A Wanted Man: A Stone Creek Novel. Linda Lael Miller

She would have brought the lamp from her room, but it was heavy, and an heirloom Mrs. Porter prized. Breaking it might even be grounds for eviction, and Lark had nowhere to go.

      She descended the back stairs as quietly as she could and gasped when she saw a man-shaped shadow over by the cookstove.

      Autry?

      Rowdy Rhodes stepped out of the darkness, moonlight from the window over the sink catching in his fair hair. He moved to the center of the room and lit the simple kerosene lantern on the table.

      Lark laid a hand to her heart, which had seized like a broken gear in some machine, and silently commanded it to beat again.

      “I’ve put some wood on the fire,” Rowdy said quietly, offering no apology for startling her. “Go on over and stand next to the stove.”

      Lark dashed past him, huddled in the first reaching fingers of warmth, dancing a little, because the kitchen floor, like the one above stairs, was coated with a fine layer of frost.

      Rowdy was fully clothed, right down to his boots.

      “I th-thought you’d moved out,” Lark said. “Gone to live in the cottage behind the marshal’s office.” He’d told them about his new job at supper that evening, said he’d still be taking his evening meals at Mrs. Porter’s most nights.

      He didn’t answer right away, but instead ducked into his quarters behind the kitchen and came out with a woolen blanket, which he draped around Lark’s shoulders. “I paid Mrs. Porter for a week’s lodging,” he said. “Since it wouldn’t be gentlemanly to ask for my two dollars back, I decided to stay on till I’d used it up.”

      Pardner came, stretching and yawning, out of the back room. Nuzzled Lark’s right thigh with his nose and lay down close to the stove.

      Rowdy dragged a chair over and eased Lark into it. Crouched to take her bare feet in his hands and chafe some warmth into them.

      Lark knew she ought to pull away—it was unseemly to let a man touch her that way—but she couldn’t. It felt too good, and Rowdy’s callused fingers kindled a scary, blessed heat inside her, one she wouldn’t have wanted to explain to the school board.

      “What are you doing up in the middle of the night?” Rowdy asked, leaving off the rubbing to tuck the blanket snugly beneath her feet. While he waited for Lark’s reply, he took a chunk of wood from the box, opened the stove door, and fed the growing blaze. Then he pulled the coffeepot over the heat.

      “I sometimes have trouble sleeping,” Lark admitted, sounding a little choked. Her throat felt raw, and she wanted, for some unaccountable reason, to break down and weep. The man had done her a simple kindness, that was all. She was making far too much of it.

      “Me, too,” Rowdy confessed, with good-natured resignation.

      Heat began to surge audibly through the coffeepot. The stuff would be stout since the grounds had been steeping for hours, ever since supper.

      Taking care not to make too much noise, Rowdy drew up another chair, placed it next to Lark’s.

      “Makes a man wish for the south country,” he said. “It never gets this cold down around Phoenix and Tucson.”

      Lark swallowed, nodded. The scent of very strong coffee laced the chilly air. “I ought to be used to it, after Denver,” she said, and then drew in a quick breath, as if to pull the words back into her mouth, hold them prisoner there, so they could never be said.

      “Denver,” Rowdy mused, smiling a little. “I thought you said you came from St. Louis.”

      “I did,” Lark said, her cheeks burning. What was the matter with her? She’d allowed this man to caress her bare feet. Then she’d slipped and mentioned Denver, a potentially disastrous revelation. “I was born there. In St. Louis, I mean.”

      “Tell me about your folks,” Rowdy said. He left his chair, went to fetch two cups, and poured coffee for them both. Handed a cup to Lark.

      She had all that time to plan her answer, but it still came out bristly. “My mother was widowed when I was seven. She and I moved in with my grandfather.” Lark locked her hands around her cup of coffee, savoring the warmth and the pungent aroma.

      “Were you happy?”

      Lark blinked. “Happy?”

      Rowdy grinned. Took a sip of his coffee. Waited.

      “I guess so,” Lark said, suddenly and profoundly aware that no one had ever asked her that question before. She hadn’t even asked it of herself, as far as she recollected. “We had a roof over our heads, and plenty to eat. Mama had a lot to do, running Grandfather’s house—he was a doctor and saw patients in a back room—but she loved me.”

      “She never remarried?” Rowdy asked easily. At Lark’s puzzled expression, he prompted, “Your mother?”

      Lark shook her head, telling herself to be wary but wanting to let words spill out of her, topsy-turvy, at the same time. “She was too busy to look for another husband. Men came courting at first, but I don’t think Mama ever encouraged any of them.”

      “Is she still living?”

      Lark swallowed again, even though she’d yet to drink any of her coffee. “No,” she said sadly. “She took a fever—probably caught it from one of Grandfather’s patients—and died when I was fourteen.”

      “Did you stay on with your grandfather after that?”

      Lark resented Rowdy’s questions and whatever it was inside her that seemed to compel her to answer them. “No. He sent me away to boarding school.”

      “That sounds lonesome.”

      Emotion welled up inside Lark unbidden. Made her sinuses ache and her voice come out sounding scraped and bruised. “It wasn’t,” she lied.

      Rowdy sighed, spent some time meandering through his own thoughts.

      Lark snuggled deeper into her blanket and tried not to remember boarding school. She’d loved the lessons and the plenitude of books and hated everything else about the place.

      Pardner, slumbering at their feet, snored contentedly.

      Rowdy chuckled at the sound. “At least he has a clear conscience,” he said easily.

      “Don’t you?” Lark asked, feeling prickly again now that she was warming up a little. If Rowdy Rhodes was impugning her conscience, he had even more nerve than she’d already credited him with.

      Rowdy leaned and added more wood to the fire. “I’ve done some things in my life that I wish I hadn’t,” he said.

      Lark sighed. Why did he have to be so darn likable? She’d been a lot more comfortable around Rowdy Rhodes before he’d warmed her feet with his hands. “So have I,” she heard herself say.

      They sat for a long time in a companionable, if slightly uncomfortable, silence.

      “Maybe I’ll go someplace warm when I leave here,” Rowdy said presently.

      So he was just passing through, as she’d suspected. And devoutly hoped.

      Why, then, did the news fill her with sudden, poignant sorrow?

      “Mrs. Porter will certainly be disappointed when you leave,” Lark said.

      “But you’ll be relieved, won’t you, Lark?”

      “Yes,” she replied quickly but without enough conviction.

      Rowdy smiled to himself. “Why don’t you tell me what—or who—you’re so afraid of? Maybe I could help.”

      “Why should you?”

      “Because I’m the marshal, for one thing. And because I’m a human being, for another.”

      Lark swallowed. “I don’t trust you,” she said.