Swept Away (18 page)

“There’s one.” He pointed to the closest watchman about a hundred yards across a deep gorge on their side of the trail to town.

Rosie crawled up beside Luke. “And the second guard is over there.” Another man was almost a half mile away on the far side. Both were sitting, leaned back against a boulder, lazing in the sun.

“They’re not real watchful.” Luke would’ve fired them on the spot. Which told Luke a lot about how Greer ran his place.

“Dare said they were plenty alert when he rode in and out.” Rosie dropped to her knees, frowning.

“They had a lot of time to see him coming. Any rider on that town road is visible for a mile or more.”

“Why post a sentry at all?” Rosie looked at him. “Is it because of you? You said Greer had a posse on your trail, so he’s worried about you showing up.”

“He knows I’m coming.” He dragged his attention away from the guards to look at his pretty partner. “Maybe that’s why the guards are posted. I don’t know what Greer told these men, but either they’re poor guards or Greer didn’t impress on them that I’m a serious threat.”

“I could pick the nearest one off from here with a good rifle.” Ruthy sounded confident. “But I don’t hold with shooting a man in the back.”

Earlier, Luke had found a place for Rosie to demonstrate her shooting. She was a surprising mix of dead shot and skilled tracker. Also a woman who knew a sin when she saw one.

Luke found the combination hard to resist. “Now that we know just where the men are, we know this back trail will get us past them. It’s a steep walk from here but it’s all hidden from the guards.”

“We can’t do it on horseback, and we’ve been half a day walking and climbing to get here,” Rosie said. “And we need to haul Greer out of there, either unconscious or tied up. We can lower him with ropes down that cliff we just climbed and tote him all the way to Broken Wheel. It won’t be easy.”

Luke decided they looked to be there for a while and he might as well get comfortable. He lay down on his belly studying the terrain.

Rosie watched beside him. “I think what we need is a way to get Greer out of here. Lure him to town and grab him there.”

“I don’t know how often he goes to town.”

“Then what can we do to get him to go?” Rosie stretched out beside him.

Luke tossed Ruthy’s question around. Then he remembered a tiny detail about the Stone ranch that no one else might know. “I have an idea.”

“Tell me.” Rosie looked away from the guards, curious.

“Let me think about it awhile.” Luke frowned. “We’d be taking a long chance with Mrs. Greer’s safety, and I need to consider all the things that could go wrong.” Luke watched the guards and considered further.

“Is there an unguarded trail out of here that goes south, away from Broken Wheel?” Rosie seemed to prefer to do the thinking for both of them, and out loud. “John could take Greer over that trail. Lock him up for stealing the ranch. Maybe under questioning he can be tripped up and he’ll admit to killing your pa.”

Watching Rosie use all her skills to sneak around was impressive. Watching her consider angles and determine how best to hurt Greer worked him up, too. And since she wouldn’t quiet down long enough for him to study on his plan, he got to thinking about her. And how pretty she was and what a big old lonely ranch he was going to have in his possession in a few days. Which made him turn to his home.

“Look at it.” The ranch was within sight, though still far
away. It was log and stone, made out of the materials that surrounded it. Two stories high. Smoke curled out of one of two chimneys. A neat front porch stretched the length of it. A log barn stood behind. Horses grazed in the corral. The sun was getting low in the west and beginning to cast a reddish glow. It was near time to head back. They’d take a more direct route now that they knew exactly where to go, but they still needed to move carefully. They’d be hours getting back to Dare’s house.

“It’s as pretty a place as I’ve ever seen,” Rosie said quietly. Her presence there was nice. “This whole canyon is beautiful. Rugged, not lush like the land back in Indiana, but it takes your breath to look at it. The red rocks jutting up out of the ground, changing colors with every foot. Those big slabs of stone that seem to have been built on sand and now the sand’s been blown away.”

Ruthy pointed to one of the strange rock formations that appeared now and then, irregular and jagged.

“Those are scattered all over this canyon. I called that one God’s Lookout Tower.” Luke smiled at the childhood memory. “Staying standing the way it does seems miraculous. I liked to imagine God was watching over us.”

“Were you born here?”

“I was. Pa and Ma moved here before I came along. They had a farm back East, but there was a fire and two older brothers died.”

“There’s so much sadness in the world.”

“Ma said with her sons gone, there were too many memories. They lost the house in that fire. Lost most everything, so it was easy to sell the land and start over out here. They were on the Sante Fe Trail and were mighty wary of the stretch of desert ahead. They heard about this pretty
country with the layered red stone and decided they’d gone far enough west. So my pa took a chance and left the wagon train.”

Pointing to the striped stone the sentry stood on, Luke said, “Those strange lines looked to Pa as if God made the earth one layer at a time. He’d taken the name Stone and it just seemed meant to be. He found Broken Wheel, a run-down little town, the same as now, some hardy folks who traded with the Comanche and Kiowa, and a few ranchers running cattle in the area. They called this Palo Duro Canyon.

“Pa picked the spot to build a house and settle down, knowing it was easy to defend. I was born here. Callie came along a few years later. Then Ma died birthing a baby when Callie was about ten.”

Rosie made a sound of sympathy, and Luke turned to study her instead of the rocks. “After that, our family changed. Pa’d always been stubborn and I reckon so was I. Ma stepped in between us and kept the peace. Without her, we just went at each other all the time. Looking back, I know some of it came from both of us being so sad about Ma dying, but I couldn’t see it at the time. Callie rode with us, doing ranch chores until she was as good a hand as Pa or me. A crack shot. I didn’t like her being out and running wild. Pa thought it was fine. That added more things for us to bicker about.”

“I never had any brothers and sisters,” Rosie said. “And I lost my folks to scarlet fever when I was twelve. I had it first, brought it home from school. I lived through it. My folks didn’t.”

He reached over to rest his hand on hers. “That’s when those polecat Reinhardts took you in?”

Nodding, Rosie closed her fingers around his. “The fever hit the school first. So it spread almost everywhere. It’d done a lot of damage, so there weren’t many people able to take an orphaned child. The Reinhardts stepped in to help. At the time, it seemed like an act of kindness. At first I was so miserable missing my folks, I didn’t much notice how they treated me. Nothing would’ve made me happy. Then they put me to work. I spent years working from before sunup to full dark, and all that time I was dodging their fists and their no-account son.”

Luke shook his head. “Tough way to grow up, but you managed to become a fine woman.” Her hair had gotten mussed throughout the day, though those curls would be hard to control under the best of circumstances. He saw the softness, remembered how the curls felt and couldn’t resist touching them, enjoying the silk under his callused fingers.

The world ebbed away. The cackling birds seemed to go silent. The cool wafting of the wind faded to nothing, until all he was aware of was one woman. Soft skin. Soft hair.

Without planning to . . . exactly, he raised up on one elbow and closed the small distance between them and kissed her.

When her hand gently settled on his shoulder, he put inches between them so he could see what was in her eyes.

He liked what he saw and kissed her again. Longer this time. Finally she pulled away, and he found his hand sunk deep in her shining red curls.

“The sun’s getting low,” she said. “We’d better get on for home now.” She slipped out of his grasp, not looking at him, her cheeks pink as the sunset.

They crawled back to the ledge, where Luke stood to his feet. As she rose beside him, his first thought was that
he needed to get nearer to her. But he let the world back in and remembered where they were and what they were doing there.

“Long past time to head in.” Luke rubbed the back of his neck. He had a warm spot left by her caressing hands. He looked at her and saw that her hair wasn’t even pretending to be pulled back in a knot at her neck. He’d let it free and it gave him a deep pleasure to know he’d mussed her up a bit. He hesitated, but it felt right so he reached out and took her hand. “C’mon. Let’s go.”

They made the long climb down and started the journey back to Broken Wheel in silence, holding hands as they walked. Luke relived the kiss. He had no idea what was going on in her mind, but he hoped it was the same thing that was going on in his. The one thing he knew about women was, a lot of them liked to talk everything to death.

He sure hoped Rosie wasn’t like that.

“Luke, we need to talk.” The light-headed joy Ruthy had gotten from kissing Luke had eased enough she could think a few clear thoughts. “Can I ask you something?”

Together they watched and waited as Broken Wheel went to sleep.

“Sure.” He was whispering, so he leaned in closer, and when he spoke, warm breath tickled her ear and sent a shiver up and down her spine.

“The thing is, up until what happened—”

“You mean up until I kissed you?”

She swallowed hard to hear him say it out loud. “Yes, until then. The thing is, you’ve acted all week as if you didn’t even care for me.”

“That’s not true.”

“You were furious when I said I wanted to help fight Greer. You’ve snarled at me every time I asked to come along. You yelled at me when I—”

“Okay. Yes. I’ve acted . . . well, I’ve been rude. A few times.”

“No. Constantly.”

“But it isn’t because I don’t care for you.”

“You think I’m a pest. You think I’m slowing you down. You think—”

“It’s because I can’t get near you and not want to kiss you.”

For a second she was struck dumb.

“Whenever you’re around, which is all the time, I catch myself thinking of how pretty you are and how sweet.” He lifted her hand and kissed the back of it.

She shivered deep inside. She should tell him to stop. There wasn’t any hurry in saying it, though. “I reckon I have had me some thoughts too, Luke. But you’ve got a lot to deal with right now. We can talk more about such things as kissing when you’ve put your troubles behind you.”

“And why is that?” There was a surprising spark of temper in his question.

“Why is what?” She turned to look fully at him. “You want to know why we should wait to see if you get yourself killed in the next few days?”

“You know, it occurs to me that you’ve been living almost as a prisoner of the Reinhardts ever since you were a kid. Now, all the sudden, here you are—a pretty woman in a town full of men. You may be thinking you can have your pick.”

“You really—?” Ruthy stumbled over her words when
she realized she was going to ask if he really thought she was pretty. Begging for a compliment. There had certainly never been any indication from those around her that she was anything other than homely. If she hadn’t been holding his hand, the surprise might’ve tumbled her into a heap on the ground. “You think I could have any man I wanted?”

It was a heady feeling. She, who had feared for years she was going to be forced to marry that horrid Virgil Reinhardt, could now have her pick of men. She was beginning to really love Texas.

“Just never you mind about other men,” he said.

“I’ll mind whatever I please to mind, Luke Stone. Until this afternoon, there was no man I was of a mind to kiss.”

“Not even me?”

He sounded almost like a little boy, and she found it so endearing she melted. “Well, maybe you. A little.”

His temper vanished and she wondered what had sparked it. Jealousy? Was that possible?

The sunset turned to dusk, and dusk to full darkness as they waited in their hiding place behind Dare’s back door. An owl hooted. The leaves rustled with the evening breeze. The smell of juniper and rich loamy soil mixed in an alluring way with the scent of a strong, quiet man. And there in the dark, as they settled in side by side, his hand reached out and touched hers much as it had while they’d walked.

And now as then, she held on.