true, or what there was of it. She swung off the saddle. A good stroll over her land should calm her down.
Imagine him believing that she had the temper of a second rooster! She’d taken only two steps when she heard the click of a gun’s hammer.
“Get back in the saddle…now.” His voice had become as hard as the metal he gripped in his fist. “Don’t argue, just do it.”
She took another step away from Pearl. “Why you low-down w—”
The mouth of the gun flashed orange. A puff of earth exploded near her foot. The blast sent Pearl on a run back over the creek.
Emma felt a scream gathering in her throat, but she turned it into a foul word.
“Rattlers sometimes travel in pairs.” He scooted back in the saddle as far as he could. “If I were you I’d climb up here on Thunder.”
She glanced down. Lordy! Only the fact that Matt had shot the viper’s head off had kept her from stepping on it. It took only a second for her to reach Thunder’s side and lift a trembling hand to Matt. He pulled her up into the saddle ahead of him, then turned the horse to follow the river, south, away from the homestead.
“Darlin’, you just might be the death of me. Let me have a look at your shoes.”
Since he seemed so determined that they were truly married, she yanked her skirt nearly to her knee. She turned the shoe, one half of her prettiest pair, this way and that.
“Any woman who goes homesteading in dancing slippers needs to be watched out for.”
The nerve of him, pointing out the error of her footwear! She’d put them on only because she had been thinking of the way she and Matt had fit together so easily under that canvas last night.
“What kind of a man brings a little girl to a place where snakes look the same as the dirt?”
“Lucy just turned four years old, but she’s known how to keep clear of snakes since she hit the ground walking.”
Holding on to a temper against someone who had just saved her life proved purely difficult.
“I don’t know why it is, Matt, but every now and then you bring out the pickle in me.” Why was that? Most of her life she’d been the soul of kindness to nearly everyone she’d met. “Well, once again I’m sorry I called you that name.”
“Wasn’t such a bad name, considering I’d just fired a gun at your feet for no good reason that you knew of.” His words rustled the top of her hair when he spoke. The hard, shifting muscles of his chest grazed her back with each clip-clop of Thunder’s hooves.
If she let herself believe that they were truly wed, there would be some things about marriage that she would like to explore. Things to do with the fact that Matt’s abdomen was no longer flat where her backside rocked against him to the sway of the horse’s stride.
In the past, she’d tried not to wonder about such things. When they popped into her mind she dismissed them by focusing her thoughts on some task that needed doing. It didn’t take long to learn that curiosity had a will of its own.
Now that she was a married woman, it might not hurt to let her imagination dwell on Matt’s anatomy. Especially that part that had suddenly sprung to life behind her.
The problem with letting her mind roam free was that it did some troubling things to her body. She had to wiggle in the saddle to ease the strange twisting in her belly.
All at once Matt slipped off Thunder’s back to walk alongside the horse. He’d turned quiet again, but it was easy to see that thoughts ran wild in his mind. Maybe the stirrings going on between them reminded him of Lucy’s mother.
It shouldn’t trouble Emma to be the second wife. Indeed, yesterday afternoon she’d have been happy to be anyone’s tenth.
“Matt…what was your first wife like?”
“You’d be the one to know that, darlin’.” He glanced up at her with his hat shading his face. She’d been a fool to leave her bonnet behind with the sun beating down, even as early as it was. “Until you came upon me in the livery, I’d never given matrimony more than a passing thought.”
Matt led Thunder to the creek and let his reins fall free. He gave Emma a hand down from the horse.
“Let’s sit here for a spell. There are