Free Midnight Rainbow by Linda Howard Page B

of his thigh muscles pulling the fabric of his pants tight across
them. Jane found herself watching his legs and matching her own stride to his.
He took a step, and she took a step automatically. It was easier that way; she
could separate her mind from her body, and in doing so ignore her protesting
muscles.
                  He stopped once and took a long drink from the
canteen, then passed it to Jane without comment. Also without comment, and
without wiping the mouth of the canteen, she tipped it up and drank thirstily.
Why worry about drinking after him? Catching cold was the least of her
concerns. After capping the canteen, she handed it back to him, and they began
walking again.
                  There was madness to his method, or so it
seemed to her. If there was a choice between two paths, he invariably chose the
more difficult one. The route he took was through the roughest terrain, the
thickest vegetation, up the highest, most rugged slope. Jane tore her pants
sliding down a bluff, that looked like pure suicide from the top, and not much
better than that from the bottom, but she followed without complaining. It
wasn't that she didn't think of plenty of complaints, but that she was too
tired to voice them. The benefits of her short nap had long since been
dissipated. Her legs ached, her back ached, her bruised arms were so painful
she could barely move them, and her eyes felt as if they were burning out of
their sockets. But she didn't ask him to stop. Even if the pace killed her, she
wasn't going to slow him down any more than she already had, because she had no
doubt that he could travel much faster without her. The easy movements of his
long legs told her that his stamina was far greater than hers; he could
probably walk all night long again without a noticeable slowing of his stride.
She felt a quiet awe of that sort of strength and conditioning, something that
had been completely outside her experience before she'd met him. He wasn't like
other men; it was evident in his superb body, in the awesome competence with
which he handled everything, in the piercing gold of his eyes.
                  As if alerted by her thoughts, he stopped and
looked back at her, assessing her condition with that sharp gaze that missed
nothing. "Can you make it for another mile or so?" On her own, she
couldn't have, but when she met his eyes she knew there was no way she'd admit
to that. Her chin lifted, and she ignored the increasingly heavy ache in her
legs as she said, "Yes." A flicker of expression crossed his face so
swiftly that she couldn't read it. "Let me have that pack," he
growled, coming back to her and jerking the straps free of the buckles, then
slipping the pack from her shoulders.
                  "I'm handling it okay," she
protested fiercely, grabbing for the pack and wrapping both arms around it.
"I haven't complained, have I?"
                  His level dark brows drawing together in a
frown, he forcefully removed the pack from her grasp. "Use your
head," he snapped. "If you collapse from exhaustion, then I'll have
to carry you, too." The logic of that silenced her. Without another word
he turned and started walking again. She was better able to keep up with him
without the weight of the pack, but she felt frustrated with herself for not
being in better shape, for being a burden to him. Jane had fought fiercely for
her independence, knowing that her very life depended on it. She'd never been
one to sit and wait for someone else to do things for her. She'd charged at
life head-on, relishing the challenges that came her way because they
reaffirmed her acute sense of the wonder of life. She'd shared the joys, but
handled the problems on her own, and it unsettled her now to have to rely on
someone else.
                  They came to another stream, no wider than the
first one they had crossed, but deeper. It might rise to her knees in places.
The water rushing