Shannon’s color heightened, but she didn’t look away for more than an instant before her glance was drawn back to Whip. His sun-colored hair caught light with each motion he made. Thick, fair, shiny, his hair made Shannon itch to sink her fingers into it. Only then would she find out if it felt as warm and silky as it looked.
Whip glanced up, wondering what had caught Shannon’s attention so much that she sat without moving. When he realized that he was the source of her fascination, his eyes narrowed and his pulse kicked hard. There was approval in Shannon’s eyes, and a sensual curiosity that aroused Whip as much as a hungry kiss would have.
Damnation. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her she could look at me all she likes.
Something is growing fast, and it’s not my hat size.
With an effort Whip forced himself to look anywhere but at the sapphire eyes that were watching him with luminous pleasure.
«How did you come to Echo Basin?» Whip asked.
For a moment the question didn’t register on Shannon. Then she blinked and looked down at her coffee cup.
«Silent John brought me here seven years ago.»
«You must have been a child.»
«I was husband-high and had no relatives who wanted me. Even before the war…» Shannon shrugged. «A lot of children were orphaned.»
«Eve, my brother’s wife, was like that. She came west on an orphan train and was bought by two old gamblers to make their lives easier.» Whip looked at Shannon. «Echo Basin must have been a harsh place for you.»
Surprise showed on Shannon’s face. She shook her head, making the mahogany lights in her hair gleam.
«It’s better than where I came from,» she said. «Here I’m beholden to no one for my bread and salt.»
Whip waited, but Shannon said nothing more on the subject of her past or Echo Basin.
«What about you, Whip? How did you end up here?»
He smiled slightly. That was a question few westerners dared to ask a man.
On the other hand, he had just asked her precisely that question.
«Turnabout is fair play, is that it?» Whip asked.
«Unless you mind?»
«Not as long as you’re the one doing the asking. I came to Echo Basin because I’d never been here before.»
Shannon frowned slightly. «You sound like there aren’t many places you haven’t been.»
«There aren’t. I’m a yondering man. I’ve been all over the world.»
«Truly?»
Whip smiled. «Truly.»
«Have you seen the pyramids of Egypt?»
«I saw them,» Whip said.
«What are they like?»
«Big. They rise out of the desert all pitted and racked by time. There’s a city nearby, a place where women go veiled from head to heels so that only their eyes show.»
Shannon made a surprised sound. «Just their eyes?»
Whip nodded. «You would be a sultan’s prize, honey girl. Eyes as blue as heaven itself.»
And a walk that’s hotter than hell, he added to himself.
But Whip wasn’t about to say it aloud. If Shannon knew just how much he wanted her, Whip doubted that she would be sitting so at ease across the small table from him.
«Paris,» Shannon said. «Have you seen it?»
«Paris, London, Madrid, Rome, Shanghai…I’ve seen them, and more besides. Do you like cities?»
«I don’t know. I haven’t been in one for years and years.»
Shannon looked past Whip to the strips of light coming between the ill-fitting shutters.
«But I think,» she said slowly, «having that many people pressing close would wear on me.»
«Are you eager to find out?»
«No. I only asked about cities because the history books are always going on about Paris and London and Rome. They’re the only places I could think of. And China, of course.»
Whip’s eyes took on a faraway look.
«China is a special place,» he said quietly. «It had empires and art and philosophy long before Christ was born. The Chinese have a real different way of looking at life, from music to food to fighting.»
«Did you like it?»
«Like, love, hate…» He shrugged. «Those words have no real meaning when it comes to China.»
«I don’t understand.»
Whip lifted his cup of coffee, sipped, and tried to find words to explain to Shannon what he had never explained to himself.
«Once,» he said slowly, «I stood on the banks of a river at midnight and watched men fish with lanterns and black birds instead of hooks and nets.»
Shannon made a startled sound.
«Did it work?» she asked.
«Oh, yes. It had been working like that for thousands of years, golden lantern light swirling with each dive the birds made, the fluting whistles of the fishermen as they called to their birds, midnight and the ebony river flowing by…. It was like breathing time itself to be there. China is old, older than I had ever imagined anything could be.»
A shiver coursed through Shannon as she watched Whip’s eyes. They were hazed with memory and distance and a black river flowing.
It was like breathing time itself.
«Are there other places like this?» Shannon asked when she no longer could bear Whip’s silence and distance.
«Echo Basin?» he asked.
«The Colorado Territory.»
Frowning, Whip ran his hand through his hair.
«I haven’t seen one to beat it,» he admitted finally.
«In all the world?»
«Oh, Ireland is green enough, but it lacks towering mountains like these. Burma and Switzerland have huge mountain ranges, but they’re stone and ice with little place in them for man.»
Shannon leaned forward, her eyes brilliant, fascinated.
«South America has a long, muscular chain of mountains with green lands in between clusters of high peaks,» Whip said, «but the high plains are so high that it makes a man weary just to walk a mile. Australia has green mountains with some snowy peaks. They’re pretty enough, but they aren’t real high. And the smell of the gum forest never appealed to me as much as the evergreen scent of the Rockies does.»
«Then it sounds like the best place on earth for you is right here,» Shannon said.
Whip laughed and shook his head, but when he looked at Shannon, his expression became very serious. He sensed the question buried within her words: Are you going to stay in the mountains that are like nowhere else on earth?
«The Rockies have held me longer than any other place,» Whip said softly, «but someday a distant sunrise will call to me, promising me everything I’ve ever wanted and have never been able to name. Then I’ll set out again, because there’s nothing as grand as the sunrise I haven’t seen. Nothing.»
Shannon fought against a sorrow so sharp it made her breath break. There was no reason for her to feel such grief. Whip was barely more than a stranger to her. She shouldn’t care if he stayed forever or left in the next hour.
But she cared so much it was a knife turning deep inside her. She closed her eyes and fought the unexpected pain.
«Like I said, honey girl,» Whip said gently, «I’m a yondering man.»
Shannon’s eyes opened. She looked at the man she knew only as Whip. Then she looked at his savagely clear eyes, eyes that had seen so much and yet moved on to another view, a different place, one more distant sunrise, for there was always more to see.
Always.
I hear your warning, yondering man. Don’t try to hold you. Don’t dream on you.
Don’t love you.
Yet Shannon had the uneasy feeling Whip’s warning had come too late. Somewhere deep inside her, something she had never felt before had awakened.
She prayed that it was only desire.