mesquite where the horses were picketed and now sat cross-legged on the blankets, her hat beside her, raking her fingers through her mass of tangled flaxen hair. It wasn’t as short as Sim had imagined, for she wore it in tight braids that fit under the crown of her hat. She had a female’s natural vanity after all.
Sim crouched and breathed in the woman-smell of her body. He’d lied when he suggested that she needed a bath. There was nothing unpleasant about her scent. Damn near the opposite. She smelled like a natural female—real and warm, like Esperanza, but different….
The memory of Esperanza cleared his head in a hurry. He set down the plate where even a human would find it and retreated as silently as he’d come. He walked around to the side of the hill, shucked his clothes and Changed.
Even after so many times, he still marveled at the miraculous novelty of the transformation from man to wolf. It was good to run free—free in a way he’d never understood before he accepted his MacLean blood, free as no human could comprehend. Stronger than either man or ordinary wolf, containing the best of both in one agile and powerful body.
He shook his thick brown coat and twitched his large, mobile ears. He raced across the valley floor, rattling the dry grasses and leaping waxy-leaved creosote and saltbush. Wind sang in his fur. Mice scurried under his broad feet, and a startled cow with a young calf stoutly turned to face him as if she could drive him away with her lowered horns and snorts of alarm.
He left her alone. He wasn’t after prey this night, and when he hunted cattle it was for some gain other than the filling of his belly. Not that the wolf had ever brought him any profit but this…this shedding of human law, human conscience, human desire.
He opened his senses to their almost painful limits, heard the frantic heartbeats of quail in their nests and smelled the musk of an angry skunk. He sifted one scent from the next and found the place where André Bernard had made camp a few nights ago. The man’s trail joined the wagon road that ran parallel to the Chiricahua foothills.
Sim circled back to Squaretop Hills and resumed his human shape and coverings. He washed his face at the water hole and spread his blankets under the open sky.
He was still wide awake when Tal approached, heavy-footed like all humans but more graceful than most. He heard her crouch several feet away, felt her study him as he’d watched her before, with a bewilderment he sensed like a hum behind his eyes.
“You’re awake?” she asked.
He rolled over to face her, resting his chin on his folded arms. “I don’t sleep much.”
She nodded as if that fact were of little surprise to her. Her hat brim cast her face in shadow, but he could see the gleam of her eyes.
“You didn’t have to do it,” she said in a low voice. “The food, I mean. I can take care of myself.”
“Not if you’ll pass up a fresh meal on the trail,” he said. He sat up, scraping hair out of his face. “You ate it?”
“Yes.” She set his cleaned plate and fork in the grass, staying out of reach. “I just came…to thank you.”
Those words came hard to her, just about as hard as they did to him. He’d thanked maybe half a dozen people in his life, if that. Never for something so small.
“Go to bed,” he said. “I’ll watch.”
She retreated awkwardly. He heard her lie down and toss and turn on her blankets, trying to get comfortable. He didn’t think it was because she was too delicate for the unyielding ground. Something about her scent had changed, and he knew instinctively what it was.
Until now, she’d regarded him as a temporary employee and treated him like one. She’d been aware he was a man about the same way any female would be, sizing him up without even realizing it, cool and objective. But somewhere between his banter about the bathing and her accepting the food he brought, she’d started looking at him different. Not so objective. Not anywhere near so cool.
His body stirred in spite of itself, and he cursed softly. So what if she was interested? She would never admit it. She had some stake in playing the boy, and no reason whatsoever to act on her impulses, given that he was a stranger and she wanted to keep her respectability.
André Bernard had been something less than respectable in Texas. Tal must have known that their ranch in the Palo Duro was a haven for rustlers, but she didn’t seem the type to approve of such illegal activities. She made plenty of excuses for André Bernard, but she hadn’t been running the Texas spread.
Sim flung his hand over his eyes. Why was he making excuses for her? He didn’t give a damn one way or the other, and nothing would come of some fleeting attraction that was about as meaningful as a bull and heifer rutting in a field.
That was all it ever was to him—rutting. Drop your pants and thank you, ma’am. They were always whores, and he always hated himself when it was finished.
He’d only stop hating himself when he took Esperanza in proper marriage, touched that unsullied skin and knew she accepted him. Needed him. Loved him.
Tonight he would dream only of Esperanza. But as he slipped into that netherworld of shades and memories, he saw Esperanza dressed in a soiled dove’s garish plumage, turning from Sim with disgust in her eyes. It was Tal Bernard, in robes of virgin white, who held out her arms to welcome him home.
CHAPTER THREE
TALLY BRACED HERSELF on the saddle horn like a raw-faced tenderfoot, trying to stay awake. She’d slept miserably last night, and not because of the meal Kavanagh had foisted on her. It wasn’t the first time she’d eaten game roasted over an open fire, and once she’d decided to accept Kavanagh’s “gift,” she’d been glad for the hearty sustenance after a long day’s ride.
It would be more accurate to say that the man himself was the source of her sleeplessness. God knew she hadn’t expected him to go out of his way to feed her…and of course she’d wondered with every bite how much he’d seen when he’d left the plate at her bedside.
She sneaked a glance at him from under the brim of her hat. He hadn’t shown any new awareness last night or this morning. He still treated her with an offhand indifference that sometimes bordered on contempt, just as she would expect a man like him to behave toward someone he clearly regarded as an overeducated, untried boy.
She’d been careful to pin up every stray lock of hair and powder her face with a fresh coating of dust when they broke camp early that morning. Kavanagh, on the other hand, had washed his face and combed out his dark hair, almost as if he’d taken to heart her rude comments about unpleasant odors.
Ever since she’d met him, Tally had been on the defensive. He hadn’t threatened her in any way, but she felt the need to keep proving herself, striking before he struck. And that was absurd, especially when he scarcely bothered with conversation and seemed content to ignore her most of the time. He hadn’t spoken after breakfast except to confirm that André had followed the road running north from Turkey Creek to Castillo Canyon.
Yet she knew he was watching her. Maybe he’d guessed her secret and was only waiting for a chance to expose it. But if he could sneak up on her as easily as he had last night, why wait? Perhaps he was simply not interested in the truth, one way or the other.
Dieu du ciel, she should be down on her knees in gratitude that he was so indifferent.
A meadowlark called from the grassland to the east. Tally cleared her throat. Kavanagh glanced at her and away again, turning his head toward the Chiricahua foothills. The mountains seemed an impenetrable wall from the valley, but Tally knew they were riddled with arroyos and streams that shrank to trickles in the spring, drawing abundant wildlife to the shallow pools left behind. Birds of brilliant plumage flashed like jewels in the darkness of the forest. Wolves and pumas roamed the highlands as once the Apaches had done. Miners might dig and scour the earth for precious metals, but the few settlers who’d made homes in the canyons had so far done little to alter the pristine world the Indians