Wild Burn (2 page)

Del stood over him and cocked his pistol. “Not quite dead,” he said in the Cheyenne’s native tongue.

The man inhaled, obviously in pain, and glared up at him. “Just…speak English…if you plan…to kill me,” he growled between panting breaths. “I do not…need to hear you…butchering my language too.”

The precision with which the scalper spoke English, complete with sarcastic inflection, had Del pausing. And that pause was just long enough for the redhead to come up behind him and gasp in horror.

The foolish woman was going to get herself killed. “Stay back.”

“
You
stay back,” she spat as she shoved Del aside, barely avoiding getting shot again when her shoulder bumped his gun hand with his finger curled around the tempting trigger. She knelt at the Indian’s side. “Mr. White Horse, are you all right?”

“You know him?” Torn between keeping the Remington locked on his enemy and uneasily sliding it back into his hip holster, Del eyed the top of her head as he might a battle-ready rattlesnake. He rarely miscalculated, but… “How?”

“He’s my neighbor.” The woman didn’t deign to look at him as she reached beneath her skirts to tear free part of her muslin shift, wadding up the clean fabric and pressing it determinedly against the brave’s shoulder. “Mr. White Horse? It’s Moira Tully.”

Moira Tully.
Every syllable of her name was as Irish as her freckles. Those freckles made Del…uncomfortable, and Del was a man well used to discomfort.

He’d had his head down, gazing tiredly at the undisturbed brush covering the forest floor, when first he’d heard her footsteps in the clearing. She had been trudging a slow path along the line where tree met grass, not five feet away, but her presence had startled him. Startled him so much that adrenaline and fatigue collided inside his skull and had him pulling his Remington on a lone woman.

A man didn’t live through an entire war by thinking first and drawing later.

With his gun trained on the smooth, pale skin of her forehead, Del had been unable to do anything other than stare at her. Her face was the most lovely shape, round with an angular jaw and sharp chin. Her Irish blood sang loud and clear before she’d even opened her wide, pink mouth—the rich auburn hair and cornflower-blue eyes gave her away more than any rolling lilt ever could.

Not to mention the freckles.

Oh, the freckles.
As though God had taken a handful of ground cinnamon into His palm and blown fine flecks of the powdery substance all over her pretty features. From her hairline to her delicate throat and disappearing into the wilting linen collar of her ill-fitting dress, there were freckles.

Her freckles made his mouth water.

He’d felt an unnatural level of relief when he had stepped back into the moss-covered oaks, but instinct reared its ugly head once more when the savage had appeared in the stand of trees. As the Indian raised his hand, Del straightened his gun arm, aiming in the space of a single breath.

Then the damn woman had stood up. And Del shot her.

Nicked her, actually, just along the creamy curve of cartilage exposed by her upswept hair—though the amount of blood seeping from the wound concerned him. But instead of acting solicitous, he’d argued with her and allowed her to dash hell-for-leather across the clearing toward the Cheyenne war dog he’d so expertly felled.

He studied the slim line of her back now as she bent over her Indian neighbor. The fabric molded so naturally to the shape of her spine. No corset. No concealing layers. Just the supple muscle and smooth freckled skin he felt certain lay hidden beneath her dress.

Del scrubbed a hand over his suddenly dry mouth, holstering his weapon. Never had it been more obvious that his days as a Southern gentleman were long gone, and his manners with them. The remembered feel of her lithe body pressed snugly against his, when he’d snatched her to him… It burned him, and he was brutally aware of two things.

First, he hadn’t bedded a woman in over a year.

Second, if he’d ever had any chance of bedding this woman, that chance shriveled up and died the second he’d shot White Horse.

“Miss Tully?” the Indian grunted. “Are you…are you bleeding?”

The back of Del’s neck heated. Here lay a Cheyenne male, found on the outskirts of Red Creek, and five minutes ago, he would have blithely assumed his next hunting job had simply…started early. Except this man wasn’t a scalper.

His miscalculation began to blister, reviving battlefield memories he’d fought to suppress since last November, and he itched for action. “What can I do?” The insides of his eyelids felt gritty. He needed sleep, and he needed a hot meal, and most desperately of all he needed to not feel as though he’d blundered unforgivably.

Miss Tully ignored him, murmuring to the native man that she was fine. “Can you move your arm for me, Mr. White Horse?”

White Horse lifted his arm, wincing and groaning but proving that a majority of the limb’s mobility remained. “The bullet went straight through.” White Horse stared unblinkingly up at Del as Miss Tully bent her head to peer at the back of the man’s bare-skinned shoulder. “Who are you?”

“Delaney Crawford.” He kept his expression carefully blank. “And you?”

“White Horse. The folks in Red Creek call me John.” He breathed easier when Miss Tully applied pressure to the exit wound. “I work with the sheriff.”

Del’s stomach dropped. “The sheriff.”

“Hank Nelson.” Miss Tully’s tone was positively wintry. “Mr. White Horse assists Sheriff Nelson with native inclusion. We’re trying to integrate the Cheyenne into our community, and Mr. White Horse has been essential in those efforts.”

As he met the steady gaze of John White Horse, Del realized this was worse, far worse, than he could’ve imagined. Discomfort dovetailing neatly into shame and self-loathing, he wondered if the constant turmoil of hatred was entirely due to the war, or if it went deeper than that. If it touched the roots of his family’s torched Georgia plantation and his daddy’s shallow grave. If, perhaps, it hadn’t always been directed inward.

Questioning that would rob him of sleep, and he had precious little sleep at night now as it was.

He reached up to tip his hat farther down over his eyes, refusing to allow these strangers to see the cracks in his cold façade. He was a war machine, made of iron, hollow inside and unbreakable out. And he needed to remain as such.

He was further wearied by the knowledge he’d have to fix this somehow. Crouching down on White Horse’s other side, he slung the Indian’s arm around his neck and prepared to hoist him up. “How far to Red Creek?”

Miss Tully frowned, big blue eyes clashing with his as her gaze flitted over his features, taking his measure. She had looked at him in just that way after his bullet sliced through her ear. Then, there had been a nervous heat in her assessment as she’d held her breath, studying him. Now she was very obviously deciding whether he could be trusted to save the life he’d nearly taken. “Through the trees.” She nodded to the left, wincing when the movement renewed awareness of her injury. “Then fifty yards down the incline. The first two cabins you come to are mine and Mr. White Horse’s.”

Del nodded. “Up on three. One. Two.” He lifted, Miss Tully with him. “Three.” Her hands never left White Horse’s wounds.

They trampled together across the clearing, a limping creature with six legs and the same number of awkwardly bent arms. “Does your town have a surgeon?” He glanced at Miss Tully over White Horse’s hanging head. Each step jarred the injured man’s shoulder, his pained breaths echoing loudly between them.

“A physician. Doc Browne.”

As they began their descent down the rocky, sloping incline on the far side of the forest, he saw the half-moon cluster of small cabins dotting the foot of the hill, each with its own square plot of tilled soil. A muddy road led away from the cabins and further down in elevation toward the surprisingly large settlement that made up the town of Red Creek. When Del squinted past the buildings along the main thoroughfare, he noticed several clapboard houses, whitewashed and pristine and far bigger than the modest cabins closest to the hills.

So why did a woman like Moira Tully live on
this
side of town?

As they approached the nearest cabin, Del said, “I’ll go for the doctor as soon as we get him settled.”

“You don’t know where to find him.”

Del snorted. “It’ll either be the saloon, the whorehouse or the man’s own home. And I’m guessing you could direct me to all three.”

Another glance in her direction showed angry red splotches blooming on fair, freckled cheeks. “He’ll be at his house with his family. I’ll fetch him.” She steered them to the first cabin, reaching out to open the door and forcing her to let go of White Horse’s shoulder. The sudden change had the Indian stirring, shifting his weight more heavily onto Del.

Del grunted, but soon they were up the steps and inside the spare one-room cabin. The thick scents of pine and roasted meat hung in the air, and the tidy collection of hunting knives displayed along one wall identified the house as White Horse’s. After depositing him onto the tick mattress, Del stepped back to catch his breath.

“Delaney Crawford.”

He turned at Miss Tully’s contemplative tone but said nothing.

She shrugged. “Now I know what name to give Sheriff Nelson for the arrest warrant.” She bared her teeth in a feral approximation of a smile.

That smile made him uncomfortable too, though his lips twitched with the curious, unfamiliar desire to grin in return.

“The sheriff won’t arrest him, Miss Tully,” interjected White Horse as the little do-gooder made for the open door.

“Oh? Why not?”

Del didn’t look at her, though he felt her sharp gaze on him. He knew what was coming, and for the first time in a long time he wished it wasn’t.

White Horse didn’t disappoint. “Captain Delaney Crawford was specially requested. He is the Dog Man Killer.”

“I don’t understand.” She didn’t hear the implied moniker in her neighbor’s damning words, but Del certainly did.

“The dog soldiers, Miss Tully. He is here to kill Cheyenne.”

Chapter Three

In the end, it wasn’t his purpose in Red Creek that surprised her but his title. The wild gunslinger was an army captain, one whose slow drawl told her precisely on which side of the war he’d fought.

The losing side.

She felt a sympathetic sting in her chest at the heartache he must have suffered. The Southern states had been brutalized, cruelly, harshly, and Moira did not envy those people their efforts to rebuild. When she had faced the need to shore her own defenses and rebuild the walls that had been all too scalable, she had chosen to run.
To start fresh,
she corrected.

One couldn’t start fresh on battered ground.

She hurried along behind Doc Browne, whom she’d just collected from the kitchen where he’d been breakfasting with his wife and sons. Both boys were Moira’s students, perhaps the most disciplined of all in her class, and she liked the family. Mrs. Browne had handed her a clean cloth for the oozing wound on her ear, but Moira couldn’t allow herself to be further tended while John White Horse lay bleeding.

“Will I need to remove a bullet?” Doc asked as they approached the cabin. He carried a leather physician’s satchel, but Moira knew the short, graying man was no surgeon.

She shook her head. “No. It went straight through.”

“And who shot John, again?”

“A…soldier.” She swallowed around the need to give more details and slander the cad, as she was still fuming. She’d opted not to run for Sheriff Nelson, knowing better than most that one couldn’t always depend upon a lawman to do the right thing.

And the right thing, in this case, would be to arrest Captain Crawford’s sorry backside.

“Which soldier?” Many of the miners were former soldiers, both Union and Confederate, but they had been able to put aside their grievances when faced with the personal gain offered by the mines. That didn’t mean there weren’t fights—brawls were common, especially outside the Ruby Saloon—but for the most part, the soldiers held their tongues, solitary, haunted creatures that they were.

The war had hurt everyone, but those men hurt worst of all.

While Moira felt sympathy for them, such visceral sympathy, she still couldn’t look at them without that little tug of instinctive fear. The memories of Boston faded too slowly.

She cleared her throat as they climbed the cabin’s steps. “One just arrived. Captain Delaney Crawford.”

Doc Browne paused, his hand on the door handle, and turned to face her with concern. “So Hank decided to send for him, after all.”

She frowned at him. Her head ached, and her ear hurt, and fatigue clouded her mind, though she’d been awake an hour already. “You knew?”

“There’s been talk of a need for him, or one like him, ever since the Cheyenne set up camp on the other side of the hill.”

“Sheriff Nelson
wanted
an Indian killer in Red Creek?” It didn’t add up. John White Horse had been working so hard to carefully introduce his people to white folks’ ways, at Sheriff Nelson’s behest. The idea that the sheriff would bring a murderer into the natives’ midst—with the express purpose of culling their numbers—sharpened the pain in her head until that pain was a hot poker stabbing at her temples.

“I—” The sudden opening of the door prevented Doc from answering, revealing none other than the subject of their conversation.

The doctor eyed him cautiously, then pushed past him. “Crawford.”

The man didn’t even blink. “Doc.”

Moira watched the exchange from the foot of the steps and stared up at the dark figure silhouetted in the dim light of the cabin’s interior. The left side of his face glowed, firelight dancing across his tanned skin. He’d removed his duster and hat, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to reveal the starkly delineated tendons of his brawny forearms. Droplets of water gleamed along the backs of his hands.

So. He’d not only lit a fire in the small hearth, he’d collected fresh water, as well. How…thoughtful.