A Wolf in the Desert (14 page)

“Indian.”

He paused, leaves of the tree catching in his hair, tangling in it unnoticed. He didn't speak.

“Don't go.” She extended a hand in a palms-up gesture, a mix of apology and entreaty. “Please. I have no right to drive you from your camp.”

“Our camp,” he corrected, drawing a long, slow breath, feasting his eyes on her. “I said I wouldn't intrude.”

“You aren't, I've finished dressing.”

“Your boots.”

“Bare feet aren't exactly indecent, Indian.” She laughed, and the sound drifted to him like a lazy melody.

Indecent was far from the word he would choose, but he didn't suggest an alternative. “You look grand, bare feet and all.”

“Thank you. For the compliment and for these.” She skimmed her hands down silk sleeves to leather-clad hips. “I've never had clothing like this.” Her gaze returned to his. “I won't ask where you got it.”

“Good.” His voice was caustic with his conflict. “Then I won't have to lie.”

“Would you lie to me, Indian?”

“About some things, yes.”

“But not all things.”

“But not all things,” he admitted.

Patience sighed and raked a hand through her drying hair. “And I suppose it's up to me to know the difference.”

“O'Hara?”

She stopped him with a shake of her head. “Never mind. It doesn't matter. Not here.” When she looked at him again over the fire, her expression was pleasant but unreadable. “No more questions.”

“None?”

“Maybe a trivial one or two.”

“Such as?”

Patience laughed again, breaking the tension. “Typical Indian, never a word more than necessary.”

Indian inclined his head at her rebuke.

“For heaven's sake! Don't just keep standing there. If one of us doesn't see to our dinner soon, it's going to be a cinder.” She looked down at the spit a little perplexed. “Whatever it is.”

He laughed then, and even to his ears it was strained. “It's quail. Several of them, actually. After weeks of canned and dried provisions, I think you'll like them.”

“At this point, I'll like anything. Swimming makes me ravenous.” She sank down by the fire. Sitting with her legs folded, she glanced up at him, inviting him to join her. “From the look of you, you were swimming before.”

“I left more than a little of the desert in a pool further down the canyon,” he conceded as he sat across from her.

“You clean up pretty good.” She grinned to herself at the flagrant understatement.

“Thank you,” he replied gruffly, reaching for the spit. “I think.”

* * *

Half an hour later, Indian set his plate aside and regarded her with honest amusement. “You truly were ravenous.”

Patience sipped gingerly of coffee left to brew too long. Taking a page from his book, she said simply, “Swimming.”

“So you said. You like swimming?”

She set down her cup and tossed her hair from her shoulder before she rested an elbow on her folded knees. “I didn't, once. For nearly a year I avoided water at all costs. Then I realized what a hindrance it was to my family since so much of our lives are centered around water. We lived by the Chesapeake, and very nearly on it. There were always water sports and fishing. My fear put a terrible restriction on all our lives. Twelve months later, on the anniversary of the day I nearly drowned, I found the courage to return to the same place, and I swam. That day I discovered water could be pleasure again, that it needn't be the bogeyman hiding in my nightmares.”

“As simply as that, you came to terms with it?”

“I was too young to understand then, but I know now I should have gone sooner, to spare my family so much concern. Concern they haven't conquered yet. Twenty years later, they still hover, seeing to it that I'm not too quiet, or as introspective and uninvolved as I was that year.”

“When this occurred, you say you were too young to understand. How young is too young?”

“It was my birthday, I was seven.”

“What happened?”

Patience stared into the fire, remembering, reliving a helpless, claustrophobic horror. But the story she told was short, terse sentences, with no maudlin self-pity. “There was a celebration, with the usual games and contests. The small sailboat I was sailing capsized. We always wore the usual protective paraphernalia, but I was tangled in the lines of the sail and couldn't surface. My brother Kieran and I were racing. He was an impossible distance ahead, or it should have been impossible.” The grimness that had crept over her features dissipated. “But for Kieran nothing is accepted as impossible. He came for me. Kieran came.” A hint of a smile touched her lips, as if she couldn't say his name too often. “He cut me free.”

Indian knew then he would like to know this man whose boyhood refusal of the impossible saved this woman who graced his eyes with beauty and his heart with bittersweet longing. “Kieran.” There was abiding respect in the name. “Brother number...”

Patience couldn't remember discussing her family with him, and wondered if his question was simply an assumption there were other brothers. “Kieran is brother number two. Devlin is first, after Kieran there's Tynan, and then Valentina, my sister.”

“And last, Patience.” Who at eight braved the deep water of the Chesapeake and conquered a year of fear. He wondered again what manner of woman he had claimed for his own here in the desert.

“My mother regrets the name. Because I'm different from the rest of the family, she's convinced she hexed me with it. A boring, placid name decreeing a boring, placid Patience.”

“I think not. Different, perhaps, but anything but placid.” No man in his right mind would find her boring. But he couldn't let himself dwell on how he felt. Returning to a safer subject he asked, “What part of the bay does your family come from?”

“Virginia, not far from Williamsburg.”

“You grew up there, the five of you?”

“There and other places.” Before he could follow with another question she clapped her hands together. “No fair! We agreed only trivial questions.”

“You agreed, dear heart, not I.” The endearment came naturally and seemed right for her teasing mood.

“Dear heart.” She smiled at him across the fire. “What a lovely expression.”

“It was my mother's name for me.” He answered the question in her eyes, the question she'd agreed she wouldn't ask. “Only my father was Indian, an Apache of the Chiricahua. My mother, Sibella, is French. I lived with them in France until I was seven. An age of change for both of us, it seems. My father was gifted in languages—he served as an attaché at the embassy. When he was killed in a terrorist ambush meant for a visiting Middle East potentate, I came to live with my grandfather on the reservations in Arizona.”

“Reservations?” The instant she uttered the word, Patience was sorry. She could hardly believe Indian had opened up to her. She didn't want some foolish interruption to stop him.

“My grandfather was shaman to his people, the Apache equivalent for medicine man or priest,” he defined for her. “He was Chiricahua, but unique in that he was accepted and revered by all the bands. I lived with him for a time on several reservations.” He took his coffee cup from the ground beside him. “That's it, my life in a nutshell.” Tossing the last of the black brew into the fire, he watched it rise again as steam. “Any more questions?”

Thousands, Patience thought, but she wouldn't ask. Questions elicited terse one-word answers. He'd volunteered much more. By biding her time, perhaps he would volunteer again. “I have one,” she heard herself saying. “How did you do this, the camp? When?”

“Part was done before you came, the rest while you were at the pool. It was simply a matter of bringing the saddlebags from our site outside the canyon.”

“The clothing?”

“The leather will be protection in high country.”

“You just happened to be passing a shop today on another of the Wolves' mysterious rides, saw them, and bought them?”

“I went looking for them, because I knew you would need them.”

A frisson of pleasure drifted through her at this oblique admission of concern. “Why the soap? And why this?” She stroked a gleaming sleeve. “Why do I need another blouse?”

“The soap reminded me of the fragrance you wore the night I first saw you. The blouse is token replacement for the blouses I wouldn't let you bring when we left your car. Call it a small salve for my conscience.” He set his cup aside, his gaze across the fire reflecting only its undulating dance, he conceded the truth. “I chose the blouse because nothing matches your eyes as perfectly.”

Patience shied away from the tenderness she heard in him. Denying the ache it kindled deep inside her, she began to gather up tin plates and utensils. “I'll scrub these in the stream and pack them back in the saddlebags.”

She left him then without daring a backward glance. At the stream, with the light of a full moon to guide her, she crossed a cluster of stones. At a small sandbar, she knelt to scrub the juices of roasted quail from tin plates. She moved by habit, distracted by her thoughts of Indian. When her task was finished and she turned to go, distraction made her careless. Her bare foot skidded over a slippery rock, sending her tumbling in a froth of water and a clatter of tin.

Before the echo of her short-lived cry faded, Indian was racing through the trees, leaping over rocks, and splashing through shallow water to reach her. She was trying to rise, when the pressure of his hold at her shoulders stopped her.

“Lie still,” he commanded, and his voice was harsh with worry.

A little dazed by her fall, Patience blinked and struggled to take stock. Her neck hurt from the jolt of her fall, but her head was still on. The fingers of her right hand were half-numb and tingling from banging her elbow. She wondered hazily why that very sensitive nerve was called the funny bone, when there was nothing funny about it. Neck and elbow aside, she decided she would be fine were it not for her toe.

As pain from her fall diminished in other parts of her body, it coalesced and centered in her right great toe. But she couldn't worry about herself now. “The dishes! I lost the dishes in the stream.”

As she struggled to rise, his grip at her shoulder tightened. “I said, be still.”

“The dishes! They'll be washed away.”

“Dammit, O'Hara, I don't give a damn if they end up in China. So, be still,” he snarled.

Patience blinked and focused on him. He was so close she could see the muscles in his cheek protesting the clench of his teeth. “You said damn,” she murmured. “You only say that when you're angry. Twice must mean you're very angry with me.”

“I am very angry, but not with you,” he retorted as he buried his fingers in her hair searching for the telltale swelling of head injury. Finding none, he asked, “Does you neck hurt? Your back?” With each negative shake of her head his worry eased only a bit. “Can you sit up?”

“Of course I can sit up,” she insisted. “And I would if you'd stop hovering like a mother hen.” Proving her point, she pushed against his hold and levered herself upright.

“Not so fast,” he cautioned, and continued his deliberate inspection. With a finger at her chin, he turned her face cautiously, first right then left. Nothing. He sighed in relief. “At least you won't have a black eye tomorrow.”

“I told you I'm all right.” She tried to ignore the sudden rush of her pulse, sought to cloak the shiver of delight his touch ignited in indignation. “I would be just fine and dandy if it weren't for my...” She caught her breath as his hands moved expertly over her ribs, the heel of his hand brushing against the fullness of the undercurve of her breasts. She lost her train of thought and began again. “I would be wonderful if...”

He'd turned his attention to her legs. Competent hands skimmed from her thighs to the long bones of her shins, to her ankles. He was so completely absorbed in his inspection, she was sure he hadn't heard her babbling, and was grateful he hadn't. It was enough that she'd fallen like a clumsy tenderfoot, but babbling like a smitten teenager added insult to injury.

Her gratitude was not to be long lived, as he crouched at her feet, lifting his head to look up at her. The moon showered silver light over him, carving his face in handsome shadowed plains and setting his hair aflame with blue-black luster. His gaze was steady, unfathomable in the dark. When he spoke, his voice was husky. “You would be fine and dandy, and wonderful if it weren't for...” He lifted a brow and waited for Patience to fill in the blank.

“My foot,” she prattled, because he was holding her foot, because every sensation she'd ever known or expected to know was suddenly seated there.

“Here?” He brushed a finger over the arch of her instep, and an incredible shock of desire rocketed through her.

“No.” She tried to deny what he made her feel. Then again, as futilely, “No.”

“Then here?” He turned his attention to the other foot, cradling the instep in his palm. His thumb massaged the highest point of the arch that always seemed slightly sore and sensitive.

Patience shuddered as pleasure laced with a twinge of pain poured through her like wildfire. Biting her lip, she fought to hold back a groan.

Indian looked up sharply. “Does this hurt?”

“Yes. No!” In a thrashing move that tossed her hair from her face, she wondered what was happening to her. In a rush, she blurted, “It's my toe.”

“This toe?”

“Yes.”

He was instant concern, searching for swelling or a bloodied nail. “Did you stub it on a stone? Or sprain it in your fall?”

A blush flooded her cheeks and burned her throat. She was thankful he couldn't see it. “Actually,” she admitted, her voice little above a whisper, “I dropped a plate on it.”