Untamed (7 page)

From the loft above, Sissy's voice filtered down. "Sorry, princess, but that ain't gonna happen."

Moments later, Josie's only friend in the world inched her way down the ladder. Instead of her low-slung blouse and scarlet skirt, she was wearing a long jacket with matching leggings, both of beaded buckskin.

"This Long Belly fellah," Sissy said when she was on level footing, "has taken it in his head that the buffalo he's looking for will come to me. We're going out looking for it this morning before the weather gets too bad."

"But he can't go off chasing buffalo—everyone knows they're all dead." Desperate, Josie clasped her hands together. "Please, please, talk to him, Sissy. Tell him you're just a plain ole whore, that you don't have anyone's spirit inside you, and that you can't possibly find a stinking buffalo that isn't even alive. Then maybe you can talk him into taking us back to Lola's."

"Sorry, princess, but we ain't got a chance of getting off this mountain until that injun is damn good and ready to take us back down—which he ain't."

With that, she went over to the stove, poured a cup of coffee, and headed out the door. Josie was hot on her heels.

"Sissy, wait," she said, joining heron the porch. "You have to help me."

"Help you do what?"

"Survive, I guess. You can't just leave me here with that... that man. We should be figuring a way out of here."

Sissy looked her over, up one side and clown the other. "You don't look no worse for the wear. If you lived through last night, you can get through anything."

"He expects me to bathe him." She shuddered at the thought. "And God knows what else."

Sissy shrugged. "Then do it."

"But I'm not a..." Too late, Josie bit her tongue.

"You're a whore now, ain't you?"

Josie shook her head.

"You telling me you spent the night in that man's bed and he didn't jump you?"

"That's right. I wouldn't let him."

Sissy snickered. "He must be a whole lot sicker than I thought."

"I don't see anything funny about this. If anyone around here so much as touches me, I'll kill him."

"Relax, princess," Sissy said with a shrug. "It's only your body. Give the man what he wants without a fight, and it'll go a whole lot better for you."

Not only was Josie less than encouraged by this advice, it made her mad enough to chew nails. "That's easy for you to say after all the men you've bedded—you probably even like what they do to you."

Sissy's dark eyes were usually flat and expressionless. Now they turned hard and mean. "I ain't never found a speck of pleasure in any man's arms. They take what they want, and I let 'em have it. You'll be better off if you do the same."

"How can you say that to me? I thought you were my friend."

"Friend?" Sissy laughed, a bitter, hollow sound. "You got to be a friend to have one, princess." That said, she stepped off the porch and started for the barn.

Josie stood there in the cold for a time, not pondering Sissy's words as much as hating them. Hating her. Part of that hatred, she had to admit, was pure jealousy over the fact that Sissy was riding off on an adventure, leaving her behind to tend hearth and home. Of course she didn't feel a drop of envy over Sissy's escort, but with that exception, Josie would rather have been on the trail with a savage than trapped in that pigsty of a cabin with his half-breed brother, who expected her to wait on him hand and foot. At least on horseback, there was always some chance of escape. As for Sissy's remarks about friendship, Josie wasn't at all sure how to take them. She'd never had a close friend before and wasn't quite sure of the boundaries. In any case, she was too cold to think about that or anything except getting her frosty backside into the cabin before she froze to death.

Resigned to her fate, if not happy about it, Josie watched the pair disappear into the forest, and then dragged herself back to the confines of her cage. The minute she stepped into the room, she noticed the water in the kettle was simmering, ready for her to go to work. So was Daniel.

"If you've got nothing better to do with that pot of hot water," he called from across the room. "I could stand a little washing up."

Josie glanced at him, thinking there wasn't enough water in all Montana Territory to accomplish the feat, then hefted the kettle off the stove and carried it to the side of the bed.

"Where do you keep the soap and rags?" she asked.

Daniel scratched his bead, giving her the impression that such items were foreign to him.

"If you'll take a look in my possibles bag over by the corner," he finally said. "I believe you'll find some flannel scraps or maybe a couple of socks that would do the trick. I'm not sure about soap. I bought a pound or so a couple of years back, but I can't recall whatever came of it."

Sighing heavily, Josie made her way to the corner where she found a dark leather pouch. After opening the outside flap, she spread the bag wide and peered into the depths. It contained an assortment of bullets, knives, beads, and packs of what were probably sugar or salt, but none of the rags appeared to be clean enough to touch, much less for use in bathing. Reaching gingerly into the pouch, Josie plucked out the cleanest dirty sock she could find, and then returned to the bed.

With fourteen brothers of all ages in her keeping, it wasn't as if she'd never seen or bathed a masculine body. Thinking of the chore that way, as something she'd done a thousand times before, Josie made quick work of removing Daniel's clothing down to his drawers and assisted when necessary as he bathed himself.

She was studying his broad chest as he patted it dry, taking in the fact that his smooth nutmeg skin was devoid of hair, and thinking how refreshing a sight it was after having lived among the apelike Baum boys, when Daniel asked a question that made her choke with surprise.

"Will you help me get these drawers off so I can clean the rest of me?"

"Ah... no." She fought a blush but felt her cheeks grow warm anyway. "I'd rather not."

"No?" His bright eyes grew huge, incredulous. "After all the bare-ass naked men you've seen? Am I that damned hard for you to look at?"

Since she'd been thinking how much better Daniel looked without his clothes, and that nothing about him from his sculpted thighs to his well-muscled shoulders reminded her in the least of her brothers, Josie's blush deepened. To save herself from further embarrassment, she almost blurted out then and there that she wasn't a whore and didn't go around looking at strange men's naked bodies. But then it occurred to her that he might think of her innocence as some kind of prize—and that she'd then find herself in yet another kind of trap.

Handling the situation in the only way she could think of, Josie said, "This isn't a brothel and I'm not on duty. Just think of me as a kidnapped woman who's helping an injured man out of the goodness of her heart."

Daniel stared at her for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then he gave a short nod and said, "Fair enough. Can I talk your good little heart into loosening that splint and taking a look at my leg? I've been laid up for about three weeks now and should be pretty well healed, but it feels like it's getting worse."

Since Josie had set more than her share of broken bones and felt she knew quite a lot about the healing process, this struck her as odd. "Who set the bone for you?"

"Long Belly, but I don't think that's the problem, That cow kicked a gouge out of my shin when she broke my leg, and right there is where it feels as if I met the business end of a branding iron. It might be a little infected."

Josie had hardly begun unwrapping the bindings that held the splint together before she knew without a doubt that Daniel had made a correct diagnosis. Blood and infected matter had seeped through the bandages, and she also picked up a slight whiff of decay.

"I'm going to have to clean this out," she said when she got down to the angry wound. "I'll be as careful as I can, but it's probably going to hurt some."

Daniel nodded, expecting this. "Whiskey's on the shelf above the stove along with anything else you might need. Would you be good enough to bring me the bottle? I think I'd like to get started on it before you get started on that leg."

After that, Daniel didn't say another word. He took a few deep pulls on the whiskey, then lay back on his pillow and closed his eyes. By the time Josie had finished cleaning the wound and covered it with a warm poultice she'd made of flour, salt, and water, he was sound asleep. Or passed out. She didn't know which.

It was as she was returning the whiskey and other supplies to the shelf above the stove that Josie came across the gun she'd been unable to fire earlier that morning. Determined to learn how to use the weapon should a threatening occasion arise, she took it with her to the table by the cabin's only window. Dropping onto one of the chairs there, she began a search for the hammer Daniel told her about.

When she found the little lever that he must have been referring to, Josie pulled it back, pleased to see that at the same time, the trigger jumped to the center of the finger guard. Now it all made sense. Once, the gun was cocked, all she had to do was pull the trigger to fire a bullet. Only trouble was, Josie didn't know how to go about 'uncorking' the thing without shooting at something. She certainly couldn't fire the gun inside the cabin. If she went outside, Daniel would surely hear the explosion and wake up, probably mad. Touching the trigger seemed out of the question, which left only one other way she could think of to make the gun safe again. Since she'd pulled the hammer in order to make the gun functional, Josie reasoned, all she had to do was put the lever back in its original place to disable the weapon.

Following this rationale, she pushed the hammer forward. It wouldn't budge. Understanding that the hammer was connected to the trigger somehow, she decided to hold it in place with her thumb, while lightly pulling against the trigger. The hammer began to move forward and then, without warning, slipped out from under her thumb.

Much to Josie's surprise and horror, the Colt went off in her hand.

Chapter 5

Relatively pain-free for the first time in weeks, Daniel dozed peacefully with images of Josie's long auburn hair swirling around in his mind like ribbons of silk. Although she still had her tresses braided, and even then they were mussed, he had no trouble picturing what her hair must look like when she unwound and brushed it for the night. He boldly went on to imagine those luxurious locks pouring through his fingers, figuring they would feel like spring rain sliding between blades of sweet new grass. She would be kitten-soft to touch, he thought, recent memories egging him on, with just a dash of wildcat tossed in to make bedding her all the more interesting.

Mercy.

Daniel then found himself wondering what, short of paying her himself, he had to do in order to convince Josie she ought to share her favors with him. In fact, he was getting good and worked up over the idea, enjoying the surge of blood to his nether regions and trying to remember how long it'd been since he'd last felt such a rush of desire, when something hot and sharp, like a knife blade fresh from the fire, suddenly parted his hair. In the next moment he heard the sound of gunfire.

Bolting to a sitting position despite the pain in his leg, Daniel reached up and grabbed the top of his head. When his fingers came away sticky with his own blood, he could hardly believe his eyes. Then he spotted Josie sitting at the table, his Peacemaker still smoking in her hand. "You shot me—you up and shot me."

."Oh, my God—no." Josie dropped the gun onto the table as if it were a rock, then leapt out of the chair and hurried to the side of the bed. "Where are you hurt?"

When she tried to lean over him, Daniel reared back out of her reach. "Get away. I'm shot in the head."

Still unable to believe that she'd put a bullet in him, Daniel fingered his scalp. By then blood was flowing freely over his forehead, a gory little river that turned into a waterfall at the tip of his nose, and then trickled down onto his bare chest and below. As he stared at the crimson puddle pooling in his navel, trying to make sense of it all, Josie crawled onto the mattress beside him.

"Don't be such a baby," she said, talking to him as if he were a child. "Let me take a look at the damage."

Daniel couldn't get the image of the smoking gun out of his mind. "Why should I? You just tried to kill me."

"No, I didn't—honest. I was just trying to find that hammer thing you told me about."

"Your search was successful. Now leave me the hell alone."

"I said I'm sorry, didn't I?"

Daniel was looking for a contrite expression to go along with the words, some sense that she meant what she said, but it was as obvious as hell that it wouldn't be forthcoming from this defiant female. To the contrary, she seemed downright pissed that he wouldn't just let her rip into his scalp.

Hands on hips, Josie said, "If you don't let me see how badly you've been shot, you might just sit there and bleed to death. If that's what you want, it's fine by me. I'm going out for a little air."