Without Words (8 page)

Half a mile on, Bret turned off the road, wove through trees until they came to a small clearing, and stopped there. After tying Brownie beside Bret’s horses, Hassie reached for the cinch.

“Loosen it a little, but leave it on,” he said.

She loosened the cinch, fighting dismay. The horses had all drunk from the smithy’s trough, but even Bret’s well fed horses needed to eat. The saddles and packs needed to come off. The horses needed to graze.

Bret didn’t seem to think so. He gathered dead branches and arranged them ready for a fire. She hurried to help.

“That’s enough,” he said when she brought an armload of dry branches. “We only need a small fire for cooking. Fire is nothing but a beacon trouble can home in on.”

Before long he had the fire burning, the rabbit roasting on a makeshift spit, corn meal mush frying in a pan, and coffee boiling in the pot. Golden light from the setting sun gilded the little clearing. Hassie resolved to try to convince him to picket the horses after they ate.

Glad she’d abandoned her fears and worries, she sat near the fire, experimenting to find a way to sit in trousers that didn’t seem wicked. Folding both legs to one side was the best and still felt vaguely indecent. Not as indecent as the purple dress, though, and a whole lot warmer.

She closed her eyes, enjoying the scents of roasting meat and coffee, hard put to feel anything but content.

“You don’t have to worry that I’ll leave you somewhere like that again,” Bret said abruptly as he turned the spit. “I know better than to take anyone at face value, and I won’t do it again.”

Hassie couldn’t believe her ears. He couldn’t think anything that happened was his fault. He had fixed it; she had caused it. She was the one who had seized on the idea of working for the Restons. She was the one....

Remembering the slate and chalk pencil, she jumped up, ran, and brought them back to the fire.

Sitting back down close enough to pass the slate to Bret but not too close, she wrote,
“My fault, my idea.”

“Was it? Would you have had that idea without the performance they put on in the hall this morning?”

It had never occurred to her. Now that it did, she realized he was right. The Restons had done it on purpose. Even so....
“I took the bait.”

“So did I, and I’ve dealt with enough weasels like those two to know better. We both were saved by a loose horse shoe.”

Both? He hadn’t needed saving. He would never have known what happened unless he came back to Werver some day. She stared at the hard lines of his face, a strange warmth spreading through her.

He would have come back. He had planned to come back. The next time chasing outlaws brought him this way, he planned to stop and see how she was doing, and if leaving her to starve
might
bother him, finding her in a brothel
might
do the same.

How foolish to worry he would hurt her. A laugh escaped. She didn’t even try to choke it back.

He lifted one brow slightly. “Maybe your voice is shot, but that’s a nice sound.”

She sobered and hid her confusion behind her coffee cup. From the time of the accident that stole her voice, no one had ever described any sound she made as nice.

“I have friends homesteading in Kansas. As soon as I finish a little business here, we’ll head that way. You can stay with them until you find a good man.”

Her fingers twitched on the pencil, but he wouldn’t want to hear—
read—
the truth. She didn’t want to marry another man like Cyrus. To Bret Sterling that might seem better than working as a maid in a hotel, but not to her.

They ate in silence. Yellow Dog joined them and stared at the remainder of the rabbit as if he could levitate it to his mouth by an act of will. He probably thought he succeeded. Bret gave the dog what remained of the carcass.

Emboldened by his charity to the dog, Hassie wrote on the slate again.
“Why are you going to Fort L?”

Bret poured the last of the coffee into his cup, and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. “I don’t know how much Rufus stole,” he said finally, “but his saddlebags were in the barn, and there’s almost six thousand dollars in them. The army’s willing to pay me the five hundred they had on his head as a finder’s fee. I figure to hand it over to the colonel there personally, see if they’ll fork over a little extra for the horse.”

Six thousand dollars! Such a vast sum barely seemed real. No wonder Bret was nursemaiding those saddlebags. And Rufus, the lying, thieving murderer, had said he’d give her ten dollars and acted put upon at that.

Bret threw the last of his coffee on the fire. “Leavenworth is days away. Right now, we need to move on while we can still see well enough to get through the woods.”

“We’re going to ride all night?”

“Just a mile or so. It’s safer not to bed down close to where we had a fire and cooked.”

“You think the marshal will come after us?”

“No, but that fellow who chased you may feel up to it.”

The thought of Zachary behind a tree with a gun made Hassie eager to leave the fire behind. She emptied the coffee pot and scrubbed out the frying pan as best she could while Bret smothered the fire. They packed up and rode into the gathering dusk.

The forest gave way to open grassland before another mile passed. Bret stopped amid the last of the trees. She tied Brownie beside the other horses and rubbed her down with handfuls of dry grass as Bret did the same for his saddle horse. Finished, and thinking to help, she moved toward the cavalry horse only to feel strong hands on her shoulders.

“You do Packie,” Bret said, turning her toward the packhorse.

The feel of his hands stayed with her as she rubbed down the packhorse. Her mind went over every touch, from his palm cupping her elbow to guide her yesterday, to the relentless hold of his arm imprisoning her against his side and chest today.

Every time he had touched her, he had a purpose. Why did he push her away from the cavalry horse? Moving from the left side of the packhorse to the right, even in the fading light, she saw Bret twist away as the big bay lashed out at him with a hind leg. Hassie gave the placid animal under her hands a pat and went back over the place on Packie’s back that made him stretch his neck with pleasure.

When they finished the rubdowns, Bret hobbled the horses and turned them loose to graze. Relieved of anxiety over the horses, Hassie’s worry over sleeping arrangements and what she was going to do about them returned. Even if Bret wouldn’t hurt her intentionally, what if he didn’t think sharing a bed would be hurting her? After all she had been married.

She fidgeted with her coat buttons as Bret carried his bedroll and saddle blankets to a sheltered spot just inside the tree line. “Watch.”

He walked over an area almost six by eight feet. “When there’s enough light, you can check by looking, but one way or another, check for holes. You don’t want to sleep on a hole with a snake in it.”

Something light fluttered over the ground. “Ground sheet.”

Saddle blankets thumped down next. “Mattress.”

A dark blanket he didn’t bother to explain topped the bed. “If you want a pillow, figure out what to use. Leave your clothes on, loosen anything tight. Boots off. Shake them out in the morning before you put them on.”

He sat down on the blankets and pulled a boot off. “This is mine. You make your own.”

Hassie ran back to where the saddles and packs lay, her heart light. The only decision left for her tonight was how close to Bret Sterling to make her bed.

B
RET LAY ON
his back, staring at the night sky, and listened to Mrs. Petty obediently stomping through the grass, following his instruction to check for holes.

This early in the season as cold as it had been, it wasn’t strictly necessary, but tracking down the thief rumored to be holed up in a small town in Nebraska and dragging him to where Wells Fargo could check him out and approve paying the reward could take two or three weeks.

Cloth whispered as she shook it out, rustled as she did—whatever. Was she loosening anything? Those trousers didn’t exactly fit tight. Without the galluses, they’d be down around her knees in two strides. Tight or not, no one with decent vision would see her from behind and believe for a minute she was anything except female. The coat helped for now. Except when she walked.

Keeping her in one piece in parts of the country where white women were rare was going to be one long repeat of today. From a distance she might pass for a boy or young man if she stayed on the horse. Hair under hat, hands in gloves. Dirt on face, purple eyes closed.

Bluish gray, damn it. The way they looked tonight was just the setting sun and the fire.

Seeing her naked breasts exposed in the gap between her chest and the front of the too large whore’s dress hadn’t aroused lust in any way. The small, firm breasts had moved with her heaving chest. Her nipples had been flushed almost red after her frantic run and peaked not from arousal but from cold.

The sight had been sad somehow and only made him angrier. Only made him more aware how vulnerable women were. No one should be able to do that to a woman who smiled and hummed, happy to be doing menial labor, thinking she was safe.

Today wasn’t the first time someone had done something very ugly to Mrs. Petty. The scar on her slender neck was a shiny gray rope. If the wound had gone deep enough to ruin her voice, the wonder was she lived. Bret had seen slashed throats, knew how fast blood fountained out.

And it bothered her. She hid the scar under high collars that reached to the bottom of her chin, and she didn’t make a sound unless really provoked.

He’d spent the war worrying over his own women, his mother, sisters, and Mary, because of that vulnerability. And his worry had been wasted. They all survived the war just fine, but hardships that Mrs. Petty wouldn’t recognize as hard had left them bitter, and Albert, strong, laughing, opinionated Albert, had been the one to die.

No, the naked breasts weren’t responsible for heat of a kind he barely remembered from before the war spreading through his belly, leaving him hard and throbbing. Her laugh had done that. A woman with a ruined voice shouldn’t have a whispery, silvery laugh that crawled up a man’s spine with delicate little female claws and roused things long dead and better left that way.

Not that he’d hadn’t had a few women since the war. But that was like a trip to the bushes, relief not pleasure. Or maybe it was like picking a scab.

What would she do if he got up and joined her in her blankets? Not that he would, but toying with the notion was an entertaining way to wait for sleep. He imagined her hoarse, almost soundless gasp of horror, pictured her running across the prairie by the light of the stars, boots in hand maybe, the dog circling and barking, the hobbled horses spooking and hopping into the next county.

By the time his unfettered imagination had added one last herd of buffalo east of the Missouri stampeding through the town of Werver and flattening both the hotel and brothel, the last of the anger and impatience of the day dissolved along with the unexpected lust.

Resentment still prickled over having walked into the responsibility of keeping Mrs. Petty safe until he could offload the problem on Gabe and Belle, but even that dulled. The sounds of the night soothed. He fell asleep.

The nightmare came as it always did, starting with scenes from the war as he had lived them. Men and horses screamed, Bret slipped in greasy mud, fell across bodies. The roar of cannon bludgeoned his ears. Scents of blood and death roiled his stomach. A man in Confederate gray rose from behind a stone wall. Bret centered his sights, started to squeeze the trigger....

Something cold and wet pressed in his ear, something warm and wet slid across his cheek. Bret jolted awake panting and flailing, scrambled to his feet in time to see a four-legged shadow disappear in the trees. He sank back down, shaking, used his sleeve to dry his ear and wipe dog saliva from his cheek.

The dog had awakened him before he pulled the trigger on a man whose face he knew as well as his own. Even knowing how the nightmare would end, because he’d dreamed it countless times before, waking before killing Albert in the dream was better than waking after.

More of a gift was waking before another figure rose from behind enemy lines and died with blood spreading across her chest and an accusation on her face. Albert had really died, although not by a brother’s hand, and Mary still lived, but after the dream Bret always needed the rest of the night, sometimes part of the next day, to put a dream that seemed so real behind him.

“Do that sooner next time,” he said softly, aiming his voice toward the trees. “Do that sooner, and you can have your own rabbits.”

S
CENTS OF BACON
and coffee woke Hassie the next morning. She opened her eyes to a gray world damp with dew and shivered. The sun wasn’t up yet, but Bret was.

“Shake out those boots,” he said when she reached for them.

She shook her boots, went far enough into the trees to be sure she was out of his sight before attending to personal matters. Wiping her hands on particularly damp bits of grass, she wondered how she could pull her weight in a camp like this. Evidently he wasn’t going to let her cook. He didn’t want more firewood than he gathered himself.

After bundling her bed away, she returned to the fire with the slate, ready to volunteer to get the horses. Brownie would come to her. Catching the others might be a different story.

“Here,” Bret said. “Make sure nothing burns while I get the horses. Bacon crisp. Don’t lift the lid on the other pan.”

So he thought she was a dummy of a different kind, the kind who would lift the lid on his pan biscuits. And probably a slug-a-bed to boot. She turned the bacon strips, amazed at the number of them. He really didn’t stint on food. Even in Ned Grimes’ house, this much bacon would feed four.

He brought the horses in two at a time, and fed each one a little something, using the saddle blankets for feeders. Oats. He was feeding them oats, and he just gave Brownie twice as much as the others.