Cherished (17 page)

“You have a bill of sale for the pinto, I
suppose?”

She stopped short. Hot color rushed into her
cheeks. “You wouldn’t listen to me,” she pleaded. “I had no
choice.”

“Just like you had no choice except to steal
five thousand dollars and another damned horse back in Denver.
Well, I’ll tell you something, lady, and this is the last time
we’ll discuss it.”

My, he was angry. Cool and controlled this
time, but angry. The taut face that made him handsomer than ever,
the electric fire in his eyes ... did he hate all thieves so
savagely, Juliana wondered, or just her?

He reached down and pulled her to her feet so
that she faced him, clutching the blanket about her.

“I don’t give a red-hot damn about any of the
fugitives I bring back, and I don’t waste my time listening to them
claim their innocence. You know why? Because I don’t care.” His
damp hair had fallen into his eyes, giving him an almost satanic
look as he continued. “This is my job. I’m not a judge. I’m not
even a damned sheriff. I’m a bounty hunter. I make my living
bringing criminals back to face trial, and I intend to make a
damned good profit bringing you back, sweetheart. If the reward
wasn’t so damned high, I wouldn’t bother with you.” His gaze
scorched her with its intensity. He gave a rough laugh. “I don’t
much care for women, except the kind you meet in a saloon. And
something tells me you’re not that kind. I don’t talk much, and I
can’t stand a lot of chatter. Or tears. So don’t try any of that.”
He shook her. “You’re going back. Unless you can manage to kill me,
because that’s what it would take for you to get away again. And I
don’t think you’re going to manage to kill me, because others have
tried who are a lot more capable of it than you. So forget about
telling me you’re innocent, forget about sweet-talking me into
letting you go, forget about escape, and save your tears and your
begging for the judge. You got that?”

Juliana drew a breath. Rain continued to pour
outside the cave, pounding the storm-tossed darkness like a hail of
bullets. She gazed up at Cole Rawdon with wide, cool eyes.

“For a man who doesn’t like to talk much,”
she remarked, “that was quite a speech.”

His jaw clenched. She thought she heard his
teeth gnash.

“There’s just one thing,” she rushed on,
before he could explode at her. “You see, Mr. Rawdon, the
difference between me and your other prisoners is that I
am
innocent,” she said triumphantly. “That is the plain
and simple truth.”

For an instant, as she met his gaze firmly
and with unwavering conviction, he almost thought it could be true.
Then he remembered how she’d stolen Arrow from under his nose, how
she had gasped in pain over a supposedly broken ankle before
sprinting for the horse with the agility of a deer. Juliana
Montgomery was good, all right. She was very good. The lies poured
from her lips as sweet as molasses.

“Keep talking, and I’ll gag you for the rest
of the trip,” he flung at her. He pushed her away, relieved not to
have to look into those luminous green eyes anymore, to glimpse the
beauty they held, a beauty filled with deceit.

Cole stepped around her, and fished a pouch
of tobacco from his pocket. He fixed himself a smoke, feeling
restless and on edge, while the girl settled down in silence before
the fire. Wrapped in his blanket, staring into the flames, she
seemed unaware of how seductively lovely she looked. But he
wondered if she knew the effect she was having on him, one that
made him damned uneasy.

Amber firelight gilded the riot of heavy
curls framing her face, and revealed every delicate plane of her
chiseled features. Her skin had lost its icy-cold paleness, and now
glowed in the flames, making her look so vibrant and alive, so
tantalizingly soft and warm, that Cole had to fight the urge to ...
to what? Grab her in his arms and kiss her? Make love to her right
here on the gritty floor of this cave? He was disgusted with
himself.

You’d think she was a regular woman, one of
the girls in the Red Feather, someone like Ina Day. She wasn’t. She
was an outlaw. She might be pretty, she might talk fine and smell
good, and she might have the most enticing bare shoulders he’d ever
seen, but she was as underhanded and dangerous as any of the scum
he normally lassoed.

And he’d better remember that.

Turning his back on her, Cole smoked and
worked at hardening his heart against the slender vision by the
campfire. He couldn’t afford to let his guard down with her, she
was without doubt an expert at manipulating men with her looks and
her body. He wasn’t going to fall for her tricks. He summoned up
the vision of Fire Mesa as he remembered it from his childhood, and
he thought of that two-thousand-dollar reward and how it just might
tip the scales in his favor.

The sooner he dumped Juliana Montgomery in
the Denver jail, the closer he’d be to buying back Fire Mesa—if it
wasn’t too late already.

Think about that. Don’t think about anything
but
that. Cole tossed the butt of his cigarette into the
fire.

“Time to turn in.”

He spread his bedroll on the ground and the
oilcloth beside it.

“Come here.”

Warily, Juliana rose and approached him. What
now? She tried to draw back when she saw the rope in his hands, but
he grabbed her wrists in one fist, and quickly hobbled them
together.

“There’s no need to keep me tied up—I’m not
going to run out into that rain ...”

“That’s right, you’re not. And you’re not
going to kill me in my sleep either.” He fastened the remaining
three feet of rope to his belt with quick precision, then lay down
on his bedroll, forcing her to the ground by his movements.

“Sleep while you can. We’ve got a lot of
ground to cover tomorrow.”

Sleep? The oilcloth wasn’t much protection
from the drafty cave floor. Cold air buffeted her. The blanket had
slipped oft one shoulder and the rope bit into her skin. Juliana
knew she wouldn’t sleep a bit.

She twisted uncomfortably, trying to find a
position where the blanket was secure and where the ground didn’t
feel quite so hard beneath her.

Cole Rawdon, three feet away, had his back to
her.

“Stop squirming around and go to sleep,” he
growled.

She thought his voice had a strange edge to
it. She wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t want to make him any
angrier than he already was, so she went perfectly still and stared
up at the rocky ceiling of the cave, weirdly lit now by the dying
gold embers of the fire.

She would never, ever be able even to doze.
Not with the storm, the rope, the lightning, and, worst of all,
Cole Rawdon’s powerful form right beside her.

At least he had made no move to touch her.
But what if he did? Tension worked its way through her aching
body.

She hadn’t a prayer of getting any sleep. She
knew it. She would lie here, cold, miserable, and afraid all
night.

But weariness swooped down on her like a hawk
and carried her off before she even realized it, bearing her
inexorably to the edge of slumber—and then beyond, deep, deep into
the dark, limitless crevasse.

Curled unconsciously against her captor in a
cave of black and amber, Juliana closed her eyes and slept.

She awoke at dawn to find Cole Rawdon
standing over her.

“It’s about time,” he drawled.

Behind him, one of the horses whinnied as if
in agreement.

Rawdon was fully dressed, including gunbelt
and boots, and looked clean, shaved, rested—and impatient. “We’re
breaking camp. Better hurry if you want breakfast.”

What she wanted, Juliana thought, was to be a
thousand miles away from here. She pulled the blanket over her head
with a groan. She couldn’t believe it was morning already. And she
couldn’t believe she had slept. She managed to sit up then, combing
the hair back from her eyes with her fingers. Cole Rawdon was
watching her, his thumbs hooked in his pants pockets, his
expression becoming more amused by the second.

Damn him. She must look a sight. It was never
easy for Juliana to wake up before ten in the morning, and in the
past she had always preferred to have her chocolate in bed before
speaking to anyone, even her maid. Now she was on top of a damned
mountain at dawn, being scrutinized by the most infuriating man
alive, who looked as if he was ready for anything. For a moment,
she wished she
had
fallen off that precipice into the
canyon last night.

Juliana gave a sigh. Pulling the blanket up
over her shoulders in an effort to preserve what was left of her
dignity, she managed to stand without his assistance, every muscle
in her back and shoulders crying out in protest.

Morning sunlight streamed beyond the cave’s
entrance, flooding the fresh-washed world outside with clean,
shimmering light. Looking down, Juliana realized that her bonds
were gone, the bedroll was folded and packed, and fresh coffee had
been made. It smelled heavenly. To her further amazement, a small
animal of some sort was roasting on a spit above the fire, and the
mouth-watering aroma of roasting meat permeated the cave.

He’d been busy this morning, hadn’t he? Where
in the world did he get the stamina?

The tantalizing smell of the meat filled her
nostrils, and made her stomach growl, penetrating even her
just-awakened fog. Lord, it smelled good. So did the coffee Rawdon
had in his cup, steam rising fragrantly into the air.

“I didn’t know you could cook,” she muttered
as she headed toward the fire and the food.

“I can do a lot of things,” he commented with
a grin, and raised one eyebrow. “Want me to show you some of
‘em?”

“No,” Juliana said hastily. But her stomach
did a strange little somersault. He seemed different when he smiled
like that—younger, almost agreeable, certainly less dangerous, and,
if possible, even more handsome. She thought of asking him what
kind of creature it was, there on the spit, but then she decided
she’d be better off if she didn’t know. As eagerly as if she were
sitting down to a china-covered spread of poached eggs, sausage,
biscuits, and marmalade, she took the greasy meat he handed her and
ate it with famished gusto. Even the black coffee was the most
delicious she had ever tasted. Ladylike manners were forgotten.
Juliana gobbled every piece as quickly as she put it to her
mouth.

Cole studied her when she was intent on her
food and not paying him any attention. If possible, she looked even
lovelier than she had last night, her eyes soft and dewy with
sleep, her pale hair tousled about her face, her skin glowing with
luminous beauty. Every now and then the blanket slipped off her
shoulder and he caught a glimpse of a lace-edged chemise caressing
her pale flesh. The chemise was pretty, delicate, just like her, he
thought. And then he caught himself. No use traveling down that
road. It could only lead to trouble. The problem was, he told
himself, he was used to being alone—or else having some dirty
outlaw scum trussed up before his campfire. Not a woman. Especially
one as beautiful and dainty-looking as this one. Even the way she
nibbled at the rabbit meat and took small, neat sips of coffee was
elegant and graceful and somehow fascinating. How the hell did
someone like her get mixed up in stealing? he wondered.

Easy, he answered himself quickly. He
scowled, thinking of Liza, of how she and Jess had laughed when
they’d left him for dead in the desert. The sound of that laughter
still echoed in his head sometimes, hurting him more than the
bullet ever had. The pain had never completely gone away. Maybe it
had hurt so much because he’d only been a kid, and had still
believed in friendship and goodness and trust. But Jess Burrows had
taught him that friendship meant nothing when money was involved,
that goodness was a myth and that trust—trust between friends, or
between a man and a woman, led only to betrayal and pain, and
probably death. Yeah, he’d learned all right and he’d better not
forget those lessons.

This girl looked nothing like Liza, Cole
reflected, dividing the last of the rabbit meat between himself and
her. She was even more beautiful in her own way. And she was most
likely every bit as cunning—maybe more. She’d probably gotten away
with a lot before the law started to catch up to her in Denver;
that would explain the unusually high bounty put out by Judge
Mason. So the less he thought about her as a woman, Rawdon told
himself harshly, the better. She was a prisoner, like any other. As
his gaze flitted from the dusting of freckles across her nose, to
those full, rose-pink lips she was licking, and downward, along the
long column of her throat to where the saddle blanket hid the
curves of her slender form, he swallowed. Like any other. He gulped
down a freshly poured cup of coffee, scalding his throat.

“There’s something I want to ask you,” he
said, trying to ignore the deep, burning pain the coffee had
caused.

Juliana swallowed her last mouthful of meat
and sent him a scathing look. “I’d rather not talk to you, if you
don’t mind.” She tossed her head back. “Since you won’t believe a
word I say, what’s the point?”

“The point is, I’m asking you a question and
you’d damn well better tell me the truth.” He reached out suddenly
and gripped her wrist. That got her attention. Her eyes went wide
and met his head-on. “Are you related to that Montgomery gang
that’s been holding up freight lines and stagecoaches all over the
place?” he demanded.

For a moment he thought he saw something go
tense and still in her face. She tried to pull away from him and
failed.

“No.”

But her voice was weak.

“You’re lying again.”

“I am not! I don’t know who or what you’re
talking about.”

“Then why did you think that hombre I shot in
Denver was someone named Tommy? There’s a Tommy Montgomery heading
up that gang.”