Free Blackwolf's Redemption by Sandra Marton Page B

wasn’t so good because her thighs and calves ached. The climb down the mountain had taken its toll. She couldn’t lean her head back, either. The final insult was that after a few minutes of sitting still, the sweats and socks she was wearing didn’t feel quite so warm.
    She eyed the duvet, then rolled her eyes. Ridiculous, to sit here with her teeth chattering. A blanket was a blanket, nothing more, and she reached for it, yanked it over herself and all but moaned as she wrapped up in its voluminous folds.
    But it wasn’t enough. Five minutes and she could feel the cold seeping in.
    So what?
    Was she a wuss or a woman?
    Not a wuss, she thought determinedly. She’d practically raised herself, her father a bullying drunk who barked orders, her mother a pathetic creature who followed those orders blindly. Somehow, she’d survived, found academic opportunities in a high school so low on the educational totem pole that when she graduated from it with a scholarship to Columbia University, not even she’d believed it. And when her major in Business had turned out to be a mistake, who’d had the courage to talk the Powers That Be into letting her keep the scholarship despite switching her major to Anthro?
    “Me,” she said into the silence.
    Spending the night in a chair? A piece of cake. So what if it was a little chilly? She just had to stop thinking so much. About what in hell was happening to her…
    About Jesse. Jesse, the enigma.
    Good looking. Well spoken. And heroic. He had a spit-and-polish uniform in his dressing room but he went around half naked, paint on his face, riding hell-bent for leather without a saddle.
    She’d never seen him in that uniform, but she knew damned well he’d look magnificent. Whatever he wore, whoever he was, Special Forces officer or Native-American warrior, he’d be gorgeous. And sexy. And spectacularly sexy…
    Sienna moaned and shut her eyes. Sleep. She needed sleep. Maybe if she turned off the lantern…
    “Woman or wuss?” she said briskly, and she reached for the Coleman lamp, doused the flame and plunged the room into darkness.
     
    Jesse was awake, pacing the living room at the far end of the house by the light of a dying fire.
    He hadn’t noticed it was dying. How could he when his brain was focused on what had just happened? On what he’d done, damned near forcing himself on a woman who didn’t want him….
    Except she did.
    Oh, yes. She’d wanted him as much as he’d wanted her.
    He came to a stop, folded his arms, glowered at the shadows the flames cast on the walls. What he needed was some rest.
    Yeah, but how to get it?
    He’d tried the sofa. Too narrow. The floor. Too hard. The Eames chair and ottoman by the windows. Too uncomfortable. He felt like a pathetic version of Goldilocks and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it except mutter and curse and grumble over his inability to catch some desperately needed shut-eye, and maybe try and find some humor in the fact that he was a man who’d never had that kind of problem before.
    As a kid, he’d learned to sleep in the open, never mind the weather. A sleeping bag had been all he’d needed; that was his old man’s sole concession to his mother on overnight hunting and fishing trips into the mountains.
    And when he’d grown up, enlisted in the army, volunteered and made it into Special Forces… Those sleeping bag excursions had turned into memories of luxury as they’d given way to bug-infested jungles and muddy holes in the ground and, if he was really lucky, caves that still stunk of whatever critters had last sought shelter inside them.
    All he’d had to do was shut his eyes, set his internal clock for a wake-up call in twenty minutes or two hours and he was gone, even with Charlie someplace out there.
    But Charlie was gone. There was no enemy here at all.There was, instead, a woman. And knowing she was in his bedroom, curled up in his bed while he was out here, was keeping him wide-awake.
    Unless he