“They Stole My Clothes Cowboy, Please Help Me!,” Said the Apache Woman Bathing in the Lake!

Chapter 2

She wore his coat when they rode into town.

The morning had come cold and gray, and Cole had told her she could stay at the cabin while he went to see who was talking. But Nia—she had given him her name over breakfast, quiet and careful, as though offering it cost her something—Nia had simply shaken her head and climbed onto the horse behind him.

Now she stood in front of the general store while Cole tied the reins, his coat hanging past her knees, her chin lifted high enough that people had to look twice before they whispered.

“I stay close,” she had said.

But she wasn’t staying close now. She was walking toward the saloon.

Cole caught her arm. “Not that way.”

Nia looked at him—and in that look, he saw something that made his hand loosen. She was not walking toward danger. She was walking toward *them*.

Two young men stood on the saloon porch, one with long hair under a sweat-stained hat. Cole recognized him from years back at roundups. Clay Jensen. Same smirk. Same mean glint in the eye.

But Clay was not looking at Cole.

He was looking at Nia’s boots.

Her bare feet were gone, replaced by a pair of worn leather boots that Cole had dug out of his trunk that morning. They were two sizes too large. But that was not what made Clay’s grin falter.

It was the way he recognized those boots.

The silence stretched like wire about to snap. Then Clay laughed—too loud, too fast—and pushed past his friend into the saloon.

Nia stood on the boardwalk, her hands wrapped in the sleeves of Cole’s coat, her face unreadable. But Cole had seen what he needed to see.

Clay knew her.

Not from the road. Not from the attack he was bragging about in the saloon.

From *before*.

And the boots—the boots that had been in Cole’s trunk since his wife died, the boots he had never seen Nia wear until today—those boots had made Clay recognize something too.

Cole looked down at them. Old leather. Scuffed toes. A small, hand-carved pattern along the side that he had always assumed was just a decorative stitch.

Nia followed his gaze. For a fraction of a second, something flickered in her eyes. Not guilt.

*Warning.*

—

Cole spent the rest of that day trying to place the boots.

He sat on the porch after Nia had gone inside, turning them over in his hands. The leather was old but well cared for. The stitching was even, the soles worn in a pattern that matched his own stride—except they were smaller. A woman’s boots.

Sarah’s boots.

He had found them in the bottom of a trunk months after she died, tucked beneath a quilt she had been sewing. He had meant to bury them with her, but somehow he could not bring himself to part with them. So he had left them in the trunk, hidden beneath the weight of other things he could not bear to look at.

Nia had found them that morning. She had pulled them on without asking, as if she had known exactly where to look.

And Clay Jensen had recognized them.

Cole turned the boot over and studied the side. The hand-carved pattern—a series of small crescent moons—caught the light. He had always assumed it was decorative. But now, looking at it with new eyes, he saw what he had missed before.

It was Apache work. The same style of stitching he had seen on moccasins and saddle bags years ago, during the scouting missions.

Sarah had never told him she could do this. She had never told him a lot of things.

He set the boots down and stared at the horizon, where the sun was beginning to drop behind the hills. Somewhere out there, Clay Jensen was nursing a wound that Cole had not given him, and Marcus Jensen was deciding his next move.

And Nia was inside, wearing his coat, carrying secrets he was only beginning to understand.