Adrienne deWolfe (11 page)

She would have to speak to her hired hand about her children.

"Miss Rorie!" Merrilee called again, panting as she ran into the garden.

When Rorie saw the child's eyes, as big and dark as eclipsed suns, she knew immediately that disaster had struck. Jumping to her feet, she all but forgot Wes as Merrilee skidded to a halt before her.

"Bee sting!" the child cried.

"Where, Merrilee?" Rorie caught the girl's shoulders. "Where did the bee sting you?"

Shaking her head, Merrilee gulped down air. "Not me. Mr. Wes!"

Rorie frowned. "Mr. Wes?"

Merrilee nodded vigorously. "He was looking for medicine in your private cabinet."

Surprised by this information, Rorie decided she must have misunderstood. "You mean he's in the dining room?"

Merrilee looked close to tears. "Yes, ma'am. Hurry!" She tugged on Rorie's hand. "Mr. Wes could get very, very sick!"

Rorie obliged, letting the child pull her into the house. She knew Merrilee was remembering the previous summer, when Topher had been stung by a bee and had swelled up like a bull frog. The boy had been feverish for several days, and Merrilee had huddled by his bedside, afraid she would lose her playmate.

"It's all right, Merrilee," Rorie said soothingly. "I'm sure Mr. Wes will be fine."

She'd no sooner said this, then a pitiful moan came from the dining room. Merrilee's uneven legs churned even faster as she pulled Rorie down the hall.

"Hurry, Miss Rorie. Hurry!"

Much to her secret amusement, Rorie spied Wes sitting on her desk, swinging a long, muscular leg and frowning perplexedly at the taffy box she'd filled with sewing notions.

"Damn," he muttered before realizing he'd acquired an audience.

"Does it hurt, Mr. Wes?" Merrilee asked, dragging Rorie all the way to his side.

He nodded woefully, but she saw the amusement dancing in his eyes. Rorie suspected then that there'd been no bee and no sting, and that he was the only pain.

Merrilee stepped onto the stool by the desk and pressed a small palm to his sun-baked cheek. "He's real hot, Miss Rorie!"

The child turned anxiously to her for guidance.

Wes had the audacity to smirk behind the child's back. "That's not the only place I'm hot, Miss Rorie."

She shot him a quelling glare. "Merrilee, sweetheart, why don't you gather up all your flowers and put them in a vase for Ginevee."

The child looked torn between her patient and her chore.

"Go ahead, Miss Merrilee," Wes said in a brave voice. "Miss Rorie will fix me."

I'll fix you, all right,
she thought, helping the child fill her basket.

When the flowers were all gathered, Merrilee hesitated once more, glancing back at Wes. "Would it be all right if I draw your pony?"

"You mean Two-Step?" He chuckled. "Why, I think ol' fiddle foot would be right pleased to have his portrait made."

Merrilee turned eagerly to Rorie. "Can I, ma'am?"

Rorie nodded. What harm could come to the child as long as she stayed clear of the gelding's hooves? Besides, Rorie had been encouraging Merrilee's gift for drawing. It was the only way to get her to discuss the phantoms in her nightmares.

"You may take a slate to the corral," Rorie said, "but you must promise not to go inside."

"I promise." Merrilee eagerly retrieved a board and chalk from the table and slipped them into her basket. "Thank you, ma'am. 'Bye, Mr. Wes."

After Merrilee had left, Rorie planted her fists on her hips and glared at the scapegrace sitting on her desk.

"Ah, my angel of mercy."

"Mercy's the last thing you'll get from me, Wes Rawlins."

"You sure have a lot of flash in those eyes. Reminds me of a Winchester when its brass receiver catches the sun."

"Don't change the subject." She tugged the taffy box from his hands. "Don't you have any scruples?"

"Now don't go spitting smoke. I was only going to eat one tiny little piece..."

She glowered at him, but it was hard not to be distracted by his ruggedly sensual beauty.

"That is
not
what I meant and you know it well. Lying to the child that way—"

"What, you don't think I have a bee sting?"

She blinked, her reprimand faltering on her tongue. It had never occurred to her he really might.

"Do you?"

"Yes."

She wasn't sure she liked the silky tone of his voice. "Where?"

"On my belly."

For the first time since arriving in the room, she noticed the wilted Indian paintbrush tucked inside his belt loop. A bee sting in such a tender area probably throbbed worse than a sore tooth.

She sighed. Why hadn't he said he was hurting in the first place?

To her embarrassment, she realized he had.

"I see." She cleared her throat. "Very well. Unbutton your shirt while I get the salve."

She stepped to the cabinet, too flustered by her self-recriminations as she unlocked the doors to notice the upside-down book above the medicine shelf. He must think she was completely heartless. First his limp when she'd met him, now his bee sting, and she hadn't offered him care for either.

The idea that a gun-toting, wisecracking rogue like Wes Rawlins could be as vulnerable as Topher, or even Po, touched her in a way that did serious damage to the barrier of distrust that she was trying to keep between them. It took all of her hard-won prudence, caution forged by her husband's betrayals and lies, to keep herself from begging Wes's forgiveness.

After all, she didn't want a gunfighter getting too comfortable in her home and giving Topher or Shae romantic ideas about shoot-outs.

All those thoughts flitted through her mind in the space of a few heartbeats. In fact, she couldn't have turned her back on Wes for more than half a minute, and yet, when she turned to face him again, he'd stripped off his vest and shirt.

Her jaw dropped.

The jar of salve nearly did too.

Perfectly at ease in all his bare-chested glory, he settled back on the desk, every sinew rippling in shameless display. Broad and brawny in the shoulders, lean and narrow in the hips, Wes had hidden a whole world of wonders beneath his faded cotton shirt: knotted biceps, corded forearms, and a rock-hard abdomen that would have taken a stinger of steel to scrape, much less pucker.

She swallowed, and he flashed a dazzling smile.

"You don't mind me unshucked, do you, ma'am? I figured with you being a doctor's wife and all, you'd grown kind of used to fixing up patients with their shirts off."

She clutched the jar like a lifeboat in a hurricane.

"Er... no." Her voice sounded too high, and she felt her face flood with color. "Of course not."

Think of him as Shae,
she instructed herself sternly.
You've massaged salve into Shae's aching back a dozen times or more.

She took a step closer, then forced herself to take another. He began swinging his leg again, an incongruous combination of youthful exuberance and manly sensuality. It drew her gaze to the thickened trunks of his thighs, which spread apart oh-so casually, on a level with her warming womanhood. The realization had a devastating effect on her pulse.

"Where were you stung?" she asked, relieved to hear her pitch had lowered, although it sounded a bit too husky to her ears.

"Here." He touched a reddened spot a hairbreadth higher than his buckle.

"Oh."

During times like this, she wished heartily that she'd learned how to curse. To treat his bee sting
there—
assuming it
was
a bee sting, of course—she'd have to walk right up to him and... and stand between his thighs!

She glanced uncertainly at his face, which he'd smoothed into stoic lines. She suspected his solemnity was a mask behind which he'd hidden a wealth of mirth, all at her expense. She, however, wasn't about to let him see how much he could disturb her.

Drawing a steadying breath, she marched herself into the danger zone. She tried to keep her eyes focused on her hands, which, she realized to her mounting frustration, were not only sticky damp, they were fumbling.

"Need help?" he drawled.

"I... uh... can manage, thank you. "

She stole a glance upward—not at his eyes, for she wasn't quite nervy enough for that—but at his chest, the chiseled work of art that God himself had crafted. An auburn dusting of baby-fine hairs clung to the pale gold of his flesh. They curled enticingly over every ridge and plane of his chest. Never in her life had she seen anything so perfect—until her furtive gaze was arrested by the jagged, circular scar on his left shoulder.

She caught her breath.

Another scar, not far below it and ominously close to his heart, looked much fresher. She'd never seen a bullet hole before, but she knew with gut-wrenching certainty that these were gunshot wounds.

Her gaze flew to his. "Wes, you could have been killed."

He stared into her eyes for what seemed like forever. Only inches away, she could see all the shades of green in his eyes, from pine to jade, to emerald, bursting outward in concentric circles from their pitch-black center.

That dark core of his gaze mesmerized her. It was the doorway to his secret self, a portal where shadows flitted past like phantoms fleeing the light. She thought he might be hiding some secret he didn't want her to know. When his red-gold lashes fanned downward like a veil, intuition told her she'd touched on truth.

"Naw." His voice was husky. "No little bitty honeybee could send me to the boneyard."

He hadn't come close to fooling her. She knew that he knew it too.

"How did this happen?"

With a will all their own, her fingers touched that second scar. She had never seen anything like it. Two odd triangular impressions, the lower one less distinct, angled outward from each other. They marred his perfect flesh like a cookie cutter might have marred soft dough. "This wound can't be more than a year old."

"Eleven months," he corrected her in a strangely hushed voice. "I remember, because..."

His voice trailed off.

"Does it hurt to talk about it?" she asked gently.

His heart jumped hard beneath her fingertips, its rhythm growing ragged. "A little," he admitted.

His gaze moved beyond her, growing dark with some haunting memory. "A man doesn't forget being bushwhacked and left for buzzard bait. Or lying helpless, unable to stop a blood feud from becoming a family massacre," he added with uncharacteristic grimness.

She swallowed, too shaken by his admission to press him further. Silence wrapped around them. He spared her the gruesome details of the nightmare he'd lived through, and yet his refusal to share his feelings and let her try to ease his hurt made her feel strangely shut out and alone.

"Wes, don't take such risks anymore." The words blazed a path from her heart to her tongue; she couldn't have stopped them if she'd tried. "You're too young—"

"I'm not that young."

She caught her breath. His voice held a razor-keen edge, a stab of warning so sharp, one might have thought that she'd challenged him.

"I'm sorry. I meant no offense."

She retreated a step, retrieving her hand. When she reached for the lid, though, he caught her fingers, and she met his gaze uncertainly. His haunted expression was receding, leaving in its place something just as discomfiting. Those forest-green depths gleamed now with a primal intensity, one that he couldn't entirely hide behind his fallen-angel's smile.

"I like when you touch me," he said, his voice deep and rumbly.

He raised her hand to his lips, and her pulse leaped. She was so disconcerted by the moist connection of his flesh tasting hers, that for a moment she couldn't breathe. She couldn't think. He raised her hand higher, pressing a damp kiss into her palm, and her knees went dangerously weak.

"Wes," she protested feebly.

He wouldn't release her hand, though, or free her from the smoky promise in his eyes. Turning her arm over, he applied gentle pressure to her palm with his thumb. The tip of his mustache, so provocatively soft, followed the sinfully wet brush of his tongue across her knuckles. She'd had no idea that goose bumps could make one feel so giddy.

"Wes, please," she whispered, "it's not proper."

He pressed her now moist and trembling hand against the hard, fierce beating of his heart. "You mean 'cause I'm so young?"

The earthy cadence of his murmur gusted fresh shivers down her spine. She was no blushing innocent, and yet this man—dare she say this young man?—had made her feel like a maid. She suspected he'd done so intentionally. She also suspected he'd gotten a ripsnorting thrill out of making a barren old spinster randy.

She flinched at the thought.

"Are you quite finished?" she demanded, snatching her hand away.

He arched his eyebrows, looking for all the world as if her outrage had surprised him. "Well, that depends. Are you going to touch me again?"