Desperate Hearts

by Alexis Harrington

  She nodded and dragged up the blanket. “Starving. We didn’t have much time to eat yesterday.” In fact, she felt wonderful—hungry, rested, and energized, as if the shackle on her spirit had been broken.

  She even looked forward to the long miles of travel they still faced. Before, the days had been arduous and long, made even harder by the pressure she’d put on herself to prove her ability to Jace. Now she knew she had nothing to prove.

  “All right, then,” he said, and stood to tuck his shirt tails in. “You hurry and get dressed, and we’ll eat. Then we need to get started—oh, and someone is waiting for you outside.”

  “Who?” she asked, immediately suspicious.

  Grinning, he reached out and took her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “You’ll have to get up and look. But I think you’ll be happy about it.” He dropped his hand. “I’ll go see about my horse while you dress.”

  Wrapping a blanket around herself, Kyla padded to the window and peeked out. Juniper, wet and muddy but seeming otherwise unharmed, paced near Jace’s horse.

  “Juniper!” She turned to Jace. “How did he get here?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s a real stroke of luck. It would probably take awhile to find you another horse out here.”

  While Jace went outside to saddle his horse, she washed in the water warming on the stove and recalled moments from the night before.

  Kyla never would have imagined that an act she had learned to think of as degrading and vulgar could be so moving, so emotionally uplifting. How far she had come since that day in Silver City. Then, she would have shot anyone who tried to touch her, especially intimately. But Jace had gradually changed all of that, leading her back one step at a time to the ability to enjoy his kiss, his caress. She thought of the feelings he had summoned from her, the way he had responded to her with a hot, dark passion, and the intensely personal communion they had shared. It had been the most satisfying experience of her adult life, and one that she would hold dear . . .

  Just as she finished dressing, she heard the unmistakable sound of gunshots. Jace—Kyla froze, a boot in her hand, and her heart pounding behind her breastbone. A moment of silence ensued, followed by more shots. They were carried on the wind, and she couldn’t tell from which from direction they came, but instinct made her duck. Dropping to her hands and knees, she scrambled for her gunbelt in the corner, and began to strap it on with hands that shook.

  Jace was out there.

  The door crashed open then and Jace dove toward the table to grab the Henry.

  “Oh, thank God you’re safe! What is that?” she asked uneasily. “Is someone shooting at you?”

  He nodded. “I think so,” he said, peering around the edge of the window. The long muscles in his forearms swelled as he gripped the rifle. “But I’m going to find out for sure.” He glanced at her. “You stay here, and stay down. No one has seen you so they won’t know you’re here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He grabbed his duster and his hat.

  “Why do you have to go out there?” she asked, trying to keep the quiver out of her voice. “Can’t we just wait and see if they go away?”

  “Kyla, if they’re looking for me, they aren’t going to go away. They’ve already seen me.”

  “But you don’t have to rush out there to meet them!”

  “I’m not going to meet them,” he said, his eyes wearing that cold, flat expression she’d first seen through the window at the Magnolia Saloon, when he stood over Sawyer Clark. “I’m going to run them off.”

  “Jace, don’t go. Please,” she implored. “It’s too dangerous.”

  He smiled, and glanced away almost self-consciously. Maybe no one had ever bothered to worry about him before. “Hell, I’ll be all right,” he said, returning his gaze to her.

  When had she ever seen eyes that color? she wondered irrelevantly. Like ice, like a hot blue summer sky.

  He crossed the tiny floor to the corner where she still knelt, and gave her a long, searching look. Then, shooting out his free hand, he gripped her by the back of the neck to press his mouth to hers in a hard, brief kiss. “Stay safe, and stay down. I won’t be away long.” He winked at her and gestured at her revolver where it rested against her thigh. “Just don’t shoot me when I come back.”

  With gnawing apprehension, Kyla watched him walk to the door, his boots reverberating on the floorboards.

  And then he was gone.

  Kyla paced the length and width of the small, dark cabin, a task that was accomplished in very few steps. The shooting continued, although more sporadically now, and it seemed to be coming from farther away. She had no way of knowing if any of the shots fired were from Jace’s guns.

  Although she had held him in her arms last night, and had seen him at his most vulnerable moment, that didn’t change who he was. He was Jace Rankin, the most famous bounty hunter in the region, smart, dangerous, and utterly fearless. He could take care of himself—he’d been doing it, and very well, for years. But her mind showed her pictures of a bullet, white-hot and deadly, finding its mark. And it only took one shot with the right aim to strike a heart or a head or a belly. The thought made her throat tight with terror and anguish.

  She sank to the rickety chair next to the stove and propped her feet on the fender. She hadn’t expected to fall in love with him. In fact, falling in love with anyone was the last thing she wanted. It was a pretty ideal that had nothing to do with her goal. But in the most secret corner of her heart, she recognized that loving him was an inevitability, a path upon which she had unwittingly set her feet the day she sought him out. To make matters worse, her feelings for Jace were one-sided. Oh, she supposed he liked her well enough, and she had earned his respect. He didn’t love her, though, and she wished she could shut off the emotion flooding her heart.

  Time and again he had proven his honor, and had revealed so many good and decent facets of his complex personality. She touched her locket where it hung suspended above her heart. Maybe given the chance and enough love to make up for all that he’d been denied as a youngster, Jace might find his own heart again—

  Suddenly, the door flew open. Kyla jumped to her feet to face men she didn’t recognize, and five guns all pointed at her. Panic engulfed her and made her heart give a tremendous lurch in her chest. But as they advanced on her, she found Kyle’s toughest voice, and whipped out her own gun.

  The men were coarse and rough, reminding her of some buffalo hunters she’d seen once when she was a girl. One of them, a short, wiry redhead, studied her with small, rabbity eyes. The cabin filled with their rank, unwashed stench.

  “All right, you come along now,” one of them ordered. “Mr. Hardesty’s waitin’ on you.”

  “You stinkin’ sheep turds stay back, or I’ll shoot your balls off, if you got any!” She swung the revolver in a wide arc, threatening all of them.

  “Shee-it, ain’t she a sassy one?” another remarked, faintly amused, as if he were merely a spectator.

  “She won’t talk so sassy once she realizes it ain’t no use,” the apparent leader said, laughing as well. Aghast, Kyla recognized the speaker as Hobie McIntyre. He was the low-down saddle tramp who had shot her. “Lem, see to that,” he added, inclining his head at her revolver.

  The man answering to the name Lem was big and stupid-looking, and missing most of his front teeth. He took a step forward, and Kyla flashed the gun at him.

  “Best you don’t see to it, Lem,” she challenged with false bravado. She cocked the hammer but she silently cursed her hand for shaking nearly as much as her voice.

  In the confusion of being threatened by so many, it wasn’t difficult for one of them to distract her. Lem grabbed her arm and twisted it so hard she thought it would snap. She suppressed the cry that crawled up her throat, but the revolver fell from her nerveless hand like a ripe apple from a tree.

  “Mr. Hardesty sent us to find you and bring you back to Blakely,” McIntyre said, gazing at her with his pale, bulgi
ng eyes. “And that’s what we aim to do. It can be easylike, or we can do it the hard way, if you’ve a mind to.” He looked her up and down with distaste, while he sucked some food particle from his ocher-colored teeth. “Like I told him, I don’t know what he wants with a wildcat like you. I seen the scar you left on his face. Oh, he didn’t say where he got it, but everyone knows. I don’t fancy that you’re even worth gettin’ hard for, but he’s got a hankerin’ for you. After we take you to Blakely, he can do with you what he will. I ’spect he’s got some big welcome-home planned for you.” He grinned suddenly.

  “I dunno . . .” the fifth one said, appraising Kyla speculatively, rubbing his chin. “I done some bronc bustin’ in my time. It might be fun with a filly like her. She’d prob’ly give a man a good ride.”

  Kyla swallowed hard, trying to unstick the sides of her dry throat. Oh, dear God, no—

  “Just forgit it, Sims. If she comes back to Hardesty with even one hair out of place, there’ll be the devil to pay and she ain’t worth it,” McIntyre said.

  Although she continued to search for an opening, a single opportunity to escape or divert these men, she knew circumstances were against her. “I ain’t goin’ anywhere with you. Hardesty and the rest of you can go to hell!" she shot back with brave venom, but inside she trembled.

  “Now you shut up, or I’ll shoot you again,” McIntyre snapped, his smile gone. “We stood here yappin’ long enough. Boys, get her and let’s go.”

  She suddenly found herself being hustled toward the door—there might not be much she could do, but she refused to be herded along like a lamb to the slaughter. She fought and kicked, struggling against the hands that gripped her. Being shorter than the rest of them, she couldn’t see much beyond a confusion of sweat-stained buckskins, grimy denim, and greasy, beard-shadowed faces. Her heart nearly bursting with fear and rage, she squirmed and thrashed around, hoping desperately that she might break free. Once, her boot connected hard with a nearby shin and she heard someone swear. She screamed blue murder, then sank her teeth into the dirty, foul-smelling hand that covered her mouth and nostrils to silence her. She spit out the taste, and screamed again. Maybe Jace would hear her . . .

  “Goddamn it, shut her up!” McIntyre ordered as they struggled out the door as a unit. “I can’t hear myself think.”

  “I’m tryin’!” Dirty Hand yelped indignantly, clamping his injured hand between his knees. “She bit me, the bitch!”

  “Well, tie her up and gag her so’s she can’t bite you,” McIntyre said, “then get to ridin’. Rankin ain’t no fool—it won’t take him long to figure out he’s been lured away. We want to be ready.”

  Despite her bucking and wriggling, Kyla couldn’t prevent them from lashing a rope around her wrists and ankles. Dirty Hand grabbed Jace’s bandana from the table and gagged her, and her screams were silenced. Carried outside like a sack of grain, she was flung across a horse’s back and the wet ground was her only view from then on. The sound of horses’ hooves, creaking saddle leather, and rough voices were all she could hear.

  “All right, you two take her off to those trees,” she heard McIntyre say. “We’ll meet you there after Rankin is dead.”

  * * *

  Jace rode far from the cabin to a distant tree line. He wove in and out of the dark firs, staying away from open rangeland. The morning sky was heavily overcast, working to his advantage to provide cover. But it also gave the gunman the same edge. Intermittent shots continued to ring out, occasionally striking just close enough to acknowledge his presence, but not to necessarily hit him. All right, goddamn it, they had his attention, whoever they were, he thought with cold fury. And he was going to find out what the hell this was all about. The situation was too risky to ignore. If he turned back and tried to ride out with Kyla, she would be in danger, too. He’d have to confront the person on the other end of that gun.

  Finally, Jace determined the location from which the shots were coming. Whoever the bastard was, he made no effort to hide evidence of himself. A small fire, obviously built with wet wood, sent up a tall plume of smoke over the trees ahead of him.

  Something about this felt wrong. Jace rechecked the rounds in the Henry and broadened his sweeping inspection of the woods near him. He never lost sight of the fact that there was always someone who wanted to make his own reputation by challenging Jace Rankin. That could be the case here, too.

  As he drew closer to the smoldering fire, a horse and rider burst from the trees and galloped off in the opposite direction, away from Jace.

  “Hey wait up!” he barked, and took off after him, spurring his horse into a flat run. But the rider was far ahead, as if his true purpose was to lure him out and farther away. What the hell was going on? Then he realized the answer.

  God—Kyla! A shiver plunged down Jace’s back like a bolt of ice-cold lightning. He sawed at the reins, his horse to a skidding halt, then swung toward the cabin, cursing himself for a damned fool every step of the way. How could he have been so stupid, so careless?

  If he hadn’t been wary and alert every moment for last twenty-two years, he wouldn’t have lived to thirty. Why had he chosen this point in time, when he was responsible for someone else, to let his judgment falter?

  He hadn’t forgotten about Hardesty’s men, but thus far they had proved to be so bumbling and lazy, that despite the episode in Cord, in his mind he had reduced the extent of their threat. Could they be behind this?

  His heart hammering against his ribs, he pulled his hat on tighter and bent low over the pommel. He the urged the horse on, pushing it to a thundering speed over the rain-soaked range that tore up muddy sod with every fall of its hooves.

  To Jace it felt as though they were wading through fields of molasses, slow and frustrating and terrifying. The cabin, a faraway speck at the mist-gray base of the mountains, seemed to get no closer, even though the horse’s sides heaved with effort. It all had a nightmare quality, except Jace knew that he wouldn’t wake up to find Kyla asleep next to him. There was no waking up from this, and he wouldn’t relax until he saw her again, in the flesh and safe.

  But even as watery sunlight began to emerge from the slate-colored clouds, Jace saw a group of riders in the distance. Cantering away from the general direction of the cabin, there were three of them, although the one on that dun looked pretty small. More like a kid than a man.

  A kid . . .

  Oh, Jesus. Hoping his horse survived to forgive him, he pushed on, and tried hard to ignore the sickening clenching in his stomach. He strained to see the details of their appearance, but he was too far away. He needed to get close enough to see better, to see if his eyes were playing tricks on him, or if that kid really did have red hair.

  * * *

  “Hoo-eee, look at that bounty hunter ride! I never seen such slick ridin’,” Lem remarked from behind the remains of his tobacco-stained teeth. “Guess he’ll be surprised when he catches up with those boys. Hobie will fix him up just fine.” His laughter was free and hearty. It made Kyla’s blood freeze in her veins.

  Terrified, outraged, helpless, from their hiding place in the dark trees she saw Jace gallop past on the open rangeland, lashing his horse toward certain disaster. But bound hand and foot, and gagged with his bandana, she could do nothing but watch. And listen to Lem and Dirty Hand congratulate themselves on their cleverness.

  “Yeah, Hobie’s real smart, comin’ up with that idea. Where‘d he find that red-haired kid?” Dirty Hand asked. Since Kyla hadn’t heard the man’s name, based her own experience, she thought of him thus. He tied a filthy rag around his fist to cover the wound her bite had inflicted.

  “I dunno—it sure beats all, don’t it? But it was my idea to give the kid the wildcat’s coat to wear and put him on her dun. Rankin won’t know the truth of it until they’ve got him locked up in that box canyon.”

  “Yup, that’ll be the end of him,” Lem pronounced, turned to Kyla. “I hope you said good-bye real nice to your hee-ro before he left. Y
ou won’t be seein’ him again.”

  Kyla gave him a murderous look, then turned her gaze to Jace’s diminishing figure and followed it until was gone. Slumped against a ponderosa pine on the ground, she shivered as much from fear as from cold. Tears kept trying to work their way up from her chest, and she persistently choked them back. Jace pursued McIntyre, the Bronc Buster, and the Redhead across the open range, undoubtedly believing, as he was intended to, that he was rescuing her.

  Questions and possibilities pelted her frantic mind like hail, and bounced against her remorse.

  Could he prevail in a fight of three against one? Yes, perhaps, if he discovered the trap in time.

  Was there some way they could have avoided being discovered by McIntyre? If they had pressed on last evening instead of stopping? Who knew how fate might have been altered if they had?

  And, oh God, if he were killed—she lowered her head. It would be her fault, as surely as if she had pulled the trigger herself. Would she be able to escape the confinement of five men? And then where would she go?

  Suddenly, a barrage of distant shots penetrated the mist of her thoughts, jerking her upright and causing her to bump her head against the tree. It was like hearing the report of a firing squad, tearing at her own heart.

  A long interval of silence followed, punctuated only by the twitter of a sparrow.

  “Well, I guess that’s that, and goddamn good riddance to him, too,” Lem said finally. “Bounty hunters are lower’n snakes, and Rankin was the worst. He tracked down my little brother for a bank robbery in Yakima. Weren’t no call for that—that teller Billy shot didn’t die.” He shot a stream of tobacco juice at the ground and pushed his bulk away from the tree trunk he leaned against, using his shotgun for a cane. “Now Billy’s sittin’ in prison, givin’ my ma more gray hair. If I had the chance, I’d spit on Rankin’s stinkin’ carcass and leave it for the buzzards to pick at.”

  “Amen to that,” Dirty Hand concurred. “Well, Hobie’ll be back in a few minutes, and we can be on our way.”

  Lem turned his gaze on Kyla, studying her with a look she had seen before and didn’t like. "If this hellcat here wasn’t intended for Mr. Hardesty, I might like a taste of her myself. There’s somethin’ about a killin’ that always gets my blood up.”