Right up until he’d absconded with Analise and brought her here, of all places. To the one town Gracie never wanted Analise to go to.
As if hearing her thoughts, he shot Gracie a sly look that she didn’t understand until he moved his hand to Analise’s abdomen and asked,
“What about the baby? Is the baby okay?”
CHAPTER 11
May 1896
Colorado
I turned slowly. The mountains caged me in a valley filled with scrub in every direction. I had survived the violence of the outlaws, but I would not survive this. I’d left behind the flames that had chased me from my family’s burning camp, but I couldn’t stop running. The vision of my mother, slaughtered, crushed beneath the burning wagon, unborn baby dead inside her ... It would haunt me forever. I knew I would always remember her, not as I’d known her alive, but as she’d been in death.
So I ran. I didn’t know for how long or how far. The sun had arced across the sky and night had fallen more than once, but time had no meaning to my pain. I didn’t know where I was, how to get back to where I’d begun. My only thought had been to flee, like a coward.
I didn’t even know if there were bullets left in the rifle I had taken from the wagon. At least I knew how to shoot it, though not with any skill. I even knew how to load it, if I’d had more bullets. But at that moment I didn’t care. The knife hung in the pocket of my skirt, sheathed in its heavy leather. It felt like an anchor, pulling me down into the depths of this horror. It banged into my leg as I charged across the desolate valley between the foothills, punishing me for my weakness with every step. My thigh would be black with bruises. I was glad of it.
Dusk hung heavy in the sky again, like a gray velvet curtain with a tiny, intricate pattern of rhinestones glimmering in the weave. I knew later the stars would be like diamonds glittering so bright they hurt the eyes. Where would I be when they came out? Where was I now? I hadn’t seen another living soul or even a sign of life since I’d left the camp.
As the silvery light crept over the lavender sky, my eyes caught on a wisp of smoke in the distance that had been invisible to me before. Had I run in circles? If I followed that smoke, would I end up back at the camp?
There would be nothing to find but death, and yet it was a destination. I reached the hilltop and looked down into a wooded valley. Aspen and cottonwood trees grew wide and sprawling in the pocket of lush vegetation. This was not where my family had camped. Pine trees scattered darkly over the foothills, but the grove where I’d hidden was nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t see where the smoke came from, but it wasn’t from the smoldering ashes of my family. It was a campfire. I smelled food.
The Smith brothers? Had I stumbled across their camp? The taste of vengeance rose up inside me, bitter on my tongue. I wrapped my hand around my daddy’s shotgun and, once again, I began to run. I bolted through the trees with branches snagging at my hair and ripping at my clothes, but still I didn’t slow.
I could hear voices as I drew closer, but not the deep drawl of any of the Smith riders. These were women’s voices.
Confused, I paused. Why would women be out here with murdering outlaws?
In shadowed twilight, I crept closer. I could smell the fire—made of cow pies based on the noxious odor—long before I could see the flames.
At last I was near enough to see them. Three women, clothed as I was in traveling dresses of indistinguishable browns and grays, sat comfortably by a fire. One of the women was Negro, another was a mix of races I couldn’t discern—she looked to have been made from golden wax—and a third who had a mane of rust-red hair, pale skin and an Irish lilt.
The Negro and Irish women were sewing as they listened to the golden woman speak. Her teeth flashed white as she smiled. She seemed to be telling a story, and the others hung on her words, pausing with needles poised for the next stitch as she drew the tale out.
Beyond her, another Negro woman, this one large and lumbering and black as the night, moved about the fire. She wore a handkerchief tied around her head and an apron that seemed to glow in this world of black and white. She didn’t give the speaker the attention the others did, but she appeared to be listening all the same as she fried bacon and tended something else that smelled heavenly. My stomach growled so loud I feared they’d hear me.
They camped beside a wagon with a tarp strung from the side to posts pounded into the ground. I crouched, watching them, afraid to step into the open. I didn’t see a corral for horses or any livestock that might pull the wagon. Were these women stranded? Perhaps victims of thievery? I thought of the Smith brothers again. Had they been here? The laughter I’d heard said no, but people had a way of rising to the occasion when tragedy struck, and they had each other to see them through.
When I looked back to the campfire, the golden woman had finished her story. She sat beside the young Negro woman, who looked, upon closer inspection, much younger than my seventeen. The larger woman still hovered over her skillets, scorched skirts perilously close to the fire, but the redhead was nowhere in sight. Their laughter drifted back to me, waking an ache so deep it hurt. There had been laughter at our campfire each night when Grandma, burdened though she was by her wheelchair, Momma, and I would clean up after our meal.
A snapping twig to my right caught me unaware and I spun around. I was face-to-face with the redhead. She gave a shout of surprise, eyes round as saucers, skirts bunched around her waist, knees bent in a squat. She stumbled backward and fell on her bare behind. Embarrassment rooted me to the spot. I looked away, sputtering an apology.
“Saint Mary and Joseph,” she exclaimed in a lilting Irish brogue as she struggled to stand, yanking her drawers up and her skirts down at once. In an instant, the women from the camp had surrounded us.
“Where you come from?” the large black woman exclaimed.
I opened my mouth to answer, but the Irish woman interrupted me. “You’re head to toe in blood, lass. What are y’ doing out here?”
The big woman had a knife in her hand, the kind my mother used to bone chicken. She waved it at me.
“She trouble. You get, trouble.”
The girl I’d guessed to be younger than me pushed forward. She looked no more than fifteen. A light rash of blemishes made a T of her forehead and nose, but it was her luminous eyes and dark lashes that gathered the attention. She would be an incredible beauty when she matured.
“She scairt,” she said. She laid a gentle hand on my arm and said, “Don’t be scairt. We won’t hurt you. I’m Chick.”
I stared uneasily from one unfamiliar face to another, afraid to speak.
“She look like somebody been at her with a whip. Somebody after you?” Chick asked.
I shook my head.
“She looks hungry, is what she’s looking,” the Irish one said.
“Don’t be feeding her like no stray dog,” the hefty one replied. “Mis’r Tate see you doin’ that he’ll have your hide.”
“That Athena,” Chick said softly of the woman waving the knife. From her tone I understood that Athena was the ruler of this small band of women.
“He wouldn’t dare lay a hand on her,” the woman who looked dipped in gold said, moving nearer to me. Up close, her skin was the color of light molasses and it gleamed in the weak light. I had thought Chick lovely, but this girl—woman—was breathtaking. She shined like a luminary. Her hair was cut very short, almost masculine, but there was nothing male about her curving figure and gleaming beauty. She spoke with fine grammar, not like the other girls.
“Best not let him hear that talk,” Athena said, still waving the knife. She glared at me with a loathing that went deeper than our short acquaintance. I didn’t know what I’d done to earn it, but I was smart enough not to ask. “He have your hide,” she told the golden girl. “Honey or no Honey.” Another pointed look at me, as if I had caused some great trouble by stumbling in half-starved and desolate.
“Why don’ she talk?” Chick asked Athena, whose expres
sion became harsher by the minute. I thought I’d better say something before she ordered me away.
Swallowing my fear, I asked, “Are you stranded?”
“Stranded?” the Irish one repeated. “No, girl.”
“Then where are your horses?”
“Mis’r Tate got them,” Athena said suspiciously.
“Do you ... Have you seen the Smith brothers?”
“Who?” Athena demanded.
“Lonnie and Jake.”
“Don’ know no Lonnie and Jake. You get hit in the head?”
I didn’t think so, but I’d fallen enough times during my mad dash that I could have.
“Why you covered wit blood?” Chick asked, reaching a hand out but not touching me.
I wasn’t ready to answer that. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be ready.
“My name is Ella,” I said. “I’m lost.”
The golden girl approached and laid a gentle hand on my arm. “Are you hurt, Ella?”
I shrugged, and tears filled my eyes. I didn’t want to cry, but I didn’t want to be lost and alone in the world, either. Whether it was wise or not, I couldn’t pretend that I was not in desperate need of help.
The golden girl said, “Bring her over to the fire. Let’s get her cleaned up.”
Even though I wanted that, wanted the fire, a taste of whatever smelled so heavenly, a rest, I couldn’t so easily forget the fear and apprehension that I knew would never leave me.
“Why are you out here? A group of women ... alone?” I heard the words, knew I’d formed them, but hardly recognized the directness, the hard tone. They seemed to have come from a different girl than the one who’d woken up just a few days ago, mad at her father for taking her away from her friends. But I would never be that girl again.
The women looked at each other. No one answered.
I stood my ground, yet inside I was shaking. It was part fear, part anticipation. If they told me they were the Smith brothers’ women, I don’t know what I would do to avenge the deaths of my family. I didn’t think I had the courage to hurt them, but I would not eat the food or lay in the blankets by the fire of the men who had destroyed my life.
The silence stretched. Finally, the golden girl whispered, “What terrible thing happened to you, child?”
Despite my resolve, her kindness and apparent ignorance of the horror that had befallen me was my undoing. “My family—” I hitched in a breath. “Outlaws killed them.”
This made Athena pull her neck in turtle-like. She looked around with big eyes as if expecting the outlaws to charge them at any moment. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. I wasn’t certain they wouldn’t.
“I thought you were them.”
“You thought we was them? What was you gon’ do? Kills us?” Athena asked, hands on her hips and scorn on her face.
I raised my chin. “Yes.”
That caused looks to pass from one woman to another.
The redhead said, “Sure, and now you can see we’re no such thing as outlaws. Why don’t you put your gun down, lass? Won’t be no need of it.”
I followed her glance to the rifle still clutched in my hands. I’d forgotten about it.
“’Less they followed her,” Athena said.
They all glanced out at the scrub and brush. “They couldna made it past the Captain,” the redhead answered.
This seemed to be enough reassurance for them all. I didn’t have such faith in this captain, whoever he was. One man would not stand against the Smith brothers.
The golden girl reached for my hand and guided me closer to the fire.
“That Honey,” Chick said softly. “Honey Girl, cause she’s sweet and creamy—that what Aiken say.”
Chick followed me and Honey Girl, chattering to my back. “The call me Chick, on account I’m small and soft. I told you that Athena; she take care of us.” The big woman glared at me so there’d be no confusion. I wasn’t one of us. “And this Meaira. She from Ireland.”
The last said in awe. I felt it, too. I knew that my daddy thought immigrants were a sea of trouble that flowed steadily on our shores. My family could trace its heritage back to England, or so he boasted. Our ancestors had come over a hundred years before, which, according to my father, no longer made us immigrants. We’re settlers, Daddy was fond of saying. The distinction was not quite clear to me, but I was sharp enough to understand that somehow the distinction existed. I imagined for Chick anything beyond the ocean was a wonder.
The woman called Honey Girl had a dark sadness in her eyes, but she smiled at me and gestured for me to sit.
I perched carefully on one of the crates by the fire while Chick bustled over to the spider frying pan propped on the rocks at the edge. She picked up a long-handled fork to turn the bacon, and Athena snatched it out of her hand. I noticed Athena walked with a pronounced limp.
“Don’t mess wit my skillet.”
“No, Athena, I surely won’t do that.”
Chick gave her a guileless smile that softened Athena’s expression. She gently touched Chick’s cheek. “Go on and sit yourself down.”
Chick scurried over to sit beside me. Meaira came with a bowl and a rag. She began dabbing at my face. When I didn’t wince, she asked. “And whose blood is this if it’s not yours?”
I shrugged. I didn’t want to tell them it belonged to my mother. I couldn’t put my thoughts around the words. Didn’t want to conjure the memory. But there it was anyway, hovering just at the edge of my mind. I felt hot tears filling my eyes again, and I clenched my teeth hard to fight them back. I was a coward, not a crybaby. But they wouldn’t be staunched. They spilled over and streamed down my face. One plopped onto my hand and mingled with the dried blood there. I must look a sight. The thought made the tears come faster. Meaira put her arms around me from one side and Chick from the other, and the two strange women held me while I cried.
***
Later I ate under Athena’s fierce eyes. Why she disliked me so, I didn’t know. But she watched the horizon fearfully—I assumed for murderers to swoop down on us. I watched for them, as well. I spent a restless night with the women, tossing and turning, starting to wakefulness in the grips of nightmares. Chick was there beside me, her luminous eyes full of compassion. On my other side lay Honey, who set her cool hands on my forehead and murmured comforting words in her sweet tone. Somehow I made it to morning.
Dawn found us back around the fire drinking Athena’s coffee. I offered to help with breakfast, and she gave me a withering stare. I didn’t know if she resented the implication that she might need help, or if it was just me she took exception to. I thought it was probably me, but I still didn’t know why. She made breakfast from last night’s meal, and then the camp became a hive of activity. I felt useless in the midst of it and tried to help. Chick kept a steady conversation, telling me that soon Aiken and the Captain would be here.
“Who are they?”
This question stilled all the women. They stared at me, then from one to another, none of them answering.
“A businessman, the Captain is,” Meaira began, hesitantly. “You understand?”
I nodded, though I didn’t think I did. “My father was a businessman. He was a banker.”
This produced another round of stares. “That not the kind Captain is,” Chick said. “He work the tables. You know. Cards. He won hisself a saloon.”
I raised my brows at this. My father had been a player of cards, although my mother had disapproved. Perhaps if he’d ever won she’d have considered it a business venture, too, but unfortunately, he hadn’t been very skilled. He understood the rules of gambling but not the concept of the game. He’d taught me when I was only eight, and by the time I was ten, I could beat him every time. He’d often joked that he wished he could smuggle me in with him. Many a night my entire family had settled around a table with a deck of cards and my daddy’s hope that practice would make perfect. For me it had, but for Daddy ... I bit my lip, knowing he would never learn to win n
ow.
“And Aiken,” I asked. “Who is he?”
“He the devil,” Athena said, turning her back on me and the conversation.
“The devil,” Meaira scoffed. “What will she think? No lass, not the devil. A man of business, as well.”
Athena snorted and jabbed a finger at me. “Well, he ain’t gon’ be happy to see her.”
The devil and a gambler who thought themselves businessmen. I still didn’t know where the women fit in, but Athena’s words inspired them all to move faster in their efforts to be packed up and ready.
It was close to nine in the morning when Honey stood up and shielded her eyes from the bright sun. The camp was tidy, and the women waited in a circle around the low fire.
“Captain’s coming,” she said.
“Is Aiken with him?” Meaira asked, looking very hopeful about the prospect of the devil’s arrival.
“Just the Captain,” Honey said. Meaira’s disappointment had a pale and shaken air to it. I wondered at her relationship with this Aiken.
I looked but saw nothing of either man. Honey must have excellent eyes or a sixth sense where the Captain was concerned. After a few minutes of staring, I made out a speck on the horizon. Possibly a man on a horse, but how could they be certain it was the man they called Captain?
The declaration of his imminent arrival had a galvanizing effect on the other women, however. They all began to move about with feigned casualness, as if they’d risen on a whim to dust off their skirts or straighten the already neatly stacked crates by the wagon. But the tension hung thick in the camp. Athena clicked her tongue and looked around like a soldier at her troop.
Honey disappeared into the back of the wagon. When she came out, she’d touched up her makeup and changed into a dress that looked very fine for camping. Meaira slouched on a crate dejectedly. I noted the dark circles under her eyes and a grayish cast to her skin. She looked unwell.
Chick fussed with her hair and adjusted her dress over her underdeveloped breasts. Even Athena, though unconcerned with her appearance, busied herself around the fire. She retrieved her skillet from a crate and started cooking. By the time the Captain came into sight, the bacon was popping and Athena began cracking eggs in beside it.
Bad Boys of the Night: Eight Sizzling Paranormal Romances: Paranormal Romance Boxed Set Page 175