by Lisa Plumley
Mason saw, and frowned. “Let’s take this outside,” he said, shouldering past Manuel without looking at him.
Juana’s brother raised his hand to hold him there—a hand that Mason shrugged off as he wheeled around again. Ire sparked between both men, its expression in Manuel underlaid by worry. Something was wrong.
Manuel’s sun-browned, dirt-smudged face looked solemn beneath his thick black hair and dark brows. His sombrero hung by its rawhide ties down his back. Its disarray, along with his sweat-dampened clothes, served as chilling evidence of his haste in reaching them.
“You are being followed, compadre,” he said to Mason. “A posse was stopped, watering their horses at Maricopa Wells when I returned the wagon.”
He glanced at Amelia. “I’m sorry, señorita. They could be here any minute.”
Mason swore and reached toward the chair beside the lamp. Picking up his shirt, he slid it over both shoulders, not bothering to button it before hefting his gun belt, too. He lowered his head to check the ammunition, rapidly scanning each shell pocket.
“The station master must have pointed me out to them, after I told him about the wagon. Entremetido!” Manuel raked his hand through his hair, making it stand on end. “I think I threw them off the trail, amigo, but they will be behind me soon.”
Mason nodded, then raised his gun belt to his hips and fastened it. A posse, after Mason? The notion of a sheriff in pursuit had been bad enough. She’d known he was an outlaw, but since their escape from Maricopa Wells, that fact had become easier and easier to deny.
Now here it was again—embodied in a posse that would capture, hurt, kill him if they could. Amelia shrank into the pillows, unable to do more than watch him until Juana stuck her head through the opened doorway.
“What’s happened?” she asked, wiping her hands on her long apron as she entered the room. She frowned toward Manuel, taking in his rumpled clothes and sweat-shiny face, and then turned her worried gaze upward at Mason. Whatever she saw in his face made her frown deepen.
From the corner of her eye she glimpsed Amelia, still in the bed. After a moment’s startled pause, Juana propped both hands on her slender hips.
“Whatever this is,” she said quietly, raking both men with a stern gaze, “it had better be important for you to have awakened Amelia and invaded her room like this.”
Manuel stared back at her. “But she—”
“She is a lady who doesn’t need a couple of knucks like you arguing nonsense in her room,” Juana insisted firmly.
She was defending her, Amelia realized—making sure no harm would come to her reputation because of what Manuel had seen. The warning to him was plain in her voice, and the sound of it left Amelia humbled with gratitude.
“Now either clear out,” Juana went on, “or tell me what’s happened.”
“The sheriff’s posse’s caught up with me,” Mason gritted out.
He nodded toward Manuel. “How far?”
“Five, six miles, maybe more.” Manuel ducked his head, checked his ammunition, too, then looked up again. “I outran them when I hit the rises near the Gila.”
“Good.” Mason turned, reached for his flat-brimmed black hat, and jammed it on his head.
Leaving. He was leaving because of the posse.
“I’ll have one of the hands saddle a horse for you,” Juana offered quietly, turning to leave. “Keep it as long as you need.”
Manuel stopped her. “I already did. I’m going with him.”
He held his sister’s gaze, his head held high. His unwavering stance beside Mason said much, bespoke of long-standing friendship between them. Amelia realized she’d been correct last night. Everyone at Picacho station trusted Mason, trusted him enough even to take his side against the law.
Juana watched them, her arms crossed over her chest. After a minute, she sighed. “I don’t see where you have much choice,” she agreed. “Be careful, both of you. I won’t have my good horses returned with bullet holes—or my friends, either.”
Mason nodded his thanks to her. He paused, clapped his hand on Manuel’s shoulder, then turned and headed toward the door.
“Mason, wait!” Amelia cried, stuck beneath the quilts where she couldn’t go to him.
He looked back at her, but his gaze went through her toward something else, something in his thoughts alone. Then Mason turned his attention toward Manuel instead, and her heart sank as even that small contact ended. Every part of him was focused on the problem at hand. The posse.
“Which direction?”
“Del norte.”
A muscle in Mason’s jaw ticked. All traces of sleep had vanished from his expression, leaving nothing behind except dark, dangerous-looking man. Outlaw.
He pinned Juana beneath his darkened gaze. “Can I leave Amy here with you? They won’t be looking for—”
“Leave me here?” Shock propelled Amelia from the bed. Frantically she snatched for a quilt to cover herself with, wrapping it around her torso with both hands.
“I’m not a…a parcel to be passed from hand to hand at your will, Mason Kincaid,” she said, marching toward him with the ends of the quilt slipping from the bed and trailing behind her. “I’m going with you.”
“The hell you are.”
He looked down at her, all hard, unrelenting man. His hat brim shadowed his face, and between that darkness and his day’s growth of beard, suddenly Mason looked a stranger to her. Not the man who’d held her so tenderly last night. Not the man in whose eyes she’d glimpsed a love she’d never expected to find.
Not the man she wanted facing a posse’s drawn guns and promises of frontier justice.
“Then…then why can’t you just hide from them?” she cried, waving her hand that wasn’t holding up the blanket. She stepped nearer, frustration and fear coiling in her stomach. “Why do you have to go? Why?”
Her voice broke on the words, threatened tears Amelia didn’t want to shed. Weeping wouldn’t change his mind. Not when it was this Mason, this cold, determined Mason, who stood before her.
“Surely James and Juana can hide you here!” she cried, her voice muffled as she scooped up her chemise and pantalets from the floor and threw them onto the bed. She was going with him no matter what he said—else hiding with him wherever they could.
She snatched her dress from the ladder-backed straight chair and threw it down, too. “They’re your friends, they’ll want to help—”
“Enough.” His jaw tightened, as did his hand on her arm, stopping her from getting dressed. With Amelia’s cooperation assured for the moment, he glanced over his shoulder at Juana. An unspoken question passed between them.
She nodded. “We’ll watch over her until you return,” she said. She tried to smile at Amelia, and failed.
“Godspeed, Mason.” Sniffling, Juana buried her hands in her apron and left, her shoulders squared for the task ahead of her.
He couldn’t separate them now, Amelia vowed. She meant to stay with him, and she would. What kind of woman would desert the man she loved when he needed her?
She sat on the bed and hastily pulled her pantalets on, shielded from view behind the blanket. Raising it higher, she struggled to get her chemise over her head without uncovering herself completely.
“I’ll wait for you outside, amigo,” said Manuel.
She heard his long, impatient strides toward the door, and popped her head out from beneath the blanket just as he paused with one hand on the thick door frame.
“You’ll be needing somebody to cover your back against those bastardos,” he said with a wolfish grin. “I’ll go with you for as long as it takes.”
“Thank you,” Mason said, nodding his assent as he watched Manuel leave.
His expression revealed nothing of his thoughts, and Amelia couldn’t stop to guess at them—not if she meant to leave with him.
Mason moved toward her, stopped her flustered attempts to fasten the chemise he’d torn from her last night, and pulled her upright against
him.
He captured her face in both hands and tilted it upward to meet his gaze. “Amy, I have to go.”
She lifted her chin higher. “I’ll go with you. I’m almost dress—”
“No.” He stopped her when she tried to turn in his arms and pick up her dress from the bed. “You have to stay here.”
With a sound of frustration Amelia pressed her hands to his chest, wanting more than anything to make him stay. She searched her mind for something that might convince him, yet beneath her palm Mason’s body quivered like a tightly strung wire. Eager. He was eager to be gone, even if it might separate them forever. Her hopes sank.
“Please don’t go!” she cried, past caring if anyone heard her—past caring that she was begging him not to leave her. She clenched a fistful of his shirt and buried her face in the warm curve just beneath his collarbone, trying to swallow past the tightening in her throat. Why wouldn’t he listen to her?
“Just hide!” she said. “Or—or, surrender. You’re not responsible for what happened to your wife. Just tell them, and I’m sure—”
“No.” His arms swept to her waist, held her. “Men like that don’t want explanations, Curly Top. They want the bounty for bringing in an outlaw, plain and simple.”
“But—”
“And if I stop to explain, I won’t reach Ben in time.”
Ben. His son. Amelia slumped against his chest as defeat seeped through her, cold enough that she might never feel warm again. How could she ask him to stay, when it might cost him the thing that mattered to him most?
She couldn’t.
Mason’s hands raised to her neck, and his touch felt so familiar, so strong and warm she thought she might weep from wanting it. Her throat ached with unshed tears. She hardly dared raise her head to look at him, lest he see them shining in her eyes, too. How could he be leaving now, when they’d shared so much?
“Kiss me goodbye,” he whispered, his thumbs stroking beneath her chin to urge her face upward. Tears spilled onto her cheeks, and Amelia felt them slide cold and wet toward her ears. She sniffled.
“No,” she croaked. Her fingers tightened on his shirtfront as she shook her head. “No, I won’t say goodbye.”
His mouth tensed. Mason’s hands stilled, then moved away from her face. Brushed past her neck. After a moment’s pause, he lowered them to his sides, not touching her at all. The loss of him sharpened the ache inside her, and foretold every day’s loss from this instant on.
“Goodbye, Curly Top,” he whispered hoarsely.
“No!” Amelia lurched toward him, wrapped both arms around his middle, not caring when her chemise gaped open and her blanket dropped to the floor. Anything, anything to keep him with her. She looked up at him, at his dark eyes and stern-set jaw and his arms still not around her, and felt her heart splinter at the proof of how easily Mason could leave her behind.
“Please, don’t go,” she whispered, unable to force anything more past her constricted throat. “Please don’t—”
“Every moment I stay, everyone here is in greater danger,” he said harshly. “In danger because of me.”
Raising both hands to her temples, he swept her hair back, digging his knuckles into her scalp. He forced her head up to meet his gaze, and she could no sooner look away than she could stop loving him.
“Every moment I stay, you’re in greater danger,” Mason said, giving each word painful emphasis as his hold tightened on her hair. A tremor passed through him, making the muscles in his throat knot and release.
His eyes closed. “I’m leaving.”
He released her, opening his eyes again. Resignation had turned them bleak, colder than she’d ever seen them. She truly couldn’t stop him. Desperate, Amelia raised herself on tiptoes and smashed her mouth against his.
He responded with the kiss she’d longed for, a kiss that echoed all they’d shared. Leaving, leaving…the knowledge that this kiss might well be their last sweetened it nearly past bearing, made her tremble as Mason’s arms swept around her and held her tightly. His tongue stroked hers, delving deeper, and the pressure of his mouth on hers was everything she hungered for. He tasted of tears, her tears, and just as she began to believe she’d convinced him to stay, Mason ended the kiss and stepped away from her.
She wanted to grab him, to make him admit he cared—or at least that he regretted leaving, that he’d be back for her. His steely posture and distant eyes told her his leave-taking had already begun. Pride stiffened Amelia’s spine even as she swiped away tears, blinking to hide the new ones that followed. A painful lump rose in her throat, making speech difficult.
“Be safe, Mason.” Even her lips wobbled with the words, and she endeavored to sound brave to him. Clearing her throat for the task, she let her gaze wander to his eyes again, and regretted it when she glimpsed the impatience there. “I—I’ll wait for you.”
His fingers touched her lips. The ghost of a smile touched his. “Don’t worry, Curly Top. I’m too mean to be captured for long,” he said.
“Amigo!” came Manuel’s voice, muffled by its journey inside through the thick adobe walls.
Mason closed his eyes and swallowed hard. “Miñuto!”
He turned, his hands going by rote to his gun belt. In the doorway he paused. In his eyes she saw the weight of the man he’d become, of the outlaw’s destiny he’d been cast into, and the knowledge of all he’d suffered softened her heart.
“I love you,” Amelia whispered.
He looked at her a long moment, his expression inscrutable.
“That’s why I’m leaving,” Mason finally answered.
Before she could reply, he was gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
“He will return for you, you know.”
Juana’s words, so confidently given, made hope flare inside Amelia like a newly lit candle. The doubt that had plagued her since Mason’s leaving doused it just as quickly. She plunged her hands into the bread dough she was kneading for Juana and gave it a vigorous push.
“Unless he…he…” Struggling over the words, she flipped the dough and sent white puffs of flour drifting over the tabletop. Her stomach knotted with unspoken worries.
Unless he can’t.
Unless he’s captured.
Killed.
She couldn’t say her fears aloud without redoubling them, without fearing she might inadvertently make them come true. Some superstitious part of her wished mightily to pretend Mason was invulnerable, however impossible a wish that was. The rest of her knew exactly how precarious one life was—his wife’s death was proof enough of that.
Innocent or not, in the west a man accused was only as safe as the marksmanship of the posse chasing him was poor.
With every hour that passed without the clatter of Mason’s horse in the stage station’s courtyard, Amelia’s fears grew. Her ears strained at every hoof beat, every noisy stagecoach arrival. Her heart thrilled to the sound of every male voice that drifted through the loosely latched shutters—until she realized the voice wasn’t Mason’s.
“If anything happens, we will know of it soon enough,” Juana said. “James went to Tucson as soon as he heard. If I know my husband, he’s giving the lawmen there a ‘bleeding earful,’ right now. He’d ride back to tell us if they brought Mason in.”
She rolled her dark eyes and added a handful of the onion she’d chopped to the pork stew simmering on the stovetop, then wiped her hands clean. “Besides, you know as well as I do, that man is too ornery to be locked up. The sheriff might set him free just to spare himself the trouble.”
Amelia smiled faintly at that, imagining Mason hulking into the Tucson jail, all bared teeth and bad temper. She wouldn’t like to be the one to try and lock up Mason Kincaid. He’d already escaped from one sheriff’s pursuit and another’s jail cell—but could he manage it a third time?
“Everyone in these parts knows Mason,” Juana went on in her melodious, Spanish-accented voice. Her gaze traveled a competent, practiced arc from th
e bubbling, chile-scented stew to the floury dough beneath Amelia’s hands to the woodpile beside the stove. “This will all get straightened out, one way or the other.”
She stooped to add more wood to the stove fire, keeping busy as she’d seemed prone to do since Manuel had returned with news of the posse this morning. But Amelia quit kneading, staring at the mound of dough without really seeing it. She wished she had Juana’s faith, and her ability to work steadily amidst troubles rather than flounder beneath them. More than that, she wished she had Juana’s knowledge of all that had happened in Mason’s life before.
Now she might never have the chance to hear it from him.
The bread dough blurred into the plank tabletop beneath it as her eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. Blaming them on the fresh onions, Amelia sniffed them away, then blinked and resumed kneading.
Maybe if she found out how he came to be a wanted man, she could still help Mason somehow. It seemed every new enlightenment that arose only sparked a new question.
“If everyone knows Mason, knows he couldn’t have been responsible for his wife’s death,” she asked slowly, “then how was he ever accused? How did he lose his son?”
She flipped over the springy, yeasty-smelling dough and went on kneading, mindful of Juana’s speculative glance her way.
And determined not to let her see how much the explanation might mean.
“You want to know if I believe he is guilty.”
Juana’s blunt statement stripped Amelia of her assumed nonchalance. Her fingers sank mindlessly into the bread dough. “No! No, that’s not what I meant at all!”
She darted a glance at Juana and found her standing with both arms crossed over her chest, eyeing Amelia with something that came very near hostility.
“Do you believe he’s guilty?” Juana asked.
“I believe he feels responsible.” She turned the dough and pushed the floury heels of her hands into it, thinking about it some more. “And responsible for the loss of his son.”
