Jessie's War (Civil War Steam) (14 page)

He stumbled back in an overly
dramatic fashion and his smile tangled and twisted in the pit of her stomach. “Your
clothes are wet, and you’ll freeze if you don’t get out of them. Strip. I’m
going to take care of the horses and I’ll be right back.”

She watched him leave, and
immediately wished he’d come back.

Her first reaction was to
resist, but if she wanted to live, she’d do as he asked. People died from
exposure out here far too often, and her clothes were soaked through. So she
tried to work the buttons of her coat with fingers numb and stiff. She fumbled
with the buttons and failed. She tried to shake off her coat and couldn’t
manage that, either.

Jessie sank to the ground in
a heap of sodden skirts. The heat of the fire burned, and she moved away from
it and toward the dark, gentle warmth emanating up from the lower chambers of
the shaft. Their chant nothing more than murmurs on the wind, she heard her
ancestors’ voices, strong and unafraid.

They beckoned to her, and her
Paviotso heart responded.

She closed her eyes for a
moment, and the song washed over her as she took up the chant. Only for a
moment, out of deference to them. In her mind’s eye, she danced with them. She
danced with her mother and her people. Danced with them into forever.

Wake
up
, that voice
whispered.

She ignored it.

The fear and the anger and
the hurt were washed away as her ancestors greeted her and accepted her as one
of theirs. For the first time in a long time, Jessie
belonged
.

Calm and at peace, she was
stone and sand, the pinion pine and the fast-moving waters of the river in
spring. She was sagebrush and scrub and the sky, filled with bright stars.

Wake
up, Jessie
.

For a moment, she was pulled
away from her people, but she reached into the abyss for them again.

She was tufa and hot springs,
the scorching sun and the thunderous clouds of summer storms. She was
snow-capped mountains and dry, desert valleys. She was the rabbit and the
coyote. She was the sleek fish of the great lake, and she was the fisher. She
was the mighty hunter and the prey.

She was one and she was nothing.
She was so very small and she was infinite.

A sharp sting pierced through
the dream vision. She ignored it. Another one broke through. Beneath the chant,
she heard something discordant and angry, breaking the melody. The dark pulsed,
and the magic began to crack.

“Jessie!” Luke roared. The
spell shattered as she grasped for it with desperate hands.

He slapped her face twice
more and then picked her up by the collar and set her on her feet. His fingers
dug into the flesh of her shoulders, and he shook her so hard her head fell
back.

“Wake up! Don’t do this to
me! Jessie,
wake up
!”

Disoriented, her ancestors’
song echoed in her ears. “I only closed my eyes for a minute. So tired,” she
mumbled.

His voice broke on a laugh,
and when she opened her eyes, she saw relief in the way he looked at her. “Can’t
you do one thing I tell you? Just one? What is
wrong
with you?” His tone was exasperated but not unkind. One
strong arm held her upright as his fingers touched her neck where her heart
beat, and it lurched into a more regular rhythm.

Luke
.

“Can’t you hear them?”

She fought to hear the voices
over Luke’s. Everything about him was so loud, she could almost hear the blood
rushing in his veins. Jessie turned away, wanting the quieter peace of her
ancestors. They were more real to her than he was, this dead man who chose
now
to walk back into her life. Her
ancestors were and always would be. Her heart yearned for the peace they
offered.

“Hear who?” He unbuttoned her
coat. Yanked it from her shoulders and tossed it onto the floor in a heap.

“The chant. Can’t you hear
them singing? Can’t you feel them?” Their song wrapped around her and held her
tight.

He unbuttoned her skirt and
allowed it to fall away. With trembling fingers, he undid the buttons of her
high-collared blouse.

“They can’t have you, do you
understand me?” His voice shook.

He held her tight, pressing
her face into the warmth of his chest, and she heard his heart, the beat strong
and frantic. Her heart lurched again.

He was the flame to her ice,
and he held her tighter than her ancestors’ song.

Down in the dark, toward
where her long-forgotten dead lay in their graves, he shouted, “This one is
mine!”

Deft fingers unfastened the
hooks and eyes at the front of her corset. The fog began to lift from her mind,
and her ancestors suddenly seemed very far away. Luke was here. Luke was now.
Luke was her past, but he was also her present.

“You can’t claim me,” she
murmured.

“Well, someone needs to.” He
sat her down, knelt, and removed both the boots and her stockings from her
feet. Unable to voice a protest, she let him. He briskly ran his hands along
her legs, and she gasped as sensation returned to her frozen limbs.

“You’re soaked through, Jess.
Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?”

“I tried to. You didn’t listen.”

He smiled at that, but his
eyes were sad. “That’s my girl. Come on back, Jessie. Give me hell. Be a pain
in my ass. You don’t belong with them yet.” He took her hands and hauled her to
her feet. Loosening the laces of her corset, he pulled it over her head, and in
the next moment, he pushed her drawers over her hips. Large, scarred hands put
a blanket on her shoulders. “You belong with me.”

“Bullshit.” The fog lifted a
little more, and she wrapped the blanket around her body and clutched the edges
together. She hadn’t missed the tightness of Luke’s face when he looked at her.

It had been a long time since
she’d seen that expression.

“You’re right, it is
bullshit.” He pulled his shirt over his head. Watching her, he spread a canvas
tarp and some blankets on the ground. “Lay down, Jess.”

She obeyed, and he covered
her with the blankets. He hung another tarp over the entrance to the cave, sat
down, and removed all of his clothing with the exception of his drawers, which
extended to his knees. Glinting in the pale light of the fire, bright metal
surrounded his left calf all the way down to his foot. Silvery screws protruded
from his flesh, and the scars surrounding those screws were raised and raw.
New.

“Oh.” She gasped, unable to
disguise the horror and shock of seeing his artificial limb, attached to real
flesh at his knee and his ankle. She’d never heard of an artificial limb
attached between two pieces of living flesh. It shouldn’t have worked that way.

He glanced down at his leg
and shrugged. “It’s nothing, Jess.”

Her heart mourned his loss,
for the pain he must have gone through.

Luke hung their wet clothes
around the fire to dry, and, with sleepy eyes, she watched the way his muscles
played in his bare back. It was a patchwork of scars, long and thin or puckered
and red. How had he gotten them, how had he lost part of his leg? What kind of
hurt had he suffered, and had anyone been there to help him, to hold him, to
ease his grief and tell him everything would be all right?

It wouldn’t be so hard to
stay angry with him if he weren’t so damned beautiful. She remembered the boy
he’d once been, with his wavy dark hair and silvery eyes dancing with mischief.
The smile that lit the room. How he’d always made her laugh. The way he’d taken
her hand at her mother’s funeral, the comfort he’d offered that awful day. The
way he’d kissed her, and made her feel like she was the only girl in the entire
world who would ever matter to him.

That same boy had torn her
heart out just six months later when he’d left to fight a war where even those
who survived didn’t come back whole.

He lay down beside her, took
her into his arms and inhaled sharply. His skin burned where it touched hers,
but the sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant. “Christ, you’re ice.”

“Yeah,” she whispered. Then
she flinched away from him. “You’re naked!”

“So are you.”

“But… but you’re
naked
.”

“We need to share our body
heat. You’re chilled to the bone.” He sat up, and she didn’t fail to notice his
strong arms or the wiry dark hair that dusted his chest and thickened where it
disappeared beneath the blanket.

She propped herself up on an
elbow and clutched the cloth to her chest.

“You’re disoriented and
confused, and when I came in, I thought… I thought—” He cleared his
throat. “Well, I can’t put you in a hot bath. I don’t have enough wood for a
bigger fire that will last the night. I can only offer you me.”

Her heart clenched, and she
closed her eyes against the rush of longing those words brought.

“This is not all right with
me.”

Luke
.

“It’s me or your death of
cold.”

He had a point. Her body
trembling from both the cold and something else, she lay back down among the
blankets. Embarrassed tears stung her eyes.

He lay down beside her and
wrapped her in an embrace.

Her body sang in the circle
of his arms, and that shamed her all the more.

“Shh,” he murmured into her
hair.

“I hate you, Luke Bradshaw.”
Her voice broke.

“I know you do.” He brushed
his lips over her brow.

Lulled by his warmth, by the
rhythm of his heart, she fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

Luke stifled a groan as blood
pounded in his groin.

Jessie lay in his arms, her
body soft and warm against his.

She moaned in her sleep and
rolled over, moving against him until her back was flush against his chest. Her
satiny, golden skin was petal soft beneath his fingertips, and her breasts
brushed his arm. She shifted, her backside rubbing against him, and his
erection grew painful.

He longed to touch her as he
once had, though he had no right to expect anything from her. That didn’t stop him
from wanting, or his body from aching.

Her body twitched, and her
breathing changed.

“Jess…” he whispered into her
hair, adjusting her head so it was pillowed on his bicep. The scent of her
surrounded him, clean and spicy fragrant, like sage-covered hills after a
summer storm, and he inhaled deeply. He pulled her closer, his hand brushing
against the underside of her breasts.

The noble part of him wanted
the touch to be accidental. It wasn’t.

God, he had missed holding
her in his arms, missed the sweetness of her touch. Missed whispering words
into her dark hair, and sharing secrets with her. He missed her laugh, the way
she smelled, the way she moved.

He had missed
her
. Jessie. Once his best friend. And
his lover.

She shifted against him
again, and he was certain she was awake.

If she stayed in his arms, he’d
kiss her. They’d been so good together once. Maybe if he kissed her she would
forget how much she hated him, and he would forget how much he deserved it.

But she didn’t turn toward
him, didn’t acknowledge him in any way. She stayed right where she was,
feigning sleep, tormenting him with the softness of her body and the silkiness
of her skin.

Unwilling to turn toward him,
yet not turning away either.

The wind rustled the tarp
covering the entrance to their camp. Their fire had died to nothing but embers,
which glowed in the faint light creeping in from under the tarp. The morning
arrived eerily quiet.

No cannons, no crushers, no
gunfire. Just the sound of horses broke the silence.

Suddenly, she jabbed him with
an elbow. Hard. “Bradshaw.”

Grunting at the blow, he said
crossly, “What?”

She turned to face him, her
taut nipples brushing against his arm.

His body responded. He wanted
nothing more than to kiss her and bury himself inside her—forgetting the
long years that had passed, and taking up where they had once left off.

Her eyes widened as if she
understood the direction his mind had gone, and she didn’t like it.

“Someone’s outside,” she
whispered.

Fuck.

He jumped to his feet, his
pistol in his hand just before the tarp was pulled back.

“No!” Jessie shrieked as he
came nose to nose with a pistol, held by one very angry-looking native. The
blanket clutched to her chest, she put her hand on his chest to stay him.

“Get behind me, Jessie,” he
growled.

He didn’t dare lower his
weapon and move her himself. Didn’t the woman realize she was in his line of
fire?

The men who’d invaded their
camp were dark skinned, black eyed, and they wore faded black dusters and heavy
trousers, with equally faded vests and slouch hats. Bone pipe chokers wrapped
their necks, and thick, leather bound braids fell nearly to their waists. The
line of their weapons shifted as she moved. Away from her, and toward him.