Luke said not one word, but the thought of Carla being touched by another man shook him. The thought of her being taken by anyone sent a killing rage through Luke’s veins. He had been so sure, so unspeakably certain, that she would never allow anyone to touch her but him.
Ten measured the barely contained rage in Luke’s expression and shrugged. “Suit yourself, boss man. But you should know one thing. Carla told me she came here this summer to get over you. You keep riding roughshod over her feelings and she’ll walk out of here at the end of the summer and never look back. Then where will you be? You may not be her first man, but so what? You’re the one who was given first call and you turned her down flat. Your fault, not hers. You’ll never find another woman with half what she has to offer and you know it.”
There was a long, taut silence while Luke measured Ten with the cold yellow eyes of a cornered mountain lion.
“I wasn’t cut out to live in a city,” Luke said finally.
“Did she ask you to?”
“No, but sooner or later she would. The Rocking M is hell on women. I’d rather not marry at all than have a woman walk out on her kids and her husband, or hit the bottle or go crazy staying on the ranch and make everyone’s life a living hell.”
“Carla wouldn’t – “
“Like flaming hell she wouldn’t,” Luke said savagely. “Do you think my mother or my aunts wanted to betray their children and husbands? Do you think my father or my uncles deliberately picked weak women to marry? Do you think I want to watch Carla get thin and sullen grieving for a way of life she can’t have if she’s my wife? Or maybe you think I should be like some college kid and just take what she’s offering and not worry about marriage, is that it?”
Ten swore beneath his breath, the words all the more violent for the softness of his voice.
“Now you’re beginning to understand,” Luke said. “Stay away from her, Ten. This is the only warning you’ll get.”
“What if I’m thinking of marriage?”
Luke closed his eyes for an instant. When they opened there was no emotion showing; not anger, not fear, not desire, nothing but an icy emptiness.
“Are you thinking of marriage?” he asked softly.
“She’s the kind of woman that makes a man think of hearth fires and long winter nights and babies teething on your knuckles,” Ten said. Then he sighed, raked his fingers through his hair again and added, “But that’s all it will ever be for this cowboy. Thinking. Dreaming. I’m piss-poor husband material and no one knows it better than I do.” He jerked his hat into place and met Luke’s eyes. “Ease off on the spurs, Luke. Carla has a real tender hide where you’re concerned.”
“And if I don’t?” Luke asked, more curious than angry.
“I’ll get to feeling protective and you’ll jump salty one too many times and we’ll have hell’s own fight. Then you’ll be short one ramrod and the ranch will be short one boss.” Ten smiled wolfishly. “You’re bigger than I am, but you’d start out fighting fair. I wouldn’t. Be quite a brawl while it lasted.”
Unwillingly Luke smiled in return, then laughed. After a moment his face settled into grim lines once more.
“Hell of a mess, isn’t it?” Luke said quietly.
“It’ll do,” agreed Ten. “Why in God’s name did you let Carla come to the ranch this summer if you knew it was going to drive you crazy?”
“I…” Luke closed his eyes and shook his head. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. She didn’t have a summer job. The Rocking M didn’t have a cook. The men were going to rebel if they had to keep eating slop that hogs wouldn’t touch. Carla is a fine cook. Some of the best meals I ever had were ones she fixed for Cash and me over in the old house.” Luke rubbed the back of his neck and grimaced. “Like I said. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Besides, I expected her to cry uncle by now.”
“Carla?”
“It’s been four weeks. She must be dying to see a movie or get her hair fixed or whatever it is that women do in town. I promised her before she ever came back here that all she had to do was say the word and the bet was off, no hard feelings and no regrets.”
“You don’t know her very well, do you?”
It was an observation, not a question, but Luke answered anyway.
“What do you mean?”
“Carla never backed up an inch for anyone, including that hardheaded brother of hers. She made a deal with you. She’ll keep it or die trying.” Realization hit Ten. “That’s why you’re riding her so hard – you think you can goad her into quitting.”
Luke looked uncomfortable but said nothing.
“Not one chance in hell, buddy,” Ten said succinctly. “Carla may be pretty to look at and have a smile as soft as a rose petal, but that’s one determined girl. Think about that the next time you start in on her. You’re beating a hog-tied pony. She can’t escape.”
Luke’s breath came in harshly. He hadn’t thought about Carla in that way, as a person of pride and determination. He had seen her either as a girl too young for him or as one more woman who would be ground up by the Rocking M’s isolation and demands. His breath hissed out in an explosive curse.
Ten smiled sympathetically. “You’ve got your tail in a real tight crack. It’s pretty hard on a man when he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.”
“Do us both a favor, Ten,” Luke said, giving the other man a hard look.
“Sure.”
“Stop trying to run interference for Carla. Every time you start hovering over her like a mother hen, I get to thinking about how good stewed chicken would taste.”
There was an instant’s silence before Ten threw back his head and laughed. He was still laughing when Luke set out for the barn with angry, long-legged strides.
7
“Did you find that ghost stud yet?” Ten asked Luke.
The ramrod’s voice had no inflection but his smoke-gray eyes were lit with a combination of sympathy and laughter. Ten knew that Luke had spent long hours out on the range in order to avoid being close to Carla, not to find the near-mythical black stallion that inhabited the narrow red canyons and rugged breaks of the extreme southeastern portion of the Rocking M.
“No, but I saw his tracks a time or two,” Luke retorted, piling a huge helping of roast beef, browned potatoes and gravy on his plate.
He glanced up as Carla put a bowl of crisp, fresh green beans next to his plate. With difficulty he forced himself to watch his dinner instead of Carla. She was more beautiful to him each time he looked at her. The thought that he had driven her into the arms of some college boy had tormented Luke. His days had become longer and longer, but even half-dead from overwork, he had only to look at Carla to feel hot claws of desire sinking into him.
Finally Luke’s thoughts had driven him to stay away from the ranch house entirely. He had spent five days roaming the Rocking M, sleeping out, waking with his whole body hot, clenched, burning with passion. During the day he had chased his thoughts as though they were cloud shadows flying over the face of the land.
At the end of five days, Luke still hadn’t decided which was worse, the thought that Carla had had another man, or the realization that her virginity would no longer be a barrier holding them apart They wanted each other. They were both of age. They could take each other, work the passion out of their systems, and then they could go on with life the only way that made any sense.
Separately.
She came here to cure herself of me. Why the hell hold back? Why not take what we both want so bad that we can’t look at each other without shaking?
“Thanks,” Luke said to Carla, his voice harsher than he had meant it to be.
Carla’s smile was soft and hesitant, for Luke’s expression was forbidding. He had been out on the range for the past five days; even before that he had been distant Ever since he and Ten had argued almost four weeks ago. If they had argued. Ten had refused to talk about it. In any case, there certainly seemed to be no anger be
tween the two men now.
For a few unguarded moments, Carla’s luminous blue-green eyes watched Luke with transparent hunger, measuring the changes five days had made. His beard stubble had become a thick darkness from cheek to jaw, making his rare smiles flash by comparison. He looked tired, drawn, as though he had been sleeping as badly as she had.
Forcing herself not to linger at the table with Luke, Carla went back to the kitchen. She had already done the dinner dishes and was in the process of mixing up a quadruple batch of cookies. No matter how many cookies she made, they disappeared in a matter of hours. There were times when she thought the men were feeding them to the cows.
“Got any more of that coffee?” called Luke from the dining room.
“About a gallon. How’s the gravy holding out?”
“You could bring a quart of that, too.”
Carla smiled to herself as she filled another gravy boat, grabbed two hot pads and wrapped them around the thin wire handle of the coffeepot. When she got to the dining room, Ten was gone.
“Where’s Ten?”
Luke grimaced at Carla’s mention of the other man. “In the bunkhouse, I imagine. Why? You need something?”
“No. I was just wondering how Cosy’s hand is doing.”
Luke took the gravy boat and began drowning potatoes. “What did Cosy do this time?”
“He cut himself and wouldn’t go to the doctor. I sewed it up as best I could, but I’m no surgeon.”
Gravy slopped heavily from the boat and ran down onto the clean table as Luke’s head snapped toward Carla.
“You what?” he asked.
“I sewed Cosy up with the curved needle and silk thread I have in my camping kit. Cash taught me how to do it years ago. He’s forever cutting his hands when he’s out prospecting. Most of the time a butterfly bandage will get the job done, but Cosy wouldn’t hear of anything that fancy. He said a plain old needle and thread was all he wanted. When I was finished he doused everything in the gentian violet solution I’ve been putting on the calf that cut itself on wire.” She glanced aside at Luke’s plate. “Your gravy is getting away.”
Luke looked down, scooped up runaway gravy on his finger and licked it off. He had to repeat the process several times before the problem was taken care of. At the same time he watched Carla while she set down the coffeepot, shifted the hot pads so that both hands were protected and poured him a mug of coffee. She maneuvered the awkward pot with unexpected grace. Nearly two months of working on the ranch had taught her how to handle the heavy kitchen equipment.
“You do that real slick,” Luke said.
Carla looked up, startled. “What?”
For a moment Luke forgot what he had been saying. Carla’s eyes were close, clear, like blue-green river pools lit from within. Her lips were full and pink, their soft curves a silent invitation to a man’s hungry mouth.
“The coffeepot,” Luke said, his voice deep. “You handle it like you’ve been doing it all your life.”
“Pain is a great teacher,” Carla said dryly. “You don’t have to get burned more than two or three times before you figure out that there’s no future in hurting.”
Luke’s eyes narrowed to glittering amber slits as her words sliced through him like razors. Pain is a great teacher. There’s no future in hurting. He wondered if Ten had been right, if Carla had come back to the Rocking M to cure herself of the pain of wanting a man who didn’t want her.
But Luke did want her. He wanted her until he welcomed pain as a diversion from the agony gnawing in his guts whenever he looked at her and saw what he should not have. Even if she weren’t innocent, she was still his best friend’s kid sister, and even if she had been a complete stranger, there was still the grim truth about the Rocking M and women. The two didn’t mix, as every MacKenzie man but one had found to his grief.
And yet there Carla stood, watching Luke with hungry, haunted, haunting eyes, making his body harden in a single wild rush, forcing him to bite back a curse and a groan.
Stop looking at me, he railed at Carla silently. Stop wanting me. Can’t you feel what you’re doing to me? Is this revenge for what I did to you three years ago?
The words went no farther than Luke’s mind, for he had just discovered that the protective layer of anger he had wrapped around himself since Carla had arrived was gone, worn out by nearly eight weeks of use. Nothing came to him in his need except a bone-deep weariness and the understanding that Ten had been half-right – Luke had been beating a hog-tied pony.
But the pony was himself, not Carla.
Wearily Luke rubbed his neck with his right hand, trying to loosen his muscles. It wasn’t the endless days of hard driving and hard riding that had tied him in knots; it was that he had run and run and run – and then looked up only to find himself in the same place where he had started, reflected in the eyes of Cash’s kid sister.
“Did the big storm catch you on the wrong side of Picture Wash?”
Carla’s soft question sank slowly into Luke’s churning thoughts. All that hadn’t been said sank in, as well – her hesitation even to speak to him, her concern that he had been out in the open when thunder rolled down from the peaks and the earth shuddered, and her yearning simply to hear his voice answering her own.
Luke knew just how painful that yearning was, for he had been haunted in exactly the same way. He had heard Carla’s voice on the wind, in the darkness, in the silver veils of rain sliding over ancient cliffs. More than once he had awakened in the night, certain that he had only to reach out to feel her softness and warmth curled alongside his body; but his seeking hands had found only darkness and the cold, rust-colored earth of the remote canyon where he had camped.
“No,” Luke said softly. “I was back in one of those side canyons where the cliffs make an overhang that keeps out the rain.”
“Like September Canyon?”
“Yes. Did Cash tell you about that place?”
“No. You did, when I was fourteen and you gave me a fragment of Anasazi pottery you had found along September Creek. I still have the shard. It’s my…talisman, I guess. It reminds me of all that once was and all that might yet be.”
Carla looked past Luke and the ranch house walls, seeing the canyon whose existence had haunted her almost as much as Luke. Both the canyon and the man were aloof, distant, compelling. Both of them fascinated her.
Luke’s breath came in and stayed, for there was such yearning in Carla’s voice and face that it made his throat close.
“Cash promised to take me to September Canyon when he comes in August,” she continued. “I’ll taste the rain winds and hear water rushing over stone, and I’ll see in every shadow a culture that was old before Columbus set sail for India and found the New World.”
“I never found any ruins,” Luke said finally. “I know they’re there, probably way up September Creek or Picture Wash or maybe even Black Springs…” His eyes took on a faraway look in the moments before he shrugged and returned to eating. “The ranch takes too much time for me to have much left over for chasing legends.”
“I’m surprised Cash hasn’t found any Indian ruins. He must have crawled over every square inch of the Rocking M.”
Luke shook his head. “Not a chance. There are parts of this ranch that no one has ever walked, white or Indian. Besides, Cash has been poking around hard rock country. He’s a granite and quartz man. Most ruins are found way up washes or creeks that wind between sandstone walls. No gold to be found there. Beautiful country, though. Wild as an eagle and damned near as hard to get to.”
“The Anasazi and their natural fortresses…” Carla focused on Luke with intense, blue-green eyes, grateful to have found a neutral subject that interested both of them. “Have you ever wondered what frightened the Anasazi so much that they withdrew to those isolated canyons?”
“Other men, what else? You don’t go to all the trouble of building your towns halfway up the face of a sheer cliff, risking the life of every man, woman, a
nd child as they climb up and down to tend the crops or draw water, for any animal less dangerous than man.”
“In the end running and hiding didn’t do the Anasazi any good. The ruins remain. The people are long gone.”
“Maybe,” Luke said softly. “And maybe it’s like mourning the passing of the Celts. They didn’t die so much as they became something else. I think some of the Anasazi came down out of their fortresses and changed into something else. I’ll bet Anasazi blood flows in Ute and Apache, Navaho and Zuni and Hopi. Especially the Hopi.”
Carla looked at Luke curiously. “You sound like you’ve studied the Anasazi.”
“Self-defense.” He looked up at her and grinned. “You asked me so many questions after I gave you that piece of pottery, I had to dig pretty deep for answers. Cash must have mailed me most of the university library.”
She laughed, then shook her head. “Poor Luke. I must have pestered you half to death. You were incredibly patient with me.”
“I didn’t mind the questions. When it was too dark or wet or frozen to work, I’d sit and thumb through those books, looking for answers and finding more questions than even you had.”
Luke’s long fingers caressed his coffee cup absently as he remembered the long, quiet evenings. Carla watched his hand with unconscious longing.
“When the snow piled up in the canyons,” he continued, “I’d sit and think about people who lived and died speaking a language I’ve never heard and never will, worshipping unknown gods, building stone fortresses with such care that no mortar was needed, block after block of raw stone resting seamlessly next to its mates. However else the Anasazi succeeded or failed as a people, they were craftsmen of the kind this earth seldom sees. That’s a good thing to be remembered by.”
Luke lifted his coffee cup in a silent salute to Carla. “So you see, your curiosity about that little piece of pottery I gave you opened up a whole new piece of history for me. I call it a fair trade.”
“More than fair,” she said, her voice husky with memories. “You gave me a world at the very time my own had been jerked out from under my feet.”
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