Untamed by Sharon Ihle Page A

the fire, suddenly parted his hair. In the next moment he heard the sound of gunfire.
    Bolting to a sitting position despite the pain in his leg, Daniel reached up and grabbed the top of his head. When his fingers came away sticky with his own blood, he could hardly believe his eyes. Then he spotted Josie sitting at the table, his Peacemaker still smoking in her hand. "You shot me—you up and shot me."
    ."Oh, my God—no." Josie dropped the gun onto the table as if it were a rock, then leapt out of the chair and hurried to the side of the bed. "Where are you hurt?"
    When she tried to lean over him, Daniel reared back out of her reach. "Get away. I'm shot in the head."
    Still unable to believe that she'd put a bullet in him, Daniel fingered his scalp. By then blood was flowing freely over his forehead, a gory little river that turned into a waterfall at the tip of his nose, and then trickled down onto his bare chest and below. As he stared at the crimson puddle pooling in his navel, trying to make sense of it all, Josie crawled onto the mattress beside him.
    "Don't be such a baby," she said, talking to him as if he were a child. "Let me take a look at the damage."
    Daniel couldn't get the image of the smoking gun out of his mind. "Why should I? You just tried to kill me."
    "No, I didn't—honest. I was just trying to find that hammer thing you told me about."
    "Your search was successful. Now leave me the hell alone."
    "I said I'm sorry, didn't I?"
    Daniel was looking for a contrite expression to go along with the words, some sense that she meant what she said, but it was as obvious as hell that it wouldn't be forthcoming from this defiant female. To the contrary, she seemed downright pissed that he wouldn't just let her rip into his scalp.
    Hands on hips, Josie said, "If you don't let me see how badly you've been shot, you might just sit there and bleed to death. If that's what you want, it's fine by me. I'm going out for a little air."
    "No, wait." Half-afraid she might be right, Daniel grudgingly agreed to an examination. "Go ahead and look, but this time be careful. I've had just about all a man can take for one day.''
    "Baby," she muttered as she hunched over his head.
    Daniel might have come up with a snappy reply, but by then, Josie's full breasts were rubbing against his shoulder as she worked, making him all too aware that they were unbound, free of the corset he'd heard white women wore beneath their clothing. Aware of a sudden and surprisingly urgent response in his groin, Daniel strategically draped his hands across his lap as Josie parted his hair—this time with her fingers.
    "Ugh," she said, grimacing as she peered at the wound. "What a mess."
    "How bad is it?" he asked. "Did you blow some of my brains out?"
    "No, you fool. It's just a little messy, a scratch that's hardly worth sewing up."
    "How can you be so sure?" Daniel recalled the endless list of tasks she claimed she could not perform, despite the decent poultice she'd made for his leg. "I thought you didn't know anything about nursing wounds and such."
    "I don't," she said, climbing off the bed. "Tending to something as insignificant as this must be instinctive. Hold still a minute. I'm going to get a rag or something to help stop the bleeding."
    Josie made short work of cleaning and patching him up after that, and even donated a strip of her petticoat, figuring it was the cleanest thing in the cabin with which to bind the wound. It was. Thanks, Daniel assumed, to the accidental shooting, her defiant attitude had also undergone a welcome transformation. In fact, Josie seemed most agreeable, a situation he figured he'd best take advantage of while she still felt that way.
    "I'm about starving to death," he said, urged on by his growling belly. "I also feel kind of weak after being shot in the head and all. Think you could rustle me up some flapjacks?"
    Daniel could see that a refusal was perched on the tip of her tongue, the automatic response he'd come