The first time the beautiful young woman heard the men outside the cabin, she was barefoot, half-frozen, and wearing a stranger’s oversized nightshirt.
Three blows struck the wooden door.
THUD.
THUD.
THUD.
She nearly dropped the tin cup clutched between both hands.
Steam rose from the hidden hot spring beneath the open trapdoor at her feet, filling the rugged Colorado cabin with white mist. Only minutes earlier, that steam had seemed like salvation.
Now it felt as though the room itself had stopped breathing.
The enormous mountain man beside the trapdoor did not move.
His broad shoulders remained still beneath his dark wool shirt. His thick brown beard was damp with melted snow, and strands of wavy hair clung to his forehead from the storm outside.
But something changed in his eyes.
The woman noticed.
He knew that knock.
That terrified her more than the sound itself.
Another fist struck the door.
“Open up!”
A man shouted from outside.
“We know she’s in there!”
The beautiful young woman went pale.
She had not told the mountain man who attacked the stagecoach.
She had barely told him anything.
She had arrived at his cabin shaking so violently she could hardly speak. Her soaked wool dress clung to her very large, full figure. Her cheeks had been blue from cold. Her fingers barely worked.
He had not asked for explanations.
He had simply opened the door.
Given her heat.
Coffee.
Privacy.
His own shirt.
Then revealed that his cabin had been built over a natural hot spring.
For the first time since the stagecoach attack, she had begun to believe she might live.
Now the men had found her.
The mountain man slowly reached toward the loose floorboard beside the trapdoor.
The woman instinctively recoiled.
She expected a rifle.
A knife.
Some hidden weapon.
Instead he lifted the plank and pulled out a weathered leather packet tied with black cord.
Her confusion deepened.
“What is that?”
He did not answer.
He opened the packet.
Inside lay a silver signet ring.
The young woman stopped breathing.
She knew the crest stamped into its face.
A pine tree beneath a six-pointed star.
Her father’s ring.
The ring he had worn every day of her childhood.
The ring she had watched disappear with him into the grave nine years earlier.
Her tin cup slipped from her fingers.
The mountain man caught it before it hit the floor.
She stared at the ring.