Page 20

CHAPTER 20

It was a long night. Diana spent part of it hunting, although roadrunners were mainly sight predators, so trying to do it at night was difficult and nerve-wracking—especially since she was aware that other wild creatures would be out and about, many of whom had a sharper sense of smell and a more acute ability to hunt at night than she did. There would be foxes, and owls, and bobcats. She ended up spending as much time as possible near Costa in the awareness that few predators likely to be found in this terrain would mess with a full-grown wild boar.

She caught a couple of lizards and a small snake by using her human mind’s knowledge of where small, cold-blooded animals were likely to be found at night. She took the snake and one of the lizards down to Farley, dropping them off near his drowsing bulk, and then scurried off to eat her lizard at a safe distance. Her human awareness of what she was eating warred uncomfortably with her roadrunner sense that raw, torn-apart lizard was delicious.

She hoped Costa was having a better time with his diet of roots and grubs, but doubted it.

They spent the last part of the night sleeping in a patch of brush near the spring, Costa lying in a great snoring heap while Diana nestled down in the crook of his leg and relied on his protection and warmth. As dawn washed the stars out of the sky, she rose from the still-sleeping Costa, tilted her head and ran her feathered cheek along his leg. Then she darted to the spring to drink and scurried down the hill to have a look at the crash site again.

It was exhilarating racing along in the cool of early dawn. Now that she could see, she was less worried about predators; almost anything she spotted would probably run away if she shifted human. She raced down the hillside, enjoying the speed and strength of her roadrunner body, almost managing to leave her worries behind.

Almost.

The fire in the wreckage had burned itself out the previous evening, fortunately without setting anything nearby on fire, and now the scorched hulk of the plane created a baroque sculpture in the growing morning light. Diana circled it. The fire had torched off the spilled aviation fuel, and what she smelled now was mainly charcoal and burned oil. Nothing useful seemed to have survived the wreck; any survival supplies that had been in the plane were charred beyond use.

She flew up to sit on top of the burnt-out fuselage. From here, in the light of the rising sun, she had a good view of the trail they had left through the sand, veering and tilting, with broken-off pieces of the plane striking sparks in the morning sun. Looking at it from here, she couldn’t help being amazed any of them had survived.

Also a darn fine piloting job, if I do say so myself.

Her keen hearing caught the sound of something large approaching through the sparse sagebrush on the hillside. Diana leaped into the air and spun around, prepared to shift if it was anything dangerous, but from up here she could easily see Costa coming through the brush and the boulders toward her.

She hadn’t had a good look at Costa’s shifted form since they were much younger. He was an extraordinary creature, large and hump-shouldered and powerful, covered in bristly hair that caught the sun with a reddish tint. Gleaming tusks curled from either side of his muscular jaw.

He was carrying something in his mouth, a bundle dangling from a cord or rope. As he got closer, she recognized their balled-up clothing. The rope was his boot laces. Costa looked up and saw her, dropped it in the sand at his feet, and shifted.

“Morning,” he said cheerfully, while Diana’s hindbrain tried to recover from the sight of Costa, muscular and naked and now with his lightly reddish chest hair catching the morning sun. He separated out Diana’s jeans and the shirt of his that she’d been wearing, then reached for his jeans and pulled them on.

Diana fluttered down from the top of the plane to land near him and shifted back herself. She was well aware of Costa’s appreciative gaze on her as she began to dress, darting swift looks at him out of the corner of her eye. She was also all too aware of the vivid sense-memory of last night, running her hands over his chest in the dark.

“Sleep well?” she asked to get her mind off it.

“Until I woke up to find you gone.” There was a slight edge to his voice.

She hadn’t thought about that part. “I would’ve left a note, but it’s hard to hold a pen in a roadrunner’s claws. Also, I didn’t have a pen.”

Costa snorted. “I checked on Farley on the way over. He’s all right, got through the night okay. I pointed him in the direction of the water hole so he can get a drink.”

“Good for him, I guess.” Dressed now, at least as dressed as she could get, she sat in the sand, brushing it out of her cuffs. “Quinn, what are the odds of someone coming for us?”

“A hundred percent,” he said immediately. “They knew where we were going, and they’re well aware now that we’re missing. An agent and a civilian can’t simply disappear without people looking into it. I checked in before we got on the plane, didn’t exactly give them many details, but the office knows we were flying to Alamagordo, and by now they’ll know we didn’t get there.”

Diana looked up at the clear blue sky, flecked with small clouds turned gold in the newly risen sun. “I don’t see a search and rescue flight.”

“They may be too far north. You said we were pretty far off the flight path. Or they could still be checking things on the ground. I expect Thornburg is having a hard time right now, between my agents grilling him and his plane being even more off the grid than he was expecting.”

Costa smiled a little at the thought. Diana wondered if he was imagining Agent Caine giving Thornburg the third degree. She would have enjoyed being a fly on the wall for that.

“Classic advice in the event of an accident is to stay with the vehicle,” she said. “And I’ve seen plenty of evidence of the truth of that, doing S the roadrunner always thought in terms of “now,” and that tended to bleed over into her human mind a little. The future seemed very far away.

They found their way back down to the spring by following an old animal trail. Diana hadn’t gotten a good look at it before, as she hadn’t yet seen it with her human eyes by daylight. It was actually quite a nice little place. Water bubbled up from the rocks, expanded into a pool and then trickled away in a thin stream that wound out of the hollow through cracks in the rocks, eventually vanishing as it soaked into the thirsty ground. Around the small pool, green leaves and grass framed it with calendar-picture perfection. There was even some degree of privacy, as the rocks sheltering the pool also hid it from casual eyes.

“Well, we’re not going to actually want to splash around in the spring,” Costa pointed out. “We have to drink from that. I don’t think anyone wants my junk swishing around in their morning coffee water.”

Diana burst into laughter. She wasn’t even sure why it was so funny; it just was. She laughed herself weak, leaning on a rock.

“I will take that as a confirmation of my position,” Costa said, eyes dancing. “So I guess that leaves either the spit-bath you suggested, or making ourselves a bathing pool.”

Diana wiped her eyes and cleared her throat. “It’s a good idea, but we don’t have anything to dig with.”

The sparkle in his eyes was joined by a grin. “ You don’t have anything to dig with.”

Before she could react, he quickly skimmed out of his jeans and boots. Diana barely had a moment to register fully naked Quinn Costa before he shifted into his boar shape.

Diana watched with interest, and some amount of amusement, as Costa used his hooves and his tusks, in combination with his powerful neck muscles, to excavate a hollow adjacent to the main pool. There was already a depression there; it looked like, in particularly wet years, the spring spilled over to create a series of small ponds. Costa scooped and scraped at the growing dampness in the widening hole, in the process getting his head and the wiry fur covering most of his body plastered with sand.

“You’re definitely going to need a bath after this,” Diana pointed out.

Costa snorted, turned, and with a delicately placed kick, knocked an opening between the two ponds. Water rushed to fill his newly excavated hole. As the level began to equalize between the two, he shifted back and placed some rocks and handfuls of sand to close off the opening and stop the backwash from their bathing pool contaminating the main pond.

Diana eyed the bathing hole. The swirling water was opaque with silt and sand. It also wasn’t very big, in spite of Costa’s efforts, really more of a shallow mud puddle.

“I’m not sure if that’s exactly what I was picturing,” she said. “I don’t think it’s any cleaner than I am.”

“It’s settling now,” Costa pointed out. Indeed it was, the sediment sorting itself and the water becoming clearer. “You’re welcome to the first bath.”

“How could I turn down such a gentlemanly offer?”

“I’ll even turn my back if you want.”

She did not want, in particular. But she also suspected she was going to be a highly undignified sight while splashing in a mud puddle, not exactly a sexy bathing beauty in a crystalline stream. “If you don’t mind.”

“Sure,” Costa said easily, though she thought she detected some disappointment in his tone. He turned to sit on a rock, bare-assed, with his back to her.

“I thought you meant you’d go a little farther away than five feet,” Diana said, stripping quickly out of her sandy clothes.

“There might be dangerous wild animals in the vicinity.”

“Oh, is that the reason.” She dipped a foot in the water, expecting it to be cold, but found it tepid and not entirely uncomfortable.

“How’s the bath?” Costa asked at the splashing noises, as she dipped herself further, trying to figure out how to get herself in past her knees.

“Less terrible than I was expecting. Oh, wait a minute!”

She was missing the obvious. She shifted to a roadrunner and dipped herself fully into the water. Now the too-small basin was a generously appointed birdbath, and the water did not feel cool at all. Roadrunners weren’t bathing birds, but she had seen enough birds in birdbaths to know how it was done. She dipped, splashed, preened, spread her wings luxuriously, and finally clambered out and shifted human again to find herself perfectly clean.

“Done,” she said, running her fingers through her wet hair to smooth out a few lingering grains of sand.

Costa turned around. Somehow, in all of this, it had escaped her notice that he was going to be struck full in the face by the sight of a naked, wet Diana standing a few feet away from him. It was only as the poleaxed expression spread across his face that she realized he was getting a dramatic eyeful.

“Since you were such a perfect gentleman, I’ll return the favor while I dry off,” she said, and strolled past him, with the breeze drying the water on her naked body, to sit down on a patch of grass.

Costa said something behind her that sounded like, “Guh.”

Soon, presumably as his higher brain functions came back online, she heard splashing sounds. Diana smiled and stretched out on the grass. It was very pleasant. The grass was thick enough to keep her from getting sandy all over again, and the coolness by the spring took some of the heat out of the sun. Once her back was dry, she shook the sand off Costa’s shirt, as much as possible, and put it on to help prevent sunburn. She left the jeans for later; she didn’t relish the idea of putting the sandy, sweat-damp denim back on her clean skin.

After a little while, Costa came over to join her, glistening and gloriously nude. Diana was stretched out on her stomach with her hands folded under her chin. She looked up with a smile, drinking him in, his body golden in the sun.

“Is this a private sunbathing spot, or can anyone join in?”

“Both,” Diana said with a lazy smile. “It’s private, but invited guests are welcome. Pull up some grass.”

Costa lay down to dry off, and Diana rolled over and sat up. She hadn’t bothered buttoning the shirt, and although it covered her breasts, technically, there was quite a lot on display. No performative gentlemanly behavior this time: Costa’s gaze followed her.

Diana stretched out her legs, crossing them at the ankles. “Enjoying the view?”

“You have no idea.”

“Same here,” she said, inspecting his bare back and the taut curve of his ass.

They remained silent in comfortable companionship for a little while. With proper camping gear and food, Diana thought, the place would have been a peaceful and beautiful location for a weekend’s stay. She plucked at the hem of the shirt laying across her bare thigh.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier,” she said, and Costa propped himself up on his elbows to listen. “About how I could have gone anywhere, but I ended up moving back to a town two hours from where I grew up.”

“I didn’t mean to?—”

“Let me finish.” She moved a little closer so that she could touch him, brushing a hand across his arm. “You’re right. And the interesting thing is how I didn’t even really think about it. I loved the life I’ve led, don’t get me wrong. I regret none of it. But when it came time to settle down, it never occurred to me to look for something permanent in any of the other places I’ve been.”

Costa looked at her wordlessly, and this time she met his eyes full on, seeing the swell of hope there. Diana swallowed and looked away, across the rocks and the valley to the clear gold sun on the hills.

“It’s home,” she said, low. “I love the desert and the mountains. I even love the difficult parts. This isn’t an easy place to live sometimes, and if I had stayed back then, I know I would always have found it too confining. But—but sometimes you have to try spreading your wings first to find out you belong. And I do belong here; I don’t think I could ever leave it forever.”

Leave it. Leave you.

Her hand rested on his thigh, and he sat up so that he could put his hand over hers. She was acutely aware of the nearness of him, the naked maleness of him.

“I’m not sure if you’re saying what I hope you’re saying,” Costa said, his voice thick.

“I don’t know either. I’m still working this out. But I think ...” She turned her head to look him in the face again. “In answer to the other question you asked earlier, I don’t know if we’d work out, but I think I’d like to try.”

For a moment nothing happened; he simply looked at her with his heart in his eyes.

Then he lunged forward, and she met him halfway.

There was nothing tentative about their kiss this time, nothing uncertain. Their mouths crashed together and Diana lost herself completely in the heat and urgency, as one of his hand came up to stroke her hair while the other curled around her waist, pulling her closer.

The next thing she knew she was straddling his naked lap, bare-legged and bare-assed herself, while they went on kissing as frantically as if their lives depended on it.

Kissing turned to petting. Her nipples were stiff and sensitive, brushing against his chest. It was as if twenty years of holding themselves back had built into impossible sensitivity.

Her legs were spread wide around his hips. When he thrust upward and buried himself in her wet heat, she cried out loud.

“Birth control ...” he gasped into her shoulder.

“Implant, don’t worry about it—don’t stop?—”

She couldn’t have stopped now if she’d wanted to, which she emphatically didn’t. Her hips jerked reflexively, and she found herself mounting towards climax with speed she had never experienced before. She cried out again as she crashed into a mind-numbing orgasm, and he gasped into her shoulder as she felt him jerk and spend himself inside her.

“Uh, wow,” he said after a moment, pulling back. “Did you—uh—was that enough?—”

“I wanted it, it was amazing, stop ruining the moment.” She kissed him to take any sting from her words away, and then kissed him again.

And she might have gone on kissing him forever, if they hadn’t been interrupted by the drone of an airplane engine.

They threw themselves apart. Costa grabbed his pants, and Diana hastily scrambled for her jeans and his shirt.

Diana only briefly glimpsed the plane above the hills around them. It was flying low, as if looking for something. Them, possibly. Or maybe it was a sightseeing flight giving the tourists an unexpected show.

“Hey!” Costa yelled, waving. “We’re down here!”

“I don’t think they can see us.” Mercifully, given what they had been doing a moment ago. “We need to get down to the crash site.”

Costa stomped into his boots, and they scrambled down the hill in a hasty flurry of activity. Diana thought they must have missed their chance, the sound of the airplane fading into the distance—but then it came back stronger, and she realized it had been circling, coming in for a closer look.

Now it reappeared, skimming across the sandy valley bottom. There was no chance it couldn’t see the wreck, or read their SOS. Diana started to raise an arm to wave. Then, frowning at the plane, she grabbed Costa’s arm as he began to lift it.

“What?” he asked, reacting to her alarm.

“Don’t you recognize it? That’s the same paint job as the one we crashed. And that looks like the same logo on the tail. It’s not rescuers, Quinn.” She shot him an alarmed look. “It’s Thornburg come back to finish the job he started.”