River to Cross, A (19 page)

Elizabeth leaped across the gully and spun around. “How are you going to get out of there?”

“I’ll find a way. Keep running—don’t wait for me.” He stretched for a broken stump near the top, but couldn’t quite reach it. He kicked his good foot into the side of the bank for a toehold.

Lightning flashed again, painting her face a glassy silver. Worried for her, he yelled at her to run. “Elizabeth,” he shouted. “Go!”

But thunder drowned out his words.

To his surprise, she leaped down into the ditch with him.

He reached for the stump again, but missed. He looked up in disbelief. Six months before, he and his team had scaled a mountain of near vertical rock. They’d hauled over the top, guns blazing, and captured a gang of train robbers.

And now he couldn’t get himself out of a ditch!

Splashing behind him, Elizabeth stooped and shoved a shoulder under his hip, lifting. “Grab it now!”

He strained for the stump at the top of the ditch. This time he managed to wrap first one, then both hands around its rough bark. He hung there, half in, half out of the ditch.

Elizabeth scrambled up his back, climbing him like a ladder, using his hips and shoulders as steps. At the top she turned and grabbed both of his elbows and pulled. Twice her feet skidded out from under her and she fell hard on her behind.

“You’re going to hurt yourself. You’re not strong enough!”

That got him an angry look.

Elizabeth dragged him a few inches more. It was enough. He got his good leg under him, crawled over the top, and staggered to his feet. He took her hand and rushed toward the clearing, lightning stabbing all around them. In the center, Jake dove to the ground with her behind a sand dune.

Chest heaving, Elizabeth clutched him and blinked up into the rain, watching the war in the sky. Thunder boomed.

He grinned. “Scared?”

She made a face at him. “If it weren’t for me, you’d still be in the ditch. And no, I’m not scared.
Terrified
is more like it.” Her heart raced, thumping as if it might jump right out of her rib cage.

He tucked her head under his chin and banded his arms tightly around her.

“I’ve never seen a storm as wild as this,” she said.

“It’s been hot here all week, and the heat triggers them off.” He studied the sky. “It won’t last long.”

His pants and shirt were drenched, plastered to his body. Yet, wet as he was, she felt the body heat radiating from him. The man was a furnace. Arms wrapped around him, she pressed closer against the unyielding hardness of his chest.

The deep-down shakiness she felt reminded her how close they’d come to getting killed. The adrenaline was still flooding her veins. His too.

Another flash of lightning made her hide her face in his neck. Her nose pushed against solid flesh. Even his neck was hard. There was no softness to this man. Under the wet black shirt, he was a brick wall. His arms tightened protectively around her. Over his shoulder she peeked at the sky. Despite the thunder, the pouring rain, and being frightened half to death, she had to admit the firm grip of masculine hands holding her was reassuring.

Jake plucked a wet strand of hair from her cheek and smoothed it behind her ear. “Are you all right?”

Her breath sucked in at the husky catch in his voice. The man in her arms was big and strong and quiet.

“You’re just about the bravest man I’ve ever met.”

His head fell back and he burst out laughing. “And you’re beautiful when you’re wet—and scared to death,” he said, gray eyes creased half shut by his smile.

She melted inside. None of this made sense. She was curled up with a Texas Ranger, but at that moment, what he did for a living seemed unimportant.

They held each other, reluctant to break the spell of the moment.

Finally he drew a deep breath, pulled back, and traced a wet streak down her cheek, “Is this rain or tears?”

“Both, I guess. I was so scared.”

“We both were.”

“I thought maybe it was just me.”

He stroked the back of her head, awed by how she made him feel.

When she moved closer against him, he smiled. She seemed almost as happy as he was.

And yet there had been times when Audrey had seemed happy with him, too.

This was not the time to think about
her
. He hoped Elizabeth wasn’t thinking about Carl.

Everything inside him went still. He didn’t move, didn’t speak. If Elizabeth was still in love with Evans, what was building between them meant nothing.

“When I was holding you”—he almost had to force the words out—“were you thinking of me or of Carl?”

Elizabeth sat up and pushed her hair back from her face, her eyes troubled. “You can’t believe I was thinking of him then.”

“It crossed my mind.”

“Why?”

He propped himself on an elbow and looked down at her. The words, raw and ragged, tore out of him before he could stop them. “I know you loved him.”

Elizabeth sighed as she caressed the side of his face. “Of course I loved him. I married him. But I never thought of him today. Not once. I was thinking about you and how you made me feel.”

He looked up as faraway thunder rumbled. The storm was passing, leaving in its wake a gentle rain. In the distance, bright sunlight spoked through the clouds.

Elizabeth said softly, “Carl is gone. I’ve accepted that.” Then she turned his face to hers and kissed him.

“Then why do you still wear his ring?”

She smiled. “When was the last time you looked?”

He pulled her hand from his cheek and turned it over, then ran his thumb across the band of white skin where her wedding ring had been. “When did you take it off?”

“Last night—after you brought me home.”

He pulled her into his arms and held her close. “Something’s going on between us,” he said. “Forget what I said about Carl. I had no right to say it. It won’t happen again. I’ll deal with it. Maybe it’s this storm. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Looking down at his arm, he brushed gritty streaks of sand away. He was jealous of her dead husband, that’s what was wrong with him. Worse, he was in over his head with her—the last thing he’d meant to do. And that raised all sorts of complications with the Rangers, with her father, with himself. With her.

He saw some unsettling similarities with how he felt about Elizabeth and how he’d felt about Audrey when he first met her. The instant attraction, for one. Anger coursed through him at the thought. Elizabeth was
nothing
like her. Elizabeth was honest.

He didn’t know how he was going to do this or how it would all turn out.

For the first time in his life, he didn’t want to know.

The ride back to Fort Bliss to return the canoe was quiet, both of them lost in their own thoughts. When Jake reached across and covered her hand with his, Elizabeth realized that neither of them had spoken a word for a long while.

“Tired?” he asked.

“A little.”

It was a mystery to her how he’d done it. For three years she’d managed to avoid men like him. That hadn’t been easy. Then this slow-talking Texas Ranger broke through the barriers she’d built around her heart. Apparently, Jake Nelson didn’t understand that the nature of walls was to keep people like him out. He blew right through them, over them, around them.

Forget finesse. Texas Rangers bulled their way in.

And military? Though he wasn’t in the Army now, he had been and he’d loved it. He’d left it only because he loved Texas more, and the Rangers needed him. This afternoon, as if putting her on notice, he’d told her he was already approved for the rank of major, to work as Colonel Gordon’s XO, which put him second-in-command of the battalion.

She suspected his upcoming promotion was only the next step for him. At this rate, he’d make full colonel before he was forty.

She glanced at the strong profile of her driver and suppressed a sigh. For Carl, the military had been a job. But it ran deeper than that for Jake, much deeper. For him, it was almost a calling. He was committed to serving his country. The Army was one way. Texas Rangers and the law was another. Thank heavens there were men like him, but she had no intention of marrying one.

“You ever think about leaving the Rangers early?” she asked, keeping her voice casual.

“Leaving? Yes. Early, no. I’ll finish what I signed on for.”

“And then what?”

“If I pass up the Army’s offer, I’m thinking about going into law enforcement.”

She turned and looked out at the passing landscape.

Jake pulled her hand across and wound his fingers through hers. He heaved a sigh. “You’re trying to figure us out. So am I. But I don’t know where to start. As a former officer’s wife, you’ve got all the answers to anything I say to try to change your mind about me and what I do.”

The words pulled from him reluctantly, as if he hadn’t planned to say them. He was quiet for a minute, then brought her hand to his lips and kissed it.

“I like being with you, talking with you, even fussing with you, and it’s only fair you know something else: I’m not going to let you run away because of what I do for a living. Not without a fight.”

Though he smiled when he said it, the broad jaw was squared off.

Love me at your own risk
, it seemed to say.

Careful, she told herself. Men like Jake played to win.

Campo Militar No. 13
Chihuahua, Mexico

The wind was picking up,
and it had started to rain again. From the window of his walnut-paneled office at the front of the building, General Manuel Diego watched the activity at the gate below.

Every few minutes, mule teams pulled another yellow-brown Mexican Army wagon through the gates. Guards waved them toward the open area for the stables behind the buildings. The soldier drivers of the big wagons leaned forward, shouting and cracking whips, hurrying to get out of the weather.

Diego leaned forward and peered down. His mouth tightened. A security guard in a black raincoat was questioning the rider on a gray horse stopped at the gate.

The rider was Major Ramon Chavez, who had precipitated the crisis in El Paso when he seized an unknown American woman hostage at the courthouse to get himself out alive. The woman, unfortunately, turned out to be the sister of the slain editor and the daughter of a prominent U.S. senator.

What rotten luck!

Diego knew exactly what Chavez had come to talk about.

An unexpected tip had come to Diego that morning, saying that the American woman and her three Ranger rescuers had made it safely out of Mexico. Diego sat down at his desk and waited for his visitor to enter his office.

He glanced at the humidor on his desk, filled with pungent black cigars, snug in their paper jackets. He picked one up, rolled it between his fingers, then sighed and put it back. He was fifty-seven now, and his wife was on him all the time about the smoking.

Despite his years, he looked strong and muscular and still possessed the beefsteak shoulders of a once-powerful physique. Thick iron gray hair swept back from a deeply tanned face.

He was a walking encyclopedia of Mexican military structure and disagreed with President Hector Guevara on almost everything the overeducated bleeding heart, as he called him, tried to do. A firm hand—General Manuel Diego’s hand—was what was needed with Indians and peasants both. Toughness. An occasional slap down by the Army always helped. He was almost ready. For two years he’d been working the countryside, and he already had much support. A distraction, a dustup with the United States, would muddy the picture enough that Diego’s troops could take over the capital before Guevara knew what was happening.

This unplanned abduction of the editor’s sister by the irritating man coming up the stairs to his office threatened everything.

He reached into a candy dish alongside the humidor and took out a piece of toffee. He sucked on the sweetness instead of smoking. His wife had a nose like a bloodhound.

There was a light knock at the door. Major Ramon Chavez, brushing himself off, strode into the room, his scarred face wet with rain.

“What happened the other day?” the general growled. “How did they slip by you?”

Mopping his face with a handkerchief, Major Chavez paced over to the window and back. “Same as always. The Rangers have connections in this country. They show up in Mexico, do what they came to do, then disappear. It’s like they never existed.”

Diego frowned. “From what I hear, these Rangers are pushy and bold, act almost like police.”

“They’re Texas Rangers. In Texas, they
are
police, every one of them,” Chavez said. His face took on a strained look, the scar tight, like a stretched rubber band. “Someone in the U.S. sent this telegram to President Guevara,” he said, and handed it to Diego.

Face flushing, Diego read the telegram, then tossed it on the desk. A gust of wind swept across the grounds outside. With a sound like thrown rice, rain pelted the windows of his office. After a moment, he looked up at a waiting Major Chavez.

Chavez nodded. “There’s more. President Guevara’s answer to that telegram was, ‘Good. I’ll knot the rope myself.’ ”

Diego swore. “And when I throw him out of office, I’ll return the favor.” He scooped up the telegram, read it again, then looked at the major. “They have positive Ranger identifications of me and you in San Jose when we brought the bodies back. Says when and if we enter Texas again, they’ll charge us with the murder of the editor Lloyd Madison.”

Just beneath the surface, mute anger was building. Diego grabbed a cigar from the humidor and bit the end off. Wetting the cigar between his lips, he struck a match, held it steady, and puffed until the tip glowed.

Chavez picked up the copy of the
Grande Examiner
on Diego’s desk. “This was her brother’s paper. It’s hers now. I heard she’s doing a special edition on us and the coming revolt in Mexico. And you.”

“I don’t think she’ll be around that long.” Diego leaned back in his chair. Lips pursed, he puffed and sent three perfect smoke rings circling for the ceiling. “If what I’m planning works, I think we can eliminate Elizabeth Evans with not a hint of military involvement.”