Protection

Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Bliss felt a smile break out across her face. Just when she was about to despair, Clint blurted out some hope for her.

“You really think you could?” Getting to the top of that mesa meant more than the world to her, and she felt gratitude overflow in her heart for the man who might just have a fiber or two of kindness in him.

“Well, it’d be tricky, but I think if I grabbed on to the rocks in the right places and dig the toe of my boots in the right spot, I could make it,” he looked up to study the wall of earth in front of them.

Bliss grinned broadly. Things were looking up!

Then it hit her that this could prove very dangerous.

“What if you fell?” she asked, her exuberant smile disappearing.

“Nah,” Clint said nonchalantly.

She still couldn’t deny the quivering in her stomach.

*****

Two nights later, Bliss lay awake in her bed, the pleasures of sleep eluding her. It appeared to her that she had lost an awful lot of sleep over the past two weeks. She was never restless.

Looking up and out of the window, Bliss took in a deep, calming breath and looked at the clear sky, the stars peppered across it so thick that they lit the room with the stream of light through her bedroom window. She smiled. Stars were the best thing about the night. Like tiny glimmers of hope for a worn out world.

Deciding to give up her want for sleep, she sat up and lit the lantern beside her bed before taking the opportunity to read a little more in the dime novel she had purchased.

Soon, she was snuggled under her quilt, leaned against a stack of pillows, and was fully enveloped in the pulp-fiction novel.

She read a few chapters into the book, getting more and more interested in the author’s way with words the whole time. She reached the point to where she was flipping pages faster than she could read them in anticipation until the author’s words formed a scene that was overly suggestive in every sense of the word. For a moment, she reread the last two sentences, not believing the words that were written there, before she felt her face heat and turn beet red. She slammed the book closed, her heart beating at a fast rate, and shoved the novel under her bed.

She couldn’t believe that she had paid money for a book with that kind of filth in it!

Was Clint Slade a man of that kind of character in real life? It hadn’t fully dawned on her the duties of a saloon girl like Vivian Lockhart until that scene popped up out of nowhere. She felt nauseated as she tried to shove the scene from her mind. Sure, Grace had talked to her about the happenings between a married man and woman years ago, but the characters in the book weren’t even engaged!

She felt completely scandalized.

Nodding her head with decision, Bliss got out of bed and retrieved the offending book from underneath her bed before silently exiting her room and walking down the hall towards the kitchen. At the end of the hallway, she marched right to the potbelly stove in the corner and opened the door, throwing the book among the flames still burning inside.

Closing the door back, Bliss felt her conscience ease some as she went back to her room.

She thought she had been silent about her excursion to the kitchen, but Clint’s door swung open just as she reached her door.

The first thing she saw emerge was the shiny barrel of his six-shooter. She waited, holding her breath, until his head peeked around the doorframe. He saw her and let down his gun.