The Lady Takes A Gunslinger (Wild Western Rogues Series, Book 1) (11 page)

Reese swore, diving into the shadows to evade the oncoming bullets. Another shot slammed Donovan against the wall, and he dropped to one knee behind a water barrel.

"Mr. Donovan! Are you all right?"

"I'm bloody fine!" He pulled off another shot at the pair across the street. Wood splintered from the edge of the watering trough. "Get out of here!"

"Not without you!"

Brew raised the rifle he'd stolen from the marshal's wall and fired at the two men emerging from behind the trough. One of them dropped his gun and grabbed for his wounded arm. Donovan fired again and the other one cried out, flattened himself to the ground, then rolled back into the shadows. The hammer of Donovan's gun struck an empty chamber.

He broke cover, running toward Grace's horse. "Go!" he shouted to Brew.

"Not without her!" he shouted back, reaching for the reins of Grace's horse.

Without hesitation, Donovan took hold of her saddle horn and vaulted up behind her, colliding with her back. He shoved her down hard against the neck of the horse and reached for the reins.

"Donovan!"

The deep voice came from the window of the jail, not ten feet away. Donovan yanked the reins around. Grace's heart sunk at the sight of Connell Smith pointing a small-caliber revolver at them through the bars of the window.

Grace felt Donovan's whole body go tense behind her.

Smith looked a little woozy, but held his gun steady. "You forgot to check my boot."

Donovan cursed behind her, reining the prancing gray around so his body shielded hers. "Go ahead," he told the deputy breathlessly, his empty gun resting on his thigh. "Shoot. I'm a dead man anyway."

"No!" Grace cried, but Donovan pressed a hand down hard against her back. She winced at the stab of the saddle horn against her belly.

For a dozen beats of her heart, Grace waited for the inevitable explosion. Numb, blind fear coiled around her throat, making breathing and rational thought impossible. Smith stared at Donovan, indecision clouding his eyes. Maddeningly, Donovan held the horse in check, refusing to run, and faced Smith head-on, daring him to shoot. Was he insane, making a target of himself for Smith's gun? Why didn't he run?

An eternity passed in mere seconds. Then, the unbelievable happened. Smith pulled his aim wide to the left and fired two shots into the dirt beside them.

Grace blinked back at Donovan, who held the nervous horse firm. There wasn't a shred of gratitude in the look he sent to Smith, only a savage kind of vindication.

"He'll be right behind you, Donovan," Smith warned. "And I'll be with him."

"I'll look forward to it."

Without another second's hesitation, Donovan spurred their horse forward with a savage nudge of his heels toward the freedom of the dark abyss before them.

* * *

The bright April moon hung high over the Texas prairie, darting in and out of thick banks of swift-moving clouds. The same Gulf-borne wind that for eons had scoured the soil, sculpted the rock, and driven less hardy creatures from the desolate sand plain now urged them on in the darkness. Shadows traversed the land like restless spirits, making their progress not only erratic, but dangerous as well.

The only sound, save the sough of wind and the occasional distant yip of coyotes, was a feminine voice—one that was beginning to sorely test the already-frayed nerves of Reese Donovan.

"I've never been so scared in my life," Grace exclaimed for the fourth time in the last half hour—which was, he noted grimly, when she'd found her voice.

Reese gritted his teeth and steered the gray horse carefully around a thirty-foot-high saguaro. He stared at the ground, trying to make out hidden obstacles in the inky darkness ahead and tried to dodge her elbow as she gestured with enthusiasm at the night sky.

"Bullets whizzing right and left! I thought we were goners for certain. You were... well, you were magnificent! It was straight out of the pages of a true western novel. And in the end it all worked out just the way we'd planned, didn't it, Mr. Donovan? Wasn't it thrilling?"

Thrilling?

Balls.

Blinking back the sting of sweat in his eyes, Reese merely grunted, knowing that sound would suffice. It did.

"Well, thrilling might be a poor choice of words," she allowed. "After all, you're used to this sort of thing, being a gunslinger and all."

Reese groaned inwardly. Where the devil did she get this claptrap?

"But, well, nothing like this has ever happened to me before." She paused, catching her breath. "It's, well, it's invaluable research, you know? Watch out for the rock on the left. Why, you couldn't buy this kind of firsthand knowledge in any scholarly library back East. The pungent scent of the gunsmoke, the way your heart goes to your throat at the sight of guns aiming directly at you." She flicked an uncertain glance back at him. "Well, actually, Ned Buntline did come rather close in
Riders on..."

Saints help him. He should have known she'd be a talker. Must be why the old man had been riding a full three rods behind them for the past five miles.

Reese ceased listening, focusing instead on the dark landscape ahead. The miles they'd covered at a ground-eating pace had passed by in a dark blur. The moon cooperated only inasmuch as it peeked out from behind the clouds for protracted periods before disappearing once more, casting them into forbidding darkness. Then, as now, they'd slowed their pace to a crawl, picking their way over rocky outcroppings and saguaro-choked coulees.

In the profound darkness of the desert night, one misstep could spell disaster. To Reese, however, it mattered little whether the pace was fast or slow.

Each jarring step was an agony.

He pressed his right forearm against the hole in his side and bit back a groan as the rawboned gray navigated over a particularly troublesome piece of footing. A warm wetness oozed against the wadded-up bandanna beneath his elbow.

The dark landscape ahead blurred momentarily, and Reese blinked it back into focus. His head pounded like a smith's hammer and he wished he had a drink. He wondered how much blood he could lose before passing out? Pitching headlong down the wall of some trailside ravine wasn't high on his list of ways to go. In fact, it was right up there with hanging.

Neither did he consider stopping, with Sanders only hours behind them, if the bastard was fool enough to send a posse out after them in the dark. Reese cursed silently. The loss of the horse had already set them back. Doubling up on the gray would slow them up by hours.

It wasn't as if the idea of tossing Miss Grace Turner off into the darkness on her pretty little behind and leaving her in his dust hadn't occurred to him. It had. However, he wasn't fool enough to believe he'd get far bleeding the way he was. When they caught up with him, as they inevitably would, the old man would probably finish the job that
tejano
on the street had begun.

No, he had no choice but to stay with them until he got the bleeding under control. Until Brownsville. He could lose them there. Here, the darkness remained their sole advantage. For that reason, he'd kept the injury to himself. Dawn would come soon enough. If he lived that long, he'd stop to patch himself up. Meanwhile, his bandanna would have to do.

She was still jabbering away, he realized, having moved on to an oral history about that brother of hers who had landed himself in some kind of trouble in Querétaro.

"...by then, you see, Luke's letter had found us in Virginia," she was saying, "but no one in Washington or Army Intelligence would lift a finger to help him. In fact, they denied knowledge of his even being there! Can you imagine? Luke, who'd devoted his life to the Army, and they were trying to tell us he'd deserted for Mexico!"

Reese grunted, hoping she'd move on without requiring a more intelligent response. She did. Something about a secret mission and a government plot. He couldn't follow it. Her voice drifted in and out to him for the next ten minutes before she moved onto a new topic. Hunger. Hers, to be exact. She kept it up for another five minutes before asking him directly. He dug a piece of jerked beef out of the saddlebags and enjoyed the quiet as she ate.

In an effort to stay upright, Reese tightened his thighs around her trouser-clad legs. Free from the impediments of petticoats and thick skirts, her thighs and nicely shaped bottom pressed intimately against him. It was fortunate, perhaps, that he was in no condition to fully appreciate her considerable attributes, for that might have been embarrassing for them both.

Right now, the only fantasies he harbored about Miss Turner involved using that starched back of hers to lean on for a moment. That and—

"How much farther do you suppose it is to Brownsville, Mr. Donovan?" chimed the object of his thoughts.

—shutting her up.

Reese squeezed his eyes closed. If the hole in his side didn't kill him, her constant yammering surely would.

"Mr. Donovan?"

Reese gave the reins in his left hand a slap across the gray's neck. "Five minutes closer than the last time you asked."

"Oh."

He sighed. For a full minute, that was all she said. He concentrated on the soft clip-clop of hooves against the sandy ground. Silence. Blessed—

"I was thinking.The moon's gone again. It's getting awfully dark. Do you think we should—?"

"No," he answered curtly.

She paused. "Really? You know Jack Leland always advises against traveling when the moon is—"

The gray stumbled, jerking Reese sideways. He sucked a breath through his teeth as fire seared his side. Tightening his arm around Grace Turner's middle to keep himself from falling, he allowed himself to lean on her for a count of five, a beat or two longer than he should have. But it was getting harder and harder to hold himself up.

She glanced back at him, past the floppy brim of her hat. "Are you all right, Mr. Donovan?"

His head ached. "Miss Turner... will you please... shut... up?"

He could almost hear her teeth clack shut. "Oh," was all she said as her back went stiff and she aimed her gaze straight off into the darkness ahead of them.

Aw, well. What did he care if she got her feelings hurt? He hurt like the devil and it was all he could do to simply stay upright behind her. Her delicate sensibilities were the last thing he needed to worry about. Maybe she'd be mad enough to give him the silent treatment. If he was lucky.

It wasn't anger that poured through Grace. It was mortification. It silenced her like a slap and crept up her neck in a flush of heat she was eternally grateful he would never see. Pressing her lips together in a firm line, she blinked back the sting of humiliation in her eyes. She'd been babbling again. She always babbled when she was scared. Didn't Edgar always say that?

"Grace," he'd say, "for God's sake, don't babble." And he was right.

How long had she been going on about Ned Buntline and blazing guns and Luke—when the truth was, she'd been too frightened to stop talking. If she did, she'd have to think about what had really happened tonight. She'd never been through anything like it in her life and they'd all come terrifyingly close to dying. In point of fact, it was nothing like Ned Buntline or Jack Leland said it was.

Grace stared straight ahead and swallowed hard. Behind her, Donovan said nothing more, but she could hear the harsh sound of his breathing. He was angry. Quite angry.

They rode for ten minutes without another word passing between them. Grace forced herself to absorb the quiet desert sounds; the howl of the coyotes and the soft plodding sound of the horses' hooves. Yet every step seemed to echo the heavy beat of her heart.

Her awareness of him, only inches away, seemed heightened by every small movement: the guiding pressure of his knees against the horse—and her thighs; the heat of his solid chest where it collided with her back by accident; the warmth of his breath against the nape of her neck. The tension mounted between them, until finally, she could stand it no longer.

"Mr. Donovan?"

He exhaled sharply.

"I just want to say," she hurried on before he could stop her, "that I'm sorry."

"Forget it."

"No, I know I tend to babble about nothing when I get scared. Edgar... Mr. Buchanan always says so."

"Edgar?"

"My, well, my beau," she replied, for lack of a better word.

"You. Have a beau?"

She stiffened at the disbelieving inflection he gave the word. "Yes. Is that so hard to believe? And I'll have you know he's a well-respected banker back in Virginia."

"If he's so respectable," Donovan mumbled, "where the blazes is he? And why'd he let you come here without him?"

"Oh, well, Edgar, he's... he's very important and much too busy to—"

"—take care of his woman?"

His words found their mark with stinging accuracy.

She tightened her grip on the saddle horn. "It's not like that."

"No? So, what is it like, princess? 'S he a coward, this Edgar of yours?"

Outraged, she half turned in the saddle. "A coward? No! He's a gentleman and terribly brave. I remember once there was a big, hairy spider crawling up my dress at a picnic, and Edgar didn't think twice. He just leapt up and squashed it with his bare hand."