The Ruination of Essie Sparks (Wild Western Rogues Series, Book 2) (11 page)

She threw the bullet at him and it bounced off his chest. "I know what you thought. You were wrong."

He rolled back against the ground and slammed his eyes shut. Nausea roiled in his gut again and he took a long, deep breath. "So I was."

"Apologize for trying to kill me."

He narrowed a look at her and thought about his options. He couldn't remember ever apologizing for anything in his life before and never to a woman. He didn't especially want to start now. But she had, no doubt, saved him a crushing agony, removing the bullet while he was out cold. Even now, the leg burned like an ember. "Sorry. I'm... grateful."

She picked up a fistful of dirt and scrubbed her bloody hands.

"Ha!" Her eyes flicked up to him with mock surprise. "That must have cost you. You're not welcome."

Squeezing his eyes shut, he asked. "How long was I out?"

It took her a few seconds to deign to answer. "An hour. Maybe more."

He groaned and rolled to a sit, remembering.

Darkness had truly fallen and stars were winking overhead. "The men. Where are they?"

"Coming," she said. "I think there were two of them on horseback, but still miles down the mountain. I saw their lantern light. But not for a while. Maybe they stopped for the night?"

"Or not." He rubbed his forehead where an ache had settled between his eyes. "The fire. You need to put it out."

She brushed the dirt from her hands. "Either I put that blade in the fire and cauterize that wound or you will leak blood until you die. Far be it from me to attack you again, so it's your choice."

She was right. He'd pushed himself as far as he could. "Do it," he told her, and handed her the knife.

Hesitantly, she took the blade and held the tip over the flickering orange flames.

"You started that by yourself?" He indicated the fire, feeling reluctantly impressed.

"Me? No. Your horse is really quite clever. All I had to do was ask and he gathered up the wood and everything."

She made a joke. He lifted one eyebrow in response. She'd obviously found the matches in his things. "Why didn't you run?"

She turned the blade in the fire until his dried blood sizzled on the edges and burned away. The metal began to glow orange. "Oh, I did," she answered, avoiding his eyes, turning the blade in the fire. "Your clever horse, again. He talked me out of it."

He narrowed a look at her. Another joke? He couldn't tell. Anything besides hostility was new. But he thanked whoever was watching over his broken life that the woman hadn't decided to go off on her own when he'd passed out. Anything that happened to her would be his fault. He'd dragged her out here into the middle of this nowhere place, where one wrong turn could be her last. Not to mention his.

Her red hair gleamed in the firelight, all wild and loose, so completely at odds with the smooth pale skin of her face. He didn't mean to stare, but he couldn't help himself.

Maybe it was her funny, bowed lips that turned down a bit at the corners, or her heart-shaped face, or her slender, well-bred nose that flared when she got angry, but not even the girl he'd once fancied himself in love with had incited such feelings of protectiveness as this woman did in him. Though, he saw now, she was no fragile flower like the girls he'd known back East who lived near the school his father sent him to. Pretty, stuck-up white girls who'd either thought of him as some kind of toy, or got secret thrills being seen in public with the half-breed son of a major university patron.
The oddity
.
The wild Indian.
Being seen on his arm made them feel somehow... generous. It had been fine with him. All of it. Until that last night. He blinked away the memory.

No, Essie Sparks was something else again. But he couldn't quite figure out what.

Turning to him, she held up the blade she'd removed from the flame. It was red hot and glowing. "This is going to hurt," she warned. "A lot."

He braced himself, picking up a stick from beside him and biting down on it. But nothing could have prepared him.

The sound came first, the awful sizzle and burn, followed instantly by the pain. He bit back a cry and flattened himself to the ground, scratching up handfuls of dirt in his clenched fists. Her cool hand tethered him as he felt himself sinking underwater. He took her hand in his and clutched it. And after a moment or two, she lifted the blade and he swam back to the surface, exhaling the breath he'd been holding with a low growl.

"It's over now." Her hands were shaking.

He gulped convulsively and nodded.

She pulled her hand away and set the knife down on a rock to cool. "You did well not to scream."

So had she not to swoon, he thought, when rational thought returned. "I need... another piece of your petticoat."

After a moment, she complied, tearing another row of ruffle from the impractical thing. She turned back to him warily, eying his leggings. He took the cotton from her and gestured for her to turn around. "I'll do it myself this time."

A grateful relief softened her expression and she did as he asked.

He got to his knees—all he could manage for the moment—and lowered his leggings again, careful not to scrape against his wound.
Séaa!
The thing felt like he'd been attacked by ten swarms of wasps. He hissed out a breath as the cotton made contact with the wound.

"Frankly, I don't know how you rode as long as you did. You need rest now if you don't want infection to set in."

By the time he'd finished, the pain in his leg dulled to a throb. He tested it for strength. There was no time for weakness. Not if he wanted to live. Black spots swam in his vision, but he braced a hand against a tree for a moment before kicking dirt into the fire, extinguishing it.

That got her to her feet. "What are you doing? We
need
that fire. And you're in no condition to go anywhe—"

"I'm going now. Are you coming with me?" He limped to his horse and mounted slowly, pulling himself up awkwardly into the saddle without using his left leg. When he settled, he reached a hand down to her.

She glared up at him in the moonlight, torn. "Do I have a choice?"

"Between me and the grizzlies? Yes." And he meant it. He watched the possibility of running, on her own, flit across her expression.

Things that had seemed so straightforward this morning seemed less so tonight. Something had shifted between them now. Some balance of power. She'd saved his life. He'd probably ruined hers. But it was no use crying over what couldn't be changed now. There was nothing for him but to get as far away from here as he could. She couldn't stay here alone in the dark, without a weapon. She was impulsive, but not stupid.

Finally, seemingly against her better judgment, she reached a hand up. He closed his fingers around hers and tugged her up in front of him. And when she'd settled into the lee of his thighs, her back stiff and purposefully avoiding contact with his chest, he said, "Cade."

She turned fractionally, confused. "What?"

"My name. It's Cade Newcastle. The Cheyenne call me Black Thorn."

She jerked a surprised look at him, then turned back around with a "Huh."

A smile settled around his mouth and he nudged the horse into a walk, leaving the campsite and the men who hunted them behind.

* * *

Mitchell Laddner pulled his mount up beside the man Dooley had sent to accompany him on the hunt for the renegade. Jacob Moran was a man of few words and even fewer morals, and that suited Laddner just fine. He wanted complete control of this operation and Moran had made it clear from the get-go that he wanted nothing of the kind. He was a follower, Moran. Laddner planned to use that instinct to its fullest advantage in the pursuit of his goals.

Twilight spilled across the sky as stars appeared. Even with the moon up, the darkness up here in the mountains was nearly complete under the thick cover of evergreens. It made no sense to go on. The climb had worn his horse out and had likely done the same to the one he was pursuing. The trail of blood he'd followed halfway up the mountain meant one of their bullets had popped that damned renegade but good. And unless that Injun was a damned fool, he'd give himself a night to rest as well.

Unless he was already dead.

The mystery was the woman. Essie. He'd half expected to see her body lying in the trail partway up the mountain. What good was she to that Indian anyway? With two on that horse, she could only be slowing him down. It didn't make sense that he hadn't killed her yet. Unless he just hadn't used her yet. On account of the bullet. A matter of time, he supposed.

He signaled to Moran that they would stop beside the stream for the night and rest. They made camp and warmed a can of beans over a fire. Moran fried up a few pieces of bacon he'd packed, wrapped in paper, and the men sat back against a pair of rocks to eat.

"I reckon," Moran eventually said, filling the empty space between them with conversation, "we'll find 'em in the morning. They can't stay ahead of us on one horse alone. Can they?"

Laddner considered the fire. It occurred to him that spending the entire night here might be foolish. The man he'd met that day on the Powder River might not do the easy thing, or even the wise thing, but he would undoubtedly do the audacious thing. If they were going to catch him, they would have to outwit and outplay him.

"Done much tracking in your life, Moran?" Laddner asked.

He shrugged. "Gotta admit, I ain't. Exceptin' wild boar an' the like. Ain't never tracked no human being. No Injun, neither."

A grin curved Laddner's mouth as he shoveled in another bite of beans.

"You seem to know your way 'round a trail. You learn in the military?" Moran asked.

Laddner shook his head. "Raised up in the woods. My daddy was a tracker of runaways in his day. After that, deserters during the war and a galvanized Yankee out here. Taught me his trade. I joined up with the Western Army as a youngster to fight the Indians. I worked for Custer himself as a tracker for a time. He used to say I had the nose of a bloodhound."

"
Custer
? Whoo-ee! You're practically famous!" Moran frowned then. "But I heard all them soldiers under him died over at the Big Horn."

"If he hadn't sent me off to Major Reno with a message that day, I'd be one of them. I managed to keep my hair."

Moran belched and contemplated his empty plate. "Poor woman. Mrs. Sparks, I mean. What do you reckon he'll do to her?"

"He'll kill her," Laddner said. "Bloodthirsty savage. What'd you expect?"

With a regretful shake of his head, Moran sighed. "If'n he don't kill her, she'll likely be a handful to tote down that mountain. Ain't seen a captive for a while in these parts, but them women's a god-awful mess, I hear, when they come back."

"She won't be coming back." Laddner popped the last of his bacon in his mouth, then stood to spill the dregs of his coffee into the soil near the fire.

"Well, if he ain't kilt her...?" Moran said, putting his plate aside.

"Then we must do our Christian duty." He walked to the stream and washed his plate with sand and water.

After Moran had chewed on that thought for a long minute, he joined him at the stream's edge. "I ain't much of a church-goer, but what would that be, exactly? Our Christian duty, I mean?"

Laddner sent the man a dark smile. "Well," he said, shaking the water from his metal plate, "we'll follow the Reverend Dooley's orders, of course, and put her out of her misery."

Chapter 7

Essie woke to the sound of another waterfall when he stopped at dawn to rest the horse. They were at the top of a precipice where the river disappeared over an edge that collided with blue sky and tumbled for hundreds of feet, straight down. Fog still hugged the slopes of the mountains thickly, making visibility nil.

At some point in the night she must have fallen asleep because when she woke he had his arms around her, and her head had fallen back against his shoulder. For a moment, she didn't move. With his hands splayed across her ribs and the rest of her intimately pressed against his chest, he was holding her gently, protectively. The way, she had always imagined, a man should hold a woman in his arms.

But he instantly sensed her awake and loosened his grip.