Chapter 4 - A Bargain Sealed in Smoke
Cora froze, her hand clamped tight around the brass latch of her door.
Across the room, Wyatt was already moving with the silent, predatory grace of a cougar. He picked up his six-shot Colt from the sideboard, cocked the hammer with his thumb, and motioned for her to stay dead still.
He moved toward the heavy shuttered window of the storage lean-to, keeping low beneath the sill. With a sudden, explosive motion, Wyatt shoved the wooden shutter open and leaned out into the freezing gale, the revolver raised.
A loud squeak echoed through the storm, followed by the frantic clatter of scurrying claws. A huge mountain porcupine, driven toward the scent of salt on the dried meat racks, dropped from the ledge and vanished into the snowbanks.
Wyatt exhaled a long plume of gray steam, lowered the gun, and fastened the iron latch back into its cradle. “Just a quill pig after the salt licks,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand.
Yet when he turned back toward the hearth, Cora saw what she had missed earlier in the adrenaline of the fight: Wyatt was limping. His left side was held stiffly, and a dark, sticky patch had seeped through the heavy wool of his flannel shirt just below the ribcage.
“You’re bleeding,” Cora said, immediately crossing the room and stepping into his path.
“It’s nothing,” he grunted, trying to brush past her toward his cot near the forge tools. “Old timber wound opened up when I hauled that cougar carcass off the drift.”
“Sit down, Wyatt,” Cora commanded, her schoolteacher voice ringing with unquestionable authority. “You told me you wouldn’t expect wife duties, but you never said I couldn’t patch up a stubborn man before he bleeds out on his own pine floor.”
Wyatt stared at her, caught off guard by the sheer steel in her petite frame. For a second, he looked ready to argue, but the sheer exhaustion of weeks of solitary toil on the mountain seemed to catch up with him all at once. He slumped heavily onto the bench beside the dining table, letting his broad head hang forward.
Cora went straight to work. She stoked the fire, set a kettle to boil, and retrieved clean linen, carbolic soap, and a curved sewing needle from her traveling trunk. When she returned to his side, she gently pulled the torn flannel away from his torso.
The sight made her breath hitch.
Wyatt’s back and chest were a map of savage scars—claw marks from grizzly encounters, jagged lines from falling timber, and a puckered white crater near his shoulder that could only have come from a Confederate minie ball during the war. But the fresh wound was a deep, jagged puncture across his lower ribs where a rusted nail on the barn door had caught him during the struggle with the cat. It was angry, red, and weeping dark fluid.
“You should have tended to this before you rode out to town for me,” she whispered, dipping a rag into the steaming, antiseptic-laced water.
“Didn’t have time,” Wyatt muttered through gritted teeth as the hot rag touched his raw skin. His massive muscles knotted under her hands like coiled steel cords, but he didn’t pull away. “Vance’s men were already sniffing around the schoolhouse. I knew if I didn’t get a legal wife onto this claim before the first heavy freeze, the probate court in Denver would try to declare my boys abandoned and seize the land.”
Cora paused, the needle held poised in her fingers. “Abandoned? Why would the court do that?”
Wyatt’s jaw worked silently for several heartbeats. His hands gripped the edge of the timber table until the pine creaked under his fingers. “Because my first wife… Sarah… she didn’t die of fever like I told the town.”
Cora looked up into his tormented gray eyes. “Wyatt… what happened?”
“She couldn’t bear the silence up here,” he said, his voice dropping into a hollow, haunting whisper. “The winters broke her mind. Four years ago, when the big blizzard of seventy-eight locked us in for three straight months, she walked out into the whiteout in the middle of the night. She left Caleb asleep in his crib and Seth in his basket. By the time I found her in the spring melt… there was nothing left to bury.”
A heavy, aching sorrow filled the cabin, thicker than the woodsmoke. Cora understood now why Caleb looked at every woman with hatred, expecting them to vanish into the frost; why Seth clung to wild dirt and defiance; why Wyatt had built a fortress around his heart that no human affection could penetrate.
“I am not Sarah,” Cora said quietly, leaning close enough that her breath stirred the dark hairs of his beard. She began carefully stitching the split flesh together with steady, practiced fingers. “I have survived poverty, hunger, and loneliness all my life. The mountain doesn’t scare me, Wyatt. And I don’t run from the cold.”
Wyatt raised his head, his eyes searching hers with an intensity that made the air between them crackle with electricity. He reached up, his rough, warm fingers gently catching her wrist, halting the needle for a fleeting second.
“Why didn’t you take the stagecoach east when they fired you?” he asked gruffly. “You had family in Ohio. You could have gone back to a civilized town.”
“There was nothing for me in Ohio,” Cora whispered, her face inches from his. “No one who needed me. No one who fought for anything worth keeping.”
Wyatt didn’t let go of her wrist. His gaze dropped to her lips, and for one suspended heartbeat, the cold bargain between them dissolved into something raw, fierce, and dangerously real. He leaned an inch closer, his deep scent of pine, leather, and smoke enveloping her senses.
A sudden, sharp cry broke the spell from the loft above.
“Mama!” Seth shrieked in the throes of a feverish nightmare. “Don’t let it bite! Mama!”
Wyatt released her wrist instantly, snapping back to reality like an iron spring. Cora pulled back, her heart hammering wildly against her ribs, her cheeks burning with heat that had nothing to do with the hearth fire.
Wyatt rose to his feet, pulling his blood-stained shirt closed. “Check on the boy,” he said roughly, not meeting her eyes. “I’ll take the first watch by the barn.”
May you like
Before she could answer, he grabbed his heavy coat and stepped out into the howling storm, leaving Cora standing alone in the firelight with the smell of his skin still lingering on her trembling fingers.
***
