Rexanne Becnel (26 page)

Swathed as she was within the voluminous folds of the slicker, Abby could hardly see what was happening to her. But she knew anyway. He was taking her to Chicago. Everything she owned in the entire world, what little she had that mattered at all to her was being left behind. The wagon train would take her oxen, divide up her food and other provisions, and leave the rest behind. Other travelers might pick over the remains, or perhaps Indians might, but everything else would be left to rot.

Tears crowded the backs of her eyes, but she willed them away. She could barely breathe as it was. If she were to cry, she’d probably drown in her own tears. Instead she concentrated on the fact that someone was bound to search for her. They’d miss her first thing in the morning, and a search party would hunt Tanner down and set her free.

She clung to that hope until their heavily burdened horse headed down an incline, then began to splash through water. They were crossing the river. Instinctively she shrank back against Tanner. If he were to drop her, tied as she was, she would immediately sink and drown.

Tanner seemed to sense her fears, for he reined the horse to a walk and pulled her slicker away from her face. “I’m going to free your hands—just while we’re in the river. But if you give me any trouble at all, I’ll tie you over Tulip’s back like a canvas pack. You understand what I’m saying?”

If she hadn’t been so afraid of the water flowing between Mac’s legs, Abby would have ignored his words completely. But more than anything she wanted her hands free. And once her hands were free, perhaps she might be able to loosen the awful gag. To breathe freely—and to scream for help.

She nodded, and in a matter of seconds her hands were free. As she rubbed the chafed places on her wrists, however, and flexed her stiff shoulders, the last thing Abby felt toward Tanner was gratitude. When he urged Mac forward into the river, she leaned as far over the animal’s neck as she could, hoping to minimize contact with her captor.

If he noticed her pointed avoidance of him, she couldn’t tell. His complete concentration seemed to be focused on the placid-looking river. But Abby was conscious of him. Every tensing of his arms. Every shifting of his thighs. He and his horse functioned in concert, and when the animal floundered in a sudden deep spot, Abby was inordinately relieved by the unity of thought between the man and the horse. For Tanner kicked free of the stirrups and floated just behind the horse, holding Abby in place but taking his weight off the animal as it swam.

In a few seconds Mac found his footing and Tanner regained his seat behind Abby, but they were both soaking wet now, and Abby was more miserable than ever. He’d brought them across the Platte to the Mormon Trail. If they headed east now, there’d be fewer people who’d even heard of Captain Peters’s company.

But there
would
be people. If she could just call out to someone. Raise an alarm.

Once more Tanner anticipated her move, for he caught her hand as it inched up toward the bandanna gag.

“I’ll remove the gag when we’re farther away from the trail, Abby. Till then you’ll just have to endure it.”

So saying, he grabbed both her wrists in one of his hands and took out a short length of cording.

“Nwr!” Abby fought to free her hands and to loosen the bandanna. But as much as she flailed and wriggled, he managed to stop her every bid to reach her gag.

“Be still, dammit to hell!” he muttered against her ear as he wound one steely arm around her, effectively clamping her arms against her sides. “Be still, or I swear I’ll tie you over Tulip’s back with your pretty little fanny pointing up to the sky.”

Though he tied her hands in front of her this time, the bindings were tighter, and Abby could do nothing but subside into helpless fury. She heard his weary sigh of relief. Then he urged Mac up the muddy bank of the river and into a ground-eating canter, rocking her back against his chest.

Just behind them she heard the wet sound of Tulip’s uneven gait. Tulip still limped, she realized. She hadn’t completely healed, poor thing. But that also meant Tanner’s threat to tie Abby like so much baggage over the mare’s back was just that, a threat he couldn’t actually carry out. Although she was relieved to figure that out, it nonetheless meant that she would have to ride before him on Mac all the time. And that was surely the worst torture of all.

As they made their way in the darkness along a muddy track that, she supposed, paralleled the north bank of the Platte, Abby tried to make out her surroundings. Though Tanner kept one hand on her bound wrists to prevent her from raising her hands to remove her gag, he didn’t stop her from tugging at the wet slicker. Once her face was free of the stiff, confining cloth, she stared about.

Dawn was still hours away. One lantern burned in the distance—someone sitting up with their sick, Abby supposed. Across the wide river two or three flashes of light signaled more of the same. God hope they sat up for birthings rather than deaths. But the deadly tide of cholera had been on the rise of late. Her father was not the last soul who would be taken by that terrible disease.

And she would never lay eyes on his grave again.

That realization, though not a new one, for she’d accepted as much already, nevertheless depressed her on an entirely new level. What was her life anymore but a series of disasters that propelled her first one way, then another? She had no say in any of it.

The wind blew harder from off to the left, and she caught the milling sound that was unique to a stock impoundment. Though she shivered from where the wind crept beneath the loose slicker to her wet skin, she ignored the cold. Instead she strained her eyes in the darkness, looking for one of the night watch who guarded every wagon train’s stock.

“Forget it.” Tanner abruptly shifted her in the saddle so that she faced the blackness that was the river. He pulled the slicker high around her shoulders, blocking her view despite her bucking protests, and kept an iron grip on her two wrists.

Abby wanted to scream her frustration, but even that was denied her by the now-wet gag. She trembled as much from anger as from the cold. But, covering her wrists, his hand was warm. Hot even.

What else should she expect from an earthly manifestation of the devil himself?

They rode along the trail, following the river for hours, it seemed. Abby lost track of the time, for there was no moon nor any stars to be seen beyond the rain-swollen clouds. The first sign of impending dawn was a pale gray shadow on the horizon before them, for they rode steadily east of course. Back to the States, toward Missouri and Lebanon and home. But it wasn’t home anymore, and anyway he wasn’t taking her to Lebanon. He was taking her to Chicago and her mother’s father. A man her kind-hearted mother had never spoken a word of. How horrible a monster must he be to deserve such from his own child.

Beset by her dour thoughts and weary beyond description, Abby stared blindly ahead as the landscape slowly unfurled before them. A dull mud-gray world covered by a grim sky, everything was wet and sullen looking. By now her body heat had dried the bodice of her flannel nightgown. But the skirt was still damp, and the shawl that bound her ankles still dripped a watery trail.

Too bad she couldn’t leave a trail the way Hansel and Gretel had. But their bread markings had been absorbed into their environment just as her own trail of droplets would be. Besides, their story was just a made-up tale. Her nightmare was unfortunate reality.

Up ahead she could just make out a cluster of white canvas-topped wagons, and a glimmer of hope fanned to life in her chest. If she could only attract someone’s attention.

But once again Tanner dashed her hopes. With a flick of his wrist and a slight lean to the left, he headed Mac in a new direction, away from the river, at an angle that would steer them well clear of the still circled-up wagons.

It was all too much. With a sharp movement of her arms she elbowed Tanner as hard as she could in his stomach. Then she kicked wildly, not caring if she hit him or Mac with her heels. She simply had to do something or else explode.

Mac shied to the left, although to Tanner’s credit he prevented the horse from bolting. But while he was distracted by his flustered mount, Abby managed to grab the gag. With a rough jerk she yanked it down, unmindful of how it pulled at her sorely dried lower lip.

“Help!” she screamed, though it came out more a croak. “Someone, please help me—”

He silenced her with one hard palm crushed over her mouth, then before she could react, flipped her facedown, sprawled over his lap.

“I warned you,” she heard him mutter roughly. But she could not answer. She was too terrified by the view that presented itself to her. Large, flashing hooves, moving faster and faster as Tanner urged the unsettled Mac into a jarring gallop. The ground tearing before her at a dizzying speed. The wet grasses whipping at her face and catching in her streaming hair.

She lay on her stomach over his legs, and her breasts jounced with painful regularity into his rock-muscled thigh. Panic-stricken, she clutched at his booted calf with her tied hands, holding on for dear life. But it was his hold that kept her from tumbling beneath those lethal hooves, she knew. His unyielding hand spanning her waist, resting partly on her derriere. Worse, the very impersonality of his hold on her, in that most intimate of locations made her ordeal even more obscene. She was just so much baggage to him—troublesome baggage at that. While she … She’d actually been foolish enough to think herself in love with him.

Her upside-down ride seemed interminable. When Tanner brought Mac to a standstill, then yanked Abby upright, however, she knew they’d not traveled very far. The sky had barely lightened at all.

He held her with one arm, for which she supposed she should be glad, for her head spun and the horizon seemed to tilt as she scanned their surroundings for anyone who might help her. But there was no sign of anyone. They’d come over a low hill, and now they were completely alone.

He swung one leg over the saddle, then dismounted, still keeping a firm grip on her. When her feet touched the ground, she swayed unsteadily. But he made her sit down. Then he walked a short distance away from her and stared off somewhere to the north.

Abby eyed him balefully, wishing him drowned in the river or some other equally violent finish. Even in her furious state, however, she recognized the tension in his stance. It showed in his stiffness when he removed his damp wide-brimmed hat and raked his hair back with one hand.

Now what? she wondered with sinking heart when he still did not turn toward her. But she wasted no time. As her head cleared, she realized that her bound ankles were finally within reach of her hands.

Her shawl was ruined, the wool yarn stretched and misshapened, and her frantic tugging to release the soaked knot only made it worse. But she was succeeding, though she bent a fingernail painfully back in the process. She was succeeding, when Tanner jammed his hat back on his head and turned to face her.

For a moment she froze, caught like a mouse in the stare of a big predatory cat. When he didn’t move, though, and only continued to stare at her, her numbed fingers jerked back into action. She tore a wet end of the shawl from the knot, then kicked first her left leg free, then her right.

The blood rushed to her feet with the excruciating sharpness of a thousand needles pricking the soles of her feet. She wriggled her legs, urging them back to full functioning, but all the while she warily watched him.

Then he smiled—that easy, confident smile she’d once thought so beautiful yet recognized was wicked as well—and her heart began a hard hammering in her chest. She scrambled to her feet, shrugging her disheveled hair over her shoulder and holding her still-tied hands before her as if to ward him off—futile gesture that it was.

“Don’t stop on my account,” he said in a voice so reasonable that it made her want to laugh at the insanity of the situation. “You’ve taken off your shawl.” He closed the distance between them one slow step at a time. “Now take off the rest of your clothes.”

“N
O.” SHE BACKED UP
as Tanner advanced, her steps matching his one for one. But his were longer, and slowly he closed the gap. “Get away from me, Tanner McKnight,” she warned in a voice that shook “Just … just get away before—”

“Before what?” he cut her off. But then he stopped and his grin faded. What in the hell was he trying to prove, tormenting her this way? He had the right girl and all the evidence he needed. Why this insane urge to prove something to her?

Tanner stared at Abby, uncomfortably aware of the fear in her eyes. But he also saw the wild tangles of her loosened hair, the oversized rain slicker threatening to slip from her shoulders, and the plain blue flannel gown, still wet and clinging to her breasts and thighs. He swallowed once and fought down the hot rush of blood to his head—and other places as well. She looked like a pagan offering to some ancient god. An earthly Venus, soft and all female.

And scared to death.

Not the way he wanted a woman to look at him. Especially not her.

He took a step back. “You’re wet. I just meant for you to put some dry clothes on.” He sidled toward Tulip, then rummaged in the bag he’d packed full of her things. He turned his head to peer into the bag. She’d need a skirt and blouse—and she’d worn no undergarments beneath her night rail as she’d slept. He’d noticed that right away.

Before he could find everything she’d need, though, Tulip shied hard away from him. A clod of mud—meant for him, no doubt, had struck the animal in the rump. The next one hit him squarely in the back.

“Dammit, woman—” He spun around, then ducked when she flung a rock at him.

It was almost funny the way she had to throw her pitiful weapon with both hands bound together. She nearly fell each time. If she hadn’t had such a murderous expression on her face, he would have laughed. But that would have hurt her pride even more than it had already been hurt. For some insane reason he didn’t want to do that to her.

Still he didn’t want to be pelted with rocks, either, so with a quick feint to the left he spun around, then, half running, half leaping, he caught her around the waist and bore them both down onto the wet, squishy earth.