by Maren Smith
“You keep staring at me,” Chin noted at one point while she was sweeping.
“Sorry.” Cullen forced his gaze back to the bacon and onion he was chopping while the beans simmered on the stove. “I guess my kitchen’s not used to having a woman working in it.”
She snorted. “Tell your kitchen to stop staring at my tits.”
His knife wavered mid-slice, then Cullen cleared his throat. “The kitchen has been so advised,” he said with a small and self-depreciating grin. “The kitchen also apologizes for its ungentlemanly behavior.”
“The kitchen is forgiven.” Chin opened the front door long enough to sweep her small dust pile out onto the porch and then all the way off the steps into the rain. As she came back inside and shut the door, however, the look she gave him was both inscrutable and oddly censuring. “You I’ll hold to higher standards.”
Why that struck him as funny as it did, he couldn’t say, but dumping the onions into the beans gave him a good reason to put his back to her, which in turn meant he didn’t have to work quite so hard at hiding his smile. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Gwailo,” she muttered, not quite low enough under her breath to prevent his hearing it. And maybe that was her intention, a parting shot so to speak, because as she did it—floor swept and table set, and her head held as high as somebody that short could possibly do it—she stalked back out the front door. She didn’t go far, only to the steps. Arms folded across her small chest and back as stiff as an old broom handle, she stared out through the drizzling curtain of rain. At the road again, he thought. Stealing peeks at her through the kitchen window, it was hard for him to tell exactly what held her attention.
“What did she call you?” Garrett asked, coming out of the back office, still carrying the book he’d been reading, wedged open with a finger to mark his page.
“White devil,” Cullen said with a chuckle.
Mouthing the slur in feigned horror, Garrett stuck his head out the front door. “Hey, Chinny, sweetheart. How you doing?” If she replied, Cullen couldn’t hear it, but a minute later, Garrett pulled back inside and shut the door again. He threw Cullen a smug grin. “Must just be you. She called me Garrett.”
That killed Cullen’s smile, and that was only what happened before dinner was called. During the meal was when the room got really small. He sat at one end of the table while Chin squared herself on a chair directly opposite of him. Marooned in the middle, surrounded by the ever-increasing tension, Garrett stared back and forth between them with equal parts puzzlement and amusement. Chin ignored every attempt at drawing her into polite conversation, and after a while, the only sounds heard were the clink and clatter of utensils on platter-bowls. That six-foot slab of burled mahogany may as well have run the length and breadth of the swift-running wash he’d pulled her out of. Short of an apology Cullen didn’t think he owed her and wasn’t about to give, he couldn’t for the life of him think how to bridge the canyon-like gap.
“With any luck, the rain will stop tomorrow,” Garrett said, hours later as they lay side by side in Garrett’s bed, hands folded behind their heads, staring aimlessly up at a ceiling they could barely see. The only light in the room was the faint amber glow of the fire in the hearth of his study below, filtered through the cracks in the floorboards around the bed. “We’ll take her back to town and, I guess, figure out what we’ll do from there.”
“Yeah,” Cullen said, but that wasn’t where his thoughts kept drifting. A smart man would have spent the night figuring out how to keep his ranch, recover his herd and not lose everything he and his brother owned to the bank. Including the blankets off the beds, the curtains off the windows and the shirts off both their backs. And yet, his thoughts kept wandering time and again back to the soft, short limbs that were, even now, curled up in the comfort of his bed. He thought about her black hair, splayed out across his pillow like a fan, and black, accusing eyes closed. He scratched his chest, unable to stop himself from picturing her twin and perfect breasts rising and gently falling as she slept.
It was inevitable, he guessed, that Garrett should start snoring long before Cullen’s thoughts settled. Outside the rain continued to fall, with another bout of lightning that moved in somewhere around midnight. The storm was a pale shadow of what it had been the night before, but now and then he could still see the flashes and hear the distant grumbles of heavenly discontent. The wind kicked up too, bringing with it the otherworldly groan that swept down the chimney and stovepipe flue, and the creak of shingle nails straining under the gusts rushing through the rafters. His thoughts kept him awake for the longest time, but eventually those noises combined into a drone of white-noise that turned oddly soothing, drifting him off to sleep.
Until something bumped in the night. Not hard. Not even very loud. More like the stubbing of a toe against a chair leg or the bump of a hip against a corner of the table. Whatever it was, it startled Cullen out of his doze. Eyes he hadn’t realized he’d closed, snapped open again and he found himself staring up at the ceiling again.
The fire in the hearth downstairs must have burned down to coals, because while the room was still lit in a soft glow of amber light, it was much fainter than he remembered it. It was probably a trick of the wind and his cautious nature that made him sit up and pay attention. So far, he hadn’t heard anything that couldn’t be explained away by the wind and yet, every fine-tuned instinct has him listening hard. A floorboard creaked. Exactly what made him think it was the floor instead of a loose shingle, he had no idea, but it had Cullen reaching for his pants before he quite realized he’d kicked the blankets aside. He pulled on his boots without bothering to don his socks and then grabbed his pocket watch off the nightstand. Though it hadn’t felt as if he’d slept, he must have. Night was almost over; it was nearly five.
The preferred Sioux raiding hour.
Were it not still raining, the sky and Garrett’s room would both have been lit purplish grey with the pre-dawn light, making it easier for Cullen to see as he turned his ear, tracking a sound he could no longer hear. Rain pattered, a constant drum upon the roof, the walls and the glass windowpanes. Wind whipped against the house, pushing at the eaves and the walls. Now and then, he swore he could hear the dull pop and crackle of what coals still burned down below, but that was it. No moccasin-muted footsteps as the house was surrounded. No creaking hinges as windows and doors were tested.
Cullen took his gun out from under his pillow anyway. Leaving Garrett to sleep, he crept to the window, pausing only long enough to slip the lock in the hatch, preventing it from being opened by anyone below. Outside, the wind moved everything, making it impossible to spot the subtle sway and bend of tall grass being crawled through, rather than blown over. He was jumping at shadows again. God knows he’d done it often enough, especially in that first year after he’d left the army; by now he ought to know the steps of this dance by heart.
Still, he kept his gun in hand, loaded, cocked and ready as he searched the shadows directly below each window in turn. Everything was moving outside. Nothing was moving downstairs. Every fine hair on his nape was standing at attention, straining for an action he didn’t think was necessary yet. And still, too unnerved to be satisfied, he slipped out of Garrett’s room and crept down the hall. He stopped again with his hand upon the latch of his bedroom. His gut tightened. His fingers itched to open it.
Just a peek, he thought. He’d tiptoe in long enough to lock the hatch and make sure she was all right.
Which, of course, she would be, his conscience argued. He was jumping at shadows. Nothing more.
But if he wasn’t…
Which he was, he already knew that. The Sioux hadn’t raided this far south in years. Using that was no kind of excuse when stealing peeks at unmarried women in the middle of the night. That kind of deviancy could get a man horsewhipped if he was caught.
If he was caught, his brain argued.
His hand still itched, his palm actually sweating. His heart kicked up half
a beat faster, as if every nerve in him were already tightening in anticipation of witnessing something he shouldn’t.
He wasn’t going to see anything, he told himself sternly. He was going to sneak in, lock the hatch (just in case), and sneak back out again. And if he did happen—just happen, mind you, not that he was planning on it—look towards the bed, all he was going to see was a lump. Just the pale sheet-covered lump of her sound asleep and swaddled in blankets. With maybe a foot sticking out at the bottom. With a well-turned ankle attached to it. Maybe she’d stretch some, showing the long slender curve of her calf, but that was it. As soon as he knew she was fine, he was going to turn right around and leave again. No harm. No foul. No horsewhip.
And no perfect, tan-tipped nipples thrusting up against the barrier of her nightshift in desperate yearning for the heat of a man’s suckling mouth upon them.
Cullen almost turned on his heel and marched his peeping-Tom ass back to Garrett’s bed. Except that he couldn’t make himself go.
He really was a white devil.
“Fuck it,” he growled, and opened the door. He did it fast—ducking in fast and quiet, slipping the latch on the hatch to lock it shut, and on his way back out the door, he did it. It was the fastest gander any man ever stole at a woman’s bed in the history of all time. Then he was back out the door, slipping it just as firmly shut again. Head bowed, he leaned against it, a part of him instantly ashamed for having given in to his baser and sinful urges. Some proper host he was. It took almost three perfect seconds before he realized he was wallowing in the shame of having peeped at an empty bed.
Not possible.
Cullen cracked the door again, then opened it all the way, staring first at the neatly made bed and then at the curtains billowing in around the only open window in his entire house. A half-moon of wetness on the floor showed it had been open for at least an hour. And then he heard it—the soft “thump thum-thump” similar to the bumping noise that had first awakened him. Nearing the window, he parted the curtains with two fingers.
Lightning obligingly lit the shadowy darkness of early morning just as the wind tugged at his barn door. Bumping it open, bouncing it closed again. It should have been latched. He knew that because he’d latched it after bedding down the horses for the night.
He ran from the house, without bothering even to put on a coat or shoes. His underjohns and jeans were halfway to soaked by the time he reached the barn, but he already knew what he was going to find. All three horses were gone and he was short one saddle. Indians didn’t leave good saddles behind.
And of Chin, there was absolutely no trace at all.
Chapter Six
Self-preservation was something Chin had gotten good at these last few years, but for some reason, what she had done this morning she was finding hard to reconcile herself to. The sun was just coming up now, not that it could be seen through the storm clouds. The normally arid California earth had long since reached its saturation point. She had slogged through swamps with less standing water than this and it was still too dark for her to risk riding. So she walked, leading the horse she’d stolen from the Drakes so as not to make the risk of a broken leg any worse than it already was.
There were holes everywhere. The horse had stumbled once and she’d fallen twice as it was. Her skirts were heavy, water-logged even though she had tucked the hems up into her waist. It was a fight to keep going, and that fight was made worse by the disagreeableness of the horse itself. It kept wanting to turn back. Bigger than she was and every bit as stubborn, every few feet she had to dig in her legs, all but sitting down in the wet grass to prevent it from dragging her back to its barn. She wished she’d chosen a different horse, instead of walking the other two equines out far enough from the ranch to be out of sight of the house and then releasing them. They’d probably wandered their way back to the barn by now. All Chin could hope was that the deception had bought enough time for her to find the wash, recover her things and get off his land before Cullen or his brother discovered what she had done, fixed the strap she’d deliberately cut on their remaining saddle, and then tracked her down. With any luck, she’d be well on her way to San Francisco before they even woke up.
Not likely, her suspicious nature argued. Dragons knew when they were being deceived. Dragons knew everything.
Cullen wasn’t a dragon. She frowned at her own foolishness. He was a gwailo, that was all. People took the names of things they weren’t all the time. The Red Petticoat was full of prime examples. Ruby wasn’t a ruby. Pearl wasn’t a Pearl. Emerald didn’t have an emerald thing about her, apart from the color of her eyes, and she certainly was no piece of jade. And Cullen Drake was not a dragon god in the guise of a man.
Nearly ripping the wet reins out of her hands, the huge horse tried again to turn around. Chin had to hang all her weight on the bridle to keep him with her and the pointed the way she wanted to go. This was impossible. Had she left the horses alone altogether, she could have been there and gone by now. She should just let him go. And then what? Walk all the way to San Fran? In a stolen pair of boots which, even with rags packed into the toes, made her feel like a little girl playing dress up in Daddy’s shoes. Daddy’s very wet shoes. She could feel the blisters forming on the tops of her toes and the backs of both heels as she slid and sloshed with every step she took in these boots. This was miserable.
If Quan Ji were out in this, he would be just as miserable, just as lost, and hopefully still on the other side of the wash. She couldn’t afford to linger. She had to leave. Today. Had she not accidentally fallen asleep, she’d have left hours ago.
Head down, water dripping from her hair and face, Chin pressed on, stumbling, swearing and heaving at the reins each time the horse jerked its head and tried to turn back. She was willing to bet this was the gwailo’s horse. The devil deserved no better mount that this to ride. She should have picked one of the smaller mares.
In the next instant, the horse reaffirmed that thought when it jerked and the wet reins ripped right out of Chin’s hands. She felt the burn of the worn edges tearing into the soft tissue of her palms, but Chin still grabbed, just not fast enough. Tail raised, the stallion broke first into a trot and then a run. Aiming itself for home, it very quickly left her far behind.
“Oh!” Chin shrieked after it, smacking her aching fists into her own thighs. She swallowed back a long string of curses, turning her face into the rain in frustration, but in weather like this a woman could drown like that. Shoving her wet hair back from her face, knowing she had no other choice, she slogged on. Without a mount. Nothing between her and a chance to disappear safely into the wilds of San Francisco except a long stretch of really wet ground, at least one more wash, and a complete lack of anything resembling respectability or funds, or well-fitting boots. Her feet would be bleeding soon, if they weren’t already.
She should go back to Culpepper Cove. Madame Jewel would take her back. If Chin explained, she might even be moved to help her.
Quan Ji and his father had waded right through Chin’s entire family. He could wade through the Red Petticoat—indeed, through the whole of Culpepper Cove—just as easily.
Her feet hurt.
They were going to hurt a whole lot more by the time she reached San Fran.
At which point she stepped into a drowned out gopher hole, twisting the very ankle she had hurt in her fall two nights ago.
Shouting in pain, Chin fell to aching hands and knees in a six-inch puddle of murky water and floating grass and hidden cactus. Her right hand was punctured and her left knee cracked on the jagged edge of an unseen rock, sending shocks of pain radiating all the way up to her hip. She stumbled to get up, only to fall again, both injured legs refusing to cooperate. This time, she landed with a splash in nothing worse than a puddle of mud and grass.
Gasping and rocking, she cradled her injured hand. Dozens of broken cactus spines (some two inches long and thicker than sewing needles) punctured her fingers, thumb and palm. Her knee d
idn’t hurt half as much, but already she could see the dark stain of blood soaking through her skirt where it clung wet to the whole wounded, throbbing area. Her dress was torn there, but not the undershift. Hands shaking, even the one not currently playing pincushion to cactus thorns, she worked her muddy, tangled shift up far enough to see the damage. Though the pre-morning darkness, she could just make out the ragged gash just below her kneecap. Blood flowed like a red river down her shin as she prodded all around it. Every touch hurt like hell, no matter how gentle her fingers, but not so much as to suspect she’d broken a bone. That didn’t automatically make the situation better, she knew. Depending on how heavy this area was in fecal matter—both cattle and otherwise—torn flesh and contaminated water was bad enough, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it now.
Sucking a pained breath, she turned her injured hand over. Part of the cactus had broken when she’d landed on it. A fleshy portion of the plant, clumped together with needles, was pinned to her palm. Wincing, teeth gritted, she gingerly pried it away. Even more gingerly, she began to work the biggest spines free. That was when she heard it—the shrill, sharp whistle coming from only a ridge or two behind her.
Her whole body jolted. She jerked around, first in shock and then in horror when she spotted Cullen, sitting stiff in the saddle of the horse she had tried to steal, no further away than a mere few hundred yards. He’d already seen her and he’d changed directions, heading straight for her.
Chin leapt up, but neither her ankle nor her knee could take her weight and down she went again. Needles from another submerged cactus (the same cactus?) now stabbed her thigh. Yelping, she kicked off it, one-legged, hugging her wounded hand to her chest and flopping to get out of the puddle like a fresh-caught trout in the bottom of a fisherman’s boat.
