Reckless Love

Chapter Nine

The Tub's slick-walled pool was far enough from its hot-spring source to have lost the scalding edge of its temperature and nearly all of its sulfurous smell. The water was a clear, pale blue that steamed gently in the cool hours of night and gleamed invitingly all the time. Though safe to drink, the water was too hot for plants to grow in it. Nothing but sand and stone ringed the pool. The high mineral content of the water had decorated the rock it touched with a smooth, creamy-yellow veneer of deposits that had rounded off all the rough edges of the native stone, making a hard but nonetheless comfortable place for Ty to soak out the last legacy of Cascabel's cruel gauntlet.

Usually Ty enjoyed the soothing heat of the pool, but not today. Today he simmered from more than the temperature of the water. Knowing that "the boy" was a girl made him want to turn Janna over his knee and paddle her until she learned some manners. When he thought how she had let him run around wearing nothing more than a few rags of blanket…

A flush spread beneath the dark hair on Ty's chest and face. The realization that he was embarrassed infuriated him. It was hardly a case of his never having been nearly or even completely naked around a woman; of all the MacKenzie brothers, Ty had been the one who had caught women's eye from the time he was old enough to shave. What bothered Ty was that he must have shocked Janna more than once. The thought of a girl of her tender years being subjected repeatedly to a full-grown man's nakedness made Ty very uncomfortable.

She must have been dying of embarrassment, but she never let on. She just kept on washing me when I was delirious and putting medicine all over me and reading to me while I teased her in a way I never would have teased a girl. A woman, maybe, but not a girl. Why, she can't be much more than… Abruptly Ty sat up straight on the stone ledge, sending water cascading off his body. Just how old is she? And how innocent?

Ty remembered the look of desire he had once seen in Janna's eyes. Instantly he squelched the thought. He was nearly thirty. He had no damned business even looking at a thirteen-year-old, no matter how soft her cheeks were or how her gray eyes warmed while she looked at him when she thought he wouldn't notice. Besides, boy or girl, at thirteen a case of hero worship was still a case of hero worship.

If she was, indeed, thirteen.

She can't be much older than that. I may be blind but I'm not dead. If she had breasts, I'd have noticed. Or hips, for that matter. Even under those flapping, flopping, ridiculous clothes, I'd have noticed… wouldn't I?

Hell, yes, of course I would have.

The reassuring thought made Ty settle back into the pool. A kid was still a kid, no matter what the sex. As for his own body's urgent woman-hunger, that was just a sign of his returned health. It had nothing to do with a gray-eyed waif whose delicate hands had touched nearly every aching inch of his body.

But it was the aching inches she hadn't touched that were driving him crazy.

"Dammit!" Ty exploded, coming out of the water with a lunge.

He stood dripping on the stone rim of the pool, furious with himself and the world in general, and with one Janna Wayland in particular. Viciously he scrubbed his breech-cloth on the rocks, wrung it out and put it on, concealing the rigid evidence of his hunger.

Then he turned around and got right back into the Tub again. This time he remembered the bar of camp soap that Janna always left in a nearby niche. Cursing steadily, he began washing himself from head to newly healed feet. When he was finished he rinsed thoroughly, adjusted the uncomfortably tight breechcloth once more and stalked back to camp.

Janna was calmly tying twists of greenery to branches she had laid between two tall forked sticks. The stems of the plants turned slowly in the sun and wind as the leaves gave up their moisture. In a week or two the herbs would be ready to store whole or to crumble and pound into a powder from which she would make lotions, pastes, potions and other varieties of medicine.

"How do your feet feel?" Janna asked without looking up from her work.

"Like feet. Where's Mad Jack?"

"Gone."

"What?"

"He was worried when he didn't find me in any of the usual places, so-"

"Where are the usual places?" Ty interrupted.

"Wherever Lucifer's herd is. Once Jack found out I was all right, he went back."

"To where?"

"Wherever his mine is."

Ty reached to readjust the breechcloth again, remembered that Janna wasn't a boy and snatched back his hands, cursing.

"Do you think that zebra dun of yours would take me to Sweetwater?"

"I don't know. She likes you well enough, but she doesn't like towns at all."

"You two make a fine pair," Ty muttered, combing through his wet hair with long fingers.

"Catch."

Reflexively Ty's hand flashed out and grabbed the small leather poke Janna had pulled from her baggy pants pocket.

"What's this?" he asked.

"Mad Jack's gold. You'll need it when you get to town. Or were you planning to work off whatever you buy?"

"I can't take gold from a thirteen-year-old girl."

Janna looked up briefly before she went back to arranging herbs for drying. "You aren't."

"What?"

"You aren't taking gold from a thirteen-year-old. I'm nineteen. I only told you I was thirteen so that you wouldn't suspect I was a woman."

"Sugar," drawled Ty, giving Janna a thorough up-and-down look, "you could have walked naked past me and I wouldn't have suspected anything at all. You're the least female female I've ever seen."

Janna's fingers tightened on the herbs as the barb went home, but she was determined not to show that she'd been hurt.

"Thank you," she said huskily. "I just took a leaf from Cascabel's book-hide in plain sight. The pony soldiers caught him way down south last year. He escaped from them. They went looking for him, expecting to run him down easily because there was no cover around. It was flat land with only a scattering of stunted mesquite. No place for a rabbit to hide, much less a man."

Ty listened in spite of his anger at having been deceived. As he listened, he tried to figure out why Janna's voice was so appealing to him. Finally he realized that she no longer was trying to conceal her voice's essentially feminine nature, a faintly husky music that tantalized his senses.

And she was nineteen, not thirteen.

Stop it, Ty told himself fiercely. She's all alone in the world. Any man who would take advantage of that isn't worthy of the name.

"Because the soldiers knew there was no place to hide, they didn't look," Janna continued. "Cascabel is as shrewd as Satan. He knew that the best place to hide is in plain sight, where no one would ever look. So when he was convinced that he couldn't outrun the soldiers and they would catch him in the open, he rolled in the dust, grabbed some mesquite branches and sat very still. The branches didn't cover him, but they gave the soldiers something familiar to look at-something they would never look at twice. And they didn't," Janna concluded. "They rode right by Cascabel, maybe a hundred feet away, and never saw him."

"Probably because Cascabel looks a hell of a lot more like a mesquite bush than you look like a woman."

"That's your opinion," Janna retorted, "but we both know how trustworthy your eyes are, don't we?"

Ty saw the reaction that Janna tried to hide. He smiled, feeling better than he had since he realized how badly he had been fooled. If his brothers ever found out what had happened, they would ride him until he screamed for mercy. Ty had always been the one the MacKenzie men turned to for advice on the pursuit and pleasuring of the fair sex.

He laughed aloud and felt his temper sweeten with every passing second. He was going to get some of his own back from the gray-eyed chameleon, and he was going to enjoy himself thoroughly in the process. She would rue the day she had fooled him into believing she was an effeminate boy.

"If you'd been any kind of a woman," Ty drawled very slowly, "I'd feel right ashamed of being fooled. But seeing as how you only say you're a girl, and I'm too much of a gentleman to ask you to prove it… I guess I'll just have to keep my doubts to myself."

"You? A gentleman?" Janna asked in rising tones of disbelief. She looked pointedly at his half-grown beard and soggy breechcloth. "From what I can see-and there's dam little I can't see-you look like a savage."

Ty's laugh wasn't quite so heartfelt this time. "Oh, I know I'm a gentleman for a fact, boy. And so do a lot of real ladies."

Mentally Janna compared herself to the sketch of her mother-loose, ragged clothes against stylish swirls of silk, Indian braids against carefully coif fed curls. The comparison was simply too painful. So was the fact that Ty had been taken with her mother's image and couldn't have been more blunt about the daughter's lack of feminine allure.

Unshed tears clawed at the back of Janna's eyelids, but the thought that Ty might catch her crying appalled her. Without a word she dusted off her hands and brushed past Ty, refusing even to look at him, knowing that for all her scathing comments to the contrary, his eyes were uncomfortably sharp when it came to assessing her mood.

When Janna was at the edge of the grassy area of the valley, she cupped her hands to her mouth and called out to Zebra, using the keening cry of a hawk. To human ears there was almost no difference in the sounds-to Zebra, it was a call as clear as a trumpet's. Within moments the mare was cantering through the grass towards Janna.

"Hello, pretty girl," Janna murmured. She stroked the mare's neck and pulled weeds from her long mane and tail. "Show me your hooves."

She worked slowly around the horse, touching each fetlock. Zebra presented each of her hooves in turn, standing patiently while Janna used a short, pointed stick to worry loose any mud or debris that had become caught between the hard outer hoof and the softer frog at the center.

"It would be easier with a steel hoof pick," Ty said.

Janna barely controlled a start. On the meadow grass Ty's bare feet had made no more sound than a shadow.

"If I bought a pick, people would wonder what I was planning to use it on. Only one other human being knows that I've tamed…" Janna's voice died when she realized that Ty as well as Mad Jack knew that she mingled with Lucifer's herd. "Could it be our secret?" she asked as she looked at Ty, her voice aching with restraint. "It's bad enough that I turn up from time to time with raw gold. If some of the men around here knew that I could get close to Lucifer, they'd hunt me down like a mad dog and use me to get their hands on him."

Ty looked at the face turned up toward him in silent pleading and felt as though he had been kicked in the stomach. The idea of using Janna to get close to Lucifer had been in the back of his mind since he had realized that Zebra was part of the big black stallion's harem.

They'd hunt me down like a mad dog and use me…

Before Ty realized what he was doing, he cupped Janna's chin reassuringly in his hand.

"I won't tell anyone," he said quietly. "I promise you, Janna. And I won't use you. I want that stud and I plan to have him-but not like that, not by making you feel you had betrayed a trust."

The heat of Janna's tears on his hand shocked Ty, but not as much as the butterfly softness of her lips brushing over his skin for an instant before she turned away.

"Thank you," she said huskily, her face hidden while she resumed working over Zebra's hoof. "And I'm sorry about what I said earlier. You're very much a gentleman, no matter what you're wearing."

Ty closed his eyes and fought against the tremor of sensation that was spreading out from the palm of his hand to the pit of his stomach and from there to the soles of his feet. Before he could prevent himself, he had lifted his hand to his lips. The taste of Janna's tears went to his head more quickly than a shot of whiskey, making him draw in a sharp breath.

You've been without a woman too long, he told himself as he fought to control a combination of tenderness and raw desire.

Yes-and the name of the cure is Janna Wayland.

"No," Ty said aloud harshly.

"What?" Janna said, looking up.

Ty wasn't watching her. He was standing rigid, his face drawn as though in pain. When she spoke, he opened his eyes. She wanted to protest the shadows she saw there, but he was already speaking.

"I'm not what you think," Ty said, his voice rough. "I'm too woman hungry to be a gentleman. Don't trust me, Janna. Don't trust me at all."