by Tess LeSue
Maybe eventually she’d come back west, she mused. If she found New York wasn’t for her . . . she could return to these parts as an independently wealthy woman. She could buy a patch of land all her own and forge a life for herself.
Or maybe not. Maybe New York would suit her. She’d see. She didn’t have to make any concrete decisions. She could just see which way the winds blew. . . .
“This is all your fault,” the Apache said, and she realized that while she’d been daydreaming, he’d been seething. “Every last bit of this is your fault.”
“I don’t see what you’re so het up about,” she observed, frowning. Sure, he was tangled up in this, but it wasn’t personal. It wasn’t like they couldn’t untangle him. Somehow . . .
“Oh, you don’t?” He sounded plenty steamed now. “You don’t understand why I’m het up? Look at me: I’m beat-up and blind, hijacked by a fame-hungry lady writer and Kennedy goddamn Voss, being dragged to San Francisco, where I’m going to be presented as some kind of prize . . . and you don’t understand why I’m het up?”
“Calm down, Apache; I know this is bad, but it could be worse.” The last time she’d seen him this cantankerous was back in the desert, right before he went down hard with the fever. Maybe he was sick again.
Although, to be fair, he had plenty of good reasons to be angry.
“Worse?” he sounded absolutely astonished.
“Yes. It could be much worse.”
“How?”
“You could actually be Deathrider. Imagine how he must be feeling. The Hunt is about him, not about you. And I don’t appreciate you blaming me for Voss. He hijacked you, not me. If you’re going to be angry at anyone, it should be him.”
“You’re the one who wrote all those books and got everyone stirred up about the Plague of the West—which is a terrible name by the way—and you’re the one who told the world Deathrider was a murderer and a child rapist and a kidnapper and a drinker of blood . . .” He was so furious now that he was speaking through clenched teeth.
“It’s not a terrible name,” Ava told him, all the while giving him soothing pats. At first she didn’t realize she was doing it, but even once she realized she was, she continued. He was clearly unwell. She needed to get him settled down. “Here, have some water.” She reached for the canteen.
“I don’t want water.”
“Of course you do.” She shoved the canteen into his hand. “Drink up.” She kept patting him. Her palm grazed his nipple through the shirt, and she felt it pucker. That unleashed the slow uncurling in her belly again, which made no sense, as they were in the middle of an argument.
“Stop that,” he snapped, meaning the patting. She’d felt him jump at her touch. She wondered if he was getting hard again. . . .
What a ridiculous thing to think in the middle of an argument, and with Kennedy Voss only a few yards away.
“You need to calm down, Apache. You’re getting yourself into a state.” It was good advice. Advice she needed to take herself, considering she was thinking about the hard lengths of his body again. . . .
“If you hadn’t written all those books, there wouldn’t be a Hunt,” the Apache continued, still fixated on the whole Hunt business.
“There might be.” She sighed and closed her eyes, leaning into him. He smelled good. Like sun-warmed cotton and something else . . . a nice sweaty smell. Masculine. She guessed it was just the smell of him.
“Stop hugging me,” he snapped.
“I’m not hugging you.” But she was. “I can’t help it. I’m just glad this is over.”
“It’s not over,” he all but shouted.
Voss turned to look at them. “What’s going on over there?” he called.
“He got stung by a wasp,” Ava called back, lying without batting an eye. “It seemed safer to say wasp than bee,” she told the Apache when Voss had gone back to shooting small animals. “I don’t even know if they have bees out here.”
“How do you know they have wasps?” he asked, completely exasperated.
“I guess I don’t.”
“You’re impossible,” he muttered.
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
She’d hoped he’d moved on from the Hunt nonsense, but he only waited a couple of moments before he returned to the topic.
“Nothing is over,” he said brusquely. “As far as I can see, we’re right in the thick of it. That maniac is going to get me killed.”
“He’s going to try.”
“So how is it over?”
“I didn’t mean that was over,” she clarified. “I meant my career was over.”
She was met with stunned silence.
“I know,” she commiserated. “It’s a shock.”
“What do you mean, your career is over?”
“I mean, I don’t want to do this anymore. Traipsing around the wilderness with maniacs. I don’t want to sleep rough, and almost die of thirst, and find lawyer-Apaches in the desert.”
“What Apaches?” He sounded bewildered.
“I don’t want to deal with men like Kennedy Voss anymore,” she said fiercely. “I don’t want to carry a gun, or worry about getting raped, or have to check my bedroll for scorpions. I hate scorpions.”
“Everyone hates scorpions.”
“I hate them more.”
“So what you’re saying is: now that you’ve successfully ruined all these lives, you’re going to give up ruining lives?”
“I do not ruin lives.” She was offended by that. But not enough to loosen her grip on him. Freckles had relaxed into a lazy gait, and the afternoon sun was making Ava somnolent. She leaned her cheek against the Apache’s back.
“Stop hugging me,” he said through gritted teeth.
“I’m not hugging you. I’m just holding on, so I don’t fall off.” She yawned.
“You get to walk away,” he said tightly, “but your victims don’t.”
“I don’t have victims,” she said sleepily. “I have subjects. And I only write about people who do things to get written about.”
There was a hoot as Voss managed to shoot himself a critter.
“Like him,” she said. “I only wrote about him because he did all those foul things. But not everyone I wrote about did foul things. Some of my books are about nice people. Like the widow Dell.”
“Look what I got! Ain’t that the biggest jackrabbit you’ve ever seen?” Voss was as excited as a boy by his catch.
Ava pulled away from the Apache as Voss came trotting toward them. She sighed. “I bet he’s going to make me skin that thing.”
She was right. He was.
“This is something else I’m not going to miss when I’m retired.”
19
WHY DO YOU do it?” the Apache asked her huskily.
It was late. Voss had roped them both up and staked them to the ground so they couldn’t get away while he slept. Dog had flopped by the Apache’s feet and was chasing rabbits in his sleep; he twitched and made soft growling sounds. They’d eaten their fill of the jackrabbit that Ava had cooked (badly) over the campfire and now had to sit there in their ropes and listen to Voss snore while he slept.
The stars filled the sky, so many glittering shards that there was hardly any darkness left between them. Ava was staring at the cloudy swirl of the constellations, wondering if she’d miss it when she was back in New York, when the Apache spoke.
“Why do you write the things you do?”
She turned her head to look at him. He wasn’t staring at the sky. He was blindfolded with the now-grimy strip of petticoat, his face as blank as a statue’s.
She felt a stab of melancholy as she looked at him. He was so battered and so far from home. She assumed he was far from home anyway. . . . She didn’t really know where his home was.
“Why did you run away?” he asked.
He had such a pretty mouth, she thought idly. It really did look like an archer’s bow turned on its side. Long, pointed, supple.
“How old are you?” she asked, curious. It was so hard to tell, considering the state of him.
“You haven’t answered my question.” He did that thing he did, where he talked right over her. It was incredibly annoying.
“I don’t know anything about you,” she said slowly. It was startling really. She felt connected to him after their ordeal—but actually she didn’t know anything about him at all. Not even his name. Which was her own fault; she was the one who’d said she didn’t want to know it. She wanted to know it now, she decided. Since they were stuck with each other. “What’s your name?”
“Why did you run away?” he repeated stubbornly, still talking over her.
“What’s your name?” Two could do stubbornness.
“I asked you first.”
She pulled a face at him. Not that he could see it. “I was young. I felt trapped.” That was skating around the truth though, wasn’t it? But what did it matter if this Apache knew? What did it matter if anyone knew?
Ava was surprised to find tears filling her eyes. Her nose prickled. Ah, she hated to cry. Especially tears of self-pity. But when was the last time anyone had asked her about herself? When was the last time she’d felt like telling anyone about herself? She could have died out here, and no one would have missed her or mourned her. . . .
Not even her own mother, who was three thousand miles away. Yvonne had been relieved to have Ava off her hands, and they’d never really seen eye to eye.
When you got right down to it, there was no one in the whole world who would miss Ava if anything happened to her. No one who really knew her.
She didn’t even have a dog. Even the Apache had a dog.
A thousand trivial things flooded her thoughts—all of the things nobody knew about her. Her favorite food, her favorite color, the fact that she loved the smell of coffee more than anything in the world. Nobody knew that she hated milk or that the she was allergic to cats. Nobody knew that babies made her feel deeply sad or that she loved rainy days. And nobody knew that having her feet rubbed made her melt into the floor with joy.
All of a sudden it mattered terribly that nobody knew any of these things about her. And it made her more willing to talk than she would have been otherwise.
“My mother had organized an arrangement for me,” she blurted. “With a man.” Ava remembered her rage at her mother. I’m not you, she’d shrieked at her, slamming doors and allowing herself to give into incandescent fury. And I don’t want to live like you. EVER!
“You didn’t want to get married?” the Apache asked.
“Did I say ‘marriage’? Not marriage. She’d organized an . . . arrangement . . . a . . . situation . . . for me.”
He’ll treat you kindly, her mother had said. She’d been genuinely astonished by Ava’s reaction. She’d been expecting gratitude. That was how little Yvonne Archer knew or understood her daughter. And he’ll buy you a house.
A house! What would she have wanted with a house? She was seventeen. She hadn’t wanted to keep house with an old man.
“As a servant?” the Apache prodded. “Is that what you mean by ‘situation’?”
“No, Apache. Not as a servant. As a mistress.” Ava felt the old heaviness in her stomach. “You know, a kept woman.” Time rolled back, and she felt seventeen again, full of the old disgust, the sinking fear. “He was thirty-five years older than me. He was a friend of my father’s.” She’d called him Uncle Geoffrey when she was a child. It was all too disgusting for words.
“Your father let this happen?” The Apache sounded appalled. Maybe they didn’t have mistresses in his tribe.
“He didn’t know. He’d stopped keeping my mother by then. He’d paid for the house and settled a bit of money on her, for her future. Not much. I guess he assumed she’d find someone else to keep her, even though she was in her forties by then, and he didn’t want to finance another man’s fun. His responsibilities to us were done.” She could feel the Apache’s confusion. “My parents weren’t married,” she told him bluntly. “I’m a bastard.”
There was a pause.
“My parents weren’t married either,” he said with a shrug.
Was he making fun of her? She examined him. He was still inscrutable. It was the blindfold. It made him near impossible to read.
“My father had two wives,” the Apache told her. His voice was deep, slow and smooth and calm. “But he never married my mother. He would have, but she wasn’t interested in being a third wife. And I don’t think she ever got over her husband—he died before she met my father.”
Ava didn’t know anything at all about Apaches, so she didn’t know if it was normal to have two wives plus a mistress. Because it sure sounded like the Apache’s mother had been a mistress. “Were they together a long time?” He’d used the past tense, so she assumed they weren’t together anymore.
“Until she died.”
“Oh.” She winced. “I’m sorry. About your mother.”
“It was a long time ago.” He sounded pragmatic. “So you ran away because of the old man? The one your mother tried to sell you to?”
“She didn’t try to sell me,” Ava laughed. “It wasn’t like that.”
“It sounds like that.”
“She wasn’t getting any money. She honestly thought it was best for me.”
“Better than marriage?”
Ava pulled a face. “No decent man would want a bastard like me. Not one of any consequence anyway. And Mother wasn’t interested in me marrying down.” Ava sighed. “She thought I’d have a better life being kept by a rich man than being married to a workingman. She always said that would wear me out. Nothing but babies and work. She didn’t raise me to scrub floors, she said. My mother was scared of poverty. She’d grown up terribly poor. It was only her beauty that got her out of it.” Ava had a vision of her mother sitting in front of the fire, brushing her thick brassy hair. She was like a classical painting come to life. A Titian. All white skin and dreamy expressions, her hair a blazing corona.
“But you didn’t want to be a mistress? Was it because he was old?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I just didn’t want it. The thought of it made me feel sick. I wanted . . . to be free.” She’d been so young. When she looked back, it was kind of astonishing how confident she’d been, how independent. She’d been so stupidly courageous—the kind of courage that belonged to the young and naïve. She’d had no idea how rough things could get. Well, she had an idea now.
“I answered your question,” she told the Apache. “Now you have to answer one of mine. What’s your name?”
“You said you didn’t care.”
“No, I said I wasn’t going to know you long enough to need to know it. Which has clearly not been true. If I’m stuck with you, I might as well know your name.”
A half smile crossed those archer’s bow lips. “My mother called me Nathaniel.”
“Nathaniel? That doesn’t sound like an Apache name.”
“It’s not. It’s white.”
“Would you two
shut up?” Voss barked from across the dying campfire. “I’m trying to sleep, and your yapping is keeping me up. I don’t give a shit about your names or who your mothers were sleeping with. Shut the hell up.”
“Apache,” she whispered after Voss had rolled over, “I’m sorry you got dragged into this mess.”
“Me too.”
“Shut the hell up!” Voss shouted. A handful of gravelly dirt came flying at them across the camp. Ava managed to dodge it, but it hit the Apache in the chest.
Dog barked.
“And shut that dog up, or I’ll shoot him!”
Ava heard the Apache say something to the dog in his own language. Dog settled again.
Ava maneuvered onto her side so she could watch the Apache.
Nathaniel. She wondered what his Apache name was. The firelight shivered on his implacable features. The swelling had gone down so much, she could really see the architecture of his face now. His nose had a wide bridge, and there were deep hollows under his high cheekbones. He was a striking-looking man. Not young but not old. Maybe thirty? Maybe older? She wished she could ask him more questions. Was he married? If so, did he have one wife, or two? Did he have a mistress?
They’d be lucky women . . .
Oh, listen to her. What on earth was she basing that on? His looks? The man was a near-total stranger. So he was quick-witted and lawyerly. So he’d shown her a little kindness. He’d also been surly and difficult, and he’d clearly annoyed people enough that they’d wanted to kill him. He could be as bad as Deathrider for all she knew. Honestly. Since when did a pretty face make her lose her judgment?
Since now.
It was just one more reason she needed to retire.
