by Sandra Brown
“No, I, uh—” she cleared her throat noisily “—I’m too keyed up to sleep. I think I’ll just sit here for a while.”
“Coffee?” He moved toward the stove.
“Please.”
She didn’t want any, but it would give her something to do and help pass the time. She set her crutches and the flare gun on the hearth within easy reach and lowered herself into the chair. The knife’s scabbard poked her lower abdomen. Why it hadn’t plunged right into her when Cooper had pulled her against his—
Her heart fluttered with the memory. It hadn’t been only the knife’s hardness she’d felt against her middle. He’d probably derived a lot of joy out of humiliating her like that.
Feeling rebellious, she defiantly took the knife out of her waistband and laid it on the hearth. Accepting the cup of steaming coffee from Quinn, she settled down to wait through what would probably be the longest day of her life.
Cooper calculated that they’d gone no farther than a mile when Reuben commenced to talk. Cooper could have gone the whole fifteen miles without a conversation, but maybe talking would make the time pass more quickly and help take his mind off Rusty.
“How come you don’t have any kids?” Reuben asked him.
Cooper’s instincts slipped into overdrive. Each of his senses was on the alert. That prickle at the back of his neck, which could always be relied upon to warn him that something wasn’t quite right, hadn’t gone away. Ever since he’d heard Rusty’s scream and found her in a standoff with the Gawrylows, he had been suspicious of the two men. He might be doing them a grave injustice. They were probably on the level. But probabilities weren’t worth a damn. Until he had Rusty safely turned over to the authorities, he wasn’t giving either of the recluses the benefit of the doubt. If they proved to be reliable, then they would have earned his undying gratitude. Until then—
“Huh?” Reuben probed. “How come you—”
“I heard you.” Cooper was following Reuben’s lead. He didn’t let the man get too far ahead of him, nor did he crowd up too close behind him. “Rusty has a career. We’re both busy. We’ll get around to having kids one of these days.”
He hoped that would end the discussion. Children and families were topics Cooper always avoided talking about. Now, he didn’t want to talk at all. He wanted to pour every ounce of energy into reaching that river as soon as possible.
“If I’d been married to her for five years, we’d have five kids by now,” Reuben bragged rashly.
“But you’re not.”
“Maybe you ain’t doing it right.”
“What?”
Reuben gave him a sly wink over his shoulder. “You know, screwing.”
The word crawled over Cooper like a loathsome insect. It wasn’t that he was offended by the word. He used far worse on a daily basis. It was that he was offended by the word in connection with Rusty. It didn’t occur to him that only the night before last he’d used it himself. He was too busy hoping that before the day was out, he wouldn’t have to pound Reuben’s face to mush; but if he made many more references to Rusty in that context, he just might.
“If she was my woman—”
“But she isn’t.” Cooper’s voice cracked like a bullwhip.
“She will be, though.”
With that, Reuben, wearing the grin of a madman, spun around and aimed his rifle at Cooper’s chest. Cooper had subconsciously been bracing himself all morning for such an attack. He raised his rifle a split second after Reuben, but Reuben got off the first shot.
“What was that?” Rusty jumped, realizing that she’d been drowsing in her chair.
Quinn was sitting where she’d last seen him, at the table. “Hmm?”
“I thought I heard something.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“I could swear—”
“The logs in the fireplace shifted. That’s all.”
“Oh.” Chagrined by her nervousness, she relaxed again in her chair. “I must have dozed off. How long ago since they left?”
“Not long.”
He got up and moved toward her, kneeling down on the hearth to add logs to the fire. The warmth seeped into Rusty’s skin and her eyes drifted closed again. Sad and dirty as this cabin was, at least it provided a roof over her head and protection from the cold west wind. She was grateful for that. After spending days—
Her eyes popped open at his touch. Quinn, still kneeling in front of her, had his hand folded around her calf. “I thought you might want to prop up your leg again,” he said.
His voice was as gentle as a saint’s, but his eyes were Lucifer’s own as they stared up at her from within their cavelike sockets. Terror gripped her, but common sense warned her not to show it.
“No, thank you. In fact,” she said in a thin voice, “I think I’ll walk around a bit to exercise it.”
She reached for her crutches, but he grabbed them up first. “Let me help you.”
Before she could protest, he caught her arm and pulled her out of the chair. He had caught her off guard and the momentum caused the front of her body to bump against his. She backed away instantly, but found that she couldn’t go far because his other hand was at the small of her back, urging her forward.
“No!”
“I’m only trying to help you,” he said smoothly, obviously enjoying her mounting distress.
“Then please let me go, Mr. Gawrylow. I can manage.”
“Not without help. I’ll take your husband’s place. He told me to take care of you, didn’t he?” He ran his hand over her hip and Rusty went cold with fear.
“Don’t touch me like that.” She tried to squirm away from him but his hands were everywhere. “Get your hands off me.”
“What’s wrong with my hands?” His expression suddenly turned mean. “Aren’t they clean enough for you?”
“No...yes...I...I just meant that Cooper will—”
“Cooper won’t do anything,” he said with a sinister smile. “And from now on I’ll touch you however I want.”
He yanked her against him. This time there was no doubt about his intention. Rusty funneled all her strength into getting away from him. She placed the heels of her hands on his shoulders and arched her back, trying to push herself away and at the same time to dodge his kiss.
The crutches slid out from under her arms and fell to the floor. She had to support herself on her sore leg and a pain shot up the jagged scar. She cried out.
“Go ahead, scream. I won’t mind.” His breath was foul and hot against her face. She turned her head away, but he caught her jaw between iron fingers and pulled it back around. Just before his mouth made contact with hers, they heard thudding footsteps outside.
“Help me,” Rusty screamed.
“Reuben?” the old man shouted. “Get in here.”
Quinn turned his head toward the door, but it wasn’t Reuben who came crashing through. Cooper’s sweating face was a fierce mask of hatred and rage. His hair was littered with twigs and leaves. There were bleeding scratches on his cheeks and hands. His shirt was specked with blood. To Rusty, no one had ever looked better.
Feet wide apart, Cooper barked, “Let her go, you filthy animal.”
Rusty collapsed to the floor when Gawrylow released her. He spun around. As he did so, he reached behind his back. Before Rusty fully realized what had happened, she heard a solid thunk. Then she saw the handle of Cooper’s knife in the center of Quinn’s chest. The blade was fully buried between his ribs.
The old man was wearing a startled expression. He groped for the handle of the knife. His searching fingers closed around it as he dropped to his knees. Then he fell face down onto the floor and was still.
Rusty gathered her arms and legs against her body, forming herself into a ball. She clapped her hands over her mouth and stared at the still form with wide, unfocusing eyes. Her breath was trapped in her lungs.
Cooper, knocking furniture aside, rushed across the room and crouched in front of her.
“Are you all right?” He laid a hand on her shoulder. She recoiled in fright.
He froze. His eyes went as hard as slate as he said, “No need to thank me.”
Gradually Rusty lowered her hands and released her breath. She gazed up at Cooper, her lips white with fear. “You killed him.” The words had no sound; she mouthed them.
“Before he killed me, you little fool. Look!” He pointed down at the dead man’s back. There was a small handgun tucked into the waistband of his pants. “Don’t you get it yet?” he roared. “They were going to waste me and keep you. They planned to share you between them.”
She shuddered with revulsion. “No!”
“Oh, yeah,” Cooper said, nodding his head. Apparently exasperated with her, he stood up and rolled the body over. Squeezing her eyes shut, Rusty averted her head. She heard the body being dragged across the floor and out the door. She heard Quinn’s boots thump on the steps as Cooper dragged him down them.
She wasn’t sure how long she stayed curled up in that fetal position on the floor. But she still hadn’t moved when Cooper returned. He loomed over her. “Did he hurt you?”
Miserably she shook her head.
“Answer me, dammit! Did he hurt you?”
She raised her head and glared up at him. “No!"
“He was about to rape you. You do realize that, don’t you? Or are the stars in your eyes still keeping you from seeing the light?”
Not stars, but tears filled her eyes. She was experiencing a delayed reaction to her horror. “What are you doing here? Why did you come back? Where’s Reuben? What are you going to say to him when he gets back?”
“Nothing. Reuben won’t be coming back.”
She clamped her teeth over her quivering lower lip and closed her eyes. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “You killed him, too, didn’t you? That’s his blood on you.”
“Yes, dammit,” he hissed, bending over her. “I shot him in self-defense. He walked me into the woods just far enough to separate us, then he turned a gun on me with every intention of killing me and making you his ‘woman.’ ” Staring up at him, she shook her head in disbelief, which seemed to infuriate him. “And don’t you dare pretend to be surprised. You had whipped them into a sexual froth and you know it.”
“Me? How? What did I do?”
“Brushing your hair for God’s sake!”
“‘Brushing’—”
“Just being you. Just looking the way you do.”
“Stop yelling at me!” she sobbed. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Except cause me to kill two men!” he shouted. “Think about that while I’m out burying them.”
He stalked out. The fire in the fireplace burned out and the cabin grew cold. But Rusty didn’t care.
She was still sitting in a heap on the floor and crying hard when he came back. She was tired. There wasn’t a place on her body that didn’t ache either from sleeping on the ground or walking on crutches or suffering Quinn Gawrylow’s squeezing caresses.
She wanted good, honest food. She’d gladly trade her Maserati for a glass of milk. Her clothes had been ripped by tree branches or ravaged by this barbaric hoodlum she was marooned with. The fur coat she had prized so highly had been used as a litter.
And she had seen men die.
Five in the plane crash. Two at the hands of the man who now threw himself down beside her. He roughly raised her head by placing his callused fingers beneath her chin.
“Get up,” he ordered. “Dry your face. You’re not going to spend the rest of the day sitting around crying like a baby.”
“Go to hell,” she spat, lifting her chin out of his grasp.
He was so furious, his lips hardly moved when he spoke. “Look, if you had a good thing going with Reuben and his pa, you should have told me. I’m sorry I ruined it for you.”
“You bastard.”
“I would have been all too glad to leave you in this paradise and strike out for the river by myself. But I think I should tell you that Reuben had a lot of children in mind. Of course you might not have ever known if the kids you hatched were his or his daddy’s.”
“Shut up!” She raised her hand to slap him.
He caught it in midair and they stared at each other for several tense seconds. Finally Cooper relaxed his fingers from around her wrist. Snarling angrily, he stood up and kicked a chair as far across the cabin as he could.
“It was either them or me,” he said in a voice that vibrated with rage. “Reuben fired first. I got lucky and deflected his rifle just in time. I had no choice.”
“You didn’t have to kill them.”
“No?”
An alternative didn’t leap into her mind, but she was sure that if she thought about it long enough she would come up with one. Temporarily conceding, she lowered her eyes. “Why didn’t you just keep going?”
His eyes narrowed to slits as he looked down at her. “Don’t think I didn’t consider it.”
“Oh,” she ground out. “I can’t wait until I’m rid of you.”
“Believe me, the feeling is mutual. But in the meantime we’ve got to tolerate each other. First thing on the agenda is to get this place cleaned up. I’m not spending another night in this stink hole.”
Her jaw went slack with disbelief. Slowly her eyes roamed the grimy interior of the cabin. “Clean this place up? Is that what you said?”
“Yeah. We’d better get started, too. The day’s getting away.”
He righted the chair he’d just kicked over and made his way toward the pile of dingy bedding where Reuben had slept the night before. Rusty started laughing and her laughter was tinged with impending hysteria.
“You’re not serious?”
“Like hell I’m not.”
“We’re spending the night here?”
“And every night from now on until we’re rescued.” She came to her feet, propping herself up on one crutch while she watched him strip both beds and pile the bedding in the middle of the floor. “What about the river?”
“That might have all been a lie.”
“The Mackenzie River is real, Cooper.”
“But where is it from here?”
“You could keep walking in the direction they said until you found it.”
“I could. I could also get terribly lost. Or injured and stranded. If you went with me, we might not make it out before the first real snow, in which case we’d probably die of exposure. If you stayed here and something happened to me, you’d die of starvation before the winter was over. And I’m not even sure the direction Reuben led me in was the right one. I’ve got 359 other choices from this cabin, and getting around to them all would take over a year.”
Hands braced on his hips, he faced her. “None of those alternatives sounds very appealing to me. On the other hand if we clean this place up, we can survive. It’s not the Beverly Hills Hotel, but it’s shelter and there’s a constant supply of fresh water.”
She didn’t appreciate his sarcasm and her mutinous expression let him know it. His whole demeanor suggested that she was foolish not to see all that without his having to explain it, and issued a challenge she wasn’t about to back down from. She had been weak this morning, but she never would be again. Pushing up the sleeves of her sweater, she said, “What do you want me to do?”
He hitched his head backward. “Start with the stove.”
Without another word, he gathered up the foul bedding and carried it outside.
Rusty attacked the black iron stove with a vengeance, scouring it from top to bottom, using more elbow grease than soap, since she had more of that. It was hard work, especially since she had to keep herself propped up on one crutch. She moved from the stove to the sink, then to the windows, then every stick of furniture got washed down.
After he had boiled the bedding in a caldron outside and hung it up to dry—or freeze, if the temperature turned much colder—Cooper came inside and washed the stones of the hearth. He found a colony of dead insects beneath th
e woodpile. They had no doubt died of old age since it was almost a certainty that the hearth had never been swept. Keeping the door and windows open to air the place out, he shored up the front porch and stacked firewood on the cabin’s south side to protect it from the weather’s brunt.
Rusty couldn’t sweep the floor, so he did. But when he was finished, she got down on hands and knees and scrubbed it. Her sculptured nails broke off one by one. Where a mere chip would have sent her into a tizzy not long ago, she merely shrugged and went on with her scrubbing, taking satisfaction in the results of her labor.
Cooper brought in two beheaded and plucked birds— she didn’t recognize the species—for their dinner. She had made an inventory of the Gawrylows’ hoard and was pleased to find a fair amount of canned goods. They had apparently made their October trip to Yellowknife and were well stocked for the winter. A gourmet cook she wasn’t, but it didn’t take much talent to boil the fowl together with two cans of vegetables and a sprinkling of salt. By the time the stew was done, the aroma was making her mouth water. Darkness was settling in before Cooper carried in the bedding.
“Is it deloused?” she asked, turning from the stove.
“I think so. I boiled the hell out of it. I’m not sure it’s quite dry, but if I leave it out any longer, it’s going to freeze. We’ll check it after dinner and if it’s not dry, we’ll hang it up in front of the fire.”
He washed his hands at the sink, which was sparkling compared to what it had been.
They sat down to eat at the table Rusty had sanded clean. Cooper smiled when he unfolded what had once been a sock and was now acting as a napkin and placed it in his lap, but he didn’t comment on her ingenuity. If he noticed the jar with the arrangement of autumn leaves serving as a centerpiece, he said nothing to indicate it. He ate two portions of the stew but didn’t say a word about it.
Rusty was crushed. He could have said something nice—one single word of encouragement. Even a puppy needs to be patted on the head now and then.