Damn the woman! He knew she disliked him. Knew she could not wait until he rode out of her life, and yet she refused to give him his clothes so he could go. Frowning, he fingered the heavy growth of beard on his jaw.
He was standing at the window that evening, entertaining some decidedly unpleasant thoughts about the perverse nature of some women, when the bedroom door opened and Rachel stepped into the room bearing his dinner on a tray.
She came to an abrupt halt just inside the door. Tyree had shaved off his beard and she could only stare, openmouthed, at the change the razor had wrought.
“Afternoon, ma’am,” he drawled, making no effort to conceal his nakedness. “Sorry I’m not dressed for company.”
She stared at him blankly for a moment, so enchanted with the change in his appearance she had not even noticed he was nude.
“Please cover yourself,” Rachel said, feeling her cheeks grow hot.
“Afraid I don’t have a thing to wear,” Tyree said, smothering a laugh. “Somebody took all my clothes.”
“Please use the sheet,” Rachel implored, unable to draw her eyes from his face. He looked so different. Not handsome, exactly, but still very attractive in a rugged sort of way. His face was totally masculine, even without the beard. She was glad he had not shaved off his moustache. It drooped lazily over his upper lip, giving him the look of a Barbary pirate. His jaw was firm and square, his mouth wide, sensual. She wondered, with shame, what it would be like to press her lips to his, to have that soft moustache tickle her lip.
Tyree chuckled softly as he pulled the sheet from the bed and wrapped it around his waist.
Rachel placed the tray on the bedside table, careful not to meet Tyree’s mocking gaze. Darn him! He was laughing at her because she had no one to blame for Tyree’s nudity but herself. He had asked for his clothes at least a dozen times.
Hoping to hide her discomfort, Rachel snapped, “What are you doing out of that bed?”
“Getting some exercise,” Tyree snapped back, annoyed by her shrewish tone. “I’m going crazy, cooped up in this room.”
Something that might have been compassion flickered in Rachel’s lovely blue eyes and then was quickly gone. “Candido’s wife made dinner tonight,” she said stiffly. “I hope you like Mexican food.”
She was backing toward the door as she spoke. Coming to an abrupt halt, she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin defiantly. He wasn’t going to intimidate her. Not in her own home.
“I’ll be back later to pick up the tray,” she announced icily, and walked out of the room feigning an outward calm that was sorely at odds with her inner turmoil.
A sudden burst of masculine laughter shattered Rachel’s serene façade and she felt her cheeks flame again. Darn him! He seemed to know her every thought.
Tyree found his clothes neatly piled at the foot of his bed the following morning, and he grinned wryly, wondering if Rachel had decided he was well enough to get up and ride on, or if returning his clothing was just her way of making sure she didn’t walk in and find him strutting around the way nature had made him.
He dressed slowly, careful not to make any sudden moves. His left side was stiff and a little sore and he winced as he bent over to pull on his boots, noting, as he did so, that someone had given the leather a nice shine.
He was stuffing his shirttail into his pants when he heard voices. Angry voices. Shoving the .44 into the waistband of his pants, he moved noiselessly down the hallway to the front door where he stood out of sight, listening.
“Last offer, old man. Take it or leave it.”
“Be reasonable, Walsh,” John Halloran replied in a conciliatory tone. “You know darn well I can’t—”
“We’ll leave it, Mr. Walsh.” Rachel’s voice cut across her father’s, quick and angry. “Now kindly get off our property. And take your hired killers with you.”
Tyree peered around the front door to get a look at the man called Job Walsh. He saw a tall, powerful-looking man somewhere in his late forties. Walsh sat ramrod straight in an expensive, hand-tooled saddle, his work-worn hands folded negligently over the horn. His face was deeply tanned, his eyes were a hard, flat brown beneath straight black brows. Eight riders flanked him. Like wolves in sheep’s clothing, they were gunmen all, masquerading as cowhands.
“I’m getting almighty tired of haggling with you people,” Walsh growled impatiently. “I’d advise you to reconsider my offer while you still can.”
Rachel stepped to the edge of the front porch, her head high, arms akimbo. “Is that a threat, Mr. Walsh?”
Walsh shrugged elaborately. “Take it any way you like, missy, but next time I come, I might just have to—”
“Have to what?”
John Halloran smiled broadly as Logan Tyree stepped outside, one dark-skinned hand resting lightly on the butt of the Colt jutting from the waistband of his pants.
Job Walsh swore softly. “Looks like you’ve gone and hired a killer of your own,” he muttered, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rachel replied haughtily, but there was a faint touch of guilty color in her cheeks.
“Don’t play Little Miss Innocent with me,” Walsh retorted crossly. He stabbed a fleshy finger in Rachel’s direction. “What I want to know is, where did you get the money to hire a professional slinger like Logan Tyree?”
“You heard the lady,” Tyree interjected smoothly. “Take your men and ride out of here.”
“Sure, sure,” Walsh said amiably. “But this ain’t over yet. Not by a long shot.”
Walsh was mounted on a flashy palomino stallion with a snowy mane and tail. The stud had stood quietly during the heated discussion but now, as Walsh sank his spurs into the stallion’s golden flanks, the horse reared up on its hindquarters and whirled around, then pranced out of the yard. Walsh’s men trailed behind him, like smoke.
All but two. Eyes hard and calculating, they measured Logan Tyree, wondering. And Tyree measured them. No words were spoken. Indeed, the three men might have been carved from granite. Taut seconds stretched into minutes. Once, Rachel started to speak, but the touch of her father’s hand on her arm kept her mute.
The tension grew unbearable and Rachel glanced anxiously at her father, hoping he would do something to break the grating silence, but he was staring at Tyree and the Walsh gunmen. Rachel felt her eyes drawn in that direction, too. Once, she sent a quick glance down the road to where Job Walsh and the rest of his men sat their horses. But no help appeared to be forthcoming from that quarter, either.
Rachel could not say when it began. She heard no words, saw no signal, but suddenly three hands were streaking for three guns. The slap of flesh upon walnut and ivory gun butts was very loud in the oppressive stillness. Two gunshots shattered the eerie silence, the second shot coming hard on the heels of the first so that the two shots blended into one long, rolling report. And both of Walsh’s gunmen went down, dead before they hit the ground.
Job Walsh did not move. His mouth thinned into a tight white line as he stared at Tyree.
The men backing Walsh reacted like a single being as six hands hovered over six revolvers.
Logan Tyree’s cold yellow eyes darted swiftly from man to man, challenging each one in turn. “Anybody wanna buy into this hand?” he asked.
There were no takers.
“You killed ‘em,” Walsh growled, gesturing at the two bodies sprawled in the dirt. “You bury ‘em.”
Rachel stared after Walsh and his men as they rode out of sight. Then, eyes filled with accusation, she focused her attention on Tyree. “I thought you said you didn’t know Walsh?”
Tyree shrugged. “Didn’t think I did. Last time I saw him, he was calling himself Jacob Warner.”
“I see. Well,” she went on briskly, “you seem to be feeling much better.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I trust you’ll be riding on then.” She glanced at the two men lying dead in the ya
rd. “The sooner, the better as far as I’m concerned.”
“Hold on, daughter,” Halloran snapped. “This is still my place, and I’ll decide who stays and who goes. Tell me, Tyree, just how high do your services come?”
“Pa!” Rachel stared at her father in disbelief. Surely he didn’t mean to hire Tyree!
“Depends on what you want me to do,” Tyree replied, ignoring Rachel’s shocked expression.
“I think you know,” Halloran murmured, and his voice was suddenly old and tired.
“Walsh,” Tyree said flatly.
“Yes. How much?”
“For you? Five hundred dollars, a hundred in advance, and the loan of a horse.”
“Done,” Halloran said quickly, as if he were afraid he might change his mind if he gave the matter any thought.
“Pa, you can’t do this.”
“Rachel—”
“You’re hiring a killer, a man who’s already wanted by the law.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Halloran replied. He did not sound very happy about it, only resigned.
Rachel shook her head, unable to believe he meant to go through with it. “Pa, please reconsider. No good will come of this.”
“Rachel, that’s enough,” Halloran admonished sharply. “I know what I’m doing.”
Rachel was sullenly silent at dinner that night, refusing to be drawn into the quiet conversation between her father and Logan Tyree. Job Walsh and his nightriders were the main topic of discussion, as they had been between Rachel and her father nearly every day and night for the past six months, ever since Walsh’s men started riding roughshod over the Lazy H.
In the beginning, Walsh’s hired guns had only roughed up the Halloran cowboys. But when that failed to scare off the hired help, Walsh’s men began shooting the Lazy H riders out of the saddle. A few were killed outright. Those who recovered drew their pay and quit; the remaining cowhands refused to ride the open range. As a result, most of the Halloran herd had been run off, either by Walsh’s men, or by the Apache, who were not averse to eating beef when nothing else was available. The last straw had come only a few weeks earlier when the Lazy H foreman had come home tied face down across his saddle, dead from a bullet between the eyes. That night, two thirds of the remaining cowhands quit, and Joe Cahill took over as foreman. Now there were only five men left on the payroll, and less than three hundred head of cattle where there had once been thousands. Three hundred cattle that were scattered across miles of broken grassland.
“Pa, how could you hire that awful man?” Rachel demanded later, when they were alone in the house.
“Honey, what else can I do? Cahill and the others are no match for Walsh’s men. And Lord knows I’m too old to strap on a gun and go after Walsh myself. Who else is there? You?”
“There’s Clint.”
“Clint Wesley is a fine young man, Rachel, but he’s just a town marshal. Job Walsh would gobble him up and spit him out. Anyway, we’ve got no proof that Walsh’s men are killing our cattle, or back-shooting our cowhands. And Clint needs proof, not just an old man’s say-so.”
“Then we’ll get proof.”
Halloran laughed softly, hollowly. “Where are we gonna get proof that will hold up in court? Walsh and his men have got more alibis than ticks on a hound. Dammit, Rachel, we can’t afford to lose any more cattle.”
“But a hired killer?”
“I know, honey. It sticks in my craw, too. But I just don’t know what else to do.”
Rachel could not sleep that night. The clock in her room put the hour at just after midnight when she slipped out of bed, pulled on her robe, and tiptoed out of the house.
Outside, a cool breeze whispered over the face of the land, talking softly to the leaves of the trees that shaded the sunny side of the house. The sky was a cloudless indigo blue, the full moon as cold and yellow as Logan Tyree’s eyes. Tyree! How she despised him!
With a sigh, she rested her elbows on the porch rail, suddenly glad that her mother, always so frail and gentle, was not alive to see what was happening. Ellen Halloran had been a wonderful, sweet, kind soul, but she had not been a fighter. She would have been appalled by the killings and the bloodshed. She would have insisted they sell the ranch to Walsh and move on rather than stay and fight it out. And perhaps, if her mother was still alive, her father would have done just that. As it was, he didn’t have the heart to pick up and start over again somewhere else.
“Nice night.”
Rachel whirled around, startled to find Logan Tyree sitting in the shadows at the south end of the porch, an unlit cigar dangling from the corner of his mouth. He had gone into Yellow Creek earlier in the day and had come back mounted on a rangy chestnut mare. He had bought himself a new rifle, too, and a change of clothes. Now, dressed all in black from his shirt to his boots, Rachel thought he looked like the angel of death. It was, she decided, an apt description considering his line of work.
“Care for a drink?” Tyree asked, gesturing at the bottle of Forty Rod on the floor at his feet.
“No.”
“It’ll help you sleep.”
“I don’t need anything to help me sleep, thank you,” Rachel replied curtly.
Tyree grunted softly, his eyes mocking her. The fact that she was out on the porch at such a late hour was proof enough that she could not sleep.
Tyree’s shirt was open and Rachel’s eyes were drawn to his bare chest. The sight of his naked flesh and the dark hair curling there did odd things to the pit of her stomach. Too clearly, she remembered tending him when he had been hurt and unconscious. The memory of his flesh beneath her hands made her palms tingle and for one mad, impulsive moment she was tempted to reach out and caress the hard wall of Tyree’s chest. But, of course, she did no such thing. Instead, she folded her arms across her breasts and tried to look at ease.
The rocker squeaked loudly as Tyree reached for the whiskey bottle. It was nearly empty and Rachel glanced at his face, wondering if he were drunk.
Tyree stared back at her, his face impassive, a glint of amusement dancing in his cat’s eyes. She was afraid of him, and they both knew it.
“I’ve been puzzling over how you managed to get out of Yuma,” Rachel remarked, hoping to dispel the heavy silence between them. “I’ve never heard of anyone escaping from there before.”
“I killed two of the guards and ran like hell,” Tyree replied evenly.
“Killed them?” Rachel repeated thinly. “In cold blood?”
“Yes, ma’am. And I’d have killed a hundred more to get out of that hellhole.”
Rachel stared at him, unnerved by the ease with which he talked about killing, as if shooting down a man was of no more consequence than swatting a fly.
“I can’t believe it,” she murmured. “I simply can’t believe my father hired a…a murderer like you.”
“There isn’t another like me,” Tyree muttered sardonically. There was a brief flare of light as he put a match to his cigar.
“I can believe that!” Rachel retorted caustically. “Tell me, Mr. Tyree, do you always charge five hundred dollars for your…your services?”
“No, ma’am,” Tyree snapped back. “I usually charge a hell of a lot more.”
“Oh? And just what is it that makes you worth so much?”
“I’m good at what I do,” Tyree answered flatly. “Damn good.”
“So I’ve heard,” Rachel said with a sneer. “They say you killed an unarmed man in Nogales. And shot one in the back over in El Paso. Even killed a widow woman in Tucson. Burned her house down while she was still inside.”
A wordless sound of disgust erupted from Tyree’s throat. “Where’d you hear all that?”
“It’s common knowledge,” Rachel answered disdainfully.
“It’s a pile of shit, is what it is,” Tyree countered mildly. “I’ll admit I’ve done a lot of rotten things in my time, but gunning down an unarmed man isn’t one of them. And as for that story about killing a helpless woman… Oh
, hell, believe what you want to believe.”
“Do you expect me to believe those stories are lies?” Rachel asked incredulously. “All of them?”
“Lady, I don’t give a damn what you believe.”
“They say you hire your gun out to the highest bidder,” Rachel mused aloud. “Regardless of who’s right or who’s wrong.”
Tyree shrugged. “A gun doesn’t know right from wrong.”
“That’s true,” Rachel agreed, her voice thick with contempt. “But a man does. Tell me, Mr. Tyree, would you murder my father if Job Walsh topped his offer of five hundred dollars?”
She had made him genuinely angry now. His face, usually passive, was suddenly dark with unspoken fury.
“You really do have a low opinion of me, don’t you?” he muttered. “You really think I’d gun down your old man after he took me in?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know,” Rachel stammered, and turned away from Tyree to stare out at the land that rose and fell in gentle swells, like waves upon the sea. Overhead, the moon was bright in the sky, bathing the ranch in silver-dappled shadows. The sweet scent of sage and honeysuckle filled the air as the wind shifted and she drew in a deep breath. She loved this land. Loved the wild, untamed mountains that rose in lofty splendor to the east, loved the stark, unfriendly desert that touched the southern border of the Lazy H, loved the ranch that was the only home she had ever known. With Walsh out of the way, the Lazy H would prosper again, and life would be good, as it had been before.
The thought of Walsh brought Logan Tyree to mind again. She did not like Tyree. She did not like him and she did not trust him. But her father was right. There was no one else they could turn to. They had to fight Job Walsh on his own terms, distasteful as that might be, or lose the ranch. It was as simple as that. Walsh was like a malignant disease, slowly eating away at the heart of everything she held dear, and Logan Tyree was the cure. Still, she could not help wondering if the cure might not prove more deadly than the disease itself. And yet, with Walsh gone, his hired guns would move on. The Slash W would go to Walsh’s sister in Amarillo. Perhaps then they would have some peace.
RenegadeHeart Page 4