McCrory's Lady (7 page)

      
“Now comes the tricky part. We've got to pick our positions carefully and locate Eden before we move. You stay back,” Colin commanded Maggie. To his surprise, she nodded in agreement.

      
“I'll just hang onto my rifle. When the shooting starts, I may be able to pick off one or two. I'm a damn good shot.”

      
“Just don't make a sound until we open fire.”

      
With that the two men began to circle around the rocky, tree-studded rim of the canyon, approaching the flickering campfire below. Maggie found a position up on the ridge, behind a pinyon pine. Using the field glasses Colin had left behind, she studied the layout of the camp and located Eden McCrory, who lay bound hand and foot in the shadows while several men milled around the fire, helping themselves to a pot that bubbled over the flames.

      
Eden had just wriggled into a sitting position, hoping one of the men would untie her long enough to let her eat something when the shooting erupted all around her. Manuel fell first, knocked into the fire by the impact of the powerful .44.40 slug. She recognized the belch of her father's big Remington. Rodriguez and Haywood were picked off cleanly. Only Morton managed to jump into the shadows behind a juniper bush. She knew instinctively he would try to reach her and use her as a shield. Eden rolled toward the campfire, but a strong callused hand tangled in her hair and yanked her back.

      
For an instant. Then her father's rifle thundered again, and the powerful stinging of her scalp eased as Morton's fingers loosened their hold. His head had been blasted almost off his shoulders. The knife he had clasped in his other hand lay gleaming dully in the dust. A dark river of blood ran across the ground, surrounding her as she screamed and screamed again.

      
Miles away, struggling to remain mounted on his gelding, Judd Lazlo heard the shots echoing across the foothills. With a curse, he tried to turn his horse. Had McCrory finally shown up? He did not like the sound of that many shots being fired. The guards should have spotted McCrory coming and laid a neat, clean ambush. Of course, he could have miscounted. His head pounded with fever and his vision was blurred. Pain lanced up his leg in jagged waves.

      
He cursed the whole McCrory family as he felt himself sliding from his horse, unable to stop his fall to the rocky ground below. Judd Lazlo lay still as death, the distant gunfire no longer echoing in his ears.

      
Wolf reached Eden first as she was trying to roll away from the dead bandit's pooling blood. It had already stained her riding skirt and boots as she thrashed frantically.

      
“Easy, easy. Let me untie you, Miss Eden,” he said, kneeling beside her. Wolf was stunned by her beautiful face. She stared up at him through her father's whiskey gold eyes, fringed by thick dark lashes. But her eyes were the only physical trait she had inherited from Colin McCrory. Eden was tiny and slender with ivory skin, delicate cameo features and masses of silky hair the color of moonbeams. She took his breath away.

      
Everything a breed buck dreams of and can never touch,
he thought grimly to himself, noting how pale her flesh was beneath his dark hands as he helped her sit up.

      
She looked into burning black eyes framed by thick, arched eyebrows. The stranger had a dark bronzed face of harshly striking male beauty. His hair was shoulder length and perfectly straight, inky black. He had Indian blood; but worse, he was a gunman, hard and dangerous, just as Lazlo had been. Eden shied in revulsion. Then, her father was there, kneeling beside her, shoving the disturbing stranger away.

      
“I'll take care of her. See if any of them are left alive. If they are, kill them,” Colin said curtly to Wolf, then turned his attention back to his daughter, cutting the ropes from her wrists and ankles, all the while soothing her. “It's going to be all right, Eden. Everything's going to be all right now, Babygirl.”

      
She could not look at him, could not bear to have him touch her. She was defiled, filthy, ruined. And she had nearly caused his death as well! Tears, held in check for so long, silently streamed down her cheeks.

      
“There, there, Eden, Babygirl...don't.” He dabbed at the tears that continued to flow from beneath her thick dark golden lashes. “It's over. They can't ever hurt you again.” Colin stroked her hair and held her. She felt so stiff in his arms, unmoving, silent. His eyes swept over her, looking for any traces of physical injuries. She seemed unhurt, but he could well imagine how they had abused her, how that bastard Lazlo had degraded an innocent like Eden.

      
Eden's silence frightened him more than anything. Dear God, had they unhinged her mind? “Eden, talk to me. I'm your father. Please...”

      
Maggie watched the desperate scene unfolding across the campfire. Darkness gathered now and the air was turning chill. Bodies littered the ground all around them. They needed to get Eden away from this place of desecration. Maggie walked over to Colin and knelt, placing her hand firmly on his shoulder.

      
“Leave her to me, Colin. You and Wolf gather the horses and let's get out of here. She can't stay in this place.”

      
Colin's eyes moved from Maggie's calm face back to his daughter, who still sat, rigid and frozen, unmoving and silent while the tears continued to seep from her eyes. She would not even look at him. Nodding in dumb misery, he relinquished his hold on Eden as Maggie sat down beside her.

      
“Eden, this is Maggie Worthington...a friend of mine. She's here to help you.”

      
Eden did not respond. Maggie shook her head at Colin, dismissing him. When he stood up and walked over to Wolf, she took Eden by one arm and gently but forcefully helped her to her feet.

      
“Let's get away from these men who hurt you, Eden. They may be dead, but the memories still hang on in this place, don't they?”

      
Eden heard the voice, soft and well modulated—a woman's voice with a crisp, unfamiliar accent. Her father was gone. God, she could not bear to look him in the face, to see love and concern in his eyes. She would never again be able to bear her guilt, her shame. As Maggie helped her to stand up, Eden opened her eyes and looked down at the pooling blood around the grotesquely crumpled, decapitated body of Clint Morton. A wailing cry of horror welled up inside her and she screamed, then threw herself into Maggie's arms, sobbing in big loud gulps as the older woman led her away from the scene of carnage.

      
Colin headed back toward her, but Maggie waved him away. He stood for a moment, his hands helplessly at his sides, then turned to continue searching the dead for Lazlo.

      
Eden could feel the other woman's hands guiding her, rubbing her back as she struggled for breath between the wracking sobs that choked her. A handkerchief, large and snowy white, was thrust into her hands.

      
“Here, dry your eyes and blow your nose. It'll help you to breathe,” Maggie said as they walked down to the stream. “Let it all out, honey. I know what the bastards did to you, believe me.”

      
Eden did as she was ordered, then clutched the soggy handkerchief and looked at the handsome, dark-haired woman. “How could you possibly know what it was like?” she asked, her voice still hoarse and thickened with tears.

      
Maggie laughed, a soft, sad sound, as she urged Eden to sit beside her by the edge of the stream. The last rays of the sun cast dim, flickering shadows all around them, like old nightmares, rising up from the darkness. “I know what it's like for men to do most anything to a woman.”

      
“What if...what if she deserved it?”

      
“No woman ever deserves being forced—that Lazlo fellow—he did some pretty rough things to you, I bet. Did he let the others join in, or only watch?”

      
Eden shuddered. “They...they watched, but he told them after he was through with me...” She began to sob again.

      
Maggie held her. “I won't pretend to tell you it's over now. Because it isn't. You and I both know that. You'll remember them and all the ugliness; but gradually the memories will fade and you...well, you have a choice. You can fade, too, or you can get stronger. Don't let them win, Eden. They're dead and you're alive. That's all that really counts in the end. Surviving in spite of them.”

      
Eden studied Maggie's face. She had no doubt this woman spoke from experience. She understood. “Who are you? How do you know all these things?”

      
“My name is Maggie. I met your father in San Luís a few days ago. He'd come looking for you—my cantina seemed like a good place to get information about a gang of cutthroats like Lazlo's.”

      
“You own a saloon?” Eden could not imagine the elegant-looking, educated lady sitting beside her in a saloon.

      
“I'm half owner of the biggest saloon and fancy house between Tucson and Hermosillo.”

      
Eden's eyes grew wide with surprise. “F-fancy house?”

      
“Bordello. I'm a madam, Eden. A long time ago, I worked in places like the one I run now...only some of them weren't as nice. I know all about men and what they can do, but just because you've found out, too—that doesn't make you a whore. Remember that,” Maggie said sternly.

      
On the other side of the campsite, Colin kicked over the last of the men they'd killed and cursed. “Lazlo got away, dammit!”

      
“We saw every man who was here. If he's gone, he was long gone before we arrived,” Wolf said with certainty.

      
“We can't find him in the dark. Anyway, Maggie's right. We have to get Eden away from here and let her rest safe for tonight. Gather up the horses they stole from the ranch and their scrub stock.”

      
As he put hackamores on his fine breeding stock, Colin listened to the soft, murmuring conversation between Maggie and Eden.
At least she's talking, thank God!
He could not make out their words, but he could see the obvious attachment his daughter was forming to the whore. He cursed silently. That was bound to complicate his plans when they returned to San Luís.

      
He waited patiently with his horses while Wolf gathered the outlaws' mounts and Maggie and Eden finally approached the campfire, apparently ready to ride. Colin looked at Eden, who still seemed afraid to meet his eyes. Frustration gnawed at him that a stranger—this woman in particular—could gain his only child's confidence when he could not.

      
He considered whether or not to say anything about Lazlo's escape, then decided it might push Eden over the edge again. He brought her horse over. “Here's Sunglow, Eden. Can you mount up all right? We won't go far—just away from this place.”

      
She darted a glance at her father and tried to smile. “It's all right, Father. I can make it,” she said in a husky voice. She swung up onto the palomino mare, then looked at him for a moment. “I should tell you about Lazlo...”

      
“It's all right, Eden. Well find him. Don't you ever think of the bastard again. He's a dead man.” His face was fearsome in the dying light.

      
“He is a dead man. I killed him,” Eden replied.

      
“She put a centipede inside his boot and it bit him deep in his instep. He rode out not an hour before we got here,” Maggie added as she swung up on the horse Wolf offered her.

      
A grimly proud smile touched Colin's face. “That so, Babygirl? It was better than he deserved, but I'm glad you did it. It's all right.” He patted her knee awkwardly. “It's all going to be all right.”

      
“Thank you, Father...for coming after me...” Her voice broke and she turned her head away and kneed the mare to trot slowly away from the dying fire, riding after Maggie and the half-breed who led a string of outlaw horses. Helplessly, Colin McCrory followed them.

Chapter Four

      
Bart Fletcher paced furiously across the Tabriz carpet on his office floor, glancing now and again out at the deserted street below as he passed the big front window. Finally, he poured himself a stiff drink of good smooth Madeira. It cost him a fortune to have it shipped across this godforsaken wilderness. The soothing, sweet, tart liquid rolled across his tongue and down his throat.

      
He was breaking the rules, of course. Bart ran a saloon, but he never drank before five in the afternoon. Not until today when he returned from that ghastly tooth butcher in Hermosillo, his jaw still throbbing, only to learn that Maggie had ridden out with Colin McCrory yesterday. He took another long drink and cursed the rotten timing.

      
All of this was Judd Lazlo's fault. Emilio told him that the accursed banditti had shown up after he had left town. Maggie had made short work of Lazlo.

      
That brought an unwilling smile to Fletcher's face. His Megs could always take care of herself. “Riding around out there with McCrory and some breed gunman, it's a bloody good thing,” he muttered as he drained the glass.

      
Still, her absence worried him. Lazlo was a mean one, and as for McCrory... God, he hadn't thought of that damned scalper in nearly twenty years. One of Jeremy Nash's charming collection of cutthroat misfits, men who made Attila the Hun seem just the sort one would prefer to invite for afternoon tea. Nash's group of mercenary Indian killers had split up, most either dead or drifted out of Mexico in the early sixties. But now McCrory was back—and he had enlisted Maggie in his cause. That made Fletcher nervous.