Elizabeth Lowell (29 page)

Out in the distance to the east, blue-black buttes and localized thunderstorms were intermixed with golden cataracts of light where sunshine poured through gaps between squall lines. Overhead, lightning played through the massed clouds and the wind increased.

By the time Lucifer and Ty reached the place where the plateau merged with the lower canyon lands beyond, the last luminous shafts of sunlight had slowly been absorbed by the thunderstorm gathering overhead, leaving behind an odd, sourceless gloaming that made every feature of the land stand forth as though outlined in pale gold.

The effect lasted for only a few minutes, until the first sweeping veils of rain came down, blending sky and land into one seamless whole. Lightning danced across the land on incandescent feet, while thunder rumbled behind its shimmering, elusive mistress.

“Well, son,” Ty said, pulling his hat down tighter against the wind and pelting rain, “this cloud’s silver lining is that no self-respecting renegade is going to be out chasing around in the rain.”

If that fact cheered Lucifer, the stud didn’t show it. He limped along with his ears half-laid-back in warning of his surly temper.

Ty felt the same way himself. With luck the storm would turn out to be a small, fast-moving squall line. Without luck, the rain would last for hours. With bad luck, the slot leading into Janna’s hidden canyon would be too deep with runoff water from the thunderstorm for them to enter and they would have to spend another night in the open.

Janna was worrying about the same thing. If she had been alone, she would have hurried Zebra toward the miles-distant slot. But she wasn’t alone, and despite Lucifer’s best efforts, his shuffling, painful walk meant that it would be several hours before they reached the haven of her hidden canyon.

The rain quickly limited visibility to a few hundred yards, making scouting both impossible and unnecessary. Janna turned Zebra and retraced her steps until she saw Lucifer and Ty. She slid off Zebra and fell into step beside Ty.

“Go ahead on to the canyon,” he said. “No sense in you catching your death out in the rain.”

“It will be dark an hour before you get to the slot. You’ll miss it. Besides, you know how it is with misery. I was feeling like a little company.”

He thought of objecting more forcefully to her presence but didn’t. Part of him agreed with her that he would have trouble finding the narrow slot in the dark in the rain, because the only other time he had been through it from this direction he had been more dead than alive. But the real reason he didn’t object was that he enjoyed having her beside him, her fingers laced through his, their hands slowly warming with shared body heat.

“Janna?” he asked after a long time of rain and silence, voicing a thought that had been nagging at him for hours.

“Yes?”

“Why did you risk your life holding on to Lucifer in that ravine?”

“I didn’t want Troon to get him again.”

“But you heard the renegades. You had to figure that Troon was as good as dead. You could have let Lucifer go, but you didn’t. You hung on despite the danger to yourself.”

She said nothing.

“Sugar? Why?”

“I promised you a chance to gentle Lucifer,” she said simply. “There would never be a better chance than in that small ravine.”

Ty swore very softly. “I thought it was something crazy like that. Listen to me. You’re free of that promise you made. Do you hear me? If Lucifer decides to take off in twelve different directions, that’s my problem, not yours. You just get the hell out of the way where you won’t get hurt.” He waited but she said nothing. “Janna?”

“I heard you.”

“Do I have your word that if Lucifer bolts or goes loco, you’ll get out of the way instead of trying to help?”

“Ty—”

“Give me your word,” he interrupted, “or so help me God I’ll turn around right now and walk back to Wyoming and to hell with that damned black stud.”

“But he’s your future, the only way you’ll get a chance to buy your silken—”

Ty interrupted with a burst of language that was both savage and obscene.

It was a mile before Janna had the courage to break the silence that had followed.

“I promise,” she said finally. “I don’t understand why you won’t let me help you, but—”

“You don’t understand?” he demanded fiercely, cutting off her words once more. “You must have a damned poor opinion of me if you think I’d build my dream on top of your dead body.”

“I never meant anything like that,” she said instantly, shocked that he had misunderstood her words. “I know you’d never do something that awful. You’re much too kind and gentle and generous.”

His laughter was as harsh as his swearing had been, for he knew that a man who was kind or gentle or generous wouldn’t have eased his violent hunger at the cost of Janna’s innocence. But He had done just that and now she was no longer innocent...and worst of all, he couldn’t bring himself to truly repent his action. The ecstasy he had known within her body was too great, too consuming, to ever be denied.

If he had it to do all over again, he would no more be able to preserve her virginity than he had been the first time. She was wildness and grace and elemental fire, and he was a man who had hungered a lifetime for all three without knowing it. She had sensed his needs, given herself to him, and had required nothing of him in return.

Not one damn thing.

And he felt the silken strands of her innocence and generosity twining more tightly around him with each moment, binding him.

“Do you do it on purpose?” he demanded angrily.

“What?”

“Give everything and ask nothing and thereby chain me to you tighter than any steel manacles could.”

She felt as though she had been struck. The cold rain that had been making her miserable became her friend, for it hid the tears and disappointment she was too tired to conceal.

When he had swept her up in his arms and held her as fiercely as she had held him, she had begun to hope that he cared more for her than simply as a sexual convenience. When he had held her hand and walked in companionable silence with her through the storm, she had been certain that he cared for her.

What she hadn’t realized was that he would resent that caring.

And her.

“Well, you’re by God going to take something from me,” he continued. “Lucifer is half yours.”

“I don’t want him.”

“I didn’t want you to risk your neck, either,” he shot back, “and a lot of good my wanting did me.”

Janna jerked her hand free of his. “Did you ever think that the reason I didn’t ask for anything from you was that there was nothing you had that I wanted?”

“Nothing?” Ty asked sardonically. “You could have fooled me.”

The tone of his voice told her that he was remembering her hands caressing him, her lips clinging, her hips lifting in silent pleading that his body join with hers. Shame coursed through her.

“Don’t worry,” she said, her voice strained. “You won’t have to lose any sleep on my account tonight. I won’t seduce you again.”

“Seduce me? Is that what you think happened? You seduced me?” He laughed. “Sugar, you don’t have the least idea how to seduce a man. A woman seduces a man with rustling silks and secret smiles and accidental touches of her soft, perfumed hands. She seduces a man with her conversation and the sweet music of her voice when she greets her guests for a fancy ball. She seduces a man by knowing fine wines and elegant food, and by her special grace when she enters a room knowing he’ll be there.” Ty shook his head and added, “You well and truly bedded me, but you sure as hell didn’t seduce me.”

Janna remembered what Ty had said about her last
night
...
suited to be nothing except a man
’
s mistress, but you lack the social graces for even that profession.

Without a word she turned away from his and swung onto Zebra’s warm back, ignoring the pain that mounting the horse without aid gave to her bruised arm.

“Jana? What the hell...?”

She didn’t answer. Her heels urged Zebra forward until Janna could see and hear only the rain.

“Come on, it’s just a little bit farther,” Ty said to the stallion, hoping he wasn’t lying. Neither his voice nor the steady pressure he put on the hackamore revealed the weariness that had settled into the marrow of his bones, turning his muscles to sand.

For a moment he was afraid that the stallion wouldn’t respond, but the pressure on the hackamore eased abruptly as the horse resumed his awkward walking gait.

“That’s it, son,” Ty said encouragingly. “She said the slot was at the top of a little rise.”

And that was all she had said through the long hours of intermittent rain and wind. When it wasn’t raining she rode far ahead of Ty and Lucifer. When it rained she rode in close enough that her tracks were always clear for Ty to follow. When it became dark she rode closer still, ensuring that Lucifer wouldn’t get lost.

He was certain that it was the stallion’s welfare rather than his own that concerned her. Not once since she had mounted Zebra had she said anything to him.

He missed her conversation. In the past weeks he had become accustomed to her insights into the land and its animals, her uninhibited response to the wind and sun, and her shy smile when he touched her. He missed her laughter when she talked about hiding from Cascabel in the same way the renegade had once hidden from the soldiers—out in plain sight. Ty missed the snippets of plays and poetry and essays she liked to talk about with him, drawing from him the missing parts of her education.

Most of all he missed the warm, companionable silence they had shared while they walked hand in hand in the cold rain.

The silence they had shared since she had ridden off was anything but companionable. It was as chill and empty as the night.

“Maybe you can tell me,” Ty said to Lucifer. “Why would a woman get all upset because I told her it isn’t her fault that she’s not a virgin anymore? Because it sure as hell isn’t her fault. She didn’t have the faintest idea of what waited for her at the end of that primrose path. She could no more have known when to say no to me than she could have walked down the plateau trail carrying Zebra on her back.”

The stallion’s ear twitched.

“But I knew where we were going. I knew the first time I kissed Janna that I should stop myself right there or I wouldn’t be able to quit short of burying myself in that sweet young body. But I didn’t stop. I wanted her the way a river in flood wants the sea. Just plain unstoppable. And God help me, I still want her just like that.”

Rain settled in like a cold lover.

“I knew what I was doing every inch of the way…and it was every inch the best I’ve ever had. I’ll die remembering the beautiful sounds she made while I was inside her, pleasuring her with my whole body.”

His voice thickened as memories poured through him in an incandescent tide. Despite his exhaustion, his blood beat heavily at the thought of being sheathed within Janna’s fire and softness once more.

“She didn’t have a chance to refuse me,” he said, his voice rough. “Not a single damned chance in hell. It should have made her feel better to know that what happened was my fault, not hers. So why won’t she speak to me?”

Lucifer didn’t have any answer for Ty.

He didn’t expect one. If the stallion had known how to handle the supposedly weaker sex, Zebra wouldn’t have been racing around the plateau with Janna for the past few years. Muttering to himself, Ty walked up the rise, urging the limping stallion along with a steady pressure on the hackamore.

At last a low nicker came floating out of the darkness in front of them. Lucifer whickered in return. No verbal welcome came to Ty, however. Nor did Janna say anything when she dismounted and walked around the stallion. Frowning, peering into the coldly brilliant moonlight that had replaced the wind-frayed clouds, she tried to gauge Lucifer’s condition.

“Is there too much water in the slot for us to get through?” Ty asked.

“No.”

He waited, but Janna had nothing more to say on that subject—or any other, apparently. At least, not to him. But it seemed she had nothing against talking to the stallion.

“You poor, brave creature. You’ve really been put through it today, haven’t you?” she said in a gentle voice as she reached out to pet Lucifer.

Ty opened his mouth to warn Janna that the stallion was feeling surly as hell, but the words died on his tongue when Lucifer nickered softly and stretched his muzzle out to her hands. Slender fingers stroked his muzzle and cheeks, then searched through the stallion’s thick, shaggy forelock until she found the bony knob between his ears. She slid her fingers beneath the hackamore and rubbed away the unaccustomed feel of the leather.

Lucifer let out a breath that was almost a groan and put his forehead against her chest, offering himself to her touch with a trust that first shocked Ty, then moved him, making his throat close around all the emotions he had no words to describe.

Seeing the stallion’s gentle surrender reminded Ty of the ancient myth of the unicorn and virgin. But as he watched her, he wondered if it weren’t some elemental feminine quality that had attracted the unicorn to the girl, rather than her supposedly virginal state.

That poor unicorn never had a chance,
he told himself silently.
He was born to lay his head in that one maiden
’
s lap and be captive to her gentle hands.

The insight made Ty very restless. Though Janna had done nothing to hold him, he felt somehow confined, caught in an invisible net, tied with silken threads…and each thread was a shared caress, a shared smile, a shared word, until one thread became thousands woven into an unbreakable bond, and the silken snare was complete.

“Ready, boy?” Janna asked quietly. “It’s going to be hard on your poor leg, but it’s the last thing I’ll ask of you until you’re healed.”

She turned and walked toward Zebra.

Lucifer followed, silently urging Ty forward with a pressure on the lead rope he still held. The reversal in their roles gave the man a moment of sardonic amusement. He wondered what would happen if he tied the rope around the stallion’s neck and then turned and walked away, leaving everything behind.