The Men of Pride County: The Rebel (6 page)

Having said that, Juliet glanced away. She could fool him with a cheery voice and false smile, but her eyes would give her away. He could read volumes in her gaze, he’d always told her, and this was one chapter she wanted
to keep to herself, the chapter that would give her the happily-ever-after ending she’d always longed for.

Her answer satisfied him, either because he believed it to be the truth or because it was what he wanted to hear—probably a bit of both. He touched her hair, the gesture brief yet filled with grateful fondness.

“You get some sleep, my dear. Tomorrow we reach Fort Blair.”

“And I’ll be busy making another home for us.”

Thankfully, he’d turned away and didn’t catch the hint of bitter melancholy in her tone.

Because Juliet knew that though she’d try her best, Fort Blair would be nothing more than another temporary stop, not the home she desired.

Chapter 4

By noon the next day, John Crowley had had quite enough of the dissension in his ranks. He’d chosen to overlook the minor digressions at first. But now, though they were several hours out of Fort Blair, soaring temperatures and sore new recruits forced a midday stop for a cold meal of hardtack and salt pork. Now, the tensions were unmistakable.

“Sir, the Southern boys won’t fall into ranks.”

Crowley looked up at his sergeant, his irritation plain. “Won’t? For what reason?”

“They say they’re suffering from heat exhaustion.”

“But you don’t believe them.”

“The only thing they’re exhausting is my patience, sir. They’ve been dogging all morning, late to strike camp, slow to form columns, refusing to heed orders.”

“Any orders?”

“Just
our
orders, sir.”

Crowley dashed the remains of his meal to the ground and stood. Though he didn’t look in her direction, he was well aware of his daughter’s pointed stare.
I told you so
. At least she was wise enough not to speak it aloud in front of his subordinates.

That chiding would wait until they were alone.

“Where is Major Banning?”

“I believe he’s tending to an ill-fitting shoe on his horse, sir.”

“I’ll be fitting my shoe to his arrogant—” The colonel broke off his mutterings as Juliet cleared her throat in a diplomatic reminder. “Fetch the major, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir.”

Then Crowley shot his daughter a withering glare. “Don’t say anything.”

Her sandy brow lifted in a blameless arch.

“How can I command the respect of my men when my own child mocks me?” he mumbled direly, to earn Juliet’s chuckle. Glowering at her unrepentant air, he strode to the nearest lounging Southerner to vent his annoyance.

“Private, why aren’t you preparing to march?”

The solider glanced up indolently and drawled, “I ain’t heard no order given, sir.”

“Have you some hearing problem, soldier?”

“Nossir. My hearing’s jus’ fine.”

“Then hear me when I tell you that if you aren’t off that ground and saddled up in thirty
seconds, you’ll be walking the rest of the way to Fort Blair—in your socks. Did you hear me that time?”

“Yes, sir.” The private jumped to his feet but made no immediate move toward his horse. Instead, he stood frozen, his expression one of infinite surprise.

“Private?”

Crowley caught the boy as he toppled forward, the shaft of an Apache arrow jutting out from between his thin shoulder blades.

“Indians!”

The cry brought Juliet to her feet, terror shooting up her spine in a stiffening bolt. For a moment, her mind was blank to all but the horrible memories of a girl of nine—to the vivid images of faces bright with menacing paint thrusting between the flaps of their wagon. To the sounds of her mother’s screams. Even though her hands flew up to cover her ears, those anguished cries echoed through her head—cries that sounded like her own….

A sudden impact sent her sprawling headlong to the ground, her cheek grinding against hard-packed sand, her breath knocked from her by the force of a man’s covering weight. Her first thought was to struggle, but the wind-sapping fall had disconnected mind from body.

“Stay down.”

There was no mistaking the source of the curt command. It was Noble Banning’s prostrated
form pinning her to the desert floor. For a moment, her awareness of him swallowed up all else. She could hear the harsh intake of his breath as it fanned her face, could feel the powerful drum of his heartbeats, could smell the hot wool of his uniform jacket and see the blueing of his Navy Colt next to her head as its barrel sought out targets. The reality of him helped push the other, darker memories back into perspective, allowing her to get a grip upon her fear.

And suddenly the danger of the man holding her close, the man who’d witnessed her weakness, was greater than the threat she couldn’t see.

“Get off me,” she wheezed.

“We’re under attack.”

His words were direct, punctuated by the bark of carbines, yet the softness of his tone held a purposeful comfort, relaying a message that she had nothing to fear. An empty comfort. Because she knew better. And she knew how to defend herself.

“I have a gun in the wagon.”

Her no-nonsense reply told him that she’d recovered from the momentary shock. His embrace loosened and she was able to wriggle free. Without so much as a thank-you or a second glance at her savior, she started running. Staying low to the ground, she scrambled for the safety of the wagon, refusing to pause even when clods of dirt spit up in front of her from bursts of enemy rifle fire.

Maisy and Colleen clung together in the belly of the wagon, squealing in terror. Their petrified features rose up when Juliet tossed back the canvas, giving her another shock of remembrance. She shook off the image of a woman and her child, then hurriedly climbed inside.

“Stay low,” she warned the frightened pair as she reached under her seat for the solid feel of her Spencer repeater. At the sight of the rifle, the two women quieted to an anxious whimpering. After checking the chambers, Juliet turned back the canvas side just far enough to give her an unrestricted view of their surroundings.

There was nothing to see. The Apache knew how to make themselves invisible amongst the mesquite and thorny shrubs that didn’t look as though they would hide so much as a feather. From their concealment, the Indians fired at their leisure, using single-shot rifles and the more deadly bow and arrow to pick off any careless soldier who made himself a target. Maisy screamed as an arrowhead thudded into the side of the ambulance, but Juliet didn’t flinch. Then Colleen edged up beside her with a huge dragoon pistol braced in both trembling hands.

“I’ll not make it easy for them unholy savages to make off with me hair.”

Juliet praised her bravado with a tight smile, then continued to scan the thickets. Panic beat in her breast when she thought of her father
out in the open. She’d seen several men fall. Had he been among them? She didn’t dare to seek him out.

A taut silence settled over those lying belly down in the dirt and those hunching down in the wagon as minutes crept by without the fateful twang of the bowstring sounding.

“Why have they stopped?” Maisy asked in a quavering voice, not rising up so much as an inch from her crouched position on the floorboards.

“I don’t know.”

“Have they run off?” Colleen asked, hopeful yet cautious, too. “We were sitting ducks. Why would they leave?”

“I don’t know,” Juliet said again. She, too, was wondering. Though she didn’t think they’d been attacked by a force of more than three or four, that was a large enough number to whittle them down to a like-sized group.

Then Juliet gave a gusty sigh of relief when she heard a beautiful sound wafting on the dusty air.

The bugle from Fort Blair.

So that’s Indian-fighting
.

Until that moment, Noble hadn’t realized how truly ignorant he was about the situation he’d committed himself and his men to.

Cautiously, he lifted himself out of the dirt. His system hummed from the familiar rush of excitement and horror that came after battle, but those sensations were now mixed with a
feeling of awe. He and his men had come up against some of the best military forces known to history. They themselves were no strangers to hit-and-run warfare. But he’d never engaged an enemy he couldn’t even see in territory so wild and foreign. All his knowledge of conflict came from set-piece battles fought on wooded terrain against an opponent he could second-guess. Nothing prepared him for this wily enemy, who struck without warning from a seemingly empty wasteland, then disappeared when the fight was no longer to his advantage.

Holstering his pistol, its chambers still warm, Noble suppressed his uneasiness when presenting his unprotected back to the wasteland, but he allowed himself to slip into the mode of efficient commander. Forgetting that he was not in charge, he called to his second.

“What are our casualties, Captain?”

Bartholomew’s count was far from good news. “Privates Washburn, Morgan, Long, and LeRoy. Corporal Stevens.”

Refusing to let himself feel for those men or even to conjure up their faces until it was safe to do so, Noble ordered, “Have a detail prepare them for travel. We’ll pay our respects to them once we get to the fort.”

“Yes, sir.”

The fast-approaching dust cloud became an identifiable force of men on the horizon. A company from Fort Blair, no doubt, come to the rescue of raw recruits and Southern fools
who were equally scared and ignorant of how to keep themselves safe on the frontier.

The column of dusty soldiers drew up, and its major dismounted to address Crowley with a sharp salute and a crisp, “We came as fast as we could once we heard gunfire.”

“I applaud your haste, Major. And I welcome your escort back to Fort Blair.”

No sooner had the major replied with a “Yes, sir, thank you, sir” than there was a delighted feminine cry.

“Miles!”

Juliet Crowley threw herself into the arms of the grinning major, who hugged her up and whirled her about unashamedly. Noble blinked in surprise, the unseen hostiles, the bundled bodies that were once friends momentarily forgotten.

He’d never thought … He’d never considered …

When he’d seen Juliet standing in shock, lost in an hysterical daze, an easy target for an Apache arrow, something had snapped inside him. Enough. He’d seen enough innocents die, and he could not bear to see Juliet Crowley’s indomitable spirit added to that number. Without thought to his own safety, he’d raced across open ground to push her out of harm’s way, but that’s where honor aided.

How good she’d felt in his arms. Soft where a woman was meant to be soft, yet strong with the lean, hard muscle of an active life, a combination
that sent all sorts of arousing signals through him.

He’d grown up around and had courted his share of women, the most beautiful, dainty, and refined creatures the Middle States had to offer, women trained to reflect well upon the men they married. He was used to gentle blushes and coquettish manners and had thought that was what he desired in the opposite sex—until he’d met the colonel’s headstrong daughter and she’d knocked all his notions of desirability askew.

Not that he was in the market for a wife. His life was carefully regimented, meticulously planned down to the slightest detail. Once he got out of this army, he’d return to Pride County and set up his law practice, then he’d pick an appropriate hostess from the neighboring elite. It didn’t really matter which he chose. The why was more important than the who. A woman of breeding and a background of power. A woman who would understand her place in his life and ask no questions. One who would be an asset to his career and his home—in that order.

Though he admired a woman of opinion and brain, he knew the practicality of having a docile and domestic bride who would do nothing to jeopardize his community standing. Nowhere was there room for a distraction like Juliet Crowley, not in his future, not in his present. He had specific goals in mind from which conscience could not be tempted if he
meant to succeed within the narrow confines of Pride.

He knew that.

He accepted that.

So why was the sight of her twirling in another man’s embrace enough to make him bristle protectively?

He’d never considered that Juliet Crowley might have someone waiting.

But why that should bother him, he didn’t know. And it irritated him almost as much as the Yankee major’s skewering glare when those narrowed eyes rested on him.

The tension was immediate, man to man, the staking of territory as basic as it was momentarily blatant.
She’s mine, hands off
, was the message clearly conveyed by that one chill stare.

Wondering why he was perceived as a threat, Noble returned the look with a cool impassivity. Though he had no designs of his own on the bold Miss Crowley, he’d let the other sweat over his intentions.

“Miles, see that the dead and wounded are taken care of,” Crowley instructed, apparently unaffected by the sight of his daughter in the major’s arms. That casual acceptance made the situation somehow much more significant. “I’d like to get to the fort as soon as possible.”

“I’ll see to it, sir.” He set Juliet away from him, giving her a quick smile and a softer, “We’ll talk later.”

And the way she leaned in close to whisper,
“We have much to discuss,” did funny things to Noble’s reason.

It wasn’t Juliet Crowley, he told himself. It was the war. He’d been without female companionship for over three years. Any woman—not just the colonel’s confrontational daughter—would scramble his thinking and excite his imagination.

He told himself that while his gaze followed her aggressive stride back to the wagon and he thought of her courage in the face of a threat that had his own men cowering in terror. Quite a woman, by any standard, the kind of woman a man would count himself lucky to have at his side in this wilderness—or anywhere else.

But not as his woman. And he reminded himself, just in case he was tempted to forget, his future had no place for the daughter of his enemy.