Caged Read Free Page B

against the wall, with the quilt wrapped around her like a toga. She was still next to him, although the gun was not.
    He didn’t have to wonder where it had gotten to, though, because it was being held in her trembling hands, aimed directly at his heart.
    How had she gotten loose?  He’d made sure that the bonds were tight enough to hold her in place, but not so tight as to cut off the circulation to her hands.  Was he going to pay with his life for being that faint hearted an outlaw?
    As if he couldn’t feel one bit of the agony that was coursing through him, he quickly sat up, which immediately gave him a height advantage, although the muzzle of that gun followed him unerringly—if unsteadily.  Damn, that thing had a hair trigger.  If she wasn’t careful, she’d kill him accidentally on purpose.
    She was still weeping; he wondered if she’d been crying the entire time he’d been asleep, or unconscious, or whatever it was that he’d been. 
    He knew instinctively that the best thing he could do—until he could find a way to disarm her without getting himself killed—was to talk to her.  Many of his lovers had complimented him on his voice. They found it either soothing or arousing, or both, it seemed.  He figured one or the other ought to work on her; he didn’t much care which.
    “You don’t want to do that, lady.”
    “My name is Mrs. Hemmingway.” A thought struck her, and a lie fell easily from her lips. “And my husband will be back from hunting any minute.”
    He let himself almost but not quite smile at her vehemence, but he also noticed that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring and his knowing smile easily conveyed the fact that he knew that she was lying about having a husband.  A lot of women who had made what society considered to be grave errors in judgment came out west to start anew, and he figured that some version of that was probably her story.
    He highly doubted Mr. Hemmingway existed, and if he did, he was probably somewhere back in the East.  Either way, it wasn’t something he was going to worry about.
    “You don’t want to do that, Missus,” he repeated, using the soft, cajoling tone he’d used with his little sister when she’d gotten some sort of hair brained idea stuck in her stubborn little head.  “Why, if you kill me, you’ll go to Hell.”
    “I don’t care .”
    The gun didn’t waver.  If anything, it steadied.
    Apparently that was the wrong tack to take.  “Then, if nothing else, think of the terrible mess all over your fine house.”
    The stunned look at his use of humor was just what he was going for as he reached for the gun, but she halted his hand mid-grab by simply turning the muzzle of the gun towards herself instead, and Cage felt his heart drop onto the floor.
    He much preferred that she keep it trained on him than point it at herself.
    “Hey now, that’s not funny, Missus.”
    “It’s not meant to be funny.”  The dead calm of her words worried him more than anything else that had gone on between them.  He’d heard that tone of voice before from badly injured or cowardly soldiers in the War and nothing good had ever come of it.
    Once he’d made up his mind what he was going to do, he did it without hesitation. He threw the little knife he’d found under the sheet—obviously what she’d used to cut herself loose and long since forgotten by her—against the far wall of the cabin, distracting her just enough that he was able to grab the gun and wrestle it away from her.
    But not before it discharged once, putting a hole into the dirt floor and kicking up a cloud of it in its wake.
    She had been going to kill herself!  She’d been seconds from actually doing it!  He couldn’t even begin to come to grips with that, so he didn’t try to.  Instead he gave his instincts full reign. He tackled her and wrenched the quilt away from her, leaving her fully nude to his eager gaze.
    Then he reached to the nightstand for another of the hemp