“Feel better?”
Jessie nearly wept with relief from the burning fire in her skin. “It feels wonderful. Thank you.” Her parched, burning skin soaked up each cool touch the way desert sand soaked up rain.
He dabbed and wiped her face as gently as a mother tending her babe. Jessie hadn’t realized, even when he’d cared for her feet and wrists, that he could be so gentle. When he moved down her chin to her neck she arched to give him better access. The Hamburg ruffle at her throat stood tall and scratched her neck and jaw. The cool wetness soothed the irritated flesh. She sighed again.
The rag hesitated at her throat. “How much of you is burned?” Blake asked, his voice husky.
Jessie looked up at his dark face looming above her in the night. As he leaned over her, his face was thrown in shadow. His nearness created a new warmth deep inside her. She managed a wry grin. “All of me. I can manage the rest. Thank you.” She took the rag from his hand and sat up.
Blake rose. “I’ll…go check on the horse.”
He lingered a long moment, long enough for Jessie’s heart to start pounding from the intensity of his gaze. Beard stubble darkened his face and gave him a rakish look that did strange things to her breathing. Finally, he turned away.
“Blake?” she called softly.
He stopped and looked back.
“Thank you.”
He nodded, then disappeared into the darkness.
Jessie let out her breath and wondered how his mere presence could make her forget the pain rippling through her. Now that he was gone, the fire in her skin made its presence known once more. Quickly she released the buttons that trailed from her neck to her waist. With slow, careful contortions, she managed to reach everywhere but her back with the cool, wet rag. And it felt heavenly. But she was so exhausted that each movement became a greater and greater effort.
Physical exhaustion opened the floodgate on her emotional fatigue. Suddenly, lifting the rag even one more time seemed an impossibly difficult feat. And pointless. No matter how cool the rag, her skin was still burned. A dead man still lay somewhere down the hill. The cool rag couldn’t wipe out the horror of the day. She’d still been kidnapped, still been tied hand and foot. She’d nearly broken her neck in the fall from the horse. She’d come heart-stoppingly close to getting raped and murdered.
She’d watched Blake get shot.
And somewhere out there along the distant train tracks north of the Rio Grande, Pace was still in chains, still on his way to prison.
What difference would a cool, damp rag make to any of that? Why should she expend the effort to raise her arm again when the task was so very hard, and so very pointless?
When Blake returned sometime later, all she could do was stare at him dully, helplessly.
“Jessie?” He knelt beside her, alarmed at the lifeless expression on her face. “Honey, what is it?”
As before—as always—his nearness stirred something inside her. She roused herself enough to speak. “I…” But words eluded her. What could she say that wouldn’t echo with self-pity? She shook her head. “Nothing. Never mind. I’m all right.”
He touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers. Despite the burning of her own flesh and the hard warmth of his, she had to bite her lip to keep back a moan of pleasure at his touch.
“Let’s cool you off again,” he said.
Her fingers seemed paralyzed as he slid the damp rag from her loose grasp. He dipped the rag into the coffee pot, then squeezed out the excess water. The cool wetness against her face was in shocking contrast to the heat of his touch where his fingers met her cheek. She held perfectly still, praying he wouldn’t notice the fine trembling that seized her.
Again, relief came instantly. This time she knew it would last much longer.
He smoothed the wet rag over her face carefully, then down her neck.
Blake tried to keep his touch impersonal, but when he reached the neck of her night gown and found the buttons undone, his hand trembled. He waited, breath held, for her to stop him. When she didn’t, he couldn’t help but push back the layer of lace and fabric, just a little, just enough to reveal her collar bone to the moonlight.
Beneath his touch, she inhaled deeply. The action raised the flesh so near his fingers until he was touching her when he had told himself he wouldn’t. The urge to reach deeper beneath the gown taunted him, but the heat radiating from her skin reminded him of the shape she was in. He had no business lusting after a woman who was in pain. No business at all.
“Here.” He placed the rag in her hand and stood up. “You finish.”
His abrupt action flooded Jessie with a shocking sense of disappointment. She hadn’t wanted him to stop touching her. The cool moisture felt wonderful, but his fingers felt even better. Yet she was a fool to want more from him. He was, after all, a stranger. And a soldier. He took orders from a man who hated her family. Why did she keep forgetting that?
Yet forget it she had. He, apparently, had not. She should thank him for not taking advantage of what she had wanted to offer, but she couldn’t. Perhaps because she wasn’t sure what, exactly, she had been feeling when he touched her. She’d forgotten her pain and discomfort, forgotten the rules by which she lived that stated no lady would let a man touch her the way she had wanted Blake to touch her.
A deep shudder ran through her. She looked down and saw the rag where he’d left it in her hand.
Blake stood next to her blanket, looking down at her, not moving. Did he intend to watch while she reached beneath her clothing to apply the moisture to her skin?
The very idea left her feeling weak and trembly, hot and cold, shy and bold. The conflicting emotions and sensations battled inside her until bold won out. She met Blake’s gaze and reached for the front of her gown. She pulled the fabric aside until one shoulder was almost entirely revealed.
Blake cleared his throat. “I’ll…uh, go check on the horse again.”
The huskiness in his voice told her he was not unaffected by the situation. Dare she believe he felt the same confusing things she did?
By the time he returned, she had done all she could. She wondered if he’d been standing in the shadows watching—his return was perfectly timed. The thought of him watching her as she had lowered the gown to her waist, then raised it to her hips while she cooled her skin sent a new kind of heat flashing through her. It settled low and deep inside in a place where she’d never felt heat before. At the same time, her breasts seemed to swell and her nipples rose to sharp points.
Jessie knew, without having to be told, without ever having felt such things before, what was happening inside her. It was a woman’s response to a particular man, the man her body told her it wanted.
Another shudder tore through her.
That such a thing should happen because of this man, a captain in the Army, a stranger who had manhandled her, who had looked down his nose at her all day yesterday, dismayed her. Never mind that she had finally made him laugh. Never mind that he had come after her, at great risk to himself, and saved her life. Those things shouldn’t be—weren’t—the reasons for the sudden hunger she felt to have his arms around her. No, not those things. It was the way he’d kissed her. Hard and fast, as though he had been desperate for the taste of her lips.
Ah, Jessie, what are you getting yourself into?
Her mind asked the question, but the night held no answer.
Still, she wasn’t quite ready to let go of the inner warmth generated by Blake’s nearness. She wanted him to come even closer. Wanted him to touch her again.
As if he read her mind, he came to her blanket and knelt behind her. “How’s your back?”
She moistened her lips with her tongue. “I…couldn’t reach it.”
There was a long moment of stillness, then in a deep, quiet voice Blake said, “Do you want some help?”
Jessie, too, waited several heartbeats before a breathless, “Yes,” trembled from her lips, followed by an equally breathle
ss, “Please.”
Just the touch of his fingers in her hair as he gathered it from where it hung down her back felt good. Better than it should.
To Blake, it was like touching spun gold, soft, silky, and cool. He wanted to bury his face against it and let the softness envelope him. The craving puzzled him, for he wasn’t a man who thought much about softness. He didn’t remember ever wanting it before, didn’t remember ever realizing the lack of soft things in his life. But the feel of her hair in his hands made him want things he’d never wanted before.
Fleetingly he wondered if the half-breed ever played with her hair.
Sonofabitch. Why did he keep forgetting she was a half-breed’s woman? And not just any half-breed, but an Apache. Like Geronimo.
Yet even the reminder failed to still the craving in Blake to wrap his arms around Jessie and hold her against his chest, absorb her pain, make her forget she’d ever known another man.
As he draped her hair over her shoulder and out of his way, he called himself every name he could think of. He didn’t have any business, or any time, for such foolishness. And he didn’t want to want a woman like Jessica Colton.
The self-lecture was in vain, for in the next moment, she slid her gown down to bare her smooth, pale back to the moonlight, to him. He was halfway to reaching for it, to touching her skin, to feeling its silkiness, before he remembered he was supposed to be helping her, not pleasuring himself. With jerky movements, he picked up the rag.
He looked from it to her back. Damn the moonlight. He didn’t need this. He didn’t want to see the back of that delicate neck, didn’t want his tongue to imagine the taste of it. He didn’t want to know she had a small mole on her left shoulder blade. He didn’t want to see the indentation of her spine or the way her torso narrowed toward a waist swathed in thin linen.
Again questions rose to torment him. How many times had the half-breed seen her like this? Had the bastard smoothed his dirty fingers across her pale, soft flesh? Of course he had. He must have. “Why, dammit?”
“Why what?” Jessie asked.
Blake cursed under his breath. He hadn’t meant to speak aloud, hadn’t realized that’s what he’d done until she asked what he meant. But questions burned in his mind, and he couldn’t stop himself from asking at least one.
“Why are you going to Florida?”
Jessie could have sworn she heard pain in his voice, but that didn’t make sense. His question, however, reminded her of what a pathetic failure she’d been at Bowie, how badly she’d let her brother down. The thought of what he must be going through tormented her. She couldn’t imagine him caged like a rabid dog. Not Pace, not the one who had taught her to ride like the wind, who’d tickled her feet until she cried, who had hoisted her onto his shoulders so she could see the baby robins in their nest in the cottonwood down by the creek.
No. Not Pace. Dear God, to cage an innocent man who so loved his freedom, who lived to feel the wind on his face, was unthinkable. Prison for him would be worse than death. With grim determination, she answered. “To free Pace.”
At the fierceness of her reply, twin shafts of pain and fury stabbed Blake in the chest. It was his own fault. He shouldn’t have asked. He didn’t want to hear how much she cared for the half-breed.
But she did care, deeply. Otherwise she wouldn’t be following the bastard all the way to Florida. And in all fairness, as far as Blake could learn, the breed was not one of the renegades. He’d either been a scout or an interpreter. Prison seemed like a raw deal for a man just doing what the Army asked.
Hypocrite, he sneered at himself. When had he ever cared what happened to an Apache? Especially one who had anything at all to do with Geronimo.
Still, fair was fair, and the scouts had been lied to, tricked, and cheated.
And Jessica Colton, the only woman who had ever really stirred his interest, radiated a fierce loyalty to her half-breed.
With careful movements, so the turmoil inside him wouldn’t be revealed through his touch, Blake started smoothing the wet rag across her back.
With the first touch of the coolness against her hot skin, Jessie flinched.
“Cold?” he asked.
His voice, his attitude, was distant again. Jessie felt the disappointment seep into her. “No,” she said softly. “It’s fine.”
His movements became brisk and efficient, yet still gentle, as he wiped her back with the rag. Then, when he’d decided he didn’t want to know any more about Jessie and the Apache, he found himself asking anyway. “I thought his name was Fire Seeker.”
Jessie was surprised by his comment. She had been relishing the feel of the cool rag, which instantly relieved her pain. It took her a moment to realize he’d gone back to talking about Pace. But his question meant…With growing amazement, she turned her head and looked at him over her shoulder. “You mean Miles didn’t tell you who he was?”
Blake’s face hardened, the moonlight casting the angles in sharper form. “He’s an Apache. What else is there to know?”
Whatever warmth Jessie still felt from her earlier yearnings for this man was smothered by the chill of his cutting words. She turned away. “Please finish my back. I’m getting cold.”
Blake got the message, all right, and did as she asked. With a few brisk motions he finished with her back. “Give it a minute to dry.”
The instant he finished with her, she scooted away from him. “Yeah, that’s right,” he told her. “Act offended.”
Jessie tugged her gown back in place and turned on her knees to face him. With a flick of her wrist, she tossed her hair back over her shoulder and met his glare. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t be offended by a bigot who judges a man by the color of his skin? Your skin, in case you haven’t noticed lately, is every bit as dark as Pace’s.”
“I’m half Spanish and half Cajun. Don’t be stupid. I don’t hate everyone with dark skin.” Blake felt the scar on his face start to throb. “But I do have a particular aversion to those who rape and torture and murder innocent people.”
Jessie shrieked in outrage. “Pace has never, never done those things!”
“Maybe not lately, since he went to work for the Army, but he wasn’t always an Army scout. First, he was an Apache. A Chiricahua—the worst of the lot. They’re raised to kill.”
“Don’t be an ass,” Jessie said heatedly. “Pace wasn’t raised that way. But I suppose you think the Army is lily white and pure. The Army never killed an innocent woman or child, is that what you expect me to believe?”
“Of course not.”
“I hope not, Captain, because I know better. I know how the Army has slaughtered hundreds of Apache women and children over the years. I know how they cheat the Indians on the reservation out of their food, leaving them to starve, to die of hunger and disease. Why shouldn’t the Apaches fight? They haven’t done anything to whites that whites haven’t done to them. But Pace has stayed out of it, and you know it.”
“How the hell would I know something like that?” Blake demanded. “Why would I even believe it? And why, God help me, would a woman like you take up with that half-breed bastard in the first place? You’re from one of the wealthiest families in the territory. From all accounts, you’ve never wanted for anything in your life. You’re young and beautiful, and could undoubtedly have any decent man you wanted dancing to your tune in seconds. I’d heard your family was friendly with the Chiricahua, but I had no idea how friendly until that little scene at the depot. Why him? Why would a woman like you take up with a half-breed like that Fire Eater?”
Jessie could do little more than gape at him. “Take up with? Take up…Oh, good God!” Rage like she’d never known before nearly suffocated her with heat. “His name,” she said fiercely, “his Apache name, is He Who Seeks the Fire. He’s called Fire Seeker, not Fire Eater. But at home his name is Pace. Pace Colton. And he’s my brother.”
Blake felt like he’d had the wind knocked out of him. “Your what?” She couldn’t
have meant it. He couldn’t have heard her right. “Your what?”
Chapter Six
“Brother, Captain Renard,” she said precisely. “That’s b-r-o-t-h-e-r. Pace Colton is my brother.”
Even in the deceiving light from the moon, Blake saw the truth in her eyes. Still, he fought it. “He’s at least half Apache, and you’re not.”
“He’s my half brother.”
Her answer generated a dozen more questions in his mind, but nothing outweighed the fact that she was telling the truth. Remembering how he had treated her on the train yesterday, he cringed. Was it only yesterday? Had he only known her that long?
His words of a few moments ago rang in his ears. He owed her an apology. He hated apologizing. “Jesus.”
Jessie pursed her lips and crossed her arms over her chest. Sudden laughter—at his expense—danced in her eyes. “Somehow I’m quite sure Jesus is going to leave you to get yourself out of this one.”
Blake smiled ruefully and shook his head. “Somehow I think you’re right. I’m…sorry. For the things I said. For the way I treated you yesterday. My behavior was inexcusable.”
“Yes, it was. Even had you been correct in your assumption of my relationship with Pace, your behavior still would have been inexcusable.”
Blake ground his teeth in frustration. She wasn’t laughing now, she was angry again. The hell of it was, she was right, but he wasn’t about to admit it. Wouldn’t even allow himself to dwell on it. His hatred for anything to do with Apaches was his business, no one else’s. Not that his feelings were any secret. Hell, anyone who knew him knew how he felt. And that included the general.
Blake’s mind spun with suspicion. “How well do you know General Miles?”
“Ah. I thought I detected his gracious bending of the truth in there somewhere. If you’re asking whether he knows Pace is my brother, the answer is yes. The general is fairly well acquainted with my entire family, unfortunately for us,” she added tersely.
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