Outlaw

15

Ten was right about the length of the drive to September Canyon. And the silence. Diana slept most of the way despite the roughness of the road, telling Ten two things. The first was that she trusted his driving skills, but he already knew that. The second was that she must have slept damned little the night before to be able to sleep so soundly now in the rolling frost seat of the pickup truck.

When Ten could take it no longer, he said, "Diana."

Her eyes opened. They were dark, clear, and then-color was an indigo as bottomless as twilight.

"Pounce's purring must have kept you up all night," Ten said, watching the road. One look at Diana's eyes had been enough.

"Pounce hunts at night." The thought of the cat gliding through darkness in search of prey reminded Diana of Nevada. "Like Nevada."

"He lived as a warrior too long. Like me. And like me, Nevada will heal," Ten said matter-of-factly. "It just takes time."

Diana made a sound that could have meant anything.

Ten waited.

No more sounds came from the other side of the truck.

"I was glad to see that Nevada and Luke didn't have to sort things out the hard way," Ten continued. "They'll get along fine now that life has knocked some sense into both of their hard heads."

Diana said nothing.

With a hunger Ten wasn't aware of, he watched her for a few instants before the road claimed his attention again. Telling himself to be patient, he waited for her to speak. And he waited.

And waited.

Ten was still waiting when they forded Picture Wash and bumped up September Canyon to the overhang. It wasn't the first time he and Diana had gone for hours without conversation, but it was the first time the silence hadn't been comfortable. Getting out ofthe truck didn't increase Diana's desire to talk. They unloaded supplies with a minimum of words, each doing his or her accustomed part around the camp.

Without a word, Ten carried the two bedrolls to the edge of the overhang, dragged two camp mattresses over and began making up the single, oversize bedroll he and Diana would share. He sensed her watching him, but she said nothing. When he straightened and looked around, he saw Diana shrugging into her backpack, clearly preparing to go out and sketch in the rapidly failing light. His arm shot out and his fingers curled hard around her wrist.

"Dammit!" Ten said. "You were the one who came to me! I never promised you anything!"

Diana's eyes were wide and dark against her pale face. For a long, stretching moment she looked at Ten, letting the truth echo around her like thunder while painful lightning searched through her body and soul.

"Yes," she said huskily. "I know."

Ten's hands tightened. Her agreement should have made him feel better, but it didn't. He kept remembering the moment when she had looked at him with eyes still dazed by her first taste of sexual pleasure and whispered that she loved him. Now her eyes were filled with pain. He had never felt another person's pain so clearly, as clearly as his own.

"Listen to me," Ten said roughly. "The pleasure you feel when we have sex-that isn't love. It will wear off. It always does. But until it does, there's no reason you shouldn't enjoy it to the fullest."

The slight flinching of Diana's eyelids was the only betrayal of her emotions, "That's very kind of you, Tennessee."

Her soft, even voice scored Ten like a whip.

"Kind? I'm not some damn charity worker. I'm a man and I enjoy sex with you a hell of a lot more than I've ever enjoyed it with any woman. What we have in bed is damned rare and I know it even if you don't!"

Diana looked up into the blazing clarity of Ten's eyes. She didn't doubt that he meant exactly what he had said. She drew a deep breath, drinking his complex truth to the last bittersweet drop. Pleasure, not love. But a rare pleasure, one he valued.

"I'm glad," she said finally.

And that, too, was a complex, bittersweet truth.

Ten should have been relieved at Diana's acknowledgment that what they shared in bed wasn't love. But he wasn't relieved. She understood, she agreed- and somehow she had never been farther away from him, even the first day when she had turned and run from him.

Swearing beneath his breath, Ten stood with his fingers locked around Diana's wrist and wondered savagely how he and she could be so painfully honest with each other and yet somehow allow an important truth to slide through their fingers like rain through sand, sinking down and down and down, farther out of reach with every second.

"To hell with talking," he said savagely.

Ten bent his arm, bringing Diana hard against his body. His tongue searched the surprised softness of her mouth with urgent movements. The hunger that had been just beneath his surface blazed up, shortening his breath, making his blood run heavily, hardening his body in a rushing instant that he felt all the way to his heels; but Diana was stiff in his arms, vibrating with emotions that had little to do with desire.

"Don't fight me, baby," Ten said heavily against Diana's mouth, his voice as dark and hot as his kiss had been. "What we have is too rare and too good to waste on anger."

Ten probed the center of Diana's ear with the hot tip of his tongue, feeling her shiver helplessly in response. He probed again and was rewarded by another sensuous shiver. With a low sound of triumph, he caught the rim of her ear between his teeth and bit delicately, repeatedly, demanding and also pleading for her response.

The intensity and need within Ten reached past Diana's pain to the love beneath. She tried to speak didn't trust her uncertain hold on her emotions slid her arms around Ten's lean waist instead. His breath came out in a barely audible sigh of relief when he felt her soften against him.

"Diana," Ten whispered, hugging her in return. "Baby, I don't want to hurt you. When you gave yourself to me that first time, looking right at me, knowing to the last quarter inch how much I wanted you…" Memory lanced through Ten, making him shudder. "Yet you held out your arms to me. No one has ever trusted me like that. I was so afraid of hurting you I almost didn't go through with it."

She looked at him with startled blue eyes.

"It's true," Ten said, easing his ringers into Diana's cool, soft hair. "I was arguing with myself all the way down into your arms. Then you took me so perfectly and I knew I wouldn't hurt you. Your body was made for mine. And somehow you knew it, too, didn't you? That's why you watched me with such curiosity and hunger, day after day, until I thought I would go crazy. Then you asked me to kiss you and I was sure I would go crazy. You fit my hands perfectly, my arms, my mouth, my body. I knew it was going to be so damned good. I was right. It was good then and it's even better now, each time better than the last."

The words caressed Diana even more than the heat of Ten's body or the pressure of his fingers rubbing slowly down her spine.

"Is it that way for you, too?" Ten asked. "Tell me it's that way for you, too."

He bent to kiss Diana's neck with barely restrained force, arching her against his body, letting her feel his length and what she had done to him.

"Baby?"

"Yes," she said as she gave herself to his power. "You must know it is, Ten. Don't you know?"

"I do now," he whispered against her hair, and then he whispered it again.

Slowly Ten straightened. He held Diana gently against his chest, just held her, as though he were afraid to ask for any more than she had already given.

And he was.

"Go ahead and sketch while you still have light," Ten said finally, kissing Diana's eyelids, brushing his lips gently across her mouth, caresses without demand. "I'll open the new box of shards and see what the grads found over the weekend."

Shaking, feeling like crying in protest when Ten turned away, hungry for him in a way that eclipsed anything she had ever felt before, Diana looked blindly out over September Canyon. She couldn't force herself to walk away from the overhang and the man she loved more with every day.

And with every day she was closer to losing him.

The pleasure you feel when we have sex-that isn't love. It will wear off. It always does.

But it wouldn't for her. Diana knew that as surely as she had known she could trust Ten not to force anything more from her than she wanted to give. She had been right. He had taken nothing from her that she hadn't given willingly. It wasn't Ten's fault that he didn't want everything she had to give to a man.

Though Diana knew sketching would be impossible, she took off her backpack, brought out her pad, opened it and sat down on the bedroll she would share that night with Ten. Adrift on the cool wind flowing down from the mesa top, she looked out over the canyon she loved. She saw neither trees nor cliffs nor even the wild beauty of the setting sun, only the image of the man she had come to love even more than the land.

In her mind she saw Ten's face with eerie precision, each line that sun and wind had etched around his eyes, eyes whose probing clarity had first unnerved, then fascinated her. The same was true of Ten's powerful, unmistakably male body; first it had frightened and then finally it had fascinated her.

Now, in the clear light of pain, Diana acknowledged what she had previously been too caught up within her own fears and needs to see-the shadows that lay beneath the clarity of Ten's eyes, the reserve that lay beneath his passion, the internal walls he had built as carefully as an Anasazi cliff fortress, walls keeping her out, his own words describing solitude.

He lived as a warrior too long. Like me. And like me, Nevada will heal. It just takes time.

But Ten hadn't healed. Not wholly.

She wanted to heal him. She needed to. But there were so few weeks left to remove scars that were years deep, a wounding so old, so accustomed a part of the man she loved, that Ten himself didn't even realize that he hadn't healed. He had scarred over, which wasn't the same thing at all.

"Such a pensive look," Ten said. Sitting down next to Diana, he glanced at the drawing in her lap. It was a close-up of September Canyon's ruins, detailing the precarious eyelash of a trail that led from the cliff dwellings up the face of the cliff to the mesa above. "Are you thinking about the Anasazi again, trapped within their own creation?"

"And time," Diana said, her voice husky, aching as she flipped slowly through the sketchbook. "Time is another kind of trap."

"Why? Are you getting behind in your sketching?"

"No. I'll be finished well within the deadline."

"Deadline?"

"The middle of August. That's when my contract with the Rocking M ends."

Ten looked deeply into Diana's eyes, wanting to protest what lay beneath her quiet words: when the contract ended, she would leave the Rocking M and Tennessee Blackthorn.

Diana looked only at the sketch in her lap, praying that Ten would reach past the wall he had built and ask her to stay without the pretense of archaeological work between them.

Ask me to stay, Ten. Ask me as a man asks a woman he wants and needs and might someday love. Please, love, ask me.

Silently, Ten's fingertips traced the line of Diana's chin, tilting her face up to his lips. He kissed her slowly, seducing her mouth for long moments before accepting the invitation of her parted lips and warm tongue. With controlled urgency he began undressing her, only to discover that he was being undressed, as well. Relief coursed through him almost as violently as desire. He kissed her again, drinking deeply, urgently, from the woman who haunted his sleep even when she was lying by his side.

By the time the kiss ended, their breathing was ragged and their clothes were scattered randomly around the bedroll. Ten's hand slid from Diana's ankle to the apex of her thighs. The deep, sultry welcome of her body made blood hammer in his veins until he could hardly breathe.

"It's a little soon to be mentally packing your gear, isn't it?" Ten asked in a low, rough voice as he caressed Diana, calling forth a husky moan and a tiny, searing melting. "A lot could happen in the next few weeks."

"Could it?" Diana asked, hope leaping even more hotly than desire within her body.

"Sure. The Rocking M is going to need some expert advice on excavating the kiva you discovered. Who better than you to give it?"

Before Diana could speak, Ten took her mouth. The slowly building pressure of his kiss arched her across his hard forearm. She gave herself to the kiss and to the man, feeling desire and regret, caring and hunger, passion and restraint in Ten's embrace, every emotion except the love that filled her until she ached.

When the long kiss ended, Ten lifted his mouth with tangible reluctance.

"There's no reason not to extend your contract."

"Luke might see it differently."

"September Canyon is my land. The dig is being underwritten by my money. If I want it to go beyond the middle of August, it will."

Diana shuddered from desire and grief mixed together, feeling as though she had been turned inside out until everything she was and could be lay exposed to the cool sunset light. Bittersweet understanding of the difference between her own needs and Ten's knifed through her, and in its wake an anguished acceptance.

She wanted his laughter, his grief, his victories, his defeats, his silence, his conversations. She wanted his body, his mind, his children and a lifetime of tomorrows. He wanted the passion that ran like invisible lightning between them, and he wanted every bit of it for as long as it lasted.

She loved him. He did not love her. But she could take from him one of the things she wanted and give him the only thing he wanted in return.

Diana rolled onto her side and began running her hands down Ten's muscular torso, caressing and citing him with the same motions.

"No, there's no reason at all not to extend the contract," Diana said, finding and teasing a flat male nipple with her teeth, "except common sense."

"What does that mean?"

"Simple. As simple as this."

Her hands closed around the thick evidence of Ten's desire and he groaned with leaping need. She continued talking as she caressed the length of his body, scattering his thoughts, taking away everything but the heat of her mouth.

"The Rocking M-" Diana's tongue probed Ten's navel "-can't afford to pay me." She closed her teeth on the tightly flexed muscles that joined neck and shoulder. A shudder moved the length of his body. "Not as much as I earn being an assistant professor at the university."

"We could-work something out. Weekends. Vacations." Ten's breath came in with a hissing sound as Diana nuzzled his ear, teasing, biting. "Part-time work. Something."

Diana's eyes closed against a wave of pain, but her mouth and hands remained gentle, loving Ten, sharing with and returning to him the gift of passion he had given so generously to her. After a few moments die could trust herself to speak again.

"You don't have to pay me to come to the Rocking M." She bit the hard muscle of Ten's biceps in a sensual punishment that was just short of pain. "All you have to do is ask. Or you can come to Boulder when you feel like it."

"Diana…"

She waited, hope penned within her acceptance like a wild animal.

Ten made a half-angry, half-helpless sound.

She let out her breath in a long, soundless sigh, knowing acceptance had been right and hope had been wrong.

"I agree," Diana said softly. "It's better to keep it just a summer affair."

"That's not what I said."

"No. It's what you meant."

"Dammit," Ten said roughly, "I learned long ago that I'm piss-poor husband material."

"Did you?" Diana asked, lifting her head, looking into Ten's narrowed eyes. "Or did you just decide sex isn't worth all the inconvenience of marriage?"

Bleak gray eyes searched Diana's face.

Smiling sadly, she turned away and let her mouth slide down the warm, muscular tension of his abdomen. "It's all right, Tennessee. I learned something long ago, too. Then you came along and taught me that I hadn't learned everything."

Diana's cheek rested for a moment on a dense cushion of black, curly hair. Her lips brushed flesh that was hot, smooth, hard, pulsing with the swift beat of Ten's life. When she moved her head to test the resilience of his thigh with her teeth, Ten made a deep sound. When her head turned again and the tip of her tongue touched him curiously, his breath came out in a low groan that was also her name.

"If I made you a promise," Diana said, biting Ten lightly once more, stroking the thick muscles of his thighs, skimming over without ever really touching the hard, violently sensitive flesh that she had aroused, "would you trust me to keep it? Would you trust me not to ask you for anything more, ever?"

Blindly Ten reached for his jeans, his fingers seeking the familiar packet, finding it.

"Tennessee," Diana whispered, brushing her lips over the musky cushion of hair, touching his hot flesh with the tip of her tongue. "Do you trust my promise?"

He groaned as a fine sheen of passion broke over his skin. His right hand clenched, crumpling the packet. "Baby, it's damned hard to think when you're doing that"

"Then don't think. Just answer from the instinctive part of you. Do you trust me to keep my promise about never asking for one more thing from you?"

"Yes," Ten said hoarsely, knowing as he spoke that it was true. He could trust Diana's word. "What do you-want?"

"This."

The sound Ten made was a combination of surprise and searing pleasure as Diana's mouth tasted him with lingering sensual curiosity.

"When I first asked you to kiss me," she whispered against his hot skin, "it was because I wanted to be able to lead a normal life, and that meant responding to men the way other women did. And it worked, up to a point. But then I began trying to imagine other men touching me the way you had, and I knew I wouldn't be able to go through with it."

"Fear?" Ten asked, the only word he could force past the passionate constriction in his throat.

Diana shook her head. Tendrils of silky hair brushed over Ten's skin in the instant before her mouth circled him in a caress that took what little breath he had remaining, tasting him, loving him as she never had before. When the caress deepened, Ten's whole body flushed with wild heat. She held him for long moments, savoring him, loving the wild-ness coursing through him at her caress. Slowly, reluctantly, she released him from tender captivity.

She lifted her head and met the smoldering brilliance of Ten's eyes. The look in them made her body melt. He felt it, knew that she wanted him as wildly as he wanted her, and had to close his eyes against the force of the need twisting through his body.

"It's not fear that will keep me away from other men," Diana said finally, biting Ten with great gentleness, feeling the wave of desire that swept through him almost as clearly as he did. "It's the fact that I don't want them. Other men wouldn't have rain-colored eyes that blaze with desire. Other men wouldn't have a scar below their jawline or one on their shoulder, their hip, the inside of their left thigh. Other men wouldn't be able to handle a brute and a kitten with the same ease. Other men wouldn't look like you, feel like you…taste like you."

Ten made a hoarse sound of intense pleasure as the moist heat of Diana's mouth caressed him again. He called her name roughly, feeling the world being stripped away with each silky movement of her tongue.

"Make love without barriers for the weeks I have left on the Rocking M," she said. "Be completely naked inside me. No matter what happens afterward, there won't be any demands, any regrets." Slowly Diana slid up Ten's body until the thick length of his arousal skimmed her softness, making her breath break. "Ten?"

His own breath came in with a harsh, ripping sound as she melted over him. "I'm not sure I can hold back with you, baby," he said roughly. "You could get pregnant. Have you thought of that?"

"Yes," Diana said, shivering, melting, searing him with her need. "Many times."

Ten's right hand opened with a savage movement, sending the small packet tumbling onto the ground. He lay still but for the elemental tremors of desire coursing through his hard body.

"Last chance," he said thickly.

Her hips moved. Sultry fire licked over Ten. Shaking with a hunger he had never felt before, Ten knew he was going to take what he must have, what she was asking him for, what they both wanted until it was agony not to have it; but he had never taken a woman like this before, no barriers, nothing except violently sensitive skin and a need so great it kept him on the breaking edge of self-control.

When Ten's aroused flesh found the incredible softness and heat waiting for him, the sensation was so intense he couldn't breathe. He felt each separate pulse of Diana's response as he parted the soft flesh, sheathing himself within her slowly, deliberately, deeply, sharing her body and his own in an exquisite intimacy that was just short of anguish.

"I've never-been like this-before," Ten said thickly, his breath breaking. "Naked. Nothing held back. It's-I can't-"

He went utterly still, fighting desperately not to lose control.

"Tennessee," Diana whispered, looking into the silver blaze of his eyes, feeling the first waves of pleasure ravish her. "Give me your baby, Tennessee."

A sound of hunger and ecstasy was torn from Ten's throat, and then ecstasy alone, Diana's name repeated in shattered syllables as he gave himself again and again to the sweet violence of a union unlike any he had ever known.