by Janzen, Tara
“Sha, sha?” she heard him repeat above her head.
“Shoo . . . uu,” she instinctively corrected him, then wondered if she’d lost her mind.
“Sha-sha, Mancos. Sha-sha.” He raised his foot and shook it the slightest bit. “Sha-sha.” The dog did, but only a little. The ugliest head on the continent lifted just far enough to shove into the man’s crotch. He laughed, a deep, rolling sound that seemed to wash all through Kristine. And then he embarrassed her beyond the ends of the earth. “Not for you, Mancos.” He pushed the dog away. “For Kreestine.”
She figured her only glimmer of hope lay in the heretofore unheard of possibility of spontaneous disappearance. Of course, it didn’t happen. Her luck hadn’t been running in the right direction for miracles lately.
Or had it? Her own laughter rose in her throat, but she couldn’t tell if it was a mature response to his or the beginnings of hysteria. He took the opportunity to steal a kiss off her cheek, his head bending close to hers, his braid sliding over his shoulder. She knew it was hysteria she fought.
“Namaste, Kreestine,” he murmured.
“N-namaste . . .” She knew who he was, knew the only person he could be, but she still didn’t believe it.
“Kautilya Carson,” he said, filling in the blank left by her trailing voice.
“Kit Carson?” she questioned breathlessly, having never heard the other name.
“Westerners say Keet, yes.”
“The Buddhist monk?” she asked, attempting to clear up one of the obviously more doubtful rumors she’d heard about him.
“No. I am not a monk.” He laughed and touched her cheek again, as if she needed reminding of the kiss they’d shared. “I ran away before they gelded me.”
“They geld the monks?” She hadn’t read anything about gelding in her comparative religion textbooks.
“They try, in the mind,” he explained. “But some like boys.”
And she certainly hadn’t read that in any textbook.
“Don’t worry.” He laughed again. “They didn’t get me. You taste like coffee. Do you have coffee?”
She absolutely did not believe this. She didn’t believe any of it. He tasted of honey, and she tasted like coffee. They’d barely met and all they’d talked about and attempted was sex, an occurrence so rare in her life and so far back in her past, she’d completely forgotten what all the fuss was about until he’d reminded her. Oh brother, had he reminded her. She needed to go back to bed and give the morning another shot at normalcy.
“Yes,” she blurted out in panic, realizing bed was the last place she dared to go. “Yes, I have coffee.”
“Good.” He reached for the bag dangling from her hand and slung it over his shoulder. “Let’s share coffee.”
In the five feet stretching from where she’d stood on the deck to the front door, she managed to stumble over thin air.
“Careful, Kreestine.” He laughed and reached out to steady her. The warmth of his hand only flustered her more. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“No. No, I’m not hurt.” She really needed to stop repeating herself, she thought. Then she ran into something substantially harder than thin air.
“My fault.”
He grinned, and that, she knew, was something he really needed to stop doing, if she was going to get her pulse slowed to a reasonable pace. He bent down and picked up a huge duffel bag, slung it over his shoulder, then hefted a large trunk onto his other shoulder, a trunk to match the six already piled in her living room.
If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, she wouldn’t have believed it. Even with a ton of luggage weighing him down, he moved with more grace than she could have imagined, as if his feet weren’t touching the ground.
* * * * * * * * *
Thank you for reading Avenging Angel. Please visit my website, www.tarajanzen.com, and follow me on Facebook http://on.fb.me/mSstpd; and Twitter @tara_janzen http://twitter.com/#!/tara_janzen so you won’t miss the release of my upcoming e-books.
Table of Contents
Reader Letter
Other Titles
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Excerpt from Dateline: Kydd and Rios
Excerpt from Outlaw Carson
