Early Dawn (11 page)

Her language brought Matthew’s head back around. It wasn’t often he heard a lady use the word
bastard
. He’d met this girl’s mother, if only briefly, and she’d been dressed like a queen. It took money, and a lot of it, to afford fine clothing and hats bedecked with gewgaws. This girl came from wealth, or his name wasn’t Matthew Coulter. Hell, she’d probably even gone to one of those fancy schools where young females got finished, whatever the hell that meant.

As if she guessed his thoughts, she looped an arm around her middle and lifted her slender shoulders in a shrug. “I have four older brothers. They don’t always keep their mouths clean.”

A tension-packed silence fell between them. Matthew sensed that she was afraid of him, and he wasn’t sure how to ease her mind. Telling her what a fine, upstanding fellow he was probably wouldn’t work. She had no way of knowing whether his word was good, and he felt disinclined to talk himself blue in the face trying to convince her.

So far, she hadn’t shed a single tear. One arm locked around her middle, she sat straight in the saddle, shoulders back, chin lifted. After all she’d been through, her behavior struck him as strange. He had a mother and sisters, and they were as strong as women came, standing fast beside their menfolk, no matter what. But in a situation like this, they’d be sobbing their hearts out. Not this gal. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought nothing bad had happened to her. Earlier, when he’d watched her by the fire, he’d figured her to be in shock. Maybe she still was. When things got too terrible to face, people sometimes slipped into a stuporlike numbness.

“You all right?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

She cut him a sharp glance and then fixed her gaze straight ahead again. “Of course I’m all right. I’m alive, aren’t I?”

She nudged her mount into a trot, forcing Matthew to increase his speed to stay abreast of her. Oddly, her avowal did little to ease his mind. Such steely self-control wasn’t natural. He could only hope she didn’t start thinking about what they’d done to her and suddenly fall apart farther along the trail. The last thing he needed was a hysterical woman on his hands.

 

In truth, Eden wasn’t all right. The pain in her ribs exploded into agony every time she took a deep breath, and a horrible shakiness in the pit of her stomach made her feel as if she’d swallowed a handful of jumping beans. Tears burned at the backs of her eyes, and she yearned to cry. Only a fear that she might never be able to stop made her cling to her composure.

Besides, losing control in front of a total stranger went against her every instinct.
Never show weakness or fear to the enemy.
Ace had driven that tenet of survival into her brain with merciless repetition. If she started to cry and couldn’t stop, her rescuer might see her as a spineless, pathetic creature lacking the courage or strength to defend herself. If he was a no-account, such an opinion of her might encourage him to boldness and possibly bring out his mean streak.

Eden didn’t like feeling so vulnerable, but facts were facts. Her body was about to give out on her. She’d been on starvation rations for five days. She felt fairly certain that Pete had broken at least two of her ribs. With her physical endurance tapped nearly dry, all she had left was her intelligence. She could
not
get weepy. She could
not
show weakness. Miscreant men were like dogs: If a victim rolled over on its back and showed its belly, they went for the jugular.

So she kept her gaze fixed straight ahead, endured the pain in her side, and held her emotions in check, ignoring the lump in her throat and the fear that sent shivers up her spine. What if? A dozen questions circled, all starting with those two words. What if the Sebastians’ horses had returned to camp? What if the brothers were hot on their heels even now? What if her rescuer suddenly turned on her?

Feeling alone and frightened had come to seem normal to Eden over the last five days, but, oh, God, how she wished her brothers would suddenly appear up ahead of them. She imagined Ace’s strong arms enfolding her in a hard hug, how she would love to hear David’s deep, reassuring laugh. She would feel so safe with her brothers all around her. With the Keegan/Paxton tribe to defend her, no one would dare hurt her again.

But her brothers didn’t appear, and though Eden tried, she couldn’t conjure them up. She was alone with a man who might be a thief, murderer, and rapist, and more of his ilk could be closing in fast.

 

When dawn finally broke, Eden was appalled when she finally could see her rescuer. He had the look of a saddle tramp, his leather jacket stained with sweat and ground-in dirt, his tan Stetson battered and filthy. He also had a lean, razor-sharp look about him, as if he had survived for months on dried meat, death, and little else. He was edgy as well, glancing frequently over his shoulder and scanning the slopes at each side of the trail, as if he expected to be shot in the back at any moment. Clearly, danger had been his constant companion for far too long.

A scruff of sable brown whiskers covered the lower part of his face, telling her it had been days, if not weeks, since a straight razor had touched his jaw. A jagged scar angled from the shaggy line of his beard across his lean cheek to the outside corner of his left eye. Another scar bisected his left eyebrow. But what she found most frightening were his eyes. They were the deep azure of a summer sky on a clear, hot day, only they looked more like ice chips, chilling her blood when he stopped his horse and turned in the saddle to stare at her.

“This looks like as good a place as any to stop for a rest.” He inclined his head at a frothy stream that flowed through a nearby cut of rocks in a stand of ponderosa pines. Rocky Mountain maple and sandbar willows peppered its moist banks. “The horses could use a drink, and so could we.”

As he spoke, the left corner of his mouth remained still, as if that side of his face had been paralyzed by the injury that had scarred him so badly. Ace had a similar affliction, compliments of a bone-shattering blow to his cheek from a rifle butt when he was only a boy, but never in Eden’s recollection had her eldest brother looked so disreputable.

Clenching her teeth against the pain in her side, Eden twisted to look behind them. “I don’t mind stopping for water, but I don’t need to rest. What if the Sebastians are right behind us?”

He swung down from the saddle. “They aren’t. And I don’t care whether or not you need to rest. I’m stopping for the horses and mule. Unlike the Sebastians, I don’t believe in running my animals to death.”

“How can you be sure they aren’t right behind us?” she asked.

“Because I scattered their horses to hell and gone, and we’ve been riding steady ever since.” He drew off his hat to dust it on his denim pant leg. Had it been clean, his dark brown hair might have hung straight as an arrow to his shoulders, but instead it had separated into stiff, oily shanks, almost as greasy as his jacket. He glanced up at her. “We won’t be staying here long, if that’s your worry. I just want to get the weight off the horses’ backs and let them take a breather. You need help down?”

Eden had endured being touched for five long days. She’d get down by herself or die trying. With shaky hands, she grabbed the saddle horn, using it for balance as she dismounted. Supporting her weight with her arms sent a white-hot pain lancing through her ribs that made her light-headed. When her legs felt steady enough to support her weight, she stepped away from the gelding. “You can’t be sure their horses didn’t return to the camp.”

“After firing those shots, I’m fairly sure.” He turned his back on her and began unsaddling Smoky. “Of course, nothing’s certain in this life, unless you count being born and dying. Everything in between is a gamble, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a damned fool.”

Just what Eden wanted to hear. She began loosening her gelding’s saddle cinch.

“I’ll get that,” he said over his shoulder. “A little slip of a thing like you shouldn’t be hefting a saddle.”

Eden was tall for a woman and didn’t consider herself to be a “little slip of a thing.” Even in San Francisco, Ace had insisted on having a stable, and he’d left Eden’s and Dory’s mounts behind when he moved to Colorado. She’d been saddling and unsaddling horses most of her life. Not on a regular basis, of course, because a stable hand usually did it for her. But in the event she had no help, her brother David had taught her how to swing the weight of her riding gear without much effort. Despite the fact that doing so now would set her ribs to throbbing, she was determined to handle the task by herself so she wouldn’t appear helpless.

“I can do it.”

He swung his saddle onto the grass and strode toward her. “I said I would get it. You’re to do what I say, when I say it. Remember? The last thing I need right now is for you to hurt your back. If you can’t ride, we’ll be in a hell of a fix.”

Unaccustomed to being treated like a child, Eden started to argue, then thought better of it. She knew nothing about this man. If she angered him, he might retaliate physically. “Fine, have it your way.”

“I will.”

She stood aside, watching as he unsaddled her mount. To her wary eyes, his hands looked as wide across the backs as laundry paddles, his fingers long and thick, his knuckles leathery from exposure to the elements. He moved with a catlike grace, his lean body powerfully muscled, each task executed with forceful strength, purpose, and an economy of movement. No stranger to work-hardened males, Eden knew without asking that he’d done grueling physical labor most of his life, developing the work ethic of a full-grown man long before puberty, just as her brothers had. Sadly, that knowledge didn’t comfort her. Even no-accounts had to work in order to survive, especially out on the trail.

After unsaddling her horse, he unburdened the mule and then led all three animals to the creek. He moved upstream from them to get a drink himself and then splashed his face with water.

Coming up for air, he asked, “You thirsty?”

Eden hadn’t had so much as a sip of fresh water in days. She walked slowly toward him, wishing she had a cup. Her ribs hurt so badly that the thought of lying on her belly in the dirt and drinking from her hands was daunting.

“Have you any utensils?” she asked.

His face and whiskers streaming water, he pinned her with a dark look. “Any what?”

“Utensils.” Judging by his expression, he didn’t know what she meant. “A cup?”

He glanced toward his saddlebags. “I have cups, but I’m not digging for one now. Just use your hands.”

In the end, she found a fairly flat rock, lay across it with no small amount of discomfort, and drew in water, gulping repeatedly and still craving more. Never in her life had anything tasted better.

“Go easy,” he warned. “Drink too much all of a sudden, and you’ll be bent double with a bellyache.”

Eden was already nearly bent double from the pain in her side. She forced herself to stop drinking and wiped her mouth with the leather sleeve of the jacket he’d lent her. It smelled of man, sweat, and horses. The odor almost made her shudder.

He apparently noticed her revulsion, for his expression hardened as he averted his gaze. “I’ve been on the trail for three years, tracking the Sebastians. If the jacket offends you, don’t wear it.”

Eden wasn’t that offended by the garment’s odor. At least the coat shielded her from the wind.

“Why?” she asked

“Why what?” One of his dark eyebrows arched in question.

“Why have you been tracking the Sebastians?” As she waited for his reply, her heart started to race. If he had an ax to grind with the gang members, stealing her away from them would be a perfect way to get revenge. “Three years is a long time to follow someone.”

He wiped droplets of water from his shaggy beard with the back of his hand. “Let’s just say I have my reasons. As soon as I get you to a large enough town where you’ll be safe, I’ll be back on their trail.”

In Eden’s estimation, only one town she knew of in Colorado was staffed with enough law enforcement officers to protect her from the Sebastians. “So you’ll take me to Denver, then?” Hope welled within her. “My family is in No Name, only thirty miles south of there, and my brother has a telephone. I could call from Denver, and they would either come get me or arrange for me to take the train.”

He squinted against the sun to meet her gaze. “Do you know how far away Denver is?”

Eden knew it was a goodly distance. “Quite a ways, I’m sure, but—”

“Wasn’t the passenger train headed there?”

“Yes.”

“Then the Sebastians will know Denver was your original destination and
expect
us to ride that way.”

Eden got an awful sinking sensation in her stomach. “Who’s to say I wasn’t bound for one of the little towns along the way?”

He ran a burning gaze over her tattered skirt. “In clothing like that? You ever visited any of those towns?”

“No, I’ve only glimpsed them in passing.”

“Well, judging from what I’ve seen, most of them were once tent cities that went bust during the gold rush. Now they’re rough, tumbledown holes-in-the-wall with rutted streets, rotten boardwalks, and shacks that pass for houses. The ones that are a step up from that aren’t much better. Why would a lady dressed in fine silk be going to a place like that?”

Eden could think of no reason. “Forget Denver then, and just take me straight to No Name. My family can protect me.”

“If No Name is a few miles south of Denver, it lies in the same direction, and we’d still run the risk of bumping into the Sebastians.”

“Where will you take me then?” Eden asked shakily.

“I have a place in mind.”

He had a place in mind? Frustration welled within Eden, and she wanted to give him a hard shake.

As Eden dried her wet hands on the dusty folds of her silk skirt, she tried to calm down and keep her imagination from running wild, but it didn’t work. Any woman in her right mind would feel wary of a man who’d been chasing a gang of outlaws for three years and refused to tell her why. What drove him? Hatred? A burning need for revenge? She wished he would be more forthcoming with information. Anyone who stuck with something for so long must have a reason. She wanted—no,
needed
—to know what that reason was. She also deserved to know where he intended to take her. At least then she would have something concrete to give her hope and help her make plans. Once in a town, she would need to contact her family. If they went to a community without telephone service, sending a telegram would cost money, and she hadn’t a cent on her person. Did her rescuer have enough spare coin to wire her relatives of her whereabouts?