3. Two
We never made it to the ranch.
I remembered almost none of the ride. I started shaking somewhere along the road, and the little man pulled over before I fell off the bike and took both of us down with it.
He walked me down to a river, laid me out where the air was cool, and cleaned the worst of the blood off while I drifted in and out.
I had no roof over me and no wall at my back. Just sky, and the sound of water running over rock.
I fell asleep before I could tell him I would have preferred a bed and a door like a civilized man.
Sunrise brought me back stiff and cold and hurting in a dozen places I'd earned the night before.
The man who'd hauled me out of that pen stood thigh-deep in the river, naked, trying to catch a fish with his bare hands.
He stood completely still for a long moment.
Then his hand snapped into the water and came up empty.
He sighed and reset, only to miss again.
His hand was fast enough. His timing was off by about an inch, every time.
My grandfather had me on a rifle before I was tall enough to see over his workbench, and by twelve I could put a round through a bottle cap at forty yards. I could have put a bullet through that trout without touching the water.
Catching one barehanded was a skill nobody had ever thought to give me.
Twelve hours ago those hands had killed four grown men. Now a fish was beating them, and it wasn't costing him anything. He wasn't even irritated.
I lay there and tried to hold both of those against each other, and my head wasn't clear enough to do it.
Coyote had a hard, wiry build. Scar tissue crossed his back and ribs, pale and raised, some old, some newer than the rest. Water ran down the knobs of his spine and gathered in the dip above his ass. I watched one drop disappear between his cheeks.
My cock thickened under the blanket. The pull of it dragged at the puncture in my thigh, and I shifted carefully, trying to make room without moving enough for him to notice.
I reached across the ground beside me for a body that hadn't been there in five years. I pulled my hand back and curled into the blanket.
Across the river, Coyote bent after another fish, bare ass lifting into the morning light, and I quit pretending I hadn't already decided.
Five years of nothing, and my body picked a naked stranger standing in a river to come back for.
I pulled the blanket down and checked the dressing over my ribs. Dry. So was the packing high on my thigh. A clean wrap ran from my wrist to my elbow.
He'd done all of it while I was out, tight enough to stop the bleeding without stealing my breath.
Somebody had trained him, and they had known what they were doing.
He struck at the water again, missed again, and looked directly at me. "You're awake."
"You're a terrible fisherman."
"I'm a patient one. There's a difference." He waded toward the bank. "You snore like a transmission falling apart. I rolled you onto your side twice so you wouldn't die."
I arched an eyebrow. "You watched me sleep?"
"All night. You ran a fever until about three, holding a whole conversation with somebody who wasn't there. I kept you cool and let you finish the talk."
"What did I say?"
"Nothing too embarrassing." He crouched at the waterline and rinsed his hands. "You kept calling him John, though. Same as you. Took me a while to work out you weren't talking to yourself. You took a swing at me once too. Missed by a mile, but I gave you room after that."
He came up out of the river, and I didn't look away.
He stood on the bank and let me look, taking his own inventory of me while I did. Men had measured me before fights since I was fourteen, always for the same thing. Nobody had ever looked at me and wanted anything.
Then he crossed to me, dropped onto his heels, and put the back of two fingers against my forehead. "Fever's gone. You'll live." He peeled the dressing away from my ribs. His lips tightened. "This still needs stitches."
"You know what you're doing?"
"My mother taught me which wounds can be closed and which ones need to stay open.
" He reached for a small field kit beside the fire.
The case held sealed suture packets, clean syringes, real antiseptic.
Field medicine somebody had spent money on.
Not what I'd expect from a man who fished with his hands.
"Sierra taught me that packaged thread works better than boiling whatever you have lying around. "
"Smart man."
"Don't tell him that. He's already unbearable."
He flushed the wound again. The cold liquid burned down my side.
"Hold still and don't be brave," he said. "Brave men tear my stitches."
Then he swung a leg over me and settled onto my hips like I was a piece of furniture he'd decided to use.
A wet, naked killer sat warm and low across my lap, and I tried to think about anything else. Tax law. The collapse of distant stars. The shoulder I'd dislocated years ago.
"How old are you?" I asked.
"Don't know exactly. Twenty-five, give or take a couple." He tore open a suture packet. "Mamá never marked birthdays, and nobody wrote me down anywhere, so it's a guess. You?"
"Fifty-two."
He looked up from my ribs and took a longer look at my face. "You wear it well," he said, and bent back to the wound.
Cold water ran off the ends of his hair onto my stomach. He had to feel what he was sitting on. There was no version of this where he didn't.
I fisted my hands in the blanket and stared up at the brightening sky.
"Breathe," he said.
"I'm breathing."
"You're holding it like it'll help."
He pinched the edges of the gash together and set the first stitch, fast and clean. He had good hands, better than mine had been at his age, and I'd had four years of instructors and a cadaver lab.
He bit his lower lip as he worked, brows drawn down, all that terrible patience running the show. Every time he leaned forward, his weight shifted against me and dragged the breath out of my chest.
I had spent months chained in a pen and felt less trapped than I did under that narrow pair of hips.
He tied off the last stitch and sat back far enough to look down between us. Then he smirked. "So that's why they call you Big John," he said, grinding down.
Heat climbed my neck. I grinned at him anyway. "Maybe."
He rolled his hips forward, one slow drag of his bare ass over me through the blanket. I grabbed his thighs, and he did it again, slower.
"Coyote."
He leaned down close enough for his wet hair to brush my chest.
"We'll deal with this when you can stand without bleeding through my work." He rocked against me once more, watching my face. "Not before."
"You're a cruel little man."
"You have no idea." He moved his lips next to my ear. "I want you able to hold on to me when I finally climb you. So you heal first. You're not going anywhere, big man. I already decided that part."
Then he stopped, both hands flat on my skin. His face tightened.
"What?" I asked. "What is it?"
"Nothing. I just…" He bent quickly and bit into the meat of my shoulder.
He didn't break the skin. He clamped down and held, his whole body rigid over me, breathing through his nose against my collarbone. Then his jaw eased and the tension left him all at once.
He sat up with everything loose in him again, and nothing in his face said he was sorry about it. "You're a lot to hold all at once," he said.
I looked at the small man sitting on me and decided I wasn't going to understand him by pretending he behaved like everybody else. "It's all right, little one. You can bite if you need to."
He grinned wide enough to show teeth.
I had just given him permission, and I was not going to get it back.
He climbed off me, came back with a strip of dried meat, tore off a piece, and held it to my mouth. "Eat."
"I've got hands."
"You do. Today they do what I tell them and nothing else."
He pressed the meat against my lips until I opened and took it. Before I'd finished chewing, he tore off another piece.
"Eat, big man. I didn't stay up all night to watch you pass out at noon."
So I lay in the dirt and let a killer feed me by hand. He was naked, easy on my hips, and more careful with me than anyone had been since Little John.
Little John would have loved this. He would have laughed himself stupid and turned it into the story he told at cookouts for years.
Hey, did I ever tell you about the time Big John ate jerky out of a naked stranger's hand in the middle of the desert?
Little John had laughed at everything, right until the last week, when he didn't have the air for it. He would have propped himself against a rock, all five foot six of him, and grinned at me.
Took you long enough, you big sad bastard. Couldn't pick an easy one, could you? Had to fall for the one with the knife.
Coyote froze.
Coyote's snake had come off her warm rock and lifted her head, flattening it so she looked like a rattler instead of the harmless thing she was. A second later, I heard what they had.
A horse was coming up the track, unhurried, one set of hooves.
Coyote was on his feet with a knife in his fist. I hadn't seen him reach for it.
The rider came up the last of the slope and stopped. Young. Dark hair. Rifle across his back. He took in the dead fire, the blood on my clothes, the giant stretched out in the dirt, and finally the naked man standing between us with a knife.
He folded his hands over the saddle horn. "Coyote. Jesus Christ. Put some pants on."
Coyote snorted. "Why? I don't have anything you haven't seen before."
The rider sighed and looked at me. "Where the hell did you find Goliath?"
Coyote frowned as he dragged his jeans on. "He's not a Goliath. He's a John. A Big John."
The kid looked me up and down. "Rafe's going to have a stroke. An actual medical stroke. I want to be in the room for it. Where'd you get him?"
"The Javelinas had him fighting hogs for money. I killed the ones who wouldn't back off and took him."
The kid looked past Coyote to the motorcycle lying in the scrub, then to the tusks wired to the handlebars. The color drained out of his face. "Tell me that isn't Zaroff's bike."
Coyote glanced at it like he'd forgotten it was there. "It's Zaroff's."
I'd never heard the name. The kid had, and it moved through his face fast enough that I got an elbow under me.
"You crazy bastard. You didn't just rob the Javelinas." The kid kept looking back at the bike like it might go off. "You robbed Zaroff. In front of his whole crew. Are you trying to start a war, or is it a hobby?"
Coyote shrugged. "Rafe will sort it. He always does."
The kid looked at me. "I'm Linc, by the way. Welcome to Pae Saco Ranch."
"John."
"Yeah, I gathered." He nodded toward Coyote. "Watch that one. He bites."
Coyote growled.
Linc gathered the reins. "You'd better get him to the main house before Rafe hears about this from somebody else." He turned his horse back toward the trail and rode ahead.
Coyote held a hand down to me. "Up, big man. We're going to see the man who owns all this."
I took his hand and stood. The world tilted. He caught my arm and held me steady until it came back.
"Who's Rafe?" I asked.
"He owns the land, the animals, the water rights, the road they dragged you in on, and most of the people standing on any of it." Coyote looked up at me. "He's going to want to know why I came back with four men dead, a stolen motorcycle, and a stranger the size of a barn."
"And if he doesn't like it?"
"Then it stops being my problem and starts being yours." He almost smiled. "Come on. He hates being kept waiting."