The Ruination of Essie Sparks (Wild Western Rogues Series, Book 2) (6 page)

"Then who are you?" she asked.

He tugged on her arm, focusing on the pain in his leg to push him forward. How had this whole day gotten so out of his control? It had been more than a year since he'd had to use his father's language. Months on end with the tribe had him thinking in Cheyenne, even dreaming in it. More than that, he was known for his silences among the People. All this talk made his head hurt, not to mention the pain throbbing in his leg.

"All right," she said, stopping again. "Wait. Listen to me for a minute. I know you want to blame me for everything the school has done, but—"

"For stealing children?"

"I did not steal—" She stopped and glared at him. "No one stole them. Parents sent their children there. Voluntarily."

"No, they didn't. But if they had, it would have been because they were
starving
in the camps. What choice did they have? That place or death."

She flinched, then her expression flattened. "Look who's talking about stealing children! What exactly do you call what you were trying to do back there?"

With a disgusted look, he pressed on through the current.

"All right! Let's just say I understand you wanting to take Daniel away from that place. I might even understand not wanting to go through proper authorities."

"That is not his name."

"Little Wolf," she corrected, flustered. "Yes. But I knew him as Daniel."

"You did not know him at all." Watching her prickle like a wild cactus pleased him in some perverse way.

"He's not the little boy you knew anymore, either, but trying to be a man. Did you know that when you came for him? No child would do what he did this morning."

"If you knew him so well, why didn't you try to stop him?" He stumbled on another rock in the water and grabbed her arm for balance. He hissed out a breath and clapped a hand over the wound. Blood had begun leaking alarmingly between his fingers.

He met her eyes and she lifted her chin.

"Maybe I'll be lucky," she said, "and they'll follow the trail of your blood like breadcrumbs. Right to the source."

He hated that she was right. Hated weakness of any kind. But his thoughts were muddied by the loss of blood and he ground his teeth together for a moment before he decided. There, in the middle of the rushing creek, he reached for the wet bottom of her petticoat.

She gasped in surprise and made a grab for it, but before she could stop him, he'd slipped his knife from its sheath and torn the bottom ruffle of her petticoat off. He brandished the knife under her nose again and shoved the long strip of sodden cotton into her hand. He took a handful of her tangled red hair in his fingers and tugged her head back so there'd be no mistaking his meaning. "Wrap it. Tight." With his other hand, he undid the leather lacing on his leggings and dropped them. "And touch nothing else."

She inhaled sharply and her eyes flashed at him in the morning sun, like the blue-green-colored turquoise that came from the nearby mountains. He felt her begin to shake. She turned her head, averting her eyes from his nakedness, and began wrapping the wound on his thigh.

"If you think you can disarm me by shocking me," she muttered, "you are mistaken." But that didn't stop her from sneaking looks at him.

No skin off his nose. He found himself staring down at her, as well. At the sweep of freckles dancing across her nose in the half-morning sunlight. At her skin, pale as the translucent petal of a spring flower. And that hair. That red hair that coiled in ringlets, escaping what had once been a confining braid. His urge to touch it not only caught him off guard, it maddened him. He wanted nothing to do with this woman except what was absolutely necessary to his survival. But despite the pain in his leg, his cock seemed to have a mind of its own about his indifference and stirred to life near her bent head.

Deliberately, he looked away and focused on the pain. "
Tighter
."

Around and around she wound the cotton until she ripped one end and tied the two pieces together—
he sucked in a breath
—hard. His leg throbbed like it had been stuck with a hot poker.

"Enjoy that?" he asked when she'd finished. He yanked his deerskin trousers back up.

"You did say tight."

"Maybe you enjoyed the rest of the view."

Shock stained her cheeks red. "Oh! Maybe I do hope you bleed to death!"

He leaned close to her. "Better hope not, or you will be out here all alone."

Her eyes cut sideways at the forested woods beside them and the craggy mountains beyond as she considered his words. "I can think of worse things," she said. And then she stopped talking.

Finally.

It gave him some small satisfaction to hear her sharp tongue silenced for now. The foolish
vé'ho'á'e
had no idea how to be a prisoner.

Pulling her behind him again, they made slow progress as he kept an eye out for pursuers. If they were lucky, the men from the school would, at least for a while, chase the path of the horses in the other direction and lose their trail here in the creek. He watched the creek for a good place to exit, but the muddy banks were smooth and wet and would leave footprints and a plain trail to follow.

Behind him, the pain in his ass had gathered up her wet skirts in one arm to make walking easier. Grudgingly, he admired her for not whining about the cold. But he could hear her teeth chatter behind him. The sound made him smile.

The sun was fully up above the mountain in the distance before he spotted an outcrop of water-grooved limestone that sloped in a low, flat slab into the creek and would allow them to climb out on the right side, the same side they'd entered on, track-free. They'd come far enough and needed to make up time. They'd be looking for him on the far side, he hoped. Not here.

He led Náhkohe out, his hooves scraping against the slippery stone. Then the woman, who shrugged off his help, climbed out herself.

"Sit," he ordered.

Frowning, she collapsed in a sodden heap on the sun-warmed rock, breathing hard and watching him.

He lowered himself gingerly down and scooped up a few handfuls of water to quench his thirst. Turning back to her, he found her still watching him like some wild animal that both fascinated and frightened her at once.

Ignoring her, he crossed the rock to the bank beyond, which was bordered by a thick hedge of Juneberry bushes.
A good place to leave the creek behind
.

He took his knife out and sliced a small, thickly laden berry branch off the bush and handed it to her.

"Eat."

She turned her face away. "No, thank you."

"Suit yourself
.
"

"For all I know, you'd try to poison me."

He ripped a berry off, popped the fruit in his mouth and chewed. "If I wanted you dead, which I am suddenly considering, I would not use berries." Shoving a berry toward her, he gestured to the small crown at the bottom tip, like every blueberry he'd ever seen. "This? Good.
Eat
. Bottom smooth? Bad.
Die
." He proffered the branch once more and, reluctantly, she took it.

She watched as he cut a second branch for himself, feeling dizzy from blood loss, not hunger. He carried jerky and some other dried food in his saddlebags, but the fruit might strengthen his blood.

He let Náhkohe get a good drink of water before leading him back to the bank, where the woman was. She sat quietly, plucking berries and eating them without taking her eyes off him. Pulling a blue gingham shirt from his saddlebags, he slipped it on over his head before replacing the rifle around his shoulders and reaching a hand down to her. "Come."

She chewed a berry slowly, watching him. "What if I say no?"

"I wouldn't," he warned.

"You could just leave me. I'm no threat to you here."

Impatient now, he flicked a beckoning hand at her again. "No."

"They'll be coming for me soon." Still she didn't move off that rock.

"Do not make me throw you on that horse, woman."

She lifted her chin. "My
name
is Essie Sparks."

"Well, Essie Sparks, unless you want to ride tied to the back of my horse, face down, you better climb on. Because we are going up that mountain."

He grabbed her by the arm and hauled her to her feet.

"Fine! All right. Let go of me. I'll get on myself." With her hands still tied, she pulled herself up, astride the saddle. A moment later, he did the same, settling against the horse and her backside with a grunt of pain. He kicked Náhkohe into a trot up the winding track beside the stream that led up the mountain.

* * *

Essie had no idea where they were headed, but
up
couldn't be good.
Up
meant wilderness.
Up
meant farther away from the civilized world she knew. Away from rescue and hope and that train she should be boarding this morning to her new life.

Grassland turned to aspen groves, which gave way to lodgepole pines farther up, and then the thick-barked ponderosa pines. As they picked their way through the forest on some animal track, she wondered if the men at the school had found the horses yet. If they even cared she'd been taken. If Mitchell Laddner was one of them, sent to find her, how hard would he look? He hated her and would probably be happy to see her gone. But if she knew him at all, he wouldn't feel the same about the renegade who'd taken her and bested him. That would never be tolerated by a man like Laddner.

"Are you going to tell me who you are to Danie—I mean, Little Wolf?" she asked as the sun broke through the morning clouds above them.

After a long pause, he answered, "That is none of your concern."

He kicked the horse into a lope, to discourage more talking, she supposed. And it worked. It was all she could do to focus on staying on the horse. She wasn't a rider, and except for the few times she'd been allowed to ride a ladylike sidesaddle at a slow walk, she'd never galloped on a horse before. Her full concentration went to gripping the animal with her legs and clutching the saddle horn. She thanked heaven for the small protection her bustle provided between them, until he jerked the horse to a stop and slid his knife from its sheath again.

She tensed, terrified he meant to kill her with it, but instead he sliced the ties to her exposed bustle and flung it into the bushes far off the trail, discarding the only measure of decent space between them.

She shot him a withering look before facing forward again. As if it wasn't humiliating enough to be pressed up against him in her undergarments with her arms bare and everything she owned practically on display, but now she hadn't even the comfort of the bustle separating her backside from... from
him
.

How many other pieces of clothing would he see fit to dispose of before this was over? She couldn't think about that now. She could only focus on surviving this insanity, one minute at a time.

They rode for hours in silence. Only the sound of the horse's hooves sliding on rocks underfoot and the sound of the morning wind whispering through the trees broke the monotony of their ride. She planned and discarded a hundred plots of escape as unworkable. An elbow to the injured leg? Too risky. A head butt backward to catch him off guard? Again, that might only infuriate him.

The farther they rode the more she felt him waver. In fact, twice, she could have sworn he jerked himself awake. Maybe he would faint and fall off the horse behind her with no effort on her part. But that wasn't likely.

At least he'd taken no liberties with her. She counted herself lucky that he was probably too weak to molest her. Anyway, if he intended to do so, wouldn't he have already? For all his threats and bluster, he wasn't as savage as he would have her believe. Instead, he spoke with intelligence. Education, even. Was it possible he'd been raised in the white world, only to end up in the Cheyenne world? If that were true, given his half-blood breeding, apparently the Cheyenne people must have been more welcoming than the whites to a man like him.

Her affection for the children at the school often made her wonder if, in fact, the Cheyenne were not the civilized ones, and whites the savages? As a group, they were not judgmental or even exclusionary as white children often were. Instead, despite the constant repression, they interacted with one another as siblings of a sort, being both protective and kind.

Essie closed her eyes at the thought of the children. Daniel, in particular. What would happen to him if they caught him? She couldn't bear to think of the punishment he'd face. How desperate he must have been to embark on such a daring, foolish plan. And what of all the others she'd left behind? They were on their own, just as she was now. Alone in a world that didn't seem to care what she wanted, and certainly not what they wanted either.

Their pace up the mountain was brutal, but every now and then he would turn the horse to look back down the valley below to spot pursuers. For the most part, the mountain blocked their view. The guards had likely found the horses at least by noon and followed them, which gave her captor only a few hours lead.

At a vast, granite outcrop, he dismounted and dragged her off, too. They crossed the rock on foot, tugging the horse behind them. Such a place would likely make tracking them difficult for the men below, and when he wasn't watching, she secretly tore bits of lace edging from her petticoat to drop behind her as they trudged up the slope.