Wild Burn (3 page)

Her eyes narrowed as she took in the flattened mess of hair revealed by his lack of hat. “Making yourself at home?” She couldn’t bring herself to be polite, the false smile she’d offered when she first saw him in the clearing impossible to conjure now. He’d shot her, shot her friend and neighbor, and he hadn’t apologized for his actions. In fact, those actions proved him to be exactly what Mr. White Horse and Doc Browne said he was: a violent, cold-blooded killer.

And the sheriff had
invited
this man to their struggling little town.

“Ma’am.” He stepped back, implicitly welcoming her inside as the firelight’s shadows shifted to cast more of his rugged features in warm gold.

As she cautiously climbed the steps, gaze locked on his, she fought a shiver. The pale jade of his irises reflected the light, flashing pure silver for the barest instant, and Moira’s breath caught high in her chest. No villain’s eyes should be so beautiful.

He watched her intently, though his bearded features betrayed no expression. His scrutiny penetrated her, pushing past the cloudy pain crowding her mind until she feared he could see every hidden part of her, all of her secrets.

Tearing her eyes from his, she stared at the doctor’s bent back while Crawford closed the door behind her. “Is Mr. White Horse going to be all right?”

The doctor nodded. “Yes. One of you did an excellent job staunching the flow of blood.”

Crawford coughed into his hand. “That would be the lady.”

“I simply need to clean the wound and stitch him up,” Doc said, “and then I’ll take a look at your ear, Miss Tully.”

Even as Moira began to murmur her agreement and pressed the cloth Mrs. Browne had given her more firmly against her ear, Crawford cut in. “I can take care of that, Doc.”

Moira whipped her head around. “As if I’d let you anywhere near my ear,” she snapped, retreating from the captain until the backs of her knees hit a chair. She sat abruptly.

“I have medical experience.”

Most former soldiers did by necessity, but he’d already done enough damage to her person for one day, and she wasn’t willing to risk more. “No.” She paused. “No, thank you.” She might have renounced her vows but she hadn’t renounced basic courtesy, even to strange men whose striking eyes left her feeling off balance.

He shrugged and moved toward the fire. For the first time since entering the cabin, Moira could breathe, and she sucked in desperate gulps of air.
Off balance
barely sufficed when describing her reaction to Crawford.

The Dog Man Killer.

She shivered, thinking of the Cheyenne children Mr. White Horse kept encouraging to come to the schoolhouse. None had yet attended, but her neighbor was hopeful, and so was Moira…or rather, she was so on the days she felt up to the challenge of teaching children an entirely new language.

She jumped in her seat, startled, when a rough-skinned hand closed gently around the wrist holding the compress in place. “Let me,” came Crawford’s gravelly voice.

She allowed him to pull her hand away and peel the clinging cloth from her damaged ear, wincing as the dried blood stuck to the fabric in places. She refused to look at him, fighting the nerves his nearness engendered, her eyes trained on the large hunter’s bow resting next to the door. “And? How bad is it?”

“Perhaps a little more than a nick.”

“What does
that
mean?”

She heard the splash and drip of water in a basin, and then a cool, wet cloth was dabbing at her ear. “More like a…notch,” he grated as he cleaned away the congealed blood.

“A notch,” she repeated, keeping her eyes on the hunting bow. She imagined yanking it from its perch and bashing Crawford over the head with it—battering him with it would have to suffice, as she had never shot a bow and arrow in actuality. “You put a notch in my ear.”

“Yeah.”

Her hands fisted in her lap. Her ear had gone numb under his attentions, so she couldn’t sense whether she still bled. Nothing about her morning had gone as anticipated, and it was all this man’s fault. And now he’d disfigured her.

She demanded recompense. “Captain Crawford.”

“Just Crawford, ma’am.”

The casual drawl of his words had her grinding her back teeth. “
Captain
Crawford,” she said again. “Thus far this morning, you’ve pointed a pistol at my head, shot me, shot my friend and permanently scarred us both.” Swallowing past the hard lump of impotent anger lodged in her throat, she adopted her best nun-turned-schoolmarm voice. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

His finger stroked with the barest hint of pressure over her wound, cool and slick with some sort of salve. “No.”

She breathed deep, fighting for patience, and immediately his scent filled her lungs, much as it had in the clearing. The mix of masculine smells had her steeling her body in order to bar any reaction. Her aversion to men seemed not to apply to this one’s proximity, which disconcerted her. “Are you quite certain, Captain? Think carefully.”

He ceased touching her, but instead of stepping away, he leaned in closer. Warm breath fanned across her cheek, making her skin tingle with unwilling awareness. He was a man, a soldier. A growly, violent gunslinger come to her town on a mission of death. She shouldn’t respond to his nearness one bit.

When she let her eyes close, however, all she saw behind her lids was the pure, pale green of his dark-lashed eyes, innocuously pretty in a face weathered by sun and war. Though he could do with a bath, she sensed his scent tugging at errant strings of attraction within her—it must be attraction, because it certainly wasn’t aversion. She wanted to breathe him in, purposefully now, but she resisted, though her lungs berated her for her self-control.

His voice when it came was a whisper as rough as the mountain faces surrounding Red Creek. “I’m sorry, Miss Tully.” His lips, his beard, brushed over her cheekbone, and there was no possible way
that
was accidental. “I…” Another caress, his whiskers surprisingly soft on her skin.

She was torn between the need to turn her head, meeting his intense gaze, and the desire to keep her chin lifted and her eyes forward, allowing him to continue this teasing. “Y-yes?” She chose the latter.

He exhaled, and heat spread over the side of her face. “I’m sorry for shooting White Horse,” he muttered against her skin, “but it can’t compare to how sorry I am for hurting you.”

Then he straightened away from her and began wrapping a bandage around her skull, to protect the open wound on her ear until it could scab over and heal. Every few seconds, his fingertips would brush her nape. Her throat. Her jaw. Her temple.

It took her longer than she would have liked to find her voice again, as the lump in her throat was no longer anger but uncertainty. “Why, Captain Crawford. What a glib tongue you have hidden beneath…” she risked a peek at him, aiming for derisiveness and fearing she fell short of the mark, “…all…
that
.” She flicked her gaze meaningfully over his tangled hair and scruffy beard.

For the first time that morning, the man smiled slightly, revealing straight white teeth that turned him from dirty gunslinger to gentleman rake in the blink of an eye. “I’m a Georgia boy, Miss Tully. We were born with silver tongues…much like the Irish.” With that, he picked up the basin of bloody water and walked with a loose-legged stride to the door, tossing its contents to the side of the front steps.

Moira had been right. He was trouble, indeed.

Chapter Four

Perhaps a little more than a nick.

The next time pretty Miss Tully found herself in front of a mirror, she was going to curse his name to high heaven and get his ass booted straight down to hell, where it belonged.

Less than an inch to the right, and Del would’ve put a bullet in her brain. The thought should have had him writhing with guilt and remorse, but all he could muster up was a faint blush of embarrassment and a shrug, his empty gestures the perfect complement to his blank conscience.

Apologizing had been difficult, and he was surprised even now to realize he’d meant what he said—he
was
sorry. He just couldn’t seem to summon the proper amount of regret. It was the first time he’d ever shot a woman, and some buried nugget of gentlemanly honor revolted upon reflection of his actions, but it wasn’t like he’d targeted her. If he had…

If he had, that bullet would have been an inch to the right.

Del ignored the tic twitching beneath his eye. The old Delaney was dead and gone. This new Delaney, hard and hollow and without remorse, would have to make do. Which was why he couldn’t have anything further to do with Moira Tully.

Unless…
He paused in the middle of looping his mount’s reins to the post out front of the saloon and stared up at the balustered second-level porch of the structure. The whores would do business in those upper rooms, as they did in every other town west of the Mississippi. The Ruby Saloon, with its dusty red-and-plum placard nailed to the balcony’s unvarnished rails, was most definitely a place where a weary man could find himself some feminine solace.

Del thought on the small cabins at the edge of town, only a few minutes’ walk from where he now stood, and resisted the urge to glance in that direction. Six little shacks, identical in their plain exteriors, with the tiny matching squares of soil settled tight against the south-facing sides of each structure. The cabins weren’t the decrepit shanties of miners he’d seen since entering mountain territory, but they were close. The homes of the poor.

He remembered John White Horse. Or perhaps just the homes of the outcasts. A young woman—unmarried, judging by her title—with that sweet, freckled face of hers, living alone? In all likelihood, she was a prostitute.

The tic beneath his eye twitched again. He didn’t like it, but it fit. Her bold stare, her snappy retorts, her comely form. If she
were
a whore and that comely form were for sale, Del could justify seeing her again. He wouldn’t be in Red Creek for very long, after all, and she was certain to forgive him for injuring her if he paid—

No.
No.
Regardless of her profession, regardless of the way she’d responded to his teasing in the cabin—and he
had
been teasing—Moira Tully was off-limits. He’d shot her. For the rest of her life, she’d be missing a small part of her left ear, and that was as much of a mark as Del was willing to leave on her.

He patted the gelding’s neck, a sense of finality in the gesture, and stepped up onto the rough-planked boardwalk. The Ruby Saloon wasn’t his destination. While he could use a drink after the events of the past couple of hours, he needed to find the sheriff, and the jailhouse was conveniently located two doors down from the drinking establishment.

The town was quiet but not deserted, signs of life apparent in the number of horses hitched along the main drag and a few drunks from the night before shuffling their way home in the harsh morning light. Del felt as beaten down as they looked. He needed sleep, and needed it soon.

But first, the sheriff.

He didn’t bother knocking, shouldering open the heavy door and taking a quick, assessing glance of his surroundings. Three empty jail cells, a hall tree, a locked weapons cabinet and a large desk. If not for the mustached man sitting behind it, calmly cleaning a sleek Henry rifle, Del would’ve assumed the musty-smelling structure was long abandoned.

The man glanced up, dark eyes flicking briefly over Del from the top of his dusty hat to the toes of his scuffed black boots. “Help you?”

“Delaney Crawford. You the sheriff?”

“Crawford.” His name got the man’s attention. He sounded slightly shocked. “You came.”

Irritation pounded at Del’s temples. “Your telegraph was waiting for me at Fort Laramie.” For three months, he’d simultaneously tracked two separate bands of Cheyenne dog soldiers, from Kansas to Nebraska and then through Wyoming. He had systematically been picking off members of one of the militant tribes—a slit throat here, a sniper shot there—and the second group he’d simply followed by reading the news clippings detailing the destruction the dog soldiers had left in their wake.

As soon as he had coldly finished executing the first tribe, he made his way to the Pony Express station that was Fort Laramie. There, he not only found his pay “for services rendered to the United States Army”—he ground his teeth in memory—but also the message from Red Creek’s sheriff requesting those same services be used to rout a rogue band of dog soldiers from the hills surrounding the small mining town.

It hadn’t taken long for him to ascertain that the second group he’d been tracking was the same band that evidently had terrorized a pair of lesser towns near Red Creek. Led by a brave named Cloud Rider, the warrior tribe was known for its arsonist tendencies. The burned homesteads trailing from Fort Collins to the outskirts of Denver were all the proof Del needed, so off he headed for Red Creek.

The sheriff stood, clearing his throat as he set the rifle carefully on the desk. “We… I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

“I’d ask how you got my name in the first place.”

The sheriff blinked. “Your name?”

Delaney settled a hand on his gun hip, casually. After the morning he’d had, he didn’t have time for games. “Yeah, my name. I’m not a gun for hire.”

“Oh?” the sheriff queried archly. “Every lawman from here to Council Bluffs knows of the Dog Man Killer. The gray-coat turncoat.”

Del’s gun was in his hand and pointed at the man’s smug face in less than a second. “Careful.” He cocked his pistol, the sound ominous in the small room. “Careful whom you call a traitor.”

The sheriff blanched. “You…you didn’t leave your company before the end of the war, then?”

Del had, as a matter of fact. He’d left every single one of them dead in a scorched field. How he had survived—if what he’d done could be called surviving—was nothing short of a miracle. What came after that field…

What came after was a story the sheriff would never hear. “I did not,” Del said, twisting an already twisted truth.