He knew he should regret taking her more than once; she was going to be sore as hell, even without straddling the horse. But how was a man supposed to resist a woman like his firefly? He had tried to leave her alone, but he would have had to have been dead to resist when she’d traced her tongue along the shape of his ear and whispered, “Love me again, Pace. Love me again.” His body had instantly demonstrated, quite visibly, that he was anything but dead.
He’d thought surely after loving her a second time, only moments after the first, that his body would have been satisfied. That he would have been incapable of more. They’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms, but he woke near sunset to find her tracing the tiny scars on his backside, scars she’d given him years ago when he had knocked Matt across the room and Jo, in defense of her father, had jabbed him with her dinner fork.
Feeling her slender fingers on his hip had been one of the most arousing things that he’d ever known. But he’d loved her twice already, and she wasn’t used to it. He might have been able to ignore the need she’d awakened, but when she leaned down and kissed each of the four tiny white marks, he’d lost control.
Just remembering what had followed made sweat bead along his upper lip.
Protected against the chill of the desert night by Pace’s arms and the blanket he kept wrapped around her shoulders, Joanna leaned against his chest and traced a finger along his lip and felt the moisture. “The night is cold. What are you thinking about that makes you sweat?”
His face was in shadow, but she caught the gleam of white teeth when he smiled down at her. “Oh, a little of this, a little of that.”
“Uh huh, and it makes you sweat?”
“It does when it’s a little of this.” He brushed his lips once across hers. “And a little of that.” Letting the horse pick his own way up the hill, Pace brushed his lips across hers again, then kissed her deeply, tasting her sweetness with his tongue, and worked his hand beneath the blanket until he cupped one firm, full breast in his palm.
“Good Lord,” Joanna murmured when they came up for air. “Now you’re making me sweat.”
He nibbled her lips one more time, and grinned. “Good. Hold that thought until sunrise.”
Joanna placed her hand over his that covered her breast. “How long until sunrise?”
“Hours.” He pulled his hand from her breast and tucked the blanket more firmly around her shoulders. “Decades. Too damn long, so quit tempting me.”
“Me? I was just sitting here.”
“Yeah. Like I said…”
Before midnight they reached the river Pace had told Joanna about. It was narrow, shallow, muddy, and easily crossed. By sunup they had long since skirted the town of Janos and had made it across the Great Divide into land that became more wild and broken with every mile.
Pace had a decision to make. Did he answer the calling of his heart as Joanna urged him to and take her to Dee-O-Det, or did he get her straight home as fast as he could? He knew he should do the latter, but…
“It’s time to decide,” he told Joanna. “Southwest into the mountains and Dee-O-Det, or west and north, toward home?”
From the comfort of his arms, Joanna’s answer came swiftly. “To the mountain stronghold where Dee-O-Det lives. Take me to Pa-Gotzin-Kay, Fire Seeker.”
If she had needed reassurance for her decision, she had it in the look of love and gratitude in Pace’s eyes.
She’d never called him Fire Seeker before. The sound of his Apache name on her lips made his chest tighten. “Are you sure?” he asked, giving her a chance to change her mind. “It’ll add a few days to the trip home, and everybody at the ranch is worried as hell about you.”
“We can send a telegram when we hit the border and tell them we’re on our way home. Right after we find a preacher.”
One corner of Pace’s mouth quirked suspiciously. “Two weddings, before we even get home? Not taking any chances, are you? You’re gonna hogtie me tight.”
Joanna narrowed her eyes in a mock threat. “Hogtie you, brand you, whatever I have to do to make sure everybody, including you, understands that you belong to me.”
“Ah, Firefly,” he said softly. “I’m the last person you need to convince. You’ll never get rid of me. To the mountains, it is.”
Pace headed for the highest ground to check their back trail again. Having seen not so much as a puff of dust behind them in days, he didn’t expect to find anything this time, either. Surely Juerta had given up and gone home, but Pace wanted to be sure, one last time, before heading for Pa-Gotzin-Kay. The last thing the band in the mountains needed was for Pace to leave a trail to their location and let the Mexicans realize they had Apaches living in their midst.
At the base of a tumble of boulders on a rocky hilltop, Pace dismounted. Taking his binoculars, he climbed the pile of boulders and scanned the land around him. In a dry wash below, a coyote sniffed a bush, and on the mesa to the east, a mule deer nibbled at the scant grass. There was no telltale rising dust to indicate riders. No sign of man at all. He checked in all directions, just to be sure.
To the south a small cloud of dust was just settling in the gap between two hills. Too small a cloud to be made by Juerta’s men. Probably a couple of deer, or maybe a prospector. Satisfied, Pace climbed back down to Joanna, remounted, and headed southwest into the mighty Sierra Madres. In these mountains, Apaches had roamed free for centuries until the coming of the white man. Here, too, Pace had spent much of his youth and early adulthood. He knew these mountains as well as his mother knew her own rose garden.
There would be no more riding at night now that they were entering the mountains. The trails, while familiar to Pace, were too dangerous. He called a brief halt at midmorning to eat and let the horse rest, then they pushed on.
Just after noon they were climbing the shoulder of a mountain on a trail no wider than God’s little finger when Pace felt an icy wave of awareness wash over him. Snapping his head up, he drew the horse to a halt and sniffed the wind.
In his arms, Jo stiffened. “What’s wrong?”
Pace shook his head. “I don’t know. But something…” He let his words trail off and searched inside himself for the answer. It wasn’t long in coming, and it made his blood ran cold. “Juerta.”
“What? Where? How?”
“I don’t know. Here. Close. I don’t know.” The flesh on the back of his neck prickled. He urged the horse forward, more than eager to get off the exposed shoulder.
Around an outcropping of granite, the trail broadened into a wide meadow between two peaks much taller than the one they’d just passed. Bordered along its length by oak woodlands on both sides, the mile-wide meadow stretched west for nearly three miles as it climbed toward another low pass. Pace hesitated, searching the lines of trees extending east to west along both sides of the meadow. He saw nothing that shouldn’t be there, but he waited another moment, waited for whatever it was inside him that knew things he shouldn’t know to tell him if it was safe.
His instincts hummed like a wire pulled too tight. What he felt was mixed, as if the safety of the meadow was surrounded by danger. The only thing he knew for certain was that whatever the danger was, it was close, and getting closer. Behind them. To the right. To the left. The only safety, and it was questionable, temporary at best, lie straight ahead, at the other end of the meadow. Pace didn’t need a printed invitation—there was no time to follow the treeline, where tracks might be camouflaged among the decaying leaves beneath the trees. He would have to take the direct, most exposed route, right up the center of the long, grassy clearing.
He pulled out his pistol and checked the load. Satisfied, he holstered it, then pulled a second pistol from his saddlebag and checked it.
Joanna’s eyes widened at the precaution. “Let me on behind,” she whispered, her gaze darting from shadow to rock to tree.
“And have you shot again?” he hissed sharply, tucking the second pistol back into the saddlebag, but leaving the flap on the
bag loose. “No way in hell, Firefly.”
“You need your hands free, and I need to be able to hold on,” Joanna insisted, keeping her voice low. “We can’t do either with me sitting sideways in front of you.” Without waiting for his help, she slid beneath the arm he held before her. She landed hard. Pain shot up her shins to her back teeth, but she swallowed her cry, not wanting to upset Pace. Imitating him, she pulled her pistol from the belt across her shoulders and checked the load.
“Damn you, Jo, get back up here!”
“Give me your arm so I can swing up behind you.”
For a moment, Pace squeezed his eyes shut in frustration so acute it cut off his breath. He didn’t want her shielding his back! He wanted her tucked against his chest with his arms wrapped protectively around her. But damned if she wasn’t right—she needed to be able to hold on tight, and he needed both hands to guide the horse and maybe to shoot. She would have to ride behind.
He held out his arm and pulled her up behind him, but he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one damned bit.
When she was settled and her arms were wrapped tight around his waist, he slid his rifle from the boot and levered a round into the chamber. Gun in his right hand, reins in his left, he jabbed his bootheels into the buckskin. The horse leaped into an all out gallop across the high meadow, leaving a trail in the tall grass that a blind man could follow. There was no other choice.
The buckskin proved his mettle. He’d been on the trail all day and the previous night, carrying two riders, climbing higher and higher with each mile, yet he acted like the headlong gallop up the meadow was no more than an ordinary romp. He stretched out his neck and raced the wind, his breath clear and strong, unaffected by the six-thousand-foot altitude. It was a damn good thing, Pace thought grimly, because there was no place to go but up, and where they were headed, it was a damn sight higher than this.
Tall grass swept past as the horse thundered up the meadow, while trees blurred off to the sides. Overhead the sky was clear above the ragged mountaintops ahead.
Against his back Pace felt Joanna’s heart thundering as hard and fast as the pounding hooves. His own heart beat just as fast while his eyes darted right, left, ahead, alert, watchful, searching for trouble. His scalp shrank against his skull as he waited for the whining impact of a bullet, but none came.
The meadow ended in a grassy saddle that hung above the meadow and connected the two mountains that towered over it. From here there were three trails to chose from, any of which could conceal at least a half dozen men waiting in ambush. The skin along the back of Pace’s neck crawled. He slowed the horse and reined him toward the center trail because it was the least rugged of the three. It followed a dry watercourse up the side of the mountain for several hundred yards before climbing out, over, then down into another long valley a thousand feet higher than the meadow.
The steep sides of the watercourse offered concealment, but when the trail led up and over the side, they would be exposed for a good half mile. At the spot where the trail started up the side of the ravine, Pace drew to a halt and slid from the saddle, never loosening his grip on the rifle. With his free hand, he dug out his binoculars again.
“Stay here,” he told Jo tersely, “and stay down. I’m going for a look.”
Joanna nodded and moved into the saddle.
Pace scrambled up the east side of the ravine and swore at the three-mile swath of flattened grass they’d left up the length of the meadow below. At the base of the meadow, the spot where Joanna had slid from the horse and climbed on behind Pace, a flash of light caught his eye.
Not a mere flash, he realized, swearing viciously under his breath, but a series of flashes. Signals.
Pace scanned the area and felt his blood turn to ice. More signals flashed from every direction—from the side of the mountain to the south of the meadow; from the side of the mountain to the north. Hellfire and damnation, enough signals for a whole fucking army.
On his right, out of the mouth of the trail that led south, rode two Mexicans leading a pair of spare horses between them.
From the look of them, they were Juerta’s men.
Sonofabitch.
Two more men entered the meadow below from the trail heading northwest. They, too, lead spare mounts.
Four men in sight, three more manning the signal mirrors. Seven total out of Juerta’s two dozen. How many lay in wait just over the crest of the trail Pace had chosen? The odds didn’t bear considering, yet he and Jo sure as hell couldn’t sit in this damned ravine. The flashing signals would surely call in more men. Even without more men, the four below might think nothing of rushing the ravine. They had to know where their quarry was.
Sonofabitch.
Juerta must have picked up their trail some time back. Hell, it wouldn’t have taken a genius to figure out where they were headed. With two dozen men and spare horses, Juerta could have easily split his forces and covered not only the mesas along the border, but most of the trails into the mountains, as well. It looked like that was exactly what he’d done.
The only thing that remained to be seen was how far away the others were. With Joanna along, Pace wasn’t willing to gamble that they were far at all. The four he could see were more than enough to deal with while trying to keep Joanna safe.
Damn his soul to hell for a fool, he knew he should have taken Jo straight home. But no, he’d wanted a few more days of having her all to himself. He’d wanted to take her to Dee-O-Det. He’d wanted to have her well and truly bound to him before he got her home and Matt started in on them.
If anything happened to Jo because of his own selfishness, Pace would never forgive himself.
Even if the men below didn’t rush them, he and Jo would be sitting ducks the minute they followed the trail up out of the ravine. They didn’t have much choice but to follow the trail, for the ravine flattened out a hundred yards beyond where he’d left Jo. Then there was nothing but bare mountainside, with no more than a juniper here, a boulder there, for cover. Nothing at all large enough to hide a horse.
Sonofabitch.
He ducked down below the rim of the ravine and turned to check on Jo. Good girl, Firefly, he thought. That white blouse and red hair would stand out like a beacon on the barren mountainside; she’d covered her head and upper body with his gray blanket. If they got out of this alive, he’d kiss her for that.
Below him, at the base of the trail, shod hooves rang out against rock. They were coming.
Joanna!
There wasn’t time for anything else to run through his mind but her name. In the next instant, one rider, then a second, rounded the bend a dozen yards below Pace’s position. The lead man looked startled to see Pace taking aim. He died that way. Before the second man could draw his pistol, Pace fired again, hitting him dead center in the chest and knocking him from his horse.
The fleeting thought of an extra horse ran through Pace’s mind, but the Mexicans’ horses turned and raced back the way they’d come.
Shit.
At the sound of a pistol shot, Pace whirled toward the opposite side of the ravine, where he’d left Jo. A puff of smoke wafted from the barrel of her pistol. Up the trail, a man fell from the saddle. The man behind him jerked back on his reins. Pace fired before the bastard could turn the horse back up the trail. Neither of these two men had been leading spare horses. Both of their mounts skidded down the mountainside on their hocks.
Nine men total, four down. Two more, close, at the foot of the trail. Fifteen men, including Juerta, unaccounted for.
If Pace didn’t have Jo with him, the odds wouldn’t bother him. He’d been in tight spots before and lived to tell about it. But not with Jo. He couldn’t let anything happen to her.
She turned and met his eyes. Her eyes were huge and haunted in her face. She’d killed a man, probably for the first time. The shock of it was all over her face.
I love you, he told her silently.
Three shots rang out from the meadow in r
apid succession. Another signal. More riders would come. There was no time to waste. Pace rose from the cover of the ravine and sighted down his rifle. One man below got off a shot that fell harmlessly short. Pace’s aim was true, with the first shot, and the second.
Six down, and time to get the hell up over that trail before anyone else showed up. He rushed back to Jo. “You’re all right?”
She swallowed and nodded, scooting to sit behind the saddle again. “You?”
“Just great,” he muttered as he climbed into the saddle. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They scrambled up out of the ravine and along the exposed trail without incident. Pace held his breath as they rounded the jutting nose of granite that hid the rest of the trail, but no riders waited, no shots rang out. Except for another round of three signal shots.
Pace cocked his head. That last round had come from somewhere other than the meadow, but the way sound bounced and ricocheted in the mountains, it was impossible to tell from where it had come. The skin on the back of his neck tightened again.
Above them, all around, he caught glimpses of flashes.
“Pace?”
“I see them,” he answered grimly.
He urged the buckskin out of a copse of trees and before them lay a long, wide canyon, fed along both sides by smaller canyons, all of them including the main one dry and dotted with scattered oak, piñon, and juniper. Pace might have been there before, but he couldn’t remember enough to know which side canyons were blind or which carried trails up and out to the surrounding mesa that extended westward.
To the right, a trail of dust rose on the still air. Pace gouged the buckskin with his heels and cut left, racing to put a small oak grove between them and the riders. He spied a side canyon ahead on the left and thought to take it, but three riders thundered out from its mouth, yelling and firing into the air.
Apache-Colton Series Page 196