It was amazing how disarming Rorrick was with just a few words. She had seen a little bit of it in Charleston, but these—these were his people. Young, old, male, female, rich, poor—Rorrick could set the most haggard, scowl-filled woman at ease within a moment with just his smile.
Because it was genuine. He was genuine.
Rorrick looked at people, and actually took an immediate and honest interest in them. So very different from her. Her own eyes dipped, her tongue frozen with most new people. Adalia, Violet, Logan—she only needed three fingers to count the people with whom her tongue did not freeze.
And now Rorrick. He would be number four. He made her talk. He made her want to talk.
Just as he did with every stranger they encountered.
Rorrick set a few coins on the bench next to the wash basin and looked to the laundress. “Have you lived in Widow’s Creek for a long time?”
“Long‘s anyone, I supposin.”
“We’re looking for a woman that would have been here three to four years or so ago. She had a boy with her.”
“Three years, ye say? That was before I lost me eye. Worked in the Torry Saloon then.”
“Her name was Ashita. She was of India. Her boy, he had blond…” Rorrick looked over his shoulder to Cass for confirmation. She nodded. “Blond hair.”
The washwoman’s one eye sparked, her hands stilling. “Ashita. She be a kind one. Saved me life after me eye. Sewed it shut. Healed it best she could. She be good at that, healin’. I ‘member her well. We shared a room for a spell. Too bad on her end.”
“End?” Rorrick asked.
“Killed by a drifter that worked the mines. Course, they all be drifters.” She went back to scrubbing the cloth. “He didn’t like what she didn’t do in bed, I heard. She always be particular on that score. Not me though. Not me t’all.”
“She—she died? Ashita died? You are—you are positive?” Cass’s words choked out as her fingers tightened on Rorrick’s overcoat.
The woman’s good eye swung to Cass. There was no sorrow, no sympathy, only cold truth in her despondent eye. She nodded. “Dead. Yes, ma’am. A year back.”
“Dead?” The word echoed, rattled in Cass’s head as she spoke it. “Dead?” The sound drifted out into the air in front of her. Not her voice. Not her space.
Her feet shuffled backward and her hand fell from Rorrick, heavy stones weighing it down. She felt the loss of Rorrick’s overcoat from her fingers, but she couldn’t lift her arm to grasp it again, couldn’t move forward.
Only backward.
She drifted backward, Rorrick’s body moving away from her.
Floating away.
The thick canvas flap of the tent slipped over her shoulder and dropped in front of her. Bitter wind attacked, whipping at her face.
But the cold couldn’t reach her. It was there. Just there. Demanding reaction. Cold she should feel, but couldn’t. The icy blasts pelted her skin, but she was only numb. Numb. Not cold.
Backward she slipped, her boots dragging through the dirt, her eyes glossing over, the tents becoming fuzzy shapes in the black, retreating.
Darkness surrounded her and still she drifted. Bumping into trees. Stumbling. Falling.
But only moving backward.
Away. Backward and away.
Failure chasing her, the black teeth ferocious, salivating for her.
Backward.
The only escape.
~~~
“Bloody tarnation.” Rorrick squinted against the wet snowflakes whipping into his eyes as he let the flap of the laundress’s tent fall closed behind him. The damn storm had come up out of nowhere an hour away from Widow’s Creek, and had he had any indication of the mess of it, he would have holed up in his cabin for a few days with Cass until it passed.
As it was, they would be stuck in Widow’s Creek for at least a night. A night in a town he had no right bringing a woman like Cass into. A woman he wanted to keep safe. A woman he needed to keep safe.
He looked back and forth along what was left of the road through town—really just a trickle down to a footpath on this end of the row of wall tents. The laundress’s tent was the second to last one in the line, with tall spruce trees stretching into thick woods of oak at the end of the path.
“Cass,” he shouted, his eyes searching through what was quickly becoming blinding snow. “Cass.”
He had felt her shrink, shrivel, and back out of the tent once the woman had reported Ashita’s death. The washwoman hadn’t done it kindly, not that she should. Hers was not a kind world, and what happened to Ashita was nothing that the woman didn’t see every week of her life.
“Cass.” He yanked down on the front lip of his beaver felt hat, angling his back to the wind. “Cass.”
His eyes dipped down just as he was about to turn and start searching the tents along the row for her.
Tracks in the snow, quickly drifting over.
Tracks that stumbled, dragged.
Tracks that shuffled backward instead of forward.
Tracks that led into the woods.
“Damnation to all hell, woman.” He jumped to his right and yanked free the oil lantern hanging by the front flap on the last tent in the row. He held the light to the tracks in the snow, his heart thundering in his chest.
She wouldn’t be so stupid.
Not in a snowstorm.
Not in the mountains.
He followed the tracks that dragged haphazard into the tree line. Even with the few evergreens, the oaks held no leaves, and the wind whistled harshly, snow swirling in reckless terror.
The tracks faltered.
Disappeared.
His head whipped around, searching the trees. No Cass.
His look went back to the ground and he thrust the lantern close to the forest floor.
The snow had spread in the spot where her tracks ended. She had fallen. Crumpled into a mess of snow and fallen leaves.
He stepped forward, his eyes analyzing every drift, every minute line of snow he could see.
She had fallen and gotten up. The backward tracks continued. Dragging.
She had kept going. Kept going into the forest. Into the snow. Into the cold.
His mind went frantic. How long had Cass been outside before he was done talking with the washwoman? Fifteen minutes? A half hour? The woman had talked and talked.
How far could Cass have gotten? He had assumed she needed air. He had assumed she wouldn’t step away from the tent. Not for how she had clutched to him as they worked their way through the town. Her hope had been crushed—he would have needed air just the same.
But this. He never considered this. Never considered she would be so stupid.
Fire exploded in his veins.
He was going to kill her when he found her.
He started forward, the lantern low to the ground, his eyes not leaving the trace lines of her boots.
~~~
“Dammit, Cass.”
She looked up at him blankly, her hair whipping in the wind around her, her bonnet long since vanished.
A wounded animal waiting for death.
She sat not against a tree, not crouched next to a boulder, but in the middle of a blasted clearing with the snow already drifting up along her skirts.
Her body gave one wicked tremor that cracked the drifts formed around her.
“Bloody hell, Cass. What in tarnation were you thinking?”
He looked around, attempting to find his bearings, counting back the steps he had taken from the edge of Widow’s Creek. He had lost her tracks for a good hour before finding them again—and then only by the luck of stumbling upon her hat half-sticking out of a drift.
She was freezing, and they needed shelter, now. Now—not the hour it would take him to carry her back up the mountain to town. But if he was wrong about their location and he went further down the mountain…
He shook his head. He was right. He had to be right.
He had never questioned himse
lf before on his bearings.
But he had never had so much to lose before.
Rorrick bent, sliding his hands through the snow to find Cass’s legs. Her skirts sopping wet, almost frozen, he lifted her, swearing silently at the extra weight. Adjusting her against his body, he clutched her to his chest and dipped one hand down to pick up the lantern.
Then he started walking down the mountain.
Within ten minutes he knew exactly where they were. Within five minutes after that, he was kicking in the few boards blocking the entrance to the old Thompson mine where he had delivered gunpowder and supplies many times.
Ten steps into the abandoned mine there was a sharp curve to the left, and Rorrick cautiously moved around the side of it and paused, listening. No animals. He moved further past the curve, cutting them off fully from the wind that whistled along the opening of the tunnel.
He bent, letting the lantern slip from his fingertips and settle onto the ground. Dropping to his knees, he set Cass down, propping her against the tunnel wall. He had been watching her slip in and out of consciousness as he carried her, and now she swayed, her eyes faltering.
Jumping to his feet, he pulled off his gloves and picked up the lantern to hang it from a rusty nail on an overhead beam.
He looked down at her. Her eyes had closed. The one thing he couldn’t do was let her sleep.
“Hell, Cass.”
Her eyes fluttered open at the sudden bark of his voice filling the tunnel, though her look landed blankly on his boots.
He stripped off his overcoat and his coat, staring at her. “How could you do that? Do that to me, dammit?” He yanked off his waistcoat and then tugged his linen shirt up off his torso. Freezing air snaked around him, but the fury running through his veins warded off the sting of it on his bare chest.
Going to his knees before Cass, he laid his waistcoat and shirt flat onto the rock-hard ground next to her.
His fingers quick to her neck, he unclasped the fastener on her wool cloak. As quickly as he could, he worked through the mounds of clothes on her body—buttons on her riding habit, ties on her skirt, ripping wet layer after wet layer off her. When he got to her stays and chemise, he leaned her forward, his fingers fast through the ribbon weaved along her spine that held the stays tight to her chest.
A shiver racked her body and she suddenly burst from her trance. “What…what…”
“You need my skin on your skin, Cass. Unless you would like to freeze to death.”
“Sk—sk—skin.” The word chattered out.
He yanked the wet stays away from her body and pulled down her chemise to sit about her hips. In one quick motion, he dragged her onto him and lay on his back, her body long on top of his.
Skin on skin. The blast of her frozen skin shocked him—a plunge into an icy stream that flayed his nerves.
His shirt and waistcoat constituted the only barrier between his back and the ground, and he started to pile every scrap of clothing he had removed from the two of them on top of her, draping her from head to toe, first with his dry clothes, and then with her wet ones. A cocoon, he hoped, of warmth that would yank her slow heartbeat back into life.
Before he managed to drape his overcoat fully over them and the mound of clothes, Cass jerked up and away from him.
“Aaaa—st—stop—it—it hurts.”
His overcoat only half wrapped over her backside, he dropped it to grab her and press her chest back onto his. “What hurts?”
She writhed, shoving at him as her voice chattered. “Yo—your sk—skin, it is bur—burning me.”
His arms clamped hard around her body, not letting her move from him. “Then it’s going to hurt, Cass. I’m hot, you’re cold, and it’s going to hurt for the both of us. But it will pass—and you’re going to suffer it until it passes.”
“Ror—Rorrick—”
“Dammit, Cass, if this is burning you, then you are closer to death than I thought, so stop squirming around and lie on me.”
She stilled, her breaths turning into gasps against his chest—gasps against the pain.
It took a torturous fifteen minutes before her panting gasps eased, only to be replaced with violent shivers that swept through her body, one after another.
An improvement.
Though the shivers were a good sign, they did nothing to ease the ire running hot through his veins. Especially with his blasphemous body reacting to her bare skin on top of his. Her breasts pressing into him. Her body vibrating with every breath. She was near death and she was still enough to drive a man to pure, vein-splitting madness.
Rorrick’s arms clamped harder around her, trying to still her trembles. “Why in the bloody hell did you walk off like that, Cass?”
“I—I can't mo—mo—move fing—fing—fing—”
His hands jerked down and grabbed her wrists, forcing her hands to flatten in between them. Fresh shards of ice impaled his skin. His face against the top of her wet head, he grimaced into her hair as he crushed her body back down onto him. “Don’t you damn well care you almost just died—froze to death?”
“I—I—”
“Well, I bloody well care. Walking away like that, Cass. What the devil were you thinking? Of all the idiotic things to do in the middle of the damn woods in a snowstorm.”
“Ro-Rorrick.” Her teeth chattered, not letting full words form. “St—stop swear—swearing at m—m—me.”
“I’m going to be swearing at you for some time, Cass, so you’ll just have to deal with it.”
She nodded into his chest as a savage shake racked her body.
It wasn’t fair, yelling at her when she couldn’t even form words to argue. But the anger was the thing keeping him warm. The thing keeping her alive.
Yet the tremors kept rolling through her body, each shiver vibrating into his skin, shaking his soul.
What he had almost lost.
Her.
Almost lost her to the blasted cold.
He had never imagined what it would be to lose her from his life. Not until tonight.
And the mere hint of the thought was devastating. A shock firing down to his core.
Her trembles started to ease, the intensity of them abating, the spacing of them growing further apart.
His arms shifted on her back, his hands splaying out onto her skin under the weight of the clothing. To his relief, the swathes of her skin he reached were cool, but warming. Rorrick took a deep breath, the cold air of the cave sinking into his lungs, cooling his ire before he dared to speak again.
For whatever she needed, she didn’t need him yelling at her.
His fingers pressed into the muscles on her back. “Ashita died and I understand how much hope you held. I understand your devastation—but to try and kill yourself, Cass?”
“I—I wasn’t trying to kill myself.” Her words blurted out, the first easily formed ones since they had found shelter in the abandoned mine.
“What were you trying to do?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t trying to do anything except escape.” She shook her head, her words flowing in a warm rush onto his chest. “My—my feet just went backward and I couldn’t stop them. And I couldn’t see. And by the time my feet stopped I didn’t know where I was. I couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t see the town. And then I just—just wanted to find you. And I thought I was going back. And then it got colder, and colder. And I got tired, so I sat.”
“And that is how you damn well die in the woods, Cass.”
“You—you’re still swearing at me.”
“You still deserve it.”
Her voice escaped small, breaking. “I am sorry I failed you—my reaction—I am not perfection.”
He swallowed his next building tirade and instead, wedged his hands from under the pile of clothing to move upward and capture the sides of her face. He tugged her head up so she had to look at him. “This doesn’t have a blasted thing to do with failing me, Cass. It doesn’t have a thing to do with perfection. You thi
nk there is perfection in grief? I don’t want perfection from you. I never did. I am just furious that you…you…”
“I was an idiot?”
“Yes. But you don’t know—you don’t know this land. What it can do to you.”
“I just couldn’t stop my feet, Rorrick.”
His hand dove under the cover of his overcoat to sink deep into the back of her hair, cupping her head to the center divot of his chest. “I know, Foxfire. I know.”
He let her lay in silence, not demanding explanations, not asking for words. The shivers had been reduced to occasional flicks of limbs and he hoped she was on her way to sleep.
Warmth and sleep, those two things alone would give her the strength to walk back up to the town once the storm passed.
An hour later the oil of the lantern was almost out and he thought Cass was asleep when he realized hot tears were flooding his chest, her face buried against his skin. She didn’t sob. Didn’t make a sound. Just silent tears falling, soaking him.
“Cass?”
“I killed her, Rorrick.” Her voice was muffled, her lips moving against his skin.
“You cannot blame yourself for Ashita’s death, Cass. It will get you nowhere.”
She twisted on top of him, craning her neck to see his face. “No, I was the one. The one to send her to this devil’s land. To send her into this.”
“If you want to blame yourself, Cass, go ahead. But you had better save part of that blame for that demon drifter that actually killed her. Save some for whoever stole her money in Charleston.” His words dropped low, savage. “Save some for your husband.”
Her head dropped, her face burrowing into his chest.
Hell, how he wanted to stop her tears. Stop her pain. Stop the torture she could not bear to let go of.
He could feel it in her. Her heart breaking. Her soul fracturing from a thousand things she couldn’t control.
But the tears were good. They meant her body was functioning again—that she wasn’t going to drift into the frozen abyss.
Of Risk & Redemption: A Revelry’s Tempest Novel Page 12
