CHAPTER ONE The Man in Irons #3
The gesture should have felt like surrender. It did not. It felt chosen, which made it far more dangerous.
Gideon supported Calder’s right wrist and closed the iron around it. Before engaging the lock, he slid the tip of his smallest finger between steel and skin.
Calder looked down. “Measuring me?”
“Making certain it isn’t too tight.”
“Rusk said pain discourages escape.”
“Rusk mistakes pain for authority.”
The lock clicked.
Gideon fastened the second cuff with the same care, his thumb passing over the raw groove left by the rawhide. Calder’s pulse moved against it.
“Why?” Calder asked.
“Why what?”
“You tell me before you touch me. You wait until I answer. You fit the irons like you’re afraid steel might offend me.” His gaze lifted to Gideon’s. “You’ve already taken my freedom. Why bother asking permission for anything else?”
The office had gone quiet.
Gideon could feel Rusk listening. He could feel the prisoner’s wrists resting in his hands, warm and rough and circled by Gideon’s authority.
He released them carefully.
“Because being a prisoner does not make you less of a man.”
Calder stopped smiling.
The silence that followed was not empty. It held the weight of something Gideon could not name and would not inspect too closely.
Calder looked down at the cuffs. When he spoke again, the performance had left his voice.
“That belief going to survive the road?”
“That depends on you.”
“No.” His eyes returned to Gideon. “It depends on you.”
Gideon fitted the ankle irons. They were joined by enough chain for Calder to walk carefully but not run. He checked the distance from steel to skin twice.
When he finished, Calder said, “I surrendered because of you.”
Gideon sat back on his heels. “You surrendered to Sheriff Rusk.”
“I walked into his office because word was a federal marshal had been sent to collect me.”
“That could have been anyone.”
“Not anyone. Gideon Shaw.”
Hearing his first name in Calder’s low voice sent an unwelcome current along Gideon’s spine.
“How do you know me?”
“I asked which marshals Harrow owned.”
Rusk moved in the doorway. Gideon looked over his shoulder, and the sheriff stopped.
Calder continued. “Your name was the one nobody gave me.”
“That’s thin evidence on which to offer your neck.”
“It was all I had.”
“If you trust me, tell me what Harrow wants badly enough to have you beaten.”
“Trust is a large word for a man kneeling between my legs with a key to my chains.”
Gideon became abruptly conscious of his position. Calder sat against the wall, boots planted apart to accommodate the ankle iron. Gideon knelt close enough that the chain lay across his thigh. One of his hands rested beside Calder’s knee.
He rose.
Calder’s smile returned, faint and knowing, but pain had begun to gray his face.
“I’ll tell you in Santa Reina,” he said.
“You may not have that long.”
“That is precisely why I need to arrive alive.”
“You expect an attempt?”
“I expected one before you got here.” Calder looked toward Rusk. “Perhaps Harrow decided the sheriff was taking too much pleasure in his work to interrupt.”
Rusk’s hand struck the cell door hard enough to rattle it. “You lying son of a—”
Gideon stepped between them.
The movement placed his body directly in front of Calder’s. He felt the prisoner’s heat at his back, close enough that Calder’s breath touched the nape of his neck.
“You have surrendered custody,” Gideon said. “Walk away.”
Rusk’s gaze dropped to the badge, then lifted. “You won’t make the railroad.”
Calder spoke behind Gideon. “That sounded almost like a warning.”
“Shut your mouth.”
Gideon did not look back. “He can use his mouth as he chooses.”
Calder’s breath changed. It might have been a laugh. Gideon refused to determine what else it might have been.
Rusk retreated into the office.
Gideon gathered the transfer papers, medical roll, and bloody quirt. He tucked the latter into an oilcloth evidence sleeve and put it inside his saddlebag.
“Can you stand?” he asked.
“Can you catch me if I can’t?”
“Yes.”
The answer came too quickly to be anything but truth.
Calder studied him, then planted one boot and pushed upward. His legs failed before they straightened.
Gideon caught him.
Calder’s cuffed hands struck Gideon’s chest. Gideon wrapped one arm around his back and the other beneath his elbow, taking his full weight. Their bodies came together from shoulder to thigh.
Heat passed through both layers of clothing. Calder was leaner than Gideon, but no less solid. His chest expanded against Gideon’s with one startled breath, and his bound hands remained trapped between them, the chain pressing cold through Gideon’s vest.
For a suspended second, neither man moved.
Gideon felt Calder’s breath against his jaw.
The clean shirt carried Gideon’s own scent, but beneath it remained leather, dust, and the unmistakable warmth of Calder’s skin.
Gideon’s hand had spread across the lower part of his back, dangerously near the place where the shirt disappeared into his waistband.
Calder looked up at him.
Close, his battered face was not handsome in any easy way. It was too sharp, too knowing, too marked by defiance. But his mouth, even split, held Gideon’s attention with the force of a drawn weapon.
“Easy,” Gideon said.
The word emerged rougher than intended.
“I am,” Calder answered.
Gideon could not say which of them moved first. Only that distance returned.
He kept one hand on Calder’s elbow until the prisoner found his balance. Then he looped a transport chain through the wrist irons, leaving enough slack for Calder to walk without pulling against his injured skin.
“We’re leaving,” Gideon said.
Rusk snorted from behind his desk. “In this heat?”
“Especially in this heat.”
The sheriff picked up his bottle. “Southern road’s quickest.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Bridge is out north of Cottonwood Wash.”
“I’ve been told that too.”
Rusk drank, but his eyes sharpened over the bottle. The broken bridge had not appeared in any dispatch.
Gideon stored the fact.
He led Calder through the office. The ankle chain shortened his stride, but he refused to shuffle. Each step was measured. Proud. The deputy by the gun rack moved aside, though not before his shoulder clipped Calder’s deliberately.
Calder swayed.
Gideon caught the front of the deputy’s shirt and drove him against the wall.
The gun rack shook. A rifle slipped from its pegs and clattered to the floor.
“Touch him again,” Gideon said, “and you will travel to Santa Reina in his place.”
The deputy’s face lost its color. “It was an accident.”
“Then improve your balance.”
Gideon released him.
Calder watched the exchange without speaking. A vertical line had appeared between his eyebrows, as though Gideon had done something more confusing than violence.
Outside, the sun struck them like an open furnace.
The street remained empty, but curtains shifted in the windows above the saloon. Word of Calder’s transfer had traveled. Gideon could feel unseen eyes counting weapons, horses, and the distance to the edge of town.
His gelding, Bishop, waited beneath the awning. A second horse stood tied beside him: a rangy chestnut mare with intelligent eyes and a scar along her flank.
“Mine?” Calder asked.
“Until Santa Reina.”
“And after?”
“That depends on the judge.”
“Everything depends on men wearing better coats than ours.”
Gideon checked the mare’s saddle. The cinch had been loosened two holes since he inspected it that morning.
He tightened it without comment.
The saddlebag buckle had also been reversed. Someone had opened it.
He examined the contents. Food, ammunition, coffee, two canteens. Nothing appeared missing. That meant the purpose had not been theft.
Someone wanted to know what he carried.
Gideon shifted the evidence sleeve and medical roll to Bishop’s bags. He added a second canteen, then took a short carbine from the saddle boot and strapped it where he could reach it quickly.
Calder followed every movement. “You believe me now?”
“I believe someone touched my saddle.”
“In Red Mesa, that practically constitutes a declaration of war.”
“Can you mount with those ribs?”
“I can mount with no ribs if the alternative is another night in there.”
Gideon shortened the ankle chain by passing it through a leather keeper, allowing Calder enough separation to sit astride without catching the links beneath the horse. He checked the arrangement with one hand at Calder’s boot and the other braced against his calf.
“I’m going to lift you,” he said.
Calder glanced down at him. “I’ve been dreaming of hearing that all day.”
Gideon’s hand tightened around the leather.
“You flirt when you’re frightened,” he said.
The humor in Calder’s face went still.
“And you order men around when you want to touch them.”
“I order men around because it’s my profession.”
“Convenient profession.”
Gideon stood. They faced each other beside the mare, close enough that the saddle concealed them from most of the jail windows.
“If you do not want my hands on you,” Gideon said quietly, “say so. I’ll find another way.”
Calder’s gaze traveled over his face, searching for mockery and failing to find it.
“I want to get on the horse,” he said.
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Something almost vulnerable appeared in those storm-colored eyes.
“Yes,” Calder said. “You may touch me.”
Gideon placed both hands around his waist.
Even through the borrowed shirt, the contact was shockingly direct. His palms spanned the hard lines above Calder’s hips; his fingers curved toward the small of his back. Calder gripped Gideon’s shoulders with his cuffed hands.
“On three,” Gideon said. “One. Two.”
Calder pushed from the ground on the second count. Gideon lifted.
Their bodies slid against one another as Calder rose. For an instant, the prisoner’s chest dragged along Gideon’s, his bound arms encircling Gideon’s neck, one thigh pressing between Gideon’s legs as he swung toward the saddle.
Gideon’s grip shifted lower to support him.
Calder inhaled sharply.
Gideon set him onto the mare and removed his hands at once.
Neither man spoke.