was a big market for relics from the long-gone past. “Sacred artifacts of Native Americans,” the fat, easily frightened guy he’d caught on his land last year, despite the No Trespassing signs posted around his ten thousand acres, had called them, though real Native Americans simply referred to themselves as Indians.
As for the sacred part…
Complete, unadulterated crap.
Yeah, there were those of his people who were suckers for that kind of nonsense. He’d come close, as a boy, but Vietnam had sure as hell changed that. The stones, the glyphs, the pottery shards were nothing but stuff leftover from another time. The ledge didn’t have any kind of woo-woo magical validity whatsoever.
But that didn’t mean he’d let thieves and leftover flower children intrude upon it.
This place was his. He owned it, at least he’d own it until he signed the sale papers.
A quick appraisal told him this woman was no leftover flower child drawn to a romanticized version of the Old West. She wore no beads, no flowered gown, nor was her hair flowing. Instead her hair was pulled back from her face in a nononsense ponytail. She wore a plain cotton T-shirt and jeans that looked as if they’d seen a lot of use. She was a thief, plain and simple, and that she’d sneaked onto his property angered him almost as much as that he had not spotted her all the time he’d sat on his horse and stared at the mountain.
Yes, it had been dark as hell then, but so what? As a boy, as a soldier, he’d been trained to observe. To see things others didn’t. And yet, she’d gotten past him.
Jesse’s eyes narrowed. His skills were getting rusty. That would have to change. For now, though, he had to concentrate on how to get her off this ledge. Whatever she was, he didn’t want her death on his conscience.
More to the point, he thought coldly, a corpse would bring not just the sheriff but a passel of reporters. More publicity was the last thing he wanted.
He shot a look to where the ledge jutted out over the floor of the canyon. The problem was getting her down without both of them ending up doing it the fast way. At the least, a fall would result in shattered bones. He needed rope, but he didn’t have any, and riding forty minutes back to the house, leaving her here to the tender mercy of the sun and maybe the first curious check of the menu by an inquisitive buzzard, wasn’t such a hot idea.
Rope, he thought. Not necessarily a lot of it, just enough to link her to him…
Quickly, he rose to his feet.
“Okay,” he said brusquely. “Take off your belt.”
Her face went white. “What?”
“Your belt.” He was already unbuckling his. “Take it off.”
“Don’t do this.” Her voice broke. “Please. Whoever you are, don’t—”
His head came up. His eyes met hers and, hell, it all came together. The look on her face. The terror in her voice. She thought he was going to rape her. Why? Because he looked like what she undoubtedly thought of as a savage? Well, yeah. Maybe. He was shirtless. He wore his hair long. There was an eagle talon half wrapped in rawhide hanging around his neck, a gift from his father.
To keep you safe, his father had said softly, the night before he had left for ‘Nam.
The stripes on his cheeks were the only thing that had no reasonable explanation. Okay. Maybe they did. He’d come here to say goodbye to his land, his mountain, as a warrior. He’d spent less than a minute choosing between his army ODs and the paint of his people. He didn’t believe in either, not anymore, but the link to those who’d preceded him could not be as easily discarded as a uniform, so he’d stripped off his shirt, striped his face, pulled his hair back with a strip of deerskin…
Jesse blew out a breath of exasperated comprehension.
The woman was a trespasser. She probably knew exactly where she was and that it was private land, but he couldn’t fault her for leaping to the wrong conclusion at being told to take off her belt by a man who sure as hell didn’t look like anything she was accustomed to.
“I need the belts to make a rope,” he said.
“A rope?”
“To get us off this cliff.”
She blinked. “To get us off this…”
He squatted beside her, grabbed her shoulders, forced her to turn her head and see the canyon. “Take a look, lady. We’re on the side of a mountain. As if you didn’t already know—”
“Oh God!” The words were a whisper, but they became louder and louder as she repeated them. “Oh God,” she said, “oh God, oh God…”
She began to tremble. Tremble? The understatement of the year. She was shaking like an aspen leaf in a windstorm. Jesse shook her. Hard.
“Stop it!”
“I’m on the mountain. Blackwolf Mountain. In Blackwolf Canyon.” She made a sound that might have been a laugh. “And this—this is the sacred stone!”
“Surprise, surprise,” he said coldly.
She swung toward him, eyes wide, face still devoid of color.
“I was in the canyon. In it, do you understand? I was looking up at the mountain. At this ledge. At these stones and the sun and then—and then there was lightning and then I was here and no, it’s impossible, impossible, impossible…”
If it was an act, it was a good one. Damn it, was she going into shock? No color. Sentences that made no sense.
He caught her wrist.
“Take it easy.”
She laughed. It was the kind of laugh he’d heard wounded men make on the battlefield just before they gave it all up and went into shocked insanity. A knot formed in his belly. No. He was not going to let this woman go there. He had enough blood on his hands to last a lifetime.
“Take it easy,” he said again. Her teeth were chattering, and he had nothing to warm her with except himself. On a low, angry curse, he wrapped his arms around her. “Calm down.”
“D-did you h-hear what I said? I wa-was down there. At the bottom of this—this pile of rock. And then I wasn’t. I wasn’t d-down there, I was—I was here. And you—and you—”
“Come here,” he growled, and he drew her hard against him. She struggled; he ignored it. After a few seconds, she gave a little sob; he felt the warmth of her breath against his naked flesh, the hot kiss of her tears. She felt delicate, almost fragile in his arms.
How on earth could she have had the strength to get up here?
It didn’t make sense.
Yes, she’d ignored his No Trespassing signs. She’d come here to steal artifacts. He was certain of that. But how had she climbed to this ledge? He knew how much muscle power it took, and he knew, too, that she didn’t have it.
Not that her body was soft. Well, yes, it was. Soft, as only a woman could be soft. But she was fit. Toned. Her arms. Her belly, pressed to his.
Her breasts.
Rounded. Full. Ripe. And maybe he was the savage she thought him to be, after all, if he was in danger of turning hard while he held a woman he didn’t know, and had every reason to dislike, in his arms.
Tonight, once he was off this damned mountain, Jesse thought grimly, he’d turn himself back into a man of the 1970s instead of the 1870s. He’d drive into town, hit the bar at Bozeman’s best hotel and find himself a woman, a sweet-smelling, sexy East Coast tourist.
It was time to work off the past months of foolish celibacy. And if there was one thing that had never changed about him, it was that he’d never had trouble finding a beautiful woman to warm his bed.
After a couple of hours