Caden's Vow

“Caden?”

“What?”

“If there was anything to find, we’d have found it by now.”

Caden shook his head. “Keep looking.”

“For what?”

“Anything.” There had to be something here, something to show where Maddie was, but if there wasn’t, he’d simply search house by house, town by town, until he found her or someone who knew where she was. And then there’d be hell to pay.

He pictured her face with her big eyes, rosebud mouth and that smattering of freckles across her cheeks. Kisses of the fairy folk, he’d say. He looked around the little glen, the sunlight filtering through the leaves in small rays, giving it almost a magical feel, and whispered, “If she is one of you, give me a goddamn sign as to who has her.”

He waited in vain for a clap of thunder, a whisper in his mind, a touch on his shoulder. His da always said the wee folk were particular, but then, as he turned, out of the corner of his eye he saw a gleam of metal. It took him four steps to get there. Four steps in which he thought he must be losing his mind, but when he got to that spot, the shine didn’t go away. It grew stronger until he was standing on top of it, and then he couldn’t see it anymore, covered as it was by a low-growing fern. He squatted.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know yet.” He moved the fern aside, and there, camouflaged against the rock, was a button. He picked it up. He felt more than heard Ace arrive at his side. The man was as light as a cat on its feet. He held the button up.

“Hard to see as it was against the rock.”

Ace nodded.

The button had a unique design. Almost a cross but not quite.

“A button,” Ace said, his disappointment as strong as Caden’s should have been.

“Yeah.” Caden whispered a thank-you to the fate, God or whomever had brought him to that button.

Caden stood. Ace cocked his head and observed his face.

“Except you recognize it, don’t you?”

“It’s got a distinct pattern.”

He closed his fingers around it, his mind consumed with all the reasons a man’s button would pop off his shirt. None of them were good.

He ran his thumb over the raised design. “It’s the Culbart brand, a lopsided cross.”

“Culbart has her?”

“So it would seem.” Culbart was a bear of a man. Rough around the edges. Not known for his soft ways with anything, let alone women. His crew was rougher still. And he had Maddie.

“That button could have fallen off for a wide variety of reasons,” Ace pointed out with an utter lack of conviction.

That was true, but in his gut Caden knew what that button meant.

He dropped the button in his pocket and swung up into the saddle. He spun Jester in a circle and kneed him back up the trail.

“But there’s only one that matters to me.”

CHAPTER FIVE

LYING LOW ON a hill above the Culbart spread, Caden surveyed the goings-on below. He’d liked to have seen chaos, but for the day and a half he’d been observing, Caden hadn’t seen anything that he wouldn’t have seen at Hell’s Eight. Animals were tended on schedule, guards were rotated through shifts and buildings were maintained. What he hadn’t seen were any signs of Maddie, but Caden knew Culbart had her. Had had her for two weeks doing Lord knew what to her.

Caden tried to remember what Fei had said her cousin Lin had endured when her father had sold her to Culbart to pay a debt. He couldn’t remember much. Fei had been sketchy on those details. Not surprisingly. There were things a good woman didn’t want revealed. Besides, whatever had happened to Fei’s cousin wasn’t particularly relevant because a man approached a woman of good family differently than he did a known whore. Whether the woman had been sold or not, virginity had value. Hell, women had value in general, but if Culbart and his crew saw Maddie as a whore...

Caden closed his fist around the spyglass and ground his teeth. If they treated her like that, he’d gut them and skin them and leave them out as buzzard bait. Maddie might not have had a good beginning, but she was better than anyone down deep where it mattered, and he’d made her a promise when she came to Hell’s Eight. He promised her she’d never have to serve a man again unless she lay down by her choice. He remembered the disturbance of footprints in the dirt, the isolation of her location. The popped button. The blood in the dirt from the dog. Fuck. Nothing about her being with Culbart was her choice.

Putting the spyglass back to his eye, Caden surveyed the Fallen C. He had to give Culbart credit. He might be a son of a bitch with some questionable morals when it came to women, but he ran his ranch with an iron hand. The evidence was in the well-kept buildings, the tidy outhouses, the numerous corrals and the condition of his animals. Probably the only thing that kept him from giving Hell’s Eight a run for its money when it came to stocking the cavalry was the fact that the Fallen C was smack-dab in the middle of Indian country. The man didn’t just have to battle wolves and drought. A tribe could decide anytime that he was trespassing on their land, and with the unrest in the East over separation, fewer and fewer cavalry were being sent to protect the West. In the coming years, Culbart would be lucky if he got out of this with his scalp intact. Of course, that was always supposing Caden left anything for the Indians to scalp. Caden popped his elbows on the ground and continued his surveillance. He needed to know the routine to get Maddie out of there.

It was early morning and the men of the Fallen C were going about their usual business. Men were going in and out of the bunkhouse, heading up to the cookhouse for breakfast. For the day and a half that Caden had been surveying the place, he hadn’t seen any sign of Maddie, but her little horse, Flower, was in the corral and not looking too happy with that stallion next door. Caden sighed again. Obviously from the stallion’s behavior, the mare was coming into heat, which complicated things because another promise Caden had made Maddie was that Flower would also not have to lay down with any man unless she wanted to, and from the looks of things, that stallion was about to take that corral fence down.

“That’s a mighty big sigh,” Ace said.

“Looks like we’re going to have a romance to break up, too.”

“You see Maddie with one of the cowmen?”

“Nah. I haven’t seen her yet, though I imagine they’d be keeping her under lock and key.”

“Maybe. So what romance are we breaking up?”

“That stallion and Flower.”

To his credit, Ace didn’t bat an eyelash. One of the things that Caden enjoyed about Ace was that the man was unflappable.

He took the spyglass from Caden and trained it on the corrals.

“Nice-looking stud. Might be worth letting it happen.”

“I promised Maddie her mare would be safe.”

Ace lowered the glass and raised a brow at him. “You promised a woman her horse wouldn’t be...deflowered?”

Caden grabbed the glass. “Maddie’s sensitive on the subject.”

“Uh-huh.”

It was a ludicrous request and he’d been stupid to make the promise. Knowing it didn’t mean Caden wanted it shoved in his face. “Shut up, Ace.”

“Didn’t say a word.”

“Good.”

“If you’re planning on ending a romance, though,” Ace drawled, “then you’d better get over there soon.”

“Yeah. That’d occurred to me.”