“Rachael, how did your mother come to hear of the leopard people and this place?” Reluctantly Rio allowed his hand to drop away from her neck as he went to the window and pushed aside the blanket to peer out.

“I don’t know. To me her stories were just that, stories. I don’t even know if I have the stories right, Rio. I probably filled in the blanks with my own versions. Does it matter? Do you really think there’s truth in the stories? In the light of day it seems a little silly to think a man could be a leopard as well as a man. Or a mixture of both. What, the head and torso of a man and the body of a leopard?” She couldn’t look at him without having the impression of a dangerous cat. Without thinking of the way his face had changed from a human warrior to that of a dangerous animal.

“Does it? Here in the forest, it seems anything is possible. You have to have an open mind if you’re going to make your home here.” He stood with his back to her and wondered how he was going to let her go.

A soft one-two note, much like a songbird, reached his ears. He turned back to her. “Rachael, Kim Pang is approaching the house.”

“That’s not possible, he was on the other side of the river. It was already raging, and with the storms and so much rain, it can’t have gone down this fast.” Just like that her world was shattered, gone, and the running started again. The lies. She turned her face away from him, not wanting him to see the sheen of tears burning in her eyes. She knew the day would come eventually. It made her angry that she never wanted to accept it, that she pretended she would find a home.

“Kim is capable of getting across the river in the same manner I use.” He searched for the right words to make her understand. “He’s the closest thing I have to a friend outside my unit.”

Rachael shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Give me time to get dressed and get out of here. Go meet him before he gets here.”

Something dangerous shifted inside him. “I don’t think so, Rachael. You can’t even walk on that leg. If you try running around the forest with those puncture wounds, believe me, you’ll pick up another infection fast. Just sit there and let me work this out.”

Rio’s eyes had narrowed into that glassy, focused stare she associated with predatory hunting. There was a soft underlying growl to his voice that sent a chill down her spine and the hair on the back of her neck rising. Rachael turned her face away from him, biting down hard to keep from lashing out at him.

She was good at keeping her expression serene, even in the worst of times, but she still had trouble controlling her runaway tongue. She didn’t need nor want him to work her problems out. People stepping into her life tended to die way too young. She didn’t want to carry the guilt of another death around, thank you very much. Rachael smoldered with a mixture of anger and fear, feeling vulnerable and helpless with the injury to her leg.

She was surprised at the intensity of her emotions. Her fingers even curled as if she wanted to rake and claw and scratch something. Or someone. The need burned in her, a startling discovery she wasn’t very proud of. What was happening to her? Sometimes when she lay in bed with her leg throbbing, there was something stirring inside of her, a heat and need she put down to her admiration of Rio’s anatomy.

Rachael swept a hand through her hair. She had a nor mal, healthy sex drive, but ever since she’d arrived, in spite of the terrible injury she suffered, need crawled through her body, an ever-present unrelenting ache that refused to go away. In the middle of pain and a life or death struggle, it seemed demeaning to her that she couldn’t control such an urge. Worse than that was the edgy, violent mood swings, going from wanting to lash out at Rio to wanting to tear his clothes off.

“Rachael? Where did you go?”

“Obviously nowhere.”

“I’m going to call Kim in.”

“What does that mean?”

“He’s a tribesman, Rachael. He knows I’m on the bandits’ hit list. He signaled to me who he was and he’s waiting for an all-clear signal before he comes on in.”

“Do you have to give it to him?”

“He’ll come in fighting if I don’t. I told you, he’s a friend.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I need clothes. I don’t want to sit around in your shirt and nothing else in front of your friends.” She was hastily buttoning up the front of the shirt, hiding her generous breasts from his view.

Rio didn’t comment on the quarrelsome note in her voice. He simply pulled the blanket from the bed and tucked it around her. “Kim’s father is a medicine man, very good with herbs. He taught me quite a bit, but Kim knows far more than I. Hopefully he can help both you and Fritz.”

When she didn’t look up, Rio hunkered down beside her. “Rachael, look at me.” When she didn’t respond he caught her chin and forced her head up. The last thing he expected to see was heat and fire glitter ing in her dark eyes. Raw hunger stared back at him with an intensity that made him groan, push his brow into hers. “Don’t. I mean it, Rachael. You can’t look at me like that and expect me to function properly.”

She had the craziest desire, no need, to squirm and rub herself all over him, much like a feline. It was a heat wave rolling through her that shook her confidence. “If I could help it, do you think I’d be making such a fool out of myself?” Scratching his eyes out seemed a better alternative than rubbing her body against his at that moment. She let him see that too.