The Touch of Fire

by Linda Howard

  He wasn’t aware of the hard thrusting of his body. He knew only the vibrant energy pouring out of her, more intense than ever, tingling through him like a great underground current. He had never before felt so alive, so fierce, so purified. He heard her cry out, felt the violence of her completion, and his seed spewed out of him in a white-hot eruption of his senses. He thrust deep in a primal search for her womb at the pinnacle of sensation, and even before the last spasms had faded he knew he had made her pregnant.

  He sank weakly to the blanket beside her, still holding her to him with fierce possessiveness. She gave a little sigh and closed her eyes, and was asleep even before her breath had washed over his shoulder where she lay. He felt as if he had taken a huge blow to the chest, robbing him of breath, but for the first time in years he was seeing clearly.

  The four years he had been hunted had almost turned him into a pure killing animal; he had lived by his instincts, his reflexes cat-quick, his sole object to stay alive. But now he didn’t have just himself to consider, he had Annie to protect, and probably their child. Yes, he was sure there would be a child, and he had to plan for the future. He had lived in the present for so long that it felt strange to think of the future; hell, for four years he hadn’t had a future.

  Somehow he had to clear his name. They couldn’t just keep running, and even if they did find some remote spot and settle down, they would always be looking over their shoulders, living with the fear that some bounty hunter or lawman, smarter than most, had managed to track them. The running had to end.

  Knowing it and planning it were two different things. He was so tired, and the incredible clarity of vision was already fading. He couldn’t even think now, his eyes were closing despite himself. And, damn it, he was already hard again, though the urgency was gone. Half asleep, he shifted onto his side and lifted her thigh over his hip, then slipped gently into her sweet warmth. The perfection of it soothed him, and he slept.

  The noon sun penetrated the shade of the trees and was burning his bare leg. He opened his eyes and absorbed the details of reality. They had slept only a little over an hour, but he felt as rested as if it had been an entire night. Damn, what had he been thinking of, going to sleep like that with both of them naked and so close to the Apache camp? Not that they hadn’t needed the sleep, but he should have been more cautious.

  He gently shook her, and her eyes opened sleepily. “Hello,” she murmured, and snuggled closer to him as her lashes drooped again.

  “Hello yourself. We need to get dressed.”

  He watched as her eyes popped open. Then she was sitting up and grabbing her shift to cover her naked breasts. She blinked owlishly at him. “Did I dream?” she asked in bewilderment. “What time is it? Have we slept out here all night?”

  He pulled on his pants, wondering what she remembered of the night. He wasn’t certain he remembered that much of it himself. He eyed the sun. “It’s a little after noon, and no, we didn’t sleep out here all night. We made love here about an hour ago. Do you remember?”

  She looked at the tangled blanket and her face was radiant. “Yes.”

  He said cautiously, “Do you remember the baby?” “The baby.” She went very still. “The baby was very sick, wasn’t she? She was dying. Was that last night?”

  “She was dying,” he agreed. “And yes, that was last night.”

  Annie spread her empty hands and looked down at them with a faintly puzzled expression, as if she expected to see the baby in them and couldn’t understand why she wasn’t. “But what happened?” Suddenly she began jerking on her clothes, her movements frantic. “I’ve got to see about her. She could have died while we were out here. I can’t believe I just totally forgot about her, that I—”

  “The baby’s all right.” Rafe caught her hands and held them, forcing her to look at him. “She’s all right. Do you remember what happened last night?”

  She was still again, staring into his light gray eyes. An echo stirred through her, as if she were looking into a deep well where she had once fallen. The familiarity of it stirred other memories. “Jacali grabbed her, and ran outside,” she said slowly. “I went after her... no, we went after her. Jacali wouldn’t let me have her, and I remember being so angry that I felt like slapping her. Then you . . . you took her away from Jacali and gave her to me ... and you told me to concentrate.”

  The memories swirled around her, and her hands throbbed with the remnants of energy. She lifted her hands and found herself staring at them without knowing why. “What happened?” she asked blankly.

  He was silent while he pulled her shift on over her head, covering her in case anyone intruded on their privacy. “It’s your hands,” he finally said.

  Still she looked at him with a total lack of understanding.

  He took her hands and held them to his mouth, kissing her fingertips before folding them warmly in his hard palms and carrying them to his chest. “You have healing hands,” he said simply. “I noticed it the first time you touched me, back in Silver Mesa.”

  “What do you mean? I’m a doctor, so of course you can say I have healing hands, but then so does every doctor—”

  “No,” he interrupted. “No. Not like yours. It isn’t knowledge or training, it’s something you have inside you. Your hands are hot, and they make me tingle when you touch me.”

  She blushed fiery red. “Yours make me tingle, too,” she mumbled.

  Despite himself he chuckled. “Not like that. Well, yes, like that too. It’s your whole body, and it drives me wild when I’m inside you. But you have healing hands, true healing hands. I’ve heard of it, mostly from old folks, but I didn’t believe it until you touched me and I felt it.”

  “Felt what?” she asked desperately. “My hands are just ordinary.”

  He shook his head. “No. They aren’t. You have a special gift, sweetheart; you can heal where others can’t, and it isn’t medicine, it’s you.” He looked away from her, toward the distant purple mountains, but he was seeing deep inside himself. “Last night. . . last night, your hands were so hot I could barely stand to hold them. Remember? I was pressing them to the baby’s back. And I felt as if I were holding a hot poker, as if the skin was being burned off my palms.”

  “You’re lying,” she said. The harsh tone of her own voice shocked her. “You have to be lying. I can’t do that. If I could, none of them would have died.”

  He rubbed his face, feeling the rasp of his beard against his palm. God, how long had it been since he’d shaved? He couldn’t even remember. “I didn’t say you were Jesus,” he snapped. “You can’t raise the dead. I’ve watched you, and sometimes the person is too sick for even you to help. You couldn’t have helped Trahern, because whatever it is you have doesn’t stop bleeding, it didn’t even stop the bleeding when my shoulder was grazed. But when I was so sick, when we first met, just your slightest touch made me feel better. You cooled me, took the pain away, made the wounds heal faster. Damn it, Annie, I could feel the skin pulling together. That’s what you can do.”

  She was speechless, and suddenly panic stricken. She didn’t want to be able to do any of that, it was too much. She just wanted to be a doctor, the best doctor she could be. She wanted to help people, not—not perform some kind of miracle. If it were true, how could she not have known?

  She shouted that question at him, as angry as she was afraid, and he jerked her into his arms. The hard face that bent over hers was just as angry. “Maybe you’ve never wanted to save anyone as much as you wanted to save that baby!” he yelled. “Maybe you’ve never concentrated like that before. Maybe you were too young, maybe it’s something that grows stronger with age.”

  Tears burned her eyes and she hit at his chest. “I don’t want it!” Even to herself she sounded like a child protesting having to eat vegetables, but she didn’t care. How could she live with such a burden? She had visions of herself being locked away, with an endless procession of ill and wounded being brought to her, of her life never bein
g her own again.

  His anger died as swiftly as it had flared up. “I know, honey. I know.”

  She pulled away and in silence finished dressing. The sensible part of her scoffed at what he had told her; things like that just didn’t exist. She had been trained to trust in her skill, her knowledge, and in luck, because being a good doctor definitely took luck. None of her instructors had ever said anything about her having “healing hands.”

  But would they even have noticed? She had been largely ignored, and definitely resented. And if they had seen something that made her superior to her classmates, would they have told her? The answer was no.

  And common sense didn’t explain what had happened last night. There was no explanation. Even if she accepted that she had healing hands, the events of the night, the total immersion of herself in . . . something . . . went far beyond that. She remembered the throbbing in her hands, in her entire body and in the baby’s body, as if their heartbeats were linked. She remembered being lost in the crystal depths of Rafe’s eyes.

  And she remembered his frenzied lovemaking, as if he couldn’t get inside her quickly enough, or go deep enough. She remembered clinging to him, her hips rocking and reaching up to him like the beat of a primal drum. An instinctive knowledge crept into her mind, and she knew that he had made her pregnant.

  A deep sense of peace spread through her even as she gave him a quick, guarded glance. She couldn’t imagine it would be welcome news to him.

  She looked at her hands again, finally accepting. Logic wasn’t always necessary, or even possible. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said in a low voice.

  His jaw was rigid as they walked back to the camp, his arm heavy and possessive around her waist. “Pretty much as you did before,” he answered. “Nothing’s changed, except now you know.”

  CHAPTER

  17

  The camp was still quiet when they returned to it, but the quiet had a different quality to it. It was more restful, as if the crisis had passed. Annie ducked into the wickiup belonging to the baby’s parents and found the young Apache woman sitting up, holding her child on her lap and crooning to her as she coaxed the fretful infant to drink some of the bark tea. The baby was still feverish and spotty, but even the quickest glance told her that the child was going to live. She examined the mother, and smiled her pleasure, for she expected her to be on her feet in another day. The baby’s father, the round-faced warrior, was also awake and without fever, though still very weak. Both parents stared at Annie and the tall white man who stood behind her like a fierce guardian angel, but they didn’t seem fearful. The warrior even said something, weakly, and gestured with his hand toward the baby. Even without knowing the language, Annie could tell he was thanking them.

  They left the wickiup together, with Annie passing through the flap first. A white man stood some fifteen feet away, a shotgun in his hands. She straightened abruptly, blood rushing from her face and leaving her deathly pale. Behind her, she felt Rafe slowly straighten, then move her gently to the side.

  The man’s face was as lined and weathered as old leather, and his hair was graying, even though Annie would have guessed his age as in the mid-forties. He was a little over medium height, and as lean and hard as a mustang. His left eyelid drooped a bit, making it look as if he were winking. There was a badge pinned to his vest.

  “Atwater,” he said in a dry, cracking voice. “U. S. marshal. You’re Rafferty McCay, and you’re under arrest. Drop that pistol real slow, son, because I’m a mite nervous about bein’ in the middle of an Apache camp, and this here Greener will cut you in two if it goes off.”

  Rafe sat on the ground, his hands tied securely behind his back. Atwater had threatened to tie Annie too if she made any move to help Rafe, so Rafe had sharply ordered her to leave him alone. She sat down nearby, her face as white as paper and her heart beating heavily in her chest.

  Jacali circled at a cautious distance, hissing and muttering, and Atwater eyed her warily. The old woman was definitely hostile. Two warriors managed to step outside their wickiups, though they were too weak to walk even to where Rafe sat tied. One of them was holding a rifle, but he didn’t lift it in a threatening gesture. It was as if, as long as this situation remained between the White Eyes, they were content to leave it alone. Still, Atwater kept an eye on him, too.

  Atwater was pondering how he was going to get his captive to jail, and he admitted to himself it was going to be a mite tricky. Like he’d said, they were not only in the middle of Apache country, but right smack-dab in the middle of an Apache camp. And there was the woman to consider. Little thing, but Atwater didn’t discount her. He’d known women to go to some hellacious lengths for the men they thought they loved.

  Tracking McCay had been the damnedest job he’d ever undertaken. If he hadn’t been trained by some Injuns himself, he never would have managed it. Even so, part of it had been luck. Following a hunch and hanging around to see what the bounty hunter Trahern had done, for one thing. Going after McCay had been the last job Trahern would ever take. Couldn’t say he regretted the bastard’s death.

  But the tracks around the cabin in the mountains, only a few, had made him think there were two horses. Either McCay now had him a packhorse or someone was with him, someone who didn’t weigh much. At first Atwater had thought it was a packhorse, because McCay wasn’t likely to take up with any kids or women, he was too smart for that, too much of a lobo. But then he remembered hearing that the doctor in Silver Mesa was a woman, and that she hadn’t been seen at her cabin for a week or so. It wasn’t unusual, no one seemed to think, since she was sometimes called away to an area ranch, but Atwater had the knack of taking odd pieces of information and making a picture out of them.

  So, just for the hell of it, figure McCay had a woman with him now, maybe the doctor. Why would he take up with a woman after all these years? It wasn’t likely unless the woman had somehow come to mean some-thing to him. Where would he go with a woman he cared for? North, up the outlaw trail? Maybe. Some good hiding places up in that damn wilderness. North would have been where most men would have gone, where it was logical to go, but McCay wasn’t most men. No, McCay would take the least-expected route. South, toward Mexico. Through Indian territory.

  Tracking him was slow going. He didn’t leave much of a trail even where he could be expected to. But those two dead bounty hunters in the stand of trees, with the buzzards circling overhead, had been a pretty good signpost.

  It took continuous circling to find a track, and he’d come across only a couple of camps, so well hidden were they. Atwater was proud of his tracking, but he had to admit it would have taken him a lot longer to catch McCay—he refused to think that he might never have caught him—if the outlaw hadn’t stopped at the Apache camp.

  Now, there was a puzzle. Atwater didn’t like puzzles. He was a naturally curious man, and when a puzzle came along he couldn’t rest until he’d solved it. It didn’t make sense for McCay to stop for so long at one place, but he had. Atwater knew he’d been at least three days behind the couple, and he had watched from up in the hills for two days before coming down. He’d kept expecting the two to ride out, and it sure as hell would’ve been easier on his nerves not to have to come down into an Apache camp.

  What he had seen just didn’t fit with what he knew of McCay. A cold-blooded killer didn’t spend five days taking care of a bunch of sick Apaches. Now, he’d have expected the doctor to want to try to help, maybe; at least that wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities. But he also would have expected McCay to either override her and force her to ride on, or callously leave her behind. He had done neither.

  Instead, for two days Atwater had watched the outlaw carrying water and helping the old woman with the dead, playing with a baby, taking time with that young Injun kid, and watching over the doctor like a hawk. Through his spyglass he had even seen, through an open flap, McCay sponging off a sick warrior. Nope, that just wasn’t normal behavior at all.
>
  And then that thing with the sick baby last night. He hadn’t been able to tell what was going on in the dark, but come morning he’d seen something he purely didn’t understand. The two of them, the outlaw and the doc, had been sitting for hours in the dirt facing each other, motionless. It had looked like they were in some sort of trance or something. Damn spooky. The doc had been holding the baby to her, and McCay had had his hands pressed over hers. The old woman had sort of watched over them, but it had been plain she’d been kinda unnerved, too.

  And then the baby had started crying, and they’d woke up from their trance or whatever, and McCay had grabbed his woman and a blanket and taken her off for a while. Atwater hadn’t followed. McCay wouldn’t be going anywhere without the horses, and he believed in giving folks their privacy at certain times.

  So here he had him a dilemma, sure enough. A cold-blooded killer ought to act like a cold-blooded killer, keep things simple. When the little pieces didn’t fit, it made Atwater wonder. He was wondering now.

  “Gettin’ you to a jail somewhere is goin’ to be a bitch,” he mused aloud. “Pardon me, ma’am. I’ve been worryin’ about it some. What if these here Apaches take it in their heads they don’t like you being tied up and all? After you helpin’ them when they was sick like you did. Can’t tell what an Injun will think. I speak some Apache, and I don’t like the things that old woman’s been saying, I’ll tell you that.”

  “He won’t make it to a jail alive,” Annie said desperately. “He’ll be killed before you can get him there.”

  “I don’t ‘spect no bounty hunter to give me any trouble, ma’am.” Atwater stared at her with his odd, half-winking gaze.

  “It isn’t just the bounty hunters, there are—”

  “Annie, no.” Rafe’s voice cut across hers like a whiplash. “You’ll just get him killed too.”