Only 04 - Only Love

twice as cold.
    “I asked how you could be sure that you didn’tleave any bastards behind,” Shannon said flatly. “You said the same way Silent John knew how not to get me pregnant. Well, the way Silent John used was—”
    “ He never touched you, ” Whip interrupted, finally understanding, believing. “You’ve really never been touched at all. My God.”
    “Hallelujah,” Shannon said sarcastically. “If I repeat something often enough, even a gray-eyed yondering man finally learns.”
    Whip opened his mouth, closed it, and stared at the virgin widow who had turned to honey and melted all over him at a touch.
    “My God,” Whip repeated. “I—” He shook his head as though coming out of deep water. “It never occurred to me that Silent John and you had’t been truly man and wife.”
    “No more than it occurred to me that you didn’t understand why I didn’t get pregnant,” she shot back.
    “Chastity. The oldest way of all. Judas H. Priest.”
    Shannon’s anger drained away as she saw how shocked Whip was. In the wake of anger came a fatigue so great that she wanted to put her head on her knees and cry. It was all too much to take in—the grizzly and her fear for Whip and his rage that she had come running up, then the heady sensuality of his touch, and then his fury.
    “Shannon?”
    “What.”
    “What did you think would happen after I had you?”
    “Think? Think? Yondering man, when you touch me I can’t think worth a handful of cold spit.”
    “You weren’t trying to trap me into marriage?”
    Shannon lifted her head. Between the grizzly andthe lovemaking, her braids had come mostly undone. Long, dark strands slid over her cheeks and down over her breasts. Her eyes were dark, unreadable.
    “Why on earth would I want to do that?” she asked.
    For the second time Shannon had managed to shock Whip speechless.
    “What possible use is a man who puts a baby in you and then flits off around the earth until it’s time to come back and put another baby in?” she asked.
    “I’d never get you pregnant and then leave you,” Whip said coldly. “You know me well enough to know that.”
    Reluctantly Shannon nodded. “You’re not the kind to run out on your responsibilities.”
    “Is that what you were counting on? Getting pregnant so I would’t leave?”
    Anger stirred in Shannon, but she was too tired to sustain it.
    “I’m naïve about sex, but I’m not stupid about life,” she said wearily.
    “What does that mean?”
    “Pregnant or not, I will never marry a man who wants me less than he wants a sunrise he’s never seen.”
    Whip flinched at the conflicting emotions in Shannon’s voice, in her eyes, in her hands clenching the blanket over her nakedness.
    “But you would have given yourself to me,” Whip said, angry for no reason.
    A shiver of memory and desire went through Shannon.
    “Yes,” she said.
    “Why?”
    “Why do you care?”
    “Because I’m afraid you’re naïve enough to believe you love me,” Whip said bluntly.
    Shannon gave Whip a shuttered glance.
    “Either way, it’s not your worry,” she said. “It’s mine.”
    “I don’t want you to love me,” Whip said, biting off each word.
    “I know.”
    “Love is a cage.”
    “Yes. I know that too. Now. Someday I’ll thank you for teaching me how to build cage of sunlight. But not today.”
    She put her forehead back on her knees, shutting Whip out.
    “Shannon?”
    “Go away, yondering man. You don’t want my body, you don’t want my love, you don’t want anything but the sunrise you’re never seen. Go chase it and leave me be.”

11
    W HIP slammed the pick into rock and felt the shock wave all the way down his arms to his ankles. Stone splintered and sheared away from bedrock, showering him with biting pieces of grit in the process.
    Nothing useful lay behind the rock Whip had hammered from the end of the short tunnel. The faint signs of gold he had been pursuing like a demon for the past two days weren’t in evidence anymore. Nor could he guess where the faint trace of gold had gone. There were no visible faults, no layering of stone, no way to decide which was the best direction to dig—up, down, sideways, straight ahead, or not at all.
    Reno might be able to make this sorry claim pay, but not me.
    No wonder Silent John took to man-hunting. It’s a damned sight more interesting than hammering on stone.
    Despite Whip’s sour thoughts, he kept on swinging the pick with all the power in