by Maren Smith
It wasn’t too late, a little voice whispered inside her. She didn’t know Sheriff Jebidiah Justice well, but he’d done a lot of things most lawmen wouldn’t have bothered to for the whores of the Red Petticoat. Ruby said he was a good man. If she waved right now, he might see her, especially if she waited to do it when the next flash of lightning lit up the street. Maybe if she went to him, he would help her.
Yeah, sure he would. She was an immigrant, a whore, and she was sitting on a stolen horse.
And even if she weren’t two of those damning three, he was much more likely to take her back to the Red Petticoat, where Quan Ji might still be waiting.
Her arms tightened around her bundle. No. No, there would be no going back. Not for her; not in this town.
Chewing at the bit, the mare eased three steps forward, tucking them well out of the sheriff’s accidental sight just as another flash of static light fractured the sky. The cracking boom that followed was deafening and spooked the horse. Chin barely kept the mare under control, but she knew a sign when the gods chose to give one.
Run, her mother had said.
Hugging her belongings tight, Chin did as she’d been told.
* * * * *
It was his prize bull. Unable to see clearly through the hard-driving rain, Cullen recognized the animal from the span of its crooked horns. He also recognized the signs of illness. Coughing and limping, the bull huddled at the base of a lone coral tree in a useless attempt to get out of the rain. The lightning helped some, sporadic though it was. It lit up the grassy mountain foothills enough for Cullen to get a better look at the hunched bovine back and skin-and-bones skeletal structure of an animal that had been, only three weeks ago, as fat and happy as a bull in his prime ought to be. The moment the flashing light retreated, however, the wind and the rain made seeing anything but the whip of his own brown hair across his face difficult.
He needed a haircut. Had needed one for months. But right now, he needed to figure out how to stop the spread of the lung plague that had decimated his herd even more. Of the two hundred head he had started with when he and his brother first settled this homestead, less than twenty cattle remained and his options were abysmally few.
“Easy, Nico.” Cullen pulled his reins tighter, giving his horse a comforting pat as the wind kicked up a gust and distant lightning sent another boom of sky-splitting thunder rolling down out of the mountains and across the open prairie. He hated to do it. He’d gone all the way to Texas for this bull and had paid more money for it than any four bulls combined. Its bloodlines were exemplary, not that any of that mattered now.
Dismounting, Cullen drew his horse to a low-hanging branch and tied him there. “Easy,” he repeated, as he approached the wheezing bull. The animal barely lifted its massive head. Its labored breathing could be heard above the whip of the wind and the down-pouring rain. As he drew nearer, that breathing changed to a lowing cough. It was as heart-wrenching to hear as it was to pull the pistol from his holster.
“Easy,” Cullen said one final time, but there was nothing easy about this, not for either of them.
As if it sensed the coming end, the bull made a stumbling effort to stand. One attempt was all it had the strength for. Legs giving out, it collapsed, first to one knee and then to all four. Cullen rested his hand on the wet crest of its head, something he never would have been able to do had the bull not been so ill. Somewhere off to his left, the report of a single rifle shot told him all he needed to know about how his brother was faring in his search for the rest of their missing herd. It also gave him the strength he needed. He stepped back, aimed and felt a part of himself die too when he pulled the trigger. It wasn’t just the life of his most coveted bull that he was taking; this was the death of their farmstead and the dream he had convinced both himself and his younger brother, Garrett, they both wanted enough to pack up everything they owned and move from the east coast to the west in an effort to obtain. What the hell was he supposed to do now?
Rain poured from the brim of his hat as Cullen bowed his head. He could have cried in that moment, he felt so damned lost. Except that older brothers didn’t get that luxury. Neither did soldiers turned ranchers. Not even when everything they bloodied their hands on went to shit.
The storm raged both inside and out as he made his way back to his horse. He palmed the reins and grabbed the saddle horn, but something stopped him before he could mount. Through the wet black of this miserable night, he caught sight of movement along a distant ridge. Indians was his first thought, and his gut tightened even as common sense snapped back that not even the angriest of Sioux or Crow war parties would attack on a night like this.
Another flicker of ghostly light gave him a glimpse of horse and rider, tearing across the uneven terrain of that distant hill. Whoever it was, not only were they trespassing on his property, but they were riding full-out, a speed no sensible man would have dared risk at night, much less in this kind of storm. The god-fearing crack of thunder that followed made the ground shake and his gut tighten all over again when that barely glimpsed horse reared and he heard its scream as it went over onto its back.
The night went black, but not for long, and when the next cut of lightning lit up the far ridge, it was enough for Cullen to catch sight of the now-riderless horse, tearing wildly back up to the top of the ridge before vanishing back the way it had come. Of the rider he saw no hint of movement, but a half second later, he heard the unmistakable sound of a female cry.
Cullen mounted, the seat of his denims soaking up the rain that had accumulated on his saddle. Nico stamped an unruly circle before responding to Cullen’s familiar weight and command.
“Hey!” he heard his brother shout some hundred yards behind him. “What the hell was that?”
Cullen didn’t answer. There simply wasn’t time. He rode as fast as he dared toward that far rise, searching in every new burst of sky light for the fallen rider, listening for any other cries and hearing with dread only that old familiar roar that made this section of his property a damned dangerous place to be in a storm. Unless a man knew what he was looking at, the wash that cut through this pastureland was all but invisible in the daytime. At night, the fury of floodwaters gushing down out of the hills, squeezed narrower and narrower into trenches of dirt and rock, was nothing but blackness carving a deadly river through his cattle’s best grazing land.
Whoever this rider was, whatever her reasons for being out here, on his land in the middle of a storm like this, if she’d fallen into that wash, then his chances of finding her in time, he knew, were as slim as his prize bull recovering from a bullet to the brain.
Chapter Three
Chin knew she was hurt. Her ankle and wrist had taken the brunt of the initial impact when the mare threw her, but she’d landed on a mountain of a small rock and now her back ached because of it. All she could do now was lie in the wet grass, the rain pelting her face like a storm of pebbles while she tried to catch her breath. She hadn’t meant to scream, but it was hard to find shame in so badly losing her composure. She imagined even her stoic father would have said something while flying backwards through the air.
Forks of bright lightning filled the black heavens. Groaning, she closed her mouth so she wouldn’t drown on intensifying rain. It was going up her nose now. She forced herself to roll, the rough prairie grass floating in a soup of mud and wet as she crawled onto hands and knees. Her back and hip protested each painful movement, but she stumbled to her feet, tripping on skirt hems by now so saturated with water that they felt twenty pounds heavier than she was used to.
Where was her bundle? Chin panicked. Fumbling in the dark, she searched in blind circles, but it wasn’t until the next flash of brightness that she spotted it—a black lump of brown cloth that barely stood out against the whipping sway of wind-blown grass not twenty feet away. It had fallen into the bottom of a wide ravine.
A boom of thunder rolled across the sky as she tramped through the tall grass, walking the edge in hopes of find
ing an easy way down. She lost her footing almost straight away and fell, sliding down the steep embankment on her butt and landing with a splash in a puddle at the bottom. The ground was a quagmire of oozing blackness that clung to her hands and legs, making her skirts heavier still when she stood. It was slick too. She flailed for balance, her feet trying to slide out from under her in opposite directions, and then sinking in ankle deep the further toward the middle of the ravine that she went. Wet, sucking earth robbed her of her slippers, forcing her to dig them out of the muck. Ruined slippers in hand, she continued slogging the rest of the way in only her stockings.
Once she reached it, she picked up her bundle and for a moment simply stood, catching her breath and feeling along the muddy folds until she was sure it was still tied tight and she hadn’t lost anything. Swiping a wrist across her cheek left a cold slick of mud on her face, but it did help get the straggles of her wet hair out of her eyes. She had mud on her lashes too. Even when the lightning flashed, she could barely see.
A thin stick riding on top of the water flowed between her legs. She felt it bump into the back of her shin and quickly swiped at her eyes again, peering down in the darkness. Another flash illuminated the ravine enough for her to see, instead of a puddle now, the rain had filled it enough to create a moving streambed—dark swirls of black water broken by a wave of grass chunks, tumbleweeds and sticks. No longer ankle-deep now, it was rising fast and already halfway to her calves.
Floating cactus scratched her as she turned, searching the shadowed edges of the ravine, looking for a low spot where she might climb out. Another deafening boom of thunder upon thunder upon grumbling roll of thunder deafened her, shaking the ground under her feet and continuing to shake it long after the light was gone. And then the sound was gone too, but the vibrations still shivered up the backs of her legs and somehow she could still hear the roar. But no… the roar wasn’t quite the same angry thunder that had just gone before. It wasn’t until the next static cut of electricity lit its jagged line from clouds to distant mountain peak that she realized what she was hearing. It was a wall—black mud and water thick with prairie debris, rushing down the ravine straight toward her.
Chin screamed again. It was all she had time to do before that rushing wall hit her, and it hit exactly like that—a wall. No more than thigh-deep, it knocked her off her feet and took her under. Sticks scratched her face; mud and water swept into her mouth, nose, ears and eyes. She lost her slippers all over again, grabbing and flailing in a cold panic as she was tumbled like a rag doll beneath the muddy wave. Until she slammed into the rocky side of the ravine. Her fingers tangled in a web of roots, and she fought her way back up to the waiting air.
“Where are you?”
Whether she actually heard that or imagined it, Chin didn’t know, but her answering scream was a wordless warble of panic. She clawed for something solid to grab hold of, but every mud, rock and grass handful she latched onto came loose in her hands as she was swept downstream. The rough, jagged bark of an uprooted tree slammed into her back, knocking her under and rolling right over the top of her, tearing dress and skin and ripping at her hair with broken stick hands in a crushing effort to grab her and bury her in the mud. For all its weight, the buoyancy of the raging water tumbled it over the top of her. Broken tangles of the root ball scrubbed her cheek like a wire bristle-brush as it whipped past. Her reflex was to grab just as the far end of the broken trunk crashed into the opposite side of the ravine, lodging it in place and smashing her face-first into the root ball. Suddenly, the sheer weight of all that rushing water hit her back, crushing her into the roots with more force than she had strength, even just to move her arms.
“Where is she?”
“I can’t see her!”
“There! Over there!”
Spitting mud, Chin clung to roots she could already feel snapping under the pressure of the mud and water weight beating at her back, filling up her dress, slowly dragging her under again. She grabbed blindly, her lashes thick with liquid mud, but everything she clung to bent and snapped under the pull of the violent wash. It was stronger than she was. Already her arms were shaking, losing the fight to keep her head up where the air was. Her elbows unbent, her arms slowly unfurling as the water pulled at her, sinking her deeper into the muddy swirls.
Run, her mother whispered.
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t even stand and she could feel the ground. If not for the current, she could have knelt and been easily shoulders above the water.
The roots she clung to were bending, snapping, dipping her lower until she was submerged to her chin. Her ears went under, muting everything but the rush of the hungry current. Cold rain battered her face, washing the mud into her eyes, blinding her further. Making her see odd shapes—man-like shapes—leaping from the security of the upper ravine onto the uprooted tree above her. How like a foolish woman, to want such visions to be real to the point that she imagined she could feel his boots landing on the trunk beyond the root ball.
Her grip slipped, her strength at an end. She caught one last ragged gasp of air just as the roots gave way. She went under, grabbing desperately… and being seized in turn by a rough, hard, huge hand. Pain squeezed her fingers, jolting up her arm and radiating out from her shoulder as the water and the grip on her pulled in opposite directions. The grip was stronger. Chin broke the surface once more. Coughing and sputtering, she was hauled up over the tangle of broken, scratching roots.
“I’ve got you,” a man said, shouting to be heard above the raging floodwaters, the thunder and the storm. He hauled her up onto the tree, wrapping his arm around her ribs to secure his hold just as quick as he was able. She flailed to grab something more solid as well, but all she could reach was him. She clung to his neck and one arm that felt as thick and hard as the tree beneath her scrambling feet.
“Hang on!” called another man from the bank. He threw something, and a length of rope whipped Chin and her rescuer both across the head and shoulders. Her rescuer caught it and tied them both together.
“Pull!” he bellowed, just as another tree in the dark waters smashed into the root ball where Chin had been mere moments before. Knocked free, the first tree rolled and they fell into the rushing water.
Her instinctive grab caught nothing more substantial than wet flannel and the stiff wrap of the leather belt around his waist. But in the next instant, she felt the jerk as the rope yanked them tightly together. They broke the surface, went under, hit the side of the rock-studded ravine. Her limbs tangled with his, turning their mad-grab for survival into a writhe of simulated passion that rivaled anything she’d ever experienced from her customers at the Red Petticoat. And then, suddenly, they broke the water’s surface. They were dragged up. Hard. Scraped raw together against the rocky ravine until, like a tangle of freshly caught trout, they were hauled up over the grassy lip of the much more stable bank.
“Whoa,” the other man said, stopping the horse their rope was tied to. He came running back to them, already pulling a knife from his belt sheath to cut through their binds. “Cullen! You all right?”
“Yeah,” her rescuer croaked, coughing and spitting to get the mud and water out of his mouth. There was no modesty in the way they were twisted around one another. His hands were on her arms, her legs, her hip as he tried to pick himself up before the rope was loose enough to allow his escape. The heat of his chest burned into hers. For just a moment, she could not tell if the thundering she could feel beating at her ribs was her heart or his. Then the rope went slack around them and he picked himself up. All she could see now was the great shadow of him, peering down at her through the night rain before the next shock of lightning lit up his features. Chiseled cheeks and a strong chin, kissed in the center by a dimple. His mop of dirty brown hair dripped on her. The rest of him was layered in the same mud and muck that made her every bit as indistinguishable a mess.
“You all right, kid?” he asked, husky and low.
Chin la
y on her back beneath him, too shaken to do anything more than tremble. She nodded, the taste of leaves and fear and the drowning force of the rain beating down on her making it impossible to speak.
A second head leaned over her, spilling rain from the brim of his hat directly into her face. If it weren’t for the lightning, she never would have seen the grin that cut widely across his handsome face.
“Well,” he said, grin widening as he turned to his brother, “who says you can’t go fishing with a lasso? Looks a might small, though. Reckon we oughta toss her back?”
* * * * *
By the time Cullen got the horses put up in the barn for the night and made it back through that god-awful storm to the ranch house he shared with his brother, Garrett had a warm fire going in the hearth, the kitchen stove fired up, coffee brewing, clean water set in a bucket to boil, and the girl they’d rescued from the flood wrapped in a blanket and seated at the kitchen table. What he was supposed to do with her now, he had no idea. Nothing even close to this had ever happened to him before. By the look of her, on that front, they were likely on even footing.
“She said anything yet?” he asked, coming to the table.
“Not a word,” Garrett good-naturedly replied. “Get her warm and clean, though, with a belly full of bacon and flapjacks—she’ll come around. Won’t you, honey?” He winked and then pulled a pan and plates off the shelf above the stove.
Unlike his brother, near-death experiences tended to make Cullen less jovial and he had a mountain of questions building in his head. Pulling out a chair, he sat down near the girl.
She couldn’t have been more than twelve; that was his first thought. Maybe younger, considering how small she was—skinny, too; damn near scrawny, in fact; no bigger than knee-high to a grasshopper, as his Daddy used to say—but he’d happily eat his hat (were it not currently floating in the mud somewhere around the ass-end of his property) if she were any older than that. That she had to be scared was his second thought. If she was though, she kept it well shuttered in the depths of her shadow-black eyes. No, the longer Cullen studied her, the less that look of hers seemed like fear, and the more he could have sworn it was caged wariness.