man said, trying to comfort her with his childhood nickname for her. “And anything to spend one more night in a bed. Even that old shuck mattress spread on a board bunk is softer than the ground.”

“I guess so,” she said, smiling a little.

“By the time we get to Texas we won’t even remember what a bed is,” he said, his whole face wrinkling as he smiled. “By then we’ll be tougher than whet-leather and rougher than a pair of Mexican spurs—why, we’ll be able to bulldog any trouble that has the gall to come our way.”

She laughed out loud. The old man knew her so well, knew just how to encourage her.

“And we’ll know all about droving,” she said. “Nobody’ll be as good as we will at trailing a mixed herd of cattle with as few hands as humanly possible.”

He threw back his head and laughed. Then, without another word, he turned and started for the herd. Aurora watched him go, smiling with affection, then frowning with worry. Cookie seemed to be limping worse than she’d ever seen him.

“Where’s your horse, Cookie?” she called. “You should’ve ridden mine!”

His only reply was a wave of his hand over his head.

It wasn’t far to the bedgrounds, true, and she herself would walk, because later in the day she’d be in the saddle for too many hours, but Cookie was an old cowboy who never walked a step if he could ride, either horseback or on the chuck wagon. His rheumatism must be acting up so much that he didn’t want to make the effort to mount and dismount.

A new despair nagged at her. Cookie was in
worse shape than she’d thought. He’d have to drive the chuck wagon at all times because one of the thirteen-year-old neighbor twins she’d hired would have to trail the remuda while the other drove her household wagon. She couldn’t spare a grown man for either job.

What was she
doing
? A third of her outfit for trailing twenty-two hundred head of cattle and a eighty-horse remuda was a crippled-up man old enough to be her grandfather and two little boys.

She gave a mighty sigh and turned back into the room, where her big dog, Bubba, was finally stretching and getting up from his bed in the corner to come to her.

“You’re a lazy hound,” she told him, bending over to hug his neck. “You sleepyhead, you didn’t even growl. But you knew it was Cookie, didn’t you?”

He would’ve growled if it’d been Lloyd Gates at her window. Bubba, who stood shoulder-high to her hip, and who many said looked half wolf, sometimes theatened to attack strangers. Yet she was getting ready to take him through a thousand miles of traveling where he would, no doubt, cross paths with quite a few strangers.

“We can do it, though, can’t we, sugar?”

For a long minute she stayed still, holding her cheek against the dog’s big head, taking comfort from his warmth and his soft fur. Today was the day she had to put up or shut up, the day she had to start doing what she’d been telling
the world she could do, erratically vicious dogs and broken-up old men notwithstanding.

“We’ve got an ace in the hole, though, don’t we boy?” she said, as Bubba leaned harder against her, rumbling deep in his throat. “Cole McCord’s our secret weapon. He can handle anything, I can just tell.”

But she knew he would try to handle too much of her affairs. And he was the strongest man she’d ever met. Just his very presence exuded power. People talked about someone walking into a room and filling it with their personality, why Cole McCord had filled the whole
street
in Pueblo City. He was the perfect example of the old Texas saying He covers the ground he stands on.

She turned loose of the dog and went to take her favorite quilt off the bed.

Cole McCord was a much more authoritative man than her daddy had been. Stronger than her uncles Jeremiah and Porter, whose households she had shuttled between during her years in Philadelphia. None had been shy about bossing other people around. But Cole would find out, as they had, that she had her own mind.

She smiled at Bubba, who was sitting on his haunches, watching her with his head cocked to one side in curiosity.

“The bigger they come, the harder they fall, isn’t that right, Bubba? You and I are going to boss this drive, no two ways about it.”

Bubba agreed, vocally, and came to lick her
hand. He could practically talk—he always made sounds nearly like words, with the intonation rising and falling in sentences. He howled like a wolf sometimes, too, and he growled at people he didn’t like, but he rarely barked. He had appeared at the Flying B as a stray pup only a few days after Aurora had returned from the East, and they’d immediately loved each other with all their hearts.

“Come on, punkin,” she said, burying her hand in the soft fur of his neck, “you have a little run while I get dressed.”

She led him to the front door, let him out into the blackness that was coming on as the moon went down, then padded barefoot back through the dark, silent house. This was the day she had to leave this place. This was different from when she left to go east because this time she was never coming back.

Now she had no home
.

She stood still in the hallway, her naked feet pressed hard against the cold wood floor, and she took a deep breath. The familiar smell of the house filled her nostrils. The smell of her family’s house, which she would never smell anymore.

Now she had no family, either. Mama had been dead nearly five years, and Papa, six months. Cookie and her other hands were her only family now.

The thick dark of the time right before sunrise seeped in through the walls and blank windows, the cold of the early spring morning
went straight to her bones. She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. Everything suddenly looked different in the early, dark morning, but everything still was the same. This place belonged to the bank now, and she was going to make a new start for herself in Texas.

What she had to cling to was the freedom of being on her own. She could make her own decisions about the business instead of deferring to Papa’s, even when she knew they were wrong. And wherever she was it would be
her
place instead of Papa’s. Her time would be her own to do as she pleased instead of doing what someone else asked her to do or what society expected of her.

A fierce excitement began to thread its way through her trepidation. Hadn’t she promised herself, on the day her daddy died, to live her life to the fullest? Every single moment of it? Well, then, she’d better get started.

Breaking into a run, she reentered her room and began throwing on the clothes she’d laid out the night before, began thinking about the business at hand. Was there anything else left in the house that she truly needed? Her few keepsakes that remained after she’d sold her mother’s jewelry and the necessary household goods had been loaded into a wagon days ago. The bed she’d just slept in and the other pieces of furniture would just have to go to Banker McFadden, who’d foreclosed on the place. Both wagons were full to bursting.

She’d simply have to build up and furnish her new home a little at a time—the house wouldn’t be all that important to her, anyway, because she’d be outside running the ranch. Only a few months from now she would be secure in a place all her own, and she would be free. No matter how small it might be, or how crude, it would be hers and hers alone, and no one could tell her what to do or foreclose on it and throw her out of it.

A sharp, hot surge of fury burned in her throat. Papa didn’t have to be such a coward—if he hadn’t killed himself the two of them could’ve held onto this place together and Banker McFadden couldn’t have snatched it out from under them.

But that was water under the bridge, and it was nothing but a waste of her strength to think about it any more. She finished buttoning her blouse, then threw the stampede strings of her hat over her head and let it hang down her back. She stuffed her nightgown into the packed leather bag that had belonged to her mother, then took her belongings, and without even one last glance over her shoulder, she left the room.

In the hallway, she turned toward the staircase, then stopped. She wasn’t going to take one last walk through the house, either. Everything that met her glance would hold a memory of her parents, of her childhood, of good times and bad ones, and all that was the past. It was gone.

So she pivoted on the heel of her boot, faced the front door, and marched toward it. Once through it, she pulled it closed and crossed the porch, whistling for Bubba, who came loping out of the shadows.

Oh, dear God, if only she could make the right decisions and not get them all killed or the cattle all lost! She couldn’t bear for Cole McCord to say
I told you so
.

She reached for Bubba’s head and rubbed it. He leaned against her and muttered some comfort. Aurora smiled, shifted the bag on her shoulder, and started walking fast toward the herd.

The sun was coming up now, bathing the whole world in pink and yellow light, coloring even the gray mist rising from the river. The cattle, strung out along the bank back upstream toward the house, were beginning to stir, a few heaving themselves to their feet to amble down to the water, bits of yellow sunlight flashing off their horns. Tom and Lonnie were taking their turn at watching them, riding slowly at the edge of the bedground.

The beautiful sight lifted Aurora’s heart, and suddenly she didn’t have a doubt in the world. She couldn’t wait for the coming adventure. She ran the rest of the way.

When she arrived at the fire, Cookie was bending over it, frying bacon in a skillet while the aroma of sourdough biscuits wafted from a Dutch oven buried in coals at his feet. As usual, he told her what she could plainly see for herself
when she looked past the wagons.

“Nate’s done brought in the remuda and the boys ain’t waitin’ to eat before they pick their horses.”

“That’s good,” she said, on her way to the household wagon to stash her things. “Did they say all was quiet last night?”

“Yep. Nobody come around ‘til ‘bout a hour ago when yore bodyguard rode in, Monte said.”

She froze in the act of tossing her bag over the tailgate.

“He’s already here?”

“Yeah. Monte’s been here all night.”

“You know I don’t mean Monte!”

Her pulse and her mind both quickened. Cole had said he’d start from town at dawn, but he had come early. Suddenly, she realized that she needed a minute to prepare herself to see him again, which was a completely silly thought. She hurried back to the fire.

“Where is he now?”

“Who, Monte?”

“No! I mean …”

Then she caught Cookie’s sly look and bit her tongue. He’d love nothing better than to tease her about Cole every step of the way to Texas.

“Mighty handsome man, that bodyguard o’ yourn.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” she lied. “I hired him for his reputation, not his looks.”

“Mm,
hmm
.”

“
Cookie
. Where is he now?”

“Lookin’ over the remuda. He only brung one horse with him.”

“That’s all right. The one thing we have plenty of is horses.”

Her heart was beating extra hard as she turned and went toward the chuck wagon. It was the whole excitement of this morning, that was all. This was the most significant day of her life so far. That and the surprise Cole was already here, that was all.

She took one of the tin cups from the fold-down table and carried it to the coffeepot hanging over the fire. Cookie tilted the pot with a long stick to fill it.

“This here’s real six-shooter coffee,” he said, as he said every time he ever made coffee. “I dropped mine into it awhile ago, and it floated just fine.”

To please him, she chuckled at the old saw he’d repeated a hundred times. She started to say something else, while she watched him push the bacon aside and begin breaking eggs into the skillet and scrambling them, but she kept forgetting what it was. Cole McCord was already here.

“Come an’ git it, boys, before I throw it out,” Cookie yelled.

Aurora turned to see the men coming toward them. Cole was in the middle of the small bunch, and just a glimpse of him made her pulse quicken even more. That loose, sure set of his wide shoulders, that panther’s prowl of his were both unmistakable, even though he
was backlit by the rising sun so she couldn’t see his face.