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until they’d separated exactly how delightful his body heat had been, radiating against the right side of her torso like a warm sun. “Thank you for your escort, Captain Crawford.”
    “It’s just Crawford, ma’am.”
    She peered up at him, trying to read his beautiful eyes. In them, she saw steely determination, and that she could respect. “Mr. Crawford, then?”
    He shrugged, his big shoulders lifting in a way that reminded her again just how solid he was. “That’ll do. At least until—” He cut himself off as his gaze slid away from her. Then, taking an audible breath, his eyes flicked to hers again. “You can call me whatever you please, Miss Tully, and I won’t mind a bit.”
    Her chest felt tight. So tight, her lungs seemed trapped in an iron vise, and there was no relief for her in looking at him. “Mr. Crawford,” she managed on a strangled whisper, and bobbed a quick, awkward curtsy before turning her back on the man and hurrying toward her salvation, the blue door of the schoolhouse.
    She did not look back over her shoulder at him to seek out his penetrating, blush-inducing green gaze. No matter how much she wanted to.

Chapter Six
    Del slept for the better part of a day, waking the next morning less fatigued but more grumpy.
    As soon as he’d secured a room in the boardinghouse, run by a Mrs. Yates and utilized by several of the lead-ore miners who preferred a bed to the muddy ground and trench foot common in the tented communities near the mines, Del had commandeered a large copper tub, bathed and fallen naked into clean sheets that smelled of cool mountain air. If anyone had knocked on the door, he was none the wiser. Sleep was a stern taskmistress and owned him, body and soul, for the next several hours.
    But he dreamt of another woman, one with damning blue eyes and freckles on every inch of her ivory skin. Including the skin he hadn’t yet seen. His imagination had no problem filling in where his eyes had been thwarted.
    Her scent had been intoxicating when he was on the verge of an exhausted collapse yesterday. She’d taken his arm and leaned the tiniest fraction of an inch toward him, and he had been swamped with the freshness of her. Mint and rose, and he absurdly wished he had a bar of soap in that scent for himself, it’d smelled so damn good. Not to use. Just to…have.
    Miss Tully, the schoolmarm. As she was not his reason for coming to Red Creek, it would be in his best interest—and hers—to leave her be.
    He stood before the small, smoke-edged mirror nailed to the wall next to the window of his room. Lukewarm water filled a basin, cloudy with the remnants of his shave. The razor had removed the most scraggly parts of his beard, leaving dark bristles trimmed close to his jaw in a near approximation of a gentleman’s beard. It was more time than he’d cared to spend on his ablutions in many long months, a circumstance he chose not to ponder as he cleaned his teeth and patted dry his face.
    Running a hand through hair that had dried loosely tangled on his pillow, he eyed his reflection as warily as Miss Tully had the last time he’d seen her. He looked old, much older than he had any right to look at age twenty-nine. He’d spent four years as a soldier, and he remembered with sudden clarity just how youthful his face had looked before he’d so eagerly marched from his family’s plantation home north of Savannah.
    He had wanted the fight, any fight. It had to be better than the itch of terminal boredom he’d always sensed boiling beneath his skin whenever he gazed out over Crawford land. Now he could think back and realize it wouldn’t have mattered what color uniform he wore—Del had simply needed to escape.
    It may not have made him a good man, but it certainly shaped him into a damn good soldier. Most of his brothers-in-arms fought with the conviction of their beliefs, or the necessity of saving their homes. He fought with the sheer desperation of a wayward soul