Texas Bride. Carol Finch
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That would’ve evened the score between us,” he teased, straight-faced. “Now that’s what it’ll take to get rid of me. Go ahead, strip naked and I’ll backtrack to town.”
Maddie’s disbelieving snort transformed into a chuckle. “You are, without a doubt, the most outrageous, perplexing, disagreeable and impossible man I have ever met. I swear, it seems you have made it your mission to deliberately shock and provoke me.”
“Sticks and stones, Garret,” he said with a careless shrug. “But regardless, I’m going to take the roundabout route to Fort Griffin so we can avoid your cohorts.”
“How is it that you know this area so well when you claimed you never trekked across it?”
Her question convinced Jonah that she had finally given up her objections to his friends-and-cohorts comments. “I didn’t say I wasn’t familiar with the area,” he corrected grimly. “I said that I preferred to avoid it.” He stared stonily at her. “I’m half Comanche. The half that counts. This is where I grew up. This was the Comanchería, until the army descended like hornets to slaughter Comanche warriors, old men, women and children, and march the survivors to Indian Territory.”
Maddie flinched when she noticed the hard expression that settled on his rugged features. She had unintentionally hit an exposed nerve. Quite frankly, she was surprised that he had opened up to her, since he had refused to do so earlier. Jonah was a prickly man who had built walls around himself and rarely let others close enough to know and understand him.
“I was fourteen when I watched my father die,” he muttered as he stared into the distance. “I was fifteen when I was herded onto a train with the rest of the Comanche children and shipped to Pennsylvania to a boarding school designed to train us to think and behave like whites. I was seventeen when I sneaked away, took a new name and made my way back to Texas to work any job I could get in order to survive.”
His gaze swung back to her and she could see bitter emotion shimmering in those emerald depths. “When I look across this frontier I see ghosts of the past and hear the anguished cries of a people who were forced off their sacred land. It’s like walking over graves, princess. There are too many painful memories, too much resentment.”
“All the more reason for you to turn back,” Maddie murmured as tears of compassion clouded her vision. “If this ordeal with Christina ends badly, I’ll be tempted to walk away from a host of bad memories, too.”
Maddie curled her arm around Jonah’s neck and pulled him forward to press her lips gently to his. She kissed him because her heart went out to him, because the swift taste she’d had of him earlier hadn’t lasted long enough to appease her. In addition, this rapidly developing craving to make emotional and physical contact with him overwhelmed her.
Her senses filled to overflowing as his mouth moved upon hers. Sensual lightning flickered through her as she breathed him in, tasted him, savored the tantalizing sensations she had never experienced in her limited encounters with men. His darting tongue delved deeper, stealing her breath, then returning it to her in the most arousing manner imaginable. Desire intensified until her mind was reeling and her body was burning with unfamiliar need and simmering with erotic pleasure.
Suddenly he jerked away and retreated into his own space—long before she was ready to give him up. Maddie was so unprepared for his abrupt withdrawal that she nearly dived off her horse before she could regain her balance. She clutched at the pommel of the saddle and dragged herself upright.
Sweet mercy, when Jonah Danhill decided to let loose and kiss a woman senseless he could knock her world completely off-kilter!
“Why’d you do that?” he demanded in a strangled voice.
“Why’d you kiss me earlier?” she retorted promptly.
“To snap you out of your fear-induced trance and get you moving,” he said reasonably. “So why’d you do it?”
She smiled mischievously as she took the lead, though she had no idea where in the devil she was going. “Because I have seen you naked already.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe it means that, having seen all there is to see of you, I find you irresistible.”
“I doubt it. And for the record, two kisses is two too many. From now on, this is strictly a business arrangement. You’re paying me to escort you on the first leg of your journey. Simple and as temporary as that.”
“I thought you said you were tagging along, just for the chance of seeing me in the altogether.” She tossed a cheeky grin over her shoulder, finding that she enjoyed saucy flirtation—with Jonah, specifically. “I’ve got news for you, Danhill. I’m not going to bare my body and soul until long past Fort Griffin.”
“My loss, Garret. I’ll be long gone by then.”
And he would, too, Jonah promised himself as he trotted past Maddie to ensure she didn’t lead them in the wrong direction. He was not tramping deeper into Comanche territory to revisit sacred ground that might stir up another caldron of bubbling resentment.
He would convince Maddie to hire an experienced guide—or at the very least, take the stage—because she was not going to go it alone, no matter what she said to the contrary.
On that determined thought Jonah picked up the pace and headed due west. He didn’t slow down until they had galloped across a wide-open meadow and took cover in the thicket of cottonwoods and oaks that lined the meandering river. He knew of one place in particular that provided a natural fortress where they could bed down without worrying about being set upon by the bushwhacking duo.
Jonah kept a close eye on Maddie, bewildered by his sudden sensitivity and consideration of her needs. Each time her face became flushed and she squirmed uncomfortably in the saddle, he halted to let her rest and sip from his canteen. She held up well, all things considered, and she matched his relentless pace without complaining, not even once.
Her only near brush with disaster in eight hours came when her mare, spooked by a coiled bull snake, bolted and tried to run away with her. Being an experienced rider, she managed to rein in her horse before it tried to leap the creek and head for higher ground.
Maddie sent Jonah a questioning glance when he veered toward an oversize briar patch. It stood in the shadows of a rugged stone cliff beside the stream they had been following.
“As a boy, we camped here many times while hunting buffalo,” Jonah explained as he dismounted. “It doesn’t look like much—”
“I’ll say it doesn’t.” Maddie stared dubiously at the outcropping of rock on the cliff. “Looks like the perfect place to meet up with rattlers, mountain lions or wolves.”
Jonah tethered the horses, grabbed his gear and gestured for Maddie to follow him up. He climbed a winding trail that was camouflaged by the briar patch and led upward to an inconspicuous spring tucked into a deep crevice of the ridge. Setting aside his rifle, pallet and saddlebags, he waited for Maddie to make her way up the steep incline.
“You have to know where this secluded spring is or you’d never find it.” He directed her attention to the inviting pool when she stepped onto the flat stone cliff top.
Maddie sighed appreciatively as she assessed the hollowed-out basin of rock tucked beneath a jagged sandstone bluff. It resembled a gigantic bathtub. She pivoted beside him to admire the panoramic view of the lush valley below, alive with colorful wildflowers and spring grasses.
“Spectacular,” she commented as she sank down cross-legged to rest. “You could see a herd of buffalo coming from five miles away.”
Jonah stared out over the land—and remembered too much. “Yeah, if the buffalo weren’t practically extinct after the army ordered their slaughter to starve out the Comanche, Kiowa and Apache.”
Maddie could tell that this trek down memory lane was taking its toll on Jonah. Had she known what she was asking of him she never would have