Liz Ireland (26 page)

He aimed his revolver, hoping against hope to get a miraculous shot at Gunter. It was the only way. The white hair beneath the man’s black hat would make a clear target, but Gunter was careful to keep behind Rosalyn enough that Jake wouldn’t be able to get a shot off without running considerable risk of shooting her, instead.

In the end, he decided that was a risk he would have to take. Every ounce of concentration he had was focused on that man’s head. One shot. That would be his one chance before all hell broke loose.

For a moment, he caught a glimpse of hair and didn’t hesitate. He cocked the Colt quickly—but not quickly enough. Gunter heard the sound and turned his pistol toward the bushes. In that second—the second before a shot cracked through the still breeze—Jake was sure he was a dead man.

He held fire, expecting a bullet to rip through his chest. But instead, an explosion of red burst through the air. Jake recoiled but watched the macabre display in amazement. At first he thought Rosalyn had been hit, because she jerked to the ground, but she only did so after being released from Gunter’s fierce grasp. The white-haired man fell violently to the earth and writhed in unconscious reflexive jerks before becoming still. Forever still.

Jake looked at his cold weapon and then turned his gaze to Cecilia. Her eyes glittered with scant satisfaction and her mouth was turned down sourly.

“Got him,” she said, lowering her rifle at last.

In the next moment, Rosalyn moaned. Jake thought perhaps she had been hit, too, but she lifted her hands and removed the gag from her mouth, turned and retched. Cecilia and Jake rose, still cautiously clutching their weapons, and approached the grisly scene.

When he came near, Jake reached out and held Rosalyn’s upper arm steadily. He couldn’t blame her for being ill; just glancing at his long-standing foe, he felt pretty close to sick himself. And he could well imagine that this wasn’t the type of thing that a lady was likely to see too often in Philadelphia.

“D
ead,” Cecilia pronounced, examining Gunter’s body without a drop of pity. “A clean shot.”

Jake was still amazed. “I can’t believe you did that.”

“Told you I would surprise you.” Cecilia shrugged, then dipped her head to rub her brow on her periwinkle sleeve. “I was at a better angle. Gunter heard your voice and was coming straight at you. Finally, I had an almost clear profile shot of him.”

“I was afraid I was going to hit Miss Pendergast,” Jake said.

“You probably would have,” Cecilia concurred.

Rosalyn shuddered and groaned, then, still clutching her stomach, attempted to rise to her feet. “Oh, dear,” she whispered.

“Are you all right?” Jake asked her.

She shook her head, and to Jake’s surprise, slowly approached Gunter. Tentatively, as though the vile man might spring back to life, she poked his leg with her slender black boot. The limb moved stiffly, then fell still again. After taking a deep, shuddering breath, Rosalyn narrowed her eyes on the man’s bloody head and spat.

“Bastard!” she said vehemently, spitting again. “Bastard!” She gave his leg another kick for good measure.

Jake took her arm. “He’s dead,” he assured her, attempting to pull her away from the gruesome sight. “He’s gotten what he deserved.”

A gravelly, guttural sound rose out of Rosalyn Pendergast’s chest. “Never!” she cried. “Nothing could be terrible enough for the likes of him, not even if he’d been tarred and feathered, or drawn and quartered, boiled in oil, disemboweled—”

“Are you sure you’re all right, ma’am?” Jake asked. He tossed Cecilia a worried glance.

Angry tears streaked down Rosalyn’s cheeks and she looked at Jake almost apologetically. “You’re Jake Reed, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

“I feel so ashamed,” she said. “I had begun to think that you killed my brother, and unknowingly I alerted this man of your whereabouts.”

“I’m sorry about your brother, Miss Pendergast. And I’m sorry now I didn’t tell you the truth right off,” Jake said. Briefly, he explained the events that had led to his writing the letter to her.

Rosalyn shook her head. “Gunter told me what had happened in Guthrie—what he knew of it. I pieced the rest together.”

“You must have been terrified,” Cecilia said. Terror was the only thing she could imagine that must have gone through Rosalyn’s mind when she realized she was her brother’s killer’s hostage. Surprised by how dry-eyed the woman was, Cecilia took her hand comfortingly in her own. “Did he...hurt you?” she asked quietly.

Rosalyn looked on the dead man with emotionless eyes. “If he had I would have killed him myself,” she said.

Cecilia and Jake exchanged glances. “Thank God it’s all over now,” Cecilia said soothingly to Rosalyn. “We can go home, and you can be on your way back to Philadelphia soon.”

“Philadelphia?” Rosalyn’s eyes registered almost no recognition at the mention of her home. To Cecilia, it seemed almost as if the woman had completely forgotten about that city, which would make sense. After what she had been through, it probably seemed a million miles away.

“Nobody’s going home yet.”

Cecilia and Rosalyn looked up at Jake, who was staring across the horizon. The cold look had returned to his eyes.

“I don’t know about you,” Cecilia said, “but I could use a bath and a square meal.”

Jake didn’t crack a smile. “Then you’ll have to wait until we get to Redwood.”

“Redwood!” Cecilia cried. “That’s another day’s ride, and I want to go home!” She pointed emphatically to the north. “That way.”

Jake’s mouth was set in a grim line, and he slowly shook his head. “I’m sorry. Darby is still out there, waiting.”

“Darby?” Rosalyn asked, startled. She darted her gaze between Cecilia and Jake, wanting to know whether there was another man somewhere who was going to snatch her unawares.

“Darby wasn’t the one chasing you, Jake,” Cecilia argued.

“But he’s the one behind it all. Gunter was just his thug.”

“Then you should send for the law.”

Jake grimaced. “I used to be the law, which has never done me a damn bit of good.”

“But if you just told them what Darby has done to—”

“What has he done?” Jake interrupted. “That’s the trouble, Cecilia. Men like Darby don’t do their dirty work themselves. The man kicked my family off our land and practically killed my father. Yet the only thing I was able to pin on him was horse thieving, and that didn’t stick.”

“You said he went to jail. Maybe that rehabilitated him.”

Jake hooted with indignant laughter. “
Rehabilitated!
That’s do-gooder blather. Most of the time jail makes men meaner.”

“My father always says you only shoot something when it’s coming at you,” Cecilia tried to reason. “You said yourself that you haven’t seen Darby in years.”

“I know him, though. He’s ruthless. He’s Gunter’s father-in-law, and while they were in jail together—because of me—they plotted my murder. I can’t let him get off scot-free.”

“But you aren’t sure!” Cecilia cried in frustration. “You can’t just hunt him down without any evidence.”

Hearing that word, Jake wanted to spit the way Rosalyn had spat on Gunter’s corpse. Evidence meant diddly. “You want to know what my evidence is?”

Cecilia’s chin shot out stubbornly, but she didn’t stop him.

“Being chased for over a year,” Jake said. “My evidence is not having been able to live a decent life because I mostly suspected that the next day I would be dead. My evidence is a man getting shot in my place, and his sister abducted.”

“By
Gunter!
” Cecilia insisted. “To get Darby you need the law on your side.”

“Cecilia’s right,” Rosalyn said, nodding solemnly.

“No, she’s as wrong as can be,” Jake corrected, but he didn’t know how to prove it. Cecilia could talk circles around him all she wanted; the only facts he had were those he felt in his gut. Darby had been the mastermind, and Jake wasn’t about to let anybody get away with murder. “We’re going on to Redwood. I’m sorry, Miss Pendergast.”

Swayed by the sheer emotion in the man’s face, Rosalyn changed her mind and nodded again. “Whatever you think is best.”

Cecilia grunted in dismay. It would serve them both right if she turned her horse northward and galloped away. But she wasn’t going to leave Jake; she wouldn’t be able to rest not knowing whether he was okay.

“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” she said.

“Oh, yes, you are,” Jake replied. “Soon as we get close in, I’m sending you and Miss Pendergast into town. You can wait for me there.”

This news swelled Cecilia to new heights of outrage. She was willing to back him up, even though she thought he was taking a rash course—and he was going to deny her even that! “
Wait
for you?” she repeated, aghast. “Wait for you to be killed, you mean?”

“I can see you have a lot of faith in me,” Jake said.

His snide tone made her furious. How could he joke about the amount of faith she’d put in him? What did he think it had cost her to surrender herself to him, to ride out after him, to stay with him under fire? A wiser girl would have ridden straight home and waited until his vendetta was finished to decide whether she would have fallen in love with him.

But then, a wiser girl would have stayed home on the ranch in the first place, Cecilia thought with disgust, and done what Clara told her. Wiser girls were bores.

Attempting to put her rage aside, she said, “I had faith that you would see the sense in having a backup.”

“It’s only one-to-one now,” Jake replied. “Those aren’t such bad odds.”

“But with me there the odds would be in your favor.”

Jake shook his head slowly. The woman just didn’t get it. “No, Cecilia. If you were there, chances are I’d be more worried about your safety than just getting the job done and getting out.”

“I helped you just now, though,” she argued, not about to budge an inch.

“Yeah, and I was scared to death for you the whole time. This is just between Darby and me.”

Cecilia’s face reddened. “I think you have a death wish.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Seeing her standing there in front of him, her head tilted at a petulant angle as she regarded him through accusing eyes, Jake knew he’d never had such a fierce desire to live. Cecilia had shown him just what there was to make a stand for. If her life was jeopardized, so was his reason for coming through the victor in his encounter with Darby.

Sensing tension in the air that perhaps had nothing to do with Darby and everything to do with the spark between the two of them, Rosalyn crept off to the place where they had made camp the night before.

Jake reached out to take Cecilia’s arm, thinking maybe she could be swayed by a more physical approach, but she leaned away from his touch. It was hard to believe that just minutes ago he was telling Cecilia he wanted her to marry him, and harder still to believe this woman, who had spent the most incredibly passionate night of his life with him, couldn’t understand why he would feel protective of her.

“I would rather die than see anything happen to you,” he told her.

Her expression softened just a hair. “If we were together, both of us would be safer.”

It was so tempting just to give in to her, to appease her, so that they could get on with their business and put this in the past. At least he’d be able to keep an eye on her if she was with him.

But that was the argument he had used in not taking her straight back to the ranch—before they’d run into Gunter and he’d realized how stupid he was for giving in to her. He never wanted to live through a scene like that one again.

“No.”

She stepped forward, her eyes pleading with him. “You won’t even consider it?”

He shook his head. “When we get to Redwood, I’ll send you to town with Miss Pendergast. If you want to look after somebody, look after her.”

Clearly, this was a secondary concern to Cecilia. She threw him a bitter look. “I don’t want anything to do with a man who won’t treat me as an equal, Jake Reed. If you don’t respect me—”

Jake groaned in frustration. “This has nothing to do with respect. This isn’t your battle to fight,” he explained. “It has nothing to do with you.”

Cecilia looked as though she wanted to scream, but she managed to restrain herself. Just barely. She cast her glance aside to make sure Rosalyn was out of hearing distance, then warned, “If you think I came all the way out here to play nursemaid to a Yankee woman while you get killed, you’re wrong.”

“Miss Pendergast is a lady,” he said, deciding that this argument perhaps might sway her toward reason. “While you’re playing nursemaid, you could take a few lessons from her. At least when it comes to being sensible.”

She stared at him in shock, and Jake feared this might not have been a good thing to say, after all.

“Sensible!” Cecilia’s face was beet red with rage. “If you think it’s
sensible
to ride off by yourself to meet a man who’s wanted you dead for all these years, be my guest!”

Shaking with rage, she stomped off toward their old camp, then, seeing Rosalyn, veered off in another direction to be alone. Part of Jake felt compelled to go after her, yet he stood stock-still, watching her go. If he went to her now, he would take her in his arms and tell her that he loved her and was scared to death of losing her. He would say again how much he wanted her to be his wife, to live with her and love her forever.

That’s what he would have said, but maybe that wouldn’t have been the best thing. Cecilia was attracted to a challenge, and adventure, and he’d given her those things. But she’d also made it clear that what he wanted to make out of his life once this adventure was over didn’t appeal to her. Much as his heart ached to do it, to pressure her and make promises to her while she was keyed up and vulnerable like this would be wrong.

It could be that once this was all over, with the past behind him and a long, peaceful, uneventful future yawning ahead of them, on a ranch, Cecilia would want nothing to do with him. Cooler heads would prevail, and they could part company amicably.

He sighed. Lord, he was beginning to dread those peaceful days.

* * *

Rosalyn Pendergast bestowed a distasteful glance on the three blankets lining the fireside. “This is pleasantly rustic, isn’t it?”

To Cecilia it looked like another night of tossing and turning on the rock-hard ground—only alone this time—and she wasn’t looking forward to it. “Hope you’ve got a strong backbone,” she warned.

“Oh, I’m not worried about that...” The older woman’s voice trailed off meekly, and her eyes darted nervously around the campsite.

Cecilia looked around, as well, but nothing was amiss that she could tell. “What are you worried about, then?” she asked.

“Oh, I suppose it’s nothing....”

Rosalyn Pendergast had spoken little during their long ride, and hadn’t issued a word of complaint even though Cecilia knew she had to have wanted to stop and rest twice as much as Jake had suggested.

“If there’s something that’s bothering you, you’d better come out with it now,” she told the woman.

“Well, it’s just...I know this must sound terribly prudish...but, well, aren’t these sleeping conditions a little
primitive?
”

Cecilia looked again at the three blankets and laughed. “I’d rustle up a feather mattress for you if I could,” she returned. At least tonight, with Gunter out of the way, Jake had let them build a fire.

Rosalyn furtively eyed the clump of trees where Jake had disappeared in search of kindling, then cast a despairing glance at his designated blanket by the fire. Finally she turned back to Cecilia and said in a low voice, “I only meant that it seems a bit
improper.
”

Even stated so directly, it took Cecilia a few moments to catch her drift. Finally, understanding dawned. “Oh, you mean you don’t want to sleep with Jake?”

Rosalyn blushed. “I suppose it’s silly of me to think about such things.”

Cecilia heard Jake’s footsteps in the darkness and smiled wickedly. Silly? The only thing silly was that she hadn’t thought of this before. “Oh, no,” she said earnestly to Rosalyn as she rolled Jake’s meager blanket into a tight little ball. “I am thoroughly ashamed that I didn’t suggest it myself.”