The Touch of Fire

by Linda Howard

  Trahern moved slightly, all of his instincts alert. Like a wolf he sensed that his prey was near. He would fire as soon as Rafe appeared. And Rafe would die in front of her, the light in those fierce eyes fading away to blankness.

  From the corner of her eye she saw Rafe move, attacking like a panther in a smooth, silent explosion of power and speed. She began screaming, but her throat locked and no sound came out. Trahern’s hand came up and so did hers. Her hand never left her pocket. Somehow she fired through the material of her skirt.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Explosions of gunfire rocked the tiny room, deafening her. Smoke filled the air and the stench of cordite burned her nostrils. She stood frozen, the pistol still clutched in her hand, the barrel protruding from the burnt, tattered remains of her pocket. Rafe was there somehow, she didn’t know how. She couldn’t remember seeing him come through the door. Someone was screaming.

  Rafe was yelling something, but she didn’t know what. She could barely hear him over the ringing in her ears. He slapped her leg and hip and she began sobbing, trying to push him away. It took her a moment to realize that her skirt was on fire.

  Then, with a jolt, splintered reality settled into place again.

  Rafe crossed the room to kick the pistol away from Trahern’s outstretched hand, and the screaming ebbed to moans. On trembling legs Annie managed to move a few steps and then stood frozen again, staring at the man lying crumpled on the floor.

  Blood soaked his lower abdomen, turning his shirt and pants black in the shadowed depths of the room. It pooled around and under him, soaking through the cracks in the floor. His eyes were open and his face was absolutely colorless.

  “Why didn’t you shoot me?” Rafe asked harshly, going down on one knee beside the bounty hunter. He knew he’d given Trahern the perfect opportunity, but when he had seen Annie’s skirt flaming nothing else had seemed to matter except getting to her before the fire licked upwards. He had literally turned his back on the bounty hunter—and Trahern had held his fire.

  “No point in it,” Trahern rasped. He cleared his throat. “I’m not going to be able to collect the money. Hell with it.” He moaned again and then said, “Damn. I never thought to see if she had a gun.”

  Horror licked through Annie. She had shot a man. She had heard other shots, but somehow she knew that Trahern had been falling even before Rafe had come through the door. She hadn’t aimed, she didn’t even know how she had managed to pull back the hammer. But the bullet had found its mark, and Trahern lay bleeding to death on the floor.

  Suddenly she could move, and she whirled to grab her bag, dragging it across the floor to the bounty hunter. “I’ve got to get that bleeding stopped,” she said frantically, going down on her knees beside Rafe. She flinched from the horrible wound. Trahern was gut shot, and her medical training told her that he was a dead man even though her instincts were screaming at her to do something to help him.

  She reached out and Rafe’s hands shot forward, catching hers and holding them. His gray eyes had a stark look in them. “No,” he said. “You can’t do anything for him, honey. Don’t break your heart trying.” He didn’t think even Annie’s healing touch could work against a wound of such magnitude, but she would exhaust herself in the effort.

  She jerked futilely at her hands, trying to free them. Tears welled in her eyes. “I can stop the bleeding. I know I can stop the bleeding.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, ma’am, I’d rather bleed to death than have the poison set up in my gut and take a couple of hard days to die,” Trahern said drowsily. “At least it don’t hurt so much now.”

  She sucked in her breath. Her chest hurt with the effort. She tried to think clinically. The wound was bleeding far more than most abdominal wounds. From the location of it, and from the amount of blood, the bullet must have severed or at least nicked the huge vein that ran along the spine. Rafe was right; there was no way she could save him. Trahern would be dead in another minute or so.

  “Just pure luck,” Trahern muttered. “I lost your trail in Silver Mesa so I decided to rest up while my leg healed. I headed out yesterday, and saw your smoke this morning. Pure damn luck, and all of it bad.” He closed his eyes and seemed to be resting for a moment. It took a great deal of effort for him to open them again.

  “It’s known you’re in the area,” he said. “Other bounty hunters .. . got a U.S. marshal on your trail, too. Name of Atwater. Damn bulldog. You’re the best I’ve ever tracked, McCay, but Atwater don’t give up.”

  Rafe had heard of the lawman. Noah Atwater, even more than Trahern, didn’t know the meaning of the word quit. He had to get out of this area, and fast. He looked at Annie and something punched him in the chest, hard.

  Trahern coughed. He looked confused. “Got any whiskey? I could use a drink.”

  “No, no whiskey,” Rafe replied.

  “I have some laudanum,” Annie said, and tried again to free her hands. Rafe still refused to let her go. He pulled her closer to him. “Rafe, let me go. I know there isn’t much I can do, but the laudanum will help ease the pain—”

  “He doesn’t need it, honey,” Rafe said gently, and tucked her head against his shoulder.

  Annie pushed at him, then she saw Trahern’s face. It was utterly still. Rafe reached out and closed the bounty hunter’s eyelids.

  She sat in frozen shock. Her seat was a rock outside the cabin where Rafe had led her and gently pushed her down. She clutched a blanket around her, because she couldn’t seem to get warm.

  She had killed a man. She went over and over it in her mind, and each time she accepted that she hadn’t had a choice, that she had had to shoot. There hadn’t been time to think, only to act. It had been pure chance that the bullet had hit its target, but she couldn’t excuse herself on those grounds, for even if she had known the shot would kill Trahern she would still have fired. In a choice between Rafe’s life or Trahern’s, there was no choice at all. To save Rafe, she would do whatever had to be done. And none of that changed the fact that she had violated her oath, the physician’s creed, and her own values by taking a life rather than doing everything in her power to save it. The betrayal of herself was numbing. The knowledge that she would do it again, if faced with the same circumstances, was shattering.

  Rafe was swiftly, efficiently getting their gear together. The ground was still too frozen for him to bury Trahern, so the body still lay in the cabin. Annie knew she couldn’t go back in there.

  Rafe was considering his next move. He had Trahern’s weapons and supplies; his own horse was well rested and well fed. He wouldn’t need to stock up on grub for a while. He had to get Annie back to Silver Mesa, then he would cut south through the Arizona desert and head for Mexico. That wouldn’t stop the bounty hunters, but it would get Atwater off his trail.

  Annie—no, he couldn’t let himself think about Annie. He’d known from the beginning that they wouldn’t have much time together. He’d return her to her home and her work, and let her get on with her life.

  But he was worried about her. She hadn’t said a word since Trahern had died. Her face was white and still, her eyes huge and black with shock. He remembered the first time he’d killed a man, back during the war, he’d retched until his throat was raw and his stomach muscles sore. Annie hadn’t vomited. He’d have felt better if she had.

  He got the horses saddled and went over to her, crouching down and taking her cold hands in his, rubbing them to give her some of his warmth. “We have to go, honey. We can make it out of here by sundown, and you can sleep in your own bed tonight.”

  Annie looked at him as if he were crazy. “I can’t go back to Silver Mesa,” she said. Those were the first words she’d said in an hour.

  “Of course you can. You have to. You’ll feel better once you’re home.”

  “I killed a man. I’ll be arrested.” She spoke very precisely.

  “No, honey, listen.” He’d already thought about that. It was probably well kno
wn that Trahern had been on his trail, and with Atwater following close behind it probably wouldn’t be long before Trahern’s body was found. “They’ll think I did it. No one knows you’ve been with me, so we can do as we originally planned.”

  But she was shaking her head. “I won’t let you take the blame for something I did.”

  He stared at her in disbelief. “What?”

  “I said I won’t let you be blamed for something you didn’t do.”

  “Annie, honey, don’t you understand?” He smoothed a strand of hair back from her face. “I’m already wanted for murder. Do you think Trahern is going to make any difference to what happens to me?”

  She looked at him steadily. “I know you’re already blamed for someone else’s crime. I won’t let you be blamed for mine too.”

  “Shit.” He rose to his feet and restlessly ran his hand through his hair. There had to be some way he could make her see reason, but offhand he couldn’t think of it. She might still be in shock, but she’d made up her mind and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. He forced himself to consider what would happen. She wasn’t likely to hang or even go to jail for killing Trahern; she was, after all, a woman and a respected doctor, while Trahern had been a bounty hunter. Lawmen didn’t think much of bounty hunters. But once the circumstances of Trahern’s death became known, that Annie had spent almost two weeks in Rafe’s company, he knew that her life wouldn’t be worth two red cents. She would be killed by the same man who had had him on the run for four years; rather, the man’s minions would do it. Rafe’s nemesis had enough money that he never had to dirty his hands with any of the details, and a lot of that money had been earned with other men’s blood.

  He had to take her with him.

  The solution was both simple and terrible. He didn’t know if she could survive a life on the run. He knew for certain she wouldn’t survive if he took her back to Silver Mesa. Damn her morals; she wouldn’t budge from her stand, and it would cost her her life. The cost was too high, at least for him.

  But what would it do to her to have to give up everything she’d worked so hard to accomplish? Being a doctor meant so much to her. There wasn’t any way she could follow her calling while she was on the hoot-owl trail with him.

  Useless regrets, because he had no choice. She wouldn’t have a practice if she returned to Silver Mesa; all too soon she would only have a grave.

  Maybe it had been fever that had clouded his thinking when he had taken her from her house, but maybe it had been his own arrogance. He knew he was good; he had been certain he’d eluded Trahern, and equally certain he could use Annie’s healing skills, enjoy her soft body, and return her to Silver Mesa undetected. He hadn’t allowed for chance, for the twists of fate that turned the best of plans upside down, and now Annie was caught in the same night-mare web that had bound him for four years.

  The only thing in their favor was that no one knew they were together. Atwater was looking for a lone man, not a man and a woman traveling together. It could be a useful disguise.

  Annie hadn’t thought of it, she was still too much in shock, but it would be assumed that he’d killed Trahern anyway. No one knew she was with him, so how could she be suspected? She was in danger only if she confessed. It made no difference to their situation: she had to go with him.

  The thought of it made him dizzy, and after a moment he realized it was relief. He had steeled himself to take her back to Silver Mesa, to say good-bye and ride away, but now he wouldn’t have to. She was his.

  He crouched down in front of her again and framed her face with his big hands, forcing her to give him her attention. Her big brown eyes looked so lost and bewildered that he couldn’t stop himself from kissing her, hard. That got her attention. She blinked and tried to pull her head away, as if she couldn’t understand why he was doing that now when they had more important things to think about.

  Just to show her, and because he couldn’t stand for her to pull away, he kissed her again. “I’m not takings you back to Silver Mesa,” he said. “You’ll have to stay with me.”

  He didn’t know if he’d expected an argument or not. He didn’t get one. She simply studied him for a minute, then nodded.

  “All right.” She paused, and worry darkened her face. “I hope I don’t slow you down.”

  She would, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t leave her behind. He pulled her to her feet. “Let’s go. We need to get away from here.”

  She obediently climbed into the saddle. “Why aren’t we taking Trahern’s horse?”

  “Because someone might recognize it.”

  “Will it be all right?”

  “I unsaddled it. When it gets hungry enough, it’ll start looking for grass. Either someone will find it or it’ll go wild.”

  She looked at the cabin and thought of Trahern lying dead inside it. She hated to leave without burying him, but she accepted that it wasn’t possible.

  “Stop thinking about it,” Rafe ordered. “There’s nothing you could have done that would have made any difference, and nothing you can do now.”

  It was an extremely pragmatic piece of advice; she just hoped she was strong-minded enough to take it.

  The bright sunlight was almost blinding on the snow, and the sky was so blue it made her ache inside. There was a fresh, sweet scent that heralded the explosion of new life beneath the snow as spring finally made its appearance. A life had ended, but time moved on. Two weeks ago she had been forced into the mountains on a nightmare ride in the darkness, cold and terrified, pushed to the limits of her strength and beyond. Winter had still held the land in its bleak grip. Now she was leaving these same mountains with something like regret, willingly following the man who had kidnapped her, and this time she was surrounded by a beauty so wild and intense that she almost couldn’t take it in. In those two weeks she had healed a wounded outlaw and fallen in love with him. He was her lover now, this tall, hard man with the frosty eyes, and to protect him she had killed another human being. Just two weeks, but in that length of time the land and her life had changed beyond recognition.

  Rafe kept the horses in the snow as much as he could. It made the going slower than necessary and also left an extremely visible trail; she started to point this out to him and then realized that the snow was melting and would destroy all traces of their passage. Anyone trailing them would have to find the cabin and pick up their trail almost immediately, or the tracks would be gone.

  “Where are we going?” she asked when they had been riding for a couple of hours.

  “Silver Mesa.”

  She reined in her horse. “No,” she said, going pale. “You said I could stay with you.”

  “Don’t fall behind,” he snapped. “You are staying with me. I didn’t say I was leaving you in Silver Mesa, I said we’re going to Silver Mesa.”

  “But why?”

  “You need more clothes, for one thing. I wouldn’t normally chance it, but your place is far enough away from the rest of the town that I can get in and out without being seen.”

  She looked down at her skirt, with a big hole burned in the side where the pocket had been. She had come so close to burning alive that it made her quake to think about it, and yet at the time she hadn’t even been aware of the danger.

  “I want to go with you.”

  “No.”

  His voice had that tone that said he’d made up his mind and wasn’t going to be swayed, but she tried anyway. “Why, if no one is likely to see us?”

  “Chance,” he said. He’d disregarded it once; he wouldn’t again. “If by chance I’m seen, I don’t want anyone to be able to connect you with me. It’s for your own safety. Just tell me what you need, and I’ll try to find it.”

  She thought of all the herbs she had growing in their little pots and knew she would have to leave them behind. All of her books, some of them her father’s, were incredibly precious to her and most of them could never be replaced, yet neither could she carry them with her. If
she went back, if she saw her familiar possessions in the place that had become home to her, if she were forced to decide what she took and what was left behind, it would hurt far more than simply never seeing them again and accepting that they were gone. Rafe would pack a few clothes for her and that would be the end of it. At least she still had her medical bag, which was her most precious possession of all.

  Even with the slowness of their progress, they reached the base of the mountains well before night-fall. Rafe insisted that they stop while they were still sheltered by the trees and wait until dark. She was glad for the rest. The day’s events had left her exhausted, and her mind was still trying to grapple with the changed circumstances of her life. Of all the scenarios she had imagined, this hadn’t been one of them.

  Sundown painted the sky, then purple shadows crept over the land. Beneath the trees it was almost totally dark. “I’m going now,” Rafe said, his deep voice barely audible. He placed a blanket around her shoulders. “Stay right here.”

  “I will.” She was a bit uneasy about remaining there by herself in the dark, but she would manage. “When will you be back?”

  “It depends on what I find.” He paused. “If I’m not back by morning, assume that I’ve been caught.”

  Her heart squeezed painfully. “Then don’t go!” He knelt down and kissed her. “I think it’ll be fine, but there’s always a chance that it won’t be. Just in case, if I get caught—”

  “I won’t let you hang for something I did,” she said, her voice trembling.

  He touched her cheek. “They don’t hang dead men,” he said, and swung into the saddle. Annie listened to the muffled hoofbeats as they faded away into silence.

  Wearily she closed her eyes. He wasn’t worried about being hanged. A bounty hunter wouldn’t worry about keeping him alive for trial; he would be killed immediately. Only if a lawman caught him would there be a chance of him living to see a trial, and she knew he would choose a fast bullet over months in jail that ended with a rope.