remains of his wrinkled muddy suit as he remembered how they’d had fun eating in the café. She’d been pretending to be a man then—and not doing a very good job of it, as he remembered.
He wasn’t surprised when he heard Em’s sharp voice. “You’re not going to undress in front of the fire, are you?”
“Why not? No one’s here and you’ve seen me before.”
She turned her back. “That doesn’t mean I want to see you again.”
“Well, as soon as I can get out of here, lady, you’ ll never have to see me again, so you might as well take a last look.” He stripped down to his skin and grabbed the warm work shirt. “I can’t believe I was just a game to you ladies. What did you do, decide which one of you was going to play me? Tell me, did the short straw get me, or was it more like a vote to see who had to play the charade?”
Em turned her head toward him, squealed, and turned back around.
Lewt smiled. “Now you know, darling, what I look like all over.”
“I already knew,” she shot back. “I saw you sleeping in the bath.”
He pulled on his heavy twill trousers. “I don’t care.”
She faced him as he buckled his belt and reached for his coat. “I’m not the only one who lied here, Paterson, so get off that high horse. Your whole life story was a lie.”
“You’re right, Miss Emily. I lied to try to make a dream come true. I wanted the normal life everyone else seems to have. But you, you lied for the fun of it. Just a little trick you played at my expense. Tell me, did Boyd and Davis know? Were they in on the game? Sumner must have been and all the other hands. And sweet-little-always-sewing Emily or whatever her name is, did she just go along, or did you pay her?”
Em frowned. “We paid her, but she’s a friend; she would have helped just because I asked her to. Her real name is Tamela. Everyone always said we looked alike in school, and she was between husbands at the moment, so she thought it would be fun.”
“I don’t give a damn,” he yelled.
“Don’t you dare swear at me.” She moved a few feet closer.
“Why? Hasn’t anyone ever yelled at the rich little Miss Emily McMurray before? I find that hard to believe, as irritating as you are most of the time.”
She raised her hand to slap him, and he caught her wrist in midair. For a blink he saw fear flash in her eyes, and he realized she thought he might hit her.
He dropped her hand and stepped away, all the anger knocked out of him without a blow. If he ever got through hating himself, he decided he’d hate her for a while. All the years he was growing up he’d always thought of himself as worthless; everyone including his parents treated him so. With one look she’d told him what she thought of him. She agreed with the majority. She thought he might be the kind of man who hurt women, the lowest kind of man.
He turned his back, closed his eyes, and wished that they could go back to the cottonwoods, where there was no world but the trees. Her lie had taken that memory from him. He hadn’t held his Em, he’d held Emily McMurray.
When he opened his eyes, he was looking down the barrel of a gun.
“Don’t make any fast moves, mister,” a voice with an Irish favoring whispered. “I don’t want to have to fire this thing. It might bring back the other men.”
Lewt stood perfectly still. Even in the poor light he recognized the two cooks he’d seen in the kitchen of Three Forks. The tall one held a rifle so old he doubted it would fire, but he didn’t want to test it. Part of him wanted to yell at the cook to just shoot him. It might be better than letting Em kill him a slice at a time with her looks.
“You was one of the men who took Anna, weren’t you?” The shorter cook moved forward. “Sarah J, I think we’ve found the right camp.”
Lewt doubted if there were many campfires around this part of the country, but if these two could find them it wouldn’t be long before Toledo’s men came riding in. “What are you doing here?” Surely the old witch hadn’t sent the cooks to kill the