Free Lake of Fire by Linda Jacobs Page B

will never be one of you!” Cord had declared.

CHAPTER FIVE
JUNE 23
    W ith the first pearling of dawn, Laura raised her head to see the clearing and the surrounding woods. The campfire had burned to pale ashes, and the pines loomed large against the mist rising off the hot pools. Cord sat with his back against a tree. The collar of his sheepskin coat was turned up; he held his Winchester across his knees.
    She started to stretch her cold, cramped muscles, but stopped. A pale shape crouched at the edge of the trees, about forty feet away.
    Gooseflesh prickled her arms, and she peered through the rising light, thinking how she might warn Cord without sounding an alarm. She could try to whisper.
    The apparition resolved itself into a large boulder.
    Her stomach tense, she lay back. Cord was on guard, and he apparently had excellent instincts: knowing from just the scent that a grizzly approached,hearing the click of a gun being cocked, and somehow divining that the outlaw spied on her while she was bathing, even as he was in another pool.
    Studying his profile, she had to admit that beneath his rough beard and thick hair he was a handsome man. And last night, when he had turned away from her, the expression in his eyes had been something she recognized. She’d seen the same look of lust … or longing on men’s faces before and elucidated the encounters in her journal.
    Only two months ago in the soft Chicago spring, the warm breeze had sighed through the gazebo on a long green lawn sloping to Lake Michigan. Just Laura and Joseph Kane, heir to the Kane Mercantile Fortune … Laura’s father would have loved it. Though she had opened her mouth to Joseph’s and run her hands across his broad shoulders and through the gold of his hair, she’d felt nothing more than a peculiar woodenness.
    Aunt Fanny had told her a lady need not necessarily expect to enjoy the act of love, but the restless stirrings Laura sometimes felt had led her to expect more, although she could not say exactly what it was that made her spurn Joseph’s offer of marriage.
    Perhaps it was the same spirit of wanting more that had induced her to travel alone by stage through the wilder parts of the West, something her father did not yet know. Had she known what that decision meant, would she make it again?
    She closed her eyes against the coming of morning.

    Cord stared down the boulder near the edge of the woods for the fortieth time. His eyes were scratchy, and he had to concentrate to keep them open.
    A few minutes ago, he’d thought Laura lifted her head and looked around, but maybe it had been another figment of his overactive imagination. If the outlaw from the stage was shadowing them because they’d seen his face, why had he passed up a dozen or more opportunities to kill them?
    Here Cord was, inside the national park, with his Winchester at the ready when it was against regulation for him to be carrying weapons that hadn’t been sealed by army inspectors.
    He looked again toward the bedroll. Laura appeared to be sleeping.
    At times she seemed a dirty transient on her way to do menial labor in the park. But then he would reconsider: those clothes she’d left behind had cost a pretty penny. And what was that remark about reading
The Divine Comedy?
    He had, in fact, named a new colt Dante because the rambunctious fellow had been a perfect little hellion.
    As dawn began to brighten, Cord rose from his cramped position and stretched his legs. Keeping his rifle close, he stirred up the fire’s embers, added wood, and put water on to boil.

    Laura opened her eyes to the welcome smell of coffee and exhaled a puff of white. Rolling over, she stretched her arms above her head and found her gaze meeting Cord’s across the morning campfire.
    He poured coffee into the mug she had used before and brought it to her. She pushed back the covers and sat up to take her drink. Sipping the strong black liquid, she studied him over the rim.
    He smiled. Though he