“You were all alone out here through the winter?”
“With my stack of books, so not all alone.” He’d been so alone it had nearly broken him. He didn’t admit it, but the ache of that loneliness had carved itself into Trace’s soul. He wondered if he’d have survived the weight of it if not for those precious books. He wondered if he’d been a little bit crazed and that had prompted him to be guardian of that trail and keep himself secret even when he saved a wagon train. He could have gone down. He could have ridden on with the survivors.
“And then more years?”
Trace nodded. “I reckon I’d turned half wild by the time Adam came along. My clothes were rags. I’d trapped some furs and brought down deer for food and the hides, built that ramshackle cabin and the barn and made some furniture. With no horse at first, and then I got Black when he was a youngster. I took to running the hills to check snares I’d set, and while I did I learned the land.”
“Running the hills?” She made it sound like maybe he was an animal. And maybe he was. Living in a cave, dressed in fur. The books separated him from being pure beast, he hoped.
“Yep. Found some likely places. No one else knew about them, and after I’d staked my homestead, I ended up owning a lot of high valleys.”
“That’s how you could run almost all day, leading us on your horse?”
“I still do a lot of running. I like the land and—strange, I reckon, but I like the feel of my feet pounding on it. That first winter, in a cave, well, I’d lived in the wilderness all my life, in Tennessee, then Missouri, now here. So I knew how to start a fire.” That fire had in some ways been his friend, too. He worked hard to keep it alive. He’d talked to it. He didn’t admit any of that; he’d said enough about his strange loneliness and what he claimed for friends and family.
“Before the worst of the snow slammed down, I found some roots and dried berries, pine nuts. I had to fight a bear that tried to use my cave for a winter den—it was probably his cave. It was a fight I won just by, honestly, the miraculous hand of God. I skinned him out and had a bearskin blanket, and the bear meat kept me going when the snow was so deep I had to dig a tunnel to get out of the cave. And when I did dig out, I found nothing I wanted to see. The whole world was eyeball-deep in snow. The cave was big enough for me and not much else. I stored the bear meat in the snowdrift clogging the cave entrance and concentrated on not freezing to death. I lived like that until spring.”
Deb made a little sound of distress.
Trace quit fussing about his lonely years to reassure her he’d been fine, though at the time he was about the furthest thing from fine a man could be. He considered telling her about his guardian duties and how he planned to ride out and hunt the men who’d hit her wagon train. But then he hesitated when his gaze caught on hers. Foolish though it was, he believed that if he looked deep enough, long enough, he’d see something that would answer a lot of questions he’d never thought to ask. Questions that, when answered, would explain his whole life.
“After all that, here you are. With land and a home and a ranch. Good friends. And with the heart of a true hero.”
She was going to thank him again. She’d done it so many times it was making him squirm. He’d helped her, sure. But any decent man would’ve done the same. Any one of his hired men. In fact, the ones who would not have helped her were few and far between and the lowest type of scum. Which perfectly described the men who’d attacked her wagon train.
He was tired of being thanked. He couldn’t stand it anymore. He wanted almost desperately to stop words he didn’t deserve. And that was the only reason he could imagine when he leaned down, then stopped, realizing he was about to kiss her.
He barely even knew what a kiss was. There’d been mention of it in the books he read, but he’d almost never spoken to a woman or been around one. Still, the whole notion of it came real natural to him.
She pulled back, then stared at him while he braced himself to get slapped. Then she brought both hands up to his face and laid them gently on his cheeks, possibly the nicest, sweetest moment of his life.
The moment stretched and grew and filled his head with all sorts of notions, then as suddenly as it had started, it ended. Deb stumbled back from him so fast he rushed forward and kept her from falling, then let go before she could run straight out the door.
“What were you doing?” She pressed both hands to her mouth, which only drew his attention to what they’d almost done . . . well, as if he could forget, so it didn’t matter.
“I—I
