McKettrick's Choice - Linda Lael Miller [93]
Cavanagh’s eyes flashed, but he slowly lowered his hand. “Them cowboys back there,” he grumbled, by way of diffusing his temper. “Not a one of them could find his hind-end with his hat. Lucky we didn’t have to depend on them in a fight.”
Holt risked a crooked grin. “Tell ’em to bed down again,” he said, addressing Rafe, who was still fuming a little himself. “It’ll be dawn in a few hours, and it’s still a full day’s pull to Laredo.”
“Tell ’em yourself,” Rafe snapped, but he headed for the orchard. Like as not, the conversation would turn in the direction Holt wanted.
John waved a dismissive hand at Holt and turned to leave, bound, no doubt, for the soft, sweet grass under the wagon. Melina, too, slipped away.
The Captain and Lorelei lingered.
“I’ll take the next watch,” the Captain said, studying Holt. “You’d best get some sleep yourself.” With that, he took himself off to the bell tower. Holt heard the old man’s boot heels thumping up the rungs of the ladder.
Lorelei stood still as a pillar in one of those Greek temples Holt had seen etchings of, in books. She might have been made of alabaster, the way the moonlight glowed on her skin, but, thanks to those leeches, Holt knew only too well that she was flesh and blood.
She swallowed visibly, and Holt watched her throat work. Imagined what it would be like to kiss that place at the base of her neck where her pulse jumped.
“You could have gotten yourself killed,” she said.
“But I didn’t.”
She moved slightly, as if to approach him. Then, damn the luck, she stopped herself. “What’s going to happen to the padre, after we leave here tomorrow?”
Holt drew a deep breath, let it out. Suddenly, he felt weary to the bone, as if he could sleep as long as Rip Van Winkle and still need another day in his bedroll. “My guess is, he’ll disappear into thin air,” he answered, and he was only half-kidding.
“I asked him to go with us,” Lorelei confided bleakly.
“He said he couldn’t leave the brothers.”
“We can’t force him, Lorelei,” Holt said, sort of herding her back toward the place where she and the others were bunking. He didn’t dare take her arm. If he touched her, he figured their flesh would fuse from the heat. “He’s got a right to decide for himself.”
They’d reached the doorway of the women’s quarters. Holt didn’t allow his mind to travel over the threshold.
Crickets, silent the last little while, suddenly chattered.
Lorelei bit her lower lip, then suddenly stepped in close and slipped both her arms around Holt’s neck. He went rigid, like a wild bronco in a chute, about to be ridden for the first time.
She planted a kiss on his mouth, too quick and too light, and then, before he could think what to do or say, she pulled back and dashed inside.
He stood where she’d left him, waiting to come to his senses.
It was a long time happening.
THE SUN WAS already blazing in the sky, though it wasn’t yet seven o’clock by Lorelei’s bodice watch, when two of the cowboys swung the mission gates open wide for the party to pass through.
Mounted on Seesaw, her hastily consumed breakfast weighing heavily in her stomach, Lorelei looked back at the padre, stationed by the fountain, smiling with benign sadness and waving farewell.
She drew up just inside the gates, letting the wagon and the last riders go by. A flash of sunlight hit the frolicking water in the fountain, and just for the merest fraction of a moment, Lorelei would have sworn she saw another robed figure beside the padre.
She blinked, and when she looked again, only the priest was there, standing alone.
The Texas sun was fierce, she reminded herself, and pulled her hat brim down to better shade her eyes. Once she’d ridden through the gate, the tall doors swung shut, and she heard the latch fall into place.
A shiver moved through her, and she nudged Seesaw into a trot, catching up with Melina. Tillie and the baby were in the back of the wagon, and Tillie stared back at the mission as though she expected it to