“Kit, catch the rope.”
The lasso spiraled above the water’s surface and landed inches from her outstretched arm. She grabbed it then rolled onto her back so he could pull her against the current. The hemp cut into her palms. As soon as her feet touched ground, he ran into the water and snatched the child.
“We don’t have much time.” Her teeth chattered around words caught in a rush of deep, heaving breaths.
He placed the boy on dry ground and touched his neck. Cullen shook his head. “There’s nothing you can do.”
“Get out of my way.” She dropped to her knees and tilted the boy’s head. The child was a frightening shade of blue. She covered his mouth with her own and blew her breath into him. Then she placed the heel of her hand in the center of his breastbone and compressed over and over, counting. “Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty.”
A chorus of murmurs rippled through the crowd surrounding Kit in a claustrophobic circle. “One, two, three, step back, four, five, give me room, six, seven…” She gave the child two more deep breaths then resumed compression.
Cullen’s strong hand grabbed her upper arm and squeezed.
“Stop.”
She jerked free.
Mrs. Springer fell to her knees beside Kit, wringing her apron in her red-weathered hands. With calm desperation, Kit repeated the cycle of breaths and chest compressions for a third time. “Come on, you can do it. Don’t give up on me now.”
The boy’s eye twitched. Did she imagine the slight movement? She put her head to his chest. Nothing. “Come on, come on.” More compressions. “Don’t quit on me.” His long black lashes fluttered. That wasn’t her imagination. Relief spiked through her veins. She pressed fingertips against the pulse point in his neck. Thready.
Thank God.
Mr. Springer stood over his boy, running his hands through his thinning hair. Cold river water poured off his clothes and puddled at his feet. His teeth chattered behind purple lips. Gray eyes appeared clouded with disbelief.
Mrs. Springer’s hair had fallen loose of the tight knot normally worn at her nape and formed a frizzy hallo around her head.
Kit shook the woman’s arm to gain her attention. “Help me get him out of these wet clothes.” Several other women appeared offering blankets. “Wrap him up, rub him. Don’t stop until his color returns.”
Mrs. Springer’s hopeless wailing turned into sobs. “Will he be all right?”
Kit wasn’t one hundred percent sure the child would survive. “We’ll need to watch him for the next twenty-four hours. But right now he needs to get warm—quickly.”
Cullen pulled her to her feet. “
You
need to get warm.”
Adam shoved a handful of blankets toward her. “Ma sent these for you. Can you teach me to swim like that?”
Cullen brushed Adam aside. “Not now.” Kit grabbed a blanket and pulled away from Cullen, but her frozen feet offered no support, and she collapsed. Cullen caught her before she hit the ground, then picked her up, and cradled her in his arms.
Her teeth chattered, sounding like castanets on steroids. “Cover my head.”
“Adam, get your ma. Bring her to Kit’s wagon. She’ll need help.”
“I don’t need help.”
The veins in Cullen’s neck pulsed. “You think you don’t need anyone.” He was a volcano on the verge of erupting. Steam actually rose off him. “You almost drowned. What the hell were you thinking?”
“That I could save him.” Craving his heat, she nestled into his chest. Every kettledrum beat of his heart resonated against her cheek. She didn’t want to be near the explosion set to detonate. “Put me down. I can walk.”
“You can’t even stand. How the hell can you walk?”
“You’re cursing at me.”
“And you’ll hear more before this is over.”
She ignored the muscle now ticking in his jaw.
He carried her to her wagon where he dropped her on its tailgate with enough force to sting her shivering butt. If a spanking had been his intention, he succeeded. White-hot anger burned off the chill.
He wrapped a death grip around the tailgate’s edge. “Get out of your wet clothes, and do not step outside this wagon. I want to know where you are every minute. Do you understand?” The staccato voice punctuated his demand. “Heed my words, or I’ll damn well put you on the first wagon heading east.” He pushed away, leaving her with a parting glare.
Sarah arrived, carrying Kit’s skirt, moccasins, drawing paper, and pencils. “Let’s get into dry clothes before you catch cold. Come on now. Stand up, and we’ll go change.”
“I can manage.”
“Of course you can, but I’m going to help anyway.”
Although colder than she’d ever been in her life, Kit moved rapidly and focused on what needed doing. She removed one of the blankets. “If you’ll hold this, I’ll stand behind it and take off my clothes.”
“Not the time for modesty, dear,” Sarah said.
“Please.”
Working with the men at the fire station and long weekend survival treks had bred modesty right out of Kit, but she sure couldn’t explain her thong or sports bra to Sarah. And, God only knew what she’d think of the butterfly tattoo.
A few minutes later, dried and dressed, her heart rose and fell in its complex rhythm, reminding her how close she’d come to drowning.
“What you did was the most selfless act I’ve ever witnessed,” Sarah said. “You shamed a few men who stood by kicking the dirt. My John was one of them.” She enveloped Kit in a warm hug. “I’m proud of you. Folks will be speaking about this for a long time.”
Kit had known Sarah only a few days, but she had discovered from long conversations riding in the buckboard that the woman could go from parochial to profound in very few words. She had more to say and it wouldn’t be complimentary. Even-tempered Sarah was definitely nettled.
“However, you didn’t come on this trip to get yourself killed. If you ever do anything like that again, John will send you packing with the next go-backers we see.”
Kit felt a consuming embarrassment. “I won’t scare you again.”
Sarah grinned. “Of course you will. Impulsiveness is in your nature. I’ve told you what John wanted me to say. Cullen said you’re not to leave the wagon. You won’t, will you?”
Kit groaned softly, letting her shoulders sag. “I’ll be right here until he releases me.”
Sarah chucked on her way out. “You’d best get one of those Shakespeare books. You might be here for a while.”
Kit leaned back on her bed. The last couple of hours had been strange. But she sensed that would be the way of things for the next several weeks. In the meantime, she could read Shakespeare or study class notes from the crime scene seminar she’d taken in college. A sketch formed in her mind. She grabbed her journal and her hand blitzed across the page.
The drawing depicted a woman in a jail cell with her hands gripping the bars, watching a man on the other side dangle an oversized key. Vines crept up his legs, anchoring him to the ground. The drawing was chilling.
She tossed the journal aside and stared out through the wagon’s rear opening. An assemblage of men and women hustled around camp like worker bees. The scene resembled dozens of reenactments in which Kit had participated, but something was starkly different. Absent, was the jovial camaraderie common among re-enactors.
Her journey to South Pass was definitely
not
a reenactment.
The trip held the fragility of life and the specter of death, and the hemp rope burns across her palms spoke to that unending reality.
Chapter Eleven
CULLEN READ THE same paragraph in Homer’s
Odyssey
a dozen times before slamming the book shut and tossing it on the table. After returning from nightly rounds, he’d been sitting in a rocker by the campfire. If he wanted a distraction, he would have to look elsewhere. The Camerons’ music hadn’t lured him away and neither had an invitation from John and Sarah to stop by for coffee. Henry had accepted, but Cullen sent his regrets. He wasn’t up to socializing, especially if he might run into Kit. Even though he’d forbidden her to leave her wagon, he wasn’t sure how much credence, if any, the woman gave his orders.
Henry moseyed into camp carrying a plate of cookies. “Sarah sent these. Kit made them this morning.” He poked Cullen with the edge of the tin dish. “I told Sarah you were rocking and moping. She said you needed nourishment for all the thinking you were doing. You plan to mope the rest of the evening?”
Cullen ignored the mouth-watering scent of cinnamon and pushed the plate away. A cookie dropped into his lap. He glared at it, expecting it to snap at him. “I’m not moping.”
“You’re a lying son-of-a-bitch.”
“Mind your own business, old man.”
Henry set the cookies on top of the stack of books beside Cullen’s chair. “Everything that happens on this wagon train
is
my business. You think all you need to learn you can get from a book. I’m here to tell you, if you don’t have enough sense to get in out of the rain what you learned in them books don’t do no good.”
Cullen glared at him. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
“You’re the one who insisted the widow come on this trip. Remember? She saved that boy’s life today, and you show gratitude by forcing her to stay in her wagon going on ten hours now. Let her out. If your mind’s not set to doing what’s right, I will.”
Cullen let loose a long sigh. “I’ll let her out in the morning.”
Henry fixed a gaze that wrinkled his forehead. “The hell you will.” He yanked the cookie plate out of Cullen’s reach and headed off in the direction of Kit’s wagon.
Cullen picked the cookie off his lap and took a bite. “Come back. Never seen you move so fast on those saddle-bowed legs.”
Henry stopped in mid-stride. “You get off your ass and go now, or my next step won’t have a turn-around.”
“I’ll do it, but I want to ask you something first.”
“If you’re just working up spit for your whistle, I’m not listening.”
“What do you think about what she did today? Ever seen a woman do anything like that?”
“The water part or the
after
part?”
“Both, I reckon,” Cullen said.
“Seen women do men’s work, but Kit’s different.” He wagged his finger like the tail on a hunting dog that just caught a stump-eared squirrel. “One thing’s for sure. She’s the prettiest, sweetest, kindest little missy I’ve ever met, and if I wasn’t old enough to be her pa, I‘d asked her to be my wife.”
Cullen lurched from his chair, toppling it over. “You’re right. You are too old.”
Henry grabbed Cullen’s arm. “You hurt that girl and you’ll answer to me.”
“Then you’d best go talk to her because I’m not sure I can keep from strangling her.”
Henry dropped his grip, chuckling. “Just keep your damn hands tucked in your suspenders.”
Cullen had been aroused since carrying the shivering woman in his arms. He needed to erase her from his mind. It was easy to envision Abigail Phillips sitting in her San Francisco garden, but her lovely countenance was no more a distraction than Homer’s
Odyssey.
Kit had turned his life upside down in less than a week. Bedding her would get her out of his blood, and a liaison would make the trip across the dusty prairie more enjoyable. He set off toward her wagon thinking that was exactly what he’d do.
A silver bar of moonlight and the earthy scent of the prairie tempered his mood until he heard a guitar carrying a somber and haunting tonal quality. Then Kit began to sing the ballad
The Light of Other Days
, pure and beautiful and breathy. Her version of the melody held a strange, otherworldly sound. He lit a cheroot and leaned against a cottonwood, his left thumb hooked into his suspenders. The music stirred his soul. Even when she strummed the last chord, the sound, lush and bursting with flavor, continued to swirl inside his thrumming heart.
Kit stepped from the wagon, sat on the tailgate, and swung her legs.
Cullen stubbed out his cigar and walked from the shadows. “Why‘d you do it, Kit?”
Her legs stopped on an upward swing, hung in midair for a moment, then she resumed pumping them at an easy glide. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You could have drowned.”
“Saving the boy was worth the risk.”
“Worth risking your life for a person you didn’t know?”
She jumped to the ground, landing only a few feet from him. “He needed saving.”
“Even if it killed you?”
She chewed on her lower lip.
“How did you know to breathe into his mouth?”
She continued chewing on her lip. Finally, she said, “It doesn’t always revive a person. If bacteria are in his lungs, he might still die.”
Bacteria in his lungs?
She said the damnedest things.
The breeze fluttered through silky strands of vanilla scented hair. Golden tendrils danced across her cheek. He barely breathed through an engulfing rush of heat. Compelled by an incomprehensible force, he closed the distance between them. His fingers burned. His muscles throbbed. He had to hold her tiny body in his arms once again.
His thumb trembled as it slid over the curve of her cheek, stopping below her mouth. With the tip of his finger, he lifted her chin and gazed into mystical eyes. He lowered his head, slowly, giving her a chance to withdraw. When she didn’t, he brushed his lips against hers, sipping her as if she were a glass of the finest French champagne, fruity and sweet. Still, she didn’t pull away, so he deepened the kiss, feeling her firm breasts pressing against him. He wanted to touch her, feel the rise and fall of her breath against his naked skin. Would she agree to take a lover? Gently, he cupped the back of her head, and his fingers furrowed into her hair. A groan of desire slipped from her lips.
Maybe.
His arousal pulsed between them.
The kiss ended but their lips lingered only a breath apart. Should he ask her to slip away with him into the darkness where he would bury his face in her hair, his hands in her pleasing curves, and satisfy them both?