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She sat back and watched in silence as the blond alpha prepared the coffee. First he set a kettle of water directly into the small bed of coals and waited for it to boil. Once it was going, he took several large handfuls of ground coffee from a pouch and dumped them directly into the bubbling water. He let it boil for a few more minutes. Then, using a handkerchief to keep from scalding his hands, he carefully lifted the kettle out of the fire, set it on the ground nearby, and sprinkled in a couple drops of water from his canteen to settle the grounds.
Shannon enjoyed watching him work. It was the same way her father had used to make coffee every morning at the ranch. She couldn’t help but see a little of her father in the way Tanner McBain moved and carried himself and spoke. In another life, Samuel Duffy probably would have been a drifter too. It seemed like a good life, a free life, and Shannon envied it a little.
But it wasn’t the life for her.
She had responsibilities. The ranch, the hucows.
Tanner filled a tin cup with steaming black brew and handed it to her. It smelled heavenly, and it tasted even better, smooth and rich. After a few sips, Shannon could feel all the tiredness evaporating from her body.
The coffee had a noticeable effect on Tanner too.
Even though the fluid was still scalding hot, the alpha knocked back half his cup like it was beer. Almost immediately, the furrows disappeared from his brow, and a smile touched his lips. He finished off the rest of his cup in one gulp, then dragged the back of his hand across his mouth.
“Ah, that’s better,” he said. “Well, we got a long day of riding ahead of us. Let’s get a little grub in our bellies, and then hit the trail. What do you say, Miss Duffy?”
Shannon blew on her coffee, took a sip, nodded.
“That sounds good, Mr. McBain.”
CHAPTER 17
By early afternoon, the mesas on both sides of the valley had converged to form a narrow, winding canyon through which the travelers rode single file. Logan was at the front of the line on his paint horse, followed by the Duffy woman on her dapple gray mare. Tanner brought up the rear on his gold palomino while the late Mr. Blaylocke’s dark bay ponied along beside him. The vertical orange walls of sandstone provided some shade from the blazing sun, but the air inside the canyon was hot and still. Sweat rolled down Tanner’s neck, and his shirt clung to his chest and back like glue.
He didn’t like it. Not one bit.
It wasn’t the heat that bothered him. He was used to that. He didn’t like being hemmed in on both sides like this. Out in the open desert if you got ambushed, there were a thousand directions you could run, but in a canyon like this, options were limited, and it was impossible to know what kind of trouble might be waiting around the next bend. Tanner needed to keep his eyes and ears open for even the slightest sign of danger.
There was just one problem.
Shannon Duffy.
Talk about a distraction! No matter how he tried, Tanner couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off the woman’s perfect, round butt rocking gently in her saddle as she rode in front of him. Of course, that just got him thinking about how good that butt would feel grinding against his lap, and before he knew it, his cock was so swollen with arousal it was fit to bust right out of his britches.
It really was too much. If this canyon didn’t come to an end soon, he was going to have to switch positions with Logan at the front of the line. Let that bastard suffer a little.
Then again, he didn’t really want to give up his view.
Damn it. He needed to focus. He was supposed to beprotectingShannon Duffy. It wasn’t just because she’d hired him as a bodyguard. There was just something about the woman that set off all kinds of protective and possessive instincts inside him.
And there was plenty to protect her from in these parts. Centaurs, snakemen, bandits… and wolves.
Redwolves.
Tanner still hadn’t told Shannon Duffy what he’d seen when he followed those wolf tracks at the boulders the day before. He’d told Logan about it, and they’d both decided it was better to keep it to themselves for now. No point in frightening the woman unnecessarily. She was already rattled enough from everything that had happened to her the day before.
One thing was obvious though—the creature that had killed Blaylocke was no ordinary wolf. If the animal’s incredible size wasn’t enough to make that clear, the tracks were. A few hundred paces away from the site of the attack, those tracks had shifted from paws to human footprints.
The animal’s bleeding had stopped too.
It was the weirdest thing Tanner had ever seen—and he’d seen his fair share of weird stuff.
The Navajos told stories about witches who could change into animals. Skinwalkers, they called them. Tanner had always thought that kind of stuff was bullshit, but now he wasn’t so sure. Besides, ever since the Occurrence, there were lots of critters roaming around that had never existed before.
Tanner ought to know, he was was one of them.
The Occurrence had happened February 3, 1849, one year to the day after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought an end to the Mexican War. That was before Tanner’s time, but he’d heard plenty of stories about it from the old-timers.
To this day, nobody knew exactly what had happened. They only knew that every single man, woman, and child from the Pacific to the Hundredth Meridian had just up and fainted. Animals too. There was some disagreement about how long it had lasted. Some folks said twenty minutes, others said two hours. At any rate, it was long enough for all hell to break loose. Stagecoaches had crashed, injuring or killing their passengers. Untended fires had burned down houses, and in some cases, entire towns. Trains jumped their tracks.
