Swept Away (13 page)

“Then the other night when you were sleeping”—Luke almost said
sleeping in my arms
, but he didn’t think it was wise to mention that now—“and Dare woke you up, were you dreaming of being in the woods?”

“No, Virgil wasn’t above trying to get into my bedroom
at night. After the first time it happened, I jammed a chair up against the doorknob and slept with a knife.”

“Didn’t your ma notice?”

“I was always last to bed and first to rise—not counting Virgil’s nighttime wanderings.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would a child be last to bed and first to rise?”

Rosie frowned and crossed her arms. She glared at the ground as if the dirt and rocks annoyed her. And maybe they did. She liked things tidy and heaven knows this canyon was a mess. He was trying to figure out how to goad an answer out of her when she said, “Ma and Pa Reinhardt never quit reminding me I was living off their charity. They insisted I work to pay my way, and I worked hard. And it seemed like the harder I worked, the less they did, until toward the end I was doing everything.”

“Everything, really?”

Rosie nodded. “Way too close to everything. The daily chores, inside and out. All the cooking. I planted in the spring. I hunted in the summer. I harvested in the fall. I cared for the stock all through the winter. And I did it all with the Reinhardts slapping at me and calling me lazy. And now that I’ve finally grown in a brain, I’m more than sure they stole my pa’s land. They didn’t farm it; I’d have noticed because they’d have probably made me do the work there, too. I suspect they sold it, claiming they were acting as my guardians, then kept the money for themselves, all while working me like a slave.”

“So is that why you’re forever cleaning? You got in the habit?”

“No, I’m forever cleaning because your friend’s house
is a pigsty. He shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine in that place. He should—”

“Get your hands where I can see ’em.” The sudden hard voice, combined with a pistol being cocked, shut Rosie up. Luke cursed himself for being distracted by the woman as he slowly raised his hands and turned to look death right in the face.

C
HAPTER 9

Dare looked death right in the face. He lifted his hands from Glynna’s body, keeping them where Greer could see.

Glynna moaned with pain from Dare’s treatment of her shoulder, but Dare didn’t let it distract him from Greer. “You really want me to leave your wife, even though she’s unconscious? She could be dying.”

This wasn’t a man making idle threats. He held that gun as if it would give him great pleasure to pull the trigger, almost like he was looking for an excuse to kill someone. The killing rage in Greer’s eyes was irrational. Dare remembered what he’d heard about Greer’s temper. How when he was in a rage, he was a madman. How could Greer find his wife on the floor like this and order the doctor out? An ugly suspicion reared its head.

Had Mrs. Greer fallen down the steps or had she been pushed? Greer wouldn’t be surprised if he’d already known his wife was lying there. Dare thought of his other visit to see Glynna. Maybe this wasn’t the first time.

“No man touches my wife but me.” Greer pulled back the hammer on his Colt.

“Flint! No!” Glynna threw up her hands to cover her face. When she moved her injured arm, she cried out in
pain and clutched her right shoulder with her left hand. “I’m sorry! Flint, please stop!”

Dare looked at Glynna, and the terror in her voice was impossible to ignore. And every condemning word she said reduced Dare’s chances of walking out of there alive. Especially now that Dare knew he needed to take Glynna and her children with him. Greer would never let that happen.

Glynna’s cry of pain drew Greer’s attention, too. But rather than acting worried, Greer’s lips twisted in annoyance, like his wife caused him one problem after another. But the gun finally lowered and went back in Greer’s holster with a smooth motion that told its own story of Greer’s deadly skill with a gun.

“Do I go,” Dare asked, doing his best to keep the fury out of his voice, “or do I wrap the ribs she broke . . . falling down the stairs?” Dare wasn’t sure if Glynna had broken ribs, but Greer didn’t know that.

Glynna’s cries of fear descended into sobs that wracked her battered body. There would come a time to make Greer pay for this, and every other crime he’d committed. Dare was mighty tempted to make today that day. He didn’t have his gun. His Winchester was out on his saddle, but that might as well be a thousand miles away. And what if he could get it? Or get Greer’s gun from him and kill him? To shoot a man with children looking on—it seemed like the kind of thing a man would have to answer for at the pearly gates. But leaving a woman in this man’s clutches would be its own ugly sin.

God, give me wisdom to handle this.

Jonas was the one with the wisdom amongst the Regulators. Dare wondered what Jonas would do right at this
moment. Pray, which Dare had already done. But what else? No still, small voice whispered any suggestions.

“Help! I hurt. Help me . . .” Glynna’s crying distracted Dare. He was there to heal, not kill. And maybe that was God’s answer. The fury in his heart wasn’t what he should heed. He needed to care for Glynna.

Dare studied the deep scrape on her chin and glanced over to see a heavy ring on Greer’s right hand. The hand that even now was clenched into a fist.

Had Greer really knocked her down the stairs, or had he done all this damage with his bare fists?

“You kids get upstairs.” Greer switched his attention to his children. No, not his children if Mrs. Greer had only married him in the last year. “You’re too lazy to work, then you’re not gonna eat. Now git! And don’t let me see your faces until tomorrow!”

It was still midmorning. Did that mean the children would go without food all day? Did Greer hit them, too? If the young’uns weren’t Greer’s, he might be even more apt to hurt them.

The belligerent look on the boy’s face hardened into hate. This boy knew exactly what Greer had done, and he wanted to protect his ma. Dare had a sick feeling that the day was coming when the boy would either kill Flint Greer or become just like him. Or both.

“Go.” Dare realized he’d never learned the kid’s name. “I’ll take care of your ma.”

With a long, heartrending look at his mother, the boy turned, caught his little sister’s wrist, and dragged her up the stairs. Long, broad steps with a sturdy railing—not that easy to fall down.

A door slammed upstairs, and Dare turned back to
Greer. “What’ll it be, Flint?” Dare did his best to sound professional. Glynna needed him. She moaned and clutched her shoulder, still semiconscious. “She needs her shoulder in a sling. Her ribs have to be wrapped.”

Dare needed to come up with something that Greer couldn’t do himself.

“Anytime someone is knocked unconscious, they most likely have a concussion.” Dare pictured Flint’s heavy fists striking the delicate woman, wrenching her shoulder out of its socket.

Dare had to look down or Greer would see death. Dare hadn’t been around women much. His ma of course, but they’d lived a long way out. It was almost a surprise just how powerful were the instincts in Dare’s heart and mind and soul to protect a woman. To stand between her and danger. Right now it was taking every ounce of his self-control to not lunge at Greer and rip out his throat. And since Greer was standing about five feet away with a gun, that meant Dare would die.

Which wouldn’t help this woman out at all.

But Dare thought of Luke and the trouble Luke was bringing, and Dare relished settling justice on this vicious bully.

“Sometimes there’s bleeding in the brain and there needs to be treatment for the patient to wake all the way up.”

“I been knocked cold before—more’n once. I came out of it without a doctor.”

“Yes, but you’re not a delicate woman. Things are different for women.” Not true. Leastways not from what Dare had learned in the medical books he’d gotten hold of. Men and women, in this case, were the same. And since he’d had little experience with women patients, mostly just the
madwoman, Lana Bullard, Dare didn’t really know what he was talking about. But then neither did Greer.

What Dare did know was, he’d do anything to stay there and take care of Glynna Greer, and then he was going to find a way to get her and her children out.

“I need to make sure her vision isn’t blurred. She could be nauseated and dizzy for days.”

A look crossed Greer’s face that made Dare wonder if the polecat hadn’t had some of these symptoms when he had his concussion.

“And we need to keep her awake.” Dare looked down and wondered how to keep a woman awake who was already asleep. “Once she regains consciousness, she can’t be allowed to sleep for”—Dare took a chance, making up an excuse for him to stay a long while—“twenty-four hours.”

Then he had a better idea. “It would be best if I took her to my office so I could observe her closely and make sure she’s responding well.”

And then he just made the next part up. “She could lapse into a coma.”

“A coma? What’s that?” Greer pulled off his hat and tossed it at a hook on the wall. He didn’t come close to getting the hat to hang up. When Greer turned back, at that second, he resembled an ape Dare had seen in a picture book. Greer had hair on his head, his face, his neck.

The backs of his hands were so thick with black hair it looked like a pelt. He had shaggy brows that almost drooped over his eyes. And those eyes—they were so wild they seemed to jump around in his head.

His nose was too flat. It looked like it had been broken so often it barely had a shape anymore. Maybe Greer had been a fighter earlier in life. His forehead was so prominent
the ape comparison was almost too close. Dare wondered what Glynna Greer had thought when she’d stepped off a stagecoach and seen Greer for the first time. Had she realized instantly that she’d made a terrible bargain? But Dare had heard Greer used to be tidy, clean-shaven and well dressed. Maybe this was what a man looked like who’d spent a year descending into brutality.

“A coma is a deep unnatural sleep. They can’t be awakened from it. It’s different than being unconscious. But it can come later, after a blow to the head, such as your wife has received.”

From you, you filthy sidewinder.

“Can I tend her while we talk, Greer? She needs treatment, and the more I can do while she’s unaware the better. She’ll be in terrible pain when she comes around.”

Flint clenched his fist and looked from Dare to Glynna for too long. Then he slashed his hand in the air, the bulky ring glinting in the light. “Do whatever you want with the lousy trollop. Should’ve never gotten mixed up with a woman. Nothing but a nuisance since she set foot in my door. I should’ve just let her keep going the first time she ran off.”

It made Dare sick to think of Greer catching her and dragging her home.

“But she’s mine. I got her, paid what was owed, and she belongs to me. Ain’t nuthin’ gonna change that.”

Dare saw the look on Greer’s beast-like face. The man enjoyed having someone small and defenseless at his mercy. He wasn’t letting her go. “Can I take her into my office in Broken Wheel? I should get back so I can see my other patients.”

“She doesn’t leave my land.” Greer’s snarled words were
more animal than man. “I’ve got a guard posted, so don’t try and leave with her, not if you want to live.”

Greer grabbed his hat off the floor and stormed out of the house. He slammed the door behind him so hard the glass in the nearest window rattled.

The door’s loud crack seemed to finally reach deep enough into Glynna Greer’s battered mind that it woke her. Golden eyes flickered open, the rarest color he’d ever seen.

“You’ve got to get out of here.” Her voice cracked. She swallowed hard. “Get out before he comes.”

Dare didn’t know how to tell her it was too late.

“Keep turning, but make it mighty slow. If you’re thinkin’ of trying to get a shot off, make sure you know my first bullet goes into her.”

Carefully, his hands in plain sight, Luke turned to face Dodger, his father’s old friend. When he faced Dodger fully, the old-timer’s eyes narrowed. “Luciano?”