by Tara Janzen
“Hmm?”
“Antelope stew and socks.”
“Socks?” Her eyes opened slowly, barely focused, and Walker felt as if he could drown in those midnight depths of darkest brown. “Why did you cook the socks?”
“To keep your feet warm.” Unable to resist any longer, he reached out and slowly brushed his thumb up the delicate arch of her cheek. Thick sable lashes fluttered closed again as she sighed, and he lowered his head close to her ear, needing to touch her with his mouth. A length of tawny hair fell over his shoulder, blocking them from the light, but he didn’t need light to taste, to feel, to remember the curves of her face. His arm automatically slid around her waist. “And I brought hot chocolate,” he murmured, teasing her skin with his lips.
“Sounds . . . good.” Her breath caught at the gentle forays of his mouth, at the sheer power of his body leaning over her, and she felt herself waking up in startling, increasing degrees, which did nothing to ease the lethargy in her limbs. “Walker?”
“Yeah?” he asked softly, nuzzling her neck.
“I didn’t”—her eyes opened on a gasp as he pulled her bandana down and found a particularly sensitive spot near her nape—“I didn’t . . . think we were going to do this again.”
“We were wrong,” he said, his voice rough.
“But—”
“But you’re cold and you need to eat,” he finished her sentence, stopping himself before she had the chance to tell him no. The lady needed to learn how to say yes. He kissed her quickly on the mouth before rolling to a sitting position. “I hope you don’t mind sharing the pan. I didn’t want to dirty a bunch bf dishes.”
“No, I . . . uh . . . don’t mind.” She pushed herself up and tried not to be so damn confused, but creating confusion seemed to be his forte when it came to her. For two enemies, they acted more like friends, and sometimes he treated her like more than even a friend.
“You go ahead and start.” He handed her the stew pan. “Let me see your feet.”
Wrapping her gloved hands around the pan for warmth, she did as he asked, and lifted one foot.
“Eat,” he commanded, peeling away her cold socks. He reached for her other foot and did the same. From beneath his shirt he pulled out a warm, almost hot, pair of clean, dry socks and rolled them onto her feet.
“Lordy.” She sighed, her eyes closing. “That feels like heaven.”
No it didn’t, he silently disagreed. The socks felt warm; kissing her felt like heaven. He’d done some pretty stupid things in his life, but falling for Blue Dalton had to rank right up there with the worst of them—or the best of them. He didn’t know anymore, but he knew he was falling for her, and he was falling hard.
* * *
“Okay, Blue,” he said, mopping up the last of the stew gravy with a thick slice of buttered bread. “We’re going to do this your way. Get out the maps and the compass. We’ll start from the beginning, mark it all down, and we’ll take it all the way to the end.”
The end. The last mark. Her eyes lifted to his face, but he’d already jammed his hat back down on his head, and she could see nothing but the line of shadow slanting across his jaw.
“Finish the chocolate. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.” Taking the pan and their spoons with him, he scooted over to the tent opening, slipped into his unlaced boots, and disappeared in a gust of wind-driven snow.
Blue stared after him, raising her hand to her cheek and absently brushing away the crystalline flakes he’d allowed inside. He was going to give her the last direction from her father’s map, the final clue to her future.
Victory didn’t taste sweet at all, she realized amidst more confusion, watching the fire cast his shape against the tent walls. The next day she’d have Lacey’s Lode. The next day she’d walk out of his life. There would be no turning back once her deception was complete.
Once you’ve stolen the treasure out from under him. She gave her head a shake at the blunt thought. She wasn’t stealing from him. She was taking what was hers, nothing more, nothing less.
By the time he returned, she’d convinced herself of her claim one more time and shut all the mental doors on guilt. She owed him nothing beyond gratitude for her jail release, and a tainted gratitude at best. He’d had his reasons for getting her out—financial reasons.
But those thoughts and convictions proved difficult to hold on to when they were huddled together over the sheaf of maps.
“You’re blocking the light. Move back over here,” he said, directing her to his side.
Blue ignored him and held her ground, or rather, her edge of sleeping bag. She didn’t want to sit next to him, had spent minutes easing herself into a safer position. Walker Evans had an effect on her she was loath to admit even to herself. When he was close, when his arm brushed against hers, or his voice filled her breathing space, she felt overwhelmed on every level. In truth, she was close to hyperventilating in an attempt to remain aloof and calm. She didn’t dare get any closer to him.
“Okay, Blue.” He let out a long, heavy sigh and sat back on his heels. “What’s wrong?”
She gave him a quick once-over, then locked her gaze on the maps spread out between them. You’re too big to get around, especially in this tent; too nice to hate, especially after you’ve kissed me and warmed my socks; and too good-looking to ignore. In simple terms, you’re turning me inside out and backward and I don’t know what to do about it.
“Nothing,” she said, fiddling with the compass in what she hoped looked like a competent manner. A large, warm hand under her chin stopped her erratic movements. He tilted her head back, gently forcing her to meet his eyes.
“What is it?” he asked. “The kiss?”
“No—yes . . . I don’t know,” she stammered, and was immediately embarrassed by the show of weakness. The slow smile curving his mouth did nothing to ease her discomfort.
“Should I kiss you again?” he asked, tracing her lower lip. His eyes darkened and drifted down to follow the lazy path of his thumb. “So you can decide?”
“I’m not even sure I like you,” she whispered.
“Yes you are, Blue,” he disagreed, his voice softening to an intimate timbre. “I like you too. I like you a lot.”
“You don’t even know me.”
Feeling her tremble beneath his fingers, Walker lowered his hand. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t, but the truth is I know you better than you know yourself.”
“No.”
She sounded so sure, so alone, as if she’d found out long ago she was on her own. He wanted to shake her world a little, make room in there for someone else, make room for himself. “I know you’re not a boy, Blue. No matter how big you wear your boots or how short you cut your hair, you’re still a woman, a very pretty woman.”
She nervously lifted her hand to her nape. “You’re a fine one to talk about haircuts. I bet you haven’t been to a barber in a year.”
“More like three or four,” he said, backing off, allowing her to misinterpret the true subject of their conversation. “The man in Walden is a butcher, gave me a cowlick the last time I went to him, and I can’t quite bring myself to walk into a beauty parlor. Didn’t think I was doing a bad job on my own, though.”
“You do that by yourself?” she asked, her head coming up in amazement.
Walker grinned. He wasn’t vain, but he knew what he looked like, and he also knew that if he couldn’t do a better job than the barber, he would have found the front door of the beauty shop. “A friend taught me how to do it without resorting to using a bowl on my head. It’s not too tough once you get the hang of it.”
“A lady friend?” Blue asked, the words out before she had time to stop them.
“Yeah, a lady friend. I’ve had a few. Maybe more than a few.”
The disclosure, though spoken without any intent, cast a noticeable pall over her moment of lightness. He watched her lashes lower over her eyes and a deep breath rise in her chest.
“Don’t kiss me a
nymore, Walker, please.”
“Sex isn’t a dirty word, Blue,” he said softly, reaching for her again. “It’s a part of life. I can’t say I didn’t make mistakes when I was young and full of myself. I probably broke a few hearts. Got my own broken more than once. But people grow up; expectations change. Look at me.” He brushed her cheek, a light caress asking her to open her eyes. When she did, he stroked his hand across her hair, gently pushing it back. “Just because you haven’t found it all, the lifetime commitment, the love that grows instead of fades, doesn’t mean you can stop trying. Sometimes we all need to wake up with someone else. Sometimes we all have to settle for caring and warmth instead of love.”
“Not me.”
Her answer angered him, because he knew it was the truth and he wished for this one night it wasn’t. “Why not, Blue? Did your nice boy from Texas turn out to be not so nice after all?”
The instant he spoke, he wished he hadn’t. Dammit. She had him going every which way. He could love her tonight, with warmth and tenderness and maybe something more, and never once would he feel that he’d “settled for” anything, but the thought she might was enough to lower his hand from her face. He didn’t want to be loved and forgotten by this woman in the way he’d forgotten other women. He would have laughed out loud at himself if he hadn’t been so surprised.
“Let’s get back to work,” he said gruffly, smoothing out the map and giving it his fullest concentration. “Do you have the list?”
Blue reached across her sleeping bag and picked up the piece of notepaper with the directions from the original map written on it. He’d thrown her again, left her with half feelings and thoughts that led her nowhere except into trouble. She wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to kiss her and never stop. Instead, she’d drawn her line and made him mad.
“We’re at forty paces due north,” she said.
“Where we were supposed to find ‘BRK,’ Bear Rock.”
“Or something.”
“You’ve got another idea?” He glanced up.
Blue shook her head and wrote “BRK” on her list. One more, she thought, just give me one more.
“Well, as far as I can tell, we haven’t taken any wrong turns. The damn thing is supposed to be right here”—he stuck the pencil point on the map—“right where we are. We should be sleeping on it.”
Not quite, she thought, silently searching the map from the true starting mark to the point of “BRK.” Without her private map, the one she’d worked on every night in her room, the task was difficult, but not impossible. She scanned the peaks and ridges in a five-square-inch area. “What’s the last direction?” she asked, her voice deliberately casual.
“Forty paces due north.”
“Not the last direction you gave me, the last direction from my father’s map,” she explained.
“That’s it, Blue. Forty paces due north. ‘BRK.’ Then forty paces due north.”
Then she was looking right at it. An unexplainable mixture of anticipation and frustration built inside her as she stared to the left of his pencil. It was right in front of her, in those five square inches of contour lines. She mentally named all the points in the area: Big Horn Gulch; Spring Creek, so named because it only ran in the spring; Wapiti Pass, which was no pass at all; Bays Back Ridge—
Bays Back Ridge. She held her breath for an instant, the name flashing through her mind. There never had been a “BRK.” The night he’d crunched her map, he’d admitted to some pieces of wax falling off, and now she knew exactly which pieces he’d destroyed, “BBR” for Bays Back Ridge. The name alone would have meant nothing; Bays Back Ridge was a long stretch of mountaintop covering over a mile of distance, but from the highly detailed approach given by her father, there could be only one particular spot from which to walk the last forty paces.
Closing her eyes, she envisioned the scree slope on the northern side of the ridge, a treacherous slide of rock falling from the westernmost pinnacle, the highest point of the ridge on North Star land. Forty paces on near vertical, shifting slabs of mother earth could put a person anywhere depending on their weight and surefootedness. The hiding place of Lacey’s Lode was like a bad joke. A big man with long legs—a man like Walker—could easily end up at the bottom of the hill with forty paces. With the rock slickened by a covering of snow, even she would have trouble maintaining enough balance to count paces instead of the number of feet slid, or—and a tingle of true fear snaked down her middle at the thought—the number of feet fallen. She wished they’d brought a rope.
The scree slope of Bays Back Ridge, the map hidden below the island in Lake Agnes—dammit. Abel hadn’t made his hoard easy to find or even retrieve once it was found. The location practically proved her long-thought theory that he’d only put the clues in his will to test her mettle from the grave. She wondered if he’d known she’d end up risking her life, first with O’Keefe and now with the scree slope of the ridge.
Eight
Her face had gone through a myriad of transitions in the minutes since he’d given her the last direction, making Walker wonder what was going on behind her dark eyes, making him uneasy. Now her gaze was transfixed on the map, empty of all but the deepest thoughts. Was she going to confess?
“Blue?” he questioned.
Troubled brown eyes slowly rose to his face, and she spoke quietly. “He didn’t make it easy. He made it hard, too hard. I don’t think he wanted me to find anything. I don’t think he expected me to get this far.”
“Of course he did. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t be sitting here.” Confess? He didn’t think so. She sounded ready to give up.
“No, Walker.” Her voice shook, and she began rolling up the maps. He wouldn’t have done this to me. He loved me. No matter what . . . no matter what we said to each other sometimes, he loved me.”
“I’m sure of it. Look Blue”—he covered her hands with one of his own, lightly, just a touch to let her know he was there—“my dad and I said some pretty harsh things to each other too. Hell, I told you about the night in Gould, the night we really went at each other. That doesn’t mean we loved each other less than other sons and fathers, just maybe that we had a harder kind of love, harder to talk about, harder to share, but not less.”
She was close to tears, too close, and she had to stop them from coming. “Hard love,” she scoffed, pulling away from him and continuing to roll up the map. “I didn’t know there was any other kind.”
“Your mother?”
“Died.”
In the back of his mind Walker had known Sara Dalton had died long ago. As a boy he’d heard the whispers of pity for a little girl, and he remembered his cheeks burning with shame and praying the wags of Walden weren’t saying the same things about him and Janelle behind their backs—practically orphaned, father’s a drunk, ranch going into the ground, poor things. At the time, Mrs. Dalton had only been a name from somewhere up on a ranch in North Park. She hadn’t been a flesh and blood woman. She hadn’t been the mother of the rare, uniquely feminine creature taking over his life.
But she must have been beautiful, all golden hair and dark eyes, and with the fine mixture of delicacy and strength he found in her daughter’s face. Abel had been a fool to go on loving another man’s woman.
“Maybe that’s what’s wrong with us,” he said to Blue. “No mother’s love to take the rough edges off.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she replied pointedly.
“Sure there is, Blue. You’ve never given a man a chance. And me? Well, I’ve given every woman who ever caught my eye only half a chance.”
“I don’t want to hear about your sex life.”
“And I’m not talking about sex. Don’t you ever think about getting married and having children of your own?”
“No.”
“Liar.”
She reacted on pure instinct, her eyes flashing, her hand flying toward his face. He caught her wrist in the split second before she connected, and held her tight.
“Maybe you’re right, Blue,” he drawled, his eyes flicking to the rolled maps clenched in her other fist. “Maybe we’ve done enough work for tonight. Tomorrow is going to be another of those long days.” He’d given her what she wanted, the last direction. It was up to her what she did with it, and up to him to follow her to the end of the trail.
Blue’s breath hurt in her chest. Her wrist hurt under his grip, and she thanked him for both the pain and the anger filling her. He’d hardened her resolve, turned her back into the woman she needed to be—until he lifted her hand to his mouth, touching his lips to her fingers above the frayed ends of her gloves, and turned her back into just a woman.
“You’re warm. Good. Get some sleep. I’ll be back.” That’s what she was afraid of, she realized with more anger and confusion, more afraid of him than of falling off Bays Back Ridge.
Walker crossed over the campsite and knelt by the fire, slowly pulling on his gloves. They were too much alike. That was the problem. He picked up a stick and poked at the dying embers. He and the lady in the tent had more trouble keeping a conversation civil than any two people he’d ever known. One minute they were talking about love, and in the next—hell, he didn’t know what to do with her, except give her time to cool off.
A short whistle from the tent drew his head around, and he watched her dog slip inside. Great, he thought, wet dog. With a muttered curse he jabbed at the fire again, sending a shower of red and gold sparks up into the cloud-filled sky.
Blue rearranged herself in her sleeping bag for the third time, trying and failing to find a comfortable position. Worse, every time she moved, Trapper moved, and she had him right where she wanted him, between her and Walker’s sleeping bags.