“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.
“Well,” Rowdy sighed, taking up the poker, opening the stove door and stirring the fire inside, “that much is true, anyway.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“In a word, yes.”
Lark felt an inexplicable need to convince him. “I did grow up in St. Louis, in my grandfather’s home. I went to boarding school, too.”
“And you lived in Denver. Beyond those things, though, you’ve been lying through your pretty teeth.”
Lark was indignant, and she forcibly suppressed the little thrill that rose inside her at the compliment couched in his accusation, as she had the delicious, strangely urgent languor she’d felt when he touched her feet. “I cannot think why you’re interested in my personal affairs,” she said, as haughtily as she could.
“You’d have been better off not to be so secretive,” Rowdy observed. “When somebody presents a puzzle, I have to figure it out. It’s part of my nature, I guess.”
“Maybe you’re just nosy.”
He laughed, low and soft. Something quivered in resonance, low in Lark’s belly, like a piano string vibrating because the one next to it had been struck. “Maybe I am,” he agreed. “Nevertheless, there will come a day—or perhaps a night—when I know everything there is to know about you, Lark Morgan, and a few things you don’t even know about yourself.”
The implication, though subtle, was unmistakable. Lark was suddenly too warm, and would have thrown off the blanket if it hadn’t meant sitting in close proximity to Rowdy in a gossamer nightgown and a woefully inadequate matching wrapper.
An achy heat suffused her as she imagined herself—the images flooded her mind and body, quite against her will—naked beneath Rowdy Rhodes’s strong, agile frame.
Worse, he knew what she was thinking. She could tell by the look in his eyes and the amused way he quirked up one side of his mouth, not quite but almost grinning.
“You are the most audacious man I have ever encountered,” she said.
“I’m a few other things you’ve never encountered, too,” he drawled.
She stood up, swayed, flinched when Rowdy steadied her with one hand.
“Sit down,” he said, “before you trip over that blanket and take a header into the stove.”
“I don’t have to listen to—”
He tugged on the blanket, and she landed, not in her own chair, but square on his lap. For a moment she was too stunned to struggle. She simply stared at him.
“Just let me hold you,” he said.
If he’d made a move to kiss her, or touched her in any inappropriate place, she’d have had some way of defending herself. As it was, he simply wrapped his arms loosely around her and pressed her head to his shoulder with one gentle hand.
She was helpless against him.
He propped his chin on top of her head. “There, now,” he said soothingly.
Lark closed her eyes, bit her lower lip and fought back tears. Other men had held her, particularly Autry, but never in that undemanding way. No, never once in all her twenty-seven years.
Perhaps Rowdy knew that had he risen to his feet, carried her to his bed and made love to her, she wouldn’t have resisted him. Perhaps he didn’t.
Lark finally stopped shivering, relaxed against his hard chest, cosseted inside the blanket, and promptly fell asleep.
* * *
HE WOKE HER AT DAWN, figuring Mai
