He turned to her, his light-blue eyes roaming over her for a moment before a lazy smile formed. “Who said anything about torture?”
He took a step toward her, his arms extended. She’d gone too far! He was going to disprove everything she’d just said in a horribly physical manner!
Chapter Twelve
CONSIDERING WHAT WAS RAMPAGINGthrough her mind, Violet gasped and slid down the other side of Morgan’s horse to escape him, then groaned as pain shot up her legs from such an abrupt landing. She would have fallen to the ground if she wasn’t still grasping the pommel of his saddle.
But he came around the horse and pried her hands loose from the pommel. “Why’d you dismount like that? You in some kind of hurry?”
“No, I—”
She stopped when he swept her into his arms and started walking toward the cabin. She realized he probably only intended to help her up to his porch, since it was about two feet off the ground and the one step that led to it had been built for his long legs, not a woman’s. And there was no hand railing to help her manage the steep climb. Her legs probably would balk if she tried to do it herself.
Still, she was utterly flustered by what she’d thought he was about to do and snapped, “I don’t want to hear any more threats from you, real or not. I’m at the end of my tether, tired, and hungry, and I need a bloody bath!”
He sniffed. Twice! “Yes, you do.”
She gasped at that insult and immediately returned it: “So do you!”
“Are you suggesting we bathe together?”
That infuriated her even more. “I meant nothing of the kind.”
She noticed the twinkle in his eyes. Was he trying not to laugh? The beast! Yet as he finally set her down on the porch, he said, “You’ll get your bath as soon as I unload the mules.”
He left her on the porch and started doing just that. The door to the house was closed, and without his permission, she wasn’t going to open it. She sat on one of the two rough chairs on the porch, hoping her brocade skirt wouldn’t get splinters from it. She wondered why there were two of them when he’d implied no one else ever came up here, but she supposed her father must have visited him from time to time. It was difficult to picture her debonair father, who socialized at Philadelphia’s finest homes and gentlemen’s clubs, sitting on the porch of this cabin in the middle of nowhere. She found it hard to believe she was there herself.
The day was still so hot, which made her appreciate the shade on the porch as she watched Morgan. He was leaving everything he took off the mules right there on the ground, his goal apparently to unburden them and set them loose before he put anything away. The unencumbered mules gravitated to the stream, which meandered inside and outside the fence.
He was close enough to talk to her. After his flat refusal to show her her father’s mine, she decided to ask him about his cabin, and then steer the conversation to the topic she was most interested in. Aunt Elizabeth had told her she was an adroit conversationalist.
“Why did you build this cabin several feet off the ground?”
“I got up here last summer, long after the spring thaw. So I didn’t know if the runoff from the icecaps would come pouring down here this spring.”
She thought he might be grinning, but it was so hard to tell with that bushy mustache of his, so she merely asked, “Did it?”
“No, not this year at least, but water did erode this gorge at some point in the history of this range. And the stream did flood this spring about four feet on this side, more on the other side. But last year I didn’t know how bad it would be and pictured my cabin being washed down the hill, so I decided to take the precaution of elevating it when I got tired of sleeping in a tent.”
“It must have taken you months to build.”
“No, just a few days.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Not with friends helping.”
She would have said that was also impossible, his having any friends, but it would have been quite an insult; she wanted to disarm him with harmless talk before she mentioned Charles’s mine again, so she asked, “Friends from Butte?”
“No, I sent for some friends I grew up with in Nashart, men I knew I could trust not to reveal the location of my mine. I ordered all the lumber, pipes, flues, bricks, and everything else needed and stored it in town before I asked them to ride over. By then I would have been followed if I’d been seen leaving town with building materials, but they weren’t.”
“By then?”
“Most of the miners in town work for a few big mine owners. And they’re a greedy bunch. But most of their mines started pulling more copper than silver or gold, so they concentrate on copper now—all except for your friend Sullivan. His silver hasn’t run out yet.”
“He’s not my friend. And besides, why would Shawn Sullivan or anyone go to so much trouble to find out where your mine is located? From what I’ve heard, there’s lots of gold and silver in these hills and mountains.”
“Sure there is, but Sullivan doesn’t want anyone else selling silver. He was getting high prices for his when he was the last supplier in this area. He didn’t like it when those prices dropped and his buyers told him to find another market if he wasn’t satisfied with what they were paying him. He couldn’t figure out where all the other silver was coming from and sent spies all around the area to find out. And came up with nothing. Then one of his men got curious about me. No one had paid me any mind before those prices dropped. They thought I came in, sold a few hides, then left again.”
