by Beverly Bird
He was several yards farther along the wall, coming down where the Anasazi had left the toeholds. He had her backpack. She stood, hurting.
He reached her and thrust the pack at her. “Let’s get one thing straight, Sergeant. From the looks of this bag, you’re planning on staying a while. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. But this ruin is mine. This area of the canyon is mine. It’s a big place. You want to commune with nature and chindis, go do it in some other part.”
Sergeant? She watched mutely as he stalked back to his tent.
“Why?” she demanded. “What are you doing here that you don’t want me to see?”
He turned back on her so hard and fast she cringed. “I like my privacy.”
“Then why didn’t you just let me fall on my own? That would have sent me limping home in a hurry.”
“After I carried you eight damned miles down to my truck and drove you to the nearest hospital. Either that, or buried you so you wouldn’t stink when the sun found you. It’s late. I’m tired. I didn’t feeling like doing either one.”
He snatched back the door flap of his tent and ducked in. A lantern went on inside. She watched his silhouette as he ripped off his shorts and dropped down onto his sleeping bag. Her mouth went dry. The lantern went out.
She tried to shout after him and had to clear her throat to do it. Finally she found her voice. “I’m going to camp tonight right where I camped last night. It’s too dark and I don’t know the canyon well enough to look for a new site now.” Not to mention the fact that she was damned if she was going to fumble around the ruins in the moonlight.
She flinched as his voice drifted out to her again. It was muffled, but she understood enough to know that he swore darkly.
Shadow went back to the place where she had slept the previous night. She dropped her pack with a ragged sigh, then she kicked it angrily. She was too exhausted to set up her tent tonight. Oh, God, what was she doing here?
Finally she wrenched her sleeping bag free of the pack and laid down, wadding a sweater beneath her head for a pillow and thumping it hard with her fist. Maybe there were chindis, she thought, maybe he was dangerous and up to no good, but right now she was too tired to care. He could parade naked right under her nose and she wouldn’t care. Much.
It was her last thought before Shadow closed her eyes and dropped immediately into a dreamless sleep.
* * *
She woke hard and fast when sunlight angled down over the southeastern rim, spearing into her eyes. She sat up, rubbing them, and looked over at Mac’s campsite.
He was already at his fire, making breakfast. The smell of reconstituted eggs didn’t do much for her, but oh, the coffee! She craved a cup so badly she could almost taste it. Well, she could have some of her own—it would just take her half an hour or so to make it.
She kicked her sleeping bag off and stood, stretching. Then she rolled it back up neatly and fastened it onto her pack again. If she was going to look for wood for a fire, she might as well find a new campsite at the same time, she thought. She actually didn’t want to keep sleeping any closer to him than she had to. She didn’t want a repeat of what had happened two nights ago. It made her feel too...achy and empty. She couldn’t handle wanting someone that much and for no explicable reason—someone she didn’t particularly like, someone who definitely didn’t like her.
She didn’t bother to fix the pack onto her back this time. She simply dragged it along with her, scanning the canyon walls as she went. She took several steps before his voice stopped her.
“Where are you going?”
She turned back to face him, surprised. “To find a place of my own. I think we’ll both be a lot happier.”
She thought she saw his jaw harden. “So you’re planning to stay,” he said finally.
She lifted her pack as proof. “You figured that out last night.”
“Want a kick start?”
He held up his coffeepot. Shadow felt her heart thump oddly. What was his story?
He clearly wanted her out of the way, so why was he—again—trying to help her with a few creature comforts in the meantime? Whatever the reason, there was a time and a place for pride and principle, and she decided this wasn’t it. “All right,” she said cautiously.
Mac watched her drop the pack and dig through it for a metal cup. It took no more than a blink of an eye for her to find it. He knew nothing in there would be jumbled, the way his own packs usually were. Hell, he wouldn’t even be surprised if everything was imprinted with her name and Social Security number.
Why was he doing this? She marched around like a damned drill sergeant, tossing out orders and expecting everyone and everything to jump to attention. She had shattered his solitude for reasons known only to her and he was angry about it. She was as tenacious as a bulldog...and, he thought, she stretched like a cat.
Deep inside, he was just a man after all, and she had some strange effect on his libido. He was a man with rules, he reminded himself, but as long as he kept the big ones intact, bending the small ones a little shouldn’t matter. He watched expressionlessly as she approached him, then he gave her the coffeepot.
“Thanks,” she said stiffly, pouring.
He made a sound that was half growl, half acknowledgment. She had great legs, especially when they weren’t hidden in jeans, but the shredded skin on her right knee looked nasty.
“Do you have anything in your pack to take care of that?” He motioned at it.
Shadow sipped and nodded. The coffee was strong and black—perfect.
“I’d be really stupid to come out here without a first-aid kit. I was just too tired to do anything about it last night.”
His voice got suddenly tight again. “And you wouldn’t do anything stupid, would you?”
She lifted one shoulder. “I’m here. The wisdom of that could be debated.”
“Why?” he asked again. “Why did you come back?”
“I don’t trust you.”
She was honest. He could deal with that. “Then why not just send the cops in?”
Because I read your dossier. “Because for the most part you seem on the level. I have nothing to go on but instinct and that wouldn’t be enough to get them to risk coming into this place.”
“And you trust your instincts?”
“Always.”
That surprised him. Navajo or not, she just didn’t seem the type to rely upon anything so tenuous.
He ran his eyes down her small, trim body. “Just out of curiosity, how do you intend to stop me if I am doing something illegal?”
His perusal unnerved her. It made her feel naked. She swallowed carefully and fought the urge to fidget.
“I have a gun, too.”
“Should I shake in my boots?”
“Something tells me you don’t do that often.”
For a wild moment, she actually thought he might smile. But it was true—he was so hard and strong, so capable. She got the distinct impression that absolutely nothing could hurt him. He wouldn’t allow it to.
Her gaze coasted past him, to the refuse midden. “Why this canyon?” she asked suddenly. “You said you were part Navajo. It couldn’t be high on your list of places to visit.”
“My mother was barely Navajo,” he said flatly. “She never taught me about Navajo spirituality.” And even if she had, Mac thought, he wouldn’t have embraced it. He would have treated it like everything else that reminded him of the woman—he would have cast it off and shut it out.
“I was raised in Salt Lake City my first ten years,” he volunteered finally. “The Hopi Mesas after that.”
“So you don’t believe in chindis?”
“I believe the past lives on in more concrete form.”
“In pots and antiquities and bones.”
“Exactly.”
She shivered. It was the concrete stuff that bothered her the most. A chindi’s belongings, most notably its name and bones, were the things surest to call it back from the d
ead.
It was going to be a long week.
Mac drained the last of his own coffee and stood. Finally his gaze followed hers to the midden.
“This site is next in a long, curving line I’ve followed up from the Yucatán,” he explained almost absently. “What I’m looking for should either be here, or it’s within a thirty-mile radius.”
With his disturbing eyes safely elsewhere, Shadow looked at him more closely. He wore shorts and boots again, nothing else. His thighs were as muscled as she remembered, covered with curly, almost blond hair. His broad shoulders tapered down to narrow hips. His shorts rode low there; he hadn’t bothered with a belt. Despite his size, he reminded her of one of the scrappy Navajo sheep-camp dogs that could react like lightning when provoked. She remembered how hard and solid he had felt against her the previous night, the way his strong body had so easily absorbed the blows of their fall.
That strange, treacherous ache was starting deep inside her again. She looked away.
“What...what are you looking for?” she asked hoarsely.
“A particular style of pot. Ice blue glazing. Painted with figures instead of lines or geometric patterns.” Why was he telling her this? he wondered. He rarely shared information. For all he knew she was a professional, trying to scoop him on this thing. He still wasn’t entirely satisfied with her explanation for coming back.
Maybe it was as simple as the fact that it had been a fairly long time since he had talked to another living soul, and something within him needed the contact whether he liked it or not.
Shadow jolted. Ice blue glazing? She remembered the potsherd she had found on the trail. There had been no figures on it, but it had definitely been blue. He’d implied that he hadn’t found what he was looking for yet—but someone had dropped that shard and it certainly hadn’t been the Anasazi.
Mac went into his tent to gather his tools. When he came out, she was still standing there.
“These pots—you’ve found examples of them all the way up from the Yucatán?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“But not here.”
“Not yet.” He frowned at her. If he was lying, she thought, then he was master of the art.
“So you’re tracking one individual potter?”
“Seems that way,” he answered. “The style is distinctive, unique.”
“And you think it was Kokopelli himself?”
His eyes narrowed on her face. “Why would you guess that?”
Shadow flushed. Too late she realized the only basis she had for such an assumption was his grant information. She made a halfhearted gesture at the walls. “Kokopelli’s Canyon.”
He seemed to consider this, then he shook his head. “There’s an obscure story that says he traveled with a woman. I’m thinking it was her.”
Shadow frowned. “I don’t know that story.”
“It’s got Hopi origins.”
“Still...I was an anthro student at New Mexico State.”
That jolted him. Was she here for some professional reason? Then why not tell him that?
“What do you do now?” he demanded harshly.
“I’m assistant curator at the Navajo Nation Museum in Shiprock. Why?”
“Just wondered if your interest in this is more than meets the eye.”
So there was distrust on both sides, she thought. Well, her being here was an admittedly odd development. She forced herself to meet his hard, gray blue gaze.
“It fascinates me,” she admitted.
He held her eyes for a long while—too long, she thought, feeling somehow...invaded. It was as if he could see a lot more of her than he was revealing about himself.
“Like I said, the legend’s obscure,” he went on finally. “They say she was his mate. She Who Waits.”
Shadow’s brows shot up. “Mate? Sort of an open relationship, wasn’t it? He traveled from pueblo to pueblo impregnating the women.”
“Ergo her name.”
“She was waiting for him to finish sowing his wild oats and settle down?”
“So to speak. Actually, Kokopelli was a trader. If women lined up for his services at each pueblo he visited, you can hardly blame him for taking advantage of it.”
There was something hawkish about his gaze again, as though he was watching for her reaction. Shadow looked away.
“I guess not. It wouldn’t exactly be human nature to turn away from that kind of bounty.”
“No. Not average human nature, at any rate. But some of us have different rules, different motivations.”
What did that mean? She frowned over it for a minute, then pushed past it. “Why do you think this pottery was hers?” she asked.
“Because of the trail. She seemed to make some and trade it at every pueblo she visited. Women didn’t usually wander. They stayed at home and tended the hearths. And there’s something distinctly feminine about the artwork on these pieces.”
Shadow was beginning to comprehend the full implications of his search. “When you come to the end of her trail, you’re likely to find her.”
He nodded.
“She’d be buried with a lot of her own work.”
“Theoretically.”
“Or maybe her trail doesn’t end. Maybe she went wherever the Anasazi vanished to.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Wow.”
This time one corner of his mouth did kick up. “Yeah. Wow.”
He took his tools and started off toward the dig site. To Shadow’s knowledge, no archaeologist yet had undertaken such a staggering find. So far no one had been able to figure out a way to do it, had been able to unearth enough information to go on. But then, she had sensed from the first that he wouldn’t be content with the mundane.
She watched him leave, then she remembered what she was supposed to be doing here. She couldn’t believe he would sell the potsherds of She Who Waits. But maybe the ice blue piece she had found wasn’t one of She Who Waits. Maybe the piece was similar, but not the real McCoy. But he was bound to have to dig through a lot of clouds before he found a silver lining.
“What are you going to do with those other pieces you found?” she asked. “The stuff that’s not hers?”
He gave her a dark look over his shoulder. Any light that had come into his rugged features as he had talked about his work was gone now. His eyes became hooded.
“Didn’t you say you were going to find your own place to camp?” he said. “Goodbye.”
Chapter 5
Mac’s mind wasn’t on his work. For the first time in what could possibly be years—in fact, he couldn’t remember the last time it had happened—he tore a fragile scrap of sandal as he tried to remove it to get to a shard.
He straightened away from the dig, looking down at his hands as though they had somehow betrayed him. He supposed they had every right. They hadn’t touched anything warm and responsive in far too long now. He thought of her hair again. He swore and raked his hands through the top of his own.
Where the hell was she?
He went back to his campsite for his canteen, looking around the canyon as he went. The place she had used the past couple of nights was pristine now, returned to its natural condition. He looked down past the other ruins and saw no sign of her.
So she had taken him at his word and had gotten lost. It had been nearly an hour now since she had left to find her own site. But it didn’t seem characteristic of her not to have come back. He would have put money on her spending the day right here at the dig, watching every tiny piece he pulled out of the ground.
Was she hurt? Had she fallen again? God knew she had a propensity for it.
It wasn’t his problem. Then again, there was something exceptionally cold about going back to his work when she could be lying injured somewhere, without water, in this broiling sun.
“Damn it,” he snarled. This was exactly why he hated to work with anyone. It was why he hated company when he was digging. No matter what that pe
rson’s intentions might be, they were there and that was distracting.
Well, she was here. He couldn’t do anything about that. So he would find her and when he saw for himself what she was up to, then he could come back and get some work done without images of her lying broken and bent cluttering up his mind.
He drank deeply from the canteen, capped it again, then set off down the canyon floor. He found her as soon as he turned the bend into the switchback. She hadn’t gone far.
A small waterfall splashed down from the higher elevations at the very back of it. The water crashed into the stream, then wandered across the canyon floor to disappear into a cave on the far side. He had been bathing on the cave side although he knew that the fresh runoff would be hard to contaminate—the water moved through the canyon too quickly. But Shadow with her ghostly name had apparently found the cold tumbling water on this side too much to resist.
She stood under the waterfall, naked, her head tilted back in pure, sensuous pleasure. The water cascaded through her hair. She faced his way, and the sight of her drove a hard, burning fist right into his gut. It brought an airless sensation to his chest, close to pain.
His gaze moved over her, even though he had meant to turn right around and go back to his dig. She was lithe and supple, delicate yet strong. Her back was arched so that her breasts were thrust toward him, small and high, her dark nipples tightening as the cold water splashed over them. His gaze moved down from there, past a narrow waist and the flare of her hips, past the little tangle of black hair at the juncture of her thighs. He already knew how athletic those legs were, had watched her climb up and down the cliff wall as nimbly as a cat. But seeing all of their smooth, clean lines was something else entirely.
He had to get out of here. He stood riveted.
Shadow was in heaven. There was a ravine near her hogan that rarely went dry and afforded her fresh water to wash in, but an actual waterfall in this desert country was an oasis, as rare as a diamond in a drugstore. She hadn’t even noticed it the first couple of times she had been through here because it was in the back, cloaked in shadows. But that was exactly the sort of spot she’d wanted to camp in—a protected alcove—and when she had walked deeper into the switchback to investigate, she had found it.