[Montacroix Royal Family Series 03] - The Outlaw (9 page)

If she'd been hoping for sympathy—which, Noel assured herself, she most definitely wasn't—she would have been disappointed. As she sipped the water, willing it to calm her rebellious stomach, she risked a glance upward. His eyes were every bit as expressionless as his lean sculpted face.

"Thank you," she murmured, handing the canteen back to him.

"Save your thanks for when we get away from here without getting killed." His tone was as hard as his flinty eyes. His dark glance swept over her dismissively. Then he clucked at the mare and turned away, leaving her to follow.

As the hours dragged on and the miles passed by, Noel became exhausted and sore and thirsty. Depression battled with pain and fatigue. Despite the fact that her behavior had been justified, never mind the fact that she would do it again in a heartbeat, the idea of having shot another human being hung heavily on her heart.

Hot tears stung at the back of her eyelids. She blinked them away. The always serene Princess Noel never cried. Ask anyone in Montacroix. Not that anyone currently living in her country would even know of her, she thought wretchedly.

Only days ago, she'd been comfortably living in her family's palace, preparing for her wedding. She'd been happy. Contented, which for her, had always been pretty much the same thing.

Since stepping into whatever time warp she'd somehow entered, she'd been thrown from a carriage, had suffered what well could be a concussion, had been mistaken for a whore, had shared a distressingly hot kiss with an escaped outlaw she'd just met, had shot a bounty hunter, then had stolen his horse.

Her family would never believe it.

She
hardly believed it.

Which meant that if Wolfe Longwalker ever did stop riding long enough for her to try to explain her situation, he'd undoubtedly find the scenario preposterous.

"I'm beginning to have my doubts about this being a very good idea," she murmured to the horse, stroking the silky black mane as they settled down for a walk. Since that initial burst of speed when they left the Road to Ruin, they'd been maintaining a pace of walk, trot, canter, then walk again "But there's not much I can do about it now."

Which, of course, brought to mind another question. Having landed here in the first place, would she ever be able to return home? To her own country? And her own time?

The fancy lady had guts, Wolfe determined grimly as he guided the mare across ground that was as familiar to him as his own face. Except for that brief hot argument in Belle's kitchen, the woman hadn't opened her mouth once. And for a woman who, if that diamond ring and those pearl earrings were any indication, appeared to earn a very good living on her back, he had to admit that she sat tall in the saddle.

That she'd proven unafraid of confrontation did not surprise him. A lot of whores he'd met over the years tended to have violent natures. Fighting seemed to be as much their specialty as loving. He'd certainly seen more than one pair of bawdy-house belles come to blows over the favors of a man. He'd also witnessed a drunken bully ending up on the wrong side of a female's dagger for cheating her out of her rightly earned pay. On the other hand, the violence didn't even out. Since the women were invariably smaller and weaker, they tended to end up on the losing end of most physical battles between the sexes.

Unless, of course, Wolfe amended, they were armed with a derringer, as this one had been. Thinking back to that expression of utter shock and disbelief on Black Jack's face when he realized he'd been shot, almost made Wolfe smile.

Almost but not quite. Not yet. He cast a glance upward at the sun, gauging time and distance. And continued.

Noel desperately longed to stop. But Wolfe continued to set a grueling pace, backtracking, riding the horses in the shallow waters along the banks of Whiskey River to throw their pursuers off the track. And since she had the feeling that there was absolutely nothing she could say to make him take a break, she had no choice but to follow his lead. Although he seemed to know exactly where he was going, she could not pick out any discernible trail.

Keeping single file, they threaded through a series of narrow canyons, headed toward the top of the mesa. Every so often, a loose stone skipped away from beneath a hoof and scattered downward, landing with a clatter on the rocks below.

Only sheer determination kept her in the heavy, unfamiliar, high-backed saddle. Her bottom ached, and her thighs, bare beneath the silk skirts, felt as if they'd been rubbed raw.

Finally, she had to ask. "Can't we stop?" she called out, ducking to avoid a tree branch that threatened to take off the top of her head. Her tongue was literally sticking to the roof of her mouth. "Just for a little while?"

"No."

The single word was flat and final. He didn't even bother to glance back at her. Indeed, if anything, he picked up the pace, urging his horse to a canter. Cursing in a very unprincess-like way, Noel picked up the pace and rode after him.

She didn't believe he'd leave her out here in the wilderness all alone, not after having already saved her life. And surely not after she'd saved his.

But she wasn't quite ready to put it to the test.

Wolfe glanced up at the sky again, almost unconsciously calculating the time until sundown. Although he'd spent much of his life among the whites, he'd been born with the iron stamina of the Dineh and could travel for days without sleep.

Before he'd been sent away to that hated white man's boarding school in the East, back when he'd still lived with his mother's sister's family, in the warm red heart of Dinetah, Wolfe had heard stories of how the elders had been capable of covering a hundred miles a day, and more.

His own mother's father had reminisced about the days when members of raiding parties would run their horses into the ground, then dismount and run.

During the
Naahondzond
—the Fearing Time—when the hated Kit Carson, known to The People as the Rope Thrower, had tried to kill off every Navajo in Arizona Territory, the outgunned Dineh had been forced to hide among the canyons. His grandfather had told of several instances of going seventy-two hours without sleep, much of it in the saddle.

But that had been desperation. This was reality.

He knew she had to be exhausted. Still, better to be exhausted, Wolfe reminded himself, than dead.

The sun was sinking below the jagged mountain peak to the west in a blazing display of crimson and gold. As dusk settled over the land, spreading deep purple shadows, Noel decided that things had gone on long enough.

She didn't care if the entire U.S. Cavalry caught up with her, not that she'd caught so much as a glimpse of any pursuers. She'd worry about being captured—and, heaven help her, hanged— when and if the occasion presented itself. Right now, she was getting down from the back of this horse while she could still move a muscle in her aching body.

Before she could insist that she could not ride another moment, Wolfe reined in his horse. "We'll stop now."

"So soon?" she asked with atypical sarcasm. Princess Noel Giraudeau de Montacroix was never sarcastic. Never!

Wolfe shrugged, vaguely irritated at the way he found himself enjoying her acid tone. The fancy lady's fragile blond looks might give the impression of sugar and spice, but down deep, where it counted, she had a steel core.

Just like him.

"You could have stayed back at Belle's. Upstairs, where you belonged," he said pointedly.

"I belong with you."

That earned a weary sigh as he dismounted and walked a few feet away, lay on top of a low rise and trained a pair of field glasses on the vast valley.

"Do you see anyone?" she asked.

"No." He took another quick perusal, then, not wanting to chance that a stray glint of polished lens would betray their presence, he stood up and returned the field glasses to his saddlebag.

When she began to dismount, afraid she'd become hopelessly tangled in the voluminous skirts, Wolf caught her around the waist and lifted her easily to the ground.

It was then that she discovered her legs had about as much consistency as water. "Thank you."

She continued to hold on to his upper arms, afraid she'd embarrass herself by crumbling into a pile of red silk if forced to stand on her own.

Beneath her fingertips, the muscles in his arms felt like boulders. She would not have guessed that a man who earned his living writing could have been so fit. So hard.

Wolfe didn't say anything. Instead, he was looking down into her face with those brooding dark eyes that had the power to stop her breath in her lungs.

They stood there for a long suspended moment, close together, his firm thighs crushing the front of her dress, his long dark fingers creating a scorching heat at her waist, him looking down at her, her looking up at him.

Unnerved, she managed to drag her gaze from his. It was then she saw it. A bright red stain on the shoulder of his shirt.

"You've been shot!"

He shrugged, feeling the tug of sensitive flesh as he did so. "It's nothing."

"Don't be so ridiculously macho." Always feeling more at ease when she was in charge of a situation, Noel placed her hands on her satin-clad hips. "Take off your shirt."

Wolfe smirked to keep her from seeing that the concern he sensed beneath her feminine determination made him uncomfortable. "I like a lady who takes the direct approach." He unbuttoned the shirt and tossed it onto a nearby stump. "Want me to get rid of the pants, too?"

If it weren't for that flinch of pain he'd tried so hard to conceal, Noel would have hated him for behaving so crudely. It also took all her concentration not to be distracted by the hard copper wall of his chest.

"That won't be necessary," she answered mildly. The blood had dried into a brown crust, making it impossible to see what she was dealing with. Taking the canteen, she began pouring water over the wound.

"You waste too much of that and you're going to get real thirsty, real soon," Wolfe said, thinking of the vast miles of high desert they'd cross before reaching sanctuary.

"Surely we can get more from the river," she said calmly. "Besides, I need to see what type of wound we're dealing with."

"Have a lot of experience with bullet wounds, do you?" Wolfe wouldn't have been surprised if there'd been a few shots exchanged by drunken cowhands on a Saturday night over such a woman.

"Not that much… All right," she admitted, intimidated by his unblinking, steady stare. "None at all. But I've taken Red Cross training."

When that only earned an arched, questioning eyebrow, she elaborated. "First aid. It's a basic level of healing."

She began breathing easier when she was able to see the wound more clearly. "The bullet seems to have only grazed the flesh."

He glanced uncaringly at the furrow that had been carved through his skin. He'd had worse. Much, much worse.

"I told you it was nothing."

"True. But if you'd been wrong, you would have missed the opportunity to say I told you so. Because you would have been dead."

"Everyone dies. Sooner or later."

"True. But personally, I'd prefer later." She was about to hand him back his shirt, when she gasped at the sight of the raised flesh running down the front of his forearm. "What's that?"

He glanced down at the thick bands of scar tissue he'd forgotten about. "A little souvenir from a youthful tussle with a bear."

"A bear?"

He saw the horror move in waves across her face and realized that she was seeing him not as the writer of all those popular western books, but as a primitive, violent savage.

"We had a dispute over territory."

"Who won?"

"If I'd lost, I wouldn't be standing here with you today." He'd killed the mean-tempered bear, but it had cost him months of recuperation. That he'd managed to do so with only a knife had gained him a measure of fame among the Dineh, but that meant little to him now. During his thirty-some winters on this earth, he had seen far worse things than a bear claw.

She glanced around, more concerned about the idea of wild animals than of the posse that was undoubtedly after them. "Do you think there might be bears around here?"

"Might well be." He shrugged. "Probably some wolves, too. But don't worry, sweetheart, I'll keep them from eating you up."

Her strange day had been an unsettling experience. Noel was exhausted. And sore. Not being in the best of moods, the careless endearment rankled. "My name is not sweetheart. It's Noel."

He shrugged. "Whatever you want."

It was his experience that fancy women tended to change names about as often as they changed towns. This time next month she'd probably be Sassy Sally. Or Diamond Doll.

Although, now that he thought about it, she'd chosen well. The name, bringing up thoughts of sleigh bells, crystal snowflakes and the rich mulled wine he'd been introduced to in London, definitely fit.

Her nerves stretched. Tangled. Twisted into painful knots.

That familiar look she'd seen in his eyes—upstairs in the Road to Ruin—returned. His harsh lips quirked in a faint, almost self-mocking smile as he caught her chin between his fingers.