The Renegades: Cole Read Online Free Page A

Reicherts waited, straining to hear her reply.
    She tilted her head, crossed her arms, and looked Cole McCord slowly up and down in the same suggestive way he had looked at her.
    “Why, Mr. McCord,” she drawled, “all the Kid and I are after is a little satisfaction.”
    He tried but couldn’t hide his surprise at her boldness, and that made her smile, even as she felt Mrs. Reichert’s horrified gaze on her back. She could hardly keep from laughing out loud in spite of the fact that she’d slightly embarrassed herself. He deserved a dose of his own medicine.
    “I’m not willing to satisfy the Kid by lettinghim shoot me,” he said with a wicked grin, “but to you, Miss Benton, I’d be happy to give a different kind of satisfaction … any time.”
    He let the words hang in the air between them for a long moment.
    “At your pleasure, Miss Aurora.”
    He touched the brim of his hat with exaggerated politeness, then turned his back on her, stepped off the sidewalk, and started across the street with his prowling panther walk. The slanting beams of the setting sun made his white shirt burn orange like the heart of a fire.
    Like the fearful anger inside her.
    Not once, in two encounters, had he considered what she had to say or discussed it with her sensibly. He had dismissed her as demented or silly or impossibly foolish, as everyone else had when they’d heard she was planning to trail the cattle.
    He stepped up onto the boarded walkway on the other side of the street, strolled across it, and pushed open the swinging doors of the saloon. Of course he would go there, where she couldn’t follow.

Chapter 2
    A urora marched directly across the street to the entrance of the Golden Nugget. Let the Reicherts and the rest of Pueblo City gossip, it’d make no difference—she’d soon be gone to Texas, and anyway, from now on polite society might as well be on the moon. Any woman who carved a ranch out of the Panhandle would be living far beyond anybody’s rules of behavior but her own.
    She pushed the swinging doors back with both hands and burst into the saloon without changing her unladylike pace. How could she slow down with her blood beating in her head like a marching drum?
    Cole McCord was leaning on the bar, his white shirt shining like a beacon in the dim, smoky room. As she started toward him, striding down the aisleway between tables with her skirts switching angrily back and forth about her ankles, conversation in the place began to lessen and then die. She didn’t look at anyone,but she felt dozens of eyes on her. Soon, the tinny piano’s lively version of “Buffalo Gals” became the only sound.
    She ignored everyone around her and didn’t miss a step on her direct path to the bar. The piano player started singing, then, and before she reached the place where Cole was standing, men’s voices began to rumble again. A respectable woman in a saloon might be a novelty but not enough of one to stop gambling games and serious drinking. Or to make Cole McCord look her way. He hadn’t glanced at her once.
    At last, she walked up beside him and leaned on the bar, which was almost too tall for her. Cole wheeled on her then, with a hard look that held anger but no surprise.
    “Good,” she said, “that means you’re alert at all times.”
    He stared at her as if she’d spoken in a foreign language.
    “I wasn’t sure that you saw me come in,” she said briskly. “Now, from that irritated glare, I know that you did. Therefore, you’ll make a good bodyguard.”
    “It was my understanding that you already believed I’d make the most amazing bodyguard on the face of the earth and that was the reason you’re tormenting me.”
    “It was my understanding that you are enough of a gentleman to listen until I have finished talking with you. Instead, you ran away into this den of iniquity thinking it was the one place I couldn’t follow you.”
    She marveled that her voice didn’t shake from the weight of her