Blackwolf's Redemption

by Sandra Marton

  The breath caught in Jessie’s throat.

  The lightning had stopped.

  The darkness vanished.

  The sun appeared, a bright yellow ball against a clear blue sky.

  It lit the canyon, the peaks, the tenacious shrubs and lodge-pole pines that clung to the inhospitable slope before him, but Jesse had eyes for only one thing.

  A figure. A human figure that lay, still as death, in the very center of the sacred stone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE climb to the ledge was as tricky and dangerous as Jesse remembered, more like sixty feet instead of forty because of all the maneuvering necessary to find the right hand and footholds, and the rush of adrenaline pumping through him didn’t help. He could feel his muscles tensing.

  Jesse stopped, counted to ten, took half a dozen deep breaths as the sweat poured off his tanned skin. If he fell, then there’d be two of them for the vultures to pick over.

  Two of what? his brain said. Had he actually seen somebody up there?

  Hell. There was no time for that. He had to keep moving.

  The ledge was right above him now. This was the trickiest part; he’d have to lean back with nothing behind him but air to get a decent handhold. Wouldn’t it be a bitch if he’d gone through all this nonsense and the thing lying on the stone wasn’t human at all? There was lots of wildlife here. Elk, deer, but neither of those could have scrambled up this high. A wolf? No, again. A bear, maybe. Or a mountain lion.

  He might have made this climb just for a look at the carcass of a dead animal. Or an injured one. Hunters might have ignored his No Trespassing signs. Nobody from around here. They knew better. But an outsider…

  For God’s sake, you’ve seen what some of those idiots who call themselves hunters can do.

  Why hadn’t he thought of that sooner?

  A wounded grizzly would be a hell of a thing to find. Well, it was too late to worry about that now. Jesse took a deep breath. One last pull with the powerful muscles of his arms and shoulders and he hoisted himself up on the narrowest part of the ledge.

  His heart caught in his throat.

  There was something here, all right. And it wasn’t an animal.

  It was a woman.

  She was unconscious but alive; her face was white as a fish’s belly but he could see the faint rise and fall of her breasts.

  A moan rose from her throat. She didn’t have any obvious wounds, but that didn’t mean anything. For all he knew, she might have been struck by that strange lightning. Lightning was dangerous. It might have damaged her heart. Or she might have hit her head and suffered a concussion.

  He had no way of knowing her condition.

  He told himself she deserved whatever had happened to her. Outsiders had no business here. Still, instinct took over. He had been trained to save lives, as well as take them. He knelt down beside her and took a closer look.

  She wasn’t shivering. That was good. He touched his hand to the side of her neck. Her skin was warm. That was good, too. He could see her pulse beating—hell, racing—in her throat.

  He put his hand over her heart.

  Its beat was strong and steady…and her breast filled his palm. He jerked his hand away and sat back on his heels.

  “Wake up,” he said sharply.

  She didn’t move.

  “Come on, open your eyes.”

  She moaned again. Her lashes lifted, revealing irises the color of spring violets.

  “Are you injured? Does anything hurt?”

  The tip of her tongue came out and swept lightly over her lips. She was looking at him, but he doubted if she could really see him; her eyes were blurry.

  “Concentrate,” he said coldly. “Listen to what I’m saying. Are you hurt?”

  Her gaze sharpened; her eyes seemed to darken. Her lips parted.

  “That’s it. Look at me and tell me if anything—”

  “Oh, my God,” she gasped.

  And then her mouth opened wide and her scream echoed and reechoed through the silence of the canyon.

  The scream that erupted from Sienna’s throat was high and thin and filled with terror, but sheer, unadulterated terror was precisely what she felt.

  A man was bending over her. He had the painted face of a savage, with black stripes delineating the sharpness of his high cheekbones. His hair was black, too, and long, held back with a strip of something, maybe deer hide. Her eyes dropped lower. An eagle’s talon was hung around his neck, dangling from a narrower length of leather.

  Dangling against his—oh, God—his naked, tautly muscled chest.

  Fear beat gauzy wings in her blood. There was only one explanation. A lunatic was wandering the Montana high country and she’d run straight into him.

  Don’t scream again, she told herself. Do not scream again. Be calm, be calm, be—

  “Get away from me!” she shrieked as he leaned toward her. She dug her elbows into the unyielding surface beneath her and tried desperately to scramble backward. No way. The man put his big, hard hands on her shoulders and shoved her down.

  “Don’t move.”

  His voice was low and rough, and now she was sure he was crazy. Don’t move? Of course she was going to move. She was going to run like the wind, but first she had to get free of his hands.

  “I said don’t move,” he growled. “Or I’ll have to restrain you.”

  Restrain? What kind of madman used a word like restrain? And wasn’t he already doing that? Questions tumbled through her head. Who was this nut? Where had he come from? For that matter, where was she? Her gaze flew past him, to the mountain that loomed over her, and beyond it, to the blazing sun.

  The sun. The solstice.

  That was it. The solstice. She’d been observing it, waiting for the moment the new summer sun would send a dagger of light between the standing slabs that guarded the sacred stone and then, without warning, lightning had torn apart the sky. Green lightning, zigzagging between the stones.

  A black void had opened before her. She’d felt herself falling into it, spinning inside it….

  And then, nothing. A nothing so cold, intense and empty she’d felt as if her bones might become petrified, as if the emptiness would swallow her.

  But it hadn’t, because she was here, with a man she’d never seen before crouched beside her. A savage with a hard face, eyes as cold and black as obsidian, and a mouth as thin as the slash of a rapier.

  Sienna tried to swallow. Impossible. Terror had leeched the moisture from her mouth. The man watched the motion of her throat, then lifted his eyes to her face again.

  “Are you hurt?”

  Was she? Carefully, she flexed her fingers, her toes, her back.

  “I don’t—”

  “Do you ache anywhere?”

  Why would he care? Still, her response was automatic. “My head.”

  One hand left her shoulder, rose to her head. She jerked away, or would have jerked away, but his other hand came up to cup her jaw and hold her head still while his fingers explored her scalp. His touch was light, almost gentle, a sharp contrast to his face, his body, his voice—but she knew it didn’t mean a thing. She had studied indigenous cultures in which the warriors treated their captives relatively gently until the moment of—

  “Aah.”

  Sienna hissed in pain. The man grunted.

  “You’ve got a lump behind your ear.” His hands shifted, began a slow trip down her throat, along her shoulders.

  “Don’t,” she said, but he paid no attention as he worked his way to her toes. His touch was efficient, not intimate, but that didn’t keep it from adding to her terror.

  “How many fingers?”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “How many fingers do you see?”

  She looked at his upraised hand. “Three.”

  “And now?”

  “Four. Who are you?”

  Carefully, she rose on her elbows, felt the coldness of stone beneath her bare arms.

  He
leaned closer. She flinched back. He gave an impatient growl, caught hold of her shoulders and leaned toward her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Checking your pupils.”

  It was unnerving. Those black eyes boring into hers.

  “My pupils are fine.”

  “Turn your head. Again. Slowly. Good. I’m going to roll you over.”

  “You are not going to—”

  But he did. His hands danced over her, his touch still impersonal. When he was finished, he turned her on her back, slid an arm under her shoulders and sat her up.

  The world spun. There was a kind of buzzing sensation in her head, as if a swarm of tiny bees had found their way inside and set up housekeeping.

  Sienna moaned.

  The man’s arm tightened around her. It was a strong, hard arm, deeply tanned by the sun, muscled and toned by work. She wanted to jerk away from him, but she didn’t have the strength and even if she had, she knew he wouldn’t have permitted it.

  At last, the earth stopped spinning. She took a deep, shaky breath.

  “I’m—I’m okay.”

  He let go of her. She swayed a little, and he cursed and wrapped his arm around her again.

  “Put your head down.”

  “It isn’t nec—”

  “Put it down.”

  She complied. What choice was there when he was glaring at her? The last thing she wanted to do was anger a madman. He was angry enough already. At what? At her? Was anger a sign of psychosis? If only she’d paid more attention to those psych courses…

  “Take another couple of deep breaths. That’s it.” He held her a moment longer. Then he let go and put a few inches of distance between them. “Your name?”

  It wasn’t a question, it was a demand.

  Should she tell him her name or shouldn’t she? She’d once read that violent criminals generally didn’t want to know anything about their victims, which was exactly why some shrinks thought you might save your life by making your kidnapper, your rapist, see you as an individual.

  Your rapist, Sienna thought, and swallowed a wild rush of hysterical laughter. It sounded so mundane. Your hair stylist. Your bus driver.

  Your rapist.

  “Answer me. What’s your name?”

  She took a breath. “I’m Sienna Cummings. Who are you?”

  “How did you get here?”

  Where? She didn’t realize she’d said the words aloud until his eyes narrowed to inky slits.

  “Pleading amnesia won’t work. Neither will avoiding my questions. How did you get here?”

  She looked at him. “Where is here?” she said, in such a small voice that Jesse was tempted to believe her.

  But she’d told him her name. Yeah, but that didn’t mean anything. He’d dealt with enough wounded men to know that there was such a thing as selective memory loss. She might know her name but not anything else.

  Or, he thought coldly, she might be lying through that soft-looking, rosy mouth.

  “Here,” he said grimly, “is my property.”

  “Blackwolf Canyon?” She shook her head. “You don’t own this place.”

  “Trust me, lady. I damned well do. Every tree, every rock, every speck of dirt is mine.”

  “You don’t own it,” she repeated stubbornly.

  Jesse almost laughed. She was damned sure of herself. Did she think she could plead ignorance and get away with what she’d planned?

  He could categorize her easily enough. She was either a hippie who hadn’t accepted the fact that the sixties were gone, or she was a thief.

  There was a big market for relics from the long-gone past. “Sacred artifacts of Native Americans,” the fat, easily frightened guy he’d caught on his land last year, despite the No Trespassing signs posted around his ten thousand acres, had called them, though real Native Americans simply referred to themselves as Indians.

  As for the sacred part…

  Complete, unadulterated crap.

  Yeah, there were those of his people who were suckers for that kind of nonsense. He’d come close, as a boy, but Vietnam had sure as hell changed that. The stones, the glyphs, the pottery shards were nothing but stuff leftover from another time. The ledge didn’t have any kind of woo-woo magical validity whatsoever.

  But that didn’t mean he’d let thieves and leftover flower children intrude upon it.

  This place was his. He owned it, at least he’d own it until he signed the sale papers.

  A quick appraisal told him this woman was no leftover flower child drawn to a romanticized version of the Old West. She wore no beads, no flowered gown, nor was her hair flowing. Instead her hair was pulled back from her face in a no-nonsense ponytail. She wore a plain cotton T-shirt and jeans that looked as if they’d seen a lot of use. She was a thief, plain and simple, and that she’d sneaked onto his property angered him almost as much as that he had not spotted her all the time he’d sat on his horse and stared at the mountain.

  Yes, it had been dark as hell then, but so what? As a boy, as a soldier, he’d been trained to observe. To see things others didn’t. And yet, she’d gotten past him.

  Jesse’s eyes narrowed. His skills were getting rusty. That would have to change. For now, though, he had to concentrate on how to get her off this ledge. Whatever she was, he didn’t want her death on his conscience.

  More to the point, he thought coldly, a corpse would bring not just the sheriff but a passel of reporters. More publicity was the last thing he wanted.

  He shot a look to where the ledge jutted out over the floor of the canyon. The problem was getting her down without both of them ending up doing it the fast way. At the least, a fall would result in shattered bones. He needed rope, but he didn’t have any, and riding forty minutes back to the house, leaving her here to the tender mercy of the sun and maybe the first curious check of the menu by an inquisitive buzzard, wasn’t such a hot idea.

  Rope, he thought. Not necessarily a lot of it, just enough to link her to him…

  Quickly, he rose to his feet.

  “Okay,” he said brusquely. “Take off your belt.”

  Her face went white. “What?”

  “Your belt.” He was already unbuckling his. “Take it off.”

  “Don’t do this.” Her voice broke. “Please. Whoever you are, don’t—”

  His head came up. His eyes met hers and, hell, it all came together. The look on her face. The terror in her voice. She thought he was going to rape her. Why? Because he looked like what she undoubtedly thought of as a savage? Well, yeah. Maybe. He was shirtless. He wore his hair long. There was an eagle talon half wrapped in rawhide hanging around his neck, a gift from his father.

  To keep you safe, his father had said softly, the night before he had left for ’Nam.

  The stripes on his cheeks were the only thing that had no reasonable explanation. Okay. Maybe they did. He’d come here to say goodbye to his land, his mountain, as a warrior. He’d spent less than a minute choosing between his army ODs and the paint of his people. He didn’t believe in either, not anymore, but the link to those who’d preceded him could not be as easily discarded as a uniform, so he’d stripped off his shirt, striped his face, pulled his hair back with a strip of deerskin…

  Jesse blew out a breath of exasperated comprehension.

  The woman was a trespasser. She probably knew exactly where she was and that it was private land, but he couldn’t fault her for leaping to the wrong conclusion at being told to take off her belt by a man who sure as hell didn’t look like anything she was accustomed to.

  “I need the belts to make a rope,” he said.

  “A rope?”

  “To get us off this cliff.”

  She blinked. “To get us off this…”

  He squatted beside her, grabbed her shoulders, forced her to turn her head and see the canyon. “Take a look, lady. We’re on the side of a mountain. As if you didn’t already know—”

  “Oh God!” The words were a whisper, b
ut they became louder and louder as she repeated them. “Oh God,” she said, “oh God, oh God…”

  She began to tremble. Tremble? The understatement of the year. She was shaking like an aspen leaf in a windstorm. Jesse shook her. Hard.

  “Stop it!”

  “I’m on the mountain. Blackwolf Mountain. In Blackwolf Canyon.” She made a sound that might have been a laugh. “And this—this is the sacred stone!”

  “Surprise, surprise,” he said coldly.

  She swung toward him, eyes wide, face still devoid of color.

  “I was in the canyon. In it, do you understand? I was looking up at the mountain. At this ledge. At these stones and the sun and then—and then there was lightning and then I was here and no, it’s impossible, impossible, impossible….”

  If it was an act, it was a good one. Damn it, was she going into shock? No color. Sentences that made no sense.

  He caught her wrist.

  “Take it easy.”

  She laughed. It was the kind of laugh he’d heard wounded men make on the battlefield just before they gave it all up and went into shocked insanity. A knot formed in his belly. No. He was not going to let this woman go there. He had enough blood on his hands to last a lifetime.

  “Take it easy,” he said again. Her teeth were chattering, and he had nothing to warm her with except himself. On a low, angry curse, he wrapped his arms around her. “Calm down.”

  “D-did you h-hear what I said? I wa-was down there. At the bottom of this—this pile of rock. And then I wasn’t. I wasn’t d-down there, I was—I was here. And you—and you—”

  “Come here,” he growled, and he drew her hard against him. She struggled; he ignored it. After a few seconds, she gave a little sob; he felt the warmth of her breath against his naked flesh, the hot kiss of her tears. She felt delicate, almost fragile in his arms.

  How on earth could she have had the strength to get up here?

  It didn’t make sense.

  Yes, she’d ignored his No Trespassing signs. She’d come here to steal artifacts. He was certain of that. But how had she climbed to this ledge? He knew how much muscle power it took, and he knew, too, that she didn’t have it.