Rode Hard, Put Up Wet: Cowboy Romance (Rebels & Outlaws 2)

"You'll find out soon enough, man. I don't need to lie, little thing like that. Ask her." He turned toward the brewery. "Ace! Come here, get this cowboy on his horse, will ya?"

Twenty Five

Catherine was waiting on the porch. She didn't want to look desperate, but they should have been back by now. Hours ago. If she was right to be worried, then she would be fine looking like she worried about the man.

He had been such an important concern for her these past weeks. He'd even found, at least seemingly, a solution to the massive rustling problem that they'd been having. If she was just being a worry-wart…

Well, she could accept that, too. It was no big deal. As long as he was home safe, she frankly didn't give a God damn.

The horse coming back off in the distance worried her. There was no rider, so that either meant that it wasn't him, or that something was very wrong.

She turned to Grace. "Stay here with your brother, I'll be back in a minute."

Then she stepped off the porch. As she got closer, she became more and more convinced. This was Glen's horse. The coloring, the size, it all pointed to being his. Which made it that much more worrying that Glen's horse didn't have Glen sitting on it.

Once she was within a hundred yards or so, though, she saw him. He was hanging from the saddle by one foot caught through the stirrup, and he looked like he had been dragged for a while. It was lucky for him, she thought, that he hadn't been stepped on already. Or perhaps he had.

He probably wouldn't think any part of it was lucky, though. She lifted her skirt and broke into a run, caught the horse's reins and slowed her down.

Then, once the horse was slowed and calmed down, she turned to Glen. He was in bad shape. She tried to recall her life back in Baltimore, when she had been training as a nurse. She checked his pulse. He was alive. The pulse was strong, to boot.

But when she pulled his leg free, he didn't react. When she slapped him, just a bit, he didn't wake up. Nothing. So she shifted his weight until she could get her arms wrapped around him, lifted as hard as she could, and took a step back.

He came off the ground just enough so he wasn't being dragged across the dirt. Not enough. Catherine lowered her hips as far as she could, got her weight under him, and pulled again, digging deep for strength she didn't know if she had.

His weight tipped and shifted until he was leaning against her shoulder. She took him, then, his feet still dragging in the dirt even as his head lolled back on her shoulder, but there was nothing she could do about that.

The stairs were the hardest part. He wasn't moving, wasn't helping. She took them one at a time, gathered her breath and heaved to get him up. By the time she dropped him on the couch, her chest burned when she took a breath and her muscles ached already.

Then she went to the well-water, wet a cloth in it and then wrung it out. That was the first thing. Keep him cool. Someone hurt this bad, she would need to make sure they didn't catch a fever.

His hair was caked with soil, his clothes sticking oddly to his frame. She undid the buttons on his shirt to check on him, started looking up and down to figure the extent of his injuries.

His cheek looked bad, and dried blood from a broken nose caked around his mouth. No visible cuts, but bad bruising. Bad enough that he might have had a broken rib. With him not moving, though, she couldn't check a whole lot else. So she took another cup of water and dripped it on his face.

His eyes blinked open after a moment.

"Where am I?"

"You're back home. Do you remember what happened?"

Catherine saw his face darken. "No."

She wasn't an expert card player, and she wasn't a master of reading people. She couldn't keep a straight face, not like she knew Glen could, when he had to. Which made it that much more worrying that she knew he wasn't telling her the truth.

"What happened?"

"I don't remember."

"Stop lying to me."

"We went to get Rod Dawson. They—" he stopped a minute, reached down for his ribs, and put a hand on them. As soon as his fingers touched the sensitive

flesh, though, he thought better of it as pain shot through, and he pulled away like he'd touched a hot stove. "They shot the Deputy."

"How did you make it out alive?" He looked at her for a minute, and she knew. She had been afraid that it was going to happen, and now it had. "What did he tell you?"

"Enough."