Fair Is the Rose

by Meagan Mckinney

  Sickened, she met his gaze. His expression brooked no disobedience. He motioned for her to leave with him. The hold on her arm was becoming painful; nonetheless, she glanced behind her at the prisoners.

  All six of them were shocked at the outcome of the escape attempt. Marmet was dead, his body almost lying in their laps. Outside, through the broken panes of glass, she could hear shouts and see lanterns sway up the gul-

  "C'mon," Cain rasped. Taking her arm in a death grip, he pulled her out the door.

  "Let me stay with them," she begged, stumbling down the crude wooden stairs in the dark.

  "No."

  "They'll kill them."

  "No."

  "I want to be with them." She clutched at his chest. "I knew Pete had the gun. He showed it to me when I gave him his dinner. I'm as much to blame. If they pay, I must pay also. I can't let Kineson kill those men because—"

  "No," he repeated, and pushed her ahead of him.

  "Oh, God. Please, Macaulay, please . . ." Her last word came out as a gasp.

  Cain swayed precariously; the old banister swayed with him. He held on to it, but the rotten wood gave way. She grabbed him just before the banister clattered to the ground below. He fell against her, and she somehow kept him upright though his weight was twice hers.

  He began to slur his words. "You don't understand, Christal . . . you don't understand . . . just play this out. It's got to be played out. . . ."

  She didn't know what he was saying. He was an enigma. He'd always been. He'd saved her from being abused by the gang, but he was in it as thick as he could be. Was he sinner or saint?

  "You—listening to me—Christal?" he whispered.

  "Kineson—"

  "I'll handle Kineson . . . just play this out. Goddammit—we'll all get killed—promise me you'll play this out."

  "Oh, God, you're bleeding so much . . ." she whispered, feeling the warmth of his blood on her hand. Her insides screamed not to help him. He was the outlaw who might ultimately prove her ruin, but the woman inside her, the lady bred to a kinder, more gentle life, couldn't not help him.

  Without giving him his promise, she walked him down the stairs to a ramshackle tavern chair and lit a lantern left by one of the outlaws. She reached beneath her gown and tore her petticoat to strips, unmindful that it was her last. She bound his arm, and at one point while his wounded arm rested on the table, she reached for his revolver in the slim hope that she might be able to defend the prisoners upstairs from Kineson's wrath, but Cain grabbed her, his face expressionless either from pain or from the fact that he'd expected her to try for his gun all the time. Caught, she continued to bind his arm as if the attempt had never occurred. The moment passed in silence, neither of them willing to talk about it.

  "Cain, we heard shots!" Kineson barked from the saloon's broken doorway. He held up his lantern to further illuminate the dusty interior.

  "Marmet's dead." Cain grit his teeth as she wound the bandages tight to stop the bleeding.

  "What the hell happened?" Kineson entered, his Do-berman eyes on Christal, who did her best to hide her shaking hands and keep her attention on Cain's arm.

  "Marmet was guzzling the whiskey again. He was so drunk, he didn't recognize me. He shot at me—guess he thought I was one of the prisoners. I killed him."

  Her hands quit shaking. She stared at Cain, who refused to meet her gaze.

  "Damn fool," Kineson whispered under his breath. He sent the rest of his men upstairs to fetch the body and watch the prisoners.

  Slowly, Cain's gaze rose to meet hers. She wondered if her face gave away her feelings. He was a fraud. On the outside he was the terrifying gunfighter Macaulay Cain, but on the inside he was someone else, someone possessing mercy and justice. Someone, perhaps, very much like her.

  She lifted her hand to touch the hard planes of his face. Almost pleadingly, she whispered, "Macaulay . . ."

  He jerked his head away from her hand and ruthlessly broke eye contact. Shutting her out, he stood and nodded for her to go to the door.

  Before, she might have had to be dragged. This time, she complied. She couldn't fight a man who had saved her life and now, strangely, Pete's. Her emotions in upheaval, she walked to the door and waited while he got a lantern.

  Kineson watched her, his eyes glittering with anger. She knew he'd always liked Cain's roughness with her. He'd always enjoyed the fight in her. Now something had changed between them and Christal could see Kineson knew it.

  Cain took her arm and they left the saloon. Kineson's last angry words followed them as he instructed the men who'd brought down the body to dump it in the gorge "fer enough away so the fool don't stink."

  Chapter Seven

  A breed which fails to honor its heroes

  will soon have no heroes to honor.

  John S. Tilley on the Confederacy

  Harvard University 1959

  The ransom drop was tomorrow. Tuesday would be the beginning of her life. Or the end of it.

  Christal boiled coffee, serving the men who grumbled and groped at her. Supper was over and some of them were already bedding down for the night, too anxious to think any more on what the next day might bring. It had grown even colder and the weather made the men jittery. Cold fingers didn't shoot as well as warm ones. Kineson was in the foulest mood of all. He took his coffee, and when she tried to walk away, he viciously tripped her. She fell onto the hard ground and the coffeepot spilled into the fire with a hiss.

  "Maybe I'll just take you with us on our ride outta here. What do you think of that, girlie? Cain can't use you forever. When am I gonna get my turn?"

  Cain rose from the shadows by the chimney, but he didn't help her up.

  She got to her feet, outrage burning in her eyes. She hated Kineson almost as much as she hated Didier. Unable to stop it, she let her anger have its head. "You'd better kill me now, then, because I'll never let you touch

  me."

  Suddenly she felt Cain's hands on her, pulling her back.

  Kineson stood, red fury on his face.

  Cain lifted a blanket over his shoulders and without a word dragged her into the woods. Kineson shouted behind him, "She's coming with us, Cain. I'll have a go at her sometime. You owe me that much!"

  Cain said nothing.

  It was too cold to go to the falls. Instead he brought her beneath the sheared-off side of the gorge, where they found protection from the wind in a grove of aspens. He flung the blanket over him and sat down, forcing her alongside. She wished she'd had the courage to pull from his embrace, but she was cold; she didn't have a shawl left to her name. Surrendering, she fell back against his chest and allowed him to pull the blanket over her.

  A full moon lit the night woods. She could make out the quivering leaves overhead and, if she'd wanted to, Cain's stony expression. They'd been fortunate that it hadn't rained since she and the other Overland passengers had been taken captive. Like most outlaws, Kineson's men had no tents. Bivouacking wasn't a hardship on them.

  Cain moved, throwing his arm across her chest to hold her closer. She couldn't look at his face. She knew he wouldn't have met her gaze anyway. They hadn't spoken all day, not about his stiff, hurting arm, nor about what he'd done to save them last night. He wanted it that way. But she didn't. She wanted to know everything about him. Especially what had changed him into a hardened outlaw.

  "Kineson is going to take advantage of your wounded arm," she said. He didn't answer. She continued, "I'm worried that—"

  "Don't be. I can take care of myself."

  She turned quiet. Her voice became a monotone. She tried hard not to care. "What if he kills you?"

  "He needs me."

  "Not after tomorrow. I think that's why he wants me to stay with him because . . . because you won't be around."

  His arm drew her even closer.

  She looked down and touched it. "I don't want to see you killed. You should escape. Right now if you can. All of us owe you, Cain. No one would dispute it
. Not after what you did last night—"

  "Listen," he said, interrupting her, "last night had nothing to do with you or the other prisoners. I did what I did to keep my ass alive. And that's it."

  "I don't believe you." Her voice was as strong as her convictions. There was something good within Macaulay Cain and she'd believe it to her dying day, despite how it angered him to bring it up.

  "That's what I'm telling you and that's what you'll believe."

  "How can you be loyal to Kineson? He'cl just as soon see you dead." She could no longer hide the emotion in her voice.

  He heard it because his answer seemed slow and difficult. "Listen, girl, don't worry about me. Kineson was in my regiment, the Georgia Sixty-seventh. We fought Federals together, side by side. We go back a long way. We understand each other. That's why he let me run with his gang."

  "But that was years ago. The war is over. Kineson's still fighting, but the U.S. won."

  "Yeah. You don't need to remind me of that."

  His bitterness caught her by surprise. Then she recalled how he'd sung the last verse of "Good Ol' Rebel."

  "Tell me about the war," she said, desperately seeking a way to get through to him. "I was too young to remember much. Tell me about it. I want to understand . . ." the man you've become. The words echoed through her mind. She felt as if she were talking to her lover, whispering in the dark about their ill-fated love and knowing that tomorrow they would finally be together in eternity. But they were not lovers. The analogy was absurd. He was the renegade and she, the victim. Still, the emotions fit. And they disturbed her.

  "You won't die. Not if I can help it," he answered without undue sentiment. Matter-of-factly, as if it were his job to protect her.

  "But you will die." Her words were not so calm. "If Kineson doesn't get you, the marshals will. Terence Scott isn't going to fork over that much gold and let you live to spend it." She paused. "And if you die, Cain, then I know what will happen to me." She paused again and whispered fiercely, "I won't go with Kineson."

  He turned her face up toward him and the illumination of the moonlight. Their eyes met, sizzling with an understanding that was beyond even words. To seal it, she knew he wanted to kiss her. The need was there, in the way his lips hardened as if he were biting back desire.

  "I want to know about you," she whispered. "Tell me about the war, tell me about Georgia."

  "There's nothing to tell."

  "I want to know."

  He looked at her as if judging her sincerity. It took him a long time to speak. He didn't seem to want to, and there was a moment when she thought he'd pull away. But whether he decided no harm could come of talking about himself, or he just wanted to share with her at this final hour, she wasn't sure. She only knew that her heart grasped at the information as if it were bread and she, dying of famine.

  "Until I was seventeen I helped my father plant goober peas at the farm." His gaze moved away, as if he were seeing another place and another time. "My family, we weren't dirt poor, but we didn't own slaves—we did the work ourselves. When the war started, I joined the Georgia Sixty-seventh and took up the Cause. They say I did it for a different reason now. Washington branded me and a lot of others as devils who fought to keep the black man in chains. But that had nothing to do with it. We were poor. I wasn't gonna die for slaves that didn't even belong to me."

  "Why did you fight, then?"

  He took a deep breath. "At first it was for home. You hear the Army of the Potomac's invaded Virginia and you look at your ma and you think: Soon they're gonna be in Georgia stealing your pigs and burning down your house. You've got to do something to stop it. So you join up."

  His voice turned raspy, filled with anger and frustration that had long been punched down and shoved away. "Then it gets cold. You got rags on your body while you're fightin' men in blue uniforms who are warm and dry. And you get hungry, sometimes with only wormy hardtack to eat, and on the other side their blue bellies are full of white army beans that you'd give your right arm for. Then you see a boy from home get his head shot right off his shoulders"—his voice lowered—"then it gets personal. And you get hard from all that cold and starving. Fightin' becomes a way of life. I went into the war a seventeen-year-old boy and one day I woke up and I was a twenty-one-year-old man. My entire life seemed to have been spent in the Confederacy. I fought my war and I didn't pay any Irisher to fight it for me like Yankees did. But in four years, even the Cause had grown into something I didn't recognize anymore. I'd lost my father and two brothers to the war, and in the end, all I wanted was to go home and forget what had ever happened to me."

  "But Sherman saw to it that you couldn't," she answered, remembering what he'd told her. Her throat constricted with emotion. The war had had no effect on her at all. All she really knew about it came from him. He'd been barely a man, asked to sacrifice everything for his homeland. He'd done it, only to be betrayed by all that he'd fought for.

  He continued, as if talking was a catharsis. "When my mother lost her youngest boy, Walker, the second of her sons to die for the Stars and Bars, she couldn't endure it any longer. She was a simple woman, born in Manchester to railroad workers. She didn't understand the War Between the States and the Cause. States' rights meant nothing to her and she didn't care about issues like white man versus black. Her family was all she ever cared about and after Walker was gone, she refused to feel the loss. She took a glassful of laudanum and never woke up. She never knew she'd become a widow too." He quit talking, and she knew he was remembering the pain all over again.

  In silence, he rested his jaw against her head. They sat for a long time, both immersed in their thoughts, until she felt his jaw against her crown, sliding back and forth, as if luxuriating in the feel of her hair. She had wanted to say something, to somehow let him know that his story moved her, and that she understood some things better now, but the words wouldn't come. Her mouth was useless. Until his knuckles brushed against her lips.

  She turned to look up at him. The moonlight was enough to see his grave expression. Ever so slowly he bent his head down to her. "You see an outlaw here," he whispered, "talking to you, wanting to kiss you. You know you shouldn't let him, girl. You shouldn't . . ."

  Then his lips came down on hers.

  His kiss was just as she expected: deep and satisfying, leaving her no need for anything but him. His mouth was as hard as it looked, and deep inside she reveled in the hardness, for it hinted at strengths she didn't possess. Her mind, body, and soul told her to stop the seduction, that it could only lead to ruin. Instead, overwhelmed by the desolate yearnings of her heart, she opened her mouth, welcoming his tongue just as she welcomed the arm that swung around her backside and pulled her against him as they knelt on the blanket.

  His mouth covered her, sucking on her lower lip. His teeth grazed the deep rose flesh on its underside, his tongue pushed through the barrier of her teeth. All logic told her to run. There were a million reasons to leave and no good ones to stay. She had no future with this man, and tomorrow would probably put an end to what they had. If she wasn't killed in the showdown, then surely he would be.

  His tongue invaded her mouth and she moaned deep within herself. But her soul was like his. They'd both been forced to be people they were not: he, by the war, she, by Didier. And maybe they could change. Maybe if she could just trust him. . . .

  "I've bedded a lot of women, Christal," he whispered against her ear, his words heated and quick after he pulled from her mouth. "But this is something more. This is wanting like I've never felt. The first time I looked at you, I wanted you."

  She trembled, remembering how he'd frightened her in the stage when he'd used his gun to lift her veil. He still frightened her, but her desire for him now overrode her fear, making it trivial, to be put aside until she could think and feel something other than him.

  "God, I wish I had a bed. I wish I could take you like your husband did, civilized, not here on the cold ground."

  A sm
all cry caught in her throat. Everything was moving too fast. She couldn't even tell him she'd never had a husband to bed her in a more civilized manner.

  "Macaulay," she whispered, but his kiss stopped her.

  He laid her back against the blanket, covering her with his long, hard body, and her thoughts grew incoherent. Her face clamped between his strong hands, he kissed her as if he would never get enough of the taste of her lips. He hardly let her catch her breath, but she didn't want to. She suddenly wanted him to take away her need for air and everything else, and leave only the need for him, which he promised to fulfill with every scorching thrust into her mouth, and every fiery trace of his fingers down her neck.

  "I'll look out for you, girl. Don't you worry about tomorrow," he whispered into her ear. Then his hand slid up her chest and cupped her breast, squeezing it through the layers of bodice and corset.

  It should have shocked her—she'd hated any man who'd tried to touch her there before—but it was natural the way he touched her. He treated her man to woman, his gentleness all the more compelling because she knew just how superior his strength was.

  As if by instinct, she caressed his face, wanting to know all of him. She touched the straight bridge of his nose, his beard-roughened jaw. Finally she ran her finger down his neck, rimming the inside of the bandanna. Her finger slid along the ridges of his scar, a tingle running down her spine as she thought of why it was there, but the scar was warm and his pulse drummed with life against the sensitive pad of her finger. That was all she wanted to think about.

  "It doesn't hurt anymore," he said quietly.

  "Whatever you've done," she whispered, a sob tearing her voice, "I won't ask."