Desert Angel (3 page)

If he had another name, Jim didn’t know it and had never asked. In the West, a man offered information if he wanted it known. Breed did his job well, without complaints or demands. He had an astounding ability with horses that would make him an asset to any operation. As far as Jim was concerned, that was enough and would remain enough.

“It’ll be daylight in another hour. We’ll wait.” They were the hardest words he had ever spoken, and he already knew that waiting the short time for the sun to rise would be the longest wait of his life.

“If I don’t find her by mid-morning, then we’ll send for him.”

He did not need to add that by then they’d probably be looking for a body to bury.

The desert was unforgiving.

TWO

Jim paced from room to empty room in the huge house, cursing the necessity of waiting until daylight before beginning the search for Melanie. Standing in the doorway of the dining room, he remembered that there was a load of furniture waiting in town for someone to pick up. He made a mental note to free up one of the men long enough to go get it.

Melanie had spent weeks poring over catalogs in search of just the right furnishings for each room. Jim had hoped that once they were settled in the new house she would be more content, but even before the furniture had started to arrive, he’d seen that the effort had been worthless.

Nothing and no one, even, he suspected, the baby she carried, could release her from the depression that overwhelmed her.

Slamming his fist against the door frame with helpless frustration, Jim turned and walked down the long hall to his office in the back of the house. This was the only room he had in-

sisted on designing, everything else was to Melanie’s specifications.

The dark-paneled room with a door leading outside had a huge, multipane window facing the mountains. One wall was entirely of stone, with a fireplace that was more than adequate to take the chill from the room. The other two walls had shelves with protective glass doors. Each shelf was filled with leather-bound books.

A rare and expensive pleasure in a time when few homes had more than a handful of books, Jim rarely indulged his passion for reading. He looked longingly at the books, knowing that it would be months before he could take more than a few stolen minutes to gratify his favorite pastime. Melanie had seen the books as a waste of money, but had only shrugged with indifference when he had insisted on the fully furnished library.

Just another of the many fundamental differences between them, Jim thought as he sat down in the leather chair behind his desk. He seriously doubted that she had read a book since leaving the expensive boarding school she had attended.

Leaning his elbows on the desk, Jim rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hands, hoping the pressure would eradicate the pain building behind his eyes. Every bone and muscle in his body ached in needless reminder of the physical labor involved in spring roundup. His tired body reminded him that he should have been asleep hours earlier. But concern for Melanie vied with regret and guilt to keep him wide-awake.

Where was she? Could someone, perhaps a passing renegade, have taken her? Most of the Apache had been settled on the reservation, but occasionally a young buck broke free of the constraints and went on his own private warpath. Geronimo left the reservation at whim, sometimes taking several dozen people with him, and rumors of the trouble he caused grew like wildfire. But in all the years Jim had been in Arizona, he’d never seen the famous war chief.

Thoughts of Melanie lost in the desert plagued him through the longest hour of his life. She was so meek, literally scared by her own shadow. She was terrified of snakes and spiders. What would a night spent alone in the desert do to her?

He refused to let his thoughts wander to the very real fact that she probably wouldn’t survive the night. And never once did he acknowledge that if she died, so would their child.

Even before the first traces of daylight, when inactivity became impossible, Jim saddled his horse. Waiting impatiently for the final minutes of night to pass, he rolled a cigarette, struck a match against his denim-covered thigh, and inhaled the aromatic smoke.

“Want company?” Hank asked, his weathered features showing that he’d had little sleep.

“No.” Jim dragged deeply on the cigarette. “I need someone to go to town for Doc. She’s going to need medical attention.”

“It’ll be done,” the older man replied, keeping his thoughts to himself, that Melanie would be more in need of the undertaker than the doctor.

Woods came out of the bunkhouse, a cup of steaming coffee in his hand. “Drink, boy. It’s gonna be mighty dry out there.”

Jim gratefully accepted the cup, hoping to derive some energy from the liquid. He was wideawake, but his eyes felt as gritty as a dust storm, and his head ached with tension.

Slowly the landscape escaped the shadows of darkness. It was time.

Grinding the remainder of the cigarette into the sand and finishing the last of the coffee, Jim grabbed the reins of his horse and walked toward the house.

Hank found the first tracks a hundred feet from the front door; shallow prints, obviously made by a feminine foot. The trail was so easy to follow that even an inexperienced tracker would have had no trouble.

Jim walked his horse for a short while, mounting when the bloody track became painfully easily to see from the back of the animal. The steps went in no specific direction, twisting and turning, doubling back on itself.

An abandoned slipper, its satin shredded beyond repair, fluttered in the light morning breeze.

When the trail led to a large saguaro, he flinched at the bloody evidence of Melanie’s passing. Numerous pieces of material matching the dress he’d last seen her wearing clung to smaller cacti.

Before the sun had warmed the morning air, less than a mile from the house, Jim found his wife. Dismounting, he grabbed the blanket from the back of the saddle, refusing to think whether it would provide her with much-needed warmth or become her shroud.

She lay on her side with her arms wrapped tightly around herself. As he knelt, his jaw tightly clenched at the sight of her burned and lacerated flesh. Carefully rolling her onto her back, Jim felt for a pulse in her neck, surprised to find a feeble quivering beneath his fingers.

“Melanie?” Jim put the blanket over her and opened the canteen of water. Dribbling a few drops on her parched lips, he watched as it ran down the side of her face.

“Come on, Melanie, try to drink some water.” Again there was no response, and knowing it was useless, he closed the canteen.

Melanie moaned when he raised her to a sitting position and wrapped the blanket around her. There was no place on her battered body that wasn’t sunburned or lacerated by the cactus thorns. As he remounted the horse with her draped over his thighs, Jim was glad that she was unconscious. The pain would have been unbearable for her had she been awake.

By the time he’d made the short trip back to the house, Melanie was muttering hoarsely and trying to push away his restraining arms. Woods met him at the front door, grabbing the reins to the horse and holding the animal still, as Jim carefully climbed from the saddle.

“Hank took off for town right after you headed out.” Woods looked at the battered bundle in Jim’s arms and shook his head in regret. No one, even an uppity Easterner like Melanie, deserved the abuse she had taken. “I got some water on the fire. I’ll bring it up and then take care of your horse.”

“Thanks, Woods.” Jim entered the house and carried Melanie up the stairs to her frilly pink and white bedroom.

Everywhere he looked his gaze clashed with pink or white ribbons and bows, lacy flounces and fancy embellishments. As he laid her on the bed, he wondered why he’d never noticed that the room was decorated more for a young girl than for a woman Melanie’s age. If he had bothered to notice, he realized sadly, the bedroom would have given him clear evidence of her refusal to leave her childhood behind.

The clopping sound of Woods coming up the stairs broke through Jim’s contemplation of the bedroom. He hurried out to the hallway and took the heavy buckets from the old man. Carrying them into the room, he mixed equal amounts of hot and cold water into a bowl, located tweezers, a soothing lotion, and a bar of scented soap.

A search through the bureau drawers produced a soft cotton nightdress, and clean sheets that Jim tore into more convenient size to use as washing cloths. When everything was assembled, he could no longer delay the formidable task that awaited him.

With the removal of each tattered garment, he grew more appalled. Her feet, legs, hands, and arms were slivered with embedded thorns. The tender skin of her arms, neck, and face was severely burned, and even though her dress had provided some protection, her back and abdomen hadn’t completely escaped the penetrating rays of the sun. He found himself praying that she wouldn’t return to consciousness before he was finished.

He averted his eyes from the mound of her belly as he covered her with a clean sheet, refusing to allow himself to think about the baby. As gently as possible, he dabbed at the flesh pulled tightly over her face, stopping frequently to dribble some water between her cracked, shriveled lips. In spite of the severe burn, there were no blisters, her body had too little fluid to make the welts. Dampening several rags, he layered them over her face and head, attempting to bring down her temperature.

Freeing one of her arms from beneath the sheet, Jim sponged away the dried blood, carefully removing as many thorns as possible. Most of them were deeply embedded and would require further attention later on, but for now his main concern was to examine the extent of her injuries and to make her as comfortable as possible.

Placing damp strips of cloth on her arm, he returned to her face, dribbling water into her mouth and reapplying the rags to her head. Time had no meaning as he worked unceasingly, cleaning one spot, then returning to previous areas to redampen the rags. Always, he took long minutes to dribble water between her parched lips.

Melanie mumbled incoherently, twisting restlessly on the bed and even reaching out to push Jim’s hand away, but she didn’t regain consciousness.

“Be still, Mel.” Jim replaced the cloth she had dislodged from her face. “Where in the hell is that damn doctor?” he muttered. He had done as much as he could; he needed the experience of a man of medicine.

The knock on the bedroom door brought a sigh of relief, as Jim turned from the bed and threw open the door. Hank’s worried features greeted him, and a scan of the hallway proved that the old man was alone.

“Where’s the doctor?”

“Doc left early this morning for the Stand Down Y spread. One of their hands got gored yesterday.” Hank’s voice was filled with apology, as if it was his fault that the doctor wasn’t available.

“Damn . . Jim turned from the old man, his gaze resting on his wife. The Stand Down Y ranch was at least twenty miles west of town. A round trip from the Falling Creek Ranch to the Stand Down Y would take more than a day. Melanie didn’t have the luxury of time.

Jim knew of only one person who could make the trip there and back in a matter of hours. The man rode a horse as if he and the animal were one, the horse responding to some unspoken command of his rider.

“Find Breed.”

“He followed me into the yard,” Hank informed his boss. “Guess he figured somethin‘ were wrong, when you didn’t show up this mornin‘.”

Jim nodded, not surprised that the foreman suspected trouble when Jim didn’t return to the roundup that morning. Breed seemed to know instinctively when something was brewing.

“Send him up to see me.”

“He ain’t gonna like that.”

“Just pass the word.” Jim closed the door and returned to the bed, automatically removing the hot rags from Melanie’s head and replacing them with cool ones. Well aware of Breed’s discomfort in a white man’s house, Jim would have normally met him outside, but right now he didn’t have the time or patience to pander to him.

An abrupt rap on the door announced the arrival of the foreman. Jim wasn’t surprised that he’d hadn’t heard Breed approach, the man moved with the silent grace of a mountain lion. Covering Melanie, he called for Breed to enter.

“I need you to go for the doctor.” Not turning to look at him, Jim carefully moistened Melanie’s lips.

Breed stood at the foot of the bed, his restlessly moving eyes the only indication of his discomfort. He looked, once, at the woman, and knew that no one of this earth could save her. If he had more time or if her wounds weren’t so severe, he could prepare a poultice of jojoba or maybe yucca, but the healing properties of the desert plants couldn’t help someone who had already chosen to depart this life.

“It will be after dark before I can get the man back here.” Breed left unsaid the knowledge that the woman wouldn’t last that long.

Dropping the rag back into the pan of water, Jim turned. He looked into the guarded pale blue eyes, reading their unspoken message.

“I have to try. Even if she were a complete stranger, I’d still have to try.”

Breed nodded, his gaze drifting momentarily to the woman. “Your son is strong,” he said quietly.