Desperate Hearts (28 page)

“
Hey wait up!” he barked,
and took off after him, spurring his horse into a flat run. But the
rider was far ahead, as if his true purpose was to lure him out and
farther away. What the hell was going on? Then he realized the
answer.

God—Kyla! A shiver plunged down Jace’s back
like a bolt of ice-cold lightning. He sawed at the reins, his horse
to a skidding halt, then swung toward the cabin, cursing himself
for a damned fool every step of the way. How could he have been so
stupid, so careless?

If he hadn’t been wary and alert every
moment for last twenty-two years, he wouldn’t have lived to thirty.
Why had he chosen this point in time, when he was responsible for
someone else, to let his judgment falter?

He hadn’t forgotten about Hardesty’s men,
but thus far they had proved to be so bumbling and lazy, that
despite the episode in Cord, in his mind he had reduced the extent
of their threat. Could they be behind this?

His heart hammering against his ribs, he
pulled his hat on tighter and bent low over the pommel. He the
urged the horse on, pushing it to a thundering speed over the
rain-soaked range that tore up muddy sod with every fall of its
hooves.

To Jace it felt as though they were wading
through fields of molasses, slow and frustrating and terrifying.
The cabin, a faraway speck at the mist-gray base of the mountains,
seemed to get no closer, even though the horse’s sides heaved with
effort. It all had a nightmare quality, except Jace knew that he
wouldn’t wake up to find Kyla asleep next to him. There was no
waking up from this, and he wouldn’t relax until he saw her again,
in the flesh and safe.

But even as watery sunlight began to emerge
from the slate-colored clouds, Jace saw a group of riders in the
distance. Cantering away from the general direction of the cabin,
there were three of them, although the one on that dun looked
pretty small. More like a kid than a man.

A kid . . .

Oh, Jesus. Hoping his horse survived to
forgive him, he pushed on, and tried hard to ignore the sickening
clenching in his stomach. He strained to see the details of their
appearance, but he was too far away. He needed to get close enough
to see better, to see if his eyes were playing tricks on him, or if
that kid really did have red hair.

* * *

“
Hoo-eee
, look at that bounty hunter ride! I never seen such slick
ridin’,” Lem remarked from behind the remains of his
tobacco-stained teeth. “Guess he’ll be surprised when he catches up
with those boys. Hobie will fix him up just fine.” His laughter was
free and hearty. It made Kyla’s blood freeze in her
veins.

Terrified, outraged, helpless, from their
hiding place in the dark trees she saw Jace gallop past on the open
rangeland, lashing his horse toward certain disaster. But bound
hand and foot, and gagged with his bandana, she could do nothing
but watch. And listen to Lem and Dirty Hand congratulate themselves
on their cleverness.

“
Yeah, Hobie’s real smart,
comin’ up with that idea. Where‘d he find that red-haired kid?”
Dirty Hand asked. Since Kyla hadn’t heard the man’s name, based her
own experience, she thought of him thus. He tied a filthy rag
around his fist to cover the wound her bite had
inflicted.

“
I dunno—it sure beats all,
don’t it? But it was
my
idea to give the kid the wildcat’s coat to wear
and put him on her dun. Rankin won’t know the truth of it until
they’ve got him locked up in that box canyon.”

“
Yup, that’ll be the end of
him,” Lem pronounced, turned to Kyla. “I hope you said good-bye
real nice to your hee-ro before he left. You won’t be seein’ him
again.”

Kyla gave him a murderous look, then turned
her gaze to Jace’s diminishing figure and followed it until was
gone. Slumped against a ponderosa pine on the ground, she shivered
as much from fear as from cold. Tears kept trying to work their way
up from her chest, and she persistently choked them back. Jace
pursued McIntyre, the Bronc Buster, and the Redhead across the open
range, undoubtedly believing, as he was intended to, that he was
rescuing her.

Questions and possibilities pelted her
frantic mind like hail, and bounced against her remorse.

Could he prevail in a fight of three against
one? Yes, perhaps, if he discovered the trap in time.

Was there some way they could have avoided
being discovered by McIntyre? If they had pressed on last evening
instead of stopping? Who knew how fate might have been altered if
they had?

And, oh God, if he were killed—she lowered
her head. It would be her fault, as surely as if she had pulled the
trigger herself. Would she be able to escape the confinement of
five men? And then where would she go?

Suddenly, a barrage of distant shots
penetrated the mist of her thoughts, jerking her upright and
causing her to bump her head against the tree. It was like hearing
the report of a firing squad, tearing at her own heart.

A long interval of silence followed,
punctuated only by the twitter of a sparrow.

“
Well, I guess that’s that,
and goddamn good riddance to him, too,” Lem said finally. “Bounty
hunters are lower’n snakes, and Rankin was the worst. He tracked
down my little brother for a bank robbery in Yakima. Weren’t no
call for that—that teller Billy shot didn’t die.” He shot a stream
of tobacco juice at the ground and pushed his bulk away from the
tree trunk he leaned against, using his shotgun for a cane. “Now
Billy’s sittin’ in prison, givin’ my ma more gray hair. If I had
the chance, I’d spit on Rankin’s stinkin’ carcass and leave it for
the buzzards to pick at.”

“
Amen to that,” Dirty Hand
concurred. “Well, Hobie’ll be back in a few minutes, and we can be
on our way.”

Lem turned his gaze on Kyla, studying her
with a look she had seen before and didn’t like. "If this hellcat
here wasn’t intended for Mr. Hardesty, I might like a taste of her
myself. There’s somethin’ about a killin’ that always gets my blood
up.”

The other man shook his head and clutched
his injured hand. “Not me—that gal spits and bites like a viper.”
He paused a moment, then added with a greasy smile, “’Course, if
she was tied up proper and gagged, she couldn’t kick, spit or bite.
All she could do is buck.”

“
I’ll bet she ain’t quite
so horny-hided under them clothes as she lets on, either,” Lem
added with an infuriating cackle, scratching his privates with no
regard for Kyla’s presence.

Kyla suppressed a shudder. Showing fear of
any kind right now could be her undoing, but her heart pounded so
hard she felt it nudging her stomach. “Just think—Hobie McIntyre,
the man who finally brung down the famous Jace Rankin. And we was
here for it. This story ought to be good for a few drinks in any
saloon in the territory,” Dirty Hand predicted.

Beyond mere disgust, she averted her head
and stared dully at the vista of mountains against the gray sky
while the two chatted amiably about Jace’s death and the money and
fame this job would bring them. Every reference to Jace lacerated
her heart with excruciating pain.

Their annoying voices faded to a drone—her
fierce struggle to escape, combined with her grief and anxiety left
her drained and listless. Her hands and feet were becoming numb
from the tight ropes lashed around ankles and wrists.

Jace couldn’t die—he was larger than life,
she told herself. He’d survived a hundred dangerous situations, a
thousand. He couldn’t die when she had only just found him and had
had a glimpse of his heart. Fate and five evil men couldn’t take
him without giving them a chance to heal each other’s souls.

She tried to blank out the pictures trooping
through her mind, but she was too tired to fight them. She
remembered her own childhood, always seeking her father’s approval
and never winning it, no matter how she tried.

And there was Jace, just a youngster, facing
a stepfather whose notion of manhood was so twisted he had
extinguished Jace’s ability to love anyone, including Kyla . .
.

That night a year ago—oh, God, was that what
waited for her now? Becoming a prisoner of Tom Hardesty, trapped in
a place where no one would help her, perhaps even being forced to
marry him?

No, she wouldn’t do it.
Especially after the tenderness that she and Jace had
shared.
The way it’s supposed to
be
, he’d said. And she knew he was right.
If she couldn’t escape, she’d kill herself or Hardesty before she’d
become his victim again. She swore she would.

Kyla’s grim thoughts were interrupted by an
uneasy tone she heard in Dirty Hand’s voice. Keeping her gaze fixed
on the landscape, she turned her attention back to the
conversation.

“—
oughtta be back by now?
It’s been a long time and that canyon ain’t but a couple of miles
from here.”

Lem stepped out of the
trees and craned his neck toward the canyon, then walked back,
squirting another stream of tobacco juice. “It could be there
was
a little
trouble. But just a little.”

“
What should we
do?”

“
We’ll wait,” Lem decided
firmly. “Hobie said to wait, and so we will.”

It
had
been a long time since those
shots were fired, Kyla realized. If Jace were—if he had been—she
had trouble even thinking the word. If he’d been killed, he would
have taken a man or two with him. And without a leader, Lem and
Dirty Hand were lost, or so she believed until more time passed and
Lem had an inspiration.

“
Maybe they’re all dead,”
he suggested, giving to voice everyone’s thoughts. “But if Hobie
and the others don’t come back, and we take the woman to Hardesty .
. . won’t that be worth a big reward?” He spoke in hushed tones, as
if the spirits of the departed might hear him and strike him down.
“Hell, we could say it was us who killed Rankin after he got
Hobie.”

The more Lem and Dirty Hand discussed this
idea, the more eager they became.

“
We could hole up a day,"
Lem went on. “You know, spend it at that cabin over yonder. Restin’
up and takin’ our ease with the woman.” He spoke as if she were a
horse or a wagon wheel, with no ability to comprehend them. But she
stared back at them with coldest look she could muster, one that
she thought would make Jace proud.

“
That’s right, take our
ease,” Dirty Hand said, repeating the phrase with a certain relish.
“Who’s left say we can’t?”

“
I am.”

Lem and Dirty Hand swung their guns around
to an intruder. Kyla’s head swiveled to see Jace standing at edge
of the trees, his Henry rifle trained on the two men. She uttered a
shapeless cry, muffled by the gag.

He spared her the briefest of glances, then
approached slowly, deliberately.

He seemed ten feet tall to her. A day’s
growth of dark beard shadowed his face, making him look even more
sinister, and he moved with an easy but controlled grace. He looked
as frightening as she’d ever seen him, and as welcome as the
cavalry. Waves of emotion sluiced through her—love, joy,
overwhelming relief, and the sense that now the situation had
become really perilous.

“
I’ll see to it that you
won’t have an easy moment for the rest of your lives,” Jace added,
his eyes flat and cold, nearly colorless, “You’d better drop your
weapons.”

“
Like hell I will,” Lem
said, holding fast to his shotgun. His gaze darted around, as if he
were searching for one of his own group to appear behind Jace. It
didn’t happen. “Where’s Hobie and others?”

Jace lifted the Henry a notch. “Dead.” His
voice had a dry, papery sound, like October leaves tumbling over a
grave in the wind.

“
You’re a liar, mister. No
one by himself could outgun three armed men. Not even you,” Dirty
Hand said. Any crude amiability he’d shown earlier was
gone.

Without taking his eyes or his aim off the
two men, Jace reached into his coat pocket and produced a leather
thong strung with bear teeth. "Recognize this?"

Lem started. “It belongs to Hobie, everybody
knows that. He cut it off’n a Indian he killed. Where’d you get
it?” he demanded.

Jace smiled slightly, cool and deadly. “I
cut it off Hobie.”

The blood drained out of the two men’s
faces, as if the true danger of their situation had begun to dawn
upon them.

“
Only a no-count snake
would rob a dead man,” Lem charged with shaky
indignation.

“
I wonder what that makes a
bunch of cowards who lure another man into a trap to kill him."
Jace stuffed the thong back into his pocket. “Drop your guns or
I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

A taut moment passed when neither Lem nor
Dirty Hand spoke or moved. Jace watched them, unblinking like a
blue-eyed cat. The air crackled with tension, and Kyla scarcely
breathed.

Suddenly, Lem lunged at Kyla where she sat
against the tree and jammed the shotgun barrel against her jaw. He
crowded his face next to hers and gripped her with his free hand.
“You decide, Rankin—is she gonna live through this? Let us go or
the hellcat dies.”

Kyla froze, and her eyes grew wide with
terror as she stared at Jace. But he kept his eyes fixed on the man
next to her and never looked at her once. Lem’s breath against her
neck was moist and sour, and the smell of fear oozing from his
pores compounded his rank odor “Don’t you think we make a
pretty—”

A rifle blast exploded in the forest
morning, and Lem was blown backward and away from Kyla, with a
neat, dime-size hole just above the bridge of his nose. She
screamed behind her gag at the horror of it all. The bullet had
come so close, she’d felt its heat. She swallowed and swallowed,
but her mouth and throat were bone-dry. God, what was Jace
thinking? Was he crazy? Events were whizzing by so quickly she
struggled to grasp them as they occurred.