He closed his eyes, the better to savor her touch, the easier to pretend that nothing was wrong. “This is crazy.”
“Why?”
Her question shattered his mood. Pace opened his eyes and glared at her. “You know why.”
Her hand on his chest stopped moving, and her jaw flexed. “Don’t you dare say it’s because we’re family. Don’t you dare do to me what my father tried to do to your sister.”
Pace rolled from beneath her and stood staring down at her, his chest suddenly heaving. “It’s because I refuse to do to you what your father did to my sister.”
His withdrawal allowed Joanna to feel the first breath of cooling air as night settled across the clearing. She rose to stand before him, the better to see him in the gathering gloom. “Well, I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to know that if you feel what I feel, you won’t be horrified the way he was, that you won’t keep pushing me away the way he pushed Rena. I’m glad to know—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You were just a snot-nosed kid at the time.”
“I was not snot-nosed. I was old enough to pay you back for hitting Daddy.”
“Yeah,” Pace said as he retrieved his rifle and pistol from where he’d placed them beneath the edge of the blanket. “And I have the scars to prove it.”
“You do not. What scars?”
“Four little white dots, one for each tine of the fork you jabbed me with.”
Joanna glanced down at his hip, as if to see through his buckskins to the scars he spoke of. “No kidding?”
“You’ll have to take my word for it. Roll those blankets up so we can get out of here.”
“Spoilsport.” Joanna shook the blankets out and began to roll them up, but she wasn’t about to let Pace have the last word about her father and stepmother. “Did you never ask Serena how she and my father came to be together? Did she not tell you what he put her through?”
Pace turned away and started burying the ashes from the fire. Serena’s voice from years ago echoed through his mind.
He wouldn’t have me if I tore off all my clothes and threw myself at him. I ought to know. It so happens I’ve tried it. More than once.
Pace had been so dead set against the idea of Matt and Serena as a couple that he had refused to believe Serena. Had she been speaking the truth? Had she tried to tempt Matt? Had Matt tried to refuse? They had both said so, but…
“We’re not talking about them,” Pace told Jo with a snarl. “We’re talking about us.”
“You’re the one who brought them up.”
“No, you were, but they have nothing to do with this. Family and everything else aside, this…this whatever it is between us stops here and now. It doesn’t go one step further.”
She piled the bedroll next to the saddle and turned away from him. “If that’s the way you want it.”
Pace couldn’t stand the hurt he heard in her voice. “It’s what has to be. Christ, Jo, look at us. You’re a beautiful young woman with her entire life ahead of you, while I’m…”
Slowly, Jo turned to face him in the light of the rising half moon. He’d finished burying the ashes and was several yards away breaking up clumps of horse droppings and scattering them into the woods. With each movement, his medicine pouch swung freely from its rawhide thong around his neck. “While you’re what?”
He turned to face her. “You have to ask? Are you blind, girl? Look at me! I’m an old man compared to you. If that isn’t enough, a young, pretty white girl like you has no business ruining her life over a half-breed Apache bastard with a reputation for trouble.”
For a long moment, the only sounds were of the horse chomping grass, crickets chirruping, and an owl hooting somewhere to the south. Then, Jo’s voice came, soft, incredulous. “I don’t believe you said that.”
“Why not?” He jerked the picket stake from the ground and led the horse to the waiting saddle. “It’s nothing more than the unvarnished truth, and you know it.”
“What I know,” she said tightly, “is that that’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“What’s—”
“Shut up,” she snapped. “Just shut up before I break my knuckles against your teeth.”
Pace would have given her a comeback—he was angry enough. Angry with himself, with her, with Juerta for forcing them together. Angry with his own body, and maybe even his heart, for betraying him. Hell, he was damn good and mad at life in general.
But he kept his mouth shut, just the way she told him to, because he didn’t know what to say about the tears he heard in her voice.
Chapter Eight
Don Rodrigo Francisco Alfredo Martinez Juerta paused in the act of slapping his quirt against the shank of his boot. The night was full dark, but the godforsaken rain had finally stopped. His men, upon seeing the look in his eyes, had managed to find enough dry wood for a fire. Even in the golden light of the flames, the man before him appeared pale. As well he should.
“What did you say?” Don Rodrigo asked quietly.
“Mi jefe, lo siento mucho.”
The quavering apology from Manuel Ortiz grated on Don Rodrigo’s nerves. “You lost their tracks?”
There wasn’t a man among the two dozen in camp who didn’t recognize that deadly quiet tone for what it was—the precursor to violence. As a group, they backed away into the shadows and left the tracker, Ortiz, to his fate.
Manuel crumpled his hat in his hands and bravely met Don Rodrigo’s narrow-eyed glare. “Sí, mi jefe, I have lost the tracks. The rain…”
“What,” Don Rodrigo said slowly, “do you intend to do about it?”
Manuel tried not to show how relieved he was at the question. That Don Rodrigo had asked it meant Manuel would be given a chance to do something. “I would like, por favor, to send several men out in the morning in different directions. I myself will double back, for that is what I believe the Apache has done.”
“Apache,” Don Rodrigo muttered. “Sí, he did have the look of one. And the sound,” he added, remembering that hair-raising cry from the day before, when the red-headed bitch had been snatched from his grasp.
Who was he, Don Rodrigo wondered. Apache. Maybe, but his skin was too light. Half-breed. How had he come to be there?
Had Don Rodrigo’s puling little cousin Augusta gone to the Colton ranch to find out why her friend had left Mexico so suddenly, as he had told her she’d done? Had the Coltons already sent someone to look for the girl? Why would they send a stinking half-breed?
It mattered not. The girl must be found. If she was allowed to tell what she knew, Don Rodrigo’s life would be over. One did not kill the daughter of President Díaz’s most favorite advisor and hope to keep his wealth and power. If Díaz found out, Don Rodrigo would lose everything. That, he could not tolerate. The girl must be found. The girl must be silenced.
And oh, he thought with a heated grin, how he would enjoy silencing that fiery beauty. How he would enjoy it, indeed. Right before he killed her.
The half moon tracked Pace and Joanna north and west across the high desert plateau and lit their way past fists of sandstone and granite thrusting up from the treeless land. Grass gave way to desert scrub: cactus and agave, mesquite and creosote, sage, paloverde, ocotillo.
At his back Pace felt Jo’s effort to keep from touching him. Instead of placing her hands at his sides or around his waist, as she usually did, she gripped the cantle for support. She’d had only a few hours of sleep, not nearly enough food, and had yet to fully recover from being shot, much less from all else she’d gone through at Juerta’s hands. Yet she sat up straight, when he knew she had to be tired.
Who am I trying to kid? he asked himself. He was at least as preoccupied with missing the feel of her pressed against his back as he was with how tired she must be.
Then there was the silence. They had ridden before for hours in silence, but it had never felt like this. Yesterday their lack of conversation had been comfortable. To
night, hour after hour, it was filled with the memory of the way she’d touched him, the way she’d looked at him as if he were everything she’d ever wanted. That kind of look could make a man lose all good sense, as Pace had proven at dusk when he’d pushed her away.
He’d hurt her, and damn, he hadn’t wanted to. But he couldn’t let her get any closer to him. Lying there on the blanket with her, he’d discovered a vulnerability inside himself that he hadn’t known existed. A vulnerability to a red-headed firefly with eyes as green as the summer leaves on a cottonwood right after a cleansing rain, and a touch that reached right down into his soul and threatened to unravel him. A touch that, despite everything he’d told himself and said to Jo, he wanted to feel again.
“You don’t really think that, do you?”
After so many hours of silence, her voice startled him. “Think what?” he asked, wondering if he’d spoken aloud of his wish for her touch.
“That you’re nothing more than a half-breed Apache bastard with a reputation for trouble. You don’t really think of yourself that way, do you?”
“I don’t really think of myself in any particular way. But, face it, Jo. That’s how other people see me. You have to admit, the description fits.”
“So does strong, honest, caring, gentle.”
Pace snorted. “Gentle? Nobody’s ever called me that.”
“You’ve been gentle with me,” she said softly. “No one has ever been more gentle than when you took care of me in the cave.”
“If I’m so damn gentle, why are you afraid to touch me?”
“Afraid? I’m not afraid. I thought you didn’t want me to touch you.”
“Nothing I’ve said has anything to do with what I want, Firefly.”
“What do you want, Pace?”
Her hand on his shoulder sent a shudder down his spine. “Too damn much,” he murmured. “More than I have a right to want.”
“What don’t you have a right to want?”
“You,” he said before his brain could shut his mouth.
Slender arms slid around his waist as Jo pressed herself against his back. He held his breath and didn’t let it out until he felt the weight of her head rest against him.
“Do me a favor?” he asked her.
“What favor?”
“Forget I said that.”
“What? That you want me, or that you have no right?”
Pace looked up at the night sky as if the stars held answers to the questions in his heart. “Help me out here, Jo. You don’t know what you’re asking. I’m trying, for once in my life, to be noble.”
“Damn being noble. Where’s a decent half-breed Apache bastard with a reputation for trouble when a woman wants one?”
At sunup they encountered an old man leading a donkey and cart. Except for Juerta and his men, he was the first person they had seen. Pace fervently hoped he was the last. In a land with few people, as the Chihuahua Desert was, word had a way of outstripping any known telegraph system of more populated areas. News of an Indian riding double with a red-headed white woman would spread like a prairie wildfire.
“We’ll never get home at this rate,” Joanna muttered.
It had taken Pace longer to find a hidden place to spend the heat of the day than he had wanted. For her sake he should have stopped hours ago, but there had been no shelter from searching eyes or burning sun.
He stood now beside the horse and studied the spot he’d found. The potential campsite was a nook in the hills, protected on three sides by sheer rock walls stretching twenty feet high and leaning in, nearly touching each other on top. On the fourth side a scraggly cedar concealed the nook. The space inside was no larger than five by ten, but it would do. Most importantly, brush grew along the ledges above, offering shade.
“And here I was just thinking how pleasant it was that you weren’t a whiner,” he said with a smirk.
She pinched his side. “I’m not whining. I just think we should keep going.”
“You’re in no shape to keep going.”
“I can last another couple of hours.”
Pace grunted as he carefully lifted her down from the saddle. “Only if I tie you to the horse.”
“That’s not tr—”
Her words cut off in a gasp as Pace stood her before him and her legs collapsed.
He swung her up in his arms. “You were saying?”
Through her exhaustion Joanna felt the power in his arms, the flex of muscles across his chest. Never before had she been so aware of a man. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and refused to form words.
Pace sat her on the ground so she could lean against the rock wall. “Besides, the horse needs rest.”
After placing his bedroll, saddlebags, and canteen beside her, he gathered the reins and eyed the gunbelt she wore over her shoulder. “Is that pistol loaded?”
“Fat lot of good it would do me if it wasn’t.”
“Fat lot of good I’d be if I didn’t ask.”
“It’s loaded.”
“Keep it handy. I’m going to tie the horse in that thicket around the bend, then I’m going to have a look around.”
Joanna wanted to protest—she didn’t want him to leave her here alone; what if he ran in to Juerta? Her own exhaustion kept her quiet. If he ran into Juerta, she would be more of a hindrance than a help. Besides, they hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Juerta since yesterday in the rain.
“Stay awake,” Pace ordered as he turned and led the horse away.
She waited a good fifteen minutes—ample time for him to get some distance away—then forced herself to her feet. If she didn’t walk around and loosen up, her muscles would refuse to ever work again. Then, too, nature was calling.
By the time she’d seen to her body’s need, she was feeling better and decided to gather what twigs and deadwood she could find in case Pace brought back something to eat. There wasn’t much fuel to be found, but she gathered what she could. With each movement she made, her muscles loosened and became more fluid. She still ached, but decided she just might live through this experience after all.
She wondered, though, if her heart would survive Pace Colton. From the time they’d spent in the cave, he was more a stranger to her than the man she’d known all her life.
Maybe it wasn’t him, maybe she was the one who was different. She no longer looked at him through the eyes of a child. Instead of her favorite, familiar uncle who seldom came home anymore, she now saw him as a man, a dangerous, fascinating man who drew her with his eyes, his heat, his voice.
Joanna had never felt for any man what she felt when she touched him, when she looked into his eyes. She’d never before known this heady rush of heat in her veins or the ache inside her to soothe whatever it was in him that made him keep his distance.
After he had admitted last night that he wanted her, he had withdrawn into himself until sunup. Then he’d gone back to treating her like a pal instead of a woman he wanted.
She didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what she wanted to do. She only knew she wanted to be closer to him. Man-woman close. If he would let her.
Was this love? This hot, achy feeling in her chest? This need to see him every moment? This emptiness whenever he was out of her sight?
She piled the firewood beneath the cedar and spread the bedroll out, wincing as she moved incautiously and pulled her side. She didn’t dare lie down on the blanket for fear she would fall asleep, so she sat and leaned back against the rock wall and wondered if Pace would push her away again, and what she would do about it if he did.
Despite her best efforts, she fell asleep. She woke sometime later to the most terrifying sight of her life.
Pace inched his way up the highest point of land in the area and, removing his hat and stretching out flat to avoid being silhouetted, pulled out his field glasses for a look. The sun was almost directly overhead, beating down on the rocks and scrub with killing intensity. Even the creatures created by God to survive in this desolate deser
t sought whatever scrap of shade was available. For as far as Pace could see, nothing moved. Not bird nor animal nor shadow. Not even a breath of air. If Juerta was out there, he’d gone to ground to wait out the hottest part of the day.
Pace stayed there searching in all directions for another ten minutes. With a silent grunt that was part satisfaction, part frustration, he moved back down the rocks as silently as he’d climbed. The bastard wouldn’t find them while he and Jo rested, but Pace wanted to know where he was. Was he still out there, searching, or had he given up?
For Jo’s sake, Pace wished for the latter but had to assume the former.
Before going back to Jo, he followed more than a mile of their back trail and wiped out signs of their passage. In the process, he bagged a jack rabbit with the slingshot he’d taken from his saddle earlier and tied to his belt.
With the rabbit dangling by its ears from his fist, he checked on the horse, then approached the cleft in the rocks silently.
He heard nothing. Not a single sound. With as little noise as possible, he edged past the cedar tree. The branches scraping across his arm sounded loud in the stillness.
Jo sat on the blanket with her legs outstretched and her back braced against the rock. Her face was, if possible, paler than he’d ever seen on a living person. Beads of sweat covered her forehead; her hands were clenched into fists at her sides.
He opened his mouth to speak, to ask what was wrong, but the panic in her eyes stopped him. Without moving, except for the hand he slid toward his gun, he scanned the crevice, searching for the source of the terror in her eyes.
He found nothing.
What? he mouthed silently.
Without moving her head, Joanna cast her eyes down, then back up. Pace followed her gaze and swore that his heart literally stopped beating. All that was visible was the tail, but there was no mistaking the rattle or the distinctive black and white rings just below. The rest of the Diamondback rattler was underneath Jo’s skirt. Before Pace’s heart started beating again, he figured, going by the thickness of the tail, the deadly snake was a full six feet long.
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