LEGEND Read online

  “You are a rat,” she said as she kissed his neck.

  “Come on, let’s go home; I’m hungry.”

  “Oh? And who do you think is going to feed you?”

  “Martha, Mavis, Myrtle, and—” He didn’t say any more because Kady was kissing him and pulling him down to the ground.

  Behind them, the opening in the rock closed.

  Chapter 15

  “MMMM,” KADY MURMURED OVER HER COFFEE CUP. SHE AND Cole were alone in the kitchen, and they’d just finished breakfast. In the three days since she’d decided to remain in Legend, at least until the supernatural force that had brought her here took her away again, they had had a delightful time. They had ridden together and talked, and Cole had taken her all over Legend and the surrounding countryside. She had never had such an old-fashioned good time with anyone else.

  So what if he never tried to make love to her? So what if when they kissed it never went beyond the closed-mouth stage. That’s what she wanted, wasn’t it? After all, she was still engaged to marry Gregory, even if she was married to Cole. Or something like that.

  “It seems rather sinful just to sit here,” she said, looking out the window at the beautiful Colorado mountains.

  Raising his head from his own coffee cup, Cole looked at her. “What else should we be doing?”

  “I can’t seem to think of a thing,” she said with delight and thought how the modern world was controlled by the clock and the calendar. She didn’t know what time it was or even what day of the week.

  “Sure?” he asked, teasing. “We could go for a ride.”

  “No,” she said as she got up to refill their cups.

  “You could cook something and we could go on a picnic.”

  At that Kady laughed. “I think the town hates you.”

  “Yes, I’m sure they do,” he answered, sipping his coffee and watching Kady with adoring eyes. Three days ago, after Kady had chosen to stay with him, they had returned to the Jordan Ranch and Cole had dismissed everyone from his property. At that moment he’d been the most hated man in the country. That is until Juan had stepped in and threatened to shoot anyone who complained because Cole wanted to keep Kady in private. “What man does not envy him?” Juan had asked, making Cole roll his eyes, glad Kady had not heard that comment.

  Juan finished cooking what had been started, and Manuel took charge of the cleanup, and everyone had gone home with as much food as he could carry so, in the end, the townspeople were happy enough.

  “We could . . .” Cole said, looking up, his eyes teasing. “We could go look for the Lost Maiden Mine. Millions of dollars in gold, and it’s very near here.”

  “Already found it,” she murmured, looking out the window.

  “What?” Cole asked, looking at her sharply. “You found the Lost Maiden Mine?”

  “Not me,” she said. “They.”

  Cole stared at her. “What do you mean ‘they’ found the Lost Maiden Mine?”

  “It was found in nineteen eighty-two, and it was in all the newspapers and magazines. For a while the whole country was possessed by Maiden Fever, as it was called.”

  When she didn’t say any more, Cole grabbed her hand and held it tightly, while locking eyes with hers. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I don’t remember much about it, really. Some hikers found the gold in a little cave near a rock that looks like the face of an old man. And don’t you dare ask me where that is, because I have no idea. I thought the mine was found in Arizona.”

  Cole gave a snort of disgust. “The old prospector who said he’d found the mine used to come into the saloon in Legend when I was a kid.”

  “What were you doing in a saloon if you were a kid?”

  “Getting drunk and doing naughty things with the girls. Now tell me more about this treasure.”

  “I don’t know much, except—” She turned to look at him and was tempted to ask about the “naughty things.” “Did the prospector have a glass eye?”

  “A great big ugly one, why?”

  “People thought he must have had, but no one was alive who had seen him, so they weren’t sure it was him they found in the cave.”

  When Kady said no more, Cole, in one easy motion, pulled her from the chair and put her on his lap. With her head on his shoulder and his big arms around her, Kady sighed dreamily. “The whole thing was wonderfully romantic. There was the legend that this old man had found a mine that was guarded by the spirit of a beautiful Indian maiden, but no one believed him.”

  When she looked at Cole in question, he guffawed. “He was a drunk and a cheat at cards, as well as a thief and a liar. Of course no one believed him. The newspaper printed the story because they needed to fill up the space.”

  “Obviously, he wasn’t always a liar, and you should work on believing in people more.”

  “You believe everything anyone tells you, so you’re gullible enough for both of us. Now tell me what was romantic about this mine and how much was in it?”

  “Leave it to you to think about the money. Anyway, a couple of hikers saw a bat fly into some rocks and started investigating and found a small cave. Inside were two skeletons, one of a young woman wearing the remnants of a beaded dress and the other of an old man wearing a leather coat. He had a glass eye and—” She looked up at Cole. “Even though carbon dating showed the woman’s skeleton to be about a hundred years older than the man’s, they were holding hands when they were found.”

  “And that’s romantic to you? Two dead people? Skeletons are romantic? Life is romantic.”

  “You are a man, that’s all that’s wrong with you.”

  “And since when did you start complaining about that?”

  When Kady smiled, Cole gently kissed her, but she had already learned not to introduce true passion into their kisses. Passion made him pull away. “Let’s go find it. The mine. Let’s go find the mine.”

  “But it’s—” She started to say that the mine had already been found, but that wasn’t true, not when now was 1873. “What do you want the money for? Don’t you have enough?”

  “It’s not the money; I want the excitement. Finding treasure. That would be wonderful! Oh, wait. What did the people who found it in 1982 do with the money? Some of your good deeds?”

  Kady grimaced. “Fought over it. The man and woman who found it were engaged to be married, but after they found the treasure, they spent ten years in courtrooms fighting over who saw inside the cave first and therefore owned the lion’s share of the loot. In the end the lawyers got nearly all of it. I think the hikers ended up with about twenty grand each, out of a total of about thirteen million. And of course their lives were a shambles.”

  Raising her head, she looked at him. “And what would you do with more millions than you already have?”

  He took a moment before speaking, and when he did, his voice was soft. “I’d bury it under the mosque. No one goes there except me, so it would be safe; then, Kady, if you do go back to your own time, you can come back here and know where to find it. You’d be smarter than to let the lawyers have it.”

  For a moment Kady was speechless because she knew that he meant every word of what he was saying.

  “Do you love me, Kady?” he whispered, kissing the top of her head.

  She hesitated before she spoke, as Gregory’s face flashed before her eyes. Then she seemed to also see the man in her dreams, the man with the veiled face, who had haunted her most of her life. “I—” she began, but he put a finger to her lips, then lifted her chin so he was looking into her eyes.

  “Someday I want to see love in your eyes when you look at me,” he said.

  Kady started to protest that statement, but Cole wouldn’t let her speak.

  “I may not be an expert in love, but I know that when you love someone, you know it. You don’t hesitate or have to think about it. Nor does anyone else come to your mind when you think of love.”

  He kissed her softly. “When I look into your eyes, I’ll always know what is in y