Cherish

  He stared down at those knuckles, which didn’t look much bigger than peas, the ridges narrow and sharp, the skin creamy and edged with a delicate pink, the color reminding him of a fragile white rose petal. Just below, where his fingers encircled her wrist, his own knuckles looked huge by comparison, their broad, flat surfaces baked brown by exposure to the sun and rock-hard with calluses. The contrast was stark and impossible to ignore—symbolic of everything she was—and all that she was not and could never hope to be—and also of her destiny, which might be inescapable unless someone stepped in to alter it.

  Rose-petal soft…that was Rebecca, too sweet and delicate to survive the brutalities of the men in this territory. Unless someone stronger and tougher became her shield, she would be used, and walked on, and left lying in the dirt, like a rose petal crushed under a man’s boot.

  The image hung there in his mind. He tried to shove it away, to laugh at himself for being mawkish. He was a gunpowder-and-leather man, not one of those Nancy-boy fellows with slicked-back hair who wore checkered suits and wrote poems. The only way women were like roses was that most of them had thorns, and beware to the man who got too close. That was his motto, drilled into him since boyhood by the haughty bitches themselves. He’d stopped believing in romantic nonsense years ago. Liked it that way. Didn’t want to change and, by God, wouldn’t.

  But it was there in his head, nonetheless. Rose-petal soft. Since telling Rebecca about his mother’s death, memories of her had been resurfacing from a black corner of his mind to haunt him. He could almost see her, trying to hawk those roses on that Santa Fe street corner. Christ. He had managed to keep that memory tucked neatly away for so many years, facing it only when unexpectedly reminded or in his dreams.

  His failure to do so now was due in part, he felt sure, to the feeling that had assailed him yesterday in the arroyo when he’d found Rebecca and realized she had probably witnessed her mother’s rape and murder. A sense that maybe their footsteps had been carrying them toward the arroyo and that moment all their lives, that in some strange way, it had been meant for him to be the one to find her. Not just any man, but him. It had been the similarities, he guessed, between his past and her present, a feeling that they were kindred souls. He’d looked at the shocked expression on her small face and into her beautiful, unseeing eyes, and he’d glimpsed not only her pain, but his own. A pain too deep for tears. Pain that he’d carried with him for years in a secret place, hidden from the world and most times from himself, but always, always there, just waiting to be resurrected by some small reminder.

  A reminder like Rebecca’s hand—slender, soft, and rose-petal dainty. He could crush it in his grip, he knew. Just bear down, harder and harder, until the bones snapped. That’s what happened to sweet, delicate things in this old world; they got crushed, like rose petals under a man’s boot, just as her mother had been.

  He could still remember that summer evening as if it had been yesterday, how he’d sat obediently on the walkway with his back to a post, his gut gnawing at his spine, his head filled with visions of food. All kinds, any kind. Hopeful, he’d watched his mother approach the men who passed, imploring them in her broken English to buy a “bee-yoo-tee-fool” rose. Just one penny, she had said, over and over. “A bee-yoo-tee-fool rose, mee-ster? For your bee-yoo-tee-fool lady? Just one penny!” But the men hadn’t wanted her roses. And then along had come the two men who raped her.

  After searching vainly for help, Race had run back to his mother, stopping along the way to gather up some of the dropped roses, a crazy, desperate hope within him that, by returning those roses to her, he might somehow make her better. A few minutes later, she had died with them clutched in her hand, the bedraggled and crushed blossoms pressed to her cheek.

  With a dizzying mix of past and present swirling in his mind, Race gazed down at Rebecca’s hand, the laughter of heartless men, from out of his past and from that very day, ringing in his ears—the sound of it the same—the cruelty in it the same—the faces of the men much the same.

  It had been so long…so many years…since Race had allowed himself to feel anything deeply. As a half-starved, quarter-breed orphan struggling to survive on the streets of Santa Fe, he’d been forced to develop a tough hide early on, learning the hard way that the strong ruled and the weak groveled. By age sixteen, he’d been damned tired of groveling and had developed a high regard for gunslingers, for when it came to commanding respect and inspiring fear in others, he’d noted that they were without equal. For nearly four months he’d hoarded his stolen coins and gone without food a good deal of the time, saving to buy a Colt revolver and enough ammunition to practice.

  By the end of his seventeenth year, word had spread throughout Santa Fe that Race Spencer, the Apache breed, was lightning-fast and deadly accurate at the draw, a reputation that was soon challenged by the reigning fast guns in town. That fateful day when Race had first faced another man on the street, knowing one of them was going to die, he had buried his more tender emotions, and as he pulled the trigger, he’d stepped over the line, leaving childhood behind and becoming a hard-edged man who seldom let anything touch him.

  And, goddamn it, he didn’t want to feel anything now. Feeling things deeply, caring about someone…a man who fell into that trap left himself open and vulnerable. But how could he hold Rebecca like this, feeling the frantic clutching of her hands and the trembling in her body, and not care? Or look into her beautiful, endlessly blue eyes and not care?

  He did. Whether he wanted to or not. Whether it made sense or not. He cared. It had hit him the instant he saw her—kneeling in the dirt, looking like a church-ceiling angel. He’d tried to shove it away, but it had sneaked past his guard several times since, each time hitting him a little harder. Then he’d caught her in his arms after shooting the ruffian, felt her frantically hugging his neck, and it had plowed into him with devastating force, dead center in the chest, like a 420-grain slug backed by 90 grains of black powder. That was it. He cared about her, and there’d be no more pretending he didn’t.

  And, Jesus, God, it hurt. Seeing her like this, knowing he might have stopped it, if he’d only just counted her safety as more important than a bunch of stupid cows. And, even worse, knowing it could and probably would happen again unless he took it upon himself to be her protector. That was a responsibility he didn’t want and didn’t need. What was more, he knew Rebecca wouldn’t want that, either, for even as she clung to him, he sensed her wariness of him as well.

  That was the most heartbreaking part of it for Race, knowing how awful her situation must seem to her. A naive, religious young woman, sheltered all her life from every kind of evil, suddenly alone in a world where her only chance of survival was to seek sanctuary in the arms of a gunslinger, the very epitome of all she deplored.

  Chapter 9

  Race wasn’t sure how long he might have sat there, staring at Rebecca’s hand, if water from the neckerchief hadn’t dribbled over his other wrist. He tightened his fingers on the cloth, squeezing out droplets of moisture that in turn soaked through the black denim of his jeans and ran in icy rivulets over his thigh. The chill of it snapped him to his senses, reminding him that the water Corey had heated wouldn’t stay warm much longer.

  “Rebecca,” he said softly. “We need to get you cleaned up, darlin’.”

  She tensed and pressed closer to him, as if by burying her face against his shirt and blocking out the world around her, she could stay hidden.

  “Rebecca?” He released a weary breath. “Corey, the fellow who brought the bucket, heated this water for you to wash with, and I hate to ask him to heat it all over again. You need to sit up, honey.”

  To his surprise, she loosened her right arm from around his neck and pushed with the heel of her other hand, levering herself erect. As she moved, she winced and grabbed her waist with one arm. An increase in pallor left her skin alarmingly white, the only touches of color the spatters of dry blood, the pinkish-purple bruise beginning to show
on her left cheekbone, and the dark smudges of exhaustion under her eyes.

  Those eyes. They seemed as big as cactus flowers, luminous and silvery in the dimness.

  “The ribs hurtin’ pretty bad?” he asked as he dipped the cloth back in the warm water.

  She glanced at the bucket, then around the wagon, as if trying to orient herself. When her gaze came back to his face, he felt a jolt of raw pain. She looked so lost. An innocent caught in a nightmare. He wanted to wrap her in his arms and promise her the stars and the moon and a life with never another bad moment. Instead all he could offer her were words—and damn it, he was damn lousy with them. Still, he had to try.

  “This here’s the bedroll wagon.” Gesturing at the sacks, he said, “Hard to tell it by lookin’, I know. Cookie brought so much food, I think we got half of it in here.”

  She lowered her gaze to her skirt, giving Race cause to remember the story Cookie had told him about the female Bible-thumpers he’d seen in town who kept their heads down and seldom looked a man in the eye. After giving the cloth a hard squeeze to wring it out, he offered it to her.

  “I reckon you probably wanna wash yourself.”

  With tremulous fingers, she accepted the wet neckerchief, started to lift it to her face, and then pressed it over her heart instead, making him think of the Mexican women he’d seen down south who lightly tapped their breasts with a fist as they prayed. Only Rebecca didn’t tap. She just sat there with her head bent, staring at her lap. He wondered if her ribs were hurting so badly that she couldn’t manage to wash herself. He was about to ask when she made an odd little sound and bent her head farther forward, completely hiding her face.

  Race expected her to start sobbing, even found himself hoping she might. It helped, sometimes, to get it all out. Being a man, he’d never been one to cry, though he’d felt like it a few times. But when things got really bad, he did pitch temper fits sometimes, cursing to turn the air blue and throwing things. He always felt a world better afterward.

  Most women didn’t cuss, and pitching temper fits was usually frowned upon by their fathers or husbands. So they wept instead, which, for reasons beyond him, most men found preferable to screaming and yelling. Race would have rather had a woman take after him with a cast-iron skillet.

  “Do you wanna talk about it, honey?”

  She shook her head. And then, to his surprise, she straightened and lifted the cloth to her face. No tears. Just a stony, rigid control that made him ache for her. She rubbed at her cheek, her hand shaking so badly that all she managed was to make quivery little dabs, missing most of the spatters, smearing those she hit.

  Race had hoped she might be able to do this herself. It would have been a hell of a lot easier, not necessarily for him, but for her. But he couldn’t stand this. He grasped her wrist, plucked the neckerchief from her hand, and gently went to work. Keeping her eyes downcast, she lifted her face for him, the expressions she pulled reminding him of a child enduring a mother’s fussing and fiddling. Pursing her lips, wrinkling her nose, blinking her eyes, and then drawing her face into a god-awful grimace as he scrubbed her ears. He found himself biting back a smile, and that quivery, achy warmth moved through him again, a feeling as inexplicable to him as it was foreign.

  “I ain’t real good at this,” he said, by way of apology. “Not much practice. It’s kind of awkward washin’ somebody else.”

  He turned to rinse the cloth, then set to work on her hair. “If you feel up to it this evenin’, I’ll heat you some water,” he offered. “Your hair ain’t gonna come total clean until you scrub it, I don’t think.”

  He rubbed at a place near her temple, stirring up more curls, which made her look as if she had a little more fertilizer in that one spot to send up sprouts. He bit back another smile, dipped the cloth again, and moved down to her neck, taking care to be gentle at the underside of her chin where she’d been cut by the plug-ugly’s knife. Luckily the wound wasn’t deep and wouldn’t require stitching.

  When he reached the base of her throat and started to go lower, she looked startled and clamped a hand to her chest, as if she’d only just now remembered that her dress was hanging open. “Oh, my…” she whispered. “I’m—my dress—it’s—” She broke off and closed her eyes. “He—he c-cut away th-the buttons.”

  Race could see she was embarrassed beyond bearing. To his way of thinking, her chemise covered her damned near as well as some of the dresses he’d seen other women wear. But, then, he also knew that it was sometimes a lot more uncomfortable to be at the receiving end of a look than to be the one giving it.

  He slung the rag over the edge of the bucket and started unfastening his shirt. “There’s more clothes for you over in your wagon. Here shortly, we’ll go get ’em.” He jostled her on his leg as he shifted to tug one arm from his sleeve, then jostled her again as he drew out his other arm and jerked the shirt from between his back and the wagon wall. “Meantime, you can wear this.” He touched the back of the hand she held over her waist. “Can you let go of them ribs long enough to stuff an arm down this sleeve, darlin’?”

  He ran the shirt through his hands to find the left armhole, then held it up. As she thrust her arm inside, he smiled and said, “Bull’s-eye.” He quickly drew the garment behind her, doing a juggling act to get it tugged around and over her other shoulder. Then, holding the second armhole up for her, he used his other hand to draw a shirt placket over her gaping bodice. “I’ll keep you covered while you aim and shove. How’s that for teamwork?”

  Wincing as she moved, she worked her hand down the other sleeve. Race made fast work of getting her battened down, wondering, as he fumbled like an idiot with ten thumbs, why his buttons were so stubborn when the shirt was on her, but went into the holes slick as greased owl shit when he was wearing it.

  “There,” he said as he fastened the last one, uncertain who was more relieved, him or her. “You can’t get much more covered than that.” He gave a low chuckle as he rolled up the sleeves, which dangled past the tips of her fingers by nearly a foot. “Jesus, darlin’, you ain’t packin’ much ballast, are you?”

  Evidently something he said took her by surprise, for she forgot to keep her eyes downcast and threw him a startled look—a look that went from startled to downright horrified when she saw his bare chest. She gaped at it for a long moment, giving him the feeling she’d never seen a man without his shirt. Nah. That was plumb crazy. She’d surely seen her father and others strip their shirts off in the heat of summer when they were outside working.

  Making an obvious effort not to gawk at him, she kept jerking her gaze away, then seemed unable to help herself and began to stare again. Her cheeks turned a pretty pink, and her eyes went as blue as the base of a flame. Race revised his opinion about the shirt business. Maybe, where she came from, men never went around bare-chested. What seemed crazy to him might be everyday right to Bible thumpers.

  Feeling suddenly self-conscious, he rubbed a palm over his pectorals and was surprised, not to mention slightly discomfited, to find that his nipples had turned hard and were standing up like the exposed heads of six-penny nails.

  “It’s all right, honey,” he assured her, giving his chest another fast rub, halting his palm over the spike closest to her nose. “As you can see, I ain’t got much by way of bubbies that I need to keep covered.”

  At that, her whole face went pink, and then moved on to bright red. As dark as he was, and never having been around any fair-skinned ladies, Race was fascinated. She reminded him of one of those color-changing lizards, like he’d seen one time down in Mexico. Only, of course, she was a far sight prettier, not to mention more colorful. He half-expected her hair to turn pink. Her scalp had.

  “You all right?” he asked, not entirely sure she was. He’d seen light-complected men turn red in the face, but only when they were choking or sunburned to a fare-thee-well.

  She dropped her gaze back to her lap and nodded. He turned to retrieve the rag, gave it a fast dip and sque
eze, then resumed washing her, unbuttoning the collar of the shirt as he worked his way down. It was difficult to tell if he got all the blood off her upper chest, but he figured what he had missed wouldn’t hurt her.

  Seconds later, as he washed her slender hands, he verified the fact that her knuckles were about the size of peas, maybe a hair bigger, and her fingers were so little around they felt squishy when he squeezed on them. There were also tiny bones that stood up on the backs of her hands and were crisscrossed with blue veins that showed through her fair skin. He couldn’t help but wonder if she had little blue lines like that all over her. They reminded him of the squiggles on a trail map.

  Sure enough, as he turned her palm up, he saw faint blue lines going up the inside of her wrist to disappear under the rolled shirt sleeve. Damn. A man could flat look forward to long winter evenings with a woman like her in his arms. Each night, he could blaze one of those trails with kisses, never knowing until he arrived where it might take him. Not that he’d care. Anyplace on her was bound to be sweet.

  He was relieved when he’d cleaned the last of the blood away. He tossed the rag in the bucket, angry with himself for thinking such things about her. If the girl had trails to paradise all over her, it would be some other fellow’s pleasure to blaze them, not his. She was too fine for the likes of him, and if he let himself forget that, it’d be no one’s fault but his own if he got kicked in the teeth.

  The same went for that mawkish rose-petal business. He’d keep her safe until he could get her off his hands, bearing in mind the whole while that having her with him was only temporary. If the good weather held, he’d take her north to Denver as soon as possible. There were plenty of respectable types up that way—the kind of men a girl like her always went for—fancy-mannered, highfalutin talkers. As pretty as she was, she could have her pick, and she’d find herself a husband, lickety-split. Years from now on long winter evenings, maybe she’d tell her children of the gunslinger who once saved her life, and they’d all laugh at her word pictures of him, a man who couldn’t read, had no manners, and was an all-around dumb cluck.