Lake of Fire (11 page)

A few seconds passed.

Cord nodded toward the pole lying on the sand. “Pick that up, find the hook, carefully, and thread this fellow onto it.”

Laura’s lips set in a line. He was toying with her, and she shouldn’t care to impress him, not when she would never see him again after this afternoon.

She reached for the pole.

Hook in her left hand, she extended her right toward Cord’s outstretched palm and its wriggling burden. Was that a hint of merriment at the corners of his mouth?

Before she could lose her nerve, Laura grabbed the moist worm, slammed the point of the hook through its narrow body—and into the pad of her thumb.

“Ow!” Pain and a drop of blood’s welling were
simultaneous.

Cord’s chuckle, which had begun when she seized the worm, choked off as he took in her misfortune. “Let me have it.”

“No.”

Laura put her thumb to her mouth and sucked the salty blood. The puncture smarted but not as much as her pride. “Stand back,” she instructed. “I’m going to catch a fish.”

Thirty minutes later, Laura lay in the sun and watched Cord through half-closed, sleepy eyes. The trout she had pulled in lay beside his, the larger of the two.

“Just my luck,” he said, “to have rescued a woman who not only kills a bear but shows me up fishing.”

With efficient sharp strokes of his knife, Cord sliced open the bellies of the fish and gutted them. A pair of gulls seemed to materialize from nowhere to quarrel over the entrails, strutting and pecking at one another.

Cord gathered wood and built a bonfire on the sand. He cut a strong green sapling from the thicket behind the beach and skewered the trout on the stick. Sitting on his heels, he fed the fire larger sticks until it blazed hotly.

Across the lake in the high mountains, a plume of smoke rose lazily in the afternoon light. “What is that?” Laura pointed.

“Forest fire on Mount Doane. Some of the soldiers are probably trying to put it out. Bit early in the season, but last year’s snowpack was only half that of the year before.”

“You know a lot about the park.”

“Gustavus Doane is the military man who escorted the Washburn Expedition in 1870. His journal of their trip gave him the credit for naming Wonderland.” Looking at Laura, Cord cocked a brow. “Those of us who lived in these mountains before they were ‘discovered’ take issue with some people’s terms.”

“You said your father was a geologist?”

“Trained at some college in the east. I don’t know much about it. He never went back there after he married my mother.” Cord prodded the fish with a fork.

“His family didn’t approve his choice of a wife?”

Without answering, he removed the stick, beheaded and boned each trout, and served fillets on tin plates.

Laura decided not to question him further and turned her attention to the meal. Tender and flaky, the pink fish reminded her of both salmon and trout.

When they had eaten, Cord set the plates aside.

Time was running out. He would douse the fire and kick sand over it, whistle up Dante from where he cropped grass, and they’d be on their way.

Moving deliberately, Cord came and straddled the rock behind Laura. They’d been as close, closer, when sharing Dante’s saddle, but this was different. His hands slid gently over the tops of her shoulders.

For an instant, she thought of pulling away, but the decorum she’d learned in Chicago felt as far away as the city itself. The sun made diamond facets on the lake, shining in her eyes until the beauty made her ache with mingled joy and sadness.

Cord drew her closer, and she thought he might have murmured her name. The afternoon breeze calmed and turned Thumb into a mirror. His arms came around her, and they watched the play of ripples lapping the sand.

“Why did you ride away from the steamboat?” she asked.

“Fishing,” he replied solemnly. “Fishing!”

“You’re fishing.” Cord turned her to him, put a hand beneath her chin, and tilted her face up. “You want to hear me say I wasn’t ready to give you up yet.”

For the rest of her life, Laura promised, she would remember this, that little halting space between knowing Cord was going to touch her and feeling his lips, warm against her temple.

“You want to hear me say how beautiful you were when I saw you rising naked out of the pool like Venus.”

Cord couldn’t decide whether her indrawn gasp was one of innocence or the calculated art of a practiced harlot. They’d been through so much in such a short time, cheated death and shared the incomparable
beauty of his land.

He told himself it didn’t matter who they were or where they went tomorrow. He wanted to take her down with him on his sheepskin bedroll, to keep her with him all of another night and another, to watch warm cherry light flicker over the smooth-looking skin he’d seen at the pool last evening.

The soft cotton of his shirt enveloped her, a powerful intimacy that made him want to protect her, from outlaws and anyone else who might challenge his claim.

She clung to his shoulders, and Cord heard what might have been a sob catch in her throat. The little breathy sound reminded him of another who had whispered his name on St. Paul’s spring air.

One who waited for him at the Lake Hotel.

Laura had never wanted anything more than to have Cord teach her what happened between a man and a woman, but she felt him hesitate again, the way he had last night.

More of that mystery boiling beneath his surface. She drew back and watched his expression alter, the proud ascetic planes turning harder.

“Cord …” Her voice came out trembling and husky; she’d never heard it that way. The sun slipped behind a cloud, and the shade in the pine-smelling woods deepened.

He closed his eyes, as though they stung. For a fleeting instant, Laura thought his emotion might have been pain.

Reaching a tentative hand, she touched his denimclad thigh.

He jerked his leg away, though he still touched her shoulders.

Laura looked at the silent forest and the still mirror of lake. The two of them alone for days, her nerves on edge from the savagery of the outlaws and being in the backwoods. Had she imagined he wanted her?

Her woman’s instinct believed he did, but he would never beg or steal a kiss the way her Chicago suitors had. No, Cord would be hopeless at drawingroom games. Not for him the niceties of courtship; with him it would be all or nothing.

Well, at least she knew the answer to the questions cascading through her. There was nothing for them, no meeting place for a mountain man and the mistress of Fielding House.

And though he had been the one to pull back, she could at least hold her head up the way Aunt Fanny said a woman must.

“Let us go, then,” Laura said in a low voice.

Cord took his hands from her as if his palms had been burned, rose, and stalked away. Like a nightmare in which her arms and legs were too heavy to move, she sat where she was and watched him go to Dante. The sun reappeared from behind the clouds, slanting through the pines.

She heard Cord speak gently to his horse. The contrast was more terrible when he spoke to her in a distant tone. “It’s an hour to the Lake Hotel. I’ll have you there by dark.”

Cord guided Dante toward the shoulder of the well-traveled road along the lakeshore, while Laura held on behind him with her hands at his waist. His rigid posture made her feel as though he were made of wood.

Across royal blue water, the Lake Hotel stood on a promontory. Three stories high, its yellow made a bright contrast to the forest.

Though their last moments together were slipping away like the sun from the afternoon sky, Cord’s eyes remained on the wheeling gulls. “Not much farther.”

With a drumming of horses’ hooves, a group of blue-coated cavalrymen overtook and passed them at a gallop, casting a cursory glance in their direction. Fishermen walked up the shoulder of the road carrying rods and buckets. The youngest of their group, a boy of perhaps six, had the honor of carrying their stringer of trout.

Laura looked away from this reminder of their angling expedition.

A horse and wagon passed with a load of sightseers chatting about their tour of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Cyclists pedaled in the gathering darkness.

Dante reached the stretch of Grand Loop Road that ran along the shore; a rustic wooden sign indicated the hotel. Beside a dock that stretched a hundred feet into the lake, the
Alexandra
was tied up alongside stacks of wood for stoking her firebox. Adjacent, a group of smaller piers were home to a flotilla of canoes and wooden rowboats outfitted for fishing.

The lake faded from ultramarine to purple.

Cord turned Dante up the hotel drive. Atop the widow’s walk on the third-floor roof, a man and woman stood with their heads close together, silhouettes against the darkening sky. In the drive alongside the long wooden verandah, a stagecoach discharged passengers. The glow of electric lights beckoned inside the glass doors to the main lobby.

“I don’t even know your last name,” Laura said.

Cord reined Dante in. “I’d take you to the servants’ entrance,” he was polite, correct, “but I don’t know where it is.”

Laura slid to the ground.

“That won’t be necessary.” She managed to match his impersonal note and marched through the main entrance into the brilliantly lit lobby.

F
orrest Fielding regarded the hand he’d been dealt with disgust. The card table in the lobby of the Lake Hotel had been in the sun when he had rounded out a foursome for poker; now night had fallen.

He had entertained such hopes on the train west, playing and winning the big pots in the paneled parlor car on the Northern Pacific, thinking his recent spate of bad luck had been about to change.

Until three days ago when Sergeant Larry Nevers had hailed the stage.

How could his proper daughter have deceived him? Well, perhaps
proper
wasn’t the word for Laura. He often saw in her a longing for adventure that might have been acceptable in a son. Like the plainspoken way she rejected Joseph Kane and other suitors, and the fire in her eyes when she viewed photographer Henry Jackson’s studies of Wyoming.