“See that you don’t waste any time,” Adams told him. “And see me again before you leave.” He inclined his head toward the Gamble Line office where the supply wagon sat. “I’m going to find out where that wagon’s headed and who’s going to be with it.”
***
An hour after supper at Porter’s station Teddy got around to asking Rhys why he had stopped the supply wagon to talk to Adams. They had walked out by the corral after Port shooed them out so he could get the supper dishes washed and, as Teddy well knew, so he could have his nightly sips from the demijohn of homebrew he kept locked in a cupboard.
“Is that the reason you have had so little to say to me since we left Wishbone,” Rhys inquired.
Teddy climbed up on the top rail of the corral fence. The bright silver moon was lighting her face in a way that could lead a man to make foolish promises if he weren’t careful. Rhys took a deep breath and swore to himself he’d be careful.
“That’s half the reason,” Teddy told him. “The other is that you can’t seem to get it through your thick skull that I don’t like being pawed and kissed and—”
“Made love to?” He smiled.
She frowned. “That’s right. I’ve got no use for it.”
He strode up close and rested his hands on the fence rail on either side of her. “What you’ve got is a bad memory,” he said, his voice sliding down low, taking her heart along for the ride.
He stepped closer, brushing against the inside of her knees. She began to shake and knew he could feel it. He knew she was lying, that she wanted to slide into his arms, that if he pressed her she would slip away somewhere in the moonlight and welcome what she had decried.
She was angry at herself and at him and it was the anger that saved her. She quickly swung her long legs over the fence and dropped down behind it, braced against it and faced him with the rails between them. “I remember you never answered my question about Adams,” she said.
“He offered me fifty thousand dollars for my shares,” he said smoothly.
Teddy lost her breath. “What did you say?” The shares were worth it but she would have a hard time coming up with that much credit even when things settled down.
He propped his elbows on the fence rail and leaned in close. “That you could give me a better deal.”
She had no clear idea when or how she could top Adams’s offer but she boldly told him she would. Teddy was overwhelmed with gratitude and too choked up to speak for a moment. He could have sold her out, left Wishbone with fifty thousand dollars in his pocket instead of driving a supply wagon across the desert. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you’re willing to wait. I promise I’ll make the wait worth your while.”
“I’m counting on that,” he replied. “You making it worth my while.”
She started to smile then realized what he was hinting. She stared up at him. Her eyes were growing dark with anger, her temper flaring like a geyser. When he reached through the fence rails for her, a move she expected, she cursed him and ducked.
A shot whizzed in front of Rhys’s face. “Sacré bleu—Teddy—” He thought he’d finally pushed her too far but then another shot sounded and he realized it was rifle fire. He threw himself on the ground. Teddy was already there, pistol in hand, but both of them knew that handguns couldn’t match the rifle’s range. Their best chance of survival was getting behind cover.
Like a pair of snakes they slithered across the corral, beneath the nervous, stamping horses and toward the small shed where Port kept tack and feed.
Another shot splintered a fence post and sent the horses bolting to one end of the corral, exposing Rhys and Teddy to the moonlight and the rifleman. A fourth shot blasted the heel off Teddy’s boot. She lunged into the shed. Rhys plowed in behind her.
“Son of a bitch!” she said, settling in a crouch and examining her ruined boot. “These were new!”
Chapter 33
From a craggy hilltop overlooking the change station, Rennie raised his rifle to his shoulder and aimed at the window of the shed. No return fire had come from the small building, but several reports had rung out from the adobe building where the station master lived.
“I’ll keep these two on their knees, Juan.” He jumped aside as a shot raised sparks on the bare rock beside him. “You ease around and git that man with the rifle. He ain’t a half-bad shot.”
“Sí. I take care of that,” Juan replied. Moving swiftly on his bowed legs he started down the back side of the hill and, keeping to cover, worked his way toward the house.
Alternating the direction of his aim, Rennie pumped shots into the shed and the window of the adobe building, protecting Juan until the short Mexican assassin had made his way to the door of the house. Brandishing a pistol in each hand Juan blasted off the lock, kicked in the door and fired four shots into Porter Landau.
Taking a protected position behind the adobe walls, Juan then aimed his pistols at the shed and peppered it with shots at window level. Rennie’s rifle shots quickly joined the heavy barrage. Wood chips and harness showered down on Teddy and Rhys, who could only fire back blindly through the walls. Rhys could tell the rifle shots were getting closer, indicating the first gunman was moving down the hill to join his compatriot.
While Teddy kept returning fire, Rhys hurriedly reloaded his empty revolver, filling the chambers with his last round of ammunition. He fired judiciously as the gun battle continued. Taking his lead Teddy slowed down her firing too, but was soon down to her last round as well.
“Got any more bullets?” she mumbled between dodging flying slivers of wood and Rennie and Juan’s rapid shots.
“Four,” Rhys said. He heard one of the men running toward the shed and fired two more times in the direction the sound had come from.
Teddy emptied her gun. A few more shots tore into the building then silence came. The calm was worse than the gunfire because both knew it was temporary, a foreshadowing of worse things to come. Teddy felt her heart beating hard enough to shake the shed down around them. She heard Rhys’s deep breaths reverberating in the small, dark space. “This is one hell of a way to die,” she said angrily. “Caught like two rats in a box.”
“We are not going to die,” Rhys told her. “I—”
The door flew in before he could tell her why not. Rhys saw a man dart away from the door’s wreckage. He fired through the wall to his right and heard a scream of fury and pain. “I am hit! Rennie!” Juan yelled.
Rhys listened for an answering voice but Rennie replied with another barrage from the rifle, this time blasting a plate-sized hole in the back of the shed only inches above Rhys’s and Teddy’s heads. Rhys threw himself over Teddy but held his last shot for a sure target. He got it an instant later when Rennie fired through the window. Rhys fired back, but Rennie’s last shot had winged his arm and the bullet he had saved for the rifle-wielding killer went astray.
Shouting at Teddy to stay down, Rhys scrambled to his feet, prepared to make a last defense, but Rennie had already marched into the shed. The rangy gunman never slowed until he was over them. He swung the stock of his rifle up, striking Rhys in mid-leap, squarely beneath the chin. As Rhys fell Rennie swung down and clubbed him on the back of the head.
“Jeez!” Teddy, caught beneath Rhys, landed a furious kick on Rennie’s shin earning herself an ear-ringing thump on the head with the rifle stock. Stunned, she fell back in all the dirt and litter.
“Kill them!” Juan dragged himself to the door and shouted at Rennie. “Or I shoot him myself.” A bloodstained hand covered the wound in his side. A gun dangled loosely in the other hand.
Rennie cursed and took the weapon from Juan. “No, my friend,” he said. “Taviz wants these two alive for a time and neither of us wants to make Taviz mad.”
None too gently, Rennie caught the dazed Teddy by the collar and dragged her out while Juan, cursing and complaining, shuffled off to get the horses they had left up in the hills. Before Teddy came to enough to p
ut up a fight, Rennie bound her hands and feet and loaded her on one of the horses from the corral. Rhys got the same treatment and no consideration given for his wound. Though he was not conscious, blood ebbed freely from the bullet hole in his biceps as he was bound and thrown over a horse.
Rhys had not regained consciousness when, an hour or so later, he and Teddy were hauled into Taviz’s secluded camp. Teddy had come to long before and had put up such a fuss that Rennie had stopped and put a gag in her mouth.
“Where is Taviz?” Juan demanded of the ebony-haired woman who sat alone on a blanket by the campfire. His side hurt and he wanted to see those responsible for his wound get some of Taviz’s hospitality.
“Taviz ride into town,” the pretty, young Mexican woman replied. Taviz had sent one of the men back to the main camp for her when he got tired of sleeping alone. “He want more whiskey,” she said, rising and swinging her hips as she walked over to the riders. All of them knew Adams had ordered the banditos to stay clear of Wishbone. Juan reminded the woman of this. She tossed back her head. “He don’t care who tell him to stay in the hills when he want whiskey,” she said.
Juan climbed off his horse and dropped down on the blanket where the woman had been, demanding that she take care of his wound.
“And get us something to eat,” Rennie added.
The woman made no immediate move to do either, having gotten curious about the prisoners. Easing around the horses she looked at Rhys first, catching his black locks in her fist and raising his head smiling prettily when she saw his handsome face. “This one we keep,” she said. “This one we send back.” She roughly poked Teddy’s leg. “We don’t want her.”
“Taviz wants her,” Juan returned biting his lip as he pulled the blood-soaked bandage from his side and began searching the woman’s belongings for something to replace them with.
“Taviz got me!” The Mexican woman thumped her chest with her fist then hurried back to the blanket and snatched her possessions away from Juan. Among them she found an old scarf and reluctantly gave it to the wounded man. Almost immediately she began tearing a long, homespun skirt into strips. Juan reached for them but, frowning at him, she jerked them away. “These are for him,” she said nodding toward Rhys.
Juan was satisfied, after a good look with the aid of the firelight, that his wound was not life-threatening, and that the bleeding had at last been stanched. He stretched out to sleep. Rennie dragged Rhys off the horse and pulled him into a shallow cave with a mouth so narrow he had to bend the man double to get him through the door. Teddy, hindered by her bonds, was forced to crawl into the cave. Rennie, who had come out after taking Rhys inside, squeezed in behind her carrying a brightly flaming torch lit from the camp-fire. He planted the torch in the soft earth of the cave’s floor and stood over Teddy, with his legs braced wide apart.
Teddy’s eyes blazed at him, relaying all the fury and hatred she could not shout out with the gag in her mouth.
“I can tell you’d like some live company in here, little spitfire.” He knelt down and ran his hand down her shoulder, across her heaving breasts, down her long, buckskin-clad legs, feeling, squeezing until he reached the ropes at her ankles. “But we got a rule that Taviz gets a woman first and I got better sense than to break it.” He drew a knife out of his boot, tested the point of it on a callused finger and smiled. “I want you to know I’m looking forward to my turn. Ain’t you?”
Teddy squirmed fitfully and mumbled into the gag, then stiffened and got stone still when Rennie walked off and pointed the gleaming knife at Rhys. Her heart started beating again when he cut the bindings on Rhys’s hands and feet. A minute later he did the same for Teddy giving her a warning, as the knife sliced through the rope, that anyone who came out of the cave before daylight would be shot. When he was done, Teddy snatched the gag from her mouth, then moaned aloud as blood began to flow freely but painfully into her swollen hands and feet.
Without complaint Rennie let Taviz’s woman take the prisoners water and bind Rhys’s arm, but when she was done he again demanded food.
Several hours later, long after Teddy had ventured near the mouth of the cave to confirm that Rennie waited there ready to shoot, Rhys regained consciousness. He came to, slowly. His head and jaw were throbbing. His first sight was of Teddy, sad-eyed as a little girl who had lost her favorite doll. She was sitting over him, bathing the lumps on his head with a wrung-out cloth. “It’s about time,” she whispered when she saw his heavy lids open. “I thought you were going to die on me.”
“Not while you owe me,” Rhys said hoarsely.
“Ha!” she said. “The way I see it you owe me, for getting us into this.” As she spoke she shimmied over closer to him so she could be sure of not being heard by Rennie.
“How did I—” He tried to sit up, but quickly got reminded that he would have to move slowly and favor his left arm.
“You’d try to seduce a duck, I reckon,” she said disgustedly. “Anyhow if you hadn’t been sweet-talking and turning those blue eyes on me out there by the corral I might have been alert to somebody watching.”
Rhys smiled in the darkness, the only thing he could do that didn’t hurt. “So you admit you feel something for me?”
She plopped the cold, wet cloth on top of his head. “I feel like killing you myself, for the hundredth time,” she ground out. “You got any idea how we’re going to get away from here before that Taviz fellow gets back and slits both our throats?”
Rhys caught her hand. “You liked making love to me, too, didn’t you Teddy?”
“For all the difference it makes now,” she said dispassionately. “It wasn’t too bad.”
“It was perfect and you know it.”
“All right!” She blurted out the words then clamped her hand over her mouth and dropped her voice to a raspy whisper. “It was perfect. Now can you stop crowing like a rooster let loose in the hen yard and help me think of how we can get away.”
“I knew it was perfect.”
He put his arm around her and caressed her face with his fingers. She was cold and trembling.
“I’m scared,” she admitted.
He pulled her close, laid her head against his shoulder, completely forgetting the burning pain in his arm. Her hair had come loose from the braid and spilled over his face and hands. The delectable scent of it, flowers and sunshine, her scent, filled him and made his heart thunder wildly. He kissed her face, then caught the fullness of her lips beneath his and kissed her deeply, passionately, savoring her, drawing strength from her as if he feasted on manna.
“We have long lives to live, Teddy,” he whispered. “We’ll get away.”
***
Taviz found them locked together and sleeping early the next morning. He pushed them apart with his boot and ordered Teddy up while he rested the barrel of his rifle against Rhys’s throat. Half of Rhys’s shirt was blood-soaked and judging by the look of his face there was more blood on the shirt than was left inside him. His eyes had rolled back and he moaned weakly, frightening Teddy, who feared his wound had started bleeding again in the night.
Taviz cautiously judged him hurt badly enough not to be a serious threat. “You move, I shoot your hands off,” he said brusquely. “Then you have to write with your toes, ehhh. Me, I don’t care, but Adams he might be disappointed if you can’t sign your name to the papers he’s got for you.”
“I knew that bastard was behind all this!” Teddy shouted. Scowling like one of hell’s furies she was backed against the cave wall where Taviz had shoved her. She was defiant to the last, and stood proudly, hands on her hips, feet apart, head thrown back. “You can tell that sidewinder he won’t get me to sign anything.”
Taviz turned, getting his first good look at Teddy as the sun crested the nearby hills and flooded into the cave. He was used to dark-haired, dark-eyed women. With her honey-colored tresses and flashing green eyes, she was a tempting change. His gaze slid lewdly over every inch of her. He liked all that he saw, thou
gh to his mind he didn’t see nearly enough of her.
Taking his gun off Rhys, Taviz stepped closer to Teddy, grabbed a handful of her hair, slid his dirty fingers through it, then gave it a hard tug that jerked her head to one side. “He don’t want you to sign nothing,” the bandito informed her. “He gives you to me.”
Teddy understood at once that Adams intended to force Rhys to hand over his shares. Once he had those he didn’t care who owned the others. He’d have enough say in the company to merge the Gamble Line with Adams Overland or see that it went bust. She was expendable already. Rhys would be too, as soon as Adams got his shares.
For a few seconds Teddy forgot the predicament she was in and was overcome by a flurry of murderous thoughts involving Parrish Adams. He’d hated her father for turning down his original offer. Now he was playing out that hatred on her. Well, damn his black soul! He wouldn’t get away with it! She swore out loud, though she wasn’t aware she was shouting out her defiance until Taviz told her to shut up.
She came to her senses when she saw the barrel of his rifle turn toward her and slowly drop down. All three of them followed the path of it with their eyes. Teddy trembled in astonishment and fear as the cold metal slid between her spread legs, sidled up the inside of one thigh and bumped to a stop against her pubic bone. Taviz licked his thick lips. “You talk too much but I think I like what I got, ehhh?”
Teddy shoved the rifle barrel away and, challenging Taviz with a scathing look, squared her shoulders. “You get nothing!”
Taviz threw his head back and laughed loud enough to start a rock slide. “She’s gutsy, this one. I ain’t had a gutsy woman in a long while.” Licentiously eying her, touching her from head to toe in his mind, Taviz ran his tongue over his lips and imagined what it would be like to have the gutsy, honey-haired woman beneath him squirming and shouting and fighting him. He did not want to wait long to find out. He made a cautious glance over his shoulder at the helpless Frenchman, daring the moaning man to move if he wanted to live any longer. Taviz laughed as Teddy cursed him. He shifted the rifle beneath his left arm, locked his finger on the trigger and reached for the tempting woman with his freed right hand. He caught her by the collar, ripped her shirt open with one swift pull and plunged his dirty fingers deep inside.
Devil Moon Page 27