A Babe In The Woods. Cara Colter
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he asked, his eyes scanning the cabin behind her.
“None of your business.”
“Who’s with you?” he asked again, quietly, but with some unmistakable iron in his voice.
“My friend Sam,” she said defiantly. A nice name. Sturdy sounding. Strong. Loyal. Which is why she had given it to the big bay gelding she used for her saddle horse.
“Why didn’t Sam come out when you fired off that shotgun?” he asked. Something in him relaxed. The faintest hint of amusement lit those eyes before the weariness and caution drowned it.
“Why didn’t you?” she snapped back.
“I thought you might shoot me.”
“I still might.”
“You’re not a very neighborly kind of person,” he pointed out, mildly.
“Me and Sam aren’t much used to neighbors.”
“But you’re used to shotguns.” Something, not quite a smile, lifted a corner of that firm mouth. “You and Sam.”
He had obviously figured out Sam was fiction, but she tried again, anyway. “That’s why he didn’t come out. He’s used to me blasting off that old shotgun at varmints.”
The stranger’s smile, thankfully, died before it was ever completely born, and cool eyes scanned her face, then the clearing and then the cabin, before returning to her. “You’re alone,” he decided.
She wanted to insist she wasn’t, but knew it was pointless. She suspected this man’s intuition was as fine-honed as her own was. Maybe more so. Despite the weariness, there was an alertness about him that reminded her of wild animals poised on the edge of danger, getting ready to flee. Or fight.
He’s in trouble, Storm thought, bad trouble.
She wondered why she did not sense imminent danger, then realized that her intuition had been known to let her down in this one critical area. Men.
“Are you lost?” Her eyes drifted to the baby. It was pounding one chubby fist against the man’s shoulder and had another tangled in the dark silk of his hair. A lesser man might have winced or tried to unlock the baby’s determined grip, but his attention remained totally focused on her. As if she might make a dash for that shotgun. People who were lost were usually not quite so on guard.
Still, she wished he was lost. That his presence here was uncomplicated—that he had become separated from his wife on a Sunday hike.
But he did not seem to be the kind of man who would get lost. Or be on a family hike, either. Her eyes went to that telltale finger. No gold band. And no little white line where one might have been a short while ago. She considered herself a quick learner.
“I need a place to stay.”
She stared at him.
“I was up here years ago. I remembered the cabin.”
He could be anybody. He’d probably kidnapped that baby. He didn’t look like the kind of man who would find taking a baby on a hiking trip a whole lot of fun.
“A place to stay? Here?”
“Only for a couple of days.”
Oh, great. Now he was appealing to her softer side. A man by himself, she could say no to easily, firmly. But a man with a baby?
He pitched forward a step, and she saw with sudden horror that there was a small pool of blood where he had stood before.
“You’re hurt!”
“It’s just a scratch.”
She could see a red stain now spreading around the side of his shirt, just above the waistline of his jeans, from his back.
She went forward. Suddenly she didn’t have to think at all. She went behind him. She could tell he didn’t like that one little bit. Like an old-time gunslinger, he didn’t like having his back exposed.
The baby was in the top part of a backpack not designed for babies. Bungee straps secured the unusual cargo. She stretched up, unstrapped the cords deftly and took the wriggling little bundle down. If she was taller, she might have been able to see what else was in the pack, and it might have answered some questions for her. But she was not taller, and the next five seconds did not hold much promise of her growing.
The man smelled faintly of soap, overlaid with woodsy aromas of sunshine and sweat. And blood. She glanced down and saw the dark-red stain just above his right hip.
She hoped to hell he wasn’t gun shot. They were a hard ride from the trailhead and a half hour to the tiny hamlet of Thunder Lake after that, if she could get her cranky truck to start right away.
Why did she think he had been shot?
He could have caught himself on a branch. Or fallen on a rock.
The baby gurgled at her and tried to insert pudgy fingers in her nose. It diverted her attention from the man’s presence, though even not looking at him, she could feel him. It was as if electricity hummed and hissed in the air around him, and made her quiet clearing vibrate with tension.
The baby’s weight was solid in her arms. She didn’t think she’d held a baby before. A baby was a rare commodity in a town like Thunder Lake. When there was one around, a baby, Storm avoided the ruckus. And now she knew why. It made a person kind of go all soft and mushy inside, even when a man was dripping blood all over her yard.
“Come on,” she said, lugging the baby up the stairs. Her mind raced. An injured man and a baby had just showed up at her cabin. He was relieved that no one was here but her, a woman on her own. Maybe she was the one with trouble. Bad trouble. She ducked a little pink finger aimed at her eye. The baby clouded things. It was hard to consider the possibility of menace in the merry presence of the child.
The man paused behind her on the porch. She glanced over her shoulder to see him unloading the shotgun. He slipped the shell into his pocket.
There’s plenty more where that one came from, buster.
The cabin was small and cozy inside. A primitive wooden table stood at its center, and a potbellied wood burner was in the corner. Two sets of rough open cupboards were on either side of a sink with a hand pump for a faucet. There was one tiny window, and in a rare fit of domesticity Storm had nailed up two squares of checkered red fabric that passed for curtains if they weren’t inspected too closely.
Her visitor went and pulled back the matching curtains that separated the bunk beds from the main cabin area. When his inspection proved they were alone, the last of the tension relaxed out of those hard muscles. He turned to face her.
“This has changed. You can sleep a crowd in here now,” he commented of the six bunks. “How come?”
“It’s an army training center. I’m expecting the troops at any moment.”
“Led by Sam?” he asked dryly, slipping his arms from the backpack straps and letting it slide to the floor, taking in the rest of the cabin in a glance.
His gaze rested for a moment on the early-blooming wildflowers she had stuck in a tin at the center of the table when she’d first arrived. Now she was sorry she had done that. She thought it made her look somewhat vulnerable, which was not the appearance she wanted to give right at the moment.
“I better have a look at that wound,” she said.
“It doesn’t qualify as a wound.”
“Well, whatever it qualifies as, you’re dripping blood on my floor, so sit down.” She shoved a chair back for him with her foot.
He looked narrowly at her, unaccustomed to taking orders, though she suspected he may have given a few in his day. His compliance was reluctant. He winced when he sat down.
He picked up a brochure on her table, and she resisted an urge to snatch it from his hand, to