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only chill her more, but that was a small price to pay if it helped further along her plan.
    With the dress remnants collected, she took one last disheartened look around the room, extinguished the lamp, and stepped out into the late afternoon sunshine.
    “See?” Maggie cried. “Just look at her!”
    “What the. . .?” Jed’s gaze swept the length of Lucy, his mouth hanging open, his hat pushed back on his head.
    Lucy resisted the urge to laugh. Men – show them a little skin and they all turned into drooling fools.
    “Where’s the stove?” she asked, pretending not to notice his reaction. But for added fun, she lifted her skirt high enough to scratch a nonexistent itch just above her knee.
    Maggie cowered behind Jed, her loud whisper carrying across the yard. “She wants to cook me.”
    Jed stuttered for a moment, but recovered with remarkable speed. “Nobody’s going to cook you, Maggie.”
    “You brought her here to cook me.” Maggie’s pale blue eyes widened in fear as a fresh wave of fear crashed over her. “You got rid of Sam and now you want to get rid of me.”
    “I didn’t do anything to Sam,” he said quietly. “And I’d never hurt you, Maggie.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and started back toward the house. “Please go lie down. You need your rest.”
    “I’ve had my rest,” Maggie snapped. “That devil woman’s going to cut me open and steal my baby.”
    Lucy watched in silence as Jed struggled to get Maggie inside the shack again.
    “You’ll be fine,” he soothed. “I promise not to let her touch anything sharp.”
    He closed the door, then leaned his forehead against it. A second later, a loud thud sounded from the inside.
    Jed looked up at Lucy and smiled sadly. “She sometimes likes to keep the door barred.”
    Lucy could have pretended to care, but it hardly seemed worth the effort. Maggie would be easy enough to take; it was Jed she needed to focus on. If he thought for one second something was amiss, he’d no doubt bring everything to a halt, and Lucy didn’t have time for that.
    “The stove?” she asked again.
    Jed pushed away from the door and pointed toward a large circle of rocks with a spit set above a pile of cold embers. “We cook over the fire.”
    “What fire?” She offered him a saucy little smile, and even added a head tilt for good measure.
    The slow grin that spread across Jed’s face left Lucy unsettled.
    “The fire you’re going to build once you get the chips collected,” he answered.
    Lucy gaped. “What? You don’t really expect me. . .”
    “’Course,” he answered. “Thought we covered that back at the auction.” He moved around the corner of the house and returned a moment later with a small wooden pushcart.
    “Here you go.”
    “But--”
    “No buts, remember?” When she made no move to take the handles from him, he set it at her feet and walked away.
    “Wait,” she called. “I can’t pick up. . .
that
.”
    “’Course you can,” he answered over his shoulder. “Go get the gloves we bought and just make sure the chips are good ‘n hard before you touch them.”
    Bile swirled up Lucy’s throat. He had to be joking. She was Lucille Firr – the Devil’s daughter! She’d done a lot of humiliating things in her day, but picking up animal chips wasn’t one of them. And regardless of what she might have said back at the auction, she had no intention of starting now.
    She tugged her collar open a bit more, fluffed her hair and worked up her most seductive smile.
    “But, Jed,” she said softly, following him back toward the wagon. “It’s such a smelly thing for a lady to do, and my gloves are in the house with Maggie.”
    “No chips, no fire.” He didn’t stop to look at her – and she was putting on a fine show with her hips swaying and her head tilted to the side a little. She even set her lips in what she’d been told was a beautiful little pout.
    She stepped around the wagon and slid her hands up his