“I wouldn’t have had to fall out of it, if you hadn’t set out snares for creatures that only exist in fairy—”
“Chimera?” Archibald interrupted timidly. “The baby is awfully hungry.”
Both Sterling and Chimera looked back at the howling infant, who was still pummeling Sterling’s arms with her flailing feet. “Sit back down,” Chimera ordered brusquely. When Sterling obeyed, she stepped behind him and hung the sock over his shoulder so that it fell to his chest.
“Now what are you doing?” he asked, and sighed.
Again, Chimera let the toe of the sock brush the baby’s lips. “I read that babies are born with these special senses,” she explained when the baby began to quiet a bit. “They look for something soft and warm when they’re ready to eat. By hanging this sock over your shoulder and letting it drop to your chest, I’m hoping she’ll think you have a big, cushiony breast there. She might turn toward it and—”
“Breast?” Sterling let his head drop back so he could see her behind him. “Me? With breasts? Lady, the only thing this baby is going to find on me is a flat, hairy nipple!”
Chimera looked at his smooth, tanned chest. “You have hardly any hair at all on your chest. She probably won’t even notice what little you have.”
“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve—” He jerked out of the chair again. “Look, Miss Abracadabra, I delivered this baby, buried her mother, rode for hours with her cradled in my arms, tried to keep her as warm and comfortable as possible, sacrificed my only kerchief—which she promptly soiled—so she could have a damn diaper. I even sang a stupid lullaby to her! I’ve done everything I could think of for her, but the one thing I refuse to do is nurse her!” He handed her the squalling infant.
“Oh, botheration with you!” She tossed the sock to him and sat in the chair he’d vacated. After laying the baby in her lap, she began to unbutton her blouse. Unaware of Sterling’s wide-eyed stare, she said, “Get behind me and put the sock over my shoulder.”
He didn’t move.
She looked up at him and saw him gaping at her breast, the top of which was now partly revealed. Her eyebrow slanted. “Contrary to what you might think, mister, breasts were not made for the pleasure of men. They were made to feed babies! Now get behind me with that sock!”
Mesmerized by the lushness of her bare skin, it was a moment before Sterling snapped out of his daze and noticed the triplets and Archibald were all waiting for him to obey their mistress. His whisker-studded cheeks flamed when he realized he’d been caught doing something children should not have been allowed to see. “Don’t the four of you have something to do?” he growled. “Like go troll hunting, perhaps?”
The children looked at each other and then went to the fire where a pot of rabbit stew awaited them. Clearing his throat awkwardly, Sterling went behind Chimera and dangled the sock over her shoulder, achingly aware of the soft swells of flesh, and the dark, enticing valley between. She cooed to the baby in soft tones, and after just a moment more of crying, the infant grasped the sock between her tiny lips and began to suck greedily, Chimera’s lush breast a warm, comforting pillow next to her tearstained cheek.
While she ate, Sterling dribbled more of the milk formula into the open end of the sock. He continued until the baby fell asleep with a contented sigh.
“Light the lamp,” Chimera whispered, and rose to put the baby to bed.
She’d already disappeared into another room before Sterling understood it was dark. Nighttime had fallen, and he hadn’t even realized it. He looked around and saw that the triplets had fallen asleep on the tattered rug in front of the dying fire. The boy, Archibald, was snoring softly on the cot in the corner. It would be just him and Chimera. Alone. In a dim room. Out in the middle of nowhere.
With her beautiful breasts.
She returned then. He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Uh, what other sorts of breasts—I mean, beasts do you have around here besides werewolves?”
She frowned. “You may have guns, but you forget that I, too, have effective weapons.” She looked down at the slumbering triplets. “I’ve but to say the word, and they’ll come at you so fast, you’ll—”
“I’m no threat to you, Chimera.”
The sound of her name slipping from his generously shaped lips sent a gentle tremor of pleasure rippling through her veins. His voice, now that she was paying attention to it, was deep and melodic. “How did you know my name?”
Sterling smiled a crooked smile and settled into a chair. “Oh, did I forget to mention it? I’m a warlock, and my specialty is reading minds.” He laughed, then grimaced when his side began to throb again.
Chimera took down a small pot of salve from a shelf and returned to Sterling. She knelt before him. “I’d wrap up your chest, but I don’t think you have a cracked rib at all,” she ventured. Hesitantly, she touched the ointment to one of the many scratches that crisscrossed his torso. As she slid the salve upon his dark, smooth chest, her fingers came alive with the sensations of the contrasts she felt. His skin was pliant but beneath it was rock-hard muscle. Soft and hard. The contrast of opposites made her hand tremble and her heart skip a beat. “If it were really broken it would be swollen, and it’s not. I’m sure it’s only...a bad bruise.”
“Possibly.”
His silvery voice wafted down to her and caused that tingle to wind through her again. Her fingers still quivering, she finished her task and was glad when he didn’t speak again. Quickly, she inspected her work, then went to throw more logs on the fire.
Sterling watched her and realized she wasn’t thinking straight. The warmth of the summer night had already made the room stuffy and hot. “If you continue stoking that fire, we’ll have to sleep outside to keep from melting.”
Melting, she repeated silently. She stared dreamily into the flames. Melting, melting. In his arms.
She gasped at her train of thought. Spinning on her heel, she faced him fully and pointed her finger at him. “What in the world do you think you’re doing to me? I didn’t ask the spirits for a lover, I asked for a hero! You behave yourself, you hear me?”
Sterling was taken aback, for at that very moment he was, indeed, contemplating the pleasure she would soon offer him. He grinned both at her perceptiveness and the fact that she demanded he behave himself. He couldn’t think of a single woman who’d ever made such a demand on him.
But he didn’t worry; he knew he was having an effect on her. It was all in the slight tremor of her voice, the bright sheen in her eyes, her invisible, inaudible response to him that he could both see and hear clearly.
His mischievous smile brought Chimera more of those knee-weakening emotions. She turned away and tended the fire again. “What were you doing in the woods this afternoon? Whose baby is that, and why do you have her? Where are you from? What’s your name? You do know you’re staying here, don’t you?” She kept her back to him as she asked the questions tumbling through her mind.
Sterling allowed himself to enjoy the view of her tiny waist and gently rounded hips for a moment before he answered. He tried to dislike the clashing combination of her crimson skirt and bright orange blouse, but for some strange reason, the two colors seemed to suit each other and the odd girl who wore them. “Resting, an Apache Indian woman’s, because the mother died, south of here, Sterling, and that’s my own decision.”
Chimera put down her fire poker and turned toward him. “Sterling,” she repeated. “What’s your last name? Silver?”
He tossed her another smile. “Montoya.”
“Spanish. Are you a Mexican?”
“Half. Half Mexican and half Irish.”
Chimera took a few steps closer to him, her sable hair rustling against her scarlet skirt as she moved. “Mexican-Irish. That makes you...Mexish.”
“Or Irixican.”
She grinned at that. “Your English is good, but now that I think of it, you do have a slight accent. I take it you grew up in Mexico. Do you speak Spanish?”<
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He nodded. “Soy de el estado de Sonora,” he said and let his gaze linger on the gentle swell of ivory skin that peeped from the confines of her orange blouse. “I’m from the Mexican state of Sonora, but the school I attended is so close to the border that I had both Mexican and American teachers. Hay algo mas que quieres saber? Is there something more you would like to know?”
She’d heard Spanish before, but the sound of his voice made Spanish seem more like music than language. “Will you teach me Spanish?” She sat in the chair across from him and kicked off her boots.
Her skirt was lifted almost to her knees, exposing her smooth, slender calves to his slow perusal. “I’m on my way to Tucson and won’t be here long enough to teach you Spanish.” I will, however, have time to teach you other things, he added to himself.
She watched his melted silver gaze flow down the length of her calves and quivered before she yanked down her skirt.
“Cold?” he asked, knowing full well she wasn’t.
She ignored the question. “What’s in Tucson?” she asked uneasily, this new information contrary to her plans for him.
He, too, ignored the question. “Do you have a father or big brother around here?” It didn’t hurt to make sure, he decided. He was in no shape to make another quick getaway like the one he’d had to make that morning.
It did not escape her attention that he hadn’t told her why he was going to Tucson. Well, she would bring up the subject again as soon as he learned he wouldn’t be going there any time in the near future. Maybe then she’d learn his Tucson secret. “If I had any menfolk around here, I wouldn’t have had to conjure you up.”
She poured two cups of water, then crossed to the hearth to fill two bowls with stew. “I don’t have any family at all. I don’t even have a last name. I was raised by an old Greek gypsy woman who left her band to settle down and practice witchcraft. I called her Aunt Xenia. Gypsies aren’t witches, but Aunt Xenia became interested in sorcery when she came across a book of incantations while traveling with her band. She could read, you know.”
Sterling lifted his cup of water. “Here’s to reading. May all gypsy-witches know how.”
She frowned at his sarcasm but let it pass. “Xenia told me she was born and raised in the east and went to school there before she joined up with the gypsies that were passing through. She was Greek, they were Greek, and going with them seemed like a good way to learn more of her Greek heritage.”
Sterling nodded. He understood exactly what Xenia must have felt when she joined her wandering countrymen, the joy of belonging and being accepted. As an orphan he’d been denied that special knowledge and had always wondered about it. Heritage. His mission in Tucson erupted into his thoughts once more.
Chimera saw the faraway look in his silver eyes and wondered what profound thoughts he was thinking. She began to suspect that beneath his sarcastic exterior there was sensitivity. The thought, for some reason, pleased her. “Anyway,” she continued, “the gypsies couldn’t understand Xenia’s obsession with sorcery. So, after a while she left them and settled here. There weren’t any hard feelings, though. Not that Aunt Xenia would have cared if there were. She always said, ‘As many men, so many minds; every one his own way.’ Terence wrote that, and how true it is. We must all do what suits us best.”
Sterling lifted his cup again. “To Terence and Xenia. May they have found each other in the spirit world.”
Chimera sighed and carried the meal to the table. “Aunt Xenia bought this land with—well, sometimes the gypsies were forced to steal, and Aunt Xenia saved all her plunder. She bought this plot with some of it. Not long afterward, she got me. She swore I used to be a flower and that she turned me into a baby because she was lonely.”
She had a habit of jumping from subject to subject, and Sterling was hard-pressed to sort through the information she gave so quickly. “She saved her plunder,” he repeated. “A flower baby?” He watched her lick a drop of stew from her parted lips. Her mouth glistened like a pink flower moistened with fresh rain. The longer he stared at it, the more convinced he became she really had been a blossom at one time.
“The flower story was only Aunt Xenia’s nice way of answering my questions concerning my mother and father,” Chimera explained. “When I got older, she admitted she’d found me on the doorstep one morning. Strange how life is a circle, isn’t it? I mean, that’s how I came by Snig, Snag, and Snug too. Someone left them on the porch. Archibald named them, the names stuck, and they really do suit the boys.
“And Archibald,” she said, glancing at the boy’s sleeping form, “has no one either. I got him a few months before the triplets arrived. Found him lying in my garden one spring morning nine years ago. He was only six, his leg was broken in two places, and he was half-starved. I don’t know where he’s from or how he managed to find his way here. He can’t remember either. All he knew was his first name and his age. Anyway, I didn’t know what else to do but take him in. Word must have gotten around that I’d adopted a crippled boy, and I imagine that’s why Snig, Snag, and Snug were left here. I guess folks think I’m running a home for unwanted children.”
Unwanted children. Sterling felt a sudden wave of compassion for the four young boys asleep in the room. “And are you running one?”
“What would you have done had you found them?”
The infant in the bedroom was proof of what he would have done, he mused.
“I was seventeen when I found Archibald,” Chimera continued. “Aunt Xenia had died the year before. She passed away in her sleep before she had time to teach me all her magic. She became a true sorceress, Sterling, but she’d only just begun to explain all the mysteries of her powers to me when she died.”
Aunt Xenia, Sterling mused. The Greek woman sounded like a real character, and since she’d raised Chimera, that explained Chimera’s unusual nature. But though she was unusual in some ways, he would soon have the proof she was no different than any other woman. She would learn tonight that she wasn’t the only one in the world who practiced magic.
“Xenia had drawn up a will and left everything to me.” Chimera sighed again. “My inheritance was this cabin, this small plot of land, her books by the great writers, and volumes on witchcraft and mythology.”
At the strange, faraway look in her whiskey eyes, Sterling added, “And an unyielding belief in all things supernatural.”
She nodded and looked down into her bowl, the intense look he gave her making her uncomfortably warm. “You were right. I shouldn’t have stoked the fire,” she said lamely when she realized she was blushing.
He smiled knowingly and leaned back in his chair, the wooden legs groaning. “This place is out in the middle of nowhere, and one of Cochise’s strongholds isn’t far from here. Haven’t the Apaches bothered you?”
She looked back up at him and was unable to tear her eyes away from his. She tried to remember the things her Aunt Xenia had taught her about trances. For she was surely being put into a trance by Sterling’s voice, eyes...aura. She forced herself to concentrate. “The land itself provides most everything we need,” she blurted, and rose abruptly to clear the table. “We go to what settlements still exist for what we can’t grow, make, or hunt. But there isn’t much civilization around anymore since the Apache fury began. It’s just as well, though. Folks call us misfits, and we aren’t very welcome anywhere. And as for perils...my magic has protected us from danger so far.”
They’d never faced real danger if her magic was their only means of defense, Sterling mused with a slow-spreading smile that disappeared when he saw her frowning at him. “Sorry,” he muttered.
“I thought you’d be different than the people who taunt me,” she said softly, and crossed to the window. “Please be different, Sterling.”
There was a halo of moonlight around her. It made her look like some dark angel, he thought. “Different,” he whispered. How odd. He was seeking to prove she wasn’t different, that she, like all the other women he
’d known, would yield to him. He studied her brandy eyes more intently and saw a mystery in them. A secret was in her low, husky voice too. There was an almost mystical essence about her. “What are you hiding from me, Chimera?”
His eyes seemed to reach out and touch her. For one brief moment, she considered trying to escape their soft, silver caress. But they held her fast for the longest time, and she felt them touching her everywhere. She blinked and then forced herself to look at his hair. It fell in ebony waves to his shoulders. It made him look dangerous. Sinister. A tide of something very similar to pleasure crashed through her at the thought of how strong, how virile he was.
He rose and ambled toward her, stopping when his arm brushed hers. “Well?”
She moved away from him, but he reached out for her. His hand met her shoulder, his fingers rested upon her back. She watched mesmerized as those fingers then slid through a lock of her hair. “I’m not hiding anything,” she said. “I—I just haven’t told you everything.”
“And how long, sorceress,” he began, and smiled down into her eyes, “will you keep your secrets from me?”
“How long will you keep yours?”
He frowned. She wasn’t supposed to have said that. She was supposed to have melted in his arms! What the hell was her problem anyway? And what the hell had happened to the ten minutes he’d estimated it would take him to achieve her surrender? He’d been here all evening, and the only thing he’d succeeded in achieving was a lot of aggravation.
He left her and strolled to examine the huge piles of books on the other side of the room. While looking them over, he decided he’d give her more time to submit to him. Yes, it was probably better not to rush these things anyway. His decision soothed him somewhat. “It’s strange that volumes of such respected works would have found their way to these uncivilized parts. I picture them on gleaming bookshelves in the house of some rich scholar on the east coast. Did your Aunt Xenia take them with her when she joined the gypsies?”
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