One thing was certain: it wouldn’t happen again. Ever.
She turned for the door to return the bird to its mother.
* * *
Full night blanketed the land by the time Jace and Kyla left the house in Misfortune to set out on the north road toward Baker City. Their saddlebags were loaded with the provisions he had bought at DeGroot’s the night they arrived.
“It’s a damn good thing I went there first,” he muttered, taking a quick look around before leading his horse out of the shop. “If I had to talk to that fool now, I’d probably punch his face in.”
The stiff breeze that had blown all day now had a decidedly sharp edge, and Kyla shifted Jace’s duster on her shoulders. She hadn’t wanted to take it from him. Although his attitude toward her had not wavered from the uneasy truce they’d reached when he had agreed to help her, his offer seemed, well, too chivalrous, too personal now. After all, she was sure he wouldn’t have given his duster to Kyle. But her own coat had been ruined when she was shot, and the night was cold. So she accepted. Jace wore a heavy wool shirt and seemed indifferent to the chill.
Kyla wanted their relationship to return to what it had been before they came here—focused solely on their original business. And that was to get Tom Hardesty. No matter what Jace said, revenge had brought her this far. It would carry her through.
“All right, come on. Let’s ride,” he said, as if reading her thoughts.
She heard his saddle creak under his weight as he climbed into it. Pulling her arm out of her sling, she pushed her hat down on her head and mounted Juniper. Her arm was still tender, but well on its way to being healed.
The dark road was full of mystery, and silver-edged, patchy clouds drifted over the face of the moon. It appeared just often enough to give her a glimpse of Jace, but she could see little except the dark silhouette of him and his broad-brimmed hat.
When they had traveled a couple of miles, Jace pulled up and brought his horse around. “This is far enough for tonight. We’ll find a place to camp and get something to eat.”
He tried hard to read Kyla’s expression, but it was too dark. She hadn’t spoken more than a few words to him since that stupid kiss. And when she did talk, her words were cold and clipped. He felt awkward and guilty, as if he ought to apologize to her—twice in one day—and he didn’t like that at all.
Making camp in the dark was not easy. There were no sheltering canyon walls nearby—the terrain was mostly flat for miles around. But they found a couple of shoulder-high boulders that provided a windbreak. Kyla managed to get a small fire going and heat a can of beans and some coffee while he unsaddled their horses.
When he sat down by the fire, she handed him a plate and a piece of bread. She would not meet his eyes but instead glanced at the clearing sky overhead. The silence was broken only by the wind in the grass and their forks scraping on the tin plates.
Jace had spent years with just the sound of his own heartbeat for company and it had never bothered him. He wasn’t much for talking, and even less for listening. But he wanted to hear Kyla’s voice, throaty and full. He wanted to know what she was thinking.
“How’s your arm?” he asked, gesturing at it with his fork. It was a reasonable question, he told himself. She had almost died from that wound.
She continued to push the food around on her dish without looking up. “All right. I’m takin’ off the sling tomorrow.”
“Sure you’re ready for that?”
“I don’t like having only one hand—it throws off my pistol aim. And who knows when I might need to defend myself?” Her words were flat and to the point.
Jace felt heat fill his face, and he was glad that it didn’t show in the firelight. “Are you saying that I can’t protect you?”
Looking up, she scowled at him. “I ain’t sayin’ anything of the kind,” Kyla retorted. “Anyway, I don’t need protectin’. I can take care of myself. I’ve been doin’ it a long time.”
“Then what burr got under your saddle?” he asked. She might dress like a boy and talk like one, but he knew the sound of a woman’s coldness.
“I ain’t got a burr under my saddle.”
He tossed his plate down. “The hell you don’t. Whenever you get mad, you hide behind Kyle. And ever since the DeGroot woman caught us in the kitchen you’ve been all pinched up, like you sucked on a lemon.” If she was mad, she could just tell him so.
Miffed by the comparison, Kyla lifted her nose a bit. “Kyle” had become such a habit, such comfortable armor, she didn’t realize she was using him often enough to be noticeable. “Maybe I’ve been pinched up ever since you told me we still have to go to Baker City. I don’t see why you can’t talk to McGuire after we take care of Hardesty. What could be so important that he can’t wait?”
Jace reached toward her suddenly, and Kyla pulled back, startled, still wary of him and fearful that she’d overstepped her bounds. Was he going kiss her again? Throttle her?
Instead he gripped one lapel of the duster that she still wore and withdrew a cheroot and a match from the inside pocket. His knuckles brushed the front of her shoulder with a surprising heat that raised goose bumps on her arms. Scraping his thumbnail across the sulfur match head, he lit it, keeping his gaze locked on her. She resisted the panicky urge to fidget under this scrutiny, but it wasn’t easy. The end of the cheroot gleamed a hot, ember red and he exhaled a long stream of fragrant smoke.
Finally he said, “I have some news to give him—something he’s been waiting a long time to hear. And I owe it to him to deliver it.” He spoke quietly as he often did, but his expression was pensive, and she felt the dead seriousness that weighted his words.
“Does it have anything to do with that drifter you shot in Silver City?” She’d heard fragments of gossip outside the Magnolia Saloon that afternoon, something about Jace’s sister—
“Yeah,” he replied and pulled on the slender cigar again. Then he took a sip of coffee and told her about the five years Travis had spent in prison for his wife’s murder.
Firelight flickered over his handsome angular face. “My old man had me convinced that Travis killed my sister. He had everyone convinced, including the sheriff. God, I should have known better.” He shook his head. “He was a black-hearted bastard. But he panicked on his deathbed, and admitted that he’d lied about Travis.” He leaned against one of the boulders and crossed his ankles. “It had been hard enough to believe him in the first place—my best friend had killed my sister? And now he was telling me that he’d made all of it up. I couldn’t accept it. When I finally knew it was true, I hit the trail to chase down Celia’s real killer—not just for her, but for Travis, too. It took me a year to find Sawyer Clark, but I finally did. Maybe you understand now why I have to go to Baker City before I can help you?”
From the distant hills a wolf’s howl rode on the wind, and Kyla shivered. Yes, she understood. What she didn’t grasp was the meanness of Jace’s stepfather. She hesitated to ask about him again. He’d gotten angry this afternoon when she had questioned him. As it turned out, though, he didn’t need much more prodding to continue.
“Why would your stepfather lie about his own son-in-law? Is he a bad person?”
“No. In fact Travis and I were a lot alike once. Except he’s tall.” A short, bitter laugh escaped him. “I think Lyle enjoyed turning me against one of the few friends I had. I guess it stuck in the old man’s craw that I got to five-foot-six and stopped growing. He was a blacksmith, a big shaggy bear of a man, and he made sure everyone knew that he hadn’t fathered me. When I was a boy, I thought the loggers’ stories about Paul Bunyan were really about him. He stood a good head higher than me. I was never sure if he thought it was fun to beat me with his belt, or if he intended to make a man out of his runt stepson. It got worse after my mother died.”
Kyla blurted, “That’s horrible! You couldn’t help your height, any more than you could help”—she groped around for a comparison—“the color of your . . . eyes
.” Those eyes.
He smiled again, an oddly flat smile that she had seen him use on people who had exhausted his patience but didn’t realize it. “He thought I was too puny to make it in the world. I know a couple of times he paid bullies to pick fights with me.”
“Oh, Jace,” she said, her voice low with regret.
Lifting his hat, he pushed a hand through his hair and shrugged, as if neither this nor anything else mattered much. “It made me strong. And I learned to fight back. Wolverines aren’t very big, but they’re vicious, fearless—they’ll take on any enemy, no matter what size, including a human. And only a fool would forget that one can crush a man’s leg in its jaws. I wanted a reputation like that, like a wolverine. I had to prove to the old man that he was wrong about me, that I wasn’t a scared, puny runt. That’s why I became a bounty hunter.”
Kyla put aside her own plate. “It doesn’t sound like you had much choice.” Then she added, more to herself, “Why weren’t we good enough for being ourselves?” Why hadn’t her father been content with a daughter? Why had he been so eager for a son that he believed Tom could do no wrong?
Jace drew on the cheroot and took another sip of coffee. “What bothers me is that as much as I hated him for what he did, in a way he won. He did make me tough, but sometimes . . .” He swallowed and his voice trailed away.
“Sometimes?”
He gazed across the rangeland, glazed now in moonlight, and sighed slightly. “I guess I feel like I lost part of who I really was.” He turned to look at her, and the wistfulness she saw in his eyes unsettled her. “That’s what could happen to you. And it would be a pity, Kyla.”
* * *
Jace didn’t sleep much that night. He figured they were safe from Hardesty’s men but just the same, it would be a hell of a thing to wake up and find the end of a gun barrel jammed between his eyes. So he only catnapped. The rest of the time, thoughts of Kyla Springer Bailey bumped around in his head. He felt useful somehow standing watch over her, even though she claimed she didn’t need protecting.
He couldn’t believe he had told her all that stuff about Lyle Upton. Hardly anyone knew about that; he sure never talked about it. Somehow, though, once he got started it was hard to stop. But he hadn’t told her everything.
How could he talk about a twelve-year-old boy who had run from a pack of bullies who looked more to him like huge, ravening wolves? A twelve-year-old was almost a man—men didn’t turn tail on a fight, no matter what. They stood their ground. That’s what his stepfather had said.
Jace couldn’t tell her that same boy, heart nearly bursting with terror, had hidden under a soap crate behind the general store, trying to stifle his panting, mopping his tears and his bleeding nose on his sleeve, angry and ashamed, but scared to death that he would be discovered.
Nobody knew about that. But Kyla had listened to the part he had revealed, and she didn’t seem to think any less of him for it. He was beginning to think of them as kindred spirits, two desperate hearts alone in the world. Wearing only brave faces even when they wished they could hide. Something she had said nagged at the back of his memory, something about not being good enough as they were. . . .
He glanced at her bundled in her blankets on the other side of the fire. She looked sweet and tempting at the same time. It was a chilly night, and he wished he had the right to join their bedrolls. To put his arms around her and cradle her head against his chest. To finish that kiss he had started and begin to woo her back into her womanhood.
He sat up straighter, searching for a more comfortable place on the boulder to lean against. God, she gave him all kinds of damn-fool ideas. Now and then when he lay between sleep and wakefulness, he found himself envisioning the ranch she had described so vividly. If the idea had once crossed his mind that she wanted the place back just to spite Tom Hardesty, she had proved him wrong. She loved that land, and her devotion was plain to see. Maybe even catching.
It might be nice to sit on a porch swing at sundown with a glass of whiskey on his knee and this flame-haired woman next to him. To watch those colts she talked about romping across a newly green pasture. To sleep under the same roof every night, and wake up in the same bed with her in his arms.
Disgusted, he tossed a twig into the fire. Who the hell did he think he was, anyway? A regular, anonymous man who could simply decide to alter his life and take up with this woman? That was a joke. He was Jace Rankin, a bounty hunter, a man who was respected, but also hated and feared, thanks to the reputation that he had cultivated for himself. He couldn’t just change that, the way he changed his shirt. This was the life he’d chosen for himself all those years ago. Like it or not, he was stuck with it now.
He let his gaze rest on Kyla again. Why did he think she would even want him? She had gone through hell to get to this point in time, and she didn’t have much to show for it except bitterness and a bullet wound.
She wasn’t likely to want a man who had to look over his shoulder every time he went to the outhouse.
Besides, he’d seen what love could do to a man. He’d watched his own sister truss up Travis McGuire like a Thanksgiving turkey—he had lost not only his heart but his sense of self.
Love was for fools. And Jace Rankin was no fool.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“We can be in Baker City this afternoon if we push it,” Jace said, reining in to survey the terrain and the horizon.
The morning dawned crisp and clear blue, and after a quick breakfast he had them packed up and on an old wagon road to Baker City. It wound through the hilly yellow landscape, which was peppered here and there with abandoned mining operations and piles of tailings. Now their horses picked their way down the road that ran alongside the Powder River.
After hearing why it was so important that he talk to Travis McGuire, Kyla had accepted the detour to Baker City. She could spare a day or two for a man who had given up five years of his life for a crime he didn’t commit. “We won’t have to spend the night in the open?”
Jace’s gaze skimmed the brow of the surrounding hills, ever watchful. She thought it must be exhausting to always be on guard, to always worry about what, or who, waited around the next bend, the next corner, the next day.
“No, we’ll stay at the hotel. Tired of living like an outlaw?” he asked and gave her an amused smile.
“I’m feeling like one these days,” she admitted with a sigh, “getting chased, getting shot, hiding out.” Even her disguise was beginning to grate, elbowed by her growing desire to be feminine again.
If she felt like an outlaw, Jace resembled one. His jaws were shadowed with two days of dark stubble. With the beard and his hat brim hiding most of his face, he looked as sinister as any desperado she could imagine, and ten times more attractive. Now and then she caught the glint of his eyes—they were like cat’s eyes, huge and blue. And just as with a cat, there was no telling what he was thinking.
They rode hard for most of the day, stopping only to rest and water the horses. Lunch was a hunk of dried beef wrapped in a slice of bread, eaten in the saddle. Kyla’s arm was much stronger than she had expected; even without the sling her discomfort was minimal. But sitting around for two weeks in Misfortune had taken the traveler out of her, and in the afternoon her strength began to wilt. As the sun grew warm, she shed the duster and eventually became so drowsy she wished she could rest her head on Juniper’s neck while he followed Jace’s lead.
When they reached the busy streets of Baker City, though, the sun angled low and golden over the town, and Kyla felt revived by the bustle. It was the busiest place she’d seen since Silver City. Traffic of all kinds filled the dusty main street—freight wagons and teamsters maneuvered around horses, riders, and pedestrians. Cowboys, apparently in from fall roundup, tied their mounts to the hitching rails outside the saloons. It was more activity than she’d like a regular basis, but the change was nice.
Jace led them to a dry-goods store and jumped down from his horse. “I’ll be back in a minut
e. I’m just going to find out where the McGuires are living.”
She watched him disappear into the store, following line of his shoulders as he went. A funny kind of restlessness, a longing, came over her again, tired as she was. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, exactly—not hunger, not thirst. It wasn’t even homesickness or her desire for revenge. But she had felt it several times during the last few weeks.
Stiffly, Kyla climbed out of her saddle, still favoring her arm, and tied Juniper to the hitching rail. She stepped up to the sidewalk, her boots reverberating on the boards. With her hands on her hips, she stretched her back, first to the right and then the left, and glanced around, hoping Jace wouldn’t be inside too long.
“Make way, sonny,” a woman said as she approached from behind with her children in tow.
“’Scuse me, ma’am,” Kyla replied, jumping out of the way. She felt her face grow hot with embarrassment.
She had fooled these casual observers, just as she fooled everyone else. Nearly everyone else. At least the woman and children on the sidewalk took no particular note of her. And across the street, the men lingering outside the saloon didn’t look familiar to her, or seem to pay her any mind. She simply blended in, and that was her aim. But suddenly she wished she could yell out loud, I’m not a boy, I’m a woman!
Maybe Jace would just get her a room at the hotel and visit the McGuires on his own. After all, if she met them who would she be? Kyle Springer, or Kyla Springer Bailey? Would she speak with Kyle’s bad grammar and hold her fork in her fist like a shovel? Or would she be able to admit to her true identity, the one that drifted farther away from her each day?
Desperate Hearts Page 13
