Desperate Hearts (24 page)

His heart thundering in his throat, Jace
jumped down and ran to Kyla, pulling his own horse along none too
gently. She lay unmoving in the snow, looking like a heap of
discarded clothes.

Wrapping the reins around his gloved fist,
he dropped to a crouch next to her and hurriedly brushed the snow
out of her face. Her eyes were closed.

“
Kyla! Are you all right?”
he asked.

She moaned, then mumbled a few words he
couldn’t understand.

“
Are you hurt?” he demanded
again. He pulled off his glove and touched a hand to her forehead.
It wouldn’t tell him a thing about her condition, but right now he
couldn’t think of something better to do. He didn’t want to move
her until he knew if she’d broken any bones. He’d once seen a man
with busted ribs get his lung punctured that way.

Kyla’s eyes fluttered open, and she saw Jace
leaning over her. He looked like she felt—pale and scared. Behind
him, his horse waited restively.

She tried to speak but the fall had knocked
the wind out of her. “My dress . . .” she uttered in a breathless
whisper. She’d seen her pack sail past her face, end over end. She
groped the front of her shirt, searching for her locket under the
fabric. She felt the warm, hard metal trapped against her
breastbone.

Jace shook his head as if she were talking
nonsense. “Can you move?” he asked.

"Yes, I guess so," she said and struggled to
sit up. A rock pressed into her back. Jace gripped her arm to help
her.

“
Do you hurt
anywhere?”

Her entire being shook as though she had
palsy, and she was bruised, but nothing felt broken or sprained.
“No. Where’s Juniper?”

“
He took off up that way,”
he said, pointing toward the ridge. “You’ll have to ride with me,
and we need to get going.”

“
But what about my horse? I
can’t just leave him.”

He shook his head and the concern in his
expression solidified to grim resolve. “There’s nothing we can do
about finding him, and you know it. We’ll be buried in snow if we
don’t keep moving.”

Yes, she knew he was right, but she was
heartsick. She’d raised Juniper from a colt. It seemed that one by
one, everything that mattered in her life was slipping away—the
ranch, her horse, her identity, even her courage. She might get
them back, but they might be gone forever. Or irrevocably
changed.

“
My horse is gone. I lost
my dress, and my gear.”

He frowned impatiently. “Hell, I’ll get you
another dress, if that’ll make you feel better,” he said, waving an
arm at their surroundings. “But right now it’s not the most
important thing we have to worry about.”

She looked up at Jace’s strained white face,
then dropped her gaze to her snow-dusted lap. No, of course it
wasn’t the most important thing, but her sense of loss grew
heavier, like a burden she could no longer carry. Her shoulders
slumped and she suddenly felt too cold and tired to go on. How much
could one person take?

As if sensing her looming resignation, Jace
gripped her shoulders in his strong hands. “Come on, Kyla, don’t
you quit on me,” he ordered. “We’ve come too far to give up
now.”

“
M-my arm hurts,” she
fretted wearily. Hot tears sprang to her eyes, this time from utter
despair. She hated to cry in front of anyone, especially Jace. He’d
think she was just a weak, puling female. But in her misery she
couldn’t stop herself, and she began sobbing in earnest. “And—and
I’m so cold.”

He studied her for a moment, his gaze
touching her mouth, her eyes. Then he did the most astounding
thing. He opened his duster and took her into his embrace, closing
the edges of the coat around her. Pressing her cheek to the wall of
his chest, he murmured, “I know you’re cold, honey, but we have to
get out of here or we’ll freeze to death.”

As if she had no will or strength left, she
leaned against him, comforted by the feel of his arms around her.
This was not Jace Rankin, she thought with hazy surprise. Not the
man with a reputation known throughout the territory. This was that
other man, a handsome, warm-blooded stranger who smelled of soap
and leather and horses, who offered reassurance and murmured a
homey endearment. The one who had saved her life and had even
washed her hair, and made her blood rush through her veins, hot and
sweet, when he kissed her. A man to whom she could entrust her
safekeeping—for a little while, anyway.

“
Can you travel?” he asked
at length.

She nodded against his chest, where her
tears had dampened his shirt. “All right,” she agreed, loath to
leave the security and warmth of his arms.

Jace helped her stand and boosted her into
his saddle. Then he climbed up behind her and wrapped her in his
duster again. “Hold it closed around you,” he said and turned his
horse toward the ridge. The animal shifted a bit under the extra
weight, but he made the adjustment and moved forward to wade
through the deepening drifts.

Kyla’s feet were numb with cold, and she’d
lost a glove somewhere during this debacle. She knew that they were
in far more serious danger than she’d originally thought.

But if anyone could save them, she knew Jace
could.

* * *

“
Oh, I think it’s starting
to rain!” Kyla sat forward in the saddle, her hat askew from
leaning against Jace.

They were down to the last daylight. As
twilight settled over the mountains, the snow began to change to
rain. Jace felt the tight muscles in his shoulders relax a bit—they
had crossed the ridge and now were near the bottom of the downward
trail. Rain meant that they were out of immediate danger. But
unlike snow, the rain fell in a heavy, cold torrent that soaked
everything, including Kyla and him.

“
Yeah, but we need to find
a place to stop for the night. And it doesn’t look like there’s a
dry spot left in whole section.”

An incongruous bright band of sunlight
opened on the western horizon, just where the sun was setting. Jace
scanned the terrain in the remaining light, searching for a likely
place to make camp. But he saw no rocky overhangs, no dry,
sheltering copses. He found only straggling scrub and drenched
ground. If they had to camp in the open, they probably wouldn’t
even be able to get a fire going.

Being wet and cold, though,
didn’t quite distract him from the soft female resting against him
inside his coat. Oh, sure, she had dressed as Kyle again, but just
as he’d anticipated, he no longer noticed her disguise. He only
remembered the woman behind it who tantalized him more than he
wished, who made him think that he
might
be able to begin his life
again. Maybe here, maybe somewhere else. Kyla might even decide to
leave the Vigilance Union to heaven and come with him.

Now and then he got a glimpse of her profile
when she turned her head. Her complexion looked like rich cream in
the sunset light. It didn’t tax his imagination to envision her in
his arms, soft and yielding, her warm, soft flesh surrounding him.
With every day that passed, the picture became more intimate, more
boldly urgent. He realized that even if he were to visit the
upstairs rooms over some saloon, it would do no good. Only Kyla
could extinguish the fire that burned in him. Only by losing
himself in the sharing of their bodies would the ache be soothed,
the wanting be satisfied.

And the hell of it was, he knew that the
chance for such an event was less than none. After Tom Hardesty,
Kyla’s spirit had some healing to do before she’d invite the
attentions of a man. Maybe Hardesty wasn’t the whole story, either.
Someone else had hurt her, he suspected, long before that.

“
Hey, what’s that?” she
asked then, mercifully interrupting his thoughts. She pointed at a
rough structure ahead.

“
I don’t know,” he said,
“but if it has walls and no one shoots at us from the door, we’re
staying there tonight.”

Riding closer, they discovered an abandoned
cabin. It loomed in black silence in the rain, lonesome and
forsaken.

“
Do you think it belongs to
anyone?” Kyla almost whispered.

“
Not anymore it doesn’t.
There are lots of deserted mining shacks like this scattered around
these parts.”

He pulled the Henry out of its scabbard and
climbed down to investigate the place to make sure no animals, wild
or human, had taken up residence. With the rifle braced diagonally
across his torso, he kicked open the door, then jumped aside and
waited for a reaction from within. But only the screech of rusted
hinges cut through the rain.

Inside the tiny cabin, he struck a match and
held it high. He found a couple of pieces of rough, homemade
furniture, an oil lamp, a stove, and some firewood. A veil of gray
dust rested on everything, and a few dry leaves lay in the corners,
probably blown in under the door.

Plainly, no one had lived here for quite a
while, although not so long that the wood had begun to rot. At
least the roof didn’t leak, and it had a puncheon floor instead of
dirt, an extravagant luxury in a cabin like this.

“
All right, come on,” he
said, and walked back to his own gear. “It’s not fancy, but it’s
better sleeping in the wet.”

Stiffly, Kyla swung a leg over the saddle
and followed Jace into the shack. She hadn’t done any serious
damage in her fall, but some of her muscles were beginning to
creak.

Jace laid the Henry across the table and
touched a match to the oil lamp. She gazed over the top of the
flame and encountered his ice blue eyes that held her without
touching her, called her to him without words. Every detail of his
appearance sprang to her notice—the length of his dark lashes, the
mahogany and ebony stubble in his beard, the curve of his mouth.
Heat and energy ricocheted between them in instant, making her draw
a deep breath.

Had it been only last night that he’d taken
her into arms and kissed her? Suddenly the rough, one-room cabin
seemed even smaller.

He broke the contact first, tossing his rig
into the corner. He unrolled his blankets, pointedly reminding Kyla
that her own bedding now lay at the bottom of ravine.

“
Where will I sleep?” she
asked, fearing the answer.

“
Well, since your things
are lost, unless you’ve got better idea I guess it’s going to be
right here with me.”

Being weary and cold hadn’t robbed Kyla of
ability to blush, and she felt her face flame with heat. She knew
Jace had slept next to her at least once back in Misfortune, but
she’d been sick then, and he’d been nearly dead with exhaustion.
That was not the case now.

Stripping off his soaked duster and hat, he
gestured at the stove. “I’ll see if I can fire up that old thing so
we can warm up and dry our gear.” He eyed the pipe. “I hope that
chimney will draw.”

Kyla noticed that his shirt was wet, too,
and clung damply to his skin, sculpting every detail of muscle and
tendon beneath. Protected by his coat and the shelter of his body,
she had fared much better in the rain.

Forcing her attention away from the flex of
his shoulders as he collected the firewood, she threw her hat and
coat on the table and glanced around the dark room. It had just one
small window, and its glass was broken. A narrow rope-strung bed
stood against one wall, and a single shelf that still held a couple
of tin cans with faded labels served as a kitchen. A little table
upon which the lamp rested stood against the opposite wall.

“
Someone must have had a
hard life here,” she said, running her fingers over the battered
tabletop. “This place isn’t much bigger than a closet. And it would
be so lonely.”

Jace crouched in front of the open stove,
feeding the dry wood into its belly. “These shacks were built by
men who chased some addled, moonstruck dream about striking it rich
on gold in the hills. I guess they didn’t realize how rarely that
happens.”

She looked at him over her shoulder. “Did
you ever have a dream? Something you longed for?” Despite what he
had revealed about his past, he didn’t talk about himself.

His back was turned to her, but she thought
she him sigh. “Yeah—I got over it.”

She gazed at the open range through the
broken window. “That’s too bad. Everyone needs hope.”

“
Yeah? What are you hoping
for?” he asked. She faced him again. Tall, bright flames that leapt
in the stove cut his silhouette.

“
You know what I want—to
get the ranch back, to even with Hardesty.”

“
And what did you want
before that?” Shutting the stove door, he pivoted on his knee to
look at her. Somehow he had become the questioner, and she one on
the spot.

She shrugged uncomfortably. “Oh, I don’t
remember now.”

He stood and took off his wet shirt, draping
it over back of a chair that he turned toward the fire. “I think
you remember just fine.”

She backed up a step, confounded by the
length and breadth of his bare upper torso, and his long dark hair
that brushed his shoulders. Undone by his assertion, her gaze
dropped to the waist of his jeans hanging low his hipbones. “Well,
maybe I do remember. But it ain’t none of your business.”

Much to her relief and vague disappointment,
he reached into his gear and brought out another shirt, threading
his arms into the sleeves. Not bothering with the buttons, he moved
one step closer and reached for her hand. His fingers, warm and
strong, closed around hers, and her heart fluttered in chest. She
thought she ought to pull away, but had no will to do so.

“
Come on, Kyla, we’ve seen
a lot together. Come out from behind that disguise and tell me
about it,” he murmured.