the silent onlookers, the still mechanic and the dark healer, but a new element had been added, or perhaps subtracted. The air all but crackled with electricity, smelled heavily of ozone—as if lightning had struck the ground they stood on.
She could feel the tension rippling through the rough hand around her wrist, and she half suspected the man who held her had forgotten he was doing so. He, like everyone else, was watching, waiting, probably crossing his fingers for a seeming miracle or, like some of the others, against evil.
Then El Rayo gave a sigh, strangely like a groan of pain, and reeled up and backward from the mechanic. His moan was echoed by the crowd, but no one moved to assist the staggering healer. He turned blindly, stumbling over something, nearly falling, slipping on the sodden clay soil that comprised the earth in the New Mexico mountains.
Shocked by his pallor, by the blue rimming his full lips, Melanie ignored the now surrounded mechanic and involuntarily cried out and tried to reach for him. Again the hand on her wrist held her back.
“No, señora. You must not,” Pablo murmured. Not “you should not,” but, “you must not.”
“Let me go!” Melanie cried, snapping her arm away from her would-be rescuer. “He needs help!”
Unaware she was calling out in Spanish, she didn’t understand the look of amazement the attendant turned on her. Or was it something else? Something to do with her wanting to help the “healer”?
“No one can help El Rayo, señora,” he said. “I have tried for many years. It’s no use.” His voice sounded as sad as his face looked, but did he mean the man was beyond help, or that he would not allow another to lend aid?
A cry from the mechanic’s wife snared everyone’s attention and Melanie turned to see the mechanic slowly pulling himself up to his elbows. “Doro?” he asked in a sleepy voice. “What happened, Doro? Why—?”
Everyone pushed to answer him, to assist him, and in the brief distraction, Pablo released Melanie’s wrist. Without further thought, she lunged for the strange healer before he pitched into a thick scrub oak.
Wrapping her arms around his body, she eased him back against her, though his weight pulled them both to the ground. A tremendous shudder worked through his body and he half turned, instinctively seeking the comfort of her arms.
He might be weak but his gaze was as sharp as it had been earlier. And whatever residue there was of his lightning touch seemed to ripple and eddy against her skin, making the hairs on her arms rise. She felt her heartbeat accelerating and knew by the tension on his face that he could hear it, feel it throbbing against his cheek.
She told herself she was holding him as she might a child, but knew this was a patent lie. This man inspired a riot of sensation in her, but none of it was the least motherly in nature. Her mouth felt dry, her fingers against his face trembled.
His lips parted, his eyes glittered at her, a cold distance bridging an anger she couldn’t fathom.
“No one touches me,” he said harshly in English, his deep baritone rough, the words as ambiguous as the man himself. Did he mean that no one had? Or did he mean that no one should?
When she didn’t move, didn’t release him, one of his hands raised to wipe the moisture from her face. Was the moisture a product of the mist, or had she been crying? She didn’t know and with his fingers lightly tracing the curve of her cheek, she couldn’t have begun to guess.
Her heart all but thundered in her chest and she felt a strange languor seeping through her body. Was he hypnotizing her? Was his touch making her feel things she’d never even imagined, let alone experienced?
His silence and intensity frightened her. Dear God, she thought in desperation, what kind of a man was he?
“Don’t you know, señora, that one touch from me can kill?”
CHAPTER TWO
When Melanie had shaken the attendant’s hand from her arm, when she’d run to try to stem El Rayo’s fall, she’d acted out of pure impulse. He’d needed help, she had responded. But this was no pathetic, wounded man. He was all but admitting he could kill her with a single touch. And his hand upon her cheek made the message all that much more ominous.
She wanted to say something, anything, to deflect the conflicting signals in his stormy gaze. But all she could think was, He is the one. She was holding a man whose single glance could destroy an entire two-story building, had her arms wrapped around a force that could maim as easily as he apparently healed.
This was the man she’d been looking for, desperate to find, and now he was not so obliquely threatening her.
But had it been a threat or a simple statement of fact? Something told her instinctively that nothing short of total exhaustion would ever have allowed him to lie so still in her arms. Everything about her first impression of him attested to that single fact. He was a man who stood alone, apart from the rest, needing and wanting no one.
The line from the psychiatrist’s report teased her again. But at all costs, he should be left alone. Not advice, not a casual reference, but a dire warning.
However, his weight, his face against the swell of her breast, his warm breath teasing her through the thin material of her wet blouse made her certain the psychiatrist had other meanings in mind. He should be left alone. Oh, yes. He most certainly should be left alone. To touch him was to dance on the edge of a high cliff without a parachute. To feel his fingers on one’s face was to know the searing heat of a volcano and the icy plunge into a glacier lake.
Melanie swallowed heavily. She had to ask for his help now, at this moment, while his powers were at least moderately on the wane, while his internal batteries were obviously somewhat depleted. This might be her only chance because she knew from the way the townspeople had averted his gaze, had avoided hers, that they would be unlikely to aid her in finding him again. He was their mystery, their El Rayo. A miracle man of this magnitude wasn’t likely to be a subject of much discussion, and certainly wouldn’t be offered to an outsider.
“Please…” she began, only to trail off at an increase in the volume coming from the group to their left. With a great effort, she dragged her gaze from El Rayo, the man she believed—knew—to be Teo Sandoval.
Over the bulk of his shoulder she could see the crowd around the mechanic. To her further shock, the young, bloodied man was being assisted to his feet. Whatever protest she might have uttered died on her lips as the man grinned crookedly and patted his own chest. At that moment all knowledge of her Spanish eluded her and she was never certain afterward what was spoken, but watched, in wonder, as the mechanic gently hugged his openly sobbing wife and baby.
Like the others, she had seen the mechanic’s chest, had heard the gurgle of expiration from his damaged lungs. She’d heard the so-called death rattle often enough in her lifetime to have recognized it here. There had been no doubt that he would die. She’d felt it, had seen it in all the faces of the people anxiously crowding around.
She looked back down at the man in her arms with a combination of awe and fear. She knew now why the townspeople had stood back from him, had avoided his skypale eyes. She was more than a little afraid of him herself. But like the villagers in this small mountain community, she needed him.
She wished she could believe that with him so spent in her arms there was nothing
