A Wolf in the Desert (11 page)

He saw her struggle, more costly than the first encounter when she'd stood gallantly with fear in check. She'd endured with stoic determination and pride, no matter the pressure. Never revealing more than nominal fright, never plumbing its seething depth, nor coming to terms with the toll it exacted.

She'd refused to break, refused the admission of terror that threatened to destroy her. Now it was there, all of it, in her vulnerable eyes. Flexing his fingers at her shoulders, he stood mute, not certain what she wanted. Not sure what she needed.

“Indian.”

Her bare whisper was a breaking cry, calling the name that was not truly his. And his heart broke with it, for what had been done to her, for her silent suffering, and for his part in it.

Swaying on her feet, she grasped the edges of his vest, her fingers sliding over abraded seams, nails tearing at roughened nap. Her head was down, tears gathered on her lashes and glinted in the sun, but never fell. On the rush of a grating sob catching in her throat, she lifted her face to him. In a wintry voice, the terrible truth he'd always known spilled out. “I was afraid. So afraid.”

“God help me.” His guttural words were prayer and plea as he pulled her closer, holding her tighter, using the heat of his body to drive the brittle chill from her. Lending his strength to her strength as guilt and pain flayed him, as the tears she wouldn't let fall were salt in invisible wounds. He should have taken her out the first day. He should have turned his back on the investigation that might or might not succeed. That might or might not save a hypothetical number of hypothetical lives.

But he hadn't done what he should. Instead he'd gambled, risking one real, flesh and blood life for that vague, faceless number. And had done this to her.

“I'm sorry,” he muttered into her hair. “Hell!” he snarled in rage, “I'm always sorry.” It was sorrow more than rage he felt as he held her tighter in an embrace that promised aching ribs. “If it's any consolation, you can call me what we both know I am. A cowardly, selfish son of the devil.”

“No!” Her head lifted from his shoulder, her fingers sealed his lips. “No,” she said again fiercely. “I may not know what you are, but I know what you aren't. Even when I forget, I know.”

She spoke nonsense, but he wanted to hear. Needed to hear. Recapturing her hand, holding it to the curve of his face, he asked, “What do you know, sweet Patience? What do you believe so fiercely?”

“That you aren't a coward. Prudent, but never cowardly.”

“I should be grateful for the confidence, when you have nothing to base it on.”

“I have enough. I've seen enough, heard enough.”

He stroked his cheek with the back of her clasped hand. “When did you grow so wise?”

“It doesn't take wisdom, only eyes to see, and ears to hear, and half a brain to remember when the other half forgets.”

He held her away from him, his dark gaze sweeping over her from head to toe. The pallor that blanched the color from her lips and cheeks, and marked her eyes with bruising shadows, had fled. There was color in her face, her eyes were calmer, her mouth was full and rosy, and enticing. The hand he held in his no longer trembled. He'd wanted to wrap himself around her to shield her from her pain. Instead she'd defended him against himself, and, in finding her cause, garnered strength and calm from it.

“You aren't trembling.”

Patience looked at her hand engulfed in his, quietly taking stock. “So it seems.”

He pulled her back a step, back to him. Twining his arm through hers, he folded her against him, resting their clasped hands on the side of his throat. The pulse there beat against her wrist, as steady, as strong, but with a heated rhythm. “You aren't afraid anymore?”

“Not now.” She drew a long, deep breath and gave him the answer he wanted. “Not with you.”

“Not even when I do this?” He bent to kiss her, touching only her lips, holding only her arm twined with his.

Patience didn't react, but she didn't move away when he lifted his head again. She answered huskily, “Not even then.”

He kissed her again, longer, slower, teasing her mouth with wondrous skill, and was rewarded by only the tiniest nuance of response. Only the slightest softening, the gentle curving of her lips against his. But it was enough. He pulled away, reluctance shining in his face, a secret storm stirring in his black gaze. “And now, Patience O'Hara? Are you going to turn and run from this? From what is beginning between us?”

“I have nowhere to run.” She deliberately ignored the last of his question.

“Is that the only reason? That you have nowhere to run?”

“Yes. Of course. Yes,” she answered a bit too adamantly.

Indian laughed softly. Releasing her hand he wound her braid around his palm, tilting her gaze to his, cupping her cheek with his free hand. The pad of his thumb traced a lazy path over her chin and the fullness of her lips, teasing as his kiss had. When she trembled, he knew it was not from fear. Her fear was gone, it was the need born of it that lingered.

“Little liar.” He tugged her braid, arching her neck even more, exposing the rushing pulse at the delicate hollow of her throat. The little flutter mesmerized and pulled him down to her again as unerringly as a lodestar. “The first was for the others,” he murmured an inch from her mouth. “This is for me.”

Binding her to him with her braid, keeping her with his embrace, he kissed her, long and hard and sweetly. Patience sighed and slipped her arms around his neck and her mouth was honey and wine. Drinking deeply of her sweetness, savoring the velvet touch of her mouth, the wildflower scent of her hair, he lost himself in her. There was no sun, no moon, no prying eyes, no threat. There was only Patience, and need.

As need flared into desire, he clung to a thread of sanity.

“No.” Taking her hands from his neck, gathering them to his lips, he kissed them. Meeting her glazed and bewildered gaze over their joined fingers, he murmured against their heated flesh. “No,” he said more quietly. Then again, “No.”

He put her from him, then, blinding himself to her shock, he bent to pluck her hat from the ground. Brushing the dirt from it with his forearm, he placed it on her head and tugged the brim low. His fingertips lingered at her cheek. “I want you, Patience O'Hara,” he murmured, “and I need you. But not here, not like this. Not yet.”

He turned away, stopped and turned back. Trailing the back of a knuckle down her throat, he promised softly, “Soon.”

Patience was still as he left her, dazed and staring after him long past the time he disappeared into the desert. She didn't feel the burning rays of the sun, nor hear the booted step that slipped stealthily through the barren dirt. A hand catching at her elbow, tugging at her sleeve, was her only warning as she whirled to face her newest intruder.

“Hurt.”

“E
va hurt you.”

“Callie!” Patience gasped. “What are you doing here?”

“I heard them talking, sayin' Eva hurt you. I don't want you to feel bad.” Tears gathered in eyes that were wonderfully blue, full and luscious lips trembled as tentative fingers brushed lightly over the tear in Patience's shirt.

“It's nothing, really,” Patience assured the girl, who couldn't have been a minute over sixteen, if she were that. Clasping Callie's hand, she pulled her to her side. “Thank you for caring, Callie, but you know what Snake will do if he sees you here.”

Delicate shoulders lifted in a graceful shrug, eyes as placid as a summer morning gazed levelly at her. “I know.”

And Patience had heard the sharp crack of too many open-handed slaps and punches too many times not to know. Brutality and public humiliation were Snake's method of punishment for small and imagined infractions of the rules he expected Callie to follow. Indian had warned her not to intervene, for her own sake, but mostly for Callie's. He'd learned the difficult lesson that intervention only brought greater abuse when they were alone. One morning of watching her move in exquisite agony had been enough to throttle his objections.

Even Patience had come to realize that Callie accepted Snake's public punishment so unflinchingly that it was unthinkable what he must do when they were alone. But what fiendish torture waited for her if he saw her in Indian's camp?

“You know he's made this area off limits.” She spoke as she might to a child, for in mind and thought, Callie was little more than that. “He'll be worse than angry if he finds out, and he might do something terrible to you.”

“I know that, too.”

“Callie.” Patience brushed hair like corn silk from the girl's forehead. Her fingers touched the scar that marred what had been a flawless face. Carefully, regretfully, as it were an unhealed wound she stroked the twisted mark. “Hasn't he done enough to you?”

“Don't matter.” Again the elegant shrug. “He can't help I make him so mad.”

Patience didn't argue. She could have argued throughout eternity and it wouldn't change Callie. She'd had little contact with the girl or any of the others, staying apart as Indian wished her to, and as she wished, but one would have to be blind and deaf not to see the girl's innocence and naiveté. Only sociopaths like Snake and the Wolves wouldn't be enchanted by her fey, sweet gentleness and unearthly beauty.

Callie was an ethereal creature misplaced in time and circumstance. One who should be cherished and protected, and left to play in shady, dew-strewn glades, not snatched away to a harsh, hard land by a pitiless marauder. Sighing in frustration at what she could never change, Patience clasped the girl's hand, surprised all over again at the fragility of the tiny bones. Pulling Callie with her, she went deeper into the camp Indian had prepared for them. Stopping behind the concealing foliage of the juniper, she explained, “The least we can do is try to keep from making him so mad.”

Mad was the right word for Snake. Mad as in insane. But what Snake didn't see, he couldn't use as another flimsy excuse to abuse Callie. “Sit here by me in the shade.” Patience sat cross-legged on a blanket-covered bed of cushioning leaves. Indian had made it for her, carefully positioning it to catch the warmth of the early morning sun, then to lie in deep cooling shade in the heat of evening. “Come.” She patted the blanket. “We can visit awhile out of the sun.”

Callie rubbed her peeling nose. “That would be nice, I never burned before yesterdee, when I lost my old cap. Snake says I just must toughen up. But I do believe the sun is closer and hotter here than in Carolina.”

“You're from Carolina, Callie?”

“Yes'm.”

“North or South?”

Blue eyes stared at her blankly. “Ma'am?”

“North Carolina or South Carolina,” Patience explained. “Do you know which is your home?”

Callie's face screwed into a frown, her fingers worried with the hem of her loose shirt as she tried to remember. “No, ma'am, I guess I don't rightly know.” Her frown deepened, taking on an edge of distress. “Does it matter?”

Patience covered Callie's hand with hers, stopping the nervous fidget. “It doesn't matter in the least. North or South, both are beautiful country.”

“Oh, yes, ma'am, my Carolina is. ‘Specially in the morning when the mists lie low in the holler. Why the whole world looks like a fairy land, so soft and gentle-like. The Cherokee call it the land of a thousand smokes, and I guess that's ‘bout right.”

“You liked it there?”

“I surely did, ‘cept when Paw taken the strop to me.”

“The strop?”

“You know, the leather that whets his razor.”

“He beat you with a leather strap?”

“Most times,” Callie answered innocently. “In the field it could be a board, and in the barn, a harness. When there weren't nothing else handy, he mostly used his fist.”

Callie's speech and mannerisms suggested the mountains of North Carolina. Patience guessed her home had been one of those few surviving enclaves hidden deep in the sheltering hills, far away from the modern, sophisticated world. A land where time moved slowly, with values that were its own. In one of Keegan O'Hara's fatherly excursions, she had lived for a month in such an enclave, coming to know its people, learning to love the old English flavor of their habits and speech. A land preserved within a land, where quaint and ancient customs still thrived. Yet, in its people, a land like any other, with those who were good and kind, and those of little honor and austere cruelty.

“The Carolinas are so far away, how is it you're with Snake?”

“Further than I ever thought I'd be, that's for sure. Wouldn't a happened atall if I weren't going home from the church social the very minute he was passin' through. He scared me a little then and I run all the way home, but he follered me. Told my Paw he taken a shine to me. Traded a brand new, genuwine switchblade knife for me.

“My Paw warned him I was weak-minded and given to dreamin', but Snake said that don't matter. Now he hates it as much as Paw did when I sit too long lookin' at a flower weavin' in the sun, or spider webs shiny with dew.” A disparaging gesture heaped the blame on herself. “I know it's wrong, and I shouldn't do it, but I can't help gettin' caught up in somethin' pretty. It's like it takes hold of my brain. I use to try to draw the pretties, so I could keep them, but my Paw fed my pencils to the hogs. Hogs'll eat anythin', you know.”

Patience listened with growing horror. In dappled shade she watched the younger woman's graceful moves, saw her gentle innocence, marveled at her breathtaking loveliness. Most of all she heard the reverent love of beauty that brought only heartache.

“When your father traded you for the knife, what did you do?”

Callie cast a puzzled look at Patience. “Why, there weren't nothin' to do.”

“Did you want to go with Snake?”

“There weren't no choice. A deal's a deal, I had to bide by it.” Another languid lift of her shoulders sent silver strands of her hair falling over her breasts in a shimmering veil. “At first I cried a little, Paw was mean sometimes, ‘specially since my brothers left and Maw died, but it was still home. I wanted to take my kitty. Snake said no, and Paw did, too. I cried when he kilt it.”

Patience swallowed hard, forcing impotent fury down. “Your father killed your cat?”

“Yes'm, he beat Snake to it.”

“That must have been terrible.” Patience had little trouble visualizing two subhuman men, one as cruel as the other, vying for the chance to inflict another wound to the heart of this exquisite child.

“It surely was. For a long time I was so sick for home and so lonely for kitty that I like to died.” A smile broke across her face, dreamy and thoughtful. “A kitty surely does keep the lonelies away. You look like you got the lonelies bad when Indian rides.”

Callie's dimples flashed in a delighted giggle. She was a child with a delicious secret. “That's why I brought you a s'prise.” She delved into the oversize faded denim bag she always carried hitched over her shoulder. “Somethin' to make you smile.”

“Callie, what...” Patience stopped in astonishment as the girl laid a tiny kitten in her lap. “My goodness, where did you get this?”

Callie was nearly shivering in her joy of sharing the one thing she loved with Indian's dauntless woman. “Snake stopped at a store in the country, where there weren't nothing else around for miles and miles. There was an old momma cat there with her babies, when Snake went in for some smokes, I snuk one into my bag.” Her fingers fidgeted again, a frown creased her unlined forehead. “She had seven, I didn't think she'd miss one. Did I do wrong? You don't like her?”

Patience stroked the kitten, listening to the rumbling purr that seemed too noisy to come from such a tiny body. “I like her very much. I think she's a beautiful kitten.”

“You can play with her anytime you feel bad. I was afeared Alice and Eva would find her and hurt her, but I know you won't.”

“Callie, the kitten is wonderful. I know you need something that's yours to love, but Snake isn't going to like this.”

Callie took the kitten from Patience and buried her face in its fur. “It don't matter what he likes,” she said in a rare, small spark of defiance. “Besides, nobody knows ‘bout her but me and you.” In a rush of new panic she looked fearfully at Patience. “You won't tell? If Alice and Eva find her, you won't let them hurt her?”

“No, Callie, no.” Patience stroked the silver hair, soothing the girl with her words and her touch. “I would never tell, and I'll never let anyone hurt your kitty. At least not if I can stop it. But how can you hope to keep her hidden from Snake?”

“She sleeps good in my bag, and when he ain't lookin', I sneak her out for a walk in the desert.”

“She'll be too big for the bag soon, and cats don't sleep as much as kittens. She isn't going to be happy so confined, Callie.”

“When she's a cat I'll teach her to run from Snake, the rest of ‘em, too. Nobody's gonna hurt my kitty,” Callie said fiercely. “Nobody.”

“Oh, Callie, I hope you're right.” Patience's voice was harsh from the sudden tightness in her throat. How could she make the girl understand the impossible task of keeping the kitten hidden? How could she keep her from being hurt again?

“Listen.” Callie was suddenly so still she hardly seemed to breathe. “Hear that?”

Patience listened. At first there was nothing, then she heard the heavy thrum of a motorcycle.

“It's Snake,” Callie said in creeping dread.

“How do you know? How could you?”

“I just know. Glory! When we all got back, and he taken off alone again, I figgered he wasn't gonna be back ‘fore dark.”

The sound of the engine grew louder, coming at a dangerously high rate of speed.

“I gotta go!” Callie was suddenly frantic. “He's mad, I hear it in the way he's ridin'.”

“Callie,” Patience began, intending to offer some encouragement, and realized there was none she could give.

“Gotta go, gotta go.” The soft voice murmured the singsong phrase over and over as she tucked the kitten into her bag. “You gotta be good, kitty, extra good.” Her task done, she was on her feet and half-away when she stopped and turned back to Patience. “Custer said you was a doctor. Not a people doctor, a animal doctor.”

“That's true, I am.”

Callie swallowed hard, struggling with the unthinkable. “If somebody hurts her, will you fix it? Take care of her?”

“Of course I will, if I can.”

Callie nodded as if she understood the qualification, but Patience wondered if she could.

“Her name's Calico, like mine.”

“It's a pretty name.”

“I just wanted you to know, seein' as how you like her and all.”

“I like her a lot,” Patience said in a tone filled with sadness for all she couldn't say and couldn't do for this childlike girl. “I'm honored that you wanted to share Calico with me.”

“She made you feel better?”

“You both made me feel better.”

A smile that would have brought tears to a stone shone on Callie's face only an instant before it was supplanted by abject terror. “Gotta go. Gotta go.”

The engine was a howling shriek now, and if mechanical objects could sound mad, it did, indeed. Patience shiv-ered in the burning sun and watched Callie scamper the distance between the two camps. “Please,” she whispered, “don't let anything happen to them.”

“If she's careful, nothing will.” A hard, callused hand slipped beneath her braid to rest lightly at her nape. “Yet.”

Without turning, Patience circled the powerful wrist with her fingers, the tips of them lying against a distended vein that pulsed with the rhythm of Indian's heart. Brushing her cheek over the damp heel of his hand, she muttered, “Yet?”

“I'm afraid that's the operative word.” He didn't explain that Callie had been with Snake three months, longer than was common. He couldn't explain what he thought would happen to the girl when Snake tired of her.

“Her nose is peeling.”

Patience's remark pulled Indian from dark, consuming thoughts. “Sorry, what did you say?”

“You said she never burned, but her nose is peeling,” she repeated, wondering where his thoughts had taken him. “In another day or two it will be raw.”

“Today was different. We ran into a dust storm, it left us all a little raw and tender and more susceptible to the sun. She had a cap, it must have been lost in the wind.”

“I wanted to give her my hat, but Snake would recognize it, and know that she'd been here.”