Mountain Laurel (Montgomery/Taggert 15)

“ ’Ring, wait a minute. I know that you take your honor very seriously, but this isn’t the time to think of honor. You have no weapons and we’re chained together. You can’t take on an armed man alone. Let’s go down the mountain, then you can get Frank and Sam to help you.”

“I don’t trust those two. No, I think that now is the time. I think he may be expecting me, that’s why he’s here.”

’Ring stood up, and when he did, he brought Maddie up with him.

She put her hands on his chest. “Don’t do this, ’Ring,” she said. “Please don’t do this. I won’t let you do this.” She sat down on a fallen tree and folded her arms over her breast.

He looked down at her as though he were amused by her.

“Don’t you dare look at me like that,” she hissed at him. “I am not being a silly female, and I resent your insinuation that I am.”

“I didn’t say a word.” His mouth was twitching in amusement.

There is nothing in the world more infuriating than a smirking man. She refused to say another word to him but instead stared straight ahead at an aspen tree.

“Not going to let me move, are you?”

She still didn’t talk to him, but looked at that tree.

With a chuckle that only a man who is laughing at a woman can make, he bent over and picked her up, his arm about her waist, her backside pointing toward the front of him. “What an interesting position. We could go together after the man.”

She pounded the back of his leg with her free hand. “You can’t go after him. You can’t risk your life for a horse.”

At that he turned her around and stood her in front of him. “You’re worried about me?”

She gave him a look of disgust. “I don’t know why I am. I guess it’s just that I’m worried about my own skin. If we’re attached and you go where there’s…there’s bullets flying, I might get hurt.”

He smiled down at her and smoothed her hair out of her eyes. “I’m glad that you’re worried only about yourself.”

“Please don’t risk yourself—or me.”

He continued smiling. “Then I guess I better not risk you. The world would lose a lot if it lost you and that God-given voice of yours.”

She let out her breath, glad that he could see reason and wasn’t going to try to be a hero and go after the man. She was still smiling at him when he reached into his pocket and withdrew a key. She was smiling when he lifted her bound right hand and kissed her palm. She even smiled when he inserted the key in the lock.

“Thank you,” she said sweetly after he released her. It wasn’t until he used the key on the band about his own wrist that she realized what was happening. She rubbed her sore wrist, her eyes wide, her voice low. “You had a key all along.”

“Of course. Now, baby, I want you to stay here and wait for me. I’ll get Buttercup and come back for you. Try to be quiet.”

“You had the key.”

“Sure. You did hear me, didn’t you? I think that Indian friend of yours will look out for you, but I can’t be sure, so I want you to be still.”

“You had the key.”

’Ring looked at her and he saw a woman who was on the verge of getting very, very angry. “You don’t think I’d have let that man take the only key, do you? Do you realize what could have happened if there had been any real trouble and the two of us were chained together like a couple of sausages? Surely you thought of that, didn’t you?”

“You had the key all the time. You lied to me.”

“You, my lovely, are the king and the queen of all liars. Come on, sweetheart, don’t you have a sense of humor?”

She was sputtering as a few hundred words tumbled over themselves to get out.

He kissed her. “As much as I’d like to stay here and argue with you, I have some business to attend to. I’ll come back for you as soon as I can.”

Maddie didn’t have time enough to recover herself before he slipped through the trees and was gone. She sat down on a fallen log and put her head in her hands. She thought of the lack of privacy of the last three days, the way they’d had to walk together, sleep together, the way they had not been able to get more than three feet from each other.

At some point her anger dissolved and began to be replaced with laughter. He had certainly repaid her for all the times she’d tricked him.