She watched as the outla—no, Zant—as Zant untied Old Blood from his place next to Knight and restrung the stud’s lead rope to a piñon tree farther away. As he stomped back over to her, Jacey asked, “Is that all you wanted to tell me—about my horse not having any manners?”
“Hell, no, but what is wrong with that nag of yours?”
Jacey shrugged. “He’s been in a bad mood ever since I castrated him.”
A shocked and guttural sound came out of Zant’s open mouth. “You gelded that animal yourself?”
“Well, I had some help, holding him down and all. But, yeah, I did the honors. And with that same knife of mine I showed you on the way to Sonora. It’s still strapped to my leg. You wanna see it again?” Loving the look on Zant’s face as he shook his head no, a look that said he was just shy of crossing his hands in front of his own crotch, Jacey grinned up at him. “Now, what else were you going to tell me I should do?”
Zant began backing up. “Nothing. Not a damned thing.” He turned, grabbed up his bedroll, and took it with him to lay it and himself close to his stallion. And far away from her.
Boots off, holster wrapped in its belt and lying beside her, Jacey climbed into her own bedroll … and grinned until she fell asleep.
* * *
But she wasn’t grinning the next morning when she woke up. Lying on her side, she pricked her ears for the sounds of movement. Any movement. Nothing. Still, some sixth sense told her things were amiss. Never again would she tease Hannah about her feeling things. Because this feeling was consuming her. Taking a chance, she pushed her blanket down to her waist and sat up abruptly. She braced herself with her arms behind her and pivoted to face the far piñon tree. No Zant, no Old Blood.
He’s left me out here. Jacey swept her gaze over to where, please, God, Knight should be … and slumped. He was still there, tied where she’d left him and dozing contentedly. So, Zant had left of his own free and sneaking will, the lop-eared polecat. Because if there’d been a struggle or stir of any kind, Knight would’ve raised a ruckus that would make a flock of nervous chickens proud.
Still, heeding Papa’s oft-repeated words of not taking strange surroundings for granted, Jacey looked all around her, listening to the dead quiet of the sandy desert basin. The giant saguaros stood with their thick, thorny arms raised, as if gunmen confronted them. The chuckling waters of the Santa Cruz competed with Jacey’s pounding heart. She slid her hand under her blanket, located her holstered Colt, and drew it out. She hid it in a fold of her blanket. Come on, you. I’m ready.
Just then, Knight snapped to, raising his head and whinnying as he peered over his shoulder. Following his lead, Jacey looked to the bend in the river, but whoever was coming remained blocked from view by high bluffs. Great. Realizing she was a wide-open target, Jacey jerked free of her bedroll and sprinted, gun in hand, to a scrubby creosote bush. As if it offered any cover. But it was the best she could do, in the time she had. Raising her Colt, steadying her aim with her other forearm propping her gunhand, she waited.
Damned if that ornery outlaw didn’t ride around the bend on that prissy stallion of his. Jacey let out her breath and lowered her Colt … before she could use it on him for scaring her. She stood up, arms at her sides, and waited.
He reined in front of her. Eyed her. Eyed her gun. Eyed the creosote bush. “Morning, Jacey. You expecting trouble?”
Jacey’s temper flared, but she bit the inside of her cheek until tears stood in her eyes. She refused to let him goad her, just so he could tease her. “Not until you rode up.”
The big man chuckled as he dismounted. “You think I’m trouble?”
Did he have to stand so close and grin down at her? Jacey pinched up her mouth. “No. I know you are.” Then because her danged curiosity wouldn’t quit nagging her, she blurted out, “Where have you been?”
“Were you scared?”
Jacey took in a deep, calming breath and let it out. “A day’s ride from Tucson? Hardly. Now, I asked you—where have you been?”
“Did you miss me?”
That did it. Jacey screamed out all her red-faced anger and frustration. Birds flew up into the air. Critters scuttled through the underbrush. Horses whinnied. The Santa Cruz stopped flowing for a startled second.
But Zant? He laughed and pulled her to him to smack a brotherly kiss on her damp forehead. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Jacey wrenched away from him, went to her bedroll to toss her Colt on it, and then stalked off toward the heavy cover of oaks and scrubby bushes under a near bluff.
Zant was right behind her, following her step for step. “Where you headed?”
Not slowing down, Jacey called back over her shoulder. “I’ve got to relieve myself, outlaw. And I don’t need any help from you.”
The crunching of his boots said he still kept pace with her stiff-legged strides. “Okay.”
“I’d like my privacy. Go away.” Jacey stopped, selected a likely spot and stepped behind it. Turning around, her hands on her skirt’s closure, she came face to face with the outlaw.
He was still grinning. “What?”
His feigned look of pure, wide-eyed innocence didn’t fool her. “I said I need to relieve myself. And I don’t need any help from you. So, get.”
“Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?”
“No.” If he didn’t walk away soon, she’d be dancing in place, so urgent was her need.
And he knew it. The son of a rattler grinned, stood spread-legged, and crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m betting I can outwait you.”
Jacey crossed her legs. “I’m betting I can get a clean hit in your chest with my frog sticker.”
“Not before you wet your pants … skirt.”
He didn’t think she’d do it. He didn’t think she’d drop her skirt and wet with him standing right there. Fine. She’d show him. “Suit yourself.”
Jacey undid her skirt and began lowering it along with her drawers. Zant abruptly turned his back to her. Jacey squatted. And grinned. Even from the back, he looked uncomfortable. But he didn’t walk away. She knew he wouldn’t. Not now. Not if his very life depended on it. It was her turn to make the most of his discomfort. “You make a mighty big target … from this angle.”
He cleared his throat and shifted his weight. “Just … take care of your business. I’ll do the talking. I got up early and rode back to Tully’s cabin, just in case that woman was bluffing, like you said. I watched the place for a while, hoping to catch them off guard. But I never did see him. She wasn’t bluffing.”
Her business done, Jacey stood and rearranged her clothing. So he had taken her concern about Tully seriously. Out loud she said, “Hmm. Too bad you didn’t scare up some bacon and eggs while you were out there.” She stepped around him and headed casually back to the campsite. “Because I’m starving.”
This time, his footfalls didn’t sound behind hers until she was halfway back to her cold breakfast, and the ashes of last night’s fire.
* * *
Later that afternoon, and more than a few miles south of last night’s campsite, Zant reined in at the well-kept fence line surrounding Buckeye Davis’s property. The man had made a good life for himself and his huge family along the Santa Cruz River. Some cattle. Some horses. A few hardscrabble crops. But all of it, including the various cabins spread about the place, were neat and orderly. Just like Buckeye. Who looked well fed and contented with his lot in life as he approached on horseback.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I looked up from that broke wagon wheel and seen you, boy. I told Arturo—you remember my oldest boy?—that it looked like you.” Grinning, chuckling, the older man looked Zant up and down. “And it is. I said to him, ‘Arturo, I’ll be a ring-tailed coyote if it ain’t Kid Chapelo’s boy all growed up.’ How long’s it been, son?” The big, sunburned, smiling old man held out a hamlike hand to Zant.
Grinning, Zant reached over the fence to shake it. “More than five years.” He th
en turned to Jacey and back to Buckeye. “Buckeye, I brought some real royalty with me this time. Meet Jacey Lawless.”
The man’s eyes widened as he looked Jacey up and down. “Lord above, who’d’ve thought? A Chapelo and a Lawless riding together again. Why, I plum feel me a need to bend my knee to you, sweet thing. So, you’re little Jacey? Your pap talked about you all the time. Always said you was just like him. Yep, the apple of his eye. How is your old pap? He still full of piss and vinegar?”
Zant watched Jacey’s face. Her chin went up a notch. She stilled in her saddle. Zant quickly spoke up for her. “Buckeye, we’re here because of some trouble.”
Buckeye sobered, splitting his gaze from Zant to Jacey, evidently assessing her grim quietness, and then finally refocusing on him. “Let’s take it inside, then. I’ll get the gate. And don’t mind all the kids underfoot. They’ll move out the way afore you trample ’em. Now, y’all plan on staying for supper. Maria and the girls are cooking up a heap of fresh beef.”
Within a few minutes, they were in the main adobe cabin, introductions were made all around, Zant found himself hugged by Maria and her brood of daughters and grandkids, and then he, Jacey, and Buckeye settled at the smooth-cut and sturdy wooden trestle table. With cool drinks of water in front of them, with the kids shooed back to their chores, with Maria, an ample and pleasant Mexican woman, overseeing the cooking, Zant briefly told their story. At the end of it, he shrugged. “And that’s what brought us to your door, Buckeye.”
At turns sad, incredulous, angry, and disbelieving while Zant spoke, Buckeye now sat up straight, clamping his big hands on his knees. “Now, you young’uns don’t think I had anything to do with any of those goings-on, do you?”
For the first time since they’d arrived, Jacey spoke up. “I didn’t know until I met you, Mr. Davis. But now I can see you didn’t.”
“I thank you for that, little lady. And it’s right sorry I am about yer ma and yer pap. I loved him like a brother.” He smacked a huge fist onto the table. “Damn, I wish I could help you. But I don’t have no doin’s with the gang no more. I’m a law-abidin’ man. Got this here family to feed.”
“I understand. But maybe you can help, Buckeye. I’m a little rusty concerning the whereabouts of the rest of the gang because I’ve been in a Mexican prison for five years, so—”
“You what?” Buckeye bellowed out his laughter. He reared back and called out to Maria, “You hear that, Mama? The Kid’s kid’s been in prison.”
Occupied with making tortillas, Maria turned and grinned broadly. “Sí, sí.” Zant felt his face heat up. He dared a glance at Jacey. Bright-eyed with held-back laughter, she quirked up a corner of her mouth. Glad to see her smiling again, even if it was at his expense, Zant shrugged his shoulders and grinned back at her. She shook her head and turned to Buckeye as he recovered and spoke again.
“I swear if this don’t beat all. Now, how can I help?”
Before Zant could say a word, Jacey jumped in. “Were you there the day my father and Zant’s … got into it?”
“Hell, sweet thing, which time?”
Grim now, Zant merely stared at Jacey when she cut her gaze to him and then looked back to Buckeye. “The last time.”
He sobered and shook his head. “No. I’d already quit the gang by then. And I’m not sorry I had. Would’ve hated to see J. C. and the Kid go at it with guns.”
Zant tamped down his own emotion to ask, “Do you know, or have you heard, what caused them to come to a final standoff?”
Buckeye firmed his lips together as he looked off to a point out the, open front door of his good-sized home. A group of dark-skinned, laughing children ran back and forth outside. But when he shook his head, Zant’s hopes fell. “No, not directly. But I did hear tell it was over a baby.” Now he looked right into Zant’s eyes. “That baby was mostly likely you, son.”
“Me?” A cold chill swept over Zant. Next to him, Jacey’s tense quietness spoke more than anything she could’ve said.
Buckeye frowned and worked his mouth, as if he were having trouble coming up with the right words. His blue eyes held a hint of sympathy when he finally spoke. “I’m figurin’ you know how your pap left your ma and you to fend for yerselves? You mayhaps was too young to remember that he also … well, he used his fists on her. Ya see, J. C. wasn’t having no part of a man who’d act like that. He already had a wife and two little girls of his own. Already knew what it was to be a pa.”
Dim, distant memories, all of them ugly, flooded Zant. A hand gently squeezed his forearm. He looked over to Jacey. She was unsmiling, but her soft, luminous eyes spoke for her. He looked down at her small hand on his arm. He’d been around her long enough to know that expressions of sympathy from her were few and far between. Which made her simple gesture all the more wrenching. He abruptly stood up. “Excuse me.”
Only quietness followed him out the door. With long strides, Zant walked a good ways from the cabin, from the laughing kids, from the pleasant and loving family here. He’d never known this kind of family devotion in his whole life. Only Don Rafael’s bullish and manipulative variety. Within a stride or two of the boundary fence, Zant stopped, bent a knee, put his hands to his waist, and stood with his head hung down. Staring blindly at the ground, his mouth worked around the erupting emotion that threatened to send him to his knees.
He stood like that for a long time. How long, he didn’t know. He looked up only when Jacey silently walked past him and stopped at the fence. Keeping her back to him, she rested her forearms on the split-rail fence and looked out over the vast desert on the other side of the Davis property. She stared silently, as if something of great interest were happening in the far mountains. “You heard some mighty rough things back there, Chapelo.”
Zant eyed her slender back, her long black braid, and her booted foot up on the fence’s bottom rail. And felt instantly better for her lack of gushing sentimentalism. Had she come out here and put her arms around him and cried and carried on, he’d have been so humiliated—because he would have given in to the same things—that he could never again look her in the face.
Instead, this way, he regained his control and shook it off. “Wasn’t anything I haven’t heard before.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier, I suppose.” She was silent another moment and then said, “Buckeye and his family are nice people.”
Zant nearly grinned at her offhand attempt to cheer him up. “Yeah, they are. He kept up with me all my growing-up years. He started coming to see me and my mother after … my father died. He’d always bring me a little present and leave my mother some money to get by on.”
Jacey turned around to face him for the first time. “Money? I thought Don Rafael was rich.”
“He was, still is. But he wouldn’t help her or allow her to live with him after she gave birth to me—a bastard. Hell, the only reason the old son of a bitch took me in when she died was because he finally accepted that I’d be his only heir.”
Jacey shook her head. “It’s hard to believe someone could be that cruel to his own flesh and blood.” She looked down and then up at him again. “How old were you … when she died?”
“Three years old, almost four.”
“No more’n a baby.” She got quiet again, stared at him. When he didn’t offer anything further, she became matter-of-fact. “I came out here to fetch you for supper. Maria wants us to stay the night, too. Leastwise, I think she does. I can’t understand her Mexican. Or her English.”
Zant wanted to hug her for making him laugh. “Then we’d better get going. With all those mouths to feed, we won’t get anything but bones and gristle if we’re late.”
Jacey pulled away from the fence and sauntered toward him. “Even that sounds pretty good right now. I never did get my bacon and eggs this morning.”
As she sashayed by him, Zant turned with her, matching his stride to hers. Restored now, grateful, but not knowing how to thank her for what she’d just done for him, he put
his arm around her shoulders and held her close to his side.
She didn’t move away. Not then, and not all the way to the house.
* * *
“Guess I was right, huh?” Jacey chuckled in a self-deprecating way as she looked over at Zant.
Freshly bathed and in clean clothes, as was she, he sat his roan like a nobleman on parade. “Yeah, I guess so. Maria did want us to stay overnight.”
“What’d you make of all the shuffling around of kids and grandkids last night to find places for us to sleep?”
“You mean her putting me up in one house and you in the farthest one away from me? I’d say Maria was making sure your virtue stayed intact.”
Jacey gave a less-than-delicate snort. “If I stayed around her long enough, there’d be no danger of me losing it, what with all the food she stuffed into me. I’d be as big as a heifer, and about as pretty, inside of a month. I still may not want to eat for another week.”
“Good. Then I’ll keep all these vittles she gave us for myself.”
“Just try it, outlaw.”
At total ease with him for the first time, Jacey laughed right along with him. Since yesterday afternoon, since she’d come out to the fence, he was different with her. She was different with him. Almost brotherly and sisterly. Almost as if they liked and respected each other. As if they could have been good friends, if all this other stuff wasn’t between them.
But friendly wasn’t exactly what she felt when she looked at him, when she found she had to increasingly look down from his steady gaze. It seemed he couldn’t look at her, either, without that certain light flaring in his eyes. In self-defense, Jacey tugged her slouch hat down low over her brow and rode along beside him in a silence she chose to call companionable.
But they hadn’t gone half a desert-heated mile over endless sand and gravel and around tumbled outcroppings of huge boulders, before a sudden thought broke the quiet between them. She looked over at the big outlaw to her left and said, “It could be a girl, you know.”
Jacey's Reckless Heart Page 16