Catch Me by Lorelie Brown

dished it into tin bowls. The beans were bland but edible and she slurped them down thankfully. Her belly had needed something warmer and more filling than the jerky and hard tack he’d been feeding her all day.
    She handed back the bowl. “I can promise anything I’d cook would have been better.”
    He took their tinware over to the creek and washed them out. “I’d be surprised if it didn’t. Women are usually better cooks. It’s where they need to focus their attention.” His lips relaxed into a near-smile. “Not on robbing banks.”
    “Hmm.” She drew her knees up under her skirts, then wiggled her fingertips under her thighs. “The male gender would likely be befuddled by their inability to stop such a crime wave.”
    Collier nodded. “Right. Because you’ve done a bang-up job eluding me.”
    “Damn you, Collier.”
    He moved back to the bags and tucked away their bowls, along with the small pot he’d cooked with. “You don’t much like being confronted with the truth, now do you?”
    “There’s truth, and then there’s truth.”
    He shook his bedroll out alongside the fire. “You mean there’s the real truth, and then there’s your version.”
    “Sometimes you have to take a person’s motives into account.” Through her skirt, she poked at the sore spot on the inside of her calf and winced from the pain.
    Dean froze in the process of smoothing out his bed and narrowed his eyes at her. “What was that?”
    “Motives. Why a body does something.”
    “No. Your leg. What’s wrong with your leg?”
    She yanked her hem from her ankles to cover her toes. “Nothing.”
    “Didn’t look like nothing.” He crouched down beside her and grabbed hold of her hem.
    Maggie scrambled back, but the saddle she’d been leaning against got in the way. “Hey now! Stop that. I didn’t say you could touch me.”
    His expression implacable, he kept after her like some sort of clockwork machinery. “And I can’t afford to have you injured. We’ve got a long way to go.”
    Her heart was trying to claw its way up through her throat. “It’s nothing.”
    “I’ll be the judge of that.” He lifted her skirt a few inches and a muscle in front of his ear twitched. “You’ve rubbed yourself raw.”
    She twitched her knees to the side and yanked her hem out of his grasp. It flittered back down to her feet. She’d never thought the first time a man got a glimpse beneath her skirts there would be such a lack of prurient interest. “It’s just a saddle sore. Not a matter of importance.”
    “It will be if it gets infected. We’ve got three weeks on the trail to get through. And I’ll be goddamned if I’ll pay for a doctor for you.” He surged to his feet and took a small jar of salve from his bags. “This’ll help.”
    She stuck her hands out. “I’ll do it.”
    “Well enough.” He tossed the salve underhand. She managed to catch it in the air and snatch it to her chest, though it bobbled at the last second.
    Unscrewing the lid was tough enough with her hands tied, but actually getting the oily salve on her skin proved near on impossible. There was no way she could hold her skirt up out of the way unless she scooped the whole thing into her lap, which would bare a lot more of her legs than made her comfortable. Especially considering how Collier was staring at her.
    She fumbled at her dress, trying to hold it out of the way with her elbow. Instead, she poked herself right on the raw spot. As pain singed down to her toes, she hissed. “Goddamn it,” she muttered. “You could untie me, you know.”
    “You stubborn little twit.” Collier snatched the small jar out of her hands and lifted her skirt just enough to expose the three-inch raw welt above her boot. “Hold this.”
    “If I’m stubborn, you’re made out of rock.” She held her skirts, pouting the whole time.
    His hands moved efficiently, dabbing on the soothing salve. Robert had always implied that if a man found a woman attractive,