Swept Away (5 page)

“I just stepped wrong and fell.”

He remembered the motion she’d made when she wanted to stop him from coming close. “Do your ribs hurt? Are you banged up anywhere else?” He thought of the bruise on her face, but if there was one, it was old. He was dealing with a clumsy woman.

That little nose tilted up again. “I want you out of my house.”

Dare turned to the boy, who glowered at him. “Get me some rags, son. I’ll tear them into strips and get this wrapped quick so I can stop wasting your ma’s precious time.”

The boy looked at Dare resentfully. Dare got the feeling this was the boy’s usual expression. Nothing personal. “Hurry up if you want me out of here so all-fired bad.”

The boy looked to his ma, and Dare saw her nod.

She said, “Hurry. There are rags in the closet under the stairs.”

The boy turned and ran. There was considerable warmth in the woman’s tone for her son. Dare was thankful for that.

Looking back at the pretty, ill-tempered woman, Dare noticed the little girl standing silent through all of this. “What’s your name?”

The girl seemed to withdraw even more, edged closer to her ma.

“Her name is Janet. She’s shy of strangers. Don’t pester her.” Mrs. Greer’s voice was so frigid it made Dare want to start a fire.

The boy was back in seconds with the rags. Dare tore long strips and bound Mrs. Greer’s swollen leg tightly.

Though she did her best to cover the noise, a few moans of pain got past her clenched jaw. Dare knew her ribs were hurt too, but he wasn’t fool enough to think the woman would disrobe so he could bind them.

Truth was, Dare had never done such a thing for a woman. Well, once he’d delivered a baby, but only once. And now he had one pregnant woman in his care, and it was scaring him to death. He’d been reading everything he could find about childbirth. Beyond that he’d never treated a woman. He mostly stayed to places inhabited by men. He treated men’s wounds and illnesses. If he was to ask a woman to disrobe, it certainly wouldn’t be against her will, as he was sure it would be with Mrs. Greer.

As he finished, he was torn between riding away fast and staying to do his duty as a doctor. “If your ribs are hurt, they need to be wrapped.”

“They’re not.”

“But if they were—”

“I told you I’m fine.”

Dare spoke overtop of her protests. “It will ease the pain considerably if they’re bound very tight. You can do it yourself.”

Their eyes met, and for just a second the haughtiness faded and her snooty nose lowered a bit. “If . . . if my ribs ever do hurt,” she said, pressing a hand against her chest in a motion Dare didn’t think she was aware of, but it told him the truth, “I’ll remember your advice. Now go. Get out of my house.”

Her words stung like the lash of a scorpion’s tail, and Dare left, glad to be shut of the woman.
“Men like you try and cheat him.”
As if he’d come out there for the money. His jaw clenched when he thought of her sneering.

He rode down that canyon again, seeing the men, mad enough to tell them he didn’t like being under their guns.

He’d give Luke the details of what he’d seen, and when it came time to toss Greer off this ranch, Dare would take pleasure in seeing that snide missus—no matter how pretty she was—lose her home, too.

Luke had never carried a wet woman before. Honesty forced him to admit he’d never carried any woman. But why did he have to start with a soaking wet one?

She hadn’t exactly asked permission to wash her clothes. He’d fallen asleep instead of riding herd over her, so he deserved what happened.

When he woke up and called out to her, she asked for just a few more minutes. In the few minutes he slept, she washed her dress. And when he called out to her, she redressed in her wrung-out-but-still-drenched clothes. When she told him he could come back, her hair was hanging loose and she was barefoot.

She asked if he had room in his pack for her soggy shoes and stockings and a few other bits of female clothing he couldn’t recognize in their tightly wadded condition. Truth be told, he might not’ve recognized them if he’d been able to see them clearly. Women were a mystery to him. He stowed her things away, and as they rode along, she dried. Some.

He did too. Some.

She asked him for a comb, but he hadn’t owned a comb in years. He ran his fingers through his hair every morning and slapped on his hat and was done. Why did women have to make everything complicated?

As they rode along in the wild, rugged country, the rocks that looked like red layer cake grew up. The grass became increasingly sparse, growing in rounded clumps. There were junipers and cottonwoods, with mesquite trees that sometimes reached a good height but were more often stunted, growing out of stone instead of dirt. Luke startled a white-tailed deer. Under normal conditions he’d have shot it and dressed it. He was running low on grub. There’d probably be time, as he was getting to town before sunset. But the need to be quiet, and knowing Broken Wheel was close enough a gunshot might draw attention, had him letting the deer go.

He might live to regret not taking the shot. Ruthy had eaten a good share of his jerky. She’d taken a drink every few minutes, as if her stomach couldn’t bear a heavy gulp but the thirst kept gnawing at her and driving her back to the canteen.

Eventually, probably once her clothes weren’t so miserably wet, she fell asleep. Her hair had dried in the Texas breeze and it had gone wild, springing into silky red curls that were far brighter than he’d guessed when he’d seen her in her mud-soaked condition.

The curls danced in the wind in a way so happy that Luke felt his spirits lifting. And considering he was going to face down the man who’d killed his pa and stolen Luke’s S Bar S Ranch, that wasn’t something that came easy.

Since she was asleep and wouldn’t know, Luke rubbed one of the little corkscrew curls between his fingers and enjoyed the silk of it. He’d never thought much about a woman’s hair. Now he found himself fascinated. He wanted to sink his hands deep into it, let the silk run over his calluses.

She smelled like his bar of plain old lye soap, but somehow on her it smelled way better. It made breathing deep a pure pleasure.

As the sun dropped over the rim of the bluffs near Broken Wheel and dusk settled in, the little woman stirred. Luke had left the main trail. Though he’d seen no sign of travel on the road he’d followed, caution had him threading around the jagged rocks in the wide canyon his pa had called Palo Duro, Mex words that meant hard wood. It wasn’t an easy life but it had suited Luke, and guilt ate at him that he’d left Pa to hold down the ranch alone.

He spotted the first lights in Broken Wheel and found a heavy stand of cottonwoods, fronted by a thicket of mesquite and grama grass that ran along the west side of town. It took him only seconds to find the house with two lanterns burning in one window, the sign Dare had told him to watch for. Dropping back, he found a place to picket his horse. He dismounted, woman in hand.

She opened her eyes. “Where are—?”

“Hush!” Voices carried a long way on the night air. They were a ways off from town and being in the woods helped mute the sound, but Luke had learned caution in a hard school. “Can you stand?”

She nodded. He lowered her feet to the ground, and she just kept sinking. Luke picked her up again and moved her away from his horse’s iron-shod hooves and eased her onto the soft leaf-covered ground to wake up at her own pace. He tied his horse, pulled a packet out of his saddlebags—more than a little surprised to see any jerky left—and snagged his canteen.

He scooped her back into his arms and carried her to the cottonwood stand near Dare’s house. Getting close
enough to whisper was no hardship. “We need to wait until full dark before I try and go in to talk to my friend. I’ll ask him if there’s a place you can stay.”

The woman nodded.

“You ready yet to tell me your name?”

Her eyes got round with fear. It looked like the little woman wasn’t kidding when she said she didn’t want to go back to her family—in the event any of them had survived, which Luke doubted.

“Don’t tell me, then.” He looked at the springing mass of her curls and said, “I’ll just call you Rosie. Between your red hair and your sunburned skin, it suits you. You want some more to eat?”

She nodded with far too much enthusiasm. He handed her a long skinny strip of dried venison, and she put her attention to chewing it up like she was starved half to death. Considering how much she’d already eaten got him to wondering just how long she’d been floating downstream.

He helped himself to the scrap of meat he had left, and they passed the canteen back and forth. When she finally stopped tucking all his food down her gullet, he said, “We need to wait until the town’s gone to sleep, then we’ll slip in quiet-like. That’s my friend Dare’s house, right there in front of us. Dare will go fetch Vince and Jonas if they’ve gotten to town. They’re friends, too. Vince sent me a letter and some legal documents and told me he was setting out for Texas. I had them all signed and witnessed back in Denver and I got my will in order.”

“A will?” She whispered nicely, which meant she was awake enough to be thinking.

“Yep. I found my sister in Colorado. I was at Dare’s house when a letter arrived from my Pa. It told me where
my sister had gotten to. She has herself a tough husband, and he’s from a tough family. They can hold this land if need be. I named Callie in my will, in case anything happens to me. The letter from Pa included the deed for my ranch. Pa signed it over to me before he died and got it in the mail.”

“Your father is dead?” In the dusk, Luke saw her sympathy and it warmed him. With all the mess surrounding his father’s death and his ranch being stolen, he realized he hadn’t taken much time to grieve.

“It happened while I was on the trail. He’s been gone a few years now. I can’t just ride into town and stake the claim to my ranch. I need to have everything in order. Then I’m going to go out to my ranch and throw that murdering coyote off my place.”

He said it with confidence, but he knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

“The man living there claims to have bought my pa’s ranch, but he couldn’t have. Pa didn’t own it to sell. He’d already signed the S Bar S deed over to me, had it all legally witnessed, and mailed it to me in care of the one friend I’d mentioned that Pa could find.”

“Why do you need to ride in at night?”

“Because the man who took it over has been trying to kill me since I sent word I was coming home.”

Rosie gasped. “Trying to kill you?”

“Yep. I was running from a posse on trumped-up charges when I found you. Twice before, I had a near miss with a stray bullet, only I don’t think it was so stray. I sent Flint Greer a letter, all legal and proper, throwing him off my land. Now I’ve got to show up and make a lawless murderer obey a signed document. I expect there to be gunplay involved.”

“And that’s why you’re going in at night?” She shook her head again as if she thought maybe she wasn’t awake at all.

“I might not make it down Main Street if I rode in during the day. I expect he’s got a lot more friends in this town than I do. I’ve done a lot of listening since I headed for home, and I’ve heard Broken Wheel has fallen on hard times since Greer cornered all the ranch land in the area not held by Indians. I think if I can just live long enough to make sure everyone knows I’m the true legal owner of the S Bar S and I’ve named my heirs, I can win this fight without much shooting trouble.”

“Much?”

“Life hasn’t been such that I look on the sunny side of things, and Broken Wheel is a wide-open town. Bullets fly on occasion.”

“And you think I’ll b-be able to find a j-job in such a town?”

Luke shrugged a shoulder. “They hadn’t oughta hurt a woman, Rosie.”

“My name is Ruthy.” She must have decided it was safe to tell, but he’d already kinda gotten to like the sound of Rosie.

He decided not to change. “I’ve got a lawman who knows I’m on my way, and friends in town who have come to fight by my side. If they’ve all gotten here, we can claim my property. I need to go in and make sure things are set, but no one needs to see me until we’re ready to make our move. I’ll wait till the lights go out, and then we’ll slip in and talk to Dare.”

“He’s one of your friends? And you’re sure you can trust him?”

“If I can’t trust Darius Riker, then I
want
someone to
shoot me.” He said it, but he hadn’t seen Dare since about a year ago when he drifted through Dare’s home in Indiana. And Luke had no wish to catch a bullet in the back for trusting the wrong man. But Dare was one of them. A Regulator. In Andersonville Prison, they’d done the dirty work everyone wanted done but no one wanted to do. It was a friendship woven with blood and honor.

Yes, he’d trust Dare Riker with his life. For the hundredth time.

His jaw clenched as he watched the lights in town wink out one by one.

The quiet eased his tension and he realized Rosie had fallen asleep where she sat. The woman had lived through a few long, hard days, no doubt about it. And what was he going to do with her in this wild town?