Chapter Nineteen
They drifted back toward the fair after the cider.
Evelyn turned the carved horse over in her fingers because she couldn't quite bring herself to put it in her pocket yet.
Three cents of painted wood and she held it like a gold piece.
The orphanage matron would have called that sentimentality, which she had ranked somewhere between laziness and theft on her personal scale of moral failings, but the matron could go hang because the matron had never won a single thing at a ring-toss game in Montana Territory, and therefore lacked the authority to comment.
Sam walked beside her with that particular looseness in his shoulders she'd only seen twice before, once at the waterfall and once during the stew.
The looseness that meant he'd forgotten, at least for a few minutes, to hold himself braced against everything.
She'd grown so accustomed to the coiled version that the loose version startled her every time it appeared.
They passed a shooting game. Tin cans stacked on a fence rail with a battered old rifle chained to the counter. A barker in a checked vest hollered at passersby, challenging any man with two cents and steady aim to knock down three cans in three shots.
"You reckon you could knock them cans down?"
He looked at her. Looked at the cans. Looked back at her with an expression that suggested she'd just asked a fish whether it reckoned it could swim.
"I reckon I could manage well enough."
"Then prove it, Mr. Cooper."
He dug two cents from his pocket and laid the coins on the counter. The barker grinned wide and handed over the chained rifle, a rusty old Springfield that had probably missed more cans than it had hit in its lifetime. Sam checked the sights, shouldered it, and fired three times.
Three cans flew off the rail in quick succession. The barker's grin fell off his face about as fast.
"Well, I'll be hornswoggled. Pick your prize, mister."
Sam scanned the row of prizes hanging from the stall's crossbeam, cheap trinkets and ribbon favors and cloth dolls.
His eyes passed over all of them and landed on a small blue hair ribbon, silk by the look of it, the same shade as the calico ribbon Evelyn had been stitching onto scarves for the past week. He pointed at it without hesitation.
The barker untied it and handed it over. Sam turned to Evelyn and held it out, dangling from his rough fingers. A little scrap of blue silk that had no practical value, and no business making Evelyn's breath catch the way it caught—hard, at the back of her throat.
"For your trouble, Miss Granger."
She took it. She laughed, one of those laughs that escaped before you could shape it— sharp and bright and surprised out of her—because Sam Cooper had just won her a hair ribbon at a shooting game.
The sheer, sweet absurdity of it hit her so hard she laughed again, louder, and pressed the ribbon against her chest.
"You're a man of surprisin' talents, Mr. Cooper."
"Ain't nothin' surprisin' about it. I shoot things for a livin'."
"You shoot desperadoes for a livin'. Tin cans are a considerable step down."
"A can don't shoot back. I'd call that a step up."
She tucked the ribbon into her coat pocket alongside the carved horse.
Two fair prizes in one afternoon. More gifts than she'd received in a single day in her entire adult life, and one of them Sam had won for her on purpose, chosen for her on purpose, and handed to her with that expression on his face that she'd stopped trying to categorize because none of the words she had for it covered enough ground.
They passed a stall selling roasted nuts, and Evelyn's stomach made a sound that drew a glance from Sam.
He stopped, bought a paper cone of roasted pecans without asking whether she wanted any, and held it out to her.
She took a handful. They were hot enough to sting her fingertips and sweet enough to make her close her eyes on the first bite, the sugar crust cracking between her teeth while the warm nut underneath melted into buttery nothing.
She opened her eyes, and Sam had that look on his face—the one where he watched her react to food with the same intensity he watched the tree line for threats.
She took another handful to give her mouth a job that didn't involve commenting on the fact that Sam Cooper paid more attention to her eating habits than most men paid to their horses.
They walked on. The crowd thinned as they moved past the last row of stalls, the noise of the fair dimming behind them, and the fiddle music going soft and blurry with distance.
Evelyn stopped walking. She couldn't have said exactly why.
Her feet just decided, the way her hands sometimes decided to stop stitching.
Her body made choices her mind hadn't authorized, which happened more and more around Sam Cooper.
It was a pattern she'd been trying to ignore because acknowledging it meant acknowledging what drove it.
Acknowledging what drove it meant admitting that Evelyn Granger—who had sworn off men with prejudice and conviction after David Morrow had publicly humiliated her—had gone and developed feelings for a bounty hunter with a gun on his hip, a twenty-year-old vendetta, and an inability to eat breakfast like a civilized human being.
She turned to face Sam. He'd stopped when she stopped, half a pace behind her, the paper cone of pecans in his left hand.
The afternoon light hit him from the side, catching the stubble along his jaw, the scar through his eyebrow, those gray eyes that could go from steel to smoke depending on what occupied them.
They stood close. Closer than the situation required. No practical reason existed for the distance between them, which measured about eight inches and seemed to be shrinking without either of them moving.
She should step back. She should laugh, make a joke, say a thing about the pecans or the ribbon.
She didn't step back.
Sam's eyes moved from her eyes to her mouth. She tracked the movement the way she tracked a needle through fabric, with the particular focus her hands brought to detail work.
He leaned in.
His right hand came up while his fingers touched the side of her jaw just under her ear where the skin had gone cold from the air. His fingertips registered warm, rough from years of rope and leather and gun metal.
His mouth met hers.
The fair disappeared. The fiddle music, the crowd noise, and the smell of roasted nuts…
All of it went somewhere else—somewhere that didn't include the space where Sam Cooper's lips pressed against hers while his hand held her jaw, her eyes closed, and the world shrank down to the size of two mouths and one breath shared between them.
He tasted like cider. His lips were chapped from the cold and the riding, rough in a way that should have bothered her and didn't, because smooth lips belonged to men like David Morrow who kissed you in parlors and then publicly discarded you six weeks later.
Evelyn had decided she preferred rough. Rough lips on a rough man who carried her upstairs, made terrible stew, cut crooked fabric and slammed doors, and then came back and tucked her into bed because he couldn't help himself.
Because underneath all that stone and silence and stubbornness lived a tenderness so fierce he couldn't show it except in the dark, when he thought she couldn't see.
She could see. She'd been seeing it for two weeks. This kiss only confirmed what her hands had known since the night she'd put them on his shoulder and refused to let go.
The kiss lasted maybe five seconds. Maybe ten. Maybe the rest of her natural life compressed into a single held breath.
Sam pulled back.
His hand dropped from her jaw while his expression changed, not slowly but all at once—the way a lamp went out when you turned the wick down too fast. The openness that had been in his face a second ago had all closed up.
His eyes shifted from her face to a point over her left shoulder, locking onto a target behind her.
Evelyn turned to follow his gaze.
A man stood about thirty yards away near the rope line at the east edge of the fairgrounds, holding still while the crowd moved around him.
Medium build, dark coat, hat pulled low.
He faced them—faced Sam—and even from that distance, Evelyn could read the intentionality of his position.
This man had planted himself where Sam would see him.
Sam's whole body changed. The looseness, the ease, the openness the kiss had put in his face—all of it gone in the time it took to draw a breath. His shoulders squared while his jaw locked, his right hand dropping to his hip where the Colt sat in its holster.
This was worse than the coiled version she'd lived with for two weeks because this version had a directional intensity he aimed at the man by the rope line the way a rifle aimed at a target.
"Sam?"
He didn't answer. His eyes stayed fixed on the man in the dark coat.
The man held Sam's stare, steadily meeting his gaze without flinching, and holding his ground the way a man held ground when he wanted the person watching him to understand that the watching went both ways.
Then, the man moved. He turned, slowly and deliberately, and stepped into the crowd.
The fairgoers closed around him, filling the space where he'd been standing, and within about five seconds he'd dissolved into the mass of bodies and coats and hats.
Gone. The way he'd gone at the flea market.
The way he'd gone at the fence line. The way Amos Wilkes apparently went everywhere, appearing just long enough to make sure Sam saw him and then vanishing before Sam could close the distance.
Evelyn looked back at Sam while his hand tightened on the Colt's grip, his jaw clenched so tight that the muscle in his cheek jumped. His eyes tracked the crowd where the man had disappeared.
"That's him." She didn't make it a question because it didn't need to be one. "That's Wilkes."
Sam's whole body leaned toward the crowd, toward the hunt that had defined him for twenty years. Every line of him strained forward. He wanted to run. He wanted to draw the gun and plunge into the crowd and chase the ghost one more time.
He didn't run. He stood there with his hand on his gun while his body aimed itself at the crowd, and whether he stopped himself or whether the kiss still held him, she couldn't tell, but he held his ground beside her while the fair moved around them, cheerful and oblivious.
"Sam. Look at me."
His eyes kept scanning.
"Sam Cooper. Look at me."
He turned his head. His eyes met hers. She'd seen plenty of things in those gray eyes over the past two weeks.
Irritation. Amusement. Hunger. That particular guarded warmth he produced when she caught him off-balance.
But she'd never seen what she saw now. Fear.
Real fear; the kind that came from a place deeper than danger.
The fear of a person who'd just kissed a woman and then looked up to find the man who'd murdered his parents standing thirty yards away, watching.
The kiss sat between them, enormous, impossible to move past or around.
Five seconds ago his mouth had been on hers.
Now the world had blown wide open and the man who'd burned his parents alive stood somewhere behind her, and Sam Cooper's face held both things at once, unable to reconcile either one.
"We got to find Foster." His voice came out low, flat, stripped to function. "Right quick."
"All right."
"Stay close to me. Don't you leave my side. You hear me?"
"I hear you, Sam."
He took her elbow and turned her toward the center of the fair, back toward the stalls, Foster's deputies, and Mrs. Montgomery's jam. Back to the world where things made sense and people didn't kiss you and then turn to stone in the same breath.
She went where he steered her because the situation required it; Wilkes stood somewhere in this crowd, and Sam had a gun and a plan, and she had neither.
But she kept her hand in her pocket, her fingers closing around the carved horse and the blue silk ribbon both, pressing them into her palm.
Two pieces of proof that five minutes ago Sam Cooper had been a man at a fair, shooting tin cans and buying pecans and leaning in to kiss her in the afternoon light.
Whatever came next couldn't take that away.
He'd kissed her. He'd chosen to. Before the fear and the ghost and the gun, he'd put his hand on her jaw and closed the distance himself. He'd leaned in. Not her. Him.
She held the horse and the ribbon and followed him through the crowd and let that fact sit where it needed to sit, which amounted to everywhere, every part of her at once, warm and terrifying and entirely beyond her control.
The fair continued around them, cheerful and unaware. Evelyn kept walking. Sam's grip on her elbow stayed firm while his hand trembled against her arm, a fine tremor she could track through his fingers, the tremor of a man holding himself together by force of will alone.
She'd sort it all out later. When they weren't walking through a crowd that contained Amos Wilkes. When Sam's hand stopped shaking.
Right now she held the horse and walked.