Outlaw Carson (17 page)

He sat on the cliff edge, waiting, letting
the light and darkness and color wash over him, blown by the
ceaseless wind. Behind him his horse snorted and tossed her head,
filling the night air with the music of harness bells. All else was
quiet, from the mountains at his back to the northern horizon.

Seconds melted into minutes, minutes built
into hours, and the the moon rose high in the sky. Still he waited
and watched, ever patient, ever angry.

Before dawn, his wait ended. He slowly
uncrossed his legs and rose to his knees, setting his metal cup of
tea aside. Far below on the canyon floor, lantern lights twinkled
and disappeared with the irregularity of the contours of the land.
It was a caravan, moving to the west and the fortress that lay
there, waiting for its master and for the prey to rise to the
bait.

Kit whistled softly, and the mare carefully
approached the drop-off, her hooves sending up feathery puffs of
dust. He stood up and pulled his rifle from the saddle scabbard,
loading a single cartridge into the chamber.

Lowering himself flat to the ground, he
settled the stock against his shoulder and sighted down the barrel.
A moment later the echo of his shot ricocheted along the canyon
walls, and one of the lanterns extinguished in a quick burst of
flame. The other lights quickly followed into darkness, snuffed by
the riders who held them.

The Turk had been warned; he knew someone
was after him. When he reached home he would know who, and after
that there would be no more warnings.

Kit rose to his feet, sheathed the rifle,
and returned his metal cup to the saddlebag. Then he swung himself
onto the mare’s back and turned her toward the mountains and
Chatren-Ma.

* * *

Barbarian, Kristine had quickly learned, was
a relative term. Any anthropologist who shared a meal with the Turk
would be hard-pressed to apply the term to Kit Carson.

The man ate with his hands, and his fingers,
and his teeth, in a manner she found just short of dealing death to
her own appetite. But what his table manners didn’t accomplish, his
dark-eyed gaze did. He followed her every move, no matter how
slight, with an intensity she was sure exposed her deepest
thoughts.

He was welcome to most of them, since they
expressed a loathing she didn’t have the courage to voice aloud.
There were a few she’d rather keep to herself, however. The ones
dreading the lustful curiosity she saw in the midnight depths of
his eyes, the one verging on panic whenever he reached out with a
bronzed hand to trace a path across her skin. If Kit was
masculinity at its gentlest and most invincible, the Turk was
masculinity in its most arrogant and brutish form, handsome in a
way no single-race man would ever be.

Two days ago, when he’d taken her from that
foul fishhouse in Shanghai, his arrogance had been nearly palpable.
He’d all but sneered as he toyed with her hair, then tossed her a
brightly colored wool skirt, cotton shirt, a black vest, and low
leather boots, and told her to get dressed. They were leaving in
five minutes.

She didn’t get much else out of him as they
traveled by small plane across the breadth of China to Tibet. She
did manage to ask him how he’d smuggled her out of the United
States. She would have thought a drugged and unconscious woman,
even one as slight as she, wouldn’t be that easy to hide. He’d only
laughed, made some comment about greedy Americans, then told her
he’d done no more than bribe some antiquity dealers in Los Angeles
with various religious objects and a tapestry stolen from Buddhist
shrines and temples, and they had arranged for a plane to fly him
and his “cargo” to Shanghai, with no customs officials bothering to
check that cargo.

The Turk’s arrogance was gone now, however.
Now he was nervous, hair-triggered to every breath taken by anyone
in his presence. The shot at dawn had turned his cocksure demeanor
to wariness. What he’d found half an hour later embedded in the
gate to his compound—a
khukri
sunk to the hilt, spearing
the torn halves of a wanted poster, a quarter section of map, and a
yard’s length of roan braid—had twisted his wariness into fear. No
mere man had accomplished the feat of sinking twelve inches of
blade through solid wood.

“Kautilya wants you back.” The Turk’s silken
voice startled her into looking up, something she’d been avoiding.
“More so than I had thought possible.”

Kristine kept her silence, watching him with
her own mixture of wariness and fear. Kit was out there, somewhere
in the night. All she had to do was keep herself together until he
came.

The Turk leaned forward and dropped another
stick of wood on the fire burning in a pit in the middle of the
kitchen’s dirt floor. They were alone in the room. Guards had been
posted in the compound, and the other bandits had retired to
bedrooms on the second floor, or to one of the other houses chinked
together against the canyon wall.

Goats, pigs, and chickens milled about the
stonewalled courtyard fronting the main house, adding a strangely
domestic ambience to the hideaway. The two blacker-than-sin
mastiffs chained to the door, however, kept her from being lulled
into anything but the barest surface calm.

Stacks of woolen bags filled with salt and
grains were piled high against three of the kitchen’s inner walls,
giving the room the look of the inside of a quilted tent. Piled on
the other side of the room were several crates of rifles, which
Kristine bet were “trade goods.” Nobody needed that much firepower
for personal reasons.

“I expected him to come, yes, but out of a
sense of duty,” the Turk continued. “He has a great sense of duty,
Kautilya does. But this . . .” He lifted the roan braid and let it
slide through his fingers back to the table. “This is more than
duty.” A frown etched deep lines into his lean cheeks. “I cannot
help but wonder what you are to him, Kreestine Richards.”

She watched him stretch lazily back in his
chair, then felt his booted foot slide next to hers.

“Maybe you are worth more to him than he is
to the Chinese? A wolfish smile replaced the frown, showing a flash
of crooked, brown teeth.

She jerked her foot back under her chair. If
Kit had ever smiled at her with that much feral intent, she would
have sent him packing long before he’d had a chance to steal her
heart like the outlaw he truly had become.

She’d seen the poster and thought the sum
the Chinese offered was just short of unbelievable, but she had no
sympathy and no answer to the Turk’s dilemma. She didn’t know where
the greatest profit lay. She couldn’t place a price on her life,
let alone guess Kit’s price on her life. But he’d already given the
Turk more than he’d given her, a fourth of the map to
Chatren-Ma.

All in all, she was having a hell of a time
sorting everything out. If he gave the Turk what he’d promised her
in order to save her life, did that mean he’d broken his word? At
this point, she really didn’t give a darn about Chatren-Ma, but the
complicated ethics of the problem were a preferable focus for her
mind than the gleam in the Turk’s eye.

“He has had many women,” the Turk said. “But
the only time he ever risked his life for one was the night he took
mine, the night I took this.” He fingered the braid again.

Oh brother, she didn’t want to hear this.
She really didn’t.

“That he was unaware of the female’s pledge
to me meant little to me then, but I wonder, Kreestine, are you
pledged to him?”

She wasn’t going to touch that one with a
ten-foot pole. All she wanted to do was go home. What was Kit
waiting for? Why hadn’t he rescued her? He’d had the whole day to
think of something.

Good Lord! What was
she
thinking?
The unprecedented selfishness of her thoughts hit home with a
disturbing force.

Slumping over the table, she dropped her
head into her hands. It was Kit’s life she was bartering away. His
life she was willing to risk for only a chance at her own freedom.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t give the Turk another weapon.

“No,” she murmured, shaking her head,
finally breaking the silence she’d used for sanctuary. Even as she
spoke, she prayed her words weren’t true. “I am not pledged to
Kautilya Carson. I am nothing to him. Nothing.”

The Turk’s low chuckle filled the room, then
he pushed his chair back.

“You lie, Kreestine, but such a sweet lie.”
He rounded the table and encircled her wrists with one large, rough
hand, pulling her to her feet, close to his chest. She turned her
head aside, hiding her face against her shoulder, but the strength
of his fingers grasping her chin forced her to meet his gaze.

“Sang Phala, it seems, chose no more of a
monk to replace me than the one I would have been.” His deep voice,
so near, so soft, caressed her fears to new life; and the
rock-solid body pressed against hers put the raw edge of terror on
those fears. Neither, though, had the impact of his words.

“You!” she gasped. The Turk was Sang Phala’s
nephew, whom Sang Phala had traded . . . to bandits . . . for Kit.
Any flicker of hope Kristine might have nurtured, died.

“For too long I have been second to
Kautilya. I will not take his leavings tonight.” He released her,
and the breath rushed back into her lungs. “But if on the morrow he
loses . . .” His voice trailed off in an unspoken threat.

Loses what? Kristine wondered, steadying
herself with a hand on the table. Surely not his life. She’d read
the characters on the poster. The Chinese wanted the outlaw Carson
alive.

And what of her? What would become of her if
Kit couldn’t save her? Would she be forever trapped in this lost
land, some barbarian bandit’s moll?

The worst of her thoughts didn’t bear
thinking, but neither would they be put to rest. They loomed large
and impregnable in her mind, like the broad back the Turk turned to
her as he lay down on his pallet.

The fire drew her gaze to its glowing
embers, and in every flash of energy, every shift of flame, she saw
spice-colored eyes, gentle and mysterious, beckoning her to sleep .
. . and to dream of him.

They rode at dawn. Or rather the bandits
rode and Kristine held on for dear life, her fingers tangled in a
whipping ebony mane. Not that she needed to hold on, for the Turk
held her securely in his iron grip on the horse’s blanketed back.
Powerful muscles bunched and stretched beneath her as the steed’s
flying hooves pounded the ground. But they were no more powerful
than the arm wrapped around her waist or the long thighs flanking
hers.

Icy wind bit at her cheeks, contrasting
sharply with the heat of the masculine body surrounding her from
behind. He’d given her a full-length sheepskin coat to wear, the
leather softly tanned and embroidered with bright threads of gold
and blue, red and green, and the downy fleece turned inward to warm
her and caress her skin.

The quarter map Kit had impaled on the
compound gate led them out of the canyons to a rocky plain, and
then into the next set of canyons beyond. The sun had not yet
penetrated the chasms stretched out before them, and after hours of
riding at a mile-eating pace, the band slowed their wild mounts,
picking their way through the labyrinth of towering walls.

The Turk repeatedly checked the map, leading
his men deeper into the maze of rock. More than one bandit cast a
wary glance behind himself as the canyons twisted and turned upon
one another. A half an hour in, water began gathering in small
pools on the ground, running down the striated earth and adding a
melodic backdrop to the splashing hooves. Soon the pools connected
into a gently flowing stream and mists began to rise, slowly at
first, barely a wisp of lightness here and there on the canyon
floor. But the farther they went, the thicker the mist became,
obscuring both the sight and the sound of the horse’s legs.

Sitting on the lead pony and in front of the
Turk, Kristine felt as if she were pushing a vanguard through the
fog. The low white cloud drifted down the canyon ahead of them,
rolling and billowing, rising ever higher. It hung like gossamer
whiffs of smoke released from the black stone that pressed in on
them from either side. Unconsciously, she scooted closer to the
Turk. His arm tightened around her, as if he, too, needed some kind
of reassurance in this strange place Kautilya had brought them
to.

A muted whinny from far behind them caused
them both to jerk their heads around. Kristine couldn’t control her
gasp of dismay, nor the Turk his grunt of surprise. They were
surrounded, enveloped by the mists that not only rose before them,
but closed behind them as well.

Three other riders, as wild eyed as the
horses they rode, floated in and out of the swirling white mass,
only three of the ten who’d left with them at dawn.

The Turk jerked hard on the reins, wheeling
his horse about, but the animal moved no farther, stopped in
midwhirl by a soft whistle penetrating the stillness.

Kristine’s heart lodged in her throat,
beating furiously. Kit!

But where?

She scanned the emptiness around her, trying
to see past the fog, but to no avail. The world was invisible. She
turned to the Turk, but the barely masked fear chiseled on his face
forced her gaze back to the riders. One by one, in growing
stupefaction, she watched them being swallowed up by mists.

“You fool!” she said fiercely, turning on
the man who held her and cuffing him on the shoulder. His eyes
quickly lost their glazed expression, flashing at her with the same
combination of fear and anger she felt inside herself. “Don’t you
know any better than to—”

“Quiet, woman!” he ordered.

“—let your enemy make your choices for you?”
she finished anyway, compelled by her quickening panic. She didn’t
know who to trust anymore. Kit had gotten her into this, and she’d
be damned if she liked his methods of getting her out.