by Tess LeSue
Ava herself was still asleep. Deathrider crept closer and sat awkwardly on the wooden chair next to the bed. The señora and her daughters had cleaned her up and dressed her in a white nightgown. Her leg was bandaged and propped up on a pillow.
She sure was pretty. Deathrider felt odd as he looked at her. The sun streamed through the lace curtains and fell in sweet patterns across her face. She had freckles, he saw, constellations of them. There was a sprinkling of dark moles too. He hadn’t noticed the freckles before—he guessed he’d been too distracted. Sitting here, in the morning stillness, he took the chance to study her. He’d been dying to know what she looked like; here was a chance to drink his fill. Wisps of flame-bright hair curled around her temples, and her eyebrows were a foxy red-brown, as were her eyelashes. Her skin seemed almost translucent, violet and shadowy under her eyes, and flushed with palest pink elsewhere. She was a unique blend of ethereal and earthy.
She looked younger as she slept, more vulnerable. He could imagine the girl she’d been at seventeen: a beauty packaged up to be passed off to some old man. A plaything, she’d said.
He took her hand, which rested on the quilt. It was rough and sun browned. Not the hand of a plaything. Her fingers curled around his when he touched her, and her eyes fluttered open. Her pupils were tiny.
“Hey,” he said softly. “How’s the leg?”
“What leg?”
She was still deep in a laudanum haze. He squeezed her hand.
“Your eyes are so . . . beautiful,” she breathed.
He flushed. How did she always manage to take him by surprise? He never knew what she was going to say. It was disconcerting.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “Isn’t that silly? I knew your eyes were pale, but no one ever said how beautiful they are.”
“Maybe most people don’t think they’re beautiful,” he said, embarrassed.
She made a dismissive noise. “It’s not an opinion. It’s a fact.” She let out a dreamy sigh. “I’ve wanted to meet you for the longest time.”
He felt awkward as hell. “You should probably stop talking now,” he said. “You’re drugged up. When you come to your senses you might regret saying all this.”
“No,” she said vehemently, “I won’t.”
Her eyes were so dark against her freckled skin. Fierce and soft all at once.
“I was scared you’d be killed before I met you,” she admitted, and to his horror, her eyes filled with tears.
“Now that you’ve met me, I guess it doesn’t matter if I get killed,” he joked. Then he watched, even more horrified, as she started sobbing.
“You didn’t do any of those things, did you?” she cried.
“Hey,” he protested. “Don’t cry.” He didn’t know what to do with crying women. He didn’t have much experience with them. What did you do? He took a leaf out of her book and started patting her.
But she just cried harder. “I don’t think you raped Susannah Fuller,” she said.
“I didn’t,” he agreed. “I told you that.”
“Or kidnapped that boy.”
“I rescued that boy,” he told her. “His mother is one of my greatest admirers. Which she certainly wouldn’t be if I’d kidnapped him.”
“And the shoot-out in Fort Kearney?”
“Wasn’t my fault. Some kid took into his head to kill me. He wanted me as some kind of trophy.”
“Was that because of my books?” she asked miserably.
Hell, Deathrider thought. He’d wanted to find A.A. Archer and punish her—now he’d found her, and she was taking all of the pleasure out of things by punishing herself.
“Yes, sweetheart,” he sighed, “it was because of your books. As was the idiot in Independence who wanted to kill me, and the one in the Sierras, and the pair on the Siskiyou Trail. And all the other idiots over all the years—they all wanted to kill me because of your books.”
“I saw all your scars,” she whispered. “Those were all because of me too, weren’t they?”
Deathrider’s stomach clenched as he remembered her bathing him. She had seen all his scars. Up close.
He reached out and ran a finger down her cheek. “It’s a shame we didn’t get to meet in other circumstances, sweetheart,” he said softly. “I reckon we could have had some fun, you and me.” Because she was some kind of woman. Nothing like he’d expected. And like no other woman he’d ever met before. And he would have damn well liked to have tried that bath again . . . albeit with a different ending this time. . . .
“The thing is, you’re so . . . nice,” she marveled. Her big dark eyes searched his. “I didn’t expect that. For you to be so nice.”
“No one’s ever called me nice before,” he admitted. “I’m not sure I like it. Nice isn’t manly.”
“It is,” she disagreed. And then she was sobbing again, in earnest.
He brushed her hair back from her forehead. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. You’re fine. It’s just the pain and the medicine and all the excitement. A good night’s sleep will fix everything.”
She shook her head. “No, it won’t. I’ve made a horrible mess of things.” She pulled his hand toward her, pressing it to her cheek. Her gaze was full of misery.
“You have,” he agreed. “A god-awful mess. The worst mess I’ve ever seen firsthand.”
She frowned. “That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“No, I imagine it wouldn’t.”
“I want to fix it,” she whispered.
It was the oddest thing, but every word she spoke was like an arrow shooting straight into him. He’d never thought to hear Ava Archer say those words. It never occurred to him that she would want to say those words.
It was probably the laudanum talking. That was all. Tomorrow she’d wake up and be straight back to the bloodless wielder of a poison pen. She’d write an account of the past few weeks that would include him ravishing some damsels, kidnapping some innocents, shooting up a town or two and maybe terrorizing some kittens.
“Nathaniel?” she said, and there were still fat tears rolling down her freckled cheeks. “I’m so very sorry. For all of it. I didn’t know . . . I never thought of you as a real person. Not until I met you.”
That seemed true enough.
“Please tell me how to fix it,” she begged.
He gave a startled laugh, and there was more than a little bitterness in it. “No, sweetheart. You broke it; you fix it. It’s not my job to find a solution to this mess. You clean up your own mess.”
She bit her lip. Then she nodded. “I will.” A fierce look came over her face. “I will. I promise.”
He pulled his hand out of her grasp.
“Please don’t go,” she hiccupped. For a moment he thought she knew he was planning to ride out, but then he realized she just meant don’t leave the bedroom. “Stay with me for a bit?” she asked.
He nodded. “Just for a bit.”
Goddamn, it was hard to leave her. It didn’t make any sense at all.
“I’ll wait until you go to sleep,” he said hoarsely.
“Thank you.” She startled him then by trying to sit up.
“What are you doing? You’re supposed to be sleeping.”
“I will. There’s just something I want to do first.”
“What?”
“This.” She threw her arms around him and pulled him into a tight embrace. He felt the press of her breasts against his chest and the feel of her cheek against his neck. “I’m sorry, Nathaniel,” she whispered into his ear. “I’m so, so sorry.”
He didn’t know what to do. Her body felt wonderful; her words even more so. “Sorry” didn’t fix anything at all, but it still felt good to hear. He wrapped his arms around her in return, dropping his chin against her head.
“I’m sorry too,” he sighed. He didn’t know what for
. Just for the whole sorry mess of life, really. For the fact that things could never be simple. For the way her body felt against his, and the way she made him laugh; and for the fact that they’d saved each other and doomed each other, and saved each other again; and because this had to be an ending and not a beginning.
She pulled back and stared up at him, her eyes liquid and her downturned mouth pouty from crying. She gave a hitching sigh. He watched hypnotized as she slid toward him and pressed her mouth to his.
He shouldn’t let her. She wasn’t in her right mind; she couldn’t know what she was doing. He froze, knowing he should push her away. But she felt so good. Her mouth was warm on his, and she melted into him, her hand sliding up the nape of his neck, under the hat, and into his hair. He fell into her kiss headlong, surrendering to her. She led the kiss, deepening it, her tongue slipping against his lips, teasing them open. His hands curled into fists against the small of her back as her tongue slid into his mouth gently. Desire curled through him slowly, like a summer breeze. It was lazy and sweet and like nothing he’d felt before. There was no ferocity. It was a slow drowning. Lethal in its subtlety. Too gentle to fight against, too intense to resist.
When she finally pulled away, he was dazed.
She fell back against the pillows, her brown eyes hazy, and her lips swollen. She looked rumpled and sexy as hell—it took every ounce of his self-control not to climb into that bed with her.
He was breathing hard, like he’d run a mile.
She smiled, a dreamy, sleepy smile. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she murmured. Her eyes were slipping closed.
It was morning, he thought dumbly.
“Nathaniel Rides with Death,” she sighed. “Magnificent.” And then she slid off into slumber, leaving him sitting alone on the hard wooden chair next to the bed, reeling.
She was incandescently beautiful against the white sheets, her hair aflame in the morning sun, a smile on her pouty mouth, the tracks of her tears still visible on her pink-flushed cheeks.
That was his last memory of her. A few minutes later he crept out, knowing he would never see her again. By the time she woke, he would have rescued Micah, and the two of them would have left this whole sorry mess behind. And Ava Archer would be part of his past, someone he’d known in another time and place.
Someone he would never, ever forget.
24
Fort Laramie, Wyoming, ten months later
AVA ARRIVED IN Fort Laramie at the height of summer, riding in with the cavalry reinforcements. By then she was one of the boys, and she’d managed to crawl out of the worst of her black mood. She and Freckles had ambled along with the column for months on the way out from California, watching the winds chase through the prairie grasses, marveling at the herds of buffalo, listening to the boyish banter of the men. Ava had come to Laramie to see the greatest gathering of Indian tribes in human history, and the signing of their treaty with the United States government. If the Indians signed the treaty, which no one was at all sure would happen.
Ava had been in San Diego when word of the Great Treaty had gone around, and she hadn’t been able to resist tagging along with the army reinforcements. It was a long journey to Fort Laramie, but what else was she going to do? She was avoiding San Francisco, because that ridiculous Hunt was still on, even though it had lost its urgency. It had all been a bit of a disappointment in the end. A lot of showmanship with no show at the end of it. Once Ortiz had turned up in October with his false Deathrider, only to meet with LeFoy’s scorn, people realized that the game wasn’t going to be easily cheated. Word went out fast that LeFoy knew the Plague of the West and could spot a fake a mile off. That stopped the trade in false Deathriders in its tracks. And no one could seem to catch the real one. There were plenty of rumors about both him and his redheaded whore, but no one could find either one of them.
“Do you think there ever was a whore?” Ava had asked Becky when they’d first reached San Diego, where they planned to lie low for a while. She’d been starting to have her doubts. Deathrider had never mentioned the whore, and she’d seen no sign of the woman in her time on the Hunt. The woman seemed more myth than reality.
“Of course there was a whore,” Becky scoffed. “Everyone in Mariposa saw her.” Becky launched eagerly into the subject. She could talk endlessly about the Hunt and all of the characters connected to it. It was her raging obsession. “Besides, I knew Seline. She was with us in Matt Slater’s wagon train. She and Deathrider were great friends.”
“What?” Ava had been astonished. “You never told me that!” She was horrified. That meant Deathrider—Nathaniel—had known the whore for years. It meant that it wasn’t a casual relationship . . . which meant . . . Oh hell, who knew what it meant, except that it hurt like blazes to think about?
Was that where he’d gone after he’d left Ava? To find the whore? The thought made Ava sick with jealousy.
“Seline was nice,” Becky said. “She had orange hair. Not red like yours, actual orange. I think she dyed it. She was the most amazing cook.”
Ava scowled. She herself was a terrible cook.
“She was the type men fall all over themselves for. You know the kind. Tall. Striking. Big boobs. Obvious.”
Ava looked down at her own chest, which was modest. Becky’s words haunted her. Visions of a big-breasted redhead draped all over Deathrider tortured her for months. She’d stopped asking Becky questions about the whore, and about Deathrider; she’d discovered the details were just too painful.
She left Becky and Lord Whatsit back in San Diego when she headed out with the cavalry. The pair of them was still hatching plans to win the Hunt, with or without Deathrider, and had no interest in joining her on her new adventure.
“I didn’t like Laramie the first time around,” Becky sniffed, “and I don’t see any reason to go confirm my dislike of the place. Besides, Jussy and I have a plan.”
The latest plan seemed to include LeFoy. Becky thought he’d be open to throwing the competition Becky’s way, so long as he got a cut of the winnings.
“All we need is for him to say we got the right Indian,” Becky said. “Which I reckon he’d do, if he could make a profit out of it. He’s not pure.”
He certainly wasn’t.
Ava was tired of talking about the Hunt. She’d lain low since Deathrider had run off, and she didn’t fancy being caught up with Voss and those killers again. The whole thing made her feel tired and dirty. And as guilty as all hell.
Ava had left Becky and Lord Whatsit to their planning and decided to go and see the spectacle of the treaty instead. It would get her away from California and the Hunt, and it would save her from her indecision. What else was she going to do? Catch a ship back to New York?
She’d tried that. It hadn’t worked. She’d bought a ticket, twice, on two separate ships, but when the day came to board, she couldn’t make herself go. The thought of going back east filled her with dread. Both times she’d stayed in her hotel room, watching out the window as the ship she was supposed to be on pulled anchor and sailed away without her. There was nothing for her back east. Nothing she wanted.
Now and then she thought of her mother with a vague sense of unease. There was unfinished business there. One day she would have to return . . . but she couldn’t face it just yet.
But Ava didn’t know what she wanted anymore. She’d fallen into a deep dark hole in the months following her adventures with Deathrider. Her gunshot wound had festered, and she’d succumbed to infection and raging fevers. She’d been laid up at the Torres ranch for more than three months. A couple of times they’d even thought she was going to die. Becky had stayed with her through it all, helping Señora Torres to nurse her and talking her through the worst of her delirium. When Ava had finally surfaced, she’d been weak and shaken. And she hadn’t quite found her feet since. She was thinner, paler and more uncertain.
; Not least of all because while she was sick, he’d left her. She wasn’t sure when . . . Her illness had been long and disorienting. But according to Becky he’d been out the door the day they got to the ranch.
Hearing that cut Ava to the quick.
She often woke from her dreams, reaching for Deathrider. Nathaniel. But he was never there. And after a while, she had the oddest feeling that perhaps she’d dreamed him up . . . that perhaps he’d never really been there at all. . . .
The Ghost of the Trails . . .
While Ava had been sick, Lord Whatsit had ridden off a few times, looking for Deathrider. He never found him, although he did find his Arab not far from the ranch. That soothed his fury at “the damn Indian,” as he’d taken to calling him. Lord Whatsit loved that horse. He’d been hanging mad when he’d discovered it was gone from the padre’s stable; Becky had been sure he would shoot Deathrider for a horse thief if he ever found him.
By the time Ava was finally healing, it was early winter, and the Hunt had well and truly moved on. The Hunters were up north, according to the rumors, sweeping through the gold towns, following whispers about the whore being seen back in Moke Hill. They thought wherever the whore was, Deathrider was sure to follow. The thought made Ava irritable.
Laramie was a way to escape the constant rumors, to try to leave the past behind her. It was a distraction, one that required long days in the saddle and a lot of physical exertion that wore her out. She figured that maybe if she got herself tired enough, she’d be able to sleep peacefully and not dream about him.
The farther she got from California, the more the past year seemed like a fever dream. The trail was as hard to ride as she remembered, but it was slightly more pleasant than last time because of the pretty spring weather. Last time this stretch had come at the end of the trail, when she was already exhausted, and it had been searing late summer; the travails of the Lava Lands and the other desolate stretches of trail had been nightmarish. This time the slightly cooler days and nights helped enormously, as did being fresher in the saddle.
