“I must be headed back.” He paused. “I’d feel better if I could see you to the hotel.”
Hazel lifted her chin. “No, thank you.”
He watched her a moment, not giving away even the tiniest hint of what might be going through his mind. Then he stepped up into the wagon and set the horses into motion.
Hazel watched him go, her heart sinking lower and lower until—
He turned his head, just briefly. But long enough to let his eyes linger on her, and then sheknew.
He cared for her. So much so that he was sending her away.
Hazel’s breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t get on that train. Shewouldn’t. If she did, they would both regret it for the rest of their lives. All she had to do was prove it to him.
But how?
Turning it over in her mind, Hazel turned to exit the platform only to come face to face with a man who had been walking toward the depot. She stumbled some, and he caught her by the arms, just as Wade had when she first met him.
“Excuse me, sir,” she said, her mind still entangled in her thoughts about Wade. But when she looked up at the man she’d nearly run into, she stifled a gasp.
He bore a long scar down his cheek. His hair was on the longer side, as dark as Wade’s, and it obscured the top of the scar. But it was still startling enough that Hazel had to force herself to drag her eyes from it.
The man smiled at her, still holding her arms. It was a disarming smile in an otherwise devilishly handsome face, and yet there was something not entirely genuine about it. “Are you all right, miss?”
“I’m fine, thank you.” Hazel gently pulled herself from his grasp.
He tilted his hat at her and continued on his way. She turned and watched him go. And that’s when she realized he must be the same man Mrs. Drexel had described that day at the mercantile.
Hazel shuddered, thinking that Mrs. Drexel had seen the man’s character correctly. Startlingly good looking, but almost certainly dangerous.
She adjusted the carpetbag on her shoulder and hurried off the platform, eager to put as much distance as possible between herself and the man with the scar. The hotel wasn’t too far away, just a walk straight up the hill.
But running into that man made Hazel wish for company. And considering the only person she knew in town besides the reverend and his wife was Mrs. Drexel, she decided to head toward the mercantile.
Glancing back across the platform to reassure herself that the scarred man was long gone, Hazel backtracked to the opposite side of the depot. She stepped down and continued on her way.
Thankfully the town was small enough that finding the mercantile was easy enough. In fact, it was hardly a stone’s throw from the depot. Hazel prepared to step into the churned up dirt of the road when the sound of voices made her pause.
They were male voices, two of them, and normally, Hazel would have ignored them, but something one of them said caught her attention.
“—still mad about that cattle.” It wasn’t even a full sentence, but it made her stop still right there by the side of the road.
“If he’s got a lick of sense, he’ll remember those were mine. Anything he—and all of you—got for them was a gift. You messed it up, and you lost the money.”
Hazel dug her fingers into her carpetbag and turned around slowly, trying to discern from where the voices carried.
“I told him that, but you know Vance.”
“I know he can go if he’s done. I don’t have time to make sure he’s appeased.”
No one was immediately nearby, not close enough Hazel could hear their conversation, anyway. Which meant . . .
She stepped quietly across the span of what appeared to be an office of sorts, pausing at the far corner. The men’s voices had grown slightly louder, one of them getting more and more irritated with someone named Vance.
Very carefully, she peered around the corner. Right there, toward the rear of the building, stood the man with the scar. He was facing another man, this one seemingly defending Vance. They both wore guns at their hips and neither one looked like the sort of man anyone would want to stand around and converse with.
Quickly, Hazel ducked back around the corner. She didn’t know who these men—or Vance—were, but she did know about the near-sale of some cattle.
They could have been talking about any cattle, she tried to tell herself. Half the land in the valley was owned by cattle ranchers.
