by BJ James
“They didn’t hurt you?” There was no ease in his stare.
“Hurt me?” Her mind dulled by sleep and surprise, she could only parrot his words. “Who?”
“Alice.” He spat the name. “And Eva.”
The encounter with the woman came rushing back to her. Not forgotten. Repressed by the lassitude of sleep, diminished by his return, but never forgotten. “How did you know?”
“I heard the story. Their version.” He shifted from his crouch to rest his weight on one knee. “I’d like to hear what you have to say.”
She shrugged, at a loss to know what he wanted.
He touched the tear at the shoulder of her shirt. His voice was harsh, brittle. “Eva did this.”
Shocked, Patience looked down at the tear, at the thin red line that marked her arm. She licked her lips, finding them suddenly dry. “I don’t know.”
“I know,” Indian said softly, the savagery of his anger constrained, but not absolved as he looked toward the other camp. “They came together. Alice stopped there.” A gesture indicated the exact spot Alice had stood to bait her. “Eva came closer, here, by the grass.” Again a gesture that was uncannily accurate. “She waited there awhile. One would assume she was talking to Alice, and to you. She moved once more, in a walk that was unnatural to her.”
Patience frowned her surprise, remembering Eva’s mincing imitation of a grand lady.
“She waited,” Indian continued, then was quiet, replaying the reconstructed scene in his mind. When he turned to face her again, his eyes were bleak. “Then she attacked.” He touched her shoulder as if he would brush away the livid reminder left by Eva’s knife. “And did this.”
Patience looked down at his hand on her arm, too amazed to hear the ache of guilt and sorrow. Lifting her startled gaze to his, she asked, “How do you know all this? How could you?”
“The land tells the story. And this...” He smiled then, softening the harshness in him as he touched her chin with the tips of his fingers. “This beautiful, expressive face Eva would have mutilated, if the woman who wears it weren’t the indomitable O’Hara.”
His smile vanished, the spark of light left his eyes. “Can you forgive me? For leaving you with them? For everything?”
Patience caught his hand in hers. “There’s nothing to forgive.”
“Nothing?”
She knew he was recalling the night in the lean-to. The awful night when he’d been reduced to behaving as the Wolves expected. As they would behave. Gripping his hand tighter, she said in a tone that allowed no dissent, “Nothing. What you’ve done, you’ve done for me. My mind and my thoughts were too muddled to understand at first. Now I do.”
“You only think you do.” Turning his hand in hers, clasping it closely, he pulled her up with him. Keeping her near, ignoring the heat that rose around them in scintillating waves. He brushed his free hand down her braid, his fingers lingering at the beaded thong. “I wonder if you’ll be so charitable when you know the whole story?”
“What is the truth? Who are you really? What are you? I’ve asked so many times!” Her fingers moved urgently within his grasp. “Tell me.”
His head moved in the tiniest negative gesture. “Telling you would change nothing and serve no good purpose. For your own welfare it’s better this way, for now.”
“Better? You hold my life in your hands and it’s better I don’t know who and what you are? What good purpose does that serve?”
“It’s safer this way.”
“Safer for whom?”
“For you, O’Hara.”
“Why?”
He laughed then, a hollow sound of little amusement. A signal the discussion was ended. “We begin to sound like a broken record. Same song, same verse.”
Patience met his look levelly. “You aren’t going to tell me.”
“No, and you aren’t going to stop asking.”
“Bet on it.”
“I suppose this is what one would call an impasse.”
“Call it what you like.” She tugged her hand from his. ”We’ve covered every possible angle and I’ve had enough.”
As she spun away from him, he caught her wrist, bringing her back to him. Folding her arm with his to his shoulder, he pulled her nearer. “There is one more thing.”
He stroked her braid, gathering it in his palm and tugged her head back, turning her face up to his. There was something new, something she couldn’t interpret in his expression.
“What?” she demanded, chafing at his unconcern for her ill-tempered resentment.
“This.” His arms closed around her, trapping her. His head descended to hers. When she would have turned away, he caught the braid again, brushing it aside to cradle her head in his palm.
“Indian, no!” Her cry was only a whisper as she struggled in his embrace.
“Yes.” He ignored her efforts as his lips skimmed over her face. “For the others.” His mouth teased a corner of hers and drifted away. “The warrior’s woman is expected to welcome him home, thus.” His cradling palm guided her mouth to his kiss.
For all her resistance, her mouth was sweet and still as he crushed her body to his. Her braid tumbled down her back, a sensuous rope of silk brushing his bare arm, teasing the sensitized flesh. Indian heard his own unexpected gasp and felt the throb of his measured heartbeat as the taste of her struck fire to embers long banked. The need he’d struggled to deny sent him reeling and he held her tighter, yet more gently than he’d ever held anything in his life.
With hot-blooded perception he was aware of every nuance of her, every subtlety. Her familiar scent was the freshness of a morning breeze in the midst of high desert doldrums, the taste of her was smoky heat in his blood. Inch by tiny inch he felt the rigidness of her posture lessen. Slowly, deliciously, the satin curves and velvet hollows of her body conformed to his.
With mindless initiative his hands moved from her head to her shoulders and her back, releasing her from his kiss if she wished it. Yet she didn’t turn from him. When her lips softened beneath his, it was Indian who broke away, Indian who moved beyond her touch.
He stood, as silent as the stone that surrounded them. As still. His body was taut, his dark eyes brooding as the summer sun bore down on him. He’d never felt such fear for anyone as he had for Patience. When Alice greeted the Wolves return with her tale of the encounter with Eva, he’d been mad with it. Fear was ashes in his mouth and ice in his heart.
As one demented, he’d hurried to her, the darkness in him growing darker, the cold colder, when he found her lying so still in the shade of the juniper. Even as he realized that she slept peacefully, only a will of iron kept him from snatching her from her slumber. He wanted to hold her close to his heart, to run his hands down the long bones, the soft muscles, proving what his eyes told him. Assuring that she was unharmed.
As he crouched at her feet, a black-eyed savage waiting for her to wake, he’d never known such utter anger, such utter relief. Such utter need. Until she looked at him as she did now, her eyes languorous with the lingering remnants of sleep, her mouth pouting and trembling from his kiss.
She was beautiful, too beautiful, and nothing in the world could have stopped him from taking her back in his arms. Nothing could have stopped his kiss. Pulling her nearer, quietly pleased when she made no move to resist, he leaned the little distance that separated them to brush his lips lightly over hers again. A kiss that was no more than a touch. The whisper of a promise.
Patience’s thoughts were muddled. She was bewildered by him and disturbed that her response was as fickle as the wind. He was her keeper and her savior. One minute she hated him. The next she didn’t know what she felt.
As if physically warding off thoughts she didn’t understand, sensations she shouldn’t feel, she lifted a hand to his chest, meaning to keep the little distance that could preserve her sanity and her tenuous control. But she hadn’t reckoned with her own raw nerves, nor the crumbling strength that held terror at bay. The
beat of his strong, steady heart under her palm was her undoing. All the horror came crashing in on her, memories as raw and fresh as this moment engulfed her. Her mind became a morass of the days past. Images flashed before her blinded sight, replaying every torment with exquisite clarity as she plummeted into quiet hysteria.
In a waking nightmare of recall, motorcycles roared out of the night, dark, shiny steeds of evil. In a pall of dust, new world savages, with war paint etched in flesh by tattoo needles, danced in the light of a thousand moons. The sound of shattering glass became the knell of a bell of doom that tolled for her. And into the darkest part of her vision strolled Eva, a knife curved like a scimitar drawn and threatening, sunlight glinting off an edge sharper and more deadly than any razor.
Patience wanted to shake herself, to pull away from this fugue of terror and found instead that she was trembling. Image after image burned itself again in her mind and wave after wave of fear engulfed her. Fear made more virulent, more consuming, in its delay.
She hadn’t been so afraid since she was seven and the black water of an arctic bay closed over her, sealing her from sky and land, sucking the breath from her lungs, filling them with its own murky chill.
She was cold, as then, so cold, and not even the high desert sun could warm her. She was afraid and only the man as true and strong as the heartbeat beneath her hand could give her respite.
There was shock and agony in her face as she clutched at him. A woman clinging to the last thread of strength. A woman lonely in her fear, worn by doubt, needing him, and terrified of her need.
“Please,” she whispered hoarsely, and her trembling became shivering, and shivering great racking shudders.
He saw her struggle, more costly than the first encounter when she’d stood gallantly with fear in check. She’d endured with stoic determination and pride, no matter the pressure. Never revealing more than nominal fright, never plumbing its seething depth, nor coming to terms with the toll it exacted.
She’d refused to break, refused the admission of terror that threatened to destroy her. Now it was there, all of it, in her vulnerable eyes. Flexing his fingers at her shoulders, he stood mute, not certain what she wanted. Not sure what she needed.
“Indian.”
Her bare whisper was a breaking cry, calling the name that was not truly his. And his heart broke with it, for what had been done to her, for her silent suffering, and for his part in it.
Swaying on her feet, she grasped the edges of his vest, her fingers sliding over abraded seams, nails tearing at roughened nap. Her head was down, tears gathered on her lashes and glinted in the sun, but never fell. On the rush of a grating sob catching in her throat, she lifted her face to him. In a wintry voice, the terrible truth he’d always known spilled out. “I was afraid. So afraid.”
“God help me.” His guttural words were prayer and plea as he pulled her closer, holding her tighter, using the heat of his body to drive the brittle chill from her. Lending his strength to her strength as guilt and pain flayed him, as the tears she wouldn’t let fall were salt in invisible wounds. He should have taken her out the first day. He should have turned his back on the investigation that might or might not succeed. That might or might not save a hypothetical number of hypothetical lives.
But he hadn’t done what he should. Instead he’d gambled, risking one real, flesh and blood life for that vague, faceless number. And had done this to her.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered into her hair. “Hell!” he snarled in rage, “I’m always sorry.” It was sorrow more than rage he felt as he held her tighter in an embrace that promised aching ribs. “If it’s any consolation, you can call me what we both know I am. A cowardly, selfish son of the devil.”
“No!” Her head lifted from his shoulder, her fingers sealed his lips. “No,” she said again fiercely. “I may not know what you are, but I know what you aren’t. Even when I forget, I know.”
She spoke nonsense, but he wanted to hear. Needed to hear. Recapturing her hand, holding it to the curve of his face, he asked, “What do you know, sweet Patience? What do you believe so fiercely?”
“That you aren’t a coward. Prudent, but never cowardly.”
“I should be grateful for the confidence, when you have nothing to base it on.”
“I have enough. I’ve seen enough, heard enough.”
He stroked his cheek with the back of her clasped hand. “When did you grow so wise?”
“It doesn’t take wisdom, only eyes to see, and ears to hear, and half a brain to remember when the other half forgets.”
He held her away from him, his dark gaze sweeping over her from head to toe. The pallor that blanched the color from her lips and cheeks, and marked her eyes with bruising shadows, had fled. There was color in her face, her eyes were calmer, her mouth was full and rosy, and enticing. The hand he held in his no longer trembled. He’d wanted to wrap himself around her to shield her from her pain. Instead she’d defended him against himself, and, in finding her cause, garnered strength and calm from it.
“You aren’t trembling.”
Patience looked at her hand engulfed in his, quietly taking stock. “So it seems.”
He pulled her back a step, back to him. Twining his arm through hers, he folded her against him, resting their clasped hands on the side of his throat. The pulse there beat against her wrist, as steady, as strong, but with a heated rhythm. “You aren’t afraid anymore?”
“Not now.” She drew a long, deep breath and gave him the answer he wanted. “Not with you.”
“Not even when I do this?” He bent to kiss her, touching only her lips, holding only her arm twined with his.
Patience didn’t react, but she didn’t move away when he lifted his head again. She answered huskily, “Not even then.”
He kissed her again, longer, slower, teasing her mouth with wondrous skill, and was rewarded by only the tiniest nuance of response. Only the slightest softening, the gentle curving of her lips against his. But it was enough. He pulled away, reluctance shining in his face, a secret storm stirring in his black gaze. “And now, Patience O’Hara? Are you going to turn and run from this? From what is beginning between us?”
“I have nowhere to run.” She deliberately ignored the last of his question.
“Is that the only reason? That you have nowhere to run?”
“Yes. Of course. Yes,” she answered a bit too adamantly.
Indian laughed softly. Releasing her hand he wound her braid around his palm, tilting her gaze to his, cupping her cheek with his free hand. The pad of his thumb traced a lazy path over her chin and the fullness of her lips, teasing as his kiss had. When she trembled, he knew it was not from fear. Her fear was gone, it was the need born of it that lingered.
“Little liar.” He tugged her braid, arching her neck even more, exposing the rushing pulse at the delicate hollow of her throat. The little flutter mesmerized and pulled him down to her again as unerringly as a lodestar. “The first was for the others,” he murmured an inch from her mouth. “This is for me.”
Binding her to him with her braid, keeping her with his embrace, he kissed her, long and hard and sweetly. Patience sighed and slipped her arms around his neck and her mouth was honey and wine. Drinking deeply of her sweetness, savoring the velvet touch of her mouth, the wildflower scent of her hair, he lost himself in her. There was no sun, no moon, no prying eyes, no threat. There was only Patience, and need.
As need flared into desire, he clung to a thread of sanity.
“No.” Taking her hands from his neck, gathering them to his lips, he kissed them. Meeting her glazed and bewildered gaze over their joined fingers, he murmured against their heated flesh. “No,” he said more quietly. Then again, “No.”
He put her from him, then, blinding himself to her shock, he bent to pluck her hat from the ground. Brushing the dirt from it with his forearm, he placed it on her head and tugged the brim low. His fingertips lingered at her cheek. “I want you, Patience O’Hara,�
�� he murmured, “and I need you. But not here, not like this. Not yet.”
He turned away, stopped and turned back. Trailing the back of a knuckle down her throat, he promised softly, “Soon.”
Patience was still as he left her, dazed and staring after him long past the time he disappeared into the desert. She didn’t feel the burning rays of the sun, nor hear the booted step that slipped stealthily through the barren dirt. A hand catching at her elbow, tugging at her sleeve, was her only warning as she whirled to face her newest intruder.
“Hurt.”
Six
“Eva hurt you.”
“Callie!” Patience gasped. “What are you doing here?”
“I heard them talking, sayin’ Eva hurt you. I don’t want you to feel bad.” Tears gathered in eyes that were wonderfully blue, full and luscious lips trembled as tentative fingers brushed lightly over the tear in Patience’s shirt.
“It’s nothing, really,” Patience assured the girl, who couldn’t have been a minute over sixteen, if she were that. Clasping Callie’s hand, she pulled her to her side. “Thank you for caring, Callie, but you know what Snake will do if he sees you here.”
Delicate shoulders lifted in a graceful shrug, eyes as placid as a summer morning gazed levelly at her. “I know.”
And Patience had heard the sharp crack of too many open-handed slaps and punches too many times not to know. Brutality and public humiliation were Snake’s method of punishment for small and imagined infractions of the rules he expected Callie to follow. Indian had warned her not to intervene, for her own sake, but mostly for Callie’s. He’d learned the difficult lesson that intervention only brought greater abuse when they were alone. One morning of watching her move in exquisite agony had been enough to throttle his objections.
Even Patience had come to realize that Callie accepted Snake’s public punishment so unflinchingly that it was unthinkable what he must do when they were alone. But what fiendish torture waited for her if he saw her in Indian’s camp?
“You know he’s made this area off limits.” She spoke as she might to a child, for in mind and thought, Callie was little more than that. “He’ll be worse than angry if he finds out, and he might do something terrible to you.”
