by Maren Smith
Had she the ability to run, she had no doubt he’d have ridden down on her like the avenging devil she had already named him. But she couldn’t run. All she could do was sit there, hip deep in floating grass, bleeding from her hand, thigh and her knee, hardly able to see him coming toward her for the tangles of her own wet hair in her face and the rainwater falling into her eyes. Rainwater, not tears, because Chin refused to cry. She refused to be defeated and she would not look away. That was what guilty people did; Chin would not be that, no matter what she had done because what choice had she had? What choice? None, that’s what.
She glared, furious and uncowed, her chin hiking higher and higher, and her hand and knee hurting more and more the closer Cullen came. The closer he came, the angrier he seemed to be, until he was right there, almost standing on top of her before he reined his perfectly obedient horse to a stop. He glared down at her, the shadow of his eyes so dark that she could barely make them out. She glared back, only looking away when he dismounted and only because of the splash.
Spitting water from her mouth and swiping it out of her eyes, she glared even harder. “Oaf!” she snapped.
Without letting go of the reins, Cullen waded in closer. He looked at her knee, and then her hand. His mouth remained hard and flat. His expression never wavered or softened. Turning only his head, he looked off the way she was headed, then back the way he’d come.
“I’ve half a mind to leave you here,” he finally said, anger hardening him by the syllable.
“I never asked you to save me,” she spat back.
“I reckon we’re both going to suffer for this, then.” He reached for her, and for a moment Chin was overwhelmed by the most churlish impulse to kick at him; fling water, grass, rocks, whatever floated into her hand and knock that hat of his right off into the mud. She wanted to do it even knowing it would only make him madder and the situation worse. Maybe that was why she wanted it so badly, because she knew it would make it worse. Possibly even drive him to that same intolerant state that he had been in when he’d grabbed her out of her chair at his kitchen table and thrown her like a recalcitrant child across his knee.
For the first time, Chin couldn’t make herself hold his stare. She looked away just as he slid his arm under her knees and around her back. His hands on her didn’t feel angry and yet the pressure of his grip just above her knee made her grab his shoulder and suck air. She bit back a yelp and then another when he heaved her up into his saddle, but only just.
The devil’s beast didn’t like her sitting on its back any more than it liked her leading it. It shifted, ears swiveling back and dancing a sideways step before Cullen caught the reins again, soothing its aggravation with a low and gentle voice. The horse responded, relaxing under his touch and, stepping into the stirrup, Cullen heaved himself up behind Chin.
His body settled in behind hers, warm the way men were supposed to be, but hard too, his chest bumping into her back as solid as well-worked steel. Chin stiffened when he caught her around the middle, adjusting her so that he sat more firmly in the saddle while she was reduced to a more precarious perch on his thighs, with the bulge of the saddle pommel digging into the back of hers. His arm around her waist became the anchor that kept her secure as he turned his horse for home. It was insane, but in that awful moment when everything hurt and she knew she was trapped, instead of worse, the grip of his arm around her waist actually made her feel… not safe, exactly, but better.
Offering neither conversation nor rebuke, Cullen said nothing to her the entire way back. To Chin, it was a journey that seemed to take hours. And the sun was well up before they crested that final rise in the near endless rolls of rain-logged hills and swamp-puddled valleys that made up his property. As any homecoming under such circumstances should be, the rain picked up and fell harder. They were both thoroughly drenched by the time Cullen rode his horse into the barn.
Garrett was already there. So were the two horses she had released before making her ill-fated getaway. Warm, dry and back in their stalls, Chin could barely make herself look at either them or Cullen’s younger brother, currently perched on a stool over the saddle she had sabotaged to prevent their inevitable pursuit. He didn’t look up from his work, not until Cullen pulled up beside the last empty stall and swung down out of the saddle.
“Have a nice ride in the rain?” he asked, deliberately avoiding looking at her. For the first time since she’d met him, he wasn’t smiling.
“Nice as can be expected.”
“Glad you got Nico back.”
“Me too.”
Chin didn’t need to look at either man to hear the thinly-veiled censure in their words.
Cullen reached for Chin. One-armed and one-legged, she struggled to keep her balance when he set her down at the mouth of the stall, then left her there. Her ankle throbbed at having to hold her weight, but that pain was nothing compared to her knee. Clinging to the side of the stall, Chin managed to stay upright while Cullen went to his brother.
“You’ll take care of Nico?” he asked, hands braced on lean hips.
“Yup.” Garrett held up a length of the tie strap she’d cut before she’d left. “You gonna take care of her?”
“Oh yeah.” Two inches wide, not quite two feet in length, Cullen took the sabotaged strap and tucked it into his back pocket. Coming back to Chin, he took firm hold of her arm just above the elbow. “Come on, Chinny girl. Start walking.”
Every step was an agony that fueled the fathomless wells of both her anger and despair. She wished he’d drag her alongside him, force her to move at his pace, faster and faster, from barn to house, up the front porch steps and into the kitchen so he could beat her and be done with it. That was what he so obviously intended. And yes, maybe she did deserve it. But—more rainwater stung her eyes—what choice did she have? She’d told him she needed to leave, but he’d refused to hear her. So maybe that didn’t give her the right to steal his horse or cut his saddle strap, but she’d known—known!—he would chase her down just as soon as he found her gone.
And that was exactly what he’d done. He’d chased her down.
What he didn’t do, however, was force her to move faster than her knee or ankle allowed. His hand on her elbow was as firm and no-nonsense as it was supportive. He shortened his steps to accommodate her limping ones. He neither mocked nor commiserated when she winced or sucked a gasp when she stepped in a way that made the constant pain that much worse. He did not soften, but he was not cruel and that made it hard for her to hate him. She wanted to. Right then, she wanted to hate him more than she had ever wanted anything else in all her life.
Except perhaps to have her family back again.
Once inside the house, he took her to the kitchen table, pulling out the exact same chair she’d sat in that first night when he had so sternly questioned her. She’d been wet and dripping then too, and just as inclined not to acknowledge a damn thing that he had to say. And yet, when Cullen pointed and told her, “Sit,” Chin didn’t argue.
She more collapsed than lowered herself onto that hard seat. Catching her breath, she shifted the unforgiving angle her knee had folded into, straightening her wounded leg to ease the burning throb in both her punctured thigh and ankle. Beyond the relief of just getting off them, there wasn’t much she could do for either. She hurt no matter how she sat, and her hand… Cradling it to her breasts, she swore she could feel each and every cactus needle sticking from her fingers and palms. Her flesh was red, polka-dotted in tiny rings of dried blood and mud. It would get infected, but she couldn’t stop and think about that now. Wary gaze locked on Cullen, she couldn’t stop herself from trembling as he took that cut segment of strap from his back pocket, tossed it onto the table just out of her reach and then pulled out a chair to sit directly in front of her.
He didn’t look at the strap; she couldn’t make herself stop staring at it. She shivered all over.
Far gentler than she had a right to expect him to be, he tackled the inj
ury on her knee first. Folding back the layers of torn skirt and petticoats, he brushed around the edges to wipe away the worst of the mud and grass seeds and better see the wound. Still without a word, he got up and disappeared into a back room.
Wincing, Chin covered the wound with a tender hand. It didn’t exactly feel good when she pressed down and what exactly she was pressing into the bloody flesh didn’t bear thinking on, but for a few sparse seconds it did feel better.
The clump of Cullen’s big boots signaled his return and Chin straightened in her seat, schooling her features into cool impassivity. She did not look at the strap again, but him she dared not take her eyes off of as he hooked a bucket of cool water off the unlit stove and sat back down. Draping a clean white rag across his knee, he set a small glass bottle of brown liquid on the table and began to clean her leg. Scooping water in his hand, he let it dribble over the wound, washing what he could down her leg before picking up the cloth and dipping it in the bucket.
His direct touch was as gentle as anyone could have been, but it was all Chin could do not to grab the table and twist away as he cleaned the wound until the blood flowed heavy enough to clear all foreign debris from the gash. When he was done, it looked more like a hole than a gash, round in appearance and larger than a dollar coin.
“Doesn’t look broken,” he finally decided, prodding all around the bruising edges. “You’re lucky.” He glanced at her hand when he said it, and the corners of his mouth flexed into a deeper frown. When he picked up the small bottle and plucked out the stopper, the smell of alcohol and something else—powerful and acidic—hit her nose. Folding the cloth to find a clean spot, he doused it in brown liquid and then, without mercy, placed it right over her cut. “It’s going to sting,” he said, but Chin had already grabbed the sides of her chair to keep from climbing backwards out of it. Sting was a gross understatement for the kind of pain chewing through her knee. Adding insult to injury, Cullen took hold of her uninjured hand and pressed it down over the cloth, forcing her to hold it in place.
Teeth gritted, Chin did. She blinked hard, looking everywhere but at him so he wouldn’t see the sudden rush of tears that flooded her eyes. She would not cry. Nobody could make her cry. Only Gabe and only that one time.
Specks of blood at her hip turned his attention next to her injured thigh. Neither one of them looked at the other as he rolled her skirt and petticoats up far enough to better see the wound. He cleared his throat, twice, but his hand as it slid up her leg to press the cloth back far enough to see was as coolly professional as any doctor.
“I don’t feel anything,” he said, rubbing his thumb over twin pin-prick sized punctures in her skin. “It wasn’t a snake, was it?”
Her resolve not to give in to his interrogation wavered. Not only was it beginning with quite a bit less accusation than she’d been braced for, but the heat of his hand against her naked thigh felt anything but unpleasant. “I fell on a cactus.”
He turned his attention to her skirt and petticoat and the handful of broken needles he pulled from her clothes, dropping them in a neat pile on the table. He only found seven. Shoving back his chair, Cullen disappeared into the back room again. He returned with a short stack of clean rags, all seemingly cut from different clothes. Draping those over his knee, he soaked another cloth in that hated brown liquid before pressing it to her thigh. The sting was instant, but far, far less intense than her knee had been.
Knowing what was coming, she tried to pull her hand away, but he caught her wrist anyway. She resisted and his grip tightened. Increasing the pressure to match each degree of defiance she offered, he pulled until she had no choice but to give him her hand. She would have closed her fist to keep him from witnessing the full extent of her foolishness, but the needles were too long and there were too many of them.
Cullen’s mouth flattened as he studied the damage. His look said everything his mouth didn’t. Taking his hat off, he dropped it on the table behind him before he bent and began plucking needles. He tackled the longest ones first, doing his best to pull each one straight out, without breaking the tip. They all bled and he had to stop often to dip fresh water from the bucket and pour it over her hand, clearing away the obscuring flow of crimson so he could see to the smaller, finer thistles.
It hurt. Chin put on her best imitation of her father’s infamously stoic face, but with each quill that Cullen plucked, the pain grew worse and impossible to ignore. It mounted, never easing no matter how tightly she clenched or relaxed, or how hard she grit her teeth or closed her eyes, or held her breath or let it out again, or squirmed in her chair or held perfectly still, or any combination of the aforementioned, for as the minutes dragged into an hour and then longer still, she tried them all.
“Almost done,” Cullen said, but he lied. He wasn’t yet half finished. He’d pulled all the needles from her thumb and the red-raw flesh of her palm, but everywhere else all she saw were quills.
It was her own fault, but knowing that didn’t make it hurt any less or Chin less inclined to take her pain and anger out on the person currently making it all feel worse.
“Sadistic bastard,” she hissed as he went to work on a particularly long and deeply-imbedded quill.
“Yeah.” Cullen didn’t look up from his work. “This is my fault, all right.”
She glared at him, then bit the inside of her cheek to keep from crying out when the tip of the next needle broke inside her index finger.
Sighing, Cullen got up to fetch a knife smaller than the one he carried on his hip. Wiping it on a rag soaked in more of the awful brown liquid, he had to cut into her finger to get that one out. Chin lost her composure to two tears and a lot of hissing, gasps and squirming mews.
“You know there’s nothing left, right?” Cullen said, grim and unsmiling as he cleaned the blood off her hand in search of the next pale quill. “Whatever you dropped out there, it’s long gone.”
“You don’t know that.” Her whole body was so tense, she couldn’t have tightened anymore, no matter how much it hurt when he picked up his knife again to dig out another broken tip. She couldn’t bear to watch and yet somehow looking away made it hurt worse. She grit her teeth when she felt the cut, hissing, “You can’t know that unless you look.”
“Must be something mighty important for you to go risking your life like this. Maybe the cost is worth it to you, but you didn’t keep it just to you. No, ma’am. You involved me, my horses, my saddle, and my livelihood, and off the top of my head I can’t think of one damned thing worth all that.”
“If you think I’m going to feel bad about being held captive here, think again.” It simply wasn’t possible for her to feel worse than she already did.
“I’ve been nothing if not a decent host.”
“Refusing to let me leave is not—”
Cullen slapped his knife down on the table so suddenly and so startlingly hard, Chin jumped. She also snapped her mouth shut.
“You’ve got no shoes,” he said, grey eyes flashing, tone deceptively calm, “except the ones you stole from me. You’ve got no coat, no clothes—except the ones you’re wearing and they’re damn near falling apart at the seams. You got no luggage—”
“It’s out there!” she shouted. She didn’t mean to, but she just couldn’t hold it in anymore. Tears burned at her eyes. “Everything I have! It’s out there!”
“It’s gone,” he said flatly.
She hit him. She hadn’t meant to do that either, but once she had, it was as if floodgates inside her suddenly broke under the pressure of a mountain’s worth of guilt, tears, fear and unhappiness. And none of it could be satisfied with one insignificant balled-up fist blow to something as inconsequential as Cullen’s shoulder. Especially since he just sat there, taking it. So she hit him again. And then again and again, her good hand bashing at the tempered steel of his shoulders until it wasn’t just her knee and ankle that hurt, but her wrist and knuckles too, and she couldn’t breathe. She sucked huge gulps of air that
she couldn’t feel filling up her empty, aching chest, and hit him again. Both hands now, and she didn’t care at all about the blood and cactus needles, because that pain was infinitely preferable to all those teeth eating her up inside.
That was when he stopped taking it.
Chin screamed when he reached for her. Not because she was scared; she was so far beyond scared that she doubted she’d ever find her way back to that again. No, she raged. She threw her whole body into it, punching and kicking, punishing him with a battery of her strongest blows which his stronger hand deflected with ridiculous ease. But he was the only one she could punish and it wasn’t right, but once started, she couldn’t make herself stop. Not even when he caught her by the back of the head, clutching her long black hair so close to the scalp that she had no way to stop him from taking control of her. Not that she didn’t try. She clawed at his wrist with her bad hand, driving cactus needles deeper into them both, but she still fought—kicking, bucking and twisting.
And still, he pulled her onto his lap, holding her there with his hand locked in her hair and his other arm tight like a band of iron around her waist. She lost her leverage to fight, and so she stopped. Stiff as a fireiron, she perched on his thighs, breathing hard. Every inch of her was wounded and throbbing, but she was fine. She was fine.
She was mad as hell, but she was fine.
Right up until he drew her back into his embrace, tucking her head under his chin as he began to rock her.
“Shh,” he soothed, his lips moving soft upon the top of her head. As if he were going to kiss her.
As if he had any right to do that. Not after what she’d done.
“Let go!” she spat.
“Shh,” he murmured again. His grip on her hair relaxed. He stroked her instead, all the way down her stiff back to her hip, where he found more needles in the folds of her dress. They dug into her, but only once; he avoided them after that. “Shh. It’s all right.”
His gentleness was worse than the cactus pins. She shoved against his chest, but her own rage was her worst undoing. All too soon it abandoned her, leaving her wallowing in nothing but the most overwhelming despair. It broke her; he broke her. She’d been just fine right up until he had to hug her. Now she had nothing, not even anger, and no way to stop the tide of tears or the keening wail sweeping up the back of her throat to pour from her. She couldn’t blink fast enough to stave them back or grit her teeth hard enough to silence the keening wail. And no matter how she fought to untangle herself—twisting, elbowing, kicking and squirming—he held her fast, murmuring his comfort of lies into her ear until exhaustion finally overtook everything else.