The Bond Unbroken

by Bond unbroken (NCP) (lit)

His hair, the color of rich oak, was streaked by golden highlights that women in her time paid a fortune to achieve. Perspiration dampened curls fell forward onto his forehead, and she had to quell the purely instinctive desire to walk over, reach up, and smooth them back. Katlin had the uncanny sensation of having done so many times in the past, even though she had never set eyes on the man until today. He was in need of a shave, but on him, the slightly beyond five o'clock shadow look that many men in her time sported by design was incredibly sexy.

  She had his gun, her gun, and Bart. Katlin also knew for the first time in her life she was with a man who posed a very real threat to all her carefully built up defenses.

  "This is not good," she groaned inwardly.

  Mitch had been watching her carefully, attempting to detect even the smallest flicker of emotion that might give him a clue as to what she was thinking. For all she gave away, her mind could be completely blank. For a fleeting instant, he found himself comparing her to his friend, Ben Thompson, who was not only known as a professional gambler but also for his reputation as an emotionless, ruthless, gunfighter. "They'd make one hell of a pair," he couldn't help thinking. He was also shocked by the sudden anger that clenched at his gut by the mere thought.

  Deciding the next call was hers, Mitch lowered himself to the ground, leaned back against the boulder, and reached into his pocket.

  The hell hound sprang to his feet with a growl.

  "Even a man facing a firing squad is entitled to a last smoke," he said, looking up at her.

  "It's your coffin," she replied with rueful a shake of her head. His left eyebrow arched upward slightly as he looked up at her inquiringly.

  It suddenly dawned on Katlin that he didn't know if she was telling him to go ahead and smoke, or if she was threatening to shoot him if he did. The saying and the warning of the affects of smoking on the body hadn't come about until her own time.

  "Go ahead," she told him with an indifferent shrug of her shoulder as she holstered her revolver. "A Texas Ranger? You got any identification to prove that?"

  "You mean a letter or something from the Territorial Governor that says this man is a Texas Ranger and you can trust him?" he asked casually. Not expecting an answer, he continued, "Sorry, all I have is my badge and my word. That's usually enough for most folks," he added as he again reached into his pocket. His action moved aside his leather vest, giving Katlin a glimpse of the shiny silver star within a circle, easily recognizable as the badge of a Texas Ranger.

  He pulled a tobacco pouch and cigarette papers from his pocket, sprinkled a small amount of tobacco onto the paper, rolled it, and sealed it with the tip of his tongue. An action Katlin found absurdly erotic, compelling her wayward thoughts to wonder what that tongue would feel like against her skin. Katlin ruthlessly pulled her thoughts up short. What was happening to her? Had her unexpected jaunt through the time warp addled her senses in more ways than one?

  He was sitting with his back against the boulder, one arm resting across his bent knees. Katlin moved to stand directly in front of him, her hands on her hips, the toes of her boots nearly touching his. She wanted to believe him. Her instincts told her to believe him, but . . . .

  "Unfortunately, I'm not most folks," she insisted with quiet but deliberate firmness. "Whether I like it or not, when I helped you, I put myself in the middle of a situation I know nothing about."

  Mitch looked up at her. His eyes rose slowly, taking in all those exquisite curves packed into one petite little body, until they clashed hers. Still trying in vain to penetrate the expressionless mask he was beginning to find unnerving, he couldn't help wondering what there was about her life that had forced her to impose such rigid control upon herself. What bothered him was . . . why should he care? If he was right, the bushwhacking was a setup, and her purpose here was to find out how much he knew and to throw him off the trail of the killer. She more than likely had orders to kill him herself if he got too close.

  He began patting his pockets and muttered a curse under his breath. "My matches are in my saddle bag."

  Katlin glanced toward where his horse was grazing on the tall prairie grass beside her mare. Along with his saddle bags, he also had a rifle in the scabbard attached to his saddle. She reached into her pocket and retrieved the disposable lighter she had used to light the fire back at her camp and tossed it down to him. He caught it easily, then carefully examined it, a frown of puzzlement creasing his handsome features.

  Of course he wouldn't know what to do with it. Not only had he never seen anything like it, those child proof lighters were a pain in the ass for someone who did know what they were doing.

  She reached for the lighter, and he laid it upon her opened hand. The mere touch of his fingers against her palm sent an alarming tingle up her arm. She jerked her hand back, too quickly it would seem. The quirk of his eyebrow and the barely discernible twitch at the corner of his lips told her more clearly than words that she had betrayed her reaction to his touch.

  "Control McKinnen. Remember, you are the ‘Ice Princess’. Ice Princess hell. If she wasn't careful, the Ice Princess would melt into a huge puddle at his feet.

  She didn't dare take the deep controlling breath her lungs were screaming for, instead, she forced herself to calmly light the lighter and extend the flame toward him.

  He put the rolled cigarette to his lips with one hand, and, with the other, he deliberately cupped her hand with his palm to protect the flame. Again, their eyes met. Blue eyes held green eyes in a stand off, a silent battle of wills.

  When his cigarette was lit, she released the button, and the flame went out. She stepped back and returned the lighter to her pocket. "Talk, Cameron. Why did those men want you dead?"

  To say that Katlin's control was being stretched to the maximum of her endurance was putting it mildly. Then to glance over and see that LuChen Sing was now sitting not two feet away from them was almost her undoing.

  "Sing, damn it," she hissed through clenched teeth before she could stop herself.

  "Do you want me to talk, lady, or do you want me to sing?" Cameron asked softly with that infuriating quirk of his eyebrow. "Though I'd better warn you, my voice will probably set the hell hound to howling."

  Katlin realized Mitch Cameron couldn't see Sing, nor hear his merry outburst of laughter. "Don't talk to me, Katlin. He'll think you're crazy," Sing warned her breathlessly.

  "No shit," she thought to herself.

  "I heard that," Sing scolded with a chuckle.

  "That's it. For two cents I'll get on my horse, ride back to camp, go into a meditation, and pray to God that I'll wake up back in 2002."

  "Won't work, Little One," Sing told her, reading her thoughts. "Mitch Cameron told you the truth. He is a Texas Ranger. One of the good guys. You need him to accomplish what you've been sent here to do, and he needs your help. You can only accomplish what must be done together."

  As suddenly as he had appeared, poof, he was gone. And there sat Mitch Cameron, calmly smoking his cigarette, totally oblivious to the bizarre scene that had just taken place.

  If this was some great cosmic joke, Sing was right, she had lost her sense of humor. If it was a test, Katlin felt ill equipped to undertake the task that had been forced upon her. It had taken her years to create an impenetrable protective shield around herself, and, in the space of a few short hours, it had become no more than a brittle shell. She felt like Humpty Dumpty perched precariously upon a high wall. If she fell, that shell would shatter into so many pieces she'd never be able to put them back together again.

  Katlin closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and prayed for strength. Just like with the boulders, she received an immediate response to her request. Slowly, she could feel the uncharacteristic panic that held her in its numbing grip begin to recede, to be replaced by a strange sense of rightness about her situation. Up to this point, everything she'd experienced had a surrealistic quality about it, almost like she was really dreaming it all. That sensation was no
longer there. She felt focused, grounded, an actual part of the reality she was now in.

  Katlin McKinnen had never backed down from a challenge in her life, and she had no intentions of starting now. For what ever reason, she had been sent into the past to change something, to make a difference. Hopefully, once she had accomplished the task, she would be returned to her own time to personally witness the positive results of that change. . . or to face the consequences of the aftermath if she changed the wrong things. She could well imagine the resulting karma created by the latter scenario tossing her so far back in time she'd wind up with the original cave man to start all over again.

  Sing had warned her of that particular pitfall. She would just have to be very careful. What she had to do was accept her situation as the gift Sing considered it to be. She was simply taking her vacation one hundred and thirty-one years into the past, during a period in history which had always fascinated her. Why not make the best of it and enjoy herself?

  Sing claimed Mitch Cameron needed her help, that they would have to work together. For as long as she could remember, she had been a bit of a loner. A loner who had grown up to become self sufficient and independent. Someone who had struggled to prove to herself and to everyone else that she didn't need anyone. Now, as much as she hated to admit it, this man was her passport home.

  The next question was, how did she go about enlisting his aid and convincing him that he needed her help as well? To say that she was in unfamiliar territory, in more ways than one, was putting it mildly. Katlin supposed the first step would be to offer a gesture of trust.

  Mitch sat and watched the woman in front of him, struggling with his own set of perplexing emotions. He had considered that damnable control of hers a personal challenge, and now, as he watched, she appeared to go through some inner conflict. Her suddenly easy to read features betrayed such a wide range of emotions he couldn't keep up with them.

  The warmth of the smile that curved her lips and the unmistakable humor sparkling in the depths of the lovely green eyes that met and held his, literally took his breath away. Where before he had thought her gorgeous, he now realized that she was in fact the most stunningly beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her startling transformation began to nag at a memory he had buried deep in the recesses of his mind. It was there, just out of his reach, like an itch he couldn't quite get to. Had he seen her somewhere before? On a wanted poster maybe? He quickly discarded the thought. If he had only seen this woman's picture, he certainly wouldn't have forgotten it.

  His eyes were drawn to her hand as it reached for his Colt and closed around the pearlized grip. His quick silver instincts for self preservation that had kept him alive all these years should have had him tackling her before she could turn his own gun on him. Instead, he was unable to pull his eyes from the barrel of his pistol as it was slowly withdrawn from her tight britches. If anyone had told him the sight could be so incredibly erotic he'd have thought they were insane. As the Colt cleared the waistband, he realized he was sporting an erection that was just as stiff as the long barrel pointed at him, and he was forced to drop one arm across his lap to conceal his unexpected arousal. Her other hand closed around the Colt's barrel, and he instinctively felt himself throb in response, almost as if it were him her hand had closed around. He was actually envious of his damned gun!

  "Katlin McKinnen at your service, Ranger Cameron," she said as she extended the pearlized grip of his Colt toward him.

  Cautious blue eyes which had been fixed upon his gun, lifted to hers as if he were trying to read an ulterior motive in her action. It took a very real conscious effort on her part to keep her mask from slipping back into place. For most of her life, she had been so careful to hide her thoughts and feelings, to keep others from getting too close, that it had become second nature. Now, she suspected if she was to win this man's trust, she would have to make a conscious effort to trust as well.

  His eyes never left hers as he reached up to reclaim his Colt and wordlessly slipped it into the holster at his hip.

  Katlin moved to his side, lowered herself to the ground, and leaned back against the boulder beside him. "Look Cameron, whether we like it or not, your problem has become mine."

  "Mitch," he told her.

  "Mitch," she repeated. "I would really like to know what I've gotten myself into."

  "Fair enough," he conceded. He took a deep drawl on his cigarette then slowly exhaled, watching the cloud of white smoke twisting into different shapes as the wind carried it upward until it disintegrated into nothingness. How much did he tell her? If by some far stretch of the imagination she was simply someone who was in the right place at the right time to save his ass as she had termed it, he owed her the truth. If he was right, and he had been set up, she already knew more than he did. Again the truth was his best course of action. He had to make her believe he trusted her, until she led him to the man or men he was after.

  "In my job, I've made a lot of enemies over the years. Those men could have been hired by a number of people. We've also been tracking down and bringing in bands of renegade soldiers all over the territory." He paused, took another deep drag from his cigarette.

  Katlin remembered that during this time in history, after the Civil War, the Texas Rangers had been mobilized to stop the renegade soldiers who were terrorizing settlers in this part of the country. She leaned her head back against the boulder and listened, finding the deep, dusty quality of his voice soothing yet oddly disconcerting. She recognized that voice. She would know it anywhere, except, that was impossible. The harder she tried to connect Mitch's voice to the memory, the more illusive the memory became.

  "It's possible someone overheard me asking questions in Fort Hays and decided to stop me before I could stop them. I didn't exactly make it a secret that I was headed to Abilene, and this was the obvious route for me to take to avoid being slowed down by the trail herds being driven up the Chisholm Trail."

  Katlin felt a shiver of excitement travel down her spine. She couldn't believe it. She was actually going to witness first hand the Texas Longhorn cattle being driven up the Chisholm Trail into Abilene. The Chisholm Trail, the greatest cattle route in history, stretching approximately one thousand miles form Brownsville Texas to Abilene. The same section that in 2002 would be known as Kansas Highway 15 through Wichita and US 18 across Oklahoma. If history and her Uncle Ben's stories hadn't been exaggerated, over three million head of cattle were said to have been shipped back east from the stock yards in Abilene. It was amazing, and she was here to witness it all.

  Katlin's thoughts were immediately pulled back to the unspoken but unmistakable "or" at the end of Mitch's explanation. He had more to tell her, but she sensed a subtle reluctance.

  "Go on," she encouraged softly.

  "Or the person behind my father's murder wants to stop me before I can find out exactly who was responsible," he finished flatly, his tone totally void of emotion.

  Katlin felt her heart clench. It would seem that they had quite a few things in common. Her own father had been gunned down while on night patrol two years ago. For over a year, she had spent all her free time attempting to discover who was responsible with no success. Her father's case was still unsolved.

  "I'm sorry, Mitch."

  "Don't waste your sympathy. There was no love lost between us. My father was a hard, cold man. I left home when I was sixteen." Part of Mitch resented that he had felt it necessary to tell her that much. Another part of him was irritated that it had come so easy to share even that small amount of information with her. He shared his personal life with no one. This whole situation was just too strange.

  "Nevertheless, he was still my father, and I won't rest until those responsible are brought to justice."

  "And you have apparently asked the right questions to the right people or the wrong questions to the wrong people, depending upon which end of the bullets you end up on."

  "It's beginning to look that way," he admitted. Mitch carefully put
out his cigarette and rolled the butt between his thumb and forefinger to be sure it was cold before tossing it away. During this time of year it didn't take much to start a brush fire that could burn out of control and destroy thousands of acres of prairie grass.

  "Your father was killed in Kansas?" Katlin asked.

  "As if she didn't know," Mitch thought to himself but played along, "No, Texas."

  "I don't understand. If he was killed in Texas, why are you searching for his killer in Kansas?"

  Mitch's mind flashed to the faded telegram in his saddle bag. The only words he'd been able to make out were Daniel and payment waiting in Abilene. There was no way of knowing how long the telegram had been laying in the woods, or even if it had been dropped by the shooter. It could very well have been received by his father from his old friend in Abilene. He had no way of knowing if it meant anything, but it was the only lead he'd had, until now. It was also something he was unwilling to share.

  "I have friends in Abilene, and my father's oldest friend moved there last year. I'm hoping he might know something that might give me a lead to go on," Mitch explained.

  "Do you have any leads on who was responsible, or a motive behind your father's murder?" Katlin asked innocently, the cop in her taking over, ready to help him solve the case. If she had been looking in his direction, she wouldn't have missed the subtle clenching of his jaw and the cold glitter that entered his eyes.

  "Now it's my turn," he told her, deliberately changing the subject. "Care to tell me exactly who you are, Katlin McKinnen, and what you're doing out here alone?"

  Katlin sat up and turned to face him, her uncertain green eyes met his curious blue ones, and she began twisting the end of her long braid around her fingers. This was what she had been waiting for and dreading. There was no doubt in her mind that he had been open and honest with her, but what did she tell him in return? The truth? She didn't think so. If she wouldn't have believed the story herself, how could she expect anyone else to believe it?

  "My situation is a little more difficult to explain," she told him hesitantly.