The Lady Takes A Gunslinger (Wild Western Rogues Series, Book 1) (14 page)

Reese woke to the whoosh of dry wood catching fire and the crackle of sparks as they escaped upward, spiraling into the darkness above him. The scent of singed wool assaulted his nose.

He blinked, trying to remember where he was. The fire disoriented him. The last thing he remembered was a driving rain chilling him to the bone, and someone—that woman—badgering him into consciousness, pulling him from an inexorable slide toward darkness. He didn't recall finding this cave or even steering the horse toward it. But here they were. How she'd managed to find dry wood for a fire was beyond him, and the fact she'd had wits enough to build it out of sight of the entrance surprised him even more.

He rolled over, instantly regretting it. His side was aflame and every muscle in his body ached, but he forced himself up on his elbow, enduring the moment of dizziness it brought. Slowly, his every movement weighted down by lethargy, he glanced down at his side and found fresh bandages there. He had no memory of that either. It occurred to him dully that she had saved him. She'd saved them all.

Grace's wet coat lay drying by the fire, steam rising from the dark fabric. The old man lay asleep on the opposite side of the fire, his snore a congested and unhealthy rattle. Beyond him, the two horses stood dozing in the shadows of the far wall, their breath forming white clouds in the darkness.

His gaze found Grace by the entrance of the cave, silhouetted by the lightening sky. With her knees drawn up tight to her chest and her shoulders draped with a blanket, she scribbled in some notebook she was holding, pausing now and then to nibble on the end of the pen and gaze out at the desert beyond. That glorious spill of golden hair fell negligently around her shoulders. Beside her lay the Henry rifle they'd taken from Sanders's office, its brass fittings glinting in the firelight.

He took in the steep rock walls of the enclosure around him, the vaulted ceiling, the pressing comfort here. It had been a long time since he'd nothing to fear at his back but a stone wall.

On the ground near the fire lay the corked bottle of elixir. Reese moistened his lips and reached for it. The cork gave a slight squeak. Wincing, he glanced at the girl. She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and scribbled in her little book. He lifted the bottle to his mouth and was rewarded by the merest drop slithering down the slippery side of the bottle.

"It's empty," a familiar female voice informed him.

Reese looked up to find Grace walking toward him, a self-satisfied expression on her face.

He lowered the bottle with a frown. "And exceptional hearing, too. Is there no end to your talents, Miss Turner?"

"We used the elixir on your wound. Medicinally speaking, of course, being all we had."

"'Course. I suppose that's the last of it."

"Not the last. Brew has another bottle, but he needs it for his cough. God knows why, but it seems to help him. I'll thank you not to dip into it."

He glanced at the sleeping man. He recognized the persistent cough and sallow, unhealthy-looking skin. Consumption. He'd heard the rattle of it often enough during his misspent youth; first, in the steerage quarters of the scow that had brought him from Dublin, then on the streets of a Boston slum. Enough to know there wasn't a thing that peddler's elixir or anything else could do to help the old man. But if she didn't know that, he decided it wasn't his place to inform her.

She knelt by the fire. "I'm glad to see you're alive, Mr. Donovan."

"I have you to thank, it seems."

"Or perhaps Dr. Braufield's Celebrated Elixir." She fed a dry branch into the blaze. A shower of sparks exploded and drifted upward with the smoke. "I won't ask how you feel. You look nearly as bad dry as you did wet."

"Ah," he said, dragging a hand through his ragged hair, "careful, princess. You might turn my head with such flattery."

"You should be resting." She held her hands above the flames, toasting that little notebook of hers along with her fingertips.

"What about you?" he asked. "Did you sleep, or have you been up all night scribbling down notes on the Great Pair-a-Dice Escapade?"

She flushed, tucking her journal protectively behind her. "What I scribble is none of your business. And for your information, I was keeping watch for the men who are following us."

He frowned, glancing back at the entrance. "Any sign of them?"

With a lift of that perfect little nose of hers she said, "It just so happens there was."

He sat up straighter. "What?"

"They passed us an hour ago. They and their lanterns went right by, without the merest glance this way."

He swore softly, rubbing a hand down his face, "Why didn't you wake me?"

"Wake you? You were out cold, Mr. Donovan. Why, in the time it took for Brew and me to bandage you up, you didn't so much as twitch an eyelash. How did you expect me to—"

"How many?"

She frowned. "Six, I think."

"You think?"

"No, definitely six."

"Did you get a good look at them?"

"Only one," she admitted. "The one holding the first lantern."

Reese waited, watching her intently.

"He was Mexican, or Indian, with dark hair past his shoulders and a light-colored neckerchief around his forehead."

"Are you sure?"

She nodded. "I could be wrong, but he looked like one of the men in the saloon that night you shot Deke Sanders. The one who claimed he hadn't seen Deke draw on you."

Reese rolled back onto his bedroll with a curse and closed his eyes. "That means they'll be back."

"What makes you think so? They didn't even look this way."

"Because that's Juan Hidalgo, a half-breed Comanche and one of the best trackers in Texas. The rain put him off our scent, but when he finds no trace of us now that it's stopped, he'll know we holed up behind them. They'll be back, sniffing around, until they flush us out of this hole."

She cast a worried look at the lightening sky. "What should we do?"

Holding the pain in his side, he turned his head toward her. "You should get on that horse and ride south as fast as you can. Put as much distance between yourself and this place as possible."

She turned on him with a disbelieving laugh, as if such a thought would never cross her mind. His dead-serious expression made her smile slip. "And I suppose if the situation were reversed that's just what you'd do."

"Aye, it is," he answered bluntly.

Those bluebonnet eyes of hers narrowed. "I don't believe you."

"That's your misfortune."

She looked him up and down as if trying fit in some puzzle piece she thought belonged to him. Then a slow smile spread over her dirt-smudged face and she shook her head. "No," she pronounced. "You want to know what I think?"

"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?"