Read The Renegades: Cole for Free Online

comfort.
    He truly ought to get out of town before the boy got out of jail. He stared into the night again, but this time he saw only Kid Dolby’s young face against the spangled sky. If he did leave now, nobody with a grain of sense would say that Cole McCord had run away from a fight, since it was with such a boy. Besides, hecould live if some called him coward. The only way it’d hurt him was that it was bound to bring more of Kid Dolby’s type out of the woods to try their luck.
    And it would hurt his pride. Basically, his reputation was all he had left of his old life—which had been his only life.
    Anger so swift it made him nauseous swept through him.
Why
had Travis had to die? Why had
he
lived, when the whole damn thing had been his fault? Now if he killed the boy he would always hate himself for that, too.
    “Mr. McCord?”
    He whirled on his heel and stepped out of the moonlight, at the same time drawing his gun in a reflex action that he couldn’t stop, but he knew that voice from the first syllable. It startled him, how familiar it sounded.
    Aurora Benton stood in the doorway, her small figure limned by the light in the hall behind her, and for an instant, just for that first moment he looked at her, a strange sense of himself came over his anger. He was as lonely as he’d ever been. Lonelier.
    “I need to speak with you.”
    Here was another human being at his door, a beautiful woman who had eyes like the summer sky, a sweet-smelling woman who fit into his arms like a wonderful gift. A woman who could make him laugh.
    He didn’t need that. He didn’t want a woman who could touch him in any way.
    “I saw your door open,” she said, andstepped into the room without waiting for an invitation. “I’ve come to give you one last chance.”
    That made him grin.
    “Mighty generous of you,” he said wryly. “What this world needs most is one last chance.”
    He holstered his gun, went to pick up his shirt. She gave a little gasp of surprise as he passed through the wide shaft of moonlight and she saw that he was half-naked. He felt her gaze touch his skin, then she went to the window to look out while he slipped the shirt on and started buttoning it.
    “I suppose I should get dressed,” he muttered, “since I seem to have one visitor after another.”
    “Who else?”
    “Is that any of your business?” “No.”
    They laughed at the same moment, then let a silence fall. Finally, she spoke.
    “This is my last chance, too,” she said, and her voice trembled. “Lloyd Gates nearly scared me spitless a while ago.”
    He spun on his heel, took a step toward her.
    “What’d he do?”
    “Came up to me at the bar right after you left and offered to escort me to my room. Asked if I’d been thanking you for saving my life this morning, then implied it wouldn’t be saved for long once I hit the trail for Texas. All in the most charming, concerned way, of course.”
    “What’d you say to him?”
    “Not one solitary word. I cut him dead, turned my back on him, and walked out the door. That son of a bitch was a big part of the reason my daddy killed himself.”
    The expletive sounded so surprising spoken in her soft, sad tones that it made him grin again. She might be sad and scared, but her spirit wasn’t broken.
    “I’ll pay you seventy-five a month and twenty head of cattle,” she said, whirling around to look at him. “Cole, it’s as high as I can go.”
    Her eyes were huge and bright with hope, and they wouldn’t leave him, wouldn’t turn him loose. In the moonlight, she looked as delicate as the flowers he smelled on the breeze, so he crossed the room to the little table by the wall, struck a match, and lit the lamp.
    “Do you know you’re trying to settle in Comanche country?” he said, more harshly than he’d intended. “That there’re still some remnants of free bands here and there?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you know it’s dry land and a drought there can last seven or eight