The Touch of Fire

by Linda Howard

  At last she got her clothing arranged so she could relieve herself, and she tried to do so quietly, but was forced to accept the indelicacy of nature. What did it matter anyway, when he was as likely to kill her as not? Logic made her admit that he wouldn’t be going to such lengths unless he had some reason for not wanting to be seen, which meant that he was an outlaw. He’d have to be a fool to take her back to Silver Mesa as he’d promised.

  And she’d have to be a fool to save his life. To save herself, she should let his condition deteriorate, or maybe even use her medical knowledge to hasten it.

  Her mind reeled under the enormity of her own thoughts. She had been trained her entire life to save people, not to kill them, but killing this man was exactly what she was contemplating.

  “How long are you going to squat there with your skirts hiked up?”

  She stood up so suddenly that she stumbled, hampered by both the drawers twisted around her knees and her stiff muscles. The harsh intrusion of his voice had been like a dash of cold water in the face, wresting her away from her thoughts and back to reality. Her face was paper white as she turned and stared at him across the big rock.

  Heavy eyelids shielded the expression in his pale eyes as he studied her, wondering what had made her turn so white and given those soft brown eyes such a stark look. Hell, she was a doctor; she shouldn’t be that shocked or embarrassed by something everybody did. He could remember a time when he never would have said such a thing to a woman, but the last ten bloody years had so completely altered him from the man he had once been that the memory was a mere wisp, an echo, and he couldn’t even feel regret for the change. He was what he was.

  After a frozen moment she bent down to adjust her underwear, but when she straightened from the task her face still had that strangely shattered look. She came back around the rock toward him, and he held out his gloved hand to her, palm up, his fingers open.

  For a moment Annie stared without recognition at the small objects in his hand, then her own hands flew to her hair and found it completely unanchored, tumbling around her shoulders and down her back.

  He must have found the bone hairpins scattered on the ground.

  Hastily she gathered her hair and twisted it into an untidy knot, picking the hairpins from his hand one at a time to secure the heavy mass. He was silent, watching her slender, feminine hands perform their chore, her fingers lifting each hairpin in turn from his leather-gloved palm with all the delicacy of a small bird selecting seeds. The movements were so essentially female that they made him ache deep inside. It had been too damn long since he’d had a woman, since he’d been able to luxuriate in soft flesh and sweet smell, to just look at a woman and enjoy the gracefulness of small motions that they all had, even the coarsest slattern. A woman should never let a man watch her at her toilette, he thought with sudden savagery, unless she was willing to take him into her body and let him ease the sexual hunger the sight of her at her private rituals aroused.

  Then the lust seemed to drain out of him with a return of that bone-deep weariness. “Let’s go,” he said abruptly. If he stood there much longer, he wouldn’t have the energy to find the old trapper’s hut.

  “Can’t we eat?” Despite her best effort, there was a pleading note in her voice. She was weak with hunger and knew he had to be in much worse shape, though she couldn’t tell it from his hard, expressionless face.

  “When we get to the hut. It won’t take long.”

  It took him an hour to find it, and it took her a moment longer than that to realize he had, for the mean little structure was so overgrown it was barely recognizable as being man-made. She could have cried with disappointment. She had expected a cabin, or even a rough shack, but not this! From what she could see through the bushes and vines growing around and over it, the “hut” was nothing more than some crudely stacked rocks and a few half-rotten timbers.

  “Get down.”

  Annie flashed him an angry glance. She was getting tired of those tersely worded commands. She was hungry and frightened, and she ached in every muscle of her body. But she obeyed him, and then automatically started forward to help him when he painfully dismounted. She checked the movement, and knotted her hands into fists as she watched.

  “There’s a lean-to for the horses.”

  She looked around in disbelief. She didn’t see anything that remotely resembled a lean-to.

  “Over here,” he said, correctly reading her face. He led the bay off to the left and Annie followed with her mount, to find that he was right. There was a lean-to, constructed using the trees and slant of the earth as part of the structure; there was room for both horses, but just barely. Both ends of the lean-to were open, though the far end was partially blocked by a crudely made water trough and more bushes. A wooden pail hung from a broken tree limb that had been driven into the earthen wall. He took it down and examined it, and for a moment satisfaction registered on his drawn face.

  “There’s a stream running just on the other side of the hut. Unsaddle the horses, then take this bucket and fetch water for them.”

  Annie stared at him in disbelief. She was weak with hunger and so tired she could barely walk. “But what about us?”

  “The horses get taken care of first. Our lives depend on them.” His voice was implacable. “I’d do it, but other than standing here, the only thing I’m capable of right now is shooting you if you try to run.”

  Without another word Annie set about the work, though her muscles trembled with strain. She dumped her medical bag, the sack containing the food, both saddles, and his saddlebags on the ground. Then she grabbed up the bucket and he directed her to the stream, which was only about twenty yards from the hut on the other side but running diagonally away from the structure rather than beside it. It was only about a foot deep, less in some places and more in others. He followed her to the stream and back to the lean-to, silent and not quite steady on his feet but grimly watchful. She made two more trips to the stream, with him behind her every step of the way, before he deemed the water trough to be full enough. Both horses drank greedily.

  “There’s a bag of grain in my left saddlebag. Give them both a double handful. They’ll have to be on short rations for a while.”

  That chore accomplished, he instructed her to haul their belongings into the hut. The door was a primitive affair of thin saplings tied together with a mixture of twine and vine, with two leather hinges. Cautiously she pulled it open, and had to bite back a cry of dismay. There didn’t seem to be any windows, but the light spilling through the open door revealed an interior draped in cobwebs, coated with dirt, and inhabited by a variety of insects and small animals.

  “There are rats,” she said in horror. “And spiders, and probably snakes.” She whirled and faced him. “I’m not going in there.”

  Just for a moment, amusement played around his mouth and softened its hard lines. “If there are rats, you can bet there aren’t any snakes. Snakes eat rats.”

  “This place is filthy.”

  “It has a fireplace,” he said wearily. “And four walls to keep out the cold. If you don’t like the way it looks, then clean it up.”

  She started to tell him that he could clean it up himself, but one look at his pale, drawn face stopped the words. Guilt gnawed at her insides. How could she have let herself even think about letting him die? She was a doctor, and even though he was likely to kill her when her usefulness was at an end, she would do her best to heal him. Appalled at her earlier thoughts, which were such a betrayal of both her father and herself, of her entire life, she swore that she wouldn’t let him die.

  But when she looked around the filthy little hut, the magnitude of the chore that faced her was so great that she let her head drop in sheer hopelessness. She took a deep breath, then gathered her strength and straightened her shoulders. First things first. She picked up a sturdy stick from the ground and gingerly stepped inside the hut. The stick did double duty in tearing down the cobwebs and in raking out
the various nests she found. A squirrel scampered out, and a family of mice scurried for the four corners. Grimly she searched them out with her stick. She poked the stick up the chimney, dislodging old birds’ nests and alarming some new occupant just out of reach. If there were more nests up there, a fire in the fireplace would encourage a swift evacuation.

  After her eyes had adjusted to the dim light, she saw that the hut had a window on each side, the openings covered with flaps of rough boards that could be pushed up and braced open with a stick. She opened both of them, letting in an amount of light that seemed positively cheery after the gloom, though the interior of the hut looked even dirtier now that she could see it properly.

  There was no furniture except for a table as roughly made as everything else, and it had two legs broken off. It lay drunkenly in a corner. The best that could be said of the hut, other than that it had a fireplace and four walls, as he had already pointed out, was that the floor was wooden. There were cracks between the boards, but at least they wouldn’t be sleeping on the ground.

  She carried buckets of water from the stream and sluiced the interior, since the water could drain off through the cracks in the floor and it was the fastest way to achieve a bare minimum of cleanliness. While the floor was drying, she gathered firewood and kindling, dumping both by the fireplace. Through it all, he never let her out of his sight, though she had no idea how he was remaining on his feet. He looked even more colorless every time she glanced at him.

  But finally the hut was clean enough that she didn’t cringe at the idea of sleeping inside it, and the other inhabitants seemed to have been routed. While she still had the strength, she dragged the saddles and their supplies inside, and made one more trip to the stream, to fill both the bucket and his canteen.

  Only then did she wave him inside. Every muscle in her body was trembling and her knees were unsteady, but at least she could now sit down. She did so, on the newly clean floor, and rested her head on her updrawn knees.

  The scrape of his boots on the wood made her reluctantly lift her head. He was just standing there, his eyes heavy-lidded with fever and his big body wavering slightly. She forced herself to move again, crawling over to the saddles and retrieving one of the blankets, which she folded double and spread out on the floor. “Here,” she said, her voice husky with fatigue. “Lie down.”

  He didn’t lie down so much as drop down. Annie grabbed at him to keep him from pitching over, and his weight nearly knocked her down. “Sorry,” he grunted, and lay in the position in which he’d landed, breathing heavily.

  She touched his face and throat, and found that his fever was, if anything, even higher. She began unbuckling his gun belt and his hard fingers closed over hers, holding them painfully tight for a minute before he said, “I’ll do it.” As he had before, when he removed the gun belt he placed it close to his head. She eyed the big weapon and shivered at its cold deadliness.

  “Don’t even think about going for it,” he warned softly, and swiftly she looked up to meet his gaze. Fevered or not, he was still very much in possession of his faculties. It would be easier for her to get away if he were delirious, but she had sworn to help him if she could and that meant she couldn’t leave him even if he did slide into unconsciousness. Until he was recovering, she was bound here.

  “I wasn’t,” she said, but his eyes remained wary and she knew he didn’t believe her. She wasn’t inclined to argue with him over her trustworthiness, not when she was weak, hungry, and so tired it was all she could do to sit upright. And she still had to see to him before she could begin taking care of herself.

  “Let’s get your shirt off, and your boots, so you’ll be more comfortable,” she said in a practical tone, and moved to suit actions to words.

  Again his hand came up to stop her. “No,” he said, and for the first time she heard a fretful note in his voice. “It’s too cold to take off my shirt.”

  Of course the exertion of cleaning out the hut had made her warm, and she had long since shed her coat, but the sun had warmed the day nicely and the air felt pleasant. She could feel him shivering under her fingers. “It isn’t cold; you have a fever.”

  “Don’t you have something in that bag of yours to bring the fever down?”

  “I’ll brew some willow-bark tea after I’ve seen to your wounds. That will make you more comfortable.”

  His head turned restlessly. “Brew it now. I’m so damn cold I feel like my bones are frozen.”

  She sighed, for she wasn’t accustomed to her patients directing their treatment, but the order in which she did things really didn’t make any difference and she could make a pot of coffee, too. She covered him with the other blanket and began laying a fire, kindling and rich pine chips on bottom, the larger pieces of wood on top.

  “Don’t build a big fire,” he muttered. “Too much smoke. I have some matches in my saddlebag. Right side, wrapped in oilskin.”

  She found the matches and struck one on the stone hearth, turning her head away from the acrid smell of phosphorus. The pine chips caught after only a second or two. She bent over and gently blew the flames until she was satisfied that they were spreading nicely, then sat back and opened her big medical bag. It looked more like a traveling salesman’s case than a doctor’s bag, but she liked to have a supply of various herbs and ointments available whenever she was treating a patient, for she couldn’t depend on finding what she needed in the wild. She got out the willow bark, neatly bundled in a gauze bag, and the small pot that she used for making tea.

  He lay on his back, huddled under the blanket, and watched her with half-closed eyes as she poured a small amount of water from the canteen into the little pot, then set it on the fire to boil. While it was heating, she took a square of gauze, measured a bit of the willow bark into it, added a pinch of thyme and cinnamon, and tied the four corners of the gauze together to form a small, porous pouch, which she placed in the water. Finally, as a sweetener, she opened a jar and added a bit of honey.

  “What was all of that?” he asked.

  “Willow bark, cinnamon, honey, and thyme.”

  “Whatever you give me, you’ll have to taste it first.”

  The insult made her back go rigid, but she didn’t argue with him. The willow-bark tea wouldn’t hurt her, and if he thought she was capable of poisoning him—well, there wasn’t anything she could do about that. Her conscience was still smarting her over the horrible thought she had had that morning, and maybe he had picked up on it.

  “If you slipped any laudanum into it, you’ll go to sleep too,” he added.

  At least he was only accusing her of drugging him, not of trying to kill him! She lifted a small brown bottle from her bag and held it up for him to see. “This is the laudanum. It’s almost full, if you’d like to check the level of it occasionally. Or maybe you’d feel better if you kept it.” She held it out to him and he stared at her silently, his pale eyes boring into her as if he could read her mind, and perhaps he could.

  Rafe stared at her, trying to decide if he could trust her. He wanted to, especially when he looked into those soft brown eyes, but he hadn’t stayed alive these past four years by trusting anyone. Without a word he reached out and took the brown bottle from her, setting it on the floor beside his holster.

  She turned aside without comment, but he sensed that he’d hurt her.

  She unpacked the food stores, arranging them on the floor so she could see what they had. She was so hungry that nausea threatened to make her retch, and she wondered if she would be able to eat anything after all.

  He had brought a coffeepot. She filled it with water and added the coffee grounds, making it stronger than she usually did because she thought she would probably need it. Then she turned back to the food, her hands shaking as she tried to decide what to prepare. There were potatoes, bacon, beans, onions, a small sack each of meal and flour, salt, canned peaches, and bread, rice, cheese, and sugar from her stores. She had been running low on food and had planned to
restock, but the arrival of Eda’s baby had forestalled her.

  She was too hungry to cook anything. She broke off some bread and cheese, then halved the pieces and offered them to her patient.

  He shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Eat,” she insisted, and put the bread and cheese in his hand. “You need to keep your strength up. Try just a bite or two at first, and stop if you feel sick.” The bread and cheese weren’t the best thing for a sick man, but it was food and it was ready to eat now. She would make some soup for him later, when she had rested and was feeling stronger herself. She set the canteen by his hand so he could have water, then she fell on her own meager fare with barely restrained ferocity.

  He ate only one bite of the cheese, but all of the bread, and he almost emptied the canteen. By the time they had finished the willow-bark tea had boiled, and Annie used a rag to lift it from the fire, then set it aside to cool.

  “Why didn’t you give me something for fever last night?” he asked suddenly, eyes and voice hard again.

  “Fever isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” she explained. “It seems to help the body fight infection. You know that cauterizing a wound stops infection, so it stands to reason that the heat from a fever works in the same way. It’s only when it goes on too long, or gets too high, that it’s dangerous, because it weakens the body dreadfully.”

  He was still shivering, even covered by the blanket and with the fire going right beside him. Driven by an urge she didn’t understand, she reached out and smoothed his dark hair away from his forehead. She had never seen a tougher, more dangerous man, but even so he needed care that she could provide.

  “What’s your name?” She had asked him before and he hadn’t answered, but as isolated as they were now surely he couldn’t have any reason for remaining nameless. She almost smiled at the incongruity of not knowing his name, when she had slept in his arms.