A Wolf in the Desert (10 page)

Patience backed away. That quickly it was finished. Not with the damage she could have done, but enough. Eva would be a long while standing, and longer repeating her threats. For a moment, as the crying woman cringed at her feet, Patience felt a strange compassion for her. Compassion she dared not reveal as she lifted her head to stare coldly at Alice who gaped as if her eyes played tricks.

“You started this, now come get your friend.” Patience's command was harsh. “Take her back to your own camp. Tend her.”

“But h-how?” Alice stammered.

“Bind the knee, stabilize it. See that she doesn't walk on it for a while. After this, stay in your own camp.” The last was flung over Patience's shoulder as she walked away, distancing herself from her own havoc. Kim's most devastating technique had served her well before. She never hesitated to employ it, but she never liked it.

When the women were gone, she returned to her seat beneath the scrub. Sunlight glinted on gray metal. Eva's knife lay at her feet. Plucking it from the sand, she wiped it clean and tucked it in her belt. Taking her low-crowned cattleman's hat from the tree limb where she'd hung it, she pulled it low over her forehead. Depleted in the unrelenting heat by the exertion of her encounter with Eva, she tugged the hat another notch lower and, with the brim shading her eyes, leaned back in the pitiful shade to wait for Indian.

She knew she couldn't sleep. Shouldn't sleep.

Not even after exhausting hours of wary vigilance, nor in the comforting assurance that Alice was too cowardly for another skirmish, and Eva incapable. As the balm of a soothing languor seeped into body and mind, she welcomed it, giving herself up to it, emptying her mind of everything but this day, this minute, the nirvana of capricious peace.

But she wouldn't sleep.

Shielded by the precious umbrella of shade, as heat swept the chill of fear from her bones, she heard the rustle of tiny leaves stirring in rising currents of heat, the cry of a bird in flight, the secret scurry of small creatures. Insects raised their chorus, a summer serenade in this beautiful land, this land she called unforgiving.

Hours spun themselves away slowly, she drowsed and listened.

She didn't mean to sleep.

* * *

Silence reached into a dreamless darkness. Silence in which there were no crying birds, no scurrying creatures, no serenading insects. Even the air was motionless, the leaves quiet. It reached for her, drawing her from the darkness to the still light.

Alarm crept into the languor of sleep, padding across tender nerves like a lazy tiger. Releasing a long breath unconsciously caught and held, Patience stirred with guarded restraint, feeling the weight of oppressive heat, the touch of an unrelenting gaze upon her. Cautiously, making no sudden moves, with the tip of one finger she pushed the hat from her eyes. The sun was a white light, blinding her, turning the world to a glittering haze. Yet she knew someone was there, watching her.

Leaning away from the tree, her back straight, she blocked the glare with a hand beneath the brim of the tilted hat. The glare swam into a pattern of hot white and sooty blur. The blur became a shape crouching at her feet. Recoiling, she choked back a cry, her eyes straining, focusing. With excruciating concentration the shape became a body, a face. Ebony eyes studied her intently.

“Indian!” The word was a croak torn from a parched throat.

He didn't move, nor turn his riveted stare. He didn't speak or acknowledge the leap of grateful recognition in her voice. Slowly, with utter care, his probing scrutiny moved methodically over her, noting grimly a tear in her shirt before returning to settle relentlessly on her face.

Patience addressed him again, to prove to herself he was real. “I didn't hear you come back. I didn't hear the bikes. How long have you been here?” Her voice faded away; he wasn't hearing her.

She stared up at him, seeing a far different man. There was a chilling light in the black depths of his piercing stare. A dangerous cast in the grim set of his features. For the first time she didn't doubt that he was far more deadly than Snake, or Blue Doggie, or Hoke.

“Are you all right?” The question cut harshly through her worried concern.

“All right?” She blinked, and shook her head to clear it. “Of course I am.”

“They didn't hurt you?” There was no ease in his stare.

“Hurt me?” Her mind dulled by sleep and surprise, she could only parrot his words. “Who?”

“Alice.” He spat the name. “And Eva.”

The encounter with the woman came rushing back to her. Not forgotten. Repressed by the lassitude of sleep, diminished by his return, but never forgotten. “How did you know?”

“I heard the story. Their version.” He shifted from his crouch to rest his weight on one knee. “I'd like to hear what you have to say.”

She shrugged, at a loss to know what he wanted.

He touched the tear at the shoulder of her shirt. His voice was harsh, brittle. “Eva did this.”

Shocked, Patience looked down at the tear, at the thin red line that marked her arm. She licked her lips, finding them suddenly dry. “I don't know.”

“I know,” Indian said softly, the savagery of his anger constrained, but not absolved as he looked toward the other camp. “They came together. Alice stopped there.” A gesture indicated the exact spot Alice had stood to bait her. “Eva came closer, here, by the grass.” Again a gesture that was uncannily accurate. “She waited there awhile. One would assume she was talking to Alice, and to you. She moved once more, in a walk that was unnatural to her.”

Patience frowned her surprise, remembering Eva's mincing imitation of a grand lady.

“She waited,” Indian continued, then was quiet, replaying the reconstructed scene in his mind. When he turned to face her again, his eyes were bleak. “Then she attacked.” He touched her shoulder as if he would brush away the livid reminder left by Eva's knife. “And did this.”

Patience looked down at his hand on her arm, too amazed to hear the ache of guilt and sorrow. Lifting her startled gaze to his, she asked, “How do you know all this? How could you?”

“The land tells the story. And this...” He smiled then, softening the harshness in him as he touched her chin with the tips of his fingers. “This beautiful, expressive face Eva would have mutilated, if the woman who wears it weren't the indomitable O'Hara.”

His smile vanished, the spark of light left his eyes. “Can you forgive me? For leaving you with them? For everything?”

Patience caught his hand in hers. “There's nothing to forgive.”

“Nothing?”

She knew he was recalling the night in the lean-to. The awful night when he'd been reduced to behaving as the Wolves expected. As they would behave. Gripping his hand tighter, she said in a tone that allowed no dissent, “Nothing. What you've done, you've done for me. My mind and my thoughts were too muddled to understand at first. Now I do.”

“You only think you do.” Turning his hand in hers, clasping it closely, he pulled her up with him. Keeping her near, ignoring the heat that rose around them in scintillating waves. He brushed his free hand down her braid, his fingers lingering at the beaded thong. “I wonder if you'll be so charitable when you know the whole story?”

“What is the truth? Who are you really? What are you? I've asked so many times!” Her fingers moved urgently within his grasp. “Tell me.”

His head moved in the tiniest negative gesture. “Telling you would change nothing and serve no good purpose. For your own welfare it's better this way, for now.”

“Better? You hold my life in your hands and it's better I don't know who and what you are? What good purpose does that serve?”

“It's safer this way.”

“Safer for whom?”

“For you, O'Hara.”

“Why?”

He laughed then, a hollow sound of little amusement. A signal the discussion was ended. “We begin to sound like a broken record. Same song, same verse.”

Patience met his look levelly. “You aren't going to tell me.”

“No, and you aren't going to stop asking.”

“Bet on it.”

“I suppose this is what one would call an impasse.”

“Call it what you like.” She tugged her hand from his. ”We've covered every possible angle and I've had enough.”

As she spun away from him, he caught her wrist, bringing her back to him. Folding her arm with his to his shoulder, he pulled her nearer. “There is one more thing.”

He stroked her braid, gathering it in his palm and tugged her head back, turning her face up to his. There was something new, something she couldn't interpret in his expression.

“What?” she demanded, chafing at his unconcern for her ill-tempered resentment.

“This.” His arms closed around her, trapping her. His head descended to hers. When she would have turned away, he caught the braid again, brushing it aside to cradle her head in his palm.

“Indian, no!” Her cry was only a whisper as she struggled in his embrace.

“Yes.” He ignored her efforts as his lips skimmed over her face. “For the others.” His mouth teased a corner of hers and drifted away. “The warrior's woman is expected to welcome him home, thus.” His cradling palm guided her mouth to his kiss.

For all her resistance, her mouth was sweet and still as he crushed her body to his. Her braid tumbled down her back, a sensuous rope of silk brushing his bare arm, teasing the sensitized flesh. Indian heard his own unexpected gasp and felt the throb of his measured heartbeat as the taste of her struck fire to embers long banked. The need he'd struggled to deny sent him reeling and he held her tighter, yet more gently than he'd ever held anything in his life.

With hot-blooded perception he was aware of every nuance of her, every subtlety. Her familiar scent was the freshness of a morning breeze in the midst of high desert doldrums, the taste of her was smoky heat in his blood. Inch by tiny inch he felt the rigidness of her posture lessen. Slowly, deliciously, the satin curves and velvet hollows of her body conformed to his.

With mindless initiative his hands moved from her head to her shoulders and her back, releasing her from his kiss if she wished it. Yet she didn't turn from him. When her lips softened beneath his, it was Indian who broke away, Indian who moved beyond her touch.

He stood, as silent as the stone that surrounded them. As still. His body was taut, his dark eyes brooding as the summer sun bore down on him. He'd never felt such fear for anyone as he had for Patience. When Alice greeted the Wolves return with her tale of the encounter with Eva, he'd been mad with it. Fear was ashes in his mouth and ice in his heart.

As one demented, he'd hurried to her, the darkness in him growing darker, the cold colder, when he found her lying so still in the shade of the juniper. Even as he realized that she slept peacefully, only a will of iron kept him from snatching her from her slumber. He wanted to hold her close to his heart, to run his hands down the long bones, the soft muscles, proving what his eyes told him. Assuring that she was unharmed.

As he crouched at her feet, a black-eyed savage waiting for her to wake, he'd never known such utter anger, such utter relief. Such utter need. Until she looked at him as she did now, her eyes languorous with the lingering remnants of sleep, her mouth pouting and trembling from his kiss.

She was beautiful, too beautiful, and nothing in the world could have stopped him from taking her back in his arms. Nothing could have stopped his kiss. Pulling her nearer, quietly pleased when she made no move to resist, he leaned the little distance that separated them to brush his lips lightly over hers again. A kiss that was no more than a touch. The whisper of a promise.

Patience's thoughts were muddled. She was bewildered by him and disturbed that her response was as fickle as the wind. He was her keeper and her savior. One minute she hated him. The next she didn't know what she felt.

As if physically warding off thoughts she didn't understand, sensations she shouldn't feel, she lifted a hand to his chest, meaning to keep the little distance that could preserve her sanity and her tenuous control. But she hadn't reckoned with her own raw nerves, nor the crumbling strength that held terror at bay. The beat of his strong, steady heart under her palm was her undoing. All the horror came crashing in on her, memories as raw and fresh as this moment engulfed her. Her mind became a morass of the days past. Images flashed before her blinded sight, replaying every torment with exquisite clarity as she plummeted into quiet hysteria.

In a waking nightmare of recall, motorcycles roared out of the night, dark, shiny steeds of evil. In a pall of dust, new world savages, with war paint etched in flesh by tattoo needles, danced in the light of a thousand moons. The sound of shattering glass became the knell of a bell of doom that tolled for her. And into the darkest part of her vision strolled Eva, a knife curved like a scimitar drawn and threatening, sunlight glinting off an edge sharper and more deadly than any razor.

Patience wanted to shake herself, to pull away from this fugue of terror and found instead that she was trembling. Image after image burned itself again in her mind and wave after wave of fear engulfed her. Fear made more virulent, more consuming, in its delay.

She hadn't been so afraid since she was seven and the black water of an arctic bay closed over her, sealing her from sky and land, sucking the breath from her lungs, filling them with its own murky chill.

She was cold, as then, so cold, and not even the high desert sun could warm her. She was afraid and only the man as true and strong as the heartbeat beneath her hand could give her respite.

There was shock and agony in her face as she clutched at him. A woman clinging to the last thread of strength. A woman lonely in her fear, worn by doubt, needing him, and terrified of her need.

“Please,” she whispered hoarsely, and her trembling became shivering, and shivering great racking shudders.