Trail of Kisses (17 page)

“
You were supposed to protect me,
not—”

“
You tried that argument this
morning,” he spoke over her. “It didn’t hold water then and it
won’t hold water now.” He leaned closer to her. “I asked last night
if it was what you wanted and you said yes. You said yes with
passion too.”

Lynne turned back to the wagon bed. “I don’t
know what I was thinking.”

“
I do.”

Cade caught her around the waist and twisted
her to both face him and to press against him. The hardness of his
body under his clothes brought every heated, dangerous sensation
from the night before crashing back over her. She wanted him so
desperately she could cry.

“
Let me go, Cade,” she said,
letting out a breath in defeat. She sagged as she stood. She
refused to admit she was a coward, but she was unforgivably
stupid.

Cade ignored her, holding her closer. The
tension pouring off of him lightened to tender
possession.

“
All I want is to keep you safe,”
he murmured.

She glanced up at him, bringing their faces
mere inches apart. “By compromising me? By stealing my
virtue?”

“
I stole nothing,” he insisted.
“You gave freely.”

She latched onto her one last chance to keep
her pride. “I’m not a… one of those kinds of women.”

“
And I’m not one of those kinds of
men,” he said. “We’ve been over this.”

He followed his words by tugging her closer
and slanting his mouth over hers. The kiss cut right through her,
dredging up every ounce of longing she had and fanning the flames
of desire that would be better off left alone. She gave in to him,
kissing him back with as much energy as he had. Then sense trickled
back to her and she resisted.

Her resistance caused him to spread his hands
across her back and pull her closer, kiss her more deeply. Their
passion became a battle. He nipped at her lip and teased her with
his tongue, all the while holding her as if she belonged to
him.

At last he loosened his grip and she stumbled,
bumping the back of the wagon. Her legs were weak and her body hot
and aching. She gasped for breath, then slapped him across the face
with all the strength she could manage, which wasn’t
much.

Cade flinched and raised a hand to his cheek
as a red spot began to form. “What was that for?”

“
For….” She didn’t have an answer
for him, even though she searched for one. She should have slapped
herself. Her mouth worked, kiss-swollen lips and all, but she
couldn’t come up with a single thing to say except, “I’m not a
coward.”

Her voice betrayed otherwise. She swallowed
and balled her hands into fists at her side as tears stung at her
eyes, then wriggled away from Cade and ran.

Chapter Nine

Cade hadn’t been one for sleeping since the
incident while working for George Tremaine, but he usually managed
to catch a few hours in the dead of night. Not that night. It
didn’t matter that Pete had pushed them hard for the rest of the
day or that his entire body was sore from holding tension
throughout the afternoon. He didn’t sleep a wink. Judging by the
sound of shifting and thumping that came from the wagon all night
as he lay out under a cloudy sky, Lynne hadn’t done much sleeping
either.

In the morning, the clouds thickened overhead
and Lynne emerged from the wagon looking just as stormy. He made
her coffee, just as he had sworn to himself he would do for her
every day from yesterday morning on, regardless of the miserable
way she refused to look at him. She could be as confused and
conflicted as she wanted to be. He wouldn’t stop protecting her or
caring for her just because she was determined to pretend nothing
had happened between them.

He wasn’t willing to let it go yet
either.

“
We should talk about this,” he
said as they rode side by side, several yards apart.

“
There’s nothing to talk about,”
she insisted.

Cade clenched his jaw, looking for a way to
get past her defenses. “I can’t do my job if you won’t let me be
close to you.”

She snapped to stare at him, then just as
quickly looked away and tilted her chin up. “You can, and you will.
You don’t need to be by my side, privy to my every
thought—”

“
And your every kiss,” he added
with a growl.

She huffed in indignation and turned
scarlet.

“
You’re not going to pretend none
of those kisses happened either, are you?” he said.

She stared straight forward. He could see the
wheels turning in her mind. Lord help him, but even that irritating
delay was attractive to him. He liked it when she used her mind.
Where else would she find a man who would value her for her sharp
mischief?

“
Your job is to keep me safe from
the men who threatened my father, correct?” she began.

His heart beat faster, eager to see what kind
of trick she would try next. “Correct.”

“
Well, no one has made any sort of
threat on my person since before Ft. Kearny.”

“
Unless you count the faulty
trigger on my gun and my wrecked boots,” he growled.

“
Which I’m still not convinced was
anything more than shoddy merchandise.”

“
I liked those boots.” Cade
swallowed the rest of his answer. Fighting about things he knew for
a fact was not going to get him any closer to resolving their
impasse. He took a breath and glanced up at the sky. A storm was
definitely on its way. The horizon was dark with thunderheads. A
few flashes crossed through the clouds. They were in for a
miserable day. It didn’t help him to have patience with Lynne at
all.

“
I think it’s perfectly reasonable
for you to continue to do your job from a distance, without
speaking to me at all,” she went on, though her words faltered near
the end. If he wasn’t mistaken, her lip quivered before she sucked
in a breath and adjusted her posture in the saddle to keep her back
straight.

He shook his head. “Lynne, we have to stop
this nonsense.”

“
Nonsense?” Her arched eyebrow was
a sure warning that she was close to arguing for the sake of
argument.

“
Is it so terrible for you to have
feelings for me? Or to have acted on them? Lord knows I care for
you.” She shot a sideways glance to him. “Yes. I said it. And I’m
proud of it too.”

She squirmed in her saddle without giving a
response. A boom of thunder sounded in the distance. Maybe if they
had a chance to spend the afternoon hunkered together in the wagon
while the storm passed, they could work a few things
out.

“
You don’t understand,” she
whispered at last.

“
No, I don’t,” Cade replied.
“Explain it to me.”

Instead of explaining, she tossed him a moody
look. Thunder boomed closer to them than Cade liked. He sat higher
in his saddle, searching for some sort of shelter beyond the
wagons. They were more or less out in the open, only a few scrubby
stands of trees closer to the river.

Lynne was beginning to take notice of their
surroundings and their situation now too. “I don’t need you to take
care of me or to protect me,” she said. She was more distracted
than not now. “I’ll tell my uncle you did your duty. Ben
can—”

She was interrupted by the twin distractions
of Ben shifting in his seat driving the wagon to scowl at her and
lightning striking ahead of them. Cade steered his horse to walk
closer to her.

“
We should probably find some way
to get out of this storm,” he said. “Pete will stop the train any
second now.”

Before he could finish his thought, the angry,
greenish clouds began to swirl in the distance. The storm had been
churning miles ahead of them the whole time he and Lynne argued,
but now it took on a more sinister form. The spinning in the clouds
coalesced into a funnel that reached out as if hungry for the
ground.

Screams and shouts echoed across the wagon
train. No one waited for the word to stop. Some people attempted to
steer their wagons to the right or the left in an attempt to guess
which direction the tornado forming in front of them would go. The
animals, be they oxen or horses or the few chickens and goats
settlers had brought with them, sensed the danger and screamed and
scattered. People jumped down from wagons and headed for the
shelter of the stands of trees nearer to the river, even as
lightning struck closer to them. Callie and John were among the
smarter folks. They jumped down from their wagon and unhitched all
of their animals.

“
We can outrun it,” Lynne shouted
at Cade’s side.

Cade frowned at her, then checked on the
progress of the tornado. It was forming fast and speeding straight
toward them.

“
You can’t outrun something like
that,” he called back to her.

The best they could hope for was to get out of
the way, but with no clear sense of which direction the tornado
would decide on, even that was a crap shoot.

“
This way!” Lynne shouted over the
growing noise and chaos. She reined her frightened horse about and
tore through the breaking line of the wagons, heading for the
river.

Cade swore under his breath and kicked his
horse to follow her. He checked over his shoulder on Ben, who was
struggling to keep the team of oxen from bolting. Whether or not
the boy could handle the team, Cade’s heart had gone with Lynne,
and so must the rest of him.

“
Lynne!”

He leaned low over his horse and charged to
where she was running. The rain began in earnest, beating down on
them even as lightning flashed and thunder boomed with deafening
crashes around them. The tornado was growing steadily fatter ahead
of them, eating up the prairie and any trees that got in its way.
It raged with a ferocity that Cade could feel in his throat and
lungs and throughout his body.

“
Lynne,” he called
again.

She had pulled her horse to a stop close to
the river. The usually mild-mannered Clover reared, screaming, eyes
wide. Lynne shouted and grasped the saddle, her face white and her
eyes just as wide as her horse’s, but somehow she managed to stay
mounted. Cade urged Arrow toward her, but as soon as Clover’s
hooves were on the ground again, she changed direction and shot
back into the prairie toward the wagons. He wheeled Arrow around
and chased after her.

The tornado bore down on them with a speed so
horrific that fear boiled in Cade’s gut. Not fear for himself, fear
that something would happen to Lynne. Clover made it halfway to the
ragged line of wagons before rearing again. This time Lynne wasn’t
so lucky. With a shout, she went spilling off Clover’s back,
turning head over heels as her foot came loose from the stirrup and
she rolled over Clover’s rump. As soon as she was free of Lynne’s
weight, Clover bolted.

“
Lynne!”

Cade jumped off of Arrow, letting his trusted
friend run free and save himself as the solid funnel of the tornado
roared closer. The winds were so strong now that he couldn’t hear
his own voice. He sprinted across the wind-torn ground toward the
spot where Lynne lay balled up in her skirts. There would be time
to check to be sure she was unhurt later. As he reached her, he
dropped to the ground and covered her body with his, embracing her
as if he could single-handedly stop the twister from carrying her
away. He willed himself to weigh ten times more than he did to keep
them anchored to the ground.

Amidst thunder and lightning and wind so harsh
it hurt the roots of his teeth and made his ears ache, the tornado
roared past. Cade kept his head down, but he could feel when the
raging funnel crossed close to them, farther from the river than
their scattered group had stopped. It wouldn’t be a direct hit. The
twister missed them by the space of about half a mile. None of that
mattered as the earth shook and churned so close to where Lynne
was. Every sinew of his body and every thought in his mind was
directed to keeping her safe.

Slowly, with aching minutes that felt like
lifetimes, the tornado passed. In its wake was the last remaining
thunder and lightning, followed by thick, warm rain. It beat down
on them, soaking everything that had been tumbled and scattered by
the tornado, hail mixed in. They had gotten lucky. More lucky than
he wanted to think about.

Lynne lay trembling under the solid shelter of
Cade’s body. Every inch of her ached. Shooting pain radiated
through her back where she had hit the ground when Clover bolted.
Her ears and behind her eyes ached with the heavy air of the
tornado. It took her several more long, painful minutes to realize
she was weeping. The noise of the storm had hid her sobs, but now
that it was subsiding, all she was left with was the starkness of
her fear.

No, she had Cade as well. His arms around her
and his body sheltering her were the only things keeping her from
losing her mind. She was face down with him pressed against her
back. The only part of him that she could reach for and hold was
one of his hands, so she clung to that as if clinging to life. The
pressure and release of his chest as he breathed in and out kept
her from feeling as though the world was flying to pieces around
her.