He felt the warmth of that skin a moment later when Casey slipped into the blankets with him, naked as the day she was born, and pressed her mouth to his in a hungry kiss.
CHAPTER 5
Preacher was as human as the next man. He couldn’t help but respond when he found his arms full of naked, eager female flesh. He tightened his grip on her and returned the kiss.
But after a mighty enjoyable moment, he pulled his head back and asked in a low voice, “Casey, what in blazes do you think you’re doin’?”
“What does it feel like I’m doing, Preacher?” she whispered as she moved her hand, exploring under the blankets.
“Blast it, gal, there are too many folks around for this sort of carryin’ on. Not to mention the fact that I’m too dang old for a youngster like you.”
“I’m not all that young, at least when it comes to experience,” Casey said. “And you’re not that old. You’ve been doing just fine as far as I can tell.”
“Somebody might’ve seen you crawl under here.”
“I wasn’t naked. I had a blanket wrapped around me.” She gave a defiant toss of her head, which made her blond hair swirl like wings around her face. “Anyway, I don’t care who sees me. You think Lorenzo didn’t know we were together all those other nights on the trail?”
“That’s different,” Preacher insisted. “Lorenzo’s not the same as a whole camp full of folks.”
Casey sighed in exasperation. “I swear, you’re the only man I’ve ever met who’d argue with a gal in a situation like this. Do you really want me to go back to my own bedroll?”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say I want you to,” Preacher told her, “but I think it’d be the right thing to do.”
“All right,” she sniffed. “But don’t be surprised if it’s a long time before I come crawling into your blankets again.”
She rolled off him, pulled her blanket around herself, and crawled out from under the wagon. Preacher sighed. Sometimes doing the right thing was damned inconvenient, he thought, and downright frustrating to boot!
Not surprisingly, it was quite a while before he got back to sleep.
Preacher took one of the final turns on guard duty that first night. He wasn’t sure yet how reliable Bartlett’s men were, and those hours before dawn were the ones when it was the most difficult to stay awake. He didn’t want to take a chance on all the sentries dozing off at the same time. He would know that he was awake and alert, at the very least.
The night seemed about as quiet and peaceful as it could be. A gentle breeze blew across the prairie, stirring the grass that grew on both sides of the broad, dusty trail. With his flintlock cradled in his arms and Dog padding along softly beside him, Preacher walked all the way around the camp. Whenever one of the other guards challenged him, he identified himself and asked if there had been any signs of trouble. In each case, he was told that everything was all clear.
He knew that. Dog would have warned him if it were otherwise. It was well nigh impossible for any threat to sneak past the big cur’s sharp hearing and phenomenal sense of smell.
The eastern sky lightened to gray. Someone stirred up the fire and got the flames crackling merrily again. Preacher came in and found Bartlett putting the coffee on to boil.
“Early riser, are you?” the mountain man asked.
“That’s right,” Bartlett replied. “I’ve found that the older I get, the more difficult it is to sleep. The aches and pains of age, you know. They keep a man awake.”
“Yeah, I’m startin’ to figure that out myself,” Preacher admitted with a grin.
“But you’re a young man yet,” Bartlett said.
“It ain’t so much the years. It’s the miles, and everything you see and do along the way. I’ve been a heap of miles since I came west.”
“I suppose you have. What made you leave home in the first place, if you don’t mind me asking.”
Preacher leaned on his rife. “No, I don’t mind, but I sort of don’t remember. I was always a mite restless, I reckon. Always wanted to know what was out there, past what I could see.”
“By now have you seen it all?” Bartlett asked. He wasn’t smiling, and evidently he was serious.
Preacher shook his head. “I don’t figure one man could live long enough to see all there is to see out here. The country stretches too far, all the way out to the Pacific and from the Rio Grande in the south to the Milk River in the north. I’ve seen a heap of it, I reckon, but there are still plenty of places I’ve never been. I intend to keep lookin’ as long as I can.”
Casey and Lorenzo came over to the fire a short time later. Casey was rather cool toward Preacher, cool enough that Lorenzo noticed. While they were saddling their horses after breakfast, the old-timer asked, “You do somethin’ to make that gal mad at you, Preacher?”
“Nope,” Preacher replied. It was more a matter of what he hadn’t done, he thought wryly, but he didn’t see any need to explain that to Lorenzo.
The day was much like the one before, at least as far as the ground they covered. They did a little better because they didn’t run into any Indians. The scenery didn’t change any and wouldn’t for quite a while, Preacher knew. They had a lot of prairie to cover before the mountains came into view in the distance. Once that occurred, it would still be a week or more before they actually reached the higher ground.
During the day, Preacher noticed on several occasions that Roland Bartlett was watching him. The youngster’s stare wasn’t a friendly one. He always looked away quickly whenever Preacher glanced toward him, but then he would start glaring at the mountain man again.
Preacher wondered if Roland’s hostility had something to do with Casey. He could have seen her crawling under the wagon where Preacher was sleeping the night before and made more out of the incident than it really was.
When they made camp that evening, Roland continued casting unfriendly glances toward Preacher from time to time. Preacher was convinced the youngster was jealous. It was the only explanation that made any sense. Roland had been quick to help them two nights earlier in the tavern in Independence, but at that time he hadn’t known there was any sort of relationship between Preacher and Casey. Now he had figured it out . . . and he didn’t like it. He was attracted to Casey himself.
Even so, Preacher didn’t expect any real trouble to come from the situation. It would be fine with him if Casey decided to throw him over in favor of Roland. That would do away with the inevitable unpleasantness when the day came that he told her he was moving on without her.
Casey sat down next to Preacher to eat supper and smiled at him, putting her hand on his arm for a second as she said, “It was a good day today, wasn’t it?”
“We covered some ground,” he allowed.
“And we didn’t run into any more hostiles.”
Lorenzo sat down on Preacher’s other side in time to hear Casey’s comment. “I’ll bet there’s plenty more out there, ain’t they, Preacher?”
“The farther west we go, the more likely we’ll be to see them,” Preacher replied with a nod.
Roland came over carrying a plate of beans and cornbread. “Mind if I join you?” he asked the three of them in general, but Preacher could tell the question was really directed at Casey.
She smiled up at the young man. “That’ll be just fine,” she told him.
Roland sat down cross-legged on the ground beside her, close but not too close. He ate in silence for a few moments, then asked, “Did you say you grew up on a farm, Miss Casey?”
“You don’t have to call me Miss. Just call me Casey. And yes, I was born and raised on a farm.”
“Why did you leave there?”
That was sort of an awkward question to ask a gal, Preacher thought. Casey didn’t seem bothered by it, though. She said, “Oh, I wanted to see more of the world than just a barn and a kitchen. That’s how I wound up in St. Louis.”