She Was Thrown Away By Her Bloodline — A Mountain Cowboy Gave Her A Home

Chapter 5

The wind built.

The ground rose and fell under her feet in ways she couldn’t see in the dark. She could only feel it. Grass, then rock, then a shallow creek that she stepped into halfway to her knee before she felt the cold water and jerked back. The shock of it ran up her leg and through her entire body. She kept moving. She told herself she was not going to die out here for the benefit of Richard Vance’s railroad ambitions and her stepmother’s careful paperwork. She said it aloud once, into the wind that wasn’t listening.

“I am not going to die out here.”

The storm arrived properly about an hour after they left her. Not a slow build. A sudden wall of wind and freezing rain that turned the ground treacherous and reduced visibility to almost nothing. She found a shelf of rock and pressed herself against it, arms pulled to her chest, and waited for a lull that didn’t come. The cold seeped through her dress, through her skin, deep into her bones until she couldn’t tell where her body ended and the cold began.

Her dress was soaked. Her boots were not made for this terrain. Her hands had passed beyond cold into something that felt like burning, and then into something more worrying. Something that didn’t feel like much at all. She tried to flex her fingers and couldn’t tell if they had moved.

She slid down the rock face until she was sitting. She told herself this was temporary. She would rest for a moment and then continue. She was not certain she believed herself. Her eyelids were getting heavy. The cold was making her sleepy, and some distant part of her mind recognized that as the most dangerous sign of all.

The sound she heard next was not the wind.

It was a dog. Close. Sudden. Sharp. One bark, and then silence. And then the crunch of footsteps on frozen ground, moving toward her fast. She tried to stand, but her legs wouldn’t cooperate.

A light appeared. Not a lantern. A torch. And then a figure came through the dark, and for one disoriented moment, she couldn’t parse what she was seeing. A man. Tall. Moving with the kind of certainty that belonged to someone who had never been afraid of the dark, because the dark had always been his territory.

He stopped when the torchlight found her face. She looked up at him from the ground, soaked through and shaking so hard her teeth were rattling, and she registered several things simultaneously. He was a stranger. He was armed. His expression was impossible to read. And his dog, a large dark animal standing beside him, had gone very still in the way animals do when they’ve located what they were looking for.

He crouched down to her level.

“Ma’am.” His voice was low, direct. No performance in it. “Can you stand?”

“I’m not sure,” she said honestly. Her voice came out thin and foreign to her own ears.

He looked at her for one second, taking in the house dress and the soaked boots and the absence of any gear that would make sense for a person to have on a mountain in a storm. And then he stood and held out his hand.

“Try,” he said.

She took his hand. The warmth of it shocked her. She stood. Her legs went sideways immediately, and he caught her arm without comment. Steadying her the way a man steadies a fence post. Practical and without drama.

“There’s a cabin,” he said. “Fifteen minutes from here, if you can walk.”

“Can you walk?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“I said yes.”

Something that might have been respect crossed his face for half a second. “All right. Stay close. Don’t fall behind.”

He turned and started moving through the storm, and she followed him because there was nothing else to do. And because she realized, with some distant part of her mind that was still capable of assessment, that she was already trusting him. In a way she had not trusted anyone in that house.

She was following a stranger into the dark on a mountain in a storm with her whole life dismantled behind her. She was trusting him because he had come to her out of the dark without being asked, and he had said “try” instead of “you can’t,” and that was more than anyone had given her in a very long time.

The dog walked beside her the whole way, a solid presence at her heel, occasionally pressing against her leg as if to guide her when she stumbled.

When the cabin door opened and the warmth of a fire hit her face, she felt her knees start to give again. The man caught her again, set her down near the fire, disappeared, and came back with a blanket that he wrapped around her shoulders.

“What’s your name?” she managed through chattering teeth.

He paused. Looked at her.

“Caleb,” he said. “Caleb Mercer.”

She pulled the blanket tighter and stared into the fire. “Evelyn Harper. And I need to tell you something, Mr. Mercer. The men who left me on that mountain are going to come back when they realize I’m not dead.”

Caleb Mercer didn’t flinch. He just looked at her in that still, measuring way he had, like a man who was adding up facts before he decided what to do with them.

Then he settled into the chair across from the fire.

“You’d best start from the beginning,” he said.