“You don’t own it,” she repeated stubbornly.
Jesse almost laughed. She was damned sure of herself. Did she think she could plead ignorance and get away with what she’d planned?
He could categorize her easily enough. She was either a hippie who hadn’t accepted the fact that the sixties were gone, or she was a thief.
There was a big market for relics from the long-gone past. “Sacred artifacts of Native Americans,” the fat, easily frightened guy he’d caught on his land last year, despite the No Trespassing signs posted around his ten thousand acres, had called them, though real Native Americans simply referred to themselves as Indians.
As for the sacred part…
Complete, unadulterated crap.
Yeah, there were those of his people who were suckers for that kind of nonsense. He’d come close, as a boy, but Vietnam had sure as hell changed that. The stones, the glyphs, the pottery shards were nothing but stuff leftover from another time. The ledge didn’t have any kind of woo-woo magical validity whatsoever.
But that didn’t mean he’d let thieves and leftover flower children intrude upon it.
This place was his. He owned it, at least he’d own it until he signed the sale papers.
A quick appraisal told him this woman was no leftover flower child drawn to a romanticized version of the Old West. She wore no beads, no flowered gown, nor was her hair flowing. Instead her hair was pulled back from her face in a no-nonsense ponytail. She wore a plain cotton T-shirt and jeans that looked as if they’d seen a lot of use. She was a thief, plain and simple, and that she’d sneaked onto his property angered him almost as much as that he had not spotted her all the time he’d sat on his horse and stared at the mountain.
Yes, it had been dark as hell then, but so what? As a boy, as a soldier, he’d been trained to observe. To see things others didn’t. And yet, she’d gotten past him.
Jesse’s eyes narrowed. His skills were getting rusty. That would have to change. For now, though, he had to concentrate on how to get her off this ledge. Whatever she was, he didn’t want her death on his conscience.
More to the point, he thought coldly, a corpse would bring not just the sheriff but a passel of reporters. More publicity was the last thing he wanted.
He shot a look to where the ledge jutted out over the floor of the canyon. The problem was getting her down without both of them ending up doing it the fast way. At the least, a fall would result in shattered bones. He needed rope, but he didn’t have any, and riding forty minutes back to the house, leaving her here to the tender mercy of the sun and maybe the first curious check of the menu by an inquisitive buzzard, wasn’t such a hot idea.
Rope, he thought. Not necessarily a lot of it, just enough to link her to him…
Quickly, he rose to his feet.
“Okay,” he said brusquely. “Take off your belt.”
Her face went white. “What?”
“Your belt.” He was already unbuckling his. “Take it off.”
“Don’t do this.” Her voice broke. “Please. Whoever you are, don’t—”
His head came up. His eyes met hers and, hell, it all came together. The look on her face. The terror in her voice. She thought he was going to rape her. Why? Because he looked like what she undoubtedly thought of as a savage? Well, yeah. Maybe. He was shirtless. He wore his hair long. There was an eagle talon half wrapped in rawhide hanging around his neck, a gift from his father.
To keep you safe, his father had said softly, the night before he had left for ’Nam.
The stripes on his cheeks were the only thing that had no reasonable explanation. Okay. Maybe they did. He’d come here to say goodbye to his land, his mountain, as a warrior. He’d spent less than a minute choosing between his army ODs and the paint of his people. He didn’t believe in either, not anymore, but the link to those who’d preceded him could not be as easily discarded as a uniform, so he’d stripped off his shirt, striped his face, pulled his hair back with a strip of deerskin…
Jesse blew out a breath of exasperated comprehension.
The woman was a trespasser. She probably knew exactly where she was and that it was private land, but he couldn’t fault her for leaping to the wrong conclusion at being told to take off her belt by a man who sure as hell didn’t look like anything she was accustomed to.
“I need the belts to make a rope,” he said.
“A rope?”
“To get us off this cliff.”
She blinked. “To get us off this…”
He squatted beside her, grabbed her shoulders, forced her to turn her head and see the canyon. “Take a look, lady. We’re on the side of a mountain. As if you didn’t already know—”