“Easy,” he muttered as he helped her keep her footing. “The ground is unstable here.”
Patience whirled on him, peeling his hand from her arm as if it were scabrous. “Let me go. Don’t touch me.”
Because they were alone again he let her go. As he watched her walk away a little distance into the desert, he listened to a stealthy retreat. Snake’s step was familiar, and Custer’s slight limp unmistakable.
Taking little pride in his performance, he waited until the sounds faded completely before he went to her. “O’Hara.” He stood at her back, waiting for some sign, some reaction to his brutal burlesque of Jekyll and Hyde. “O’Hara, look at me.”
She didn’t turn. Her back seemed straighter, more rigid.
“This wasn’t what you think.” Indian touched her shoulder, meaning to turn her into his arms to justify, to comfort. “Let me explain.”
She shrugged him off, swayed with the effort, then straightened again, assuming the ramrod posture. Drawing a shuddering breath, with the back of a shaking hand she wiped her mouth viciously. Her hand dropped stiffly to her side as an unnatural stillness enveloped her.
Indian knew she was in pain, the silent, gut-wrenching, tearless pain of humiliating helplessness. Pain he caused her.
Cursing himself and the world, he turned her into his arms. When she fought him, he let her, stoically suffering the claw of broken and unbroken nails, the pummel of poor, sore hands. He knew it wouldn’t be for long. She’d fought him hard and well, as he’d wanted, but she was near the end of her strength. He waited for this last spurt of rebellion to end, speaking softly to her in a nearly wordless murmur as he waited.
When the inertia of mind-destroying fatigue overwhelmed her, when she was still again and quiet, he gathered her nearer. That there was not even token resistance proved how close she’d come to total collapse, how complete the despair that sapped the last of her vitality. Repulsed by circumstances that brought her to this, and for his necessary role in it, Indian tucked her head into his shoulder, stroking her hair, offering what respite he could.
He suspected this was a rare occurrence in any circumstance. An uncommon moment when this spirited woman faltered, in need of restoring peace to her ravaged mind and body.
She’d weathered more than he’d thought possible. When he’d caught his first glimpse of her pinioned in the glare of unmerciful headlights, she was small and fragile, her delicate heart-shaped face almost overwhelmed by a lioness’s mane of hair like flame. He wouldn’t have given a penny for her chances of outlasting the savagery he knew was coming. Yet he couldn’t intervene, not then. The odds in her favor escalated when she’d proven immune to the head games his fellow riders were so adept at playing.
The derringer was a surprise. He didn’t expect it, but from the moment she’d palmed it like a pro, he knew this woman was a breed apart.
The pièce de résistance was Blue Doggie. No one in his right mind would have believed that before Indian could reach her, this scrap of a woman, brutalized physically and mentally, could fell a man more than twice her size in one two-fisted uppercut.
She’d endured beyond human endurance and hadn’t broken, until Indian took it upon himself to see to her welfare. Until Indian, in his own inimitable style, brought her to the brink. To this silent suffering.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered into her hair, and the hard shuddering that shook her finally stopped.
With the flat of her palm, Patience pushed away from him, her face was bleak. “No, I’m sorry, for being weak. It won’t happen again.”
“This isn’t weakness, it’s being human and civilized. But if it were a matter of strength, I’ve seen men who considered themselves far stronger than you could ever be break under less.”
“You misunderstand me, Indian.” She turned a diamond-hard gaze at him. “I make no apologies for this. I’ve seen enough and done enough in my life to know that there are situations beyond our control, and times when the spirit and body fail us. My weakness was believing in you even a little. I won’t make that mistake again.
“I’m not a complete fool.” Her arms hung tensely at her sides, her fingers flexed, a scrap of rawhide tumbled to the ground before they curled again into tight fists. A mouth made for laughter thinned to a grim line. “As mercuric as you are, I do know what you’ve spared me.”
“Do you?” he interjected quietly. “Do you, indeed?”
“Yes.” She spat the word at him. “I know.”
“Such confidence,” Indian mocked. “Such blind certainty.” He took a step closer. With a finger beneath her chin he lifted her face to meet her gaze again. “They were out there, Snake and Custer, the worst of the lot, watching, slavering over a tempting morsel.”
Patience swung around to look to the road where six bikers lounged on Beauty’s hood, or hunkered around her on the ground. Bottles flashed in the light, drunken laughter spilled over the desert. Stumbling across her misfortune offered the perfect excuse for a binge.
“There are six by the car,” she said. “No one was here. No one was watching.”
“They were here.”
“How do you know? How could you?”
“I knew.”
“Ah! You’re psychic? Telepathic, perhaps? Superhuman?” The latter was drawled contempt.
“Neither.” He refused to rise to her baiting. “I’m a simple man, with simple skills.”
Regarding him, she remembered how he held himself aloof from the others. How no one challenged his claim. He rode with them, lived by their laws, but he was not one of them. She was sure of it. Even in rage and terror she’d perceived him as separate. Different.
Six bikers and an Indian.
“Who are you?” she whispered. “What are you?”
“A simple man called Indian. No more. No less.”
“No,” she denied emphatically. “Not simple. Never simple.”
“All right.” He nodded. “If you wish, not simple.”
She recalled when she thought him as inscrutable as the saguaro, now she decided the saguaro lost, hands down. “Tell me how you knew these men were watching.”
Indian shrugged a shoulder, bare beyond the edge of his vest. “I’m a tracker. A good one. My grandfather taught me to see things others don’t see, to hear things they don’t hear, to know things they will never know.
“Custer and Snake came, not as secretly as they thought, seeking an excuse to take you from me. They will if we don’t play this right.” He stroked her hair. Mesmerized, he watched it glide through his fingers, glistening like dark fire in the moonlight.
Red hair was prized by the bikers. Because of it she was a trophy coveted by too many men. Regretfully his fingers tangled in silk, holding her, keeping her, ignoring her hand at his wrist. “I can’t fight them all.”
Patience ceased her silent rebuff of his caress. With her hand at his wrist and the steady throb of his pulse beneath her fingertips, she stared up at him. “Take me from you? They would do that?”
“Yes.”
“But your laws, your precious biker laws, what happens to them?”
“They apply, but only if we are believed.”
“You mean they have to believe that I’m truly your woman.” She caught a ragged breath, her tongue moved nervously over dry lips. “They have to believe that you’re my lover. Rapist,