Renegades and Pretty Women

Chapter Fourteen

　

Joe was confused. Never before had she given much thought to what happened between a woman and a man. It was never a thing that she wanted. While she wasn’t ignorant enough to think that any man she laid with would do to her what that man had done to her mother, she hadn’t ever wanted to risk it.

She hadn’t ever wanted to let a man paw at her with his nasty hands and shove his dirty pecker inside of her.

She hadn’t that was until she’d met Jonah.

She’d known from the start that he was handsome and then when she had watched him loving on Scarlett through the fabric of their tent it had only served to further fuel the attraction she felt for the man.

Joe’s pacing along the rocky shoreline of the far side of the frigid lake increased.

She wanted Jonah. She wanted to feel his hands touching her… Learn what kind of pleasures that man could give her. She knew it must be something because she had heard Scarlett’s moans. And while the woman had only been using Jonah to frame him for bank robbery, Joe knew that those moans hadn’t been faked… they couldn’t have been.

But Joe couldn’t let herself give in. She wouldn’t. Giving in would make her weak and Joe Redding was not weak and would not give in to such feminine follies as passion and desire. She did not need a man.

In her aggravated pacing and tangled thoughts, Joe was not paying any attention to where she placed her feet and she tripped.

Her body was suddenly suspended in air above the frigid water of the lake and Joe was shocked to hear a scream escape her lips before she went splashing into the water, striking her head sharply against a rock and slipping unconscious beneath the waves.

***

Jonah came to the lake and felt his heart stop beating in his chest when he saw Joe lying face first in the water. Her body was simply bobbing in time with the waves.

Jonah tried to tell himself that the urge to save her life had nothing to do with the desire and friendship he was starting to feel for the woman and was simply because she had saved his life and he owed her one, but he knew he was lying as he ran as fast as he could to the waters edge.

His side was screaming and burning, though he knew that the wound was healed enough that it shouldn’t tear back open and bleed. Even if it did he didn’t care. He had to get Joe out of the cold water.

If she didn’t drown, she could still very well freeze to death.

But exactly how was he supposed to reach her? She had fallen in the deeper side of the mountain lake and Jonah had a broken arm so swimming wasn’t an option.

Jonah laid down on his stomach on the rocks and stretched out over the water, keeping his lower body steady on the ground.

He stretched his left arm as far as it would go and grunted with the effort as his fingertips brushed against the fringes on the sleeve of her buckskin shirt.

He clasped onto those fringes with near desperation and pulled her slowly toward the bank, only releasing his hold once she was close to the rocks long enough to grasp her arm more firmly.

Ignoring his own pain and the way it felt as if his side was splitting open, Jonah dragged her up and over the rocks and flipped her onto her back.

Dread filled him when he realized that she wasn’t breathing. There was a bloody knot on her brow just below her hairline as well.

Jonah put his good hand on her chest and pushed hard several times, then turned her head to the side when he heard the gurgling in her throat.

Water poured from her mouth as she coughed several times and then began to breath, though Jonah noticed that she remained unconscious.