Blackwolf's Redemption (6 page)

“That didn’t look like a regular army uniform. I mean, those boots. And that hat on the shelf…”

“And what do you know about regular army uniforms?”

“We had ROTC on campus.”

“Yeah,” he said with biting sarcasm, “Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Well, that sure makes you an expert.”

“Look, if you don’t want to talk about it—”

“I was in Special Forces.” His tone was not only flat, it was icy. “Any more questions?”

Sienna shook her head. He was right, she was prying, and it was none of her business.

“Fine. Now, eat your soup.”

“Any other orders you want to give, General?”

“Wrong rank,” he said curtly. “And I’m not giving you orders, I’m just telling you what to do.”

Her eyebrows rose. Who could blame her? He knew he sounded like an idiot.

“Okay,” he said, “okay, I’m not good at this.”

“At what?” Her smile was as sickly sweet as her voice. “At behaving like a human being?”

“At having anybody here. This place…I spend most of my time here alone.”

“What a surprise.”

“I’m not much for company.”

Another of those sugar-on-overload smiles. “I’d never have guessed.”

He looked at her. There was that attitude again. Women weren’t supposed to be like that. They weren’t supposed to have that do-I-strike-you-as-a-pushover thing going on—but then, he’d never known a woman like this one.

This was, no question, turning into an interesting experience. Except he didn’t want an interesting experience. He’d had enough of those to last a lifetime.

“Just eat the soup.” He pushed a plate piled high with slices of white bread toward her. “Bread, too. You burned up a lot of calories today.”

He could almost hear her thinking of a way to refute what he’d said, just as a matter of principle. But she was too smart for that. Despite her earlier claim about not being hungry, she was. She needed food; she knew it, he knew it, and after a couple of seconds she shrugged, picked up her spoon and dug in.

She ate all her soup. Four slices of bread. When she finished, she licked her lips.

“That was delicious.”

He nodded, folded his sixth piece of bread in half and bit into it.

“I am,” he said, “one hell of a gourmet cook.”

She looked at him. Then, slowly, her lips curved into a smile. It was, he thought, a great smile, the kind that didn’t seem painted on just to make a man feel good. Not that there was anything wrong with a woman doing whatever it took to make a man feel good, it was only that honest smiles were rare.

“I can see that,” she said somberly, “you and a lady named Mrs. Campbell.”

“Hey,” he said, trying to sound as if she’d injured his pride, “it takes special talent to turn a can of soup into five stars in the
Michelin Guide.
”

She laughed. “Tell me about it. I do a lot of that kind of gourmet cooking, too.”

“Ah.”

“Ah, indeed.”

He looked at her, then away. “I take it Jack doesn’t do kitchen duty?”

“Jack?”

“The guy. The one you were with.”

Her smile faded. “Oh. That Jack.”

“Is there another?”

“No. I mean…” She frowned, found a breadcrumb on the counter and toyed with it. “For a little while there, I forgot.”

“About Jack?”

Her head came up. “What’s with the Jack thing? Why would I think about him?”

“Because he’s your lover,” Jesse said, his voice gone hard.

“My lover? Jack?” Her tone was incredulous.

“What is he, then?”

“My professor. Well, he isn’t a full professor, but I’m working on my thesis with him.”

“A thesis in…”

Her expression turned defiant. “Anthropology. Native American peoples.”

“You mean, Indians.”

“I mean Native Americans. That word, Indian, is an insult—”

“That’s news to me. Besides, do I look insulted?”

Sienna stared at him. What he looked was proud. And so beautiful it put an ache in her throat.

What if this Jesse was real? If he was the man she’d read about and wondered about? What if this was, as he kept insisting, reality?

It was impossible.
This
was impossible. She couldn’t dwell on it or she’d—she’d tumble off the edge of the earth and who knew where she’d land?

Her stool squealed in protest as she shoved it back, got to her feet and snatched up their spoons and bowls.

“I’m an anthropologist,” she said steadily. “Jack Burden is my adviser. That’s what brought me to this place.” She moved swiftly from the counter to the sink, dumping the dishes and cutlery, returning to grab the loaf of bread and close the wrapper. She’d started her response to him calmly, but she could feel emotion building inside her. “I didn’t come to steal, or to deface things or to trespass on your land. I came to study something ancient and—and wonderful and amazing, and I resent—”

Jesse rose from his seat.

“Okay,” he said quietly.

“No. No, it’s not okay.” She looked up at him, but between the bad lighting and the angry tears that had risen in her eyes, her vision was blurry. “It’s not okay for you to accuse me of—of such awful things. I am not—”

“I said, okay. You’re not.”

“Not what?” she said, her voice shaking. “Not here? Not standing in a room that doesn’t exist, with a man who doesn’t ex—”

“I exist,” he said roughly, and despite all the promises he’d made himself and her, he took her into his arms and raised her face to his. “I exist, Sienna,” he said softly. “You know it and so do I.”

Her eyes met his. They glittered with unshed tears but, he was certain, with something else, too.

Awareness.

Of him.

Of herself.

Of the electricity between them.

Jesse raised his hand and stroked an errant curl back from her temple. She turned her head like a cat moving deeper into what could easily become a caress.

All he had to do was bend his head and kiss her. One kiss and she’d melt into his arms.

Make love to me, Jesse,
she would whisper, and this time, she’d mean it. No games. No last-minute recriminations. No backing away from what they both wanted.

“Jesse?”

Her eyes were wide and luminous. Her lips were parted in anticipation. He thought of that uniform, hanging in his dressing room. Of a time, an eternity ago, when he had been an officer and a gentleman.

And took a step back.

“Take the lantern,” he said gruffly. She didn’t move; he grabbed it and shoved it at her. “Go on, take it. There are extra blankets in the chest at the foot of the bed. Pile them on. You’ll need them.”

“But where will you sleep?”

He wouldn’t. Not with her just down the hall.

“I’ll bunk in the living room. By the fireplace.”

“Yes, but—”

“Damn it,” he growled, “must you fight me on everything?”

That don’t-screw-with-me look was back on her face. He wanted to pull her to him and kiss it away. Instead, he folded his arms, glared at her until she muttered a very unladylike word, turned her back and marched off. At the last minute, just before the dark swallowed her up, he called her name.

“Sienna.” She stopped, but she didn’t turn around. “Lock your door,” he said, his voice as rough as sandpaper. “And keep it locked.”

Then he looked away from her, tucked his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and stared blindly out the window into the deep black night that had finally embraced the house.

W
AS
he watching her as she went down the dark hall?

Sienna wanted to run but instinct warned her against it.

You didn’t run from a predator. You stood up tall and showed no fear, and that was important here. Jesse had deliberately tried to scare her, she was sure of it.

But he couldn’t.

She wasn’t afraid of him. Or of what had just happened between them. The excitement of his hands on her. The way he’d looked at her. The wild storm raging outside, the even wilder storm just waiting to break free inside….

By the time she was halfway to the bedroom, her heart was doing its best to leap from her chest. Only another few feet, she told herself; she was almost there. All she had to do was keep up the pose. Head high, shoulders back, steps steady. Now to open the door. Good. Step through it. Fine.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, and she slammed the door, locked it with trembling fingers, fell back against the cool wood and took a long, ragged breath.

How dare this man do this to her? What gave him the right to try to frighten her to death?

Lock your door.
What was she supposed to be? His slave?
And for what? Did he honestly think he’d needed to tell her to safeguard herself against him after that take-no-prisoners kiss?

A man who kissed a woman as Jesse had kissed her was dangerous.

And a woman who responded to such a kiss was in deep trouble.

Sienna swallowed dryly.

No. She had not responded. She was—she was in pieces, emotionally. He knew it. He’d taken advantage of her but it would not happen again.

Really? How many times can you kiss him back and still tell yourself it’s not your doing, that you’re not actually responding?

The whisper inside her was sly. And brutally honest.

Okay. What she had to do was get control of things. Calm down. Take deep breaths. In. Out. Good. And again. Very good. See? It was working. Her heart was slowing. Only a thousand beats per minute instead of a million, she thought on a nervous laugh.

Laughing was good, even if it was shaky. It meant she was thinking again instead of simply reacting.

If only the storm would stop. If the lights would come on. At least she had the lantern and its bright glow. The only thing wrong with that was that it cast such a brilliant glow that it made the darkness pooled beyond it all the more absolute. She could see nothing beyond the bed. The windows were blank and black.

Not good.

Resolutely, she crossed the room, put the lantern on the night table, hurried to the windows and shut the vertical blinds.

Much better.

There was something about the night pressing in that was disturbing…but not as disturbing as Jesse Blackwolf. He was
the proverbial enigma wrapped in a paradox, a beautiful, sleek, powerful mystery. He thought she’d trespassed on his property, that she’d come to steal artifacts, but he’d still risked his neck getting her down that mountain. He’d brought her here, taken care of her, fed her…

And kissed her.

He could have done more.

For a moment, for a heartbeat, he could have done anything he’d wanted. She’d known it. So had he.

But he hadn’t. Why? Why had he let her go, let her put a locked door between them? Not that a lock would stop him. If he came for her, the door would be a meaningless barrier. And once he’d broken it down, she’d be defenseless. He’d strip her of the oversized clothing, carry her to his bed, take her again and again and again….

Excitement shimmered within her.

Was that what she wanted? To be ravished? To have no choice except to give in to him? To have his mouth hot on her skin, his hands exploring her? To feel his hard body against hers?

Possessing her.

Sienna sank down on the edge of the bed and pressed her fingertips to her temples. Maybe she really was going crazy. A kiss. That was all it was…though, when you came down to it, maybe it hadn’t been a kiss at all. Maybe it had been a raw declaration of power. Men were still into those things in the 1970s….

Assuming this was the 1970s and not some white-walled room in an Intensive Care Unit. Or the local psycho ward.

“Enough,” she said, and sprang to her feet.

She wasn’t going there. It was enough to understand why he’d kissed her. Never mind the decade or even the century. Men were men. The
I’m-male-you’re-female-and-that’s-that
routine was in their DNA and would probably remain there forever.

The key to sanity was to think logically. Concentrate on practicalities. Like the fact that she knew her name even if she wasn’t so sure about the date. Or that if she pinched herself—“Ouch!”—if she did, it hurt.

So, she was fine with the basics.

She was also in one piece. She had hot soup in her belly. She was dry. And warm. Well, fairly warm, not outside in the cold and the wet.

And the door was locked against Jesse.

He couldn’t get to her. Couldn’t take her in his arms again. Kiss her. Caress her. Make her blood run thick and hot…

She drew a long breath. What she needed was sleep—but not in this bed. Not under Jesse’s blankets or with her head on his pillows. No way. Damned if she understood why that seemed so important, but it did.

There was a big armchair by the window. All she had to do was turn it so it faced into the room, like that, then settle into it, like this. Shut her eyes and sleep. When she awoke, it would be morning.

Things had a way of looking lots better by daylight.

But the chair, while big, wasn’t comfortable. Not as a substitute bed. She couldn’t stretch out or do anything with her legs except tuck them up under her, and that wasn’t so good because her thighs and calves ached. The climb down the mountain had taken its toll. She couldn’t lean her head back, either. The final insult was that after a few minutes of sitting still, the sweats and socks she was wearing didn’t feel quite so warm.

She eyed the duvet, then rolled her eyes. Ridiculous, to sit here with her teeth chattering. A blanket was a blanket, nothing more, and she reached for it, yanked it over herself and all but moaned as she wrapped up in its voluminous folds.

But it wasn’t enough. Five minutes and she could feel the cold seeping in.

So what?

Was she a wuss or a woman?

Not a wuss, she thought determinedly. She’d practically raised herself, her father a bullying drunk who barked orders, her mother a pathetic creature who followed those orders blindly. Somehow, she’d survived, found academic opportunities in a high school so low on the educational totem pole that when she graduated from it with a scholarship to Columbia University, not even she’d believed it. And when her major in Business had turned out to be a mistake, who’d had the courage to talk the Powers That Be into letting her keep the scholarship despite switching her major to Anthro?

“Me,” she said into the silence.

Spending the night in a chair? A piece of cake. So what if it was a little chilly? She just had to stop thinking so much. About what in hell was happening to her…

About Jesse. Jesse, the enigma.

Good looking. Well spoken. And heroic. He had a spit-and-polish uniform in his dressing room but he went around half naked, paint on his face, riding hell-bent for leather without a saddle.

She’d never seen him in that uniform, but she knew damned well he’d look magnificent. Whatever he wore, whoever he was, Special Forces officer or Native-American warrior, he’d be gorgeous. And sexy. And spectacularly sexy…

Sienna moaned and shut her eyes. Sleep. She needed sleep. Maybe if she turned off the lantern…

“Woman or wuss?” she said briskly, and she reached for the Coleman lamp, doused the flame and plunged the room into darkness.

Jesse was awake, pacing the living room at the far end of the house by the light of a dying fire.

He hadn’t noticed it was dying. How could he when his brain was focused on what had just happened? On what he’d done, damned near forcing himself on a woman who didn’t want him….

Except she did.

Oh, yes. She’d wanted him as much as he’d wanted her.

He came to a stop, folded his arms, glowered at the shadows the flames cast on the walls. What he needed was some rest.

Yeah, but how to get it?

He’d tried the sofa. Too narrow. The floor. Too hard. The Eames chair and ottoman by the windows. Too uncomfortable. He felt like a pathetic version of Goldilocks and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it except mutter and curse and grumble over his inability to catch some desperately needed shut-eye, and maybe try and find some humor in the fact that he was a man who’d never had that kind of problem before.

As a kid, he’d learned to sleep in the open, never mind the weather. A sleeping bag had been all he’d needed; that was his old man’s sole concession to his mother on overnight hunting and fishing trips into the mountains.

And when he’d grown up, enlisted in the army, volunteered and made it into Special Forces… Those sleeping bag excursions had turned into memories of luxury as they’d given way to bug-infested jungles and muddy holes in the ground and, if he was really lucky, caves that still stunk of whatever critters had last sought shelter inside them.

All he’d had to do was shut his eyes, set his internal clock for a wake-up call in twenty minutes or two hours and he was gone, even with Charlie someplace out there.

But Charlie was gone. There was no enemy here at all.
There was, instead, a woman. And knowing she was in his bedroom, curled up in his bed while he was out here, was keeping him wide-awake.

Unless he wasn’t actually tired.

“Bull,” he muttered as he strode past the fireplace again.

Hell, he was exhausted. A man made poor decisions when his body and mind were worn out. But that kiss, that kiss…

Jesse muttered a sharp expletive and kicked a glowing coal back onto the hearth.

And he was stuck with her. He wouldn’t have turned a field mouse out on a night like this. Tomorrow, first thing, absolutely, he’d send her on her way, but for now—for now, he had no choice but to give her shelter.

The fire was burning down. He’d forgotten to feed it. He’d forgotten more than that since Sienna Cummings turned up, he thought grimly.

What had become of logic? Of self-control? Why in hell had he kissed her just now? Not once. Twice. And that second time, all restraint gone…

He squatted before the hearth, added wood, poked at the glowing embers until the new logs caught with tendrils of orange flame.

Okay. He’d already gone through this. He needed a woman. A soft female body beneath his. He was a man, with a man’s instincts, and living like a hermit was not a good thing…but that wasn’t enough to explain what had happened.

Kissing a woman the way he’d kissed this one…

His intruder.

His beautiful intruder.

His terrified intruder.

And she was that. Terrified. Not of having been caught
stealing. She wasn’t a thief. He knew that now. She was scared of something else, something more….

But not of him.

When he’d kissed her she’d kissed him back. Melted in his arms, her mouth hot on his. He could have taken her then….

The storm was still raging, the power was off, the roads were undoubtedly blocked and here he was, pacing like a caged tiger, getting himself as worked up as a schoolboy and over what?

A kiss.

He had more important things to worry about. The horses, for instance. He hadn’t given them a thought in hours.

Lightning flashed outside the window as he headed for the kitchen, shoved his feet into dry boots, grabbed a rain slicker and a flashlight, then went out the back door at a trot. There were only a few animals in the barn and most had calm dispositions, but the intensity of the storm might have spooked them. He’d talk to them, feed them. That was lots better than wasting time thinking about a woman he’d never see after tomorrow.

Keeping busy was, as always, the ticket to success.

The horses were fine.

They whinnied their greetings, butted velvet noses against his shoulder as he went from stall to stall. He gave them buckets of oats, dug a handful of mints from a box near the door, gave each animal the much-coveted treat, refilled water buckets, spoke softly and reassuringly. A barn cat meowed for attention and wound sinuously around his ankles; he bent down, stroked it, smiled at its thousand-decibel purr.

Eventually, despite his best efforts, there was nothing left to do but return to the house.

He dripped water over the mudroom floor, hung up the slicker, toed off his boots and headed for the living room. The
house was cold and getting colder by the minute. Even the warm spot before the fireplace seemed narrower than before.

What about the bedroom? It had to be like Siberia.

So what? Sienna had his robe. His bed. She was warm enough. Besides, that wasn’t his problem. He’d given her food, shelter, something dry to wear….

“Hell,” he muttered, and headed down the dark hall, candle in hand.

He’d knock. Wait for her response. Better to wake her than run the risk of letting her freeze off that cute little ass.

He reached the bedroom door. Took a couple of breaths. Knocked. Nothing. He knocked again. “Sienna?” No reply. He tried again, louder this time. “Sienna? Are you okay?”

Still nothing.

Jesse started to turn away. A muscle jumped in his jaw. He tried the doorknob but she’d followed orders and thrown the bolt.

What he hadn’t bothered mentioning was that the bolt didn’t always work.

He blew out the candle and entered the room quietly. He didn’t want to scare her, he only wanted to make sure she was all right.

The room was dark as pitch—she’d closed the verticals. A protective instinct; he understood it even if he’d never have followed it. Being able to see the enemy coming was vital to survival.

It took a few minutes until his vision adjusted. Still, the soft sound of her breathing, the delicate scent of woman and wild-flowers told him where she was before he saw her.

Jesse narrowed his eyes. Not that he gave a damn about any of that. The point was, she hadn’t done as he’d told her, after all. Instead of getting into bed and piling on the blankets, she’d fallen asleep in a chair. She looked uncomfortable, her head
tilted at an awkward angle, her long legs tucked under her. And she had to be cold. The room was cold enough for him to see the exhalations of his breath.