Early Dawn

by Catherine Anderson

  “You just don’t wish to be the unlucky fellow who gets saddled with me?” she asked with a lightness of tone that she was far from feeling.

  Again, he took his time before speaking. His eyes shimmered like polished pewter in the firelight when he finally met her gaze again. “I’d like to be that man,” he said, his voice gone gravelly. “And just having the thought in my head scares the ever-loving hell out of me. Does that make sense?”

  It touched Eden that he would admit he felt afraid. A lot of men would rather bite off their tongues. “Perfect sense.”

  “Anyhow.” He gestured limply with his hand. “Like I said before, I felt cornered that morning. When you look at me, I see tenderness in your eyes.” He swallowed hard, his larynx diving and then bobbing upward again. “You make me feel in ways I don’t want to feel—feelings I never thought I’d shake hands with again. So I took a shot at you. I’m just not ready to go there again, Eden, not yet anyway, and maybe I never will be.”

  Recalling her recurring urge to scour her skin when she bathed, Eden could sympathize with how he felt, perhaps better than he knew. “I guess that’s two of us. As strongly as I’m attracted to you, Matthew, I’m not sure I’m ready to take it anywhere, either.”

  He tossed away the dregs of his coffee. “You’ll get there, honey. You just need time and the right man to help you find your way.”

  Watching him refill his cup, Eden wondered, What if you’re the right man? But it was a question she didn’t voice. “I’m sorry I made you feel cornered,” she told him softly. “I’ll try never to do that again.”

  Cocking a dark eyebrow at her, he smiled slightly. “You want the truth? Meeting you has been one of the best things that’s happened to me in a very long time. You take me places in my mind where I don’t want to go and force me to look at my life from a new perspective. You’ve given me a lot to mull over.”

  “I have a lot to mull over as well.” Eden pushed up on one knee to refill her coffee cup. As she sat back, she said, “Let’s make a bargain.”

  “What kind of bargain?”

  “To just be friends. No pressure, no expectations, and no disappointments if friendship is all we ever share.” Resuming her cross-legged position, she hunched forward to rest her arms on her knees, the cup cradled between her palms. “You’re a wonderful friend, Matthew, and hopefully, you feel the same way about me. Just friends. That way, neither of us will ever feel cornered. Things will just happen—or they won’t.”

  “Speaking of things happening . . .” His voice trailed away, and his gaze chased off into the darkness. “Have you ever?”

  Eden didn’t understand the question. “Have I ever what?”

  “Been with someone? With a man, I mean.”

  “In the biblical sense?”

  He chuckled. “Where I hail from, the Bible doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot to do with it, but, yes, in the biblical sense, have you ever been with a man?”

  Eden’s neck went hot. “John and I kissed, but I always said no to anything more. A lady saves that for marriage. According to Ace, a man isn’t inclined to buy the cow when he can get the milk for free.”

  “A very smart man, your brother.”

  He ended the conversation by starting the after-meal cleanup. Eden went to help, and they worked side by side in companionable silence. When Matthew spread out the bedroll, Eden felt drawn to it like a shaving of iron to a magnet. She sat on the pallet to remove her boots and jacket, then doffed her gun belt and hat.

  “After I bathed, I couldn’t get the binding tight enough around my ribs,” she told him. “Would you mind doing me up again?”

  “Not a bit. Knot the shirt under your protuberances and stand up.”

  Eden smiled to herself as she tied the shirttails snugly beneath her breasts. It was so like Matthew to attempt to ease her self-consciousness. “This is highly improper, you know. After all else that’s happened to me, I know it’s absurd to fuss about proprieties, but the dos and don’ts have been drilled into my head ever since my mother started trying to make me into a lady. In San Francisco, a real lady wears gloves in public, and if the wind lifts her skirts and shows her ankles, she’s in danger of damaging her reputation. Just think what people might say if they could see me baring my middle night after night.”

  Matthew’s mouth tipped in an understanding smile. “I don’t fault you for feeling self-conscious. I’m a little uneasy about it myself. Until now, all my friends have had hairy bellies.”

  Eden nearly choked on a startled laugh. He grinned lopsidedly at her and began wrapping her ribs. When his fingers grazed her skin, Eden snapped taut, not from fear this time. A delicious, tingling warmth moved through her and pooled like liquid fire low in her belly.

  As if Matthew felt it, too, he hesitated and shot her a piercing look. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought his hands trembled slightly as he finished the task.

  “Thank you, Matthew. It feels so much better with the binding.”

  She’d snuggled down under the blanket and jackets when Matthew joined her. He looped a hard arm over her waist, pressed full-length against her, and toyed with her damp hair, his touch as light and airy as the brush of a bird’s wing. Eden felt that fiery, tingling sensation again. She tried to analyze why she was suddenly starting to have such feelings, but she was too exhausted. Her eyes fell closed on a wave of blissful contentment. It felt so wonderful to have him hold her again.

  The last thought that flittered through her weary mind before sleep overcame her was that perhaps she was more ready to make love with Matthew Coulter than she was prepared to admit, even to herself.

  From that night on, Matthew and Eden began forging a strong friendship. With each passing day, she came to admire his wilderness savvy even more. He continued to keep them supplied with meat by hunting with a makeshift spear, or with his bow and arrows when they needed larger game. She was grateful for the food and continued to do her part—collecting wild roots and other edible plants to round out their meals, gathering firewood, helping to care for the horses, keeping the canteen filled with fresh water, and helping to cook and clean up, morning and night. In addition to so many hours each day in the saddle, the extra tasks exhausted her, but even when her feet were dragging, she forced herself to keep going. To survive, it would take both of their efforts, and she didn’t want to let Matthew down.

  Matthew’s respect for Eden grew in equal measure. Ten days after the cougar incident, Eden removed the stitches from his chest. The wounds had nearly healed, and whenever he stripped off and saw the angry red marks, he had to give her credit for a fine stitch. She’d done a fabulous job of sewing him up, a lot better than the doc had done on his face. She’d already saved his life once, and it was never far from his mind that she might yet again. She also impressed him in other ways. Climbing off her horse to collect edibles clearly exhausted her, yet she continued to do it, day after day. On more than one occasion, he glanced back to see her nodding off in the saddle, so drained of energy that she couldn’t stay awake. He knew how badly broken ribs could hurt, because he’d suffered with them himself, and he’d still been in agony after three weeks of bed rest. Yet Eden never complained. The only way he could tell she was suffering was when she held her side as she moved.

  At night Matthew did all that he could to lighten her workload, but he quickly came to discover that Eden truly was one of the most stubborn females he’d ever met. If he took over the meal preparation, she found another chore to do, often one more difficult than cooking would have been. While he understood her need to contribute, her determination to do so became a constant worry for him. Now that her sunburn had faded, she seemed pale, and he thought she might be losing weight. Some evenings, no matter how tasty the food, she pushed it around on her plate and didn’t really eat much.

  At night after the work was done, they sometimes sat cross-legged facing each other, knees almost touching, to play checkers, using squares traced in the dirt and rocks as thei
r game pieces. Because their board wasn’t color-toned, it was challenging to remember which squares were supposed to be red or black, and their mistakes led to merciless teasing.

  “You little cheat,” Matthew accused.

  Eden laughed. “I am not a cheat. I’m merely creative .”

  When checkers didn’t appeal, they switched to hilarious bouts of tic-tac-toe or hangman, using the light of the fire to see their scratchings in the dirt. One night Matthew chose the word utensils to baffle his pretty opponent. When she finally gave up and he told her the word she’d been trying to guess, she gave him a sharp, wondering look.

  “You are a complete fake.”

  “How so?”

  “That first morning when I asked if you had any utensils, you pretended not to know the meaning of the word! Now I discover you not only know the meaning, but how to spell it, too!”

  Matthew couldn’t help but grin. “I never said I didn’t know the meaning of the word. It’s just that where I come from, we don’t call cups ‘utensils.’”

  “What do you call them, then?”

  “Cups.”

  Clutching her sore ribs, Eden chortled with laughter, tears of mirth streaming down her cheeks. When she caught her breath, she squeezed out, “I suppose there’s something to be said for keeping things simple.”

  Some nights, instead of engaging in games, Matthew played the harmonica while Eden sang along. When the tunes he knew grew repetitious, she hummed some new ones for him, and he was able to play them by ear. Other times, they made up stories, some funny, others scary.

  One evening, Eden launched into a spellbinding tale. “When I was still little, eight men who lived near us went out hunting and disappeared for weeks,” she told him. “Search parties were formed, but no one could find them. Finally one of the wives remembered her husband mentioning a camp along Stillman Creek, so a group of searchers followed the stream up into the mountains to see what they could find.”

  “And?” Matthew asked. “Did they come across the men?”

  Eden nodded. “All of them but one. They found seven men and eight horses, all dead.”

  “Dead?”

  She nodded again, then shivered and looked over her shoulder into the encroaching darkness. “It was strange. So far as the searchers could see, there’d been no reason for the men and horses to remain in that camp. But they did. Rather than leave, they stuck fast until they starved and thirsted to death. Imagine that, with water only a few feet away.”

  Matthew bit back a smile because he’d heard this story before, only it had been four men who had disappeared in the mountains of Oregon. “So what happened to the eighth man?”

  “That’s the really scary part. They found him wandering in the woods, so thin he was skeletal. His hair, which had been black before he left, had turned as white as snow, and he was raving mad. The searchers determined that something—they had no idea what—had surrounded the camp, making all the men and horses terrified to leave. So terrified that they preferred to stay in that place and starve to death rather than face the horror that awaited them in the woods. Only one man had the courage to run, and he paid for it with the loss of his reason.”

  “Did he ever get better?”

  Eden’s expression went sad, and she shook her head. “He never came right again, and he was never able to tell anyone what had happened. To this day, hunters who venture up Stillman Creek still disappear. Only now no search parties will go looking for them. They’re too afraid.”

  Matthew strove to keep his expression solemn. “What do you think is up there?”

  She shivered and rubbed her arms through the jacket sleeves. “There are evil forces in the world, Matthew—forces we can’t see or feel until it’s too late. That’s what I think is up there, something unspeakably evil.”

  He finally allowed himself to grin. “It’s impossible for a man’s hair to turn white in a few weeks. Human hair only grows a half inch per month. It has to turn white at the roots and grow out, little by little, to become snow-white.”

  Her cheek dimpled in an impish grin. “I know, but isn’t it a deliciously scary story?”

  Matthew threw back his head and guffawed. “You little minx! You sat there, pretending to look over your shoulder. You don’t believe a word of that tale.”

  “No, but it’s still fun to tell it.”

  A little later, as they prepared for bed, a loud snap resounded through the woods near their camp, the report rivaling that of a high-powered rifle. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence in a forested wilderness area. Limbs suddenly broke loose from trees all the time. Matthew had no fear that it was the Sebastians moving in on them. Those scoundrels would approach like snakes, quietly slithering through the bushes to catch them by surprise. Even so, Eden started so badly that her feet nearly parted company with the ground. Matthew found himself smothering another laugh. She hadn’t managed to scare him with her story, but she’d definitely frightened herself.

  When they got into bed, she snuggled close to him, clearly feeling edgy and in need of his nearness. Sweet torture. He couldn’t hold her like this without growing aroused. It just happened. Old Glory had a mind of his own. Only tonight, with a shock of wonderment, Matthew realized Old Glory wasn’t the only recalcitrant body part under the blanket. His wrist accidentally grazed one of Eden’s breasts, and her nipple was as hard as a little rivet. He hadn’t touched her there to cause that reaction. Which meant what? That she was as inflamed as he was?

  Shit. He tried to close his mind down, to evict the thought from his brain. But now it was there, with roots that ran stubbornly deep. She wanted him. And, God help him, he wanted her. But she wasn’t ready for that yet, and he wasn’t either. Eden wasn’t a woman to use and then discard. If he took her, he had to be prepared to take their relationship to another place—the forever place. That was ground Matthew didn’t want to tread.

  Before the night was over, he was back in the creek, freezing his ass off and cursing Old Glory, who refused to give up the ghost.

  Despite her unnerving effect on his body when they went to bed each night, Eden proved to be an engaging companion otherwise, always ready to tease or laugh no matter how weary she was. For Matthew, who had been alone on the trail for so long, her presence became something he prized. He limited their entertainment time each evening to only an hour so she would get plenty of rest, but he enjoyed himself so much it wasn’t always easy to call it a day, especially when he knew he’d end up back in the creek at least once during the night.

  Despite her obvious exhaustion, Eden still awakened before he did some mornings, and he’d crack open his eyes to find her already cooking their breakfast. More than once, Matthew thought to himself that she was the damnedest woman he’d ever met, but he didn’t mean it in a derogatory way. Eden faced all challenges with her shoulders straight and her chin up. She had an indomitable spirit.

  He found it impossible to picture her in some fancy drawing room with a bunch of stuffy society types, serving tea and pretending she had no thought in her head beyond her next dressmaker’s appointment or charity ball. It was equally impossible to imagine that she’d have been happy living that kind of existence.

  During their long rides during the day, they sometimes broke up the monotony by sharing stories about their lives and families. She laughed at some of his tales, and he laughed at some of hers. In the sharing, the friendship they had agreed to forge deepened to a level of intimacy that was everything but physical, which Matthew regretted every damned night and was coming to suspect that she regretted as well. He came to care about her in a way he’d never have believed possible when he first met her. Maybe people truly did have different corners in their hearts.

  Eden, on the other hand, found herself experiencing those fiery tingles more often than not. Just the brush of Matthew’s fingertips on the back of her hand sent a jolt up her arm, and at night when he held her close, she was filled with yearning. Sometimes she ached to have his hands on her
breasts. Other times she felt a peculiar wetness at the apex of her thighs. At first, she wondered if she was developing a female ailment, because her sensitive places felt almost feverish and throbbed with every beat of her heart. But no. She finally decided that the new sensations stemmed from desire.

  After what the Sebastians had done to her, Eden hadn’t expected to be physically aroused by a man, ever. But having Matthew’s arms around her made her feel safe in a way that nothing else did, not even wearing the borrowed Colts.

  As their weeks in the wilderness moved toward a month, Matthew started to get the whim-whams now and again while they were riding in circles. That worried him, because his hunches rarely proved wrong, and he feared the Sebastians might be somewhere in the general area. He didn’t believe they were close enough yet to pose an immediate threat, but he needed to determine where they were and what they were up to. Not wishing to alarm Eden unnecessarily, he decided a few days later to ride out and do a little scouting. To that end, he stopped to make camp early one afternoon, telling Eden that he needed to go hunting.

  “I haven’t seen much deer sign in this area,” he said. “In order to get something, I may be gone until well after dark.”

  Eden nodded and glanced toward the trees. “I’ll spend the time looking for edibles.”

  Matthew wished she would just rest, but he knew telling her that was a waste of breath. She was already heading into the nearby woods when he rode out. Recalling the circles they’d ridden in and the directions they’d gone over the last couple of days, Matthew decided to ride east for a few hours, keeping an eye out for tracks. Nothing. He crossed old back trails of his and Eden’s a few times but saw no sign that the Sebastians had been in the area.