Page 46 of The Promise of Jenny Jones
Jorje swore as Tito checked both men, then looked up shaking his head. He snarled something at Graciela, but her ears still rang from the shot and she didn’t hear.
She was too frightened to look at him or Jorje, and her throat made no sound when she tried to speak. She darted one last horrified glance at the blood soaking into Favre’s poncho, then she ran a few steps onto the desert and stood with her back to the camp, shaking as if the hot breeze were a gale.
She felt as she had when she was ill, hot and cold at the same time. Her teeth chattered. These were not the laughing cousins who had danced with her and teased her at the hacienda. She didn’t know these men; they might have been strangers. Gingerly she touched the bruises beginning to appear where Carlos’s fingers had circled her throat, and she swallowed the dark taste of bile and fear.
Without Favre, she was at the mercy of Tito and Jorje. Sooner or later they would kill her. She sensed this. Sheknewthis.
Deeply frightened, she scanned the empty land baking in the midday heat. Jenny had promised, she told herself, and Jenny never broke a promise. Jenny would come and save her. She had to believe this. Jenny must be out there. Somewhere.
When she turned dragging footsteps back to the campsite, Jorje and Tito were hacking shallow graves out of the hard desert floor. She clung to thoughts of Jenny whenever she noticed Tito or Jorje studying her with hooded, speculative eyes.
She prayed that Jenny would arrive while she was still alive.
“There!”
Ty followed Jenny’s pointing finger, nodded, and they both urged their horses forward and down into the next dry gulch. Jumping to the ground, they crawled up the far side of the arroyo, and Ty wrestled a spyglass out of its case.
He spotted them at once, resting in the thin shade of some stunted scrub oaks. Silently, he handed over the glass. “She’s unharmed.”
“So far,” Jenny muttered. Stretching out on her stomach, she propped one elbow in the dirt and steadied the glass. A minute later her forehead dropped against her arm. “Thank God!” Lifting the spyglass again, she peered intently. “I only see two men.” She returned the glass to Ty.
“But four horses,” he said. “The other two are somewhere nearby.”
Ty slid down the incline and lifted a canteen from his saddle. After a long swallow, he wet his throat and face. The temperature must be near one hundred degrees. His shirt was soaked with sweat. Not speaking, he watched Jenny break twigs from the scrub oak and construct a shaded area by draping her saddle blanket over the twigs, which she had driven into the ground.
Sensing that an offer to assist would offend her, he waited and watched her try and fail until the shelter was constructed. The view wasn’t unpleasant. Sweat molded her trousers around shapely buttocks, and her wet shirt outlined two handfuls of breast.
Swallowing images as hot as the scorching air, he joined her beneath the shade she had created and gave her the canteen.
“We take them at night,” he said. Her throat arched when she tilted her head back to drink, offering a long clean line that he wanted to explore with his fingertips.
Jenny nodded and wiped a hand across her lips. “Has to be tonight. They’ll reach the railroad tracks tomorrow.”
“Are you thinking dead? Or are you thinking incapacitated?”
She scowled then whipped out her dictionary. A minute later she said, “I’m thinking incapacitate, like in tied-up and their horses run off. Unless they give us no choice, then we kill them.” Slapping shut the dictionary, she pushed it into her back pocket. “Incapacitate. That’s a good word.”
“So far we agree.” Ty jerked open his collar. The air hung hot and motionless at the bottom of the arroyo. Nothing stirred. Sitting this close to her, he could feel the heat rolling off of her, could smell the pork rinds drawing out any infection beneath the bandage on her arm. He mopped his face and throat. “Want me to take a look at your wound?”
“I checked it this morning. It’s coming along.” She shifted, brushed some small rocks out from under her, leaned against the saddle at her back. “Don’t worry, I’ll hold my own tonight.”
“I’m not worried.” But of course he was. Two against four weren’t the preferred odds, especially as one of the two was one-handed.
As if she’d read his mind, she slipped out of the sling. Grinding her teeth, she extended her arm, winced, folded it back near her breasts, then extended it again.
“Stop looking at my chest, damn it.”
“I’m looking at your arm.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“All right, I’m not.”
“So stop it.”
She stared until he lifted his gaze to her eyes, then she extended her arm again, working out the stiffness. It had to hurt like hell.
Since he’d grasped how she thought by now, Ty knew they wouldn’t risk leaving the arroyo until after midnight. A long sweaty afternoon stretched before them and most of the night.
