Then Belinda stepped forward and said, “I did it, Miss Higgens. You’re punishing the wrong sister.”
“Your loyalty is to be commended, Belinda. But I know who is the real culprit here.” She spitted Angel to the spot with a piercing glare.
“I didn’t do it,” Angel said, her chin tilting mulishly.
“Enough! It won’t help to add lying to your list of sins. It’s the cellar for you.”
Angel started to run, but Miss Higgens grabbed her by the arm in a grip that would have done a vulture proud. She was hauled out back to the root cellar and thrust down inside. The wooden door was dropped closed and a piece of wood pushed through the door handles to seal her inside.
“Let me out!” she cried, pounding against the wood, unmindful of the splinters gathered by her flailing fists. “Please.” Her terror was so great that she was even willing to confess and show remorse for a crime she hadn’t committed. “Please,” she begged. “I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again!”
Miss Higgens was ruthless in her determination to stomp out sin. It simply wasn’t to be tolerated. She had proof of Angel’s transgression. After all, the biscuits had been right there under her pillow. “You will stay in there until you’ve had a proper chance to reflect upon your sins and find true remorse.”
Angel didn’t know how long she was left in the cellar, but the horrors of the place magnified over time. The cobwebs held poisonous spiders. The bugs crawling over her grew to immense proportions. The mice became rats and threatened to chew off her fingers and toes. And the dark, the oppressive, relentless dark, seeped into her soul.
“Angel? It’s me, Belinda. Can you hear me?”
Angel had been wishing so desperately for the sound of another human voice, she thought she was dreaming. She answered, anyway. “Belinda? Is that you?” She leaned her ear against the crack between the cellar doors, so she could hear.
“I’m sorry to be so long in coming,” Belinda said. “This is the soonest I could sneak away to visit you. I’m so sorry, Angel. I knew I shouldn’t have taken the biscuits. But I was so hungry. It seems like I’m always so hungry!”
“Oh, Belinda. How could you? Mama would—”
“Mama’s not here,” Belinda said in a sharp voice. “We’re on our own, Angel. If we don’t take care of ourselves, no one else will. You saw how willing Miss Higgens was to think the worst of you. Our mama was a thief. Nobody, especially not Miss Higgens, is ever going to let us forget it. I’m sorry you got blamed, but I’m not sorry I took the biscuits!”
Belinda left without giving Angel a chance to argue with her. Belinda’s words stayed with Angel in the dark and created an epiphany. What good was it to be honest and starve? Why shouldn’t she take what she needed? The trick was not to get caught. And she wouldn’t, not ever again. Because she would be the one doing the stealing, and she would hide her tracks better than Belinda had.
Miss Higgens had left her in the cellar for twenty-four hours without food or water or—except for Belinda’s visit—any other human contact. Angel had come out of the cellar a changed person—harder, more self-reli-ant…and terrified of the dark.
Over the years Angel had lived along a fine line that sometimes crept over into lawlessness. She had taken, when not taking meant going hungry; she had done an honest day’s work when it could be had. Despite her epiphany, Angel had never been able to leave behind the notion, ingrained from birth by her mother, that breaking the law was wrong.
Belinda hadn’t been so fortunate. The deprivation in their youth had made Belinda crave things, and her scruples had been discarded as she satisfied those cravings. Eventually Belinda had taken to selling herself to live better during the war. Angel had cried the last time she’d seen her sister alive.
Suddenly the cave’s darkness was broken by a ray of white light. Dallas had found her. Angel couldn’t help the feeling of relief that swept over her. The blackness was gone and with it the memories of a painful past. Here was a man who made her wish she had lived a better life. A man to whom truth and honesty meant something. A good man…whose horse she had stolen, whose trust she had betrayed.
Why did she feel so guilty? She had survived in the past by “feeling true remorse,” and then putting the guilt aside. Since childhood, duplicity had held a limited, but necessary, role in her life. Why was she feeling regrets now?
Because she liked and respected Dallas Masterson, and she wanted—needed—his respect. Still, she couldn’t set aside the practical side of her nature. The damage was done. She had stolen his horse and left. It made more sense to go forward from here than to turn back.
Angel uncurled slowly and raised a hand to shade her eyes, but she couldn’t see the man who stood in the darkness beyond the light. “You might as well come with me,” she said, lifting her chin pugnaciously. “I’m not leaving until I explore that exit on the other side of the cave.”
“Why, I just might do that, pretty lady,” a guttural male voice said. “But I think maybe some of my friends might wanta come along. Hank, Ty-rel, Clete,” he called. “Come see what I found!”
Dallas wasn’t sure what woke him, but he was suddenly alert, all his senses tuned to danger. He reached down to the floor beside the bed and touched his revolver in the dark. He always kept it nearby, ready at a moment’s notice. He listened, but the house was quiet. He left the gun where it was and rose. The feeling of danger had passed; now he felt anxious. He quickly yanked on a pair of jeans before he headed for Angel’s bedroom.
The door was ajar. It had been shut last night. He slowly eased it farther open, not certain what to expect, but ready for anything. His gut tightened when he found the bed empty.
“Angel?” The bathroom door was open. That room was empty as well.
He knew she was gone, but that didn’t stop him from searching the house. He shoved a frustrated hand through his hair as he tried to imagine where she would have gone, and why. He peered out the front window. The truck was still there—not that he had expected her to try to drive it. But she had done a lot of things he hadn’t expected.
She went back to the cave.
He didn’t want to think that, but it was the only conclusion that made sense. As he pulled on his socks and boots and threw on a shirt and jacket, he swore at himself for not paying more attention to what she’d said yesterday.
She took my horse!
That thought came out of nowhere, but as soon as it came, he knew it must be true. All the same, he drove his pickup around to the stable to check. Sure enough, Red was gone.
“Damn! Angel Taylor you have a lot to answer for!” he muttered to himself.
She’s scared of the dark.
As he drove like a madman toward the cave, he worried about how she was handling the dark. Was she afraid? Would she have the courage to go into that darkened cavern by herself?
She has a flashlight and a knife.
Of course! He had bought them for her at the store. He had thought she was delighted by the penknife and Mickey Mouse flashlight merely because they were unusual. She must have been planning to run away all along! He smiled ruefully. He wondered whether she had tried the Twinkies or the potato chips yet, and how she had liked the taste of them.
She may get lost.
There were three turns to make before she arrived at the water-bound tunnel. He wasn’t sure she had been paying close enough attention when they were in the cave together to realize that. What if she accidentally took a wrong turn and got lost? What if her flashlight battery wore down before he found her?
She might find a portal and disappear into the past!
Dallas didn’t want to contemplate that possibility, but asked himself why he refused to accept the fact she might really be what she said she was. What if she really had come from the past? What if she did manage to get back?
He would well rid of her. Why, she had been nothing but a bother and a nuisance since he had rescued her from those cowboys. He was a solitary man, used to his pr
ivacy. Angel had invaded it and brought…excitement and laughter and a curiosity that made him look at everything with new eyes. She also possessed an innocence that was as seductive as it was charming.
Dallas reminded himself that he had no use for the marrying kind of woman. Hadn’t his mother cured him of the notion that true love could last a lifetime? He had watched his father become a shell of his former self after his mother ran away. He had heard his father cry when he read the note his mother had left and had hidden his own sobs of despair and betrayal in his pillow. He would never let a woman do to him what his mother had done to him and his father. No woman was going to wrap herself around his heart and leave him hurting when she decided to see what was over the next horizon. Better just to take what he needed from a woman and avoid the emotional strings that tied a man in knots.
She’s gotten under my skin.
So maybe he was a little worried about her. That didn’t mean his heart was involved. He worried about abused kids and the homeless, too. That didn’t mean he was going to miss her when she was gone. Why, all they’d ever done was talk. He’d hardly even touched the woman.
She would be dynamite in bed!
All right. He admitted he’d had a few daydreams about her. Was it so bad to imagine what it would be like to make love to her? She was a beautiful woman. Her innocence appealed to him. What would it be like to be the first to touch her, to see and feel her responses to the kinds of pleasure a man and woman could share?
She’s trouble.
If he was being honest with himself, the truth was he felt something different with Angel than he had felt with any other woman. Maybe it was the protective instincts she aroused in him. Or the way she constantly challenged him and refused to knuckle under to his opinion. There was no doubt about it—she was different. What bothered him most was that he had actually thought once or twice about what it would be like to have her around all the time. Angel had made him yearn for something he had professed not to need—a closer relationship with a woman.
Somehow, in the darkness of that cave, he had formed a bond with Angel that he was finding difficult to untie. He had kept other women at bay with word and deed; Angel had simply slipped past all those fortified walls like fog slips through the mountains.
Dallas hit the brakes, and the truck skidded to a stop as he observed the scenario at the opening of the cave.
“What the hell?”
He reached instinctively for his Colt revolver and swore heatedly when he realized that in his frantic concern for Angel, he hadn’t picked it up from beside the bed. Never, never had he forgotten his gun! That’s what comes of letting yourself get involved with a woman, he thought bitterly. The gun would have helped. But it didn’t really matter. He wouldn’t mind busting a few heads together.
Angel took one look at the leering face of the man as he waved his flashlight back toward his friends, and she reached for the knife in her pocket. In the time it took him to refocus the flashlight on her, she was standing before him with her weight balanced on the balls of her feet, the knife held loosely in her hand. A stench, a sickly sweet smell emanating from the man, curled her nostrils. He was wearing some sort of sleeveless denim jacket that hung open. There was a great deal of flesh visible from the waist up, all of it hairy.
“Now, now,” he said. “We don’t want anyone to get hurt, do we?”
“No,” Angel agreed. “So I suggest you start backing up.”
The man just laughed. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “Me and my buddies just want to have a little fun.”
“Like shoats in a pigpen,” she muttered.
“What was that?” he demanded. “You say somethin’ about pigs?”
“I’m telling you to back up,” she said. “Or face the consequences.”
He chuckled. “Little thing like you ought to know better than to try talking back to a big fella like me.”
Angel moved without warning, slicing at the big man’s naked arm. The cut was shallow, but the stranger yowled as if she’d gutted him, and he dropped the flashlight to clutch his wound.
Angel grabbed the light and ran while he was still grappling with his bloody arm.
“She’s comin’ your way!” the man shouted to his friends. “Stop her! That bitch cut me with a knife!”
Knowing she was armed kept the other three men at a distance. Angel never slowed down, just waved the knife at them, feinted as though she were going to attack, and then ran like the devil. By the time she reached the cave opening, the man she had wounded had reached his friends, and she could hear him exhorting them to go after her, ranting at them for their cowardice in the face of “one tiny little woman.”
Once out of the cave, Angel used the flashlight to search for Red. He had drifted off a ways, munching grass—near four strange, menacing machines that she had not noticed in the shadows when she’d arrived. She edged warily around them to reach Red, then threw herself into the saddle and lit a shuck out of there, back toward Dallas and safety.
Mere seconds later she looked over her shoulder to see that the men had mounted the machines as though they were horses. The roaring sound behind her was more terrifying than the scream of a cougar. She looked back and saw that the heads of the four men had been completely encased in large, dark objects, becoming featureless. Indeed the men and machines seemed like exotic one-eyed beasts chasing after her.
It became very clear, very fast, that she could not outrun them. When Angel saw a set of headlights, she veered toward them. Hopefully this was someone who would help her; she was no worse off if it wasn’t. She was counting on providence to arrange for her rescue. Otherwise she would fend for herself. These four men might overwhelm her, but they would pay dearly before they did.
Dallas took one look at Angel riding hell-bent for leather on Red, chased by four rough-looking men on motorcycles, and reached for his gun. When he found it missing, he realized he was going to have to rely on cunning and intelligence—and luck—if he hoped to get Angel out of this without anybody getting hurt. Of course if he ended up having to use a little muscle along with his brain, he wasn’t going to mind one bit.
He stepped down from the cab and went to stand just beyond the front lights of the pickup, which he had left on after he killed the engine.
Angel yanked Red to a sliding halt, threw herself out of the saddle and headed toward the truck on the run. “Help!” she cried. “I need help.”
“Over here, Angel,” Dallas said in a quiet voice.
She flew into his arms and he gave her a quick, hard hug before putting her away from him. “Go stand over by the truck, but stay out of the light.”
The appearance of the truck had changed things for the men on motorcycles. They skidded their bikes to a stop on the fringes of the light and revved the engines threateningly.
“This is none of your business,” the wounded man shouted from the darkness. “Get back in your truck, mister, and get outta here.”
“I’m making it my business,” Dallas said. “You can make something out of it if you want to, but I won’t go down easy. Any of you boys wants to try me, come ahead.”
Finally one of the motorcycle engines went dead, and the man Angel had wounded with her knife stepped into the light.
“I’ve got me a grudge to settle with that bitch, even if I have to go through you to do it.”
For the first time, in the light from the truck headlights, Angel saw the face of the huge man who had confronted her in the cave. He had a mustache that hung down and hid his lips. His nose was too big for his face and his eyes too small. His hair hung limp and greasy.
Her gaze drifted down over the rest of him. Obscenities were written on his denim jacket, and his hairy belly hung down over jeans that had some kind of metal studs along the outside seam. There were tattoos on his arms, like the black markings she had sometimes seen on the slaves—now freed by President Lincoln—who had come from Africa. He looked mean and in no mood to be reasonable.
“You and me,” the wounded man said. “Winner gets the girl.”
Dallas felt the killing rage rise up inside him and controlled it. This man had threatened Angel, frightened her, wanted to rape her. The hair stood up on his nape; he was a feral animal challenged for his mate. “Fine,” he said, his voice cold and hard. “You and me. Winner gets the girl.”
Dallas stepped into the light.
Angel saw the sudden wariness in the biker’s face. He clearly hadn’t been expecting to face someone of Dallas’s stature. He still had the advantage of reach and weight. He stepped forward, hands fisted and held up to protect his face. Dallas lifted his hands into daunting fists, as well. Angel watched the two men circling each other, looking for weaknesses and an opening to attack.
The biker struck first.
Dallas dodged the blow but felt knuckles graze his cheek as he hit up under the biker’s chin. He heard the man’s teeth click as his head rolled with the punch. He managed a solid hit to the ribs before the biker closed on him. The man was huge, and his bearlike grip was squeezing the breath and the life out of Dallas. Desperate, he kicked the biker in the shin. Dallas slipped out of the man’s grasp as the biker limped backward in agony.
Dallas didn’t give the man a chance to recover, but moved inside his guard with a quick right to the eye and a left to the solar plexus.
The biker gasped as Dallas’s punch forced the air out of his lungs. He swung wildly, and Dallas ducked and came up punching again.
It was over quickly, as the biker dropped to his knees, then sagged to all fours. “Enough,” he gasped, blood dripping from cuts on his mouth and cheek.
Dallas grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and yanked him to his feet. “If I ever see you around these parts again, I’ll make sure you spend your time here in jail. Is that clear?”
“Yeah,” the biker mumbled.
“Now you and your friends get on your bikes and get out of here.”
Dallas waited while the bikers revved their engines and then took off, wheels spinning. As the roar faded and the quiet took over, he turned to Angel. He had worked off some of his anger in the fight, but his adrenaline was still pumping. He stalked over and stood spread-legged in front of her. He wanted some answers.
A Little Time in Texas Page 7
