She put her fingers over his lips, sealing in the unwanted promise before it could be spoken. "It's all right," she said. "I knew I would have to leave someday. Someday… is today."
Ty lifted Janna's hand and pressed a kiss into her palm. "Wyoming is beautiful, too. If you don't like it there we can go anywhere."
Tears Janna couldn't conceal came to her eyes. Ty's words were agony to her, for they weren't the words she had longed so much to hear, the words he only spoke to her in her dreams, the words his silken lady would someday hear from his lips.
I love you.
But Ty didn't love Janna. He was amused by her, he liked her, and he was enthralled by her sensuality without realizing that passion's wellspring was her own deep love for him. He talked about their future together, but it was a future decreed by his unbending sense of honor and duty, not his desire to make Janna his mate, his lifetime companion, the mother of his children.
Honor and duty weren't love. Neither was kindness. Janna would rather live the test of her life in the wild than watch Ty become bitter and ground down by regrets for the freedom and the dream he had lost.
And Janna would rather die than live to see the day when Ty stood like a captive mustang, his head down and his eyes as dead as stones.
"Go ahead and cry," Ty said, folding Janna into his arms, rocking her. "It's all right, sugar. It's all right. You'll have the home you've dreamed of if it's the last thing I do. It's the very least that I owe you."
Janna closed her eyes to conceal the wave of pain his words had caused. Very gently she brushed her lips over his shirtfront, savoring for the last time his heat, his scent, his strength, the male vitality that radiated from him.
"You owe me nothing at all."
Ty's laugh was harsh and humorless. "Like hell I don't. You saved my life, and all I've done since then is take from you. When I think of you throwing yourself under Lucifer's hooves just to catch him for me, I…"
Ty's words faded into a hoarse sound. Strong arms tightened almost painfully around Janna, as though Ty were trying to convince himself that she was all right despite all the dangers she had endured for him.
"I didn't catch Lucifer to make you feel obligated to me," Janna said quietly. "I did it so Lucifer wouldn't be killed by some greedy mustanger or be caught by a man too cruel to do anything but make Lucifer into a killer. You were the one who gentled Lucifer. You were the one who taught him to trust a man. Without that, what I did would have been worse than useless. Thank yourself for Lucifer, not me."
Ty tilted up Janna's chin and stared at her translucent gray eyes. "You really believe that, don't you?"
"I know it. You don't owe met anything. Not for your Me, not for Lucifer, and not for the pleasure we shared. Not one damn thing. Once we get to the fort we're quits. You're as free as Lucifer once was. And so am I."
A chill came over Ty, making his skin tighten and move in primitive reflex. Janna's voice was calm and precise, lacking in emotion, as bleak as the darkness underlying her smile. She was systematically pulling away from him, cutting the ties that had grown silently, powerfully between them during the time they had spent in the hidden valley.
"No."
Ty said nothing more, just the single word denying what Janna had said. Before she could say anything in argument, Ty turned away and whistled shrilly.
Moments later Lucifer came trotting over and began lipping at Ty's shirt in search of the pinch of salt Ty often had hidden in a twist of paper. There was no salt today, simply the voice and hands Lucifer had come to enjoy.
Ty petted the stallion for a few moments before he picked up the heavy saddlebags Mad Jack had left behind. Ty had cut slits in the leather that joined the saddlebags. Through the slits he had threaded the surcingle. Once the strap had been tightened, the saddlebags would stay in place on the stallion's back.
Lucifer didn't care for the surcingle around his barrel, but he had become accustomed to it. He did nothing more than briefly lay back his ears when the strap tightened just behind his front legs. Ty praised the stallion, shrugged his own backpack into place and vaulted onto the mustang's back. It was a heavy load Lucifer was carrying, but Ty wasn't worried. Lucifer was an unusually powerful horse. Even if Ty had added a saddle to the load, the stallion wouldn't have been overburdened for normal travel.
"I'll scout the area beyond the slot," Ty said. "Get Zebra over there and wait for my signal."
"Ty, I won't let you-"
"Let me? Let me!" he interrupted, furious. "To hell with 'letting'! You listen to me and you listen good. You might be pregnant. If you think I'll run off and leave an orphaned girl who could be carrying my child to fend for herself in Indian country, there's no damned point in even talking to you! I'll try hammering my message through that thick skull of yours after we get to the fort. Maybe by then I'll have cooled down or you'll have grown up. Until then, shut up and stop distracting me or neither one of us will live to see tomorrow."
Lucifer leaped into a canter before Janna had a chance to speak, even if she had been able to think of something to say.
By the time the stallion reached the exit to the valley, Ty had gotten his temper under control. He didn't permit himself to think about Janna and the immediate past, only about Cascabel and the immediate future.
Ty dismounted and looked at the area right in front of the cleft. No new tracks marked the meadow. A vague, telltale trail had been worn through the grass despite his and Janna's efforts never to take the same way twice into the cleft.
It doesn't matter now. By the time we come back the grass will have regrown. And when we do come back, we won't have to try to live so small we don't even cast shadows.
Beyond the ghostly paths there were no signs that anything had ever passed through the cleft to the outer world. Ty picked his way over the narrow watercourse and through the shadowed slot between rock walls. The afternoon light glowed overhead, telling him that the sky was nearly cloudless. Until the sun went down they would be vulnerable to discovery, for there would be no rain to conceal their presence while they crossed the wild land.
Yet they had no choice but to move in daylight. There was simply too much risk that one of the horses would injure itself scrambling over the cleft's treacherous watercourse in the dark. Besides, even if they got through the slot safely at night and then traveled until dawn, they would still be deep within Cascabel's preferred range when the sun once more rose, exposing them to discovery.
Their best chance was to sneak out of the slot and take a long, looping approach to the fort, hoping that Cascabel would have been driven to the southern edges of his territory while the two of them traversed the northern part. The fort itself was a hard three-day ride, and there was no haven short of the stockade walls.
Standing well back from the sunlit exit to the cleft, Ty pulled out his spyglass and examined as much of the land as he could see beyond the stone walls. A quick look showed nothing. A long look showed no more. A point-by-point survey revealed no sign of renegades.
Wish my backbone didn't itch.
But it did, and Ty wasn't going to ignore his instincts. There was danger out there. His job was to find out where and how much. Unconsciously he fingered the hilt of the big knife he always carried at his belt. He waited for fifteen minutes, then lifted the spyglass and studied the land again. Again he saw nothing to alarm him. He took off his backpack, checked the load in his carbine, grabbed a box of bullets and went out to have a closer look at the land.
He was no more than thirty feet from the cleft when he cut the trail of three unshod ponies. The hoof prints stayed together and marked a purposeful course, telling Ty that the horses had been ridden; they had not been grazing at random as wild horses would. The horses had come out of Cascabel's usual territory.