Then Nevada’s glance shifted to her mouth and Eden remembered the instant when his fingertip had caressed her lips. Her heart hesitated before it beat with increased speed.
“Does that quick little tongue of yours ever get you in trouble?” he asked finally.
The intriguing rasp was back in Nevada’s voice, making Eden shiver.
“Only with you,” she admitted. “Normally I’m rather quiet. But I love the sound of your voice, especially when it gets all slow and deep. Like now.”
His eyes narrowed even more, all amusement gone, replaced by something as elemental as a wolf’s howl. The searching intensity of Nevada’s glance made Eden shiver. He turned away abruptly.
“Can Baby lead us to the cabin?” Nevada asked harshly.
“Yes.”
“Then tell him to do it.”
“Lead us home, Baby. Home.”
Baby turned and began trotting along the base of the scree slope. Nevada turned Target to follow the wolf’s tracks. The instant the horse began moving, Eden made a stifled sound and clung very tightly to Nevada. He looked down, saw her arms wrapped around him, saw hands that were slender even inside gloves, knew that the hard rise of his flesh was only inches from those feminine hands, and tried not to swear aloud at the ungovernable rushing of his blood.
For several minutes there was a silence that was at least as uncomfortable as Nevada was.
“Nevada?”
He grunted.
“I wasn’t making fun of your voice.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you angry?”
Nevada hesitated, then shrugged. “Some kinds of honesty are dangerous, Eden.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Drop your hand down a few inches and you’ll understand just fine.”
Nevada’s voice was remote, clipped. When Eden realized what he meant, she was glad he couldn’t see her blazing cheeks. Beneath her embarrassment she was shocked. When Nevada had told her he lived every instant as though it were his last, he had meant it, and the proof was right at hand.
“Makes a girl wonder what it would take to cool you off,” Eden muttered against his back, certain he wouldn’t be able to hear.
He did, of course.
“Hell of a question,” Nevada retorted. “Sure you want to hear the answer?”
Eden opened her mouth for an incautious reply, only to think better of it at the last instant. Before she closed her mouth, she felt the unanticipated, fragile chill of snowflakes dissolving on her tongue. Her eyes closed and she held her breath, waiting for the exquisite sensation to be repeated. As she waited, the world swayed gently beneath her and her arms clung to the living column of strength that was Nevada.
Suddenly Eden had a dizzying sense of the wonder of being alive and riding through a white storm holding on to a man whose last name she didn’t even know, while snowflakes melted on her lips like secret kisses. She laughed softly and tipped her face back to the sky, giving herself to the miracle of being alive.
The sound of Eden laughing made Nevada turn toward her involuntarily, drawn by the life burning so vividly in her. He looked at her with a hunger that would have shocked her if she had seen it, but her eyes were closed beneath the tiny, biting caresses of snowflakes. When her eyes opened once more, he had already turned away.
“Nevada?”
He made a rough, questioning sound.
“What’s your last name?”
“Blackthorn.”
“Blackthorn,” Eden murmured, savoring the name as though it were a snowflake freshly fallen onto her tongue. “What do you do when you’re not rescuing maidens or falling down mountains, Nevada Blackthorn?”
“I’m segundo on the Rocking M when Tennessee is there. When he isn’t, I’m ramrod.”
“Segundo? Tennessee? Ramrod? Are we speaking the same language?”
The corner of Nevada’s mouth lifted slightly. “A ramrod is a ranch foreman. A segundo is the ramrod’s right-hand man. Tennessee is my brother.”
“Is the Rocking M your family ranch?”
“After a fashion. We’re the bastard line. The legitimate folks are the MacKenzies. Tennessee bought into the ranch when Luke MacKenzie’s father was trying to drink himself to death. I own a chunk of the Devil’s Peak area. Cash and Mariah gave it to me for a wedding gift.”
For a few moments Eden was too stunned to breathe. “You’re married?” she asked faintly.
“It was Cash and Mariah’s wedding, not mine.”
“They gave you a present on their wedding day,” Eden said carefully.
Nevada nodded.
“Why?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’m very patient.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“I doubt that much fools you,” she said matter-of-factly.
Nevada thought of the instant he had seen Eden coming toward him in a smoky bar and his whole body had reached out to her with a primitive need that had shocked him. But he would have been a fool to talk about that, and Nevada Blackthorn was no fool.
“Mariah is Luke’s sister,” Nevada said. “She had a map to a gold mine that had come down through the family. The map wasn’t much use because it was all blurred. I passed the map along to some people who are real good at making documents give up their secrets. When the map came back, I gave it to her. She found the mine, Cash found her, and they got married. They gave me a chunk of the mine as a wedding present.”
The hint of a drawl in Nevada’s voice told Eden that she was being teased. She didn’t mind. She liked the thought that she could arouse that much playfulness in Nevada.
“Why do I feel you left something out?” she asked.
“Such as?”
“Such as how a segundo knows the kind of people who can make crummy old documents sit up and sing.”
“I wasn’t always a segundo.”
Eden hesitated. The drawl was definitely gone from Nevada’s voice. Even as she told herself she had no right to pry, she heard herself asking a question.
“What were you before you were a segundo?”
“What the Blackthorn men have been for hundreds of years a warrior.”
Vivid images from the fight in West Fork flashed before Eden’s eyes, followed by other images. Nevada lying half-buried in a rock slide with a rifle in his hand. Nevada checking the rifle’s firing mechanism with a few swift motions before he even tried to stand up. Nevada’s bleak eyes and unsmiling mouth.
Warrior.
It explained a lot. Too much.
The vivid joy in life that Eden had experienced moments before drained away, leaving sadness in its place. Her arms tightened protectively around Nevada’s powerful body as though she could somehow keep whatever might hurt him at bay. When she realized what she was doing, she didn’t know whether to laugh or to weep at her own idiocy. Nevada needed protecting about as much as a bolt of lightning did.
But unlike lightning, Nevada could bleed and cry. And he had. She knew it as surely as she knew that she was alive.
Breathing Nevada’s name, Eden moved her face slowly against the cool suede texture of his shearling jacket, wiping away the tears that fell when she thought of what Nevada must have endured in the years before he went to work for the Rocking M. The knowledge of his pain reached her as nothing had since the death of her little sister during Alaska’s long, frigid night.
Nevada felt the surprising strength of Eden’s arms holding him, heard his name breathed like a prayer into the swirling storm, sensed the aching depth of Eden’s emotions. Without stopping to ask why, Nevada brought one of her gloved hands to his cheek and rubbed slowly. With a ragged sigh she relaxed against him.
For several minutes there was no sound but the tiny whispering of snowflakes over the land, the creak of cold leather, and the muffled hoof beats of the two horses as Nevada held them to Baby’s clear trail. When Nevada saw the outline of the cabin rising from the swirling veils of snow, he removed Eden’s arms from around him.
“Time to let go, Eden. You’re home.”
Reluctantly Eden released Nevada. He swung his right leg over the front of the saddle, grabbed the saddle horn in his right hand and slid to the ground. Braced by his grip on the saddle horn, Nevada tentatively put weight on his left foot. There was pain, but he had expected it. What mattered was that the foot and ankle took his weight without giving way.
Nevada reached up, lifted Eden off the horse and lowered her to the icy ground.
“Legs still working?” he asked, holding on to her just in case.
Eden felt the hard length of Nevada pressed against her body and wondered if she would be able to breathe, much less stand. She nodded her head.
“Good. Go in and get a fire going while I take care of the horses.”
“Your foot”
“Go in and get warm,” Nevada interrupted. “You’d just be in my way.”
Eden would have argued, but Nevada had already turned around and begun loosening the cinch on Target’s saddle. As she watched, he removed the heavy saddle easily and set it aside. There was a hesitation when he walked that reminded her of Baby injured, but hardly disabled.
Besides, Nevada was right. She didn’t know what to do with the horses.
Without a word Eden removed her backpack and jacket, shook snow from them and went into the cabin. Baby followed her in and went immediately to the coldest, draftiest spot in the cabin’s single room. His thick fur had been grown for a Yukon winter. Until he shed some of his undercoat, a fire was redundant.
It took only a moment for Eden to stir the banked coals to life. That was one of the first things her parents had taught her about living in cold country no matter how long or how short the absence was supposed to be, always leave the hearth in a state of instant readiness for the next fire. No more than a single match should be needed to bring light and warmth into a cabin.
Eden exchanged her snow boots for fleece-lined moccasins before she went to the ice chest to look for a quick meal. After sorting through the snow she had used to chill the contents of the ice chest, she found a package of chicken. Fresh vegetables were in a cardboard carton. She selected a handful, took the knife from her belt sheath and went to work.
By the time Nevada came in the front door carrying a pair of hiking boots in his hands, the cabin was warm from the fire and fragrant with the smell of chicken and dried herbs simmering together on a tall trivet over the fire. Eden looked up as Nevada took off her knit ski cap and rubbed his fingers through his short, black hair. He shrugged out of his thick shearling jacket, hung it on a nail next to hers, and walked unevenly toward the fire. Moments later he had removed his single cowboy boot and his socks and was toasting his bare feet by the flames. Bruises shadowed his left foot, which was also reddened from cold.
Eden set aside the vegetables she had been chopping and knelt next to Nevada’s legs. She took his left foot between her hands and went over it with her fingertips, searching for swellings, cold spots that could be frostbite, or any other injury.
Silently Nevada’s breath came in and stayed that way. Her fingers felt like gentle flames caressing his cold skin. Not by so much as a sideways look did she reveal that she knew what her touch was doing to him. The thought that Eden might be as innocent as she was alluring disturbed Nevada more deeply than her warm fingers.
“I told you I’m fine,” he said. His voice was rough, irritable, for his body was reacting to Eden’s touch once again.
“Your idea of fine and mine are different.” Eden pressed her fingertips around a swelling. “Hurt?”
“No.”
She examined his toes critically. Other than being cold, they showed no damage. She let go of his foot. Before he could prevent it, she had pressed her hand against his forehead. His temperature brought a frown to her face. She put her other hand against her own forehead for comparison.
“You’re running a fever,” she said.
Nevada grunted. He had been running a fever for the past hour or more. Tennessee had been right. He should have stayed out of the mountains. But he hadn’t been able to. Since the fight in West Fork, Nevada had been too restless to stick around the Rocking M’s tame winter pastures.
“Are you planning on riding out into the storm as soon as your feet warm up?” Eden asked evenly, removing her hand from Nevada’s forehead. “Or are you going to be sensible and wait out the storm here?”
A pale green glance fixed on Eden with searching intensity. The warning Nevada had spoken to her once before hung in the air between them: Stay away from me, Eden. I want you more than all the men in that bar put together.
“Aren’t you nervous about being alone with me in a cabin at the end of the world?” Nevada asked softly.
“No.”
“You damned well should be.”
“Why?”
Nevada said something rude under his breath.
“I know you want me,” Eden said simply. “I also know you won’t rape me. And not because of Baby. The way you fight, you probably could take care of a pack of wolves. But if I said no, you wouldn’t so much as touch me. Even if I said yes
” She shrugged.
“You have more faith in me than I do.”
Eden’s smile was as beautiful as it was sad. “Yes, I know.”
She stood up and went back to chopping vegetables.
Broodingly Nevada looked around the cabin. Once it had been a base camp for hunters who were less interested in fine decorator touches than in solid shelter from storms. In the far corner of the room, next to Baby, there was a small potbellied stove. A section of chimney pipe was missing. Obviously Eden had decided it would be easier to stay warm near the big fieldstone hearth than to fix the stove’s broken chimney.
Narrowed green eyes inventoried the contents of the room in a sweeping glance that missed nothing. Bedroll and mattress laid out, clothes either hung on nails or put neatly into the rough-hewn dresser, kitchen implements stacked on overturned cartons, camp chairs, a small can of oil set near the kitchen pump, a bucket of water to prime the pump, a kerosene lantern as well as a battery model; it was apparent that Eden was at home in the Spartan shelter.
Eden walked across the room, pushed a thick, faded curtain aside, and looked out. Snow was coming down thick and hard. Saying nothing, she let herself out of the cabin’s only door and closed it behind her. Instantly Baby came to his feet and went to stand by the door. A minute later the door opened again. Eden came in, dragging Nevada’s packsacks behind. She kicked the door shut.