Child Bride

by Suzanne Forster

  As soon as he’d disappeared from Annie’s sight, she felt a tug of fear and indecision. What if something happened to him? He could be hurt, or killed. A sense of dread overwhelmed her as she realized how helpless she was to do anything. What would she do if he died? No matter what had happened between them, he was still everything, her whole life.

  And then, in the wake of her rising horror, the anger came tumbling back. And the tears. Caustic, burning tears. Damn Chase Beaudine anyway, she thought, knuckling the wetness away from her eyes. Damn him straight to the hinges of hell. He’d tossed her out of his life like damaged goods, and now he expected her to stand here and passively wait for him, wondering if he was going to live or die? No, she wouldn’t do that. She couldn’t. No woman could be expected to worry herself sick over a man who had just torn her heart from her body. That was too much. That was torture.

  She found her tennis shoes underneath the sleeping bag and slipped them on as she tried to think what to do. More than anything she needed distance. She just wanted to get away from this place where heartache burned in the very air she breathed.

  The horses nickered softly as she approached them, and Shadow roused from where he was sleeping. Annie knelt next to the dog, explaining to him that he couldn’t come with her as she studied the saddles that Chase had thrown over a fallen birch tree the previous night. They looked as if they weighed almost as much as she did, and though Annie had never ridden bareback, it appeared that she had no other choice.

  Untying the mare, she led her to the birch tree and used it as a step to climb aboard. Moments later, after several awkward tries, she was on the horse’s wide, warm back, clinging to her halter and praying the animal knew the way back to the cabin.

  The sun was breaking over the hills as Annie’s mount veered from the path and set off across a meadow that looked vaguely familiar to her. She gave the horse its head, hoping the detour they were taking meant they were nearing the cabin.

  Her legs ached from gripping the animal’s ample girth, and her hands and arms were stiff from hanging on for dear life. There were other parts of her aching, too, but they had nothing to do with horseback riding. Her throat muscles felt bruised and sore from locking off wave after wave of sadness. And in another, deeper part of her body, she felt pried open and vulnerable in an entirely new way.

  The twinges of tenderness reminded her of what she and Chase had done last night. And of how much she had loved the deep thrill of having him inside her. She had loved it so much, she was sure another man could never satisfy her now, and not simply because of physical proportions. Chase had been determined to give her more pleasure than pain, even if it meant sacrificing his own needs. He’d held back when she’d begged him not to because he’d known it wasn’t time. Only when she was ready for the fullness of the act had he given in to her pleas.

  He had ruined her for any other man, she thought, closing her eyes at the sharp spasm of pleasure. She would ache for him the rest of her life.

  A low whirring of sound pulled her out of her troubled reflections. The mare’s ears pricked, and suddenly she was moving faster, as though she’d heard the noise, too, and recognized it. As they crashed through a thicket of thimbleberries, Chase’s small cabin appeared in the clearing ahead. The windmill that powered the water pump and generator was cranking around in the breeze.

  Annie had to fight back tears of relief. She hadn’t felt so grateful in a long time as she was to see that small, forlorn cabin nestled up against the hills. It looked and felt like home, though she knew she couldn’t let herself think in those terms any longer.

  After leaving the mare in her stall with fresh water and a bucket of oats, Annie headed for the house. The first thing she wanted was a long shower, as piping hot as she could get the water. Then maybe she could figure out what to do with the rest of her life.

  Her spirits lifted a little as she bounded up the front steps, but the minute she opened the door and walked in, she knew something was wrong. There was a stillness in the room, a pulsing presence that told her she wasn’t alone.

  “Is someone here?” she said, halting midstride as a shadow loomed behind her. “Who is it?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question.”

  The man’s voice had a harsh resonance that brought gooseflesh to Annie’s forearms. She whirled, and caught a quick impression of the intruder in the shadows thrown by the open door. She couldn’t see him clearly, but he looked to be at least as tall as Chase. Darkness, that was the word that struck her as she tried to discern his features. The image of a black jungle cat flashed into her mind as she caught the glint of his obsidian eyes, and the long, dark hair flowing down his back.

  “Where’s Chase Beaudine?” he asked. “And what are you doing in his place?”

  It hit Annie all at once who he was. Who he had to be! The rustler everyone was stalking. Bad Luck Jack.

  “Chase isn’t here,” she said, stalling for time. She was already envisioning herself being taken as a hostage if she didn’t come up with some way out of the situation. There wasn’t any point in trying to get past him and out the door, but there might be a way to outsmart him.

  “Where is he?” the man asked.

  She let her eyes dart nervously toward the bedroom door. “I don’t know,” she said, sharpening her voice. “He’s gone, that’s all. I don’t expect him back for some time. Days maybe.”

  She glanced again at the bedroom.

  “Somebody in there?” He nodded toward the doorway.

  “No,” Annie said emphatically.

  The man looked from the door to her and back again, then motioned her toward the room. “Let’s check it out. You first.”

  Annie’s pulse was throbbing in her forehead as she halted in the bedroom doorway. “There’s no one in there,” she insisted. “He’s gone.”

  The intruder pushed her over the threshold none too gently and entered the room behind her. “What’s that?” he asked, spotting the vault door immediately.

  “Nothing, a back entrance—”

  “Open it.”

  Moments later they were in the tunnel, Annie leading the way after lighting one of the rusty kerosene lanterns that had hung on the kitchen wall. The man behind her said nothing as they cut through the musky darkness; he just kept prodding her forward.

  Once they’d entered the small open cavern, Annie hesitated to let him check out the area. As his eyes roamed the walls, she began to inch away from him, trying to hold the lantern steady so he wouldn’t notice. “Look out!” she cried, hoping it would throw him off-balance as she ducked into the nearest tunnel and snuffed out the lantern.

  She heard him stumble forward, and then came the sound she’d been waiting for: a harsh shout of surprise and the teeth-rattling thud of a large body colliding against hard clay. He’d fallen into the pit. Annie fumbled to find her matches and relight the lantern in the pitch-blackness. Once she had the wick glowing again, she approached the pit with great caution.

  Her victim was sitting on the clay floor, rubbing the knee of his jeans, which was ripped out. She thought he seemed rather subdued until he glanced up. The luminous glare of his eyes froze her like a blinded animal. Lord, he did look like a jungle cat. “Who are you?” she asked. “Bad Luck Jack?”

  His eyes narrowed as he stared up at her, and then a faint smile transformed his features into something a little less terrifying. “I have had better luck,” he said. “But no, that’s not my name. I’m Johnny Starhawk, an old friend of Chase’s.”

  “You’re who?” Shock crashed through Annie. He couldn’t be Johnny Starhawk. She’d met the man in Costa Brava. He’d worn fatigues, aviator sunglasses, and the short-cropped hair of a marine. This man’s hair was a flying mane that fell below his shoulder blades, and now that she could see him clearly, she realized he had a strip of rawhide tied around his forehead. He looked like a renegade Indian. But hadn’t Chase said Johnny was a prominent lawyer?

  She held out the lant
ern, peering down at the sensual arc of his cheekbones, the hard, flaring jaw and tawny skin. An irreverent thought entered her mind. Johnny Starhawk was gorgeous, she realized, smothering a quick smile. Too bad she was already in love.

  “Chase left me an urgent message.” He continued to rub his knee as he stared up at her. “Why do I have the feeling it has something to do with you?”

  “Maybe I should explain,” Annie suggested. She started with profuse apologies, hastening to add that she’d taken him for a rustler who’d escaped custody, and then informing him that she’d already met him once, five years before. “Do I look at all familiar?” she asked, holding the lantern up to her face.

  “I could take a better look if you got me out of here.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” She glanced around the cavern, realizing she had no idea how to get him out. “Chase has a rope ladder, but I don’t know where he keeps it.”

  “Forget that for now,” Johnny said, staring up at her as though he might be remembering. “You said we met?”

  “Yes, in Costa Brava. I could tell you how it happened—”

  “Please do.”

  Annie decided she rather liked the dry forbearance in his tone. The Indians she’d known in Costa Brava, though primitive by American standards, had been a very gentle people. This man looked anything but gentle, yet there seemed to be a streak of charm hidden under the pantherish darkness. Still, she was rather glad she had no way to get him out of the pit. It felt a little safer with the big cat in his cage.

  There was a sensual indolence in the way he rested his head against the wall of the pit, watching her as though he was waiting for the games to begin. Annie found herself talking quickly, urgently, as she recounted the details of their rendezvous on the way to the border. She described the jeep Chase was driving, the clothing they wore, Chase’s knife wound and bouts of delirium. By the time she’d finished, Johnny had risen to his feet, and his expression had transformed from dispassion to rapt disbelief. “You don’t remember me, do you?” she said, sharply disappointed.

  “I feel like I’m staring at a ghost.” He searched out the details of her face through the murkiness. “So you’re the kid Chase married? Annie ... Was that your name?”

  “Yes.” The word shook on her lips. Emotion roiled up inside her so suddenly, she couldn’t control it. Tears sprang to her eyes, and her taut facial muscles crumbled with relief. She knew he must think she was crazy, a woman gone completely out of her mind, but he was the first person to recognize her. He’d actually said her name, and that simple acknowledgment felt like an affirmation of her existence.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m Annie—Annie Wells.” Mingled with the joy, the pain, the shaking relief, Annie had the oddest sense of being given the right to reclaim her identity and her life, of being reborn in some way. “Forgive me,” she said, profoundly embarrassed. “I was just so afraid you wouldn’t remember me, that no one would ever remember me again.”

  “Nothing to forgive.” He waited a moment, studying his hands, respectful of her need to recover privately. “We found Chase unconscious in the jeep after it went over the embankment,” he said quietly, “but you’d been thrown free. All we ever found was one of your shoes, floating on the river.”

  “I know. Chase thought I was dead all these years.”

  “I’ll bet you gave him one hell of a surprise.”

  “Yes. I did.” Annie’s smile went crooked. She could feel tears threatening again, and she fought them back, determined not to embarrass herself any further. But she couldn’t stop the sigh that welled up when she spoke. “Chase doesn’t remember me. Or anything that happened between us down there. He wants the marriage ... dissolved.”

  Johnny studied her. “And you don’t, right?”

  “I love him,” she said, the words tight, aching. “I guess it shows, huh?”

  “You can’t even say his name without sounding like you’re praying. Yes, it shows, Annie. What’s going on?”

  Annie needed very little encouragement to pour out the whole sad story. Somehow she held her hurt and anger in check as she gave Johnny Starhawk a blow-by-blow account of the chaos that had erupted since she’d arrived. But the more she talked, the more she realized anew how thoroughly she’d disrupted Chase’s life. “I guess it’s no wonder he wants me gone,” she said. “I’ve brought him nothing but misery. He said so himself.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Johnny said, grinning.

  “What do you mean?”

  As Johnny Starhawk registered the strange, changeless beauty of the child-woman hovering above him, the sweet suffering in her blue eyes, he couldn’t imagine how any man could resist her, even a hard case like Chase Beaudine. “No promises, Annie,” he said, “but I’ve got a couple of ideas on how to handle my ex-partner.”

  Eleven

  “FREEZE, BEAUDINE! You even blink, and I’ll shoot you where you look the biggest.”

  The harsh command came from just over Chase’s right shoulder. Chase hesitated in midstride, his boot crunching down on a chunk of broken glass. “You always were a lousy shot, Jack. Even with a life-size target.”

  “At this range I could blow your head off blindfolded.”

  Dead to rights, Chase thought, his lip curling with disgust as he surveyed the rotting innards of the mining shack. The bastard had caught him dead to rights. Jack must have seen him coming around the back of the cabin, snuck out the front, and come up behind him. Chase considered some kind of countermove, like going for the rustler’s gun. But Jack did have a point. Even he couldn’t be expected to miss at such close range.

  “Drop the bullwhip, Beaudine.” Two sharp clicks sounded as Jack slammed a shell into the chamber of the bolt-action rifle.

  Chase released his clenched fist, letting the bullwhip drop to the floor.

  “How’d you know I had a stash buried up here?” Jack asked.

  “A hunch,” Chase said. “You know how that is,

  Jack.” As he spoke, Chase noted the shattered glass on the floor of the shack, as if someone had thrown a bottle against the wall. A gaping hole in the shack’s floorboards revealed a corroded metal box stuffed with paper money. Now where the hell would a dumb brute like Jack get all that filthy lucre? he wondered.

  “As I recall,” Chase said evenly, “you had fresh dirt on your boots the last time I hauled you in. Dust is one thing. Fresh dirt, that’s another. That means somebody’s done some digging.”

  “You’re too smart for your own damn good, Beaudine.” The rustler’s voice cracked with edgy laughter. “Which is why I’m going to have to do something I’m already beginning to regret. I’m going to have to pump some lead into that skull of yours. Slow you down a little. Give us less fortunate folks a chance.”

  The tendons of Chase’s neck stiffened as Jack spoke. The rustler might be dumb, but he was plenty vicious enough to commit cold-blooded murder. “You don’t want a homicide rap on your hands, Jack. There’s no percentage in that.”

  “Depends on who’s doing the calculating. You see, what I don’t want is to get caught again. I’m getting real sick of that. It’s startin’ to eat away at me.”

  As Jack began an embittered analysis of the various and sundry times that Chase had apprehended him, Chase himself came to an unsettling awareness. The information filtered back to him from the tension in his fists and the sledgehammer blows of his heart. It burned along his nerve endings, galvanizing his thoughts and awakening him to an insight so fundamental, he wondered why he’d never experienced it before. He didn’t want to die. Not on this misty summer morning, and not for a very long time if he could arrange it.

  It wasn’t fear triggering the insight. He’d stared into the eyes of death plenty of times, but never with such a keen sense of needing to survive, of wanting to beat the odds. Now, with a gun at his back, he didn’t have the time—or the inclination—to examine the reasons, he just knew there was something he had to keep breathing for. The future seemed to be beckoning to
him, holding out some crazy promise of happiness.

  It almost made him dizzy, that eerie feeling of destiny. He felt as if he’d been given a glimpse of his own fate. And on the heels of that realization came the unavoidable “reason” for his reawakening. A mental fanfare of trumpets announced her name: Annie.

  He moaned. Annie? She was the reason he wanted to keep on breathing? The woman was his hanging judge, his jury. She’d made his life a living hell. But even as he tried to convince himself that she wasn’t his manifest destiny, he could feel the truth crowding in on him, strangling all his objections.

  Annie Wells was a bottle of bad liquor he couldn’t keep corked, but God help him, he couldn’t stand the thought of never seeing her again. He might as well be dead as live with that kind of emptiness.

  A gun barrel nudged Chase’s shoulder. “Beaudine? Are you listening to me?”

  “So help me, God, I didn’t hear a word you said. Jack. I was thinking about a woman.”

  “A woman? At a time like this? Hell, you need a bullet in the head.”

  Cold metal dug into the base of Chase’s skull. The deadly soft click of the rifle’s hammer exploded in his mind. He lashed back savagely with his bootheel, landing a blow to the rustler’s shins. A shot rang out as Jack stumbled backward, firing wildly. Chase dropped, hitting the dust and grabbing for his whip at the same time. He wrapped the rawhide thong around Jack’s legs so many times, Jack toppled like a piece of rotten timber.

  “Looks like your streak is over,” said Chase, scooping up the gun the rustler dropped and aiming it at his heaving chest. “I ought to be pissed at you, Jack. Hell, I ought to empty this rifle into your black heart ... but I’m just not in the mood. Take a gander at me,” Chase said, giving in to a roguish smile that would not be subdued. “You’re looking at a man with a future, Jack, and that’s the only blessed reason you’re alive.”