“You’ll loan me one?”
She opened her mouth to rebut the assumption but instead quickened her pace toward the stable. “I’m not waiting while you get a gun,” she said.
Wondering how any one woman could have so much obstinacy, Rhys watched her head into the stable then hopped off the sidewalk and trotted up the street toward Penrod’s to make a selection from the case of guns in the store.
“I got all kinds,” Penrod said. “And I can sell you what you want.” He displayed a .44 army-pattern Colt with an ornately engraved barrel and a silver-plated handle. “Fancy if you want to impress the ladies.”
“No,” Rhys said, certain the lady in question would scoff at the weapon.
“Well, if it’s tried and true you want, this Colt Peacemaker is hard to beat.”
Rhys tried the walnut grip and checked the sighting on the blued-metal casing of the second revolver Penrod showed him. The feel was right, the gun was unpretentious and dependable, which was all he wanted. He knew how to use the weapon, and declined Penrod’s offer for a demonstration. As a youth he had learned to shoot with custom-made weapons from his master’s gun room. Rhys knew he could hold his own against any man should he have to.
“This one,” he said and quickly selected a holster. Penrod added a box of shells to the order and tallied up a total.
“I’ll buy it back if you decide you don’t need it.” The storekeeper dogged Rhys’s tracks all the way outside. “ ’Course I’ll have to knock off some. It being used—Well, durn!” he said as Rhys, ignoring him, sprinted off toward the Gamble stable.
***
Teddy was gone.
Two youths Rhys had not met were in the stable. One was tossing hay down from the loft, the other was unenthusiastically cleaning stalls. Both paused at their work when Rhys burst in. “I need a saddle horse,” he said.
The boy shoveling manure looked up at the lad in the loft. The boy above gave a consenting nod. “That’s him, can’t you tell?” He eyed the neat black suit Rhys wore, the rose-silk vest, silver-gray cravat and the nattily polished boots. “Teddy said he’d look like a dandy.”
The youngster below leaned on his shovel. “Don’t look so dandified to me. Got a gun.”
Rhys put a stop to the time-wasting conjecture. “Did Teddy say which horse to take?”
“You Delmar?” the lad demanded.
“Yes. Which horse?”
“That bay in the corral out back,” the boy said. “I slung a saddle and bridle on the fence and,” he smiled suspiciously wide, “you can catch him yourself.”
Cursing Teddy for not waiting and, at the least, for not having one of those boys saddle his horse, Rhys hurried out back. He saw at once why they hadn’t volunteered. The bay was a big spirited stallion who began tossing his head and pawing the ground when he saw Rhys approach. He was a fine animal and took a bridle surprisingly well, but the saddle was another matter. One look at it and the stallion hopped and bucked around the corral with Rhys attempting to hold onto him and the heavy saddle.
Not until Rhys threw the saddle down and looped his fine silk cravat over the stallion’s eyes did he get him to stand still. By then more precious minutes had passed and Teddy, he knew, would be harder to catch. Shortly, though, he had his mount saddled and out of the corral. He rode through the stable fostering two looks of disbelief.
“Which way?” Rhys shouted.
“West.” One of the boys tossed him a canteen as he rode through. “An’ Demon there can catch that paint of Teddy’s if any horse can.”
Demon’s hooves thundered through Wishbone. Rhys had a moment of doubt as he took the road west. If Teddy didn’t want him along she could have told the boys to send him on a false trail, but then he remembered the mines were northwest of Wishbone and rode on.
He pushed his mount. The stallion felt strong beneath him and eager to run. The day’s heat hadn’t yet come down. Until it did he would ride hard. He didn’t like the idea of Teddy running up on road agents alone.
On the other hand, God help the men who got in her way.
Chapter 23
Teddy spared her horse. The big paint pony Bullet had caught and broken for her two years before was a frisky mare who would have liked testing the wind, but Teddy purposely kept to a trot on the horse she called Dune.
She wasn’t slowing the pace because she wanted Rhys to catch up. She didn’t care if he did or not. Preferred that he didn’t, she swore as she slowed Dune a little more. The Frenchman would be more trouble than he was worth. Probably couldn’t shoot either. And he didn’t care what happened to the Gamble Line as long as he got his money.
Wending past the scattered sentries of saguaro and the legions of cholla cactus lining the roadbed, Teddy pulled her hat low on her forehead and rode on. She had been dreading the day one of the big Concord coaches would fail to roll in. All she could do now was hope the trouble was a busted wheel or at worst an axle, because if there had been a bona fide holdup and a payroll was lost, it was only a matter of time before she would lose the whole business. Wells Fargo wouldn’t stay with her after that. Cabe Northrop had been plain as day about her standing with the company.
She was up to her hatband in debt and trouble, and close to ruin. She felt akin to the prey a white-rumped shrike had just plucked from the desert floor. Shortly the airborne shrike would swoop low again and impale its unlucky victim on a cactus thorn. She watched the bird dive for the kill and somehow, miraculously, the tiny animal in its grasp wrenched free and fell the short distance to the ground—spared this once, from destruction.
Teddy hoped she would be as lucky—that nothing disastrous had happened to Rope or Strong Bill or the stage, that she and the stage line were not, as it appeared, only a swoop away from devastation.
Without thinking about it she twisted in the saddle and looked down the guttered road for Rhys. No rider was in sight against a backdrop of barren, scattered hills. She wondered if he’d had a change of heart or, more likely, had been unable to ride the stallion she had told the Ansley boys to saddle for him. Teddy sighed wearily and rode on. She hadn’t actually expected more of Rhys Delmar than that he would fall by the wayside at the first obstacle.
The first change station was fifteen miles out of Wishbone on a stretch where there was no water except from the station’s well. Porter Landau, a lean and desert-baked stock-tender, manned that station alone. Porter had been a prospector, but he had given up the uncertainty of picking and panning, and now had a regular forty-dollar-a-month draw from the Gamble Line. He worked alone because he was closest in to town. Most other stations along the line had two keepers.
Bullet rode out and gave Porter a hand about twice a week and did the same for the first station east of Wishbone. Teddy was about halfway to Porter’s when she heard the rapid beat of hooves behind her. She reined Dune in and, involuntarily holding her breath, stared back at a rider galloping her way. She recognized Demon and presumed the rider to be Rhys. Only someone unaccustomed to the desert would be punishing a mount like that.
He pulled Demon to a stop once he was abreast of her.
“You trying to kill that horse?” she shouted.
Rhys shot Teddy an amused glance. The day’s heat was still mild and the stallion was pulling at the bit. He’d enjoyed the run and wanted to keep going. Both Teddy and Rhys could see that Demon wasn’t spent in the least. “I am trying to catch a fool,” Rhys said.
“You had him before you left,” Teddy came back. “That horse needs a breather. We’ll ride slow on to the station and let’s hope we find the stage made it that far. If it didn’t, the horses can drink and rest a few minutes before we head out.” She held her jaw tight as she gave him a censorious look, and tried hard not to let show that she was glad to see him. “Did you think to bring a canteen?”
“There’s one on the saddle.” Rhys held the canteen high, smiled, and patted the rolled blanket behind him. “And a bedroll, too,” he said.
“You might need it,” she said
indifferently, giving the paint a gentle nudge with her heels. “I see you got yourself a gun. What can you do with it?”
Rhys moved the bay alongside her horse and looked over at Teddy. “The usual things a man can do with his gun.” His grin was one-sided, infuriating.
Teddy’s face flushed and her eyes flashed. “Not a damned thing worth getting excited about then,” she said, and urged the paint a length ahead of his mount.
Rhys caught up to her again. “You sound as if you do not like men so much and yet it is with men you choose to spend your time,” he said.
“I like men fine,” she replied, “as long as they stick to business instead of skirt chasing.”
“A little amour is good for the heart, Teddy.”
The horses were close. He reached over and softly stroked her arm. She snatched it away from him.
“Now that’s what I mean,” she said angrily. “Some men don’t know what to do with their hands.”
“I do, I assure you,” he said silkily.
“You can save the assurances and the pawing for that saloon sweetie. Or for Justine Blalock. I hear she’s gone soft on you.”
“Mademoiselle Justine is lovely but a bit young for me. I prefer a woman with—”
“I do not care to hear about your taste in women.” Scowling at him she reached into one of her breast pockets, couldn’t find what she expected and cursed. Switching the reins to the other hand, she fumbled about in the other pocket.
“If you need help—”
She looked sourly into his eyes as she lit up a long slender cheroot and began smoking. “I don’t need your help or your pawing or your kisses. Thank you.”
“You liked my kisses well enough when we were kissing,” he insisted. “But afterwards, well, Teddy, don’t you think you overplayed the offended virgin part?”
Teddy threw the newly lit cheroot away. She had promised Felicity long ago to give up the habit and until lately hadn’t been bothered by the urge to resume smoking them. She thought she could blame Rhys Delmar for that too. She glared at him hotly. “What in holy hell makes you think I’m a virgin?”
“Aren’t you?”
She gave her head a toss. “No. I had a lover once.”
He eyed her surreptitiously. “Once?”
“Once was enough,” she said flatly.
“That I do not believe. Making love is like tasting a superb wine. One swallow is never enough.”
“It was for me.”
“Then you had the wrong lover. He was, perhaps, too young, too inexperienced.”
“He wasn’t young and he wasn’t inexperienced. In fact, he was like you in a lot of ways,” Teddy said and scowled at him. “Not that he looked much like you.” Jace was fair-haired and had big brown eyes, pretty eyes. “What I meant about him being like you was that he was good-looking, too. He had women, like flies to honey, chasing after him—he’d had plenty.”
“Of flies?”
“Of women, dammit!” She stared furiously at him. “But in Wishbone he only had eyes for me.”
“In that we are alike,” Rhys teased.
“Like hell,” Teddy responded. “Anyway, I was impressionable and downright silly at nineteen. He’d been courting me on the sly and I’d been thinking I was the luckiest girl in town. Well, like I said I was silly back then. Anyway, one spring night I slipped out and met him down at the river thinking I was about to experience paradise, sublime ecstasy.”
“What happened?”
She huffed. “Nothing. Ecstasy turned out to be a lot of hard breathing, smelly sweat and sand in my hair.”
“You are saying you did not make love.”
“I am saying he was mighty quick on the draw. It was all over faster than a sneeze and I said if that’s all there is to it I can live without it.”
“There is more to it, Teddy.”
“You say so. He did too, but I learned fast that men are mostly talk and disappointment.”
With effort Rhys let the comment slide. “You did not see this lover again? This Jace?”
“No. He was a gunfighter. He went and got himself shot down in Tombstone about a month later. So,” she said flatly, “I reckon he wasn’t always quick on the draw.”
Rhys had a peculiar mix of emotions. He felt a fierce, burning swell of anger that another man had made love to Teddy, though he had never been particular about a woman’s past before. He also felt a groundswell of relief that it had not been Teddy who had shot the inept fellow. There was one other emotion, too, suspicion that she had made up the whole story just to annoy him.
And she had annoyed him.
“This happened long ago,” he said. “Surely since there has been a man who made you feel a special stirring in your heart, whose embrace you desired.”
A hint of color spread over Teddy’s face. “Nope,” she said.
“The truth, Teddy,” Rhys insisted, recalling unquestionably that she had responded to his kisses, had yielded to his touch. “When I held you, kissed you, you desired me. Is it not true?”
She gritted her teeth and stiffened and decided on the spot that she wouldn’t admit what he had said was true even though it was. “It is not. I never wanted to kiss you. I think I made that plain afterwards,” she said. “So don’t go thinking there was anything to it but you acting the stud. I felt nothing but disgust.”
Disgust? He thought not. But he was willing to concede the point at the moment. The time would come when she would admit he was right.
***
The horses tied outside the corral wore harness. Not a good sign. The stage was nowhere to be seen.
“Port!” Teddy called loudly as they approached the adobe station.
Porter Landau, white-haired and wearing denim pants tucked into knee-high black boots, stepped from behind the station house with his rifle ready.
“That you Teddy?” He put up a hand to shade his eyes and stared at the approaching pair. “Who’s that with you?”
“It’s me!” Teddy confirmed. “And the Frenchman Bullet told you about. You seen the stage?”
Porter lowered his rifle. “I’m plumb worried,” he said. “It ain’t never been this late. And with Rope and Strong Bill on the run—Well, it don’t bode no good.”
“You could be right.” Teddy rode up close to the well and dismounted. Not wanting either of the men to see how upset she was, she pulled her hat low and led her horse over to a trough by the well and let the animal drink from the water that had been drawn for the stage team. “I’m worried, too,” she said after a minute. “That’s why I’m out here.”
Rhys dismounted next to Teddy. He stuck out a hand to Porter, who by then had walked over to the well. He introduced himself.
“You helpin’ Teddy?” the station keeper asked.
“I am attempting to,” Rhys responded. “Although she seems convinced she does not need me.”
“Well keep an eye on her anyway,” Porter admonished. “She’s the type to leap before she looks and I ain’t so certain what you two are goin’ to find to leap into out there.”
Teddy gave Porter a sharp look but let him speak his mind. “What can you spare from the larder, Port?” she asked. “We might need more victuals than I brought along.”
“Got plenty of jerky and you’re welcome to it,” the old man responded. “An’ there’s beans and coffee and a slab of bacon. Help yourself.”
Teddy got the supplies while Rhys filled extra canteens. Ten minutes later they had mounted and were riding off. Teddy remained pensive. Rhys respected her need for quiet. They were an hour’s ride out of the station when the stallion’s ears flicked back and the big muscles on his withers quivered. The mare snorted uneasily as Teddy guided her along the stage road where it cut through an outcropping of boulders higher than the rooftops in Wishbone. Rhys’s keen eyes searched the wayside but could discern nothing that should alarm the horses. A scaly Gila lizard lay motionless on a flat, sun-heated rock to his left. Off to his right a speckle-backed cha
parral cock searched among the stones for a meal.
Neither should have upset the horses, but something had. Their keen senses detected a threat that Rhys’s more civilized ones could not find.
“Can you see anything out there?” he asked Teddy.
She had stiffened in her seat and looked as skittish as the horses. Rhys saw her hand start to slide slowly toward her gun.
“Could be a snake, or a coyote, or a man,” she said softly. “Anything could hide in those rocks. And you’d best be ready for a fast ride once whatever it is shows itself.”
Rhys regretted he hadn’t had time to test the Colt he’d bought from Penrod. He could only hope it was as dependable as the storekeeper had said—and that, if necessary, it would save his and Teddy’s lives.
He drew it a few minutes later when Teddy abruptly stopped her horse and pointed at the ground. In the hardscrabble and sand of the roadbed were a strange assortment of tracks. Horses had stood and stamped and it looked as if a wheeled conveyance had slid to a stop then cut a deep swath in the ground as it turned about. Bootprints littered the ground, too.
Teddy voiced what both of them feared. “Riders stopped the stage here,” she said unevenly. “A holdup.”
Gun in hand, she swung off the paint and began examining the ground, dropping to her knees when she came to a spot where the sand bore a dark unnatural stain. Rhys remained mounted, keeping a wary eye on the road and the rocks. He had his gun ready should anything move. But the desert seemed to have grown abnormally quiet and the small creatures which had been ignoring the riders were suddenly out of sight. The sense of dread he felt was like a fist in his midriff.
***
Teddy tested the damp sand between her thumb and forefinger.
“Blood?” he asked.
“Looks like it,” she said, rubbing her hand clean in the loose sand. “But whose? A road agent’s or one of my men?” Without remounting she began to slowly circle out from where the disturbance had occurred. “And I’m wondering why the stage went back once whatever happened here was over. Porter’s station is closest from here. The sensible thing would have been to keep going.”
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