“I didn’t mean any offense, Jake.”
She said his name as if it were an intimacy, and her cheeks turned a delightful pink.
“You’re not that old,” she added.
“Tell me I’m a handsome devil, and maybe I’ll forgive you.”
She giggled again. The sound warmed him clear through.
“You’re a handsome devil,” she replied. “A very young handsome devil, so young you’re still wet behind the ears.”
“You’re definitely forgiven.”
Lobo flicked his ears toward the hillside. Jake followed the wolf’s gaze but saw nothing.
“Don’t mind Lobo. He probably sees his dessert running around up there. Rabbits are his favorite food.” She returned her second sandwich to the saddlebag, then started on her cake. After taking a bite, she skimmed her lips with her tongue to lick away flecks of chocolate. “Mr. Rand . . .”
“Are we off on that again?”
“Jake.” The pink flush returned to her cheeks. “May I ask you something?”
“I’m thirty.”
“No,” she said with a laugh, “not about your age.”
“Ask away.”
She turned her cake as if studying it for flaws. “Can you explain why you don’t have calluses like most miners?”
It wasn’t what he expected. Jake looked down at a palm. A dozen lies swam through his mind, but for reasons beyond him, he couldn’t voice them. He had come here knowing he’d have to lie his way into a position of trust, and he had thought himself prepared to do that. That had been before he had met Indigo and her parents.
“I, um . . .” He cleared his throat. “For the past several years, I’ve been doing desk work.”
“Desk work?”
“For a very large mining corporation.”
“What possessed you to quit?”
Jake felt as if he were drowning. “I didn’t, exactly. It’s more like a leave of absence. I, um—” He took a deep breath. “I came here hoping I could—” He looked into her eyes and, though he couldn’t say why, knew he couldn’t lie to her. “Have you ever had the feeling you’ve sleepwalked through your life?”
“No.”
“Well, I did. I came here searching for the truth.”
“The truth,” she echoed. “The truth about what?”
“About myself, about everything I’ve believed myself to be. The truth about my work.” He sighed. So far, he hadn’t told her anything that wasn’t true. “When you work within a large company, it’s all too easy to assign a dollar value to everything. People become names on paper. A man can get so caught up in making profitable business moves that he notices nothing else. Something happened to make me realize that maybe I had lost touch with all the things that really counted. I had to find some answers. I ended up here at Wolf’s Landing.”
“By accident?”
Jake felt his pulse quicken. But after coming this far, he couldn’t retreat into a falsehood, no matter how harmless. “No, not by accident. I had heard about the cave-ins at your father’s mine and about his injury. I figured he might hire me on. From what I heard about Wolf’s Landing, I thought it might be the place where I could find the answers I needed.”
“So you didn’t just happen to be in Jacksonville.”
“No.”
“You told my father—”
“I know what I told him.” Jake braced his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. “Some things aren’t easy to explain. What would he have thought if I’d said I was searching for answers? It was easier to say I was just passing through.”
She gazed at him for what seemed an endless time. Then her expression softened. “I hope you find the truth you’re seeking. And I won’t embarrass you by telling my father.”
Relief flooded through him. “You won’t?”
“No. A journey within is a private thing, and I respect that. So would my father, if you told him.” Her eyes warmed on his. “So many never question. They never look within themselves for any kind of truth. I’m not sure they even realize there’s a truth to look for. My father isn’t one of them, though. He journeys to a place within himself nearly every day. And so do I and my brother. It’s the Comanche way.”
Jake eyed the remains of his sandwich. In his nervousness, he had pressed his thumbs into the bread. “A place within,” he repeated. “You make it sound almost noble. Yet it feels so—” He broke off, uncertain how to finish. “When I take a good, hard look inside myself, I’m not too sure I like what I see.”
She smiled. “If you don’t like who you’ve become, set your feet along another path.”
She made it sound so easy. But it wasn’t. How could he turn his back on everything he had worked so hard for, on everyone he loved? Perhaps his world in Portland wasn’t all it should be, but it was where he had come to belong. “It isn’t always quite that simple.”
“A journey within is never simple.”
She searched his gaze. It took all Jake’s resolve not to look away. He had the feeling she was reading him. After a moment, she broke the visual contact to finish off her cake. Silence fell over them. Jake concentrated on the remainder of his lunch, no longer enjoying the taste. He tossed a crust of bread at Lobo, who still sat beside Indigo, regarding the hillside. When the bread hit the wolf’s chest, he let it drop to the ground and eyed it with disdain.
Stretching her arms above her head, Indigo took a deep breath, then rolled onto her side. As she did, the air around Jake seemed to explode with sound. A rifle shot.
For an instant that seemed years long, he couldn’t react. His eyes registered the smallest details, imprinting the images on his brain like a camera did on a negative. Lobo, sitting beside Indigo one moment, thrown aside the next. Blood everywhere, splattered across the towel, on the grass, on Jake’s face. Indigo screaming. The horses bolting.
Jake felt as if he were submerged in cold molasses. A rifle, dear God, a rifle. Blackberry juice flooded his lap as he released the jug with fingers that took forever to react. He dove forward to shield Indigo’s body and had the crazy sensation that he was floating against a head-wind and might never reach her. One thought tumbled inside his mind. If Indigo hadn’t stretched out onto her side when she did, she might have taken the bullet in her chest. He covered her with his body and crossed his arms over her head.
Jesus, sweet Jesus.
No more shots rang out. Panting as though he had been running, he rose on an elbow, swiped the blood from his eyes and scanned the hillside. He saw a man darting through the trees. Leaping to his feet, Jake grabbed Indigo’s arm and dragged her toward the shack, his one thought to get her under some kind of cover.
“Lobo!” She sobbed and tried to wrench free. “Lobo! I can’t leave Lobo!”
Jake swore. “Forget the goddam wolf!”
He dove with her through the ramshackle cabin’s yawning doorway. Once inside, he shoved her to the floor near a window and crouched over her to peer through the grimy glass. If the man was still up there on the hillside, he was well hidden. Something sticky clung to Jake’s lips. He grimaced and spat, then brushed at his face. A cobweb.
“Lobo . . .”
The horror clouding Jake’s mind fell away layer by layer. He glanced down to see Indigo holding up her hands. Lobo’s blood flecked them. She shook violently. Jake groaned and drew her arms down. Then he gathered her close. Settling his hand on her hair, he registered two things—two totally insane, irrelevant things: one, that her hair was as silken as he imagined; two, that he felt nothing but fierce protectiveness now that he held her.
“I’ll go back for Lobo, honey, just as soon as it’s safe.”
“Why?” she wailed. “Why did someone shoot him? He never hurt anyone. Never!”
Keeping an eye on the hillside, Jake ran a palm down her slender back, trying to comfort her in the only way he knew. Dear God. Had that bullet been meant for her?
She was so frantic about the wolf that Jake risked going back out into th
e open. As he bolted out the doorway, he veered to the left and dove into the brush. Blackberry vines snagged his shirt as he belly-crawled toward the laurel tree. Lobo lay where he had fallen. His left shoulder, once padded with muscle and thick fur, was now a gaping hole. Blood was everywhere. He could scarcely believe it when he saw the wolf still breathing.
After scanning the hillside, Jake rose, scooped Lobo into his arms, and ran back to the shack. Indigo met him at the door. He nudged her aside, barked at her to stay down, and took the animal to a corner. Indigo dropped to her knees beside him. Seeing how gently she hugged her pet nearly broke Jake’s heart.
She didn’t cry. Jake would have welcomed tears. Instead, she sat back on her heels and placed a reverent hand on the wolf’s forehead. Jake stripped off his shirt.
Though he didn’t particularly like the wolf and knew he would probably die, Jake couldn’t let him go without a fight, not when Indigo loved him so. He made another trip to the window to check the hillside. Then he pulled his knife and cut a strip of wool from his shirt for binding. The remainder of the garment would do as a pad. With enough pressure applied to the wound, perhaps the bleeding could be stopped.
Returning to Indigo, he grasped her shoulder and drew her out of his way. “Let me do what I can,” he said softly.
The interior of the shack was cloaked in shadow, which gave him poor light to see by. Using his knife, Jake carefully probed for the lead. Indigo leaned forward beside him, her shaking hands hovering, her silence eloquent testimony to her grief. My best friend in the whole world.
Jake hadn’t called on God for a long while, other than to take His name in vain. But he prayed now. Not for the wolf, but the girl. It was going to half kill her if Lobo died.
Jake’s knife tip scraped the lead. Cautiously, he inched the mass upward. At last, the ball came free of the mangled flesh and kerplunked on the dusty wood floor.
Working quickly, Jake folded the remains of his shirt and clamped it over the wound. He held the pressure for a while in hopes he could stop the bleeding. The wolf was still alive, which in itself was unbelievable. Now that Jake had examined the wound more closely, he knew there was no hope. Most of one shoulder was gone. If Lobo lived, he’d be badly crippled. It would be kinder to let him go.
So why was he doing this? At best, he’d give Indigo hope where there was none. A glance at her face answered that question. Her blue eyes were huge and frightened, pleading with him to save her pet. Jake tried to remember being her age, and only one thing came clear. At nineteen, he had still believed in miracles. It wasn’t up to him to disillusion her. Life would do that soon enough.
“I-Is he g-going to die?” she asked in a shrill voice.
“I don’t know, sweetheart. It doesn’t look good.”
She laid a tremulous hand on Lobo’s head again. “He can’t die, he just can’t. Lobo? Do you hear me, my friend? You can’t die. You can’t leave me . . .”
Using the strip of wool, Jake bound the wound, then moved back to the window and left her to her grief. What he heard made him feel sick. He wished she would wail and sob. Anything would be better than those heartfelt whispers and shaky pleas. He couldn’t imagine loving anything that much, and the realization made him feel hollow.
He scanned the hillside and tried not to think. It was a time for craziness, he supposed. The feeling that he no longer knew himself or what he wanted, that his life was missing something vital, was a product of the madness. You’ve despised him all your life, and now you’ve become just like him.
As those endless minutes stretched into an hour, her whispers abated, and she slumped against the wall, holding a vigil that Jake knew would end in her pet’s death. He regretted that, but right now, his main concern had to be getting her out of here. He kept seeing her, arms stretched skyward before she lay on her side. Had that bullet missed its mark?
The thought terrified Jake. All he had on him was a stinking knife. Why in hell hadn’t he brought a rifle? And where were the horses? If that bastard walked up to a window and started blasting, Jake couldn’t put up much of a defense with nothing but a three-inch knife blade as a weapon.
He peered at the hilltop. The sun had dropped. They didn’t have much daylight left. Two hours, possibly three. What if he couldn’t find the horses?
“Indigo, can we make it back on foot before dark?”
A shadow that blended with shadows, she stirred slightly. “We can’t move Lobo.”
Jake’s gaze slid to the wolf. Didn’t she understand that there was no hope? “Honey, we can’t stay here with him.” The time had finally come to tell her of his suspicions. “I think that bullet might have been meant for you.”
She drew a sharp breath, clearly appalled. Then she looked at the wolf. “If Lobo dies, I’ll wish it’d hit me.”
Jake could only stare at her. “You don’t mean that.”
“Yes.”
He combed his fingers through his hair, fighting down an unreasoning anger, not at her, but at that bastard on the hillside.
“Is there anyone you know of who might try to shoot you? Think hard, Indigo. Anyone at all?”
“No.” She moved again, a shadow in the gloom, her hair a dim glow around her shoulders. “I think whoever did it meant to hit—” Her voice cracked. “A lot of people hate Lobo. They’re afraid of him. He’s been shot at before. Whoever did it probably thought killing him would be funny.”
Funny. Jake felt as though he might vomit. As recently as yesterday, he might have shot the wolf himself. But he never would have done it knowing the animal was a pet. It was inconceivable to Jake that another man had. But it was easier to believe that than to think someone had meant to kill Indigo.
“Whoever did it took a big chance. If he had been a hair off, he would have hit you.”
“A good marksman is seldom off,” she replied. “If the bullet had been meant for me, it would have found me.”
Jake prayed she was right.
“I still think we ought to get out of here.”
“No,” she said simply. “I can’t leave Lobo.”
Jake swallowed. “Honey, he’s not going to make it. You know that.”
“He might. The bleeding’s stopped, I think. If we move him, it’ll start up again. He’ll die for sure.”
Jake propped an elbow on the filthy windowsill, planted a hand over his face, and sighed. “You can’t risk your life for a wolf, Indigo.”
“You say wolf as if it’s something dirty.”
“I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”
“No, but it’s how you feel. He’s different, not a dog, so you don’t like him.”
Jake sighed again. “I’m sure I would’ve come to like him, given time. But even if he were a dog, my vote would be the same. Your life is far more precious than an animal’s.”
“I’m different, too.” Her voice came to him in a thin whisper. “Lobo and I, we’re alike. I know you don’t understand, but we’re friends. Not ordinary friends, but special. You don’t leave your friend to die alone.”
“If he loves you as much as you love him, he’d want you to go. It might not be safe here.”
“And it might not be safe out there in those woods,” she came back. “The horses have run off. If someone meant the bullet for me, we could get shot going out there to look for them. We’re as safe here as anywhere, maybe safer. And—Lobo—he wouldn’t desert me, no matter what the danger. I won’t do less for him.”
Aside from her irrational loyalty to the wolf, she had a point. Jake kept his gaze riveted to the hillside. He considered searching for the horses, but what if the rifle-man came down to the shack while he was gone? More than likely, it was as she said, and she was in no danger. But that was a gamble Jake couldn’t take. He considered striking off for Wolf’s Landing to get help. He scotched that idea for the same reason.
“Who knows,” he whispered. “Maybe you’re right and staying put is the best idea. Your mother knew we planned to come back this wa
y. Maybe she’ll send someone out to look for us.”
“She won’t know where we stopped. The horses aren’t here.”
That was true. Jake slumped against the wall. Maybe, just maybe, luck would be with them. Maybe the bullet had been meant for Lobo. Maybe Loretta Wolf would send someone to find them, and the saddle would draw attention. Maybe the man who shot Lobo was miles away by now. Maybe everything would come out perfect.
It was one hell of a lot of maybes.
Chapter 6
BY MIDNIGHT, JAKE REALIZED HE HAD never understood the true meaning of the word endless. He measured the seconds by the muted and sluggish ticking of his pocket watch. The moon had surely frozen in one position. Even the wind had stopped blowing. Silence closed in around him, an awful, horrible silence that seemed to be waiting.
Jake had never been afraid of the dark, but tonight the moon-touched blackness of the woods seemed threatening. Though not a draft of air stirred, the shadows seemed to shift and move toward the shack. When he stared long enough at a shape, it took on the outline of a man. Sweat beaded at the nape of his neck and trickled down his spine. At times, his heart pounded so hard he felt sure it would beat its way through his ribs.
He kept seeing Loretta Wolf’s guileless blue eyes. She had trusted him to bring her daughter safely home. Now, here he sat, armed with nothing but a knife when a madman with a rifle might lurk nearby. One well-aimed shot would take him down. After that, Indigo would be on her own.
Behind him, she sat in rigid silence. She seemed aware of nothing but the wolf. Her stillness unnerved him. Maybe it was the Indian in her, but the way she grieved didn’t seem natural.
A cramp knifed up his thigh. He changed positions to ease it and accidentally thumped his boot on the floor. The sound seemed deafening. His arm brushed the grimy windowsill, and the dust filled his nostrils. Hunching his bare shoulders to ward off the cold, he kneaded his leg and stared at the hillside.
Sudden movement made him turn. Lobo, a silver-and-black wraith in the moonlight, shoved himself up with his uninjured foreleg. Golden eyes fixed on the window, he stretched his neck and let out a low howl that rose eerily to a mournful crescendo.
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