“Everything was thrown around like someone had a temper tantrum. Anything like that happens again, I’m going to request a security guard!” She sucked in a big breath. “You bring the horse over to the makeup tent in an hour.”
It would probably take half that long to get Bandit, halter him and lead him back here. Tiernan considered using restraints since horses often freaked at anything new being done to them, but he didn’t want to hobble Bandit or use a twitch or ear restraint, not when he had other methods of handling him.
As he walked back to the pasture where he’d left the horse, Tiernan thought about the makeup tent. Who would have been in there messing around? Some kid?
After rounding up Bandit, Tiernan clipped a lead to the halter and then hand-led the spirited horse to the gate, all the while touching him and tuning in, making the connection that would convince the horse that he was safe, not an easy task when working with a prey animal. Getting a jump on the Paint’s fight-or-flight instinct before it took hold was key. Tiernan could only imagine the horse’s response to what was about to happen to him.
By the time they arrived at the makeup tent, and Tiernan secured Bandit’s lead to a nearby tree, he was confident that he and the beast had bonded.
Carrie came out of the tent, carrying a box. “Ah, there you are. I’m ready. How’s our friend?”
“As settled as I could manage.”
Referring to her sketches, Carrie first lightly chalked in the new color design wherever needed on the Paint’s hide. All the while, Tiernan stood next to the horse, touching him with a steady hand, using their unspoken connection to keep the horse calm.
Then Carrie slipped on an oven mitt and dipped it into a pan of brown dye. Patient until then, Bandit rolled his eyes and Tiernan sensed the immediate desire to flee.
“Nah, nah,” he murmured, stroking the horse both physically and mentally until Bandit settled.
“You have quite the control there,” Carrie said, using the dye on the mitt to create the basic shapes of the pattern on the horse’s hide.
“’Tis a gift,” Tiernan said with a grin.
Even so, Bandit’s flesh shuddered, and Tiernan concentrated, put thoughts of a pretty pasture on a lazy spring day into the horse’s mind. Bandit stilled just as Carrie took a soft cloth with some petroleum jelly and blended the color to make it look more natural. But a moment later, when she went at his face with a toothbrush with a squeeze of white paint from a tube, the horse sidestepped.
“Easy now,” Tiernan murmured, rubbing the horse’s ear between two fingers just as the producer and director of the film walked by, hot in the middle of an argument.
“Sorry, Jane, it’ll take too much time.”
“You said we would do this my way, Max!”
“I’ve rethought it and decided against it.”
Bandit settled and let Carrie work in the white paint.
“You promised!” Jane said.
“Too costly. I already took a bath having to get another camera after one of ours mysteriously melted down.”
Something had happened to one of the cameras? And this after the makeup tent had been messed with. Tiernan wondered if the camera meltdown was something that just happened or was planned.
“That’ll be covered by insurance,” Jane argued.
“Look, I don’t have the insurance now, and I need the extra money for the mine scenes. Getting some of that equipment in when we shoot the gold scenes is going to be far more costly than what I was originally quoted. As will be the big cleanup after I blow the mine’s entrance as part of the act-two plot point.”
“Then we can change—”
“Jane, enough! I am the director.”
The producer flushed with color and looked away.
Tiernan hadn’t known they were going to blow up the mine entrance. He wondered how stable the mountain was in this area, and whether such a move would cause more problems than the director was even aware of.
The producer and director passed Tiernan.
Their emotions flared—desire, resentment, power. Realizing they were more than coworkers and had a serious relationship, he suddenly had a fleeting image of Ella in mind. Tiernan closed himself down and concentrated only on the horse as Carrie used hair spray to set the color.
The last thing he wanted to think of was dealing with a relationship with someone he could love. Not when he could never have that for himself.
***
Wind swept around the hills, whistling through the pines and pummeling the entrance to the abandoned mine, his favorite place to journey. This day, he would not travel alone. He wished his companion to see with unfettered vision, to experience with a truly open mind for the first time. He’d been cultivating her for this moment.
He shook the drug from his leather pouch into the palm of his hand and offered it to her.
Dutifully, she accepted the tablet and put it to her ripe lips. Her hair fluttered around her face as her gaze locked with his, and she tongued the drug as she would soon tongue him. Then she rolled the drug into that clever mouth and with a little moan that made his groin tighten, swallowed and smiled at him—not the pure smile of the innocent, but one artful and calculating. She licked her full lips, knelt before him and thrust forward firm breasts straining at her thin blouse.
He’d tasted those breasts before, had suckled her until he’d been blinded by desire. “Strip,” he commanded, sitting and closing his eyes.
He could see her in his mind.
She gave him a calculating look, then sat and pulled off her boots and socks. Such beautiful feet, long with perfect toes and the nails painted a deep red that reminded him of blood. She slid a bare foot along his inner leg to his groin and raised her knee so that he could see she wore nothing beneath her skirts. The sight made him catch his breath.
She smiled and raised her hands to her shirt. Unbuttoning it took an agonizingly long time.
“Hurry,” he urged, his mind already expanding for the journey.
The sun hung low in the sky and dispatched shadows that careened from crag to crag around them until the very rocks awakened. Was she aware yet? Did she see the way the sun cast dying purple and chartreuse beams across the sky, behind the expanding clouds?
Her eyes dilated and her breath grew ragged and for a moment, she seemed surprised. Then she purred and spread open the cotton shirt and fluttered closer to him to offer her perfect breasts. A gift he couldn’t refuse.
He twirled his tongue around the turgid flesh and opened his trousers to release himself for her. Smoothing her skirts up over her waist, he slid over her.
“Wait,” she whispered, tightening her thighs, denying him entrance.
His senses were amplified and her voice echoed in his head as if the rising wind whirled through the tunnels of the mine. Desire slid through him like a molten volcano waiting to erupt.
“You have something more exotic in mind?”
“A trade. You can have whatever you want of me if you give me what I want in return.”
He barked a laugh. Did she really think she could bargain with him? It amused him to let her think she could.
“And what is it you want?”
“To have what you have. I know what you found.”
“You’re delusional…well, yes, of course you are.” He’d made certain of that with the drug. “Now, spread your legs like a good girl.”