Desperate Hearts (13 page)

The faintest scent of sachet reached her.
She pressed the sheet to her nose and smelled lavender. She’d had a
room like this once. There had been a bit of lace and needlework,
flowers and ribbons. She had been ladylike and feminine. But it had
been a lifetime ago, and it had only lasted a brief time.

What was happening to her here and now was
the most important thing she had to think about. And the man who
had the answers was on his way to this room. She could hear his
footsteps beyond the door. She pulled the sheet up to her chin.

Their eyes locked as soon as he came in, and
he smiled almost jubilantly.

“
You’re awake. Welcome
back,” he said.

“
Back?” Her voice croaked
from disuse and she cleared her throat. “I didn’t go
anywhere.”

Jace sat in the chair next to the bed, and
Kyla pulled the sheet closer still.

“
Yeah, you did. You’ve been
unconscious since we got here to Misfortune four days
ago.”

“
Four days?”
she echoed, dumbfounded. She had lost whole days
and had no memory of them? No sense of their passing? It was
stunning.

“
And then night before last
you . . .” He faltered, and looked away, seeming to take great
interest in a loose thread on the mattress.

Apprehension swept over her. “I what?”

He glanced up. “Well, you almost died. For
hours I wasn’t sure if you’d make it or not.”

Trying to assimilate what he was telling
her, she said, “Many Braids . . . I saw Many Braids. Did you send
for him? Is he still here?”

He gave her an indulgent look. “We haven’t
seen him since the night by the campfire.”

“
Yes, yes he was here.” She
knew what she saw. “He had feathers and herbs, and he chanted over
me. He said I had one foot in each world. I remember that
now.”

“
You’ve been pretty sick—a
person’s brain can play funny tricks when a fever gets that
high.”

Kyla lifted her brows. She couldn’t have
imagined that, or dragged out some old memory to be relived as new
in a hallucination. The medicine man performed rites she had never
seen before, had no knowledge of.

“
What do you know about
him?” she asked.

“
Well, he’s a pretty
amazing man. He was a venerated elder of his tribe and a great
warrior, too, before the surrender with Chief Joseph. He knows more
about herbs and medicines than most white man’s doctors. Sometimes
I’ve even thought he knows a little magic. That is, if I believed
in that stuff.” He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees,
letting his bands dangle between them. “But he hasn’t been here.
I’ll tell you, though, I would have felt a little better that night
if he had been with us.”

It didn’t make any sense but . . . if Jace
said the medicine man hadn’t been here, it must have been just the
two of them. It was a very odd sensation, though, remembering a
dream as clearly as a waking moment.

Suddenly she realized how bad he
looked—exhausted, unshaven. His eyes had the same dull, bloodshot
appearance they had that morning she met him outside the hotel in
Silver City. He obviously hadn’t slept much, or eaten either, for
quite a while.

Kyla had not liked Jace from the moment she
met him. He was a killer, a hard, intimidating man who seemed to
have no heart. Some of that was still true. Now, though, she was
forced to see him in another light. He had saved her life. He had
sat by her for days and taken care of her. She did not remember
that. She simply knew it was true.

He could have left her anywhere along the
way, at some farmhouse, or with a family here in town. But he
hadn’t.

“
What about Hardesty’s men?
Won’t they find us here if we stay in town too long?”

“
I don’t think so. We
backtracked and sidetracked enough to throw them off. No one comes
to Misfortune, anyway. Cord was on a main road. This place isn’t.
Besides, I’m keeping an eye out for them.”

“
Where is this?” she asked,
gesturing at the room. If they were staying with his friends, why
hadn’t he mentioned them?

He told her then about Travis and Chloe
going to Baker City, and about Mildred DeGroot cooking for
them.

So, they were alone together in this house?
That, too, would have terrified her last week. Now, after
everything that had happened, it seemed a little less daunting.

Getting well was more important. She knew
she needed rest and care. She was willing to allow that she would
get both. An astounding thing happened in this room today,
something nearly as astounding as the story he had just told
her.

Kyla Springer Bailey began to trust Jace
Rankin.

* * *

She slept a lot over the next couple of
days. Sometimes the disturbing dreams came back, but she never
wondered where Jace was—he was always nearby.

He brought her broth and pablum, which she
crabbed about but ate anyway. She let him take care of wound; his
touch was surprisingly light and gentle. The acute pain was almost
gone now, and the wound had finally begun to heal properly.

After a search of the house turned up no
women’s clothes, Jace gave her one of his shirts to wear because
the tails were long, reaching to her knees. Like his bandanna, it
smelled of him—leather and soap and horses. But it was still a
pretty skimpy garment and felt trapped by her lack of suitable
attire. She wasn’t ready to put on her own clothes, but couldn’t
very well get out of bed if all she had to wear was a man’s
shirt.

Trust or no, Kyle never lost sight of the
fact that Jace was a man and, she observed, a full-blooded one. And
as she improved, she became more and more of it, in a way that she
had not been before.

That fact was made very clear to her one
morning she woke and rolled over to see Jace shaving at a mirror in
the little room that adjoined hers. She knew he slept there, just
steps away from her own bed, but had been too weak and tired to
give it much thought.

Fascinated, she studied him through the open
doorway. He wore no shirt and his bare back was to her. A strange
breathless flutter rippled through her when she looked at the
planes and shadows of his shoulder blades. The muscles in his right
arm and shoulder flexed ever so slightly as he plied the razor. The
light scraping sound made goose bumps rise on her scalp and arms.
When he tipped his head back to shave under his chin, his dark
hair, wet from washing, dripped water down the column of spine into
the waist of his jeans. Her gaze drifted lower, down narrow hips to
his legs and back again.

Jace cleared his throat, bringing her out of
reverie. Hastily she averted her eyes and sat up on edge of the bed
away from his door. Her face warm, but this time not from
fever.

No man had made her blush before. Although
she had not fully submerged into Kyle’s persona until recently,
Kyla had hidden behind a tomboy’s demeanor and clothes for most of
her young womanhood. It wasn’t that she hadn’t liked being a girl,
but Hardesty had robbed her of the freedom to be one. And in trying
to fend him off, she had kept all men away from her.

Hank had been different. He’d taken her as
she was, hurts and all, and made her his wife despite her
straightforward opinions and need for independence. He knew that
their marriage would be in name only. And she had not loved him the
way a woman was supposed to love her husband. He had told her he
would wait until she was ready, until the time was right. The time
never came. But now the man in the other room intrigued her,
despite her entrenched fears.

Without thinking, she put her hand to her
hair. She had managed to take enough sponge baths to stay fresh,
but her hair was another story. Days of being confined to bed had
turned it into an itchy, snarled mat. She tried to comb it out with
her fingers, but it was useless.

“
I think we can fix
that.”

She jumped at the sound of Jace’s voice and
spun to face him. He stood in the doorway, still without a shirt,
and she didn’t know where to look. His jeans hung low and snug on
his hips. Her immediate impression was of a man slender but
powerfully built. Of a flat belly and muscled flanks that led up to
a wide chest. Of old eyes in a young face. Then her gaze darted to
his left shoulder where a shiny pink scar marred an otherwise
rugged torso. It appeared to be recently healed.

“
Fix what?” Her words
sounded impossibly high and skittish to her own ears.

“
Your hair—” Jace began,
then followed her gaze and glanced down at the old injury. “Oh,
yeah,” he said, sounding a bit self-conscious. “That’s a souvenir
from my last visit to this town. I got into a scuffle over a lady’s
honor.”

“
You were shot?”

He shrugged and leaned against the doorjamb.
"It was a little more complicated than dealing with a bunch of
rowdy miners who just wanted to contribute is a young boy’s
corruption." He smiled ruefully. “You’d think I’d have learned my
lesson by the time I got to the Magnolia Saloon.”

“
Does it still hurt?” she
asked quietly, wondering not only how long her pain would last, but
his too.

“
Sometimes. Especially when
the weather changes.” He looked at her evenly. “You’ll have a scar,
Kyla, there’s no getting around it. But your arm will
heal.”

She turned her head. “Oh, I know. I don’t
care how it looks. No one will ever see it, anyway.”

A moment of uncomfortable silence fell
between them.

“
About your hair,” he said
finally.

“
I’d love to wash it, but
it would be pretty awkward with—“

“
I’ll do it.”

She stared at him, astonished. Her first
impulse was to refuse. It seemed too close, too personal, a touch
that reached beyond the scope of bandaging her arm. She knew that
her illness had forced him to the intimate task of undressing her,
and she cringed at the thought, but that had been an emergency.

She wavered, though. There was a piece of
soap in her gear, and a comb. The prospect of clean hair was too
tempting to refuse. And a few moments later she found herself
standing over the kitchen sink wearing a sling, his shirt, and her
longjohns, while his strong hands massaged lather into her hair.
They bumped hips and thighs, and his left arm crossed between her
shoulders. Tense at first, she began to relax as her dislike of
being touched retreated for the moment. In fact, the experience was
both soothing and stirring. A little sigh of contentment escaped
with her breath.

What an incredible turn this had taken: Jace
Rankin, dangerous bounty hunter, a man with a killer’s reputation,
was washing her hair.

Jace’s thoughts were running along the same
path. Of all the jobs he’d done in his life, being a nursemaid was
a new one for him. Never mind that it felt kind of nice, his hands
in her sudsy hair, or that the back of her neck was remarkably
smooth and pale, a place that begged a kiss—

“
Ouch!” Kyla’s smoky-voiced
protest bounced up from the bottom of the sink. “Don’t scrub so
hard.”

“
Sorry,” he muttered,
easing up on her scalp. He kept telling himself that under ordinary
circumstances this woman, tough and delicate, was not one he would
look at twice. That it would be the biggest mistake he could make
to entertain the ideas that had been stealing through his mind.
Hell, she was Hank’s widow and Hank’s body was barely
cold.

But the battle he had waged against her
death had changed his viewpoint. People left their lives behind
every hour of every day, and he’d been present to see a few of them
go. Yet he’d never had the feeling he had that night when he
realized that she was so close to death. Helpless. Angry. Even
cheated somehow.

“
Actually, you’re pretty
good at this,” she commented, bringing his attention back to his
task.

“
Great, maybe I should give
up bounty hunting and go to work in a barbershop.”

Her shoulders jumped when she giggled
briefly. He’d made her laugh, he marveled. It was as though he’d
discovered a small, rare treasure. He had never heard her laugh. He
tried again.

“
Oh, so you think I
couldn’t do it? Can’t you picture me stropping my hunting knife to
scrape the scruff off some leather-hided old bullwhacker? Hell,
they’d stand in line for a block just to be shaved by a famous
bounty hunter.”

“
They probably would. And I
could tell them I was your first customer,” she teased, laughing
again, and he joined her. That felt kind of nice, too.

He rinsed her hair with clear water that had
been warmed in the teakettle. Then he rubbed her head with a thin
towel he’d found in the chest upstairs. “Sit over here by the
stove.” He pulled a chair close to the heat and handed her the
comb.

Settling in the chair, she started working
out the tangles, which were considerable in her thick hair. “This
feels so much better.”

He surveyed the jagged edges that began to
emerge as she forced the comb through. Gesturing at the
water-darkened mahogany mass, he said, “You know, I’ll bet I could
straighten that up. I found a funny-looking pair of scissors around
here the other day.”

A look of grave doubt crossed her small
features, and her hand stilled. “Oh, I don’t know—”

“
Yeah, sure, I can do it.
Well, I couldn’t make it any worse than it is now.”

She dropped her gaze to her lap, then after
a pause looked up again with a defiant expression. “I wasn’t tryin’
to be pretty, y’know, so you can just forget about that. I’m
supposed to be Kyle Springer.”