Outlaw (5 page)

"Stop it," Ten said finally. "You're making me feel like the Marquis de Sade."

Startled, Diana turned toward him. "What?"

"Don't worry. I'm not talking about the way you hug the door handle as though it were your last hope of safety," Ten drawled, giving her a sideways glance.

A flush crawled up Diana's cheeks. She looked down and saw that she was all but sitting on the door handle in order to get as much distance as possible between herself and Ten.

"I—it's nothing personal," she said, her voice strained.

"Like hell it isn't," Ten said calmly. "But that's not what made me feel like a sadist. It's the way you look at all those canyons that's getting to me. It's the way a starving man looks at food, or a thirsty man looks at water, or Luke looks at Carla when they all sit in the rocking chair while she nurses Logan. If it will make you feel any better, we can stop and get closer to whatever it is you love so much."

Ten's perceptivity startled Diana. It was unexpected in a man. But then, Ten had been unexpected from the first moment she saw him. The longer she was around him, the more unexpected he became.

"That's—that's very kind of you, Mr. Blackthorn, but I'm afraid looking won't make me feel much better."

Clear, ice-gray eyes glanced briefly at Diana, then resumed watching the rough road.

"What would make you feel better, professor?"

"Being called something else,
ramrod,
" she shot back before she could think better of it.

The corner of Ten's mouth tugged up. "I'm not much on formality. Call me Ten."

Diana started to reciprocate, then stopped, afraid that Ten would mistake politeness for an entirely different sort of offer.

He shot her another quick glance. "Go ahead, I won't take it as a come-on."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Go ahead and ask me to call you Diana. I'll assume you're being polite, not looking for a little action."

"Let me assure you, I'm not looking for a 'little action.'"

"I figured that out the first time I saw you. So uncramp your hand from the door handle and tell me why you're looking at the countryside like you're saying goodbye to your only friend."

"Are you always this direct?"

"Yes. Are you always this nervous around men or is it me in particular?"

"Does it matter?"

"If I'm the one setting you on edge, I'll get out of your hair as soon as possible," Ten said matter-of-factly. "If it's just men in general you don't like, it won't matter who's on site with you."

Diana was silent.

"Well that tells me," Ten said, shrugging. "As soon as Nevada arrives, I'll turn September Canyon over to him."

"It's not you," Diana said, forcing out each word.

"Did anyone ever mention that you don't lie worth a damn? You've been terrified of me ever since I came over the corral fence and taught Baker what his horse already knew—in a fight, smart goes farther than big."

Diana closed her eyes, seeing again the blows landing too quickly to be believed. "Fast, strong and lethal count, too. Baker never had a chance, did he?"

"Only a fool, a horse or a woman would give a man like Baker a chance."

"Are you calling me a fool?"

"No. I'm not calling you a horse, either."

She made a strangled sound that was close to laughter, surprising herself.

A quick, sideways glance told Ten that Diana's grip on the door handle had eased. It also told him that her eyes were an even deeper, more brilliant blue than he had thought, and that the curve of her mouth was made to be traced by a man's tongue.

The shadow of another small canyon opening up off the road caught Diana's attention. The hint of laughter that had curved her mouth faded, leaving behind a yearning line.

"What is it that you see?" Ten asked softly.

The words slid past Diana's reflexive defenses and touched the one thing she permitted herself to love, the
Anasazi homeland with its mixture of mountains and
mesas and canyons, sandstone and shale, its violent summer storms, and the massive silence that made her feel as though time itself flowed through the ancient canyons.

"That canyon off to the right," Diana said, pointing to a place where a crease opened up at the base of a mesa. "Does it have a name?"

"Not that I know of."

"That's what I thought. There are hundreds of canyons like it on the Colorado Plateau. Thousands. And in
each one, it would be unusual to walk more than a mile along the mesa top or the canyon bottom without finding some legacy of the Anasazi, such as broken pots or masonry or ruined stone walls."

Ten made a startled sound and glanced quickly at Diana.

"It's true," she said, turning to face him. "The Colorado Plateau is one of the richest archaeological areas of the world. Some experts say that there are a hundred archaeological sites per square mile. Others say a hundred and twenty sites. Naturally, all of the sites aren't important enough to excavate, but the sheer number of them is amazing. For instance, in Montezuma County alone, there are probably one hundred
thousand
archaeological sites."

Ten whistled through his teeth. The boyish gesture both startled and intrigued Diana, for it was so much at odds with the fierce man who had fought Baker and the quiet man who had treated a sick kitten with such care.

"How many Anasazi lived around here, anyway?" Ten asked.

"Here? I don't know. But over in Montezuma Valley there were about thirty thousand people. That's greater than the population today. It's the same for the rest of the Colorado Plateau. At the height of the Anasazi culture, the land supported more people than it does today with twentieth-century technology.

"And up every nameless canyon," Diana continued, her voice husky with emotion, "there's a chance of finding the one extraordinary ruin that will explain why the Anasazi culture thrived in this area for more than ten centuries and then simply vanished without warning, as though the people picked up in the middle of a meal and left, taking nothing with them,"

"That's what you're looking for? The answer to an old mystery?"

She nodded.

"Why?"

The question startled Diana. "What do you I mean?"

"What is it you really want?" Ten asked. "Glory? Wealth? A tenured job at an eastern university? Classrooms full of students who think you're smarter than God?"

"Is it academia in general you dislike or me in particular?"

Ten heard the echo of his own previous question and smiled to himself. "I don't know you well enough to dislike you. I'm just curious."

"So am I," Diana said tightly. "That's why I want so know about the Anasazi. Their abrupt disappearance from the cliff houses at the height of their cultural success is as big a mystery as what really caused the extinction of dinosaurs."

She glanced covertly at Ten. Though he was watching the rough, difficult road, she sensed that he was listening closely to her words. Despite her usual reticence on the subject of herself, there was something about Ten that made her want to keep talking, if only to give him a better opinion of her than he obviously had. Not that she could really blame him for being cool toward her; she had done everything but crawl under the table to avoid him at dinner.

The contrasts and contradictions of the man called Tennessee Blackthorn both intrigued and irritated Diana. A man who could fight with such savage efficiency shouldn't also care about sick kittens. A man who could handle the physical demands of the big truck and the rotten road with such effortless skill shouldn't be so interested in something as abstract and intangible as the vanished Anasazi, yet he had shown obvious interest every time the subject had come up.

But most of all, a man who was so abrasively masculine shouldn't have been perceptive enough to notice her silent yearning after unexplored canyons. Nor should she be noticing right now the clean line of his profile, the high forehead and thick, faintly curling pelt of black hair, the luxuriant black eyelashes and crystal clarity of his eyes, the subdued sensuality of his mouth.

The direction of Diana's thoughts made her distinctly uneasy. She turned and looked out the window again, yet it was impossible for her to go back to the long silences of the previous hours in the truck when she had tried to shut out the presence of everything except the land.

"As for prestige or a tenured teaching position," Diana continued, looking out the window, "I'm not a great candidate for any university, especially an eastern one. I love the Colorado Plateau country too much to live anywhere else. I stand in front of classrooms full of students—worshipful or otherwise— cause teaching gives me the money and time to explore the Anasazi culture in the very places where the Ancient Ones once lived, and then make what I've seen and learned come alive in drawings."

"You're an artist?"

Short, golden brown hair rippled and shone in the sun as Diana shook her head in a silent negative. "At best, I'm an illustrator. I take the site photographer's pictures, read the archaeological summaries of the site and study the artifacts that have been excavated. Then I combine everything with my own knowledge of the Anasazi and make a series of drawings of the site as it probably looked when it was inhabited."

"Sounds like more than illustration to me."

"I assure you, it's less than art. My mother is an artist, so
I know the difference."

"Do your parents live in Colorado?"

My mother lives in Arizona." Normally Ten would have let the matter of parents drop, especially since Diana's voice had planted warning flags around the subject, but his curiosity about Diana Saxton wasn't normal. She showed flashes of passion coupled with unusual reserve. And it was reserve rather than shyness. Ten had known more than a few shy cowboys. Not one of them would have been able to get up in front of a room full of people and say a single word, much less teach a whole course.

Diana wasn't shy of people. She was shy of men. Ten had immediately figured out that she didn't much care for the male half of the human race. What he hadn't figured out was why.

"What about your father?" Ten asked.

"What about him?"

Though Diana's voice was casual, Ten noted the subtle tightening of her body.

"Where does he live?" Ten asked.

"I don't know."

"Is he why you don't like men?"

"Frankly, it's none of your business."

"Of course it is. I'm a man."

"Mr. Blackthorn—"

"Ten," he interrupted.

"—whether I hate or love men is irrelevant to you or any other man I meet."

"I'll agree about the other men, but not me."

"Why?"

"I'm the man you're going to spend the next five days alone with."

"What?" Diana asked, staring at Ten.

"One of the grad students broke his ankle climbing up a canyon wall," Ten said. Without pausing in his explanations, he whipped the truck around a washout on one side of the road and then a landslide ten yards farther down. "Another one got a job in Illinois working on Indian mounds. The other three can come out only on the weekends because they work during the week."

"So?"

"So I'm staying at the September Canyon site with you."

"That's not necessary. I've been alone at remote digs before."

"Not on the Rocking M you haven't. There will be an armed guard on the site at all times." Without altering his tone at all he said, "Hang on, this will get greasy."

The relaxed lines on Ten's body didn't change as he held the truck on a slippery segment of road where sandstone gave way to thin layers of shale that were so loosely bonded they washed away in even a gentle rain.
During the summer season of cloudbursts, the parts of the road that crossed shale formations became impassable for hours or days. Nor was the sandstone itself any treat for driving. Wet sandstone was surprisingly slick.

"There are professional pothunters in the area," Ten continued. "They've worked over a lot of sites. If someone objects, they work them over, too. Luke and I decided that no one goes to September Canyon without a guard."

"Why wasn't I told this before I was hired?" Diana asked tightly.

"Because the sheriff didn't tell us until last night."

Diana said something beneath her breath. Ten glanced sideways at her. "If you can't handle it,
tell me now. We'll be back at the ranch in time for dinner."

She said nothing, still trying to cope with her seething feelings at the thought of being alone with Ten in a remote canyon for five days.

"If I thought it would do any good," Ten said, "I'd give you my word that I won't touch you. But you don't know me well enough to believe me, so there's not much point in making any promises, is there?"

Diana didn't answer.

Without warning Ten brought the truck to a stop in the center of a wide spot in the road. He set the brake and turned to face his unhappy passenger.

"What will it be?" he asked. "September Canyon or back to the ranch house?"