by Rachel Lee
“Esther…Esther, stop. It’s not the same thing at all.”
Slowly, so very slowly, she raised her tear-stained face. “What do you mean?”
“You weren’t hitting me because you were mad at me or because I wouldn’t listen to you, or even because you were just frustrated. Were you?”
“No.” She closed her eyes and drew a long, steadying breath. “I was…I was…”
“Trying to protect yourself.”
She nodded miserably. “It was— I was suddenly— My father used to pick me up like that and throw me. I just—”
“You just had a flashback, that’s all. It’s okay. It’s okay to hit in self-defense.”
“But you weren’t…you wouldn’t hurt me.”
He didn’t answer immediately, just stared down at her until finally her eyes opened. “You don’t know that,” he said. “Not really. How could you? We just met.” He hesitated. “Did he pick you up like that when he threw you down the stairs?”
She nodded, her hazel eyes huge in her face.
“Hardly surprising you went ballistic.” He shook his head and dared another squeeze.
“You’re very understanding.”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Just calling it like I see it.”
“I’m still sorry I hit you.”
“Apology accepted. Not necessary, though.”
At that a small smile peeped through and her expression became almost shy. “You’re stubborn, aren’t you?”
“So I hear from time to time.”
He looked so exotic, and suddenly awareness pierced Esther, driving out all the confusion of her earlier feelings. Fear, sorrow, embarrassment, even old hurts seemed to recede into the background of a sudden, astonishing awareness of Craig Nighthawk.
His dark eyes looked down at her, holding her gaze steadily. A strand of his long, black hair lay across his cheek and she wanted desperately to reach up and brush it gently aside. She wanted to run her fingertips all over his face, learning the texture of his skin, memorizing the plains, hollows and hills. What had come over her?
But her heart skipped a couple of beats, then settled into a faster rhythm, signaling her acute awareness of him. Deep inside, her womb began to feel heavy and she found herself wishing for touches she could scarcely imagine. Instinctively, she pressed her knees together, a movement that at once eased and worsened the ache.
It was as if his gaze held her, forbidding her to look away. Tears were drying on her face, leaving her skin feeling sticky and tight, but she couldn’t even move a hand to wipe them from her cheeks. All she could do was look deep into his dark eyes and feel herself falling…
Craig knew the exact instant he lost the battle. The sensation of her fingers rubbing absently against his chest hadn’t been enough, nor had her parted lips, or even the yearning that seemed to glow in her hazel eyes. No, it was the instant he felt her knees clamp together, signaling exactly what she was feeling.
He knew he shouldn’t do this. A voice in his mind was barking protests, but he didn’t heed them. His heart sank a little, recognizing that he was setting himself up for exactly the kind of misery he’d sworn he would never allow to happen again. Nothing else seemed to matter when every cell in his body was straining for a closeness he hadn’t had in a very long time.
If he didn’t shoot himself over this, she was probably going to do it for him. But even that realization didn’t stop him. He was caught in a force as old as the planet, and like a whirlpool it was dragging him down.
Gently, with exquisite care, he tipped her chin up a little more, then lowered his mouth to hers. They had kissed before; she wouldn’t be upset by a kiss. And to him it felt as if she melted right into him, welcoming him gladly. Instinctively, he drew her closer, cradling her shoulders and her hips as near as he could get them. He needed more, so much more, but for now he had to be content with merely tasting the heady brew of his desire for her.
Anything more was out of the question.
When he lifted his mouth from hers, her eyes fluttered open, looking dazedly up at him. She wanted more; the wish was plainly written in her eyes. He wanted more, too, damn it.
He tried to speak, but his voice seemed to have fled. He cleared his throat, and managed a husky croak. “Are you afraid?”
She looked startled, then color flooded her cheeks and rose to the roots of her hair. “No,” she whispered, her voice sounding almost strangled. “Should I be?”
Should she be? What a hell of a question to ask him. There was no reason on earth she ought to be afraid. All he wanted to do was give her all the pleasure he possibly could.
And that was why he was afraid of her.
Sanity reared its ugly head. If he gave this woman everything he wanted to, he would be walking into a situation he didn’t want to be in. Nothing but heartache lay down that road.
Of course she wasn’t afraid. She didn’t have any idea of where they were heading. But he did, and for both their sakes he gathered his self-control and wrapped it around him like a suit of armor.
Esther saw and felt the change. Knew in her heart the instant he withdrew from her. In that instant he abandoned her on the edge of a steep precipice, leaving her feeling as cold, exposed and abandoned as she had ever felt in her life. In that instant she hated him.
She rolled away from him swiftly, and tried to struggle to her feet, made awkward by her brace. Her awkwardness only made her angrier at him, because it was all his fault she was lying on the floor of her studio trying to get to her feet and feeling so damn embarrassed by her responses to him—responses which he had deliberately drawn from her.
Oh, she could kill him!
“Esther. Esther, look, I’m sorry….”
She made it to her feet and glared down at him. “Just leave,” she said sharply. “Just go.”
He felt like an ass reclining on the floor while she stood over him, but decided it was wisest to remain where he was. The lady was a powder keg right now.
“I’m sorry,” he said, though for once he didn’t mean it the way it probably sounded. He wasn’t sorry as much for her sake as for his own. Tasting forbidden fruit was always a mistake, especially when it turned out to be sweet.
“I—” She broke off, looking suddenly confused, as if his apology had prematurely interrupted her anger. “Look, you’d better just go.”
“I was planning on sleeping here tonight.” As soon as the words were out, he wanted to kick his own butt. Given the circumstances, they sounded all wrong. Quickly he tried to forestall her fury. “I mean, in case your father shows up.”
Conflicting needs collided head-on, leaving her torn by her desire to be left alone and her fear of being alone. Damn him for putting her on the horns of this dilemma.
Taking a chance, Craig sat up, then pushed himself slowly to his feet. “Look,” he said. “I got carried away and I apologize. It won’t happen again.”
Of course it wouldn’t, Esther thought miserably. Why should it? Never in her entire life had a man wanted her for anything at all.
She looked down at her brace, feeling her eyes puff with tears she refused to shed. God, she hated that thing. It was a badge of her shame, one she couldn’t even hide. Her own personal version of the scarlet letter.
“Please leave,” she said again, then turned and limped away with as much dignity as she could muster. When she reached Guinevere, she bent to scratch the dog’s head and untie her leash from the hook in the wall. Then, head high, she walked out of her studio.
Behind her she heard Craig say, “I’ll be back.” She ignored him and just kept walking.
She needed to eat, but could hardly bring herself to. Not even pasta primavera could tempt her appetite. With the bowl of pasta in front of her on the table, she stared out the kitchen window and watched the daylight fade from the sky.
Night seemed to seep out of the nooks and crannies where it had hidden all day, spreading slowly to the shadowed places and across the ground to climb the wa
lls of the barn. She watched it slide stealthily across the window ledge beside her, a conquest so gradual that it was impossible to say when day became dusk and dusk became dark.
Ordinarily she would have been enthralled by the gradual changes of hue as night slowly leached all the color from the world, but tonight she was locked in a misery so deep that not even the beauty of nightfall could pierce it.
Her cocoon, carefully spun of isolation, was beginning to unravel. She wasn’t really isolated. How could she be isolated when she had an agent out in the big bad world, when sheriff’s deputies dropped by, when her next-door neighbor could turn her life on its ear any time he chose? When her father could find her.
She’d been deluding herself, wearing blinders and focusing on just one thing: putting a huge distance between herself and Richard Jackson. But it hadn’t done her any good.
God, she felt bruised and battered. Not physically. No physical bruise could hurt the way emotional ones did. She had spent her entire childhood feeling this way, so sore inside that the passage of her own thoughts was painful, like a breath of cold air over a sensitive tooth.
She had thought, though, that all that pain was behind her. Had honestly believed that with her father out of her life, she would never feel this way again.
God, how mistaken she had been. But how could she have imagined that in a matter of just a few minutes Craig Nighthawk could make her feel every bit as bad?
She had to stay away from him. At all costs. Never again would she let anyone into her life who could make her feel like this.
God, why had she ever let him touch her? Why had she been asinine enough to curl into his embrace as if he offered some kind of shelter or protection? And him! Why had he kissed her when it was so clear he didn’t want her? The instant her brace had touched his leg he’d lost all interest.
And why shouldn’t he? She was defective and she damn well knew it. No man wanted a woman who limped around with a steel brace strapped to her leg, and all he’d done was react the way she had always expected: with revulsion.
But this was all her own fault. She, and no one else, had let down her guard enough for Craig Nighthawk to slip past her barriers. She had let him inside where he could wound her, and he had done precisely that.
Not because he was a cruel or evil man, but just because he was a man. Just for a minute there he’d forgotten that she had a bad leg and he’d kissed her. He hadn’t meant to leave her feeling like this, she knew.
But he had.
A cloud scudded across the crescent moon and Craig watched it with glum resignation. It was going to rain before morning. He would have to make a shelter out of the tarp wrapped around his bedroll and hope it didn’t rain too hard. Not that it really mattered. He’d been soaked before and would be soaked again before his time was done. It kind of went with ranching.
It also kind of went with sitting up all night to keep watch over one slightly crazy woman. He sat on his side of the fence, refusing to even consider the possibility of crossing over to sleep on her front porch again. He wouldn’t put it past Esther Jackson to call the cops if she found him trespassing, and his reputation was bad enough around here since his arrest for the little Dunbar girl’s kidnapping.
He supposed if he had a grain of the common sense a man ought to have, he would just march away and sleep in his own damn bed.
But he was worried about her, especially since her father had called only that morning. The man was beginning to strike him as just a little too persistent for comfort. He wouldn’t sleep a wink if he wasn’t close enough to keep an eye on her.
But hell, what a fiasco in the studio that afternoon! Damn, first he scared her half to death by picking her up, then he had given her entirely the wrong idea by holding her and kissing her. He wondered how she would react if she even guessed a tenth of what he would like to do to her. It took no great leap of the imagination to envision himself kissing her in all kinds of intimate places. Tasting her. Touching her. Burying himself deep inside her.
Not that it was ever going to happen. It was probably for the best that she was mad at him. It would help keep him in line so he didn’t make a great big mistake by getting involved where there could only be sorrow.
Closing his eyes, he tilted his head back and turned his face up to the sky. The wind caught his hair, whipping it around his face, but he ignored it.
He never felt as centered as he did when he was sitting on solid ground beneath the night sky. It was as if he tapped into some flow of power between the earth and the heavens. He could almost hear the whispers of the stone people in the ground beneath him, could almost feel the spirit in the wind that rippled the grass like waves on a sea.
In that instant he felt more connected with himself and with his roots than he had in a very long time. It was as if all his years in the Anglo world washed away, leaving him cleansed. Leaving him as he had been so long ago, sitting around a fire with his father and grandfather, with his uncles and cousins, listening to stories that made him swell with pride and eagerness. Stories that had made him forget the ugliness of his daily life.
Although that ugliness had been relative, he supposed. His people were often hungry because they could no longer hunt as they once had. The land to which they had been confined was too small to support enough deer for hunting, and the buffalo were gone. They had been told to become farmers, but the land was poor and too dry. So they had often gone hungry.
There had been the curse of alcohol, too, and the curse of having no jobs, and the curse of being treated like scum when they left the res.
But the earth had still been beautiful, and the sky had still been blue, and when a man was blessed with the opportunity to sit a few moments beside a stream, however muddy and small, he knew that not everything was bad.
And tonight, sitting beneath the clouding sky with the wind whispering secrets to the night, he found himself remembering the stories his father and grandfather had told of the days when his people had been great warriors. The days when they had been blessed by the bounty of the earth.
They had been blessed, his father had said, because they had honored the earth. But too many of them had forgotten how to do that, had become distracted by the material things the white men brought.
Craig supposed he was one of them, living cut off from everyone and everything except his ranch and his sister’s family. But that had been a conscious choice, because on the res there were almost no choices left. You couldn’t put a people in a prison and rip away their religion and culture and expect them to be anything other than dependent.
But he hated dependency, and had moved out to escape it. And in moving far enough away, he had discovered that it was possible to live in this world that had seemed so forbidding when he had been a child.
But now, having succeeded in escaping, he wondered what he had escaped. Not only was he feeling lonely all the time, but he was beginning to feel rootless as well. Nothing on earth would induce him to return to the hopelessness of reservation life, but he somehow had to make a peace within himself if he was to continue in any kind of life.
That peace whispered around him now, hinting at ways that would keep him in touch with the earth while he lived apart. Encouraging him to reach out for the power that filled the air around him and claim it as his birthright.
And that was the surprising blessing he was beginning to discover in his life as a rancher. Perhaps in the end it would prove to be for the best that he had had to give up trucking. Sometimes he almost hurt when he thought about what he had given up, but then he would get on his horse and ride with the sheep for a while, or take the pickup and drive around the fence line, and he would discover this incredible sense of…rightness. As if when his feet touched the soil, his soul found its source.
So he continued to sit, his arms wrapped around his knees, his head tipped back to the heavens. Watching over Esther Jackson was going to be good for his soul.
At ten-thirty, he watched a deputy drive
up to her place and step out. Esther came to the door to greet him and they chatted for several minutes before he drove away. It looked like Beau Beauregard, but he didn’t stay all that long so he was probably not making any better time with Esther than Craig was. Not that Craig cared.
The clouds overhead thickened, and lightning began to fork across the sky. The wind kicked up until the rustle it made in the grass was loud enough to sound like the chirping of a million crickets.
All of a sudden he found himself remembering a stormy afternoon as he’d driven across eastern Montana. The day had started brilliant and clear, but as he drove east, he watched a storm build behind him.
At first the puffs of cloud had been innocent enough, white and fluffy like cotton balls. But as he’d watched in his rearview mirrors, their number had grown and they had begun to come together, their undersides growing darker as their burden of water had grown.
Finally, from north to south as far as the eye could see had stretched the black wall of a squall line. It had still been behind him, though, and as he drove ahead of it, drenched in the sunlight, he played a game of tag with nature.
Eventually he lost. One moment he had been in sunlight, and the next he had been in the dark gray-green of a stormy world. He could still see the sunlight on the road ahead of him and on the open land to either side, but now he watched as the storm’s shadow gradually swallowed the rest of the world.
Before the easternmost ribbon of highway had fallen into shadow, the rain had caught up with him, a heavy, gusting downpour that had sometimes made the trailer behind him feel more like a sail than a loaded van.
He still remembered the exact instant when he had realized how small and powerless he was. Ordinarily, he had felt big and powerful, driving a loaded eighteen-wheeler and looking down on other cars and trucks as they passed by, taking great care because of his huge size and weight. But when that storm had blown across him and pulled at his trailer, he’d known just how puny he really was. How big the powers of nature were.
