Free Outlaw by Elizabeth Lowell Page A

smiled slowly. "Honey, haven't you figured it out yet? I'm so tenderhearted a butterfly can walk roughshod all over me."
     
    It was the second time in as many minutes that Ten had called Diana "honey." She knew she should object to the implied intimacy. At the very least she shouldn't encourage him by laughing at the ludicrous image of a butterfly stomping all over Ten's muscular body. So she tried very hard not to laugh, failed, and finally gave into the need, knowing that it was a release for all the emotions seething just beneath her control.
     
    Ten listened, sensing the complex currents of Diana's emotions. He reached for the door before he looked over at her and nodded once, as though agreein g with himself.
     
    "You'll do, Diana Saxton. You'll do just fine."
     
    "For what?" she asked, startled.
     
    "For whatever you want. You've got guts, lady. You'd go to war over a carton of Anasazi artifacts. You stand up for what you believe in. That's too damned rare these days."
     
    Ten was out of the truck and closing the door behind him before Diana could put into words her first thought: she hadn't stood in the rain with an unfamiliar rifle in her hands to save a few artifacts from pothunters. It had been Ten she was worried about, one man against three.
     
    / didn't need to worry. Ten is a one-man army. Cash was right. Someone taught Ten to play hardball. wonder who, and where, and what it cost....
     
    The truck's door opened. Ten set the closed carton of artifacts on the seat next to Diana, then swung into the cab with a lithe motion. His masculine grace fascinated her, as did the fact that his rain-soaked shirt cling to every ridge and swell of muscle, emphasizing the width of his shoulders and the strength of his back. If he had wanted to, he could have overpowered her with terrible ease, for he was far stronger than Steve had been; and in the end Steve had been too strong for her.
     
    Grimly Diana turned her thoughts away from a past that was beyond her ability to change or forget. She could only accept what had happened and renew her vow that she would never again put herself in a position where a man thought he had the right to take from her what she was unwilling to give.
     
    "Don't worry," Ten said.
     
    "What?" Diana gave him a startled look, wondering if he had read her mind.
    "The artifacts are fine. Milt was an amateur when it came to fighting, but he knew how to pack pots. Nothing was lost."
     
    "Just the history."
     
    His hand on the key, Ten turned to look at Diana, not understanding what she meant.
     
    "The real value of the artifacts for an archaeologist comes from seeing how they relate to each other in situ," she explained. "Unless these artifacts were photographed where they were found, they don't have much to tell us now."
     
    "To a scholar, maybe. But to me, just seeing the artifacts, seeing their shapes and designs, knowing they were made by a people and a culture that lived and died and will never be born again..." Ten shrugged. "I'd go to war to save a piece of that. Hell, I have more than once."
     
    Again, Ten had surprised Diana. She hadn't expected a nonprofessional to understand the intellectual and emotional fascination of fragments from the past. His response threw her off balance, leaving her teetering between her ingrained fear of men and her equally deep desire to be close to the contradictory, complex man called Tennessee Blackthorn.
     
    Ten eased the big truck down the slippery shoulder of shale and headed back for the big overhang that served as a base camp for the dig. By the time they had unloaded their gear, set up sleeping bags at the opposite ends of the overhang's broad base and changed into dry clothes behind the canvas privacy screen that had been erected for just such emergencies, the rain was becoming less a torrent.
     
    Neither Diana nor Ten noticed the improving weather at first. They had gravitated toward the shard-sorting area that the graduate students had