Always You by Jill Gregory Page B

stomach, but before she could reach him, the third man barred her way. With a grunt he grabbed her around the waist.
    “Good work, Lomax!” Jethro, the scarecrow, whooped.
    Lomax looked to be about fifty, a potbellied and foul-smelling goat of a man with long, greasy red hair and lashless eyes the color of river mud. Instinctively Melora kicked him in the shin, and he released her with a bellow of pain.
    “Git her,” Strong commanded as she bolted. Jethro spurred his pinto forward.
    She got no farther than the shadow of the pines before Jethro whipped the horse around her, cutting her off. With her heart in her throat, Melora changed direction, darting to her left, but found Lomax blocking that path, his arms outstretched. Strong slid from the gray and sauntered over, stepping over Cal’s unmoving form without even glancing down.
    “I told you boys I’d find us a woman to keep us entertained while we’re hiding out,” he said smugly, grinning around the group. He approached Melora, beaming like a skunk eating cabbage. “And a real looker she is, too.”
    “You leave me alone.” She retreated a step as he bore down upon her. “If you let me tend to... to my husband, he might live. If not, you’ll all be hunted down for murder! So if you don’t want to get yourselves hanged—”
    “Hell, we’re already bein’ hunted for murder,” Jethro broke in, guffawing, shrugging his bony shoulders. “And they kin only hang us once, so why the hell should we give a damn about your poor ol’ husband there?”
    The chill that swept through Melora froze her blood like creek water. She knew there was no point cajoling or arguing with these men. She recognized their ilk. Suddenly she dodged past Strong, whipping by him so quickly he didn’t have time to grab her. She ducked beneath the pine boughs and ran through the thick, soft blackness toward the stream. From behind her came the noise of pursuit, and her feet slid ever faster over the rough ground.
    Was Cal dead? Horror churned through her. My God, she was trapped out here with these three murderers! She knew what they would do to her, and shivers convulsed down her spine as she plummeted forward in a desperate run for freedom. She’d rather die than be caught; she’d rather break her neck running through this thick, pillowy blackness than submit to them.
    But as she spied the glint of the stream and pelted toward it, a rope slithered around her shoulders, slid nearly to her elbows, and then tightened so swiftly she gasped in pain. She was flung to the ground as the rope jerked sharply, and then Jethro leaped off his horse and trod over to her, grasping the rope between his hands.
    Lomax and Strong appeared out of the darkness and leered down at her as Jethro knelt, grabbing a handful of her hair as she struggled to sit up.
    “Hope you’re worth all this trouble, lady.”
    “Bring her back to the hideout,” Strong ordered without further ado. “Me and Lomax’ll check out the camp and get their horses and supplies and finish off that hombre. Then we’ll meet up with you straight away. And lookee here, Jethro,” he added, jabbing a finger at the scarecrow twisting the rope in his hands. “You’d better make damn sure she’s still alive and kicking until we’ve all had a turn with her. Don’t you forget.”
    Fighting back the nausea rocking through her, Melora presently found herself wrenched up before Jethro on his horse, the rope still taut about her shoulders, crushing her bones. She had to bite her lip to keep from crying out. The fear was now a living, breathing thing inside her, consuming every thought. She tried to keep from trembling as the pinto galloped through the darkness, crossing a short gully, then veering west beneath the shadow of a series of buttes.
    Strong and Lomax had gone back to finish Cal; that meant by now he was almost certainly dead. And she, instead of finding herself the prisoner of one man, someone at least who had demonstrated