by Janzen, Tara
“We must go,” he murmured weakly as he lifted his head, then he returned for another kiss, and yet another. “It is not far now.”
The fathomless cavern actually proved to be about twenty fathoms deep, by her estimation of the rise between switchbacks. She doubted if she’d ever return, and certainly not without Kit, but even taking his phenomenal memory into account, she thought two heads full of catalogued facts were better than one. Especially since he seemed to be tiring at a rather accelerated pace.
The last tunnel grew narrower and narrower, giving Kristine her first bout with claustrophobia. The rough stone walls caught at her coat, the uneven floor twisted beneath her feet—rising up unexpectedly to trip her, then falling away in short, lurch-inducing drop-offs. She fell against him repeatedly. He caught her every time. And every time she felt his strength ebbing, and she started to know real fear of this strange place.
“What’s happening to you, Kit?” she asked, trying and failing to keep the tremor out of her voice.
He slumped against the tunnel wall with a moan. Her arms encircled him, but his weight was too much, dragging them both to the cramped floor.
“Kit?” She spoke his name quietly, then shook him, yet still got no response. Panic crept into the darkness, pulsing through the air, until she saw things that weren’t there, heard voices in the silence, and felt a presence other than her own and his.
“No,” she said firmly, tightening her jaw and fighting the adrenaline rushing into her bloodstream. “No.” She would not give into rampant confusion and the terror it would bring.
A vague sensation, like a touch, tugged at her sleeve, and she whirled around. Back off, Jack, she growled from some deep place in her mind. He is mine. You cannot have him.
She turned back to Kit. Using every grain of strength and every shred of will she had left, she hauled him to his feet, only to find her last inch of strength wasn’t enough. He slipped back against the wall.
Breathing heavily, she rested her forehead on his and began to pray and curse in a litany of desperation, her hands wrapped around the collar of his tunic.
“Dear God . . . help me . . . help me get this stupid son of a bitch and two fathers to his feet . . . Excuse me, Melanie. No offense and nothing personal intended.” She pulled him up and pressed her chest against his to hold him. “Damn you . . . Kit Carson, you better find whatever the hell it is you just lost, like your consciousness, or I’ll drag you out of here by your feet. You hear that? Your feet. And on this floor that’s going to be one poor way to go.” She shoved her shoulder beneath his arm and felt her knees give way. She locked them, trapping herself into immobility. “Last chance, outlaw,” she hissed between her teeth. “Come to, or suffer the consequences.”
His knee bumped hers in a feeble, unfinished step, but it was enough.
Epilogue
Four months later…
Kristine swirled around the dance floor on her father’s arm, a vision in yards of white lace and satin. She was primped, coiffured, curled, powdered, and lipsticked to within an inch of her life. Rouge had been unnecessary; she glowed like a full-blown rose.
Across the room, her very own husband was waltzing with her mother. Muriel glowed a little herself, even if the man she danced with was not who she might have chosen for her daughter, a man wearing a white tunic lightly embroidered down the front in gold thread, a melange of anciently inscribed gold bracelets, and roan braid that hung below his shoulder blades. It was the biggest wedding her family had ever pulled off.
The Golden Plum, the finest caterer in northern Colorado, had plied the guests with champagne and strawberries, pricy treats of shrimp and lobster without a chicken breast or Swedish meatball in sight, and the tiniest little sandwiches Kristine had ever seen. The cake was four tiers of chocolate confection draped and laden with white frosting and candied violets to match her eyes. She and Kit had already vowed to eat themselves into indulgence and beyond on the leftovers.
They had a band, practically an orchestra. They’d rented the country club hall and had it decked to decadence in cascades of white carnations and lavender—to match her eyes. Up by the bandstand, an undeniably gaudy display had her and Kit’s initials intertwined in pink rosebuds within a heart of baby iris—to match her eyes. Her bouquet was white roses, baby’s breath, and orchids of a color to match her eyes.
This was her wedding, and Kristine knew she was only going to get two. She’d wanted to do this one with pomp and circumstance, and her father hadn’t balked at the price.
Kit had insisted on buying all those flowers that matched her eyes, and she loved them, each and every one. She’d privately paid the caterer, but the band was her father’s, all twenty pieces of it.
Jenny and her mother had taken over her dress and the bridesmaids’ apparel with a vengeance. Denver had never seen such a burning commitment to shopping. The two older women had lost five pounds apiece, though Jenny swore she’d lost six.”
“Mrs. Carson?”
Her father whirled her around and into her husband’s arms.
“Yes, Mr. Carson?” She grinned up at him.
“I have married you twice, patni, once under the Eyes of Buddha, and once in the way decreed by your Christian Bible, though I doubt God had a hundred guests and four tiers of cake in mind as additions, and still you keep your secret from me. This is not the manner of a good wife.” He arched one brow at her.
He had married her under the Eyes of Buddha, literally, in a monastery tucked into the highlands of the Forbidden Kingdom of Mustang, now a province of Nepal and once his home. A wizened lama with a sparse gray beard had given them their vows while Kit had lain on what she feared would be his deathbed.
She’d gotten him out of Chatren-Ma, but she’d never told him how. Looking at him now, with his skin returned to its normal healthy color and the energy of his life-force surrounding her, she knew she never would. To tell him was an invitation to disaster. He wanted to go back.
“You’ll never get it out of me,” she said, flashing him another smile. The secret was locked in her heart, and she’d learned how to keep her thoughts to herself.
In answer, he swung her up into his arms, his own grin turning sly. “I have a secret, also, Kreestine. One it would do you well to learn. Maybe we can trade, eh?”
He strode out of the ballroom with long sure strides, but Kristine barely noticed they were leaving.
He had a secret? From her? She doubted it. She’d spent two weeks in that monastery cooling his heated brow and talking to every monk not under a vow of silence. She’d learned plenty, some of which she could have done without.
The gold mask, for instance, had been a gift from an Asian princess in the throes of unrequited love. The semiprecious stones and the luxurious sheepskin spread on his bed had been the not-so-subtle offering of a wealthy Indian woman to the monastery. She’d wanted to “buy” herself a house-boy, and had chosen Kit from the ranks of novices not destined for a life of pure faith. He’d been fifteen. Kristine had figured the rest out on her own, and decided she would have run away too.
She’d found another of his secrets in his saddlebags, and she’d laughed until the tears rolled down her face, a much-needed stress reliever that had left her sobbing in a huddle on the ground. She’d been so afraid he would die.
Days later, after his fever had broken, she’d found the humor again and wondered how the Turk was liking his new haircut.
“What secret?” she asked Kit now, her arms wrapped around his neck.
“A trade, nothing less.” He set her back on her feet by their new car, a Cadillac of all things. He’d toured every showroom, then surprised her by opting for what he called an “American thoroughbred.” Barbarian, indeed, she’d thought to herself. The man had impeccably refined taste. It had taken her all of two minutes to get used to traveling in style.
She looked around the parking lot. “We can’t leave, Kit. It’s our party.”
“The secret, patni.” He pressed against her
and seared her with a kiss. Damn the man, she thought, he knew all her soft spots—his kisses and her curiosity.
“You first.” She sighed the words along the line of his jaw, stealing more kisses on the way.
“You will have our child.”
There he went again, stunning her into silence.
“Well—well yes,” she stammered when she recovered. “Someday, no doubt, we’ll have children and—”
“Nine months, Kreestine.” His hand slid across her tummy. “In nine months you will have this child.”
“Impossible,” she gasped. “You can’t know that.”
“This I know, and more.” He kissed her cheek.
“More?” She angled her head back to look up into eyes soft with mystery, and her voice lowered to an incredulous whisper. “You know if it’s a boy or a girl?”
“Yes.” A rogue’s smile teased his mouth. “But for this knowledge there is a price.”
“No.” She forced herself to say no. She couldn’t . . . wouldn’t . . . pregnant? With his baby? Unconsciously she covered his hand with hers. “Make me a promise.” She had to know.
“I will not return without you, I promise. I will prepare myself in a manner to lessen the effect of the cavern, I promise. There are ways. And I promise our . . . child, will only need one father to see him, or her, through life. All these things I promise.”
She took a deep breath. He never broke a promise. “I think you’ve already realized that I must have found another way out of, and consequently into, Chatren-Ma.”
“Yes.”
“The only people who ever need to go back into the caverns again is a spelunking team, hopefully under the auspices of a certified historical and archaeological expedition.”
“Yes,” he agreed patiently. When she didn’t continue, he prompted her. “The way, Kreestine?”
“Do you know how many cells are in the monastery?”
“About a hundred, not counting the shrines, meeting rooms, work areas, and kitchen,” he answered, giving her a quizzical look.
“It’s common sense, Kit,” she said. “A hundred men, monks, without nary a woman to tote and clean for them, would not have hauled their water through that maze of paths, tunnels, and traps of emptiness day after day after day. They would have built something, like plumbing, or a viaduct, or at least a shortcut to the river.”
His eyes widened. “You found a path to the river?”
“It used to be a path, now it’s a rockslide.”
“You destroyed a path to the river?”
“I was desperate, and at the time, and to this day, I’m very grateful we didn’t go down with the rocks, though that might have been quicker than walking over them. Your turn.” An expectant—very expectant—smile lit her face. She thought she was finished. He didn’t.
“What is the location of the path inside the monastery?”
“Kit,” she warned.
“Our child will probably lead such an expedition, patni. He should know these things.”
“He?”
“A son,” he confirmed with a smile, taking her back into his arms. “Our son.”
She held him for all she was worth, brimming with happiness. Then she stretched up on tiptoe and whispered in his ear, “Ninth cell east of the granary on the north side.”
The adventure of life with the outlaw Carson, it seemed, would never end.
* * * * * * * * *
Read on for excerpts from Shameless and The Dragon and the Dove
Shameless
One
The brick wall was hot against Colton Haines’s back, seared by a Wyoming summer sun and burning through his shirt. It was support, though, hard and reliable, a place to get what he couldn’t find elsewhere.
A mist of fine dust kicked up at the end of the alley and sheeted by him in its journey east, blown by a ceaseless wind. He swiped at a tear with the back of his hand, hating the weakness in himself even more than he hated the tears’ cause. The dampness mixed with the sandy grit on his knuckles, making a patch of salty mud he wiped off on his jeans.
He couldn’t stand in the alley, leaning against the back wall of Atlas Drugs, and cry. He couldn’t. He’d driven the ten miles into town to get to her.
Sarah.
His chest constricted on a sudden breath, and he squeezed his eyes shut to hold back another tear. She had never betrayed him, not from the very beginning, not like his mother, who’d just betrayed everything.
He needed Sarah’s loyalty like a lifeline. In return she deserved a man, not a twenty-year-old boy crying because his mother was—He didn’t know what to call it, not even in the privacy of his own mind. “Taking a caller” was the best he could do, and even that hurt. He couldn’t think about it, no more than he could stand there and cry about it.
He pushed off the wall, propelled by his anger, and walked over to use the water spigot. As he crouched next to the running stream of cool water, his glance raked the endless expanse of prairie surrounding the town of Rock Creek. A herd of antelope grazed less than a hundred yards away from the main street, proof of the town’s lack of worth. His mouth tightened. Rock Creek didn’t even have enough civilization to hold back a herd of skittish wild animals.
And he’d thought it was the neatest damn place on earth. He made a short sound of disgust and rose to his feet.
Cleaner, with no revealing tracks staining his cheeks, he used his wet hands to slick his hair back under his cowboy hat. He settled the brim low on his forehead and with a quick motion rubbed the dirt off his boot tops on the backs of his jeans. He didn’t want to look even one tenth of one percent as torn-up as he felt. What he wanted was Sarah and the way she believed in him.
Sarah thought he was strong, and next to her he was. It was one of the many pleasures of kissing her and holding her, how he had to temper his strength so as not to scare her, or ever hurt her. Her love and trust gave him the desire to be good, to be the best.
Sarah.
He squared his shoulders and looked out on the sea of sun-cured grass floating to the horizon, broken by coulees and occasional scrub. There was nothing for him in Rock Creek. He’d known it that day so many years ago when he and his mom had washed up in this backwater, nowhere place on a flood of grief, both broken from the loss of her husband, his father. He shouldn’t have forgotten. He shouldn’t have invested so much of himself in the two-bit town, so many of his dreams.
There was nothing in Rock Creek, he silently repeated, never had been, nothing except Sarah. He turned his back on the prairie and headed for the main street, the cool interior of Atlas Drugs, and the soothing comfort of the girl he loved.
* * *
Sarah knew the instant Colt stepped into the store. The bell over the door didn’t jingle any differently for him, but the air changed. The weatherman could talk all he wanted about increases in atmospheric pressure; Sarah felt it every time Colton Haines walked into a room.
She turned and their eyes met briefly over the postcard rack at the front of the store. She checked where her Uncle Tobias was helping Doris Childress at the pharmacy and hoped the preacher’s wife would keep him busy. She knew her uncle felt bound and beholden to report on her to her father—it was that or catch hell—and lately the comings and goings of Colt had been the priority news on any given day of the week.
Colt stayed up by the tourist goods, where the display of T-shirts hanging from fishing line strung across the aisle offered the most privacy. Not many tourists stopped in Rock Creek, but when they did they could get an official Rock Creek T-shirt at Atlas Drugs.
Over the top of a shelf filled with shot glasses and knickknacks, she saw the wide blue and black stripes of his favorite shirt stretched across his broad but youthful shoulders, a young man’s shoulders used to carrying the burden of a grown man’s responsibilities. He was like that all over—lean and hard with muscle, promising to fill out. For Sarah, everything about Colt was a promise of things to come, of their future.
; Sometimes when he looked at her, she saw the deepening of their friendship over the years of a long and good marriage; and sometimes, especially when he’d been kissing her, she saw the heat banked up in him, ready to explode, tethered only by the same love that had lit the fire. It always amazed her, the way he wanted her, and the strength it took not to take her.
As she rounded the edge of a display unit and drew closer to him, she noted the dust on his black cowboy hat and his clothes. His jeans fit him like a soft, well-worn glove, faded indigo hugging narrow hips and strong flanks, and breaking across the tops of remarkably dust-free boots. A smile teased her mouth. She knew the trick. He’d taught her.
“Colt?” she asked softly, not whispering exactly, but not wanting her uncle to hear them. The less her father knew, the better, for all parties concerned.
Colt turned when she spoke, and he felt a small portion of his hurt melt away under the soft gray light of her eyes. There wasn’t anyone like Sarah. She wasn’t the prettiest girl in town, or the most popular, but he’d had to win her. Once, in grade school, he’d teased her about her straight, dishwater hair until she’d cried, then he’d pulled her braid.
He was still putting his hands on her hair, but only to hold her closer, to feel the silky fine silver and gold strands slip through his fingers. The most he ever did to her braid was unweave it so the summer-blond veil of hair fell over her shoulders. He’d lost count of the number of nights he’d spent dreaming about watching her hair slide over her breasts. It took a lot of imagination. He’d never seen her breasts.
He’d known she was in the aisle, approaching him, but he’d waited to face her, wanting one last chance at pulling himself together just in case something showed. He thought he’d done a pretty good job, until he looked at her.
“Colt?” Her voice went from welcoming to concerned.
He forced a smile and wondered what part of him was giving him away.
“Hi. Can you get out of here?” His voice was gruff, but it didn’t shake.
