“Don’t touch me.” I nudged him away with my elbows, my hands still pressed together to stanch the blood.
He ripped some fabric, then wrapped a piece of his butter-colored shirt around my cut. His hands were wide, with defined veins and square nails, trimmed and clean. His shirt was unbuttoned at his throat below his white kerchief and black vest, his fingers warm on my wrist. I thought of Magnolia pressing salve and rosewood calico to my sliced thigh. Her gasps of laughter at catching ourselves amid honey locust thorns, her palm swiping her forehead, smearing a translucent stain of red blood. All autumn long, no one had touched me.
He tied off my bandage and pressed the back of his palm to my forehead. “Can you walk?”
“Course I can walk.”
“Where’s your buckskin? Cricket, right?”
I gestured behind us. Then folded forward over my crossed legs, pressed the pads of my palms to my eyes. It had been a long while since I’d felt so known. Here in the wildwood, with an outlaw, I felt authenticity. I glimpsed that vulnerable and rare pulse of friendship, in a way I hadn’t since everything that had happened last spring.
“You’re just lightheaded,” he said. “Lost some blood.”
“I know that,” I snapped.
“I truly thought they were my catch,” I added, my tone somewhere between a grumble and a sob. “I don’t like sharing.”
“I can tell. Me neither.” The wind cracked through the dried leaves of a pin oak. “Perhaps we’ll learn?”
His boots swept through the grass toward the turkeys. These past months, I’d felt rooted to the earth, steady and unwavering. But this man was a raging storm. He made me want to race into his winds and feel something. Get lost a moment. Abandon myself, make another shocking choice.
He wasn’t good for me, just the sort of anarchy I should avoid. But Olive was right—I couldn’t survive winter alone. Perhaps he was the safest, as I couldn’t hurt him. “I won’t promise outrageous things,” I said. “I’ll call you a cheat, when you cheat.”
He tied together a couple of birds for each of us. Then stood, long body unfolding. “I won’t treat you as weak neither.”
“That’s just an excuse so you can snarl whenever you like.”
“Arguing with me is the most fun you’ve had in weeks,” he said.
“You’re dreaming.”
He crouched beside me. Crinkles edged beside his eyes, his tan throat glistening with sweat. He was loathsome—but a smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. “You love it,” he said.
“You—”
He cut me off. “Darling, I just don’t have time for playing.” He stood, hefted me upright. “Let’s go.”
I bit my lip, amused, off-kilter, then slung my Winchester cross my back and followed him through the brush. I couldn’t remember anyone, ever, flinging fire back at me with such smoothness. I didn’t know what to do with him.
Sound eased in that calm before nightfall. The softening of blackbird song in the overstory, the smush of leaves underfoot, the gawky yips of coyotes out yonder. We’d reach Cricket by candlelighting,and I knew the buffalo trails of this land well enough to ride by the glow of the full moon. Though lightheaded and unsettled, I hadn’t lost that much blood—I’d be fine.
The Lawman whispered through the hardwoods, his broad shoulders turning to avoid a branch, his gaze roaming the timber: attentive, silent, lethal. The wind reverberated through creeper, and then athwuptsliced through forest sounds.
I dove behind a stump, cocked my pistol.
A hatchet cleaved through my muslin sleeve, pinning my hand against the bark. The weapon jangled with hawkbells, and a golden eagle feather reverberated. I scanned the wood. No movement, no color, no sound, just the weight of the impending. The Lawman crouched beside me, hands raised, his gun dropped into the autumn-hued leaves.
All wrath—was this the borderline of Osage territory?
Chapter Twelve
Ididn’t hear him, but in the twilight I saw him approach. An Osage man stalked soundlessly between the saplings, a multihued blanket cloak draped across his body, a pistol trained on the Lawman. He was the tallest man I’d ever seen.
“We mean no harm.” I gestured toward the birds with my bandaged hand. “We’re hungry—and I’m wounded.”
The Osage’s brows were drawn, fury knotted in the clench of his jaw, the deep divots along his cheeks shadowed. He pressed his gun against the Lawman’s stomach. A few others came forward, moccasins silent in the shrub brush.
My breath hitched, held.
