Cale glanced over his shoulder. Raven was still there. It was as though he had dreamed it all. The old man appearing on the snowy mountainside. His furs being stolen and gambled away at the rendezvous. Accepting Raven in exchange for Orrin Schuyler’s debt. He hardly believed it had all happened.
Except the girl was real. He knew it from the eyes of the mountain men who followed her progress as she walked several paces behind his horse. He felt a sense of possession that was totally alien to him. He wanted to shield her from sight, so she couldn’t be ogled by all those other men. Of course, he did nothing of the kind.
“Didn’t figure you to take on a woman.”
Cale slipped a leg over his piebald gelding and landed on both feet in front of a curly-haired man with pale blue eyes who was dressed in grease-slick buckskins. One word served as greeting and welcome. “Laidlaw.”
Cale held out his hand, and the other man grasped it at the elbow.
“It’s been a long winter, Cale,” Laidlaw said. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
Cale had met Laidlaw, who was from the hills of Tennessee, his first winter in the mountains. Laidlaw had taught him everything he knew. How to survive the bitter cold, how to trap beaver, how to avoid the Blackfeet and Arikara, and how to trade with the Flathead and Nez Perce. It was Laidlaw who had encouraged him to remain a free trapper rather than hire himself out to work for one of the big fur companies. Laidlaw’s advice had kept him alive and made him a rich man, though he chose to save his money, rather than spend it.
“Got time for a smoke?” Laidlaw asked.
“Sure.” Cale headed with Laidlaw toward his camp.
Laidlaw’s mouth curved in a crooked smile. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
Cale glanced over his shoulder and experienced a moment of chagrin. The girl. Raven had stopped in her tracks when he joined the other man. “You coming?” he called to her when she hung back.
She glanced around her at the men whose eyes ate her alive. He could almost feel the shudder that shook her small frame. “I am coming.”
Cale felt that odd protectiveness again, the urge to comfort her. He shrugged it off. He knew better than to let himself feel anything for Raven Schuyler. She belonged to him, like his horse or his furs, for the period he had agreed upon with her father.
Only, there was another factor involved that made her more than that. He had been in a state of half-arousal ever since he realized she was his. She was tiny in comparison to his over six-foot height. She couldn’t weigh more than a single pack of furs. From what he had gathered, she hadn’t lain with a man before. Cale wondered if she would really fight him. He didn’t want her that way. He wanted her willing. There would be time enough, when they were alone in his cabin and certain not to be interrupted, for him to woo her into his bed.
The mental picture of her bucking beneath him brought his shaft to hardness. He grunted with annoyance at his body’s fierce reaction to the mere thought of his flesh pressed close to hers. But what did he expect? He was a man who had been without a woman for better than a year. And he wanted her.
Cale welcomed Laidlaw’s interruption of his carnal daydreams, until he realized the subject Laidlaw had chosen to discuss.
“Where’d you find the girl?” Laidlaw asked.
“She’s payment for a debt.”
Laidlaw raised a dark brow and whistled. “Must’ve been some debt.”
“It was.”
Laidlaw was an intelligent man, and he must have realized from the curtness of Cale’s replies that he didn’t want to discuss the woman.
“How was the trapping?” Laidlaw asked instead.
“Beaver aplenty. A few muskrat and marten.”
“So you have lots of furs to trade?”
Cale’s upper lip curled wryly. It seemed all roads led back to his possession of the girl. “It’s a long story,” he said. “I’ll tell you over a cup of coffee.”
Laidlaw’s camp wasn’t much, a ground cover thrown over a bed of pine boughs and a ring of stones where a fire had been laid. The two men settled themselves comfortably on opposite sides of the warm stones.
The valley called Pierre’s Hole was about thirty miles long and fifteen wide, bounded to the west and south by low, broken ridges. The land spread north in a meadow of grass as far as the eye could see. Cale found himself with a view of three snowcapped mountain peaks called the Grand Tetons to the east.
Laidlaw set a battered, speckled-blue coffeepot on the fire and offered Cale some tobacco for his pipe.
Cale realized Raven was still standing nearby, holding the lead rope of a newly purchased mule loaded with his supplies for the coming year—gunpowder, a new ax, a dozen five-pound steel beaver traps with double springs, and the scented castoreum to attract the beaver, with which he baited the traps. He had also purchased foodstuffs he craved—sugar, coffee, flour, beans, and bacon.
Raven was apparently waiting for permission, or a command, to sit. He started to say “Join us” and realized that wasn’t what he wanted after all. It wasn’t that he thought she would be embarrassed by the discussion of her father’s perfidy, but rather that it would be uncomfortable to have her listening with that martyred expression to every word that came from his mouth.
“Gather some wood for the fire,” he said.
Raven tied the mule’s lead to a nearby scrub tree and turned wordlessly to obey him.
Before she had taken three steps he said, “Don’t go beyond my sight.”
Raven shot him a quick look of—disdain?—before heading across the meadow toward a stream fed by rivulets and mountain springs. It was bordered with willow and cottonwood that had grown so thick it was nearly impassable.
Cale found himself watching the gentle sashay of her hips as she moved away, which set the buckskin fringe on her skirt to swaying. When he turned back he saw Laidlaw grinning at him.
“She’s prime, all right,” Laidlaw said.
Cale was grateful for the beard that hid his flush. “She’s payment for a debt.”
“You already said that,” Laidlaw replied with a chuckle.
Cale shook his head like a baited bear. “It’s not like I planned to get myself a woman,” he began. “It just happened.”
Laidlaw poured Cale a cup of coffee and handed it to him. “I’m envious,” he admitted. “Have you had her yet?”
“We just settled the debt this morning.”
“She’s the one who stabbed Jack Pelter a few years back, isn’t she?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“She is,” Laidlaw confirmed. “Man had so many cuts on him by the time she was through, they started calling him Ribbon Jack.” He pursed his lips. “Naw. You haven’t had her yet.”
“What makes you say that?”
Laidlaw smirked. “Don’t see any marks on you.”
“What happens between me and the girl is none of your business,” Cale snapped.
“Ain’t that a sack o’ hell. Man’s got a pretty woman for his bed and won’t share the details with his best friend.”
“Get your own woman. There’s plenty to be had here.”
“Not like that one,” Laidlaw said wistfully.
Cale didn’t dispute him. He himself thought that Raven was an extraordinary woman. She carried herself with a sense of presence that was every bit as majestic as her father had suggested. Cale was surprised to hear she was the one who had cut up Ribbon Jack. He had seen the slashes on the man’s face at the Wind River rendezvous two years ago. All the more reason to make sure she wanted him as much as he wanted her when he finally bedded her.
“You gonna tell me what happened to those furs of yours?” Laidlaw said.
Cale explained everything that had happened over the past month, from finding Orrin Schuyler in the mountains, to their confrontation that morning.
Laidlaw whistled in appreciation. “Sounds like you’re lucky you came through with a whole skin—no pun intended.”
Cale grinned. His smile faded as he caught sight of Raven returning with a load of firewood. Not far from the stream, she was surrounded by a rowdy group of drunken men.
Without bothering to excuse himself, he rose, grabbed his Hawken rifle, and headed toward her.