Early Dawn (20 page)

He turned in the saddle. “Too late now. You’ll have to wait until we stop for the night.”

A few minutes later, he drew his horse to a halt and dismounted to examine some tracks. When he straightened, he was grinning. “Just as I suspected. This sign is still pretty fresh, twelve hours old, give or take a couple of hours either way. We’re behind them.”

Eden stared at the tracks. “What if they figure out we rode in a circle and double back on us?”

“They won’t figure that out right away. We rode north, then west for a ways. They may get suspicious when our tracks veer south, but they won’t know for sure we rode in a circle until our trail cuts east. By then, they’ll be so far into it, they’ll keep going rather than double back.”

He gazed eastward for a long moment. “Decision-making time, Eden. Do we make a beeline for a town, which is what they’ll expect us to do, or do we ride in another circle?”

Eden followed his gaze, wondering what communities lay in that direction. The only towns in Colorado she knew much about were Denver and No Name, which weren’t that far apart as a crow flew. But they were quite some distance away, to the southeast if she wasn’t mistaken. She yearned to say they should head for help. Her ribs were paining her again, making it difficult to breathe, and though she’d slept well for a few hours last night, exhaustion was already returning.

Sadly, if the Sebastians were as wily about losing posses as Matthew claimed, they might be just as clever when it came to running prey to ground. As confident as she felt with two Colts riding her hips, she also had to factor in the possible element of surprise. If the Sebastians intercepted her and Matthew as they rode toward a community, catching them off guard, they would be at a disadvantage.

“I think we should do the unexpected,” she pushed out. “At least for a few days. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and my brothers will find us.”

For an instant, she thought she saw admiration flash in Matthew’s eyes. Then he adjusted the brim of his battered Stetson to shade his face from the early-morning light. “You sure? I know you must be exhausted beyond bearing after six days on the trail.”

“I’m sure.” And suddenly Eden was. Since last night, she was starting to trust this man in a way she couldn’t rightly explain. “They’ll expect us to head straight for help. The last thing they’ll think we might do is ride around in circles out here.”

“They’ll really be confused if we take the same route today as we did yesterday.”

Eden shifted to get more comfortable in the saddle. She appreciated his willingness to confer with her and take her opinion into account before making a decision.

“The trick to outsmarting them is to do the exact opposite of what they expect,” he continued. “Following the same circle we made yesterday will accomplish that for today. They’ll be scratching their heads, wondering what the hell we’re up to. Their tracks are mixed in with ours now, too. That’ll make it harder for them to follow us.” He remounted his horse and grabbed Herman’s lead rope. “Tonight we’ll study a map. Come morning, we’ll pretend to head for a town, then veer off course to head for another one, or make another circle in a totally new area. That’s how they’ve escaped, again and again—by riding willy-nilly, first one way and then another.”

It sounded like a good plan to Eden. She just prayed she could stay in the saddle. She fell in behind Matthew, keeping her bay in his tracks as much as possible. When they reached the stream where they’d stopped to rest the horses yesterday, he once again unburdened the animals and rubbed them down with burlap.

“May I ask you something?” she said.

“Shoot.”

“Why do you remove all the gear from the animals and rub them down every time we stop?”

“Saddle sores. Normally, it isn’t necessary, but these animals are being worked hard every day without a break. I worry that the constant rub of the gear will raise blisters. I like to get the sweat off of them and check them over. If one of them gets a sore, I’ll catch it early.”

That made sense to Eden. As much as she’d been around horses, she’d never lived on the trail, using a horse from dawn to dark every single day.

They dined on the leftover meat from breakfast. Before leaving, Eden smeared her cheeks with mud again for protection from the sun. When she returned to camp, Matthew handed her a weather-beaten and badly flattened straw hat with a long crack in the crown.

“I carry it for hot weather. Felt hats make me sweat in the late summer.”

“Thank you.”

“It hasn’t held up very well, being stuffed in a pack, but it’ll keep the light out of your eyes and help protect your skin.”

He truly was talking more today than he had yesterday, Eden decided. Maybe being around another person was loosening his tongue. He still wasn’t what she would call chatty, but she was grateful for a reprieve from the long silences.

As the day wore on, she took note of his skill at tracking. He often dismounted to hunker over the hoofprints and trace their edges lightly with a fingertip. He also toed the horse dung with his boot.

“How fresh do you think it is?” she asked.

“About twelve hours old.” He graced her with a slow grin. “They truly did play heck catching all those horses. Would love to have been a fly on the wall—or maybe I should say on a pine tree. I’ll bet the air turned blue.”

Eden felt sorry for the horses. She’d seen how cruelly the Sebastians treated them. “If you belonged to those monsters, you’d run, too, if you ever got a chance.”

He glanced up. Their gazes locked. An electrical feeling charged the air between them for a moment. Matthew’s smile slowly faded and his jaw muscle started to tic. Once he had remounted his horse, he removed a gold timepiece from his pocket and thumbed the back of the case. Since he didn’t open the watch, she wondered at the gesture, especially when she glimpsed the bleakness of his expression.
Livvy
, she thought. The watch had probably been a gift from her. At least three years had passed since her death, yet he still mourned her. Eden had once mistakenly believed that she’d found true love. Now, seeing Matthew’s grief etched all over his dark face, she knew for certain that what she’d felt for John had been pale in comparison to what Matthew had felt for his wife.

The realization filled her with an inexplicable emptiness. When she recovered from this ordeal and could tolerate the opposite sex again, she wanted to find that kind of love. Not the paper-thin, superficial love that she’d shared with John, but the sort that ran bone deep and refused to release a heart even after death. To be loved that deeply—ah, it would be grand. Someday she wanted a man to pull his watch from his pocket, to trace the words she’d had engraved for him in the gold, thinking of her with heartfelt yearning.

That evening, Matthew stopped to make camp at the same place they’d stayed the previous night. Before building a fire pit or taking the gear off the animals, he crouched down to study the ground. Eden walked over to stand beside him.

“Are they making the circle a second time?” she asked.

He nodded. “Judging by the horse dung, they came through here about six hours ago.”

Eden quickly calculated how many miles the Sebastians were from them and breathed a sigh of relief.
Twenty-four miles.
That was a lot of distance on horseback. “They’ve lost time then.”

“Probably lost our tracks for a while where we rode in the stream.”

“Then your trick worked.”

He nodded again and pushed erect. “Tomorrow we need to go into a totally different area, and I’ll have to pull some other tricks from under my sleeve.”

As Eden worked with him, caring for the animals and gathering firewood, she recalled how she’d trained the rifle on him the last time they’d been there and felt ashamed all over again. Over the last two days, Matthew had proved to be many things, but a scoundrel wasn’t one of them.

Watching him as he groomed the horses, she felt her throat tighten with emotions she couldn’t define. Against the magnificent backdrop of the majestic mountains and huge ponderosa pines, he looked as rugged and elemental as the terrain around him. Yet he touched the animals with such gentleness, his large, callused hands smoothing their manes and delivering scratches behind twitching ears. His voice carried to her through the twilight, deep and soothing. She couldn’t catch the words he spoke, but his tone said it all. He truly cared for Smoky and Herman, and he was forging a fast friendship with the abused bay gelding as well. The horse nickered and grunted, clearly grateful for his new master’s kindness. The equine’s utterances made the horse sound almost as if it were trying to talk, and Matthew replied as if he understood every inflection.

After being with the Sebastians for so many days, Eden was as grateful for Matthew’s kindly nature as the bay gelding was. Today on the trail, he had circled the clematis and other wildflowers that he’d allowed Smoky to trample yesterday—not, she felt certain, because he cared a whit about the blossoms, but because he knew they were important to her. That told Eden more about the man than he could possibly know.

When the animals had been tended, Matthew gathered rocks to build a small fire pit and then arranged the wood so they could enjoy another hot meal for supper. Eden was hungry and fantasizing about the concoction he might throw together when he began fishing through a pack and then approached her with an armful of bathing paraphernalia and a set of clean clothing.

“You first,” he said as he thrust everything into her arms. “I’ll get the fire going while you’re gone so you can warm up when you get back. That water is bound to be ice-cold.”

Eden accepted the armload and turned to go.

“Oh, wait a minute,” he called. “Let me clean the toothbrush so you can use it. If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not spoon with a woman who’s sprouted fur on her teeth.”

The twinkle in his blue eyes made her smile, despite the bone-deep weariness that had her struggling to stand erect. “If I have fur on my teeth, you’ve undoubtedly developed a heavy winter coat on yours.”

He winked. “Nope. I brushed last night and plan to again tonight after you have a go.”

As Eden headed off toward the creek a few moments later, she marveled that she wasn’t worried about Matthew sneaking peeks at her while she bathed. He wasn’t that kind of man, and knowing that about him chased away the last traces of fear she’d been feeling for nearly a week. There were horrible men in the world, a fact that Ace had tried to drive home to her since childhood. But the goodness of humanity far outweighed the bad. She wouldn’t spend the rest of her life being afraid of every stranger she came across. She
wouldn’t
. Instead she would remind herself that there were far more Matthew Coulters in the world than there were Pete Sebastians.

As Matthew had predicted, the water was so cold that it nearly took Eden’s breath away, but she determinedly immersed herself. After brushing her teeth and setting the toothbrush on a rock, she grabbed the bar of soap and began lathering up. At first, she felt almost lighthearted. She’d been denied the luxury of cleanliness for far too long, and finally getting to wash felt absolutely glorious. She had no sooner finished shampooing her hair, though, than her mood changed.

Filth
. Images of the Sebastians filled her head. She could almost feel their hands on her. Overcome by a compelling need to rid herself of their touch, she waded into the shallows, returned the soap to the rock, and began scooping up handfuls of sand to scour her skin. To scrape off their scent, the lingering traces of their obscenity. At the edges of her mind, she knew the chafing passes should be causing her pain, but what little discomfort she felt seemed distant and unimportant compared to her need to feel pure again.

She wasn’t sure how long she scrubbed, only that the sound of Matthew’s low voice suddenly jerked her up short. “Eden, if you keep on that way, you’ll rub yourself raw.”

Eden whirled so quickly that her long hair swung over her face, the wet strands clinging to her nose and mouth. Then she remembered that she was naked, hugged her breasts, and dashed back into deeper water, where she could sink up to her chin.

Matthew stood on the bank, long legs braced wide apart, one knee slightly bent, his gaze fixed on the darkening horizon behind her. His jaw muscle twitched under the thick scruff of dark beard, and his larynx bobbed as he swallowed. Slowly, he drew his gaze back to her, his focus on her face. Shadows shifted in his eyes.

“You can’t wash the memories away.” He switched his weight from one leg to the other. “I wish you could, but scrubbing your hide off won’t erase what happened.” He passed the back of his hand over his mouth. “I’m sorry for interrupting your bath, but you were gone for so long I got worried, and I . . .” He swept off his hat, raked his fingers through his hair, then clamped the Stetson back on his head. “I didn’t want you to take another chill, so I came to check on you.”

Eden glanced down at the upper swells of her bobbing breasts and saw red tracks on her skin from the drag of her fingernails. For a moment, she felt dizzy and disoriented. Clawing at herself that way wasn’t normal.

“I feel . . . so
dirty
,” she pushed out, needing to explain her crazy behavior so he wouldn’t think she was unhinged. “I need to get it
off
.” A lump welled in her throat, and scalding tears filled her eyes. “Only no matter how hard I scrub, I don’t feel clean.”

Memories skittered around in her head like spiders. A low moan escaped her throat, and then, though she tried to stifle them, sobs erupted from her throat. Matthew cursed under his breath.

“Eden, you need to get out of that icy water. If I go back to camp, can I count on you to do that right away?”

She gulped and nodded, unable to speak. When he turned on his heel and walked away, she stared after him through a blur of tears until he disappeared from sight. Then, shivering from the cold, she waded toward the bank, grabbed the towel, and started drying off. Every time she looked at her scraped skin, she feared for her sanity. What had possessed her?