Lake of Fire by Linda Jacobs

peak Cord pointed out as Mount Moran, he reined Dante in and called a halt for the night. Though the summer sun was still above the western range of the Tetons, he estimated aloud that it was around nine o’clock.
    Then he turned to Laura in a matter-of-fact manner. “Seems to me it’s your turn to cook.”
    She asked herself how difficult it could be to soak and boil some beans and add jerky to season them. Cord had surely never sampled the kind of delicacies that routinely graced the table at Fielding House.
    With the sun sinking fast, he unlimbered his rifle and sat upon a boulder to clean it. Laura assumed he was doing routine maintenance until he rose, placed the weapon over his shoulder, and began walking through the marshy flats like a stalking cat.
    “What are you doing?” she asked.
    “Hunting.”
    “What?”
    “Birds.”
    She knew a little about bird hunting from listening to man talk in Chicago drawing rooms, most notably that it was accomplished with a shotgun, not a rifle.
    A moment later, the distinct flapping of wings accompanied a flock of plump birds bursting into the sky. Cord threw his rifle against his shoulder; sound cracked. He pumped the lever to chamber another round and fired again.
    A pair of feathered bodies dropped to earth.
    Cord turned to her with white teeth flashing. “Ptarmigan.”
    He strode out twenty paces, bent, and retrieved the birds. Then came back to her with the same confident walk and held out the game.
    She recoiled at the bright ruby blood drops on the multicolored feathers.
    “Aren’t you going to cook?” The limp masses hung from his strong fingers.
    “Perhaps,” she ventured, “you could clean them.”
    A vertical line appeared between his black brows.
    She drew in a breath and reached for the birds, herhand closing over the scaly legs. “I’ll need a knife.”
    Cord reached to his hip, pulled a horn-handled hunting knife from a sheath, and offered it to her.
    With the birds dangling from one hand, she took the knife in the other. Even as she did, she knew her best intent wouldn’t pluck, gut, and prepare these birds in a proper manner. Every piece of meat she’d ever seen had been cut at the butchers, or by one of the servants. She didn’t have the first idea where to make incisions without slashing into intestines and exposing her and Cord to the foulest of diseases.
    “I’m sorry,” she admitted. “I don’t know what to do.”
    He jerked birds and knife from her. “You’re not a tart, you’re not a cook, but you can shoot.” Blue eyes bored into hers. “Well, so can I, lady. What good do you do us?”

    Upon awakening the next morning, Laura lay beside Cord on his spread-out sheepskin, a stone poking the small of her back. Even at dawn, this day promised to be warmer than the one before, as insects were already crawling on the long blades of river-bottom grass.
    Forty-eight hours since she’d risen to a summer snowfall and watched men die. The memory, sharp and vivid, of Cord leveling his Colt at the outlaws, still had the power to make her breath come shallow.
    Laura turned onto her side and looked at him. With his eyes closed, black lashes trembling with eachinhalation, he once more looked vulnerable, something she knew he was not.
    No, he was hard-edged and completely at home in this country that had a way of suspending the rules she’d chafed at in Chicago. Thinking of it in those terms, she almost wished she were the kind of woman who felt at ease in the wilderness. Despite the looming night shadows, no matter the yipping cry of coyotes, she breathed the cleanest air she’d ever known and gazed into the clearest sky.
    Cord stirred and his eyes opened, their focus unerringly on hers. A small shock seemed to go through him; his pupils dilated. They studied one another across ten inches of bedding, the warm gust of his breath upon her cheek.
    Should he choose to force his will upon her hundred-pound frame, she would be at his mercy.
    He threw