Tender Touch (30 page)

“I don’t need to think about it, Col. You’ve brought a gentleness into my life I’ve never known. You taught me to care about myself again, and to stand up for myself. That’s not bad medicine. That’s good. All good.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed again and he blinked back tears as he held his gaze on the snowy peaks so far away. Her own gaze lifted to the blue and white pinnacles.

He had not mentioned marriage, not once. Oddly, it didn’t matter. Neither did Little Beaver. But there were other things that did. She drew herself from his embrace and turned back toward the wagon train. “Now there’s something you must understand, Col.”

His heart sank to his toes at the gravity in her voice, knowing he wasn’t going to like what he was about to hear.

“I’m not free to go with you, or with any man. That night, after you took me to the hidden canyon, before Edward Magrudge came to my wagon, I realized that I had been allowing you to fight my battles for me. I can’t do that anymore.”

“Bri—”

She whirled to face him. “No, Col. Let me finish. What kind of life would we have hiding out in the mountains, waiting for my husband to find me and maybe kill you, or both of us? You asked me to trust you once, and I did. Now you have to trust me. I’m going to wait here for Barret—”

“Dammit, Bri, you can’t mean that.” Rage contorted his face. “Have you gone crazy?”

“No, I think I’ve merely grown up, finally. That’s something Barret will have to accept, as he will have to accept the fact that I will never again allow him to strike me, torture me, or threaten me.”

“He isn’t going to accept anything except having you back under his thumb to pound on whenever part of you it suits him, and you know it.” Col grabbed her by the arms and shook her gently. “Don’t do this, Bri. The bastard’ll wind up killing you, if he doesn’t do it the minute he gets hold of you again.”

Her chin lifted and her spine was as stiff as a wagon tongue. No sign of emotion showed in her eyes. “I have to, Col. I’m sorry it hurts you. I never intended that, but you know as well as I do that it would never work between us as long as he’s out there trying to track us down.”

His hands slid from her arms. The gray eyes that had been so full of hope were now as barren and icy as the glaciers that slumbered on the highest peaks of the mountains he so loved. “I won’t stay to see him put back all the bruises I helped heal.”

“I understand.”

“Then there’s nothing more to say. We’re done.”

Neither of them spoke a word all the way back. After he had lifted her off the horse, he fetched the few belongings he had stored in the wagon. Brianna watched silently as he helped himself to enough cold fried bacon, coffee, biscuits, and beans to see him to the Wind River Mountains.

“Tell Marc if he ever needs anything, he can find me in the Wind River Valley.”

“I’ll tell him.”

He refastened the flaps on his saddlebags, tied on his bedding, and heaved himself into the saddle. He said no goodbye, nor even looked back.

Dry-eyed, Brianna watched him go. Like the china tea pot she had once broken to give herself a chance at a new life, her heart shattered.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Bitch! Goddamn whore-bitch!”

The words burst out of the darkness like lightning from storm clouds. Barret poured water out of his boot and set the footwear on the bank. He emptied the second boot and scowled at the sorrel grazing contentedly some feet away. Ought to shoot the confounded animal.

“Throwing me just because a damn fish jumped after a fly!” He raised his voice and shook his fist at the mare. “Ought to make crow bait out of you. And them mules along with you.”

The horse didn’t so much as cock an ear. Barret had let go of the lead rope as he floundered in LaBonte Creek and the pack mules had bolted. One had bucked its way out of the water. The packs it had carried now lay strewn for a good two hundred feet along the river bank. He didn’t know where the blasted animals had gone and wasn’t about to go searching in the dark.

It was the bitch he was married to he wanted most to shoot. If she had stayed home where she belonged, none of this would have happened. When he got her back to St. Louis, he’d lock her in the fruit cellar until she was so spider-bitten and crazy, no one would listen if she did babble to someone about what she’d unearthed in the barn.

The thought of taking her home gave him an odd sense of comfort, as if the two—Brianna and home—were synonymous. With a shock, he realized he had barely even thought about Glory since leaving St. Louis. It was Brianna who filled his mind, Brianna he hungered for at night.

As Barret searched the scattered packs for coffee and a kettle, he wondered for the hundredth time why Stinky Harris had not come back from checking in with Punch Moulton and laying a trap for Nigh. Maybe the man would be more reliable if Barret blacked both his eyes for him when he got back.

Somewhere out in the darkness a mule brayed. It sounded close. Heaving a sigh, Barret put down the pot he’d found and tiptoed, barefoot, toward the sound. He didn’t dare trust the contrary animal to stay put until morning.

Ten miles back, a Frenchman and two Indians settled in to a cold camp of their own. They gnawed jerky, passed a jug of whiskey, and cleaned their weapons while they chuckled over the incredible foolishness of the greenhorn they had tracked all day. A couple more days and they’d catch up to the bastard.

Then the fun would begin.

***

Col didn’t even make it out of the Willow Springs encampment before he heard a woman screaming his name. Hope leaped into his throat. He wheeled the gray about, his eyes seeking Brianna’s tall, lithe form. But it was Lucy Decker he saw running toward him, skirts hiked up as she dodged sagebrush in her path. Col’s bowels squeezed up, knowing somehow the girl was bringing trouble with her.

Lucy was out of breath when she reached him. “Where you going, Col? I need to talk to you.”

“I’m leaving, Lucy.”

“What do you mean, leaving?” She clutched at his knee, her green eyes wide with alarm.

“I mean I won’t be back. Now let go.” He pried her fingers loose only to have her latch onto his stirrup. “But you can’t g
o without me. I love you, Col.”

Beyond patience, he snarled, “What are you up to, Lucy? You know I don’t want you.”

Lavinia Decker was heading their way. In a move he was sure was calculated to get her mother’s attention, Lucy wailed loudly, “I’m carrying your baby, Col. You can’t go off and leave me.”

Anger surged through him. “You may be carrying someone’s baby, but it sure as hell ain’t mine, and you know it.”

“Lucy?” Lavinia said as she reached them.

Crying tears as big as buffalo chips, the girl turned to her mother. “He has to marry me, Mama. You have to make him marry me.”

Lavinia looked as though she’d aged ten years. “You got yourself in a hole of your own digging, girl, and this time I’m not bailing you out.” Turning to Col, Lavinia said, “Sorry ’bout this, Columbus. Girl’s got herself in the family way, but I know you ain’t the father.”

“He is, Mama. He is the father. You have to make him marry me.”

“No, Lucy. Ever since I noticed you ain’t been washing out any monthly rags, I been askin’ round. Didn’t take me long to figure out who you been messing with. Another married man, only this one went and got hisself killed. And 1 ain’t about to let you pass blame on an innocent man.”

Her tears genuine now, Lucy backed away, her hands held out in supplication. “You don’t understand, Mama. 1 just want to be loved, that’s all. Why can’t the men I want, want me?”

“You got to give love to get it back, honey, and I’m afraid that’s something you don’t seem to know how to do.”

Putting her arms around the girl, Lavinia guided her back to their wagon.

Watching them walk away, Col felt as though he’d just battled three grizzlies and a pack of Blackfoot warriors—and lost. He felt older than Lavinia Decker looked, older than the mountains that were his destination. Then he saw Brianna, still standing where he left her. For several long moments she stared at him before turning her back and sitting down at the table to take up her mending as though nothing at all had happened.

In that moment, Col knew he’d lost a bigger battle than any amount of grizzlies and Blackfeet could wage.

***

The moon was full, as round and pale as a woman’s breast.

Brianna’s breast.

Columbus Nigh stared at the shimmering trail cast across the rippled waters of the Sweetwater River by the silver magic of moonlight. The trail beckoned. Beyond the Sweetwater Valley rose the Wind River Mountains, their snowy peaks like disembodied wisps of cloud in the night sky. Tomorrow would see him at Three Crossings and another day would put him in the foothills.

He could smell snow from the highest peaks on the icy gale buffeting the fire of his small camp. His eyes ached from the blowing sand and alkali. His heart ached as well, but he scorned the pain of it, the same way scorned its cause.

Brianna.

How could he feel so much pain when he had no heart left? She had ripped it from his body as carelessly as she would pluck the blossom of a rose.

Ruthlessly banishing her from his mind, he dug into his saddle bags for the leftover biscuits he had brought with him. Not because he was hungry, but because eating gave him something to do. And activity kept him from thinking. He stared at the pale, round biscuits in his hand, seeing only a woman’s breasts.

Sweet, tender breasts, with tips as pink as a rosebud, as beckoning as the cry of the wilderness whispering in his ear.

Dropping the biscuits into his lap as though singed by long-dead heat rekindled by his errant thoughts, he reached for the jug stolen from Jeb Hanks on his way out of the Willow Springs camp. He yanked out the cork and put the cool ceramic to his lips. One deep gulp after another gurgled joyfully down his gullet. The firewater blurred the image of the woman that refused to leave his mind, and dulled the pain in his chest where his heart should be.

Relief without solace, rest without peace.

Again he drank, angry that his long, hard ride could deplete the strength of his body without touching the damnable workings of a brain filled with too many memories and too little sense.

A lull in the whining gale brought a snatch of' music from an emigrant camp closer to the rock Father De Smet called the Register of the Desert. A pile of granite over a quarter of a mile long and bearing the inscriptions of fur trappers, explorers, and emigrants.

Col winced as a trickle of whiskey found the crack in his lip, chiseled by the dry, hot wind. Leaning his head back on his saddle, he closed his eyes and let the music mingle with the night sounds to lull him to sleep.

In the faint glow of early morning, clear and dry and deathly still, he awoke. The fire had been reduced to smoldering embers. His slitted, bloodshot eyes caught movement and he froze.

The coyote sat back on its rump, a pink crescent of tongue peeking from between its teeth. Canny golden eyes seemed to mock him with their soberness.

Disgruntled and out of sorts, Col inched his hand toward the gun in his belt, planning to shoot the annoying critter. Before reaching its goal, his hand encountered something dry and crumbly. He looked down to see the biscuits he had spurned the night before. When he picked them up he realized they weren’t as dry as he’d thought.

The coyote appeared to grin at him. In the short whiskers around the canine mouth were a few white crumbs. The critter had been literally eating out of Col’s hands. Or, to be more accurate, out of his lap.

With a snort, Col tossed the rest of the bread to the coyote. Within seconds both had disappeared.

Contenting himself with coffee and cold fried bacon seasoned with alkali dust, Col saddled the dappled gray and turned his nose westward.

His head thudded dully in his ears like the stomp of dancing feet. His mouth tasted like fouled alkali water and his stomach roiled in reprisal at last night’s harsh treatment. He dosed his stomach and mouth with sweet river water and ignored the headache.

A pair of antelope fawns leaped out of his path and bounded away as he continued his journey toward the Wind River Range. Farther on a bald eagle grudgingly abandoned the carcass of an ox that lay on the trail. Col’s stomach heaved as he breathed in the stench.

Long about mid-morning he wasted half a dozen shots on a small bunch of mountain sheep high up the rocky cliffs. To soothe his sore temper, rather than his empty stomach, he shot the head off a rattier. He considered the idea of eating the snake but the effort of cooking it seemed too great. Instead, he stopped at Devil’s Gap and traded some of his carvings to emigrants for fresh-baked bread and cold beans.

He rode five miles off the trail into the Green Mountains to let the dappled gray feast on grass that hadn’t already been chewed to the nub by the livestock of emigrants.

His own meal was as tasteless as the dust he’d been swallowing for days. If he’d stayed with the wagon train he’d have been eating dried apple pie and antelope stew. Brianna had become more than a passable cook.

Brianna.

There was no moon to remind him of her today. But he needed no reminders. She stuck in his brain like a well-burrowed tick. He glanced up at the sun in a mercilessly clear sky, adding insult to injury with its blinding glare and suffocating heat.

The sun and the moon.

Did she miss him as much as he missed her? She was so complex compared to Little Beaver. Indian women were experts at masking their emotions, but within their own lodge there was no need. From loved ones they hid nothing. He would never understand the way Brianna’s mind worked.

Yesterday, when he told her about Little Beaver’s death, she had been full of compassion and understanding. Even now, the memory of how she had kissed his butchered finger tied his throat in knots. At that moment he had known he was loved. He had felt blessed.

Then she had banished it as though it were no more than a hoard of mosquitoes.

Dammit! They had made love. They had worshipped each other with their bodies.

Her voice came to him as though he were still there, facing her on Prospect Hill:
You’ve brought a gentleness into my life I’ve never known. You taught me to care about myself again, and to stand up for myself. That’s not bad medicine. That’s good, all good
.

He swallowed and blinked back sudden tears.

I realized that I had been allowing you to fight my battles for me. I can’t do that anymore
.

Didn’t she know he wanted to protect her? To fight dragons and pursuing husbands and anything else that threatened her?

What kind of life would we have hiding out in the mountains, waiting for my husband to find me and maybe kill me, or kill us both?

Su
dden realization dawned on him.

The damn fool woman. She was trying to protect him.

Col sawed on the reins. The gray reared and pivoted at the same time, facing northeast when he came down on all fours. Sitting there, Col stared with narrowed eyes back the way he had come.

Brianna belonged to him and she knew it. Whatever notion she’d had in her craw when she told him she was going back to Barret—

No, that wasn’t right.

I’m going to wait here for Barret
—

She’d said wait, not go back. What else would she have said if he hadn’t interrupted? Why had he let his bruised ego blind him to what she was doing?

Digging his heels into the dappled gray’s sides, he turned his back on the snow white peaks of the Wind River Mountains and headed east.

He’d fought Pawnee, Arapaho, Blackfeet, and Bannock. He’d killed more grizzlies than most and set his foot where no other man had ever trod. Every part of his anatomy bore proof, in the form of scars, that he was no coward. Never before had he let another man walk off with what belonged to him, and he wasn’t about to start now.

Brianna was his. He’d see Barret Wight dead before he’d let that yellow-bellied woman-beater touch one hair on her stubborn head.

Night was half over when Columbus Nigh found the Magrudge wagon company on Greasewood Creek. Only a scrappy yellow dog challenged him as he rode through the circle in search of Brianna’s wagon.