Holt's Gamble (20 page)

It wasn't like him to let his guard down like that. With a shudder, he realized it could have easily been an unfriendly Indian hunting party as the harmless man mounted before them. A bead of sweat tricked down his back between his shoulder blades. What if his carelessness had gotten her killed?

Watkin's horse pranced nervously in a circle. Its rider, dark-haired and with the solid build of a farmer, fought to keep his seat. "Hey, remind me not to come at you from the blind side again, huh?"

"Sorry, Mel," Clay answered with a singular lack of sincerity. "What do you want?"

Mel raised an amused eyebrow at the blunt dismissal in Clay's voice and eyed the beautiful, somewhat rumpled woman beside him. "Mrs. Holt." He touched the brim of his hat to her and returned his gaze to Holt. "Jacob asked me to come out and find you. Says he needs a hand with the stock when we make the crossing."

"Crossing?" Clay replied, straightening. "I thought we weren't supposed to make the ford until tomorrow."

"Yeah. But Kelly found a promising spot a day closer and he's already moving some of the wagons across."

Clay holstered his gun and sighed. "Thanks, Mel. Tell Jacob we're right behind you."

Mel tossed him a knowing smile. "Will do. And my apologies for the... interruption," he added as tactfully as possible. He nodded to Kierin. "Afternoon, ma'am."

Kierin blushed deeper in reply and forced a small, tight smile. "Mr. Watkins."

Watkins laid a spur to his horse's flank and soon disappeared over the rise.

Kierin flopped back with a dramatic moan to the ground, arms flung wide, eyes clamped shut. "Oh God!"

"It's all right," he told her, getting to his feet. He knew exactly what she was feeling.

"All right?"
She nearly laughed. She
would
have laughed if it hadn't all been so humiliating. "Did you see the look on his face?"

"Yeah," Clay answered, his grin returning at the memory of Watkin's expression. "Sheer terror."

Kierin ignored his optimism and groaned. "I give him all of ten minutes before the whole train knows what we were doing out here."

He leaned down and reached a slender hand down to her. "If he says anything," Clay responded gently, "it'll be that I was having a hell of a time controlling myself around my beautiful 'wife.' " His gaze swept over her face. "And who would blame me?"

She was caught off guard by the sudden tenderness in his voice. It was the nicest thing he'd ever said to her. Kierin lifted her gaze slowly to meet his, fearful that he was merely teasing her again. But one look told her he wasn't. The candor in his eyes startled her, sending currents of warmth flooding through her.

"Come on," he repeated, taking her hand. "We'd better get back." He helped her up and whistled for Taeva, who'd been grazing not far away.

He pulled her up behind him this time after he'd mounted. Her arms circled his tapered waist and she clung to him, cheek pressed against his back as the prairie sped by them.

Her mind was a jumble of emotions. Clay was as unpredictable as the wind that buffeted the plain, as mysterious as its secrets. But in spite of his hostility and all the other things she'd accused him of earlier, she was suddenly and unalterably aware of a new truth.

She was falling in love with him.

* * *

"H'yaw!"

Jacob's voice rang out above the rush of the Big Blue's current. His bullwhip cracked sharply, then landed with an ineffectual splat in the water a few feet away from the lead team of oxen. "Git up there, you miserable lame-brained tubs a' gleet..."

Mose and Tulip, the two oxen in the lead, bellowed stubbornly in complaint as the rain-swollen river eddied around their flanks, but refused to budge. They'd planted themselves squarely at the midpoint of the fifty-yard span of water, apparently oblivious to the string of blue oaths Jacob flung at them. The second team shifted restlessly in their wooden yokes, grinding the wagon's wheels deeper into the muddy bottom.

Waist-deep in water, Jacob snatched his hat off in frustration and slapped it across the wooden oxbow. "I never see'd no animals as ornery as you, you mule-headed piece o' fish bait. Git up there. H'yaw!"

Kierin tightened her grip on the rocking bench seat at the front of the wagon and tried to keep from smiling. Jacob's temper didn't flare often, but when it did, it was truly something to behold.

"We takin' in water yet?" he shouted, ignoring her amused expression.

Kierin shook her head. "The blocks you and Clay put above the axles seem to be doing the trick, but not if it gets much deeper."

"Ain't gonna
get
no deeper... less 'n we sink," Jacob muttered irritably.

"Hey, Jacob. Got trouble?" Mel Watkins called from his wagon as they forded past. Beside him on the seat, his young wife, Elizabeth, held two of their four small children on her lap. She smiled and waved at Kierin. The two older boys, eyes shining with curiosity, peeped out around the canvas cover in the front.

Jacob waved him on. "Nah, just an ornery team, I reckon."

"Where's Clay?" Mel asked, leaning back out as they passed.

"Takin' the rest of the stock across," Jacob answered.

"When I see him at the other side, I'll send him on back for ya."

"Be obliged," Jacob called after him. He waded back against the current to the wagon front, the late afternoon sun sparkling off the moisture in his wiry black hair.

Tulip bellowed again.

"What do you think's wrong with them?" Kierin asked.

Jacob reached into the jockey box and pulled out a long-handled crowbar. "They's fractious critters," he muttered with a growl. "But maybe we's hung up on somethin' down below. Gonna have me a look at the wheels."

"Is there anything I can do?"

"You 'member how to use this?" He held out the bull whip to her, then stripped his dark cotton shirt over his head and tossed it into the wagon.

Kierin smiled. "Do bees buzz? Flies fly?" she teased. Jacob had spent hours on the trail patiently teaching her to use the lead-weighted whip made of braided rawhide and she could finally muster a respectable crack out of it. "You just tell me when."

"Yes, ma'am," he acknowledged with a grin and he waded back to inspect the rear axle.

Kierin watched Jacob go, grateful that things were so easy between them. Since the night in the wagon, their friendship had blossomed as naturally as the carpet of spring wildflowers amid the long prairie grasses. Some days they'd walk along in companionable silence, admiring the ever-widening landscape of the plains and other days he'd spend hours teaching her something useful like, how to crack a whip or cleat an ox shoe.

He'd told her, without a trace of self-pity, about growing up on the plantation in Mississippi, about the cotton and the endless work and bloodied fingers he'd had from the picking. Sometimes he talked of Bess and he'd get that faraway look in his eyes as he had that night in the wagon.

In her turn, she'd told Jacob about raising her brother, Matthew—being more mother than sister to him and about the terrible void he'd left in her life when her pa had taken him West. She'd even spoken to him of Lily—without, she mused, so much as a blink from him—and her regret over not having said good-bye. It seemed a natural consequence of their friendship to share these things with Jacob.

If only it could be that simple with Clay,
she thought. Kierin's gaze was pulled to the far bank in search of his familiar shape atop the tall Appaloosa stallion. Her heart constricted when she spotted him coming back toward the wagon. Head bent in concentration, he guided his horse across the rocky river bottom near the shore.

The afternoon breeze ruffled through his thick dark hair. It had grown longer since the trail's start and brushed the tops of his shoulders in back. The wildness of it suited him, just as the freedom of the trail seemed to. He rode with the ease of a man at home in the wilderness, in complete harmony with the animal beneath him.

It made her stomach flip-flop to see him approach. The memory of his kiss made her press her lips together in silent warning. She could still taste his kiss and remember how his arms felt around her. Desire ebbed through her again, making her pulse thud in her ears.

At that moment, Clay looked up and his eyes found hers. He urged the black horse forward with his knees and held her with his smoky gaze. His expression betrayed nothing of what he might be thinking as he approached, but his steely eyes met hers squarely, almost arrogantly, as if challenging her to be the first to look away. When she didn't, an appealing smile crept to the corners of his mouth.

"What's the problem? We stuck?" he asked over the noise of the bawling animals.

"Jacob's gone to check," she told him. "Mose and Tulip refuse to move and the others seem a little spooked, too."

Clay gave an understanding nod. "Water's pretty high and running fast," he said, unfastening the leather thong on his gun belt where it spanned his muscular thigh. "Almost lost the cow driving her across." He handed her the weighty holster, then stripped off his shirt. "You okay here?"

Kierin's eyes fell of their own accord to the sweat-sheened contours of his chest. He swiped the wadded shirt across his face and across the back of his neck, brushing away the beads of moisture there. The gesture made her mouth go suddenly dry.

"Kierin?" he asked again, tying the horse's reins to the brake handle.

Her head snapped up guiltily. "Huh? What?"

A smile tipped one corner of his mouth. "I asked if you were all right here."

"Oh, yes. Perfectly fine." She swallowed back the lump of humiliation in her throat. Lord, she couldn't even look at him anymore without making an utter fool of herself.

"Good girl." He eased down off the horse and lowered himself gingerly into the chilly river. "Waugh-hh!" he gasped. "By damn, that's cold."

"Clay," Jacob shouted from the other side of the wagon, "We got us a hunk of dead wood wedged in the spokes o' the right front wheel. Stuck tight. We gots to back the team up to git it outta there."

"All right. I'll get up by Tulip and see what I can do." Clay braced himself against the flanks of the animals as he maneuvered himself to the head of the team.

The oxen both bawled and shifted uneasily in the water. "Back, shh-h-h," Clay told Tulip. "Back up, girl."

The wagon moved almost imperceptibly backward and Jacob braced his shoulder against the wheel, reaching below the level of the water to the snag. "Not yet."

"Shh-h-h, back, Tulip."

Kierin watched Jacob try again, the muscles in his shoulder straining against the wheel. Out of the corner of her eye, Kierin saw a flash of movement in the water. Her eyes darted upstream and caught the zigzag motion of a huge dark snake headed directly for Jacob.

"J-Jacob! Behind you!" she screamed. "Snake!"

Chapter 10

Jacob whirled around, flattening himself against the wagon with a look of stark terror on his face. A strangled sound escaped him that was not quite a word, not quite a scream.

"Jacob— get up! Get up in the wagon!" she begged, reaching out to him with her hand.

He couldn't move. Paralyzed with fear, Jacob pressed himself against the wagon, black eyes riveted to the oncoming devil.

"Clay!" Kierin's voice was hoarse with fright. Awkwardly, she tugged the heavy pistol from the holster in her lap. Clay struggled against the current, frantically trying to reach Jacob. The oxen rolled their eyes in panic when they spotted the snake, heaving in all directions in their yokes. As the wagon lurched and bucked sideways, Kierin was thrown painfully against the hickory bow. Clay's gun flew out of her hand and fell with a hollow clatter to the planked floor at her feet.

The black serpent was coming fast, carried by the swift-moving water—unerring in its deadly aim.

Fifteen feet.
Kierin fumbled for the fallen gun.

Ten feet. Oh, God, where is it?
she screamed silently. Her fingers closed around the stock.

Five feet.
She yanked the gun up, but the tip flailed wildly as she tried to balance its weight.