Page 84 of The Widow and the Wanted

Boone points at me. “Proper reaction.”

“It crushed your leg?” I ask.

“Pinned it,” Boone says. “Didn’t break it, praise be, though it felt like it had. Horse took a ball through the neck and dropped half across me. Knocked the wind clean out. Snow comin’ down. Men and horses thunderin’ past. Couldn’t hear much besides cussin’ and gunfire and that poor beast thrashin’ itself to death over me.”

His voice changes. Something dark and fearful comes up through it.

“I had my pistol,” he goes on. “Got one arm free enough to drag it. Hollered till my throat bled. But battle’s a cruel bastard. Ain’t nobody hears one fool under a horse when there’s a hundred others dyin’ and screamin’ for their mommas. Line pushed on. Snow got worse. Light was goin’. And after a while I had to admit I was in a bad way.”

“So what happened?”

“Okee came back.”

Okee gives him a look. “I did.”

“And? What did you do?” I ask.

“It was after the skirmish,” Okee says. “Men were regrouping. Horses being counted. Wounded being sorted. I couldn’t find Boone. I asked where he’d been seen last. No one knew. Or if they did, no one cared to retrace it in weather like that. We’d lost men already. Hundreds of men. The officers were more interested in preserving what remained of the company than searching drifts for one missing soldier.”

“So you went alone?” I ask.

He shrugs once. “I rode back along the tree line. Then I heard him. The horse was dead by then. Boone was half buried under it, snow up around his ribs, one hand bare and blue from trying to work at the saddle straps. He was pale. Lips going gray. The girth strap had twisted under the carcass,” he says. “I could not shift the horse alone. Not quickly. So I cut leather where I could, dug snow away by hand, and got Boone’s leg free enough to drag him out.”

My eyes widen. “By yourself?”

“All by himself,” Boone says, with a tilt of his chin and a glint in his eye.

“I got him onto my horse,” Okee says. “He could not sit up by himself, so I tied him there with my bedroll straps and walked us back slow.”

“In the snow,” Boone adds emphatically.

“Yes, Boone. In the snow.”

“Up a damn mountain.”

“It was a hill.”

“What happened after that?” I ask, because for all their bickering there is a tenderness opening between them now that feels too precious not to explore.

Okee is quiet a moment. Boone watches him.

“At camp,” Okee says, “the surgeon looked him over. Said nothing was broken. But he was cold enough to be in real danger. So I kept him awake and warm.”

Boone’s voice gentles like a melody, each word a fond memory. “He sat up with me all night,” he says. “Fed me coffee. Rubbed my hands till it hurt. Cussed me every time I tried to drift off.”

Okee looks away, embarrassed by Boone’s swooning display. The room quiets. Boone’s thumb strokes once over the inside of Okee’s wrist. “A man can get lucky in a fight,” he says. “Lucky enough to live through near any fool thing. But somebody turnin’ around in weather and gunfire when everybody else has already counted you gone…” He shakes his head, smiling to himself. “That ain’t luck. That’s love, whether the fool doin’ it means to call it that or not.”

My eyes sting all at once, and a lump rises in my throat thick enough to choke on. “Well,” I say, “that is the most romantic thing I have ever heard, and I resent you both for it.”

Okee turns back. “Resent us? Why?”

“You have a beautiful love story. I’m envious.”

Boone’s eyebrows draw together the way they do when he’s irritated. “Lula, you damn near froze in our arms. We been snowed up in this daggum cabin for weeks. You nursed me to health. You don’t think that’s romantic?”

The fire pops between us.

I had thought I understood the nature of this beast. Thought the danger in it was simple. Alone with two handsome outlaws in a remote cabin and me foolish enough to bed them both. That is threat enough.