"Can Baby lead us to the cabin?" Nevada asked harshly.
"Yes."
"Then tell him to do it."
"Lead us home, Baby. Home."
Baby turned and began trotting along the base of the scree slope. Nevada turned Target to follow the wolf's tracks. The instant the horse began moving, Eden made a stifled sound and clung very tightly to Nevada. He looked down, saw her arms wrapped around him, saw hands that were slender even inside gloves, knew that the hard rise of his flesh was only inches from those feminine hands, and tried not to swear aloud at the ungovernable rushing of his blood.
For several minutes there was a silence that was at least as uncomfortable as Nevada was.
"Nevada?"
He grunted.
"I wasn't making fun of your voice."
"I know."
"Then why are you angry?"
Nevada hesitated, then shrugged. "Some kinds of honesty are dangerous, Eden."
"I don't understand."
"Drop your hand down a few inches and you'll understand just fine."
Nevada's voice was remote, clipped. When Eden realized what he meant, she was glad he couldn't see her blazing cheeks. Beneath her embarrassment she was shocked. When Nevada had told her he lived every instant as though it were his last, he had meant it, and the proof was right at hand.
"Makes a girl wonder what it would take to cool you off," Eden muttered against his back, certain he wouldn't be able to hear.
He did, of course.
"Hell of a question," Nevada retorted. "Sure you want to hear the answer?"
Eden opened her mouth for an incautious reply, only to think better of it at the last instant. Before she closed her mouth, she felt the unanticipated, fragile chill of snowflakes dissolving on her tongue. Her eyes closed and she held her breath, waiting for the exquisite sensation to be repeated. As she waited, the world swayed gently beneath her and her arms clung to the living column of strength that was Nevada.
Suddenly Eden had a dizzying sense of the wonder of being alive and riding through a white storm holding on to a man whose last name she didn't even know, while snowflakes melted on her lips like secret kisses. She laughed softly and tipped her face back to the sky, giving herself to the miracle of being alive.
The sound of Eden laughing made Nevada turn toward her involuntarily, drawn by the life burning so vividly in her. He looked at her with a hunger that would have shocked her if she had seen it, but her eyes were closed beneath the tiny, biting caresses of snowflakes. When her eyes opened once more, he had already turned away.
"Nevada?"
He made a rough, questioning sound.
"What's your last name?"
"Blackthorn."
"Blackthorn," Eden murmured, savoring the name as though it were a snowflake freshly fallen onto her tongue. "What do you do when you're not rescuing maidens or falling down mountains, Nevada Blackthorn?"
"I'm segundo on the Rocking M when Tennessee is there. When he isn't, I'm ramrod."
"Segundo? Tennessee? Ramrod? Are we speaking the same language?"
The corner of Nevada's mouth lifted slightly. "A ramrod is a ranch foreman. A segundo is the ramrod's right-hand man. Tennessee is my brother."
"Is the Rocking M your family ranch?"
"After a fashion. We're the bastard line. The legitimate folks are the MacKenzies. Tennessee bought into the ranch when Luke MacKenzie's father was trying to drink himself to death. I own a chunk of the Devil's Peak area. Cash and Mariah gave it to me for a wedding gift."
For a few moments Eden was too stunned to breathe. "You're married?" she asked faintly.
"It was Cash and Mariah's wedding, not mine."
"They gave you a present on their wedding day," Eden said carefully.
Nevada nodded.
"Why?"
"It's a long story."
"I'm very patient."
"Could have fooled me."
"I doubt that much fools you," she said matter-of-factly.
Nevada thought of the instant he had seen Eden coming toward him in a smoky bar and his whole body had reached out to her with a primitive need that had shocked him. But he would have been a fool to talk about that, and Nevada Blackthorn was no fool.
"Mariah is Luke's sister," Nevada said. "She had a map to a gold mine that had come down through the family. The map wasn't much use because it was all blurred. I passed the map along to some people who are real good at making documents give up their secrets. When the map came back, I gave it to her. She found the mine, Cash found her, and they got married. They gave me a chunk of the mine as a wedding present."
The hint of a drawl in Nevada's voice told Eden that she was being teased. She didn't mind. She liked the thought that she could arouse that much playfulness in Nevada.
"Why do I feel you left something out?" she asked.
"Such as?"
"Such as how a segundo knows the kind of people who can make crummy old documents sit up and sing."
"I wasn't always a segundo."
Eden hesitated. The drawl was definitely gone from Nevada's voice. Even as she told herself she had no right to pry, she heard herself asking a question.
"What were you before you were a segundo?"
"What the Blackthorn men have been for hundreds of years – a warrior."
Vivid images from the fight in West Fork flashed before Eden's eyes, followed by other images. Nevada lying half-buried in a rock slide with a rifle in his hand. Nevada checking the rifle's firing mechanism with a few swift motions before he even tried to stand up. Nevada's bleak eyes and unsmiling mouth.
Warrior.
It explained a lot. Too much.
The vivid joy in life that Eden had experienced moments before drained away, leaving sadness in its place. Her arms tightened protectively around Nevada's powerful body as though she could somehow keep whatever might hurt him at bay. When she realized what she was doing, she didn't know whether to laugh or to weep at her own idiocy. Nevada needed protecting about as much as a bolt of lightning did.
But unlike lightning, Nevada could bleed and cry. And he had. She knew it as surely as she knew that she was alive.
Breathing Nevada's name, Eden moved her face slowly against the cool suede texture of his shearling jacket, wiping away the tears that fell when she thought of what Nevada must have endured in the years before he went to work for the Rocking M. The knowledge of his pain reached her as nothing had since the death of her little sister during Alaska's long, frigid night.
Nevada felt the surprising strength of Eden's arms holding him, heard his name breathed like a prayer into the swirling storm, sensed the aching depth of Eden's emotions. Without stopping to ask why, Nevada brought one of her gloved hands to his cheek and rubbed slowly. With a ragged sigh she relaxed against him.
For several minutes there was no sound but the tiny whispering of snowflakes over the land, the creak of cold leather, and the muffled hoof beats of the two horses as Nevada held them to Baby's clear trail. When Nevada saw the outline of the cabin rising from the swirling veils of snow, he removed Eden's arms from around him.
"Time to let go, Eden. You're home."
Reluctantly Eden released Nevada. He swung his right leg over the front of the saddle, grabbed the saddle horn in his right hand and slid to the ground. Braced by his grip on the saddle horn, Nevada tentatively put weight on his left foot. There was pain, but he had expected it. What mattered was that the foot and ankle took his weight without giving way.
Nevada reached up, lifted Eden off the horse and lowered her to the icy ground.
"Legs still working?" he asked, holding on to her just in case.
Eden felt the hard length of Nevada pressed against her body and wondered if she would be able to breathe, much less stand. She nodded her head.
"Good. Go in and get a fire going while I take care of the horses."