The Renegades: Nick Read Online Free Page B

foolish dreamer to think the treed claim with water was meant for her and her child. It actually did belong to the ruthless man on the black horse.
    His voice came from right behind her.
    “You’ve had me in sight since you drove your stake, so you know that mine was already there.”
    He was at her shoulder, on foot now, leading the horse—they had come up behind heras silently as ghosts. She had let her feelings consume her watchfulness, and in this terrible desert, that way lay disaster for her and her baby. She had to be more careful!
    She whirled on him.
    “All right! I can see. I admit it!”
    The words came out in a banshee scream and she clapped her hands over her mouth. Her blood was roaring in her head, the sickness rising again in her belly to steal what little was left of her strength. She set her mind against it, but it came anyway.
    Never, ever could she let him see it; never would she tell him she was expecting a baby. That would make her completely vulnerable and he’d try to take the second claim, too.
    Suddenly she couldn’t even think anymore. The rest of the heat drained out of her face, her mouth went stiff with grief.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, really looking at her now. “I had no call to interfere in your life and get that last claim for you. Proving up a homestead is too much of a job for a woman alone.”
    “A hysterical woman, you mean?”
    “Any woman,” he said, almost gently. “I never should’ve done that.”
    “Why did you, then, if you knew you could prove this claim was already rightfully yours?”
    “You were holding a gun on me,” he snapped. “Remember? What was I supposed to do—shoot a woman?”
    Now he was as hard and angry as ever.
    “That’s a good enough reason right there that a lone woman ought not be out here,” he said.
    “I’m not asking to be treated different from a man, in spite of what I said earlier,” Callie snapped back. “Go ahead and shoot.”
    They stared at each other, the ridiculous words hanging in the air between them. Neither could resist a smile as hard as they tried.
    “But not until I get a gun that works,” she added quickly.
    His smile vanished.
    “A woman who won’t give up,” he said. “That makes what I’ve done even worse. If it hadn’t been for my meddling, you’d be on your way out of the Strip right now.”
    “No, I’d be searching for a claim on foot or trying to ride my hateful horse to find one. I’d camp out here for days if I had to, waiting for somebody to give up and go back home.”
    “Let me buy you out, and you can get a place in town.”
    “No! I can’t live in town. It’d kill my spirit.”
    “You can’t survive alone out here. Go home, now, before you blister your hands and break your back trying to farm this ground.”
    “I can never go back to the Cumberlands,” she said, her throat tightening with unshed tears.
    He hesitated for a moment, waiting for her to say why. Somehow, somewhere in the back of her mind, that made her want to smile again, in spite of all. She would never have guessed he’d be interested enough to be curious.
    “Well, I can’t take care of you,” he said finally, irritation flooding his voice. “I won’t. I hate it that I tied you to this land.”
    “You didn’t,” she said, pulling herself up to her full five foot, three inches. “I would’ve staked a claim come hell or high water. It was Vance’s … my … husband’s … and my dream. We planned it from the minute we read about the Run in the newspapers.”
    He held her gaze although she tried to look away, and he saw her tears for Vance.
    “Well, you’ve reached that goal in his memory,” he said. “Now let me buy you out, Mrs….”
    “Sloane.”
    “Let me buy you out, Mrs. Sloane,” he said again, in a soft voice so full of pity that she couldn’t believe this was the same man who’d ordered her off his claim. “I’ll pay enough for you to get a nice place with a well.”
    If there was