- -
- 100%
- +
He handed her back the canteen and placed his fingers under the back of her other hand, pushing the food to her mouth. His voice was incredibly gentle when he asked, “Then what makes you think I’m going to be worried about you fighting me?”
Nothing. Nothing at all. She sank her teeth into the meat, gnawing on the realization that what she thought or wanted didn’t matter here any more than it had mattered anywhere else. And with each chew, she was aware of how he watched her. The food coalesced in a hard lump in her mouth. Caine passed her the canteen. She didn’t lift it to her mouth. There was just no way she could swallow anything with his words sashaying through her head. She turned and spat the food into the dirt. His sigh brought her right back around again.
“I can see I’m going to have to change my ways around you if I don’t want you wasting away.”
“You don’t like skinny women?”
“What I like or don’t like is immaterial. I’m married.” He motioned to the food in her hand. “You going to eat that?”
Was he planning on making her? “I couldn’t.”
“Because I made you mad?”
What did he want? A yes? A no? She settled on a shrug.
He took the food from her hand and wrapped it up. It seemed to take him forever to put it away in the saddlebags, though his movements were smooth and efficient. It was just her own sense of time that was off-kilter. A twig snapped in the darkness beyond the small circle of light. Her heart leapt in her throat.
Caine settled back against the boulder, resting his arm across his bent knee, looking so powerful that the rifle propped by his side appeared superfluous.
“Relax.”
“I can’t.”
He sighed and angled his hat down. “What worries you more, them or me?”
Him, definitely him. “You.”
“Why?”
A stark, bold question by a stark, bold man. She licked her lips, debated answering, but there was something about the set of his mouth that made her think he’d force the response. “I know what to expect from them.”
He pulled the saddlebag over to him and fished around in one of the outer pockets. “What makes you think I’m any different?”
She licked her dry lips again, took a sip of water and forced herself to answer. “I don’t know.”
“That would be my point. You don’t know.” He pulled out a package wrapped in brown paper and untied it carefully. “I could be a real sweetheart between the sheets.”
Sweetheart or devil, she didn’t see how it made a difference. She took another sip from the canteen, at a loss as how to answer.
“Give me your hand.”
She instinctively tucked it into her stomach. He shook his head, reaching for it, pulling it forward until it stretched between them, palm up like a sacrifice. She tugged. He didn’t let go. The corner of his mouth twitched as he looked up at her from beneath the brim of his hat. “Trust me, you don’t want to do that.”
She watched as he put the brown paper in her hand. It was light and solid. He closed her fingers around it and let her go.
“I figure that will go down easier than jerky.”
Desi propped the canteen on the rock beside her. She parted the brown paper. Inside lay three heart-shaped confections. A fourth, more oddly shaped piece was smaller than the other three. Dark, rich and shiny, they lay like the perfect temptation in her palm.
Chocolate. Dear God, chocolate. She brought the package up close enough to take a deep breath of the heady aroma. It flowed through her system along with the memories of happier times, when she and her sister romped through the family mansion, running from room to room with reckless abandon. Never appreciating how good they had it, longing for the adventure they didn’t know could turn into a disaster. Chocolate had been an expected daily treat. They’d pitched tantrums when they hadn’t gotten it. In their innocence and bliss they’d never appreciated what a luxury it was to have it at all. She touched the irregular fourth piece with her finger. It had several vertical slices. Like someone had chiseled bits and pieces off it over time.
“My mother always swore by chocolate in times of stress.”
She looked up. It was Caine’s chocolate. He had to have been the one to chip off those tiny pieces. It was obviously something he valued and savored. She wrapped the package up, biting her lips against the pain it caused, and handed it back to him. “I can’t take your chocolate.”
Just as calmly he pushed her hand back toward her.
“Why not? Don’t you like it?”
“I love it.”
“As I want you to have it, where’s the problem?”
She didn’t look down as he unwrapped the paper again. “Why?”
“Because you’re my wife,” he said, nudging it toward her, “this is our wedding day and thirty years from now when you reminisce to our kids about it, I’d like for you to have a pleasant memory to pass on.”
She didn’t know what to be shocked by more. The fact that he thought so far down the road or the fact that he thought about her at all. She took two of the whole pieces of chocolate and held them out.
He shook his head. “I gave them to you.”
He said that as if he couldn’t care less about the sweet, except she held the evidence to the contrary in her hand. She tucked her pinky against the chopped piece, running her fingertip across the irregular ridges. The chocolate was dear to him, a prize he savored. “You like it, too.”
“That I do.”
“I can’t take something you value.”
“Why don’t you take a nibble before making a statement like that.”
He was tempting her. With chocolate. A devil in dirty clothes and a battered hat and more muscle than she could shake a stick at. The chocolate began to warm to her hand. Soon it would make a mess. “I don’t want it.”
“Now, that’s a lie.”
She cut him a glare.
“Now what?”
The truth just burst out. “I don’t want to be beholden to you!”
His laugh was unexpected. “Are you telling me all it takes is giving you a sweet, and you’ll be in my debt? Gypsy, it’s going to be darn easy being married to you.”
He was right. If she couldn’t even manage this small courtesy, she was going to be very easy to manipulate. However, now that she’d dug this hole for herself, she wasn’t quite sure how to get out of it. She settled for a blunt, “No.”
He took the two pieces of chocolate. “So maybe if we share, it won’t offend your sense of proper?”
This time the look she cast him was puzzled.
He shook his head. “As much as this might ruffle your sense of how it’s going to be, I don’t want to be at war with my wife.”
So he’d made her a peace offering with what he had, giving her something he valued. Sharing. It wasn’t such a bad way to start things. She took back the smaller piece and replaced it with the larger one.
His left eyebrow went up. He flicked a finger in the direction of the smaller piece. “You’re getting the short end of the stick.”
She didn’t think so. “Maybe I want you to have a happy memory, too.”
Even as she said it, she knew it was true. She might not have had the wedding of her dreams, she might be married to a total stranger, but he’d risked his life to save her twice, and he was her husband. Just in case she lived long enough to think back on this day as a memory, she wanted to see herself as more than helpless debris tossed along the current of her life.
Caine took the candy. One glance at his expression made her glad she’d made the gesture. The harsh planes had mellowed into an expression of satisfaction. He held up the candy like a man making a toast. “To a happy future.”
She noticed he didn’t say together. She touched the broken piece to his whole one. “To a happy future.”
He caught her hand before she could put the candy in her mouth. His fingers wrapped around hers, holding her steady as he leaned in. She watched as his mouth opened. The gleam of his teeth was faint in the firelight. His lips brushed her fingers, firm but surprisingly soft as he took a bite.
“To seal the deal.”
“That was mine.” She licked her lips as a fine tingle shivered up her arm. “You gave it to me.”
“Nah, that was clearly mine.” He touched one of the nicked edges. “I put my mark all over it.”
“It’s still mine now.”
He shook his head again, a smile flirting with the corner of his mouth. “Wrong again.” His finger touched the corner of her mouth, drawing those strange tingles there. “Once mine, always mine.”
He held one of his chocolates against her lower lip, pressing in gently as she absorbed his statement. A comfort or a threat? When she didn’t open her mouth immediately, he worked the chocolate in deeper using gentle side-to-side motions that spread the melting confection along the lining of her lip. The taste of his skin blended with the taste of the sweet. His gaze held hers, the green of his eyes almost black in the faint light. “To seal the deal.”
She took a bite, letting the flavor flow through her mouth. It was rich and sweet and so good. She swallowed. The taste of man and chocolate blended in a pleasant combination. She blinked. It was such a foreign concept to think of anything to do with a man being pleasant.
His smile was strangely gentle as he sat back against his rock and fed another stick into the fire. “I’m not an ornery man, Desi.”
What was she supposed to say to that? She settled on “Thank you,” which sounded ridiculous even to her own ears.
“I don’t have any intention of being an ornery husband.”
Again, she didn’t have anything to say. The smile that twitched his lips should have warned her but it didn’t. She was too distracted by the taste of chocolate, the taste of man and the confusing image he presented that was so different from what she thought he’d be. “But I do plan to be real sweet between the sheets.”
Sam and Tracker slipped back into camp with the same stealth with which they’d left. Two dark shadows, as comfortable in the dark as they were in the light.
Caine nodded as they dropped their saddlebags on the other side of the fire. The set of Tracker’s shoulders spoke volumes. Something had happened in town. “Did you have any trouble?”
“Nothing we couldn’t handle.”
Sam took out his makings. “Sure enough that town needs some cleaning up.”
Across the fire, Desi stiffened. She was watching Tracker and Sam with a dread that didn’t make sense.
“And Desi’s things?” A woman needed her things about her, familiar geegaws and such that made wherever she landed home. He’d never met a woman who didn’t put a lot of stock in her personal treasures, and he had no reason to feel Desi was any different.
Tracker sighed and pulled out a brown, wrapped package and crossed the small distance, standing over Desi where she sat on the low rock, looking big in comparison, which might explain the anxious expression on her face, but he didn’t think so. There was more going on here than what anyone was letting on.
“I’m real sorry, ma’am. The bastards got to your things before I could retrieve them but the mercantile had some ready-mades that might do.”
Desi took the package with hands that trembled. Caine could put that tremble down to fear, but he hadn’t lived this long by guessing wrong. “Thank you.”
There wasn’t a more shaky bit of gratitude ever expressed. Tracker held the package a little longer than necessary, drawing her gaze. “You’re welcome.”
Sam rolled his smoke, his eyes on Desi, too. “You might not be able to believe this right now, seeing as where you came from, but you can relax now.”
Something was definitely up. “Is there something that happened in town that I should know about?”
Tracker shook his head, his long hair sliding over his shoulder. He stepped back. “We handled it.”
Caine glanced over at Sam. “What did you handle?”
“What needed it.” He pitched the unlit smoke into the fire.
It wasn’t like Sam to waste a smoke. A glance at Desi didn’t reveal any more than Tracker and Sam had. She just sat there clutching the package to her chest, all hunched down as if she wanted to disappear. Shit!
“I’m thinking maybe I should have been the one to fetch my wife’s things.”
Tracker’s gaze flicked to Desi as he said, “I’m thinking things worked out the way they should have.”
Maybe. Caine asked Desi, “What do Sam and Tracker know that I don’t?”
She licked her lower lip the way she did when she was nervous. “I have no idea.”
That was a bald-faced lie. He cupped her chin in his hand and brought her face up. She’d tell him and then he’d handle it. Her lids flinched but the rest of her expression stayed stub bornly set. “Now, try telling me the truth.”
“Leave her alone, Caine.”
He didn’t let go of Desi’s chin or take his gaze from hers. “This is between me and my wife, Tracker.”
“Some things don’t need telling.”
He didn’t agree. The haunted look in Desi’s eyes drove him to know. “I’ll be deciding that.”
Denim rustled as Sam stood. “No. You won’t.”
Caine straightened, letting his hand slip from his wife’s chin. “Who’s going to stop me?”
Desi gasped as Sam took a step forward. “If you can’t resist being an ass long enough to find the respect you owe your wife, I guess I will.”
“I don’t think so.”
A soft sound had him looking down. Desi was backed against the boulder doing her level best to fade into the rough rock, her blue eyes wide and locked on him and Sam, but he wasn’t exactly sure she saw him. There was a wildness to her gaze, an inward focus that reminded him of battle-crazed men lost to reality. She clutched the package to her. He stepped back from Sam. Sam’s gray eyes cut to Desi and then back to him. “Leave it alone, Caine. At least for now.”
“She’s had about all she can take,” Tracker added.
Caine could see that. He hunkered down in front of Desi as he asked them. “Tell me one thing, when the time comes, did you leave one for me?”
“We did better than that.” Sam added, “We left you three.”
“Good.” He needed to know there would be a place to release the rage that consumed him. “Desi?”
She didn’t answer the call, didn’t look at him. He rubbed the backs of his fingers across the backs of hers, his nails hitting the paper on the package, the rustle of the paper sounding loud in the sudden silence. “Sweetheart, you haven’t finished your chocolate.”
A long pause and then she blinked. She looked down at her hand. “Oh no.”
Smears were on her fingers and the brown paper. “You’d best eat it fast before it makes a mess of your new clothes.” Her lashes lifted and he was staring into her big blue eyes and all the devastating sadness she normally hid.
“I was going to save it.”
“I’ll get you some more.” He wasn’t sure where he would find it or how he would pay for it—they were building the ranch and not established—but anything that took the sadness from those blue eyes was worth it.
She opened her hand and stared at the mess. He caught her wrist and brought her hand to his mouth. He pressed a chaste kiss on the edge of her palm. Chocolate spread to his lips. He backed off, licking his lips. “It’s still good.”
He brought her hand to her mouth. “Eat it while I get supper.”
She glanced toward the jerky. It didn’t take a genius to interpret what she was thinking. No, not jerky.
“Oh, we can do a lot better than jerky.” Sam disappeared into the darkness and came back carrying two large oval tins with handles. “The padre’s housekeeper sent a bunch of tamales and pork stew along with tortillas and—” he lifted a square basket “—wedding cakes.”
Desi stopped licking at her hand. “Oh.”
Oh, indeed.
“Maria said it wasn’t proper you didn’t have a wedding supper.”
Caine took the basket with the cakes in it from Tracker and put it beside Desi. “Maria cooks like a dream.”
“Learned everything she knows from Tia.”
“Tia?” Desi asked.
“Tia’s been taking care of us since the massacre.”
“Massacre?”
She was beginning to sound a bit like a parrot but Caine couldn’t begrudge her. After the day she’d had she had to feel a bit like she’d been tossed from a coach going at full speed and was now just bouncing around in the aftermath. “We all used to live in the same town. After the massacre took our families, we banded together.”
“We didn’t know shit about surviving,” Sam interjected, opening a tin.
“Damn near starved to death,” Tracker agreed, getting out a metal coffeepot. “Best thing we ever did was to try and steal tortillas from Tia’s windowsill.”
Caine rubbed at the back of his neck with the memory. “That woman wields a mean broom, though.”
“That she did,” Sam agreed, pulling out husk-wrapped bundles. “Lined us up against the wall of her home and lectured us a good hour while dinner simmered in the pot. Quoted the bible one minute and threatened our manly charms the next.”
“Damn longest hour of my life,” Caine said, remembering the hunger that had driven him to steal, the shame at being caught by a good woman who quoted the bible, but most of all he remembered how good that damn meal had tasted after he and the others had worked another hour to earn their place at the table.
“Does she still live with you?” Desi asked.
“Hell, yeah.”
“Runs Hell’s Eight with an iron fist.” Sam popped the top off the second tin. The rich scent of spicy meat stew filled the air.
“She’s family.”
“Yes.” Maybe not by blood but by everything that mattered, Tia was family.
Desi’s face took up that guarded look he didn’t like. He took the package from her hands and set it aside. It wasn’t hard to see where her thoughts had wandered. “She’ll like you just fine, Desi.”
Caine reached back for his saddlebag and fished out his tin plate and spoon. Tracker poured some stew onto the plate and tossed on a tortilla. Sam added a tamale. Caine glanced over at where Desi sat dwarfed by the coat. “Add another tamale on there.”
Sam followed his glance. “Yeah. She could use some fattening up.”
Shit, Caine hoped Desi hadn’t heard that. It only took a turn to see that she had. That full, totally tempting mouth was set in a flat line and those eyes were shooting daggers at him again. He sighed and handed her the plate. “He wasn’t slinging mud. Just concern.”
She took it. “It doesn’t matter.”
He noticed the fine tremor in her hands as he let go. Hunger, fear, anger…? Hell, there were too many reasons that could cause that shaking to pinpoint just one. She didn’t immediately grab up the spoon.
“Maria said to tell you she didn’t make it too spicy, ma’am,” Sam offered.
Desi appreciated that. She’d only met the woman once, early on before James had understood how determined she’d been to escape. Plump and colorful, happily married to the town’s blacksmith, she’d been a too-cheerful reminder of all Desi had lost. Desi’s renewed defiance after the one time she’d delivered food had ensured James had never let Maria back again. “Thank her for me, please.”
“You can tell her yourself,” Caine inserted in his low drawl. “She comes out to Hell’s Eight once a month in good weather to visit Tia.”
Which meant there was no chance she’d find any peace at Caine’s home. Desi clenched the spoon in her hand. The food that had her stomach rumbling a moment before was suddenly as appetizing as glue. No woman wanted her male relations taking up with a whore. If Tia was as formidable as the men implied, she’d spend her days paying for her crimes against decency and her night paying for Caine having to marry her. The future did not look good. She kept her voice even as she said, “Thank you, I will.”
She stared beyond the firelight, to the wildness beyond. It matched the wildness she felt inside. She just wanted to be free. Free of men’s demands, society’s scorn and the personal pain that ate like acid at her soul.
“Desi?”
She resented Caine’s interruption as much as she resented her circumstances. “What?”
He placed his fingers under the plate and pressed, until she either had to lift the plate or wear the contents. She lifted. His cool green eyes met hers with a confidence she wished she could borrow.
“I promise you, nothing’s going to be as bad as you’re imagining.”
5
It wasn’t as bad, it was worse. Desi stared at the bedroll set on the opposite side of the fire from everyone else, the distance emphasizing this was her wedding night. She’d come back from changing into her new clothes and found this. The euphoria and contentment from her full stomach faded. She glanced across the fire to where Caine stood talking to Tracker and Sam. While she didn’t consider twenty feet a token to privacy, Caine probably did. Men, she knew, didn’t mind other men watching them stake their claim. She’d hoped it would be different if she were a wife, but she glanced at the double bedroll again and knew that had been a vain hope.
The Hell’s Eight men did everything together. Legend said they were ghosts of warriors past come back to right wrongs. Others said they’d made a deal with the Devil to survive when the Mexicans had wiped out their town. No one ever said they worried over much about what was proper or respectable. And she was a whore in the eyes of everyone around her. Maybe even in her own heart if she dared to check, but she wasn’t checking and she wasn’t believing it. That being the case, she wasn’t behaving like one.
Deliberately, she picked up the closest half of the bedroll and moved it four feet to the left. She would have moved it farther if a shadow hadn’t come between her and the firelight. A booted foot settled on the far corner of the bedroll. She didn’t need to look up to know who that boot belonged to. She’d spent all day today while riding, watching that boot rock in the stirrup. The three horizontal scrapes across the instep marked it as Caine’s. “You worried about catching on fire?”
“No.”
She gave the bedroll a yank. It came out from under his foot easier than she’d expected. She hit the ground hard enough to leave bruises on her fanny. She also managed to move her bedroll and extra two feet.
His shadow stretched over her, then his hand, and then the amusement in his drawl. “The heat of the fire isn’t going to reach this far.”
She accepted his hand. “I don’t mind.”
He didn’t let go as he bent down and grabbed the bedroll. “I do.”
She snatched it out of his hand, draping it over her arm as she smoothed the wrinkles out. “Then you can stay over there.” She didn’t dare look at his face as she added, “I don’t mind.”
He took her hand again. His thumb stroked over the back of it. “I must be in a real contrary mood tonight because I mind.”
Anger surged from deep within. “Why, because you’ll miss out on an opportunity to show your friends how well you fuck?”
That thumb didn’t even break rhythm. “And here I was thinking I won’t get a wink of sleep watching my wife shiver in her blankets.”
She wrenched her arm from his grip and stomped back to his bedroll. She threw the blankets down atop the saddle. “Do me a favor.”
He came quietly up behind her, but it didn’t matter. The man had too much presence to sneak. The hairs on the back of her neck always warned her when he was around. “What?”
“Don’t try to dress it up prettily.”
“Dress what up?”
She glanced across the fire. Tracker and Sam were staring hard at the flames, pretending not to be aware of what was going on. She lowered her voice. “What’s going to happen here tonight.”
She couldn’t see his eyes under the brim of his hat, but she could see the quirk of his lips. “You got something against sleep?”
She turned and slammed her hands on her hips, anger writhing through her like a living thing. “Stop it. Just stop pretending. If all you were planning to do was sleep, we wouldn’t be over here and—” she kicked the pile of blankets “—we wouldn’t be sharing a bedroll.”
A log popped on the fire. She jumped and spun around. By the time she turned back, Caine was right there, close enough that the edge of his poncho touched her coat. His coat. She swallowed and risked a look at his face. He didn’t look angry, but with him, who could tell? His hand lifted. She flinched. His eyes narrowed. She braced her spine for the blow that was coming. His fingers grazed her jaw, slid along the bone, feather-light, but the drag of the rough callus left no doubt he was strong. His thumb came to rest against her mouth as his fingers cradled her cheek.