Ten signaled for Diana to join him. She scrambled up the rugged slope with the offhanded grace of a deer. Very quickly she was standing close enough for Ten to sense the heat of her body.
"Find anything?" she asked breathlessly.
"Potshards, masonry rubble and that."
Diana followed the direction of Ten's thumb. It took her a moment to realize what she was seeing. Sometime in the past five to eight hundred years, a piece of the cliff had fallen, all but filling the alcove below. Once the opening had held rooms. Now it held only an immense mound of cracked, broken sandstone. Water seeped in tiny rivulets from beneath the stone, telling of a spring hidden beneath. Her trained eye quickly picked out the angular stones and random potshards that marked an Anasazi site.
"I hope they were already gone when the cliff came down," Diana said in a low voice, remembering what Ten had said.
…lying beneath stone, only this time you aren't moving, this time you don't get up and walk away.
Ten's big hand stroked her head from crown to neck. "Somehow," he said slowly, "I don't think they were. In fact, I'm…certain." He caressed her sensitive nape with the ball of his thumb before he lifted his hand and stepped away. "Better get sketching, honey. Even stone doesn't last forever."
Intent and relaxed at the same time, Diana sketched quickly, not wanting to lose the effect of slanting afternoon light on the ruins across the canyon. At her urging, Ten had crossed the small creek again and stood looking toward the ruins, giving scale to the cliff and the ragged lines of once whole rooms.
"Just a few more minutes," she called.
Ten waved his understanding. Diana's pencil flew over the paper as she added texture and definition to cliffs and canyon bottom, cottonwood and brush. The heightened contrast gave an almost eerie depth to the sketch.
The drawings she had made before had been accurate representations of the ruins as they were today. The drawing she was working on now was a recreation of the ruins as they had looked long ago, when the sound of barking dogs, domesticated turkeys and children's laughter had echoed through the canyon, a time when women ground corn in stone metates or painted intricate designs on pottery while then-men discussed the weather or the gods or the latest rumor of raids from the north. The narrow canyon would have been alive with voices then, especially on a day like today, when the sun was hot and vital, pouring light and life over the land.
Yet today, despite Diana's usual custom, she wasn't sketching people among the buildings. Nor was she sketching the burning blue radiance of the sky. There were heavy clouds surrounding the sole figure in her drawing, a man standing on the margin of the creek. The man was both dark and compelling, black hair lifting on a storm wind, an outlaw shaman calling to his brother the storm.
The power of the man was revealed in the taut male lines of shoulder and waist, buttocks and legs, a strength that was rooted in the center of the earth and in a past when the lives of humans and spirits had been intertwined. Standing with his back to the collapsed alcove, the shaman was a still center in the swirling violence of the wind. His brother the storm had answered the shaman's call.
The shaman turned around and looked at Diana with eyes the color of rain, eyes that saw past the surface of reality to the soul beneath.
Diana shivered, blinked, and realized that she had been staring at the finished drawing so intently that her body was cramped in protest. Automatically she flipped the sketch tablet closed, both protecting and concealing the drawing. She slipped the tablet into its carrying case and stood up. Moments later she was hurrying down the slope toward Ten.
He turned at the sound of her approach, watching her with eyes the color of rain.
"Finished already?" Ten asked, holding out his hand to take Diana's pack.
She gave him her hand instead. Slowly he laced their fingers together until their hands were palm to palm. The sensitive inner skin of her fingers felt the hard pressure of him everywhere. The slow, complete interlocking was as intimate as a kiss. His palm was warm and hardened by work, making her wonder how it would feel on her skin if he were given the freedom of her body.
The thought haunted Diana while she and Ten went through their normal end-of-the-day chores-a basin bath behind the screen, then preparing dinner and cleaning up the campsite. Although the sun had vanished behind stone cliffs, true sunset was still an hour away. Shadows flowing out from the rocks had taken the edge off the unusual heat of the day, but the canyon walls still radiated the captured warmth of the sun.
Diana felt no need to pull her customary loose sweater over the sleeveless cotton blouse she was wearing. In fact, after her camp bath she had substituted sandals and shorts for hiking boots and jeans. Ten was feeling the heat, too. After his bath he hadn't bothered to put on a shirt or socks and boots. At the moment he was stretched out on his bedroll, which he had moved to the edge of the overhang, hoping to catch a vagrant breeze.
"Too bad we're not camping at Black Springs," Ten said, stretching slowly, fully. "There are pools big enough to cool off in."
"Sounds like heaven. Not that I'm complaining," Diana added, frowning over a handful of shards. "I've been at sites where the only water we had was strictly for drinking."
She turned away from the shards she had been sorting, saw Ten sprawled with feline ease across his bedroll and felt an increasingly familiar glittering sensation from her breasts to her knees. Without stopping to think, she walked over and sat next to him.
"Ten?"
His eyes opened. They were a burning silver.
Diana's thoughts scattered, and with them her ability to speak coherently. "Can I-that is, would you- could we-?"
"I thought you'd never ask."
Large hands closed around Diana's face, bringing her closer. Their mouths fitted together smoothly, seamlessly, and at the first taste of each other they both made low sounds of pleasure. Ten's hands shifted, lifting Diana, easing her across his chest until most of her weight was pressed against him. The shiver that went through her was as clear as lightning at midnight. He groaned and released her.
"Dammit, honey," Ten said heavily. "I didn't mean to frighten you. I didn't think how you would feel being on a man's bed again, and me half-naked at that."
Diana shook her head. "It wasn't in a bed. It was the front seat of a car. That's why I always sit so far away in the truck. And he never-never completely took off his clothes. Or mine."
Ten closed his eyes so that she wouldn't see the rage tugging against his control. He held her gently against his chest, stroking her head and back, kissing her hair, wishing that he could change the past.
But he could not. He could only hold Diana and want her until it was a kind of agony.
The slow stroking of Ten's hand sent currents of pleasure through Diana, making her breath sigh out. She smoothed her cheek against his chest, encountered a resilient cushion of hair instead of cloth, and made a murmurous sound of discovery. Ten's hand hesitated, then continued its languid journey from the silky hair of her head to the intriguing line of her back. Though the pressure was unchanged, the caress was different, sensual rather than soothing, enticing rather than calming. He felt the heat of her breath on his breastbone as she kissed him lingeringly. Then he felt her lips open. She hesitated.
"Go ahead," Ten said. "Find out if I taste the same there as I did on my neck."
Diana lifted her head until she could see his eyes. "You won't mind?"
His smile was slow, hot, infinitely male. "Baby, you can put that sweet mouth anywhere on me that you want."