Victoria Bylin - Of Men And Angels

A sob exploded from her chest. Regrets buzzed in her mind like insects with ugly black wings and she couldn’t swat them away. Her body was a shadow, empty and gray, but her vision sharpened and she saw the bright beauty of the arid plateau. Her ears pounded with the vastness of the silent earth. There was so much of life she had missed, so much she hadn’t tasted, touched, understood.

“I don’t want to die,” she said, choking on the dryness of her own mouth. A thunderous tremor traveled from her toes to her scalp. Her whole body shook with it, except for her injured arm being held steady in Jake’s strong hands.

“Can you still feel your fingers?” His eyes were the brightest blue. She hadn’t noticed that until now.

“My—my arm doesn’t hurt—except for the bite.”

“Are you sick? Can you breathe?”

She sucked in air and nodded. “I hear Charlie.”

“He can wait a minute.”

She saw the baby kicking on the blanket. As faint as his wail seemed to her ears, it was distinct, as welcome as the first strains of a symphony. Jake let go of her arm and went to the saddlebag. The buckle flashed in the sun, and he came back with the flask and one of his own shirts.

“Sit back,” he said. “This is going to hurt.”

She leaned against the boulder and stuck her arm out as if she were a child with a skinned elbow. Sweat beaded on her face, and she gritted her teeth against the speckled light spinning through her head. Closing her eyes, she clutched at Jake’s sleeve to steady herself. He rested her bloody arm on top of his, cupping her elbow and trapping her fingers between his chest and biceps.

He splashed alcohol over the wound, and she shrieked. She thought of her mother blowing on her skinned knees, then she felt soft cotton on her torn flesh and the heat of his hand. The wound stung terribly, but she was breathing more easily.

“We’ll wrap it up, and then we’re gonna beat all hell for Grand Junction,” Jake said. He sliced the shirt with his knife, wrapped her arm as tight as she could stand and tied the ends. “You stay still while I pack up.”

His eyes were full of a glassy blue light, and Alex knew that hers were just as watery. He wrapped the baby in a fresh petticoat and tucked him in the crook of her good arm. Then he rolled up the blanket and the slicker, kicked sand in the ashes of the fire and vanished behind a boulder.

She figured it was nature calling, but then she heard a low moan, a single cuss word, and the sound of a man losing his breakfast and his pride. She wanted to go to him, but her legs were too weak. It struck her then that some things were private, and this was one of them.

When he came back, he took a swig of water and spat it on the ground. Taking Charlie in the crook of his arm, he pulled her up with his other hand. He didn’t let go, and she didn’t want him to.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“I’m just shaken up.”

“Can you ride?’

The bay was tethered to a scraggly juniper on the other side of the campsite. It was a foot taller than she remembered and twice as skittish. She worried even more when it curled its lips and snorted at her.

“He’s not as mean as he looks,” Jake said, tugging on her good arm.

Her feet refused to budge. “He doesn’t like me.”

“It doesn’t matter what he likes. I’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

Something ornery and hysterical took root just below her ribs, and she shook her head. “I want to walk.”

“You want to what?”

“I’m going to walk to Grand Junction.”

“Okay,” he drawled. “I’ll take Charlie, and you can meet us in town. How’s that sound?”

“That sounds good.”

“I’ll even wait around and buy you supper when you get there. That should be in about a week, that is if you don’t fall in a ditch and break a leg, or die of thirst, or starvation. And don’t forget bobcats and rats. You know about rattlers, but coyotes can get mean, too.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“You’ve got outlaws and Indians to consider, and then there’s sunstroke. You’ll have to sleep during the day and walk at night. It gets pretty dark, but there should be a full moon in a few days.”

“Anything else I should worry about?”

“Scorpions. Tarantulas are just big hairy spiders, but scorpions sting like hell. Now centipedes are downright cute.”

Laughter bubbled in her throat. The entire situation was beyond all reason, beyond anything she had ever imagined. She was sobbing and laughing at the same time, and Jake was grinning like a man who had wrestled a bear and won. His eyes glowed, and she saw that in spite of his toughness, he liked to laugh.

In her most formal voice, Alex said, “Considering the tarantulas, I suppose I’ll take my chances with your horse, Mr. Malone.”

“A wise decision, Miss Merritt.”

With a bold-as-brass smile, he slipped his hand around her waist and pulled her to his side. His body was warm and strong against hers, and with a tiny smile, she said, “I feel better.”

His fingers cupped her waist, and somehow she knew that everything would be all right.

But it wasn’t all right. Pressure built deep in her chest, and something wild and insane took root low in her belly. The trembling came back with an energy of its own. Maybe the snake had left its mark. Maybe that was why her legs went weak and she couldn’t breathe.

Maybe it was the snake, and not the shimmering light in Jake Malone’s eyes, the sheltering wing of his arm and the parting of his lips. Slowly, like a drop of rain trailing down a leaf, he lowered his mouth an inch closer to hers. Closing her eyes, Alex faced the certainty she was about to be kissed and acknowledged the truth that she wanted him to do it.

Only she couldn’t possibly want that. She was engaged to Thomas. Jake Malone and his shimmering eyes and soft lips had no place in her life, but he was already kissing her and she couldn’t pull away.

Kissing him was unthinkable. A betrayal, a lie, and she couldn’t do it. Except her lips had come alive, and she shivered as his tongue grazed them. The kiss was tender, searching, like Charlie’s rosebud mouth looking for his mother’s breast.

Her hand flew to his chest and she felt the beat of his heart. A soft hum rippled through him as he eased his tongue past her lips. She had never kissed a man like this before, never felt his need mixing with her own. The strange and glorious closeness of his soul made her tremble, and she liked it.

But it had to be a lie, an aberration borne of fright and danger. She loved Thomas. He needed her. She had no right to kiss an outlaw in the desert. She had no interest in kissing him, and yet a small squeak, a tender cry of need, escaped from her throat.

Jake pulled her closer, and she wanted to laugh and dance and touch the sun, to feel the hardness of his muscles and the coarseness of his beard. She wanted to pour herself into him, to fill the hidden corners of his soul, and so with the morning air on her face and the sun blazing across the plain, with her aching body daring her to do it, she filled the hot emptiness of his mouth with her breath.

The moment turned both tender and fierce. His free hand traveled down her spine, past her waist, down to the small of her back, and a notch lower. His fingertips drew a slow circle that deepened with each turn of his wrist.

When he touched her bottom, she gasped. He hesitated, but she couldn’t force a single word past her lips and so he went on kissing her. His tongue dove deeper, his lips became hungrier. Everything about this man was confident now, and in a rush of hot, wet panic, she planted her hands on his chest and pushed.

“What the—”

He staggered backward, struggling to keep his balance with the baby cradled in one arm. Charlie shrieked, and Jake landed on his backside like a rodeo clown.

He glanced at the baby, tucked the cloth over its head, then rose to his full height and squinted at her. Rimmed with purple shadows, his eyes seemed wise and all-knowing, scarred by life’s battles and experienced with its pleasures.

“Jeez, Alex, what did you think I was going to do? It was just a kiss.” His voice softened. “It’s just nature.”

Shaking her head and close to tears, she held up her hands to stop him. “I’m not an idiot. I know exactly what it is. And it isn’t an excuse for what I just did.”

His blue gaze pinned her to the spot. “You wanted to kiss me. You want to prove you’re alive and kick death in the teeth. Whorehouses always fill up after a gunfight.”

What in the world was she supposed to say to that? That she had never needed to kick death in the teeth before now, that everything in her world was orderly and simple, because she worked very hard to keep it that way?

Or should she tell him that until now, she had never lost her mind while kissing a man; that her insides felt like warm milk and she could still taste the salt of him on her tongue? Alex bit her lip. She had to keep the moment in perspective.

“Frankly, Mr. Malone, I just made an embarrassing mistake. You see, I’m engaged to a man in Philadelphia, and well, I—uh—”

“You just got carried away.”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Whatever you say.” He shrugged as he held out the baby. “Here, you take him. I’ll check on the horse.”

For some reason, his opinion mattered, at least for today, and Alex followed him to the bay. “My fiancé’s name is Thomas Hunnicutt. We work together. With children.”

Jake fiddled with a stirrup. “Is that so?”

“He’s kind and thoughtful. We’ve known each other for years, and when his wife died, it seemed right to get married. She was my best friend.”

The desert air hurt her lungs, as if it were too thin to support a human life, and she took a deeper breath. He glanced at her, and a fleeting shadow passed over his face.

“Thomas Hunnicutt is a lucky man, Miss Merritt. I apologize for my earlier indiscretion.” His manners were impeccable, his voice as sincere as a prayer, but something about the tilt of his head made Alex tremble all the more.

The horse fidgeted next to her, but she no longer cared. She would have climbed on a kicking mule to get away from this man. But what would she do with this terrible ache? This desire to touch his face? Even now her heart felt swollen with a need to taste more than the desert air, to feel more than the heat of the earth rising through the soles of her shoes.

There’s more to life, Alex, so much more….

Her father’s words came at her like a forgotten promise and a strange realization seized her heart. Not once had she been hungry or thirsty, in need of clean clothes, or desirous of a man’s kiss. Until the stage crashed in that torrent of muddy water, she hadn’t felt fear. Until the snake bite, she hadn’t felt pain. And until Jake kissed her, she hadn’t tasted desire.

Standing by the bay, with her arm wrapped in his shirt, with her sunburned skin stinging from the salt of her own perspiration, Alex felt her nerves rippling like grass in the wind. Did misery really sharpen a person’s senses? Did sugar taste sweeter after a mouthful of sand? She had to hope so. What else could explain the trembling in her bones?

Jake Malone saw it all in her eyes, and she could only pray the heat pulsing in her veins was nothing more than shock, an illusion, something that wouldn’t last, because her feelings for this man turned her well-planned future into a wasteland.

She belonged in Philadelphia. She belonged anywhere but here. And that meant she had to push back the glittering mirage of passion and see the true dryness of the desert.