“Will he stay there?”
She wanted to say yes, but she knew the stallion too well. He had been driven from his preferred range in the past, but he had always returned to Black Plateau, often with new mares he had run off from ranches or other wild herds. The stone canyons, year-round seeps, and untrammeled space of the land spreading out from the plateau seemed to have an indelible allure for the big stallion. Year after year he returned, no matter how hard man chased him.
But this time he would be chased by bullets that even his strong legs couldn’t outrun.
The thought was unbearable to her. There was only one way she might be able to prevent Lucifer’s death—by betraying him to a man who wouldn’t use a gun.
She looked up into Ty’s steady green glance and prayed that she was making the right decision.
“The best grazing and water for a hundred miles in any direction is around Black Plateau,” she said, her mouth dry. “I know every seep, every bit of cover, every place where grass grows lush and thick. I’ll take you to each secret place until we find Lucifer, but first you have to promise me one thing.”
The unhappiness and determination in her face made Ty wish for a moment that he had never heard of the big black stallion. But he had heard of Lucifer, and so had every other man from the Rio Grande to the Snake River. The stallion’s time as a free-ranging mustang was rapidly coming to an end, and Janna knew it as well as Ty did. That was why she was blinking back tears and trying to speak.
“I’ll be as gentle as possible with him,” Ty said in a low voice, taking her hand between his own. “I don’t want to break Lucifer’s spirit. I just want to breed him with some fine mares. I’ll take him to Logan’s ranch in Wyoming and let him run with the remuda while I build my own ranch. For Lucifer, it will be almost as good as running free down here. He’ll be safe, Janna. No man will come after him with a rifle or a whip.”
“What if…?” her voice died.
“If Lucifer can’t accept capture,” Ty continued, stroking her hand with his fingertips, “I’ll turn Lucifer loose myself. I’d rather that he die free than live in a cage with eyes as dull as stones. Is that what you wanted me to promise?”
She drew a shaking breath. “Thank you, but I already knew those things about you or I’d never have spoken in the first place and offered to help you.”
“Then is it money you want? I don’t have much, but I’ll be glad to—”
“No,” she interrupted swiftly. “I’d never take money for Lucifer. I want you to promise that you’ll let me try to gentle him first. I couldn’t bear to see him brought down by a rope and broken by force.”
Ty thought of the stallion’s raw power and his hard, flashing hooves. “No. It’s much too dangerous.”
For a long moment she looked at his face. The dying rays of the sun revealed a determination as great as her own.
Without a word she eased her hand from his grasp, tossed the rain poncho aside, and went about smoothing out a place to sleep for the night. As she worked Ty watched her in silence, wondering what she was thinking.
Finally the lightning barrage ended, leaving only a hard, steady rain. He looked over at Janna, who was half-reclining against the stone wall. In the darkness he couldn’t be sure whether she was asleep. He thought she was.
“Janna?” he called softly.
No answer came.
He pulled on the rain poncho and walked from the protection of the ledge. If he had been camping with one of his brothers, he wouldn’t have gone more than ten feet before relieving himself. As it was, he went considerably farther.
When he came back Janna was gone.
Chapter Fifteen
The cold rain made Janna shiver and long for the bedroll she had left in her winter camp, but no matter how much it rained, she didn’t stop to find shelter from the downpour. As long as it rained her tracks would be washed out. Besides, she was less than three miles from one of her Black Plateau caches. By morning she would be warm and dry and sleeping in a place no man would ever find.
Not even Ty MacKenzie.
When the clouds finally dissolved into streamers of mist buffeted by a playful wind, she was beginning to wish she hadn’t left Zebra behind. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to leave Ty afoot in a land teeming with Indian renegades. Zebra would at least take him as far as the thousand hidden canyons and secret springs of Black Plateau before she trotted off to look for Lucifer’s herd once more.
And Janna had no doubt that it would be toward Black Plateau that Ty headed, rather than toward the safety of the fort. He wouldn’t leave the territory until he had what he had come for—Lucifer.
The cold light of a new moon gave small illumination and less comfort to her as she walked steadily toward the dark bulk of the plateau, which rose from the land until it shut out the stars along the horizon. When she could see the faint notch she called Wind Gap, she turned west. Alternately running and walking, she came closer to the place that was as much a home as she had ever had.
In the darkness before dawn, it took her three tries to find the mound of broken boulders where she had stashed a spare canteen, blanket, knife, and matches. The blanket was mouse chewed and musty but dry. She wrapped it around her and filled her canteen from a hole that had been worn in solid stone, creating a bowl that held rainwater after a storm.
Canteen and knife on her hip, dry matches in her shirt pocket, she climbed farther up the canyon until she came to a place where water from runoff streams had long ago worn out a room-size hole in the canyon wall. Water no longer reached the hollow—even in the highest flood it remained safe and dry.
By the time Janna scrambled up the last steep pitch of rock to the east-facing hollow, she was trembling with hunger, cold, and exhaustion.
Because the wind was from the north, only the hardest gusts reached her. She thought longingly of the hot spring in her winter camp, and of sunlight and of beds fragrant with piñon. Then she thought of the warmth of Ty’s big body, and the sweet friction of his chest against her back, his thighs against her thighs, his arms like warm steel around her as he hung on to Zebra’s long mane.
The curious, fluttering warmth returned to the pit of Janna’s stomach, making her shiver with something more than cold. She remembered his strength, the feel of his flexed muscle when he had lifted her and she had balanced herself by hanging on to his arms. The memory made her palms tingle as though she had been rubbing them along his sleeves. She thought of the strained, intent look on his face when he had bent down to her in the thicket where he had startled her from a deep sleep. And she wondered what would have happened if Zebra hadn’t scented the renegades on the wind, ending the hushed expectancy of the moment.
After a time Janna finally fell asleep. Her dreams were as restless as the wind.
* * *
Ty slept until the wind swept the sky free of clouds, allowing the moon’s narrow silver smile to illuminate the land.
“How about it, girl?” he asked very softly. “You afraid of the dark?”
Zebra tugged impatiently against the hand restraining her nose. She wanted to be free to go down the trail.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Which will you go after, Janna or that big black stud?”
Zebra snorted.
“Well, I’ll tell you, girl,” Ty said, swinging onto the mare’s warm back, “I hope it’s Janna. When I find her, I’m going to...”
His voice faded. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he found her. His dreams had left him restive and aroused, and as surly as a bear with a broken tooth. He was furious that she had slipped out into the stormy night without so much as a makeshift poncho to turn away the rain. No matter how many times he told himself that she had earned whatever her stubbornness brought her—or that she was obviously able to take care of herself in any case—the thought of her being wet and cold and hungry haunted him.
“Hell, why didn’t she at least ride you?” muttered Ty to the horse. “Did she
figure your tracks wouldn’t wash out well enough? Or did she figure you would run off and I’d follow and miss her tracks completely?”
Zebra didn’t even pause at the sound of her rider’s voice. She picked her way down the slope with the swift, clean poise that only a mustang could achieve over the rugged land.
He didn’t bother trying to guide the mare. He didn’t know where he was going. Besides, in the dark the animal’s senses were much more acute than his own. His only advantage over the mustang was his brain.
Some advantage, he told himself sardonically. I can’t even outwit a slip of a girl.
The thought didn’t improve his disposition. Nor did the fact that every time he closed his eyes, he saw the utter stillness of Janna’s face when he had refused to promise that she would be the one to capture Lucifer.
Hellfire and damnation, he seethed silently. What kind of a man does she think I am to let her risk her scrawny little ass fighting that stud?
A vivid memory of Janna’s body condensed in his mind, reminding him that her bottom wasn’t scrawny at all. It had been smooth and resilient beneath his hands when he had pulled her from the horse. Her hips had curved enticingly below her slender waist, curves that sheltered feminine secrets, curves that invited a man’s hands to follow them, then his mouth, his lips, his tongue...
He shifted to relieve the pressure on his burgeoning, hardening flesh. He ached with every heartbeat, an ache that had become all too familiar since his mind had discovered what his body had known all along: Janna Wayland was a woman, not a boy.
Did she know how much I wanted her? Is that why she ran out into the storm?
Uneasiness flattened Ty’s mouth into a hard line. She had saved his life, risking her own in the process. The thought that he, however unintentionally, had driven her away from the protection he could offer in this troubled land made him disgusted with himself and his unruly body.
His reaction to Janna baffled him. He had never pursued women in the past. He had never had to. They came to him like moths to a naked flame. He took what they offered, gave them pleasure in return, and avoided virgins because he was determined not to marry until he could have a fine silk lady for a wife. He had made no secret of his intention to remain free, but the women who came to him either hadn’t believed him or hadn’t cared.
But none of them ran from me, by God. Hell, often as not I was running from them.
The cold wind swirled down from Black Plateau’s rumpled heights, reminding Ty of how miserable Janna must be—on foot, no real jacket, and probably soaking wet, as well. He glared out at the pale rose dawn as though it were responsible for all that had gone wrong since he had been within moments of catching the big black stud, only to find himself caught by Cascabel instead.
The dawn sky passed from pale pink to a pale, rain-scrubbed blue. There was little real warmth in the early-morning sun, but as Zebra trotted toward the crest of a long rise, the light was strong enough to allow Ty to find out where he was. He halted Zebra just below the top of the rise, dug a new spyglass out of his backpack, and looked out over his trail. Nothing moved behind him but a few ravens flying blackly through the hushed air.
He shifted position, looking to the right and the left. It was the same everywhere he could see. Nothing moving. He couldn’t have been more alone if he had been the first man on earth.
Zebra snorted and shifted her weight, telling him that she wanted to be on her way.
“Easy girl. Let me look around.”
No matter where he looked, the countryside was daunting. It was also beautiful to anyone who appreciated the naked form of mountains and mesas, stone pinnacles and steep canyons, long crests and ridges of rock bare of gentle greenery. The plants that existed were spread out over the rugged countryside so thinly that the stone skeleton of the land was visible in many places.
Against the deepening blue of the sky, rock ridges and cliffs and gorges gleamed in every color from white through pink to rusty red and black. On the lower slopes juniper stood out like deep green flames burning at random on the fantastic rock formations. The only familiar-looking part of the landscape to someone who hadn’t been born west of the Mississippi was the pile of stone known as Black Plateau. From a distance, it rather resembled a ruined mountain.
Other than that, the stark combination of sheer red or white cliffs and rumpled rivers of black lava were like nothing Ty had ever seen. He could still remember the excitement and visceral sense of danger that the land had called forth from him at first look. Harsh, beautiful, beguiling in its secrets and its surprises, the vast country threatened his body even as it compelled his soul.
Frowning he looked out over the land behind him once more, letting his gaze go slightly unfocused. Even using that old hunter’s trick to reveal movement in a vast landscape, he saw nothing new. If Janna was somewhere behind him, he couldn’t see her. Nor could he see any renegades, soldiers, mustangs, or rabbits. He put the spyglass away.
“All right, girl. Let’s go.”
Zebra moved out smartly, hurrying over the crest of the rise as though she understood that to silhouette herself against the sky was to ask for unwanted attention. The mustang had taken a straight line beginning at the place where they had sheltered from the worst of the rain and ending at the long, broken line of cliffs that marked the eastern margin of Black Plateau. Ty knew of no way up onto the plateau from the east side, unless there was a game trail. In any case, he wouldn’t want to try such a path riding bareback on a mustang that might take a notion to unload him at any time.
“I can ride you or track you,” he muttered. “Which would be better?”
If personal safety had been the most important consideration, he knew he should let the mustang go and track her. But he wasn’t worried about his own safety half as much as he was about finding Janna quickly. And for speed, riding beat tracking six ways from Sunday. If Zebra unloaded him, then he could worry about tracking her through the afternoon thunderstorms that occurred as often as not in the canyon country. Until then, he would stay with her like a cactus thorn and hope to get to Janna before she caught lung fever from running around in the rain.
And Ty would also hope that Troon poured enough rot-gut down his throat to ruin his aim entirely, so that Lucifer lived to be captured by Tyrell MacKenzie.
Chapter Sixteen
The track was as perfect and as unexpected as a diamond in a handful of mud.
“Whoa, Zebra.”
Ty might as well have saved his breath. Zebra had already stopped and lowered her nose to the footprint. She sucked in air, blew it out, and sucked it in again. Unlike the mare, he didn’t have to rely on his sense of smell. He had no doubt that the line of slender footprints was Janna’s. What baffled him was that the tracks appeared from nowhere and vanished within thirty feet.
Bruja. Witch.
Skin shifted and prickled on his neck. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but it was easier to believe in witches than it was to believe that something as generous and gentle as Janna had survived unaided in this land.
Atop Zebra, Ty quartered the land where the prints had vanished. Beyond them he spotted a narrow tongue of stone coming in from the right. The toe of the last track was more heavily imprinted, as though Janna had dug into the wet ground in the act of leaping toward the stone. Zebra whuffed over the stone tongue for a minute before she looked back at Ty as though to ask, Well, what now?
“Good question,” he said.
The runner of rock led to a rugged, narrow ridge that was nothing but wind-smoothed stone. Someone as agile as Janna might have been able to use the ridge as a trail, but it would be rough going for the mustang and her rider.
Like all good hunters, Ty had learned long ago that tracks weren’t the only way to follow prey. A better way was to know where the prey was going. He had seen the dismay and fear in Janna’s face at the thought of Lucifer being hunted with a rifle. It took no particular prescience on Ty’s part to decide that she would head for
the stallion by the shortest possible route. Unfortunately, nothing of the country ahead of him looked passable by man, much less by horse.
Then he remembered what she had said: I know every seep, every bit of cover, every place where grass grows lush and thick.
Sitting motionless, he looked at the land ahead of him. It wasn’t simply luck that had led him to cut across Janna’s trail. In fact, luck had had little to do with it. Despite the vastness of the land itself, there were relatively few places where people and animals could move freely, and fewer still where they could pass from one mesa or canyon to another. The jutting mesas, deep stone ravines, and unfailing ruggedness of the land limited movement to the broad washes between Black Plateau and the mesas or to snaking around the plateau itself. Everything—deer, wild horses, Indians, cattle, and cowhands alike—was forced to follow pretty much the same course over the face of the land.
Hiding was another matter entirely. There were literally thousands of places for a person to hide. But eventually every rabbit had to come out into the open to find water or food or simply to find a safer place to hide.
Janna was no different.
* * *
Janna bit her lip and tugged her hat lower over her auburn hair, concealing any telltale flash of color. The sun’s heat had strengthened to the point that cold was no longer a problem for her. Her canteen took care of her thirst. Her stomach, however, was unhappy. It reminded her ceaselessly that it was past time for breakfast and lunch, not to mention that she hadn’t had so much as a snack after her midnight walk in the rain.
Yet hunger wasn’t her biggest problem. Ty was.
Barely a half mile away, he sat on stone outcropping that gave him a commanding view of the countryside. A rugged piñon that grew in the crevices gave concealment to his body. If Janna hadn’t caught a glimpse of movement when he had climbed up to his present position, she would never have spotted him in time to go to ground.