Chapter Eleven Dressed for Betrayal #3
Will slid down the bank twenty yards away to watch the trail, granting them the small privacy of distance.
Hank opened Drew's coat and checked the bandage. His hands trembled once. Drew covered them.
"The bullet grazed me."
"Men bleed out from grazes."
"Not from this one."
"You a doctor now?"
"I am the man inside the body. My opinion has relevance."
Hank bent his head, his forehead resting against Drew's breastbone. The posture transformed him. On the trail he was the unmoving point around which fear organized itself. Here, hidden in the earth with fire behind them, he allowed the fear to show.
Drew stroked the back of his neck. "I came back."
"You were late."
"Warren talks too much."
"Thought you changed your mind."
The admission hurt worse than the wound. "Never."
"Saw you ride into that camp dressed like him. Thought maybe the man I knew was clothes you put on."
Drew tipped Hank's face up. "Drew White was a lie. The man you knew was not. Andrew Whitaker is not my father. A coat cannot change whom I love."
The word escaped before he decided whether this was the moment for it. Hank went utterly still.
Drew had intended, if he ever said it, to offer the truth without blood on his shirt or rifle fire in the distance. Yet the trail had never waited for ideal conditions.
"You don't have to answer," he said. "Not here."
Hank kissed him.
It was not careful. It was the desperate collision of a man who had imagined loss and found life under his hands instead.
Drew held on, meeting the fierce pressure of Hank's mouth until pain and desire blurred into one bright proof of survival.
Hank's hand cupped the back of his head.
The other stayed spread over the bandage, protective even in hunger.
When they separated, both were breathing hard.
"Later," Hank said again. His voice broke on the word.
"Later," Drew agreed.
They rested only long enough for the pursuing riders to pass above the cut. Luther had chosen the main road, expecting wounded men to seek speed rather than concealment. When hoofbeats faded north, Will returned.
"Camp is six miles east," he said. "Can he make it?"
"He can hear you," Drew replied.
"Then can you make it?"
Drew looked at Hank. The honest answer mattered now. "Not alone."
Hank stood and offered both hands. "Good thing you ain't."
They altered the tack so a lead rope ran from Drew's bridle to Hank's saddle horn. Drew mounted again. His pride protested; his body accepted the help. Riding beside Hank did not mean carrying every burden separately.
The last miles passed beneath moonlight and gathering clouds. Twice they stopped for Drew to breathe through the pain. Once Hank gave him water mouth to mouth because lifting the canteen made his side spasm; the practical act became a lingering kiss neither man apologized for.
Near camp they saw three lanterns arranged in a triangle, Sam's signal that the herd remained safe. Hank answered with one covered flash. Riders came out at once.
Sam reached them first. "You look terrible," he told Drew.
"Mr. Rourke dressed me."
"Explains it."
Relief moved through the waiting crew when Will held up the waxed packet.
Men who still distrusted the Whitaker name nevertheless cheered the papers that could save their homes.
Hank helped Drew down before everyone and kept an arm around him when his knees failed.
No one mocked the intimacy. No one looked surprised.
Inside the medicine wagon, Sam cut away the ruined bandage and declared the wound ugly but shallow. Hank stood within arm's reach through every stitch. Drew gripped his wrist rather than the leather strap.
"You can breathe," Sam told Hank. "Ain't sewing you."
"Finish."
"Such gratitude."
When it was done, Sam left them with boiled water, clean cloth, and a warning that neither man heard.
Hank washed the blood from Drew's skin. His touch moved slowly over every place the stable search had missed—shoulder, spine, hip, the bruise at his knee.
Drew's arousal returned beneath that thorough attention, impossible to conceal even through exhaustion.
Hank saw and exhaled a sound that was almost pain.
"Later," Drew reminded him.
Hank bent to kiss the uninjured skin above his heart. "I got a long memory."
"So I have observed."
Drew drew him up and loosened the borrowed collar that still made him feel bound to Warren. Hank removed it. Then the coat. Then the blood-stiffened shirt. Each layer of Andrew Whitaker's disguise fell into the straw beside the wagon cot.
Hank wrapped him in a blanket and sat behind him, solid and warm. Drew leaned back against his chest while Sam and Will began copying the records at the small table. The wet page from the creek dried near the lantern, Warren's network of companies emerging line by line.
"We have him," Drew said.
"We have proof," Hank answered. "Men like him take more catching."
"Then we catch him."
Hank's mouth brushed his hair. "Together."
At their feet, the expensive coat and torn white shirt remained crumpled in dust and straw.
Neither man looked at them again.