Read River to Cross, A for Free Online Page A

And he stank so bad of gunpowder and sweat he could smell himself.
    He shrugged. So what?
    Over the icy little spring he managed to get most of the grease and soot off his face and hands. He sank down, leaned against a tree, and cocked a leg up. For nearly five minutes he knifed the mud from his boots, telling himself it wasn’t good for the leather. But he couldn’t explain combing his hair and running a razor over his face. What had happened with her back there was a warning to jerk his emotions in line.
    He looked back at the creosote bush and rolled his shoulders, forcing them to loosen up. His mind turned.
    Something didn’t add up, something he couldn’t put his finger on. Married or not, she’d felt the same jolt of attraction that had shot through him. He hadn’t imagined it, and he hadn’t imagined her reaction, either. She’d been as rattled by it as he was.
    But he also saw caution in her eyes. Perhaps even a tinge of fear. If she was attracted to him, she didn’t want to be. He sucked in a slow breath.
    Feeling’s mutual, honey. I don’t want to be attracted to you, either.
    Eyes closed, he forced himself to relax. He drew a couple of deep breaths and focused on those places within himself he needed to change and concentrated. One place demanded immediate attention—a little itchy spot in his mind that Elizabeth had dug herself into and interrupted his thoughts.
    A few minutes later, he was quiet inside and felt himself back in control. He’d locked her into a little box in the back of his mind.
    “Captain,” she called, “my fingers hurt. They don’t work right. I managed to undo only three buttons in all this time.”
    Softly he let loose a cussword. He looked over at Fred. “Her wrists were tied too tight for too long.”
    “You stay put,” Fred said. “You’ve done most of the work with her. I’ll take her dress off.”
    “No, you won’t.” Jake jumped to his feet and hurried off toward the bush.
    Fred snickered. “She’s getting to him.”
    “And he doesn’t even know it,” Gus said.
    “I figured something was going on after she bit him and all he did was carry her like a little queen to her horse.” Fred laughed. “Anybody else would be dead by now.”

 
    Elizabeth closed her eyes in a long, slow blink when a tall man with curly blond hair appeared from behind the creosote bush. For a moment she had a sense of tilting reality, of time running backward, of something half remembered. It was as if she were looking at Carl again.
    His own gaze was jumping all over her face as if he felt it, too.
    “Let’s get started on those buttons,” Jake said.
    Elizabeth stared up at him, and for a minute it was hard to breathe.
    Last night it had been so dark and his face so black and scary, nothing about him had registered. In the early morning light and the confusion of getting off the horses, she still hadn’t noticed him much. All those dark faces looked the same to her. With Jake, because he was closest to her, she’d received only a fleeting impression of cheekbones, a face full of angles and shadows, and a mouth that could’ve been carved in stone, all hidden under a layer of soot.
    Now, however, he’d managed to get all the soot and disguise washed off. The faint scent of soap and male sweat assaulted her. He was bigger than Carl, but their hair and eyebrows were the same pale blond.
    Like Lieutenant Carl Evans, Jake Nelson was a towhead, his hair just as light and thick and touching the back of his collar. But there the resemblance stopped. He looked to be in his late twenties, older than Carl, inches taller and pounds heavier, and his eyes were gray, not brown, like Carl’s.
    For some reason he looked harder than Carl. Two very different men. Yet every time she looked at him, she had a strange sense of having walked this way before.
    She lowered her eyes, unsettled by a tug of attraction to this big slow-talking man. The wrong man.
    Elizabeth stiffened her shoulders,