The Western Dare (Harlequin Heartwarming) by Roz Denny Fox Read Free Book Online

Campbell’s team pull abreast of hers.
    “What’s the matter with you?” he shouted. “Can’t you signal or something? I almost ran you down. Are you totally irresponsible?”
    “You might have slowed your horses,” she said through clenched teeth. Mark was more right than he knew. Nolan Campbell seemed just as dictatorial as Dave.
    “Sheesh!” Mark rolled his eyes in disgust. “You’d better fan it, Mom. I told you, the old dude’s a loose cannon.”
    Emily gazed at the huge wagon inching toward hers. Snapping her reins, she sped ahead of Camp. “Just stay away from me,” she ordered. “From us.”
    Mark’s lips curled in an impudent grin.
    Camp coughed and spit out grit thrown from the Bentons’ wheels. In a flash of brilliant insight he wondered why on earth he’d wasted time regretting that he didn’t have a wife and kids. Especially a wife!

CHAPTER THREE
    “Historic reality is a far cry from men’s version of it.”
    —Gina Ames’s observation
on her first data sheet.
    T HE SETTING SUN CAST long shadows behind the wagons before Maizie gave the signal to stop for the night some five miles outside the community of Arrow Rock.
    Camp had bounced up and down on the hardwood seat so long his butt felt numb. Blistered even. He wanted desperately to leave his perch, yet he was half-afraid to get down in case he couldn’t walk. Too humiliating. You have to do something, dolt.
    What he did was watch the others unhitch their horses and hobble them in the carpet of grass beneath a stand of yellowwood and hickory trees. His best view was of Emily’s wagon, since he’d parked beside her. She looked positively chipper the way she hopped down and bent to loosen the singletrees. Camp was struck by an urge to ruffle the wisps of hair escaping her hat. Curls that shone like new copper pennies in the peachy afterglow of the sun.
    His gaze slipped automatically from Emily’s hair to the seat she’d just left.
    Would you look at that! Emily Benton had a thick bench cushion covering that hard plank seat. How would Sherry justify that bit of comfort?
    Camp scowled, then moaned as he shifted his position, checking to see if the other women had cheated, too. They had! Of all the nerve... Yet on another level—the one that hurt—Camp wished he’d been as smart.
    “Are you all right?” Emily’s quiet question jarred him from his stupor.
    He straightened quickly, ignoring the hot prickles shooting up his thigh as feeling returned to one leg. “I’m fine. Just wondered why we aren’t circling the wagons.”
    Her low laughter sent hot prickles of another sort along Camp’s already tender nerve ends.
    “And you call yourself a historian, Campbell. For shame. Pioneers only circled the wagons to ward off attacks by marauding Indians. Which didn’t occur nearly as often as Hollywood would like us to believe, I might add.”
    He bristled. “Wagon circles are well documented in the journals I’ve read. They guarded against more than Indian and outlaw attacks. Circles discouraged scavenging by coyote, cougar and bear.”
    Mark and Megan Benton tumbled out of Emily’s wagon in time to overhear the last exchange. “Mo...th...er!” Megan wailed. “We’ll all be eaten in our sleep.”
    “Bears. Cool!” Mark discarded his sullen look for one of delight—the first Camp had seen from either of the kids.
    “I’ll bet there’re rattlesnakes, too,” the boy announced in a loud, shivery voice, his face shoved close to his sister’s.
    She shrieked and scrambled back inside the wagon. Camp felt sorry for Emily. She had her hands full with those two.
    “Megan, get back out here,” Emily called. “It’s time to pick up our list of nightly chores from Maizie. It’ll be dark before you know it.”
    “Chores?” Camp looked blank. His stomach felt caved in to his backbone. The apples Maizie dispensed at the noon water stop had barely whetted his appetite. But starved though he was, Camp wanted to record his