Thank God.
Aurora stopped playing, everyone lined up with plate in hand, and the whole crew ate at once, since the canyon was holding the cattle. Cole made sure to sit across from Aurora instead of beside her.
No one talked much, even once the meal was done, and when the first guard went out, the rest of the crew fell exhausted into their bedrolls. Aurora got up and walked toward her wagon with only a soft murmur to him as she passed by.
“Thanks again, Lightning. Good night.”
“Good night, Rory.”
But he couldn’t sit there and let her go. He tried, he truly tried—he didn’t move at all until she’d reached her wagon.
“Rory,” he said then, and was on his feet striding toward her before she’d done more than turn toward the sound of his voice.
“Yes?”
He waited until he was so close no one could overhear. Or maybe he waited just to hold her where she stood for an instant more, with her hair catching gold sparks from the fire and her body showing its perfect shape in dark clothes against the pale canvas.
“Tomorrow we need to ride several miles down the canyon, farther than we went the other day. I want to take a look-see for signs of an outlaw hideout or maybe even a stray band of Comanches.”
He stopped, but then he forced his tongue to say the words.
“Before I go.”
She stiffened.
“I have a lot to do here,” she said. “And outlaws or Comanches or not, we’re in the Palo Duro now. To stay.”
Truth hit him like a slap in the face. Their long, private scouts were over. No longer did he have her all to himself for the whole day as a matter of course. His job was done.
Yet he couldn’t give it up.
“I know you’re here to stay,” he said, “and I don’t mean you should run if we find something. What I’m saying is that you’re better prepared if you know what you’re up against.”
She looked into his eyes for the longest time, her own a blue, smoky gray in the gathering dusk.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll give it one day. We’ll ride out after I get the men started on the house.”
She turned, went into the wagon, and dropped the flap closed behind her.
That was when he knew the real reason he had to ride alone with her one more time. He had to try to tell her good-bye.
They rode down the canyon the next morning mostly in silence, and he wondered how he could ever have thought he could talk. But yet he couldn’t keep silent. His throat hurt with the words crowding each other to fill it and spill out onto his tongue.
Why the hell hadn’t he rolled out of his bed before dawn and gone on his way? He’d never had any trouble before now leaving a woman asleep and unaware of his leaving.
“You think your crew knows how to build a house?”
There. That had come out without breaking his teeth or his jaw. They could have one more good ride, and he could help her make plans and think through what she had to do next and in the morning she’d wake up and he’d be gone. That was the way to do things.
She chuckled.
“They’ll have to learn if they don’t. I can’t exactly hire some carpenters from town.”
“It’s good you’re having them drag the logs in from further upstream,” he said. “I’d hate to see you lose any of the trees around the house.”
He felt like an awkward guest in a stranger’s parlor. Why didn’t he just keep his mouth shut instead of saying something so stupid?
Evidently, from the quick glance she gave him, Aurora thought the same.
All this home-building talk made him sick, anyway.
“If you thought there were outlaws or Comanches in here, why didn’t you say so before you moved the piano?”
He looked at her sharply. She sounded slightly amused.
“I didn’t say I thought they were in here.”
Her mouth turned up at the corners. She had the most gorgeous, full lips, the most sensual mouth in the world.
But he would not, would not let himself kiss her again.
“So we’re spending today exploring the canyon in the hope we’ll find some enemies?”
Her husky voice held a definite edge of amusement.
“I didn’t say they’d be enemies, did I? They might be the best neighbors you ever had and bring you squash from their gardens and eggs from their chickens.”
That made her laugh out loud. Oh, God, how he would miss that sound!
“Outlaws and Comanches with gardens and chickens,” she said. “Civilization has come to the Palo Duro.”
“Not to mention music,” he said. “You could give one of your open-air concerts in return for the gifts of food.”
“Thanks to you,” she said, and she gave him that look again.
He couldn’t get up before dawn and ride away without a word. He would hate himself forever for a coward if he did, for he had to have every memory of her that he could gather.
“Let’s sit by the stream awhile,” he said, and rode Border Crossing up to an old cedar growing a few yards from the creek.
Loco was too mild a word for the shape he was in. He had no earthly idea what to say to her.
They dismounted and sat cross-legged in the shade of the cedar, on a grassy bank near a rock they could lean against.
“This is a great picnic spot,” Rory said lightly, “but it’s too early to eat the one meal we brought. Searching out our neighbors all day will make us hungry later on.”
I want to spend all day making love with you. I’m only hungry for you.
She was close enough to reach for, close enough to kiss if he bent toward her, but she sat Indian-style, as he was, her back very straight, her manner tense as she faced him. Now the way she looked at him was unreadable.
He wanted this look, whatever it was, off her face. He wanted her smiling at him the way she’d done on top of the rim yesterday.
That look would never come again, though, not when he was done talking to her. Then she’d really know him, she wouldn’t want him any more, and he would want to go.
Yes, the sooner he was gone, the better.
But he needed one more time in her arms, one more unforgettable time.
Proof right there, if any was needed, that he was a no-good, selfish rounder. Another time with her would only break her heart.
His own heart was beating out of his chest with the effort he had to make not to touch her. A curl of her hair was caught on her cheek. His hand itched and prickled, but he didn’t reach out and brush it back to fly in the breeze with the others.
He reached for the strength at his core, for the force that had brought him alive through hails of bullets and days and nights of hunger and thirst, through his mother’s death and his brother’s, and the galling misery since Travis’s.
“Aurora,” he said, “I have to talk to you.”
“I’m listening.”
An edge in her voice as fine-honed as the brightness in her blue eyes made him look at her again. She was wound tight, tight as the wanting that was tearing him apart.
Something in her face told him that she knew this was good-bye. She knew him so well—except for thinking that he was a much better man than he was.
He opened his mouth, but he couldn’t speak. The big cedar enfolded them in its shadow, in its spicy smell, and waited with them. Aurora didn’t move, didn’t take her gaze from his face.
“This cedar,” he said finally. “There’s a legend about the cedar tree that lots of Indian people know.”
She watched him through those sky-eyes of hers, her look steady and straight with a hot light burning deep in it like a sun.
“Lightning can strike near the cedar tree, it can run along the ground and in circles around it trying to enter, but it can’t. It cannot split the heart of a cedar the way it does other trees.”
“So?”
The huskiness was taking over her voice.
“My heart is the heart of a cedar,�
� he said. “My heart doesn’t open. I live in the middle of danger, always, because my real name is He-Stands-In-Lightning.”
The corners of her luscious mouth lifted a little.
“At last,” she said, “I hear your real name.” He couldn’t resist their old game. “You think.”
“I know,’” she said, and the trace of a smile vanished from her lips. “I know when you’re telling me the truth.”
She went so solemn so suddenly that his gut knotted. What if she burst into tears? What would he do? If he touched her to comfort her, he was lost.
“My name was given to me because of my life,” he said, and he fought to loose the tightness in his own voice. “I’m not meant to have a home or any peace. I never have, I never will.”
She only looked at him.
“I’m leaving at sunup tomorrow,” he said, and his voice sounded harsh as a crow’s cry. “My job’s done. I got you here safe.”
There. He had told her, honorably, and had not left her twisting in the wind the way he’d left so many other women. He could go now. He could get up and walk away and be able to look himself in the eye.
But her face held him there. So beautiful and so stricken, yet strong. So strong. She was no longer the girl who had badgered him into coming with her. This was a woman to be reckoned with.
“And I’m not meant to marry,” she said. “You don’t have to run away the minute I start making a home, He-Stands-In-Lightning.”
“That’s nothing to do with me,” he said, and the truth of it was like a knife in his heart.
“I know that. But you’re always welcome in my home, we’ll always be friends.”
“You don’t know me,” he blurted. “I killed my best friend. I killed Travis.”
Not one thing changed about her. She didn’t pull back in revulsion or stare at him in horror.
“You shot him? Why?”
“No, some bandido shot him, but I put him in front of the bullet. We raided a hideout on the Nueces when we should’ve waited for help—they outnumbered us six to one and we knew it.”
“If Travis knew that, too, then why is it all your fault?”
He wiped his hand across his eyes, but it didn’t help. All he could see now was Travis’s face when his spirit had left him.
“I wouldn’t hear to waiting. I badgered him. I hoo-rawed him.”
“He didn’t have to listen to you.”
“He did when I said I was going in alone. We were partners.”
He stared at her, horrified that he was actually talking about this, yet somehow relieved, too. All these months he could hardly bear to think the truth about Trav’s death, much less speak it.
“I hate to break the news to you,” she said wryly, “but you’re only human, Cole McCord. Human beings don’t know everything. Sometimes they make a bad call.”
It helped. Not a whole lot, but it helped.
“I make more than my share of bad calls,” he said. “I brought my little brother into the Rangers, and he got killed within a year. I went off to my mother’s people and played in the woods the summer she worked herself to death on the farm.”
She looked at him a boundless time with that fierce, blue gaze.
“You’re not God, Cole McCord. I’m trying to tell you that.”
“And I’m trying to tell you that you don’t want me to love you. The people I love don’t live long.”
“You don’t want to love me,” she said in her husky voice.
“No, I don’t.”
He intended to get to his feet, to go to his horse and leave her then, to ride on up the trail and out of the canyon before he had even planned. But that old trap of wanting to know her opinion, of needing to see how she saw him, held him still. He looked for the disgust in her eyes, the disapproval she might be too polite to voice.
It wasn’t there. He saw only acceptance and admiration. And love. That had to be love, that look like the one she’d given him on the rimrock.
“You have to go tell this to Travis’s widow,” she said. “I know that.”
“Yes.”
“And you may not come back, I know that, too.” “Yes.”
She lifted her hand, then, and caressed his cheek, traced his cheekbone with her thumb. He felt so familiar to her now, although they hadn’t touched each other for weeks. That was because he was now and would always be a part of her.
This was her fate, her destiny, to love him. Forever. And somewhere inside her she had known that from the first sight of his face.
“I only want one promise from you, He-Stands-In-Lightning.”
“What is it?”
She looked deep into his wary eyes. For the longest time they looked at each other in the growing sunlight, trembling a little in the rising wind. She removed his hat, laid it on the ground, and brushed his hair back from his forehead, coming a little closer to him with each movement.
“Remember this,” she said.
“Until the day I die.”
They came together like fire and fuel, already alight, already burning before their lips could meet. He thrust one big, hard hand into her hair and took her mouth with a passion that stopped her breath, nearly stopped her heart.
She reached for the buttons at the fly of his Levis, brushing the swelling bulge beneath with her knuckles as she ripped at it with trembling fingers, aching to hold him in her hands. He groaned and cupped her breast in his palm, he tried to break the kiss to help her at her task but, once kissing, they couldn’t stop except to kiss again.
He blazed a hot trail down her throat with his mouth, she kissed the hollow of his collarbone and tore his shirt open. She unfastened the buckle of his belt, pushed at the waistband of his jeans, he pulled her blouse from her riding skirt without lifting his lips from her skin.
At last, somehow, without ever letting go of the kiss, they managed to peel off their clothes, and they fell into the delight of touching each other with no barriers at all. His hands slid down her back, burning her skin, cupping her buttocks in a greedy, quick caress before coming back to her yearning breasts again. He found both her nipples. The need to have him inside her made her lose breath, it hit her so hard.
Their eyes met. Her whole body thrilled to his.
This would be the last time. She’d live the rest of her life on this.
“Rory,” he whispered.
His eyes blazed. They devoured her face.
Then he brought her hard against his hot maleness, wrapped her body with his and started the kiss all over again.
I love you, Lightning. Oh, dear God, how I love you!
She told him that with her greedy lips and long, slow, importunate caresses of her tongue and her hands that could not get enough of him, she told him with tiny, faint moans deep in her throat, she told him in every way possible except with words. For words would be shackles to him, and he had to be free. He wouldn’t be Lightning if he couldn’t be free to roam in the storm.
He gathered her to him, sheltered her close in the curve of his big body, began to pleasure her with his hand. When she lay melted and helpless, unable to so much as lift her finger, he drew back and smiled at her, his face warmed with the gold of the sunlight falling through the leaves.
Then he took her breast into his big, calloused hand to cradle it there, and she began to stroke his hair, running its silk beneath her palm again and again until he lowered his head and began to lave its tip with his tongue. Her arms, her hands, her whole body went nerveless except for that exquisite sensation, except for the precious sight of his dark head bent so tenderly over her breasts.
“Never stop,” she whispered, “never stop.”
But soon her whole body contradicted her, her blood began to race for more. Shameless with need, her hands caressed him everywhere she could reach, her voice made wordless little begging sounds she didn’t even recognize.
He knew, he knew what she wanted, what she needed, but still he made her wait.
She writhed beneath h
im, she gathered the breath to whisper “Please,” she rubbed her face against his jaw and bit his ear, and finally, at last, after an eternity when she thought she would die, he wrapped his arms around her, stroked her back, and lifted her to meet him as gently as if she were glass. He entered her.
The comfort was glorious.
But then he moved, and she wanted still more. She wrapped her arms around his bare shoulders, her skin moving on his, and the sheen of sweat they both created sealed them together. She arched up to him, brought him more fully into her.
They moved together then as if this ancient rhythm had been theirs to share for years and years, moved together as if their only other time, that one sweet night beneath the pine tree, had taught them to be one. Always. Forever.
The word came, again, into her mind where, only a heartbeat before, no words had been. This had to last her forever.
She thrust her fingers into his hair, brought his mouth to hers, and kissed him avidly, silently begging him not to leave her with her lips and tongue, her heart and soul. He brought her back to that moment, then made her believe that it would never pass, that no other time would ever come.
He kissed her wild and free and thoughtless again, he held her so close that they could never part, and he consumed her with the hot maleness of his body. She moaned and whimpered, deep in her throat, for mercy.
But he gave her none. His hands swept trails of fire onto her back, and his lips dropped burning kisses at random on her face and neck. He took her deeper and deeper into the conflagration that drew them both like the lost to light.
Until their blood sang and the lightning struck and they rode like conquerors on the back of the storm.
Afterward, they lay entwined for the longest time, skin melded to skin, legs and arms entangled so they could never be separated. They couldn’t be parted. Not after this. It would go against the laws of nature, the structure of the world, the form of the universe.
Except that after the dark fell tonight and the sun came up tomorrow, Cole would be gone.
Tears began to roll down her cheeks, they forced their way between the bones of their faces, pressed together, ran into the hollows of their throats.
“Here, now,” he said gruffly. “What’s this?”
The Renegades: Cole Page 25