"Hold still, sugar. Let me help you."
Afraid to trust her voice, Janna shook her head in a negative.
"Yes," Ty countered instantly. "You've patched me up often enough. Now it's your turn to be patched."
Janna looked up into Ty's glance. His eyes were very dark yet alive with flames reflected from the campfire. The warmth of his hands on her chilled skin was shocking, but not as shocking as the heat that uncurled in her loins at the thought of being cared for by him. She shivered in a combination of cold and remembered desire.
And she hated it, both the memory and the desire, hated wanting a man whose feelings for her teetered between pity and contempt, lust and indifference.
"You're chilled through and through," Ty said, frowning as he saw Janna shiver violently. With quick motions he began unwrapping the cloth that bound her chest. "Where's the medicine you need?"
She shook her head, refusing him, refusing her memories, refusing everything.
"Janna, what in hell is the matter with you?"
Ty didn't wait for an answer. Janna felt cloth being stripped from her body by his big hands. Suddenly she couldn't bear the thought of her naked breasts being revealed to Ty again. He would touch them, kiss them, and the heat that was spreading from the pit of her stomach would flare up, burning away everything, even the knowledge that she loved a man who loved only his own dream… and she was not that dream.
With an inarticulate cry Janna tried to push away Ty's hands. It was like pushing on warm stone.
"It's too late to be shy," he said flatly, ignoring her attempts to stop him from unwrapping her breasts. "Hold still while I get this wet stuff off you."
"Let go of me."
The quality of Janna's voice was chilling. Ty's hands froze in the act of unwrapping her.
"Janna, what's wrong?"
His voice was gentle but Janna didn't hear that, or the emotions churning just beneath his control. She heard only her own memories, Ty's voice echoing and reechoing in her mind as he listed all her shortcomings a amp;a woman-nothing to offer a husband, too unskilled to be a mistress, good only for the male need that built up inexorably when no other woman was around.
"Little one?" Ty asked, tipping Janna's chin up and brushing a kiss over her lips. They were as cold as her voice had been. "What did I do to make you so angry with me?"
When he would have kissed her again, she jerked her head away. "Don't touch me. I don't feel like being your whore tonight."
Chapter Thirty-Two
Ty's tightly held emotions exploded into a fury that was unlike any he had ever felt. He stopped trying to peel off layers of wet cloth and grabbed Janna's shoulders instead.
"Don't say something like that about yourself! Do you hear me, Janna Wayland? You are not a whore!"
Angry, ashamed, defiant, Janna stood shivering within Ty's grasp. "Just what would you call it?"
"We're… lovers."
"I don't think so," she said distinctly. "To be someone's lover suggests a certain affection mixed in with the lust. I'm not your lover. I'm a convenience until you take Lucifer and go off to buy your silk- "
"Don't say it," Ty interrupted savagely. "I'm sick to death of having those words flung in my face."
"Then stop flinging them in mine."
"I've never-"
"The hell you haven't!" Janna interrupted, her voice as savage as his. " 'I'll have my silken lady or I'll have none at all for longer than it takes to pleasure myself,'" Janna quoted, each word clipped. "'You're the least female female I've ever seen.' Then you said that Cascabel looked more like a mesquite bush than I looked like a woman, and the comparisons didn't stop after you had me, either. You
couldn't wait to tell me that it was a woman you'd needed, not me."
Janna's voice broke, then steadied as words rushed out. "And then you told me that my virginity was all I had to offer to a husband because I had no family, no profession, no money. You said that you had ruined me, because now I wasn't good enough to be a wife and wasn't educated enough to be a mistress and that meant that I wasn't good enough to be anything but a 'toy of many men, not one.' That's a whore in any man's language."
"Janna-my God, I never meant-"
"I'm not finished," she said, cutting across Ty's shocked words. "Or maybe I should say you're not finished. You've had a lot to say about my shortcomings as a woman. As woman hungry as you were, I couldn't even seduce you. You said, 'Sugar, you don't have the least idea how to seduce a man. A woman seduces a man with rustling silks and-'"
Ty's hand clamped across Janna's mouth, cutting off her bitter recitation of his words.
"You don't understand," Ty said urgently. "I didn't mean any of that to belittle you. Especially after we made love."
The mute defiance of Janna's eyes and the hot rain of her tears said that she had understood him all too well.
"Janna," he whispered, kissing her eyelashes, tasting her tears, "please believe me. I never meant the words as an insult to you. You're a young girl alone in the world and I seduced you, knowing I shouldn't. That's all the words meant. My shortcomings, Janna, not yours."
She trembled as she felt Ty's caresses and soft words stripping away her anger, revealing the despair that was the other side of her fury. Nothing he had said or could say would change the heartbreaking reality: she was not the silken lady of her lover's dreams.
"Do you believe me?" Ty asked, the words as soft as the repeated brush of his lips over Janna's eyelids, her cheeks, her mouth. "I never meant; to belittle you. Satin butterfly… believe me… I never meant…"
Gentle words became tender kisses, which lingered and deepened until Ty's tongue touched Janna's for just an instant. Then he withdrew.
"You're so cold you're shivering," he said huskily.
With a volatile mixture of despair and tenderness and desire, Janna waited for Ty to suggest the obvious way to warm her.
Ty looked from Janna's clear, fathomless eyes to the fire whose flames were licking against a huge wall of stone. "And that fire has a lot of rock to warm before it will do us any good." Suddenly he smiled. "But there's a better way."
Janna's answering smile was bittersweet as Ty's hands went to the soggy material that was still wrapped around her breasts. She could refuse him when she was in the grip of anger, but she could never refuse the man who had kissed her so gently just moments before.
When Ty saw the sad acceptance of Janna's smile, he felt as though a knife were turning within his body. He knew that he could have her now, that she would give herself to him once more with all the sensual generosity that had been such a marvel each time he had experienced it; but this time, after the shattering ecstasy had passed, she would believe herself a whore once again.
Nothing he could say would change her mind, for he had said too much already, heedlessly, not knowing that his words were wounding her. He had never meant to strip her pride away. But he had, and he finally knew it.
Too late.
Janna felt the world tilt as Ty picked her up and carried her away from the fire. She made a startled sound and threw her arms around his neck.
"It's all right, Janna. I won't drop you."
Although Ty's voice was as gentle as his kisses had been, in the moonlight his face was a portrait composed of harsh planes and angles, and the line of his mouth was as sad as Janna's had been. At first the clammy fabric of his shirt made Janna shiver with renewed chill. Caught between two bodies, the cloth quickly warmed, and so did she.
Neither of them spoke while Ty walked down the path that led to the hot spring. As the stone ramparts closed in and the valley narrowed, the temperature rose due to the heat radiated by the hottest pool. Ty stopped well short of the first pool, choosing instead the one they called the Tub. There he knelt and lowered Janna into the water without bothering to remove the rest of her clothes. She made a long sound of pleasure as the water's heat penetrated the chill that had come from hours of riding through the storm with only the haphazard protection of the poncho to turn aside the cold rain.