The Renegades: Cole (16 page)

She thought Monte gave her a questioning glance, but he would never say anything, nor would any of the other men. They would think and talk to each other about it, plenty, though,
and she had her authority to think about.

Dear Lord, she had her whole crew, the whole outfit to think about!

“Is everybody accounted for?” she called to Monte across the short distance and the heads of the cattle.

A wave of frightening guilt swept through her. How could she forget about everyone and everything except Cole?

“Don’t know yet …” Monte said, the last of his words lost in the noises of the herd.

Aurora thought he said something about the chuck wagon. She turned to Cole.

“Oh, dear God, Cookie! Were he and Nate able to get the wagons out of the way when the herd began to run?”

She began scrambling to get down, but Cole, as if he couldn’t bring himself to let her go, tightened his arms around her, stood in the stirrup and dismounted.

“Cookie’s been through more than one stampede,” he said comfortingly. “He’s probably built a fire and is stirring up some supper about now.”

That helped her a lot. The more she thought about it, the more she remembered the wagons and the remuda being far enough ahead to be out of the stampede.

Cole held his hands out for her to step into and boosted her up onto Shy Boy.

“That helps,” she said. “My legs seem to be just a tad bit shaky, for some reason.”

“Mine, too,” he said, looking up at her with his irresistible grin.

With his knowing, tempting brown eyes that wouldn’t let her look away.

“Oh, sure,” she said sarcastically. “You seem about done in to me.”

“Let’s lay over all day tomorrow and take a nap,” he said. “I need it.”

“You’ve got a job to do, cowboy. No naps.”

He shook his head in mock dismay.

“Stubbornest woman I ever did see,” he said to Shy Boy. “She’s liable to work us both to death, boy, if we don’t dig our heels in.”

She smiled wickedly.

“I’m going to change horses and let him go as soon as I find the remuda,” she said. “You’ll have to rebel all by yourself.”

He laughed up at her, and she wanted nothing so much as to reach down and touch his face, trace the shape of his cheekbone, smooth his wet hair into shape behind his ear.

“You needn’t run this stubborn business into the ground just because I told you it was your best feature,” he said. “Can I at least have a minute to change clothes?”

She frowned while she looked him over, head to toe. That was a real mistake, because the sight of his magnificently muscled body showing through his clothes, soaked to the skin, sped up her pulse until she thought her heart would beat out of her chest.

“You’ll dry,” she said, grinning at him. “Cowboy up.”

He pretended not to hear that.

“I was thinking maybe you could
help
me change,” he said, dropping his voice to a sultry tone that sent a new, more urgent heat through her blood, “and then, maybe, I could help you?”

The images that suggestion created in her mind took what little strength was left in her limbs.

“Turn about’s fair play,” he drawled coaxingly.

“Will you mount up and ride?” she said briskly. “If you want to go down the trail in the summertime, McCord, you’ll have to learn to do your playing in the winter.”

He grinned as if he’d won a great victory.

“Well, then, Miss Aurora, you’ve got a date for the winter …” he said, reaching to tip his hat that wasn’t there.

Monte rode up to them. Cole paid him no attention.

“… but right now I’ve got to go find my hat, which I lost trying to save your cattle, which, I might remind you, is not part of my job.”

He turned and threw a careless smile at her segundo.

“Monte,” he said.

Monte was too busy looking from one of them to the other and back again to answer.

“Twenty head of those cattle, I might remind you, are yours,” Aurora said. “Those are, no doubt, the ones you were trying to save.”

Laughing, Cole sauntered back to his horse
and stepped up onto Border Crossing. Aurora had to force herself not to watch every move he made, had to wrench her mind away from the memory of his touch. She practically had to take her head in her hands and turn her face to Monte.

“We was a mite worried you coulda been trampled,” Monte said, still looking at her, then at Cole.

“No,” she managed to say in a fairly steady voice, “but right now I feel as if the whole herd had run over me.”

“Shoot, Miss Aurora, better cowboy up,” Cole drawled, as he pulled his horse around and trotted away, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Aurora stared at Cole’s back in spite of all she could do. She could feel Monte’s eyes on her profile, but she was powerless to pay him any attention. Cole wasn’t looking for his hat, she knew that and he knew she knew it—if that hat wasn’t trampled to shreds in the mud, it had blown all the way to Texas. He was riding away from her because when Monte rode up, they were on the verge of ending up kissing each other senseless or going off to crawl into her wagon and make love.

Her hands were shaking, and not from the stampede. Her heart was pounding, and she felt so hot she could strip off her wet clothes right there in the cold wind that had blown away the storm. Cole’s taste on her tongue and the shape of his hands on her body had her blood racing
with … desire. Never, ever had she known the meaning of that word before now.

She thought she had known, yes, when he had kissed her before, but this was different. This was so primal she didn’t have a choice.

“Um, Miss … Aurora?”

Slowly, with the greatest of difficulty, she tore her gaze from Cole and looked at her segundo.

“Yes?”

“Reckon we oughtta plan to hold ‘em here for the night? Where we’ve at least got the mountains at our back?”

She stared at him for a moment, as if he’d spoken in some language only vaguely familiar, which she could neither comprehend nor speak. With a great effort, she figured out what he had said.

Standing in her stirrups to look at her surroundings with
her mind on her herd
, she considered the place as a bedground.

“Why … yes,” she finally said. “This spot will do. I’ll go find Cookie and tell him.”

She rode off in the direction she’d seen the wagons and remuda take when they came through the pass, but she couldn’t keep from glancing behind her from time to time, looking for Cole. At first she told herself it was the herd she was looking at, but it wasn’t. She could barely even remember where she was headed and why.

What
was
this connection she’d always felt between her and Cole McCord? Was it all physical
desire? Would she ever be free of it again? She let herself look over her shoulder one more time after she found the wagons headed back toward the herd, but he was nowhere in sight.

She rode to meet Cookie, and when she told Shy Boy “Whoa,” she sank down in her saddle and just sat there for a moment, exhausted. Not by the horrendous run they’d all been through but by the effort it took to think of something else besides Cole.

If she didn’t feel his arms around her again, and soon, if she didn’t have his hands on her skin, she would not survive this wanting.

“Well,” she managed to say to Cookie, “I see you came through in fine shape.”

“Dern tootin’,” he said, and gestured for Nate to keep on driving the hoodlum wagon toward the herd. “Takes more’n thousands of crazy cows t’ run ol’ Cookie into the ground.”

She smiled, really seeing him at last. “You still look a little pale around the gills, however.”

“Somethin’ wrong with your eyes,” he retorted. “You gonna keep me jawin’ here all night or you want hot grub and coffee for your men?”

She laughed and turned Shy Boy back toward the herd, too. He slapped down his lines, and they all moved on at a trot.

“Monte said you’d probably already have a fire built by the time I found you.”

“Monte’s a right smart man,” he said, chortling.
“I got dry wood in the
cuna
and sourdough in the pot.”

When they had reached the bedgrounds and decided on the best place for both wagons, Aurora got off Shy Boy, unsaddled him, and rubbed him down. He was eager to roll, though, and to start chomping grass, so she turned him into the remuda and went to change her clothes. She was making progress. During all that, she’d only looked for Cole three times. Or maybe four.

She climbed up into her wagon and began stripping out of her wet shirt and riding skirt, peeling away the thin underthings plastered to her skin. Even the cool air seeping in around the canvas door to brush her bare body here and there reminded her of Cole’s hot touch. Where had he gone? Why was it taking him so long to look for a hat he knew he’d never find?

Reaching into one of her wooden boxes, she pulled out a towel and began drying herself, but every friction against her flesh heightened her longing. She wanted him so much. Oh, dear God, she had to feel his arms around her, his hands on her skin.

This torment was too much to bear. Never, ever would she get close enough to him to let him hold her or kiss her.

She knew better, though, deep down in her woman’s heart, and that scared her all over again. Was she going to feel this feverish for the rest of the drive if … she couldn’t let herself finish the thought.

Yes, she could. If … she went to his bed tonight …

An overwhelming urge to open her trunk, to take out a real dress, to slip into something soft and flowing, something that made her feel like a woman came over her. Instead, she reached for another set of work clothes.

She couldn’t deal with the comments around the campfire that her sudden change to a dress would create or the sly looks from the men, who would all be talking about her and Cole by tomorrow if Monte shared his wonderings with any of them. There was precious little entertainment on the trail—besides stampedes and other disasters—and the least nugget of gossip occasioned jokes and teasing no end.

So she slipped into a dry shirt and riding skirt, fixed her hair as best she could, and went to eat her supper. She already felt like a woman every time Cole looked at her.

Oh, Lord, what was she going to do? Her legs shook as she climbed down out of the wagon. She couldn’t wait until she saw him again, she
had
to see him, right this minute.

And there he was, standing talking with some of the men between the chuck wagon and the fire, looking truly wonderful in his clean shirt and Levi pants, both miraculously crisp and starched, although his shirt was wrinkled from being packed into his bag. He was also wearing the pale-colored Stetson he always wore, which looked totally undamaged by the storm.

But seeing him turned out not to be enough. Now she needed, with a pervading desperation spreading through her, to touch him again. To kiss him again.

He turned his head slightly and looked at her the instant she stepped onto the ground, as if he’d heard her, when she’d hardly made a sound. His steadfast gaze melted her.

She would never have managed to stiffen her legs enough to walk to the fire had he not turned back to the conversation again. She went straight to one of the logs they used for a chair and sat down. By the time Cookie had the food completely cooked and the coffee made, maybe she could trust herself to eat.

He must’ve felt her watching him, for a moment later, Cole turned and strolled toward her. Right then she decided that she’d never be able to stand up or walk again. His hat looked exactly the way it always did: silverbelly colored, Texas brimmed, worn enough to have personality. But
definitely
not battered enough to have come through a storm.

“You’re looking mighty fine and fresh, Miss Aurora,” he said, studying her ostentatiously. “A man would never know you’d just been through a stampede.”

“You’re too bold for your own good, Mr. McCord,” she said, pretending to take offense at his manner.

“That’s true,” he said and nonchalantly sat down beside her. “I try my best, but I can’t seem to get over it.”

He smelled of something spicy he’d used after shaving—he had
shaved
when he’d changed his clothes. He looked and smelled wonderful.

“You’re a bit on the fine and fresh side, yourself,” she said. “How in the world do you have ironed clothes way out here?”

“Ingenuity, ma’am,” he said solemnly. “Have ‘em ironed before leaving town, then roll ‘em just right into the bag and wedge it between the sideboard and the pile of cowboys’ gear in the wagon.”

She tilted her head to one side and examined him as thoroughly as he had done her. He gave her a long, deep look. Her pulse quickened, her blood heated in an instant. She wasn’t sure she could talk, but she did.

“I had no idea when I drove into Pueblo City to hire you that you were the most
dapper
bodyguard in the West, as well as the most dangerous.”

He shrugged.

“There are those who call it dapper and others who call it a disguise,” he drawled.

“Disguise?”

“For the bad character underneath,” he said, showing that devilish grin.

“Who said that?”

He shrugged, feigning a sudden sheepishness.

“Mostly angry ladies, I must admit. And maybe a few enemies here and there.”

He paused, taking time to charm her with his mischievous glance.

“Perhaps, also, a few opponents losing at cards.”

She laughed, in spite of the small twinge caused by the thought of ladies who knew him well enough to be angry with him.

“Well, they’re all wrong,” she said. “Your character is the last thing that worries me about you right now.”

He raised one black eyebrow.

“Oh? And what’s the first?”

The power you have to ruin my mind because I can’t think about anything but you
.

“Your carelessness with your health,” she said. “Since you’re wearing your hat and it looks unscathed, I can only assume that you took it off on purpose—at the risk of pneumonia or worse—and carried it in your saddlebags through the storm.”

He smiled at her, holding her gaze, never letting her see anything but him.