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

Chapter 9

They reached the eastern edge of the range on the morning of the third day.

Caleb had said three days minimum, and he had been right about the minimum part. The second day had cost them four hours when a washed-out section of the back trail forced a detour that climbed higher than either of them had planned, through terrain that required both hands and both feet and left no room for conversation or anything else except the immediate negotiation of the next ten feet of ground.

Evelyn had not complained. She had not asked how much farther, or whether they could rest, or whether the detour meant they were lost. She had watched where Caleb put his hands, and she had put her hands in the same places, and she had kept moving.

The third morning, she woke before him. That surprised her. She had assumed he woke first, always. But she opened her eyes in the pre-dawn gray, and he was still asleep, Scout curled against his side. Both of them breathing in the slow rhythm of genuine sleep.

She lay there for a moment and watched him without meaning to. The lines of his face gone loose in a way they never were during the day. The hard angles softened just enough to show something younger underneath.

She looked away. Got up carefully. Started the fire herself, using the flint box she had watched him use twice, and figured out by the third attempt.

When Caleb woke twenty minutes later to a fire already going and water already heating, he went still for one moment in a way that told her no one had done that for him in a long time. He didn’t say anything about it. But when he handed her the first cup of coffee, he handed it to her first, instead of pouring his own, and she understood that was his version of saying thank you.

They moved at first light.

The town of Boseman appeared below them in the mid-morning, spread across the valley floor in the particular organized chaos of a frontier city that had grown faster than its own plans. She had been here twice with her father. It had felt small to her then, provincial. Now it looked like civilization itself. Like a promise.

“We don’t go in together,” Caleb said, stopping where the trail met the first road.

“Why?”

“Because Richard Vance has had three days. If he came back from the mountain without confirmation, he’d have men watching the roads into Boseman.” He looked at her directly. “And because you walking into town in trail boots two sizes too large with no coat and no bag will draw exactly the kind of attention you can’t afford right now.”

She looked down at herself. He was not wrong.

“What do you suggest?”

“I go in first. I know a woman on the south end. Clara Briggs. She runs a boarding house. Decent, discreet. Doesn’t ask questions she doesn’t need answers to.” He paused. “I’ll get you clothes. Something that doesn’t announce where you’ve been. Then we go to Hoskins together.”

He held her gaze. “I’m not dropping you at the edge of town and riding away, Evelyn.”

She had not realized until he said it that she had been bracing for that possibility. The breath she released was longer than she intended.

“All right. How long?”

“An hour, maybe less.” He looked at Scout. “He stays with you.”

She stopped him. “Be careful.”

He looked back at her. Something crossed his face. Not surprise, exactly. But the expression of a man who had received something he had stopped expecting.

“Always am,” he said.

He went down the road alone, and she sat on a boulder at the tree line with Scout pressed against her leg. She did not let herself think about what would happen if someone recognized him. Or if someone had already been to Clara Briggs’s boarding house asking questions. Or if the hour turned into two, and then three, and then nothing.

She watched the road, and she breathed, and she reminded herself what she had told Caleb that first night. She always made another plan.

She was still working on what the other plan would be when Scout’s ears pricked forward and she saw Caleb coming back up the road with a bundle under his arm, at a pace that said nothing had gone wrong. The relief hit her harder than she expected.

He came up the last stretch of road and held out the bundle. A plain day dress in dark blue. A coat that had been worn but was solid. A pair of shoes that were closer to her size than the trail boots.

“There’s a spring twenty feet that way. Give yourself ten minutes.”

She gave herself eight.

When she came back, Caleb looked at her. That full, steady assessment that didn’t linger anywhere because it didn’t need to.

He nodded once. “Better. You look like a woman visiting an attorney, not a woman who just came off a mountain.”

“That’s exactly what I am,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

They went into Boseman.