Authors: Maclain's Wife
They rode hard until dawn, and there was no telling if they'd lost the posse. But if they did, Ben knew it wouldn't be for long.
He had to get to Helena and fast, but Polly was taking them too far north. He tried to question her, but she ignored him. That woman had a stubborn shield around her heart. He knew something about shields, after trying to protect his heart from her. They weren't all that effective.
She led him through rough terrain to a shanty in the foothills. They stopped to water and rest the horses, and he made a fire while she changed the bandages on Fugitive and Renegade's legs.
"That's a pretty smoky fire." Polly's boots crunched on the frozen ground, then she knelt down beside him. "I found some dry cedar. It will burn hotter."
"I'm out of practice. It's been a while since I've been on the run." Ben watched as she sprinkled cedar twigs into the small circle of flames.
Her hands were callused from riding and rough from the cold, but they were beautiful to him. He missed the feel of her touch on his skin. His groin tightened. He missed her so much. If only she would look at him.
Her gaze remained riveted to the flames. "I picked up some food at the mercantile."
"Before or after you picked up the dynamite?"
"Before." She opened a tin can with her pocket-knife. "I didn't figure on feeding two, so don't eat all the beans. We have to share."
"You didn't want me with you."
"I still don't, but I don't have time to argue. It's a free country." She grabbed a small frying pan and dumped the contents of the can into it. "Just don't think I'm in the mood to give you too many free meals."
It was as if a light inside her had died. Her eyes were not as bright, her voice noteless, her mouth without a smile. He wished he knew what to do.
She heated the beans and the saltpork in the same small pan. She broke a biscuit apart and handed him half.
It was tasty enough to a man who hadn't eaten since breakfast. The beans were hot, and that satisfied him. The temperature was well below freezing. He could smell snow on the wind.
"Why are you heading so far north?" Ben watched Polly smother the fire so that there was little smoke.
She set aside the empty bucket. "It's my business."
"I'm not leaving you to do it alone, whatever it is, so you might as well tell me."
A muscle clenched along her jaw. "Emily needs her pa. You ought to be trying to prove your innocence."
"Now you think I'm innocent. It wasn't too long ago you were furious at me for being just like your pa." But he didn't say the words harshly. Polly was hurting, he could see that. He ached to wrap her against his chest and love her until there was no longer a single doubt.
She scowled at him. "No outlaw is innocent."
She was softening, he could tell. "I haven't been an outlaw for years. I'm a small town sheriff. That's who I've become."
She didn't look impressed, but the muscle in her jaw was no longer clenched so tight that it spasmed.
"You're going to try to find the gold, aren't you?" He scraped the fork against his plate, cutting into the tough saltpork. "Have you figured out where it is?"
"I'm guessing, but I think I do." Polly picked at her meal. "Pa truly thought I knew where Roy Junior stashed the gold. Seeing as how I haven't seen my brother in four years and Pa knew it, I can't know where the gold is. Unless Roy Junior hid it someplace only I would know how to find."
Interest perked him up. "Your father's camp isn't far from here."
"One of them." Her gaze lifted to the top of the jagged peaks, purple against the blue of the sky. "Are you ready to mount up?"
"I've never been this far north. When my men and I rode with your father's gang, we met just south of here, at the waterfalls." Ben helped her wash off the plates with creek water he'd fetched earlier. "That's why I'd never met you before you stepped foot in my town."
"It's still your town, is it?" She wiped off the plates with a dishtowel, then packed them away. "We don't have a lot of time to spare. Mount up. We've got some riding to do."
She didn't look at him again, but he could feel it.
She wanted to give in, to let go. She wanted to love him again.
Every minute with him was torture. Polly set her heart against him and refused to even look up as he took over the lead. She didn't want the hot tingle of need that zinged through her blood every time she gazed at the breadth of his shoulders or the thickness of his thighs as he rode the saddle.
Just like she didn't want to remember the way his kisses tasted, or the fact that she missed their lovemaking. She ached for the weight of his body covering hers and the sweet, thrilling sensation of his hard shaft filling her.
Goodness, she had enough distractions with watching for signs of the posse behind them and robbers ahead of them. But her thoughts just kept returning to the memory of the tender way Ben had loved her.
Tender, not rough. She knew in her heart Ben was not the same brand of man her father was, but her head just wouldn't let her forget.
She could not let herself love a man who wouldn't love her back.
"There, take a right where the road forks," she called ahead to Ben. And because the back of her neck prickled for the fifth time that morning, she turned her mare around and studied the lay of the land.
It was all scrubby pines and outcroppings of rocks. Brown bunch grass spotted the dirt with fingers of frost. The morning sounded the way it should–birds called, a hawk soared overhead, and a gopher darted out of its hole, cried in alarm, and watched them pass.
Still, she could feel the danger.
"Faster." She took the lead from Ben, although he was more than capable. She followed the trail from memory. Renegade shied at the two willows that leaned together at a small creek's edge. Polly reassured the animal and sent her nose-first through the break in the willows.
The boughs scraped along her knee and shin. No one had passed this way for a long time. She thought of her brother, dead, and that saddened her. Pa's passing had been a relief, but this was different. She and Junior had grown up together, for better or worse. She dismounted and gazed around the hundred-foot canyon floor she once called home and felt sad for her brother's passing.
"Polly." Ben was there, and he took her into his strong arms. She wanted to stay there, sheltered from the pain of loving, but her pride wouldn't let her.
She tried hard to find the strength to walk away from him. She did it, but she longed for his warmth and his goodness. "We stayed here the summer I was five and Junior was eight. It was one of the happier times. My mother was still alive. She used to cook the meals for the men right over there."
She knelt down to rub one of the stones that once ringed a great cooking pit with her fingertips. Remembering hurt the same way love hurt.
Ben knelt down beside her. "What makes you think your brother was here? I don't see any sign."
"Junior wouldn't have left any. He was too smart" She gestured toward the carpet of fallen leaves, half decayed and frozen solid by a thick layer of ice. "We were just children then, too young to understand what Pa did for a living. He told us he was like a pirate."
She stood and gestured toward the far corner of the clearing. "My brother and I would play pirate when Pa was gone on one of his jobs. We would make up heroic battles and protect our pretend gold for hours and hours. All summer long, we pretended we had gold in that cave."
"What cave?" Ben felt watched and turned slowly around.
"This one." With her guard down, maybe because of all the memories, Polly crunched across the leaves.
He recognized the tense line of her shoulders and knew Polly had felt it, too. Her hands were loose at her hips, ready to draw.
Ben felt a warning grip his spine, and he turned. He saw the flash of sunlight reflecting off a gun's barrel high on the embankment overhead. Who the hell had followed them here? And how? He didn't take the time to ask; he simply followed his instincts and fired. His gun and Polly's shot simultaneously.
No answering volley. No shout of pain. Nothing.
A bad feeling settled low in Ben's guts. He studied the sheer wall that rose fifty feet straight up. It was too high to see much of anything.
Whoever was up there, gun aimed down at them, had a serious advantage.
"Head for cover!" he shouted to Polly, but she was already on her way to a line of boulders along the far wall. Gunfire peppered the air, coming straight from the top of the embankment. Bullets bit into the ground and the rocks in a direct path toward Polly.
That damn gunman was trying to shoot her. Furious, Ben dashed out from behind a tree as bullets sprayed the ground in front of him. He dove behind the rocks and landed on his knees at Polly's side.
"I can't imagine that's Marshal Powers." She tapped bullets from her gun belt into her hand.
"What other enemies have you made lately?"
"Since I've met you?" She frowned, darkly teasing. "Probably a dozen or more."
The gunfire started up again. It was one gunman, Ben figured, but two guns, maybe a repeating rifle. Bullets plowed into the dirt, sending dust flying, and broke apart sharp pieces of rock. He covered his face against the debris.
"We need an offensive position." He coughed, trying to see through the grit in the air.
"If you see one, let me know." She eased up just enough to send a volley of bullets back at their enemy.
More gunfire answered, from a different place this time.
"Toss down your guns, MacLain." Dixon's voice rasped on the steep embankment overhead. "I've got your pretty wife in my sites. All I have to do is squeeze the trigger."
Dixon. That bastard would enjoy killing Polly. Fury soured Ben's mouth as he threw one set of guns into the open.
Polly lifted one questioning brow, and he knelt down to pull a third colt from his boot
"I've been in this situation before," he confessed.
"Pa would have had another in his back pocket."
Ben produced it. He watched the shadows return to her eyes, and she looked away. He cleared his throat and shouted loud enough for the outlaw to hear. "What do you want, Dixon?"
"You know what I want. I want the woman. I want the gold."
"That's going be a problem. I'm not handing over my wife." Ben thumbed back the hammers. "I don't have the gold."
"Roy Junior, the back-stabber, ran off with the strongboxes when my men were out fightin' with the law." Dixon's anger got the best of him, and he stopped shooting.
"Is that so?" Ben listened hard, trying to gauge where the outlaw was.
"That's right." Fury vibrated like cannon fire as Dixon continued. "I got nothin', do you hear me? Nothin'. And that no-good snake-in-the-grass ran off with a fortune I earned. I want it back."
"I told you, I don't have the gold."
"Then I want the woman. Junior said she'd know where it was stashed. I'll kill you for her, MacLain." Dixon sent a round of bullets into the rocks. "And if I can't have the gold, then I'm sure as hell gonna make sure you two don't get it."
The angle of the gunfire changed.
Damn. Dixon was trying to circle around behind them. They'd be caught between the tall embankment at their backs and the rocks they were using for cover. He'd be able to pick them off like rabbits in a ditch.
"He means to kill us." Polly's jaw tensed as her gun's barrel tried to pin down the origin point of Dixon's bullets.
"He does." Ben squeezed off a shot.
Polly fired.
Nothing. Just more answering gunfire.
"This isn't working." Ben could see it flash before his eyes–Dixon pinning them down here and killing them one at a time.
Ben hadn't forgotten the outlaw's grudge against Polly.
"Stay here." He ordered his wife, who looked up at him with no small amount of fury. Well, he didn't have time for her stubborn pride. Dixon was up on that hillside, hidden in the trees, and it was only a matter of time until their small supply of ammunition ran out.
Ben wasn't the kind of man who liked to wait.
He charged through the clearing, guns blasting. Answering bullets fanned through the earth behind him, beside him. He kept moving and headed straight for the sheer cliff of that embankment.
He would get Dixon face-to-face instead of being hunted like a holed-up rabbit. He tucked the guns in the small of his back, grabbed hold of a root, stuck the toe of his boot into a crevice and started climbing. He heard gunfire behind him–Polly's gun–and heard a sharp curse of pain overhead.
She cheered. "I winged him."
"Barely took any skin from my arm." The sneer in Dixon's whiskey-rough voice echoed in the tiny canyon. "I've got to thank you, Polly. I wouldn't have escaped that damn prison if you hadn't busted up the jail the way you did. I owe ya, princess."
"Then let me go."
"Not without the gold and a little torture."
Ben heard the sick triumph in the outlaw's voice. Dixon was looking forward to harming and then killing Polly. Ben knew how men like Dixon worked–he used to ride with them. He dug his fingers into the crumbling earth and pulled himself up another foot.
He also heard the sharp snap of limbs breaking. Dixon was on the move and running fast.
"Polly!" he shouted over his shoulder, dangling thirty feet above the canyon floor. "He's coming for you–"
"I hear him." She tried to guess where Dixon was and fired. Missed. She reloaded fast, knowing as Dixon changed position on the rim overhead that Ben would be a target. And so would she.
The repeating rifle bit into the bark of the tree behind her. She hit the ground and scanned the terrain.
There
. Sunlight gleamed on steel. She aimed as Dixon burst out of the thick foliage, aiming straight at her.
Before she could pull her trigger, Ben climbed over the rim. His anguished "No!" tore through the air and he hurled himself at Dixon–and into the path of the firing Winchester.
She saw Ben jerk from the impact and drop to the ground. Fury blinded her and she pulled the trigger. Dixon's body flew back against a tree and stayed there, caught lifelessly on a sturdy pine bough.
Ben didn't move. She saw a bright red stain spread across his back, even from a distance.
Don't let him he dead.
Chapter Seventeen