felt a niggle of worry low in his belly. He knew how it felt to be numb with grief and, for an awful minute, wondered if she intended to freeze to death. He couldn’t let her stand outside much longer, but the thought of having her in his house was unbearable. Closing his eyes, he counted to ten and then to twenty, praying she’d be gone.
When he found the courage to look, he saw her walking down the hill through the ankle-deep snow. Heavy flakes dotted the shoulders of her cloak and he worried that her feet were wet. Even wrapped in heavy wool, she had to be shivering. When she reached the barn, she looked back at the cabin. Her eyes, he remembered, were bright blue, but in the dim light they were hollow and dark. He slammed his fist against the wall. He didn’t want her here. With a defiant tilt of her chin, she walked into the barn and closed the door.
He wondered if she’d find the matches and lantern he’d put on the shelf for her, and if she’d burrow in the fresh straw for warmth. The temperature would plummet before dawn, and the walls had holes the size of his fist. He’d made them in fits of rage.
She had to be hungry. The thought unnerved him, but he refused to give in to the small voice urging him to invite her inside. Loneliness was the price he paid for the worst decision of his life.
His shoulders sagged with a familiar guilt as he tossed two logs on the fire, stripped down to his long johns and rolled under the comforter covering the wide bed. In the silence of the night, echoes of the hymn she had sung drifted into his usual thoughts of Laura and the children. He considered going out to check on the widow, but he didn’t want to see her clear blue eyes. Besides, he reasoned, even a dog had the sense to get out of a storm. If Mrs. Dawson wanted to come in out of the cold, she could knock on his door. He might not like it, but he wasn’t quite heartless enough to turn her away.
Ethan knew how cold it could be at night. His ranch was situated on a high plateau in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Some winters were as dry as the southwestern desert. In other years his land endured as much snow as the Rockies. This winter had been mild and the spring storm would have been welcome, except for the woman in his barn.
Curled against the rough wall, he wrapped the blanket around his feet. The fire had burned down to embers and the cabin was nearly black. Sleep came slowly, bringing with it vivid pictures of his family. But instead of recalling happier times as he usually did, he relived the day they died. Vivid and harsh, the memories followed him into an exhausted sleep until the gray light of dawn filled the cabin.
Waking up with a jolt, he thought of the widow.
Boiling mad, he tossed back the blanket and pulled on his clothes. Just as he did every morning, he stood straight and stared at himself in the heart-shaped mirror hanging over the bed, trying to remember the man he had once been. It was a hopeless cause, and today it was worse because of the woman in his barn.
Guilt burned in his belly like a banked fire as he hunched into his coat and tugged on the gloves Laura had knitted back in Missouri. Pushing down on his hat, Ethan opened the door and groaned at the sight of knee-high snow. His gaze rose to the barn. Half buried in the drifts, it looked like a sinking ship, and his heart sank with it. The trail to Midas would be impassable for days and muddy for weeks.
The thought of having Mrs. Dawson on his property for another minute, let alone a week, turned his mood from sour to rancid. Fighting his temper, he stomped across the yard and stormed into the barn. He expected to see the widow wrapped in her heavy cloak in the pile of fresh straw, but she wasn’t there.
“Mrs. Dawson?”
The silence accused him of being a coldhearted son of a bitch. Had she wandered into the storm to die? He knew how it felt to fight that temptation. Only his pride and a sincere fear of hell had kept him from eating a bullet when Laura and the children had died. If Jayne Dawson had chosen that path, the decision was hers. They would both have to live with the choices they had made.
The thought gave Ethan no comfort. He made his voice louder. “Mrs. Dawson!”
A low moan drew him to the back of the barn. Peering into an empty stall, he saw a filthy horse blanket and the bottom edge of the widow’s navy-blue cloak.
“Lady, get up.”
She stirred beneath the blanket, then bolted upright as a chest-deep cough erupted from her throat. She covered her mouth with both hands, but the air still shook with the ferociousness of the coughing spell. Fever burned in her cheeks.
Ethan wanted to look away, but he couldn’t. Her eyes were the color of the sky at high noon, and her straw-blond hair had frozen into a tangle. Remorse burned from his heart to his head. He treated his two horses better than he had treated this woman. What if it had been Laura in need, or his daughter?
He cleared his throat to soften his gravelly voice. “Ma’am, you need help.”
Struggling to breathe, she clutched at the blanket. “I am so sorry…to do this to you…I shouldn’t have—”
“Don’t waste your breath.” He couldn’t bear that high-pitched wheeze. “Can you wait while I do chores?”
Nodding, she struggled to her feet and stood while he filled the feed bins and used an old broom handle to poke through the ice covering the water buckets. He needed to muck out the stalls, but it would have to wait. Mrs. Dawson looked ready to faint.
He leaned the stick against the wall. “We need to get inside.”
Instinctively he held the door for her, just as he had done a thousand times for his wife. The widow’s skirt brushed across his boots, then she waited for him to take the lead. Her eyes barely reached his shoulder. She’d never be able to match his stride, and so he swung his boot from side to side to kick a path for her.
He couldn’t hear her footsteps, only a light wheezing and the swish of her skirt. When she fainted, he barely heard the thump of her body sinking into the drift.
“Oh, hell,” he muttered.
Dropping to his knees, he yanked off one glove and touched her cheek with the back of his hand. Feverish heat burned straight through to his bones, and he saw that the collar of her shirtwaist was wet with perspiration. He shook her shoulder and called her name, but she didn’t make a sound.
The last thing in the world he wanted to do was to carry her, but what choice did he have? Sliding one arm beneath her shoulders and the other under her knees, he rocked back on his heels and lifted her from the snow.
As her face rolled against his chest, he saw bits of straw stuck in her hair and sleep creases on her cheeks. He wanted to scream at the heavens as he trudged to the cabin, pried the door open with his elbow and carried her to his bed. The unwashed sheets still bore the mark of his body and the torment of his dreams. It seemed wrong to set her down in such a private place, but he did it anyway.
She moaned and muttered how sorry she was, whispered Hank’s name and called for her mother. He had to get her into dry clothes, but the cabin was barely warmer than the barn, and it made sense to leave her in the cloak until he had a fire roaring in the hearth.
He poked the coals and added two handfuls of kindling so it would catch fast and burn hot. The scrap box he kept by the rock fireplace held next to nothing and he kicked himself for being lazy about filling it. Hunching in his coat, he made a quick trip to the woodpile behind the cabin, stacked the logs on the hearth and laid a piece of dry pine on the embers. It caught with a whoosh, pushing heat into the room as Ethan looked at the woman on his bed.
She
