by BJ James
“Trust you! You ask too much.”
“I know, yet you told me you did before. Only a little, but it was a start.”
“Yeah, well I also told you I was losing my marbles. Trusting you to any degree is proof.”
Indian sighed, a low, weary sound, discovering he was tired as well. Before the gang stumbled across Patience, he’d ridden for half a day. A hard, taxing ride, adding one more name, one more contact to a growing list. Only one, when there were so many.
Yes, he was weary. Weary of living on the edge, of running and hiding. And too weary for more of this. “We’ve been over this time and again. We take one step forward and two back. Then two forward and three back.” He touched her hair only briefly, but in that brief moment she didn’t move away. “How many more times will it take? When will you trust me unconditionally?”
He asked too much, too soon. More than she could give to a stranger, even one who had taken her from crueler hands. Perhaps more than she could ever give him.
Silence grew intense, a tarnished web spun by evasion and unanswered questions. A howl rose out of the distance, the melancholy cry of a rancher’s dog. A descendant of the wolf that once hunted this land, roaming where it would in tightly knit packs, until it was hunted into nearly total extinction. A creature of civilization, returned by the night to the wild, mourning the passing of his kind. A lost and lonely creature. As lost and lonely as she.
Tears gathered in her eyes, she blinked them back. She never cried. She wouldn’t now. But nothing stopped the ache in her heart. Nothing eased a growing, desperate need to believe in this man she knew only as Indian.
“How can I trust you?” Her whispered cry was as mournful as the solitary dog.
“Follow your instincts. Listen to what they tell you.”
“No!” She inched back a step, stopping when the fender of the bike brushed her hip. “I don’t even know your name.”
“You will,” he promised, “when the time comes. That and more.”
Patience neither rejected nor accepted his conjecture. Her heart and mind were in conflict. One saying, Yes, believe him. The other insisting, Never.
“Life isn’t always clear-cut choices. Everything can’t be black or white with no shades of gray. And things aren’t always what they seem.” He lifted his hands as if he would take her shoulders. To shake the obstinate opposition from her? To make her believe what he wouldn’t if he were she?
God! What he was asking of her. What he asked her to do. His hands shook. His fingers flexed into impotent fists at all he couldn’t say. With a ragged sigh, he dropped his arms to his sides. “People can’t always be what they truly are, but there’s faith. Faith in what we can’t see, or don’t really know, and we believe.”
He wheeled around, returning to the rim of the mesa, rather than waiting for a response. He didn’t want one yet.
The sky to the east would soon be paling, the stars fading. The fitful night wind was dying, only creatures of the dark roamed the cloaked and hidden land.
The camp at the base of the mesa was quiet. They were intruders, these men and women who desecrated the canyon floor like flotsam washed from a sandy sea. Intruders who would never belong and would never know as the desert dweller knew, that here was a place to be revered. A place of secret life and rare beauty. A place for contemplation and reverie, where in distance and stillness there was peace.
The campfire burned in smoldering embers. As the man they had named Indian looked fiercely down on them, they slept at last.
A wave of bitterness welled inside the Apache. For what had been done to a land that once had been the land of his people. Bitterness that pulled him back to the desert after many years away from it.
He wanted to take Patience away from this. He wanted more than he could say, to spare her what lay ahead. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t go. Not yet. Not with consuming rage in his heart.
Not until the task he’d come to do was done.
For her safety he’d delayed entry into the drunken orgy of the camp. Now that immediate danger was past and delay served no purpose. He swung around, facing her, feeling her cautious gaze on him. “Are you waiting for me to shed my mask and turn into a brute?”
“Maybe.” She didn’t turn away. In the darkness he was a shadowy figure painted in bold, somber strokes, more handsome phantom than man. Yet when he touched her he was flesh and blood. Indian was no specter created in the mind of a frightened woman. But was he part of the nightmare?
Beneath the desert moon she knew only that he was tall, slender, broad in shoulders, lean-hipped. His hair and eyes were like the night, his features of carved stone. The nuances that were the essence of him, the truth, lay shrouded in mystery. If he wore a mask, it would be revealed by the light of day.
Indian crossed his arms over his chest, the fringe at the hem of his leather vest rippling with the move. He looked back at her, meeting her intent stare, holding it. After a moment, he smiled. “It won’t happen, you know,” he said in an even voice. “There is no mask. I’ll be the same in the light as I am now.”
“No mask,” Patience murmured, her eyes shifting to look past him toward the canyon. “But a masquerade? Could it be that you’re not really one of them?”
Indian was staggered once more by her shrewd perceptions, realizing, as before, that she was a dangerous woman. A risk to herself and to him.
Shrugging in a dismissive gesture he hoped would mitigate her suspicions, he refuted them with a stolid insistence. “There’s no masquerade. I ride with the Wolves. That makes me one of them.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“If a hawk flies with crows, he doesn’t become one.”
Indian laughed, with false humor. “O’Hara,” he mused with deliberate drollness in his tone, “Irish to the bone. Yet you speak like an Apache.”
Patience wouldn’t be diverted. “I’m no more Apache than you are vagrant biker.”
“Dammit, Patience.” With a shake of his head he bit back what he would have said, refusing to be drawn into contention, and sorry he’d let it go so far. “It doesn’t matter,” he said with a return of stern forbearance. “Believe what you will.”
“I’ll believe what I see as the truth, Indian.”
He heard a strange serenity. It didn’t mean she wasn’t frightened, nor that she wasn’t filled with rage at the indignity and the loss of freedom. It didn’t mean truce or compliance. She’d reverted, instead, to powerful and primordial instincts. The most basic and powerful element of survival.
Patience O’Hara, with her flaming hair falling to her waist and Irish blood flowing through her veins, was more Apache in her heart than she knew.
“Watch with more than your eyes,” he told her thoughtfully, “and see.”
He lifted his face to the sky. Little had changed, but dawn would come too soon. “We must go. We’ve delayed long enough.”
“Your good and true friends are sleeping.”
“Yes.” Ignoring her mockery, he moved past her, his curious, rolling, moccasin-clad step no more than a whisper over the ground. Mounting the bike, his face without expression, he waited for her to follow.
“We’ll wake them.”
“Nothing will wake them, they sleep like the dead. Only the sentries know we’re here. Only they will know we’re coming in.”
“Sentries?”
He shifted on the seat to face her fully. “They’ve been watching. Two of them, beyond hearing, but watching nevertheless. You will always be watched. Guard yourself well when I am not with you.”
“Who will guard me from you?”
“I will. You have had my word on it.”
He expected a response. Another trenchant evaluation of the worth of his word. But there was only thoughtful, unbroken silence. As the hush deepened he lifted a hand to her, waiting.
Patience looked past him to the vast expanse beyond him. There was nothing, no light in the darkness, no sign of human inhabitants, no
avenue of escape. Yet in the throes of its death, hope demanded one more probing search. One more assurance there was no hope.
“There’s nothing out there.”
“You wouldn’t let me go in any case?”
“No.”
Something almost like a smile tugged at her lips for a second. “I had to try, one last time.”
“I know.” He would have done the same. He would keep on trying, as he knew she would.
“Dammit, Indian! Why did this have to happen to me?”
“The wrong place, O’Hara,” he answered. “The wrong time.”
“The right time will come.” She took his hand. Her clasp was steady and strong. “My time. I promise.”
Indian said no more. With unspoken words of hate and the pledge of vengeance ringing in his ears, he took her down into the netherworld that waited below the rim of the mesa.
* * *
It was morning. When Indian had taken her down a pitch of track strewn with potholes and boulders without regard for waking those below, she hadn’t thought she would ever sleep. Yet she had. Dawn broke and the sun was warm on her face before she woke. With waking came instant recall and alarm. Scrambling from a blanket laid by the separate fire he’d made, she looked frantically around, sure there were dangers lurking at every turn. But little differed from the scene that had greeted her in the night.
By ones and twos, the bikers and their women slept in the comatose throes of alcohol. The fire was cold, gray ash. Clothing littered the ground, discarded where the mood struck. Bottles lay where they were thrown, some intact, some shattered. In the pale light of morning the camp was suspended chaos, waiting to begin again.
With her face a mask of disgust, Patience listened to the titter of birds foraging for a first meal. Overhead a black hawk, with white-banded tail flashing in the sun, surfed a rising thermal. Life in the canyon continued little changed, as it had for a millenium, as it would for another. The Wolves were a passing intrusion, a blight endured.
In her unsettled sleep she’d dreamed that when she woke they were gone. But only Indian’s place by their smoldering fire was empty.
The one constant in her life for hours was gone.
Her first thought was of escape. Freedom. But escape to where? Where would she go? How? She gauged the face of a cliff rising thirty feet to the top of the mesa. An incline too sheer to climb, the mixed layers of tawny volcanic tuff and blue-black basalt too rough.
Yet beyond the tawny walls of her prison lay civilization. Close enough that a howling dog could be heard. Close enough that she could reach it. If she could wend her way undetected through the canyon. If she knew which direction to walk.
If.
Pushing a hand impatiently through her falling hair, she considered her options. Spinning around, seeking a hidden trail that might be her secret path to freedom, she found herself face-to-face with Indian.
“I wouldn’t if I were you.” Only his lips moved as he spoke in a low voice.
“What?” He was so close, Patience could see her reflection in eyes that were as dark by day as by night. “What do you mean?”
“You were thinking of escape. Even a tenderfoot could see the cliffs are too steep and too rough. That leaves a path.” He swung around, gesturing in the direction he’d come. “There’s one of sorts, with sycamores and junipers enough to conceal your passage, and somewhere out there lies a ranch.” He turned back to her, his dark face unreadable. “You wouldn’t make it. They’ll sleep for hours yet, but even with a head start, you wouldn’t.
“I would come after you.” There was neither anger nor threat in his words. Only fact.
“I know,” she admitted.
“But you had to try, or think of trying.”
Her chin tilted a telltale inch. “Wouldn’t you?”
He looked down at her for what seemed a long time, then he smiled. An action that, as it had the night before, did more wonderful things to an already handsomely constructed face. “Yes.”
Patience waited for more, but there was none. She realized she should have known. He never said more than one word, when one was enough. Somewhere in the camp someone snored, coughed and sighed, and slipped again into the heavy, rhythmic breathing of deep sleep.
Indian turned his head, found the source of disturbance, then returned his attention to Patience. “It’s better not to disturb them, better to let them sleep off most of what will be monumental hangovers. But if you’re hungry...”
“No,” Patience assured him quickly. Then again. “Not at all.”
As if he would erase the bruises of fatigue from her, he brushed the tender flesh beneath her eye with the pad of a thumb. “I’d hoped you would sleep longer.”
“I’m an early riser.” She didn’t dodge away from his touch, didn’t flinch when his palm curved at her cheek.
“Every minute of every day is too precious to waste. Even the bad ones? Even days like today?” He didn’t wait for an answer. Taking his hand from her, he stepped back to pick up a slender stalk of mesquite lying at his feet. Pausing a moment, he squinted at the sun, judging the time. “Desert heat is tricky. Until you’re better acclimatized, I’d like you to stay in the shade as much as possible, and drink as much as you can.”
“I can take care of myself,” Patience shot back. “I’ve been in the desert before.”
“Maybe you can, and maybe you have. But not like this.” He stopped gathering up the rest of the brush he’d collected. When he straightened there was a sheen of sweat shimmering on his face and throat. “There isn’t an air-conditioned hotel within a hundred miles, O’Hara. No dude ranch. No swimming pool. The only cooling the canyon can offer is the shade of a sycamore or juniper. On its best day, at its fullest, the creek wouldn’t cover the top of your feet.”
Patience stifled a retort in the sudden intuitive knowledge that it might be to her advantage if no one knew just how familiar she was with the desert. The less anyone knew of the lessons taught her by her fey, adventurous family and their madcap expeditions, the better. With parents whose concept of education was living life to the fullest, in as many places, in as many ways as possible, there was little she hadn’t tried and accomplished. For most of her twenty-seven years, she’d roamed the world with her parents, her brothers, and her sister. Before she entered the university, the one glaring lack in her education was the classroom.
But no one need know. Especially Indian. All the better to find a way out of this, if she could lull him into a false sense of security in the certainty of her incompetence.
“Maybe I will,” she mused, almost laughing out loud at the ironic simplicity of her plan. It might not work, nothing might, but this was worth a try. To Indian, she said, “Maybe you’re right.”
Indian paused as he was, his hands filled with brush and his eyes with doubt. “I am?”
“Of course you are.” With a helpless gesture completely foreign to her nature, she said, “I was foolish to suggest my vacation in the west could qualify me as anything more than a tourist. I shouldn’t presume that it did.”
“Foolish, huh?”
“Exactly.” Patience was uncomfortable under the laserlike scrutiny of his searching gaze, but felt no qualms at lying by omission. After all, what concern was it of his if her vacations in the west had actually been many, and not really vacations in the truest sense of the word?
He needn’t know of her Gypsy father’s penchant for wandering the world exposing his children to varying life-styles. Nor that one of those ventures included two years her father managed a ranch in Arizona, with his family serving as cowhands. Those years, with another spent on an archaeological study in the petrified forest, might not qualify Patience as an expert, but she was anything but a novice.
“You think it’s best I rest in the shade?”
“Yes, Patience.” There was amusement in his voice, her change in temperament didn’t fool him. He didn’t for a moment believe she’d suddenly become the acquiescent female resi
gned to her fate. Only time would reveal what her resourceful mind had concocted. In the meantime it would be up to him to ensure that she didn’t make her circumstance worse. In spirit of her game and because he admired her determination, he added innocently, “I’m glad you’ve come to terms with what has to be.”
“This isn’t exactly a case of ‘if you can’t lick them, join them,’” she warned, certain that sudden and total capitulation would only fuel his evident doubt.
“I never thought it was.”
“I’m not embracing Chief Joseph’s philosophy.”
“That, either,” he agreed.
“It’s just a matter of being practical.”
With a mockingly gallant bow, Indian murmured, “Of course.”
For some reason that small bit of gallantry and its mockery infuriated her. An angry retort burned on her tongue, but she bit it back. She was talking too much, saying more than was needed. For the security of her plan, she’d best do as she’d agreed. “I assume you have plans for the brush you’ve gathered, so I’ll just sit in the shade, while you do whatever it is you plan to do with it.”
“That’s a good idea, Patience. You sit in the shade, and I’ll do...whatever.”
For the next hour Patience lounged beneath the branches of a sycamore, occupying herself with straightening her sleep rumpled clothes and brushing her hair. All the while, her attention was riveted on Indian.
He’d shed the vest he wore without the complement of shirt or tee. His bare shoulders were broad, with ironlike sinews and muscles rippling beneath skin the color of pale cinnamon as he worked with limbs and shrubs. Faded jeans cinched with leather thongs rode low on his hips. She noted again that instead of the boots de rigueur for most bikers, he wore moccasins laced to the knee.
Shoulder-length hair that gleamed like polished onyx was drawn severely from his face, accentuating the utter and complete masculinity of his classic features. His face was a study in concentration, sparing only an occasional flashing glance at her as he worked. Every move was with purpose and sure, in a task he’d performed many times.
The camp was stirring with the first signs of life when he backed away to survey what he’d done. Turning to her, magnificent with sunlight gleaming over his sweat-burnished torso, he bowed with the same mocking gallantry. “Night quarters.” One corner of his mouth lifted in a rakish smile. “Yours and mine.”