“Don’t go,” he whispered. “No one’s coming after you. Even if what you heard was real, no one’s coming after you now, not in this weather. Please don’t go.”
She liked the way desire rumbled in those words. Though she had no intention of opening the sealed chambers of her passion, it felt good to hear him knocking at the door.
“Don’t be foolish,” Anna told him. “You’ve already made your feelings for me clear.”
“This isn’t about feelings.”
“At least not any that are north of your navel. Come on, Ryan. I told you I’m not that kind of woman anymore. Haven’t been since . . . well, since you.”
“Sorry I soured you for all those others,” he grumbled. “Hey, you leave that blanket. It’s nippy in here.”
“But I’m ─”
“─ Naked, too. I noticed.” A lopsided grin lit his face, which the firelight bathed in golden flickers.
She grabbed the blanket firmly. “I’ll only need it for a minute, so I can find dry clothes and make us something hot to eat.”
He held onto it like a shred of dignity, even though she thought she heard his stomach growl at the mention of warm food. “From what I remember before you drugged my drink, it’s a little late for you to go developing a sense of modesty, Annie Faith.”
“I told you, I’m not Annie anymore.”
“What’s in a name? ‘That which we call a rose, by any other name would still have thorns.’”
“I thought the line ended, ‘. . . would smell as sweet.’”
He grimaced. “How should I remember? Somebody stole my book of Shakespeare ─ Annie Faith.”
“Sangre de Cristo, you’re such a ─” Biting back another curse, she ripped the blanket from his grasp.
He groaned, and laid his right hand atop his wounded shoulder. Strips of torn cotton surrounded it to bind his wound. Otherwise, nothing concealed the masculine contours of his upper body, the taut muscles, thicker than she recalled, the ─ She forced her gaze from straying southward, suddenly ashamed. She had no interest in looking at him that way. She hadn’t earlier, when she had worked at curing him. A fluttering beneath her stomach suggested she was lying to herself.
How foolish she was, to even think of his man’s body. She loved the stark isolation of her canyon life. She needed nothing, no man, most especially that one who had the most cause to hate her. Yet she remembered, only moments earlier, how good it felt when he had held her, how warm and safe and . . . whole.
A flash of memory nearly overwhelmed her. Hammering a cross into the stony soil. A reddish pile of loose gravel that made a tiny mound over the grave. Though she’d been so weak with grief that she could barely stand, she’d dug the hole herself. Deep, so scavengers could not unearth it. Deep, as if by doing so, she could hide it from herself.
Tears made the hearth’s flames sparkle in her vision. Tears that she had never shed in the six years beyond that cross.
Now, as if his body’s heat had thawed what might have been, she looked back toward Quinn. His gaze sparked against hers, cold and angry at his weakness and perhaps the memory of what she had done before.
Like an offering, she tossed him back the blanket. The floor was cold, and she would soon pull on her other pair of worn jeans, another coarsely woven shirt.
She turned her back on him and felt him glaring as she dressed.
* * *
God help him, he couldn’t pull his gaze away from her. Sore and weak as he was, Quinn watched the way she moved as fluidly as melt-water trickling downhill in the spring. Reaching for a pair of jeans hung from a peg, she pulled them on to cover nothing but her bare flesh. Flesh that had lain against his moments ago.
He groaned at this impossible arousal, the staggering realization that she was doing it again. She was making him want her, with her firm, lean body, which had felt so right against his. She was ensnaring him, though her silken words now whispered psalms of healing, not of sin. She was convincing him, a little at a time that though her beauty and her voice remained, Annie Faith had changed to Anna, and Anna might be someone that he’d like to know.
Or else he was, despite his wound, a healthy man, just shy of thirty, who hadn’t had a woman in so long he couldn’t say. The reaction he had as he watched her dress could be nothing more, nothing but his basest instincts, trying to distract him from cold truth.
After what she had done, he couldn’t trust another woman, much less her. After what she’d cost him, he ought to want her dead.
Yet he had to admit, at least to himself, that he no longer did. Though he had told himself before that he was warming her so she could tend him, he realized now he couldn’t bear to watch her die. Not even if he’d been strong enough to ride out of here today.
Her obvious fear and loathing for Hamby and his men spun his long-held hatred for her on its axis. She hadn’t turned his mare and goods over to them as he had so long suspected. Instead, as strange as it might seem, the thief must have fallen prey to an even greater evil.
Yet did that make her any less a thief? Did it make her any less guilty for her part in his family’s deaths? And most importantly, did he betray their memories by wanting her the way that he did now?
* * *
They would be married in a week’s time, Ward had told her. Though for her it was an answer, the thought made Lucy’s soul quiver like a hummingbird’s frail wings.
Still, she felt the need to keep up appearances with Miss Rathbone, who had helped to guide her in the five years since her mother had passed on.
Lucy chattered quickly, half-starved for some scrap of approval. “Why, if one didn’t go outside, one would almost suspect we’d never left the States. The house is so much finer than what I’d expected. Don’t you think so?”
Miss Rathbone looked up slowly from unpacking one of Lucy’s bags. Her fathomless brown eyes surveyed the surroundings, as if she hadn’t deigned to take them in before.
The judge had shown them to the pair of bedrooms, which someone had decorated thoughtfully. Someone who understood a woman’s tastes. The bedding had been trimmed with expensive eyelet lace. The chamber sets were painted with delicate violet flowers.
Nervously, Lucy drew back the heavy green and violet curtains of her room to gaze out over the thick pines outside. Snowflakes filled the air like a host of wintry moths. She could feel their cold radiating through the windowpane, so she quickly closed the draperies once again.
Miss Rathbone lit an oil lamp against the resulting gloom. “I suppose it could be worse.”
Lucy had nearly forgotten her question to the older woman. But that was typical of her recent conversations with Miss Rathbone: fits and starts, long pauses, terse replies, while all along, her every deliberate gesture, every brooding glare blamed Lucy for their change in circumstances.
As well she might.
Lucy swallowed back her guilt and swelled her chest with an almost painfully deep breath. She was here now, in this place, destined for marriage, and she would make the best of it. After she wed Cameron, she could send Miss Rathbone packing, sever every tie she had with what had happened in Connecticut this winter.
And then there would be no one here who might too soon guess her secret. No one here to hold up a mirror and reflect back at her those dark-eyed glimpses of her shame, and of her pleasure most sublime.
* * *
In an economy so ingrained that it was second nature, Anna had tucked the cottontail’s small carcass deep inside her coat. Despite the shock of her horse’s death and her own near-freezing, she had carried the rabbit home. It remained inside her coat, so she recovered it after she dressed, happy for at least that small bit of fortune on this luckless day.
She draped the coat across a stool near the fire so it could dry. Then she and Quinn shared tea and cornbread left over from this morning. Anna ate in wary silence, thinking about how she had lost her balance in the few days since he’d arrived. Before, everything had seemed simple, sterile, just the
way she liked it. Now her emotions, which she thought trapped in amber, had bubbled to the surface and threatened to overwhelm her.
Afterward, she took the rabbit by the back feet and retrieved the knife from her coat pocket. She threw the old serape over her shoulders, then took the rabbit out the door, beneath the roof’s narrow overhang. The dog pranced eagerly, awaiting the viscera that were loosed by her quick blade. She left Notion outside to enjoy his bloody meal, then returned indoors to skin the cottontail over a shallow pan.
From his pallet near the hearth, Quinn watched her cautiously. He sat cross-legged, the blanket draped around his frame. “When I first got here, I figured you might do that to me.”
Expertly, she peeled off the soft pelt, turning it inside-out as she worked. “What makes you think I’ve ruled out the idea?”
He shook his head. “You were right before. You didn’t go through all this trouble just to kill me. But I’m still wondering why.”
“It’s what I do, heal people.” She cut through joints and tossed the meaty chunks into a pan she’d filled with snow. Blood droplets bloomed into pink petals against the field of white.
“But why heal me? Didn’t you realize who I was?”
“The Navajo brought you here. I trusted their wisdom. And I trusted the curing woman’s teaching.” Anna paused to add some spices from her precious store into the pan. She measured out a double portion of dried corn she’d soaked this morning and poured it in as well.
He said nothing, but his moss-colored eyes seemed to flicker in the firelight, to weigh her every word.
She decided it would be best, this time, to answer him completely. “The only other voices that spoke to me were those of fear and of what I once was. I trust neither of those voices anymore.”
His words dropped into a husky whisper. “What happened to change you? What did they do to you, Annie Faith no, Anna?”
She hooked the pot’s handle over a metal arm and swung it into place to cook above the fire. She watched the snow inside the pan melt gradually over the heat, just as she sensed herself dissolving with Quinn’s question and the emotion in his words.
She turned to look at him and saw his shape sparkling with the tears trapped in her eyes. “I owe you a great deal, Quinn Ryan. But I don’t owe you that story.”
He paused as if to consider, then continued. “It’s all right. I’ve decided. I won’t try to take you when I go.”
“Take me where?”
“To Copper Ridge, to face what you did to me six years ago. You might not believe this, but I’m the sheriff there. Guess old Hamby took a fancy to my badge, or I would show you.”
She blinked at him, unable to comprehend what he had said. When she recovered, she asked, “Since when do they elect card sharps to put in charge of law and order?”
“I suppose about the same time they cast a thieving saloon singer in the role of angel of mercy. I don’t gamble anymore. Haven’t since . . . well, you.”
His words hurt, but she supposed that she deserved them. “You mean you weren’t shot by someone you had cheated?”
“It was one of Hamby’s boys, like I said before. I caught the bastards burning out some Navajo. I meant to ride back into town, get help. But they ─ they were ─ Good Lord . . .” He closed his eyes tightly, as if by doing so, he might stop reliving something far too awful to describe.
As she watched him, she could feel the dark echo of his pain. She imagined him being overwhelmed by lurid images, much like those that had touched her when he’d asked what Hamby’s men had done. She tried to clamp down on her compassion, bring it under tight control, but instead it grew as wild as the creek with the melting winter snows.
As if she’d never broken with music, Anna felt a tattered fragment of a song rise up. The first song since that terrible attack six years before. A Spanish corrido, its simple melody might soothe Quinn. But even more compelling was the feel of it inside her mind, the weight and texture of each note.
She had to try to sing it, not only to console Quinn but to assure herself that she still could. She had to give voice to this bright mirage of music lest it dissolve into old pain.
She’d never sung the words before, had only heard them in the old woman’s creaking voice. Yet her mouth gently curved around each word, each note, as if she’d sung it all her life.
“Se ve vagar la misteriosa sombra
que se detiene al pie de una ventana,
y murmura: “No llores angel mio,
que volveré mañana . . .”
Before she’d never thought much of the words, a soldier’s lament at his leave-taking, a soldier’s promise to his angel to return. She thought of Quinn’s return to her, though there had been no heartfelt promise, and the only angel in their story lay long-shrouded in a cold and stony grave.
Quinn lifted his head to look at her. She heard, as she continued, his exhalation of surrender. She felt, rather than saw, his own sharp-toothed memories loose their chokehold on his soul.
When she finished, he spared her a weak smile. “You sound even nicer singing sad tunes than you did belting bar songs back in Mud Wasp. Ever consider going back to that ─ maybe just the singing, not the rest?”
She gave the pot over the fire a stir, thinking of the music she had lost. Whatever had it earned her but trouble anyway? She shook her head. “Do you think of returning to your wicked ways, Quinn Ryan?”
He stared at her in a way that sent a shiver rippling up her spine. “Only to the one that’s tempting me right now. Aside from that, I’m mainly thinking of going back to get my spare gun and a couple of deputies to fix Hamby and his boys for good.”
“It could be weeks until you’re strong enough to walk out of this canyon.”
“I was hoping you might have an extra horse that you could loan me.”
“I had only the one. He’s gone.”
Quinn shifted the blanket to cover both his shoulders. “Gone? Where is he?”
“Just where this poor rabbit’s going,” Anna answered, “to satisfy the hunger of a beast.”
* * *
Though Lucy lay sleeping in a bedroom designed to insulate her from the wildness of Arizona, the blue-gray expanse she dreamed of appeared no more civilized. Neither the hoof prints of the horse in harness nor the runners of the sleigh yet marred the moonlit surface of a snow-covered cornfield. She glimpsed that unsullied scene from beneath the poor cover of bare elm trees and the sheltering dark boughs of a holly. Brilliant berries dotted the leaves’ bases, like small globules of blood.
There had been blood inside, too, in that sleigh tucked in the shadows. Blood beneath the rug that warmed them. Blood amid the plumes of steam that rose from breathy exhalations, faster, harder . . . all so enticingly forbidden.
Lucy’s breaths grew quicker as she dreamed of David’s hands, his mouth . . . Dear, God!
She’d told Miss Rathbone she was going to a sleighing frolic with Edward Harris and his sisters. Miss Rathbone, acting in her father’s stead while he finished his Washington business, had allowed her. But what Miss Rathbone hadn’t guessed was that a second young man met her just outside the gate when the Harris siblings brought her home. He’d convinced Edward he would be happy to escort Miss Worthington inside, where he had business.
And why shouldn’t Edward, steady Edward, have believed them? Lucy, his fiancée, had always conducted herself honorably. His young sisters both complained of the icy clear cold of the night. And David Tanner, the Worthington’s assistant coachman, had always presented himself as one who knew his place.
But Edward had never seen the flirtatious glances that passed between his fiancée and the fellow nor heard the shocking things he whispered when she chanced to cross his path. He never would have guessed how his decorous Miss Lucy, instead of having the impertinent young man fired, had gone out of her way to come upon him with increasing frequency, had even sent to him one of her embroidered handkerchiefs on Christmas Eve. He had no reason to suspect that D
avid had a horse in harness in the barn, that handsome, dark-haired David had been waiting for his chance.
How many times had Lucy dreamed that evening? She had known, as if by instinct, how the secret touch would be the one that would ignite her, just as David’s daring whispered words had sparked her soul. And oh, how those sparks had caught, how they’d leapt into a roaring blaze in those few minutes . . .
At least until that awful instant when Edward had returned to find her. Until he’d dragged her home and seen ─ even Miss Rathbone had seen it ─ that damning splotch of blood upon her skirt.
The rush of shame that wakened her made Lucy sob aloud. And yet, and yet . . . she wiped tears from her eyes, then closed them, trying to recapture the exhilaration of what happened in those lustrous moments before she had been caught.
Cañon del Sangre de Cristo
March 31, 1884
“Here, Ryan, why don’t you make yourself useful?” Anna leaned to pass Quinn the damp bundle she had brought in from the cold, even though he’d just awakened.
Notion roused himself to walk over and sniff her smelly burden.
Quinn sat up, yawning, and quickly coughed. His face screwed up, apparently at the odor. Shaking his head, he reminded her, “You said yourself last night the wound was healing nicely. No more of those stinking poultices.”
She unceremoniously dumped the slimy burden, which was far bigger than a poultice anyway, into his lap. The newborn goat squirmed and weakly bleated, “Ma-a-a-h.”
She fought a smile at the confused expression on his face. For the love of Dios, he looked as sleep-tousled as a boy when he awakened.
“It’s a tiny cabin, no room for deadwood. Come on,” she urged. “Take that rag and rub down the little fellow before he freezes. He came a few weeks too early for spring weather.”
Her memory took her back to the mornings during her recovery, when Señora Valdez had first awakened her at dawn to demand she help with simple chores. Anna had cursed the old woman at the time, unable to make sense of the curandera’s methods.
Canyon Song Page 9
