by Mary McBride
The sagebrush and scrub beside the tracks began to shimmer as Kate’s eyes filled with tears. So be it, she said to herself. If it cost her Race’s trust and love, she thought, at least she’d still have his life.
* * *
With her hand on the door, Honey turned to look at Gideon, still asleep in the rumpled sheets, one arm still outstretched in the warm space she had quietly vacated only moments ago. Heat flickered in the pit of her stomach and for a second she yearned to return to the bed, to feel Gideon’s heat and his weight, to be filled by him.
Soon, she thought, quietly opening the door and walking out into the empty hallway. She’d be back in two shakes or less—with warm tortillas and sweet butter for their breakfast, with a ready-made frock to replace the rags she was wearing now.
Despite lack of sleep, Honey felt fresh and strong and competent. She felt complete. It was as if Gideon’s loving had filled in all those empty spaces inside her. Her feet were light, almost winged, as she trotted down the stairs and whisked out the hotel door onto the street.
The half-breed, Charlie Buck, was catnapping in a corner of the lobby. His dark head snapped up just as Honey sailed out the door. “What the hell,” he muttered. He made a grab for the rifle beside him then and, when his elbow hit the oil lamp and sent it crashing to the floor, the startled Indian dropped the remnants of his smoldering cigarette into the little spreading puddle of kerosene and broken glass at his feet.
Outside, all Honey saw was a glorious day. The sky was a fierce blue and the sun glittered in the cottonwoods that ran along the creek just west of town. A little breeze played at the ragged edge of Honey’s skirt and lifted her long hair off her shoulders as she progressed along the sidewalk. She wanted to skip down the middle of the dusty street, telling the whole world, or at least all of the inhabitants of Cerrillos, how much she loved Gideon Summerfield, and how—if she never did anything else in her life—she’d finally done something absolutely, perfectly, beautifully right.
For the first time in her life she was happy just being herself. She had nothing to prove—to herself or anybody else, her father in particular. If she recovered the bank’s money now, she thought, she’d give it back for Gideon’s sake and not in any effort to impress her father or to garner his praise. No, she corrected herself. Not if she recovered the money. When. For she still had every intention of retrieving the stolen cash. Now that she loved Gideon, there was no way on God’s green earth she’d let him go back to jail.
She was concentrating so hard on her plan to rescue both Gideon and the money that when she walked into the dry goods store it took a moment for the sense of familiarity to strike her. Like the mercantile in Golden, this one also bore a haunting resemblance to her mother’s place in Loma Parda where Honey had lived as Edwina Cassidy. This time, though, the memories rushed back sweetly, unaccompanied by a sense of loss or might-have-beens. She didn’t long for the lost Edwina. She was happy to be Honey—here and now.
“Help you, miss?” The gray-haired matron stood behind the counter, her expression sour and her arms crossed, as Honey plucked a simple calico wash dress from a pile on a table.
Under the woman’s disapproving gaze, Honey slipped out of her tattered dress and into the simple frock. The sleeves were much too long and the waistband too loose and the hemline dragged on the ground, but it was clean and whole, and that was all Honey was seeking at the moment. She didn’t need fancy clothes to feel beautiful with Gideon.
With delicious memories from the night before still drifting through her head and the taste of Gideon’s kisses still on her lips, Honey twirled in the new dress. She felt giddy and glad, and only slightly childish beneath the glare of the matronly storekeeper. But when Honey whirled to a breathless standstill, the sour-faced woman wasn’t watching her at all. Instead she was peering out the window.
“Looks like the hotel’s on fire,” the woman said as she gave a prim little pat to her iron gray hair. “Won’t mind one bit if the place burns down to a cinder. It’d serve those whores and drunks right to fry here on earth rather’n wait for their share of hellfire.”
By now Honey’s gaze had moved to the window, and as she stared she barely heard the woman’s starchy voice. Smoke was pouring from the ground-floor windows of the hotel. Flames were licking up the north wall of the wooden structure. Horrible tongues of fire.
Wild eyed now, with a panicky scream rising in her throat, Honey looked around her at the shelves and the stacked dry goods and the oddly familiar wooden crates and lidded jars. The brooms and shovels and pickaxes hooked to the ceiling seemed to sway above her head, and for an instant she wasn’t sure where she was—it seemed so much like her mama’s store in Loma Parda. Then, when she glanced down at the oversize calico dress, she wondered fleetingly why she was wearing her mother’s frock. She wasn’t allowed to play dress up in the store. She...
“Lookee there,” the shopkeeper exclaimed. “See. The roof’s caught now. Lord have mercy. I sure hope those sparks don’t blow across the street.”
Honey looked, staring dazedly at the hotel where she had just left the man she loved, deeply asleep.
“Gideon!” His name tore from her throat as she grabbed up the loose yardage of her skirt and went flying across the street, oblivious of the shouts of the storekeeper behind her.
A hand clamped on Honey’s shoulder when she was about to enter the burning lobby and Charlie Buck’s stern, chiseled features loomed through the smoke.
“You’re not going in there,” he told her.
But before he could get a good grip on her, Honey drove the heel of her hand up into his chin, and as the big half-breed reeled back, she ran into the hotel.
Inside, the smoke was dense. Though she could barely see, Honey remembered that the stairs were just ahead and a little to the right, so with the hem of her skirt covering her nose and mouth, she made her way through the heat and the acrid haze.
Her fingers had just touched the banister when there was a whoosh at her back. She looked over her shoulder in time to see orange flames rushing up the curtains, more flames crawling across the lobby floor toward the stairs where she stood now as if she had grown roots, long deep roots that wouldn’t let her move. Then the fire hissed her name.
It wanted her. Its hot orange eyes were unblinking.
Honey’s mouth opened in a voiceless scream. And the flames screamed back.
* * *
In his dreams, Gideon wavered between the pleasures of the angels and the tortures of the damned. One moment he’d be with Honey in a field of tall green corn, losing himself in her sea-colored eyes and her feminine warmth, then the next moment the cornstalks surrounding them would darken to iron bars and the woman in his arms would disappear like a wisp of smoke.
One minute he’d be listening to the sweet music of her voice, then the honeyed notes would turn to the harsh rasp of convicts walking in lockstep, dragging their chains along a stone floor. Now, in the confusing welter of his sleep, he heard the clanging of a bell and the high-pitched cries of frantic men that signaled an escape.
Gideon sat up, quick as a switchblade opening, and in less than a heartbeat he realized where he was and exactly what those bells and shouts signified. The hotel was on fire. And in the blink of an eye he realized Honey was gone. But rather than panic at her absence, he felt a sense of relief. All he had to worry about now was getting himself out.
He dressed quickly, all the while watching the fingers of smoke curling up under the door, bending over to avoid the acrid haze that was beginning to collect at the ceiling. He strapped on his gun belt, secured it, then slung a leg over the windowsill and eased himself out onto the rickety porch roof that ran along the front of the building.
A cheer went up from the crowd below and somebody gestured to a hay wagon parked close to the front of the building.
“Jump, mister,” a voice called.
“Jump,” others chimed in.
Gideon did, landing with a dull thud on th
e loose bales. He climbed over the side of the wagon, then turned, expecting to see Honey’s face—happy, shining with relief—somewhere in the crowd, but instead he found himself staring into the stony countenance of Charlie Buck.
“Where’s the woman?” the half-breed growled.
With the clanging of the fire bells and the raucous shouts of the crowd, Gideon could barely hear him. He leaned closer, cupping a hand to his ear. “What?”
The half-breed clamped a hand on Gideon’s shoulder. “I said where’s that ten-thousand-dollar piece of female? What’d you do, Summerfield? Stash her somewhere out back?”
“She’s not out here?” Too concerned now with Honey’s whereabouts to even react to the man’s accusation or pay any mind to his grip on his shoulder, Gideon’s eyes searched the crowd for a single pretty face, a pair of sea-colored eyes.
“When did you last see her?” he yelled at the half-breed.
Charlie Buck angled his head toward the hotel’s front door. “Couple minutes ago. She ran in there looking for you.”
Gideon cursed as he shook off the half-breed’s hand and pushed his way through the crowd to the door. The front of the lobby was already engulfed in flames. There was no way in hell—and that was what the interior looked like to him—he could get through that. Or even if he could, he wouldn’t be in any shape to help Honey once he’d gotten through.
Charlie Buck was suddenly beside him now, grimacing in the smoke, swearing viciously about ten thousand in ransom money going up in flames.
Gideon turned and ran back to the hay wagon. He leapt up on the bales. Reaching up, he was able to grasp the edge of the porch roof. Slowly then, his shoulders straining the seams of his shirt and the wound on his side ripping open as he stretched, he pulled himself up far enough to swing one leg onto the roof.
He slid back through the window he had escaped from moments earlier, bending double beneath the room’s lowering curtain of smoke as he made his way toward the door.
And, though Gideon Summerfield hadn’t prayed since he’d been ten years old, all the while he moved he was praying. Hard.
* * *
At the foot of the stairs, Honey stared at the fiery creature slowly making its way toward her. The fire would advance, then snake back upon itself, and then slither forward once again. It flicked its orange tongue at the hem of her skirt.
She lifted her arm to shield her face. The intense heat was drying her tears before they were halfway down her cheeks. She could barely breathe now. She was choking on smoke and on the words she wanted to scream back at the burning beast.
It lunged at her just then, and Honey lashed back with her foot. Her fear gave way to rage.
“No,” she screamed. “Not now. You can’t take me now. Please. Gideon’s upstairs sleeping and I have to get him out. I love him. I love him so. I’d die if anything happened to him.”
The fire struck out at her again, rushing, crackling. But it was only fire now, not a fearful, flame-breathing dragon. Honey recognized it for what it was. Unafraid, able to move her trembling limbs, she turned her back on it, squeezed her eyes shut against the smoke and started up the stairs.
In the middle of the burning staircase, she collided with Gideon.
The hem of her skirt was blazing as he swept Honey into his arms, then took the steps two at a time, returning to their room. He stood her in the tub of cool bathwater, still holding her, afraid to let her go. She was safe. She was alive. The tears that stung his eyes now were only partly from the rising smoke.
“What a fool thing to do, Honey.” He wanted to shake her for risking her neck, but he could only hold her tightly against him.
“I had to find you,” she said, sighing, resting her head on his shoulder, circling her arms around his waist.
Gideon pressed his lips to her hair. “You found me, darlin’,” he whispered. “You found me.” In more ways than one, he thought. He’d been so lost so long he’d given up hope of ever being found. His heart had been so cold for so many years he didn’t think it was possible to feel the warmth it was pouring through him now. Or the hope that was rising in his soul like something on the wing.
He tipped up her chin, found her big, turquoise eyes through the haze and wanted to tell her he would never let her go. That he’d do whatever he had to do in order to be with her. If that meant going back to prison in Jefferson City until the parole board granted him his freedom, then so be it. She was worth whatever price he had to pay.
There was so much he wanted to tell her, but all Gideon could do just then was whisper her name. “Honey.”
“Ask me to marry you, Gideon,” she whispered back, a soft urgency in her voice.
Her eyes were shining in spite of the smoke that was building in layer after layer above them, and Gideon thought he could quite happily drown in those ocean-colored orbs, or—more happily—live the rest of his days exploring their blue-green depths. He thought if he were any other man he’d already be on his knees begging her to be his wife. The wish was so strong it nearly choked him.
“If you won’t do that,” she whispered now, “then kiss me.”
That he could do, though it struck him as a half mile past insane. The hotel was going up in flames around them and Honey was standing in the washtub where he’d dumped her to put out her smoldering skirts. For all he knew, theirs was the last unscathed room in the entire building. They ought to be running for their lives....
Which was what it felt like when he lowered his head to kiss her. Breathless and wild and urgent. Because he might never kiss her again. Because he wanted to spend the rest of his life kissing her. The fire raging through the hotel was nothing compared to the one racing through him now—through his body, but his heart and soul as well. He had never wanted anything as badly as he wanted Honey Logan, now and always.
“Marry me, darlin’,” he whispered against her lips. “Marry me forever.”
“Yes.”
Her sigh was lost in the depths of another kiss, and Gideon’s head was swimming. He was a crazy man, proposing to a woman he couldn’t have while the whole blasted world—or their small part of it—was going up in flames. For a wild, suicidal moment he imagined them dying, locked in this embrace, their flesh and bones melting into a single being and their ashes traveling on a warm wind to a sacred place.
Crazy. Here he was thinking about dying when he’d never wanted so badly to live.
“We’re getting out of here. Now.” He lifted her out of the washtub, then strode to the open window, only to turn and discover Honey had gone the other way.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“Out,” she answered.
Now who was crazy? Gideon glared past Honey at the door. “You can’t go that way. It’s an inferno out there.”
“Well, I can’t go that way, Gideon.” She stabbed a finger at the window and widened her stance stubbornly.
“Why the hell not?” he growled.
“It’s too high. I...I just can’t.” Saying that, Honey reached for the doorknob and promptly jerked back her hand. “It’s red-hot.”
Gideon resisted saying he had told her so as he watched her stare at the window, her eyes enormous with panic.
“Oh, my God. I can’t, Gideon. I can’t.”
He crossed the room, swearing under his breath, swatting the lowering cloud of smoke out of his path, then he slid one arm around her waist and crooked a finger to lift her stubborn chin. He grinned for all he was worth. “Ain’t no such word as can’t, darlin’. If your mama never taught you that, you’re about to learn.”
* * *
The moment she had stepped off the train it had been obvious to Kate that the cloud of smoke hovering like an evil specter over Cerrillos hadn’t come from the smokestack of the big black locomotive. Something was definitely on fire. And when she had heard somebody shout that it was the hotel, Kate had clutched the leather valise in one hand, rucked up her long skirt with the other and hurried toward the bui
lding where the flames were now shooting through the roof.
In a panic, she scanned the faces in the crowd. Where was Honey? There couldn’t be another hotel in this little town, and this was where that Summerfield man’s telegram had said she would be.
Kate caught the sleeve of a female bystander. “Please, can you tell me, is there another hotel in town?”
The gray-haired woman shook her head.
“Do you know if everyone inside has gotten out?” Kate asked, her voice tightening with panic and climbing to a higher and sharper register, her fingers digging into the woman’s sleeve.
The woman shrugged out of Kate’s grasp, then replied sourly, “Well, if they ain’t out, they’re getting a well-deserved little taste of hellfire right about now, don’t you think?” Her gaze returned to the conflagration.
A shout went up from the crowd then and somebody pointed to the porch roof where a man was easing himself out from a window. Once out, he leaned back in and gently guided a woman through the open space. Her hair fell over her shoulders in long, dark tangles. She looked so tiny. Like a bedraggled child who had just walked through a puddle in her mother’s calico dress.
Honey! Kate’s hand moved to cover her wildly beating heart. She wanted to cry out but her mouth was as dry as ashes, so she simply stood there and watched as the man led her daughter to the edge of the roof. He leapt with the grace of a wildcat onto the hay wagon below, found his balance quickly on the wobbly bales, then turned, smiled up at Honey and held out his arms.
Honey took a hesitant step toward the edge of the little roof, then stopped. Even at that distance Kate could see her daughter’s lips quivering with uncertainty. Her face was pale and her eyes were huge and afraid. As huge and afraid as they had been when Honey had been just a tiny girl and Kate had caught her on top of the bureau in her bedroom.
“You get down from there this instant,” Kate had commanded her.
“I can’t.”
“You managed to get up there, Honey Logan. Now you get right back down.”
