Free Trail of Kisses by Merry Farmer Page B

clothes
dampened Cade’s errant ardor. She backpedaled from the bush,
clutching the towel to her chest.
    “ What is it?” he asked, pushing
faster through the shallows.
    Lynne didn’t answer. She clutched the towel
tighter around her chest and sidestepped to meet him as he stepped
onto the dried grass beside the stream. Her silence set his nerves
on edge.
    “ It’s your boots,” she said at
last.
    Cade’s tension fell into confusion. “My
boots?” he said, striding to the bush. What the devil could be so
upsetting about his—
    Behind the bush, separate from the rest of his
clothes, his boots lay in tatters. The leather had been sliced
clean to ribbons and separated from the soles. Long, thin scars
marked the soles where he could see them. The laces were
shredded.
    He was instantly on the alert and spitting
mad. He scooped one of the shredded boots off the ground and
studied it for a moment before glancing around. The area near the
stream was open, nothing but grass and a few scrubby bushes between
it and the cottonwood trees that marked the edge of Fr. Kearny.
Callie and John were still in discussion farther up the stream as
they dressed. The miners cavorted as though nothing was out of the
ordinary downstream. Closer to the fort, a handful of groups were
either coming or going. Ben walked toward them with a basket of
laundry.
    “ Ben!” Cade called, marching
across the grass to meet him. “Did you see anyone lingering around
our things just now?”
    Ben picked up his pace to meet Cade closer to
the stream. “No, sir, I didn’t see nothin’.”
    Cade’s frown deepened. Somebody had to have
seen something. He twisted to study the miners again, counting
them. How many had there been when he and Lynne were in the water?
He checked the groups of people walking away from the stream. They
were all families, most with young children.
    The hair stood up on the back of his
neck.
    “ He’s here,” he said, low and
cautious.
    “ W-who?” Lynne asked. She had
thrown her blouse and petticoat on and was halfway through
fastening her skirt.
    Cade turned and marched back to her. He needed
to get her out of the open as quickly as possible.
    “ Whoever is trying to hurt you,”
he said, leaning closer. “And I sure as hell am not going to let
them.”
    For a flash like lightning, fear zipped across
Lynne’s face. Just when her eyes grew as wide as he thought eyes
could get, she tensed, then let out a breath. With obvious effort,
her expression went flat.
    “ Really, Cade? No one is out to
hurt me. Honestly.”
    Cade stood straighter, towering over her.
“Denying something like this,” he held his ruined boot out to her,
“is not going to keep you safe.”
    “ No one is trying to hurt me,” she
insisted. She finished with her skirt and stiffened as she faced
him. “Are they, Ben?”
    “ No, ma’am, I sure hope not,” Ben
answered her, breaking into a bashful smile, unable to meet her
eyes.
    “ See?” she said, throwing out an
arm to point at Cade’s boot. “It was probably just an animal of
some sort that did that. Why, the prairie has coyotes and things,
doesn’t it?”
    “ We would have seen a coyote,”
Cade said. He marched past her to pick up his other boot. “We would
have seen or heard any animal that was big enough to do
this.”
    But not a human. It was the only animal that
could have made cuts that clean, and they hadn’t seen or heard
anyone near the bush.
    Because they had been distracted. Because he
had let his guard down and let his little head do the thinking.
He’d let his guard down once before when it mattered and disaster
had befallen. Only now, with Lynne, the stakes were much higher. He
wasn’t going to let it happen again.
    “ I need to speak to Pete Evans,”
he said, scooping his clothes up. “I need to talk to the whole damn
U.S. Army.” He started to walk back to the fort, leaving Ben behind
with the laundry. Lynne followed him.
    “ None of them are going to speak
to you