Haskell straddled a buckskin, Raven a brown-and-white pinto pony that she’d picked out herself, impressing her colleague with her knowledge of horseflesh, although he didn’t give her the satisfaction of mentioning it. She wouldn’t have thought much of the compliment, anyway, as she was still in a snit over what he’d said at breakfast.
He couldn’t help wondering, however, how she, having been raised by a rich family in a New York City mansion, had acquired her eye for western stock. He didn’t consciously admit to himself that she was, for all her haughtiness and general arrogance, a rather impressive girl who seemed at a relatively young age—he believed she was only twenty-two—to have made herself at home on the rugged western frontier.
She’d not only made herself comfortable, but she even seemed to thrive on the adventure and danger of it all. He wondered what her family thought of her career, but he allowed the mystery to remain.
He didn’t feel like making conversation with her this morning. He didn’t like to make conversation with any girl who was giving him the cold shoulder, and that’s what she did throughout the morning and well into the afternoon. She didn’t utter more than ten words to him all day, and those ten only concerned practical matters such as the horses and their midday lunch, which they’d consumed with coffee boiled over a low fire beneath a scraggly cottonwood, in the shade of a low bluff.
The trail they followed nearly straight north of Douglas cleaved some of the loneliest, most forlorn country Haskell had ever visited. A panging barrenness had always weighed on him the several times he’d traversed this eastern Wyoming desert either on his way to or from Denver, on his sundry assignments during the years he’d worked for Pinkerton. The land was all low bluffs and slanting rimrocks, with long stretches between them of prickly-pear flats and occasional tufts of buckbrush and sage. Distant, thin lines of trees marked dry watercourses.
The only animals that Haskell saw all that first day were hawks, jackrabbits, sand rattlers, and the distant dun-and-white shapes of antelope grazing the tufts of blond grass speckling a hillside. There were occasional buzzards—usually feeding on something dead—and a few deer. That was all.
The main entity out here—and it really did feel like a living thing—was the heat. It burned down through his hat and vest and blue chambray shirt and caused sweat to run down his back. There wasn’t much perspiration, however, because the dry heat sucked most of it out of his skin, leaving him feeling like a two-hundred-and-forty-pound piece of jerky.
For the most part, there was no wind, which was odd for this windy country. The broad, wide-open expanse between far horizons, under a deeply arching bowl of sky the same blue as Raven’s eyes, had the staleness of pent-up air in a windowless room. The light was at once intense and pale, causing Haskell’s eyes to ache despite the shade offered by his slouch hat.
They kept a steady pace but rested the horses often because of the heat. Most of this country was nearly as empty as the moon, with the headquarters of a couple of sprawling ranches spaced many miles apart. If a horse went down out here, Bear and Raven would have to ride double for a long way to secure another one. Both horses going down could very easily mean doom for both riders.
When the sun began impaling itself on the highest peaks of the Big Horns in the west, Haskell started looking for a place to camp. He found an ancient river bottom through which a spring-fed creek trickled. The creek was little more than a freshet meandering through the river bottom, but it was water just the same.
They stopped and tended their horses, rubbing both down with scraps of burlap and then graining and watering them. When Haskell removed rope from his saddlebags with which to string a picket line, Raven said primly, “While you do that, Agent Haskell, how about if I gather wood for a fire?”
He snorted at her formality and said, “Sounds fine as frog hair to me, Agent York. Don’t stray too far. Be dark soon, and it’s easy to get lost in this country after the sun goes down.”
She’d started walking away, but now she stopped to arch a caustic brow at him. “Aren’t you going to tell me to watch out for sidewinders? Isn’t that what men of your overbearing fabric tell women to frighten them?”
“Oh, yeah,” Haskell said, wrapping an end of the rope around a spindly cottonwood. “Watch out for sidewinders, Agent York.” He grinned.
She rolled her eyes and walked away. Before she disappeared in the brush, he watched her ass sashaying behind those skin-tight denims, and he groaned.
It was going to be a long night.
11
When Haskell had the horses secured to the picket line, he began digging a hole in the sand with an empty airtight tin to house the fire. He’d just circled the shallow hole with rocks when Raven returned with an armload of driftwood carried by spring floods, which she dumped beside the ring.
She grabbed her left hand clad in a thin, doeskin glove. “Ouch!”
“What is it?” Haskell asked. “Break a nail?”
He saw something move on the ground near where she’d dropped the wood. It was a black spider with a red spot on its back.
Haskell rose. “Let me see.”
“It’s a sliver,” she said, pulling the glove off and stepping away from him.
“It’s a spider bite.”
He tried to grab her hand, but she pulled it away. “I told you, it’s a sliver. Don’t worry about it.”
“I am going to worry about it, Miss Fancy Britches, because if we don’t get the poison out of there pronto, I’m gonna be stuck right here, probably diggin’ your grave.”
“Don’t get hysterical.”
“Let me see it!”
She turned her mouth corners down as she relented and let him inspect her hand. There was a small bite mark on the back of it, near the thumb. Even as he watched, it was turning red and beginning to swell.
“A black widow.” Bear chuckled. “Ain’t that a coincidence?”
“Hmmm,” she said. “Don’t the females eat the males when they’re done having sex?”
“Like I said, ain’t that a coincidence?” He reached down and pulled his bowie knife from the top of his right boot.
“Jesus Christ, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
She tried to pull her hand out of his, but he held tight. “Stand still. We gotta get the venom out of there. Black widow bites can be worse than rattlesnake bites.”
Raven glared at the big, foot-long knife with a wide blade of glinting, razor-edged Damascus steel and a hide-wrapped handle that Haskell had molded to fit his grip. “How do you propose to get it out—cut off my hand ?”
“Quit caterwauling.”
He held her hand up in front of his face. She did not resist, although she looked on with trepidation at the huge blade, stretching her lips slightly back from her teeth. Bear held the handle up, curved point down, and very deftly buried the point into the middle of the swelling bite. He turned the knife, boring a small hole from which blood oozed.
“Ow,” she said. “It burns.”
“That’s the poison.”
He turned the knife again, making the hole a hair larger, and then he set the knife down on the ground, lifted her hand to his lips, closed his mouth over the bloody hole, and sucked.
She sucked air through her teeth as he sucked the venom out of the bloody hole, spit it onto the ground, sucked again, and spit.
“Hold on,” he said, and went to where he’d draped his saddlebags over a rock. He fished his bourbon bottle out of one of the pouches, removed the burlap he’d wrapped it in, and popped the cork. He took a swig, spit it onto the ground, and shook his head regretfully as he walked back to her. “Awful waste of good whiskey.”
She was scowling down at her hand, which she was holding like an injured bird against her belly. “I’ll be damned if the burn isn’t going away,” she said.
“Not for long.” Hask
ell grabbed her hand and poured whiskey on it.
She sucked a sharp breath through her teeth again. “You got that right!”
“Hold on.”
He poured more whiskey over her hand, saying, “Sorry, Sam.” And then he took another pull himself, swallowed, and corked the bottle.
“Yeah, you’re right,” she said in a tight voice, squeezing her hand. She glanced at him and then glanced away as she said, “Thanks . . . I guess.”
He held the bottle out to her. “Drink?”
“No, thanks.”
Haskell shrugged and set the bottle down near his saddlebags. Then he walked around the rock and cut an ear off one of the prickly-pear plants, which were nearly as plentiful as stones. He shaved the spines off the ear, split the ear with his knife, and used the point to scrape out a thimbleful of the pulp. He walked over to Raven and used his right index finger to smear the pulp over the wound.
“Keep the blowflies out.” He winked at her.
“Thanks,” she said, staring down at her hand.
“That’s going to hurt a little tonight, but you’ll be feelin’ just as mean an’ nasty as ever again come morning.” He cleaned the blade of the knife on his handkerchief and returned the knife to its boot sheath. “Next time you fetch wood, Agent York, make sure you’re not fetchin’ spiders, too.”
“Thanks for the lecture, Agent Haskell,” she said without obvious ire, still holding her hand, regarding him now with a slightly befuddled cast to her gaze.
“No problem.”
He couldn’t help holding his gaze on her. His heart hiccuped as he took in her thick black hair, her pale oval face shaded by the broad brim of her Stetson. Her lips were rich and full. She seemed to know his eyes were on her, because she kept her head down as though to inspect her left hand, which she was still holding with her right.
Bear’s heart thudded. His hands tingled. It took a fierce will to keep from placing his hands on her shoulders, drawing her to him, tipping her chin up, and pressing his mouth to hers.
Suddenly, her head came up. She gazed at him obliquely for one second, slightly parting her lips. And then, as though catching herself, putting her passion on a short leash, she narrowed her eyes and said in a hard, caustic tone, “If you’re expecting payment, Agent Haskell, I am sorry. Our continued partnership will have to be enough.”
“Not even a kiss?”
She parted her lips a little more as she stared up at him, that same puzzlement as before entering her otherwise frigid gaze.
Then he grinned. “Just joshin’, Agent York. Keep your panties on.” He cuffed his hat back as he turned away from her and knelt beside the wood she’d gathered. “Me, I’m gonna build us a fire and get some coffee boilin’.”
“Arrogant bastard,” he heard her mutter as she walked away.
Bear built a low fire and set his black coffee pot to hissing on the flames. While Raven got to work cooking a pot of beans into which she sliced side pork and part of an onion, he took his rifle and walked around the camp, getting the lay of the land and making sure they were alone out here.
This far off the beaten path, and in an area whose remoteness attracted desperados on the run from all over the West and even the Midwest, a man had to keep his wits about him. Even when he was traveling with a woman whose beauty threatened to dull them.
Night had fallen, as it does in the desert, with an ethereal stillness and silence. The darkness was almost complete, assuaged only by the stars sparkling like Christmas tree ornaments, looking close enough in the clean, dry air that a man might reach up and scoop a handful out of the sky.
Haskell moved closer to the camp, glancing toward the orange flames dancing in the little clearing in which they’d bivouacked. He could see her moving around the fire, just now sitting down on a rock near the bubbling beans and the steaming coffee pot and popping the canteen’s cork.
She lifted the flask to her lips. Her watched her throat moving as she drank. She lowered the flask, sighed, and brushed the back of her hand across her mouth. Her breasts pushed against her blouse, and in the firelight, he could see the points of her nipples through the muslin. She leaned down to set the canteen beside her saddle and bedroll and then swept her hair back behind her head when she straightened her back.
She sat on the rock, leaning forward with her hands on her knees, considering the bubbling beans and the coffee pot with the steam issuing from the snout for a short time before she knelt beside the fire and gave the beans a stir. Haskell felt like a voyeur, watching her from cover of darkness, but there was just something so damned watchable about the willowy, graceful, black-haired girl.
His mouth, his hands, his cock yearned for her.
Why was she trying so damned hard to resist him?
He cursed under his breath and moved forward, bending a cottonwood branch as he stepped into the circle of firelight, and leaned his rifle against a boulder. There was a clatter as she dropped the spoon, and suddenly, she was facing him, extending her .41-caliber pistol straight out in her right hand.
“Easy,” he said, giving her a cockeyed grin. “Just me.”
She released a held breath, scowled at him, and returned the pistol to the small holster she wore on her left hip. “Come and get it,” she said, giving him her back as she knelt beside the fire again. Then she glanced over her shoulder to clarify her meaning: “Coffee and beans are ready.”
They ate in silence, one on each side of the fire. Occasionally, he’d glance over the flames at her to find her staring at him. She’d glance away quickly and continue eating. Occasionally, he’d find himself staring at her while she ate, and when she turned to find his eyes on her, he’d glance away as nonchalantly as possible, his cheeks warming.
Why did he so often feel like a tongue-tied schoolboy with an aching hard-on around this girl?
Long night, he thought. Long damn night.
And it was, too.
He rolled himself up in his blankets on one side of the fire, she on the other. While he tried to pretend he was asleep, not fidgeting around and tossing as he would have if she weren’t here, he could not for the life of him beckon so much as a doze. His mind was as crisp and clear as the sky and as dramatic as the twinkling stars.
He stared straight up at them. Sometimes, after staring long enough, he felt as though he were staring down at them. Occasionally, he’d look across the umber coals at Raven. He couldn’t tell, because she was as still as he was, but something told him that she couldn’t sleep, either.
After at least two hours of this torture, he heard her give a sigh, saw her toss her blankets aside. She rose, and he caught a flash of her white chemise, which she wore over men’s summer-weight longhandles, just before she wrapped herself in a blanket, stomped into her boots, and stalked off through the brush.
Probably heading off to answer a nature call.
Haskell lay there, staring at the stars. And then he, too, heaved himself up from his blankets. Clad in his longhandles and hat, he stepped into his boots and pushed through the brush. His eyes were fully adjusted to the darkness, and he negotiated the uncertain terrain easily by starlight, meandering around rocks and cactus clumps.
He knelt by the freshet running down the middle of the ancient river, doffed his hat, and cupped the tepid water to his face. He splashed it onto his head, pressed it into his shaggy curls.
Despite its not being very cold, it was refreshing.
Finally, he straightened, enjoying the slight chill of the water running down his face and head and dribbling onto his shoulders, chest, and back. He wished he had grabbed a cigar, so he could enjoy one out here in the middle of the canyon. A Cleopatra might just clear his head.
He was considering returning to the camp for one, when he heard a sound off to his right. His senses came alive, and his trigger finger itched. He wished he had strapped his guns around his w
aist. Foolish to have wandered out here unarmed.
Some owlhoot might have seen the fire—
He heard the sound again as he stared off into some spindly willows that followed the stream’s meandering course among white rocks. He couldn’t quite make out what it was. It might be a deer or a coyote visiting the freshet for a drink, or it might even be Raven.
Whatever it was, he couldn’t return to the camp without checking it out.
He rose from his knees, stuffed his hat onto his head, letting the rawhide thong dangle against his chest, and trudged as quietly as he could along the stream. Slowly, he moved through the brush. When he could see the slender creek again, flashing in the starlight, he stopped.
The profile of a human-shaped shadow knelt beside the stream, head lowered. A slow ringing grew in Haskell’s ears as he watched her cup water to her chest. Raven had removed the chemise. She opened her longhandles top, and he could see her breasts slant out from her chest as she crouched over the water and cupped water to them.
She froze. With a startled gasp, she whipped her head toward him, black hair winging out in the darkness. She closed the top across her breasts, and the starlight shone in her glaring eyes.
“Uh . . . sorry,” Bear said, and walked away in chagrin.
His ears warm and his cock aching, he returned to the camp and rolled himself up in his blankets. He sighed, smacked his lips, and closed his eyes.
He did not open them when he heard her return to the camp. There was a prolonged rustling, and then he jerked with a start when he felt her grind a toe against his ribs.
He lifted his head from his saddle and glared up at her. The fire was almost out, but he could still see that she was naked. She stared down at him, her hair a thick black curtain framing her face, tumbling down her shoulders and across her bare breasts, which were pale as cream in the darkness, the nipples in dark silhouette against them.
Wild to the Bone Page 8
