The Renegades: Nick (13 page)

Nick couldn’t die, like Vance. She couldn’t bear it.

Nick stood at the front door, not wanting to enter. No, wanting too much to enter.

If seeing the glow of light through the window had made him have visions of Callie moving around in his house, tending the fire, lighting the lamps, waiting for him, the actual sight of her would pull at him like the Shifter to a mare. It had been all he could do not to
take her right there in the wagon in the middle of a driving storm.

It was time he got hold of himself. He had lived alone for a long, long time, he didn’t need anyone else—especially not a woman. Particularly not a woman in love with her dead husband. They could be friends as well as neighbors, but nothing more. He must remember that.

He reached out, pushed open the door, and stepped through it.

His blood turned to a river of ice. He had thought he could trust Callie, of all women, but there it was—Fox’s letter shaking in her hand.

“You would read my mail, Callie?”

The words came out in a harsh, croaking voice he’d never heard before.

She looked up, her green eyes wide and filled with panic, her face so pale the freckles stood out plain. Oh, God, after reading the letter, now she was afraid of him. She believed what people were saying about him.

“Who are these people calling you a child-killer?” she demanded, fierce as a she-bear with cub. “How
dare
they say such a thing about you?”

He stared at her, unable to believe it was anger, not fear, in her voice. But her eyes flashed green fire; she was ready to fight.

This must be his imagination at work.
He
was the one who was angry because she was prying into his private business. But no,
she
was furious—not afraid, not embarrassed; so incensed that she didn’t even care that he’d caught her going through his papers.

“Anyone who has met you, even anyone who has
seen
you, would know this is pure slander. Do you think they’ll really come here to try to … hurt you?”

She
didn’t
believe it. She wasn’t afraid of him—she was taking his part!

A shaft of sweet happiness went straight to his core.

She was worried about him; she feared for his safety. Callie cared about him.

The cold stone that was his heart finally cracked beneath the heat in her eyes and her voice.

H
e felt he was falling into a hole with no bottom.

Her eyes
blazed
on his behalf. When had anyone ever stood up to champion him? Not since his long-ago days as Goingsnake.

Her anger gave way to worry.

“Would they really come here to try to kill you, Nickajack?”

Her voice broke over his name; her green eyes glistened with sudden moisture. Just the question alone was enough to set his blood beating through his body in a wild dance of excitement. Just the sound of his real name, his whole name, on her lips set his heart racing.
He wanted to go to her, to hold her, to hold onto her.

When had anyone ever cared, to the point of tears, whether he lived or died? Not since he was seventeen and the ague had felled his mother.

He had to make her stop looking at him that way or he’d be lost forever, falling in love with her!

But that was the one thing he must never do. Callie could still betray him as Matilda had done—there was plenty of time left for that. Less than one moon past, he had never even met Callie Sloane from the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky—and one moon from now he might find out that she was not as honest as she looked.

He needn’t worry, though—not really. He couldn’t love anybody. A loner never could.

Yet her concerned question was playing like music in his ears, and the crack in his hard heart opened a little bit wider.

“Who knows?” he answered. “People are hard to predict.”

“But you would never hide behind anyone!”

“Those parents are sick with sorrow,” he said. “And after all, I am a child-killer.”

She stared at him wide-eyed, as if she hadn’t understood the words.

“No! That’s not true!”

He forced his legs to move, to carry him on into the room.

“I’m the cause of two fine boys dying long before their time. Their families and their friends want to kill me, and who can fault them for that?”

He meant to keep on walking, to turn his back on Callie and go stir up the fire. Her eyes held him, though, so wide and intense that looking away would seem cowardly.

“So you knew somebody was going to shoot at you at that exact place and time.”

Good. Now she was starting to believe the worst. If she hated him, maybe he would no longer be drawn to her.

Yet it hurt so much to lose her faith that his breath stopped. He finally dragged in enough air to speak, but not enough courage to tell her the lie that might end everything between them.

“I led them into an ambush.”

“Oh,” she said, and the faint tinge of sarcasm in her tone came through loud and clear.

It had been there in her earlier statement too, he suddenly realized. He’d guessed wrong about her again.

“So,” she said, prim as the schoolmarm she wanted to be, “you rode ahead of, or behind, those two fine boys and forced them into a spot between you and the bullets that were
about to fly—a spot where you knew they’d be killed and you’d be protected.”

She was taking up for him again, and everything in his soul warmed and reached for more. He had to put a stop to this.

“They would’ve followed me to the gates of hell and through them. It was my call.”

He had to turn away from that fierce championship in her eyes. As soon as he could, he would.

“Did you
know
the ambush would be there?”

“No,” he snapped. “Then it wouldn’t have been an ambush, would it?”

He tore his gaze from hers and strode to the fireplace, then grabbed up the poker like a man possessed.

God help him, he caught her scent of flowers right behind him. He didn’t turn around.

“Goingsnake was a killer? A killer of his own men?”

Paper crackled; she must be waving the letter in the air.

He wheeled to face her.

A mistake. A terrible mistake. His body ignored the fears bombarding his mind. It filled with desire at the sight she made, standing there barefoot in what must be nothing but her skin and his big shirt that fell all the way to her knees, her hair still damp and tousled
around her face, its color catching all the lights of the fire.

Clothed only in his shirt and her indignation on his behalf.

“You have no right to read my letter,” he said, miraculously making his voice come out low and cold in a tone that usually made grown men quail, “much less to question me about it. Put that back where you found it.”

“What’s a Raven?”

“A hero, someone who’s done great things. Which Goingsnake did not.”

“Several people must have thought he did, if he was called that at one time.”

“They never should have called him that.”

“Because he couldn’t save those boys?”

“And because he couldn’t stop the Board of Governors from selling the Strip.”

He hated her for making him speak, for pulling those words out of him against his will, facing off with him as if they were old, sworn enemies. And he loved her for standing there so passionately on his side as if they were old, faithful lovers, for making him want to reach out and pull her body to his.

His arms, his legs ached to do it. Only three steps separated them.

She wouldn’t let go of him. Her burning gaze held his, her lips, parted with the passion of her cause, called to his own. He ought to kiss her to shut her up.

But a kiss would be only the beginning, this time. This time he would take her completely, and that would make him lost forever in loving her. And what if she turned out to be as treacherous as Matilda?

“So the Board of Governors kept you from getting one of the Indian allotments in the Strip? Your love for this whole land caused you to lose your part of it?”

“You sound like a Pinkerton man.”

She didn’t sound—or look—like any man on this earth. She was all woman, a woman determined to defend him.

“Is that what happened?”

She waited for a lifetime, holding him fast with her eyes.

Finally, he answered.

“Ironic, isn’t it?”

“How much danger are you in?”

He scowled.

“You sound like you’re buckin’ for a job,” he snapped. “I can watch my own back.”

“Not the night of the Run, you couldn’t.”

“That was only an excuse to make sure no claim jumper came and jerked up your flag,” he said nastily, knowing how hard she had striven to be independent. “If I’d realized then that you’re brave enough to hire out as a bodyguard, I wouldn’t have worried about you.”

Hurt flashed across her face and she held
her breath, silent for a minute as she searched his eyes. He felt like a low-down liar because she had helped him that night, too. It was a lie for a good cause, though.
Something
had to make her turn against him, or he’d be a goner.

“But I’m not the one with a
bounty
on my head.”

He ignored that and dropped to his haunches in front of the fire, turning his back on her.

“I wonder how much they’re offering,” she said thoughtfully. “And who I should notify if I decide to turn you in.”

He threw her a quick glance over his shoulder.

She laughed.

“Oh, Nickajack, you’re acting just like my brothers, being all hateful, trying to shut me up.”

Then her whole tone changed and he felt her come closer.

“When you went by the name of Goingsnake, you were putting actions to the feelings of your heart. That’s the most heroic thing any human being can do. That’s why people gave you the title of Raven.”

The words, the soft way she said them, tore like a tornado right through his body. God help him, he wanted to turn and pull her to him, into his lap, to bury his head in her breast. He wanted her in his arms, here on the
hearth rug in front of the fire. He wanted his mouth on hers …

But then he would
really
love her, and she would still be in love with her dead husband. As if it mattered. He didn’t
want
anyone to live with, ever.

“Yes,” he snarled, “I knew selling it would be to our eternal shame. Ignorant settlers like you will tear out the heart of this land and for no profit. You’ll never survive here, Callie.”

He hated himself for going for her jugular, but desperate times called for desperate measures and he was only telling the truth. He had encouraged her in her fantasy for too long. He threw down the poker, stood up, and left the room without looking at her again.

“I’ll sleep in the barn,” he said, when he returned from the bedroom with a blanket.

He kept his face turned away from her all the way to the door, but stopped after he’d opened it.

“There’s food in the springhouse and in the pie safe,” he told her, without turning around. “Help yourself.”

Her light, silvery mountain voice thrilled him as if it were her hand on his skin.

“How much danger are you in, Nick? Are the families of those boys or some money-hungry old enemies likely to come here?”

“No,” he said. “Those families hated losing the Strip as much as I did, and their grief’s not
as fresh now. Fox’s message is two seasons old.”

He needed to leave her, he had to leave her—but not so that he’d be lying out there in the barn awake all night, imagining her here in the house with her heart full of support for him. Here was his last chance to destroy this insidious bond between them, and these insane emotions pulling at his heart.

“I’m the one who told Matilda where we’d be that day,” he said, “after they all followed my orders and kept the secret. I am the one who killed them.”

He tinned away from her then, toward the new, cool night coming on, and forced himself to walk, not run, out of the house, across the porch, and all the way to the barn. Never, not even in the ambush, had he been in worse danger: all he wanted was to stay with her and take her into his arms.

Callie dug her toes into the braids of the rug to keep from going after him. He had a price on his head. No wonder he wanted to keep people off his place and away from him.

A flood of caring almost overwhelmed her. He was banished, too. He was hurting as much as she had been the day she’d walked out of the Sloane Valley knowing she could never return.

A wild tangle of feelings seized her and drew her several steps toward the door with
the letter still in her hand. Partly, she needed to see him that instant; partly, she wanted fiercely to comfort him. With a touch.

Her little voice of truth demanded more.

With a kiss. She wanted to comfort him with a kiss.

She could still see his face—jaw hard, mouth set, his look completely expressionless except for the pain he couldn’t quite keep out of his shadowed eyes. All she wanted was to see them heavy-lidded and focused on her lips, then glazed and dreamy from her kiss.

Wanting it so badly took her all the way to the door. She caught herself as she reached for the latch.

She must be losing her mind. This deep, wrenching feeling wasn’t all sympathy and understanding for him; she had always hated injustice, that was it.

No doubt she would feel this same way about anyone else in his situation. It was just as unjust for Nick to have a price on his head for standing up for what he believed in, as for her to be banished from home for loving Vance, the man destiny had sent to cross her path on top of the mountain that long-ago day.

But Nick still lived in
his
home! The thought brought a welcome anger that she reached for and nourished. And she was in as much danger of starving to death—or more—as he was of being killed by old enemies in the faraway
Cherokee Nation. Why should she feel so sympathetic to him?

She did, though. He must have left that letter lying on top of that table for two seasons to punish himself, to remind him every time he walked past that those boys had died in his care.

Trying her best, she recovered some of her anger as she turned back into the room. He’d had no reason to say such horrible, discouraging things to her. In fact, he was a greedy pig, because one claim was all he needed and he was coveting the whole huge Strip. She hadn’t had one inch of land until she’d staked her claim.

Ungrateful wretch! If this hateful treatment was the thanks she got for being sympathetic with him, then tomorrow she would tell him what a miserable ingrate he was. After that, she’d go to her own place and stay away from him. She would put all her energy toward survival for herself and her baby, instead of toward sympathy for him, and that would take care of these crazy feelings of desire.

They probably stemmed from her condition, anyway. Ever since she’d been with child her feelings had run away with her in a heartbeat, whether they were sad or happy or angry or mean. No, she didn’t really care about Nick Smith, and she felt attracted to him only because she had been lonely too long.

Callie deliberately filled her mind with memories of times spent with Vance while she put the letter back where she’d found it and tended to the fire. She thought about his soft blue eyes and his curly brown hair.

Try as she would, though, she couldn’t quite get his face clear in her mind when she finally dropped, exhausted, onto Nickajack’s bed.

For all the nights they waited for their assigned day to return to town and register, they lived like that—she in the house, he in the barn. During the days, they stayed apart on their separate claims. Nick wanted to help her with her soddy, but she absolutely would not hear of that.

Callie protested mightily about moving back to her own place for the nights, too, but her things were spread all over his barn to dry, there was absolutely no shelter on her claim except for the few trees which would attract lightning in any storm, and the awful memory of the cyclone was too fresh to forget. Her safety was the baby’s safety, so she must stay under Nick’s roof until she had her own. Another hard thunderstorm came through in the middle of the week and proved that a wise decision.

Every morning Callie cooked Nick’s breakfast to pay for her bed, refused his offer to help her build her house, packed herself a jug of
water, two biscuits, and some jerky, then drove to her claim and resumed the endless chore of cutting sod bricks and stacking them into walls. It took every ounce of her perseverance to even dream of having a roof up before winter, every scrap of hope in her heart to keep on with the monotonous, backbreaking labor, but she did it.