He caught her arm again. “No, you’re not.”
She jerked away from him. “I most certainly am going back to the camp. If you’re tired, you may remain here, that is your choice. I do not try to impose my will on other people. Now, would you please get out of my way?”
He didn’t move. “You’re still not going to tell me anything, are you?” he said softly.
“There is nothing to tell.” She glared up at him, barely able to see him in the darkness.
“When do you meet him again?”
“Three days,” she said before she thought.
He seemed to be thinking about something else. “I don’t want you to go back to the camp tonight. There’s something wrong in that camp. Something wrong with one of your people, and I don’t know which one it is.”
“Edith,” Maddie said quickly. “I mean, if there is something wrong, I have no doubt that Edith is the cause.”
“Toby is trying to find out what he can, but in the meantime I don’t want you near the place for a while.”
“So, you want me to spend the night here in the woods with you. Alone. Just the two of us. Tell me, Captain, do you plan for us to share blankets?”
“Why, Miss Worth, that thought hadn’t crossed my mind. Tell me, do you always have such carnal thoughts, or is it me alone who incites them?”
“Drop dead,” she said, and started down the mountain. She heard ’Ring move toward his horse, and he didn’t try to detain her again, so she was able to make some progress before he stopped her. Damnation, but he could move silently! She wondered where Hears Good was and if he was impressed with this young man’s abilities. Probably not, she thought. Hears Good wasn’t impressed with much of anything a white man could do.
“Ah, Captain Montgomery, what a surprise to see you here. Although I should have guessed that you’d reappear. It’s not as though I’ve been allowed any privacy since you came into my life.”
“I want to show you something.” He picked up her right arm and she felt something heavy being slipped around her wrist. A bracelet? He was giving her a bracelet now, in the middle of the night?
When he dropped her arm, she found it was heavier than she’d at first thought—and it rattled. “What in the world—” she muttered, then she knew what he’d done.
Handcuffs! He had handcuffed her to him. She jerked her arm and saw that there was about two and a half feet of chain linking the two of them together. “Release me,” she said through her teeth.
“I will in the morning, but for now I need some sleep, and with the way you have of sneaking around, I just might sleep through your leaving.”
She was so angry that she couldn’t speak.
“Come on,” he said as though nothing were wrong, and when he moved, her arm rose.
She stood where she was.
“Ah, now, come on. You aren’t going to be sulky, are you? You must be able to see that this is the only way. I
can’t protect you if I’m asleep, and I can’t let you go down the mountain by yourself. Surely even you can see that.”
She swallowed against the lump in her throat. “Release me,” was all that she could say.
“Oh, hell,” he said in the voice of a man pushed to his limits, then he lifted her into his arms and carried her back up the mountain to where his horse was.
She didn’t fight him. She knew from experience that fighting did no good, but she lay rigid, rather like a board stretched across his arms.
When he was at his horse, he set her down and began unsaddling the animal. Every time he moved, the chain rattled and her arm came up.
“I find this situation intolerable,” she said in the calmest voice she could manage. “I cannot accept this.”
He removed the saddle and went to set it on a stump, and as he walked, he pulled Maddie with him. “You’ll get used to it.” He turned back to her. “Look, I don’t want to have to do this. I thought long and hard before I did it. If you were a woman of reason, maybe I could talk to you, but talking to you is like talking to my horse. You smile and lie and sing so very beautifully and, just as I let Butter get away with things I should discipline him for, I let you get away with things I shouldn’t allow either.”
Reason? This man spoke of reason? This man, who thought that a horse he owned and a woman who he definitely did not own were one and the same, talked to her about reason?
“I am not your horse,” she said quietly. “You cannot tie me up as you do your horse.”