CHAPTER THREE Skin and Steel #3
Gideon’s fingers tightened until he felt muscle shift beneath Jude’s borrowed shirt.
Jude did not ask him to loosen his grip. He moved closer instead, allowing Gideon to brace against him.
“Talk,” Gideon said.
“About what?”
“Anything.”
Jude drew the thread through. “You have terrible timing.”
“Talk.”
“Your horse hated me.”
“Bishop hated everyone.”
“He liked you.”
“He tolerated me.”
“He carried two full-grown men after being shot because you asked him.”
Pain and grief twisted together beneath Gideon’s ribs.
“Choose another subject.”
Jude studied him.
Then he said, “Noah used to sing when he worked.”
The needle entered again.
Gideon focused on Jude’s voice.
“He couldn’t carry a tune. Didn’t stop him. He sang hymns, drinking songs, Mexican ballads he only knew half the words to. Used to invent the rest.”
Jude tied off one stitch and began another.
Gideon’s face remained near his throat. Each breath warmed the same patch of skin. He felt Jude swallow.
“What did you sing?” Gideon asked.
“I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“One bad singer was enough.”
“Coward.”
Jude’s mouth curved faintly. “Noah said that too.”
Another stitch.
Gideon’s vision blurred.
Jude’s hand tightened against his waist. “Stay with me.”
“I’m here.”
“Tell me where.”
“In a cave.”
“Very good.”
“Chained to a murderer.”
“Less flattering.”
“With his hands on me.”
Jude stopped.
The needle remained poised above Gideon’s skin.
Gideon lifted his eyes.
Something unguarded moved across Jude’s face. Heat. Surprise. Perhaps hunger. It appeared and disappeared so quickly that Gideon could not be certain blood loss had not invented it.
Jude’s voice was lower when he spoke again.
“Do you want my hand removed?”
Gideon looked down at the palm spread against his waist.
“No.”
Jude held his gaze for another second.
Then he continued stitching.
Five stitches closed the furrow.
By the final one, Gideon’s forehead rested against Jude’s shoulder. He had stopped pretending the position was accidental. His right hand gripped the back of Jude’s shirt. His thighs remained spread around the outlaw’s knees, giving him room to work.
Jude tied off the thread.
“Finished,” he whispered.
Gideon did not move.
Jude’s breath touched his ear. “Gideon.”
“I heard you.”
“Then release my shoulder before you leave marks.”
Gideon opened his hand.
Five pale crescents appeared in the cloth where his fingers had pressed.
“I’m sorry.”
“You warned me you might break my arm. This is an improvement.”
Jude covered the wound with folded linen and wrapped a bandage around Gideon’s waist. To pass it behind him, he had to lean across Gideon’s lap and reach around his bare back.
The movement brought their bodies together again.
Jude’s chest pressed against Gideon’s. One arm encircled his waist. Their faces passed so close Gideon felt the brush of Jude’s stubble against his cheek.
Gideon’s hands hovered above Jude’s back.
He did not know where to place them.
Jude did.
“Hold me,” he said. “I can’t reach otherwise.”
Gideon put both arms around him.
One wrist remained connected to Jude’s. The chain lay between their stomachs, cold against Gideon’s heated skin. His free hand settled between Jude’s shoulder blades.
Jude stretched the bandage around his back.
For several breaths, the medical necessity ended and neither man separated.
Gideon felt Jude’s heart striking against his chest. Jude’s mouth remained close to his jaw. The cave had become impossibly small, reduced to skin, breath, metal, and the pressure of arms holding what they had no language to claim.
Then something warm touched Gideon’s hand.
He drew back.
Blood marked his palm.
Not his own.
Gideon’s gaze dropped to Jude’s side.
A dark stain had spread across the shirt beneath his left ribs.
“You’re hit.”
Jude looked down. “Grazed.”
“You said you weren’t.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You told me there was no new injury.”
“I was occupied.”
“With what?”
“Keeping you alive.”
Gideon’s anger arrived hard and immediate, powered by fear he refused to name.
“Sit down.”
Jude raised an eyebrow. “You’ve just been stitched.”
“Sit.”
“There is the marshal.”
Jude shifted from between Gideon’s knees and sat against the opposite wall. The short chain forced Gideon forward with him.
Their positions reversed.
Jude leaned back against the sandstone with his legs extended. Gideon knelt between them, bare-chested, his fresh bandage wrapped tightly around his waist.
He reached for the buttons of Jude’s shirt.
Jude caught his hand.
“You’re shaking.”
“I can clean a wound.”
“You could barely hold the needle.”
“I don’t need the needle unless you’ve lied about the graze.”
Jude released him.
Gideon opened the shirt.
The fabric parted over Jude’s chest and stomach. Firelight moved across sweat-damp skin, old scars, and the dark trail of hair disappearing beneath his waistband.
A bullet had torn through Jude’s left side, shallower than Gideon’s wound but longer. Dried blood covered the surrounding skin.
Gideon’s breath caught.
Jude noticed.
“That bad?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Gideon did not answer.
He had seen Jude partially undressed in the jail, but this was different. No sheriff watched. No official duty stood cleanly between them. Jude sat with his shirt open and his thighs bracketing Gideon’s body while the cave held their breathing and returned it to them.
The cuff connected Gideon’s left wrist to Jude’s right. Jude’s bound hand rested near Gideon’s bare hip.
Gideon lifted the damp cloth.
“I’m going to clean it.”
Jude nodded. “You may.”
Gideon pressed the linen to the graze.
Jude’s stomach clenched.
His free hand closed around Gideon’s upper arm, fingers sinking into muscle. Gideon felt the strength of the grip and the restraint within it.
He cleaned the wound slowly.
Unlike Gideon, Jude did not curse. His mouth tightened. His chest rose and fell more sharply. Sweat gathered along his collarbone.
Gideon placed his free hand flat against Jude’s stomach.
“Breathe.”
“You enjoy giving that order.”
“You’re not obeying it.”
“I’m distracted.”
“By pain?”
Jude’s storm-colored eyes settled on him. “Among other things.”
Gideon’s palm remained against his abdomen.
The contact was warmer than before. More deliberate. He felt each breath move beneath his hand, felt Jude trying to control the reaction and failing by degrees.
The bullet had removed skin but not enough flesh to require stitches. Gideon used the last of the whiskey to clean it.
Jude hissed and pulled him closer by the arm.
Gideon’s face came within inches of his chest. His breath passed over Jude’s skin. The outlaw’s heart beat hard beneath the dark hair at his sternum.
“Still distracted?” Gideon asked.
“More than ever.”
Gideon lifted his head.
Their faces were close.
Too close to pretend the awareness between them belonged only to pain.
Jude’s gaze fell to Gideon’s mouth. This time he did not disguise it. Gideon saw the intention form—the slight movement forward, the breath drawn and held, the free hand loosening around Gideon’s arm.
Gideon felt himself answer before he moved.
Then the cuff shifted between them.
Steel scraped stone.
The sound returned the cave to its proper shape.
Marshal.
Prisoner.
Authority neither man could set down.
Gideon withdrew enough to continue dressing the wound.
Jude’s eyes closed briefly.
Neither spoke until the bandage was secure.
“You said Noah was a surveyor,” Gideon said.
Jude opened his eyes.
The distance in his expression returned slowly. “Federal.”
“For how long?”
“Six years.”
“He worked for the General Land Office?”
“Out of Santa Reina.”
“And he discovered Harrow’s forged deeds?”
Jude looked toward the cave entrance. “He discovered markers had been moved.”
Gideon sat back on his heels but kept one hand near Jude’s side in case the bleeding resumed.
“What markers?”
“Property stones. Harrow’s men shifted them at night. Sometimes a hundred yards. Sometimes a mile. A rancher would wake up and discover the spring his family had used for twenty years now sat inside Harrow land.”
“Stones can be replaced.”
“Records are harder.”
“What records?”
“Survey books. Water claims. Homestead filings. Noah found claims entered under the names of dead men and land transferred by people who couldn’t write. Harrow paid a clerk in Santa Reina to copy forged signatures into the territorial books.”
“That is land fraud. Not murder.”
“Noah thought the same.”
Jude’s face changed as he spoke his brother’s name. The sharpness remained, but something wounded moved beneath it.
“He rode to Dry Mercy to compare the federal survey with the homesteaders’ deeds. Four families had refused Harrow’s purchase offers. Noah told them the land office had altered their filings. He was going to take his field book and the original deeds to a federal judge.”
“What happened?”
“Harrow’s riders reached them first.”
The fire consumed another piece of dry stem. Shadows moved across Jude’s open shirt.
“They burned the settlement,” he continued. “Shot the men who tried to reach the well. Noah and four others made it to the schoolhouse.”
Gideon remembered the file.
Five bodies discovered in a ruined schoolhouse. Jude Calder’s rifle found nearby. Three witnesses who claimed they saw him ride away.
“What were the names of the other four?” Gideon asked.
Jude’s eyes sharpened. “Why?”
“If you are telling the truth, you know them.”
Jude’s jaw tightened.
“Isaac Bell. His son Matthew. Rafael Vega. Thomas Quinn.”
The names came without hesitation.
“Rafael Vega,” Gideon said. “Relation to the widow at Sundown House?”
“Her husband.”
Gideon stored the fact.
“How did your rifle reach the schoolhouse?”
“I carried it there.”
“You expect me to believe that helps your story?”
“I didn’t say it helped.”
Jude looked down at Gideon’s hand resting near his waist.
“Noah sent a boy from Dry Mercy to find me. By the time I arrived, the buildings were burning. I went into the schoolhouse because I could hear someone inside.”
“Your brother?”
“He was alive.”
The words nearly failed.
Jude turned his face toward the cave wall, but Gideon had already seen the grief open inside him.