Caine's Reckoning

He brought her hand to her mouth. “Eat it while I get supper.”

She glanced toward the jerky. It didn’t take a genius to interpret what she was thinking. No, not jerky.

“Oh, we can do a lot better than jerky.” Sam disappeared into the darkness and came back carrying two large oval tins with handles. “The padre’s housekeeper sent a bunch of tamales and pork stew along with tortillas and—” he lifted a square basket “—wedding cakes.”

Desi stopped licking at her hand. “Oh.”

Oh, indeed.

“Maria said it wasn’t proper you didn’t have a wedding supper.”

Caine took the basket with the cakes in it from Tracker and put it beside Desi. “Maria cooks like a dream.”

“Learned everything she knows from Tia.”

“Tia?” Desi asked.

“Tia’s been taking care of us since the massacre.”

“Massacre?”

She was beginning to sound a bit like a parrot but Caine couldn’t begrudge her. After the day she’d had she had to feel a bit like she’d been tossed from a coach going at full speed and was now just bouncing around in the aftermath. “We all used to live in the same town. After the massacre took our families, we banded together.”

“We didn’t know shit about surviving,” Sam interjected, opening a tin.

“Damn near starved to death,” Tracker agreed, getting out a metal coffeepot. “Best thing we ever did was to try and steal tortillas from Tia’s windowsill.”

Caine rubbed at the back of his neck with the memory. “That woman wields a mean broom, though.”

“That she did,” Sam agreed, pulling out husk-wrapped bundles. “Lined us up against the wall of her home and lectured us a good hour while dinner simmered in the pot. Quoted the bible one minute and threatened our manly charms the next.”

“Damn longest hour of my life,” Caine said, remembering the hunger that had driven him to steal, the shame at being caught by a good woman who quoted the bible, but most of all he remembered how good that damn meal had tasted after he and the others had worked another hour to earn their place at the table.

“Does she still live with you?” Desi asked.

“Hell, yeah.”

“Runs Hell’s Eight with an iron fist.” Sam popped the top off the second tin. The rich scent of spicy meat stew filled the air.

“She’s family.”

“Yes.” Maybe not by blood but by everything that mattered, Tia was family.

Desi’s face took up that guarded look he didn’t like. He took the package from her hands and set it aside. It wasn’t hard to see where her thoughts had wandered. “She’ll like you just fine, Desi.”

Caine reached back for his saddlebag and fished out his tin plate and spoon. Tracker poured some stew onto the plate and tossed on a tortilla. Sam added a tamale. Caine glanced over at where Desi sat dwarfed by the coat. “Add another tamale on there.”

Sam followed his glance. “Yeah. She could use some fattening up.”

Shit, Caine hoped Desi hadn’t heard that. It only took a turn to see that she had. That full, totally tempting mouth was set in a flat line and those eyes were shooting daggers at him again. He sighed and handed her the plate. “He wasn’t slinging mud. Just concern.”

She took it. “It doesn’t matter.”

He noticed the fine tremor in her hands as he let go. Hunger, fear, anger…? Hell, there were too many reasons that could cause that shaking to pinpoint just one. She didn’t immediately grab up the spoon.

“Maria said to tell you she didn’t make it too spicy, ma’am,” Sam offered.

Desi appreciated that. She’d only met the woman once, early on before James had understood how determined she’d been to escape. Plump and colorful, happily married to the town’s blacksmith, she’d been a too-cheerful reminder of all Desi had lost. Desi’s renewed defiance after the one time she’d delivered food had ensured James had never let Maria back again. “Thank her for me, please.”

“You can tell her yourself,” Caine inserted in his low drawl. “She comes out to Hell’s Eight once a month in good weather to visit Tia.”

Which meant there was no chance she’d find any peace at Caine’s home. Desi clenched the spoon in her hand. The food that had her stomach rumbling a moment before was suddenly as appetizing as glue. No woman wanted her male relations taking up with a whore. If Tia was as formidable as the men implied, she’d spend her days paying for her crimes against decency and her night paying for Caine having to marry her. The future did not look good. She kept her voice even as she said, “Thank you, I will.”

She stared beyond the firelight, to the wildness beyond. It matched the wildness she felt inside. She just wanted to be free. Free of men’s demands, society’s scorn and the personal pain that ate like acid at her soul.

“Desi?”

She resented Caine’s interruption as much as she resented her circumstances. “What?”

He placed his fingers under the plate and pressed, until she either had to lift the plate or wear the contents. She lifted. His cool green eyes met hers with a confidence she wished she could borrow.

“I promise you, nothing’s going to be as bad as you’re imagining.”

5

It wasn’t as bad, it was worse. Desi stared at the bedroll set on the opposite side of the fire from everyone else, the distance emphasizing this was her wedding night. She’d come back from changing into her new clothes and found this. The euphoria and contentment from her full stomach faded. She glanced across the fire to where Caine stood talking to Tracker and Sam. While she didn’t consider twenty feet a token to privacy, Caine probably did. Men, she knew, didn’t mind other men watching them stake their claim. She’d hoped it would be different if she were a wife, but she glanced at the double bedroll again and knew that had been a vain hope.

The Hell’s Eight men did everything together. Legend said they were ghosts of warriors past come back to right wrongs. Others said they’d made a deal with the Devil to survive when the Mexicans had wiped out their town. No one ever said they worried over much about what was proper or respectable. And she was a whore in the eyes of everyone around her. Maybe even in her own heart if she dared to check, but she wasn’t checking and she wasn’t believing it. That being the case, she wasn’t behaving like one.

Deliberately, she picked up the closest half of the bedroll and moved it four feet to the left. She would have moved it farther if a shadow hadn’t come between her and the firelight. A booted foot settled on the far corner of the bedroll. She didn’t need to look up to know who that boot belonged to. She’d spent all day today while riding, watching that boot rock in the stirrup. The three horizontal scrapes across the instep marked it as Caine’s. “You worried about catching on fire?”

“No.”

She gave the bedroll a yank. It came out from under his foot easier than she’d expected. She hit the ground hard enough to leave bruises on her fanny. She also managed to move her bedroll and extra two feet.

His shadow stretched over her, then his hand, and then the amusement in his drawl. “The heat of the fire isn’t going to reach this far.”

She accepted his hand. “I don’t mind.”

He didn’t let go as he bent down and grabbed the bedroll. “I do.”

She snatched it out of his hand, draping it over her arm as she smoothed the wrinkles out. “Then you can stay over there.” She didn’t dare look at his face as she added, “I don’t mind.”

He took her hand again. His thumb stroked over the back of it. “I must be in a real contrary mood tonight because I mind.”

Anger surged from deep within. “Why, because you’ll miss out on an opportunity to show your friends how well you fuck?”

That thumb didn’t even break rhythm. “And here I was thinking I won’t get a wink of sleep watching my wife shiver in her blankets.”