Free Without Words by Ellen O'Connell

brought an armload of dry branches. “We only need a small fire for cooking. Fire is nothing but a beacon trouble can home in on.”
    Before long he had the fire burning, the rabbit roasting on a makeshift spit, corn meal mush frying in a pan, and coffee boiling in the pot. Golden light from the setting sun gilded the little clearing. Hassie resolved to try to convince him to picket the horses after they ate.
    Glad she’d abandoned her fears and worries, she sat near the fire, experimenting to find a way to sit in trousers that didn’t seem wicked. Folding both legs to one side was the best and still felt vaguely indecent. Not as indecent as the purple dress, though, and a whole lot warmer.
    She closed her eyes, enjoying the scents of roasting meat and coffee, hard put to feel anything but content.
    “You don’t have to worry that I’ll leave you somewhere like that again,” Bret said abruptly as he turned the spit. “I know better than to take anyone at face value, and I won’t do it again.”
    Hassie couldn’t believe her ears. He couldn’t think anything that happened was his fault. He had fixed it; she had caused it. She was the one who had seized on the idea of working for the Restons. She was the one....
    Remembering the slate and chalk pencil, she jumped up, ran, and brought them back to the fire.
    Sitting back down close enough to pass the slate to Bret but not too close, she wrote, “My fault, my idea.”
    “Was it? Would you have had that idea without the performance they put on in the hall this morning?”
    It had never occurred to her. Now that it did, she realized he was right. The Restons had done it on purpose. Even so.... “I took the bait.”
    “So did I, and I’ve dealt with enough weasels like those two to know better. We both were saved by a loose horse shoe.”
    Both? He hadn’t needed saving. He would never have known what happened unless he came back to Werver some day. She stared at the hard lines of his face, a strange warmth spreading through her.
    He would have come back. He had planned to come back. The next time chasing outlaws brought him this way, he planned to stop and see how she was doing, and if leaving her to starve might bother him, finding her in a brothel might do the same.
    How foolish to worry he would hurt her. A laugh escaped. She didn’t even try to choke it back.
    He lifted one brow slightly. “Maybe your voice is shot, but that’s a nice sound.”
    She sobered and hid her confusion behind her coffee cup. From the time of the accident that stole her voice, no one had ever described any sound she made as nice.
    “I have friends homesteading in Kansas. As soon as I finish a little business here, we’ll head that way. You can stay with them until you find a good man.”
    Her fingers twitched on the pencil, but he wouldn’t want to hear— read— the truth. She didn’t want to marry another man like Cyrus. To Bret Sterling that might seem better than working as a maid in a hotel, but not to her.
    They ate in silence. Yellow Dog joined them and stared at the remainder of the rabbit as if he could levitate it to his mouth by an act of will. He probably thought he succeeded. Bret gave the dog what remained of the carcass.
    Emboldened by his charity to the dog, Hassie wrote on the slate again. “Why are you going to Fort L?”
    Bret poured the last of the coffee into his cup, and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. “I don’t know how much Rufus stole,” he said finally, “but his saddlebags were in the barn, and there’s almost six thousand dollars in them. The army’s willing to pay me the five hundred they had on his head as a finder’s fee. I figure to hand it over to the colonel there personally, see if they’ll fork over a little extra for the horse.”
    Six thousand dollars! Such a vast sum barely seemed real. No wonder Bret was nursemaiding those saddlebags. And Rufus, the lying, thieving murderer, had said he’d give her ten