Janna was calmly tying twists of greenery to branches she had laid between two tall forked sticks. The stems of the plants turned slowly in the sun and wind as the leaves gave up their moisture. In a week or two the herbs would be ready to store whole or to crumble and pound into a powder she would use to make lotions, pastes, potions, and other varieties of medicine.
“How do your feet feel?” she asked without looking up from her work.
“Like feet. Where’s Mad Jack?”
“Gone.”
“What?”
“He was worried when he didn’t find me in any of the usual places, so—”
“Where are the usual places?” Ty interrupted.
“Wherever Lucifer’s herd is. Once Jack found out I was all right, he went back.”
“To where?”
“Wherever his mine is.”
Ty reached to readjust the breechcloth again, remembered that Janna wasn’t a boy and snatched back his hands, cursing.
“Do you think that zebra dun of yours would take me to Sweetwater?” he asked.
“I don’t know. She likes you well enough, but she doesn’t like towns at all.”
“You two make a fine pair,” he muttered, combing through his wet hair with long fingers.
“Catch,” she said.
Reflexively his hand flashed out and grabbed the small leather poke she had pulled from her baggy pants pocket.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Mad Jack’s gold. You’ll need it when you get to town. Or were you planning to work off whatever you buy?”
“I can’t take gold from a thirteen-year-old girl.”
She looked up briefly before she went back to arranging herbs for drying. “You aren’t.”
“What?”
“You aren’t taking gold from a thirteen-year-old. I’m nineteen. I only told you I was thirteen so that you wouldn’t suspect I was a woman.”
“Sugar,” he drawled, giving her a thorough up-and-down look, “you could have walked naked past me and I wouldn’t have suspected anything at all. You’re the least female female I’ve ever seen.”
Her fingers tightened on the herbs as the barb went home, but she was determined not to show that she’d been hurt.
“Thank you,” she said huskily. “I just took a leaf from Cascabel’s book—hide in plain sight. The pony soldiers caught him way down south last year. He escaped from them. They went looking for him, expecting to run him down easily because there was no cover around. It was flat land with only a scattering of stunted mesquite. No place for a rabbit to hide, much less a man.”
Ty listened in spite of his anger at having been deceived. As he listened, he tried to figure out why her voice was so appealing to him. Finally he realized that she no longer was trying to conceal her voice’s essentially feminine nature, a faintly husky music that tantalized his senses.
And she was nineteen, not thirteen.
Stop it, he told himself fiercely. She’s all alone in the world. Any man who would take advantage of that isn’t worthy of the name.
“Because the soldiers knew there was no place to hide, they didn’t look,” she continued. “Cascabel is as shrewd as Satan. He knew that the best place to hide is in plain sight, where no one would ever look. So when he was convinced that he couldn’t outrun the soldiers and they would catch him in the open, he rolled in the dust, grabbed some mesquite branches and sat very still. The branches didn’t cover him, but they gave the soldiers something familiar to look at—something they would never look at twice. And they didn’t,” she concluded. “They rode right by Cascabel, maybe a hundred feet away, and never saw him.”
“Probably because Cascabel looks a hell of a lot more like a mesquite bush than you look like a woman.”
“That’s your opinion,” she said, “but we both know how trustworthy your eyes are, don’t we?”
Ty saw the reaction that Janna tried to hide. He smiled, feeling better than he had since he realized how badly he had been fooled. If his brothers ever found out what had happened, they would ride him until he screamed for mercy. He had always been the one the MacKenzie men turned to for advice on the pursuit and pleasuring of the fair sex.
He laughed aloud and felt his temper sweeten with every passing second. He was going to get some of his own back from the gray-eyed chameleon, and he was going to enjoy himself thoroughly in the process. She would rue the day she had fooled him into believing she was an effeminate boy.
“If you’d been any kind of a woman,” he drawled very slowly, “I’d feel right ashamed of being fooled. But seeing as how you only say you’re a girl, and I’m too much of a gentleman to ask you to prove it...I guess I’ll just have to keep my doubts to myself.”
“You? A gentleman?” she asked in rising tones of disbelief. She looked pointedly at his half-grown beard and soggy breechcloth. “From what I can see—and there’s darn little I can’t see—you look like a savage.”
His laugh wasn’t quite so heartfelt this time. “Oh, I know I’m a gentleman for a fact, boy. And so do a lot of real ladies.”
Mentally Janna compared herself to the sketch of her mother—loose, ragged clothes against stylish swirls of silk, Indian braids against carefully coiffed curls. The comparison was simply too painful. So was the fact that Ty had been taken with her mother’s image and couldn’t have been more blunt about the daughter’s lack of feminine allure.
Unshed tears clawed at the back of Janna’s eyelids, but the thought that Ty might catch her crying appalled her. Without a word she dusted off her hands and brushed past him, refusing even to look at him, knowing that for all her scathing comments to the contrary, his eyes were uncomfortably sharp when it came to assessing her mood.
When she was at the edge of the grassy area of the valley, she cupped her hands to her mouth and called out to Zebra, using the keening cry of a hawk. To human ears there was almost no difference in the sounds—to Zebra, it was a call as clear as a trumpet’s. Within moments the mare was cantering through the grass towards Janna.
“Hello, pretty girl,” Janna murmured. She stroked the mare’s neck and pulled weeds from her long mane and tail. “Show me your hooves.”
She worked slowly around the horse, touching each fetlock. Zebra presented each of her hooves in turn, standing patiently while Janna used a short, pointed stick to worry loose any mud or debris that had become caught between the hard outer hoof and the softer frog at the center.
“It would be easier with a steel hoof pick,” Ty said.
Janna barely controlled a start. On the meadow grass his bare feet had made no more sound than a shadow.
“If I bought a pick, people would wonder what I was planning to use it on. Only one other human being knows that I’ve tamed...” Her voice died when she realized that Ty as well as Mad Jack knew that she mingled with Lucifer’s herd. “Could it be our secret?” she asked as she looked at him, her voice aching with restraint. “It’s bad enough that I turn up from time to time with raw gold. If some of the men around here knew that I could get close to Lucifer, they’d hunt me down like a mad dog and use me to get their hands on him.”
Ty looked at the face turned up toward him in silent pleading and felt as though he had been kicked in the stomach. The idea of using her to get close to Lucifer had been in the back of his mind since he had realized that Zebra was part of the big black stallion’s harem.
They’d hunt me down like a mad dog and use me...
Before Ty realized what he was doing, he cupped her chin reassuringly in his hand.
“I won’t tell anyone,” he said quietly. “I promise you, Janna. And I won’t use you. I want that stud and I plan to have him—but not like that, not by making you feel you had betrayed a trust.”
The heat of her tears on his hand shocked his, but not as much as the butterfly softness of her lips brushing over his skin for an instant before she turned away.
“Thank you,” she said huskily, her face hidden while she resumed
working over Zebra’s hoof. “And I’m sorry about what I said earlier. You’re very much a gentleman, no matter what you’re wearing.”
His closed his eyes and fought against the tremor of sensation that was spreading out from the palm of his hand to the pit of his stomach and from there to the soles of his feet. Before he could prevent himself, he had lifted his hand to his lips. The taste of her tears went to his head more quickly than a shot of whiskey, making him draw in a sharp breath.
You’ve been without a woman too long, he told himself as he fought to control a combination of tenderness and raw desire.
Yes—and the name of the cure is Janna Wayland.
“No,” Ty said aloud harshly.
“What?” she asked, looking up.
He wasn’t watching her. He was standing rigid, his face drawn as though in pain. When she spoke, he opened his eyes. She wanted to protest the shadows she saw there, but he was already speaking.
“I’m not what you think,” he said, his voice rough. “I’m too woman hungry to be a gentleman. Don’t trust me. Don’t trust me at all.”
Chapter Ten
Under Janna’s watchful eyes, Ty sprang onto Zebra’s back with a flowing, catlike motion. The mare flicked her ears backward, then forward, accepting him as her rider without a fuss.
“I told you she wouldn’t object,” Janna said. “You’ve ridden her before.”
“Don’t remind me,” he said. “I’ve had nightmares about that ride every night since.” He leaned down and offered her his left arm. “Grab just above the elbow with your left hand, pretend I’m a piece of mane, and swing up behind me.”
She followed his instructions and found herself whisked aboard Zebra with breathtaking ease. She lifted her hand instantly, too conscious of the heat and power of his bare arm. And then she found herself confronted by an expanse of naked shoulders that seemed to block out most of the world.
“H-how is your back healing?” she asked.
“You tell me,” he said dryly. “You can see it better than I can.”
She bit her lip, irritated by her silly question and his goading response. But asking that question had been safer than following her original impulse, which had been to run her hands over his tanned, supple skin. Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to concentrate on the shadow bruises and faint, thin lines of red that marked recently healed cuts. She traced the longest line with delicate fingertips.
He flinched as though she had used a whip on him.
“Don’t do that,” he snapped.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was still painful. It looks healed.”
His lips flattened, but he said nothing to correct her assumption that it had been pain rather than pleasure that had made his body jerk. Her fingertips had been like that single touch from her lips, a brush of warmth and a shivering hint of the feminine sensuality concealed beneath men’s clothing.
“When we get back from town, I’ll put more salve on,” she continued.
His mouth opened to object, but he closed it without making a sound. The temptation to feel her soothing hands on his body was simply too great for him to deny himself the opportunity of being cared for by her.
Silently Ty nudged Zebra with his left heel. The mare turned obediently and headed toward the cleft in the rocks that surrounded the tiny valley. Each motion of the horse’s buttocks, combined with the natural forward slope of Zebra’s back, gently moved Janna toward Ty’s warm body.
He flinched again when the brim of her floppy hat touched his skin.
“Sorry,” she muttered, pulling her head back.
He grunted.
Zebra kept on walking and Janna kept sliding closer to him. Before they came to the cleft that led from the valley, she was flush against his body. Only by leaning back at an awkward angle could she prevent her hat—or her lips—from brushing against his skin.
The fifth time she felt compelled to apologize for the contact she could not avoid, she wriggled away from him until she could put her hands on the horse’s back between their bodies. Cautiously she pushed herself backward a fraction of an inch at a time, not wanting to alarm Zebra.
As her weight settled farther back on the mare’s spine, her tail swished in warning, sending a stinging veil of hair across Ty’s naked calf.
“Damn, what is her tail made of—nettles?”
Janna didn’t answer. Instead, she eased herself backward another inch, then two.
Zebra balked and humped her back in warning.
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked, turning to look over his shoulder at Janna. “What the hell are you doing way back there? Don’t you know a horse’s kidneys and flanks are sensitive? Or maybe you’re trying to get us both bucked off in the dirt?”
“I was trying not to hurt your back.”
“My back? My back is just fi—” Abruptly he remembered what he had said about his back being hurt by her light touch. “I’ll live,” he said grimly. “Scoot on up here where you belong before this mustang bucks us both off.”
“I’d rather not,” Janna said through stiff lips.
He kicked his right leg over Zebra’s neck and slid off onto the ground. “Get up there where you belong,” he said in a curt voice. “I’ll walk.”
“No, I’ll walk,” she said, dismounting in a rush, landing very close to him. “I’m used to it. Besides, I haven’t been hurt and you have.”
“I’m all healed up.”
“But you said your back—”
“Get on that mustang before I lose my temper,” he said flatly, cutting across her protest.
“Lose your temper? Impossible. You’d have to find it first.”
Ty glared into Janna’s gray eyes. She didn’t flinch.
With a hissed curse he grabbed her and dumped her on her stomach across Zebra’s back. He had plenty of time to regret the impulsive act. Janna’s scramble to right herself and assume a normal riding position pulled the fabric of her pants tightly across her buttocks, revealing to him for the first time the unmistakable curves of a woman’s hips.
At that instant he abandoned all thought of climbing on Zebra behind her. The feel of those soft curves rubbing between his thighs and against his aching male flesh would quickly drive him crazy.
Cursing steadily beneath his breath, he reached up to drag her off the mare. He told himself it was an accident that his hands shaped her buttocks on the way to pulling her down, and he knew that it was a lie. He could have pulled on her feet or even her knees. He didn’t have to grab her hips and sink his fingers into her resilient flesh, sending a wave of heat through his body.
Even as he withdrew his hands, he wondered if he had been as wrong about Janna’s breasts as he had been about her hips—she had more than enough curves to fill a man’s hungry hands. The realization that the ride into town would probably tell him just how soft and tempting her breasts were was enough to make him groan and swear even more.
The amount of control he had to exert to drag his hands away from her body shocked him. He had never been the kind of man who grabbed at what a woman wouldn’t freely offer to him.
“Stand still,” he said harshly as she twisted against him, trying to regain her balance.
“Now listen, you son of—”
A broad, hard palm covered her mouth. Green eyes stared into furious gray ones.
“No, you listen to me, boy,” snarled Ty. “We’re going to get on that horse and you’re going to ride far enough forward that Zebra’s spine isn’t hurt. She’s a good-sized mare, but carrying double is still a lot of weight for her, especially when one of her riders is my size.”
Janna stopped fighting. She hadn’t thought that her foolish scooting about might have hurt Zebra. With a small cry she turned toward the mare. The horse looked back at her with an equine’s patience for crazy humans.
“I’ll walk,” she said.
“Like hell you will. It’s too far.”
“I’ve walked a lot farther in a morning.”
“And left footprints every step of the way. If you take time to hide your trail, it’ll take a week to get to town. If you don’t hide your trail, the next man through that gap won’t be Mad Jack. It will be Cascabel.”
There was a moment of silence while she digested the unpleasant truth of what Ty was saying. Signs left by an untrimmed, unshod horse wouldn’t attract much attention, particularly after they crossed their trail with that of any of the several wild horse herds in the area. Tracks left by a trimmed, shod horse, or a human, would bring down Cascabel quicker than the strike of his namesake reptile—the rattlesnake.
“It won’t hurt Zebra to carry double,” Ty said, “especially without a saddle. Just don’t ride so far back.”
“What about you? I don’t want to hurt your back, either.”
He closed his eyes so as not to see the unhappiness in her at the thought of hurting anything, even the man who was presently making her life very difficult.
“I’m ticklish, that’s all,” he said grimly. “My back is fine.”
“Oh.”
He swung up onto Zebra, helped Janna swing up behind him and gritted his teeth at the feel of her breath against his naked skin. When Zebra walked once more to the cleft that led out of the valley, the gentle rubbing pressure of Janna’s thighs against his own was an even worse distraction than the heat of her breath washing over his spine.
Think of her as a boy.
Ty tried. All he could think of was the lush resilience of her hips. The smooth, curving heat of them could never have belonged to a boy.
Be grateful she doesn’t have big breasts to rub against you.
He tried to be grateful. All he could think of was pulling off her tentlike shirt and finding out just how soft her breasts were, and if her nipples were as pink as her tongue, and if they would pout hungrily for his mouth.
The reflexive tightening of his body in response to his thoughts was communicated to Zebra. Sensing his agitation without understanding its source, she began to shy at the breeze stirring through the belly-deep grass as though it were a yellow-eyed cougar stalking her.