Elizabeth Lowell by Reckless Love Read Free Book Online Page B

drawled, smiling slowly as he relaxed against the folded blankets beneath him.
    Janna watched from a distance while Ty’s eyelids closed and the taut lines around his eyes relaxed as he drifted into sleep. Only then did she return to his side, kneel, and pull up the blanket so that his shoulders were covered once more.
    Even with the overhang of red rock to reflect back the sun’s heat, she was afraid of his catching another chill. She didn’t know what she would do if he became ill again. She was exhausted from broken sleep or no sleep at all, and from worrying that she had helped Ty to escape from renegades only to kill him by dragging him through a cold rain into the secret valley.
    These had been the longest days of Janna’s life since her father had died five years before, leaving his fourteen-year-old daughter orphaned and alone at a muddy water hole in southern Arizona. Watching Ty battle injury and fever had drained Janna’s very soul. He had been so hot, then drenched in cold sweat, then hot and restless once more, calling out names of people she didn’t know, fighting battles she had never heard of, crying out in anguish over dead comrades. She had tried to soothe and comfort him, had held him close in the cold hours before dawn, had bathed his big body in cool water when he was too hot and had warmed him with her own heat when he was too cold.
    And now he flinched from her touch.
    Don
’
t be foolish,
she told herself as she watched him sleep for a few moments longer.
He
doesn
’
t remember anything. He thinks you
’
re a skinny boy. No wonder he didn
’
t want you petting him.
And then,
How
can he be so blasted blind as not to see past these clothes?
    As she went to the small campfire to check on the soup, she couldn’t help wondering if Ty would have responded differently if he had known she was a girl.
    Her intense desire that he see her as a woman caught her on the raw. She knew she was becoming too attached to the stranger whom chance had dropped into her life. As soon as Ty was healed he would leave with as little warning as he had come, going off to pursue his own dreams. He was just one more man hungry for gold or for the glory of being the person to tame the spirit horse known as Lucifer.
    And he was too damned thickheaded to see past the skinny boy to the lonely woman.
    Lonely?
    her hand froze in the act of stirring the soup. She had been alone for years but had never thought of herself as lonely. The horses had been her companions, the wind her music, the land her mentor, and her father’s books had opened a hundred worlds of the mind to her. If she found herself yearning for another human voice, she had gone into Sweetwater or Hat Rock or Indian Springs. Each time she went into any of the outposts of civilization, she had left after only afewhours, driven out by the greedy eyes of the men who watched her pay for her purchases with tiny pieces of raw gold—men who, unlike Ty, had sometimes seen past Janna’s boyish appearance.
    Gloomily she studied the soup as it bubbled and announced its readiness in the blended fragrances of meat, herbs, and vegetables. She poured some soup into her steep-sided tin plate and waited until it cooled somewhat. When she was sure the soup wouldn’t burn Ty’s mouth, she picked up her spoon and went to the overhang.
    He was still asleep, yet there was an indefinable change in his body that told her he was healing even as she watched. He was much stronger than her consumptive father had been. Though Ty’s bruises were spectacular, they were already smaller than they had been a few days before. The flesh covering his ribs was no longer swollen. Nor was his head where a club had struck.
    Thick muscles and an even thicker skull,
she told herself sarcastically.
    As though he knew he was being watched, Ty opened his eyes. Their jeweled green clarity both reassured and disturbed Janna. She was glad that he was no longer dazed by fever, yet being the focus of those