Early Dawn (31 page)

When he had washed up and joined her at the fire, Eden had a five-course meal ready—seasoned steak slathered with morel-mushroom gravy, pan-roasted groundnuts, mountain asparagus, simmered cattail shoots, and a mixed green salad. Matthew’s eyes widened when she handed him a filled plate and a steaming cup of coffee.

“This is a meal fit for a king.”

Pleased, Eden said, “My mother is fascinated by wild flora and passed her interest on to all of us. I learned a lot about Colorado’s edible plants during my visits to No Name. We went on horseback rides and lots of walks. She’s a font of information and has taught me most of what she knows.” She swung an arm. “God’s general store. If you know what to look for, there are all sorts of things to eat out here.”

He took a bite of cattail, chewed for a moment, and then arched his eyebrows. “These are
good
. I won’t complain tomorrow about you stopping to collect food.” He murmured even more appreciatively when he tasted the groundnuts. “What are these?”

Eden chewed and swallowed. “Indian potatoes. My mother calls them groundnuts. They sprout underground from a vine with purple flowers. You can harvest them year-round, but they’re best in the fall. My sister-in-law Caitlin gathers them every autumn to use over the winter. They’re supposedly more nutritious than regular potatoes.”

“Nutritious or not, they’re flat tasty.”

He made similar comments about the asparagus and salad, but he especially loved the tender venison steaks in mushroom gravy.

“I can’t believe you put a meal like this together with stuff you found,” he said.

“I didn’t do it all by myself. You helped. My thought is to utilize as many wild plants as we can to make our rations from town last longer.”

He nodded. Then he grew quiet, his expression solemn as he ate. When his plate was clean, he glanced up and flashed a crooked, decidedly sheepish grin. “I have to apologize again. I should never have said you don’t have what it takes to be a rancher’s wife.” A twinkle danced in his eyes. “You’ve been dragged from pillar to post for so long I’ve lost track of the days, the last two of them pure hell. Yet, here we are, eating a meal you mostly put together by finding food along the trail.”

“Well, all my trimmings would have tasted bland without your contribution of the fresh meat. Let’s just say it was a joint effort and pat each other on the back.”

“I definitely don’t want to make the mistake of patting you on the head.”

She gulped back a giggle. “Will I ever hear the end of that?”

“Probably not.” He fell into another brief silence. “I don’t really blame you for getting your back up that morning. I meant to tell you so that night, but we ran into the snakes, and I never got the chance.”

She tried to speak, but he cut her off.

“It was high-handed and sneaky of me to make a decision and then put off telling you for so long. I honestly wasn’t playing games, though. I just knew how exhausted you were, and I figured it wouldn’t be news you’d be glad to hear, so I kept it from you for as long as I could.”

Eden took a thoughtful sip of coffee. “I overreacted.” She slanted him an apologetic smile. “It
wasn’t
news I wanted to hear. I’d been comforting myself with the thought that I could do anything for a little while longer. When I realized that a little while might be extended into weeks—well, it was overwhelming. Your comment earlier about my not cutting the mustard as a rancher’s wife was still bothering me, too. The combination of it all—my exhaustion, my stung pride, and facing weeks on the trail—well, it sent me reeling, I guess. The next instant, I’d moved from annoyance into a full-blown temper.” She lifted her shoulders. “I have a quick temper, and when it gets the better of me, I’m not always reasonable. I insisted on saddling the horse to prove something. I’m not sure what, exactly, but it made sense to me at the time.”

He chuckled. “I understood.” He turned the tin cup in his big hands. After gazing into the dregs of his coffee, he looked at her again. “I shouldn’t have said that to you, Eden. It was a complete lie, and I really am sorry.” He pushed up the brim of his hat and rubbed a hand over his eyes. “The truth is, you’d make any man a fine wife. You’ve got more grit than any woman I know, including my mother, and she has enough sand to smooth a rough-cut board.”

“You just don’t wish to be the unlucky fellow who gets saddled with me?” she asked with a lightness of tone that she was far from feeling.

Again, he took his time before speaking. His eyes shimmered like polished pewter in the firelight when he finally met her gaze again. “I’d like to be that man,” he said, his voice gone gravelly. “And just having the thought in my head scares the ever-loving hell out of me. Does that make sense?”

It touched Eden that he would admit he felt afraid. A lot of men would rather bite off their tongues. “Perfect sense.”

“Anyhow.” He gestured limply with his hand. “Like I said before, I felt cornered that morning. When you look at me, I see tenderness in your eyes.” He swallowed hard, his larynx diving and then bobbing upward again. “You make me feel in ways I don’t want to feel—feelings I never thought I’d shake hands with again. So I took a shot at you. I’m just not ready to go there again, Eden, not yet anyway, and maybe I never will be.”

Recalling her recurring urge to scour her skin when she bathed, Eden could sympathize with how he felt, perhaps better than he knew. “I guess that’s two of us. As strongly as I’m attracted to you, Matthew, I’m not sure I’m ready to take it anywhere, either.”

He tossed away the dregs of his coffee. “You’ll get there, honey. You just need time and the right man to help you find your way.”

Watching him refill his cup, Eden wondered,
What if you’re the right man?
But it was a question she didn’t voice. “I’m sorry I made you feel cornered,” she told him softly. “I’ll try never to do that again.”

Cocking a dark eyebrow at her, he smiled slightly. “You want the truth? Meeting you has been one of the best things that’s happened to me in a very long time. You take me places in my mind where I don’t want to go and force me to look at my life from a new perspective. You’ve given me a lot to mull over.”

“I have a lot to mull over as well.” Eden pushed up on one knee to refill her coffee cup. As she sat back, she said, “Let’s make a bargain.”

“What kind of bargain?”

“To just be friends. No pressure, no expectations, and no disappointments if friendship is all we ever share.” Resuming her cross-legged position, she hunched forward to rest her arms on her knees, the cup cradled between her palms. “You’re a wonderful friend, Matthew, and hopefully, you feel the same way about me. Just friends. That way, neither of us will ever feel cornered. Things will just happen—or they won’t.”

“Speaking of things happening . . .” His voice trailed away, and his gaze chased off into the darkness. “Have you ever?”

Eden didn’t understand the question. “Have I ever what?”

“Been with someone? With a man, I mean.”

“In the biblical sense?”

He chuckled. “Where I hail from, the Bible doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot to do with it, but, yes, in the biblical sense, have you ever been with a man?”

Eden’s neck went hot. “John and I kissed, but I always said no to anything more. A lady saves that for marriage. According to Ace, a man isn’t inclined to buy the cow when he can get the milk for free.”

“A very smart man, your brother.”

He ended the conversation by starting the after-meal cleanup. Eden went to help, and they worked side by side in companionable silence. When Matthew spread out the bedroll, Eden felt drawn to it like a shaving of iron to a magnet. She sat on the pallet to remove her boots and jacket, then doffed her gun belt and hat.

“After I bathed, I couldn’t get the binding tight enough around my ribs,” she told him. “Would you mind doing me up again?”

“Not a bit. Knot the shirt under your protuberances and stand up.”

Eden smiled to herself as she tied the shirttails snugly beneath her breasts. It was so like Matthew to attempt to ease her self-consciousness. “This is highly improper, you know. After all else that’s happened to me, I know it’s absurd to fuss about proprieties, but the dos and don’ts have been drilled into my head ever since my mother started trying to make me into a lady. In San Francisco, a
real
lady wears gloves in public, and if the wind lifts her skirts and shows her ankles, she’s in danger of damaging her reputation. Just think what people might say if they could see me baring my middle night after night.”

Matthew’s mouth tipped in an understanding smile. “I don’t fault you for feeling self-conscious. I’m a little uneasy about it myself. Until now, all my friends have had hairy bellies.”

Eden nearly choked on a startled laugh. He grinned lopsidedly at her and began wrapping her ribs. When his fingers grazed her skin, Eden snapped taut, not from fear this time. A delicious, tingling warmth moved through her and pooled like liquid fire low in her belly.

As if Matthew felt it, too, he hesitated and shot her a piercing look. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought his hands trembled slightly as he finished the task.

“Thank you, Matthew. It feels so much better with the binding.”

She’d snuggled down under the blanket and jackets when Matthew joined her. He looped a hard arm over her waist, pressed full-length against her, and toyed with her damp hair, his touch as light and airy as the brush of a bird’s wing. Eden felt that fiery, tingling sensation again. She tried to analyze why she was suddenly starting to have such feelings, but she was too exhausted. Her eyes fell closed on a wave of blissful contentment. It felt so wonderful to have him hold her again.

The last thought that flittered through her weary mind before sleep overcame her was that perhaps she was more ready to make love with Matthew Coulter than she was prepared to admit, even to herself.

 

From that night on, Matthew and Eden began forging a strong friendship. With each passing day, she came to admire his wilderness savvy even more. He continued to keep them supplied with meat by hunting with a makeshift spear, or with his bow and arrows when they needed larger game. She was grateful for the food and continued to do her part—collecting wild roots and other edible plants to round out their meals, gathering firewood, helping to care for the horses, keeping the canteen filled with fresh water, and helping to cook and clean up, morning and night. In addition to so many hours each day in the saddle, the extra tasks exhausted her, but even when her feet were dragging, she forced herself to keep going. To survive, it would take both of their efforts, and she didn’t want to let Matthew down.

Matthew’s respect for Eden grew in equal measure. Ten days after the cougar incident, Eden removed the stitches from his chest. The wounds had nearly healed, and whenever he stripped off and saw the angry red marks, he had to give her credit for a fine stitch. She’d done a fabulous job of sewing him up, a lot better than the doc had done on his face. She’d already saved his life once, and it was never far from his mind that she might yet again. She also impressed him in other ways. Climbing off her horse to collect edibles clearly exhausted her, yet she continued to do it, day after day. On more than one occasion, he glanced back to see her nodding off in the saddle, so drained of energy that she couldn’t stay awake. He knew how badly broken ribs could hurt, because he’d suffered with them himself, and he’d still been in agony after three weeks of bed rest. Yet Eden never complained. The only way he could tell she was suffering was when she held her side as she moved.

At night Matthew did all that he could to lighten her workload, but he quickly came to discover that Eden truly was one of the most stubborn females he’d ever met. If he took over the meal preparation, she found another chore to do, often one more difficult than cooking would have been. While he understood her need to contribute, her determination to do so became a constant worry for him. Now that her sunburn had faded, she seemed pale, and he thought she might be losing weight. Some evenings, no matter how tasty the food, she pushed it around on her plate and didn’t really eat much.

At night after the work was done, they sometimes sat cross-legged facing each other, knees almost touching, to play checkers, using squares traced in the dirt and rocks as their game pieces. Because their board wasn’t color-toned, it was challenging to remember which squares were supposed to be red or black, and their mistakes led to merciless teasing.

“You little
cheat
,” Matthew accused.

Eden laughed. “I am not a cheat. I’m merely
creative
.”

When checkers didn’t appeal, they switched to hilarious bouts of tic-tac-toe or hangman, using the light of the fire to see their scratchings in the dirt. One night Matthew chose the word
utensils
to baffle his pretty opponent. When she finally gave up and he told her the word she’d been trying to guess, she gave him a sharp, wondering look.

“You are a complete
fake
.”

“How so?”

“That first morning when I asked if you had any utensils, you pretended not to know the meaning of the word! Now I discover you not only know the meaning, but how to spell it, too!”

Matthew couldn’t help but grin. “I never said I didn’t know the meaning of the word. It’s just that where I come from, we don’t call cups ‘utensils.’”

“What do you call them, then?”

“Cups.”

Clutching her sore ribs, Eden chortled with laughter, tears of mirth streaming down her cheeks. When she caught her breath, she squeezed out, “I suppose there’s something to be said for keeping things simple.”

Some nights, instead of engaging in games, Matthew played the harmonica while Eden sang along. When the tunes he knew grew repetitious, she hummed some new ones for him, and he was able to play them by ear. Other times, they made up stories, some funny, others scary.