Night of the Wolves by Heather Graham Read Free Book Online Page B

she promised, and headed for the stairs. Just dragging herself up the steps suddenly seemed like a tremendous effort.
    She made it to her room. Her father’s room. No, her room now, as he would have wanted it to be.
    One of the girls had laid out her nightdress, and left her a basin of water on the washstand. By rote, she carefully removed and hung her clothing, washed up and slipped on the nightgown. She dipped her hands into the water again to refresh her face, and caught her reflection in the mirror. In the white gown and the lamplight, she appeared gaunt and pale. As if she were some kind of wraith. Despiteherself, she found herself thinking of the women in the saloon. Dolly, who was so…assured. That new girl, oddly pretty and fresh. She paled in comparison. She winced. How odd! She wasn’t accustomed to feeling insecure.
    She turned again to her reflection and realized she was comparing herself to others because…
    Because of Cody Fox.
    A flood of red heightened her cheeks as she continued staring into the mirror.
    She took her towel and patted her face dry, and turned quickly away from the mirror, feeling ridiculous. The world had gone crazy—and she was worried about being noticed by a man. She definitely needed sleep. Ever since Grant’s death, she hadn’t even thought about men except when she’d volunteered at the hospital, where they’d simply been sad and scared human beings longing to die with the warmth and comfort of a woman’s hand clutching their own.
    Maybe that was it. It had simply been so long since she had buried her fiancé, so long since she had even thought about appearances, attraction…and then a man like Cody Fox came along and suddenly she was seeing herself as a woman again.
    Alex let out a sigh of irritation, blew out the lamp and crawled into bed.
    Darkness, exhaustion. They would surely allow her to rest.
    But she found that her eyes were drawn to the double French doors that led from the master suite to the balcony. The moon wasn’t full, but still there was a flood of light falling to earth from the heavens, a yellow glow permeating the world beyond her windows, making its way through the drapes.
    Bathed in that glow, shadows moved. They looked like the wings of birds, giant birds dancing in the air beyond the window. She almost thought she could hear the rush of wings, but she knew it was only the sound of the wind as it rushed over the plain.
    She forced herself to close her eyes, and at last she slept.
     
    T HEY WERE IN THE ACT of burying the decapitated man when the sheriff and his deputy made it back into town at last.
    The sheriff, Cole Granger, was a tall, hard-muscled man with sharp blue eyes and hair so dark it had a blue sheen in the moonlight. His deputy, Dave Hinton, was smaller, but he had a solid handshake and steady eyes.
    Jim Green explained what had happened when Milo and his band of outlaws had come to town.
    “These fellows saved us, and that’s a fact,” he said, then cleared his throat, kicking at the freshly dug mound of earth below his feet. “Honest, Cole, we weren’t being cowards—we just didn’t know what to do, you know? Ace Henley got this fellow, though. We don’t have a name for him, don’t know nothing about him. But we’ve taken care of him—and we’ve buried him deep.”
    “Damn it, damn it all straight to hell!” Granger said, sounding disgusted with himself. “I shouldn’t have ridden out, and I sure as hell shouldn’t have taken Dave with me.” He looked Cody and Brendan in the eyes. “Thank you. I don’t know how the hell you did it, but thank you. There’d been trouble out at John Snow’s trading post—and I had to get out there, see what was going on. But I didn’t count on getting back so late.”
    “We hit some trouble on the return,” Dave said.
    “Trouble? What happened?” Cody asked.
    “Darnedest thing,” Cole said, shaking his head. “We were coming through a patch of brush and trees about five miles