Donners of the Dead (19 page)

“Horses are fine.”

“You’re okay?”

He stared at me across the fire, and there was something in his dark eyes that burned even brighter. “I am now.”

He didn’t look away, not for a few heady seconds, so finally I had to. I lost my gaze to the flames and cleared my throat. “What was your wife’s name?”

I don’t know why I said it. I don’t know where it came from other than the question had come into my mind every time Jake had gotten this look in his eyes, a look that told me he had been through so much, seen through much, felt so much.

I kept my eyes focused on the fire but still saw him stiffen at the question. He was probably going to be mad.

I licked my lips and apologized again. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”

“No, no,” he said with a sigh. “It’s fine. Her name was Marie. My son was Sam.”

“What did they look like? What were they like? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“I don’t mind
you
asking,” he said gently. He rested his elbows on his knees and folded his large, calloused hands together and looked off into the night sky, at the few stars that were peeking over the tops of the trees. The moon was bright even when hidden by clouds.

He took in a deep breath. “I met Marie when I was eighteen. She was sixteen. I’d just left home, wanting to join the Rangers. Said my goodbyes to my folks, who were probably quite glad I was leaving, and moved to San Antonio. Met Marie the first night I’d been accepted into the Rangers. It was…customary, I suppose, to celebrate. I was taken to a brothel,” my eyebrows shot up, “and she was the woman I was given. She was only sixteen at the time and I could tell she was nervous around me—skittish. Turns out it was her first time. Wasn’t mine. She was a beautiful girl, really. Long, curly blonde hair, eyes as blue as cornflower. I was a goner.” He sounded wistful as he said that, and I felt an uncalled for yet vicious strain of jealousy run through me. “She’d been given to the brothel by her father just the week before. A low-life piece of hog’s ass is what he was. I guess I fell in love with her that night. I couldn’t stop going to see her. She’d never take any payment, and sometimes we never made love, we just talked about our hopes and dreams.”

Jake reached over and turned the raccoon over in the fire, trying to darken the other side. His arched brows were furrowed, eyes lost in thought. “It kept on that way for quite some time. But there were problems. Two of them. One was that I was jealous. I loved her. She was my woman. No one else owned her but me. Not the other men who came to see her, not the madam. It made me sick inside to know I had to share her. The other problem, the more noble problem, was that her daddy used to beat her and beat her bad. It didn’t stop when she got to the brothel, not by a long shot. I’m sure she thought that place would be the last place he’d ever go, but she underestimated her dear daddy. He’d show up there a few nights a week, drunk. He’d fuck a few whores then find Marie.”

I noticed I was holding my breath, my fingers gripping the edge of the animal hide as he talked. He went on, his voice lowering, a hard edge coming on. “He’d find her and smack her around. Sometimes he’d break a bottle over her head. Sometimes he’d touch her in ways the other men would. One day I found her passed out in the corner of her shit-filled room, blood all over her. I decided I couldn’t let her—us—live this way anymore. I asked to be transferred over to the Mexican border and I took her with me. It wasn’t easy but that’s what guns are for. We never looked back.”

“Wow,” I said breathlessly. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Our lives got better after that,” he said, still staring off into the distance. “A few months later we found out she was pregnant. It was a tough pregnancy and I was gone with the Rangers half the time. It was hard on us. My father had died by then, but I asked my mother to come down and help take care of Marie in my absence. She and I grew closer after that. Like Marie’s father, mine beat me and my ma too. Now that she was free of him, I felt like I was starting over with a new family.

“Finally, Sam was born and I was lucky to be home to witness it. My whole life changed at that moment, I can hardly explain it.” He grinned to himself and my heart did a backflip. “I’d always been a loner as a kid. The lone wolf, they’d call me back in school. I was happiest that way. But once Sam was born and I looked into his blue eyes and looked at Marie and my mother, I knew that somehow, despite everything I’d thought, the tough and dangerous life I’d wanted, I was meant to be a father. A family man. For a while there I even thought about quitting the Rangers. Marie, as you can imagine, was plumb excited about the idea. We thought since we were raising a few horses already that we could turn it into something more lucrative. Leave the violence behind. And I tried.” He paused and rubbed at his chin. “I tried, but there was this battle in Monterey that I had to fight in. One last thing, I’d told her, one last time. Anyway…you know the rest.”

“Do I?” I really was prodding now. “What happened between then and now? How…how on earth did you handle that? How did you survive?”

“We all find ways to survive. There were a few moments where I put the pistol to my head and said a prayer. I don’t know why I never pulled the trigger. Perhaps I was too scared. Too cowardly.”

“Perhaps you had hope.”

He gave me a sad smile. “Darlin’, if I had hope you can bet your bottom that I wasn’t aware of it. There was no hope. There was nothing but hate. Anger. It consumed me. I wanted to help rid Texas of the Mexicans that took me away and the Injuns that killed my family. That’s all I wanted.”

“And you never loved again.”

He grew silent and rotated the spit again. “I wasn’t about to get close to anyone, not in
that
way.”

I wasn’t about to ask about the other way. I didn’t need to know.

“What does it feel like?” I asked him. “Being in love?”

His eyes darted over to me. “You don’t know? What about Avery?”

I shook my head. “I…I think I was infatuated with Avery. I always had been. He’d been the only person who cared…I thought that’s what love was.” I felt horrible even saying his name but out it came.

“I see,” he said, slowly nodding. “Well, I don’t know. I reckon it’s different for everyone. With Marie it hit me hard and fast like a sledgehammer. It didn’t mean it meant any less. I suppose…” He trailed off. “I suppose other times it comes slowly. Gradually. Sneaks up on you.”

“Like a wolf.”

“Love
is
a wolf,” he said, the fire dancing in his eyes. “Perhaps that’s why they howl in the dark of night. Love drives them mad like it does to everyone. Fast or slow, whatever way it hits you, love will drive you mad.”

“Does it not seem so silly to be talking about such a thing when we’re out here with the wolves and the monsters in the trees?”

“No, Eve,” he said. “It’s not silly. We’re still human even in the face of beasts, even with our lives at risk. When you’re close to death, love is sometimes the only thing that makes sense in life.”

I was about to tell him that we weren’t close to death when I noticed that beneath his jacket, blood was starting to seep through his shirt.

“Shoot,” I swore under my breath.

I quickly grabbed my boots and slipped them on while noticing that he had taken them off when he put me to bed. There was something so disarming about the image of caveman Jake McGraw taking the time to undo my boots before tucking me in. It melted away some of the ice that had built up inside me.

I made my way over to the packs and brought out what was left of the first aid supplies—gauze, cloth, and tape—and came over to his side.

He looked down at the blood that was seeping through his shirtfront. “I’m fine. Go get some rest.”

“Like hell I will,” I said determinedly.

He grinned at me. “I’m liking your language.”

I didn’t feel the need to apologize for my cursing. I came behind him as he sat on the log and slowly helped him remove his jacket. “Do you have any moonshine left?”

“I reckon there might be some left in the flask.”

He nodded over to the packs and I quickly retrieved it.

“You planning on getting me drunk, Pine Nut?”

“I’m planning on cleaning your wound, Ranger.”

“Ranger? I like that.” He nodded. “I like that a lot.”

“Lift up your arms,” I instructed him.

“Bossy.” But he did as I asked. I carefully pulled the shirt off of him and he immediately started shivering from the cold air.

“I won’t be long,” I said to him, coming around to his side. With his body, such a perfect specimen of a man, I wished it could take all night.

I bit down on my tongue to bring me back into the present and poured a little bit of the moonshine on his wound, wiping it around and getting rid of most of the blood.

“Easy,” he said with a wince. “You want to give me the rest of it? I feel like I might need some liquid courage tonight.”

“Just a moment,” I said. I came closer to him, feeling the heat of his body on one side of me and the fire on the other. I poured a tiny bit more on the wound and dabbed it gently. Jake’s eyes were close to mine, his lips inches away as he watched me working. I couldn’t meet his eyes—I wouldn’t.

I spent far too long pressing the cloth into him, to the point where he wasn’t even wincing anymore. Finally he shifted slightly, the sound of the fabric of his pants sliding across the log, and I felt his strong fingers brush against mine, taking the flask out of my hands.

I breathed out as he moved his head away from me to swallow down the rest of it. He coughed from the alcohol’s burn and I started layering the gauze. I worked slowly, more for other reasons than because I wanted to be gentle. With him so close to me, his warm skin beneath my fingers so surprisingly smooth, I felt like I couldn’t leave his side. I also felt like I couldn’t get closer. I was stuck in some sort of limbo.

“Eve,” he said in a silken voice.

“Yes?” I whispered. The world felt like it was changing around me. I noticed I had moved closer to him, somehow, that I had finished bandaging him already and yet my fingers were resting on his chest, pressing into him. The trees and the sky, they had grown blacker than obsidian, and the only thing lit, the only thing visible, was his bare body, glowing gold in the firelight.

Beneath my hands, his heart was beating wildly.

“Are you scared?” he asked softly. His face had come closer again, his lips near my cheek then near my ear. From the way my skin prickled, the way the hairs on my neck stood up and the shivers that slinked down my spine, I would have to say that yes, I was scared.

But now I didn’t know of what. This fear was new. I was scared of Jake. I was scared of myself.

And I think I liked it. I liked this kind of fear. It was doing curious things to my insides, putting me through a beautiful sort of pain that was so very foreign to me.

“Because,” he said with a gruff voice that warmed my stomach, “the longer you touch me, the more scared I get.”

I bit my lip. “What do you think I’m going to do?” I whispered.

He shook his head once. “No. Not you. You’re too innocent. It’s what I’m going to do. What I want to do. What I feel like doing. And Lord knows how very wrong it is to have these thoughts. Especially about you.”

“I’m not so innocent,” I managed to say, even though I could barely imagine what his thoughts could be about. He’d already kissed me once before. He couldn’t possibly want what I didn’t dare imagine he wanted. Not with me. Not with the inexperienced, young, half-Indian girl from River Bend.

He leaned in until his lips brushed against my earlobe. “You are innocent, just like your name before she ate the apple, that forbidden fruit. And I love it.”

I couldn’t suppress the shiver. I slowly moved my head toward him so that our noses rubbed against each other. One of my hands went for the side of his head, my fingers sinking into his soft hair. I couldn’t control myself, my actions were apart from my brain, and suddenly I understood why he was afraid of what he would do. I should have been afraid of myself, too.

Instead, I welcomed it. He could have been the apple that changed Eve’s innocence. He could have been the snake. And I suddenly didn’t care.

W
e were too
close. It was all too much.

I shook my head and steadied my breath which was coming out hot and ragged. “My innocence is gone. But whatever I do have left, I want you to have it.”

“You’ll always be innocent to me,” he murmured, barely moving his lips, his gaze never leaving mine.

“Then…” I said, my heart thudding in my chest as I traced his rough jaw with my fingers, “you’ll have to at least try and take it.”

“Oh darlin’,” he said huskily. “You have no idea what you’re asking of me and I might be not be good enough of a man to say no.”

“I have some idea,” I whispered, “if you just point the way.”

He broke into a wide grin and let out an amused chuckle that lasted a shining second before he suddenly grabbed my face, his large hands taking up both sides of it, and kissed me.

Hard.

And still his lips were soft, covering mine, and I felt the hot, wet pressure of his satiny tongue push into my mouth. I welcomed it and moaned once it touched mine. My cheeks flamed with heat, but I couldn’t tell if it was because I was self-conscious or it was the fire that was inside of me, burning up in my chest and belly.

I felt my innocence being charred.

And as he kissed me, I kissed him back. I found myself being dragged into a warm abyss that was just his hands and lips and tongue and us kissing each other like we were afraid to stop, like we’d die if we stopped.

The world outside us stood still and it was just him and I melding together in front of the flames, feeding on each other, because with each kiss it only stoked my hunger, a hunger for him, his body and mind and heart and soul and everything so very brave and strong about him.

“Oh, Eve,” he spoke against my lips before he brought his to my neck and started sliding them down to my collar bone. I couldn’t help but moan again, my body overloaded with these feelings and sensations I had never felt before. It was an assault and I was both fighting back with my mouth and surrendering at the same time.