Free A Wolf in the Desert by Bj James

burned in smoldering embers. As the man they had named Indian looked fiercely down on them, they slept at last.
    A wave of bitterness welled inside the Apache. For what had been done to a land that once had been the land of his people. Bitterness that pulled him back to the desert after many years away from it.
    He wanted to take Patience away from this. He wanted more than he could say, to spare her what lay ahead. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t go. Not yet. Not with consuming rage in his heart.
    Not until the task he’d come to do was done.
    For her safety he’d delayed entry into the drunken orgy of the camp. Now that immediate danger was past and delay served no purpose. He swung around, facing her, feeling her cautious gaze on him. “Are you waiting for me to shed my mask and turn into a brute?”
    â€œMaybe.” She didn’t turn away. In the darkness he was a shadowy figure painted in bold, somber strokes, more handsome phantom than man. Yet when he touched her he was flesh and blood. Indian was no specter created in the mind of a frightened woman. But was he part of the nightmare?
    Beneath the desert moon she knew only that he was tall, slender, broad in shoulders, lean-hipped. His hair and eyes were like the night, his features of carved stone. The nuances that were the essence of him, the truth, lay shrouded in mystery. If he wore a mask, it would be revealed by the light of day.
    Indian crossed his arms over his chest, the fringe at the hem of his leather vest rippling with the move. He looked back at her, meeting her intent stare, holding it. After a moment, he smiled. “It won’t happen, you know,” he said in an even voice. “There is no mask. I’ll be the same in the light as I am now.”
    â€œNo mask,” Patience murmured, her eyes shifting to look past him toward the canyon. “But a masquerade? Could it be that you’re not really one of them?”
    Indian was staggered once more by her shrewd perceptions, realizing, as before, that she was a dangerous woman. A risk to herself and to him.
    Shrugging in a dismissive gesture he hoped would mitigate her suspicions, he refuted them with a stolid insistence. “There’s no masquerade. I ride with the Wolves. That makes me one of them.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œIf a hawk flies with crows, he doesn’t become one.”
    Indian laughed, with false humor. “O’Hara,” he mused with deliberate drollness in his tone, “Irish to the bone. Yet you speak like an Apache.”
    Patience wouldn’t be diverted. “I’m no more Apache than you are vagrant biker.”
    â€œDammit, Patience.” With a shake of his head he bit back what he would have said, refusing to be drawn into contention, and sorry he’d let it go so far. “It doesn’t matter,” he said with a return of stern forbearance. “Believe what you will.”
    â€œI’ll believe what I see as the truth, Indian.”
    He heard a strange serenity. It didn’t mean she wasn’t frightened, nor that she wasn’t filled with rage at the indignity and the loss of freedom. It didn’t mean truce or compliance. She’d reverted, instead, to powerful and primordial instincts. The most basic and powerful element of survival.
    Patience O’Hara, with her flaming hair falling to her waist and Irish blood flowing through her veins, was more Apache in her heart than she knew.
    â€œWatch with more than your eyes,” he told her thoughtfully, “and see.”
    He lifted his face to the sky. Little had changed, but dawn would come too soon. “We must go. We’ve delayed long enough.”
    â€œYour good and true friends are sleeping.”
    â€œYes.” Ignoring her mockery, he moved past her, his curious, rolling, moccasin-clad step no more than a whisper over the ground. Mounting the bike, his face without expression, he waited for her