Wild Burn (5 page)

Except she wanted to touch Crawford, even though he made her the tiniest bit nervous. She wanted to find out what it would be like to slide her hand through the crook of his elbow, to rest her fingers on his strong forearm and maybe, just maybe, lean into him slightly. Would she feel safe? Protected once again, as he had done in the clearing? She rather thought there could be no better sensation than that of safety in a man’s presence. Though she doubted she would ever experience it herself.

So, taking a deep breath, she tucked her hand into his proffered arm and curled her fingers into the tangible evidence of his soldier strength.

She heard his matching inhalation as she settled her arm on his, and they began to walk, together. “So you’re a teacher.”

“I am.”

“I’ll bet you’re awful strict with the children.” Was that a teasing note in his rumbling voice?

“When I have to be,” she answered primly.

She sensed him nodding beside her. “I had a teacher like you once.”

“Oh?”

“Not as pretty, or Irish, but she had this expression that could freeze you in your tracks. She knew if you’d been up to mischief, or planning some.”

Moira tried not to care that he’d called her pretty, focusing instead on the latter part of his statement. “Then you likely kept very still under her watch.”

He snorted lightly, as if an actual chuckle was beyond him. “Would that I had. Would’ve saved me her ruler on my knuckles more than once.”

“I don’t strike the children.” Even the teacher nuns back in Boston had chastised her for it, her inability to mete out necessary discipline. It was why she’d quickly been assigned to the nursing hospital, where she could heal wounds instead of deal in them. Though she’d wanted to wallop Captain Crawford upside the head with John White Horse’s bow, she doubted she’d have been able to follow through. It was much easier to glare at him, after all.

The captain seemed to hear the hurt defense in her tone. “I’m sure you don’t, ma’am.” His words were gruff but gentle. “Is this it?” He drew her to a halt in front of a whitewashed clapboard building nearly twice the size of her cabin. Its brightly painted blue front door never failed to cheer her—a sign that someone in Red Creek cared that its children had a proper place of learning.

When she’d first arrived in Red Creek, she’d been appalled by the fact that at least half of her twenty-two students hadn’t been able to write their own names, much less read. They’d memorized the Bible verses they’d heard their parents repeat, but the level of literacy saddened Moira until she felt it her duty—if not her calling—to improve them. Their futures depended upon it.

“Yes, this is it.” She disentangled her arm from his, not noticing until they’d separated exactly how delightful his body heat had been, radiating against the right side of her torso like a warm sun. “Thank you for your escort, Captain Crawford.”

“It’s just Crawford, ma’am.”

She peered up at him, trying to read his beautiful eyes. In them, she saw steely determination, and that she could respect. “Mr. Crawford, then?”

He shrugged, his big shoulders lifting in a way that reminded her again just how solid he was. “That’ll do. At least until—” He cut himself off as his gaze slid away from her. Then, taking an audible breath, his eyes flicked to hers again. “You can call me whatever you please, Miss Tully, and I won’t mind a bit.”

Her chest felt tight. So tight, her lungs seemed trapped in an iron vise, and there was no relief for her in looking at him. “Mr. Crawford,” she managed on a strangled whisper, and bobbed a quick, awkward curtsy before turning her back on the man and hurrying toward her salvation, the blue door of the schoolhouse.

She did not look back over her shoulder at him to seek out his penetrating, blush-inducing green gaze. No matter how much she wanted to.

Chapter Six

Del slept for the better part of a day, waking the next morning less fatigued but more grumpy.

As soon as he’d secured a room in the boardinghouse, run by a Mrs. Yates and utilized by several of the lead-ore miners who preferred a bed to the muddy ground and trench foot common in the tented communities near the mines, Del had commandeered a large copper tub, bathed and fallen naked into clean sheets that smelled of cool mountain air. If anyone had knocked on the door, he was none the wiser. Sleep was a stern taskmistress and owned him, body and soul, for the next several hours.

But he dreamt of another woman, one with damning blue eyes and freckles on every inch of her ivory skin. Including the skin he hadn’t yet seen. His imagination had no problem filling in where his eyes had been thwarted.

Her scent had been intoxicating when he was on the verge of an exhausted collapse yesterday. She’d taken his arm and leaned the tiniest fraction of an inch toward him, and he had been swamped with the freshness of her. Mint and rose, and he absurdly wished he had a bar of soap in that scent for himself, it’d smelled so damn good. Not to use. Just to…have.

Miss Tully, the schoolmarm. As she was not his reason for coming to Red Creek, it would be in his best interest—and hers—to leave her be.

He stood before the small, smoke-edged mirror nailed to the wall next to the window of his room. Lukewarm water filled a basin, cloudy with the remnants of his shave. The razor had removed the most scraggly parts of his beard, leaving dark bristles trimmed close to his jaw in a near approximation of a gentleman’s beard. It was more time than he’d cared to spend on his ablutions in many long months, a circumstance he chose not to ponder as he cleaned his teeth and patted dry his face.

Running a hand through hair that had dried loosely tangled on his pillow, he eyed his reflection as warily as Miss Tully had the last time he’d seen her. He looked old, much older than he had any right to look at age twenty-nine. He’d spent four years as a soldier, and he remembered with sudden clarity just how youthful his face had looked before he’d so eagerly marched from his family’s plantation home north of Savannah.

He had wanted the fight, any fight. It had to be better than the itch of terminal boredom he’d always sensed boiling beneath his skin whenever he gazed out over Crawford land. Now he could think back and realize it wouldn’t have mattered what color uniform he wore—Del had simply needed to escape.

It may not have made him a good man, but it certainly shaped him into a damn good soldier. Most of his brothers-in-arms fought with the conviction of their beliefs, or the necessity of saving their homes. He fought with the sheer desperation of a wayward soul scrambling for some sort of meaning.

Owning slaves had never sat quite right with that soul of his, a softness in his character that his father had detested. Del had been conflicted, confused, absolutely trapped by the responsibilities of his family name… So he’d run.

He knew exactly what kind of man he was, and he’d known for many long months: he was a coward.

He grimaced at his reflection once more before stepping away to slide his braces up to his shoulders. Mrs. Yates had very kindly laundered the dirty garments in his pack, and the newly cleaned clothes did as much toward refreshing him as had the day of sleep. She had also left a tray of food next to the pile of clothing outside his door. Though long gone cold, he’d devoured it before dressing, but he could definitely stand to eat another meal prior to starting his day’s work.

He sat on the edge of the bed to pull on the sturdy wool socks he wore beneath his boots. The sooner he began looking into Cloud Rider’s warring tribe, the sooner he could leave this town and head…somewhere else. He shook his head as he strapped on his gun belt. He shouldn’t care whether he left today or left a month from now. The money would come to him either way, either from the sheriff or the government, and Red Creek was as good a place as any to kick up his heels. There was no reason he shouldn’t stay here.

There was no reason he
should
, either.

His duster and hat hung on a hook by the door, and he grabbed both as he strode from the room. The narrow second-floor hallway boasted eight doors, each with a brass number nailed to the dark, stained panel. His was the last and the farthest from the stairs, situated in the northwest corner and bearing an “8” on its front, and the large window at the end of the hall closest to him afforded him a view of the main street. The boardinghouse stood on the edge of town, with only the local livery stable between it and the short grassy walk to the half-dozen outlying cabins.

He pinpointed the one belonging to Miss Tully. Sheer ivory curtains hung in the small windows fronting the second cabin from the end. This early in the morning, a soft glow came from within, and as he stared, a shadow passed behind it. A slender, womanly shadow, and Del could easily imagine the pretty young schoolteacher wandering around a tiny cabin nearly identical to the one in which John White Horse lay recuperating.

A tiny sliver of guilt pricked at his gut, and he turned to head down the stairs. His appetite diminished, he bypassed the communal dining hall and exited through the rear of the house. The air outside was cool, fresh and carried the sweet scent of mountain pine. He drew deep breaths into his lungs and waited, waited, for his mind to clear. He urged his better sense to tell him that, no, he shouldn’t be striding determinedly toward Miss Tully’s cabin, and no, he shouldn’t knock his hat back on his brow with a rough-skinned knuckle to get a better look at her front door. A door that needed a fresh coat of paint, maybe in a sunny yellow.

When he thought of her, he thought of sunny yellow paint.

His mind also wasn’t clearing quickly enough to tell him he shouldn’t be knocking on her not-yellow door and then holding his breath as he waited. Waited to hear the soft shuffle of her footsteps behind the door, waited as the early-morning light came slowly sliding over the hill just beyond the cabins. He’d climbed down that hill with her yesterday, her ear bleeding and a full-grown Indian man clutched between them, and his mind certainly hadn’t been any clearer then, either.

When the curtain fluttered on the window next to the door, he stepped back and kept his face angled toward the ground. Unthreatening, that was him. Only there to inquire after her health. Maybe to find out how he could make amends, because he really
should
make amends. Perhaps she’d be willing to share a meal with him at the boardinghouse.

Suddenly, he was once again ravenous.

The door opened slowly to reveal her, limned in the warm light of the hearth flickering behind her. Glorious dark red hair fell in thick, loose waves past her shoulders to stop at the top of her rib cage.

His fingers twitched. Just…
glorious
.

“Mr. Crawford.” Her gaze flicked over his features, summer-blue eyes wary. “What can I do for you?”

“Mornin’, Miss Tully.” He swallowed. He was a stupid man. He knew better than to be here, talking to a lady—a
schoolteacher
—when he was in Red Creek on business. If he needed a woman, he could go to the Ruby Saloon. Not the second cabin from the end, with its garden and its gray stone chimney, its tidy golden glow streaked through with the homey scents of biscuits and coffee. “Just stopped by to see how your ear is doing.”

Her brows lowered in a sharp frown. She was always frowning at him, it seemed. “It’s fine, thank you.”

“I see you’re not wearing a bandage.”

She shook her head as she pulled a black woolen shawl tighter around her shoulders. He could see where her bodice met the simple skirt of her brown calico dress. There were no telltale bumps of a boned corset beneath the light fabric, no sign of a metal-caged crinoline or bustle at her hips. She was achingly dressed—achingly in that he hurt with the desire to dance his hands over her body and learn every inch of her slim shape. The gown was so worn it would prove no greater barrier than a thin bedsheet, and he could fall to his knees before her and curve his fingers around those slender thighs, part them with his thumbs as he fisted her skirts and—

“Is that all?”

No, no, that
wasn’t
all. He wanted her to knock his hat off his head while he stayed on his knees, grip his hair in her long fingers and steer his hands, his mouth, from the back of one knee and up her inner thigh. It would be so soft.
She
would be so soft, that pale skin…and probably freckled too. Oh, Christ, he—

“Mr. Crawford?”

Hell. “Sorry, ma’am. Guess I’m still tired.”

He wondered if she believed his excuse when she tugged the shawl even closer across her chest. “I see. Are you…? How long will you be in Red Creek?”

It was difficult to shrug with inconvenient arousal tightening every muscle in his body. “As long as it takes.”

Her gaze changed, narrowed. “As long as it takes to kill the Cheyenne, you mean.”

“I’m not going to hurt the tribe across the hill, Miss Tully.”

“Not unless you think they’re dangerous. I know what you do now.”

“Oh?”

She nodded. “Mr. Vangaard runs the general store and collects the post. He has a nice stack of old newspapers in his back room filled with the accountings of your grand deeds. Saving the West one dead Indian at a time.” Sarcasm gave her words a cruel twist.

“That’s not all I do.” It absolutely was all he did, not that he wanted her to know.

“Mm.” She let her eyes settle briefly on the gun at his hip, and her lips compressed before she spoke again. “I suppose you’re going over there now.”

“I am.”

“The chief, Walking Bear, is John White Horse’s uncle. I’ve not yet met him, but, knowing Mr. White Horse, I can only assume he is as peaceful as his nephew.”

“I’m sure the problem doesn’t lie with Walking Bear’s tribe, Miss Tully. But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t investigate, at least once.”

She shifted her weight to lean against the doorframe. “Don’t hurt any more innocents, Mr. Crawford, or you’ll undo every good thing Mr. White Horse has accomplished in the past three months.”

It was much more difficult than it should’ve been to draw in air as she gave him a beseeching look. The softest expression she’d yet gifted him, it did funny things to his insides, and it drew him to her. He climbed the steps until he stood on the one just below her. “I won’t.”