CHAPTER SEVEN
Up to her neck, hiding behind a cascade of water, whatever warmth had returned to Sidney’s body by lying out in the sun was gone. Her teeth chattered and her muscles shivered beyond all measure and control. The curtain of water blurred the view. Above her came the rapid-fire Spanish of several men, though the crashing water made it nearly impossible to pick up what they were saying. Well, that wasn’t the only reason: her Spanish was rudimentary at best.
She recognized caballo and ropa, horse and clothes, because some of the stable hands at her parents’ farm had come from Mexico.
She had no idea what these men wanted.
She had no idea where Bryan had gone off to.
She had no idea how much longer she could stay in the water.
Every nerve burned, like a total-body freeze brand. She had a death grip on the rocks behind her to keep her from leaping out of the water and into danger. At least she thought she had a grip. She couldn’t really feel her fingers to know for sure.
Her blood flowed sluggishly, her red cells sticky in her veins, like a warm tongue on a metal pole in the deep freeze of winter, even while her pulse pounded like Niagara Falls behind her eardrums.
The men jabbered above her, but not in such a way that she thought they’d discovered Bryan. However, there was little cover for him to hide. A few large rocks. A couple of scrubby trees. Why hadn’t he dived in after her? What was she going to do if they found him?
Then the voices faded and she waited. And waited. Then she felt a change in the swirl of the water around her legs. She braced. Ready to run, ready to fight. Then Bryan broke the surface next to her. He held a finger to his lips and she choked back an excited screech.
Grabbing her hand, he tugged her along the fall line until they came to an area where there was still good cover but the water wasn’t coming down as fast, as thick. It gave them a clear sliver of the world beyond.
A violent shudder racked her body. She couldn’t stay in the water any longer; she’d have to take her chances with the strangers. She bolted for the shoreline. Bryan must have had a tight grip on her hand, because she made it one step before he jerked her to a stop.
“Easy,” he whispered.
Over the roar of the water, she’d barely made out the word, but even though he hadn’t spoken very loudly, the single word was powerful, confident, and it stepped her back from the ragged edge of her sanity.
He slipped behind her and pulled her against his chest. Compared to the icy water, his body heat felt like seven suns on her back, even as tiny quakes and shivers shook his body as he wrapped his arms around her. More to keep her from bolting to the shore and giving them away, she suspected, than anything else, but at this point she would take what she could get.
Then the men came into view, down by the rock they’d laid their clothes out on, Sidney and Boomer’s loose reins in their hands. Three men that they could see. Rifle scabbards attached to their saddles, pistols on their hips like a spoof of a spaghetti western, except not nearly as funny.
One of the men picked up her jeans. They looked around, and the one with the red bandana, twiggy legs, and a barrel chest straining his buttons gesticulated to the other two. They climbed the rock where she and Bryan had lain, scanning the area, for them, she presumed.
Twiggy spouted words again. Agua and rápido were the two words she understood. Water. Fast. One of the other men jumped down from the rock and started tugging off his boots with a violent string of what sounded remarkably like curse words.
Before he got a toe in the water, Eli whinnied, high and full of distress, then plunged into the pond and bulldozed through the water.
“Shit,” Bryan muttered. “He’s coming straight for us.”
“How do we call him off?”
“We can’t. If he gets close enough, I want you to climb on and get the hell out of here.”
“What about you?” Sidney asked.
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Bry, he can carry both of—”
“No. You go. Alone. If they give chase, Eli can’t outrun them with both of us on his back.”
Eli was about ten yards away, swimming now as the pond got deeper. Water spilled over his back, his head held high, the whites in his eyes showing, his nostrils flaring, and his harsh, rapid breaths beating the surface of the water.
Bryan pushed her lower, over to where the waterfall screened them better. “Get ready,” he said when Eli was a few feet away.
She couldn’t feel her fingers, and her arms hung like cold slabs of sausage at her sides. With the hypothermia, did she have the strength to climb on? More importantly, could she stay on?
Eli’s mane lay on the side toward her, his head and neck blocking her from the men’s view. Digging deep, she focused all her will, all her intent, on her grip as she reached out.
“You’ve got this.” Bryan gave her a little push as she grabbed for Eli’s mane. With the dexterity of thick oven mitts, her fingers refused to obey. This was their chance—she couldn’t blow it. She couldn’t let Bryan down. She wrapped a fistful of mane around her hand.
“T-thatta g-girl.” Bryan grabbed her hips to give her a boost. “N-now throw y-your leg o-over.”
Something smacked into her hand and Eli’s mane was ripped from her weak grasp. A rope. One of the men had lassoed her horse.
Eli called out, an indignant scream of fury. Struggling and fighting against the rope, he thrashed his neck, kicking out until the rope bit into his flesh and Sidney feared it would either cut off his air or break his vertebrae. In his fight for freedom, a rear hoof thumped her in the thigh. She felt the pressure, not the pain, but her leg still collapsed beneath her.
Then Eli was gone. Out of reach. She opened her mouth to scream her frustration, but Bryan’s hand clamped down on her lips before she uttered a sound.
They were taking her horse.
She couldn’t let that happen. Eli was all she had. She thrashed against the hold Bryan had around her, an unyielding cage of flesh and steel.
Then, after what seemed like a matter of seconds and at the same time dragged on eon after eon, epoch after grinding epoch, the men were gone, and Eli with them.
“L-let me go,” she ground out. The muscles in her jaw hurt from all the chattering, her molars seconds from shattering under the unrelenting pressure.
With a hand on her back that she could barely feel, Bryan guided her to the shore. “Wait here,” he said as he slipped past her to climb out first. “I want to make sure it’s safe.”
At that point she didn’t really care if it was safe or not. Staying in the water another second wasn’t going to happen. She started to climb out and the water fell away. Gravity knocked her to her knees, but that didn’t stop her either.
She crawled hand over hand over the rocks. The jagged edges dug into her skin, bit into her fingertips, which were wrinkled and blue from the wet and cold.
Over his shoulder, he hissed, “Get behind that rock and stay down.”
She pressed herself against the sun-heated rock. Closing her eyes, she sighed. She’d never been so close to heaven before.
Bryan grabbed a thick stick to use as a makeshift crutch and hobbled to the rock across from her, where their clothes lay in a heap. He climbed up, crouching at first, then slowly standing, making sure no one was around. When satisfied, he gathered up the clothes, tossed them down, and followed them to the ground.
“They’re gone.” His words were flat, ringing hollow in her ears like the dong of a cracked bell.
In her head, she heard, “Eli’s gone.” Her heart rate didn’t elevate, there was only so much adrenaline could do against the weight of her devastation.
Eli was gone.
Dread sat heavy in her gut, a blob of molten fear and insidious, burning, churning hatred.
As sad and miserable as it made her life sound, Eli was her world. He’d brought her up when she’d been at her lowest. A calm, quiet strength that didn’t care who her parents were, or what they’d done.
She didn’t care what she had to do, what she must risk, what she must face.
She would get him back.
She had to.
* * * *
The journey back to the ranch was arduous. Soon, the sun would glide behind the mountain ridge and dark would hit hard. Sidney’s shirt was dry, but her jeans were still damp and sanded her inner thighs like eighty-grit sandpaper against an overripe peach.
With every step, the bruise on her thigh throbbed. The bottoms of her feet were blistered and stung as if she’d screwed up the coal walk at a Tony Robbins seminar.
At least she’d stopped shivering. She could have been in worse shape, so she wouldn’t complain.
Bryan hadn’t complained.
No one word.
His breath was ragged. His shoulders sunburned. His right palm gouged bloody from the end of the branch he used as a cane—the T-shirt he’d placed over the end only helped in the beginning—and he wasn’t complaining. Wasn’t giving up.
He put one foot in front of the other, figuratively. It wasn’t pretty. By the hard set of his jaw, it wasn’t easy. It sure as hell couldn’t be any fun.
She admired his strength, his determination.
“I still don’t understand why you won’t let me go ahead and bring help.”
He didn’t bother looking at her. “We stick together. I don’t want you out here alone in case they come back. Besides, not much farther now.”
Not too long after, they topped a hill, and the back of Bryan’s cabin came into view. The clunk-scrunch, clunk-scrunch, of Bryan landing the cane then hopping ahead ended abruptly. Sidney stopped and looked back. He swayed before he caught himself, sweat streaming down his face, veins corded on his forearm as he caught his balance. He closed his eyes and sucked in a long, deep breath and blew it out with a dark guttural howl of victory that sent chills skittering up her spine.
A huge grin split his face. “Can I buy you a beer?”
She smiled back at him, relief giving her a spurt of newfound energy. “Thought you’d never ask.”
That howl Bryan let out must have traveled through the air like the low moans of a humpback whale, because it wasn’t a minute later that Santos came cantering past the cabin on his horse, Taco.
He let out a string of expletives she would have to have Bryan translate for her sometime.
“Qué pasό, amigos?” Santos’s horse skidded to a stop when he jumped out of the saddle.
Sidney grabbed the reins while Santos secured Bryan’s right arm around his shoulder and tossed the makeshift cane aside. Then Santos let loose a battery of excited questions, all in Spanish and all too rapid for her to catch a word of it.
Bryan laughed. “Gonna have to slow your roll, buddy. The one word I caught was idiot.”
“What the hell, man?” Santos boiled it down to simple English.
“Get me back to the cabin, get a drink in my hand, and I’ll fill you in.”
“Can you ride?”
“Better than I can walk.”
Santos gave him a leg up on the horse’s offside, and for the briefest of moments a combination of sheer agony and numbing exhaustion flitted across Bryan’s face. Then he caught her eye and flashed her a grin that released a bevy of bees in her belly and made her think of rude, crude, lascivious things she longed to do to a man who didn’t want to be strung along.
But when he smiled at her like that, it made her want to give him, and her priorities, a shake, rattle, and roll.
When they made it back to the cabin, Bryan poured himself out of the saddle and Santos was quick enough to catch him before he landed on the ground in a puddle of fatigue.
She tied Taco to a rail near a water trough, then turned back to the men. There were still a couple dozen strides and three steps Bryan needed to navigate up to the cabin porch. “I’ll help get him inside,” she said.
Bryan looked toward the cabin, hopeful and pensive, as if the hike was as daunting as a trek across the Sahara in the middle of a sandstorm.
“I’m good here.” Bryan collapsed onto the log in front of the dead fire from the other night. His aim was off and he slid down the side of the log, landing on his ass, the bark crunching under his weight as it peeled the top layer of skin off his back. The scrape turned rosy-red as blood oozed out. He didn’t seem to notice.
“I’ll grab us some water and that beer.” Sidney said as she stepped onto the porch.
Santos held the two-way to his mouth and muttered something into it, but she was too far away to make out the words. Someone squawked something back to him, equally as unintelligible, but the gist, she figured, was Santos letting someone know they were safe.
Too tired to make the trip up to the barn and change out of her jeans, Sidney made herself at home in Bryan’s cabin, rummaged through the locker at the foot of his bed, and came away with a pair of his sweats. She didn’t blame him for what happened that day, but she figured he at least owed her some dry clothes.
She toddled to the bathroom, shucked her jeans and underwear, and sighed with relief when she found a big bottle of baby powder to sprinkle on her chafed thighs. The sweats were warm and dry and butter-on-a-hot-day soft against her angry skin. She rolled the waistband down and the legs up and called it good.
By the time she made it back outside with Bryan’s cooler packed with some bottles of water and a few beers, Mac and Hank were walking down the drive. Bryan struggled to get up as Mac approached.
“Sit your ass down, Marine,” Mac ordered.
Bryan disobeyed and stood anyway, balancing on one leg. Mac socked him in the arm, not too hard, but hard enough. He grinned and pulled her into him with an arm around her neck like he was going to give her a noogie on the top of her head. Instead, he kissed the side of her head with a loud smack.
Mac wrestled free.
“You okay?” Hank asked Sidney.
Sidney set the cooler down next to Bryan and plopped down on the log. She opened her mouth to tell them she was fine, but “I don’t know” tumbled out.
Now that the sun had set, the air cooled and a violent shiver shook her.
“Cold?” Hank asked.
She nodded, and Hank stepped toward the pile of logs stacked between two trees.
“I got it,” Santos told Hank. With a look to Bryan and Sidney, Santos said, “Talk, amigos.”
“It…it…” Sidney sucked in a deep breath and tried to find a way to articulate what they’d endured. The gut-twisting fear of being discovered, the sheer agony of submersing their bodies in the freezing water, the terror of watching Eli fight for his freedom.
If Eli was an ass and didn’t let anyone ride him, would they keep him? Or put a bullet in his head? Her stomach dropped, along with any confidence she’d see her horse again.
“It was fucked up.” Bryan finished for her as he dropped back to the ground. He snagged a beer out of the cooler, then held up a beer and a water to Sidney and she pointed to the water. He tossed it to her and opened his beer with an enticing fizz. “Drink,” he told her.
Between gulps of beer, Bryan told the whole story, in a precise and cuss-filled account that sounded more like a military debriefing than a conversation. Conveniently, he left out the whole almost-naked-and-humping-like-bunnies part, but judging by the way his heated gaze flicked toward her over the wispy smoke of Santos’s growing fire, he hadn’t forgotten one touch, one kiss, one moan, one moment.
She glanced away as her stomach clenched and a heaviness settled between her legs. But when he tabbed open his third beer in about as many minutes, the action reminded her of why it was important she stay away.
Like the Titanic, Bryan was slowly sinking from a hole ripped in his armored plating—his soul—pint by pint, gallon by gallon, this disaster wrought on by booze instead of sea water.
If she held on, he’d sink her too.
As much as she liked him, she must cut him free to save herself.
“So let me get this straight.” Mac focused on Bryan as she reached an arm across her body and rubbed at her left shoulder. She grimaced. Hank batted her hand away and worked the muscles along her left shoulder. “You rode out of here, no rifle, no pistol, no radio, no leg…” Mac’s voice climbed the ladder from calm, cool, collected, up to about-to-lose-her-shit.
“Mackenzie,” Hank warned.
Mac pulled away and stepped toward Bryan, her face harsh in the glow of the fire. “What in the hell were you thinking?”
Sidney opened her mouth to defend him. Bryan had only been trying to cheer her up. But he cut her a look that made her swallow her words.
Bryan met Mac’s accusing gaze and said, “I wasn’t.”
Mac flicked her eyes to Sidney and back again. Hard, hazardous.
Sidney’s insides squeezed together, forming some kind of vacuum that made her feel a half-size smaller. “It was—”
“Entirely my fault,” Bryan said.
* * * *
The campfire burned hotter, brighter, making it easier to see everyone’s faces. Mac and Hank remained standing and Santos sat on the log on the other side of Sidney. Boomer didn’t know what the hell was keeping Alby away.
“Bry—” Sidney started.
Boomer raised a hand to shut her up, but didn’t take his eyes off his old sergeant. This was between him and Mac, but if he was going to get his ass chewed in front of God and everyone, deserved as it may be, he sure as hell wasn’t going to take it sitting down.
He boosted himself off the ground. His quad quivered with the strain and it took every tired, sore, complaining muscle in his core to keep his balance and not look like a toddler on a two-day bender. He wanted his prosthetic, needed to pace and purge some of his stress, but he’d left his leg up at the barn.
Mac stepped in front of him. An inch or two closer and they would be toe to toe. He was starting to feel like a recruit in basic training. And, like his former drill instructor, Mac wasn’t the kind to take any shit. He looked down to meet her hard gaze, but that didn’t mean he didn’t look up to her.
“How much had you had to drink?” Like Sidney, Mac also wasn’t one to pull her punches.
He tossed his empty can. It landed with the other two he’d killed. “I was off the clock.”
“How. Much.”
“Alcohol had nothing to do with it.”
“Then how did three drifters get the drop on one of the United States’ finest?”
He clenched his jaws, refusing to spew excuses.
“What about pills?”
He narrowed his eyes, but he kept his trap shut. Arguing with Mac wouldn’t solve anything. He hadn’t had more than half a flask and the pills…fuck…the pills. He shoved down the defensiveness and stomped a boot on its ugly neck.
Had the pills been needed?
Or wanted?
How much of the snafu was due to the fact he’d wanted Sidney? Alone.
He’d rather take his chances in a war zone than be banished to the friend zone.
Mac tapped on the center of his chest with her index finger like she was drilling into the earth’s core. If it had been anyone else, anyone, they’d have lost that finger.
“You’re better than that, Boom.” She tapped again, just as hard, just as forceful. “Much better.” Her voice dropped and he strained to hear her over the crackling of the fire.
He let out a breath. “I’m going to get the horses back.”
“It’s not the horses I’m worried about.”
His stomach dropped and rolled. He was the guy no one wanted on their team, the guy no one wanted watching their back, the guy everyone knew was going to get them all killed.
* * * *
It was late and the others had gone to bed, leaving Boomer and Sidney out by the fire. They’d demolished all the water and beer she’d packed into his cooler, and he desperately needed a bed and a piss. Not necessarily in that order.
He pulled a double layer of stockings over his stump and slipped his leg into his prosthetic, which Santos had brought down from the barn. The muscles in his shoulders complained and grumbled with the effort, and he gave them a mental slap down.
The plan for the morning was to hit the trail early to search for the stolen horses. Another strenuous day. He didn’t have the time or the mental bandwidth to wallow in his aches and pains. He’d have plenty of time for that once the horses were recovered.
His priority was getting Sidney back to her room. She was sitting on the ground with her back to the log, her arms around her legs, her forehead resting on her knees. It had been a while since she’d talked or even moved. She hadn’t said anything when the others left for the night.
Standing, he put his full weight on his prosthetic, feeling some pressure at the end of his stump that shouldn’t be there. He’d lost a little weight since he’d been back on the ranch, and the socket wasn’t fitting like it should—good luck finding a prosthetist this far out in the boonies—but it was still a vast improvement over hopping.
“Wake up, Irish. Time for bed.”
When she didn’t respond, he reached down to gently squeeze her shoulder. She was trembling. Not violently, but a low-level vibration that shook him to the core. Even though her skin was cool to the touch, somehow, he knew this had absolutely nothing to do with the cold that had descended with the sun.
“Hey, hey, hey.” He squatted in front of her. “Look at me.”
The trembling became more pronounced. Then she raised her face, and Boomer sucked in a deep breath, because suddenly there wasn’t enough oxygen for the both of them. Even the dying light from the fire couldn’t hide her puffy eyes, the tear-streaked dirt on her face, and the splotchy complexion beneath.
Her heart was broken.
Because of him.
He plopped on his ass, his breath short as the weight of his choices, his poor decisions, sat heavy on his chest like an armored Humvee.
He pulled her onto his lap and tucked her against his chest. The coals still burned blue, scorching his shirt and back. He shifted a little farther from the fire. The harder he held her, the harder she sobbed. When your world shattered, there were no words that could comfort, so he didn’t offer any.
He let her cry it out. Let her take the time that she needed. How long they sat there was anyone’s guess. Long enough for his ass to go numb and his cock to come to life. Which made him feel even more like a bastard. Even if he couldn’t help it.
Finally, she lifted her head and dried her face with her hands. “Sorry,” she said, her voice thick and tight.
He cupped her face and kissed the side of her head. She smelled like smoke and despair, but that made him want her more. “Come on, I’ll walk you back to the barn. Ride out is gonna come early.”
She stood and gave him a hand up, but neither one of them let go. He took a couple steps toward the barn. Lagging behind, her hand slipped from his. He turned back.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Her eyes fell to the ground and he waited her out.
Then she nodded to herself, as if she’d given herself a little pep talk, and looked him square in the eye. “I don’t want to go back to the barn. I want to stay with you.”
His jeans immediately got tighter, his brain vapor locked, and the most intelligent thing that came to mind was, “Ah…”
This wasn’t a come-on.
This was a very bad idea.
He understood why she didn’t want to be alone, but he wasn’t certain he could spend the night with her without laying a hand on her. He wanted more, but the truth was Sidney was no different than his ex-wife. Neither woman could live with the booze and the pills, and he didn’t want to live without them.
Even so, telling her no would make him feel more like a jerk. The blood drained from his face. If he said yes, it might be the longest, hardest night of his life. But right now, she could ask him to stand in front of a firing squad and he’d do it if it would make her feel better.
She waved a hand in the air. “No, wait, scratch that. I’m good.” She nodded her head as if convincing herself. “Yeah, I’m good,” she said, not really to him at all.
As she stepped by him, he grabbed her arm, turned her back to him, and said the word he knew he shouldn’t say: “Stay.”
She looked up but wouldn’t meet his gaze, so he stepped in closer and tipped her chin up. “I want you to stay.”
Her eyes searched his face, for conformation? For sincerity? She must have seen whatever it was she was looking for, because she fell into step beside him.
Inside the cabin, they took turns showering off. He gave her his last pair of clean sweats and a T-shirt to change into. She wasn’t shy about using his toothbrush and he liked that intimacy more than he should have.
He tugged on a pair of shorts, doffed his leg, and crawled under the covers ahead of her. The bed was a long twin, and considering some of the places he’d slept, he considered it luxurious, but he was a big man, and fitting both of them in the bed would be a challenge.
He lay on his side and held the covers open for her.
She slid in beside to him, her back to his chest, and settled her head on his pillow. “You good?”
His back was to the wall, her ass was against his crotch, and he tried real hard not to think about how good he was. “Fine,” he said, though the word came out strangled.
He draped his arm over her side because there wasn’t anywhere else to put it. She threaded her fingers through his and tucked their joined hands under her chin. It wasn’t long before her breathing evened out, and he figured she’d crashed.
She’d towel-dried her short hair, and it stuck out at odd angles. Tufts tickled his cheeks, but instead of pulling back, he moved in closer and inhaled a deep whiff of his shampoo in her hair. His cock twitched as the combination hit him like an aphrodisiac speedball. He tried to ease back, but with the wall behind him there was nowhere to go. He was lucky she was holding his hand, because all he wanted to do was encircle her waist and snug her tighter against him and forget all the reasons she was the last person he should go to bed with.
“Did you just sniff me?” Sidney’s voice was sleepy, but he detected a hint of humor.
He groaned, thought about apologizing, but he wasn’t sorry. “Too pervy?”
She chuckled and rolled over. He’d left the light on in the bathroom and it spilled enough light into the room for him to make out her features, but little more. “No, I think it’s sweet.”
A smile he couldn’t help slid across his face.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Never been accused of being sweet.”
“What about this afternoon? You claimed all the responsibility. It wasn’t all yours to take.”
“My fault. My resp—”
She touched her lips to his, which shut him the hell up. He guessed that was her intention. The kiss was soft and gentle, and he ached to roll on top of her and take it deeper, to bury himself deep inside her.
But that wasn’t why she was there, and he’d accepted that going in. He wouldn’t betray that trust by clubbing her on the head and dragging her into his lair.
He ended the kiss and immediately wished the hell he hadn’t. He wanted her lips on his. On his skin, his body, his co—Stop! Just. Stop. He closed his eyes and counted to ten in Spanish. When that didn’t suffice, he did it in Farsi, then Arabic.
When he opened his eyes, she stared back at him, her gaze intense, like if she looked hard enough she’d know his thoughts, his heart. That wasn’t a burden he’d wish on his enemy, much less someone he considered more than a friend.