Only You (19 page)

He smiled despite the sweat sliding down his spine from the fierce tension of his body.

“You’ll be the death of me,
gata.”
Then, his voice harsh, he added, “Help me.”

“How?”

“Bring your knees up.”

Long legs shifted.

“Higher. Yes, like that. God,” Reno said heavily, “I wish I could see you.”

Eve made a stifled sound as she felt his fingertips trace every part of the night-blooming flower that
was fully revealed to him. It was as though he wanted to memorize with touch what he couldn’t clearly see.

Delicately Reno tested the satin nub he had found hidden within her petals.

Eve’s breath came in with a husky sound that could have been pleasure or pain.

“Talk to me,” Reno said. “Tell me if I hurt you.”

He circled the sensitive knot with his fingertips before he caught it and plucked gently.

Eve stiffened as though he had taken a whip to her.

“Eve?”

She couldn’t answer. Pleasure raced through her body from Reno’s touch, making it impossible to think or speak. A broken breath, a stifled moan, and a scented rain were the only answer she could give him.

It was enough. It told Reno that Eve wanted him as profoundly as he wanted her.

He pressed lightly into her again for the sheer pleasure of feeling how much she hungered for what he could give her. The hot rush of her response clung to him, shimmering in the vague light, making him dizzy with the answering surge of his own blood. He shifted, bringing his aroused flesh very close to her, pushing lightly, testing her ability to take him.

The testing was also a caress. Eve made a sound of wonder as pleasure rippled through her. Sensual heat licked over Reno’s violently aroused flesh, dragging a ragged groan from him. His hips moved reflexively, pushing between hot petals, seeking an even deeper joining.

Eve’s eyes opened as the pressure between her legs intensified, Reno’s body slowly stretching her with a gentle, measured movement that was at
odds with the harsh lines of his face.

“Tell me,” he said hoarsely.

Reno wanted to say more, but he couldn’t. He was feeling Eve too intensely, sleek heat and sultry rain and a loving glide of flesh over flesh. She was feeling him in the same way, her eyes heavy-lidded, watching him as he took her and gave himself to her in the same deliberate movement.

Never had Reno known such a sensual merging of body with body, heat with heat, breath with breath. There was no barrier, no cry of pain, no sudden attempt by Eve’s body to reject him.

She gave way before him like a summer storm, luring and surrounding him as he pressed into her hot center. No matter how deeply he probed, there was only liquid heat and a satin constriction caressing him in secret, teaching him what it meant to be fully, passionately joined with a woman.

The hot perfection of sheathing himself so slowly within her nearly undid him. Blood hammered through his veins, filling him until thought he must burst or die.

“Eve…”

Reno’s voice was ragged, all but throttled by the wild race of his blood.

Eve heard him and knew that he was trying to ask if he was hurting her. She would have answered, but the slow, heavy penetration was transforming her.

Rings of fire pulsed up from the point where her body joined his. The tiny, secret convulsions brought a pleasure so great she could only give herself to it and to the man who was so deeply a part of her that he felt each silky pulse distinctly. And with each pulse came a sensual rain that eased his way even more, luring and welcoming and caressing him profoundly.

Reno felt his control being stripped away by the sweet rhythms of Eve’s pleasure. He measured himself once within her, then twice, before the firestorm within him burst. He arched into her welcoming heat and gave himself to her in a shuddering rush that left him spent.

The weight of Reno’s body against Eve’s sent another wave of passion through her. She made a sound deep in her throat and twisted against him as her body was impaled by a shaft of ecstasy.

The sinuous, gliding pressure of Eve over his buried flesh sent tongues of fire licking sharply through Reno. He moved slowly within her and savored her shimmering response.

Watching her, he moved again, enjoying her throaty cries and the melting of her body around him. He had never known a woman to enjoy so clearly his presence within her. He had never guessed how much satisfaction there could be in watching his smallest motion transformed into sensual feminine pulses and a silent, sinuous pleading for more of him.

Nor had he known what his own body was capable of, the rushing transformation repeated, sweet needles of fire pricking delicately, deeply, until he was consumed by a need that was all the sweeter for having been ignited while he was fully sheathed within her.

“I hope you’re right about having lots of lives,
gata.”

Eve’s lashes lifted, showing eyes that were still glazed with pleasure.

“What?” she asked huskily.

Her voice broke before the question was finished, for Reno was moving slowly within her, filling her.

“Do you like this?” he asked, withdrawing and returning once more.

“Dear Lord, yes.”

“It doesn’t hurt?”

Soft laughter was Eve’s answer. Her hands caressed the length of Reno’s spine. She paused to comb through the scattering of silky hair in the small of his back before she went on to his buttocks. The taut muscles intrigued her, as did the swift, ripping breath he took when her hand strayed between his thighs. She repeated the caress, drawing another shudder from him.

“No more of that,” Reno said, dragging Eve’s hand back to his flank.

“Don’t you like it?”

“Too damn much,” he admitted. “Save it for next time.”

“Next time?”

“Yes,
gata.
Next time. I may need it then. I sure don’t need it now.”

“I don’t understand.”

Reno moved again within Eve, caressing and stretching her in the same motion.

“If I get any harder,” he said, “it will be over too soon. I want this one to last a long, long time.”

“Oh.”

He bent down and put his cheek next to hers. The heat of her skin amazed him.

“Are you blushing?” he asked.

Eve buried her face in his neck and hit his shoulder lightly with her fist.

“How anyone can be so abandoned and yet so shy…” Reno’s voice faded into a soft laugh. “Never mind. You’ll get over it.”

A muffled comment told him that she doubted it.

“Look at me, sugar girl.”

When she shook her head, he gently pried her face from his neck.

“Shy little night-blooming flower,” Reno said, dropping tiny kisses over Eve’s hot face. “If you knew how rare you were, you wouldn’t blush.”

He saw the narrow gleam of Eve’s eyes as she peeked through her lashes at him.

“And you are rare,” he breathed against her lips.

“I’m just a…”

Whatever Eve was going to say was lost in the slow penetration of his tongue until he filled her mouth just as he filled her body. The tiny, throaty cry she gave affected him the way a burning match affects dry straw. He retreated and returned with exquisite control from her body, measuring both of them simultaneously, intimately. Then he withdrew again.

With a ragged sound that was Reno’s name, Eve moved her hips, trying to reclaim him.

“You make me feel like the man who first discovered fire,” Reno said in a low voice, watching her.

He rocked slowly against her, leaving none of her untouched, moving with the deliberate rhythms of a storm that has eternity to gather and break.

“Hurt?” he asked softly.

Her answer was a rippling sigh of pleasure.

“Tell me if I hurt you,” Reno said.

Smoothly he shifted, sliding his arms beneath her knees, bending and lifting her legs, pressing them gently back against her body, moving in slow motion, joining them more deeply than she would have believed possible.

“Eve?” he whispered.

“Dear God,” she said, shivering with pleasure.

As Reno moved, a hot, gentle vise closed around
Eve, a burning so soft she knew it only in after-thought. A long, sweet shimmering began to steal through her, making her want to laugh and cry at the same time.

Reno withdrew, taking the sensual pressure with him.

“No,” Eve said.

“I thought I was hurting you.”

“Only when you left.”

She made a low, ragged sound as Reno slowly returned, rocked against her, then retreated as deliberately as he had taken her. The ghostly shimmering returned, delicate currents of fire claiming her softly.

“I think…” Eve whispered.

He moved again, and flames licked gently, stealing her voice.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I think…a woman…discovered fire,” Eve said. “With you…”

Tender fire leaped, consuming her.

Reno heard the echoes of ecstasy in Eve’s voice, felt it in the rhythmic shivering of her body, and wanted to shout his triumph at the stars.

But he had no breath to shout, for the flames that he had nurtured in her were spreading outward, licking over him in the silken rhythms of her release. He held himself utterly still, fighting against the need to join her. He didn’t want that yet, not before he had plumbed the depths of her ability to respond to him.

The lure of Eve’s body was too great to withstand. When she twisted slowly, repeatedly, against him, Reno felt the world unravel in a series of soft explosions. With her name breaking on his lips, he came undone a single heartbeat at a time,
giving himself to her in a long, rippling current of fire.

Eve’s breath caught and sighed out in wonder as she held Reno, savoring the gentle shuddering of his body. For long, sweet minutes, her slender fingers caressed his back and shoulders. The breadth and power of him were obvious even now, when he lay with his head between her breasts, breathing slowly, utterly relaxed.

Smiling, Eve stroked Reno’s back with slow sweeps of her hands, savoring the strength of him and the knowledge that she had never been so close to anyone.

It was more than the fact of their interlocked bodies. She loved Reno as she had never loved anyone in her life.

Eve didn’t know she had spoken her thoughts aloud until Reno lifted his head and turned it from side to side, stroking her breasts with his cheek as he spoke.

“Love is an illusion, sugar girl,” he said. “But passion isn’t.”

She felt the slow drawing of Reno’s tongue over her nipples. With each delicious movement, his body stirred within her, redoubling the effect of his caresses. An answering heat splintered through her, making her breath break audibly.

Reno heard Eve’s response and felt it in the swift rise of her breasts. His laughter was velvety, dark, exultant.

“Passion is very real,” he said, biting delicately at Eve’s taut nipples. “We’re good together, you and I. Hell, we’re better than good. There’s no word for what we have when we’re like this.”

“What do you mean?” she whispered.

“Little innocent,” Reno murmured, drinking the tender shivering of her flesh as his teeth raked
lightly. “You don’t even know, do you?”

“What?”

“This.”

His hips moved and he drove into her as though he would fuse their bodies into a single seamless whole. A throttled cry and an urgent twisting of her hips answered him. Laughing with sheer pleasure, he twisted against her in turn and listened to his name come from her lips in a rush.

“Yes,” Reno said. “It’s me. Again. But don’t blame me,
gata.
I’ve never been like this before in my life.”

Another twist, another cry, another sultry wave melting through Eve to lick over Reno, fueling his passionate fire, driving him higher, urging him to drive her higher as well.

Reno moved heavily, sparing Eve nothing of his power. Nor did she ask for less. She moved in urgent counterpoint, meeting strength with fluid grace, hunger with desire, fire with searing fire.

When sweat misted her skin, he bent his head and licked salty drops, bit flesh that strained to become part of him. He seduced her breasts with his teeth and tongue, demanding and receiving a hard bud from each while his hips moved relentlessly, demanding a different kind of flowering.

His hand slid down between their slick, hot bodies until he found the satin bud. He circled, pressed, raked with shattering delicacy.

“What are you…” Eve said brokenly. “Dear God…
Reno.
”

Pleasure burst in her with the force of a blow, arching her body as fierce currents swept through her, driving her even higher.

Reno held Eve wild and shivering while he moved over and within her relentlessly, riding the fierce passion he had called from her. He punctuated
each heavy thrust with a savagely restrained caress that demanded everything of her, plucking at the delicate bud until it began to flower one dark petal at a time.

Eve cried out as her body experienced an ecstasy that had no beginning and no end, shattering her, transforming her. If there had been room in her for fear, she would have been terrified; but there was room only for Reno’s driving body and the dark words of desire and demand he poured over her.

She cried out in abandon, sinking her nails heedlessly into his back as she arched like a drawn bow, succumbing to the sweet violence he had called from her.

Reno’s smile was as untamed as Eve’s cries. He held himself utterly motionless, absorbing her violent trembling into his strength. When she was still once more, he bent his head, drew his teeth over her shoulder in a fierce caress, and began moving inside her again.

Eve gasped as passion ravished her body once more.

“Reno.”

“I warned you,” he said in a low voice. “Until we can’t even lick our lips.”

Reno moved powerfully, pulling the night down around them like a cloak of black fire.

And like fire, they burned.

T
HE
jumbled waste of rock, sand, and tough shrubs looked like it went on forever in all directions, but Reno knew it didn’t. It was simply another wide step down in the long descent from the Rockies to the place more than a hundred miles to the west, where the mysterious, powerful Rio Colorado coiled invisibly between stone banks.

If it weren’t for Slater hovering on the horizon like a vulture, I’d be happy to camp by fresh water and not move for a few weeks.

Or months.

Reno smiled wryly at his own thoughts. For the first time in his life, he was in no real hurry to find Spanish treasure. He was having too much pleasure in other explorations, charting the undiscovered territory of a dual sensuality that was both savage and sublime, violent and tender, demanding and renewing. He didn’t want it to end until
both of them had drunk the dark wine to the last heady drop.

Until we find the mine, you’ll be my woman whenever I want you, however I want you.

Eve had kept her end of the bargain with a generosity that was as unexpected and consuming as the sweet violence of their joined bodies. The thought of never again reaching for her in the darkness was unsettling to Reno. Whenever the thought came, he pushed it away.

Sufficient unto each day the troubles thereof.

The old advice echoed in the silence of Reno’s mind. He had no argument with it. He had enough troubles for this or any other day.

By now, word of the presence of a man and a woman riding along the edges of the stone maze would have gone out along the mysterious, efficient grapevine that existed throughout the West wherever strangers met at a water hole or crossroads, or shared a cup of coffee over a tiny campfire.

Hope Rafe hasn’t forgotten all the old signs we used to leave each other when we hunted as boys.

And I hope Wolfe hears I’m out here with a woman looking for gold. He knows the country. He’ll know I need a good man at my back if I find the mine.

Damn Slater and his hawk-eyed half-breed tracker. Anybody else would have given up a week ago.

By the end of the following day, Reno and Eve were camped at the base of a red sandstone formation that rose against the sky like a sail hewn from a single piece of stone. High up on the side of the cliff, rock had weathered away more quickly than in other parts of the formation. The result was a window set like a gem in the solid rock wall. A shaft of light from the setting sun speared through
the opening, gliding everything it touched with deepest gold.

Yet even more astonishing than a window in stone was the muted murmur of fresh water nearby. They had climbed out of the stone maze and were riding once more through a landscape where mountains were close enough to make out individual peaks. The camp they made was between a series of sunny river bends.

Reno had been right about Eve’s reaction to water after having ridden through a rock desert. The first time she saw a trickle of water twisting through the center of an arid valley, she talked excitedly about riding next to a “river” again. Reno had teased her about it, but he hadn’t objected when she asked to camp at the point where the small stream spread out into a series of sunwarmed pools bordered by whispering cottonwood trees.

At sunset and dawn, the land looked like an illustration for a mythic tale from a book men had forgotten how to read. It made Eve wonder if she had stumbled into an enchanted land where time stood still.

“It looks like it’s been here forever,” Eve said.

Reno followed her glance to the golden window time had carved from stone.

“Nothing lasts forever,” he said. “Not even rock.”

Eve looked at Reno, then back to the sail of stone rising improbably against the endless sky.

“It looks like it does,” she said softly.

“Looks don’t count for much. That window gets a bit bigger each day as grain after grain of the sandstone is chiseled out by the wind,” Reno said.

Eve listened, and sensed what lay beneath the
words, change coming whether it was wanted or not.

“Someday that little window could be a full-blown arch,” Reno said. “Then the arch will get worn thin over time until it collapses, leaving a notch behind in the rock wall. Then the notch will be cut deeper and wider by wind and rain, until finally nothing is left but red rubble and blue sky.”

Eve shivered again. “I can’t imagine this land worn down like that.”

“That’s where the sandstone came from in the first place,” Reno said, looking at the soaring red wall. “Mountains that were worn down a grain at a time and piled by the wind into ancient dunes or washed down to seas so old even God has forgotten them.”

The quality of Reno’s voice drew Eve’s eyes from the fantastic rock formations. Motionless, she watched him as he watched the land and spoke calmly of unimaginable eons passing into eternity.

“Then the sand became stone again,” he said, “and the earth shifted and new mountains were lifted to the sky to be worn down by new winds, new storms, new rivers running down to new seas.”

“‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’” Eve whispered.

“It’s the way of the world, sugar girl. Beginnings and endings all tangled together, like the pictographs on a canyon wall, Indian and Spanish and us, different symbols, different people, different times.”

Slowly Eve looked back to the red stone that seemed so massive and enduring. Then she faced the man who refused to acknowledge that anything endured, even stone.

Or love.

A
S
Reno and Eve followed the old Spanish trail, each valley or basin they rode through had more water and less rock than the previous one. The climb was so gradual that it was understood only at rare vistas where men could look back down toward the stone maze.

Slowly sagebrush gave way to piñon forests, and piñon gave way to pine. Red cliffs sank back down below the surface of the earth as sandstone gave way to different layers of rock that had come from deep beneath the surface of the earth, where heat transformed sandstone into quartzite, and limestone into marble.

Only one thing didn’t change. Each time Reno looked out over the back trail, there was a thin veil of dust miles and miles behind them.

“Somebody is still dogging us,” Reno said, putting away the spyglass.

“Slater?” Eve asked unhappily.

“They’re raising a lot of dust, so it’s either Slater’s men or an Indian raiding party.”

“Some choice,” Eve muttered.

Reno shrugged. “On the whole, I’m thinking it’s Slater. We don’t have anything Indians want enough to spend two days following us to get.”

“Are we going to try to lose him?”

“No time,” Reno said bluntly. “See those yellow patches high on the mountainsides?”

Eve nodded.

“Aspens are turning,” he said. “I’ll bet those clouds we’re looking at will leave a dusting of snow in the high country tonight.”

“How long do we have before everything gets snowed in?”

“Only God knows. Some years the high country closes the first week in September.”

A startled sound escaped Eve. “But it’s that late now!”

“And other years it can be open clear up to Thanksgiving, or even later,” Reno added.

Eve made a relieved sound. “Then we’re all right.”

“Don’t count on it. A storm can blow up and drop snow chest-high to a Montana horse in one night.”

Silently Eve remembered the warnings in the journal about the short summers and long, brutal winters in the country around the mine. Don Lyon had speculated that if the Indians hadn’t killed his ancestors, the mountains had.

“Those mountains won’t give up their gold easily,” Reno continued, as though following Eve’s thoughts.

“If mining gold were easy, someone else would have cleaned out the Lyons’ mine long ago,” she pointed out.

Reno stood in the stirrups, looking out across their back trail again.

“Why is Slater hanging back?” Eve asked.

“I suspect old Jericho’s greed finally got the better of his lust for vengeance,” Reno said dryly.

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t think much of the notion that the journal led to a real gold mine.”

“Raleigh King did.”

“Raleigh King was a braggart, a bully, and a fool. Whatever he believed wouldn’t mean spit to Jericho. But about the time we cut Spanish sign along the trail, Jericho must have begun thinking.”

“About gold,” Eve said glumly.

Reno nodded. “But he can’t read the signs. We can. He can’t find the mine. We can.”

She looked unhappily over their back trail.

“And even if his Comancheros can read the sign,” Reno continued, “I’ll bet Jericho got to thinking about how much plain hard work gold mining is.”

“It didn’t make him give up.”

“No. He’s just going to wait for us to find the mine and get a bunch of gold together,” Reno said. “Then he’s going to come down on us like a blue norther’.”

Silence followed Reno’s calm words.

Finally Eve asked faintly, “What are we going to do?”

“Find the mine and the gold and hope to God above that Cal or Wolfe or Rafe gets wind of Slater before he gets impatient and kills us, and to hell with the gold.”

“What good would Caleb or one of the others be? It would still be three of us against however many Slater has.”

“He’s got at least two men scouting us, and the rest are raising enough dust for an even dozen. And the longer he’s on the trail, the more the word goes out. But he’s replaced the men he lost in that ambush three times over.”

“Do you think there’s much chance of Caleb following us?”

“More chance than there is of us finding Spanish gold,” Reno said succinctly.

“How will he know where we are?” Eve asked.

“News travels fast in a wild land, and Cal is a listening kind of man.”

“Then Slater could know about other people following us, too.”

“He could,” Reno agreed.

“You don’t sound worried.”

“Cal isn’t hunting me with death on his mind,” Reno said. “Slater knows Cal as the Man from
Yuma. He’ll be real unhappy about having Cal on his trail. Cal, Wolfe, and I caught Jericho’s twin brother in a cross fire. What happened to Jed would have been a lesson to a man smarter or less mean than Jericho Slater.”

T
WO
days later, Eve was still watching the back trail as often as the way ahead. Hand shading her eyes beneath her hat brim, she stood in the stirrups and she looked out over the way she and Reno had come.

She thought she saw a thickening in the air way back where the Abajos began rising from the last broad step up from the stone maze, but it was hard to be certain. In the dry air, it was possible to see eighty or a hundred miles. At that distance, things smaller than mountains and mesas tended to flow together in a muted rainbow blur.

The slight haze she thought she saw could have been caused by a group of wild horses that had been startled by something and had galloped off, leaving a cloud of dust to rise behind.

The vague darkening in the air could also have been caused by wind blowing up dust, but it was beneath one of the blue-black clumps of cloud that were marching over the land. Dust and rain didn’t seem a likely combination.

It could have been simply a trick played on her by eyes tired from straining forever into the distance, seeking something that might or might not be there.

Or it could be Slater and his gang, dogging Reno and Eve’s trail with unnerving patience.

Eve turned away from her scrutiny of the back trail.

She felt a distinct thrill of pleasure as she watched Reno ride closer. He called her
gata,
but
he was the one who moved with feline quickness and grace in everything he did.

Even before Reno spoke, Eve sensed his buried excitement in the way he held himself. It was a difference few people would have noticed, but she had come to know him very well during the long days and passionate nights on the trail.

“What did you find?” Eve asked before Reno could speak.

“What makes you think I found anything?” he asked, reining in alongside her.

“Don’t tease,” she said eagerly. “What is it?”

Smiling, Reno reached back into a saddlebag. When his hand emerged again, he was holding a piece of curved wood wrapped in rawhide that was cracked with age and dryness, and bleached nearly white by the sun.

Eve looked at the junk lying on Reno’s palm. Then she looked at him, perplexed by his excitement.

Smiling, he hooked his arm around her neck, pulling her close for a brief, hard kiss before he released her once more and explained.

“It’s a piece of stirrup,” Reno said. “The Spanish didn’t always use iron stirrups. This one was carved from a hardwood tree that grew half a world away from here.”

Hesitantly Eve touched the fragment of stirrup. When her fingertips brushed the smooth, weathered wood, she felt a spectral chill down her spine. Awe and curiosity rippled through her.

“I wonder if the man who used this was a priest or a soldier,” Eve said. “Was his name Sosa or Leon? Did he write in the journal, or did he watch while another man wrote? Did he have a wife and children in Spain or Mexico, or did he give himself only to God?”

“I was thinking the same things,” Reno admitted. “Makes you wonder if someone two hundred years from now will find that broken cinch ring we left next to the campfire ashes yesterday, and if they’ll wonder about who rode there and when and why, and if we’ll somehow know someone is thinking about us hundreds of years after we died.”

Eve shivered again and withdrew her hand.

“Maybe Slater will find the cinch ring and use it for target practice,” she said.

Reno’s head came up sharply. “Did you see sign of him and his gang?”

“I couldn’t be sure,” Eve said, pointing. “It’s so far back.”

Standing in the stirrups, Reno stared along the back trail. After a long minute, he sat once more and looked at Eve.

“All I see in that direction are some storm clouds trying to rain,” he said.

“I thought it might be the wind kicking up dust,” she said, “but the clouds were right over that spot, and it looked dark almost all the way to the ground. Rain and dust don’t mix.”