Page 9 of Coyote

"Yeah."

He was quiet long enough that I started building in the dark behind my eyes. The room I'd put him in. The door I'd leave open. The things I wanted to do once he was healed enough to hold on to me properly.

"I don't want anybody dying on my account," he said.

"Then don't try to run."

He hesitated for a second. Then both arms tightened around me, and he put his mouth close to my ear. "I won't run from you, little one."

God help me, I believed him.

I opened the throttle and took him home.

We never made it to the ranch.

I remembered almost none of the ride. I started shaking somewhere along the road, and the little man pulled over before I fell off the bike and took both of us down with it. He walked me down to a river, laid me out where the air was cool, and cleaned the worst of the blood off while I drifted in and out.

I had no roof over me and no wall at my back. Just sky, and the sound of water running over rock.

I fell asleep before I could tell him I would have preferred a bed and a door like a civilized man.

Sunrise brought me back stiff and cold and hurting in a dozen places I'd earned the night before. The man who'd hauled me out of that pen stood thigh-deep in the river, naked, trying to catch a fish with his bare hands. He stood completely still for a long moment. Then his hand snapped into the water and came up empty. He sighed and reset, only to miss again. His hand was fast enough. His timing was off by about an inch, every time.

My grandfather had me on a rifle before I was tall enough to see over his workbench, and by twelve I could put a round through a bottle cap at forty yards. I could have put a bullet through that trout without touching the water.

Catching one barehanded was a skill nobody had ever thought to give me.

Twelve hours ago those hands had killed four grown men. Now a fish was beating them, and it wasn't costing him anything. He wasn't even irritated.

I lay there and tried to hold both of those against each other, and my head wasn't clear enough to do it.

Coyote had a hard, wiry build. Scar tissue crossed his back and ribs, pale and raised, some old, some newer than the rest. Water ran down the knobs of his spine and gathered in the dip above his ass. I watched one drop disappear between his cheeks.

My cock thickened under the blanket. The pull of it dragged at the puncture in my thigh, and I shifted carefully, trying to make room without moving enough for him to notice.

I reached across the ground beside me for a body that hadn't been there in five years. I pulled my hand back and curled into the blanket.

Across the river, Coyote bent after another fish, bare ass lifting into the morning light, and I quit pretending I hadn't already decided.

Five years of nothing, and my body picked a naked stranger standing in a river to come back for.

I pulled the blanket down and checked the dressing over my ribs. Dry. So was the packing high on my thigh. A clean wrap ran from my wrist to my elbow.

He'd done all of it while I was out, tight enough to stop the bleeding without stealing my breath.

Somebody had trained him, and they had known what they were doing.

He struck at the water again, missed again, and looked directly at me. "You're awake."

"You're a terrible fisherman."

"I'm a patient one. There's a difference." He waded toward the bank. "You snore like a transmission falling apart. I rolled you onto your side twice so you wouldn't die."

I arched an eyebrow. "You watched me sleep?"

"All night. You ran a fever until about three, holding a whole conversation with somebody who wasn't there. I kept you cool and let you finish the talk."

"What did I say?"