Triumph (7 page)

“Godiva—that is all!” she told him.

“I will find out.”

“Will you? What is your name, sir? Tell me, so I can always remember the incredible rudeness of the invading Yanks,” she demanded.

He grinned, but it seemed his teeth grit audibly, for a number of seconds. “Ah, if you are Godiva, then call me Captor of Godiva, so it seems, madam. And I am no invader.” He lifted her to the ground. “Madam, if you’ll allow me ...” he said, bowing with a polite flourish. Then he walked to the pile of clothing, bent over, and one by one began to retrieve her garments. His broad-shouldered back was to her. Pity she had nothing to throw against it! She thought again about running, but she had learned how quickly he could move. And she did want her clothing.

He turned at last, taking a few leisurely steps toward her. Impatiently, she strode forward, snatching her clothing from him. With it clutched in her hands, she demanded, “Do you mind?”

He grinned. “Yes, actually, I do. It’s just a shade nerve-wracking to turn one’s back on you. Just now, you considered an escape—but luckily for you, dear Godiva, you chose reason over stupidity.”

“The gentlemanly thing to do—”

“That does not seem relevant here, does it, since you enticed me into the woods in something—shall we say—slightly less than a lady’s apparel?”

She swung her back on him, dropped his frockcoat, and quickly dressed. Despite her bid for dignity, she tripped over her pantalettes. When she turned back to him, cheeks reddening, he was somewhat attempting to conceal an amused smile.

“What now, sir?” she demanded.

“I’ll take my coat back.” He came forward to retrieve it. He stared into her eyes, then reached to the ground for the coat she had dropped. Standing before her, he slipped the garment back over his shoulders. His eyes never left hers.

“And now?” she queried.

“We follow the path we should have taken.”

She shook her head suddenly, with honest passion. “You don’t want to find my injured lads. I swear to you that they are harmless—”

“We shall see.”

“If you chase them, they will think they have to fight.”

“Madam, I assure you—”

“Don’t you see, they’re young! They’ll think they’re honor-bound to die. All men seem to come into this wretched war thinking that they’re obliged to die! Please ... !”

She was startled to realize that she had reached out, touching his arm. She felt the hardness of his muscle beneath the fabric of his clothing. He was fit, rugged, in good shape. Not an officer whose men did his bidding while he sat back himself. His men ...

He was here on his own. Did he command others? Or had he gained his rank through his prowess with the weapons he carried?

She gazed at her hand where it rested on his arm. Met his eyes again. Snatched her hand away. She didn’t want to touch him. She didn’t want to think of him as being human, much less male, and a male in a healthy and rugged good condition which would make him all the more a very dangerous adversary.

She knew she was flushing as she stared at him.

“They don’t need to die,” she whispered. “Honestly. It would be like the murder of children.”

“You can’t begin to imagine how many children have died,” he told her curtly.

“But ...”

“I’ve no interest in causing further harm to your injured. Still, Godiva, you will come with me. And we will see this through. Together.”

He turned around, heading toward the horses. Watching him, frustrated, furious, and more afraid than ever of his strength and determination, Tia remembered the small ladies’ Smith and Wesson she carried in her skirt pocket.

With his back to her, she quickly dug in her pocket, reached for the weapon, curled her fingers around it, and pulled it out. She aimed it dead center on his spine.

“Sir!”

He swung around and paused when he saw the gun.

“Now—you will come with me. My prisoner.” Feeling elated, she kept the gun level on his heart, but approached him, her eyes narrowed, her gait suddenly light. “Ever hear of Andersonville?” she asked quietly.

“Indeed, I have,” he said coolly.

“Say your prayers, soldier,” she told him, “for you will be going there.”

“I think not,” he told her.

“Why? I will shoot you, you know.”

“Will you?”

“Do you doubt it?”

His narrowed gold eyes assessed her. “I don’t know you well enough to know just what you will do. You do ride around the woods naked. Maybe you would shoot a man in cold blood.”

“Don’t tempt me!” she warned.

He stared at her for a long moment, then said, “It’s growing late.” He turned, starting for the horses.

“Stop, you fool! You are my prisoner. I am very capable with a gun. My marksmanship is excellent.”

He ignored her. She gritted her teeth hard. She didn’t want to shoot him. He was the enemy, of course, but he was a flesh-and-blood man. She couldn’t just shoot him down, but he was simply walking away. “Stop, I mean it!”

Again, he ignored her.

She fired—intending to shoot into the dirt.

Except that ... she didn’t shoot at all.

He swung back around, slowly arching a brow. She stared from the gun to him, and back to the gun again.

“You didn’t think I’d leave you with a loaded gun, did you?” he queried.

“But ... how ...” she began, and then she realized that he had quickly, subtly found the gun when he had gone to collect her clothing—when he had turned his back on her.

And now ...

Now he thought that she had been ready to shoot him down in cold blood.

The color drained from her face as he stared at her.

She turned to run.

She went no more than ten feet before she found herself spinning, then crashing back down to the earth again. And he was straddling her, pinning her down. She couldn’t breathe. She could only feel the heat from the fire in his eyes.

“Lady, trust me!” he said softly. “From here on out,
you
are
mine
.”

“Y
OURS! OH, NO, YOU
are mistaken,” she promised him icily. “I’m not yours—or the Union’s. I don’t belong to any man or state or government. I’m not property—”

“As no woman—or man—should be,” he interrupted quietly.

She caught her breath, well aware that he was suggesting she fought for what was called the “peculiar institution” of slavery.

She didn’t owe him any explanations, nor could she possibly care what this stranger thought about her, her ideals, ethics, principles, or the reasons for any of her behaviors. And still, she found that she was defensively lashing out at him. “Kindly release me, sir. I don’t belong to any man, and I don’t own any men—or women or children. Neither do any members of my family.”

“Who are you then? Where is your family? Tell me that, and I will gallantly help you to your feet.”

She pursed her lips, staring at him stubbornly.

“I can wait.”

She smiled icily. “Good. I can wait, too. I have no desire at all for you to try to behave ‘gallantly’ in any way, shape, or form.”

“Fine. We’ll both just wait.”

To her horror, he stretched out beside her, an arm and a leg continuing to pin her to the ground. Infuriated, she started to struggle, only to find that she did nothing but edge more closely against his blue-clad frame.

And he watched her. Watched her with those large hazel eyes of his. Again, she felt a strange shivering sensation while meeting his gaze, as if she knew him, or should know something about him. And she grew desperate to free herself from the intimacy he forced.

“Catherine,” she lied. “My name is Catherine—Moore.”

That was all it took. He rose, offering a hand down to assist her with all the gallantry he had promised. She would have none of it, of course. Petty, childish, perhaps, but he could hang before she would accept the slightest assistance from him. She scrambled to her feet on her own, eyeing him warily all the while.

“And now?”

“Now we ride.”

“My horse—”

“Will follow again.”

She shook her head. “You’re being unnecessarily cruel to a good horse, Yank. The added weight—”

“Your weight is nothing,” he assured her dismissively, which made her want to draw up to her full height. Except that she was petite, which didn’t seem at all fair. Her brothers were giants; even her mother was tall.

She wanted to be formidable.

“You’re mistaken—” she began, but he interrupted her curtly.

“I will have your silence, madam!”

“I don’t have to—”

“I can gag you.”

She gritted her teeth again, standing with her arms folded firmly across her chest. “Be glad you did find the bullets in that gun, Yank. It doesn’t take a wrestler to fire a lethal shot!”

“I stand forewarned. Now you shall stand silent,” he said. He just looked at her and spoke with a low, almost pleasant tone. She had been threatened, really threatened, and she knew it. She lifted her hands, arching a brow, not willing to give him the last word, nor really willing to be silent.

And so she watched him.

Minutes later, she thought that the most distressing thing about being with the stranger—other than fearing for her life and future—was the uncanny way he seemed to have of knowing exactly where people had been, and where they had gone. He picked up on the trail taken by her party of green soldiers and injured men, though he barely glanced at the tracks in the pine-strewn trails, nor took time to study broken and bent foliage and trees. He quickly assessed the area, set her upon his horse again, and mounted behind her. Then they started riding. And despite the time he had taken pursuing her, capturing her, and returning to this spot along the river, she knew that they would overtake the others. Whether they did so before or after they reached the old abandoned Indian camp, she couldn’t quite determine.

But they would find her little party of injured. That was a simple fact.

“You should just take me in,” she told him suddenly. “I am the famed Godiva. I have led thousands of men to their deaths, I have caused ships to crash, I—along with General Lee perhaps, and blessed Stonewall, while he lived, and a few others—have almost single-handedly kept the Confederacy in the war. I have—”

“Graced many a stage, I imagine?” he queried dryly.

She bit her lip, lowering her eyes. Once upon a time, her mother had thought to find her livelihood on the stage. Long ago, before she had met and married her father. She certainly hadn’t inherited her mother’s golden coloring, but perhaps she did carry within her a certain talent for the dramatic—and as he had suggested, bald-faced lying.

“Take me in, I warn you. I am dangerous. If you wait for darkness, terrible things may happen. I’m not even human, really. I’m a shape-changer. I—”

“The cabin lies just ahead, and I imagine your men are within it,” he said flatly.

“And what could you possibly want with my injured?” she queried.

“To see who they are,” he told her.

“Green boys.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“But—”

“You’ve lied about everything.”

“I’m not lying now!”

“But there’s no way for me to tell that, is there—Catherine?”

The way he said the name was chilling. As if he knew she had lied even there.

“I warn you—given the opportunity, I will shoot you down before I’ll let you injure a single one of those boys.”

“If those boys are who and what you say, they are in no danger from me.”

“And if they’re not, you may be dead yourself in a matter of minutes!”

“I don’t think so.”

She didn’t need to see his face to feel the strange hazel piercing of his eyes. She wondered again what it was that seemed so familiar about him, when she was sure she didn’t know him. He reminded her of someone, and she couldn’t quite place who, or why.

“Think about it—I could be leading you into a real trap,” she warned quietly.

“I’m thinking, and I don’t believe that you’re leading me anywhere at the moment,” he replied, his voice a very soft drawl. Then it struck her—he might be wearing a Yankee uniform, but he hailed from somewhere in the South.

She twisted around to accost him. “What kind of a traitor are you?”

“I’m true to my convictions, and that makes me an honest man. I wonder if there is any honesty in you whatsoever.”

She turned again. The light had begun to fall. She might have lost her own way here, as familiar as she considered herself with the area. But he was right; they were almost upon the old Indian cabin in the woods.

“What do you think you’re going to do? Barge in and shoot down a half-dozen men?” she inquired desperately. “Because, of course, they’ll be forced to shoot at you if you come after them.”

“Not if you keep them from doing so,” he said.

“What? Why should I stop them?”

“Because you want them to live.”

“The odds are—”

“That not one of your ‘green’ boys will get off a single shot before I mow them all down.” It didn’t sound as if he was bragging—merely stating a fact.

He reined to a halt along the trail right before the cove with the small cabin. It had been built and abandoned many years before, during the Seminole War, when the Florida Indians had built their homes with native pine before learning that they had to run so often and so fast that it made far more sense to build platform houses with nothing but thatch roofs—houses above the ground and the vermin in the swamps where they were finally forced.

Since those days, the cabin had been used often enough. Lovers had known it as a place to tryst; hunters and fishermen had found it a haven in the woods. It was known, however, only to the locals.

Or so she had thought.

“Well, Godiva?” he inquired.

“Let me down. I’ll tell them not to fire. Except, if you think you can drag my wounded boys back to be seized for a wretched Yank camp—”

“All I want to do is see your wounded boys, Godiva.”

That was difficult to believe. And the Yankee’s Spencer repeating rifle didn’t just look dangerous, it killed, “mowed” men down, just as he’d suggested.

“Let me down then.”

This time, he dismounted from behind her. She braced herself to refuse any assistance to dismount from him.