Caden's Vow (3 page)

“Why?”

Bella’s expression softened. “Because if you want Caden,
Maddie, then you need to do whatever it takes to make him see you and what could
be. Something big. And no one can do it for you.”

She turned on her heel.

Maddie stood where she was anchored by her grip on the tree and
the weight of the preposterous idea Bella had put forth. “Wait.”

Bella shook her head and raised her hand. “No. It is time for
you to make up your mind who you will be.”

Maddie had the insane urge to chase after Bella, to have her
tell her what to do, but what was the point? Bella was right. She had decided
herself it was time she stopped being a child.

Caden was leaving as if it was nothing to anyone. The man never
understood he was missed when he left. Or maybe he didn’t care. Sometimes it was
hard to know. Follow her heart, Bella had advised. Did she have the courage to
do something that big?

Caden had told her that he wouldn’t leave without seeing her.
The anger that hit her was strong. The determination just as strong. She was
done being left behind. Every day when she got up, life happened to her.
Tomorrow, she was going to happen to her life.

* * *

M
ADDIE
’
S
TREASURES
WERE
packed into a saddlebag along with two changes of
clothes before dawn even touched the sky. Caden had left an hour earlier. She’d
heard the back-porch step creak as he’d slipped out. Saw the light in the barn.
It was time for her to go now, too. Sneaking down the back stairs, she ducked
out the same door as Caden, but she avoided the third board on the steps. While
no one would protest Caden’s departure, hers would be sure to cause a fuss. Her
redbone hound whined and lifted his head. She smiled and made a motion of her
hand. He came over immediately. She fed him a piece of meat left over from
supper. He wolfed it down and, when another wasn’t forthcoming, drooped his head
until the loose folds all but obscured his eyes. He had the look of his father,
Boone, but was the despair of Tucker’s pack. Worthless, he’d been named, because
while he could track like his father, he wouldn’t bay.

The day Tucker had cut him from the litter, she’d cried for
him. When she’d heard his name, that had been the final straw. She’d taken the
dog as hers, expecting a protest. No one had said a word. He’d become her “porch
hound,” as Tucker called him. She’d tried to change the dog’s name, but he
refused to respond to anything else, which just went to prove everything had a
meaning to someone, and she had to respect his preference.

It still made her nervous having a friend, even if it was a
dog, but there was no going back. Worthless had claimed her as much as she’d
claimed him. So far they’d been friends. Tonight, he was going to become her
partner. She hoped. Tapping her hip, she beckoned Worthless to her side.

The note and IOU she’d written crinkled in her pocket. Flower
was a sweet little mare that Tucker had trained for her. She had a gentle way
about her and not a mean bone in her body. Maddie trusted her as she trusted no
human. No matter how valuable the horse was, Maddie couldn’t choose another. And
not only because her riding skills weren’t that good. She needed things around
her right now in which she had faith. She might have decided to happen to her
life, but that didn’t mean she had any confidence she could pull it off.

Flower nickered as Maddie approached her stall. She opened the
door, her hands shaking. She patted the mare’s neck and took a breath. The only
other time she’d taken her destiny into her own hands was when she’d bolted
after Tracker out the door of that whorehouse. She still didn’t know what had
made her do it, but once done, there’d been no going back. She’d been prepared
to beg the big man, but he’d turned and looked at her, appearing so dark and
alien she’d almost reconsidered, then with a nod he’d held out his hand. She’d
taken it full of fear, only to find beneath that harsh exterior was a good
man.

He’d been looking for his Ari then, sympathy for her plight no
doubt driving him to collect discarded women along the way. Tracker had brought
her home to Hell’s Eight the way he brought many others. Giving them a place to
heal. Most had left after a month or two. Moving on. She’d stayed. She hadn’t
had any other place to go and she’d been afraid to start over. Or so she’d
thought. Truth was, she’d just been slow to be ready.

She looked beyond the open stable door to the fading night
beyond. But that was all changing. “We’re going adventuring, Flower.”

She snubbed the little horse to the hitching post and fetched
her tack. Worthless flopped by the post. “Caden thinks he can just break a
promise to me, but he can’t,” she told the hound. He rolled his big brown eyes
at her.

Thanks to Caden’s relentless instruction, she made short work
of saddling and bridling the little mare. At the time she’d wanted to curse him,
but now, when time was critical, she appreciated every tedious lesson. She
couldn’t afford to let Caden get too far ahead of her. She took the IOU out of
her pocket and stuck it on a nail jutting out of the post. Stealing a horse was
a hanging offense. She wanted to be sure the Hell’s Eight knew she was only
borrowing Flower. Over the IOU she put the note she’d written to Tia and Bella.
It was short and to the point. A thank-you and a simple
I’ve decided to live my life.
As an afterthought she’d added,
Please, don’t worry.
She hoped she’d spelled
everything right.

It was a novel thought that someone would worry about her. She
smiled. Taking control of her life was working. She now had friends.

Looping the leash around Worthless’s neck, she tied the other
end around the saddle horn. His silent tracking was going to work for her. The
last thing she needed was for Caden to know she was following until they were
too far out for him to send her back.

She took one last look around. Here she was safe. Beyond the
door, her life waited. For a minute she hesitated. Worthless whined and stood.
She nodded. “You’re right. It’s time to go.”

She swung up into the saddle, her skirt settling around the
pants Caden had purchased for her when he’d noticed how she’d been sore after
that first time riding. She hadn’t had pantaloons and she’d been too embarrassed
to tell anybody. She’d fretted for days he’d tell and she’d be embarrassed. So
much had embarrassed her back then. Gathering up the reins, she sighed. She’d
felt so lacking amid the confidence of the Hell’s Eight women. But that had been
her own silliness, as Bella would put it.

Then, a few days after that first riding lesson, Caden had
handed her a box and told her to open it in private. Her first thoughts had been
shameful. Thinking he’d bought her scandalous womanly things, and it had been
with great trepidation she’d placed the box on her bed. When she’d opened it,
she’d cried. Stupid, silly tears. He’d bought her ugly man-pants to wear under
her skirts. Made of soft wool and thick enough so her thighs wouldn’t chafe.
She’d lost her heart to him right then, though it took her weeks to identify
what that skip of a beat had meant.

She loved those damn pants. Loved that damn man. And now she
was planning on loving her damn life. So much had changed around her in the past
year. So much had changed within her. She’d gone from a scared child who hid in
make-believe to a woman who was learning to live. It was exciting. It was
energizing. It was as scary as all get-out. Patting Flower on the shoulder and
smiling at the eagerly waiting Worthless, Maddie urged the mare forward.
Worthless fell in beside.

“Ready or not, here we come.”

CHAPTER THREE

M
ADDIE
’
S
SENSE
OF
adventure took a rapid downhill spiral. It wasn’t as easy as she
thought it would be to follow Caden’s trail. Worthless would first pick up and
then lose the scent. And frankly, she couldn’t tell the difference. Flower
didn’t always want to go where Worthless went, she couldn’t see what she was
doing, and that damn breeze rustling the leaves kept whispering in her ears
little words of warning.
Go back. Go back.
But she
was tired of going back, so she plunged on, letting her mind drift so worry
wouldn’t eat her alive, trusting Worth to get her where she needed to go.

Flower stumbled, tossing Maddie about in the saddle. She
grabbed the horn. The mare tossed her head and took two steps back. Worthless
whined at the end of the leash as he was pulled off the scent. Lifting her head,
she saw immediately why the horse stopped. An overgrown, impenetrable bramble
thicket was just sitting there where she needed to go. Darn! She’d have to go
around.

The dog whined again, straining toward the thicket as she
tugged on the leash.

“We don’t have a choice,” she snapped at the animal. She
immediately regretted the harshness. It wasn’t Worth’s fault that she was
confused. She just hadn’t expected everything to look so similar in the dark.
She had no idea where she was. Flower tossed her head again. No doubt she wanted
to be safely home in her stall. Maddie had a sense of day coming, but not much
sun got through the thickness of the trees. Worth whined again, straining to the
left. There was a slight hole in the thicket there, but it certainly wasn’t big
enough for the horse. Wrapping the leash around her wrist, she pulled him back.
She sat deeper in the saddle and looked around. In all directions, she saw
trees. If she didn’t know better, she’d say the same tree just repeated itself.
She didn’t even know if she could find her way home from here. She had no choice
but to go forward. She’d just have to take the chance that she could find the
trail again. And the discouraging thought came to her that if she and her horse
couldn’t pass through here, neither could Caden, which only left one question:
What exactly had the dog been following?

“You were supposed to follow Caden,” she told Worth. He looked
up at her, tongue lolling, panting slightly. No doubt he was thirsty. She was,
too. The mare nickered. Poor Flower was probably thirstier than them all. Maddie
reached for her canteen only to discover it gone. It’d fallen off somewhere
along the way. Tears burned behind her eyelids. She took another breath, closing
her eyes as the panic started deep within. She was lost with no water. Going
back was no more possible than going forward. Her great adventure was a
disaster. She should have just stayed at Hell’s Eight.

The buzzing started at the edges of her mind. Holding her
breath, she reached for her calm place, picturing in her mind the pond at her
home outside of Carson City. It was so easy to summon the image this time, to
imagine she felt the breeze upon her face. In the summer it was so pretty with
the shade of the trees spreading out over the water and the clover sprinkling
the shore like a smile. The breeze off the water felt so good on those hot
summer days. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and imagined until she could
feel the sun on her face, smell the damp earth, hear the soft rustle of the
summer breeze through the trees, feel it caress her face and shoulders.

She did love summer days. There was something so hopeful about
them that made a body feel as light as a feather. There was nothing she loved
more than sitting by her pond, and if she were lucky, with a book to read. She
did love to read, and Mrs. Cabel, the schoolteacher, occasionally allowed her to
take a book from her library so long as she treated it with respect. She always
treated those books with respect. They were her treat, her escape into another
world.

But something was wrong. This time of day, the shade was always
on the right side of the pond, providing a more comfortable place to sit. It’d
be the perfect place for a picnic. She guided Flower to the right. The dog
whined and went along. She crossed the rocky surface of the stream. The horse
stumbled, jostling her. She shook her head, chuckling. She always tripped over
that big stone in the middle. It was so easy to lose track of time here on the
sunny side of the pond. In her mind’s eye she reached her spot, smoothed her
skirts as she sat on the blanket, leaned back against the tree and just let the
cares of the day fade away. She loved it here by the pond.

Pain in her calf snapped her eyes open. She grabbed at her leg.
Worthless was on his hind legs, clawing at her skirts. Flower tossed her head
and sidestepped. Reality slapped her in the face as she looked ahead. It was not
the scene at the pond but a sheer drop-off that faced her. Thirty feet down she
could see a river cutting through the ravine. The mare tossed her head and took
a step back. Maddie grabbed the horn.

Dear God. She’d almost driven them over the cliff. Dragging her
eyes away from the drop, she looked around. She didn’t recognize where she was.
She didn’t recognize where she was going. Didn’t know how long she’d been
drifting in her mind. Long enough for the sun to come up and the woods to change
to clearing, but that didn’t tell her much.

“Where did you bring us?” she asked Worthless. He sat down and
flopped his wrinkles at her. Some help he was. She backed Flower away from the
edge. “At least it’s pretty.”

And it was. Hell’s Eight was up high on the cliffs where it was
sparse and the environment was harsh, but down here things had a lusher feel.
More like home. There weren’t so many sharp edges to the landscape. It rolled
more than cut and grass grew around rocks and summer flowers sprouted along
hillsides and leaves filtered sunlight. It would be a wonderful place to stop
and picnic if she weren’t lost.

“What are we going to do?” she asked the hound. He stood on his
hind legs and pawed at her foot. Leather creaked as she leaned down and petted
his head. Worthless wagged his tail, his expression blissful as she scratched
behind his ear. Clearly, he shared none of her concern. And why would he? He was
used to hunting with Hell’s Eight. For sure Tracker wouldn’t be lost. Neither
would Caden, Tucker or Caine. They knew this country like the back of their
hands, whereas she... She sighed. She only knew how to create pictures in her
mind.

She made a note of another one of her needs. She truly needed
to learn how to find her way around the wilderness. The next time she brought it
up with the men, she wouldn’t be fobbed off with a ruffle of her hair and the
statement that there was no need, the way Sam had done. Hell’s Eight’s
protection or not, she needed her own skills.

She didn’t want to be watched out for. Protectors came and
went. She’d had a lot of protectors over the years. Protectors had a way of
losing interest, and when they did, she was always alone again and left to her
own devices. At that point her choice was to rely on herself or to find another.
With no skills to sustain her, there really was no choice. But she didn’t want a
protector anymore. She just wanted herself. She wanted to be like the men of
Hell’s Eight, like the women of Hell’s Eight. She wanted to be able to look
trouble in the eye and knock its teeth out.

She flexed her fingers, made a fist and tried to imagine what
the face of trouble would look like, but it always came at her in so many
different forms it was hard to pick just one to punch. Like now, trouble tended
to be a sneaky bastard. She was lost. Her current trouble was as simple and as
complex as that. She tried to remember all she’d heard about Fei’s mine. The
stories were wild and exciting on one level, like something out of a storybook.
But it hadn’t been a fairy tale. Shadow had lived it with Fei. When Maddie
listened to them tell the story, all she could think of was the expression of
confidence in Fei’s face as she talked about how she’d handled things. Maddie
wanted to be that confident. She wanted people to look at her and know that she
could handle things. She wanted Caden to look at her like that. She wanted to
know it herself.

She remembered the talk about the climb, how hard it was to get
up the side of the cliff to the mine, which meant it was high. Her options in
trails that were rideable were either to go back the way she came, to travel
along the right side of the mountain or to take the steep drop down.

With her heart in her throat, she turned the mare to the path
along the side of the mountain. The sun was rising on her right, clearing the
mountain. She didn’t know if that was good or bad, wrong or right. She didn’t
even know if that was east or west. How could she be so ignorant about such
important details? Of course, growing up in town, it was never important which
way the sun came up. On Hell’s Eight she’d never been left alone; always someone
guarded her. Another form of protection that had not served her.

She urged Flower forward. The one thing she hated about being
“here” so much was the uncertainty of the emotions that always ate at her. In
her make-believe world, it was calm. It was peaceful. There were never any wild
swings of emotion. No fear. No hate. No pain. No sadness. Just calm summer days
by the pond or maybe an evening at a social where she’d dance with handsome
gentlemen who treated her with respect and thought she was lovely. She shook her
head. Sometimes she wondered if she’d known going with Tracker had meant that
she would be “here” so much and what being “here” meant if she wouldn’t have
done it. She shook her head again as the birds sang in her ear and the horse’s
hooves clopped along the path. Maybe not. Her make-believe world hadn’t been as
satisfying even back then, and it’d been harder and harder to hold on to her
peaceful feeling. Maybe losing the ability to pretend would have happened anyway
and instead of being safe at Hell’s Eight, she would have just been in...

She sighed as the path turned around the hill. It’d been so
much easier as a child to pretend. So much easier to shirk the responsibility of
living. Until the day when a customer had stabbed her friend Hilda. Maddie
moaned in her mind, remembering the horror of the blood, of putting her hands
over the wounds, of trying to stop the pulsing flow, her only friend’s blood
gushing over her hands in a steady stream. No matter which wounds she covered,
no matter how quickly she covered them, she couldn’t stop the blood. All she
could do was sit there and listen to Hilda gasp and groan as her life was ripped
from her by an act of senseless violence, while around them the brothel girls
and their customers went about their business. All because Hilda hadn’t
undressed fast enough. Maddie bit her lip as sobs welled as fresh today as they
were back then. Hilda had deserved better. It’d been so unfair. So wrong. Long
after Hilda had stopped breathing, Maddie had been trying to clean up the blood,
as if cleaning up the evidence would bring her back. But there’d been no
bringing her back, no forgetting the words Hilda had whispered to her.
I was going to...

It’d been a game they played. When they got enough money, they
were going to buy a house. When they met a nice man, they were going to have a
home and children. When they saved enough, they were going to travel the world
and live high. And Hilda hadn’t gotten to do anything except spread her legs for
the dirty men who paid the money.

I was going to.

Maddie had closed her eyes, those words hanging in her heart.
It’d been in that spilt second that Tracker had come into the saloon, and in
that split second she’d found the courage to jump on his offer. And now here she
was, in the middle of nowhere on an adventure chasing her life and completely
lost. Somehow her escape wasn’t turning out the way she wanted. But then again,
it wasn’t as if she’d gotten any of it right.

At first she’d thought Hell’s Eight would be everything she
needed—a nice house, cleaning, cooking, baking but no bedding. She really didn’t
like bedding and no one there expected her to. And at first living there
had
been nice, really nice, but somehow it hadn’t been
enough. In the past couple months, she’d been consumed with the same
restlessness she so often sensed in Caden. A need for...just something. She
needed more than safety. She needed her own dreams. Her own life.

Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t even see the riders coming at
her around the corner until she almost ran into them. Flower tossed her head,
whapping Maddie on the chin. Stars shot between her eyes. Four riders pulled up
in front of her, two abreast on the trail. Flower stepped back a quick two
steps. Maddie would have taken six. They were a hard-looking bunch. Their
clothes were dirty from the trail, whiskers sprouted on their cheeks, and they
all had guns strapped to their thighs, but they weren’t unfamiliar. She didn’t
know who they were, but they didn’t look any different from any of the saddle
bums who’d frequented the Red Velvet Slipper looking for companionship. The look
they were casting over her didn’t feel any different, either. It was the type of
look men gave her when they came into the saloon parlor, hot and hungry, seeing
her as a body, not a person, wanting her as a vessel, not a companion. Her
stomach heaved the way it always did, and her mind rebelled the way it always
did, but the pretend wouldn’t come. And she was left staring at them and the
reality of what was likely about to happen.

“Well, what do we have here?” the older man on the right asked,
pushing his hat back and folding his hands across the saddle horn.

She fumbled for a smile and turned Flower. “I’ll just move over
here and let you pass.”

He laughed and nudged his horse forward, cutting her off.
Worthless snarled.