Warrior (12 page)

“I can?”

“The buckets.”

“What?” he asked, taken off guard once more. Nevada turned and looked at the buckets warming next to the fire as though he had never seen them. In some ways it was true. He had pumped water as a physical outlet, not because they needed three buckets plus a kettle of water warming by the fire. “The buckets make me a mind reader?”

“Sure. You knew I wanted to take a bath. Presto. Bathwater appears.”

“Wrong. You’re not well enough yet.”

“Pucky.”

Nevada blinked. “What?”

“Don’t try to change the subject. I need a bath. This time you’re not going to talk me out of it.”

“I didn’t talk you out of it last time,” Nevada pointed out coolly. “I just said I wasn’t going anywhere and you decided not to have a bath after all.”

“Um. Well, this time you won’t get away with it. If I don’t wash my hair it’s going to get up and walk off my head.”

“Eden—” Nevada began.

“Nope,” she interrupted. “No deal. I haven’t run a fever for almost two days. I’m having a bath and that’s all there is to it.”

“What if I stay and watch?”

“I’ll blush a lot, but I’ll survive.”

“You’re playing with fire,” he said flatly.

“People who are cold tend to do that.”

Nevada shook his head in disbelief, hardly able to comprehend that someone as soft and vulnerable as Eden was ignoring the kind of warnings that had made grown men back off. “Has anyone ever mentioned that you’re too stubborn for your own good?”

“Frequently. Gives me great faith in the powers of human observation.”

Narrowed green eyes swept over Eden’s slender body. “Oh, I’m an observant, noticing kind of man, as you pointed out. Right now I’m noticing how hard and tight your nipples get when they’re cold. Do they get like that for a man’s mouth, too?”

Eden’s lips opened but no sound came out. She was too surprised to think coherently, much less speak.

“I’ve noticed your tongue, too,” Nevada continued. “Quick and pink and clever. I’d like to feel it all over, everywhere, every last damned aching inch of me. But most of all I’ve noticed those long, long legs of yours. I want to be where they meet. I want to sink into you, all the way in, and I want to watch you while I do it. I want it so much I wake up sweating.” His pale, crystalline eyes pinned Eden. “Still planning on taking a bath in front of me?”

“You’re not – you can’t – damn it, Nevada, you won’t—”

Nevada hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and waited, watching Eden with eyes that missed nothing and concealed nothing of his response to what he saw.

Eden said something succinct and inelegant, glared at Nevada and stalked past him to the fire. Calmly Nevada joined her and added more wood, redoubling the flames.

“Scrambled eggs or oatmeal?” he asked as though nothing had happened.

“No,” she said between her teeth. “Thank you.”

“So polite.”

“You ought to try it sometime. Works wonders in human relationships.”

“I prefer honesty.”

“Do you? Then try this.” She flashed him a sideways look from brilliant hazel eyes. “I’m not angry because you want me. I’m angry because you hate wanting me. Why, Nevada? What is so awful about wanting me?”

“Not having you.”

The breath, and much of the anger, went out of Eden in a long sigh. She started to speak, made a helpless gesture of appeal with her hands, and tried again.

“I won’t say no to you, Nevada.”

“Why? Do you go to bed with every man who wants you?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re damned fussy about who touches you.”

“I think you’re right.”

“So why me, Eden?”

When Eden opened her mouth to explain the complex, unexpected, seething, surprising mixture of emotions Nevada called out of her, the only words she could think of were very simple.

“I love you, Nevada.”

His mouth flattened into a savage line. “That’s what I was afraid you were telling yourself. Fairy tales. You can’t accept that all there is between us is sex. I wanted you the instant I saw you. You wanted me the same way. Calling it love doesn’t change what it is. Sex. Pure and simple and hot as hell.”

“You can call it whatever you want.”

“But you’ll call it love, right?”

“Why do you care what I call it? I’m not asking you to lie to me about how you feel. When you get right down to it, I’ve never asked you for one damn thing but a bath!”

Nevada kept on talking as though Eden had never spoken. “Let me tell you what the real world is like, fairy-tale girl. The real world is Afghanistan, where you walk through a narrow mountain pass in single file with five handpicked men and arrive at your destination and look around and you’re alone, nothing on your back trail but blood and silence. The real world is a place where you fight for what you believe in, and then find out that win or lose, the weak and helpless are still the first to die. The real world is a place where you know a hundred ways to kill a man and not one damned way to save a baby’s life.”

Eden tried to speak. It was futile. Nevada kept on talking, his eyes like splinters of ice, his voice emotionless, his words relentless, hammering on her, forcing her to hear.

“The real world is a place where you walk into villages with men whose wives and sisters and mothers and daughters have been murdered in ways you can’t even imagine, villages where children are diseased and maimed by starvation, villages where babies are too weak to cry because they starved in the womb and their mothers have no milk and by the time you get to them, all you can do with your prayers and medicine and rage is hold those babies until they die and then you bury them and walk away, just walk away, because any man who cares for anything enough to be hurt by its loss is a fool.”

“Nevada,” Eden whispered, reaching for him, wanting to comfort him. “Nevada, I—”

Her words ended with a startled sound when his hands flashed out and pinned her wrists against her sides.

“Don’t touch me, Eden,” Nevada said in a low voice, but even as he spoke he was leaning down, coming closer to her, so close that all that lay between their mouths was the mingled heat of their breath. “I want you too much. I want you until I can’t sleep, can’t take a deep breath, can’t look at my hands without seeing them on your body, can’t – my God, I can’t even lick my lips without wondering what you would taste like.”

“Find out,” Eden whispered against his lips. “Taste me, Nevada.”

With a sound that was almost anguished, Nevada lowered his head the final fraction of an inch.

Eden’s lips were soft, warm, undefended. They opened for Nevada without hesitation, yielding the secrets of her mouth to him at the first gliding touch of his tongue. Hot, generous, sweet, clean – he could not get enough of her. The changing taste and texture of her mouth lured him deeper and deeper until he could go no farther and yet he still wanted more, so much more. He was straining against her, shaking, tormented by all that he would not allow himself to take.

Then he realized that Eden was trembling, too, and her tears were hot against his lips. He tore his mouth from hers and stepped back, releasing her wrists as though they had burned him. When he licked his lips he tasted the salt of her tears. Something deep within him ached with a surprising pain.

He had tried to stay away from Eden because he had known that all he had to give her was tears. What he hadn’t known was that he could still feel pain himself. The realization shocked him.

“Do you understand now?” Nevada asked in a soft voice, but there was nothing of softness in his eyes, his body, his certainty, his memories.

Eden was too shaken by Nevada’s passion and his pain to do more than nod her head. At that instant she knew how he felt beyond any doubt or wishful misunderstanding. Her instincts had been right. Nevada was a winter man, his emotions frozen, and he was that way by choice, not accident. He had been stretched to the breaking point in Afghanistan. He had not broken.

And the price of remaining sane had been to walk away from his emotions. They were a weakness in a time and place where only the strongest and most fierce survived. Nevada Blackthorn had survived.

Warrior.

Eden had spoken only in the silence of her mind, yet Nevada’s expression changed. He knew her too well, had known her instantly and wanted her with a violence equaled only by his refusal to acknowledge the possibility of love.

Sex, not love, Eden reminded herself, understanding now why Nevada had insisted on making the distinction ruthlessly clear.

Fairy tales. Fairy-tale girl.

Eyes closed, Eden interlaced her fingers to keep from reaching for Nevada in an offer of comfort and healing that he neither wanted nor would permit. Yet somehow she had to free her beautiful trapped cougar without getting ripped to pieces in the process.

If she could free him at all.

There was no guarantee of success. There was just his need and her love and the battle yet to be fought.

Win, lose or draw, she told herself bracingly.

No. It’s win or lose, period. Nevada doesn’t know any other way.

No second place. No truce. No genteel neutral ground between victory or defeat where two people could meet and shake hands and talk politely about things that didn’t matter. Either they both won or they both lost. Whatever the outcome, Nevada would discover that he wasn’t the only one willing to fight for what he believed in.

And what Eden believed in was love.

“Coffee’s ready. Want some?” Nevada asked.

“Please,” Eden said absently, still caught in the instant she had first understood the risk and necessity of what she must do.

“Back to being polite, huh?” he asked. He crouched over the coffeepot and poured a fragrant stream of coffee into a mug.

Eden gave Nevada a sidelong glance from her place by the hearth and decided it was time to fire the opening shot of her undeclared war.

“Go to the devil, Nevada, but hand over my coffee first.”

His mouth lifted at the left corner. Without looking at Eden he set the pot back on the burner and handed her the mug as he turned back to the fire.

“Guess I had that one coming,” he said. “And a few more besides. But I’m feeling generous.”

Nevada turned and looked at Eden over his shoulder. “That was the second thing I noticed about you in West Fork. Your smile. Not a bit of calculation in it. Generous.”

“My smile was the second thing, huh? So what was the first thing you noticed?”

“I’m a man,” Nevada said dryly. “What do you think I noticed?”

“That I was wearing a quilted down jacket?” Eden suggested, her voice as dry as his.

“Yeah, something like that. Then you started walking. You move like a woman.”

“Nevada, I am a woman.”

He shot Eden a glittering green look before he turned back to the fire. “You were the wrong woman in the wrong place at the wrong time – and you walked right up to me.”

“You had a beard.”

“So did the bartender.”

“I liked yours better. It looked sleek and healthy, a wonderful male pelt. I wanted to rub my cheek against it to see if it felt as good as it looked.” Eden set aside the coffee mug, stretched and smiled to herself as she fired the second shot. “Then I found out it felt even better than it looked. When you kissed me, your beard was like a thick silk brush on my skin. I liked that, Nevada. It made me wonder what your beard would feel like on my neck, on my bare shoulders, on the inside of my wrists, between my

“

“You just can’t stop pushing, can you?” Nevada interrupted roughly.

Eden finished stretching, lowered her arms, and let her fingertips idly brush Nevada’s hair. “When you don’t leave me any room to move, it’s hard not to push.”

Nevada hesitated in the act of dropping another piece of wood on the already vigorous fire. When he let go of the wood, there was a shower of sparks. Without a word he rotated the buckets, bringing a cool side to meet the increasing heat of the flames. He stretched out a long arm, picked up the mug of coffee and handed it to Eden again.

“Nervous?” he asked dryly.

“What?”

“You’re petting me. That’s what you do when you’re nervous, isn’t it? Pet the nearest thing?”

Eden realized that her fingertips had returned to ruffling Nevada’s hair as though he were Baby. “Like I said. It’s hard not to push or touch when you’re being crowded.”

“I didn’t know I was crowding you,” Nevada said, pinning her with a pale green glance. “In fact, I would have sworn it was the other way around.”

For a moment Eden sipped coffee, gathering her scattered thoughts. She had fired the first two shots, yet she felt as though she had just stumbled into an ambush. The combination of passion and calculation in Nevada’s eyes was unnerving. Obviously there was more to this kind of skirmish than she had thought. Maybe she would be better off doing as Nevada did – using the kind of honesty that could rock a man back on his heels.

“I’m not used to being told when I can track cats,” Eden said, “or when I can take a bath, what I can eat, where I can—”

“You’re sick,” Nevada interrupted.

“I was sick. I’m well now. I have a very good appreciation of my own physical limits. Being raised in the Yukon does that for you. I’m fine, Nevada. So if you keep me locked up any longer, you’d better be prepared to deal with a major case of the rips.”

“The rips?”

“Yeah. I’m like Baby. If I can’t tear around outside, I’ll tear around inside.”

“The rips,” Nevada repeated, shaking his head. “Honey, I’ve never met anyone like you.”

“That makes us even,” Eden said, watching him over the rim of the mug. “I’ve never met anyone like you, either. And I’ve never been kissed like that, heaven and hell and the rainbow burning between

“

She saw the sudden expansion of Nevada’s pupils, heard the intake of his breath, sensed the hot leap of his blood.

“Was it like that for you, Nevada?”

For an electric instant Eden thought Nevada was going to pull her down to the hearth and kiss her again. Instead, he came to his feet in a lithe rush, stalked across the cabin, grabbed his jacket and opened the front door.