"No."
"I think you're not the unfeeling brute you'd like everyone to believe you are."
He snorted, staring at the rock ceiling.
"I think you want everyone to think you need no one. That you're tough as hobnails, rough as cob. But deep down, you're as human as the rest of us. You bleed, you feel, and as much as you deny it, I even think you care."
"Oh, really? An' what happened to the drunken cynic without—let me see, how did you put it—human compassion? Ah, yes, I think that was it."
Her neck flushed a lovely pink as she examined a broken fingernail. "A lady can change her mind. I didn't know you then."
"And you don't know me now. You were right the first time." He sat up stiffly, meeting her eyes with a hooded look of his own. "Look, you can cling to your romantic notions if you wish. But this isn't some adventure novel you're in, Miss Turner. This is real life. Those men who are chasing us are using real bullets that'll cut us down fast as a blink if they catch us. I don't know who you think I am, but I'm not him. For that I've no apologies. I chose to play a lone hand a long time ago. I don't need anyone and I don't want anyone needing me. It's clean, it's easy, and that's just that way I like it."
She folded her arms across her chest. "Is that so? Then it must pain you to know that you needed me tonight. Where, pray tell, would you be if I'd left you back there in the rain when you were ready to fall off that horse?"
"I'd be dead," he replied bluntly. "Which is the likely outcome of this enterprise anyway. You should have saved yourself the trouble."
"Perhaps that's the difference between us, Mr. Donovan. I don't mind the trouble."
Her self-righteous tone was almost more than he could stomach. I don't mind the trouble.
Without contemplating the wisdom of it, he shoved to his feet and, too late, thought better of it.
Sharp, hot pain flashed through his side, and black spots swam through his vision like a flock of dark-winged bats. His mind aimed for the horses, but his legs had other ideas. The cave tilted. Grace rushed toward him as he stumbled sideways toward the rock perimeter. Her hands shot out to push against his chest, and almost as quickly, she buckled under his weight.
She let out a short cry of surprise as he took her down with him. Reese tried to roll sideways at the last second, but by then he'd lost all sense of direction.
"Oooff!"
"Ohhghh." He groaned as his weight come down on her. The cave went momentarily black.
The light filtered back to him. He had no notion of how long he'd been out. Some part of him knew she'd fallen under him. But the part that responded to the smith's hot iron in his side had him curling insensibly toward his gut, pressing her down even harder. With his cheek flattened against her shoulder and his legs tangled with hers on the hard dirt floor, he slowly regained his senses as the blood rediscovered his brain.
It took him a moment to realize that she was struggling beneath him. Arms flailing at her sides like an upended bug, she pushed uselessly at his shoulders. A strange squeaking sound came from her chest. He jerked his head up and found her wide-eyed, choking for breath.
With a curse, he lifted his weight quickly off her and onto his elbows. "Good God—Grace!"
"Muh-muh!" She choked incoherently. Curled toward him, her face scrunched in pain and pure shock, she couldn't seem to get her breath. Her mouth opened in a silent plea for air.
Bracketing her shoulders between his hands, he pressed her back against the floor and gave her a small shake. "There, easy, now." His thumbs dug into the hollows of her shoulders in small, tight circles. "Breathe slow and easy. In and out. There's a good girl. You just had the wind knocked out of you, that's all."
The forced calm of his voice seemed to galvanize her lungs into action. She gulped air in short coughing gasps at first, the color returning to her lips.
"Aye, slow and easy."
Eyes closed, she nodded, taking longer cleansing breaths. Reese could feel the fullness of her breasts brush his chest with each shaky rise and fall.
Under different circumstances, Reese mused grimly, he might be able to justify the spontaneous and somewhat painful tightening of his lower regions that brief, intimate touch inspired. Now, however, it only made him feel like a bona fide heel.
She opened her eyes and did the strangest thing. She smiled at him.
Reese scowled. Forget that he'd nearly crushed her. Forget that she'd been fool enough to think she could stop fifteen stone of momentum. The woman had the gall to smile at him with those guileless blue eyes of hers as if she'd just discovered his deepest, darkest secrets!
His fingers tightened on the soft curve of her shoulders. Only then did it occur to him that he was the one shaking, not her.
"For God's sake, woman! I could have killed you."
She regarded him steadily. "But you didn't."
"I coulda squashed you like a bug! Knocked your head against a rock or... or worse."
"But you didn't," she repeated with a frown.
Nose to nose he glared at her, not understanding what that had to do with anything. "What in God's name were you thinkin', steppin' in front of me that way?"
"Thinking? I wasn't. I mean, I didn't think. I just saw you falling and—" She stopped midsentence, studying the anger on his face without comprehension. "Oh, never mind. You wouldn't understand." She pushed her palms against his chest. "Just let me up."
He didn't move. He held her there with his weight, conscious for the first time of her softness beneath him. She eyed him the way a cornered doe might the dark barrel of a gun. Her fingers tightened around his upper arms.
"Mis-ter Donovan."
He wanted to understand. God knows, he wanted to understand what went on in that convoluted mind of hers. But he decided he had as much hope of that as discovering gold in this godforsaken pile of rocks they'd taken shelter in. She was a mystery to him, an unplumbed mine. Somewhere, he suspected, there was a treasure inside her, one he could only begin to fathom, something that frightened him more than all the coldhearted murderers he'd known in his life. At least, he thought, with them, you knew what to expect. With her...
She squirmed under his weight. "Did that bullet affect your hearing as well as your equilibrium?"
At her movement, a curl of desire made him forget the hot pain in his side. Heat coiled through him like the lick of a flame. She felt small under him, but not too small. Slender, but not fragile. It came as something of a relief that it was simple lust and not something finer she inspired in him. Lust was one emotion Reese Donovan understood.
A smile lifted one corner of his mouth as he met her questioning eyes. "I heard you."
She waited, hardly breathing. "Well?"
He could feel the thud of her heart against the wall of his chest, like a trapped bird's. Lowering his mouth a breath away from hers, his hips shifted seductively against her pelvis. "I was just wonderin'..."
Her eyes locked with his. "W-what?"
"I was wonderin', Miss Turner," he whispered low, his gaze fixed on her alluring mouth, "now that you've had a taste of it, if you still don't mind the trouble?"
The tremor he felt this time belonged to her. She searched his eyes and, without a thought to the effect it would have on him, moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.
She gulped audibly. "I-I..."
Donovan smiled, his intent clear. Her breath whispered against his face like a caress—sweet. So sweet, he thought. He wondered just what it would be like to taste the lips of a woman like her; to crush his mouth against her and delve inside her. To understand her in the only way he'd ever understood women.
The erratic thud of her heart kept tempo with his own. She blinked at him, her lips parted—in pure shock, he supposed with some satisfaction.
His predatory smile faded however, when—to his astonishment—her eyes slid shut with languid romance and she offered up her puckered lips.
It vanished altogether at the metallic click of a gun's hammer
beside his ear.
"Get up off'n her, you polecat."
Grace's eyes flew open at the sound of Brew's voice. The feel of cold steel against Reese's temple froze him cold. He hadn't even heard him coming.
"Hold on a minute—"
"No! Brew, wait," Grace cried, holding her hands out to stop him. "It's not what you think!"
"I got two good eyes, don't I?" he demanded, nudging the gun's barrel against Reese's skull. "I can see plain as day what's a-goin' on."
"No, no, nothing's going on! It was an accident. He fell and I tried to catch him. I got the wind knocked out of me. It was just an accident. That's all."
Reese pushed up off his elbows and rolled off her slowly, conscious of the gun still aimed at his head.
"You sayin' he weren't takin' any liberties?" Brew demanded.
Grace swallowed hard, her blushing gaze darting to Donovan. "No. He was simply trying to help me."
Holding his hands out at his sides, Reese shifted his eyes to the old man. "I know how it looked, but she's telling you the truth. Nothing happened. Now," he added slowly, "put the pistol away before you shoot somebody."
Brew watched the two of them, eyes narrowed with mistrust. Finally, lifting the weapon away from Reese's head, he eased back the hammer. "She may be dressed in some whelp's castoffs, but she ain't one o' yer caliente seen-yor-eetas. Grace is a lady, Donovan. And don't you forget it."
Reese lowered his arms, a muscle working in his jaw. Uncharacteristic heat crawled up his neck. Far be it from him to forget his bloody place with a woman like her. Hadn't Adriana burned that lesson into his soul well enough the first time?
"I wouldn't think of it," he said, slowly getting to his feet. "But perhaps you should be reminding the 'lady' not to be puttin' herself in harm's way"—he sent Grace a cynical smile—"if you catch my meaning." He turned his back on them both, putting her and his improper urges out of his mind.
Grace watched him go, resisting the impulse to press her cool fingers to her suddenly hot cheeks.
Mortification forced her eyes downward, away from Brew's questioning look, as she sat up, willing the thud of her heart to slow.
I was wonderin', Miss Turner, now that you've had a taste of it, if you still don't mind the trouble....
Reese's taunt rang in her ears. Trouble. Yes, Donovan was trouble with a capital T. But not at all the sort she'd expected.
Heavens, he'd nearly kissed her! Kissed her the way she'd seen him kiss that Maria back in the cantina. She'd seen it in his eyes, felt it in the taut power of his body against hers. Worse yet, she'd wanted it. Practically begged him to do it!
Oh, the humiliation! What in the world had possessed her to pucker up that way like some idiotic schoolgirl? Of course, it was too much to hope he hadn't noticed. He'd noticed, all right. He was probably chuckling about it to himself even now.
Yet...
She sat up and brushed the dirt from the dingy sleeves of her shirt. Just for a moment, when his face had been a mere breath away from hers, when their eyes had met, she'd thought—hoped, perhaps—that the desire she'd glimpsed in his eyes was earnest, sincere.
Edgar had held her before, even kissed her. But never, not once in all the times he'd touched her, had she felt as if her heart would leap from her chest, nor had she ever been so recklessly willing to abandon propriety and practically beg a man to kiss her. Even now, something burned deep inside her, like a hot ember left untended.
"You all right, Gracie?" Brew asked, watching Donovan, who limped slowly to the horses.
"Nothing happened, Brew," she said, staring at her oversized boots. "Nothing at all."
Except that something had happened, Grace thought. Inside her. Something wonderful and frightening. And nothing in her life from here on out would ever be quite the same.
* * *
Connell Smith shifted in his saddle, watching as Ephram Sanders scowled at the fast-moving water in the arroyo. The older man reined his sorrel horse in tight circles while the rest of his men, save the tracker, watched, standing full clear of the marshal's explosive temper.
Sanders's size nearly dwarfed the sixteen-hand horse he rode, his broad barrel chest emphasized by the dark, oversized duster he wore. The current rushed around his plunging horse as its legs tangled in the long stalks of submerged Indian ricegrass.
"Well, where the hell are they, Hidalgo?" Sanders shouted over the sound of the rushing water. He punctuated the demand by letting fly a stream of brown tobacco juice that disappeared into the swirling current. "We been following this belly washer for miles. And nothin'!"
Juan Hidalgo's soulless black eyes studied the far, unblemished gravel bank of the arroyo, then swept back in the direction of the abandoned cave they'd discovered earlier, after retracing their steps.
Smith's gaze followed it. Along with the doused campfire and footprints, they'd found blood. A lot of blood. What they hadn't found was Donovan.
"Alla," the half-breed answered, pointing to the south. "Delante de nosotros."
"Speak English," he demanded, then muttered, "you pepper-gut son of a—"
Hidalgo lifted his head, skewering Sanders with a look so murderous the marshal snapped his mouth shut and backed his horse up a step. A long knife appeared in the tracker's hand as if by magic, and he nudged his horse closer to the other man. Sanders gripped his Colt revolver.
"Hidalgo!" Smith shouted, already moving forward with his own gun drawn. "Don't."
Sanders made a jerking motion with his brawny arm toward Smith. "I don't need you steppin' in for me, boy. If Donovan was any example, you couldn't hit your hat if you dropped it, much less old Hidalgo, here."
Heat crawled up Smith's neck at the reference to his ill-fated shots at the escaping prisoner. He holstered his pistol, frankly relieved to be out of the middle.
Hidalgo's mouth formed an ugly line as he flashed the deadly blade at Sanders. "You think that silver peso on your chest would save you from this, patron?"
Sanders's smile was indolent and unafraid. "Don't threaten me, Hidalgo. You'll live to regret it."
"Perhaps." The half-breed's teeth showed white against his dark skin. "Perhaps it is you who will regret it, amigo."
"I'm payin' you to find them. So far all you've found is jackrabbit scat and tracks that lead nowhere. You don't turn 'em up, an' you ain't gettin' a single peso of that money I promised you."
Money was a language both men understood. After a tense moment, Hidalgo reluctantly sheathed his knife. "You want Donovan? He is there," he said, pointing downstream, toward the Rio Grande.
Sanders sneered. "You been sayin' that for an hour now. And where are they?"
"I think ol' Hee-dalgo's right," Del Odem put in, shoving his hat down further over his flaming red hair. "They're following the arroyo, covering their tracks."
"Yeah," put in the man called Tobins, "but them hoofprints back at the cave that led into the creek were headed directly north."
"Only a fool would believe that." Sanders told him. "It was a trick."
"Maybe it weren't. Maybe they doubled back," Tobins said. Rubbing his hands together, he glanced upstream. "We figured they'd head south, toward the Rio. Maybe they turned north to throw us off."
Sanders's eyes narrowed, considering that possibility.
Cal Mollen flicked his hand-rolled cigarette stub into the water. It sank with a hiss. A mean-eyed tejano with a record of offenses as long as his arm, Mollen purely enjoyed wearing the official piece of silver on his chest, Connell mused. His knowledge of this countryside was rivaled only by Hidalgo's.
"Nothin' north or west for a hundred miles," he argued. "Davis Landing, Habeas Corpus, they're too far. Don't make sense. Unless they're headed back to Pair-a-Dice."
"No." Hidalgo shook his head with finality, his long ebony hair still damp from the rain. "They will go to Brownsville. La frontera—the border," he added with a dark look at Sanders. "This is what I would do."
Sanders cursed, nudging his horse up out
of the arroyo with a lurching spray of water.
"Mollen, Tobins—you two make for Brownsville now. If you ride fast, cut hard east, you'll beat them there. One of 'em is hurt. It's bound to slow them down. Take a room at Miller's hotel. Watch the lighters crossing the Rio. Me, Hidalgo, and Smith will follow this wash south to the river, then cut over to Brownsville. We'll meet you there."
He maneuvered his horse around Smith's, allowing his gelding to nip the deputy's mare on the rump. Smith fought for control as his horse crow-hopped sideways with a sharp cry.
The marshal grinned and turned his attention back to the two men. "Don't fail me, boys. If Donovan makes it across the river to Matamoros," he added meaningfully, "I'll hang your hide on a stick myself."
Mollen and Tobins exchanged looks and nodded.
"You're deputized," Sanders continued, "but the law in Brownsville there might have other ideas about it. If you see Donovan, take him, but don't get caught. And nobody touches him before I get there. Understand?"
Mollen gave Sanders a nod. "We'll get him. You can count on us." The two men spurred their horses into a lope and disappeared over a rise.
Smith rubbed the back of his head with a frown, giving the stitching on his saddle horn particular attention. Splitting up the posse was bad business with a man like Reese Donovan on the other side.
You should have tossed in your badge and packed up with Lilah yesterday morning like she begged you to. But Sanders had strong-armed him into riding with the posse. Why?
The term whipping boy came to mind.
But he suspected the real reason was that Sanders didn't want him out of his sight. Only an idiot could have missed hitting Donovan last night at that range. An idiot, or a sympathizer.
It was the chance he'd taken, letting Donovan escape—one he could live with. Sanders could prove nothing. However, he'd decided hours ago that it was his own back he'd better be protecting if he ever wanted to see Lilah again.
His silence drew Sanders's wrathful gaze. "You comin', Smith? Or ain't you got the stomach for it?"
"Yessir," he said curtly. "My stomach's just fine, sir. I wouldn't miss it, considering the odds."
The Lady Takes A Gunslinger (Wild Western Rogues Series, Book 1) Page 10
