“I can’t wait much longer either,” he had muttered, imagining her naked a few short steps away. When he got back to Copper Ridge, he would have to find relief.
Wrinkling his nose, he thought of Liliana and Carmen, the harlots who lived in the rooms over the Blue Streak Saloon. He’d never succumbed to either of their charms, but even at a distance, it was apparent neither one was too particular about her hygiene. Come to think of it, hadn’t Max complained of coming back from Carmen’s bed with so many crabs he was reminded of his lost youth at the seashore?
With a shudder of revulsion, Quinn had decided he could wait.
But not now, not with Anna’s bow-shaped lips only a fraction of an inch from his. Not with the scent of whatever herbs she’d dropped into her bath water making him want to drink her in.
Now he leaned in close to taste that lovely mouth of hers once more. It tasted golden, with a hint of the rare treat of honey she’d allowed them for this morning’s griddlecakes.
He felt the wiry tightness of her lithe body relax into his arms. His lust accelerated like a fractious horse taking the bit into its teeth. With every moment, it thrummed faster, harder, wanting her . . . wanting . . .
He traced the angle of her jaw with his thumb, then used his tongue to separate her lips. Sweet Lord, she felt as good as he remembered, as right as he had hoped. She kissed him back, caressed his neck with her palm, not with the reluctance with which one might discharge an old debt, but with the tender eagerness of an innocent toward her first lover.
Quinn couldn’t wait another moment. He had to reach under her shirt, to find those small breasts with his fingers. No iron-staved layers of female undergarments formed a stockade against trespass. Beneath the cotton fabric, there was only soft, smooth flesh. His hand brushed past the warm silver of her necklace, on its way to finding someplace warmer still. Anna rocked back on her heels and gasped out her pleasure as he touched her hardening nipples.
Yet even as he unbuttoned her shirt, used his mouth to follow where his roving hands had led, he wondered what it was about her that sent him plunging past all reason. He felt helpless to control his actions, a river raging in futility against the ocean’s pull. But instead of waves, the sweet curves of her body drew him; instead of the thunderous surf, he heard only the echo of her song. Not the unintelligible Mexican lament she’d sung two weeks before, but a sprightly saloon ditty that had once convinced him she had spirit. Annie Faith had sparkled among those world-weary fallen women he had known, so alive he couldn’t help but be drawn to her, as if her light would also bestow warmth.
It hadn’t. Though he’d been well on his way to offering her the moon, she had only offered treachery in return. And now what? On the day that he would leave here, what could they give each other? A ghostly afterimage of sins from the past ─ or only a reminder of the wreckage left from their impact?
Though he was powerless to rein in his body’s urges, she pushed him away.
“I’m sorry,” she told him without elaboration. She might have been apologizing for allowing him liberties or for stopping him, or even for her crime from the past.
That was one of the changes about her that annoyed him most. He felt as if she were reading him every other line of someone’s letter, that her silences meant far more than the words she let him hear.
“I think we should go now, to take advantage of the light.” Anna buttoned her shirt, then handed him the food to pack with his bedroll. After he had finished, she helped him tie the bundle on his lower back, beneath his still-sore shoulder. Last of all, she slung a water skin on his good arm. Quinn noticed it smelled suspiciously of goat.
“I suppose this means you won’t come with me.” He should have felt relieved, but the irritation in his voice was real. Although he still hadn’t forgiven her for what she’d done six years ago, she was no monster ─ and she had saved his life. He’d sleep better if he knew she was safe. At least that’s what he tried to tell himself. His body had ideas all its own.
She smoothed the silky golden strands that had escaped her braid, then reached for her broad-brimmed leather hat to put it on. “I’ll help you find the trail to Copper Ridge. That’s all I ever promised.”
“I know. But, Anna . . .”
She pulled open the door and let Notion bound out before her. She hesitated, turning toward him. Daylight spilled inside, casting a shadow that fell across her eyes, making her expression grow as cryptic as her silence.
He cleared his throat, wondering once again at the woman she’d become. “I want to thank you for helping me. You had plenty of reason to leave me in the snow. If you’d been the woman I used to know, you would have left me there to die.”
She hesitated for a moment, adjusting the canteen’s strap across her shoulder, then turned her shadowed gaze on him once more. “I was left for dead once, Ryan. The Navajo found me and brought me here, the same as you. Don’t you see? It’s just a circle. My reward is in completing it. Or maybe ‘reward’ is the wrong word. Maybe I’m repaying something owed.”
“To me?”
She shook her head. “To this canyon, to the woman who once lived here, maybe even to the God that shaped them both. But not to you. I wouldn’t presume to name the price that could repay what I took from you when I was Annie Faith.”
That was when he realized it hadn’t been only lust that made him want her. It was Anna herself, the woman who had grown out of the ruin of the girl that he had known. Comparing Annie Faith’s superficial glitter to Anna’s inner light was like comparing a cheap glass bauble to an uncut diamond.
If he stayed with her much longer, he might fall in love. The thought frightened him deeply. The last time he’d lingered with her, she had caused him so much grief. Could he ever truly forgive what she had done? Could he ever really put it from his mind? Or would it lie in wait like a drowsing monster, to spring to howling rage at the slightest provocation?
He took off her hat and let the sunlight illuminate her face and awaken the soft blue of her smoky eyes. He imagined her gentle features hardening into a mask of resentment, finally hatred, when he brought up her crime again, when memories of his lost family ─ and his own part in their deaths ─ pushed him beyond the brink of cruelty.
How could he do that to her? How could he do it to himself? With his fingertips, he traced the angle of her cheekbone, the curve of her jaw line.
Anna caught his wrist in her hand. She gazed into his eyes as if she were reading the fine print on his soul. Turning his hand, she kissed his fingers then stepped out of the light. When she closed the door, she shut both of them inside.
* * *
Her hand still on the door’s latch, Anna smiled up at Quinn and softly said, “I know now.”
He squeezed her hand, very gently. “You know what?”
“I know what I owe you.” She paused, distressed by the pain that it would bring her, yet pleased with the rightness of the idea, the simple fairness of it.
Ryan’s expression shifted from confusion to discomfort. “You would . . . you would make love to pay me back? Do you really think that ─”
She shushed him by touching her fingers to his lips. “I’ve told you, I’m not the woman you remember. I give you something far more valuable than simple favors of the body. Wait there, by the fire.”
“Annie ─ Anna . . .” He sounded troubled, though he walked closer to the fireplace, as if to warm himself. “Don’t do this. There’s too much you don’t know.”
“Secrets separate us from the past. Maybe they keep us from the future, too. Perhaps it’s time that I let go of mine.”
She went to the chest and opened up a small drawer built into its side. From it, she pulled with trembling fingers a little book of Shakespeare. She took it to the spot where he stood near the hearth.
She spared Quinn a quick glance before she knelt, still holding the treasure.
“My Uncle Ferris gave that book to me.” Ryan’s face softened with the memory. “You shoul
d have heard how he read Hamlet.”
“‘From Uncle Ferris, with love, December 25, 1874,’” From long memory, Anna quoted from the book she had once stolen. “‘May the Bard’s words sustain you.’ They sustained me, Ryan. I liked to read them often. ‘My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late!’”
Something long-dimmed in his green eyes quickened. “Romeo and Juliet.”
“The very one.”
“I thank you for the book’s return.”
“The book is not my gift. It belongs to you already.”
Anna let the thin pages slide open, until she found the right one.
“You don’t need to do more. What happened was so long ago, and you already saved my ─”
She glanced up at him, tears sliding down her cheeks. Something in her expression silenced him, allowing her to return her attention to a fine, blond lock of hair. How long, how long since she’d last touched it? How long since she had dared to look?
She lifted it by the narrow strip of violet ribbon that bound it, a still-lustrous bit of trim she’d salvaged from the ruined dress that Quinn had bought her long ago. Carefully, she untied the silk, then used her knife to cut the trim in half. Just as carefully, though her hands trembled, she divided the lock of hair into two smaller sections, then retied two smaller bows.
As if he sensed her pain, Quinn then knelt down beside her.
“What . . ?” His question faded into confusion.
She took his hand and opened it, then placed one lock of fine hair on it. Her tears flowed freely now, as she had feared. “Rosalinda was her name. She was born eight months after I came here. But I’d been badly hurt. She was so small, the tiniest baby you’ve ever seen. Beautiful, though. Pink like the desert sky gets in a winter sunrise, with eyes that pale, pale blue. I thought she was my gift, for surviving.”
“How long did she live?” His voice had softened so she could barely hear it.
“Just three days. I wanted to die, too.”
He closed his hand around her gift. “You think she was mine.”
“I know it. From our two weeks.” She passed him the book, then folded her half of the precious lock into her hand. “Let me put this away so we can leave.”
She stood and walked to the chest, favoring her bad knee, which had stiffened. She never heard him come up behind her, but he must have, for he took her in his arms once she had put the lock of hair back in the drawer.
It felt so easy to lean into his strength, so good to let her tears disappear into the fabric of his shirt, as if he could absorb her pain the way the cotton soaked up moisture.
He smoothed her hair as if she were a child. “I’m sorry,” he said simply. “I’m sorry for it all.”
“I told you I’d been punished. Every day since I hurt you. If I hadn’t robbed you back in Mud Wasp, I wouldn’t have been caught. Judge Cameron couldn’t have given me to Hamby. Hamby never would have hurt me. I could have had a stronger child. And Rosalinda might have lived . . .”
She felt his muscles tense.
“Judge Cameron?” Ryan asked. “Cameron gave you to Ned Hamby?”
“On the condition that I never reappear.”
“But why? Wait a minute. You mean to tell me Hamby’s been Cameron’s boy all along? The judge got rid of you so he could take my gold, didn’t he? Sweet Jesus!”
She pulled away from Quinn. Of course this was about the gold. Not Rosalinda. Never Rosalinda. Anna pulled open the door, sick with regret for bringing up her daughter’s name.
Their daughter’s, even if she meant less to Ryan than a bag of stolen coins.
Her voice quavered as she spoke. “We’d better go now. We’ll need every bit of daylight if we’re to find the trail.”
* * *
Back in Texas, the bluebonnets would be blooming. Ned Hamby imagined sapphire fields of white-tipped blossoms, rippling with the spring breeze like the surface of a lake. Occasionally, the fiery blooms of Indian paintbrushes would fleck the surface, as brilliant as the last pure shafts of sunlight before dusk.
The longhorns liked to graze among the wildflowers. Ned dreamed himself a herd, each one wearing his own brand. Each one munching blossoms in the mild spring sunshine.
“My Ned got off to such a rough start,” Mama’d tell her friends. “Who’d a guessed he turn out of be a man of property so young?”
Ned’s pride swelled with her phantom words, so he dreamed up one more line for Mama.
“Can’t imagine why I ever called that boy no-‘count,” she told the other hens.
He smiled, though the vision made him sick with longing to go home. Home. That’s what it still was, no matter how many years, how many sins had passed since he’d been back there.
Lost in his reverie, Ned never heard Black Eagle coming ‘til the half-breed’s plug loped past and splattered him with mud.
“Goddammit!” Hamby swore. Damn the slushy melt-off, damn that idiot half-breed for his impatience, and especially damn Hop for laughing so hard.
Ned wiped mud from his cheek with the rough back of his jacket’s sleeve. Tearing his revolver from his holster, he shot at both his men. Black Eagle and Hop wrenched their mounts’ heads in opposite directions and disappeared into the trees.
Christ almighty. He had to get clear of these boys, this close-walled canyon, and his debt to Cameron before he lost his mind. Ned didn’t even care about the promised money now. He’d long suspected the judge would always hold the possibility of wealth like a carrot, dangled just beyond his reach.
No, the money didn’t matter anymore. Only Texas mattered, that and getting back to Mama without a bounty on his head.
And he’d killed every mother’s son who got between him and that goal.
CHAPTER SIX
Quinn mutely followed Anna as she walked, a battered canteen tucked slung over one shoulder, her old rifle tucked comfortably beneath the other arm. That crooked bastard, Cameron, had been the one who took his gold. He could barely think past that bald fact, despite a good three hours’ hike. The judge had stolen his gold, then employed its theft to coerce a hapless gambler into becoming a puppet lawman, his hands tied by Cameron’s ever-changing demands.
“Son of a bitch,” he swore, furious for all the damage Cameron had wrought, more furious still at himself for being such a fool.
Ahead of him, Anna flinched. He might have called out to her not to worry, but instead, he began to wonder how he felt about her now.
Was she a victim or a thief? Surely, Cameron had used her even more callously than he’d used Quinn. He’d given her away, to be abused and then disposed of. Murdered, by men so violent that the rumors of their crimes made grown men shudder. Although Anna had survived, she’d clearly suffered. Yet hers had been the hand that set this debacle in motion.
Even so, he wasn’t bothered by the sight of Anna carrying a gun. He didn’t worry, as he once would have, that she would turn on him again. Though she was still young, the harshness of her life had weathered away her cutting edges. Only a meaty jackrabbit or a rabid coyote need fear her now.
Perhaps, he thought, more than hardship changed her. Perhaps the life that had once grown inside her had altered her as well. That tiny life too fragile to survive beyond the warm, safe confines of her womb.
Rosalinda was her name.
The memory of Anna’s words blazed through him, as painfully charged as tiny bolts of lightning. Bolts from the blue.
You think she was mine, he had told her.
She truly believed it, and he was stunned to find that he was beginning to believe it, too. Had he really made a child once, with Anna? He reached into the pocket of his mended coat and touched the book of Shakespeare. Secreted between its thin and precious pages was the lock of fine, blond hair, a treasure beyond reckoning.
Anna’s treasure. He recalled her separating the thin lock into two equal halves, then tying each one with a tiny bow of violet silk.
She had shared h
er treasure with him, one as sacred as a gift of her heart’s blood.
I know what I owe you, she had told him. And though he’d first misunderstood her, she had been right about one thing. What she had given had been far more valuable than the simple favors of the body, as she’d put it.
Not that he could have turned down an offer of that sort. As much as he hated to believe it, he knew if she had beckoned, he would not have left the warmth of her cabin ‘til tomorrow. He wasn’t certain that he would have ever left her bed again.
Just remembering the way that she’d once moved beneath him, moaning with soft cries of pleasure, broke him out in a cold sweat. Sweet Jesus. He wanted her more than he’d ever wanted any woman, including the sparkling beauty she’d once been.
“Anna,” he said softly, not wanting to spook her. “I think you should come with me to Copper Ridge.”
She slid down a few feet of loose and slushy scree. At the bottom, she rested her back against a vertical span of red rock and glanced up at him. Weak winter sunshine glimmered off the silver crucifix depending at her throat. “The trail’s just up ahead, and I need to get home. I can’t go back into that world, Quinn. You and I both know that. There’s nothing for me there.”
Her yellow dog pushed his head beneath her hand until she scratched his ears.
Ryan half-jumped, half-stumbled down beside her. He came to rest too close to her, so that his face was only inches from hers. But Anna didn’t step back from him. Instead, tall as she was, she looked him nearly eye to eye.
“I could make a place for you there,” he offered, and his next words flooded out before he could examine what they meant to him. “You ─ you were the mother of my child.”
For several moments, she merely stared at him, silent and expressionless as the wind-carved red stone around them. Then a smile warmed her features, almost as gradual as dawn.
“You believe me, then,” she told him.
He nodded, wondering if she might be playing him for a fool. But only for the slightest fraction of a moment.
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