The Outlaw

by JoAnn Ross

  "No. It's not the dress."

  Noel began to shiver, suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling of a cold rain that chilled all the way to the bone. But the rain was not as icy as a vivid, visual picture of a man's remarkably blue, angry eyes.

  "Excuse me, Sabrina, but I have to telephone Chantal."

  Before the day had ended, Noel was on her way to the Montacroix airport, where she was booked on a flight to Paris. From there, she'd take an Air France Concorde flight to New York, then change to American Airlines for another flight to Phoenix, where she'd arranged to rent a car to drive to Whiskey River, Arizona. The remote ranching community was located in the northern mountains near the Navajo Indian reservation.

  "I still do not understand why you have to leave now," her father, Prince Eduard, complained gruffly. Puzzled by her uncharacteristically rash behavior, her parents had insisted on accompanying her to the airport.

  "I don't exactly understand, myself," Noel admitted. "All I know is that I don't have any choice. I have some important connection with this sketch, Papa, I feel it. Since Chantal tells me the sketch is from Arizona, I must go there."

  "That sketch," Eduard told her, "is a hundred years old. And even with your gift—"

  "Eduard, dear." Jessica Giraudeau placed a calming hand atop her husband's. "We must allow Noel to follow her feelings," she counseled. "As Burke and Chantal have done."

  She gifted him with the soft, coaxing smile that had once charmed legions of men who'd sat in darkened theaters all over the world, dreaming impossible dreams as they watched the actress on the silver screen. Any man who'd ever met the ultraglamorous Jessica Thorne had wanted her. But Prince Eduard Giraudeau de Montacroix had been the one to win her hand. As well as her heart.

  "As we did," Jessica said, reminding him of their own rocky courtship. A courtship that had nearly cost the prince his crown.

  Eduard was not easily deterred. "Even if it destroys her chance for happiness?" Both women understood that his frustration was an attempt to mask his fatherly concern. "What if you do not return in time for the ceremony? Do you think Bertran is going to wait forever?"

  Noel refrained from pointing out that her fiancé had already patiently waited years, ever since first proposing to her on her seventeenth birthday. Such unwavering affection was admirable in these days of short-term relationships, she reminded herself.

  "It's a moot point, Papa," Noel murmured.

  The truth was that lately she'd been having strange, disloyal feelings about Bertran, feelings that she could not put into words. Why was it that her upcoming nuptials were causing her more misgivings than whatever might be awaiting her in Arizona?

  "Because I'll be back in time for you to walk me down the aisle."

  "I am pleased to hear that." He nodded his satisfaction as he turned the Rolls-Royce onto the road leading to the terminal. "Because your mother worries."

  Although the Air France flight attendants unfailingly upheld the airline's tradition of esprit de service, Noel grew increasingly on edge as the plane sped across the sky on its way to America.

  After picking unenthusiastically at what she knew was undoubtedly a superb meal of grilled squab and tender roasted potatoes, she turned on her overhead light and attempted to settle down with a copy of the London financial Journal. But the text could have been written in Sanskrit, for all the sense it made to her.

  Sighing, she turned instead to this month's issue of French Elle, but the magazine failed to capture her attention. Instead, her mind kept rerunning the rainy scene of the man on horseback. Who was he? And why was he calling out to her?

  Finally, sheer exhaustion got the better of her. Noel leaned her head back against the gray leather seat, closed her eyes and instantly fell into a deep, almost trancelike sleep and began to dream.

  There was music—someone, somewhere, was playing the piano. Her body ached. Uncomfortable, she shifted on the satin sheets beneath her.

  "The girl's in pretty bad shape," she heard a female voice say. The sweet scent of lilacs and roses drifted closer, mingling with the pleasant aroma of juniper wood emanating from a nearby fireplace.

  "Her injuries appear worse than they are." The man's voice was as deep and dark as a starless night.

  "That's a good thing," the woman responded. "Since the poor little thing looks like something the cat dragged in."

  The man mumbled something Noel could not quite catch. Then, "Hand me that bowl."

  A moment later, she felt a cool cloth stroking her throbbing forehead and breathed in the soothing scent of lavender water. The cloth moved over her face, down her neck, across her shoulder blades. When he hit a tender spot, she flinched and moaned again.

  "Shh." He pressed a fingertip against her lip, then brushed her hair back from her forehead with an infinitely tender touch.

  She was basking in the comforting touch, when the voice of the flight attendant, announcing their imminent arrival in New York, caused the dream to shatter into a thousand crystalline pieces.

  Still unsettled from the vivid, too-real dream, Noel managed to thank the smiling young woman for the warm moist towel the attendants always handed out prior to landing. As she washed her face and hands, Noel imagined that the white cloth carried the soothing scent of lavender.

  2

  Whiskey River, 1896

  The dream crept into Wolfe Longwalker's mind shortly before dawn, his thoughts tangling with a woman who was dreaming of him. Her hair was as pale as corn silk bathed in the golden glow of July sunshine. Her scent, as fragrant as a meadow in full bloom, surrounded him, infiltrating his mind, tantalizing his senses. Unable to resist the creamy lure of her skin, he reached out and touched her cheek with his fingertips, finding it to be just as soft as he'd imagined.

  He drew her into his arms, but as he lowered his mouth to her softly smiling one, she vanished, like the seductive dream she was.

  Cursing, Wolfe pushed himself off the wood-plank floor where he'd been sleeping, having found the cot too short and too narrow. He walked to the barred window and looked out at the wooden scaffold that was being built in his honor.

  As he planned his escape, the dream, and the woman, faded from his mind.

  Whiskey River, 1996

  Thirty-six long and exhausting hours after leaving Montacroix, Noel was in love. She had, of course, traveled to her mother's home country many times. But except for an occasional trip to southern California, she'd never been west of Chicago. Until now.

  All her life she'd been enamored with the mythology of the American Southwest, fostered by countless movies. But never had she expected the reality of the landscape—the wild, cactus-studded Sonoran desert, the towering red sandstone rocks, endless blue sky and constantly changing, dramatic light—to transcend the larger-than-life myth.

  Arizona was bigger than she'd thought it would be, and far more beautiful than its depiction in any movie.

  It was, she decided, one of the rare instances in life when the actual did not destroy the validity of the imagined. For a woman who'd grown up in a small landlocked Alpine country, the vastness of this panoramic pastel land, rolling away in all directions, empty of everything but beauty, quite literally took her breath away.

  According to the travel guide she'd bought in the Phoenix Sky Harbor terminal, Whiskey River was home to three hundred and fifty full-time residents and at least triple that many during the summer, when vacationers came streaming north to escape the desert heat. Noel felt an instant flash of recognition as she drove down the main street. Which wasn't all that surprising, she decided, since her book had also informed her that the town had served as a movie set on more than one occasion. Gene Autry, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood had all ridden horseback down Main Street. So had Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp.

  She also knew the man in her dream had been here, as well.

  Her ever-efficient secretary had booked her into a bed and breakfast a few miles outside Whiskey River that had, until recently, been a working ranch.


  As she checked into the inn, the owner, Audrey Bradshaw, a pleasingly plump woman in her mid-sixties, explained to Noel that the cattle had been sold off last year.

  "Now that Jake's gone," Audrey revealed, "I've just about decided to move to one of those retirement communities in Phoenix or Tucson. It gets too lonely out here."

  "I can see how it might feel that way," Noel murmured politely, wondering how anyone could bear to leave such a heavenly spot.

  "Not that it wouldn't be a real good deal," Audrey said. Dressed in period clothing, the woman was wearing a white apron over a blue, flower-sprigged calico dress. Her unnaturally strawberry-red hair had been penned into wild corkscrew curls that would suit someone far younger than her age. "For the right person. Jake and I were real happy here for more than forty years. Had all my kids in the same hand-carved bed upstairs that Jake was born in."

  Noel, more than most people, could understand roots. "I was born at home, too."

  "Well, isn't that nice." Audrey nodded her head, causing the red curls to bob like springs. "Not many young folks can say that." She handed Noel an old-fashioned brass key. "Be sure to check out the museum."

  "Museum?"

  "Through there." She nodded in the direction of a red velvet curtain.

  Noel had always believed that there were two types of travelers. Those who were willing to live haphazardly out of suitcases and those who, immediately upon arrival at their destination, could not relax until they'd unpacked.

  She had always been one of the latter.

  But today, some inner instinct drew her through the draperies.

  Restored with what appeared to be genuine antiques, the room, which smelled of lemon oil and vanilla potpourri, boasted a high ceiling with thick crown molding, sponged burgundy walls and brass wall sconces. Garlands of red and pink roses and dark green leaves spread lushly across the ivory carpet.

  "Welcome to the Road to Ruin's rogues' gallery," Audrey said as she joined Noel.

  "The Road to Ruin?" Noel asked absently, her gaze drawn to a life-size cardboard cutout of a man standing in the corner of the room.

  "This place used to be a brothel. Back in the olden days."

  "How fascinating." Noel smiled, tempted to call her overprotective father and tell him she was staying in a Wild West brothel.

  She crossed the carpet and stood looking up into a pair of familiar indigo eyes, so vivid she could almost feel the black fire emanating from them. A cold chill ran up her spine, in direct contrast to the fingers of heat uncurling in her belly.

  It was him! The man from her dream. The man whose touch had proven both soothing and arousing at the same time. She could hear his voice, brushing like ebony velvet against all her nerve endings. Suddenly, she was hit by a strong rush of emotion. So strong that Noel had to remind herself to breathe.

  "Who is this?" Her voice, displaying her sudden emotional turmoil,, was not as confident as usual.

  Although she still had no idea why she'd been so irresistibly drawn to Arizona, Noel knew, with every fiber of her being, that it had everything to do with this man.

  "That's Wolfe Longwalker. Whiskey River's most famous—or infamous, depending on your point of view—citizen." Audrey grinned. "He's a sexy son of a gun, isn't he?"

  "He's quite—" Noel paused, seeking the right word "—striking." She sensed, with the inborn intuition she'd learned to trust, that this was a man who'd known a great deal of tragedy.

  Depicted by the artist as clad solely in boots and a pair of fawn-hued buckskin trousers, Wolfe Longwalker wasn't conventionally handsome, but he was undeniably sensual.

  His cheekbones were a sharp slash riding high on his lean dark face; his hair, as black as ebony and as straight as rainwater, hung to his shoulders. His lips were set in a straight grim line that revealed not an ounce of softness.

  Although his dark blue-black eyes were truly riveting, and made the hairs at her nape tingle, Noel managed to pull her gaze away and make a judicious study of the rest of the man. Commanding muscles rippled in his arms and shoulders, across his chest and down his flat, rigid stomach.

  "It's a remarkably lifelike image," she murmured, feeling a foolish urge to reach out and touch the card-board, to see if that tawny copper flesh was as warm as it looked. "Did you paint it?"

  "Oh, no. It was done by some graphics company in southern California. They created it on a computer from an old tintype. We figured the inn needed its own outlaw. What with all its colorful history and all."

  "He was an outlaw?" That didn't feel at all right.

  "Well, to tell you the truth, the jury's still out on that one," Audrey allowed, crossing her arms over her abundant chest. "But he sure as hell was hanged as one."

  "Hanged." The image returned to shimmer in her mind's eye. That unnerving, misty picture of a single figure she now knew to be Wolfe Longwalker, seated tall astride a horse, his hands tied behind his back. The image shifted into focus long enough for her to view the ugly noose around his neck.

  "In town," she murmured. "In the street."

  "Yep." Audrey nodded. "The original scaffold got hit by lightning and burned down before the hanging. What with all the threats of an Indian uprising, the marshal didn't want to take time to build a new one." She eyed Noel with renewed interest. "If you knew about that, I guess you must have heard of him."

  The room was closing in around her. Noel had to resist rubbing her arms to warm her suddenly cold skin. "Not really."

  "Perhaps you've seen a picture. There was a sketch artist did a drawing for the Denver paper after Wolfe was hanged. It showed up in a National Geographic issue about the Wild West a few years ago."

  "Yes. I've seen a picture." Noel took a steadying breath and did not elaborate.

  "Well, we've got a lot of those," the woman said with a wave of her hand, directing Noel to the photos hung in wooden frames on the burgundy wall. "Too bad there weren't any photographs taken of Wolfe the day of the hanging."

  "What was he accused of doing?"

  "Some German settlers outside of town—mom, dad, three kids—were shot by Indians and their cabin burned to the ground. Evidence pointed right at Wolfe bein' the ringleader."

  "Though people around these parts still argue to this day whether Wolfe was really the killer. Or just a rabble-rouser who managed to stick like a burr beneath the saddles of most of the ranchers in the territory." Audrey handed her a faded sepia photograph. "I suppose one of the reasons folks were willin' to think the worst of Wolfe was the fact that he didn't exactly hang out with the pillars of the community."

  Noel studied the photograph depicting two men and a woman. One was obviously Wolfe Longwalker, looking incredibly handsome in a dark suit. With him was another man dressed in a similar suit and holding a top hat in his right hand. Standing between them, clad in the style of the late 1800s, was a striking brunette woman.

  "She's beautiful," Noel murmured. "But her eyes are so sad."

  "Maybe she had an inkling how things were going to turn out in the end," Audrey suggested. "That's Etta Place and Harry Longabaugh. The Sundance Kid," she elaborated at Noel's blank look. "Before Sundance and Butch Cassidy went off and supposedly got themselves killed in Bolivia."

  "I've seen the movie." Indeed, in her younger years, she'd had a secret crush on Robert Redford. "I like to believe they escaped."

  "Me, too," Audrey agreed. "There was talk that Etta and Wolfe supposedly had a little something goin' on the side—Wolfe was supposed to be one helluva ladies' man. But I've always figured that his affair with Etta was just rumor."

  "Wolfe may have been a pain in the ass, and there's an outside chance that he might even have been a murderer. But the guy was too smart to make the mistake of creeping into Etta's tepee. Harry would've shot him dead right on the spot."

  Murmuring something that could have been agreement, Noel picked up a slender paperback novel. "First Man, First Woman. By Wolfe Longwalker?"

  Audrey nodded. "Wolfe wrote a lot
of books. He was kind of the Zane Grey of Indians."

  Noel studied another entitled The Night Way. "I've never heard of him."

  "Not many people have. Probably because he was an Indian. But I guess he was real popular in his time. Back East, that is. Out here, his version of how the West was won hit a little too close to home."

  "The books went out of print ages ago. The Navajo Tribal Council reprinted some of them. They just came out last week and they're already selling like hot-cakes."

  Noel took the hint. Not that she needed any prompting where Wolfe Longwalker was concerned. "I'll buy them." She added a volume entitled Sand Paintings on A Hogan Floor and Other Short Stories to the others. "This one, too."

  "Good choice. That's my favorite of the three." While Audrey rang up the sale, Noel roamed the room and continued to study the old photos and newspaper clippings depicting Whiskey River's rambunctious past, and most particularly, the turbulent life and times of Wolfe Longwalker.

  She was just about to return to the old-fashioned cash register, when another book caught her eye. "Rogues Across Time?" she read the gold inlaid lettering out loud.

  "What's that?" Audrey's forehead furrowed in a puzzled frown.

  Noel picked up the weathered text and began leafing through the pages. "It appears to be a collection of short stories about various adventurers." Each story was accompanied by a black-and-white ink drawing.

  "I don't remember buying that." The innkeeper's frown deepened. "Who's the author?"

  "I don't know." Noel held up the brown book for Audrey's perusal. "There's some type of stain over the name."

  "Oh, well," Audrey decided with a shrug, "my memory isn't what it used to be, that's for sure. I must have gotten it in that barrel of old westerns Newt Watt-son sold me when he needed money to pay off his drunk-and-disorderly fine."

  It definitely was a rogues' gallery, Noel determined as she leafed through the stories of pirates and highwaymen and gunslingers. When she turned a page and came face-to-face with Wolfe's glowering visage, she imagined she could feel the book growing warm in her hands.