Montana Wildfire (15 page)

Her gaze fixed on Jake. He lay huddled beneath a thin blue blanket on the opposite side of the clearing. A muted sliver of light filtered through the ceiling of leaves. The pinkish ray glinted off the top of his blacker-than-black head. Though she couldn't see his face—the blanket was drawn up too high—the position of his shoulders suggested he was lying on his side, facing away from her.

Another twig snapped.

Amanda quickened her pace, careful to keep her steps as quiet as her limping gait would allow. Fear made the chore difficult. The feeling of being watched not only persisted, it grew. Her heart pounded in her ears. The tempo was so loud she was surprised the racket didn't wake Jake up.

Sighing in relief, she reached his side of the clearing and went down on one knee behind him. The ground felt cold and lumpy beneath her. An icy chill seeped through her skirt, cooling the fear-warmed flesh beneath.

She shivered, and her hand rose. Her fingers trembled, hesitating for one throbbing heartbeat before making contact with Jake's shoulder, which was padded only slightly by the blanket.

As she'd expected, he awoke instantly. What she didn't expect—wasn't prepared for—was the speed with which he reacted.

Jake thrust off the blanket in the same instant he flipped onto his opposite side. His shoulder grazed her bent knee. The contact was brief, but hard enough to send a stunned Amanda off balance.

Amanda gasped, and lurched to the right. Her hand shot out, her palm crushing the grass as she tried to steady herself. From the corner of her eye, she caught the glint of muted light touching deadly steel. Her gaze snapped to the side. She'd barely had a chance to focus on the long, curved steel blade before Jake hurled it.

A golden curl resting against her cheek stirred as the knife whipped past; the throw was that close.

A startled whimper seeped from Amanda's throat, and all the strength drained out of her arm. As she collapsed onto the ground, she heard rather than saw the
thunk
of the blade sinking into a tree trunk on the opposite side of the clearing. Her body went rigid. Her heart stopped, lodging itself in the vicinity of her dry, fear-tightened throat.

Sweet Jesus, the man had tried to kill her! Worse, he'd very nearly succeeded!

Panic coiled in her stomach. Wild surges of it rushed in her veins. From the inside out, she began to shake. Her lashes swept down, and she curled her arms around her waist. Air rushed into her lungs in one jagged inhalation. The grass she crushed flat beneath her cheek felt dewy, cold, and as frigid as death.

"What the—?" Jake blinked hard, and shook his head to clear it. He gouged the sleep from his eyes with the roughened pad of his thumb and index finger, but... dammit! When he looked around again, not a thing had changed.

His curses were loud and explicit, slamming off trees and grass. His gaze volleyed between Amanda and the knife, unable to decide which made him angrier, the blade he'd sunk up to the carved mahogany hilt in a pine tree trunk, or the woman who'd curled herself into a fetal ball in the grass near his hip.

A shaky sob drew his attention to Amanda. His hooded gaze settled on her and settled hard. Her normally pale cheeks were ashen, but she didn't look like she was hurt. He didn't see any blood—thank God!—and no cut marred her flawless white skin. She was, he noted absently, shaking from head to toe.

Good. That made two of them! Keeping his fury out of his voice was an effort Jake chose not to make.

"What the hell goes through your head, woman?"

His lethal glare detected her flinch. It wasn't satisfying. After what she'd just done—what she'd almost made
him
do—Jake wanted a hell of a lot more from her than terror. Begging for forgiveness would be a good start! "Look at me, damn you! I want your eyes open when I strangle the life out of you."

Whether she heard him or not was debatable. One thing he knew for certain; she didn't open her eyes. The lower lip she caught between her teeth was pearly pink and moist; it quivered almost as much as the rest of her. His angry shouts had only made her shake more violently. And whimper.

The sound gouged through Jake's gut like a dull knife.

His fingers were still shaking when he plowed them through his sleep-tousled hair. That...
annoyed
him enough to spear Amanda with a hot, angry glare. "I hope you had a good reason for what you just did, lady," he growled, his tone low and gritty with an emotion he didn't dare name—let alone acknowledge he felt. "A
damn
good reason. One that's worth dyin' for... because, darlin', I don't think you know how close you came to doing exactly that."

Not know?
Amanda thought. As if she could eve
r forget!
To narrowly miss being stabbed to death by a wild half-breed wasn't an everyday occurrence for the attendants of Miss Henry's Academy For Young Ladies. It was an event to be remembered, if only because Amanda had never come so close to dying in her life!

Still, for all Jake's fury, his words did serve an unintentional purpose. They tickled her memory. The reason she'd come over to his side of the camp shot through her mind. Also, his callous tone—
she
was the one who'd almost died, for heaven's sake, what was
he
going on about?!—burned the edges off her fear and sparked a flame of indignation deep inside of her.

Someone was out there. Someone was watching them. The hair at her nape still prickled with awareness. Goosebumps still tingled on her forearms and legs.

She opened her eyes, and pulled the man crouching beside her into focus. Jake's features were hard. The copper flesh between his brows was pinched in a warning scowl, and the muscle in his cheek pulsed erratically as he clenched and unclenched his teeth.

His expression would have intimidated her, had she time to be intimidated. She didn't. She had to warn Jake about whoever was out there, and she had to do it before whoever it was took them by surprise. "I... I heard a noise, Mr. Chandler."

"A noise? That's
it?"
Jake rolled his weight back on his heels. His hands hung limply between his knees. Too limply, Amanda thought. It was as though he was making a conscious effort not to wrap his fingers around her throat and squeeze—the way his eyes said he wanted so badly to do.

His sleep-tousled hair swayed around his shoulders when he shook his head in disgust. "Well, isn't that dandy! You almost get my knife planted in your skull just because you wanted to tell me you heard a noise. Shit, lady, should I even ask what you'd do if you
saw
a bear?" He held up a hand when she opened her mouth to answer. "Forget I asked."

Resentment coiled in Amanda's stomach. She welcomed the distraction. Anger was good, it was healthy... and it was much, better, much safer than the terror that had preceded it.

Feeling suddenly small and vulnerable curled up in a shivering ball at his feet, she pushed herself into a sitting position. She had to look up to meet his eyes, but at least she didn't feel so vulnerable, so miserably feminine! Her fingers, she was glad to find, didn't shake
too
much when she tucked a thick, sleep-tangled curl behind her ear.

Her gaze lifted, and meshed with his hard, steely glare. "I
did
hear a noise."

"I'll bet." His tone said he doubted it, as did the sharp glint in his eyes. Amanda bristled. "Know what
else
I'd bet on? I'd bet the noise you
say
you heard was made by a squirrel. Or the wind."

"Are you calling me a liar?" Her chin tipped, her green eyes shimmering a challenge.

One black brow slanted a reciprocal dare. His voice remained as cold as the look in his eyes. "No, princess, I'm calling you an alarmist. There's a difference."

"Not much of one! Would I have woken you up if I didn't think it was important?" She sucked in a steadying breath. It didn't help. Her fingers curled around fistfuls of her wrinkled calico skirt. "I'm telling you,
I. Heard. A. Noise!"

"And
I'm
telling
you
it was the wind."

"What
wind?" she demanded. To prove her point, she licked the tip of her index finger. Jake's glare tracked the movement. Amanda tried not to notice the heat that gaze caused to spread up her arm. It was impossible
not
to notice her reciprocal shiver of reaction. Her tone lost its sting as she held her wet finger up in the air. "There's a breeze, I'll grant you that, but no wind. And even if there was—which there isn't, but if there
was
—it still wouldn't explain the twigs I heard snapping."

She paused for affect—of which there was little, except the veiled suspicion she saw shimmering in his eyes.
"Footsteps,
Mr. Chandler. That's what I heard.
Footsteps."

"No, Miss Lennox. What you heard was a squirrel. Or a dog. Or a fox. Or... hell, I don't know." His shrug was jerky and strained as he pushed to his feet. "If you were from around these parts you'd know that at this time of morning, sound travels. Things seem louder than they are. Noises get distorted, warped. What you say you heard could have been damn near anything, coming from damn near anywhere."

Amanda gritted her teeth with frustration. There was no reasoning with this man, really there wasn't. "I didn't hear just 'anything,' I heard
footsteps.
And they were close by."

He glanced away. "So you say, and so I still don't believe. Now, if you'd
seen
someone that would be different..."

Amanda scrambled to her feet. Hoisting the skirt up so it wouldn't trip her, she dogged his footsteps with a stilted, limping gait of her own. She contained—barely—the urge to smack him good.

Why wouldn't Jake believe her? she wondered, as she stared at a point midway between his shoulder blades. He'd shrugged on a shirt at some point during the night. The faded, forest green cotton stretched over his sinewy shoulders, the color an earthy compliment to his copper skin and jet-black hair. The material left no doubt as to the powerful muscles bunching beneath. Her traitorous heart skipped a beat.

Exactly when her resentment began to fade, Amanda couldn't say. She only knew that it
had
dulled, and that she didn't like it one little bit. Fury was sensible, safe. This white-hot awareness of all things male—of all things
Jake Chandler—
well, that wasn't sensible at all. And nothing about it—about him—about her
reaction
to him—could be misconstrued as safe. Just the opposite; it was hot and dangerous.

She tore her gaze from his back and found herself staring intently at his hips; lean and firm, provocatively molded by tough, clinging denim. Her teeth clamped down on her lower lip. Lord, he was nicely shaped. And had she really thought looking
there
would be a safe, sensible thing to do? She was wrong. Dead wrong. Glancing at his rock-solid thighs wasn't any better.

Dammit! Wasn't there an inch of his body that was safe to look at? Was there a sliver of him that didn't spark some complex, erotic reaction in her? If so, Amanda couldn't find it.

She raked him head to toe, her gaze momentarily cool and objective. The man had no obvious flaws. Oh, hell! the man had no
un
obvious flaws, either. From the top of his head to the tips of his bare feet, every inch of him was formed to appeal to the eye—and the soul. Every single inch!

He was heading for the tree trunk he'd sunken his knife into. The progress of his swaggering strides made the air around Amanda shift. Feeling the kiss of it against her cheeks, she slowed her pace and drew in a curious breath.

She froze. Her fists uncurled. The skirt slipped from her slackened grasp, rustling around her ankles in wrinkled calico folds. She might as well have walked face first into a solid brick wall; the scent of him had that great an affect on her.

The morning smelled abruptly of spicy man and freshly milled soap. It was a fatal combination; a flagrantly male, blatantly seductive one.

Jake felt the heat of her gaze on his back, but most of his attention was trained on his knife. The hilt bit into his palm when his fingers curled around it. The muscles in his shoulder and arm strained as he wrenched the blade free. Chunks of bark rained to the ground, nipping at the tops of his bare feet.

He stared at the blade, scowling darkly. An image of what would have happened had his aim been true—which it usually was—flashed through Jake's mind. The vision was brief, wispy, gone as quickly as it had come. His reaction was disturbing; it lasted a hell of a lot longer!

A shiver iced through him. The sensation started where the cool wooden hilt was warming to his palm. Tremors vibrated up his arm in increasingly chilly waves, and...

Dammit! he was shaking again. A cold sweat broke out on his chest and brow. His gut twisted, and his heart felt tight, as though invisible fingers had clamped around it and squeezed it in a death-grip. Unwelcome sensations invaded his body and his mind, humming through the rest of him with alarming speed and accuracy. If Jake didn't know better, he would have sworn he was getting his first real taste of fear.

He took a few needed seconds to compose himself. The grass felt cold and dewy beneath his feet as, tuck
ing
the knife into its leather sheath, he turned to look at Amanda.

His heart sank. She wasn't standing where she should be. In fact, she wasn't standing anywhere at all. The clearing was empty.

Miss Abigail Henry owned and ran the best finishing school Boston had to offer. The teachers there had diligently taught Amanda how to make excruciatingly small embroidery stitches, how to master the pianoforte and harp, and how to command a battery of household servants. Roland Lennox had paid a small fortune for his daughter to learn everything she needed to know to become a lady. Amanda had learned it all—grudgingly, true, but she
had
learned it.

Only now did she realize her educators had left out life's most important lesson: how a woman managed to convince a stubborn-as-all-hell male to listen to reason!