The Endless Sky (Cheyenne Series) (23 page)

      
“How dare you,” she ground out in a low voice, advancing toward him with fists balled up, quivering with rage. “How dare you drag me into this—this sinkhole and stand glaring at me as if I were the one who's guilty of something! I didn't leave you—you left me! What did you expect? That I'd wither, an old spinster pining away for you? I have a right to a life!”
I have a right to love!

      
Chase stood calmly as she glared up at him, raising a fist to pummel his chest while the other hand came toward that same stinging cheek again. He seized her wrists and held them tight, pulling her against him as she kicked and struggled to break free.

      
“Stevie—”

      
“Don't call me that! Don't ever again call me that! You're just like all other men—lying, deceiving users. You aren't even using your own name! What sort of a masquerade are you playing, I wonder, convincing that freighter and those troopers you're just an Osage bounty hunter looking for a reward on that renegade White Wolf?” She sensed the subtle tensing in his body. An expression of amazed alarm flashed in his eyes before they returned to stony shuttered blankness. And she knew! “Dear God, you're him! You're that awful raider—spying, posing as a tame Indian, gathering information so you can lead a pack of bloodthirsty savages to rob and kill!”

      
His face had blazed with anger before. Now it held only cold menace. “Bloodthirsty savages! You married a damned blue-belly and you call us bloodthirsty? We're fighting for our lives,” he snarled in a low, deadly voice.

      
“Hugh Phillips isn't a thief stealing soldiers' pay or a murderer scalping innocent victims!” she shot back in blind fury. Whatever his shortcomings, he was her husband and being a soldier did not reduce him to the level of a renegade such as Chase had become.

      
Chase felt pole axed. “Phillips—you married that glory seeking sadist?” he asked incredulously.

      
“What if I did!” she shot back defensively. How dare
he
accuse
her
!

      
“I'd have expected Josiah Summerfield's daughter wouldn't have settled for less than a full colonel. Phillips is a mere lieutenant.”

      
She wanted to strike that sneering expression of disgust from his face with her fists, to hurt him the way he had hurt her. “A mere lieutenant! After the way you destroyed my reputation in Boston, I was a pariah! Hugh Phillips was my best prospect,” she said bitterly. Suddenly the adrenaline surge of blind anger was spent. She felt weary, exhausted to the bone and utterly heartsick for the death of all her dreams.

      
Chase studied her as the words registered. He hadn't considered what his abrupt departure might do to the reputation of a young heiress keeping company with a libertine like him. Knowing Boston gossips, it was even possible word of the marriage agreement between Jeremiah and Josiah Summerfield had gotten out. Perhaps she did have good reason to hate him, he thought bleakly as he felt the tension draining out of her slender body.

      
Her face was pale with large dark smudges beneath her eyes. The look of fragility was at odds with the spitting furious hatred of a moment earlier. Had she come after him to learn who his contacts were, to turn them and him in to the army? He found it difficult to believe. But after three years as an army wife—trapped in what seemed to be far from a love match—perhaps she desired revenge against him. And maybe she even deserved it.

      
His troubling ruminations were interrupted by a sharp rap on the door. “Asa darlin, Strop just heard several of them officer boys ride into town. Seems like them men tangled with some Sioux northeast a ways. If that gal's husband misses her, I don't want him comin' lookin' for her here.”

      
Chase yanked open the door with an oath. “Where did the officers go, did he hear?”

      
“Straight to the hotel, most of ‘em.”

      
Would Phillips come searching for his wife after he found her absent from her room? He swore again, looking at the pale slender woman who stood ramrod stiff, glaring defiantly at him. “What the hell am I going to do with you, Stevie?”

      
“I'm not yours to do anything with, Chase. Let me go,” she said quietly.

      
“I don't think so,” some gut level instinct made him reply as he reached out and seized her wrist.

      
“Don't you dare grab me again! I'm not a sack of flour you can just sling over your shoulder and walk away with.”

      
He ignored her squirming protests and said to Rocky, “If they come here, you never saw me or the lady.”

      
“You got that right, baby.” She stepped back as he strode through the door, dragging Stephanie with him.

      
Then he paused and turned back to the madam with a grin. “I owe you one, Rocky.”

      
“I'll collect, Asa. I always do,” she replied, returning the smile as she watched him vanish out the back door into the inky night.

      
Stephanie became alarmed when the darkness enveloped them. He dragged her behind him, his long legs moving in ground-eating strides. When they reached the corral behind the livery stables, she grew really alarmed. Fighting to catch her breath, she tugged against his iron-tight grip. “What are you planning, Chase?”

      
He could hear the fear in her voice. Irrationally it angered him. “Be quiet if you don't want old Willis to pepper us with buckshot for horse thievery.”

      
He walked stealthily around the corral to a small lean-to where all sorts of tack was stored. Rummaging through his saddlebags, which he had stashed there earlier in the evening, he pulled out some rawhide strips and a none-too-clean handkerchief, then began binding her wrists tightly together.

      
“You can't—you wouldn't—”

      
“I can and I am,” he said curtly.

      
Before she could protest further he stuffed the cloth in her open mouth, then secured the binding on her wrists to an iron wall hook in the lean-to, hoisting her up so high that her feet barely touched the ground. She tried to spit out the gag, then to rub it out of her mouth against her arm, but nothing availed as she twisted and struggled ineffectually. Leaving her to thrash and make muffled cries, he quickly slung his saddle up on one shoulder and called softly in Cheyenne for his big dun gelding. The horse came to the corral gate obediently and he let it out, then quickly saddled up, grateful he had been prepared to ride out after meeting the Frenchman. De Boef would just have to wait till another time.

      
He led the horse the few yards to the lean-to. Reaching over, he lifted her off the hook, and threw her across his saddle. Then he mounted and walked the horse down the deserted back street.

      
Slung so awkwardly across the saddle, Stephanie could not even get her breath, much less scream. The horse picked up speed as they reached the outskirts of town, bouncing her against the unyielding hardness of leather and Chase's thighs. It was oddly intimate. Her breasts pressed against his leg and her hair, worked loose from its pins, flowed like a heavy cloud around his boot. She tried to kick with her feet but he stopped her struggle with a sharp swat to her derriere.

      
“Lie still or you'll fall and break that beautiful little neck,” he whispered, but she continued to squirm until he cleared the last of the small shanties scattered at the edge of town.

      
Then he kneed the dun into a ground-eating canter, which so winded her that she ceased struggling, afraid she would suffocate. After what seemed an eternity of the pounding punishment, he reined in and slipped gracefully from the horse, then eased her down. Her legs buckled beneath her and everything started to go black as she coughed and choked through the gag. Her head throbbed from being upside down so long.

      
Chase removed the gag and cut the bindings from her wrists, then swept her up in his arms and carried her to the edge of a small stream. After placing her on the ground, he walked back to his horse, took a tin cup from his saddlebags and filled it with cool water from his canteen. “Here, drink,” he ordered.

      
Stephanie wanted to hurl the cup in his face but her mouth was parched from the gag, her throat literally closed off. She held it up in her numb hands and drank greedily. Finally stopping after she had drained the cup, she wiped her hand across her chin awkwardly, then watched him drink directly from the canteen. The strong bronzed column of his throat moved with each swallow.

      
Limned in moonlight, his profile was even more beautifully sculpted than in her erotic fantasies. In Boston she had been a green virginal girl. Now she was a woman who knew a man's touch.
God help me! I never wanted Hugh but I want you!
When he, too, finished drinking, he refilled the canteen at the stream, then walked over to his horse, seeming to ignore her. “What are you going to do with me?” she asked in growing alarm when he shrugged off his tattered shirt and moccasins, then began to unbutton the fly of the greasy denims.

      
“Not what you think,” he answered with a wicked leer. “I hate the stink of white men's clothing. I'm going to bathe in the stream and change. Nobody will be after us this soon.”

      
Stephanie sat appalled as he continued removing his pants. The muscles of his arms and shoulders flexed with each movement, gleaming hard and satiny in the soft light. She could see the dark thatch of hair on his chest and remembered its texture. Mesmerized, she still knew every nuance of his body, the male scent of him, the heat and the hardness when he had crushed her to him and kissed her. She squeezed her eyes closed, shamed to the core of her soul by her base physical cravings.

      
Her eyes flew open when he kicked away his pants and turned toward the stream, completely naked. She watched his long-legged stride, taking in the breadth of his shoulders, his small tight buttocks and lean sinewy thighs. What was wrong with her, ogling her naked abductor! She had just been given the opportunity to escape while the arrogant savage was in the water.

      
Stealthily, she stood up, then began edging slowly to the dun gelding. She grabbed the reins and swung up onto the horse, kicking him into a gallop. A shrill whistle split the air before she had ridden a dozen yards. The dun skidded to a halt, then turned toward Chase, his ears held forward, waiting obediently. No amount of cajolery would budge him. In that instant, she remembered how he had trained Thunderbolt the same way back in Boston. The big black had always come to him. No one could ever steal him.

      
“I’m not by nature a careless man, Stevie,” Chase said as he casually wrapped himself in a soft buckskin breech-clout and pulled on fringed buckskin leggings. After slipping the beaded moccasins on again, he strolled casually toward her.

      
“What if I'd reached for your gun instead of your horse?” she asked.

      
He shrugged enigmatically. “Then I imagine we'd both have found out if you could pull the trigger.”

      
“You don't think I could.”

      
He studied her face in the shadowy light. “I'm not sure. Once I thought I knew you but that was before you married Phillips.”

      
“Why do you hate Hugh so much?”

      
“You accused the White Wolf of being a killer and I am, but I don't attack women and children. My warriors don't rape thirteen-year-old girls and club old men's brains out either.”

      
“You're saying Hugh does that?” She felt faint and dizzy, remembering those helpless captives being herded into corrals by Hugh's men—young girls and old people, treated as if they were livestock being sent to the slaughterhouse. Was it possible?

      
“Believe what you want,” he replied when she sat mute, staring down at him. He turned his back on her and walked over to the edge of the stream, stuffed his white man's gear in his saddlebags, then returned to fasten them behind the saddle.

      
Stephanie sat astride the horse with her legs indecently exposed. If Chase was aware of the bare flesh, he gave no indication of it until she tried to pull down her rucked up skirts to cover herself. Then he reached out one hand and closed it over the curve of her calf.

      
“Don't,” he said softly as his dark fingers glided over her pale smooth skin.

      
She held her breath, her mouth once more gone suddenly as dry as it had been when he removed the gag. Moistening her lips she asked, “Why did you kidnap me, Chase? The whole army will be scouring the territory searching for me.”

      
“It was that or kill you,” he replied tersely as he swung up behind her on the dun and kicked him into an easy lope.

      
“You think I'd tell them you're the White Wolf?”

      
“Probably. After all, you're a soldier's wife and I'm a bloodthirsty savage with a price on my head.”

      
“How did this happen, Chase? When you left Boston you said you wanted to find your father's people. Couldn't you locate them...or were they all dead?’'

      
“No. I found my uncle and great-aunt among the Northern Cheyenne, although it took nearly a year.”

      
“Then why aren't you with them? Why not live away from white civilization, just be Cheyenne?”

      
“You mean, why become a raider? Have you lived out here the past three years and seen nothing? The Cheyenne can't live as they did when I was a boy. The buffalo are vanishing, most other game is scarce—wantonly slaughtered in a deliberate policy to starve us and the other plains nations, to drive us all onto reservations where we can live on the White Father's dole...and our spirits can die slowly. “Red Cloud of the Oglala and Morning Star of the Northern Cheyenne tried to make peace—to keep to the great hunting preserve supposedly given to the tribes in the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, to trade with the government agencies. Then last summer Custer came riding right into the heart of the sacred Black Hills, looking for gold. Do you know what they call the glorious trail he blazed on our land—the Thieves Road.”