Blackwolf's Redemption

by Sandra Marton

In a moment, he would be deep inside her. This man. This stranger.

  This stranger!

  Sienna’s eyes flew open. “Wait,” she said breathlessly. “Jesse, wait!”

  He clasped her face as she tried to twist it from his, held her still and kissed her.

  “No. Jesse. Please! I don’t want to—”

  He wasn’t listening. For all she knew, he couldn’t even hear her. Breath sobbing in and out of her lungs, she shoved hard at his chest.

  “Jesse,” she gasped. “Listen to me!”

  She beat at his shoulders and he caught her wrists, dragged her arms high above her head, forced his knee between her thighs.

  “No! Jesse, no, no, no…”

  His big body stilled. Then he let go of her wrists, rolled away and got to his feet.

  Naked, without his body covering hers, a cold as deep as the surrounding darkness settled against Sienna’s skin. Her teeth chattered; she rolled onto her side. Something fell over her. Terry cloth. A robe? Whatever it was, she covered herself with it and scrambled up against the pillows. Light blazed down. She threw up a hand to shield her eyes and saw Jesse standing over her, the lantern in his hand.

  Half naked, his sweats hanging low on his hips, he stood motionless. His hair was loose and hung to his jaw. He’d wiped away the black stripes, but the eagle talon still swung from its rawhide thong. He was, somehow, a remarkable mixture of savagery and civilization, wild and dangerous…

  And incredibly beautiful.

  Heat rushed through her. What would it have been like to have felt him possessing her?

  “That’s a risky game to play,” he said in a low voice.

  Her eyes flew to his. “It wasn’t a game,” she said, rushing the words. “I never meant—” Sienna hesitated. She wanted to blame what had happened on him but she couldn’t. “Everything—everything’s confused,” she said in a tremulous whisper. “There’s so much going on….” She swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

  He gave a harsh laugh. “Yeah. So am I.”

  “I don’t—I don’t know what…what happened. I’m not—”

  “Frankly, I don’t give a damn what you are or aren’t. You won’t be here long enough for it to mean anything. As soon as the storm ends, I want you off my land.”

  She nodded. It was what she wanted, too. Somewhere out there, people had to be missing her. Looking for her…

  “Get some clothes on. There’s stuff in the dressing room.” He leaned forward and placed the lantern on the nightstand. “I’ll be in the kitchen, putting together something to eat.”

  “Really, that’s not nec—”

  “I decide what’s necessary around here, lady. Get that through your head.”

  “Jesse. Mr. Blackwolf—”

  “Put on a couple of layers of clothing. Without power, it’s going to be a long, cold night.”

  Sienna nodded, watching as he headed for the door. Stupid, she knew, but the thought of him vanishing into the dark in this unknown place made her uneasy.

  “Wait!”

  He swung toward her. “What now?”

  “The light. Don’t you need it?”

  He reached for the candle. “This will do me just fine.”

  The door slammed after him, and Sienna was alone.

  She waited for what seemed a very long.

  The question wasn’t would he come back, but would her legs hold her when she stood up? She felt shaky. That she’d come within a heartbeat of letting a hard-edged stranger who thought she was some kind of thief almost take her to bed seemed impossible….

  Sienna let out a shaky breath.

  Be honest, at least!

  Jesse Blackwolf hadn’t been the aggressor. She’d been as eager as he. She’d wanted him to make love to her, wanted him more than she’d ever wanted a man before. Not that there’d been many to start with. A boy in her junior year at college, another at the start of her postgraduate studies—her sex life was pretty pathetic by 2010 standards.

  How about by the standards of 1975? She tried to remember what she knew of sex in the seventies. Free love? Sexual equality?

  Not that it mattered.

  She’d reacted to Jesse on her own terms, not those of any particular year or era. His touch, his taste, the feel of him against her…

  She shut her eyes, let herself remember it all. The texture of his silky hair, the hard planes of his shoulders and chest, the press of his erection. The heat, the warmth of his kisses.

  Desire, something so potent she couldn’t think of a name for it, had caught her in its grasp. All she’d wanted was to be in Jesse’s arms, to know what it was like to belong to him….

  “Stop it,” she said sharply.

  She wasn’t like that; she didn’t want to be like that. Sex had a place in a woman’s life and that was exactly the way it should be, it should have a place in a woman’s life. End of story.

  What had just happened was nothing but the end result of a day that had started in one time and ended in another, and no, absolutely no, she was not going to think about that now!

  Sienna sat up, pulled on the robe—Jesse’s, of course. She could tell by the size, which dwarfed her. By the scent, redolent of mountain air, pine and man. Then she headed for the dressing room, lantern in her hand….

  And stopped in the doorway. She hadn’t really looked at the room before, when she’d fled here. Now she saw that it was huge, easily as big as her Brooklyn apartment.

  Except, her place overflowed with, well, with just plain stuff.

  Jesse’s dressing room was so close to empty, it was Spartan.

  Shelves and cubbies lined the walls, but most of them were empty. Only a couple of narrow sections contained clothes. A couple of wool sport jackets hung from a rack; jeans, sweaters, T-shirts, sweats—tops and bottoms—were all neatly folded and neatly aligned on the shelves. Boxer shorts and socks were alongside.

  At the far end of the room, in lonely splendor, a military uniform hung suspended from a hanger on a rod. A pair of boots, polished to a gleaming luster, stood directly beneath.

  Sienna set the lantern on an empty shelf. Was her reluctant host a soldier? It was none of her business. Still, she crossed the room for a closer look.

  Her breath caught.

  The jacket bristled with medals and ribbons. She had no idea what any of them were; she didn’t even know what branch of service the uniform represented, but whatever it was, Jesse must have served it well.

  She couldn’t imagine him as a soldier. He was too independent to take orders from anyone. He was good at giving orders, though….

  She jumped as a fist banged against the still-shut outer door.

  “Hurry it up,” Jesse barked.

  Sienna almost laughed. “Yessir,” she said, and gave the all-but-empty room a brisk salute.

  The kitchen was easy to find.

  The lantern provided plenty of light and all she had to do was follow the smell of…

  “Chicken noodle soup?”

  Jesse turned as she entered the candlelit room. He’d put on a long-sleeved chambray shirt, the sleeves rolled back on his tanned, muscled forearms. He was wearing a fresh pair of jeans and his hair was drawn back from his face and secured with a length of rawhide. He stood at a marble counter over a pot bubbling away on the burner of a camping stove, a wooden spoon in his hand, a noncommittal expression on his face, and gave her a long look.

  “I see you found something to wear.”

  Sienna glanced down at herself. She was wearing heavy gray cotton sweats—classic, basic gymwear. There’d been half a dozen pair in the dressing room, varying only as to color. Jesse was apparently not given to anything that defeated the utilitarian purpose of sweats, or to silly designer logos.

  She couldn’t imagine he ever would be.

  “Yes.” She decided to test the waters, offer a small flag of truce by giving him a hesitant smile. “I took your advice about layering. I have on two of your T-shirts. And—” she raised one foot “—tw
o pairs of socks.”

  “Good.” He swung back to the stove. “You can put the lantern over there.”

  “Okay.” He heard the soft scuff of her sock-clad feet as she made her way across the Mexican-tile floor. “The soup smells wonderful.”

  “I opened two cans. There’s plenty of it.”

  “Good. Anything I can do?”

  Yeah, he thought. There was.

  She could stop looking so beautiful.

  He had to be really desperate, he thought coldly, finding Sienna Cummings beautiful. Not that there was anything wrong with her looks; it was just that he didn’t go for her type. Independent women, questioning women, ones who thought they were on an equal footing with men…

  Not that he liked his women stupid.

  He just liked them to know when to defer to a man.

  He wasn’t into this women’s lib nonsense that had taken the country by storm.

  Linda hadn’t been into it, either. She’d known how to make a man feel good. She’d looked up to him, let him know he was in charge….

  Until he suddenly hadn’t been.

  I need a man who knows how to be a man, Jesse, she’d said, and how could he fault her for that? A woman didn’t want a man in her bed who woke up soaked to the skin from nightmares that kept threatening to pull him under, who had no clue as to what he wanted to do with his life, who had believed with all his being in things that no longer made sense….

  “…must be something I can do,” Sienna said, and he blinked and focused his eyes on her.

  “What?”

  “I said, you did the cooking. I’d like to do something. Set the table, maybe?”

  “I opened a can,” he said gruffly.

  “Two.”

  She smiled. It was impossible not to smile back.

  “Yeah. Okay.” He jerked his head toward one of the birch cupboards. “How about setting the counter? The bowls are in there. Silverware’s in that drawer, bread’s in that cabinet. You want butter, there’s some in the fridge. Just don’t keep the door open longer than you have to.”

  “Yessir.”

  Jesse narrowed his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.” She hesitated. “It just, you know, slipped out. I mean, I saw your uniform. It was just hanging there. Look, I didn’t mean to pry….”

  “Then don’t,” he said sharply. “Just give me those bowls.”

  The look she flashed would have made him laugh if he’d been in a better mood, but he wasn’t in a better mood and all she got in return was a glare.

  She slapped the bowls on the counter beside him. He ladled the soup into them, then turned off the camping stove.

  “I was in the army,” he said flatly. “Okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Now, sit down and eat.”

  She took one of the high-backed stools, dipped her spoon into the bowl he put before her…and cleared her throat.

  “That didn’t look like a regular army uniform. I mean, those boots. And that hat on the shelf…”

  “And what do you know about regular army uniforms?”

  “We had ROTC on campus.”

  “Yeah,” he said with biting sarcasm, “Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Well, that sure makes you an expert.”

  “Look, if you don’t want to talk about it—”

  “I was in Special Forces.” His tone was not only flat, it was icy. “Any more questions?”

  Sienna shook her head. He was right, she was prying, and it was none of her business.

  “Fine. Now, eat your soup.”

  “Any other orders you want to give, General?”

  “Wrong rank,” he said curtly. “And I’m not giving you orders, I’m just telling you what to do.”

  Her eyebrows rose. Who could blame her? He knew he sounded like an idiot.

  “Okay,” he said, “okay, I’m not good at this.”

  “At what?” Her smile was as sickly sweet as her voice. “At behaving like a human being?”

  “At having anybody here. This place…I spend most of my time here alone.”

  “What a surprise.”

  “I’m not much for company.”

  Another of those sugar-on-overload smiles. “I’d never have guessed.”

  He looked at her. There was that attitude again. Women weren’t supposed to be like that. They weren’t supposed to have that do-I-strike-you-as-a-pushover thing going on—but then, he’d never known a woman like this one.

  This was, no question, turning into an interesting experience. Except he didn’t want an interesting experience. He’d had enough of those to last a lifetime.

  “Just eat the soup.” He pushed a plate piled high with slices of white bread toward her. “Bread, too. You burned up a lot of calories today.”

  He could almost hear her thinking of a way to refute what he’d said, just as a matter of principle. But she was too smart for that. Despite her earlier claim about not being hungry, she was. She needed food; she knew it, he knew it, and after a couple of seconds she shrugged, picked up her spoon and dug in.

  She ate all her soup. Four slices of bread. When she finished, she licked her lips.

  “That was delicious.”

  He nodded, folded his sixth piece of bread in half and bit into it.

  “I am,” he said, “one hell of a gourmet cook.”

  She looked at him. Then, slowly, her lips curved into a smile. It was, he thought, a great smile, the kind that didn’t seem painted on just to make a man feel good. Not that there was anything wrong with a woman doing whatever it took to make a man feel good, it was only that honest smiles were rare.

  “I can see that,” she said somberly, “you and a lady named Mrs. Campbell.”

  “Hey,” he said, trying to sound as if she’d injured his pride, “it takes special talent to turn a can of soup into five stars in the Michelin Guide.”

  She laughed. “Tell me about it. I do a lot of that kind of gourmet cooking, too.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah, indeed.”

  He looked at her, then away. “I take it Jack doesn’t do kitchen duty?”

  “Jack?”

  “The guy. The one you were with.”

  Her smile faded. “Oh. That Jack.”

  “Is there another?”

  “No. I mean…” She frowned, found a breadcrumb on the counter and toyed with it. “For a little while there, I forgot.”

  “About Jack?”

  Her head came up. “What’s with the Jack thing? Why would I think about him?”

  “Because he’s your lover,” Jesse said, his voice gone hard.

  “My lover? Jack?” Her tone was incredulous.

  “What is he, then?”

  “My professor. Well, he isn’t a full professor, but I’m working on my thesis with him.”

  “A thesis in…”

  Her expression turned defiant. “Anthropology. Native American peoples.”

  “You mean, Indians.”

  “I mean Native Americans. That word, Indian, is an insult—”

  “That’s news to me. Besides, do I look insulted?”

  Sienna stared at him. What he looked was proud. And so beautiful it put an ache in her throat.

  What if this Jesse was real? If he was the man she’d read about and wondered about? What if this was, as he kept insisting, reality?

  It was impossible. This was impossible. She couldn’t dwell on it or she’d—she’d tumble off the edge of the earth and who knew where she’d land?

  Her stool squealed in protest as she shoved it back, got to her feet and snatched up their spoons and bowls.

  “I’m an anthropologist,” she said steadily. “Jack Burden is my adviser. That’s what brought me to this place.” She moved swiftly from the counter to the sink, dumping the dishes and cutlery, returning to grab the loaf of bread and close the wrapper. She’d started her response to him calmly, but she could feel emotion building inside her. “I didn’t come to steal, or
to deface things or to trespass on your land. I came to study something ancient and—and wonderful and amazing, and I resent—”

  Jesse rose from his seat.

  “Okay,” he said quietly.

  “No. No, it’s not okay.” She looked up at him, but between the bad lighting and the angry tears that had risen in her eyes, her vision was blurry. “It’s not okay for you to accuse me of—of such awful things. I am not—”

  “I said, okay. You’re not.”

  “Not what?” she said, her voice shaking. “Not here? Not standing in a room that doesn’t exist, with a man who doesn’t ex—”

  “I exist,” he said roughly, and despite all the promises he’d made himself and her, he took her into his arms and raised her face to his. “I exist, Sienna,” he said softly. “You know it and so do I.”

  Her eyes met his. They glittered with unshed tears but, he was certain, with something else, too.

  Awareness.

  Of him.

  Of herself.

  Of the electricity between them.

  Jesse raised his hand and stroked an errant curl back from her temple. She turned her head like a cat moving deeper into what could easily become a caress.

  All he had to do was bend his head and kiss her. One kiss and she’d melt into his arms.

  Make love to me, Jesse, she would whisper, and this time, she’d mean it. No games. No last-minute recriminations. No backing away from what they both wanted.

  “Jesse?”

  Her eyes were wide and luminous. Her lips were parted in anticipation. He thought of that uniform, hanging in his dressing room. Of a time, an eternity ago, when he had been an officer and a gentleman.

  And took a step back.

  “Take the lantern,” he said gruffly. She didn’t move; he grabbed it and shoved it at her. “Go on, take it. There are extra blankets in the chest at the foot of the bed. Pile them on. You’ll need them.”

  “But where will you sleep?”

  He wouldn’t. Not with her just down the hall.

  “I’ll bunk in the living room. By the fireplace.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Damn it,” he growled, “must you fight me on everything?”

  That don’t-screw-with-me look was back on her face. He wanted to pull her to him and kiss it away. Instead, he folded his arms, glared at her until she muttered a very unladylike word, turned her back and marched off. At the last minute, just before the dark swallowed her up, he called her name.