Free 2000 Kisses by Christina Skye Page A

those spirits who guard the precious water.
    The sky curved in a vault of blinding turquoise from horizon to horizon, cut only by the glint of wings. Her heart moved, carried aloft like those swift, beating wings.
    He would come for her.
    She would wait.
    She touched the painted figures on the nearby rock. The same patterns covered the fine clay bowls she built before the walls of her father's village. Always she worked with clean strokes, color balancing color, line matching line, lest her pictures bring shadows and disorder to those who looked upon them. Her pots were traded for turquoise and precious parrot feathers from the far south. Her father bargained carefully, swollen with pride at his daughter's work.
    But if he knew she waited here for a man, he would drive her from his walls with his own hands and lay his curse on her blood.
    Sunlight filtered between the canyon rocks, reflected off the small spring at her feet.
    She shivered as a shadow fell across the ravine.
    Raven and tortoise.
    Swift sun and shining moon.
    She whispered the old words for protection, her fingers tracing the stone figure worn knotted on a strip of leather at her neck.
    His gift.
    Bride token and totem.
    Her fingers closed around the polished coyote worked by his own hands. She shivered at the touch, for the coyote is old and very clever, one who can trick as well as assist.
    Why did her warrior not come?
    She cradled his sun-warmed stone, wishing for his laugh, his hands loosening the feathers from her hair and the painted tunic from her shoulders.
    Overhead the sun marched on, crossing rocks and ridge.
    He would come as he had promised. Sometime before the rising of the moon he would stand before her, laughing as he drew off his bow.
    But he did not come. And the fear grew in her chest like thorns.

    Tess woke up feeling woozy.
    She eased open one eye and winced at the light. Her throat burned, and she felt shaky when she tried to sit up.She remembered trying to fold her blasted map, then standing up and—
    And passing out cold. There had been a man somewhere nearby at the time. She tilted her head, still groggy, but not so groggy she didn't notice that someone had unbuttoned her shirt down to the lacy edge of her bra. And if that wasn't provocation enough, there was a cowboy with lazy blue eyes who had one callused hand wrapped around her thigh. And one of her stockings was
gone.
    Tess shot upright. “What do you think you're doing?”
    “Trying to take off your other stocking.”
    “;Do it and you'll regret it.”
    The cowboy's eyes narrowed. “I think we've got a communication problem here.”
    His face was burned dark by the sun. Tess remembered him now. He was the sheriff her brother had said would protect her. Not with his hand on her thigh, he wouldn't.
    “Get your hand off me.”
    A vein pumped at his clenched jaw. “Don't go jumping fences until you get to them, Ma'am.”
    He had a slow, mellow voice and his eyes were even more startling than Tess remembered. He also looked exactly like a roguish actor whose face regularly appeared on magazine covers around the world.
    “You're sure you're not Mel Gibson?”
    “I'm sure.”
    “If you really are the sheriff, then you'd better explain why you had your hand up my skirt.”
    Something glinted in his eyes. “Doctor's orders.”
    “Oh, right.”
    “Too many clothes, he said.”
    Tess sniffed. She wasn't sure what a sheriff should look like, but it certainly wasn't
this.
She smiled icily as she pointed at his chest. “If you're the sheriff, where's your badge?” Even out here there had to be
some
dress codes.
    He stalked across the room, yanked open his desk drawer, and shoved a tarnished, weather-beaten tin star into place on his shirt pocket. “Feel safer now?”
    “Not much.” Tess tried to sit up, but he held her still.
    “Don't try to move. You're in no shape for it.”
    “I'm fine.” She moved restlessly beneath his hand.
    “Don't you
ever
relax, woman?”
    “Not