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He stood there staring at her through the darkness, panting for breath, his pulse pounding in his head.
But with silent clarity he also knew he had to control things too. He willed his own body to calm, knowing the effort it would take to come down off the high they created. No woman had ever stirred him to such passion.
Sam moved away, cleared his throat and looked above them. Where the door once stood, was the sky peeping in on them. It wasn’t as dark now. He didn’t move, he couldn’t. Not yet. He needed this extra time to control himself.
“It’s gone,” was all he could manage to say.
The sky lightened a bit and he saw her face. Sweet and innocent, his mind echoed, and pink as a flower in first bloom.
“I was never
so scared in my life,” she whispered, not taking her eyes from him. “It felt like it was ripping the skin off my face…”
“Yeah,” he muttered miserably.
“It won’t come back, will it?” she asked, peeping out at the night sky.
“No…it won’t come back. But maybe we better ride…”
She nodded. Nodog got to his feet.
For once, she didn’t bombard him with questions he couldn’t answer. She was silent and he appreciated it.
Chapter Seven
The smell of a clean earth hit them the minute they stepped out of the cellar. As though the Lord Himself swept the land clean. But the sight before them was appalling. What once was a house now lay in a mass of timber and boards. The coffee pot had blown clean away. The chimney began to crumble, piece by piece. A tree lay on its side, uprooted like an onion in a garden. The horse was nowhere to be found. They were afoot now and this wasn’t good.
Nodog sniffed about, patrolling the area around them.
Sam studied the land, and then he glanced at Riley. Riley was staring out at the remains. Her eyes were brilliantly blue, her cheeks pink from the friction of their kisses. Her mouth was raw and red and looked so tempting. She was beautiful, Sam realized in that moment. He was an inch from telling her how he felt, but he held his tongue.
“Maybe we better cut that hair of yours and bind you up,” Sam said, studying her instead of the remains.
“Cut my hair. Do we have to do that? Can’t I just stuff it?” Her eyes grew wide.
“Naw, you cain’t. Your hat blew off in the wind. If your hat was to blow off in front of someone, or someone took it off they would see you was a girl. We’ve got to cut it; it’ll grow back, Riley,” Sam assured her, taking a knife from his pocket. “You’ll see, when this is all over, you’ll have your hair and your ranch back.”
“I-I hate cutting it. It’s one of my better features,” she protested.
“It is; that’s a fact. I’ve never seen prettier hair in my life, Riley, but this is more important,” Sam explained, coming toward her with the knife in his hand. He remembered how his fingers ran through her hair when they kissed, how soft it had been against his fingertips and he hated to cut it off, but she’d never pass for a boy if her hat blew off.
He made her sit on a stump where obviously the previous owner had used it as a chopping board for splitting logs. Then, by the light of the dimming day, he began to whack off her hair, until it was short enough to pass for a boy. He plopped the hat back on her head and checked his work out.
“That’s better.” Sam nodded. Her eyes looked bigger now with her hair short. “Your eyes sure look bigger since I whacked that off. I thought you’d be butt ugly with it short, but instead you have the eyes of an angel.”
And more beautiful, but he couldn’t tell her that.
Riley stared at him, speechless.
“What’s the matter?” He saw tears held back in her eyes.
“No one’s ever said anything that nice to me, Sam.”
Riley glanced down at her hair on the wet ground as Sam put his knife away and bent down, stuffing a small wad of her hair into his pocket before she saw him.
“Now what?” she asked.
Sam went to his saddle bags he had placed in the cellar during the storm. “You take this behind them trees and you wrap yourself tight then put your shirt back on. You can do it, can’t you?”
