Bride On The Run. Elizabeth Lane

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СКАЧАТЬ thought you told me you could ride,” he said as Lucifer came abreast of his own mount and slowed to a swaying walk.

      “I did,” Anna muttered, tugging her skirts over her knees. “I just didn’t specify what I could ride.”

      He rewarded her witticism with a scowl. “It’s clouding up. Let’s get moving,” he said, nudging his mule to a brisk trot. This time Lucifer fell into line, bounding down the rutted road like a nine-hundred-pound jackrabbit. Anna clenched her teeth as her raw buttocks pounded the bumpy ridge of Lucifer’s spine. Misery rankled and roiled in her, festering until she could keep her silence no longer.

      “You—don’t like—me, do—you?” she muttered, spitting out the words between bounces.

      “Did I say that?” Malachi did not look at her.

      “You didn’t—have to! Damn it, I’m not stupid!”

      “I never said you were.”

      “Then slow down, for mercy’s sake!” She seized Lucifer’s harness and by sheer force of will wrenched the big, lumbering animal to a halt. “No matter what you might think of me, I won’t be treated this way!” she said. “Either we come to some kind of understanding here and now, or I’m not budging another inch!”

      Malachi, who had already gained half a furlong on her, hesitated, then wheeled his mount and rode back to where she waited. “All right,” he said in a cold voice, “have it your way. Your call.”

      Anna’s breath hissed out in a ragged exhalation as she prodded Lucifer to a slow walk and waited for Malachi to fall in alongside her. She swallowed hard, steeling her nerves before she spoke.

      “You desperately wanted me here,” she said. “At least that’s what your cousin, Mr. Wilkinson, led me to believe. And I did believe it, or I never would have come such a distance. So why are you treating me as if I’d brought in the plague?”

      Malachi’s silence was as long and deep as the shadows that flowed through the craggy hollows of the canyon. The haunting cry of a desert owl shattered the darkness. As the sound echoed across the gorge, Anna realized how alone she was in this place, how helpless, how utterly dependent on this hostile stranger who was her lawful husband. It was too late, this time, to go flouncing off and climb aboard the next train out of town. She was stranded in this alien landscape with no money, no food and no one else who would help her.

      “You’ve asked a fair question. I’ll give you that.” Malachi’s voice rumbled out of the shadows, almost startling her. “But not even you can believe this is going to work. I asked Stuart to find me a woman who could survive and pull her own weight in this wild, hard place—a woman who could run the ferry and drive the mules and—”

      “You could have hired a man for that,” Anna said curtly.

      “Could I have hired a man to help an eleven-year-old girl grow up to be a good woman?” His voice rasped with emotion reined in too tightly for too long. “Could I have hired a man to dry the tears of an eight-year-old boy who still misses his mother?”

      Anna let the damp evening wind cool her face for a moment before she spoke into the awkward silence. “So I’m not a fit candidate for the job. Is that what you’re saying?”

      Malachi’s answer was a disdainful snort. “Look at you! Your clothes, your hands, the very size of you! Have you ever milked a cow on a morning so cold that the ice froze in the bucket? Have you ever plucked a duck and singed off the pinfeathers over an open fire?”

      “As a matter of fact, I have.” That much, at least, was true. The orphanage had had its own dairy barn and kitchen, and Anna had worked long, drudging hours in both.

      “Could you pull a pig out of the quicksand or stick a calf that’s bloated on too much spring clover?”

      “Could your wife do those things?”

      Malachi’s breath sucked in as if he’d been gut-punched. “This has nothing to do with Elise,” he said in a raw-edged voice. “I was asking about you.”

      Anna drew herself up, fueled by a slow-welling anger. “Whatever else you may think of me, Mr. Stone, I haven’t had an easy life. There are a good many things I can do if I have to.”

      “Yes, I can well imagine.” His cold voice dripped innuendo. Anna recoiled as if he had struck her. She had surmised what he thought of her, but hearing the words spoken, and with such contempt, stung her like an openhanded slap in the face.

      She was still groping for a retort when he cleared his throat and continued his assault on her character. “The message Stuart telegraphed to Kanab mentioned you were widowed in a Comanche attack. Is any part of that story true?”

      “No.” Anna was too angry to lie. “I thought the story might win Mr. Wilkinson’s sympathy, and I suppose it did. I’m here.”

      His eyes narrowed as if he were looking at her down the barrel of a rifle. “So what’s the real story, Anna, or whatever the blazes your real name is?”

      “It’s Anna.” She stared between the dark V of Lucifer’s ears, biting back the urge to spill out the whole truth. How could she tell this man that her face was on Wanted posters in three states, and that Louis Caswell himself had put up one thousand dollars of the reward money? How could she tell him about the lawmen and bounty hunters that dogged her trail, the fear-filled days, the sleepless nights?

      “I was desperate,” she said, settling on a half truth. “I was out of money, out of work, had no place to go.”

      Malachi sighed, his powerful shoulders shifting in the deep indigo twilight. “I wish I could believe you,” he said. “But your kind isn’t exactly known for veracity.”

      “My kind?” Anna glared at him, her stomach churning.

      “I think you know what I’m talking about.”

      She fought the nauseating rage that rose like bile in her throat. “Would it make any difference if I told you I’m not a—” She hesitated, staring down at her pale hands. No, she could not even bring herself to say the word whore. She had known too many of those poor, lost girls. And she had come all too close to sharing their fate. In those homeless, hungry days, only the gift of her voice had saved her from the hell of those upstairs rooms.

      “I’m not what you think I am,” she said, recovering her poise. “But of course, I can’t expect you to believe that, can I?”

      His silence answered her question, and for the space of a heartbeat Anna was tempted once more to tell this man the whole true story and beg for his protection. But no, she reminded herself, he would not believe her. And even if he did, he would not like what he heard. The upright Malachi Stone would not take kindly to the fact that the woman on his hands was wanted for murder.

      Beyond the winding, narrow thread of the road, the canyon was a darkening wonderland of castle-shaped buttes, spires and buttresses. Colors changed with the changing light, deepening from sienna to violet, from indigo to midnight. The wind moaned as it funneled down the arroyos, a lonely, haunting sound that was broken only by the rush of the river and the steady, plodding hoofbeats of the two mules.

      Anna gazed upward at the darkening gap of sky. Her spirits sank even deeper as she saw the flicker СКАЧАТЬ