Tracker grunted. “Then we teach them to cook on the way to Hell’s Eight.”
Shadow snorted and picked up his horse’s reins from where they dangled to the ground. “Says the man who’s always ducking the women trailing behind him.”
Tracker looped the reins of his roan around the horn of his saddle. Buster lost a bit of his lazy slump. There was nothing the horse loved more than covering ground, and since he had a stride as smooth as butter, there was nothing Tracker loved more than riding him. “I don’t want their gratitude.”
It made him uncomfortable, made him feel like a liar. He wasn’t a hero. There just wasn’t much else a man could do when a woman looked at him with hope fading from her eyes as she realized he was there to save someone else, not just give her something on which to hang that hope. A ride to a safe place. A chance to start over. Not all took it, but some did. And those who did he brought home to Hell’s Eight. From there they did what they wanted. Went home to family, went off to new beginnings or stayed under the group’s protection. Something Shadow knew, because he’d brought just as many women to Hell’s Eight as Tracker had. The difference was that the women didn’t imagine themselves in love with Shadow. Tracker wished he knew the secret of keeping them at arm’s length. He was getting damn tired of being the butt of jokes.
Leather creaked as Shadow swung up into the saddle. “You might as well enjoy it, since you can’t escape it.”
“No.” He wasn’t a ladies’ man and never had been.
“Women have touched us for less clear reasons.”
“Yeah.” He recalled the way Desi looked at Caine. The way Sally Mae looked at Tucker. The only greed in either woman’s eyes was that of a woman in love who wanted her man. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d been looked at with love. Any softness he’d received in his life, he’d paid for. He was damn tired of paying. He was getting damn tired of a lot of things.
Buster tossed his head and snorted impatiently. Tracker agreed. It was time to leave. He swung up into the saddle.
Shadow stopped him. “Tracker?”
He gathered up the reins. Buster pranced with impatience. “What?”
“You don’t have to go.”
He blinked. “I gave my word.” For the longest time the Ochoa word hadn’t been worth shit, but now it stood strong. He wasn’t going to be the one who dragged it back into the dirt.
“Desi will understand.”
“I doubt it. She loves her sister.”
“She also loves you.”
He shook his head. “It’s not the same.”
Shadow adjusted his hat against the glare of the morning sun. “What is it with finding Arianna, Tracker?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You told me once that you had a feeling she’d be the end of you.”
“I was drunk.” The dreams had been getting stronger lately, coming nightly, yanking him from a sound sleep with a sense of urgency and doom. He’d tossed back the whiskey in an attempt to escape them.
“You never drink, but when the last one wasn’t Arianna, you went on a two-day bender.”
“I’d been a month on the trail with five women who did nothing but argue. I was just cutting loose.”
“You hate drink and what it does to a man.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m not as foolish as the next when I get off the trail.”
“Bull.”
He didn’t need this from his brother. Not now. “Let it go, Shadow.”
“Not if finding Ari means I lose you.” Shadow’s horse shifted with the tension in the man.
“There’s no ‘if’ about it. I’m going to find her.”
“And if it means your death?”
He’d made his peace with that possibility a year ago. It wasn’t that hard. The pain in Desi’s face as she spoke of the last time she’d seen her sister, the agony in her voice as she’d exposed her guilt, the hopelessness as she’d begged Caine to help her…Like Caine, he’d do anything to remove that pain from her. Despite all that she’d been through, Desi was the purest soul Tracker had ever seen. An angel with blond hair and blue eyes. An angel who had seemed so familiar the first time he saw her that he’d thought he recognized her, until he’d gotten closer. So close, his instincts had whispered, but not the one.
And then she’d revealed the existence of her twin, and that sinking sense had come with the loss of inviolability. Then the dreams had started. Arianna called to him in those dreams, begged him for help. And he could help her; he knew that as well as he knew saving her would destroy him. He imagined Desi’s face when her sister came home. Going out a hero wasn’t a bad way to go. He met Shadow’s gaze and held it. He didn’t want to leave any doubt that he went to his end with peace in his heart. “Then I’m making the trade.”
Shadow shook his head. The breeze that raised the long, silken hair that lay on Tracker’s back barely disturbed his brother’s. “I’m not.”
Tracker couldn’t help that. “Your destiny lies elsewhere.”
It was a shot in the dark, but the twitch of Shadow’s eyelids revealed what he’d suspected. His brother had demons of his own to wrestle with in the dark of night, when there were no distractions.
“Promise me you’ll watch your back.”
Tracker nodded. “As well as you watch yours.”
“That will be damn good.”
“Understood.”
Shadow wheeled his horse to the west and nudged him into a canter. As one, man and horse blended seamlessly into an easy rhythm. Tracker watched until his brother grew small in the distance before turning Buster south and urging him into his own ground-eating lope. His destiny waited.
His destiny rested in a little run-down adobe house about a mile out of the town of Esperanza. Evidence of past prosperity was all around the property. A barn big enough to house several horses stood just off to the right. Several corrals surrounding the structure were in various states of collapse. Only the fences near the house were maintained. The home itself clearly had been built for a family, and remnants of happier times remained in the faded red paint on the shutters. However, the only people Tracker had seen coming and going from the house since he’d arrived last night were a stooped, elderly Hispanic man, a small elderly woman, presumably his wife, and a blond woman Tracker had seen only from the back, through the window. By the lack of hoofprints around the exterior, he was pretty sure those were all the residents.
He trained his spyglass on the window again, hoping for a better look at the blond woman. All he saw was the back of a wooden chair, a cup on a table and the edge of a black iron stove. Impatience, a foreign emotion, gnawed at his calm. He wanted—no, needed—to see the young woman who lived there. His gut said it was Ari. He needed it to be Ari. He was sick of the dreams, sick of the apprehension, sick of the fairy tales his imagination wove around her. The woman had lost her family to murderers, her virginity to Comancheros, and probably her sanity to God knew what else. Whatever he found, Ari wouldn’t be a woman who tiptoed into his dreams at the end of nightmares, held out her hand in invitation and looked at him with softness. He’d be lucky if she still had a thread of sanity.
He shifted his position slightly. There wasn’t much cover around the house, which was good from a defense standpoint, but was hell on his knees, as it forced him to crouch. There was only so much cover sagebrush could provide a man his size. And only so much strain his twice-busted legs could take without screaming