by BJ James
He was inching along, pale as death, clawing at its rough surface with one hand, clutching a makeshift chair with the other, when the latch lifted, the door opened, and Hank Benedict stepped through it.
“Ahh,” she observed casually, as if he were hale and hearty and fully clothed. “I see you’re awake.”
Steve didn’t answer. He was too busy biting back the sickness that threatened when he turned too quickly to acknowledge the obvious.
In his watchful, brooding silence, Hank crossed to the hearth, adding the wood she carried to the stack at its edge. When she turned her arms were folded over her breasts, her hidden hands were clasped against the urge to offer a shoulder to lean on. Steve Cody was a strong, proud man who suffered his own weakness with neither reason nor grace. He wouldn’t welcome help. Especially from her.
So she kept her distance while her concerned and practiced study marked the sheen of sweat glistening on his face and shoulders, and running in rivulets down his abdomen. In the days of her unstinting care she’d become intimately acquainted with every roughhewn feature and every craggy line of his face. Learning, in familiarity, to distinguish bruise from the shadow of fatigue, gaunt lines of pain from the etchings of natural expression. With that hard won perception she saw shadows darker than any bruise staining the tender tissues beneath the brush of his lower lashes, and frustration more painful than pain itself.
He was a fierce and wounded warrior in dire need of venting his fury. A bewildered creature who would lash out with dark satisfaction at any who would comfort him.
Holding his bleak, hard stare, with the compassion in her own tucked carefully away, she let her lips tilt in a wry smile and offered a hand to bite. “Well, now,” she drawled, “are you planning to climb that wall, or are you holding it up?”
Steve’s head snapped back, his eyes narrowed, anger flashed in them. “Cute,” he snarled, only a trace of weakness in his voice. His grip threatened the makeshift chair that supported his full weight. As his ill humor found its quarry, he cared not one whit that the flimsy slatted back succeeded poorly in shielding his nakedness. “Almost as cute as the friends you sent to call.”
“They weren’t my friends.” She held his gaze, refusing to shy away from the indictment. “I didn’t send them.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“Yes.”
A simple answer. Direct, with no equivocation, and more convincing than any argument. But it would take far more proof before Steve believed. “One of them wore a boot with a star on the heel.”
“I wear a boot with a star on the heel,” Hank said. “Does that mean I’m one of the culprits?”
“It means you ride for the Rafter B, as they do.” Steve hadn’t known until this second that he’d recognized the star as one sported by nearly all the cowhands who worked for Jake Benedict and his daughter.
“As they did,” she corrected simply. “But not anymore.”
“Sure.” The jeer was a coarse insult, branding her a liar.
Hank looked down at her boot, at the star visible on the scuffed and scarred heel. Years ago, when Sandy carved the original in her boot heel, a teasing gesture commemorating the breaking of her first horse for the Rafter B, she’d never guessed that it would become a respected tradition. Nor did she expect that each new hand would wear a star when he broke his first horse for the ranch, carving it proudly in the heel of each new pair of boots. She hadn’t expected any of the mystique about the silly symbol, nor that it would be zealously coveted by the likes of Jeffie, who had yet to win the right to wear one. Most of all, she never thought something so innocuous would one day be a source of incrimination.
“I haven’t tried to deny their guilt. I won’t deny our mistake in hiring them.” She stood her ground under his hard, cold stare, asking no quarter, as the import of what she’d said penetrated the haze of pain and anger that dulled his mind.
“You know who they are.” The remark was the final accusation, more trenchant in its softness than a shout. “You’ve known from the first.”
“Not from the first.” Hank’s response was clipped, a refusal of blame. When misjudgment of men and their principles was a crime, she would readily plead guilty. Until then, she would not stand accused of more. “I knew within a short time, but after the fact, not before.”
“Ah, I see, a revelation.” Steve mocked. Goaded.
Smothering an oath, Hank reminded herself he was hurt and felt betrayed, and had every reason to be hostile. “Jeffie sleeps in the barn loft some nights. He was there when Ransome and Wallace Lawter saddled up and rode out before dawn. He was there when they returned. Apparently Wallace suffered an attack of conscience. He and Ransome quarreled and fought. Jeffie heard it all.”
“Then he came to you.”
“He was frightened and hardly knew what to do at first, but yes, he came to me.”
The fierce black stare never altered. “And you came to me.”
“Yes.”
Steve’s thoughts ranged. Ransome Lawter, a preening, strutting braggart, and Wallie, the brute. They fit his impression of the men who ambushed him. Their names had been offered with the willingness of one with nothing to hide. “I hadn’t quite worked out who they were, but I would have, in time.”
“You think I gave you their names to cover my own guilt?”
“They ride for the Rafter B. They take their orders from you.”
“Not in this.” A thread of steel crept into her smoky voice. “No one at the ranch could ever condone this. Neither Jake, nor Sandy, nor I. Perhaps it bears saying again that because we couldn’t, the Lawters no longer ride for us.”
“Maybe they do.” He refused her the slightest concession. “Maybe they don’t. A moot question at this point, wouldn’t you say?”
“Steve.” She spread her hands in an imploring gesture. “Can you truly say you think I would be capable of this?”
“Lady, I don’t know what you’re capable of doing. At the moment, I don’t care. But you gotta admit one thing.” He scoured her with focused fury. “It’s one hell of a way to win a bet.”
“I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. What can I say? What can I do to make you believe me?”
“There’s nothing that will change what I believe, or undo the damage that’s been done.” He risked a tiny, derisive bow. “You win, Miss Benedict, ma’am. There’s no chance in hell I can meet the terms of our wager. When the snow flies over the mountains, the canyon will finally be part of the Rafter B.”
Calling on every shred of his waning strength, he forced himself to relinquish the support of the chair. Standing rigidly straight despite the stitch in his side, he met her pained expression coldly. “If you’re all through looking, I’d be obliged if you’d fetch my pants.”
“Certainly.” Smarting from his accusations, but denying herself the satisfaction of explaining to him that after three days of caring for him, there was little about his body that was unfamiliar to her, she crossed to the shelf. Riffling through the stacks, she selected a freshly laundered pair of undershorts, faded jeans and a shirt. Returning to him, she kept her gaze carefully riveted on his face. “Will you need help?”
Steve snatched the clothing from her, regretting his folly when the undershorts fell at his feet. He didn’t stand a chance of retrieving the garment without pitching on his face.
“I don’t need your damnable help,” he growled, covering his mounting humiliation with a resurgence of vitriolic humor. “After nearly thirty years of dressing myself, I think I can manage now.”
“Have it your way.” She meant to leave him caught in his own arrogant dilemma, but her tender heart wouldn’t let her be that callous, even to a man who thought so wrongly of her. “Here.” Eyes averted, she scooped up the shorts, offering them with her fingertips. “You’ll need these—to keep the jeans from chafing the newest scar on your saddle-worn backside.”
“Newest scar? My back—” He snatched the shorts from her, his face set in a scow
l. “What the devil are you jabbering about?”
“You figure it out, Mr. Rodeo Star. While you’re figuring, ask yourself who took care of you these past three days. Have you wondered who fed you? Who bathed you?”
“Three days?”
“Exactly.” Tender heart or not, Hank took a certain satisfaction in his shocked response. “I assure you, there’s little need for modesty at this late date.”
“You’ve been here for three days?”
“Sandy came by with the doctor the first day.”
“Sandy and the doctor,” Steve parroted. “But only on the first day.”
“Don’t worry, Dr. Bonner is a good man and an excellent diagnostician. He checked you over pretty thoroughly, then conferred with the doctors who treated you last. He’ll be back in a day or two, to see how you are. Until then, the good news is that most of the trauma to your head was strictly cosmetic. So, there was no fear of severe concussion, even with your history. Your ribs are badly bruised, but not broken. The worst of it is a bruised kidney. Which means you won’t be riding broncs or training wild horses for some time.”
“Let me see if I have this straight. I didn’t have a concussion, but I’ve been out of it for three days.”
“Right. Given your hardheaded disposition, it was suggested by the medics who treated you before that it would be wise to keep you sedated for a time.”
“For a time, but not for so long.”
“No one expected you would react as you did, nor that the mildest sedative would put you out for days.”
“During which time I was at your mercy.”
“There was no one else, Cody.”
A brow arched, a new ache announced itself. “You undressed me?”
“Down to the last stitch.”
“And, of course, you washed me.”
“Every inch.”
Resenting his own helplessness, he closed his eyes, trying to recall the intimacy. There was no inkling of recollection. Yet when he looked again into her clear eyed gaze, he knew. He might doubt her word regarding the attack, but not in this.
“Then I suppose it is a bit late for modesty.”
“A bit.” She stifled a smile at the understatement.
“I trust you won’t mind if I choose not to continue au naturel for the little time you remain here,” he drawled, willing that she find something to do, someplace to go, before his treacherous legs finally buckled on him.
“I don’t mind at all.” She knew he wanted her to leave. Modesty aside, after his brusque declaration of his ability to dress himself, he wouldn’t want her hanging about witnessing the struggle. She understood. She understood all of it very well. Yet something perverse in her, perhaps the same demon that prompted her to mention a most strategically placed scar, prompted her to stay.
Going to the hearth, she busied herself with the stew, stirring, tasting, pronouncing it almost ready. Next she attended the fire, noting that, even kept to little more than embers, it generated an uncomfortable heat. Soon the room, which was already stifling, would be unbearable. In the days before, when the temperature soared, she’d used water directly from the stream to bathe him and cool him.
She wanted to laugh when she considered what a brawl bathing him would be now. The laughter in her thoughts still lingered on her lips when she turned and found him watching her.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“I beg your pardon?” She hung the spoon she’d used to stir the stew on a hook embedded in the stone fireplace. In a move intended to be nonchalant but that became unconsciously seductive as it drew her shirt taut over small, firm breasts, she brushed a loose tendril of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“Like hell!” His grip on the chair cracked a thin slat, threatening to drive a splinter into his palm. “You like puttering around so virtuously, while I stand here buck naked wondering when my knees will finally buckle, dumping my bare butt and my last shred of pride at your feet.”
“Oh, I doubt that.” Hank made no pretense at diplomacy. “Considering your insufferable arrogance, I suspect you’re a long way from your last shred of pride.”
“Point taken,” Steve growled. “You can go now.”
“Really? You’re absolutely certain you don’t need help? Considering buckling knees and such.”
“I’ll be fine once I make it back to the bed, not to sleep or rest, but get into my clothes. I do recover quickly.”
“Hobble away from one nightmare and straight to another, no matter the cost. That’s your creed, isn’t it?”
“Bucked, trampled, and in the saddle again. It’s all a bronc rider knows.” Steve remembered other times, other hardships. “We live it every day in all we do. And we live it better alone.” Quietly, he insisted, “You really can go now.”
In a gathering of strength, a confident but pensive smile flitted over his hammered face. And Hank understood the mystique of the rodeo cowboy, Western hero in spurs and boots, and Stetson with the proper curl. The lonely, wounded gladiator, fiercely individual, with an unbelievable threshold for pain. Even higher for confidence, and more for sheer bullheadedness. He lived for the challenge, that rush of adrenaline, and believed he could do anything. If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow—someday.
Through it all, her cowboy hero smiled his wicked smile.
“I’ll give you a while.” She was surprised that her voice was rough, and her step a little unsteady. At the door, with her hand on the latch, she paused. “For the record, you aren’t the first cowboy I’ve tended or seen naked. I doubt you’ll be the last.”
Giving the offhand remark a moment to sink in, she opened the door and stepped through. Glancing back at him, she added, “Take as long as you need. When you’re dressed, we’ll discuss your recovery—and when I’ll be leaving.”
The door banged shut, and Steve was left to face the punishing fulfillment of his foolhardy boast.
It was the combination of heat, fatigue, and claustrophobia that drove him from the house. After the ordeal of dressing, his original intention had been to rest and recoup. When he stepped onto the porch, he realized what he really needed was to move, to rebuild his stamina, not lie about stoking his weakness with inaction.
Sunlight hit him in the face, full blast, as he descended the steps in his new old man’s pace. By its angle he calculated the time, discovering it was just coming on to noon, when he could have sworn the day was almost done.
“How time does fly, when I’m having fun.” Yeah, three whole days of it had flown by, and what great fun. But he wouldn’t dwell on what was done and couldn’t be changed. When a horse bucked him, he couldn’t undo it, but he could damn sure see that it didn’t buck him again. As he would see that he never spent another three days suffering the dubious charity of a Benedict.
Bracing his shoulders and breathing shallowly, he set himself for the harrowing adventure of finding her and sending her on her way to the Rafter B.
Crossing to the barn and the empty corral proved to be quite another ordeal. As much because he’d been bedridden for too long as from his injuries. Both difficulties he could correct. Ducking into the barn, he was grateful for the relative cool of its shady walls. He’d found heat and cool were always relative in Arizona—relative to the day, the season, the situation.
A short tour of the stalls proved all horses but one were still in their stalls. With practiced eyes, he saw they’d been well tended in his absence. Gitano pranced and tossed his head as he passed by. Blue Belle nudged his shoulder and nibbled at his hand. Someone had been lavishing them with attention, maybe petting them, and the barn was cleaner than he would have left it.
Nothing was amiss but the absentees.
“Lorelei.” Steve passed a hand over the top rail of her empty stall. It didn’t take a mastermind to know that where he found the horse he would find Hank Benedict.
“Hank,” he muttered. A tomboy’s name, incongruo
us and ill-fitting. A name from childhood that suited the woman no better than the garments of a child. A name as graceless as she was graceful, as ugly as she was lovely. As prosaic as she was intriguing.
Intriguing. She was more than that. More than graceful or lovely. More than alluring and captivating. She set his head spinning, his blood scalding. He wanted her when he’d first seen her on the street in Silverton, even with his head threatening to come apart. He wanted her when they wrangled and wagered over horses and land. He’d kissed her, and walked away from Jubal’s sale with Lorelei, the horse she wanted—and he wanted her.
He wanted her when she rode like a cossack across the range. A the rim of the canyon, only the grace of God kept him from dragging her from her black devil of a stallion, and proving to her that she wanted him, as well.
He’d mistaken lust for love once and paid dearly. He wouldn’t make the same mistake again, but hadn’t he paid anyway?
And still he wanted her. Every inch of her. So badly that even when she was most annoying and he most angry, a secret part of him longed to reach out and bury his hands in her hair to drag her to him.
He wanted her now. So much he didn’t care what she was, or what she’d done.
“This is crazy.” He leaned his head on the stall door. “I must be losing my mind.”
“Steve!” There was panic in Hank’s voice as she called his name, yet the hand that clasped his shoulder was gentle. “What are you doing here?”
Dropping Lorelei’s reins, with the question spilling from her she dodged beneath his arms to stand within their circle, facing him. Her eyes were huge, their gaze raced over his face. “I heard you cry out. Are you all right?”