THE CEILING OF the jacal spun. Through the ringing in his ears, he caught Nena releasing a soft, sympathetic hiss. She knelt next to him, her attention focused on his shoulder.
“Are there more?” He could force out speech if he tried, but reaching for the words was like trying to grasp a fish in water. Slippery. He ended up with empty hands more often than not.
He tried to move his left arm and gasped from the pain. A soft tingling swept over his body; sweat sprang forth and lay clammy on his face, on his neck and chest. His mind spun off-kilter, like a wheel separated from a wagon in a collision. He had been shooting. The vampire loomed over him, then turned toward Nena.
He would never let a monster touch her again. He had seized his knife and acted.
He knew the slice of his own flesh when he heard it; a pop that made his stomach turn. Since then, he could only sense the world through a thick, brutal throbbing.
“It’s gone,” Nena was saying. “There aren’t others, I don’t think.”
Nena was here. The nightmare was over. She was safe. He could rest. He could close his eyes and rest at last, couldn’t he?
“Néstor.” Her voice cracked like a whip. His eyes flew open. “Look at me.”
He did. He loved looking at her. He wanted her to be the last thing he ever saw, the first thing he ever saw, his heavens and his earth. Her brown hair was a messy halo around her face, but her loveliness had no sweetness now: it was set and determined, the line of her mouth hard. “Sit up as straight as you can and look at me.”
She reached for his shirt to lift it. This seized his attention and held it. His heart leaped to his throat at the brush of her hands on his skin. For a blessed, mad moment, pain was forgotten—Nena was taking off his clothes.
Madre Santa, who could think of pain when anticipation raced over his skin like a burning shot of aguardiente?
But she was lifting his shirt over his head, shifting his left arm in the process. His breathless reverie shattered at the surge of white pain. Stars burned around the edges of his vision.
“I’ll be fine,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Hush,” she commanded. She tossed his shirt aside, then her hands were on his skin, exploring the left side of his body. The warmth of her palms was on his chest, his ribs, skating up to his collarbone. The gentle weight of her fingers. The brush of her breath on his shoulder as she leaned into him.
“Your shoulder is dislocated,” she murmured. “I have to put it back into place.”
She knelt so close that he could smell her hair: sweat, gunpowder, and precious lingering traces of wildflower soap. He wanted to bury his face in it and fall asleep engulfed by the scent of her. To slip into drunken oblivion and forget the jacal and all that had happened.
Distantly, he registered that she had spoken.
“Yeah,” he said belatedly. “Yeah, all right.”
The words came out breathier than he thought they might. They sounded as distracted as he was, as intoxicated as he was. Could she feel how his heart skipped every other beat, racing to keep up with his pulse? Could she see the gooseflesh that danced over his skin in the wake of her fingertips?
Nena shot him a suspicious look. He marked the sweep of her eyelashes, the appearance of a crease between her brows.
“This will hurt,” she said flatly, as if having to clarify something that she believed was exceedingly clear.
“I can handle it,” he said in a way he hoped sounded casual. He wasn’t sure if this was true. Pain drummed a dull, throbbing rhythm in his left arm. As shock melted away from him like ice in the sun, different parts of his body began to ache. His back, from where he had been thrown on the stone floor of the patio. His good knee, which had struck first and broken his fall. There were smudges of bright blood on Nena’s hand; dimly, he recognized that he must be bleeding.
But if Nena’s hands on him were a spirit, he would drink until it made him sick.
Something shifted in her posture, in her breathing.
“I know you can,” she said. She shifted her weight and leaned into him, bringing her cheek so close to his that he could feel the brush of her voice fall on his ear as well as hear it. “You’re a bad man, aren’t you? You can handle a little pain.”
His breath caught.
The weight of her hands became seeking. More confident. One drew gently up his rib cage, the other up his breast.
All he had to do was turn his head to the left, and his nose would brush hers. She was so close that hair that had fallen loose from her plaits tickled his cheek.
He dropped his eyes to her mouth. The space between his lips and hers was candescent with promise. One short movement was all it would take to steal a kiss, to lose himself in her.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a distant call went up.
He was too focused on the woman in front of him and not on the severity of the situation around him: they were far from civilization, with scant weapons and fewer supplies, their only defense against the night and its monsters the flimsy walls of this jacal. He was injured, and severely so.
But all he saw was her.
“Do you know the kind of trouble I would get into for being this close to a man? Alone, no less?” Her voice lowered, husky against his ear. Was her breathing as rough as his? As shallow? “But no one’s here,” she whispered. “And I like being alone with you.”
Her hands were settling. One rested lightly on his left bicep, the other high on his chest. He wanted them running over his ribs. Pain be damned, he wanted them lower.
“Do you?” he breathed.
A dim alarm rose in the back of his mind as her grip tightened on his bicep. A faint warning whistle that was carried away by a swift wind as she turned her face to his. The tip of her nose brushed against his cheekbone. Nena. She was his Nena, lovely and perfect and real and here.
She lowered her dark eyelashes bashfully. “Yeah,” she said. “It gives me ideas.”
His heart pounded brassy and bold. If only she knew the kind of ideas being around her put in his mind. How watching her saunter ahead of him drove him to distraction as they packed up camp because of how trousers accentuated the shapeliness of her legs and ass. Even hours later on the road, he couldn’t stop thinking about how they were his trousers, fabric that he had worn a thousand times brushing against her skin, lying against the softness of her inner thighs as she rode.
“What . . .” he began. He meant to ask what kind of ideas, but was cut off when Nena braced against him and wrenched his left arm.
A bolt of pain sang through his arm. A cry cracked out from him.
A pop in his shoulder.
A flash of nausea up his throat.
“Hijo de puta,” he howled. “What was that?”
Nena rocked back on her heels, a self-satisfied smile playing across her lips.
She had taken his dislocated arm and thrust it back into place.
“That works better if you don’t know what’s coming. Fortunately,” she added, with more than a hint of smugness, “you are very easy to distract.”
She stood and went out to the patio, carefully stepping around the body of the dead Rinche. She returned within moments with Néstor’s knife, then walked to the back of the jacal, to the saddlebags, and came back with her dirtied dress in her other hand. She dropped to sitting cross-legged next to him and immediately set to cutting broad strips of fabric from the skirt of the dress. She ripped another strip of fabric, examined it, and, satisfied, tied it to the first. Gone was the temptress who whispered into his ear, replaced by a workmanlike and focused curandera making what appeared to be a sling.