But Blake and Jessie were not close. They were like two cats spitting at each other. Or, Pace thought with growing certainty, like a stallion circling a mare in heat. The stallion knew what he wanted and wasn’t about to give up. But the mare was damn sure going to make him work for it.
Pace chuckled to himself. If Jessie realized he was comparing her to a mare in heat, she’d like as not slit his throat in his sleep. The old Jessie wouldn’t have. No, the old Jessie would have firmly lectured him on the impropriety of his thoughts. But the new Jessie, the one since Blake—Pace sighed. Blake was right. His baby sister had grown up. Jessie was a woman now, and it was obvious as hell to Pace just whose woman she was.
The question remained, was she Blake Renard’s woman in fact, or was she trying to keep it from happening? She acted like she was ready to shoot him between the eyes. Renard wasn’t much better. Another explosion was looming, Pace could feel it.
It happened the next afternoon when they stopped in the relative safety of a rocky canyon—with water, of course—to rest the horses and eat. Pace saw the fireworks coming and sat back to watch the show. Renard would have seen it, too, if he hadn’t had his back turned, tending the horses, when Jessie poured salt into his coffee.
Pace suspected she did it in retaliation for Renard complaining her coffee was too weak.
“A man likes his coffee strong,” Renard had told her three nights running. “Most women know that, but then, I wouldn’t expect you to.”
Jessie had fumed, Serena had covered her mouth and looked away, and their mother had merely gaped.
In truth, there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with Jessie’s coffee. It was just right—strong enough to melt a horseshoe. Pace figured Renard knew that, too.
Now the captain was going to pay.
A glance told Pace no one else had seen what Jessie had done.
“Come and get it,” Jessie called.
Blake gave each of the geldings hitched to the wagon a final pat, then took a deep breath. It was time to put himself within reach of her again. He’d pushed the pace of their travelling as hard as he dared, but still it seemed they would be forever getting back to Arizona. For two cents he’d ride off and leave them.
Hell. Who was he kidding? Even if Pace were strong enough—which he would be soon—Blake couldn’t leave one man to protect three women. He still had that uncanny feeling of being followed. And he still hadn’t spotted anyone on their back trail.
He wouldn’t leave them. Couldn’t. But that didn’t mean he had to like putting himself within reach of Jessie’s spiteful tongue. She’d gotten to him so often lately, she had him snapping back at her. No doubt the two of them sounded like a couple of brats fighting over a toy.
And he’d called her childish.
With a shake of his head, he joined the others around the small fire. Jessie handed him a cup of coffee. He accepted it, surprised by the offer. She usually poured everyone’s but his and left him to get his own. Maybe she was as tired of the bickering as he was. With a tiny spark of hope, he sat cross-legged on the ground and took a sip.
Damnation!
Coffee spewed from his mouth in a wide spray over the small fire. Blake choked and gagged and reached for the canteen behind him. It took four times of rinsing his mouth with fresh water to get rid of the vile taste. By the time he was finished, he was ready to throttle somebody. And he knew just the body to blame.
They sat around him, four Coltons. Pace looked everywhere but at Blake. Daniella and Serena murmured concern that seemed genuine and asked if Blake was all right. Miss Priss had her lips pursed and her eyebrows raised to heights that reeked of condescension.
“What the hell was that, salt?” he demanded.
She looked at him, the picture of innocence, and took a sip of her own coffee. “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about, Captain. The coffee tastes the same as it always does to me. But then, you have been complaining about it a great deal lately. Perhaps you should stick to water in the future.”
Blake rose slowly. “You little brat, you salted my coffee.”
Jessie dropped all pretense of innocence and rose to face him, hands on hips, nose in the air. “You had it coming, and you know it. And I’ll thank you to stop calling me names. I am not a brat, or a little girl, a child, an idiot, or any of the other dozen names you’ve called me lately.”
“You ornery little…if you were mine, I’d—”
“I’m not yours, Captain Blake Renard. I’m not your anything. I’m not your responsibility, your friend, or your wife,” she taunted.
“Wife? You’re damn sure not, thank God.”
“You should thank God. If I were your wife, I swear I’d push you off that damn cliff up there.”
“You wouldn’t have to push me, woman. If you were my wife, I’d by God jump.”
“Children, children,” Daniella said, half amused, half shocked. “What’s all this talk about a wife? Is there something the two of you would like to tell—”
Blake didn’t hear the rest of her words. Over Jessie’s right shoulder, on the rim of the cliff in question, he saw a flash. Sunlight off metal. And the silhouette of a man’s hat jutting barely into the skyline.
There was no time to warn anyone. Only time to act. With an oath, he grabbed Jessie, threw her to the ground, and landed on top of her. The first bullet hit ten feet beyond where they lay. If they’d still been standing it would have hit Jessie in the back.
Beneath him, Jessie struggled.
“Be still,” he hissed.
By the second bullet, Jessie understood. Someone was shooting at them! And Blake was shielding her with his body.
The third bullet came almost instantly after the second. She felt Blake flinch and grunt. Her mouth went dry. Was he hit?
The canyon erupted in what sounded like one continuous roll of thunder as Pace reached Blake’s repeating rifle and returned fire from behind the wagon. Then came Serena and Daniella, with handguns, firing from the cover of nearby rocks. Under the barrage of cover fire, Blake managed to drag Jessie into the rocks.
A short distance away, Serena swore.
“You winged him,” Pace called.
“Yeah, but I was aiming for his head. Guess I’m out of practice.”
On the canyon rim, Wade grunted. Son of a bitch. He drew off his bandanna and wrapped it around his upper arm to stop the bleeding. The wound was more of a nuisance than anything. For now. When the adrenaline wore off, though, he knew it would hurt.
What the hell was it about Blake? “I shoulda had him dead a half a dozen times by now.” So why was the bastard still alive? Wade wasn’t careless by nature, and he didn’t usually screw things up. But it seemed—
“Son of a bitch.” A bullet took his hat off. He hadn’t expected the women to shoot. Damn she-devils.
Down in the canyon, Blake was finally able to draw his gun and brace his back against a boulder. “You all right?” he asked Jessie.
She swallowed and nodded, her hair streaming like pure gold around her face. One cheek bore a smudge of dirt. He’d never wanted to kiss her more. “Thanks to you,” she whispered.
Blake leaned around the boulder and got off one shot before the pain seized him.
When he moved, Jessie stared for a full second before she realized that red smear on the rock where he’d been leaning was blood. “You’ve been hit,” she cried.
Blake grunted.
Frantic, Jessie pushed and shoved and tugged until she found where the blood oozed from his left shoulder blade.
“Leave off, Jessie. You can play nursemaid later.”
“Fine.” She threw her hands up and scooted away, stung by his tone. “Bleed to death. See if I care.”
“You do, you know,” he said as he eased around to take another shot at the gunman on the rim.
“Do what?”
He squeezed off a shot and was rewarded with the sight of a rifle falling to the canyon floor. “Care. About me.”
Jessie struggled to
keep from crying. “Not on your life, buster.”
No more shots came from the gunman.
Blake turned and looked at her. “You’re still a lousy liar.”
“Go to hell.”
A streamer of dust rose from beyond the rim. Pace cursed and dashed for Blake’s horse to go after the fleeing gunman. Blake cursed at not being able to go with him, but he knew he’d be useless. Jessie cursed, because she knew she wasn’t going to be able to just sit there and let Blake bleed.
“Is everybody all right?” Daniella called. “Jessie?”
“More or less,” Jessie called, reaching for Blake’s back. “Where’s that big knife you always carry?” she asked him. “I need to cut your shirt away.”
“I don’t have the knife anymore, and you’re not cutting up my shirt.”
“Jeeze, Mother,” Serena complained. “They’re at it again. Can’t you make them play nice?”
“What I want to know,” Daniella said, rising from her place in the rocks, “is what they’re playing. Who is undressing, and why?”
“Mama, shame on you. Could you get the bandages, please?” Jessie was proud of how steady her voice was. She wished she could say the same for her hands. And her heart. The whole left side of the back of Blake’s shirt was soaked in blood.
Serena rushed for the extra saddle bags containing bandages while Daniella hurried to Blake and Jessie. “Oh, Blake! You’re hurt. Why didn’t you say something?”
“I was too busy ducking, at the time.”
Jessie took the canteen and a rag from Serena. “You mean you were too busy protecting me. Saving my life again. Playing hero.”
Blake gave a crooked grin. “Honey, a hero is the last thing I am. But then, you know that, don’t you?”
“Oh, shut up.”
“How bad is it?” Serena asked.
“I can’t tell,” Jessie said. She met Blake’s gaze steadily. “You sure you don’t want me to cut your shirt off?”
“No need.” He reached to tug his shirt tail from his pants. Pain made his breath hiss out between his teeth.
“Jessie, help him,” Daniella said.
A quiver of reaction raced through Jessie. She knew he was hurting, bleeding. But that didn’t keep her from remembering the last time she’d helped him take off his shirt, nor the way his hot, damp skin had felt beneath her fingers. Didn’t keep her from remembering the feel of his smooth, bare chest pressed intimately against her naked breasts. How could she see him, touch him, in front of her mother and sister, without giving her feelings away? Feelings she didn’t want, but couldn’t help.
“Never mind,” Blake said, trying again to pull his shirt free.
“No.” Jessie shoved the canteen and rag into Serena’s hands. “Hold these.” Then she moved Blake’s hands aside. “I’ll…I’ll do it.”
She had to reach clear around his waist to pull the shirt free. Her nose pressed close to his shoulder. He smelled of sagebrush and dust, leather and horse and man. And blood.
As carefully as she could, and with encouragement and unwanted instructions from her mother and sister, Jessie pulled the shirt up and got his good arm free. Then she worked the shirt over his head and carefully down his other arm. She bit her lower lip. She was hurting him, she knew. He tensed once, but made no sound.
He was darker than she’d expected. His back was almost as dark as his face and hands. Coppery. She hadn’t realized that, in the dark, but she remembered the feel of it. And the taste.
She looked up to find him watching her over his shoulder. With stinging cheeks, she began cleaning the wound. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of backing off and asking her mother or sister to take care of him.
The bullet had torn through flesh and bounced off his shoulder blade. The deep gouge was three inches long and bled profusely. It took her several agonizing moments to clean the bits of blue fabric from his shirt out of the wound. When she finished, more sweat than was warranted by the heat trickled down her face and between her breasts.
Jessie folded a thick bandage, and Serena held it in place while Jessie wrapped strips of cloth around Blake’s chest and shoulder to hold it in place. It had to hurt badly, but he made no sound.
Hoofbeats. Blake and the three women each grabbed a gun. But it was Pace. He shook his head. “Must be nearly a dozen canyons feeding into this one a half a mile west of here. All rocky, with blind twists and turns. I figured it was better for us to get moving than for me to track him down.”
In Pace’s eyes, Blake saw that the two men’s minds ran together. Get the women out of here.
“By the way,” Pace told Blake. “That was a hell of a shot you made, knocking the rifle out of his hands.”
“Must have been luck. I could barely see the rifle.”
“Well, you hit it, all right. It’s useless, all torn up. But then, so’s the hand that was holding it.”
“The hand?”
Pace smiled. A cold, hard smile. An Apache smile, Blake thought. “Well, the thumb at least,” Pace said. “The tip of his thumb is laying over there in the rocks. I’d have brought it to you, but Mother frowns on fleshy trophies.”
“Pace!” Daniella’s eyes widened. “Such talk. You’ll have Blake thinking we’re nothing but a bunch of heathens.”
A scant few minutes later the fire was out and the wagon was rolling down the canyon. Pace rode slightly ahead. Serena rode the other horse beside the wagon while Daniella drove. Blake, much to his chagrin, was relegated to the bed of hay in the back, with Jessie beside him to see that he stayed put.
“I feel about as useless as a rock,” he grumbled.
“That’s because you are,” Jessie retorted. She raised a hand to stop his answer. “It’s not your fault. You’ve been shot. I’d wager that by now the pain reaches from the top of your head clear down to your heels.”
“How would you know?” he grumbled, not about to admit she was right. He was propped on his right side because lying on his left shoulder didn’t bear thinking about. He had on his only other shirt, while the one he’d been wearing lay wadded up in a ball behind the sack of grain until Jessie could wash it.
Despite the pain, he fought a grin. So, she wanted to wash his shirt, huh? Maybe getting shot was worth it.
Jessie sat beside him and kept her gaze trained on the canyon rim. There were things she needed to say to him, and they weren’t going to come easy. He still terrified her. Or rather, the things he made her feel terrified her. Why that should be, she had no idea. She certainly hadn’t been afraid of anything the night they’d…oh, Lord. She hadn’t been thinking that night. She’d let her emotions rule.
She shifted her gaze to the other side of the canyon. “You saved my life again.” She swallowed. “That first bullet would have—”
“I know what it would have done, Jessie. Don’t think about it.”
“I can’t help it. I’ve been so spiteful and mean lately, and then you go and do something like that. It makes me feel ashamed. I’m sorry, Blake. About the coffee, about everything. I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately.”
“I do.”
She was spilling her heart out to him and he was laughing?
He wiggled his eyebrows at her and put his hand boldly on her waist. “Me.”
Jessie didn’t know whether to slap him or laugh. He couldn’t possibly mean that the way it sounded. But by the heat in his eyes, she knew he did. “Stop it,” she hissed.
Blake sobered. “Is that what you want, Jessie? What you really want? Do you want me to leave you alone, to forget everything that’s happened?”
Did she? If he left her alone, if he were out of her life and heart, maybe these awful, emotional ups and downs would smooth out and she could be herself again. She wouldn’t have to hurt any longer over the way he’d deceived her.
“Do you want me to pretend we’ve never—”
“Yes!” No! But hurt was still in her, the feeling that he’d used her, that she couldn’t trust him.
She didn’t think she’d ever get over it. Wasn’t sure she wanted to. Knew she’d be better off if she didn’t. “Yes. That’s exactly what I want. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
His face hardened. “You got it, honey. I won’t bother you again.”
The days that followed the ambush were long and hot. New Mexico was dry and rugged, every dusty inch of it they crossed. With the exception of the places Blake chose to camp. There, they always had water. But there were no other surprises along the trail. Except that Blake kept his word and didn’t bother Jessie again. She hadn’t really expected him to leave her alone.
But it’s what I wanted. Wasn’t it?
While it was true that she breathed easier knowing he wasn’t going to pursue her, she couldn’t deny she was disappointed. Not that she would have given in to him. No. She wouldn’t.
But she missed his…friendship, she supposed. Every day he seemed to draw more and more into himself. He no longer sat at night and talked with Pace over a cup of coffee. When Serena spoke of her sons, he made excuses to leave camp. When her mother tried to draw him out he answered with as few words as possible.
It wasn’t just Jessie he was shutting out, it was everyone, and she didn’t understand why.
“What happens when you get back to Fort Bowie?” Pace asked Blake one night. “We’ll be there tomorrow.”
Blake merely shrugged.
“No one’s going to thank you for helping me. Fact is, you’re liable to end up court martialed.”
Jessie had forgotten. She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten the consequences Blake would undoubtedly suffer for helping them take Pace out of Fort Sam Houston. Maybe she’d wanted to forget.
Blake just shrugged again.
“Why’d you do it?” Pace asked. “You hate Apaches.”
“You’re only half Apache.”
Pace shared a wry grin with Serena and their mother. “That usually only makes people hate us more.”
Blake drained the rest of his coffee and rose. “I’ll take the first watch.”
The air had yet to settle from his abrupt departure when Jessie followed him. “Don’t do it, Blake.”
He stood a dozen yards from camp with his head back, looking at the stars. “Don’t do what?”
Apache-Colton Series Page 134