A Promise of Thunder

amiss.
    Unable to pinpoint the cause of her distress, Storm took another stake from the wagon and drove it into the ground. She’d been at it for quite a while and still had a ways to go before she’d reach the place from which she started. When she finished she’d have the full 160 allotted acres staked out. Then all she had to do was erect a crude shelter and file her claim in Guthrie.
    Who said a woman wasn’t as capable as a man! She couldn’t wait to prove to that opinionated half-breed that she had done exactly what he said she couldn’t.
    It was dusk when Storm arrived back at the place where she had started and prepared to erect her crude dwelling according to the rules. It didn’t need to be fancy, just something to prove the land was occupied. She glanced over at the adjacent land, noting that Grady hadn’t yet erected his tent. Then she saw something that froze the blood in her veins.
    Through the settling dusk she saw the figure of a man rise unsteadily from the ground, stagger clumsily, then fall. Common sense told her not to interfere with something that was none of her business, but her conscience demanded that she take a closer look. What if the “Sooner” had arrived on the scene and Grady Stryker had shot him? What if the man she saw was Grady himself? What if—There was no sense speculating, Storm decided as she climbed aboard the wagon, picked up the reins, and set the horses into motion. Placing her shotgun—the one Buddy had insisted she always keep nearby—beside her on the seat, she crossed the short distance to Grady’s land.
    She heard him groan before she stopped the wagon. She knew instantly that it was Grady by the size of the long, lean frame sprawled on the ground. She was out of the wagon in a flash, stepping over the boundary markers and falling to her knees beside him. There wasblood everywhere. On his clothes and soaking the ground beneath him. Panic-stricken, Storm felt as if she had leaped backward four days to the nightmarish moment when she had knelt beside a dying Buddy.
    “Can you stop the bleeding?”
    Grady’s voice brought her abruptly back to reality. She couldn’t think of one reason why she should help a man like Grady Stryker. He had brought her more pain than she had ever known and disrupted her life from the first moment she set eyes on him in Guthrie. He might not have pulled the trigger of the gun that had killed Buddy, but she held him fully responsible for the accident.
    “Storm, snap out of it. I asked if you can stop the bleeding.” His voice was harsh with pain.
    “I—I don’t know. How serious is it?”
    “How in the hell do I know! You tell me.”
    Gingerly Storm turned him over, looking for the point of entry. She spotted it immediately, high on his left shoulder. The bullet appeared to have cut cleanly through the flesh, exiting on the opposite side.
    “It doesn’t look too bad, if we can stop the bleeding. The bullet went clear through.” When she continued to stare at him, as if mesmerized by the sight of blood, Grady lost his temper.
    “Dammit, lady, I’m apt to bleed to death before you make up your mind to help me. You are going to help me, aren’t you?”
    Lost in the vivid blue of his eyes, Storm nodded and began tearing strips from her petticoat.“Who did this to you? How many are there out there waiting their turn to prove themselves a faster draw?”
    Stifling a groan, Grady said, “That damn ‘Sooner’ showed up. I figured I’d scared him off, but he was smarter than I gave him credit for. The minute I turned my back on him he fired.”
    “You’re not as smart as you thought if you didn’t disarm him first,” Storm said with a hint of censure.
    Grady didn’t answer. It took all his concentration to keep from crying out as Storm stripped off his shirt and pressed folded strips of torn petticoat against his wound to staunch the bleeding.
    For some unexplained reason she found the sight of his bare chest strangely unsettling, and her hands shook clumsily as they touched his taut flesh.
    “Don’t you know how to be gentle?” Grady chided when she pressed harder than he thought necessary.
    “Only when it pleases me,” Storm said sweetly. “I have no reason to treat you gently, or even to help you at all. Not after what you did to Buddy. He—” She paused to steady her voice. “He was my best friend.”
    “I thought you said he was your husband.”
    Storm flushed. “Yes, of course he was my husband. But