Behind a Lady's Smile Read Free Page A

happened. Her father had done the best he could, but no man could fight an angry female grizzly. When she’d found him, he’d still been alive, torn up pretty bad and weak from loss of blood.
    Genny didn’t like to think about the way he’d died, but it was stuck in her head like a burr stuck in her hair. He’d made her promise to go home—home to England. She’d promised and had meant it. But winter was nearly on her by then and she couldn’t think of leaving. By the time the weather had turned, real fear had sunk in. England? She hadn’t the foggiest idea how to get there. She didn’t even know how to get to town for certain. Her father stopped bringing her with him when she was old enough to stay alone in the cabin for a few days. It had been years since she’d ventured far from home.
    England was a world away, across the entire continent, and then across an ocean of endless water. How would she get there? She didn’t even know which direction to start walking. And so, even though it had been warm enough for weeks to travel, she’d stayed put. When Mr. Campbell had shown up, she began getting a niggling of an idea. Maybe she could follow him to a town and then she could ask directions from there. And if he said no, she’d pay him with her mother’s jewelry. The thought of going up to a complete stranger, though, had nearly paralyzed her. She hadn’t talked to anyone other than her father since the last time she’d been to town. Old Jake didn’t count; her father always said he was more ghost than man, though she’d never known what he meant.
    She heard the clomp of Mr. Campbell’s boots outside and turned her head toward the door. When he walked in, his big body blocked out nearly all light from the entry. Her father had not been a big man, certainly not the kind of man who could have carried her up a mountain. This man was like a boulder, big, hard, and solid. Like a big, warm boulder, she amended. When he walked over to her, she could feel the floorboards shaking.
    “I’ve got your cornbread and jerky.” He held up a large paper sack that looked like it held enough food for a week, not one night. He looked around for someplace to put it and ended up dragging one of the cabin’s two chairs across the room and setting it next to her bed. He stared down at her for a long moment before turning to leave. “I’ll be back in the morning,” he said, without looking at her, and Genny was certain that would be the last she’d see of Mitch Campbell.

Chapter 2
    T he men back at camp thought it was hilarious that Mitch Campbell, of all people, would be babysitting a girl for the next few weeks, thanks to his own stupidity. Mitch wasn’t particularly known for his warm-heartedness and generosity, so at least some of the men were a bit suspicious of his motives.
    “She rich? Got to be. Only thing you care about is money.” This was from Will, who teased him relentlessly about his stinginess. True, Mitch would rather drink water than whiskey and it had nothing to do with being a teetotaler and everything to do with the fact that whiskey cost money and water was free.
    “She’s a looker. That’s it.” This was from Rainy Talbot, a man Mitch didn’t particularly like. He mostly didn’t like the look in his eyes when Rainy had asked if she was pretty, and so Mitch told him she was missing nearly all her teeth and her eyes were squinty. While he wouldn’t call the scruffy girl he’d left in the cabin a beauty, she might tempt a man who hadn’t been with a woman in a while. And Rainy Talbot wasn’t the sort of man who attracted women unless he was in a saloon flashing his money.
    “Still, she’s a human being and injured and I caused it, so I’m gonna have to stick around until she can fend for herself. I’ll find you. You all stink so bad, I’ll just sniff the air.”
    Mitch was going to miss them. They’d been a team for years now, moving across the country to record what they saw for the