Cherished (47 page)

Skunk. He was talking about Skunk.

“I wanted you to find him. I wanted you good
and scared when I got my hands on you—I remember how much violence
upsets you. You see, I’ve got to teach you a lesson, Juliana, a
lesson about you and me. You”—and he leaned down closer to her,
letting his eyes rake every inch of her slender form—“are what I
want—and I will kill you before I let any other man touch you.” An
ominous silence followed, in which she could hear the uneven rasp
of his breathing. “Did Cole Rawdon touch you, Juliana?”

Watching his eyes, gold-flecked marbles set
deep within his tanned face, and seeing the tension creased in his
forehead, she didn’t have to think about her answer.

“No,” she said firmly, staring him down.

With a flash of anger she added, “But he
never hurt me or frightened me the way you have.”

“You called out to him in your sleep.”

Startled, Juliana let this remark hang in the
air. She moistened her lips with her tongue, waiting.

“I think I’m going to have to kill Mr. Cole
Rawdon,” he said quietly, a thoughtful expression forming across
his features. “As part of your lesson.”

“No!” Juliana sparked to life at this. Blood
drummed in her temples, and she felt her fingers curling into
fists. “There’s no reason for that. He didn’t touch me—he was
bringing me back to Denver for the reward ...”

“But he took you out of the Plattsville jail.
Killed two men doing it.”

“He didn’t trust Sheriff Dane,” she explained
desperately. “He thought Dane would keep the reward for
himself.”

“You’re lying.” Breen’s lips stretched out,
not in a smile this time but in a snarl, reminding her of the bear
that had trapped her in the tree. “You wouldn’t be trying to
protect him so much if he was planning to turn you in. Besides, I
know he’s somehow mixed up with those brothers of yours.”

“No, he isn’t,” Juliana began, frantic now,
her heart seeming to freeze in her chest, but her words were
interrupted by Bart Mueller, calling to Breen from the rocks of the
escarpment.

“Rider in the distance, boss. Maybe more than
one—just a speck, really, but they’re kicking up trail dust—can’t
see how many.”

“Indians?” Breen snapped.

Mueller shrugged his beefy shoulders. “Maybe.
You’d best have a look.”

Cole
, Juliana thought with a leap of
hope, but immediately fear gripped her. If it was him, and perhaps
Wade and Tommy with him, Breen and Mueller would kill them—they
would watch the riders’ approach and lead them into a trap. She
felt panic rising in her, clogging her throat. If she could get
away, sneak away and warn them—or at least distract Breen and
Mueller so that they lost the advantage ...

She had to try. For the moment neither Breen
nor Mueller was watching her. Both were perched on top of the
escarpment, shielding their eyes with their hands, peering far into
the distance.

There was no time to think or to plan.
Move
.

Juliana ran.

She darted across the clearing, toward a
tumble of rocks behind the ridge, not knowing what lay beyond them.
Her feet flew across the hard-packed dust, making a soft, scraping
sound. If she could only reach cover, if she could get behind the
rocks before they spotted her missing, she might be able to keep
ahead of them, losing them among the broken boulders of the
foothills ...

But she heard a shout even before she reached
the first jutting stones.

“Get her, damn it,” John Breen yelled, and
glancing back, she saw that both men were clambering down from the
escarpment, sprinting toward her, their faces harsh with
determination.

She ran faster.

Shots rang out. She scrabbled over the
shallow jumble of rocks and found herself at the foot of a sloping,
chaparral-covered butte that stretched beyond the escarpment,
winding its rocky trail all the way to the stream John Breen had
mentioned. There was cover ahead, if she could only reach it.
Manzanita,
piñón
s, and
the yellow-orange flowers of the agave loomed ahead amid the
jutting rocks and natural ledges. She stumbled forward, catching
her foot in a weed, but she managed to stay upright, pulling it
free with a gasp. She kept going, her heartbeat a locomotive, her
cheeks puffed out with the exertion of running. She knew full blast
the terror an animal must feel when it was being hunted.

She reached the rocks and began a frantic
climb, her gaze darting desperately about for a place to hide.
Nowhere. They could pick her off on this trail like a fly on a
wall.

As terror bubbled within her, she saw the
opening, a tiny, jutting space beneath an overhanging oak, and
stooping, she staggered in, fighting for breath. She found herself
in a miniature cave, a natural enclosed shelf, not much bigger than
a shed, surrounded on three sides by granite rock. She backed
against the wall, feeling its hard burning surface press into her
back. Dizzy, she tried to catch her breath, wondering how long it
would take them to find her. Were they coming? Had they somehow
lost her on the trail?

She didn’t dare peek out from her meager
shelter to see.

She heard the sound of boots on rock, hard,
scuffling. Pebbles clattering aside. The soft rustle of trampled
leaves and brush. One of them was coming.

Juliana fought back panic. She had seen the
fury on John Breen’s face when he saw her running away. She still
remembered the sharp whack of his hand across her cheek. He would
do more than strike her this time. He might even kill her.

She edged backward, and her foot struck
something. A stone. No, a rock. Twice the size of her hand, with
sharp, grainy edges. She reached down with trembling fingers and
clutched it.

Her palms were slippery; it nearly tumbled
from her grasp. But she closed her hand about it tightly and held
it. If she had to ... she would ...

She had to think of Cole. And of Wade and
Tommy. She had to get to them, warn them away from this place—and
if she had to kill whoever was out there, then she would.

She swallowed back the terror and took deep
breaths. The cave smelled of rotting leaves. It was damp. Something
small and brown scurried past her feet and out into the sunlight.
Juliana shifted ever so carefully, positioning herself so that she
was standing a little to the side of the opening, so that she could
see whoever came in before they saw her ...

The scrape of a boot sounded just inches
away. She could hear breathing, a man’s heavy, irregular
breathing.

She heard a raspy intake of breath. Juliana
wanted to scream. She bit down on her lip so hard, it started to
bleed, and she squeezed the precious rock tighter.

Suddenly, Bart Mueller’s dark head and broad
shoulders poked through the low opening, and he was staring
straight up at her as she stood trapped.

There was no time to think, to hesitate even
an instant. She swung her arm downward with all her strength.

What she saw after that made the nausea swirl
and rise within her. She closed her eyes and choked it back,
clutching the wall for support. The rock clattered from her
hands.

Bart Mueller was dead. He had to be. When she
could bring herself to open her eyes once more and look down, she
knew with sickening certainty that he was as dead as a man could
get.

She was shaking all over. Would her feet
move? she wondered weakly. She had to get out of here. There were
no other sounds from the trail, but she knew John Breen wouldn’t be
far off. He was no doubt searching another area, but even now he
could be moving closer.

She forced herself to reach down and pick up
Mueller’s gun, which had fallen from his hand when she hit him. She
checked the cartridge, her fingers trembling. Empty. The gun was
useless. She let it fall.

Then she stepped over Mueller’s body, over
the stream of blood running from the gash in his scalp, and out
into the open once again. No sign of Breen. Maybe, just maybe she
could get away. Maybe she could get to Cole in time to warn him
...

She heard a sound and, spinning, saw John
Breen less than twenty feet from her, crouched beside a thicket of
manzanita, one hand leaning against the reddish bark, the other
drawing his gun.

He was staring straight at her.

“Stop right there, you bitch, or I’ll shoot
you where you stand,” he yelled, his usually smug face for once a
fiery red.

Juliana froze for an instant, poised in
motionless silhouette on the overgrown trail. She knew Breen was
just furious enough to shoot. But she wouldn’t stand and be
captured like a mouse too frightened to flee the murderous claws of
a cat.

She whirled and began to run, zigzagging up
the trail, grabbing at branches with her hands, struggling for
toeholds as the slope steepened and the rocks tumbled away beneath
her feet. Her palms and fingers were bloody and scratched, a branch
scraped her cheek, but she stumbled on, her pace only quickening as
a shot thundered past her, the bullet slamming into rock only
inches from her head.

She ducked sideways, and staggered onto a lip
of rock surrounded by a steep limestone wall. It was a little
crest, another shelf of stone amid the
piñón
s and juniper.

A dead end.

She was out of breath. She could run no
farther. But she had to. She couldn’t give up, she had to keep
going until she was dead and could fight no more. She struggled to
draw a breath, her hands on her tortured chest, and then suddenly,
the sound of a gunshot kept her pinned like an insect to the
spot.

John Breen scrambled and jumped his way to
the ledge, his pearl-handled Colt aimed all the while at her heart.
“Now you’ve asked for it, you bitch,” he cried, his voice hoarse,
as he cornered her beneath the cloudless blue sky.

His face was flushed a horrid purple.

“Mueller,” he shouted, but Juliana, suddenly
overcome with rage at this man who had tormented her for so long,
shook her head.

“He won’t answer you. He’s dead.”

Incredulity crossed his face, “You killed
him?”

“I wish it had been you instead,” Juliana
whispered.

“You’re going to wish like hell it had been,
honey.”

Juliana’s hands were on the huge slab of rock
embedded in the slope behind her. The rock was hot, burning her
flesh. The sun beat down mercilessly upon her head. She wheezed out
a breath, keeping her chin high. So it had come to this. Well, then
she would die. Maybe she would suffer first, but then it would be
over. She would not beg. She would not give him the satisfaction of
watching her plead for her life.

“I would have married you, Juliana, and you’d
have been looked on by the world as a queen—the esteemed wife of
one of the world’s richest men. But no, you had to ruin everything.
So now I will take from you what should have been mine long ago.
What would have been mine beginning with our honeymoon night. I
will savor it to the fullest, and then I will kill you and be rid
of you forever.”

In his eyes she saw a feverish lust, and she
realized with a queasy little skip of the heart what he intended to
do.

“Just shoot me,” she cried, her voice ringing
with fury. “Your touching me would be worse than any death ...”

“He’s not going to shoot you or touch you
ever again, Juliana,” said Cole Rawdon from a rocky peak almost
directly above.

She swung her head at the same moment John
Breen did toward that cool, beautifully steady voice.

Cole’s tall form stood poised beside a desert
willow, his Colt .45 clasped in his hand, pointed at Breen. Juliana
thought she was dreaming. The riders Mueller had seen in the
distance—they couldn’t have reached this spot so quickly.

But he was here. He had come.

“Drop your gun, Breen,” Cole ordered, his
voice cutting as sharp as a bowie knife through the hot air. “You
can’t win this one. Drop it now.”

Breen squinted upward into the sun, trying to
make out the other man’s face. His own features were twisted with
fury, then slowly they smoothed themselves out as he made a
tremendous effort to regain control of the situation.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Rawdon. Drop that gun.”

Breen craned his neck yet again, trying to
get a better look at the man above him, but the sun was too bright
in his eyes. “I’ll make a deal with you, Rawdon—” he began, but
Cole interrupted him.

“A bullet goes between your eyes on the count
of three if that gun isn’t down and out of reach by then. I’m
counting, Breen.”

Reluctantly, the older man let his weapon
slide free. Juliana, surprised by her own agility, scooped it up
without thinking. Then Cole began making his way down the slope
with surefooted grace.

Breen’s voice echoed strangely in Cole’s
mind. The rocks played tricks, and the fact that he had tracked
Juliana to this spot so close to where Jess Burrows had tried to
kill him must be having an effect on him. Seeing that escarpment
where he and Liza had camped that last time had brought back the
queerest sensations. Peculiar. Peculiar, too, that Breen had
brought Juliana to this damnable place.

He searched her face as he jumped down the
last stretch of the slope and landed on the lip of rock where she
was rooted, the gun clamped between her trembling hands.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, her eyes huge, brimming with
vivid emotions that seemed too strong for her delicate face; but
aside from being disheveled, her clothes torn and hands scratched,
she looked whole, and he said a silent prayer of thanksgiving. He’d
tracked her like a madman these past days, stopping only when
darkness made it impossible to go on, for fear he would somehow
lose the trail—thinking of nothing but finding her before whoever
had slit Skunk’s throat could turn their viciousness on her. He had
thought he was chasing another bounty hunter panting after that
damned reward, but he couldn’t understand why Juliana’s captor was
traveling southwest instead of toward Denver. He hadn’t ever
expected John Breen himself, but it was just as well. This would
save him the trouble of going all the way to Denver to deal with
the bastard. He’d take care of Breen here and now so that he could
never hurt Juliana or anyone else again.