Trail of Kisses (24 page)

“
We are not!” the miner
protested.

The last thing Cade wanted was the nonsense
and unrest caused by the miners to interfere with the much larger
danger of Lynne’s attacker. “Did any of you see anyone around the
back of our wagon just now?”

Most of them shuffled their feet and scratched
their heads. The miner insisted, “It was an Injun, I tell you!
Black as night!”

“
There are no Indians near here,”
Pete said.

Cade already knew it wasn’t an Indian. “I want
everyone’s things searched,” he said. “There’s a knife out there
that cut Lynne’s throat. It might still have blood on it. I want
every knife in the entire camp confiscated.”

The people who had come to see what was going
on backed off slowly. One muttered, “I ain’t giving up my knife,”
before turning and marching off as if protecting a piece of metal
was more important than protecting Lynne’s life. Cade glared at the
man’s back.

“
I’m not confiscating every knife
on the wagon train,” Pete said. “It just wouldn’t be practical, for
one.”

“
Someone is trying to kill Lynne
and you think it’s not practical to find out who?” He would search
every wagon himself if he had to.

Pete held up his hands to calm Cade. “I didn’t
say I wouldn’t mount a search. I’ll get the boys on that right
now.”

“
You’d better.” He was beyond
being polite. Lynne wasn’t trembling anymore, but she hadn’t pushed
away from the arm he had around her yet. That in itself was a dark
sign of how frightened she was.

A few of Pete’s assistants had already found
their way over to Lynne’s wagon and were peeking around. “Search
everyone in the area,” Pete directed them. “Ask as many questions
as you have to, polite or not.”

“
Yes, boss,” one of the men
answered and jogged off to search.

Pete turned back to Cade and Lynne. “You’d
best get that cut seen to. It’s a shame Dr. Meyers stayed behind,
but Ike can patch you up.”

“
I’ll do it,” Cade said. He knew
enough about cuts and bruises to wash and dress a small wound.
Besides that, he wasn’t about to let anyone else touch Lynne. Not
now.

“
W-why don’t you go search for the
m-murderer with the others and I’ll stay here with Miss Tremaine,”
Ben suggested, wide-eyed and pale.

Cade considered the plan. Ben was scared out
of his wits. Knowing him, he thought the killer would come back and
slit
his
throat. But Cade didn’t want even Ben anywhere near
Lynne.

“
You go search with the others.
I’m staying right here,” he said.

“
Come on, boy.” Pete gestured for
Ben to go with him. “You can help me ask folks about their
knives.”

When they were all gone, Cade steered Lynne
over to the last embers of their campfire and had her sit on a
barrel. He knelt at her feet, reaching for the water he’d set aside
for coffee and a used napkin that was clean enough. He spotted his
gun half hidden under a rock and slipped it back into his belt with
a frown. There would be time to worry about how it got there
later.

“
Let me see,” he said, switching
his tone what he hoped passed for tender and soothing.

Lynne was still breathing quickly. Her eyes
shone with unshed tears as she tilted her head up and exposed the
plain of her throat. The cut across was long, but it hadn’t gone
deep. It had already stopped bleeding in most places, though a
little bit of blood still seeped from the side that was cut
deeper.

“
This might sting a little bit,”
Cade said as he dipped the napkin in the water and dabbed at her
cut.

Lynne hissed in surprise, then squeezed her
eyes shut as he cleaned her up.

“
I’m sorry,” he said.

“
Sorry?” she squeaked, then
cleared her throat and repeated, “Sorry?”

The full impact of everything that had
happened, of everything that could have happened, hit Cade like a
bag of rocks in the gut. His hand trembled as he wiped the blood
from Lynne’s neck.

“
It’s my job to protect you, and I
failed to do that.”

She shook her head and rested her hand over
his. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have been so stubborn.”

He happened to agree with her, but it didn’t
absolve him of his guilt.

“
I’m not letting you do anything
like that again,” he said. “I shouldn’t have let you get so
stubborn in the first place.”

There was a thick silence between them before
she said, “I’m glad that you did, though.”

“
Come again?” He stared hard at
her and resumed cleaning her wound.

She waited until he was done before saying,
“Papa may call me his brave girl, but he never lets me do anything
I would need to be brave about. It’s nice to have someone who lets
me get into trouble.”

“
Well, I won’t have you getting
into any more trouble like this,” he said. For some reason her
words made him want to smile as much as they made him want to roll
her up in a blanket and tie the ends so she couldn’t do herself any
harm.

Lynne nodded, then slipped forward off of the
barrel and into his arms. She hugged him tight and his heart
flopped in his chest. There was nothing steamy or unseemly in her
hug, but it meant more to him than any passionate embrace. He
squeezed her back as if his life depended on it. He knew that it
did in so many ways.

“
I tell you one thing,” he
whispered against her ear as he stroked her head. “I’m going to
find the man who did this to you, and I’m going to make him answer
for his crimes.”

Chapter Thirteen

If determination alone was enough to catch a
killer, Cade would have had the man who attacked Lynne on his knees
within seconds. But whoever the blackguard was, he was clever
enough not to be caught. Cade chewed over the problem, his mood
black, through the night as the wagon train sat parked at the
branch of the Platte River into its northern and southern
courses.

They would make the crossing in the morning. A
dozen or more different outfits had set up business in the area to
take settlers across, for the right price. Pete Evans was in no
mood to barter with any of them and had chosen a man he knew and
trusted to ferry all the wagons across. It would take most of the
day, but Cade was fine with the minor delay. It gave him time to
consider each of the men traveling with them to puzzle out who had
attacked Lynne.

“
Are you sure you didn’t see
anyone running away from the wagon?” he asked Ben for the hundredth
time deep into the night.

The boy shook his head, staring into the fire.
“No, sir.”

He would usually have been asleep at that late
hour, but since the attack, Ben had been sleeping as little as Cade
did and staying just as close to Lynne. Cade had yet to decide if
the boy’s devotion was sweet or frustrating. It had meant he’d had
very little time alone with Lynne in the couple of days since the
attack.

“
No one at all?” Cade pressed on.
“You were up there on the driver’s seat. You didn’t hear
anything?”

Ben kicked his toe against the side of the
ring of rocks where their campfire had been made. “I was sleeping,”
he said.

That was all the answer Cade was going to get
from him. Judging from the scowl that the boy directed at the fire,
he was as angry at himself for not hearing anything as Cade was.
Not that Cade had a leg to stand on when it came to judging the boy
for falling asleep. He’d fallen asleep on duty once himself. That’s
what had started this whole ordeal.

He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face,
staring at Lynne as she slept fitfully in her bedroll on the ground
beside him. The sight of her beautiful face relaxed in sleep
brought a smile to his lips. For better or worse, falling asleep
that night when he was supposed to be guarding George Tremaine’s
shipment of silver was the worst, best thing that had ever happened
to him. It had led him to Lynne.

He had to find her would-be killer. He wasn’t
about to sit by and let whoever he was hurt one more hair on
Lynne’s head. The problem was, he knew exactly who was after her.
It was one of the Briscoe Boys, one of them who was brash enough to
have taunted Lynne with hints and messages from the time they’d set
out. The slashed photo, the threatening note, his boots, and he
wasn’t fooled for a moment into thinking the gun he’d bought in Ft.
Kearny had just been faulty. No, whoever the Briscoe Boy in
question was, he was clever and he was close.

But where? Where was he hiding?

Cade stared across the night-black camp, both
where there wagons were parked and on to the row of thrown together
buildings marking the crossing. Some entrepreneurial folks had set
up a couple of saloons and a store at the crossing. The man he was
looking for could be in one of those buildings drinking and
laughing at him right now. He could be one of the miners heading to
the Colorado mines. He could be one of the smiling farmers who kept
saying they were going to build a new life in Oregon. Heck, he
could even be that odd Reverend Joseph who didn’t seem to know one
end of his Bible from the other. The killer could be anyone,
anywhere, and Cade couldn’t find him.

Those thoughts and others even worse swirled
through Cade’s head all through the night. Ben gave up and climbed
into his makeshift bed in the wagon’s seat, but still Cade puzzled
on. There was only so much he could do without the law backing him,
and unfortunately, with the war raging in the East, law was
something in small supply along the trail.

When the first light of dawn spread across the
horizon, he was still sitting on his barrel by Lynne’s side,
cradling a mug of coffee. His eyes stung, his head ached, but his
heart was more determined than ever. He wouldn’t let any harm come
to Lynne.

“
Have you been sitting there all
night?” she asked in a groggy voice when she awoke, and blinked
back sleep to stare at him.

All Cade could do was offer her a weary smile.
“It’s a big day. We’re crossing the river. Soon we’ll be on the
last leg of the journey. There’s a lot to look forward
to.”

Instead of smiling in return, she brushed her
tangled hair out of her face and sat up. “So you didn’t
sleep.”

For a moment, the weariness of frustration
pressed down on him. “No. I couldn’t.”

She pushed her blanket aside and stood,
stretching, then dragged herself to the barrel next to him. She
raised a hand to touch the bandage around her neck, almost as if
she had forgotten it was there save for an itch, then quickly
yanked her fingers away and folded both hands in her
lap.

“
You want some coffee?” he asked.
“It’s cold, but it’s still strong.”

“
Strong enough to keep you awake
all night?”

He reached for the pot beside the burned-out
fire. “I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to you,”
he murmured.

Lynne’s expression flashed from a half smile
to worry to something that Cade could have sworn was sadness.
“That’s so sweet of you,” she began, accepting a cup of cold
coffee, “but that’s not why you don’t sleep.”

He had to be honest and answer, “No, it
isn’t.”

She shrugged and sipped her coffee. “Why
then?”

Cade let out a breath. The old shame pricked
him as he thought about that night. It was faded now, but somehow
the dire situation Lynne was in brought it all back. He’d never
told anyone the full story, not even George Tremaine, but he didn’t
want there to be any secrets between him and Lynne.

“
It was late last winter, not even
a year ago,” he began, looking at the blackened and broken wood
that had been their fire. He shrugged. “It’s not much of a story
really. Your uncle set me in charge of overseeing shipments of
silver being taken from his mine to the railhead. I’d made the trip
a hundred times before with nothing to write home about. We had a
new hand with us, though, a young man who decided there was more
money in working for a mine than in doing the actual mining. Jake
was his name.

“
I suppose I was trying to impress
him,” he admitted with a sigh, resting his elbows on his knees and
feeling twice his age. “I spent most of that trip boasting about
how experienced I was, how I was such a good shot. He probably
thought I was ten kinds of fool, and I’m sure the wagon drivers did
too. I was insufferable.”

He peeked up at her to see if she would agree
and make some sort of tart comment. He loved her for those sassy
comments, but he loved her even more right then for saying nothing
at all. She just watched him, sipping her cold, black coffee, eyes
soft and kind.

“
You asked me once before if I’d
been in an attack while working for your uncle. It wasn’t an attack
at all, not really. I spent three days bragging like an idiot, and
then I wrapped up to sleep one night out in the middle of nowhere,
telling Jake he’d better look sharp and keep his eyes peeled all
night long. It was cold and I was more than happy to turn my duty
over to someone else. I woke up the next morning to find the silver
and wagons gone, along with half the drivers and Jake. Turns out
Jake was an outlaw who infiltrated your uncle’s camp so that he
could do just what he did, walk off with a load of silver without
so much as a shot being fired.”