Chapter Six

Trinity had fashioned crutches for her—a gift of independence that almost made Amanda feel like crying. Instead, since neither of the others were around to be pissed off about it, she shuffled closer and hugged him.

With no inkling it would be taken as an invitation … for a lot more.

Not that she felt like fighting him off or even trying. But even when he grasped her hair and dragged her head back for a kiss she expected way less than what she got.

It wasn’t a friendly peck or even a lingering promise. It was an assault on her senses that set her on fire.

Because it was so fierce with hunger that it was clear he was more than dead on ready. He was already in the grips of the fever and he impressed that upon her so convincingly that it lit her up, as well.

She wasn’t sure how she found herself flat of her back on her pallet when she’d been standing beside it hugging him only moments before, but so it was—dizzying—with Trinity plastered to her from chest to groin as soon as they settled.

The mock sex he performed on her mouth brought her to dew point in seconds. She was so completely disoriented by the fire fogging her brain that she couldn’t figure out why they were both fully dressed—still—or how she might remedy an unacceptable situation when she really, really wanted to feel skin to skin.

Somehow he managed to strip her. It may have been connected in some way to the sound of rending fabric. Although she was in no condition to care about anything in those moments except the fact that she could feel her bare skin rubbing his clothing and then her bare skin rubbing against his bare skin.

And his mouth and hands everywhere—kneading, stroking, gnawing and sucking.

She almost felt as if she was being consumed.

She began strumming her hands over him, bucking her pelvis against his suggestively, and struggling to curl her one good leg around him and shift the other safely out of the way.

He took the hint. Supporting himself on one elbow, he reached between them, found his engorged member and began a search.

Thankfully, he knew the general vicinity, but Amanda was breathless and dizzy with effort by the time she’d helped him ring it.

Anticipation climbed.

When he wasn’t making enough progress fast enough, she reached down, grabbed one cheek of his ass in each hand and heaved.

Trinity struggled for a few moments to drive deeper and finally reached behind him, detached her hands from his ass, and then manacled both arms above her head. Somewhere in the rounds, though, he had made enough progress that Amanda managed to contain her impatience long enough for him to pump until he hit the back wall. Since the process entailed sending out waves of glorious sensations each time he stroked the walls of her sex, she was completely diverted inside of a few moments and redirected to the goal.

In pursuit of his own patch of heaven, Trinity curled over her and matched his mouth to hers just as she reached the end of her tether, kissing her deeply and setting off a mind blowing climax. She gasped and groaned into his mouth, sucked his tongue as the convulsions rattled her. A jolt went through him when she did and then he drove deep and came.

They were both panting for breath when he broke the kiss.

He stared down at her face for long enough Amanda became aware and slitted a gaze at him from under her lashes. He lowered his head, stroking his face against hers. “My mate,” he murmured.

That sent a jolt through her.

She didn’t know why she didn’t instantly dispute it—not then and not later.

She was surprised. She was stunned.

She thought she might have put it down to a ‘line’—the sort of bullshit men said afterwards that they thought a woman wanted to hear.

Yes! Lie to me!

Right!

But she missed the moment and then … well it just didn’t fit the next moment or the one after that.

Caleb came through the door as if he’d been thrown through it just about the time Trinity finally dismounted. Striding toward the pallet, he gave Trinity a shove to roll him out of the way and dropped to his knees. “Beloved,” he murmured, dragging her up for a kiss that ….

Well, actually stunned her.

It was just that good.

It lifted her right out of the ‘I’m good! Go the hell away!’ mood and set her in the ‘maybe?’ column.

In a few minutes it was definitely. Amanda had no idea how he managed to lift her from completely sated to hungry in only fifteen or twenty minutes of gnawing and sucking on every patch of flesh he could get to, but he resurrected the dying embers of passion and they were both thrashing around on the pallet in search of a good fit.

He found it—almost as if he’d been watching and taking notes.

Suspicion flickered through her, but, really, she had no brain function at the moment to hold on to much of anything.

Manacling her arms above her head before she could grab his ass, he pumped into her fast and then slow until he apparently determined the depth of penetration and the speed of the strokes that produced the most moans and groans. And then he dragged her up to the top of the mountain and catapulted her off of it in a major volcanic eruption that so completely drained her that she sank into oblivion in the aftermath.

She didn’t think she hit comatose for long, though. Trinity was busy preparing the noon meal when she came around and Caleb, now dressed, was working on something at the table.

It was really bizarre.

Not that she’d expected them—either of them—to be cuddling with her when she woke up, but she got this weird feeling kind of like déjà vu except that it was the sense that she’d imagined everything that had happened.

She was naked, though.

And both of them had made a deposit so she was icky sticky.

And her clothing, she discovered with outrage, was wrecked. “Trinity! You asshole! This is like one of the only things I have to wear—had, damn it!”

Balling it up, she threw it at him and then struggled to her feet with the crutches and began stalking toward the door the best she could.

She didn’t look back to see how they’d taken the rebuke. She didn’t care. She was pissed off about it.

She was stark naked, too, and without a change of clothing, but she was too mad to consider it and, even if she had, they were in the middle of nowhere, high in a tree, and she’d had sex with all three men. It seemed way late to worry about modesty at all.

It was after the shower—while she was trying to figure out how she was going to get back up the ladder she’d hobbled down—that she realized she’d screwed up—majorly. She stepped out dripping because she’d forgotten to take anything to dry off with. Motion below caught her attention and she looked.

It wasn’t Kameron coming through the woods, though.

It was a boogery looking bearded man with long, greasy, scraggly hair.

Sucking in a sharp breath, Amanda jumped away from the railing, managed a few awkward steps in a ‘race’ up the ladder to the door and then stumbled and fell through the door as she reached it.

Pain shot through her when she hit the floor.

Caleb and Trinity both rushed to help her.

“Man!” she gasped as Trinity hauled her to her feet and Caleb tried to shove the one crutch she’d made it inside with into her hand. “There’s a man! I saw him when I got out of the shower.”

The concern on Trinity’s face disappeared and the ‘war mask’ took its place as he brushed past her and went outside.

Caleb scooped her off her feet, glanced around and then carried her to her pallet. “Do not move!” he growled at her.

Taken aback, Amanda gaped at him, but he’d already turned away and headed toward the door.

Trinity stepped back inside before he reached it. “Five.”

Caleb changed directions and followed Trinity to the back wall. When he pressed on one panel, a door popped open. Reaching inside, he grabbed something and handed it back to Caleb.

It was a rifle.

He handed Caleb two full clips of ammo and then took a rifle and clips out for himself.

“You know who it is?” Amanda gasped.

Trinity looked around as if he’d forgotten she was there. “The floor is reinforced where you are. Stay put.”

Reinforced?

The thought had barely boggled her mind when they heard a gunshot, followed by an impact with the floor. A hole appeared and a bullet flew through it.

“Give us the woman!” a man bellowed from outside. “And we’ll call it even.”

Caleb and Trinity stalked outside and strafed the ground below with what sounded like maybe a hundred rounds. By the time they stopped, she was nearly deaf and the air was full of smoke from the gunpowder.

“No!” Trinity bellowed back.

“Fuck you!” Caleb seconded him.

A hail of bullets hit the cabin, seemingly peppering it from every direction. Holes appeared in the floor and walls, the glass in the window shattered. Amanda made herself as small a target as she could and she was still amazed she didn’t get hit.

“We’d consider splitting the bounty on her if you guys are willing to negotiate.”

Trinity and Caleb answered by emptying another clip.

Caleb slammed into the cabin and ran to the ammo locker to get more clips.

“What did he mean, bounty?” Amanda demanded.

He flicked a glance at her. “He is a lying bastard,” he growled, slamming out again.

The smell of smoke wafted up through the floor and horror filled Amanda.

They were at the top of a tree in a building made out of firewood! It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the attackers had decided on an easier way to get them—which wouldn’t have made sense if the objective was to take her in alive.

Caleb and Trinity emptied two more clips each and then Amanda heard firing below—but no bullets hit the floor or the walls.

She wrestled with the need to know what was going on versus the possibility of getting her head blown off the moment she stuck her eye to one of the holes.

Stupidity won out and she inched toward the closest to get a quick peek.

The entire bottom of the tree, she saw to her dismay, was on fire.

And the reason none of the bullets were flying up was because Kameron was standing near the tree line firing at the men on the other side.

At least a half a dozen bodies littered the ground below the tree.

Caleb burst through the door with Trinity directly behind him.

Amanda sat back guiltily.

Both of them whipped a look at her.

“Gather what you can,” Trinity said grimly. “We will have to move—soon.”

Dismay enveloped Amanda. “You can’t put the fire out?”

“They had soaked the trunk with fuel and lit it. We have dumped all of the water we had and it has done very little.”

Amanda grabbed her duffle and everything close enough to reach and stuffed it in the bag. Then she got her crutches and struggled to her feet. It was born in fairly quickly, though, that she wasn’t going to be much help on crutches. She did manage to move the bag within reach so that they could finish filling it.

There was a crash on the porch deck outside the door that almost gave Amanda heart failure—especially when the cabin swayed wildly for several moments.

Kameron burst through the door, scooped her up, snatched the coverlet from her pallet to cover her nakedness since she hadn’t had the time or the brain function to find clothing and dress, and then turned and headed out again. Then he leapt down to the lower deck where the shower was—or had been—and from there dropped at least twenty feet to the ground, absorbing the impact with his legs. When he straightened, he took off at a run.

Trinity and Caleb, heavily burdened with bags and weapons, hit the ground right behind them and also launched into a run.

Amanda had no idea whether they were running from the fire or the men who’d been shooting at them or maybe both, but it didn’t seem like a good time to try to get the answers. In any case, she had to clench her teeth together because of the jarring run just to keep from biting her tongue.

They must have run two miles. It seemed like forever that she was expecting someone to get a bullet in the back.

Thankfully, there were no more bullets that flew toward them.

They came to a corral of some kind eventually. Kameron stopped and lowered her carefully to the ground, steadying her until she was able to balance herself with the crutch she’d managed to hang on to. Trinity and Caleb also stopped, dropped their packs and then all three climbed over the top railing and virtually disappeared into the gathering gloom—the first she’d actually realized that the sun was setting or had set and darkness was gathering. They returned a few minutes later leading … monsters and tied the reins of the halters the beasts were wearing to the top rail.

Caleb climbed out and began to lift and toss the packs and guns they’d carried to the men inside the corral and Trinity and Kameron loaded them onto the rumps of the beasts and tied them off.

Something they were supposed to ride, Amanda wondered with an inward shudder?

They weren’t just horrible to look at, they were huge beasts. And they stank to high heaven.

Sure enough as soon as they’d finished loading everything, they tossed the top pole out of the way and led the beasts out of the pen. Then Kameron picked her up and mounted the one he was leading.

“What happened?” Amanda asked finally since it seemed safe enough to talk.

“Scavengers,” Kameron said succinctly.

That threw her into confusion. “That were shooting at us?”

“That would be my guess. I had returned to the wreck to see if there was anything useful that was left and the scavengers had been before me. Most everything that was of any use had already been taken. I was headed back when I heard the shooting. Ordinarily, there are few people this far out so I am thinking it was the same group.”

“You think they’re still after us?” Amanda asked uneasily.

“No. They are dead.”

A jolt went through her, but she decided not to ask how he was so certain. “I wonder what that bounty thing was about?” she muttered rhetorically.

Kameron said nothing for several moments. “Did the company have insurance on you?”

Amanda swiveled around to gape at him. “What would that have to do with it?”

He shrugged. “If you are dead and there is proof then the insurance will pay. If the insurance company can find you alive, then they do not have to pay. My guess is that both had put up a reward for your return—dead or alive.”

A coldness swept over Amanda.

She would have argued. She wanted to, but she’d heard the bastard say that there was a bounty on her.

Well, she supposed on the entire crew and she wondered now if any of them had managed to make it out alive.

“That’s why we’re in such a rush?” she asked cautiously.

“No. The mens are dead. It is the fire. We will need to get to a place where it cannot reach us.”

Amanda struggled until she could look back in the direction they’d fled from. To her horror, she saw the sky was lit up red and the blossom was clearly growing, spreading very quickly. “Oh my god! They won’t stop it? Put it out?”

“They will not because they cannot. They have nothing to stop it. They will focus on trying to protect what they have and, quite possibly—very likely—they will lose everything in the path of the fire anyway.”