by Beverly Bird
“You never had to.” He looked away toward the door as though wishing desperately the storm would end soon. Shadow followed his gaze, suddenly wishing the same thing herself.
When he spoke again, his voice was too quiet, almost musing. “In those seven years, did you ever let a man take care of you? Just pour himself over you without taking anything back for himself? Did you ever stop being the one in control?”
Shadow’s mouth went dry. For one breath-robbing moment she could only think of his hands moving over her skin the way they had worked that shard. The ache came back inside her, and with it an undeniable heat, sliding through her, staining her skin, stealing her breath.
He glanced back at her idly, then his face changed, hardening fast.
That hunger inside her was alive now. It was in her deep black eyes, questing, searching for something as she watched him. It flared there, that inner heat, ready and wanting...knowing on some level what it was that she needed, and he could have sworn in that moment that that something was him.
This time he pushed abruptly to his feet before she could actually ask for something he couldn’t give. He wondered if she would be as blunt and honest about her physical needs as she was about everything else.
“Sorry, Sergeant,” he said hoarsely. “I’m not the man for the job.”
He heard her sharp, indrawn breath but didn’t see the color drain from her face. He yanked back the door flap and squatted down on his haunches to look out at the storm.
“When it comes to women, I take what I’m given and give what I can,” he went on tightly. “The lovers I choose know that. They don’t expect me to stay, they don’t whine about me spending the night. They’re tougher than that, stronger. I share touches with them, then I go.”
She would need so much more than that, he thought. She would take so much more than that, whether it was given willingly or not. And that was his biggest, most ironclad rule.
How had this gotten so personal? Shadow wondered wildly. But then she realized that on some level it had been from the first. She, at least, had reacted to him even before she had watched him stroll about naked. He, on the other hand, seemed determined not to react to her at all.
“Where?” she whispered. “Where do you go?”
“Home.”
“Where’s that?”
“Wherever I want it to be at the time.”
“Always?”
He finally looked over his shoulder at her. “Do I always wander or do I always go home afterward?”
“Go.” She already knew about the wandering. A man with no home. And she remembered his eyes at the waterfall. A man that haunted would keep on the move, running from something within. There would be no haven for him.
“Yeah,” he said quietly.
“That’s lonely.”
“That’s sane.”
“Why?”
She had been honest. He could be the same. He met those dark, searching eyes of hers, feeling an unaccustomed pain, one he had not allowed himself to feel in a very long time now.
“Because you can’t lose something you never claimed for your own.” He stood again. “The storm’s breaking, Sergeant. Take my sleeping bag for the night. Yours’ll be soaked.”
He bent and gathered it up for her, telling her in no uncertain terms that it was time for her to go.
Chapter 6
The heat rose steadily as the sun climbed. By the time it blazed directly over Kokopelli’s Canyon, strands of Shadow’s ponytail clung to the back of her sweaty neck. Little runnels of perspiration slid down between her breasts, and she had to be careful not to touch the boulder she was sitting on with her bare skin.
She wanted to go back to the waterfall so badly that her mind kept returning to the possibility again and again. But she doggedly kept on with her notes, watching Mac work. If the heat bothered him, it didn’t show.
He worked late into the night before he stopped. At sunset, he rigged up a pair of battery-powered spotlights over the dig, illuminating a small section of it almost as bright as day. Still, Shadow was painfully aware of the dark ruins behind her, of the eerie abandoned dwellings over her head. She fidgeted uncomfortably on the very hard boulder as she made notations on the last piece he had taken out of the midden.
“Call it a night and go back to your camp,” he suggested dryly, without looking up. “You won’t offend me.”
“I’m fine.”
“Then how about some more water?”
“In a second.” She finished what she was writing and put the notebook down, then she stood. Mac sensed rather than saw what she did next—he wasn’t stupid enough to look. But he knew that she slowly rolled one shoulder then the other to get the kinks out, arching her back so that her tank top clearly outlined her breasts. He knew that she bent over to touch her toes and stretch out the muscles along the backs of her legs, presenting him with a tantalizing view from behind.
His jaw hardened and a dull heat started throbbing low inside him again, getting stronger the more he tried to ignore it. He willed her silently to cut it out and go get the water.
But when she finally did, he glanced over his shoulder to watch her leave. His eyes narrowed at the easy yet somehow purposeful way she moved. There were no wasteful gestures about her motion; each one flowed into the next with unconscious grace. He wondered if loving her would be like that, flowing, smooth, yet subtly driven.
A headache started behind his eyes, one of frustration and restraint.
Both were why he was still working at ten o’clock at night. Restraint took his concentration away from the dig, and the night ahead would bring frustration he preferred to avoid as long as possible. She had returned his sleeping bag this morning. He had no doubt that her scent would linger on the cloth, in the down.
His fingers grew rigid. Very carefully, very slowly, he pulled his hands back from his work.
She had to know by now that she was wasting her time here, he thought. She wouldn’t catch him doing anything illegal, and she wouldn’t find the piece of herself she had somehow lost. He gave her another day or two at the outside and then she would probably go home. The realization eased the tension across his shoulders a little, but it also brought a hollow feeling to his gut. The plain, bald truth was that her company—in and of itself—hadn’t been an entirely bad thing. If she hadn’t looked as good as she did, he might actually have enjoyed it.
For the most part she had remained silent, but occasionally she had asked a well-placed question. And when the sun had begun fading in the canyon, she had simply retrieved the last of his venison, skewered it, roasted it, and brought it back to him without comment so that he could eat without breaking from his work. He had finished the meat and was absently wiping the juice from his mouth before he even realized what had just happened.
She brought the water to him now, setting his cup on a rock without comment.
“Did you say blue?” she asked suddenly. “That the pieces you’re looking for have ice blue glazing?”
He went still in mid-swallow, watching her warily from over the rim. “Yeah. So?”
She pointed into the dig. “Is that a trick of the light?”
He followed the line of her outstretched finger and his heart gave an odd hitch. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly, tossing his cup back over his shoulder. “Oh, sweetheart, good eyes.”
Shadow’s own heart gave a kind of twisting squeeze that almost took her breath away. She knew the endearment had been casual, without meaning, probably even unconscious...and she knew that she didn’t want endearments from this complicated, unhappy man. She didn’t want anything from him except perhaps the whole truth about what he was doing here. Yet her blood surged as she watched him ease his way carefully down into the midden, several feet deep now.
He barely disturbed dust. It still amazed her how he could move like that when he was so strong, so large.
A fraction of pale blue stuck out from one of the side walls of the excavation—ma
ybe half an inch of the piece. The glazing had taken on some odd quality in the artificial light—not quite shining, not quite glimmering, but almost luminescent. Shadow found herself biting her lip as he worked it free. It was only a shard. He cupped it gently in his palm and the way he touched it took her breath away.
“Is it one of her pieces?” she asked.
“Yeah. Oh, yeah.”
“So she was here.”
“Looks that way.”
“How do you know she didn’t trade the pots to other travelers, people who might have taken them to places she never visited?”
Mac finally looked up at her. It was a good question. “Because I’ve never found them anywhere else but in this Yucatán-Four Corners sector.”
“And no one else has either?”
He shrugged. “There’s no way to track what illegal pot hunters have done, but reasonable control is kept over these reservation sites. There are no pieces in any private collections that I know of. None have shown up for auction. There are none in museums. About all that proves is that no one else has stumbled upon the mother lode I’m looking for—the place where she’s buried with most of her possessions. There’d be a bunch of pieces there, so some of them would almost have to have come to public light.”
Shadow considered that. “Can I...can I see it?”
He looked at her for a long moment, then he finally shrugged. “You found it.”
Shadow stepped carefully into the excavation and looked down at the small piece in his palm. Her heart slammed. It could be the artificial light, but it looked exactly like the piece she had found up on the trail. And if it was, if Mac was telling the truth about his work, then that meant that someone else was moving the pottery of She Who Waits out of here.
If Mac was telling the truth. Every instinct she possessed insisted that he was, but she’d be a fool to confide her find in him until she had more proof than that.
She stepped away from him carefully. “So will you move on now?” she asked. “Now that you know she’s been here to this canyon?”
He made a motion over his shoulder at the other three ruins. “She could be buried down there somewhere. I’ll dig a little more at this midden tomorrow, but I’m almost to the bottom now and she doesn’t appear to be here. I’ll move down there on Thursday and start working the next one.”
“How long will it take you to go through all four of them—assuming you have to?”
He shrugged again. “Six more weeks at the outside. What I’m doing is a lot less time-consuming than a full dig where every single thing that comes out of the ground has to be labeled and sorted. I don’t pull anything unless I have to. It’s too much unnecessary work with pieces I’m not interested in.”
He came out of the hole to stand close to her. Though he didn’t touch her, she was suddenly aware of the feel of him again, powerful and implacable.
“What’s the matter, Sergeant?” he asked. “You worried about running out of vacation time?”
Shadow brought up her chin. “The problem’s occurred to me. When I have to leave, I figure I can just trace any new pieces that come up for sale. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
“Not without it screaming.”
He turned away and flicked off the spotlights. They were plunged suddenly into darkness and Shadow gasped. She began to back up carefully, away from the ruins, then his voice came quietly out of the night.
“You don’t believe I’m stealing pots any more than you believe the sun’s going to fall out of the sky tomorrow.”
She found that she couldn’t respond to that one way or the other. And by the time she found her voice and her vision adjusted to the darkness, he was gone.
* * *
She washed at the waterfall. She stood under the spray, shivering with it now that the sun had gone. Goose bumps prickled over her skin and tightened her nipples. It was just the cold, she thought, such a shock after the heat of the day. It had nothing to do with her body clamoring to be touched again. It had nothing to do with the memories of the day that kept taunting her, flashing in and out of her mind...his hard-gentle hands working, his muscles moving under his skin as he stretched and lifted and moved.
She moved out of the waterfall and grabbed the towel she had left on the bank, wondering where he was.
Mac peeled out of his shorts and stepped into the comparatively tepid water at the cave side of the stream. Against all reason, he glanced back toward the switchback. The closest rock wall hid her camp from sight. He could barely hear the waterfall from here, only if he strained, only if he knew what he was listening for.
She was in it. He didn’t have to see it, didn’t need to hear it, to know that. The day had been so ungodly hot that he doubted if either of them had a stronger priority right now than getting into wet, clean water.
In spite of himself, another image flashed in his mind, of what she had looked like standing in that water yesterday. He got it into his head that she was standing just exactly that way now, sleek and bare, her back arched, her arms raised over her head.
He growled an inarticulate curse and grabbed his soap from the rocky bank, suddenly anxious to finish here and get into his sleeping bag whether it smelled of her or not. Sleep was what he needed, something that would ease his mind. He needed an escape. She was haunting him.
He stepped out of the water, bending to swipe up his towel as he started back to his tent, drying himself as he walked. He ducked inside, compelled to pull on a pair of clean shorts to sleep in, as though that was somehow safer.
He finally laid down and closed his eyes. Then he knew he had been right about the sleeping bag.
Something of her lingered in it, a scent of smoke and woman. He thought of kicking it off, of hurling it to the other side of the tent, but in the end it wasn’t worth the energy it would take.
It wouldn’t get her out of his head.
She was wholly unlike most of the women he had known, and the one he desperately needed to forget. She was capable rather than mewling. Generous instead of clawing. Quiet most of the time, insightful at others. Tenacious, honest and strong. In short, he couldn’t attribute any of the qualities he disliked about her gender to her. For all intents and purposes, she was the kind of woman he normally gravitated toward for a night, a weekend, a brief time in the sun.
And she wasn’t anything like those indifferent, self-serving females at all because he knew instinctively that she wouldn’t let him go afterward.
He could go down to that switchback, he thought, could slide into that bag with her and sink himself into her hidden fire, and he doubted if she would object. They were a man and a woman alone, and he could still remember her hungry gaze yesterday during the storm, wanting him, wanting any man who could give her back that piece of herself, whether she realized that or not. He could still remember that innocently speculative look in her eyes the morning she had left only to come back, a look he now doubted she had even been aware of giving.
It would be like Kokopelli and one of his maidens, he thought, fast, mutually satisfying, and theoretically at least, someday he could wander on. But he had the strong sense that if he sank into her, into this particular woman, even for one night, he wouldn’t be able to leave again. She wouldn’t hold him, but she would ensnare him.
It wasn’t worth it. He wasn’t Kokopelli. He was too old, too scarred, to change.
He groaned and rolled over in his sleeping bag, deliberately closing his eyes.
* * *
Shadow listened to the scurrying sounds of some nocturnal animal, then she shifted, rolling to her left, wondering why the ground seemed so much harder tonight. True, her sleeping bag was not as well stuffed and as heavy as Mac’s had been. But she had slept the first two nights without his and the rocky ground hadn’t bothered her then. Of course, you never missed something until you had it and it was taken away.
He had said something like that yesterday, in the storm. What was it? She scowled, trying to remember
his exact words. You can’t lose something you never claimed for your own.
She rolled to her right side and wondered what he had lost.
A wife, probably. That was usually the story, and the sort of thing that would make a man as bitter as Mac seemed to be. And yet she had the sense that it was something deeper than that, something that had scarred him while he was still too young, too vulnerable to deal with the blow.
Shadow grimaced in the darkness. Some small part of her yearned to fill the angry, hurting hole inside Mac Tshongely. She wanted to mend his wings, but in the end it would be the same as it always was. He would fly, whole and strong, and she would be left on the ground. She couldn’t do that anymore. She felt strongly that she was running out of pieces of herself to give, and Mac Tshongely would take a lot from her. If she shared touches with him, even a few, then she knew somehow that she would never be able to forget him.
She thought of leaving the switchback anyway.
She thought of going down there, slipping inside his tent. She didn’t think he would send her away. She could make the ache inside him go for a little while, could give him a brief respite, a temporary haven in her arms. She could assuage this new, clawing hunger inside herself. She could slide her hands over his cool, rough skin, could glory in the uncomplicated touch of his own hands. Like one of Kokopelli’s maidens, she could meet him sweetly in darkness and say goodbye when the sun rose again.
She groaned.
More likely, she thought, she would play the role of She Who Waits, wanting, needing, always hoping until that last twilight came. She shivered in her sleeping bag, suddenly cold again. Mac Tshongely wasn’t your average broken dove. He was surly...and instinctively kind. He was hard, yet he could coax life out of the sands of time. A loner who unconsciously shared. A man who didn’t want her here yet had risked bodily injury to break her plunge to the canyon floor.
She groaned again and deliberately closed her eyes.
* * *
Impossibly, Mac felt himself harden. Don’t think about her. He reached out and turned on his lantern, as though it could clear his mind along with the darkness. It didn’t.