by Rowe, Julie
Trying to understand herself and someone else would have to wait until she’d had more sleep.
Time took on a hazy quality, and the next thing she knew Smoke was kneeling on the ground, still holding her.
“Kini?” he asked in a soft voice that nonetheless got her attention.
She tried to sit up and he let go of her legs. A glance around told her she had no idea where they were.
“How long did I sleep?”
“About fifteen minutes.”
It felt longer than that. “I think I can walk on my own now.”
“Good, because company’s coming.”
“What?”
“The Texan was found faster than I’d hoped,” Smoke whispered. “We’re being tracked.”
She looked at her feet and his. “I’ll probably make a trail a mile wide for anyone to follow.” And get you killed.
“That’s what I’m counting on.”
“Huh?”
“A false trail for the city boys to follow while we go another way.”
The plan was probably supposed to reassure her, but she couldn’t seem to wrap her brain around it. She was so fucking tired.
Her despair must have registered on her face because Smoke cupped her jaw with one large hand and leaned close to say, “You’ll be able to rest soon.”
As in dead?
He saw the unspoken question as soon as the thought surfaced in her head and scowled at her.
Geez, she might as well be wearing a neon sign tacked to her nose.
“Safe,” he growled.
She sighed and waved her hands at him. “Let’s go before I think something unforgivable.”
His only answer was to grunt and take her hand, pulling her along next to him until her body accepted the forward momentum and kept moving of its own accord.
“In my defense, I think I’m tired enough to plead mental incapacitation.”
He didn’t say anything for so long she was sure he wasn’t going to, until he slanted her a scorching hot look. “Too bad. I was going to eat you out later.”
Her jaw dropped as a wave of heat and longing rolled over her and dumped energy into her overtired muscles. She pictured his head between her thighs all too easily. His blue eyes watching her watch him as she writhed beneath him.
She tried to take in a breath, but her diaphragm didn’t seem to be working. After a brief struggle to convince her body to function somewhat normally again, she managed to ask, “Could I take a rain check?”
The shit-eating grin on his face erased all the hurt from her body, leaving nothing but anticipation behind. For about two minutes. Then the dull ache settled over her like an unwanted blanket on a hot day.
She stumbled, weaved, and wobbled all over the place. Smoke nodded in approval at one point when she tripped and fell to her hands and knees. At least one of them was happy with the drunken trail she was leaving.
He angled his head to the south side of the canyon. “See that washout? It goes all the way to the top of the canyon. That’s the false trail.”
“Where are we going really?”
“A spot farther to the west.”
“And why aren’t we using the washout to get out of here and go for help?”
“It’s the obvious choice. The easy choice. The only choice in sight to someone who didn’t grow up here.”
“You’re assuming that the bad guys don’t have someone who grew up here on their payroll.”
“Yeah, but they know you didn’t.”
“True.”
She stared with bleary eyes at the steep washout. “I have to climb that and make it look like I did it myself?”
“Yup.”
Her thighs ached already. “You suck.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Smoke allowed himself to smile at Kini’s aggravated tone, more to keep her calm than to communicate how he really felt. There was a spot between his shoulder blades that twinged in warning. Someone was on their trail.
He was a hair’s breath away from following the urge to circle around behind their pursuer, or pursuers, and commit however many murders it would take to wipe them out. The only thing that kept him from doing it was Kini.
She was in no shape to be left alone, not even for a few minutes. Too tired to take more than two steps in a straight line and muscles shaking with both exhaustion and pain, she needed him. More than he needed to kill.
He got her to the base of the washout, but she ran out of gas. No surprise there. She’d gotten farther than he’d expected. He helped her get another twenty feet when they finally got lucky. Evidence of other people, footsteps and a granola bar wrapper on the ground.
He looked at Kini, about to tell her the good news, and discovered her on the verge of passing out completely.
He scooped her up and whispered in her ear, “Sleep, you’re safe.”
Her answer was to cuddle up to him and drop off into unconsciousness like a stone thrown into a pool of deep water.
His fellow soldiers, the men he worked and fought with for years, trusted him enough to sleep while he was on watch. Same as he trusted them. All of them heavily armed and ready to fight if attacked.
Kini had no weapons, no idea where she was, and no energy left. A body couldn’t be more vulnerable, yet she trusted him enough to take care of her, to carry her to a place of safety.
His eyes burned because of that trust. He didn’t think he’d earned it, and he sure as hell didn’t deserve it, but he was damn well going to do everything he could to live up to it.
The spot he had in mind for them to lay low in was a little more than a quarter-mile away, down canyon.
There was a national park a little farther on where some of the ancient native peoples who’d come before his ancestors had built homes in the canyon walls and pit houses. They’d dry farmed or channeled water to corn crops, but a long drought had forced change and they’d never returned.
There were still one or two pit houses as yet undiscovered by the archeologists. His grandfather had shown him where they were when he was a boy and told him to stay away from them, as the spirits of those people might still reside there. It was disrespectful to go in and poke around for what might be left behind.
So he’d built his own. Sort of.
Smoke moved carefully but quickly, noting that others had walked down the canyon floor since the last rain or windstorm. He hadn’t seen any signs of people before the washout, so maybe folks were using it to gain entry to the canyon. Hiking to the park?
He’d just about reached the spot where he was going to have to climb up a narrow side gully and the chimney at the end of it, when the echo of gunshots reached him.
He stopped under an aspen tree, crouched, and balanced Kini’s weight on his knees and chest while he used the scope on his weapon to see what was going on behind him.
Four men climbed out of the wash and stood at the edge of the canyon, looking in the direction of town. None of them looked like they had a broken leg.
What happened to the Texan, or was he the reason for the shots? Would they give up the search for Kini or assume she found a ride?
A moment later, the answer became obvious in a rhythmic thrumming against his skin. The sound followed a couple of seconds later as a helicopter flew over the canyon by the wash, heading for town.
Son of a bitch. Whoever was looking for Kini had enough money and brains to use a helicopter?
He got moving, leaving little trail as he eased his way down the narrow gully. At the back wall, he squeezed past a rock that looked like it was solidly anchored into the cliff. It was, but the rear side of it had ridges that acted like ginormous stairs going up to a ledge.
Even from close up, the ledge looked shallow. He’d taken great pains to ensure it appeared to be a solid wall of rock and dirt to hide the entrance of a modified pit house formed from a screen of stones and soil.
He was going to have to wake Kini in order to get her up there.
“Hey,”
he said, giving her a bounce in his arms. “Wake up.”
She moaned. “Why?”
“To get into our hideout.”
“Bad guys again?” She sounded barely awake.
“Yeah.”
Her eyes blinked open, and she looked even more tired. He put her on her feet. With a hand under her ass, he shoved her up the stair rock then followed her up to the next step and the next and the next. With careful hands, he guided her to the ledge then pointed at the shadow, all while watching to be sure no one was observing them. The ledge was well hidden, like the internal space of a snail, the landscape around it curled in on itself. Kini crawled into the shadow he’d pointed out, and disappeared from view.
A second later, her head came back out, a huge grin on her face. “Cool.”
He handed her his backpack. “There’s water and food in there. Eat something and drink. I want to backtrack us a bit to be sure we won’t lead anyone here. Okay?”
She nodded. “Do you have some kind of light? I can’t see past my nose in there.”
“There are glow sticks in one of the pockets.” He waved at her to go back inside.
He climbed down and listened hard before he moved, retracing his route to the entrance of the gully and into the canyon.
The thwap, thwap, thwap of the helicopter beat against his skin, sending him to ground in a thick clutch of trees and bush. The bird overflew the wash then circled the canyon several times in an obvious search pattern. They had a search light, but that wasn’t going to help them; there was too much brush.
Idiots. The backwash from the rotors stirred up all kinds of dirt and dust, erasing recent footprints like they’d never been there. Made his job easy.
The helicopter flew around for another twenty minutes while the men who’d gone up the wash came back to the edge of the canyon and searched it with binoculars. Finally, they moved off toward the Rogerson farm.
Smoke stayed low and got back to the gully and up the stair rock before any more searchers arrived in the area.
It was a tight fit to get inside the camouflaged entrance of his hideout. As soon as he was in, he scattered dirt and rocks across the ground so no drag marks were visible.
A soft snore had him looking at Kini curled up on the dirt floor of the structure with a pale-yellow glow stick in one hand. Though it didn’t give off a lot of light, it was enough to reveal the dimensions of the room.
Roughly circular in shape, it measured about fifteen or sixteen feet across. The floor was mostly loose dirt and appeared empty. It didn’t look like anyone had been in here in years. Good.
Next to Kini sat an empty water bottle and a granola bar wrapper. She’d followed his orders almost to the letter. Too tired to argue.
He checked his watch. Nine o’clock at night. They could rest and stay out of sight in here until the search cooled down, then they’d make their run for town and help.
Smoke studied the sleeping woman. So much energy in such a small body, yet that body, with all its curves housed an indomitable will and restless intelligence he found just as attractive as the rest of her.
Fatigue was making itself known through muscle aches and the deep desire to lie down next to his sleeping beauty.
No reason to resist. He pulled out another water bottle from his pack and drank it down then ate a granola bar. It was enough for now. He curled around Kini’s sleeping form and dozed off.
The deep rumble of an overflying helicopter shook the room, waking them both.
She jerked and sucked a breath.
“You’re okay.” Smoke tightened his arms around her. “Safe.”
Her rigid body relaxed, despite the sound of the helicopter repeatedly flying over the canyon in multiple directions and in no discernable pattern.
“Huh,” Smoke grunted. “Sounds like someone is having a temper tantrum.”
“In a helicopter?” she asked, her voice hoarse.
“Wouldn’t be my first choice, either,” he admitted. “It’s going to attract attention.”
They lay still, Kini wrapped in his embrace until she asked, “How long did I sleep?”
He checked his watch. “A couple of hours.”
“Okay, that goes along with the way I feel.”
He waited for her to finish. When she didn’t, he asked, “How do you feel?”
“Like shit.”
Two hours of sleep wasn’t enough, but he needed to check her over, get more food and water into her before letting her grab another nap. They’d wait until whoever was out there trying to flush them out, had settled down a bit.
A soft snore came out of her.
“Hey,” he said, rubbing her arm with one hand. “Don’t sleep.”
“So tired,” she mumbled.
“Food, water, and a first-aid assessment first.” He grabbed his backpack and began pulling everything he’d need to do a thorough inspection of every cut, scratch, and bruise on her body.
“In that order or can we do all of it at once?”
The pen light he shone at her face showed puffy eyes surrounded by bruised skin. A number of the lacerations she’d gotten yesterday were oozing watery blood, thanks to a near constant exposure to dust and dirt. Infection was a real concern.
He handed her a bottle of water and a protein bar then pulled out a package of baby wipes and began washing away the gritty, gummed up scabs on the largest of her cuts. The one on her neck. The one that had come way too close to her jugular. He’d closed it with butterfly bandages and they’d held, more or less.
The skin around the laceration was an angry red, and he could tell by her flinches his attempt to clean it hurt.
He hesitated, his hands, his gut, his heart refusing to add to her pain. “Some of this dirt is in there good.”
“It’s okay,” she said, her voice barely audible. “You’re remarkably gentle.”
Logic tried to argue with the lodestone in his gut and convince the rest of him that cleaning her wound was absolutely necessary. His gut wasn’t buying it. “That’s not what most people say.”
“What do they say?” she asked, sounding genuinely curious.
“I hit like a freight train.”
Both of her hands closed around one of his. She studied his fingers, rubbed the callouses, then placed a kiss on the center of his palm. “They’re a bunch of idiots, whoever they are.”
One little kiss. One tiny press of her lips to his skin was all it took to rev his heart rate up until he was vibrating with the need to kiss her. Not a nice safe peck on the cheek, either. A no-holds-barred, all-or-nothing claim was what he wanted. What he needed.
She was in no shape for that. Injured, exhausted, and on the verge of collapse. Only an asshole would attempt a seduction now.
Her lashes lifted and her gaze met his as her lips hovered over his palm. Those lips were curved up into the sexiest smile he’d ever seen. Ah fuck, sweetheart.
A puff of warm air hit the sensitive center of his hand. Her tongue peeked out from between her lips, as if about to lick.
“Don’t do it.” It came out as a harsh rumble he would have flinched from, but Kini…she just cocked her head, the question clear.
“I’m on the edge of losing my shit,” he told her, unable to keep the bone-deep need for her out of his voice. “And you don’t need me tearing your clothes off and fucking you sixteen ways to Sunday.”
Desire flared in her gaze and she sucked in a breath, lowered her head, and licked his palm.
The touch of her tongue and lips, the look on her face, sensuous, sexy, and naughty, ripped the thin veneer of civilization he’d managed to maintain clean off of him.
Growling, he slid his right hand behind her head, holding her in place so he could take her mouth. She opened for him, her tongue tangling with his, her hands fisting his shirt tight as if she were afraid he might try to run away.
No fucking chance of that.
He wrapped his other arm around her waist and hauled her up against him, grinding hi
s erection against her soft stomach.
She made a gasping, inarticulate sound, and flinched.
He felt it jerk her body, realized the noise she’d made had an edge of pain, and tore his lips from hers. Son of a bitch, he’d hurt her. He had no business touching her with his blood-stained hands. Because the blood wasn’t just on his hands. It had been ground into his body, his heart, and soul until no part of him would ever be clean.
He pulled away and would have put more space between them, so he could see what he’d done to hurt her, but the grip she had on his shirt only got tighter.
“No, no, no,” she chanted. “Don’t stop, please. I need—”
Yep, he was that fucking asshole.
“I did something that hurt you,” he said, realizing only after the words were out of his mouth that he sounded fucking pissed off. “Where?”
She let go of him so fast he nearly fell on his ass. “I’m fine.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m sorry for…throwing myself at you.” Her eyes were locked on the dirt beneath their knees.
“Do not apologize for—” He cut himself off.
Think asshole, think.
She was injured, tired, and had been through enough hell to drive most people off the deep end. “I practically jumped you, and I hurt you doing it.” He went nose to nose with her. “Now, show me where it hurts.”
Her glare could have melted all the snow at the summit of Mount Everest.
She turned on her knees, so he could see her back, and lifted her shirt to reveal a large bruise about the size of a man’s fist.
Rage roared through him. “I will kill that son of a bitch.”
“I think he’s already dead.”
“Then I’ll revive him so I can kill him again.” Smoke reached out and cupped the black-and-blue mottled skin, lending his warmth to her.
“You’d start the zombie apocalypse just for the chance to kill a guy who’s already dead?” A smile lurked at the corners of her lips, but he was beyond finding any of this funny.
“I’d go to war with the whole world for the chance to kill him again.”