Foxfire Bride (31 page)

"Are you strong enough for a short walk?" she asked, studying his face. Tanner suspected he didn't look too sprightly himself.

"Yes." In truth he felt exhausted but nothing could have made him admit it. Once away from the fire, he pressed her arm to his side and asked, "How many days?"

"It's been almost a week." She glanced at his sling. "How does the arm feel?"

"Sore."

"You lost a lot of blood. And you had a fever that scared all of us."

Bits of memory came back to him. "You led my horse."

"We took turns, shifting between the mules and you."

She turned him so deftly that he hardly noticed until he saw the campfire ahead and realized she'd turned him around. "Did anything happen that I should know?"

Fox ducked her head and he suspected she was frowning. "All in all everything went smoothly."

"But?"

"There are small settlements in the area we've been passing through. Mostly Mormon settlements but a few have saloons. Jubal Brown had an incident in one of those."

Tanner stopped and forced her to face him. "Go on."

Fox shrugged beneath the hand he'd placed on her shoulder. "He got drunk and apparently instigated a fight over a woman in the saloon. To put it politely, we were asked to leave at once."

"I'll speak to him," Tanner replied, his gaze fixing on the men at the fire.

"He's already been spoken to," Fox said in a tight voice.

Her tone said it all. Tanner nodded. "And Peaches?"

"I think he's a little better."

Her tone also spoke to this issue and Tanner understood her answer was more wishful thinking than truth, which didn't surprise him. Peaches was slumped with fatigue and his dark eyes were dull.

Fox laced her fingers through his and gazed up at him with softness in her eyes. "I missed you."

"If an unconscious man can miss someone, then I missed you, too," he said with a smile. More than anything right now, he wanted to kiss her. Wanted to sink down to the spring grass and hold her in his arms and sleep without the feverish dreams. He wanted to tell her how amazing she was, tell her that he'd never met a woman like her. Wanted her to know that her courage astonished him.

Later, as he lay in his bedroll gazing up at the spangled sky, he thought about everything he owed his father. His upbringing, his education, a privileged life, his livelihood. For as long as he could remember, he had made decisions to please a man whose only flaw was that he couldn't be pleased. Whatever Tanner did, it wasn't good enough. How long did a son keep trying? How long until the debt was paid? Could he ever make a choice without first considering the effect on his father? Without wanting his father to finally offer approval?

No matter how he turned the question in his mind, the answer came up the same. His father would never accept a woman like Fox. And in truth, he doubted Fox held any interest in the world Tanner lived in. He couldn't picture her paying or receiving calls, or standing by while a household staff tended her home, nor could he imagine her rigged out in a ballroom gown.

The San Rafael Swell was impassable. It rose like a great barrier of towers, buttes, and chasms. In places the sheer red cliffs soared to two thousand feet. An inexperienced guide could waste weeks attempting to find a passage, but Fox had faced this obstacle before. Still, it pleased her that she led them directly to the hogback and the narrow opening that dropped them down into a long valley. Here the terrain leveled out and she pushed the company hard, riding long days to make up time.

Temperatures soared and in places the ground was barren. In the last couple of days the men had turned silent and surly. Finally spotting the trees that signaled the presence of the Green River was like finding an oasis in the desert.

"Lord, I am ready for some fricking shade," Hanratty said, swinging down from his horse and wiping sweat from his forehead. He led his horse to the river and knelt on the bank, splashing water on his dusty face.

"You sit under a tree and catch your breath," Fox ordered Peaches. In the midst of a coughing spell, he cast her a grateful glance, then doubled over again.

She watched him a moment, feeling her heart seize, then pressed her lips hard together and began pulling the packs off the mules. After a minute she noticed that Jubal Brown worked beside her.

"He's bad off, ain't he?" Jubal asked, jerking his head toward Peaches.

"He's been better," Fox said, separating the packs into those with provisions they needed to make camp and those with items they wouldn't require tonight.

"He needs a doctor and a month of bed rest at least."

"Well, I'll just take him to the hotel then. Get him a fine room and some pretty nurses."

"Don't go getting pissy with me. I didn't make him sick."

Fox walked away, going to the river's edge. She could tell herself twenty times a day that Peaches was improving, but that didn't make it true. A dozen times she'd asked herself if she shouldn't have insisted that he stay in No Name. It didn't help to know that Peaches would have ignored her.

Tanner walked up behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. "There's a lady doctor traveling with the group camped up by the willows. Maybe she should take a look at Mr. Hernandez."

Fox glanced toward the other groups waiting to ford the Green River. "I'll speak to him but I can almost guarantee that he won't agree. Most likely the lady doctor would just tell him to stay in bed a month." Spreading her hands, she indicated the steep canyon walls to the north and south. "This is the only flat space for miles. I don't know why there isn't a settlement here with a place for a man to rest, but there isn't." They stood in silence, gazing at the campfires up and down the riverbanks. "He won't do it, Tanner. He's going to Denver with me and that's that. But five minutes after we reach Denver, I'll have his butt in a real bed and a real doctor on the way to see him." Her mouth turned grim. "I don't know what else to do."

After supper she asked Peaches if he felt up to a game of chess. For the first time that she could remember, he shook his head no.

"It's been a long day, Missy," he said, squeezing her hand. "We'll have a game tomorrow. If crossing the river goes well."

"It should. We'll pay the ferry to take you and the packs across. Then me and the men will swim the horses and mules."

"Tanner's not wearing the sling anymore, and he's eating again. Glad to see it."

"I'd like to see you eating more."

"You eat enough for the two of us, Missy. Always have."

They smiled at each other then Fox made him promise again to have a chess game tomorrow before she wandered off in search of Tanner. She found him kneeling on one of the gravel bars, turning a piece of rock between his fingers.

"It's petrified wood," he explained when she asked. "And there are fossils scattered all over this area."

Fox knelt beside him and examined the petrified wood. "Hanratty was talking to one of the other groups that have been here a couple of days. He says they've found a lot of jasper and agates in these gravel bars."

"Doesn't surprise me."

"I've seen fossils before. What makes them?"

Tanner warmed to the subject and was still telling her about dinosaurs when the sun slipped behind the peaks.

"You know a lot of interesting things," Fox commented as they walked back to their fire, brushing up against each other seemingly by accident.

"So do you. We just know different interesting things." Stopping, he pulled her behind a tree and kissed her deeply, then wrapped his arms around her. "I wish there weren't so many people around."

"Me too," Fox said, her voice smothered against his neck. Lord, he smelled good.

She longed for him, burned for him. She even dreamed about him. Sometimes, when the trail ahead was obvious, she would drop back and ride behind him so she could look at the wide slope of his shoulders and the way he sat his horse. His dark hair was long again, dropping below his collar, and she liked that. Loved watching his strong thighs grip the sides of the bay. And every time he favored his sore arm, she noticed that she touched her shot-up earlobe, a discovery that made her smile.

Lifting her mouth, she tasted deep of him and shivered when his arms tightened around her and she felt the heat and hardness of his desire for her.

It would be so easy to love this man.

The thought shocked her and kept her awake long after the campfires along the river had been extinguished and the only sounds were the night music of crickets and the rustle of small animals moving through the underbrush.

In her entire life Fox had loved only two people. Her mother and Peaches. She had never imagined there could be another.

And yet, when she gazed at the craggy angles of Tanner's strong face or looked at his hands or remembered the heat of tangled bodies, her chest tightened and she couldn't breathe right. An ache closed her throat.

She suspected that was what love was, a knot behind a person's ribs that could expand with wild miraculous joy and then clamp down into a ball so heavy it hurt to carry.

Lying there in the dark, feeling the weight behind her ribs, she reaffirmed her vow to take revenge on Hobbs Jennings and kill the bastard. Since she could have no future with Tanner, it didn't matter that she had no future at all. It would be better to cut her life short than to spend it hurting inside, wanting what she could never have.

A warm steady rain followed them south as they left behind the book cliffs Fox had been tracking. Last night they had given up on a fire and had gone without coffee. They'd eaten cold food while rain dripped off their hat brims. Cakes of mud clung to their boots and had to be carved off with a knife before they crawled into their tents.

It was still drizzling when they woke. Mornings were never Fox's best time of day, and mornings without coffee made her snarly. She led out without speaking to anyone and stayed well ahead until Hanratty rode up beside her.

"What do you want?"

"Coffee, a couple thousand dollars, and a willing woman."

Fox flipped her wet braid over her shoulder and didn't bother turning her head. "There's a hope for one of those things if the fricking rain ever stops." Grimacing, she gave herself a mental kick. Since talking to Barbara Robb, she was trying not to swear. Trying not to stride.

"I was talking to some people back at Green River," Hanratty said. "One group is going to Denver, too, but they're heading straight east."

"Which will be a ride as easy as ours until they reach the Grand River, which is impassable on the route they've chosen and it's going to look even worse because it's flooding now." She was in no mood to justify herself and resented his implication.

"How do you know it's flooding?"

"Because it's spring." She refrained from adding "you idiot." Collecting a smidgeon of patience, she added, "The Grand drains the Colorado mountains. It runs high longer during the spring melt than other rivers."

"I want to tell you something," Hanratty said. Then he fell silent for so long that Fox finally sighed and glanced at him. He rode hunched against the rain, his gaze straight ahead.