A Wolf in the Desert (9 page)

As he'd walked the desert clearing his head he knew, suddenly and with conviction, what would come to pass and what survival would require of him. Deliberately delaying his return to the lean-to, giving her time to sleep or be near sleep, he'd loitered where no sane man would loiter and devised his plan.

He didn't expect he would have to wait long after his return to the quarters they shared. So he lay by her, aware on an unconscious level that she sank deeper into sleep, but with his immediate attention focused on the brush nearest the lean-to. The first sound that sent alarm ranting through him could have been a mouse, a night bird, a reptile. The second was the unmistakably stealthy footstep of a man. Not so close yet, but close enough to begin.

“Forgive me, O'Hara,” Indian muttered. Turning his body into hers, one leg pinned her legs to the ground, one hand clasped her hair, the other cupped her breast.

Patience woke abruptly. There was no confusion, no disorientation. She knew where she was and what was happening. All she didn't know was the identity of her attacker.

“Stop!” she cried, and began to fight, calling on every dirty tactic she'd used in fun in the free-for-alls against her brothers. But now she fought in earnest, there were no pulled punches, no sheathed claws, no tempered kick or bites. This was for real.

She wanted his eyes. Dear God! she wanted them. She struggled to see his face, to reach it, but any way she turned he was there at her back, his great, hard hands holding her, touching her. His breath was hot on her face, his hair tangled with hers. She butted him head-to-head and heard his muffled groan. In the momentary loosening of his grasp, she managed a half turn, but still couldn't see his face or reach his eyes.

Damn you. Bastard.
The words were only in her mind, she wouldn't waste the energy to speak them. Silently she fought on, denying her flagging strength, straining from his kisses, growling in the back of her throat like an animal. Then he was on her, over her, as his mouth covered hers.

She couldn't think. She couldn't breathe. His body was heavy, pinning her to the ground. She tried to move her head from side to side to escape, but his hands in her loose-flying hair held her in his kiss.

She was drowning, suffocating, dying.

The kiss went on forever. A deliberate kiss, and for all its prowess and expertise, curiously without passion.

Her fingers were in his hair, catching handfuls of long silky strands, tugging with the last of her stamina. Her arms cramped, her grip slipped away. This was a nightmare and she couldn't wake up. A battle she wouldn't win.

A ragged sob rose from a shattering heart and died in her throat. Then he was gone. Rolling away from her, but not leaving.

Patience lay as he left her, gasping for air, breathing in the scent of evergreen. Her hand hurt. She lifted it close to her face. There was fringe twined around her fingers. Buckskin fringe, stained with her blood as it cut into her flesh.

No one wore buckskin but Indian.

Like an old crone she sat up, slowly, bones creaking, muscles squalling.

No one had hair like silk but Indian.

Staring into the desert, she tried to ease the horror.

No one smelled of evergreen but Indian.

“You,” she said wearily, turning at last to the shadow that slumped at the edge of the shelter.

“Yes.” He didn't lift his head from his hands.

“Why didn't you finish what you began?” she asked bitterly.

“Are you asking why I didn't rape you?”

“That's what it was all about, wasn't it?”

“No.”

Patience needed more, but he said nothing. “That's it? Am I to believe you get your kicks out of near rape?”

He looked a her then. “Would you prefer the real thing?”

“Damn you, Indian! What do you think of me?”

“A lot more than you think of me at the moment, I imagine.”

Patience absorbed the sorrow she saw, remembering that he hadn't really hurt her, hadn't done more than touch her breast and kiss her. They'd slept side by side for two weeks and he'd made no advances. Now this, something half-done. It made no sense, or it made a great deal of sense. “They were out there again,” she ventured, realizing she should have guessed. “Weren't they?”

“Yes.”

“Talk to me, Indian. I need more than one word answers. Explain. I don't want to...” The admission she was about to make froze on her tongue. Lamely, she finished. “Just talk to me.”

“Why?” He moved closer to the lean-to, ducking the fraction needed to enter. He knelt in front of her and saw the remnants of terror illuminated by the dying fire. “What, O'Hara?” He smoothed her hair from her face, the back of his hand brushing her cheek. Sickness churned in him when he saw the effort it took not to recoil from him. Yet he was grateful for the effort, and heartened by it. “What don't you want?”

Her tired eyes were luminous, her bruised mouth trembled. She shook her head and would have turned away, but his fingers at her throat wouldn't let her.

“Why?” he asked again with a kindness that was her undoing.

“Because I don't want to hate you.” Her reluctant whisper was ragged and low.

“After all I've done, how could you not want to hate me?”

“I don't know.” She bit her lip and shook her head again. The attack was a sham, but an insidious dread seemed to have seeped into her bones, to dwell there forever. She curbed a shiver that had nothing to do with the chill of the desert night. “I don't know!” Her voice was rough from screams unuttered, from fears unnamed. “I don't know anything anymore.”

“I'm sorry.” He pulled her into his embrace, a strange tenderness in him as she tensed only a little, then lay quietly against him. “Sorry for this, for everything.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” He pulled away, only far enough to look down at her, the reflection of embers from the fire glowing softly in his eyes. Thoughtfully he murmured, “I wonder.”

“I know all that matters. That you truly wouldn't hurt me and that you would never do this without reason.”

“There was a reason. The same old reason.” He pulled her down with him as he recounted the confrontation by Hoke's fire. When he was finished, exhaustion overtook her, and he held her, watching over her while she slept again.

He'd bought a little space and a little trust. The Wolves would wait for a while, but his time and hers was fast running out. And the definitive information that could topple an empire eluded him still. He needed only a little more, but could he risk her life to save hundreds? Would he?

For the first time he asked the question of Matthew Winter Sky.

Matthew had no answer.

A
nother week, their third camp. As nearly as Patience could judge, they were in the vicinity of Phoenix. Not that she could see the city, nor had she seen it. Not even its lights, except a glow that washed the southern horizon at nightfall. Which, she admitted, might not be Phoenix at all. A battered and fading sign glimpsed on the little-used roads and trails the bikers used was her one clue.

That wreck of a sign had assumed an inordinate importance in Patience's thoughts. Tattered and curling, peppered with buckshot, and leaning at an impossible angle, it had become her lodestar, not to the north, but to herself. It was her orientation, the finding of herself. It had become increasingly important to know where she was, to document it even in the vaguest of terms. A necessary exercise to keep this real.

Terror could dull the mind, nature's palliative turned reality to a nightmarish dream. Patience wouldn't allow herself that luxury. Reality she could control, dreams she could not.

The pitiful derelict standing haphazard among the mesquite could have been a prank. Some desert dweller's idea of a great joke. But for Patience it was truth. It had to be.

The little knowledge was hope. Hope for escape. Hope for a future. An exhilarating stimulus that swept paralyzing fear from the mind, sharpening muddled thought processes.

Clutching this cherished secret to her heart, Patience could look out on her movable prison with a new understanding. The sudden frenzy of moving twice in as many days, and the clandestine travel seemed confusing and more than strange after two weeks of idle days in the canyon. She realized now that the weeks had been a time of waiting, hiding and waiting, for some signal. But what? And why?

In those first days of her captivity few left the canyon, then only in pairs. Now all the men rode, and with them most of the women. Indian, who hadn't left her alone in camp before, rode, too.

Only Patience never left her prison without bars. Each trip out, two of the women were left behind and set to guard her. Given the way some of them looked at her, the silent, sullen watching, she often wondered who would guard her from her guards.

Sitting apart now, as she always did, as Indian wished her to, she became a not-so-detached observer of the latest spate of activity. That they were readying to ride was obvious. If she hadn't spent this interminable time with them she would know this was different, more than a joyride. Excitement ran through the camp like chain lightning. A spark leaping from one to another, as wanderers nailed to one place for too long made preparations for a serious ride.

Only Hoke, his triumvirate, and Indian did not see to their bikes. There was no camp fire now, with the midday heat too oppressive for it. Snake and Hogan and Custer crouched on their haunches around Hoke, listening, seldom speaking. A few paces away, out of range of their conversation, but keeping them constantly in his line of sight, Indian busied himself with the repair of a moccasin in perfect repair.

As she watched him watch them, Patience was completely convinced he knew what they were saying, as surely as if he heard them.

He's reading lips, she decided. What did the foul four have to say that was so important? And why did Indian eavesdrop in such a covert manner?

Sighing, shrugging a shoulder beneath her sweat-soaked shirt, she turned away. The broiling sun bore down through the scruffy shrub that was her meager shelter. The air was stifling, so hot it seared the lungs with each breath. The bits of shade that dappled her skin offered no relief. In this crudest of camps, the most temporary and barren, Indian had neither time nor resources to construct a lean-to. A little shelter that would be welcome now.

Subconsciously she lifted her braid lying over her shoulder like a strip of heat. Brushing her fingers over the banded tips she found herself turning again to Indian, remembering his care and his tenderness as he'd worked with her hair, braiding it, securing it against the wind that beat at her as she rode behind him.

In seeming oblivion of her interest, he knelt at the edge of their sector, one knee on the ground, one foot firmly planted. His hair was drawn cruelly from his face, a glittering fall of all the iridescences of black. His features were cast in stark relief, angular and rough-hewn, its handsome harshness unrelieved by his dark, riveted gaze and the grim line of his mouth. Beneath his right eye, a bruise she couldn't see faded to yellow as it blended into the coppery hue of his skin.

The bruise she'd given him with the butt of her head on the night that proved her suspicions. The night she knew Indian was more than he pretended to be. But who was he? What was he? And why did he travel with these men who viewed him with mistrust, if not total distrust, and afforded him only tentative acceptance at best?

As she puzzled about him, he stood, rising to his full height of six feet. He wore the buckskin vest, his chest and arms bare beyond its cut. Beneath the blazing sun, darkening skin that never seemed to burn shone red-brown. Only a light sheen of perspiration shimmered on his forehead and chest, when others, including Patience, sweated profusely. He was a being made for the desert, a man abiding with its exigencies, dealing with them in uncanny ease.

The riders called themselves Desert Wolves. A grandiose misnomer for the creatures they were. Swaggering marauders in a fragile, unforgiving land, but not of it. As Indian turned his probing, intelligent gaze to her, she knew that only he among them was of the desert, only he was the wolf.

Her thoughts faltered, her pulse quickened as he came to her in his easy, ground-eating step. With his back to the others he knelt by her, touching her face with his fingertips, smoothing a drifting tendril from her cheek. “We ride soon.”

She nodded in acknowledgment. “Everyone but my guardians.”

“Alice and Eva,” he complained under his breath. “I hate to leave you with them.”

Alice was the oldest, the roughest, the sliest. A beefy woman with tattooed arms. And Eva, a crude creature with hard, bitter eyes, who looked with evil intent at the world. A mockery of her own sophisticated name.

“I'll be all right,” Patience assured him with a conviction far from the truth.

“You'll stay close?” He meant the place he'd made for her, her place apart.

“I won't budge an inch beyond our perimeter. And I won't do anything to antagonize either of them.”

The promise didn't satisfy him, but it was the best he could expect. The best he could have.

“I wish...” It did no good to wish. There was an alternative in the beginning—to take her out of the desert to safety, abandoning all he'd accomplished, or to keep her with him, salvaging what he could of a crucial investigation. He'd made the self-serving choice and now she, as well as he, must live with the consequences. Framing her face between his hands, he looked deeply into her eyes, into her soul, the source of her indomitable spirit and sometimes foolish courage. Willing her to keep herself safe, he growled a low demand, “Take care.” He pressed his lips briefly to her hair. Moving away, touching her only with his eyes, he murmured, “Please.”

Then he was away to his bike without a backward glance.

Long after the predominant roar of the Harleys had been swallowed by the desert, Patience sat as he'd left her. All that moved was her hand, stroking her hair. When she realized her fingers had by their own volition found the place his lips had touched, she yanked her hand away. Folding one over the other, keeping them stiffly in her lap, she sat with dread in the silence of the camp.

She missed him already, and insisted to herself that it was because he was her only ally. Because he was her gentle protector, more than her keeper. Because the women were her enemies, with the two set to guard her now, the worst of the lot.

“Hey, Red.” As if on cue the taunting call shattered the silence, drawing her almost gratefully from thoughts she wasn't ready to accept. “You gonna sit all day and mope?”

When Patience didn't answer, Eva joined her brittle call to that of Alice's. “Miss High and Mighty ain't so high or so mighty now, is she? Didja see her mooning after the pretty boy, Alice?”

Alice chuckled, an unhealthy rattling sound. “Face longer than a lonesome hound dog. Too bad the pretty one ain't here to see. Make his heart go pitty-pat.” A crude expletive rolled off her tongue with a hideous naturalness, as she tossed back a lock of hair too sooty black. “Do more than that to Snake.” Poking Eva with an elbow, her face crinkled in a sly caricature of a grin. “That I'd like to see.”

“None of us was good enough for him,” Eva announced tartly. She called no names, but no one doubted that she spoke of Indian. “Only your ladyship here would do. Bet he wouldn't think so much of her once Snake got through carving on her patrician face.” The way she pronounced it, breaking it into broad, derisive syllables, patrician became a parody of itself. A scornful insult.

“To my way of thinking, a little roughing up would improve more than your ladyship's looks. Tone her down some, then she wouldn't be so special, sitting over there all alone,” Alice observed a little too casually.

Patience didn't like the direction their taunts were taking them. With her thoughts ranging, she searched for a way to diffuse the escalating situation. Drawing a blank, she took refuge in the only recourse left her. Passive resistance. Complete silence. If their remarks prompted no retaliation, she hoped they would find little sport in them. It hadn't proven successful on a lost and lonely trail, but it was still her best and only recourse.

“Hey, you.” Eva sauntered closer, hips swaying as her boots scuffed the dust in her burlesque of the mincing steps of a grand lady. She was more slender by far than Alice, yet still bigger than Patience. When her call elicited no response, she stopped, hands on her hips, flat, cruel eyes flashing beneath a shock of close-cropped hair the color of platinum. “You!” She pointed a finger. “I'm talking to you.”

Patience knew she'd been mistaken in her silence. Mistaken because there was nothing she could do to diffuse this. These women had waited nearly three weeks for redress of some imagined dishonor and they intended to have it.

Concealing a rueful sigh, she turned to these hardened camp followers bent on malicious mischief. Lifting her chin a regal inch, she addressed them calmly. “Yes?”

“Yes!” Alice snorted. “She doesn't know what you want and she's already saying yes.”

Patience ignore Alice. “You were speaking to me, Eva?”

“Well, I sure as hell wasn't talkin' to myself.”

“How may I help you?” Patience wondered how many times she'd heard her mother use that phrase to discourage determined gossips. She hadn't really listened then, but was surprised at how like Mavis she sounded. “Is there something you need?”

“Something I need!” Eva howled and slapped her knee. “That's a good one. What would I need from you?”

“I have no idea,” Patience said as she stood to face the woman. “You came to me, not I to you.”

“Oh, my, what a pretty speech. Do you think you could teach me to talk like that?”

Eva was circling her now, and Patience turned as she turned. Alice had initiated this encounter, but Patience was convinced she was only the instigator. One who liked to stir the bitter broth, then stood back and watched it bubble. Alice would be no trouble; Eva was the one she must not take lightly.

“I could teach you,” Patience said, pretending she hadn't heard the contempt in the gibe, “if you like.”

“And if I don't like?”

“You asked, Eva, I didn't offer.”

“You really think you're something, don't you?” Eva's eyes glittered with hate, her words were filled with venom. “You waltz in here like Miss Perfect in the flesh, and have all the men panting after you. Including Indian, who wouldn't give me a look.” She clamped her teeth down on a damning admission. And Patience understood at last why the woman hated her so.

Eva wanted Indian, and in her mind Patience had taken him from her. “You're wrong, Eva. I didn't waltz anywhere. I was brought against my will. I never wanted any part of this.”

“You think I believe that?” Brows many shades darker than platinum lifted nearly to her hairline. “What kind of fool do you think I am?”

“I don't think you're a fool at all. Mistaken, but not a fool.” Patience kept her voice steady, her face serene.

“Nothin' ruffles the grand lady, does it?” Eva sneered. “I wonder how grand you'd be with that red braid hacked off at the scalp? Or your nose trimmed like a cheatin' squaw?” The knife at her belt was suddenly in her hand.

The game was over.

Patience had no knife, but she was not without weapons. Her father had insisted long ago that his daughters not be without protection. Keegan determined that protection would be themselves and the skills learned from a great, hulking Oriental who had no speech, but moved like a dancer and taught physical mayhem with ceremony in a teahouse setting. What Kim taught Patience and Valentina was simple and deadly. With a single move either could disable or cripple a much larger assailant. But she had no wish to cripple Eva, nor to do her lasting harm. She wanted nothing more than to persuade the jealous woman to leave her alone.

As she backed away, hoping this little giving of ground would satisfy the woman, Patience readied for attack. Relaxed, her weight evenly balanced on both feet, arms at her sides as she leaned ever so slightly forward, she could move surely and quickly. Surprise and speed, and unexpected knowledge would be her forte. With regret for the need of it, she waited for Eva to charge.

Spurred by envy that was fueled by the cool composure of the smaller woman, Eva became like a wild animal guided by rage rather than thought. With a cry she launched herself at Patience, slashing savagely with the knife. She had only a millisecond to halt, glaring blankly at the space where Patience had been, before a booted heel crashed into the side of her knee. That very vulnerable and complex structure buckled, pitching Eva's weight onto it, inflicting added damage in an instant before she fell on her face.