And she tasted him.
Anger. Power. Determination. And the darker tastes of man and desire.
“Ready?”
She blinked. The man was wrapping one end of the joined belts around his wrist. It was a big wrist but it matched the rest of him. His height. His shoulders. His powerful arms, ridged abdomen, long legs…
“Keep looking at me like that,” he said in a low voice, “you’re asking for trouble.”
A flush rose in Sienna’s face. “What’s your name?”
He looked at her as if she were crazy. Maybe she was, but before she stepped into space, real or imagined, it seemed she should at least know who he was.
“Does it matter?”
She turned, shot a glance at the yawning distance between them and the canyon floor. Then she looked at him.
“Yes,” she said stubbornly. “It does.”
Just when she thought he wasn’t going to answer, he shrugged those big shoulders.
“It’s Jesse.”
Sienna stared at him. “Jesse?”
“Jesse Blackwolf.”
“But—but—”
“You wanted my name. You’ve got it. Now, let’s get moving before that storm hits.”
“But…” she said again, and he grabbed her wrist.
“No more talking. You got that?”
She got it, all right. Besides, what could she say? How could she possibly tell him that he could not, absolutely could not be who he said he was, that Jesse Blackwolf, if he’d turned up, was in his sixties? So she kept quiet as he wrapped a section of the belt around her wrist, secured it, then gave it a tug that seemed to meet with his satisfaction.
“Do everything I do,” he said. “Concentrate on—” He grabbed her by the shoulders, hoisted her to her toes. “Listen to me, if you want to survive. The rules are simple.”
“Rules?” she said, with a nervous laugh.
“Rules. Five of them. Do not look down. Do not look up. Keep your eyes on your hands and feet and on me. Pay attention to what I say. Obey what I say, without question. Understand?”
She didn’t have enough saliva in her mouth to answer. Instead, she nodded her head, but the truth was, the only thing she actually understood was that she’d never been so scared in her life.
He turned his back to her and took a step forward.
“Wait!”
He looked over his shoulder, face taut with impatience.
“What now?”
“How—I mean, what, exactly, am I supposed to do?”
“I just told you.”
“No. I mean—I mean, I’ve seen people climb rocks. Should I search for handholds? Dig my toes into the crevices? Stay in one place until I’ve found the next—”
“Are you deaf, woman? You do what I do. Nothing else. And stop trying to analyze everything. This is a mountain. The ground is forty feet down. There’s a score of places in between where we can break our necks.” His eyes narrowed. “You’re just going to have to trust me.”
Trust him? A man who couldn’t possibly exist, standing with her on a mountain she couldn’t possibly have climbed? A man who snapped orders like a general but looked like a savage and thought that the way to handle a woman who asked questions and proved she had a brain was to kiss her into submission?
“You have no other choice.”
It was as if he’d heard what she was thinking.
And he was right. What could she do but step off into space behind him? Maybe she was dreaming. Or hallucinating. Or whatever you did when you were unconscious. Maybe, indeed, but she was stuck up here, anyway, with no way down except this.
A whimper inched its way into her throat. She tried to stop it. Too late. Jesse Blackwolf, the man who called himself Jesse Blackwolf, had obviously heard it.
“Scared?”
What was the logic in lying? Still, she wasn’t going to sound pathetic about it.
“Damned right, I’m scared!”
He smiled. It didn’t last more than a second; it was the barely perceptible lift of one corner of his mouth, but it was a smile and it changed him from terrifying male to gorgeous man—and was she crazy, noticing such a thing at a moment like this?
“Good,” he said. “You’d have to be a fool not to be scared, and a fool’s the last person I’d want tied to me right now.” He reached out, one big hand cupping her chin. “Obey me. Be a good girl and I promise, I’ll get you down safely.”
Obey him. Be a good girl. Even now, with the coppery taste of fear on her tongue, Sienna almost laughed. Nobody had said anything remotely like that to her since she was twelve, but this didn’t seem the time or place to correct him on what her Women’s Studies prof called gender issues that still existed more than thirty years after the women’s lib movement.
“Is it a deal?”
She nodded. He leaned forward and brushed his mouth lightly over hers.
“For luck,” he said.
And then he turned his back to her and stepped off the ledge.
At least, that was the way it looked.
He hadn’t stepped off it, though. His head and shoulders appeared as if from nowhere, along with an extended hand.
“Let’s go,” he said briskly.
“I’m coming,” Sienna said. And she would—in a decade or two. Right now, her feet seemed glued to the sacred stone.
“Remember what I said? Just do what I tell you to do.”
“Something you should know about me,” she said with forced lightness as she inched forward. “I never do what anyone tells me to do. Especially a man.”
“You want to burn bras, do it somewhere else.”
Okay. This time, frightened as she was, she did laugh at the old-fashioned phrase.
“Good. Relax. Take a deep breath. Another. And give me your hand.”
“In a minute.”
“Now,” he commanded. “Hear that thunder? The storm’s getting closer. Bad weather’s not a pleasant thing to experience on an exposed ledge.”
A convincing roar of thunder followed his words.
“Sienna! Give me your hand.”
Who could possibly argue with such authority?
Not me, Sienna thought, and she took Jesse’s hand and stepped off the cliff.
A gentle rain had started by the time they reached the canyon floor.
As for the climb down…She had no clear memory of it. Halfway down, scree coming loose under her feet, fingernails torn off by desperately digging into cracks that only a very generous person would call handholds, she’d finally taken Jesse’s best advice.
She’d stopped thinking.
It had been easier after that, but he’d still twice saved her from plummeting to earth.
Each misstep had left her hanging, one hand clutching the rocky face of the mountain while her feet dangled in midair. Each time, he’d clasped his fingers tightly around her wrist, his face contorting with determination