She fell back in exasperation.
There had to be some way out of it. There had to be.
She stared at the ceiling for several long minutes. The best she could come up with was a fairly dirty trick, but she had to try it.
She waited. This time, she wanted to make sure that he was gone. She waited longer.
Then she screamed, high-pitched, long and hard and with a note of pure terror.
Within seconds, Delilah burst in upon her, her dark skin gray with fear. "Shannon! What is it?"
"Beyond my window! Right outside! There's someone here, oh, I know it, Delilah!"
Shannon lowered her lashes quickly. She wondered if God would ever forgive her for the awful scare she was giving Delilah, then she figured that most men and women who had survived the war had a few sins on their consciences—God was just going to have to sort them all out. He would understand, after all they had been through, that she had to go after her sister herself, come what may.
"Outside, now?" Delilah whispered.
"Let me up before someone gets in!" Shannon urged her. She was whispering, too, and she didn't know why. It didn't make much sense, not after her blood-curdling scream.
Delilah hurried over to the bed, clicking her tongue as she worked on Shannon's left-hand knot. "Lord, child, but that man can tie a good knot!"
"Get a knife. There's a little letter opener in my top drawer. It's probably sharp enough."
Delilah nodded, hurrying. She came back and started sawing away at the stocking. "Yes, he sure can tie a knot!" she murmured once again.
"I know," Shannon said bleakly. Then she looked up, and her eyes met Delilah's.
Delilah jumped back, dropping the letter opener and shaking her finger at Shannon. "Why, you young devil! This whole thing was a ploy!"
Delilah had nearly severed the knot. Shannon yanked hard and managed to split the rest of the fibers. The letter opener was within her reach on the bed. She grabbed it before Delilah could reach it, and quickly severed the second bind.
Then she was free.
"Shannon McCahy—"
"I love you, Delilah," Shannon said, quickly hugging her and giving her a kiss on the cheek. "Take care of Gabe."
"Shannon, don't you go getting yourself killed! Your death will be on my conscience! Oh, Lord, but your poor pa must be rolling over in his grave!"
"Pa would understand," Shannon said, then she hurried from the room. She had lost a lot of time. Malachi would ride hard at night. It wouldn't be easy to catch up with him. Not that she wanted to meet up with him tonight. She just wanted to find him so that she could follow along behind him.
She hurried down the stairs. Delilah had picked up her saddlebags from the porch and dragged them into the hallway. Shannon knelt and checked her belongings. She reached into the top drawer beneath the empty Colt brackets and found matches and added them to her bags.
Delilah had followed her downstairs. Once again, Shannon hugged her.
"Come home soon," Delilah said.
"If Matthew comes, you tell him what happened. Maybe, maybe Matt can do something if the rest of us fail."
"Shannon—"
"We're not going to fail." She gave Delilah a brief, hard hug and hurried out of the house.
Entering the stables seemed strange, even just seeing the hay bales where she had fallen beneath Malachi.
She was startled to discover that she had paused and imagined the two of them as they had been that night, so very close in the hay. A curious heat swept over her, because she was remembering him as a man. The touch of his hands, the curve of his smile. The masculine scent of him. The husky tones of his voice.
She pressed her hands against her cheeks with shame. She wasn't in love with Malachi Slater. She didn't even like him. She had hated him for years.
But that wasn't what disturbed her. What disturbed her was a sense of disloyalty. She had been in love. Deeply in love. So in love that when she had heard of Robert's death, she had wanted to die herself. She had ceased to care about the war; she had ceased to care about the very world.
And now her cheeks were heating because Malachi Slater had spent the night touching her…
In anger, she reminded herself.
But with laughter, too, and with a new tension. And he had teased and taunted her.
And promised her things.
He had whispered against her flesh, and his words had often been husky and warm. She had never denied him his dashing charm or, in her heart, his bold masculinity.
She had just never realized how deeply it could touch her as a woman.
Her breath seemed to catch in her throat and she emitted a soft sound of annoyance with herself. He was a Rebel, and he was Malachi, and she would never forgive him for being either. She needed him tonight. And she would find him.
She quickly assessed the horses in the stables. She chose not to take Arabesque, her own mare, for the horse was a dapple gray, a color that glowed in the moonlight. She patted the mare quickly. "Not this time, sweetheart. I need someone dark as the night, and fleet as a bullet. Hmm…"
She had to hurry.
Without wasting further time, she decided on Chapperel, a swift and beautiful animal, part Arabian, part racer, nearly seventeen hands high and able to run like lightning.
He was also as black as jet, as black as the night.
"Come on, boy, we're going for a ride," she told the gelding, as she quickly saddled and bridled him and led him from the stables.
She looked at the sky. There was barely a sliver of a moon, but the stars were bright Still, the trail would be very dark. It would be almost impossible for her to track Malachi.
But maybe it wouldn't be so hard to track the twenty horses that had raced before him. They had headed west— that much she knew for a fact.
And they would be staying off the main roads, she thought.
The Red Legs who had taken Kristin might still be a part of the Union army, and then again, they might not. No Union commander in his right mind was going to sanction the kidnapping of young women. No, these people had to be outlaws…
And they wouldn't be taking the main roads. They would be heading west by the smaller trails, and that was what she would do, too.
How much of a lead did Malachi have on her? An hour at most.
Shannon nudged the gelding, and he broke instantly into a smooth and swift canter.
And seconds later, he was galloping. The night wind cooled Shannon's face and touched her with the sweet fragrance of the earth. The darkness swept around her as she crossed the ranch and then the open plain.
Then it was time to choose a trail. She ignored the main road where the wagons headed west and where, over the past years, armies had marched by with their cannons and caissons. There was a smaller trail, rough and ragged and barely discernible, through the trees.
She reined in and dismounted and moved close to the ground, picking up a clump of earth. There were hoof marks all around.
She rose and felt a newly broken branch.
This was the trail she would take.
Malachi knew Missouri like the back of his hand.
He knew the cities, and he knew the Indian territories, and the farmlands and ranches. He could slip through Kentucky and Arkansas and even parts of Texas with his eyes nearly closed.
But these boys were moving west into Kansas. In another hour, they'd be over the border.
And he was an ex-Confederate cavalry captain, still wearing his uniform jacket.
He should have changed it. He should have accepted Shannon's offer of a civilian jacket, but somehow, he had been loathe to part with the uniform. He'd been wearing it for too many years. He'd ridden with too many good men, and he'd seen too many of them shot down in the prime of life, to forget the war. It was over. That was what they said. Abraham Lincoln had said that they must bind the wounds. "With malice towards none, with justice for all."