In those two weeks they’d had together, he’d taught her that a man could give pleasure, not just take it, and that pleasing her could increase his joy
. She well remembered the awakening of her senses, his introduction to a secret, unimagined world. For the first time in her life, she went to a man willingly, for more than mere protection. He’d paid Miss Hilda a god-awful pile of coins to guarantee the two of them her boardinghouse’s finest private room — with no intrusions. The money he had spent made Anna feel special, and she had tried to pretend for those two weeks she was the gambler’s woman, not just a diversion on the road.
Yet in the end, she knew he’d leave her
. A man like Ryan couldn’t shear the same sheep for too long. Already, he had overstayed his welcome, returning to her bed night after night. And without a string of other men to harass her, she began to look forward to his visits, to fall prey to his gentle, expert touch.
Of course, he’d meant to leave her
. They all did, even the ones who seemed to fall in love. A singer in a cheap saloon, she was little better than a prostitute, she realized, and all he’d bought was the illusion of something that was real. So she steeled her soul against his kindness and remembered only the ease with which he spent money on an expensive new felt hat, the fortune he had squandered on a fine silk dress for her. He must have so much more. He might even have enough . . .
Her own delicate shiver brought her to the present
. Quinn pulled the blanket higher. Protectively, as might a lover, though she realized now that with his injury, with her near-freezing, they had not made love, as she had begun to imagine.
Mixed up in her relief she felt a bright stain of regret, which took her by surprise, like a s
pot of blood in a fresh egg yolk.
She forced her mind to turn back to what she’d overheard, then forced herself to speak
. “I fell when I was walking. I’ve never been so cold. Then I heard men’s voices ─ saying they’d come back to find a woman. I think ─ I think they might have been the ones who ─ ones who . . .”
“The ones who hurt you
? Who, Annie? You have to tell me who.”
“They’ll come back, and God forgive me, I’ll kill them before I let them lay a hand on me again.”
“Who are they?” he insisted.
“I don’
t know their names except for one. There was a man named Hamby. I can’t let him ─ ”
Quinn swore softly, interrupting her descent into panic
. “─ Hamby. That makes sense. I caught him with my mare. And don’t worry. You won’t have to kill him. I’d be glad to do the honors for you. One of his boys put that bullet in me.”
“I have to get up now,” Anna whispered, her mind swirling with old horror
. “I won’t let them catch me here like this.”
He pulled her down, toward him
. “Calm down and relax. How can you be sure of what you heard? You were half-frozen when you stumbled in here, ice all over you. People hear things, even see things when they’re cold like that. Hell, I thought I was having lamb stew with my mother when I was lying in the snow.”
“I heard them . . . at least I
think
. . . maybe . . .” She pulled away, more appalled by the comfort she was drawing from Quinn’s nearness than a possible attack. Her skin tingled with a whisper of old pleasure where it grazed his.
Surely Quinn must feel it, too, the way their bodies remembered what they both would disavow
. He must, or else he wouldn’t pull her even nearer, wouldn’t touch his lips so cautiously to hers.
Anna felt an almost painful spark where their mouths met, almost like a shock that sometimes leapt from metal to flesh on a dry, cold winter’s day
. Yet unlike that sensation, this one drew her forward like a lodestone drew a compass needle, giving her direction, a new path to point out.
His kiss grew less tentative, more questing
. As if he sought some treasure he would only know once it was found. As if he’d somehow forgotten what she had done to him.
Their mouths together formed a moist warmth so inviting, she could barely force herself to pull away
. Yet finally she did, for she remembered things that he would not acknowledge, and other things that he would never know.
“Don’t go,” he whispered
. “No one’s coming after you. Even if what you heard was real, no one’s coming after you now, not in this weather. Please don’t go.”
She liked the way desire rumbled in those words
. Though she had no intention of opening the sealed chambers of her passion, it felt good to hear him knocking at the door.
“Don’t be foolish,” Anna told him
. “You’ve already made your feelings for me clear.”
“This isn’t about feelings.”
“At least not any that are
north
of your navel. Come on, Ryan. I told you I’m not that kind of woman anymore. Haven’t been since . . . well, since you.”
“Sorry I soured you for all those others,” he grumbled
. “Hey, you leave that blanket. It’s nippy in here.”
“But I’m
─”
“─ Naked, too
. I noticed.” A lopsided grin lit his face, which the firelight bathed in golden flickers.
She grabbed the blanket firmly
. “I’ll only need it for a minute, so I can find dry clothes and make us something hot to eat.”
He held onto it like
a shred of dignity, even though she thought she heard his stomach growl at the mention of warm food. “From what I remember before you drugged my drink, it’s a little late for you to go developing a sense of modesty, Annie Faith.”
“I
told
you, I’m not Annie anymore.”
“What’s in a name
? ‘That which we call a rose, by any other name would still have thorns.’”
“I thought the line ended, ‘. . . would smell as sweet.’”
He grimaced. “How should I remember? Somebody stole my book of Shakespeare ─ Annie Faith.”
“
Sangre de Cristo
, you’re such a ─” Biting back another curse, she ripped the blanket from his grasp.
He groaned, and laid his right hand atop his wounded shoulder
. Strips of torn cotton surrounded it to bind his wound. Otherwise, nothing concealed the masculine contours of his upper body, the taut muscles, thicker than she recalled, the ─ She forced her gaze from straying southward, suddenly ashamed. She had no interest in looking at him that way. She hadn’t earlier, when she had worked at curing him. A fluttering beneath her stomach suggested she was lying to herself.
How foolish she was, to even think of his man’s body
. She loved the stark isolation of her canyon life. She needed nothing, no man, most especially that one who had the most cause to hate her. Yet she remembered, only moments earlier, how good it felt when he had held her, how warm and safe and . . . whole.
A flash of memory nearly overwhelmed her
. Hammering a cross into the stony soil. A reddish pile of loose gravel that made a tiny mound over the grave. Though she’d been so weak with grief that she could barely stand, she’d dug the hole herself. Deep, so scavengers could not unearth it. Deep, as if by doing so, she could hide it from herself.
Tears made the hearth’s flames sparkle in her vision
. Tears that she had never shed in the six years beyond that cross.
Now, as if his body’s heat had thawed what might have been, she looked back toward Quinn
. His gaze sparked against hers, cold and angry at his weakness and perhaps the memory of what she had done before.
Like an offering, she tossed him back the blanket
. The floor was cold, and she would soon pull on her other pair of worn jeans, another coarsely woven shirt.
She turned her back on him and felt him glaring as she dressed.
* * *
God help him, he couldn’t pull his gaze away from her
. Sore and weak as he was, Quinn watched the way she moved as fluidly as melt-water trickling downhill in the spring. Reaching for a pair of jeans hung from a peg, she pulled them on to cover nothing but her bare flesh. Flesh that had lain against his moments ago.
He groaned at this impossible arousal, the staggering realization that she was doing it again
. She was making him want her, with her firm, lean body, which had felt so right against his. She was ensnaring him, though her silken words now whispered psalms of healing, not of sin. She was convincing him, a little at a time that though her beauty and her voice remained, Annie Faith had changed to Anna, and Anna might be someone that he’d like to know.
Or else he was, despite his wound, a healthy man, just shy of thirty, who hadn’t had a woman in so long he couldn’t say
. The reaction he had as he watched her dress could be nothing more, nothing but his basest instincts, trying to distract him from cold truth.
After what she had done, he couldn’t trust another woman, much less her
. After what she’d cost him, he ought to want her dead.
Yet he had to admit, at least to himself, that he no longer did
. Though he had told himself before that he was warming her so she could tend him, he realized now he couldn’t bear to watch her die. Not even if he’d been strong enough to ride out of here today.
Her obvious fear and loathing for Hamby and his men spun his long-held hatred for her on its axis
. She hadn’t turned his mare and goods over to them as he had so long suspected. Instead, as strange as it might seem, the thief must have fallen prey to an even greater evil.
Yet did that make her any less a thief
? Did it make her any less guilty for her part in his family’s deaths? And most importantly, did he betray their memories by wanting her the way that he did now?
* * *
They would be married in a week’s time, Ward had told her. Though for her it was an answer, the thought made Lucy’s soul quiver like a hummingbird’s frail wings.
Still, she felt the need to keep up appearances with Miss Rathbone, who had helped to guide her in the five years since her mother had passed on.
Lucy chattered quickly, half-starved for some scrap of approval. “Why, if one didn’t go outside, one would almost suspect we’d never left the States. The house is so much finer than what I’d expected. Don’t you think so?”
Miss Rathbone looked up slowly from unpacking one of Lucy’s bags
. Her fathomless brown eyes surveyed the surroundings, as if she hadn’t deigned to take them in before.
The judge had shown them to the pair of bedrooms, which someone had decorated thoughtfully
. Someone who understood a woman’s tastes. The bedding had been trimmed with expensive eyelet lace. The chamber sets were painted with delicate violet flowers.
Nervously, Lucy drew back the heavy green and violet curtains of her room to gaze out over the thick pines outside
. Snowflakes filled the air like a host of wintry moths. She could feel their cold radiating through the windowpane, so she quickly closed the draperies once again.
Miss Rathbone lit an oil lamp against the resulting gloom
. “I suppose it could be worse.”
Lucy had nearly forgotten her question to the older woman
. But that was typical of her recent conversations with Miss Rathbone: fits and starts, long pauses, terse replies, while all along, her every deliberate gesture, every brooding glare blamed Lucy for their change in circumstances.
As well she might
.
Lucy swallowed back her guilt and swelled her chest with an almost painfully deep breath
. She was here now, in this place, destined for marriage, and she would make the best of it. After she wed Cameron, she could send Miss Rathbone packing, sever every tie she had with what had happened in Connecticut this winter.
And then there would be no one here who might too soon guess her secret
. No one here to hold up a mirror and reflect back at her those dark-eyed glimpses of her shame, and of her pleasure most sublime.
* * *
In an economy so ingrained that it was second nature, Anna had tucked the cottontail’s small carcass deep inside her coat. Despite the shock of her horse’s death and her own near-freezing, she had carried the rabbit home. It remained inside her coat, so she recovered it after she dressed, happy for at least that small bit of fortune on this luckless day.
She draped the coat across a stool near the fire so it could dry
. Then she and Quinn shared tea and cornbread left over from this morning. Anna ate in wary silence, thinking about how she had lost her balance in the few days since he’d arrived. Before, everything had seemed simple, sterile, just the way she liked it. Now her emotions, which she thought trapped in amber, had bubbled to the surface and threatened to overwhelm her.
Afterward, she took the rabbit by the back feet and retrieved the knife from her coat pocket
. She threw the old serape over her shoulders, then took the rabbit out the door, beneath the roof’s narrow overhang. The dog pranced eagerly, awaiting the viscera that were loosed by her quick blade. She left Notion outside to enjoy his bloody meal, then returned indoors to skin the cottontail over a shallow pan.