WARRIOR

by Elizabeth Lowell

  "Really? What?"

  All right, how am I going to get out of this one? Eden asked herself wryly, caught between embarrassment and amusement.

  "Er, take my word for it," she said, knowing her cheeks were bright with something more than cold.

  "Give me some words and I'll see how I take them."

  "Better yet," Eden said quickly, thinking of a graceful exit from the topic, "I'll give you a textbook on cat anatomy."

  "Did you bring it with you?"

  She sighed. "No."

  "Then we're back to words."

  Eden suspected she was being teased. Nevada's eyes had a definite crinkle at the corners. She took a deep breath, reminded herself that she and Nevada were both adults, and began speaking as though she were in a graduate seminar.

  "Male cats are built to begin, but not to end, copulation. Therefore, disengagement must be rather uncomfortable for the females."

  Nevada gave Eden a sideways glance. "I'm missing something."

  "Barbs," she said succinctly.

  The sleek black of Nevada's beard shifted a bit as his mouth quirked, but he said only, "Can't be all that bad—"

  "Spoken like a true male," she muttered.

  "—because the older females keep coming back for more," Nevada finished, ignoring Eden's interruption.

  She saw the gleam in his eyes and knew that Nevada was teasing her. She struggled not to laugh. It was impossible. The wicked light in Nevada's eyes reminded her of Baby's when he had danced up to her with a mouthful of forbidden socks and lured her into play.

  Nevada listened to the rippling warmth of Eden's laughter and silently decided that it was even more beautiful than a wolf's wild song. He fought the impulse to put an arm around Eden and hug her to his side, and then to bend down and taste lips whose tempting curves haunted him at every moment.

  I should have left yesterday, storm or no storm. If I stay much longer I'm going to reach out and take what I need more than I need air.

  Having her would be like sinking into fire, all hot and clean and wild, no boundaries, no restraints, nothing but the two of us and the fire burning higher and higher…

  A wolf's howl leaped and twisted in the wild silence, calling to them, demanding their attention.

  "He's found cat sign!" Eden said. She looked eagerly around the landscape, trying to decide on the quickest route to Baby. "It could be bobcat, I suppose."

  "I'm betting it isn't," Nevada said promptly, heading toward the creek. "There's a big old fir on top of that rise. The lady cougar likes to lie up beneath the lowest limbs and watch the land."

  "Hurry," Eden said, following. "Once Baby starts running, we may not see him again until he's ready to come into the cabin and chew the ice out from between his toes."

  Nevada moved swiftly down the slope toward the creek that gleamed blackly between low banks of snow. Despite the snow that had fallen yesterday, neither Nevada nor Eden needed the snowshoes they had tied to their backpacks. Only in the steepest ravines or in the most dense forest was snowpack more than six inches deep. Yesterday's storm had filled in minor hollows and ripples, leaving behind a pristine surface that took and held tracks as though it had been designed for just that purpose.

  Baby howled again. Then came a series of short, excited barks.

  "He's seen the cat!" Eden said.

  "Will he call off?"

  "Doubt it. Not after being shut up in a car and then in the cabin."

  Nevada leaped the stream with a lithe power that made Eden think enviously of a cougar. She judged the distance to the other side and skidded to a stop. If she jumped, she'd be asking for an icy dunking on landing and a twisted ankle in the bargain.

  "Go on," she urged. "I'll catch up as soon as I find a safe way across. Try to get a look at the cat so we can identify it if we see it again. Once they're forty feet up a tree, cats are darned hard to see, much less identify, even with binoculars."

  Nevada hesitated for only an instant before he took off up the rise toward a big fir tree.

  Eden trotted – and occasionally slid and slithered – along the side of the creek, muttering about boulders concealed by snow and other traps for the unwary. Finally she came to a place where sun or wind or both had cleaned the rocks of snow. She jumped from boulder to boulder across the stream and headed up the rise. Soon she was following Nevada's tracks.

  Lord, that man runs like a big cat. No slipping, no struggling for balance, nothing but clean, long-legged strides.

  Baby's barks were faint now, continuous, and very excited.

  Sounds like the cat is up a tree. That was fast work. Hope Nevada got a look before it was too late.

  When Eden got to the top of the rise, she saw the place where the cougar had been stretched out on the ground beneath a low limb, watching the world in relaxed silence until a loudmouthed black wolf had appeared. Then all hell had cut loose. The cougar – for the size of the tracks left no doubt that a cougar had made them rather than a bobcat – had exploded out of cover, sending a shower of snow from lower branches. The cat had hit its full running stride instantly, racing over the sparsely wooded slope, heading uphill as cats always did when pursued.

  Baby's barking ended abruptly, telling Eden that Nevada had already caught up. Cocking her head, Eden listened, heard nothing to indicate that the chase was anything but over, and returned her attention to a particularly fine set of tracks the cougar had left. Baby wasn't going anywhere now. Neither was the cat. The tracks, however, were at the mercy of the rising wind and the sun. She had to photograph the tracks before they lost their fine, crisp edges.

  Automatically Eden took off her backpack, opened it and went to work. She pulled out camera and ruler, lined up the ruler close to the tracks, adjusted the camera's macro-zoom lens and triggered the shutter. In the forest silence, the snick, snick, snick of the shutter and the faint rubbing of her clothes against the snow when she knelt were the only sounds. When she was through measuring and photographing the prints, she took out a notebook and began to record information.

  Eden was halfway through a sentence when she had the distinct feeling of being watched. She spun around. Nevada was standing less than an arm's length away.

  "Lord, Nevada, you're a quiet man!"

  "Sorry. I didn't mean to startle you."

  Eden pushed a deep breath out of her lungs to slow her hammering heart, took a better grip on her pencil and resumed recording her observations.

  "Did you get a look at the cougar?" she asked.

  "It's the young female. She wintered well. Coat is thick and smooth, no sign of hesitation in her stride. I can't be positive, but I think she's nursing cubs. Her teats were swollen."

  With a startled sound Eden jammed her notebook and pencil into her jacket pocket. "I'd better go call off Baby. I don't want a new mother getting panicked."

  Nevada lifted Eden's backpack and started back up the trail. "Don't worry about the cougar. Last time I saw her, she was stretching out on a limb to watch Baby jawing at her from below."

  "Will I be able to see her?" Eden asked, excited.

  "Some."

  "How much?"

  "The black tip of her long, thick tail."

  "Figures," Eden muttered. "Seems like all I ever see of my cats are silent ghosts sliding away at the corner of my eyes."

  When Nevada and Eden arrived at the fir where Baby was leaping and yapping, not even the tip of a tail was to be seen. Eden called off Baby and went to work examining the tree through binoculars. Finally she spotted the cougar partway up the big evergreen.

  The cat was indeed stretched out along a hefty limb, watching the activity below through half-closed eyes. So well did the cougar screen herself with greenery that Eden wouldn't have seen the animal at all if she hadn't yawned. The motion revealed an astonishing length of pink tongue, as well as teeth of intimidating size and sharpness. The yawn ended, the jaws began closing, and the pink tongue vanished.

  An instant later, so did the cougar. Oc
casional tufts of snow rained down, revealing that the cat was still moving somewhere within the drooping, multiple arms of the tree. No matter how hard Eden looked through the binoculars, she couldn't see so much as a patch of the cat's thick, tawny fur.

  Baby whined coaxingly, tired of having to be silent.

  "Nope," Eden said to Baby as she lowered the binoculars. "Fun's over." She turned to Nevada. "Are you sure she was nursing?"

  "It's more of a hunch. She's healthy, but tires fast, even for a cat. She took to a tree real quick, even though Baby wasn't close to her." Nevada shrugged and squinted up into the tree with pale green eyes. "I'm no expert, though."

  "I'll take your instincts over the expertise of anyone I've ever worked with. You're a very noticing kind of man." Eden reached for her pack, which Nevada was still holding in one big hand. "Let's try backtracking from that big fir. If you're right about her having cubs, she'll have a den, too. Maybe we can find it."

  "It would make our work a lot easier," Nevada agreed.

  Eden heard the word our and felt a shiver of pleasure travel through her body. But if Nevada realized what he had implied, nothing was revealed on his face.

  "The cougars over on the other side of MacKenzie Ridge," he continued, "have much bigger territories. Up here, the countryside supports more deer, so the cats get by with a lot less land. Even so, they can cover twenty, thirty miles a day looking for prey or for a mate or just keeping their boundary markers fresh."

  "Speaking of food, my lunch is in my backpack." Eden tugged discreetly at one of the straps Nevada held.

  "Hungry?"

  Eden looked up. Nevada's light green eyes were very clear, the lashes surrounding them were ragged slices of midnight, and he was watching her with an intensity that made her breath shorten.

  "Yes, I'm … hungry."

  Her voice was too husky, but Eden was helpless to change it. Something in Nevada's eyes was making her blood shimmer wildly through her body, leaving chaos in its wake. She would have moved, but felt unable to so much as take a step. Motionless she waited for him to say something.

  "Nevada?" she whispered finally, looking up at him, wondering what was wrong, why she felt as though she were on the edge of a cliff and had only to spread her wings and fly … or fall endlessly, spinning away into infinity like a snowflake on the wind.

  Nevada saw the yearning and uncertainty in Eden's wide hazel eyes, hissed a searing word between his teeth and let go of her backpack. The straps slid through her fingers. She grabbed awkwardly with both hands, but it was Nevada's extraordinary quickness that kept the pack from being dumped into the snow. Instead of giving the backpack to Eden, he slung it over one shoulder and turned back the way they had come.

  For a moment Eden was too unsettled to follow. She watched Nevada stride through the widely spaced trees. He moved with a strength and silence that should have frightened her, but did not. His male grace and power tugged at her senses, just as the realization that she had never seen Nevada in any but dark clothes tugged at her emotions.

  He wants me. He's never made any secret of it. So why won't he even kiss me?

  The thought of being kissed by Nevada made Eden's blood shimmer wildly once more. Her breath came in hard, ragged, and she wanted nothing so much at that instant as the feel of Nevada's lips on her own.

  Lord, if Mark had had this effect on me, we'd be married by now, with kids in the bargain.

  The thought of having Nevada's children went through Eden like lightning, shaking her – another human being with a smile like hers and black hair like his, another person with curiosity and discipline and maybe, just maybe, a boy with his father's smooth coordination, his strength, his restraint.

  Eden's breath rushed out, leaving her almost dizzy. She blinked and took several slow breaths as she looked around in the manner of a person who has awakened in a strange land. The snow-brushed trees were unchanged, the white glitter of sunswept snow was the same, and the tracks still showed as blue-white marks in the snow. Nothing in the world around her had changed.

  Yet everything had changed. For the first time in Eden's life, her own inner world, the untouched, unviolated privacy of her dreams, had been transformed by the presence of a man.

  I'm falling in love with Nevada.

  No. Scratch that. It's past tense, over and done with, and I was the last one to know.

  Baby whined and nudged Eden's hand. Absently she stroked his big head. He ducked, caught her gloved hand in his mouth and tugged. Immediately he had her full attention.

  "You're right, Baby. It's time we left the mama cougar in peace. Or is it lunch you're after, hmm? Does your sharp nose know that all the food left with Nevada? Or do you sense that he's making off with my heart as well as my backpack?"

  Yellow eyes watched Eden alertly.

  "Yes, I know," she said in a low voice. "It's stupid of me to let someone walk off with something that vital. But my lack of sense is nothing new. A smart girl would have followed everyone's advice and let you die after finding you in that trap, rather than take a chance on getting savaged while trying to teach a wild young mostly-wolf to trust people again."

  Baby cocked his head to the side, listening to Eden with every fiber of his mostly-wolf being. Then he made a soft sound deep in his throat and turned his head to look out across the land.

  "Okay, boy, I get the message," Eden said. She swept her arm in the direction in which Nevada had gone. "Go catch up with lunch."

  It was like releasing a catapult. Within three seconds Baby had reached his full stride and was running with his belly low to the ground and his tail streaming out like a dark banner. Eden followed more slowly, needing time to get a better grip on her unsettled and unsettling thoughts.

  Nevada won't be an easy man to love. He's a winter man, shut down deep inside, waiting for a spring that hasn't come.

  On the heels of Eden's thought came another, a realization as unflinching as winter itself. Don't kid yourself. You're going into this with your eyes wide open or you're not going at all. Nevada isn't waiting for spring. He probably doesn't even believe spring exists. That's quite a difference.

  It's a difference that could break my heart.

  Yet even knowing that, Eden could no more walk away from Nevada now than she had been able to walk away years ago from a wild young wolf made savage by pain.

  ~ 7 ~

  With unnerving quickness Nevada pushed back from the long table where everyone on the Rocking M ate dinner.

  "Good God, Nevada," Ten muttered as his brother turned away to leave. "You're as jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. If you're so worried about that female that you can't sit through a whole meal, go check on her."

  The ranch hands sitting around the Rocking M's table became silent. Nevada had indeed been edgy for the five days since he had ridden back down out of Wildfire Canyon missing one boot. Privately the hands had speculated that Target had dumped his rider down the scree slope out of self-preservation, but not one of the men had offered that theory within Nevada's hearing. After learning about the modern-day fight at the OK Corral, the cowhands had been very careful to give Nevada all the room he might need, and then extra space for good measure.

  Nevada turned around with feline quickness. Narrowed, ice-green eyes focused on Ten.

  "What female?" Nevada asked softly.

  "The mama cougar, who else?" Ten said blandly as he poured gravy over his second serving of chicken. "We all know how worried you get over mothers." He winked at Mariah, who was at the moment very rounded out by her twins. "You always know women are pregnant before they do, and then you nag them like a maiden aunt to get them to take proper care of themselves. It's a wonder the human race ever got gestated without your help."

  Nevada grunted.

  Ten's wife, Diana, smiled at her plate. Carla, Mariah and Diana were all touched by Nevada's concern for them and their babies. It was so unexpected coming from a man as hard as Nevada was.

  "Go
ahead and check on that female again," Ten continued, carefully not looking at his brother, for Nevada wouldn't have missed the amused warmth in Ten's gray eyes. "We've got eleven hands now and two more coming tomorrow. Won't even miss you. Right, Luke?" Ten added as Luke walked in and sat down.

  "Miss who?"

  "My point exactly," Ten said.

  Nevada looked sharply at his brother, saw only the top of a black head bent over a plateful of excellent food, and muttered something too low for Carla, Mariah or Diana to overhear.

  A muffled cry came from the next room. Diana and Carla looked at each other as both pushed back from the table.

  "Sit down, Diana," Nevada said. "I'll see what's bothering Carolina. Whatever it is isn't serious. You can tell by her cry."

  Both Diana and Carla settled back into their chairs. Neither woman questioned Nevada's words, for they had quickly discovered that he had an uncanny ability to judge not only the identity of a child by its cry but also the urgency of the problem.

  "Thanks," Diana said to Nevada's retreating back. Then, softly, she said to Ten, "Your brother is wasted as an uncle. He should have babies of his own to love."

  Beneath the table Ten squeezed Diana's hand and said in a low voice, "Nevada's been through too many wars, honey. He doesn't trust life enough to risk loving a woman. And without love, there won't be any babies. The Blackthorns may be the bastard branch of the MacKenzie family, but we don't make babies with women we don't love." His thumb stroked over Diana's palm as he added wryly, "It just took me a while to figure that out in our case."

  Diana smiled at Ten and laced her fingers through his.

  Nevada's acute hearing had picked up every syllable of the conversation between Diana and her husband. Nevada didn't disagree with Ten's assessment of the Blackthorn clan. The day Nevada had discovered Diana could be pregnant and was definitely alone – because Ten was uncertain of his own ability to love – Nevada had taken his brother out to a lonely stretch of pasture and given him the fight Ten had been begging for since the day Diana had left the Rocking M.

  It had been a learning experience for both men. One of the things they had learned was that the love of a brother for a brother was a lot deeper than either had suspected.