Cherish (3 page)

Following the hoofprints to the edge of the clearing, Race determined that the killers had indeed headed north over the rise after doing their dirty work. He stared in that direction for a moment, recalling the traces of dust he had seen there earlier. All the signs pointed to his having surprised them, curtailing their search before they could rip apart that last wagon.

He burned to follow them. Right now, though, he had a more immediate concern—giving the dead a proper burial.

To do that, he’d need a shovel. In hopes of finding one, he headed toward the closest wagon, which was lacking a wheel. Looking around, Race spotted it leaning against a nearby boulder. Two of the spokes were broken, and it appeared that the men had been trying to do repairs and had probably been interrupted by the killers. The broken wheel answered one question, at least, why the travelers had set up camp in a dry creek bed so far from water.

As he drew up near the wagon’s front axle, he noticed a rifle in the boot at the opposite side of the dismantled driver’s seat. He stared at the well-varnished butt of the gun for a long, hard second. Why he felt surprised, he didn’t know. Even cheek turners would have to carry firearms in order to hunt for fresh meat along the trail. He just found it difficult to believe these people had made no attempt to save themselves when they’d had weapons within easy reach. These men could have fought back—could have defended their women—but they hadn’t.

Cheek turners
. He’d never been able to understand them, and he sure as hell hadn’t admired them. In fact, until now, he’d always considered them cowards. Now he realized he couldn’t have been more wrong. It took a rare kind of courage to die for your convictions, especially when you had a gun handy.

The next wagon in the circle had been parked at an angle almost perpendicular to the one in front of and behind it. As Race circled a pair of oxen that lay dead in the traces, he came upon an open, camel-back trunk, the lid blocking his view of what lay on the other side. As he stepped around it, he caught a glimpse of someone in his side vision. Not a dead someone either.

Instincts honed to a sharp edge by years of guarding his back, he whirled, dropped into a half-crouch, and jacked a cartridge into the chamber of his Henry, ready to shoot the first thing that moved.
A girl
? She knelt only a few feet away from him, looking for all the world as if she were praying.

Incredulous, Race stared at her. Golden hair that shone like a ten dollar gold piece. Sky-blue eyes. A face so perfect that a man expected to see its equal only in dreams. He blinked, convinced he was conjuring her up. But when his vision cleared, she was still there.

Over the past years, Race had covered nearly every trail in this godforsaken territory, and seeing a pretty female was an uncommon occurrence. So uncommon, in fact, that one step up from ugly started to look damned good to a man after a few months. This girl looked a whole lot better than damned good.

And she was definitely real, he decided. He had a vivid imagination, but not this vivid. He sometimes dreamed of women with golden tresses. What man who saw mostly black-haired, dark-skinned females didn’t? But the images he conjured were always perfect in every way—golden hair falling in a cloud of curls over a naked body, with pink-tipped breasts peeking out at him through the silken strands. This girl’s hair was so curly it bordered on unruly. It was also badly mussed, with stubborn corkscrew tendrils popping loose from the braided coronet atop her
head, the wisps catching what remained of the sunlight and shimmering like gold filigree. Race had never yet dreamed up a woman whose hair needed combing.

Then there was her dress, a relentless black and so modestly fashioned, it covered her from chin to toe. When he dreamed up a female, he dreamed her up naked—or damned close to it—and what little he did let her wear wasn’t funereal black, no how, no way. And—no small point, this—he liked females with some meat on their bones. This girl was slightly built—fragile, almost—with a skinny little neck, narrow shoulders, and breasts on the smallish side.

Oh, she was beautiful. No question about that. But she was too pure and sweet-looking for his taste, not to mention way too young. Some men might cotton to robbing the cradle, but Race Spencer wasn’t one of them.

She was staring fixedly at the sprawled body of an older woman who lay near her. “Miss?”

She didn’t turn at the sound of his voice or acknowledge his presence in any way. Did she even realize he was there? Her stillness was starting to alarm him. Tension clawed his backbone. Was she deaf? Gone loco? She looked it, all stiff the way she was, her head tipped slightly to one side, as if she’d been about to ask a question and lost her train of thought sort of sudden-like. Even the set of her soft mouth hinted at that—lips slightly parted, as if she were about to speak. He had to look sharp to even be certain she was breathing.

“Miss?” he said again, this time more loudly.

Again, no response. Race stepped toward her, his heart catching at the mix of emotions he saw reflected in her unchanging expression—stunned disbelief, dawning horror, and an awful, paralyzing fear. It was as if she were caught in the throes of a bad dream—frozen stiff by the terror. Only this was no nightmare, and there would be no shaking her awake. Like a fist plowing into his midriff, realization struck.

This girl was in shock.

Race scanned the clearing again, his guts clenching. None of these poor people had met with easy deaths, es
pecially not the women, and judging by the state this girl was in, she must have seen it all happen.
Sweet Jesus
. His first impulse was to gather her into his arms and try to reassure her. Anything to take that look out of her eyes. But he knew better. No sudden moves. A soothing tone of voice. If she was aware of him on any level, she’d be scared to death.

The breeze ruffled the golden curls that had escaped her braid. Studying her, Race noticed scratches on her chin, a bruise along her cheekbone, and a scrape at her temple. Had she taken a tumble? There were streaks of dirt on her skirt and a rent in the shoulder seam of her dress, all of which could have happened in a fall.

Race just hoped she wasn’t badly hurt. Draped from chin to toe in multiple layers of cloth as she was, it was difficult for him to tell if she’d sustained any injuries from the neck down. He sank to one knee in front of her. Slowly—very slowly—he set his Henry aside, just in case seeing it might frighten her.

“Sweetheart, are you bad hurt anyplace?”

No response
. As he gazed into her eyes, the naked pain he saw reflected there got to him as nothing else ever had.
Shattered innocence
. Until today, this girl had probably never seen the dark side of humanity.

Gently he cupped a hand to her cheek. Considering the warmth of the evening, her skin felt awfully cool. Almost chilled. That worried him. Was this type of shock similar to the shock men suffered from a serious physical injury?

Tracing her cheekbone with his thumb, he whispered, “It’ll be all right now, honey.” His throat felt as though he’d swallowed flour paste. Anger surged through him. An awful, helpless anger. If he ever got his hands on those bastards, he’d kill them. “You don’t gotta be afraid of me. You hear? I heard the shootin’, and I came to help. Ain’t nobody gonna hurt you now. Understand?”

If she heard him, she gave no sign of it. But he felt better for having said it.

Her skin felt like satin. And that face. Like the rest of her, it was small and delicately made, every angle and plane perfect. She was older than he’d first thought. Nine
teen, maybe twenty. Not a girl, after all, but a woman fully grown. It was the sweetness of her countenance that had made him think she was younger. His experience with women ran more to prostitutes, and no matter how young they were, none ever looked sweet. Hard as nails, more like, with eyes gone glassy from too much drink and a contempt for men that ran bone-deep.

By contrast, this girl put him in mind of the angels he’d seen painted on church ceilings down in Mexico.
A wounded angel
. The thought came from out of nowhere. He didn’t even believe in angels, and if, by chance, they did exist and one of them tumbled from heaven, he felt pretty damned sure God wouldn’t choose Race Spencer to rescue her.

“If this ain’t a hell of a note, I don’t know what is,” he said softly.

The dark gold of aged honey and tipped with platinum, her eyelashes fluttered, making him wonder if she was reacting to the sound of his voice. Maybe she was starting to come out of it. Almost afraid to breathe, he watched her, alert for the slightest change in her expression. Then she resumed staring again, apparently unaware of him and everything else around her.

He shifted his gaze to the corpse lying beside her. Like the other women, this one had been sorely abused before she died, the only difference being that her throat had been slit, an Arkansas grin curving from ear to ear under her small chin. Her black dress and gray underclothing were torn, her sprawled legs exposed, caked with dry blood, and bearing the marks of a man’s brutal grip.

It took Race a moment to notice that the dead woman’s gray hair was streaked with gold, the sheen dulled by the passage of years, but not so much he couldn’t tell that she’d once been a blonde. He threw a startled glance at the girl. There was no mistaking the resemblance—the same fragile build, the same delicate features and ivory skin. Mother and daughter?

Jesus-God, no
.

A strange feeling came over Race in that moment—an almost frightening sense that powers beyond his under
standing had led him here to this arroyo.
Loco
. He didn’t normally let foolish notions overtake him, and thinking that he’d been destined to find this girl was about as foolish as a notion could get. It was like saying that fine silk and burlap went well together.

“Honey?” he whispered, gently taking hold of her hand. “I’m gonna go get a wagon ready to roll so I can get you out of here. I’ll only be a few feet away, so don’t go gettin’ scared at bein’ left all alone. I’ll keep an eye on you the whole time, and you’ll be all right. Understand? Nobody’s gonna hurt you.”

That was a promise Race meant to keep. If the killers returned, he’d keep back one bullet with her name on it. He wouldn’t let those loco sons of bitches get their filthy paws on her.

He started to push to his feet, but then he thought better of it. Judging by the tear in her dress and the scratches on her face, she had taken a nasty tumble. Blood might not show through the heavy black muslin. Wouldn’t that be a fine kettle of fish, leaving her here to bleed to death while he went off to fix a wagon?

Grayness
. Rebecca was trapped in a thick blanket of it—a warm, fluffy grayness that closed in around her like goose down. She kept hearing a voice—the deep, silken voice of a man. It didn’t sound like Papa, yet he kept calling her “honey” and “sweetheart” as if he were a close relative. Uncle Luke, perhaps?

Rebecca strained to see him. He was there—right on the other side of the grayness.
“You know, darlin’, it just struck me. You could be bad hurt under that dress you got on, and I’d never know,” he said softly. “I swear on one of them there Bibles that I ain’t fixin’ to do nothin’ out of the way. I just gotta make sure you’re all right. You understand?”

No, she decided. It wasn’t Uncle Luke. This man spoke like an uneducated cracker. She felt big, hard hands settle on her shoulders. Panic welled as bold fingertips traced her collarbone.
Oh, God
. He was making free with her person. She attempted to move. Couldn’t. Wanted to
scream, but was unable to make her voice work. A dizzying, falling sensation came over her. Then she felt the cold earth against her back. She realized he had laid her on the ground. The next instant she felt him reaching under her skirts.

One of the strangers? Oh, dear Lord in heaven!
Just like Ma. He’s going to do me just like they did Ma
. Horror filled her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t fight back. She felt big, searing palms sliding up her leg.

Suddenly a tiny pinprick of light appeared in the wall of gray. As though looking the length of a narrow tunnel, she peered through it and saw her tormentor’s face, burnished and chiseled, his jaw sporting black stubble.
The devil himself
. His dark eyes glittered as he looked down at her. She felt his touch nudge at the apex of her thighs. Renewed horror washed over her in an icy, flattening wave, the reflux catching and carrying her like flotsam, deeper into the grayness. Tumbling, lost to sensation, she surrendered to the darkness, plunging farther and farther into it, glad to escape awareness.

Scowling, eyes slitted, ears attuned, Race made fast work of examining the girl’s second leg, unable to shake the feeling that she might snap awake at any moment. He was heartily glad when he found no sign of a serious injury. A few scratches and scrapes was all, and only a little bleeding from those. Otherwise, she seemed to be all right.

He wasn’t certain he could say the same for himself. If just feeling his way up her skirt had his heart drumming a war dance, he hated to think how he’d have felt, fitting her with a splint. He might have died of the excitement.

“Well, darlin’, it looks to me like you’re gonna live,” he announced, his voice ringing with relief.

Pushing to his feet, Race went to fetch a quilt that had been tossed from a wagon, then returned to lay it over her. Her expression remained frozen, like one of those porcelain dolls he’d seen in a shop window in Santa Fe when he’d been a bare-faced kid.

Damn.

As he rocked back on his boot heels, it occurred to Race that somebody would have to care for this girl until she recovered.
Not him. No, sir
. Just the possibility made sweat bead on his forehead again. But if not him, who? He had several young hired hands who’d probably jump at the chance. But he’d have to be out of his mind to let a single one of those randy whippersnappers get within ten feet of her.