by Tess LeSue
Before you go . . . Not the subtlest of hints. Damn it. She’d have to use all her charm in the morning to get the woman to agree to keep the Apache. It wouldn’t be for long. . . . He’d be fighting fit in no time and heading off on his own. If he wasn’t permanently blind . . .
“How are your eyes?” she asked abruptly, pressing the last tortilla into his hand and struggling to climb out of the hay.
“Not sore anymore,” he said shortly.
“Can you see anything?”
“Blurs,” he admitted. “But the light hurts.”
“That’s why you bandaged them?” Of course that was why he’d bandaged them. She was just blathering now. She was acutely aware of him over there in the hay, the whole long, burnished, near-naked mass of him. She didn’t wait for him to respond but kept talking. “I’ll bring you the water and soap, and you can try to clean yourself up. We can move you to fresh hay afterward.” She wasn’t about to bathe him, not with the thoughts she was having. She dumped the pail next to him and dropped the washcloth and soap in his lap. “I’ll eat outside to give you privacy,” she said primly, all but running for the door. She was sweating profusely.
“It’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” he said dryly.
“I have no desire to see it again!”
Which was a total and complete lie, because she couldn’t resist stealing a peek when he was scrubbing himself. Maybe even more than one . . .
If she’d been fevered before, she was liable to burst into flames now.
16
HE COULD SEE much better than he let on. And Cleopatra didn’t look at all the way he’d imagined. For some reason, he’d pictured someone smaller, more wizened. Much older.
She sounded like one of the hardy homesteaders you met on the plains—practical women with cynical edges. He’d pictured someone stringy and seasoned, a tough old boot of a woman. But now that he had limited vision back—oily, indistinct, but there at least—“Cleopatra” upended all of his assumptions about her. For one thing, she was tall. And she wasn’t wiry. She was built like someone who spent a lot of time on a horse: she was muscular and athletic. And she was certainly vigorous; she was a crackling ball of energy, striding this way and that, never still. He couldn’t see her very clearly; she was just a chalky red-gray blur in a misshapen hat, but even just that blur suggested that she wasn’t at all what he’d been picturing.
Deathrider’s vision had started to return only the day before, and it was mostly just a smear of blurred light and shadow, but it was enough to reassure him that he probably wouldn’t be blind forever. Lucky for Micah, or he’d be a dead man.
If he wasn’t already . . .
Hell. Deathrider didn’t have time to be blind. Or sick. While he sat around here, unable to even feed himself, Micah was being dragged straight into the mouth of hell. Who knew what Pete Hamble had done to him by now . . . ?
Deathrider wasn’t used to being impotent, and he didn’t like it, not one bit. When he’d gone down with the fever, he’d fallen into a surreal swirl of dreams, most of which included Micah: Micah in the pink dress, hauled across the desert, always just out of Deathrider’s reach, a pink flicker ahead; Deathrider could hear Pete Hamble’s voice echoing, repeating, over and over and over, Stay down. Staydownstaydownstaydownstaydown.
It was his fault, all his fault. And he was powerless to stop any of it.
And then she broke into his dreams. Cleopatra. The woman who’d found him in the desert. The one who had more prickles than a prickly pear. He’d been stone-cold blind when she’d found him, so he had no idea what she actually looked like. All he knew was that her voice broke into his fever dreams like rain falling in the desert. Her voice meant water. Her voice meant life. Her voice led him safely out of the desert and out of his fever.
Fortunately for him, she talked a lot. She never left him alone in the darkness for long. She talked to him, to her horse, to Dog and most of all to herself. He’d seen it before in people who spent a lot of time alone on the trail: they talked incessantly, whether there was anyone to talk to or not, because solitude could be overwhelming, particularly when you were out in the wilderness. The vastness made you feel small, and all you could do to exert your selfhood was talk. Which was why Micah bitched all the time and why Pete Hamble had been such a yapper.
Deathrider’s savior—Cleopatra—was one of their ilk. She didn’t let silence take root, not for a minute. Even as he scrubbed the mud from himself in the barn, he could hear her chattering away to Dog outside, telling him that if he so much as looked at those chickens, she’d cook him for supper.
Deathrider had no idea how he’d ended up covered in mud. It coated him thickly, like a second skin. He had very little memory of the past few days; there was a great big empty patch between when she found him in the desert and when Dog had come barking into his dreams, pulling him up from the fever. Deathrider’s vision was still bad, blurred to hell, but he could see enough to stand and to track people moving. He didn’t feel quite so panicked now that he had some visual sense of what was happening around him. The only concern he had now was how to disguise himself once the swelling was gone. The whole point of Micah’s stupid plan had been to hide Deathrider’s distinctive eyes.
Once Deathrider had realized the swelling had decreased, he’d tied the petticoat strip over his eyes. It was thin cotton, and he could still see through it—just—but it gave him some cover from recognition. He wasn’t in any condition to be recognized, and he was feeling all too fallible after the insanity in the Apacheria. He was still weak as a kitten and in no way capable of fighting or fleeing. It still hurt to move, and he was awfully weak. He could only just manage to give himself a sponge bath unaided.
“How in hell did I get so muddy?” he asked, frustrated when he couldn’t lift the worst of the filth easily. “What did you do? Dump me down a mine shaft?”
“I beg your pardon?” She sounded outraged. But she always sounded outraged, or irked, or just plain put out. It seemed to be her natural state. She appeared in the doorway, radiating resentment. He wished he could see her face. He’d love to know what she looked like. “I’ll have you know you’re muddy because I saved your life,” she sniffed at him.
“I didn’t know mud had healing properties.”
She didn’t deign to answer that.
It didn’t matter how much he scrubbed at himself, he didn’t feel any cleaner. “Is this even coming off?” he asked, exasperated. “I can’t see to tell.”
“Don’t go thinking that I’ll help you.” She was still in the doorway though, and he had the sense that his clumsy mopping at himself was annoying her. Dog was barking madly in the background. She turned and let loose with a scolding worthy of a seasoned cowhand. “You leave those chickens alone! You got a whole thighbone to chew on. You don’t need to eat those birds too!”
Dog fell silent. Deathrider didn’t blame him.
“How am I supposed to reach my back?” he complained when he almost lost his balance trying to scrape the filth off. “How did I even get mud back there?”
“It’s your own fault.”
“I’m sure. I have a history of wallowing in mud when I’m dying of fever.”
“The water in that pail is filthy. You’re just making yourself dirtier,” she scolded him.
“It’s filthy because I used it to clean myself.”
He heard her sigh. “Let me get you some fresh water.” She muttered under her breath as she snatched the cloth out of his hands and stalked off with the water pail. When she returned, she thumped the pail down by his feet, sending water sloshing. “Turn around,” she snapped. “Let’s get this over with.”
“I thought you weren’t going to help me?”
“It’s either that or watch you spread the muck all over yourself for the next few hours. At the rate you were moving, I wasn’t going to get a chance to bathe
until the wee hours.”
She was so tall. He’d not met a woman close to his height before.
She grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him roughly. He heard her muttering again as she swiped at his back with the cloth. He groaned in pleasure. He didn’t mean to; it just slipped out.
“Am I hurting you?” She paused, concerned. For all of her prickliness, she could be mighty considerate.
“No,” he reassured her, and then clamped his mouth shut. If he told her it had been a groan of sheer pleasure at the firm pressure on his sore muscles, she might stop. She was that contrary. She wiped circles on his back, scrubbing the mud away with movements that sent spirals of bliss curling through him. It felt so damn good. His body had taken a hell of a beating these past weeks, and it sure appreciated her attentions. Maybe a little too much.
“Don’t you go getting ideas,” she snapped at him, clearly reading his mind.
Although until she had said that his ideas had been amorphous. Now they twisted into concrete images. He was aware of his bare skin, of the flimsiness of the cloth tied around his hips, of her closeness as she cleaned him. His sheer helplessness was weirdly arousing.
Somehow not being able to see her made the moment even more loaded. As she ran the cloth over his neck and shoulders, she fell silent. The air between them grew charged, and he broke out in gooseflesh.
“I’ll do your arms and legs,” she said, and maybe he imagined it, but he thought her voice sounded a little unsteady. “But that’s all, you hear? The rest is up to you.”
He shivered as the cloth wound its way over his body. Down each arm, over his hands, between his fingers, tracing his spine, ending abruptly above the cloth at his buttocks, resuming at his thighs, running down the back of his legs. Here and there she seemed to linger—and he held his breath.
Hell. Two days ago he had been on the threshold of death, and now here he was horny as a bull buffalo in spring, just because some woman was wiping mud off him. And he’d never even properly seen the woman.
He felt a wave of crushing disappointment when she stopped. He turned to face her, and he heard her breath catch. He could well imagine what she was seeing. He was as hard as hell, and the bit of cloth he had wrapped around his waist was hardly going to disguise it.
“I told you not to go getting any ideas,” she warned him. “I’ll shoot you if you try anything.”
“You’re the one rubbing me down,” he pointed out.
“Cleaning you,” she corrected.
“Don’t blow it out of proportion. It’s just an instinctive reaction.” Strangely, he wasn’t at all embarrassed. Partly because he couldn’t see properly, and partly because he was crawling out of his skin with lust. He wished she’d touch him again.
“That design on your chest,” she said abruptly, referring to his tattoo. “What does it mean?”
“It’s private,” he said, his voice husky.
“Oh.” There was a brief silence. The word “private” hung between them like a cast spell. He heard the cloth fall into the pail of water. “I’ll leave you to finish yourself off,” she said. He heard an intake of breath as she realized what she’d said. “I mean, finish cleaning yourself!”
“Don’t you need to bathe too?” he asked. Through the gauze of the material bandaged across his vision, he saw her shadowy form grab the clothes the village woman had left for him and drop them on the hay next to him.
“No!” she snapped.
“I’d be happy to do your back for you,” he suggested. He bit his tongue when he realized she was all but running for the door.
“Let me know when you’re dressed!” she ordered, disappearing outside.
Hell. None of that had been what he’d expected. How had he gone from weak and listless to randy in the blink of an eye? He stripped the mud-crusted cloth from his waist, tossing it aside. He cleaned himself as quickly as he could, marveling at how the mud had found its way into every single nook of his body. By the time he was dressed in the peasant clothes the village woman had found for him, his legs were trembling. He had no stamina at all.
“It’s safe to come back,” he called once he’d settled himself in the hay. He pulled clumps of hay over his lap to hide the fact that his cock was still standing at attention. It didn’t seem to care how exhausted he was.
Deathrider saw a blurry figure appear warily in the doorway. He heard her sigh of relief when she saw that he was dressed and docile. She must have expected to find him still naked and ready to ravish her. He wasn’t the type, but she wasn’t to know that. He knew that women had a hell of a time in these parts. Even tall, energetic women who had no compunction about threatening to shoot a man if he so much as moved in her direction. He imagined she’d survived this long only by exercising extreme caution. He thought back to the day she’d found him in the desert. She’d been plenty cautious then too, and he’d had to argue like hell to get her to help him.
“Apache,” she said brusquely as she came into the barn, “I need you to do exactly what I tell you.”
He sat up, concerned by her tone of voice. Maybe she wasn’t quite as convinced of his docility as he’d thought.
“I need to bathe myself,” she said tightly, “and I’m not spending the whole time worried that you’re going to poke me with your stick.”
He gave a startled laugh. Poke her with his stick?
Although, to be honest, his stick was in a poking kind of mood. It was still hard and throbbing. So who could blame her for her caution?
“Hold your hands out,” she instructed.
“Why?”
She held up a rope. “I’m tying you up.”
“You can’t be serious?”
“Look, Apache. I’m tired. I’ve walked the soles of my feet off, nursed you, skinned and plucked and cooked a bunch of dead animals, made and remade that goddamn travois and brought us safely across miles of waterless wasteland. Now I want to bathe. And I don’t want to be worried about getting raped while I do it.”
“I’m not a rapist.”
“And I’m not a fool. I don’t know you from Adam. All I know is that you’re a dangerous enough character that three lots of people knocked you black-and-blue and left you to die in the desert. It was one thing to have you loose when you were semiconscious from fever. It’s a whole other thing when you’re capable of standing on your own two feet and getting . . . you know . . . that.” She gestured in the general direction of his groin, which was still covered in hay.
She was deadly serious. He sighed. He couldn’t blame her. He’d have done the same in her position, he supposed.
“Tomorrow we’ll go our separate ways,” she told him firmly. “And you won’t have to be tied up anymore. But for tonight, I want you where I know you can’t hurt me.”
“Fine.” He was a lunatic to agree to this.
But he could see her point of view. He wasn’t a rapist, but he wasn’t a paragon of virtue either. She was a woman alone, and he was a strange man with a clearly violent past (as far as she was concerned). He surrendered and held his hands up. He supposed it was his own fault anyway, for not controlling his arousal. What did he think would happen?
But hell, the feel of her hand sliding down his body had been hard to resist. . . .
He winced. He shouldn’t have thought about her hands. If possible, he was growing even stiffer. At least he was wearing the loose peasant shirt and had a lapful of hay. It would have been awkward trying to argue against her if she saw he was still hard as hell.
She roped him up and tied him to the post so he couldn’t move far. Typically, though, she was cautious of his comfort, and it wasn’t at all unpleasant.
“You get some sleep,” she ordered. She was a shadowy shape as she moved in front of the lantern.
She took a fresh pail of water and disappeared into a stall, out of view. She was taking ev
ery precaution to keep her privacy, even though he couldn’t see anything more than shadows and blurs.
Deathrider closed his eyes, intending to leave her to it. But he was keenly aware of the sound of her clothes rustling as they fell to the ground. And then the splashing of water as she wrung out the cloth. And then she started singing quietly under her breath, not loud enough for him to make out the words, but plenty loud enough to keep him awake. His cock twitched at the sound of her. He sighed and stretched.
Idly, he wondered what she looked like. He bet she had long legs. A woman that tall would have to. And he bet they were muscular, firm and curved from ankle to ass. He imagined her running that soapy cloth down one hard thigh and then the other, sliding it over her round calf muscles. He imagined the swell of her ass as she bent over. . . .
Hell. He was so hard, it hurt. He shifted so his cock lay flat against his belly. The ropes chafed at him as he moved. The whole situation felt as erotic as hell. Being tied up in the hush of the barn, alone, blindfolded, listening to a naked woman soap her body.
He’d have to try this again some time when he could actually enjoy it. . . .
Visions ran through his head of ways the scenario could have played out. If he’d been healthy, and she’d been willing . . .
He wished he knew what she looked like. Were her breasts high and round? Pointy? Pouty? Small and hard? Did she have large pale nipples or pebbly dark ones? Were they hardening under her hand as she soaped them?
Goddamn.
He must have still been suffering from fever, because these were mad thoughts. He should have been getting rest, strengthening himself to go rescue Micah, not fantasizing about a complete stranger.
Although she wasn’t a complete stranger, was she? They’d been through quite an ordeal together. She’d saved his life. In some ways, he belonged to her now . . .
Although he didn’t really know anything about her.
“Hey, Cleopatra,” he called out, wanting to break the rising tension. It felt grotesque to cast her in his personal fantasies when she was just trying to get the mud off herself.
