Only 04 - Only Love

to wash your hair?” Shannonasked. “I know how awkward it is to do in a basin.”
    The thought of how good her fingers would feel rubbing over his scalp made Whip’s body tighten despite the punishing hours of labor he had just finished. His own relentless sexual response to Shannon made his mouth flatten into a harsh line. He didn’t like wanting a woman to the point that his body wasn’t his own anymore, no matter how hard he worked to exhaust himself.
    “No,” Whip said curtly. “I’ve managed my whole grown life without a handmaid. No point in taking up such foolishness now.”
    “Well, do go and eat some wasps,” Shannon retorted. “It will make your tongue seem sweet by comparison.”
    Whip grabbed the basin of hot water and stalked off toward a nearby grove of aspen trees, where there was an icy creek to use for rinsing off soap. Prettyface followed, leaping and prancing like a puppy. He loved playing tag with shots of water from Whip’s quick hands.
    “That’s it, Prettyface,” Shannon called after them. “Desert me! Go follow the yondering man who smiles like a fallen angel and has a temper fully suited to hell!”
    Both males ignored Shannon.
    With a frustrated sound, she turned back to camp, looking for something to vent her irritability on. All that came to hand was the pickax leaning against the log next to her shotgun.
    “I’m not mad enough to hammer stone… yet,” she muttered.
    She tested the water in the bucket, which was hanging from a cast-iron tripod over the fire. The water was lukewarm. Barely.
    “Go ahead, take all day to heat up,” Shannon muttered. “I’ve got nothing better to do than stand around sticking my finger in cold water.”
    She hovered around the campfire, feeding fuel into it, testing the water, and wondering if fire burned colder in the high mountains. Surely it didn’t take this long to heat water at the cabin.
    “I’ve got the hot spring at the cabin,” Shannon reminded herself. “It takes no time at all to get a bucket of hot water for washing clothes.”
    Sighing, Shannon tested the water for the fifteenth time. It was passably warm.
    “Finally. Now I can do the wash. Thunder and blazes, I can see why folks run around in dirty clothes a Comanchero would be ashamed to wear. Heating water for baths and such could make a body crazy.”
    Just as Shannon bent to take the bucket from the tripod, Prettyface broke into a savage kind of barking that was more a snarling howl of rage than anything else.
    A shot rang out.
    Water sloshed as Shannon slammed the bucket handle back over the tripod and ran for the shotgun. The sound of another shot overwhelmed the dog’s furious sounds.
    Whip’s shout came as Shannon broke into a run, heading for the aspen thicket. As she ran, she understood what her ears had been trying to tell her—the “shots” she was hearing were the sounds of a bullwhip at work, not a rifle.
    The bullwhip cracked and then cracked again, splitting the air like lightning. Whip shouted something that Shannon couldn’t understand.
    Then came a terrifying kind of chomping, snarling cough, as though the mountain was clearing itsthroat. Shannon had never heard the sound before, but Silent John had described it often enough.
    Grizzly.
    “Whip!” Shannon screamed, running harder than she ever had before in her life. “Oh, God, you don’t even have a gun!”
    She leaped a fallen log, staggered for an instant on landing, then gathered herself and raced on, cocking the shotgun even as she ran.
    Shannon saw the grizzly before she saw Whip. The bear was reared up on its hind legs, taller than Whip, wider, terrifying in its strength. The enraged bear was snapping its jaws together. Saliva showed stark white against the dark muzzle. The grizzly’s massive paws swatted at the bullwhip that cracked again and again around its head.
    Naked to the waist, Whip stood with his back against a thicket of aspen that was too dense for him to penetrate. It wouldn’t have done any good even if he could have hidden among the trees—the grizzly would have broken through the aspens at a gallop.
    Nor could Whip outrun the bear, even if the terrain had been flat and open. On level land, grizzlies were as fast as horses. On broken land, grizzlies were faster.
    Prettyface leaped and snarled behind the bear, fangs slashing, seeking the grizzly’s hamstrings beneath the thick coat of fur. With horrifying speed the bear turned and slashed at the dog with claws