The sun was a merciless hammer, beating down on the cracked earth. The silence between them, which Beatrice had at first found merely awkward, had grown into a palpable entity—a third member of their party, vast and unforgiving as the landscape itself.
For two days, they had walked, Wes Callahan setting a relentless pace that left Beatrice’s muscles screaming in protest. He moved through the terrain not like a man traversing it, but like a part of it, his steps sure and silent where hers were a clumsy scramble of shifting stones and snagged petticoats.
“Water,” he said, his voice a low rasp that startled her out of a reverie about cool Boston fountains.
He stopped and pointed, not at a glistening pool, but at a distant, scraggly line of cottonwood trees. “There.”
Beatrice squinted, dabbing her brow with a handkerchief that was already damp and gritty. “The phreatophytes,” she murmured, more to herself than to him.
“Their deep root systems are an indicator of a subterranean water source, likely a shallow aquifer or the remnants of a seasonal creek bed.”
Wes turned his head slowly, his dark eyes narrowed under the brim of his hat. He stared at her as if she’d just started speaking in tongues.
“They’re trees, Miss Kincaid. Trees that only grow where there’s water.
You can call it Latin if it makes you feel smarter, but it won’t make you any less thirsty.”
The condescension in his tone was a familiar sting. It was the same tone Professor Albright used when dismissing her theories in front of the all-male botanical society.
She lifted her chin, her pride a flimsy shield against the heat. “Knowledge is never a burden, Mr. Callahan.
Understanding why something is true is the foundation of science.”
“Out here,” he countered, turning to walk again, “knowing what is true is the foundation of not dying. There’s a difference.”
She fell into step behind him, biting back a retort. He was right, of course, and the fact that he was so effortlessly, infuriatingly correct chafed at her more than the dust in her throat.
Her books had taught her the principles of the desert, but they had not prepared her for the sheer, oppressive reality of it.
Later that afternoon, he stopped again, kneeling on one knee. He gestured with his chin at a series of faint impressions in the dirt. “What made that?”
Beatrice peered down, her scientific mind clicking into gear. She saw the four-toed print, the faint mark of claws that didn’t appear to be retractable.
“A canid of some kind,” she deduced. “Given the size, perhaps a feral dog from town.”
A dry, humorless sound escaped Wes’s lips. “A dog.” He ran a finger along the edge of the track.
“Notice the way the outer toes are splayed? How the pad is smaller, more triangular than a dog’s? That’s a coyote.
A dog’s a pet. A coyote’s a survivor. Knowing the difference might be important if you find one sniffing around your bedroll.”
He stood and moved on without another word, leaving her staring at the tracks. Humiliation burned in her cheeks, hotter than the sun.
He was treating her like a child, a foolish student on her first field lesson. Every correction, every curt instruction, was a fresh reminder of her incompetence in this world he commanded so completely.
She was the scholar, the educated woman of letters, yet out here, her knowledge felt like a collection of pressed, lifeless flowers compared to his living, breathing understanding of the land.
Frustration spurred her onward. She would not be a liability.
She would watch, she would learn, and she would prove to this cynical, hardened man that she was more than just an “entitled Easterner.” So intent was she on mimicking his long, ground-eating stride, on keeping pace without complaint, that she grew careless.
Her eyes, usually fixed on the ground cataloging every hardy shrub and resilient wildflower, were instead locked on his back.
She was traversing a gentle, scree-covered slope when she spotted it—a magnificent specimen of Echinocactus texensis, the horse-crippler cactus, its pink-throated flower a splash of impossible delicacy against the brutal spines. It was perfect.
She had to get a closer look, perhaps take a quick sketch. Distracted for only a second, she shifted her weight.
Her boot landed on a loose, flat stone that slid like a shuffled card.
Her ankle twisted with a sickening, grinding pop. A bolt of white-hot pain shot up her leg, so sharp and absolute it stole her breath.
She cried out, a strangled sound of shock and agony, as she crumpled to the ground.
Wes was beside her in an instant, his fluid grace a stark contrast to her own clumsy collapse. “Dammit, woman,” he bit out, his voice a low growl of pure exasperation.
“I told you to watch your feet.”
Tears of pain and fury welled in her eyes. “I… I saw a specimen,” she stammered, hating the weakness in her voice, hating that she had proven him right yet again.
His jaw was tight, his frustration a visible aura around him. But as his gaze fell from her face to her now-protruding ankle, the anger in his eyes flickered and was replaced by something else.
Something focused and severe, but stripped of its earlier contempt.
“Don’t move,” he commanded. His voice was still curt, but it was the command of a man taking charge of a crisis, not a man scolding a child.
He knelt, his movements economical and precise. Beatrice flinched as his hands, large and calloused, moved toward her boot.
“This is going to hurt,” he stated, not as a warning, but as a simple fact.
His fingers worked at the laces, surprisingly nimble. Every slight jostle sent a fresh wave of agony through her, and she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out again.
When the boot was finally off, he probed the swelling flesh around her ankle. His touch was firm but astonishingly gentle, his examination methodical.
She watched his face, the harsh lines softened by intense concentration. In that moment, he was not the cynical guide or the hostile landowner.
He was something else entirely—a healer, a protector.
“It’s a bad sprain,” he diagnosed, his gaze meeting hers. “Maybe a fracture. We’re not moving again today.”
He stood and disappeared into a thicket of scrub oak, returning moments later with a handful of feathery, green leaves. He knelt again, this time pulling a small mortar and pestle from his saddlebag—tools she would have expected to see in an apothecary, not in the kit of a backcountry tracker.
He crushed the leaves, adding a splash of water from his canteen, until they formed a dark, fragrant poultice.
“Yarrow,” Beatrice breathed, recognizing the plant. Achillea millefolium. “Used for centuries as a styptic and anti-inflammatory.”
Wes paused, his pestle still. He looked at her, a flicker of surprise in his eyes.
“So your books are good for something after all.” There was no mockery in his voice this time, only a quiet acknowledgment.
He applied the cool paste to her swollen ankle. The relief was immediate, a blessed counterpoint to the deep, throbbing ache.
Then, he tore strips from a spare flour sack and began to wrap the injury, his hands moving with an practiced efficiency that spoke of long, hard experience. He supported her foot in his lap as he worked, and the unexpected intimacy of the contact sent a strange tremor through her.
She watched his hands. They were scarred and weathered, the hands of a man who wrestled a living from this unforgiving land.
Yet they were wrapping her ankle with the care of a surgeon, the pressure perfectly even, the knot he tied secure but not constricting. She saw the man beneath the cynical guide then—a man of immense capability, of hidden depths and a quiet, tightly guarded compassion.
He had seen her pain, and without a word of sympathy, he had simply and competently set about easing it.
When he was finished, he helped her to a sitting position against a flat-faced boulder, his arm strong and steady around her waist. The brief contact sent a jolt through her that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with him.
“Rest,” he ordered, his gruff exterior snapping back into place as if he’d caught himself being too soft. He built a small fire with brisk, efficient motions, his back to her, creating a deliberate distance between them once more.
Beatrice leaned her head back against the warm rock, the sun dipping below the canyon rim and painting the sky in hues of orange and violet. The pain in her ankle was a dull, constant throb, but it was overshadowed by a new and unsettling sensation.
The hard shell of her own pride and prejudice had cracked. Wes Callahan was not the ignorant savage she had first supposed him to be.
He was a man of substance and skill, a man whose gentleness was buried so deep it was only visible in the fleeting moments when he allowed his guard to drop.
For the first time since their tense bargain had been struck, she looked at him not as a tool to achieve her goals, but as a man. And in the quiet space of that realization, a dangerous, unfamiliar warmth sparked to life within her chest.
It was not admiration, not yet respect, but something far more elemental. It was a flicker of attraction, and she knew, with a certainty that both thrilled and terrified her, that the most perilous part of this journey had just begun.