Authors: Christina Dodd
Like the horses. Like Thorn.
But she didn’t have the time or the inclination to mourn. She ran across the yard to the house and into her bedroom. Stepping over the rope, which was laid flat on the floor without a knot in it, she put on her oldest, most serviceable riding habit. In her bag, she packed some day-old bread, the barbeque Sue Ellen had insisted she take, and a cup for dipping water out of the water holes. Finally, from her father’s rifle cabinet, she removed two Colt six-shooters with the belt holster that held them and a Winchester .44 carbine.
Shorter than a rifle, the carbine was easier for her to handle — and she did know how to handle it. She knew how to handle all firearms. Not too long ago, the territory had been Indian country, and every man, woman, and child west of the Pecos knew how to shoot.
But she’d never had to kill a man before. As she loaded the holster belt with cartridges and strapped it on, she realized she’d never been angry enough to kill a man before.
Now she was.
Back in the stable, she selected Rooster, a six-year old sorrel with stamina, patience, speed, and an unflappable nature. All qualities she needed, both for tracking and in case the … the criminal tried to ambush her.
In the light of the moon, the hoof marks shone like beacons leading away from the stable. It surprised Rose that the thief had left so clear a trail through the grass — he never had before. What did it signify? Had he been in a hurry? Or was he planning an ambush?
No matter. Her daddy had taught her some tricks he’d learned from his stint with the Texas Rangers. Tricks the Comanches used. No man would get the drop on her.
The trail led north, deeper into the mountains, and it soon became clear that, once away from the ranch compound, the bandit felt the need for caution. He made numerous attempts to disguise the trail — riding down creek beds that trickled with water from the fall rains, cutting across ash flow tuffs where hoof marks scarcely showed. Rose had to stop frequently and scour the ground for clues.
The night added a surreal sense to her mission, cloaking her in darkness, yet also cloaking anyone who might threaten her. She moved stealthily from shadow to shadow, from ponderosa pine to gray oak, avoiding the open places where the moon betrayed all movement. About two hours before dawn, she was rewarded by the sound of two horses moving toward her. Leaving Rooster on the flat, she took her firearms and scrambled up the shadowed side of the canyon. Just in time, she crouched behind a boulder that had tumbled free of the palisade cliff. She quivered with strain: her eyes, her muscles, her nerves anticipated action. Yet her stomach churned like a rock in a stream.
Then, as casually as if he were riding down a Dallas street, Thorn came around the bend. He was leading Starbright on a tether and whistling under his breath, and his offhand manner replaced Rose’s apprehension with a spitting rage. Cocking the lever to feed a cartridge into the breech, she rose, fit her carbine into her shoulder, and stepped out from behind the rock, taking aim with the care of a sharpshooter.
“Don’t!” Thorn’s command echoed back and forth across the columnar walls, and he brought his horse up short. On the leading rein, Starbright wasn’t so cooperative, and Thorn struggled with her for a moment. When he had control, he looked up at the place where she stood in the shadows and begged, “Darlin’ Rose, don’t shoot me.”
That voice. That whiskey-smooth, coaxing voice. How many times had she done as he asked? How many times had she been sorry?
Jolted from her first, burning rage, she hesitated an instant too long and felt the rush of blinding fury fade. “You dirty thief. How did you know it was me?”
“I’ve been watching for you — although I didn’t expect you quite so soon.” He pushed back his hat so she could see his face, and he grinned so wickedly her trigger finger itched. “I’ll have to see what I can do about helping you sleep.”
Same song, different verse. Did the man think of nothing else? “You’re mighty bold for a man who’s about to have lead fired into his heart.”
“Are you as good a shot as you ever were?” he asked.
“Better.” It wasn’t a boast. It was the truth.
“Then you’d better do it now, before you lose your nerve. Here” — he brought his horse around, presenting his broad chest — “this is a better target.”
She sighted down the barrel, held her breath, settled her finger on the trigger, tried, tried to squeeze it — and couldn’t.
In as gentle a tone as she’d ever heard from him, he asked, “Darlin’, would you believe me if I told you I didn’t steal your horses?”
“When I’ve caught you red-handed?” With her trigger hand, she wiped at the film that fogged her vision. “Hardly.”
He muttered, “I was afraid you wouldn’t.”
Steadying the carbine, she tried again, remembering all her daddy’s strictures, bracing herself for the recoil.
The recoil that wouldn’t come, because she couldn’t get herself to pull the trigger.
Thorn shook his head and compassion colored his tone. “Rose, there was only one moment you could have killed me, and that was when you stepped out from behind that rock, all mad and righteous. You can’t do it now, woman. Put the carbine away.”
“I’ll do as I like,” she retorted, as petulant as a child.
“Put it away.”
His voice lashed her with authority, and before she could think, she’d lowered the carbine.
“That’s better.” His patronizing approval almost brought the gun back up again, but he continued, “You’d feel damn remorseful when you killed me and the thieving didn’t stop.”
“Not much chance of that.” She gestured to the horse. “What are you doing with Starbright?”
“I stole her back for you.”
She laughed and heard the resentful, hysterical edge in her merriment. “Then where’s Goliath?”
He pointed north. “About five miles ahead in a junction of two canyons. The thief built a corral, and there are four other horses in it. They’re all yours. They all have your brand on their flanks.”
“And how did you happen to find them like that?”
“I followed the thief when I heard him take the horses from the stable. I would have caught him, too, but I was … er … all tied up.” He grinned. “Once I got those knots untied — you’re damn good with a rope — he was too far ahead for me to do more than track him, and when I found the corral, no one was there except the horses.”
“So you whisked in and stole Starbright.”
“Yeah, but even that was pushing my luck. Now, you want to tell me what’s happening? I’d help you if you’d ask me.”
“Help me? Help yourself, more likely. What’s the matter with you?” Indignant and upset, she started down the slope, slipping on the loose dirt and gravel. “Stealing my horses. That’s a mean-spirited revenge, not at all like the Thorn I used to know.”
“Lower the hammer on your carbine,” he warned, sliding out of the saddle.
She continued to scold. “And taking Starbright the night I sold her. That’s just plain ugly, depriving me of that income. I need that money. You want me to starve?”
Thorn met her before she reached the flat. “Put the safety on your carbine before you discharge it accidentally.” Leaning down, he tried to do it for her.
She jerked it away. “I’ll do it!” She clicked the safety. “Are you afraid I’ll shoot you accidentally, like I couldn’t on purpose?”
“No, I’m afraid you’ll shoot yourself, and I haven’t waited nine years for you for nothing.”
He didn’t sound sweet or cajoling or wicked or kind then. He sounded stern and concerned, like father and lover in one, and her indignation tasted twice as bitter at his false devotion. Poking her carbine barrel in his chest, she asked, “What are you going to do when you run out of my horses? You going to go steal someone else’s? You going to keep at it until someone sees you who isn’t afraid to shoot you?” She poked at him again, and he stumbled backward down the slippery slope. “Or until someone recognizes you, and you get strung up by the neck? You know how long it takes a man to die by hanging?”
“Longer than the victim likes.”
“Patrick’s told me. He saw it done in Ireland. About forty-five minutes to die. If you’re lucky, somebody’ll come along and jerk on your feet and break your neck. It shortens the agony.” The image of a struggling, gasping Thorn swinging from a tree flashed before her eyes, and she poked him again. “Is that what you want?”
“Let me show you what I want.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Grabbing the carbine by the barrel, Thorn jerked it out of Rose’s hands. He broke open the barrel, levered the cartridges into his hand, and shoved them into his pocket. Then he turned the carbine sideways and tossed it back into her arms. Before the weight of it could make her stagger, he grabbed her and jerked her forward. The whiplash flung her head back, and that seemed to suit him fine, for he used the opportunity to press a kiss on her.
She kicked at him, but the high tops of his boots eased the blow, while he attempted, by the coaxing of his lips, to ease her ire.
He let her take a breath, and she snarled, “You have now proved that there are more horses’ rumps here than there are horses.”
“And you have now proved that you haven’t been kissed enough,” he snarled back.
He kissed her again, massaging her back while feeding her delight through her mouth. The taste of pleasure made her stagger, but nothing could halt her declaration when he again lifted his head. “You’re nothing but a suck-egg mule.”
“And you’re stubborn enough to be my mate.”
This time the embrace contained enough invitation to cool her ire down from a boil to a simmer. As her knees and elbows went limp, the carbine slid slowly toward the ground, eased by the press of their bodies.
He caught it at the last moment, too much the Texan to allow a Winchester to hit the dirt. Weighing it in his hand, he asked, “You’re not going to kill me, are you, darlin’?”
Watching him between slitted eyelids, she thought, and thought hard. She had a choice. She could kill him — or could turn him over to the law. She’d done it before. It had broken her heart, but her mama had taught her right from wrong, and stealing her daddy’s hand-tooled leather saddle had been wrong.
She’d warned Thorn not to do it. She’d warned him that she would turn him in, but he’d thought her so infatuated she wouldn’t. So he’d reacted to the admonition as if it were a dare.
A dare that had cost him dearly.
But it seemed he’d learned nothing from his stay in prison. Only how to steal bigger and better things. And everyone — both the law and the vigilantes — hanged horse thieves, without remorse or a second thought.
So it was up to her to convince this varmint to follow the high road. He could do it. He had a mama on a ranch not far from here, a lovely woman of high morals and a credit to the community. He had two brothers and three sisters – every one law-abiding citizens. So Thorn could be, too.
By God, Thorn would be, too.
“There’s nothing lower than a horse thief,” she finally said.
“No, ma’am.”
“Unless it’s a dead horse thief, six feet under.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So you are going to promise me” — reaching up, she grabbed his ear and twisted, bringing him to his knees as successfully as their old schoolmarm — “that you’ll stop stealing horses.”
“Rosie,” he gasped. “For God’s sake, Rosie, let go!”
She twisted a little harder. “When you promise.”
He could have grabbed her wrist and squeezed it hard enough to make her release him. Instead he whimpered like a helpless calf, which he ill resembled. “Ow ow ow! What makes you think I’ll keep the promise?”
“I don’t think anything.” Releasing him, she took a handful of hair on his forehead and lifted his face to hers. “I only know that I
will
kill you if you betray me again.”
Looking up at her, he seemed to see things in her face. Things no one else ever saw. Things like — she’d wanted him all her life. Things like — she’d never lied or stolen or cursed, saving herself for this one big sin, the sin of loving Thorn without benefit of wedlock.
“Rose?” He wrapped his arms around her knees. “Rose?” His broad hands burned a path up her thighs, pressing the heavy, gray material of the riding skirt into her flesh.
And she received the weight of his hands, the heat of his demand with avid greed. Somewhere in the dark and the chill of a Texas night, her resolution had hardened. She would kill him if he stole again — as she would take her pleasure of him tonight. Sinking to her knees, she pressed her lips to his urgently, half-afraid that the need to pillage would overtake him before he taught her the meaning of pleasure.
He opened his lips to her search, but when she tried to press him down, he refused. “Not here. Not now.” He looked around at the rock-strewn landscape. “You deserve better than this.”
“This is Texas. There’s nothing better than this.”
He chuckled. “I want to treat you like porcelain, like a delicate southern lady, and you always remind me that you’re as solid and as lasting as good Texas stone. At least” — he stood and swung her up in his arms — “let me remove you from the dirt.”
Still holding her, he kissed her until her whole body clenched and his shirt was wadded in her fists.
Placing her across the top of the waist-high boulder that had previously hidden her from his sight, he said, “Let me take off your clothes. Let me do everything for you.”
“No.” Proudly, she pushed him away and sat up. Beneath her fingers, her buttons sprang apart, revealing her chemise beneath her jacket. She was a working woman and wore her corset only for social occasions.
But he seemed jolted. He seemed shocked. He seemed unable to tear his gaze away from the flesh she revealed as she shrugged out of her jacket and unlaced her chemise. “Oh, honey,” he whispered.
She didn’t know if he was calling her a sweet name or making a sweet compliment. She only knew that his callused fingers reached out to touch her breasts with a little reverence and a lot of experience. Bracing herself against the stone, she flung her head back, accepting the homage as her due and reveling in his wonder.