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  Brianna did precisely what David had told her. Legs scissoring, her pulse hammering like a sledge, she raced across the grassland, her feet hitting the ground with such force that she felt her teeth snapping. Daphne, shorter of leg, was a weight at the end of Brianna’s arm, which she held extended behind her.

  “Hurry, dear heart. Show me how fast you can run!”

  Daphne picked up speed. To Brianna’s terrified gaze, the earth passed beneath them in a dizzying blur. Her lungs started to burn. She felt Daphne’s pace slow, and then she began to lag behind. Then, without warning, the child caught her toe on something and pitched forward into a headlong sprawl, breaking Brianna’s grip on her hand. Carry her if you have to. There was no time to see whether Daphne was hurt. No time even to think. She clutched her daughter in her arms and ran as if the devil were at her heels.

  Chapter Twelve

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  egs churning to cover ground, Brianna struggled to keep the sobbing child in her arms and realized with a skip of her heart that she’d lost her bearings. She stumbled to a stop. Had she been running that way? Or had it been that way? With no time to spare, she turned in the direction that felt right and broke into a lope. Go until your legs give out. The wad of money in her skirt pocket weighed next to nothing, but it felt like a ten-pound weight. David wouldn’t have given it to her if he’d believed he was going to remain alive to escort them to No Name.

  As Brianna ran, every word he’d said in those last few seconds became scored onto her brain. He’d known he might die, but even so, his only concern had been for her and their daughter. Their daughter? Oh, God. He’d walked out to face death, protecting a little girl who wasn’t even his. Remembering the tender gruffness of his voice and the look on his face made Brianna go blind with tears. Shamrock. She’d hated that nickname. Now she sent up frantic prayers that he’d live to nettle her with it again.

  Daphne grew heavier, making Brianna’s arms quiver and cramp. Worse, trying to run carrying the extra weight was exhausting her. Her breathing became labored, her lungs hitching. A stitch pierced her side. It became harder and harder to lift her feet.

  Brianna’s legs gave out. David had told her to run as long as she could and then slow to a walk, but as she staggered to a stop near a rock, she was so exhausted and winded that she couldn’t take another step. He’d said to head north come dawn, but what if it was overcast? Without the sun clearly visible, she might go too far east or west and wander around on the prairie until they perished. Grabbing for breath, she stood there, arms trembling to support Daphne. The child was sobbing, her tears wetting the jacket. In that moment, Brianna had no energy left to kiss scraped shins or elbows. She had no more strength, period. The thought barely filtered through her mind before she crashed to her knees. With Daphne’s added weight, her landing was hard, but the sharp, bone-bruising pain seemed dim, hovering just beyond the edges of her panic.

  Just then, the rock exploded, its jagged top splintering like glass, pieces going in all directions. Something hit her at the corner of her eye. Then, a fraction of a second later, a gunshot rent the air. That isn’t right. The report was supposed to ring out before the bullet struck. Or was it the other way around? Her thoughts swam. She felt as if a horse had kicked her in the head. Then, as if her brain were a pot of soup that had just been briskly stirred, the eddy of confusion began to slow, allowing her to think—if not clearly, at least in fits and starts.

  Down, she needed to get down. She blinked, got her vision back into focus, and caught a glimpse of something bright yellow in the deepening shadows. The fire. Oh, dear God. She’d lost her bearings when Daphne fell, and now they were back near the camp. She was kneeling in plain sight, and Daphne was wailing and blubbering.

  She dove to the ground, using the stone as protection as she shielded the child with her body. “Shush, baby, shush,” Brianna whispered frantically, tapping her fingertips against the little girl’s wet lips. “Those men—they’ll hear you. Quiet, quiet!”

  More gunfire erupted, cutting through the prairie gloaming with stutters of silence between the reports. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. David had ordered her to run, and she had, but somehow, she had circled back. If she stood up right now, they’d see her.

  They. Those horrible creatures. There was no way David could come out of this alive, not when he was up against three gunmen. The shooting stopped. Brianna held her breath, hoping to hear another exchange, but the prairie had gone deathly quiet. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath. Brianna clamped a hand over the nape of Daphne’s neck, warning her without words to stay low and not lift her head.

  Straining her ears for the sound of voices, Brianna heard nothing except the frightened whicker of a horse somewhere in the distance. She guessed that the animals had fled when the fight started. David. If he was dead, she and Daphne were on their own, and soon those awful men would sweep out from camp, searching for them. Horror chilled her skin. This close to the fire, she didn’t dare dash for safety. They would spot her and Daphne right away. Her only hope was to wait for full darkness.

  It seemed as if an eternity passed. Occasionally she thought she heard movement in camp, but she couldn’t be sure. The twilight had deepened to charcoal gray. In a few more minutes, the cover of night would descend to give her and Daphne an opportunity to run again. She waited, afraid to even take a deep breath for fear they would hear her. Daphne whimpered. Brianna clamped a hand over the child’s mouth.

  A footstep. Brianna tensed, her pulse slamming, certain she’d heard something. And then it came again—the soft, almost imperceptible chink of a boot spur. She shrank closer to the ground, terrified to look over the rock to see how close he was. Be quiet, Daphne, please, please be quiet. Had only one of them survived? If all three were alive, they’d be out here in force, sifting through every blade of grass. A picture of David’s face swam in her mind. Oh, how she regretted now that she hadn’t realized sooner what a good fellow he actually was. In that moment, she would have given almost anything to hear his voice, even if he was cursing.

  “Son of a bitch!” A hand closed over Brianna’s right arm, and she was jerked to her feet as if she weighed no more than a feather. “I told you to run, God damn it! As fast as you could go and as far as you could go! And I find you hiding only a few feet from camp!”

  Brianna, about to let fly with both fists, went limp. “David?” she whispered incredulously. “You’re alive? Oh, thank God!” She threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, thank God. David! I thought sure they’d killed you.”

  He grasped her by the shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “Don’t you David me!” He gave her a shake that rattled her teeth. “You willful, stubborn, ungrateful little brat!”

  The next instant, his hand closed around her wrist, as relentless as an iron manacle, and she was jerked half off her feet as he turned back toward camp. “Daphne, come along,” he barked.

  Brianna’s foot tangled in something in the dark. David caught her from falling and drew her abreast of him. “You—you have this all wrong!” she cried.

  “Shut up!” There was a snarl in his voice. Even in the dim light, she could see that his lips were peeled back, stretched thin over his white teeth. “Don’t test my temper right now. I’ve a good mind to turn you over my knee and give you such an ass warming, you won’t be able to sit for a week!”

  Still wailing, Daphne ran ahead of them toward the fire. Brianna was relieved to see that the child seemed to be unharmed. Unfortunately, it was the only thing she could be glad about. In a temper, David Paxton was a fearsome man. She wanted to explain to him what had happened, but she was afraid to say another word.

  When they reached camp, he pushed her, none too gently, down onto a rock. Then he loomed over her, one forefinger rigidly extended to punctuate every word he blasted her with. “You deliberately disobeyed me! I walked in here, willing to die so you and Daphne would have a chance to run, damn it! And instead you stayed within throwing distance, putting not o
nly your own life at risk, but my daughter’s as well! Do you have any idea what those bastards would have done to both of you? Do you? If I hadn’t prevailed, the party would just now be starting.” He jabbed his finger at Brianna’s nose. “And you, my fine, high-minded lady, would be the main source of entertainment!”

  Daphne, who had finally stopped crying, tried to interrupt. “Papa?”

  “Not right now, Daphne,” David snapped. “This is between me and your mother. Go check the damned vegetables to see if they scorched.”

  “But, Papa, she’s hurt!”

  “I don’t care if she’s—” David broke off and grabbed Brianna by the chin, moving slightly to one side so his shadow, cast by the fire behind him, no longer hindered his view. “Oh, shit.” He went down hard on one knee. “Oh, shit! Were you hit?”

  Brianna remembered something striking her at the corner of her eye and started to reach up to investigate. He grabbed her wrist. “Don’t touch it. If there’s lead lodged in your skull, you might push it deeper.”

  She could feel him trembling, which was altogether frightening. “I think it was a piece of rock, not a bullet.”

  “Rock?”

  Daphne broke in with, “The rock in front of us blew up, Papa.”

  David hauled Brianna back to her feet, encircled her waist with one arm, and half carried her closer to the fire. As he deposited her carefully on the grass, he said to Daphne, “Toss on some more tinder, pumpkin. I need better light.”

  As the flames flared, he tilted Brianna’s face to examine her injury. The next thing she knew, he pulled his knife from the sheath that rode on his trouser belt. She flinched away. “Rest easy,” he told her. “I’ve got to sterilize it first.” He thrust the blade into the coals. “Daphne, can you get another pot out of the packs and run get me some water?”

  While he wasn’t looking, Brianna carefully fingered the wound. The flesh around it felt tender and ached dreadfully, but she discovered nothing sharp. Her hand came away covered with blood. “It’s only a cut, David. A piece of rock flew up and got me.”

  He turned, saw her crimson-streaked fingers, and clenched his jaw muscle. “Will you ever do as I say? I told you not to touch it!”

  “It’s my face. I guess I know if there’s a bullet in it or not. And I tried to do as you said. It’s not my fault nobody ever taught me my directions.”

  He slanted a burning look at her. “What do you mean, your directions?”

  “North, south, east, and west—those directions. All I know is right and left, unless you count forward and behind.”

  His stony expression turned incredulous. “Right and left?”

  Brianna flung out her arm. “That is right.” She flung out her other arm. “And that is left. It’s useful enough knowledge, I suppose, but it isn’t much help out on the prairie.”

  As sharp as finely honed blades in the flickering light, his blue eyes pierced hers.

  “I ran, just as you said, truly I did. But then Daphne fell and rolled. By the time I managed to pick her up, I’d gotten turned around. I wasn’t sure which direction I’d been going, so I did an eenie-meenie-minie-moe.”

  “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Brianna saw Daphne returning from the creek. Now that he seemed to have control of his temper, she dared to say, “Mind your tongue, sir.”

  David drew his knife from the fire. The metal glowed red-hot.

  “You’ll not touch my face with that thing, either. All I need is a bit of cleaning up.”

  He waved the blade to cool it. Daphne set the pot on the fire, then hunkered with her skirt and cloak tails drawn over her knees, minding David’s warning not to let the cloth flutter into the flames. “Where are those men, Papa? Did you scare them away?”

  David studied the cooling knife blade. “Let’s just say they made a bad choice and soon saw the error of their ways.”

  Brianna had all but forgotten the other men. She glanced uneasily around. The recently fueled fire cast its light afar. She saw what looked like blood on the grass in several places, and there were also drag marks in the earth, leading off to a small copse of brush about fifty feet away. Had David killed all three men and then hidden their bodies so Daphne wouldn’t see them? Or had the ne’er-do-wells run for their lives? Their horses were gone. But, then, Blue, Lucy, and the bay weren’t there, either.

  “Did you give them what for and whip them, right and proper?” Daphne asked.

  Brianna waited for David to speak. He’d stood strong against three armed men and had every right to brag a little. Instead, he said, “Sometimes trouble comes calling. You don’t invite it, and you try to avoid it, but it comes anyway. When that happens, you do what you have to do, and if you’re real lucky and God is watching out for you, you live to feel sad about it, and then try to put it behind you.”

  “Are you feeling sad, Papa?”

  David settled a warm gaze on the child. “Heck, no! I’m feeling very glad that all of us are safe. I think it calls for a party.”

  “It’s fortunate that you have our penny in your pocket. I bet that’s why you won.”

  That stupid penny again. Brianna wanted to tell Daphne that it had been God, not the coin, that had kept David safe, but she didn’t want to stir that hornet’s nest again.

  David reached inside his duster to rest his hand over his shirt pocket. “By Jove, you’re right, pumpkin. Maybe our lucky penny helped save the day.”

  “For certain sure,” Daphne cried. “It’s the luckiest penny ever.”

  “Did our vegetables scorch?” he asked.

  Daphne looked in the pot and beamed a grin at him. “Nope. The water almost cooked away, and I think they’re way too done, but they didn’t burn.”

  “Well, then, after we get your mama’s face doctored, we’ll have ourselves a meal fit for royalty. I’m a fair hand at making corn cakes over the fire, and we’ve got plenty of sugar to spare. You ever had corn cakes drizzled with syrup?”

  “Not for a very long time.”

  “Well, it’s on the menu tonight.”

  “Yum!” Daphne exclaimed, the fate of the men forgotten. “Where’s the cornmeal? I’ll run get it.”

  David told her which pack it was in. As the child ran off, he shifted in his crouch and slipped the cooled knife back into its sheath. “I’m sorry I lost my temper like that,” he said softly. “It’s one of my worst faults, yelling and getting mad when I get a bad scare.”

  What Brianna found utterly amazing was that she’d never once feared he might strike her with his fists. She’d worried momentarily about the future of her backside, of course, but in her experience, a paddling could be survived with only a bit of soreness. Being knocked flat—having a man’s hard knuckles connect with her cheek—well, that was quite another thing, and she never wanted to live through it again.

  “I understand.” She watched her daughter, who was barely illuminated now by the flames as she dug through the packs. She’d taken to this lifestyle as if she’d been born to it. “Those men. They’re dead, aren’t they?”

  “Dead as doornails. I’ll take care of them later after Daphne’s asleep.”

  Brianna couldn’t express with words how grateful she was to him for shielding her child from that kind of ugliness. “And the horses and mule? Are they—dead, too?” Brianna had detested four-legged beasts of burden for six long years, but she’d grown unaccountably fond of David’s animals. “Did you hide their bodies as well?”

  David laughed. “It’d take six men and a boy to drag a horse. All the animals are fine. When the gunfire broke out, they used the good sense God gave them and ran. Blue will round them up. That’s why I wanted you on him today. Unless he stepped into a prairie-dog hole and broke a leg out there, he’ll find his way back to me.”

  His tone when he spoke of Blue told Brianna he loved the horse deeply. Two days ago, she might have questioned his sanity, but tonight she gazed off into the darkness, hoping Blue was okay and that he’d bring Lucy and the bay saf
ely to their camp.

  She realized she was trembling like a leaf just as David reached out to grasp her shoulder. “You okay, Shamrock?”

  It had been such a close call. She’d never been so scared in her whole life, but right then, she needed, almost desperately, to move forward and not think about it. “I’m fine,” she pushed out. “Just a bit shaken up. When I realized I’d run in a circle, I was frightened half to death. I ran and ran and didn’t go anywhere.”

  “How’s the head? It looks as if the bleeding has stopped.”

  “I had almost forgotten about it.” Touching the spot, she added, “It’s definitely nothing urgent. Let’s wait until Daphne has settled down before we clean it up. It’s only panging a bit. I’ve endured far worse.”

  “When?”

  That was a question she didn’t care to answer. So instead she changed the subject. “Twice today, you said I should tell Blue to take me home.” Brianna searched his face, admiring the chiseled cut of his features, delineated by the firelight. “Would he truly have headed for No Name? That seems a bit far-fetched. It’s a long way, isn’t it?”

  David lifted the coffeepot and moved it to the edge of the fire. It seemed to Brianna that a lifetime had passed since he’d put it on to boil. The brew was probably as thick as sludge. “That’s a trick every smart rancher teaches his horse. The dangers are many out on a cattle spread. You can get gored by a bull, or fall and break a leg. If you’re so badly injured you can’t guide the horse, you need him trained to take you home while you try to stay on his back. Blue is smart and well trained and has the homing instinct of a pigeon. He would have headed straight for No Name, just like I said.”

  Brianna searched the darkness, her throat going tight. She couldn’t believe she felt like weeping over a stupid horse. But, oh—he wasn’t just any horse. “I do hope he’s okay, David.”