Loe raamatut: «His Abductor's Desire»

Chapter One

Montana Territory

1887

“Nobody move! Keep your hands where we can see ’em!”

A hush swept over the room as the bank customers, one by one, began to realize what was happening. Charity Blake would have smiled at the effectiveness of her command if she hadn’t been so unsettled to find the place crowded. It was late Tuesday afternoon. No one was supposed to be there except the clerks. Even the bank manager should have been two blocks over at the saloon settling in for a long night of drinking and gambling, his weekly indulgence when his wife spent Tuesday evenings with her sewing circle. Yet, there he sat behind his desk, quivering hands held high in the air, staring wide-eyed back at her.

Apparently their reconnaissance had been wrong.

She vowed to do better next time and pushed the disappointment from her mind. It was better to concentrate on not allowing her own hands to shake around the grip of her pistol than linger on the setback. Besides, she knew from the first two robberies that she had only seconds to command the attention and thus the respect of the room before someone tried to be brave. It was time to get to work.

“Don’t worry, folks. We ain’t here for yer valuables, just the money in the vault.” Her contrived accent came out deep and loud to make it past the muffling barrier of the scarf covering the lower half of her face and to hide her cultured Bostonian intonation.

As she spoke, her partners took their appointed positions. Elle had come in through the back door and quietly made her presence known, while Dew moved to disarm the men in the room, quickly establishing a stack of revolvers in the far corner.

“Get up and open the vault.” Charity barked the order to the manager.

He sputtered for a moment as if he might argue and looked at the customer sitting across the desk from him. Had she not been watching so closely, Charity would have missed the almost imperceptible nod from the man that gave the manager the courage to get on his feet. Hands still in the air, he walked his wiry frame to the vault, which sat in plain view behind the row of clerks, and stopped there, afraid to proceed.

“Th-the key is on my belt.” He explained, hands still in the air. His gaze went from her to the customer left sitting at his desk.

Charity followed his gaze and found herself looking at a broad pair of shoulders encased in a fine wool coat. The coat was impeccably tailored, not the roughspun typically found this far outside of the town of Helena. A banking official was her first thought, but that didn’t explain why her heart was suddenly threatening to pound out of her chest and the blood had gone cold in her veins. The girl who had long ago been banished to areas deep in her subconscious had already recognized the set of those shoulders. She knew that thick, sable hair brushed back in a style that had been entirely too long for Boston society but was a trademark of his contemptuous nature.

“My friend here can help you.” She managed to sound in control as she nodded to Dew who then quickly walked over and cut the key free.

After a moment of hassling with the lock, the bank manager pushed the door and it opened with an ominous screech that filled the deathly silence of the bank. Dew motioned him inside with her gun and followed him in to fill the three saddlebags slung across her shoulders with as much cash and gold as they could carry.

The moment they were out of sight Charity walked up behind the mysterious customer sitting at the desk. It was stupid. Everyone knew you didn’t go begging for trouble. But the devil who she had long suspected had taken up residence inside made her do it. The barrel of her pistol parted the hair at the back of his head.

“What’s yer name, mister?”

The man did not so much as flinch when the steel touched his scalp.

“My name is none of your damned business.” The voice was as hard and cold as the pistol.

“Turn around,” she commanded in a controlled, steady voice, but inside her stomach was in knots.

“The sheriff’s office is only blocks away. If you shoot, you won’t make it out of the bank alive.” He did not turn around nor raise his hands from the desk in surrender.

His refusal to give in to her command only made her devil beg to be appeased. This man and his family had taken everything there was to take from her. She needed to stare him down. Needed him to watch her take something from him, whether he knew her identity or not.

“Turn around, Mr. Davenport.”

That got him.

He jerked around to look at her, steely blue eyes riveted to her face. Too bad he couldn’t see her smile behind the scarf. He wasn’t the type to startle very often and the look he gave her was worth the slim chance of recognition.

Well, almost. Amidst the surprised gasps from some of the bank patrons—it wasn’t every day a member of the Davenport banking family came to a backwater town like Lindon—she heard Elle’s groan of dismay. There would be hell to pay from that quarter later. But Charity knew he wouldn’t recognize her with the scarf covering half her face and her hat pulled low over her forehead. She wondered if he’d even recognize her without the disguise. Did men like Brent Davenport ever remember girls like her after they were done with them?

“You’ve caught me unprepared. I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

Oh, but he had. Their first meeting had been five years ago in Boston when she had been a naive and insipid seventeen-year-old. It had happened at a dinner party she and her father had hosted at their town home. Brent had arrived with his uncle, the head of Davenport Capital, and spent the evening evading the adoring glances of one besotted idiot. Namely, her.

Over the next several months he had toyed with her affections. Nothing too serious—a dance when they happened to attend the same party, a smile from across the room, a casual conversation, and once an out-of-season tulip, her favorite, sent to her during intermission when they had attended the same play. The usher who had brought it to her had responded to her questioning gaze by pointing to the box opposite theirs and Brent had been there watching her. She had felt his gaze on her for the rest of the evening and to this day could barely recall Iolanthe.

That had been the night everything changed. Their flirtation quickly escalated from casual to something far more dangerous. Until he’d disappeared. The anger the memory evoked was enough to make her smile anew at the sight of her gun mere inches from his face.

“I didn’t think your kind made it this far west of Boston.”

He looked at her then so intensely she was certain he saw right through the disguise and knew exactly who she was. “What would you know about my kind?” There was that smirk she remembered all too well.

“Get up!”

Charity knew it was wrong to let him see that he’d gotten to her, but it didn’t matter now. She had just had a moment of epiphany—she’d figured out how to get her fortune back and it wasn’t through robbing banks. To hell if he recognized her. Ransom would accomplish the task quicker and exact a bit of well-earned revenge in the process.

When he didn’t move, she pulled back the hammer in warning. It prompted him to slowly get to his feet just as Dew came out of the vault with the loaded saddlebags.

“Everyone in the vault,” Charity ordered. “Everyone but Mr. Davenport here.”

There was surprisingly little resistance from the customers as they quickly filed into the vault. Elle and Dew had them locked up in under a minute.

“Where is your horse?” Charity asked him when they were finished.

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“It’s out the back way,” Elle offered, having been posted out back for the past two hours. “The gray.”

“You won’t shoot me and get out of here alive.”

“No, probably not, but I don’t really want to shoot you.”

No further explanation was needed because they all heard the unmistakable sound of metal scraping metal and looked to Dew. She held a pair of small, lethal-looking knives and looked like she knew how to use them.

“Fast as any bullet from this range.” Dew smiled.

“There are far more creative ways of dealing with a reluctant hostage.” It was Charity’s turn to smirk. “Bring his horse around.”

Elle complied and it was quickly decided they would stick to their original plan to separate and reconvene at Two Mile. Only Dew would now create a disturbance as she rode through town, in order to create a distraction. Anyone would be suspicious of a man as elegantly dressed as their hostage riding with the two dusty cowpokes that Elle and Charity appeared to be.

Once the horses were secured, Dew mounted and rode off toward the saloon. Charity and Elle waited until they heard her gunshots, a not entirely unheard of occurrence in a town like Lindon, but enough to draw every able-bodied man in that direction, before prodding Brent outside to his horse.

He resisted the moment they reached the horses and made a move to grab the reins of his mount. Charity had anticipated his bid for freedom and pulled her knife from its sheath on her hip and jammed it against his kidney.

“My accomplice isn’t the only one with a knife,” she threatened.

“You’ll hang for this.” His low voice was forced out between gritted teeth.

“On your horse,” Charity ordered.

Soon Charity was holding his reins wrapped tightly in her gloved hand as they rode out of town. The moment the deserted street gave way to plain, they rode hell-bent for Two Mile, the indistinguishable copse of cottonwood trees that marked their ascent into the mountains.

* * *

They rode hard for a while, pausing only for the seconds it took to bind his wrists once they were safely outside of town, and then only slowing after the sun went down when it would have been too risky to keep up such a pace. Brent knew he had to make his move now, while he still had a chance of making it back to town. Otherwise he would risk disappearing forever in the mountains that loomed ahead. With any luck, the night would give him sufficient cover to hide.

He forcibly tried to remove from his mind any thoughts of the furious green eyes that had stared at him down the length of the pistol’s barrel back at the bank. The hat had been pulled low, almost obscuring the face, but those eyes were haunting. Hitting him like a punch to the gut with their ferocity. Recognition had tugged at his consciousness, but rationality told him he was wrong.

It wasn’t her. It couldn’t be her.

But what if it was? His eyes strayed again to the hips of the rider bouncing in the saddle on the horse in front of him. Even in the gray of dusk, he could see the shadowed outlines of their curves. Those shapely hips belonged to a woman. The voice had suggested a woman, too, but it had been too obscured by the scarf for him to tell if it was hers.

Would he even recognize her voice now? Something deep inside told him yes. Just as the eyes had triggered an awareness, so would the voice. He remembered everything about her. And Brent knew he couldn’t leave without finding out for sure if the woman was Charity.

But the girl he knew wouldn’t have done this, reason insisted, and the anger he’d been trying hard to tamp down flared to the surface. His Charity was everything gentle and sweet, not this hellion with a gun. He allowed himself a moment to indulge in the emotion, but then pushed it down again. Anger would only hinder reason.

He waited until the horses slowed to a brisk canter and the taller rider made a move to leave his post in the rear. Brent could tell he planned to maneuver his horse next to the woman’s to talk to her privately. Probably about making camp for the night.

Recognizing an opportunity when he saw it, he instantly devised a plan to get the rider’s gun and force the woman to hand over hers. He waited until the rider was just about parallel to him and lunged. But he overestimated the weight of the rider, realizing too late that it was a tall woman made to look bulky with a padded overcoat, and they both toppled to the ground.

Brent landed awkwardly on one shoulder with the rider directly on his back. The fall had winded him, leaving him gasping for breath and praying no serious damage had been done.

The woman turned abruptly, grasping at the reins of Brent’s horse as it whinnied and violently shook its head to protest against the commotion. Her movements tore the scarf loose and for one moment he had a plain view of her face.

Charity! His dormant heart jolted to life in his chest.

Brent opened his mouth to call out to her only to have a large rag, wet with a nauseatingly sweet smell, shoved against his nose and mouth. He cursed the fact that he had landed on his bound hands and violently struggled to get them out from under him. Just as he felt one begin to release from the bonds, his vision went black.