Читать книгу Hostage to Thunder Horse - Elle James - Страница 8

He’d gained ground in the last hour, bearing down on her, the relentless adversary wearing at her reserves of energy. The cold seeped through her thick gloves and boots, down to her bones.

Alexi Katya Ivanov revved the snowmobile’s engine, thankful that the stolen machine had a full tank of fuel. Regret burned a hole in her gut. Somehow she’d find the owners and repay them for the use of their snowmobile. She’d never in her life stolen anything. In this case, necessity had forced her hand. Steal or die.

She’d ditched her car several hours after crossing the border into North Dakota, and she was tired of wincing every time a law enforcement vehicle passed by. But she didn’t know where to go. She’d only lived in Minneapolis since she’d been in the States. Instinct told her to get as far away from the scene of the crime as she could get.

Throughout the night, she’d pushed farther and faster, praying that she wouldn’t be pulled over for speeding. Not until Fargo did she realize that the headlights following her hadn’t wavered since she’d left Minneapolis. Butterflies wreaked havoc in her belly—whether they were paranoia or intuition, she didn’t care. Her gut told her that whoever had framed her as a terrorist had also set a tracking device on the body of her car. How else had he found her and kept up with her through the maze of streets in the big cities?

She’d stopped once and taken precious time to search the exterior, but the snow-covered ground kept her from a thorough investigation of the undercarriage. Thus her need to ditch the car and find alternate means of transportation. Out in the middle of nowhere North Dakota, rental cars were scarce, if not impossible to find, not to mention they required a credit card to secure. She hadn’t used a credit card since…Katya twisted the handle, gunning the engine. She refused to shed another tear. The bite of the icy wind was not nearly as painful as the ache in her heart. Her beloved father was dead. An accident, according to the news, but she’d gotten the truth from one of his trusted advisors back in Trejikistan. He’d been gunned down by an assassin while driving to their estate in the country.

Immediately after hearing the news of her father’s death, Katya had been attacked in front of her apartment building. If not for the security guard she’d befriended, Katya would be dead. The same guard had hidden her from the attacker and let her know that the police had been to her apartment, claiming she’d been identified as a suspected terrorist. They’d found weapons and bomb-making materials there. Things that hadn’t been there when she’d left to go to church earlier that day, hoping to find some solace over her father’s death. The guard hadn’t believed her capable of terrorism. Thank God.

On the run since then, she’d avoided crowded places, sure that someone would recognize her from the pictures plastered all over the local and statewide television.

She’d taken her car, switched the license plate with that of some unsuspecting person and driven out of Minneapolis as fast as she could.

Something slammed into the snowmobile, shaking her back into the present. A glance behind her confirmed her worst suspicions. The man following her had a gun aimed at her. For as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but gently rolling, wide-open terrain without trees, rocks or buildings to hide behind. The best she could hope for was to stay far enough ahead of the gunman to duck behind another hill. As her snowmobile topped a rise, another shot tore into the back of the vehicle.

Ducking low, she gunned the engine and flew over the top of the hill.

The ground fell away from beneath her, as the snowmobile plunged down a steep incline.

Katya held on, rocks and gravel yanking the skids back and forth during the descent into a rugged river-carved canyon. With each jarring bump, her teeth rattled in her head. Her hands cramped with the effort to steer the machine to the bottom. No snow graced the barren rocks, giving the snowmobile’s skids little to grab onto. The rubber tracks flung gravel and rocks out behind her.

Katya couldn’t worry about bullets from the man following her. It was all she could do to live through the ride.

With a bone-wrenching thump, Katya reached the river bank. She couldn’t believe she’d made it. She wanted nothing more than to throw herself on the ground and hug the earth.

Bullets pinged off the rocks beside her, forcing her back into survival mode. She raced the snowmobile along the riverbank, aiming for the bluff that would block the bullets. The machine ran rough, the tracks slipping on the icy surface, getting less traction than needed.

With the shooter perched on the hillside, Katya was a prime target to be picked off. If only she could make it to the bend, her attacker would have to stop shooting long enough to follow.

Hunched low in her seat, she urged the hard-used machine across the snow and gravel. A hundred yards from the bend in the river and the reassuring solid rock of the canyon wall, it chugged to a halt.

Katya hit the start switch. Nothing happened. Bullets spit snow and gravel up around her. Katya flung herself from the seat to the rocky ground, crouching below the snowmobile. A bullet pierced the cushioned seat, blowing straight through and nicking the glove on her hand.

At the shooter’s angle, the snowmobile didn’t give Katya much protection. If she wanted to stay alive long enough to see another day, she’d have to make a dash for the canyon wall, where she hoped to find a place to hide among the boulders.

As if on cue, the snow thickened and the wind blasted it across the sky. She couldn’t see the top of the canyon wall. And if she couldn’t see all the way to the top, whoever was up there wouldn’t be able to see her. Sucking in a deep breath, Katya took off, running upstream toward the bluffs.

The wind blew against her, making her progress slow, despite her all-out effort to reach cover. But once she was around the bend, the force of the wind slackened.

Katya hid among the rocks, bending double to catch her breath.

Her ride down the canyon wall had been nothing short of miraculous. Would the shooter make a similar attempt? Katya doubted anyone in his right mind would. Which meant he’d have to dismount and leave his machine at the top in order to come down and find her.

Without the snowmobile, she didn’t know how she’d find her way back to civilization, but she could only solve one major problem at a time. Her temporary respite from being a target was only that. Temporary. In order to stay alive, she had to keep moving.

As she wove her way through the boulders and rocks, the wind picked up, the snow lashing against her cheeks, bitter cold penetrating the layers of GORE-TEX and thermal underwear beneath. Her feet grew numb and her hands stiff. At this rate, a bullet was the least of her worries.

The cold would kill her first.

MADDOX THUNDER HORSE topped the rise and stared down into Mustang Canyon to the narrow ribbon of icy-cold river running through the rugged terrain. He’d tracked Little Joe’s band of mares to the valley below, worried about Sweet Jessie’s newborn foal. Full-grown wild horses normally survived the harsh North Dakota winters without problems. But a newborn might not be so lucky. Temperatures had plunged fast, dropping from the low forties to the teens in the past three hours. With night creeping in and the snow piling up, Maddox couldn’t look for much longer or he might be caught in the first blizzard of the season.

The handheld radio clipped just inside his jacket gave a static burst. “Maddox?”

Maddox fumbled to unzip the jacket just enough to grab the radio and press the talk button. “Whatcha got, Tuck?”

“I got nothing here in South Canyon. How about you?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s past time we headed back. The weatherman missed the mark on this one. Wankatanka grows angrier by the minute.” Tuck attributed every change in weather to the Great Spirit.

The Bismarck weather report had called for snow flurries, not a full-blown blizzard. But Maddox had tasted the pending storm in the air. He understood this land and the weather like his ancestors, the equally rugged Lakota tribe who’d forged a life on the Plains long before the white man came. He’d felt the heaviness in the air, the weight of the clouds hanging over the canyons. Maddox knew if they were to find the horses, they’d have to hurry.

“See ya back at the ranch.” Maddox clipped his radio to the inside of his jacket and zipped it back in place. Gathering his reins, he half turned his horse when movement near the river below caught his attention. With the snow falling steadily and the wind picking up, he had almost missed it. Maddox dug out his binoculars and pressed them against his eyes, focusing on the narrow valley below. Were Little Joe and his band of mares hunkering down in the canyon until the storm blew over?

Bear, the stallion he’d rescued five winters before, shifted beneath him from hoof to hoof, his nostrils flaring as if sensing the storm’s building fury. Bear didn’t like getting caught in snowstorms any more than Maddox did. The horse had almost frozen to death that winter Maddox and his fiancée, Susan, had been trapped in a raging blizzard. Bear had made it back alive. Susan hadn’t.

Maddox peered through the blowing snowflakes to the bend in the river. His gaze followed the line of the waterway as it snaked through the canyon.

As a member of the Thunder Horse family, Maddox had grown up living, breathing and protecting the land he and his ancestors were privileged enough to own. Over six thousand acres of canyon and grassland comprised the Thunder Horse Ranch where the Thunder Horse brothers raised cattle, buffalo and horses. They farmed what little tillable soil there was to provide hay and feed for the animals through the six months of wicked North Dakota winter. For the most part, the rest of the land remained as it was when his people roamed as nomads, following the great buffalo herds.

Maddox loved the solitude and isolation of the Badlands. He’d only been away during his college days and a four-year tour of duty in the military. The entire time away from Thunder Horse Ranch he longed to be home again. The Plains called to him like a siren to a sailor, or more like a wolf to his own territory.

Now it would take an extreme change in circumstance to budge him from the place he loved, no matter what sad memories plagued him in the harsh landscape. Time healed wounds, but time never diminished his love for this land.

As his gaze skimmed the banks of the river, he passed over a flash of apple red. Orange-red and blood red he’d expect, like the colors of Painted Rock Canyon, but not bright, apple red. He eased the binoculars to the right, backing over the spot. Squinting through the lenses, he tried adjusting the view to zoom in. A white bump near the river’s edge caught the blowing snow, creating a natural barrier quickly collecting more of the flakes. On the end of the drift, a red triangle stood out, but not for long. The snow thickened, dusting the red, burying it in a blanket of white.

Poised on the edge of a plateau, Maddox weighed his options. He hadn’t found the mares and he still had an hour’s ride back to the ranch house. If he dropped off the edge of the plateau to investigate the snowdrift and the red item buried in white powder beside it, he could add another hour to his journey home. In so doing, he risked getting stuck out in the weather and possibly freezing to death.

Instinct pulled at him, drawing him closer to the edge of the canyon, urging him to investigate. He rarely ignored his instinct, following his gut no matter how foolhardy it seemed. His army buddies called it uncanny, but it had saved his life on more than one occasion in Afghanistan.

No matter how cold and dangerous the weather got, if he didn’t go down and investigate, curiosity and worry would eat away at him. He might not get the opportunity to return to investigate for days, maybe months, depending on the depth of the snow and how long the ground remained frozen.

With gloved fingers, Maddox tugged the zipper on his parka up higher, arranging the fur-lined collar around his face to block out the stinging snow now blowing in sideways.

He nudged Bear toward the edge of the plateau.

As they neared the dropoff, Bear danced backward, rearing and turning.

Maddox smoothed a hand along Bear’s neck, speaking to him in a soothing tone, soft and steady over the roar of the prairie wind. “Easy, Mato cikala.” Little Bear.

Bear reared up and whinnied, his frightened call whipped away in the increasing wind. Then he dropped to all four hooves and let Maddox guide him down the steep slope into the valley below. With the wind and snow limiting his vision, Maddox eased the horse past boulders and rocky outcroppings devoid of vegetation until the ground leveled out on the narrow valley floor. He urged the horse into a canter, eager to check out the mysterious red object and get the heck back to the ranch and the warm fire sure to be blazing in the stone fireplace.

His gaze fixed on the lump on the ground, Maddox pulled Bear to a halt and slipped out of the saddle. His boots landed a foot deep in fresh powder, stirring the white stuff up into the air to swirl around his eyes.

As he neared the snowdrift, the red object took shape. It was the corner of a scarf.

His heart skipped a couple beats and then slammed into action, pumping blood and adrenalin through his veins, warming his body like nothing else could.

He bent to brush away the snow from the lump on the ground, his fingers coming into contact with denim and a parka. His hands worked faster, a wash of unbidden panic threatening his ability to breathe. The more snow he brushed away, the more he realized that what had created the snowdrift was, in fact, a woman, wrapped in a fur-lined parka, denim jeans and snow boots. Her face, protected somewhat from the wind had a light dusting of snowflakes across deathly pale cheeks, sooty brows and lashes.

Maddox grabbed his glove between his teeth and pulled it off, digging beneath the parka’s collar to find the woman’s neck. He prayed to the Great Spirit for a pulse.

An image of Susan lying in his arms, hunkered beneath a flimsy tarp, while gale-force winds pounded the life out of the Badlands, flashed through his mind. This woman couldn’t be dead. He wouldn’t let her die. Not again. Not like Susan.

With wind lashing at his back and the snow growing so thick he could barely see, he didn’t feel a pulse. He moved his fingers along her neck and bent his cheek to her nose. At last, a faint pulse brushed against his fingertips and a shallow breath warmed his cheek.

Relief overwhelmed him, bringing moisture to his stinging eyes. He blinked several times as he tightened the parka’s hood around the woman’s face and lifted her into his arms.

Too late to make it back to the ranch, he had to find a place to hole up until the storm passed. Being out in the open during a blizzard was a recipe for certain death. As he carried the woman toward his horse, he made a mental list of what he’d packed in his saddlebag.

This far into the winter season, he’d come prepared for the worst. Sleeping bag, tarp, two days of rations and a canteen. Trying to get the woman back to the ranch wasn’t an option. Just getting out of the canyon would take well over an hour. Two people on one horse climbing the steep slopes was risky enough in clear weather. He couldn’t expose the unconscious woman to the freezing wind. He had to get her warmed up soon or she’d die of exposure.

Maddox remembered playing along this riverbank one summer with his father and brothers. They swam in the icy water and explored the rock formations along the banks. If his memory served him well, there was a cave along the east bank in the river bend. He remembered because of the drawings of buffalo painted along the walls. He carried the woman along the river’s edge, clucking his tongue for Bear to follow.

The stallion didn’t look too pleased, tossing his head toward home as if to say he was ready to go back now.

The wind pushed Maddox from behind and for the most part he shielded the woman with his body. He crossed the river at a shallow spot, careful to step on the rocks and not into the frigid water. He couldn’t get wet, couldn’t afford to succumb to the cold.

The blizzard increased in intensity until he trudged through a foot and a half of snow in near-whiteout conditions. Maddox stuck close to the rocky bluffs rising upward to the east, afraid if he stepped too far from the painted cliffs, he’d lose his way. Bear occasionally nudged him from behind, reassuring him that the stallion was still there.

After several minutes stumbling around in the snow, Maddox thought he’d gone too far and might have missed the narrow slit in the wall of the bluff. A lull in the wind settled the snow around him, revealing a dark slash in the otherwise solid rock wall.

The entry gaped just wide enough for him to carry the woman through. Once the ceiling opened up and he could hear his breathing echo off the cavern walls, he inched forward into the darkness until he found the far wall. There he scuffed his boot across the floor to clear any rocks or debris before he laid her down in the cavern.

With little time to spare, he hurried back out into the storm to lead Bear out of the growing fury of the blizzard. As darkness surrounded them, Bear tugged against the reins, at first unwilling to enter the tight confines, his big body bumping against the crevice walls. When the cave opened up inside, the horse stopped struggling.

Running his hand along the horse’s neck and saddle, Maddox focused his attention on survival—both his and the stranger’s. If the woman had a chance of living, she had to be warmed up quickly. Although protected from the blizzard’s fury, the cold would still kill them if he didn’t do something fast. Once he came to the lump behind the saddle, he stripped off his gloves, blowing warm air onto his numb fingers.

Leaving the saddle on the horse for warmth, Maddox worked the leather straps holding the sleeping bag in place. Once free, he laid it at his feet on the cave floor. Next, he loosened the saddlebag straps and pulled it over the horse’s back. Inside the left pouch, he kept a flashlight. His chilled fingers shook as he fumbled to switch it on.

Light filled the small cavern. The walls crowded in on him more so than he remembered from when he was a child. About half the size of the Medora amphitheater, the cave would serve its purpose—to shield them from the biting wind and bitter cold of the storm.

Without wood to build a roaring fire, they would have to rely on the sleeping bag and each other’s body warmth—hers being questionable at the moment.

Maddox set the flashlight on a rock outcropping, untied the strings around the sleeping bag and unzipped the zipper. He placed the open sleeping bag next to the woman. He had to get her out of the bulky winter clothing and boots and inside the sleeping bag.

Time wasn’t on his side. He didn’t know how long the woman had been unconscious or whether she had frostbite. Maddox stripped his coat off and the heavy sweatshirt beneath, wadding it up to form a pillow. Then he tugged his jeans off and the long underwear until he stood naked, regretting his lack of boxer shorts. The frigid air bit his skin, raising gooseflesh everywhere.

He went to work undressing the stranger, removing layer after layer. When he tugged off her jeans, she moaned.

That was a good sign. She wasn’t completely comatose. Hope burned in his chest as he swiftly finished the job of undressing her down to her bra, panties and the pendant she wore around her throat. Nowhere in her pockets could he find any form of identification. He shoved all their clothing to the bottom of the bag, then laid the woman on the quilted flannel interior.

Tucked inside the sleeping bag, she didn’t shake the way most cold people did. Her body had given up trying to keep her warm. The lethargy of sleep had numbed her mind to the acceptance of a peaceful death.

Maddox’s body fought to live, his teeth chattering in the cool of the cave’s interior. He refused to let the sleep of death claim her, as it had Susan.

Before he lost all his body warmth, he slid into the sleeping bag beside the woman and zipped the edges together. Although the bag was made for one large person, he was able to close both of them inside with a little room to spare. He wrapped his arms around her body, rubbing his hands up and down her cold arms and tucking her feet between his calves to warm them.

Cold. She was so cold.

Susan’s face swam before him, her lips blue, her tawny blond hair buffeted by the wind, the only movement on her lifeless form. For a moment his world stood still as he stared down into the quiet countenance, the blank stare of his dead fiancée intruding into his thoughts.

But that was years ago. This woman wasn’t Susan. For the first time since he’d found her, he studied the woman, blocking out the sad memories. In the shadowy glow of the flashlight, he leaned back enough to stare at the woman so near death he was afraid he might already be too late.

Dark hair, as black as his own, splayed across his gray sweatshirt pillow in large loose waves. Sooty, narrow brows winged outward in sharp contrast to her pale, almost translucent skin. Her hair dipped to a shallow peak at the center of her forehead and her lashes lay like fans across her cheeks. A pointed chin, perky nose and delicate ears completed her perfection.

As close as he was, Maddox caught a whiff of a subtle yet exotic perfume. His breath caught in his throat. This stranger didn’t have Susan’s girl-next-door fresh looks, yet her ethereal beauty was so profound it sucked the wind right out of his lungs, his groin tightening in automatic response to her skin against his. He hadn’t been drawn to any woman since Susan’s death. He hadn’t let himself be, his burden of guilt weighing heavily.

The woman in the sleeping bag with him was a stranger. A beautiful, exotic stranger with skin the color of a porcelain doll and hair softer and silkier than anything he’d ever run his hands through.

He forced himself to focus on anything other than her physical attributes, shifting to all the unknowns, the mystery and reasons he shouldn’t trust her. He didn’t know her, she hadn’t carried a driver’s license or passport. He didn’t know her background.

Who the hell was she? Would she live to tell him?