“Great,” she said as soon as she was in place. The rope was still a foot above her head, and even if she’d had a knife, the rope was so thick it would have taken her an hour to cut it. What she needed was a pair of bolt cutters. “Or a saw-blade bread knife,” she said, looking up at the rope.
“You couldn’t wake up and help me with this, could you?” she said to the man, her head against his back, but she received no reply. Leaning around the broad back of him, she looked down at the horse. “Look, I’m going to have to climb up to stand in this saddle, so I want you to hold very, very still. Got that? I’m no circus performer, so I don’t want you chasing rabbits. Or whatever it is horses chase. Understand me?”
The horse turned to look up at her in a way that made Kady quite nervous. Using the man’s body as though it were a ladder, she carefully and slowly climbed up until she was standing in the saddle behind him, leaning most of her body weight against his as she steadied herself as she reached for the rope.
The horse shifted on its feet, and Kady would have fallen if she hadn’t caught herself by throwing her arms around the man’s neck. “Be still!” she hissed to the horse, and it had the good sense to obey her.
It was not easy to loosen the treacherous hangman’s noose from around the man’s neck. The rope seemed to have embedded itself in the man’s skin, and only by much tugging and pulling was she finally able to free him.
And the moment he was free, he collapsed back against Kady’s legs, almost causing her to fall from the horse. Crouching, she clutched him tightly
as he leaned into her and she bore what seemed to be half of his two hundred pounds on her own body. With great difficulty, somehow managing to keep herself as well as him from falling, she eased back down into the saddle so she was sitting behind him.
His head was leaning back beside her own, his eyes closed, his breathing not detectable. “Wake up,” she said, then pulled one hand up to pat his cheek sharply. She didn’t have the heart to slap him, but truthfully she didn’t think any slap would revive him.
“How do I get you to a doctor?” she asked the unconscious man in her arms; then, instead of trying to revive him, she stroked his thick hair from out of his eyes. His hair was dark blond, his skin was lightly tanned, and for the first time, Kady noticed that he was one gorgeous hunk.
“Not in the same class as Gregory,” she said aloud, “but a woman could do worse.”
“Stop it,” she reminded herself. “There are more important matters at hand than some guy who likes to spend his days playing cowboy.”
With superhuman effort, Kady pushed the man forward until he was leaning over the horses’s neck; then she fiddled with the rope that was binding his hands. It took longer than it should have, but she had no knife, so she had to undo the tight knot.
At last she had him untied; so, slowly, with her hands bracing him against falling, she got off the horse and onto the ground. But once she was down and looking up at him, he seemed as tall as a mountain and about the same breadth.
Now all she had to do was get the rifle in case those horrible men returned, and the skirt of her dress, then get back onto the horse and ride to the nearest town and hospital. Simple.
But the minute she reached for the rifle, she heard a sound behind her, then looked and saw, to her horror, that the big man was falling straight toward her.
There wasn’t much time, but she did what she could to prepare herself for the impact. Spreading her feet wide apart, she braced herself. But no bracing could prepare her for the impact of his heavy body tumbling down onto hers. He fell against her hard, sending her sprawling onto a bed of leaves and gravel that cut into her lightly clad legs.
For a moment Kady lay where she was, blinking up at the lacy underside of the cottonwood tree branches, but the need to breathe brought her back to the urgency of the situation. Every ounce of the man was draped across her like some great, warm blanket. A blanket so heavy that she could not draw a breath.
When pushing against his shoulders didn’t budge him, she realized that she was not going to be able to move him. Using what strength she had left, she did her best to wiggle out from under him; when she had the upper half of herself free, she paused to take a few deep, delicious breaths, and then finally managed to get the bottom half of her out from under him.
“Now what do I do with you?” Kady asked aloud, looking down at him, sleeping with all the innocence of a child.
“Feed you,” she said brightly, then hauled herself up and began to search his saddlebags for something to cook.
Chapter 4
AN HOUR LATER KADY KNEW THAT SHE HAD DONE WHATEVER she could to save the man. He seemed to breathing all right now, but he hadn’t regained consciousness. Since there was no way she could get him back onto the horse to get him to a hospital, she set about making a camp for the night.
She had searched through the saddlebags for what could be cooked, but had found only beef jerky, a canteen of water, and a tin cup. After she’d covered the man with the single blanket, she built a fire, something she was quite good at since she’d done a great deal of outdoor grilling in her life.
Within minutes she’d boiled a concoction of the dried beef, wild mustard, and some very nice greens she’d found growing nearby. After cooling the broth so it wouldn’t burn him, she put the man’s head onto her lap and began to try to get the liquid down his sore throat.
He’d fought her until she’d spoken quite sharply to him and told him she was going to tie his hands again if he didn’t drink his broth and behave himself. Her stern voice seemed to reach the little boy in him because he grimaced, but he drank. Afterward, Kady let him sleep while she sat on a boulder a few feet away and tried to think about what had happened to her in the last hours.
She was certain she was no longer in Virginia, but she didn’t know where she was now and certainly not how she’d come to be there. Once again she opened the satin envelope and looked at the photograph, for her instinct told her that that picture had something to do with what had happened to her.
It didn’t take much deducing to see that the injured man lying on the ground before her was the boy in the picture. Even with his eyes closed and years older, he was the same. He’d opened his eyes once while Kady was trying to get him to drink, and she’d seen that they were dark blue, like sapphires.
But, of course, it was impossible for this man to be the boy in the photo because that picture was over a hundred years old. If he were the boy in the photo, then that would mean that when she went through the rock, she’d done a bit of time manipulation. Which, of course, was impossible.
After a while she went to the man and began to search through the pockets of his trousers. She found a half dozen coins, no paper money, and the coins were all dated in the eighteen seventies. There was a letter in the saddlebag dated July 1873, saying that Cole Jordan owed twenty dollars for cattle. The initials on the saddle were C.J.
Impossible, she thought as she shoved the items back into the saddlebags. Better to stop thinking of this.