Winter Fire

by Elizabeth Lowell

“Isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do men have to pay women to get it?” Conner asked sardonically.

  “Not all men do.”

  The boy shrugged. “So they marry for it. Same thing in the end. The husband pays room and board and the wife suffers his attentions in exchange.”

  Case took a deep breath and blew it out soundlessly. He had no idea where to begin fixing Conner’s sour view of what sex between a man and a woman was all about.

  “Big Lola may not be the best example of womanhood to judge sex by,” Case said after a moment.

  “She sure as hell has a lot of experience.”

  “Of a kind, yes. But there’s another kind.”

  “Marriage?”

  Case thought of Hunter and Elyssa. Their love for each other haunted him even as he avoided any possibility of such emotion for himself.

  “Love makes it different,” he said finally.

  “Uh huh,” Conner said, not convinced.

  “It’s true. When a woman loves a man, she wants him. Physically. There’s no bribery, no threat, no force. Just the kind of loving that makes the sun shine brighter.”

  “I haven’t seen anything like that.”

  “I haven’t seen Paris but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

  “Are you saying that my sister loves you?”

  The blunt question made Case wish he had never started the conversation.

  “I’m not saying anything of the sort,” he muttered.

  “Sounded like it.”

  Case blew out another breath and tried again.

  “A lot of people never know the special kind of love that makes the sun brighter,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy sex with someone they like.”

  For a long time Conner looked at the older man without speaking. Then slowly, subtly, the boy relaxed.

  “You didn’t force Sarah?” he asked.

  “No. And the next time you even hint at such a thing, I will personally whale the living tar out of you.”

  Surprisingly, Conner laughed.

  “I’ll bet you would,” the boy agreed. “I’m sorry if I insulted you. I just had to know that Sarah wasn’t being forced by a man again.”

  “You were pretty young when she was married. You might have misunderstood what all the, er, grunting and groaning was about.”

  “Even a baby knows the difference between a pat and a fist.”

  Case tried to think of a tactful way to ask his next question.

  He came up empty-handed.

  “Wasn’t there any tenderness between Sarah and her husband?” he asked bluntly.

  “Tenderness?”

  “Like kissing and such.”

  “Far as I know, my sister got her first kiss the night she came back riding double with you.”

  “Judas priest,” Case whispered. “Why did she marry the old—never mind. None of my business.”

  Conner’s face seemed to flatten and tighten. It was a flash of the man he would become in time, honesty and strength and force in equal parts.

  “Why do you think my sister married him?” he asked coldly.

  “Necessity.”

  “Damned straight. She was barely fourteen and I was nine. No relatives survived the flood. We were starving. She answered an advertisement in the newspaper.”

  “And married Hal?”

  Conner nodded. “The old son of a bitch couldn’t even get a squaw to put up with him.”

  “How did you kill Hal?”

  The easy question caught Conner off-guard. He looked around quickly.

  No one else was in sight.

  “How did you know?” he asked.

  “I didn’t, until now.”

  “Don’t tell my sister,” he said urgently. “I want your word on that.”

  I’m supposed to keep my half of the ranch secret from Conner, Case thought wryly, and now here’s a second secret I’m supposed to keep from Sarah.

  “Are you sure she doesn’t already know?” he asked.

  “Yes!”

  “What happened?”

  Conner made a hard, chopping motion with his hand.

  “What does it matter? He’s dead.”

  “Shotgun from ambush?” Case asked casually.

  “No. Hell’s fire, I didn’t even mean to kill the old bastard.”

  Case lifted an eyebrow and waited.

  Sighing, Conner ran a hand through his hair, settled his hat with a jerk, and started to talk.

  “He’d been after her the night before. It was one of the few times he caught her.”

  Case’s eyelids flinched once, then again. He didn’t like thinking about Sarah and an old man so cruel he couldn’t even get an outcast Indian woman to live with him.

  Far as I know, my sister got her first kiss the night she came back riding double with you.

  “He was on a real toot,” Conner said. “He was still drinking when he rode out prospecting the next morning. I followed him.”

  “On foot?”

  “Hal’s horse was as old as he was. But he was a real walking fool. It was afternoon by the time I caught up.”

  Case watched the boy through narrowed eyes.

  “I told Hal to quit mistreating my sister,” Conner said. “He started to pistol-whip me. It wasn’t the first time, but it sure was the last.”

  “You shot him?”

  “We fought over the gun, it went off, and Hal just sort of folded up.”

  Despite Conner’s matter-of-fact words, Case could see the shadows of old anger and horror in the boy’s green eyes and thinned mouth.

  “I tried to feel bad about it afterward,” Conner said softly. “But I felt worse when I had to shoot a mustang that had a broken leg.”

  “How old were you when Hal died?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Hard way to grow up.”

  “I grew up when I was nine,” Conner said. “After that, all that mattered was Sarah.”

  “And you’re all that matters to her.”

  “Me and the land. And now you.”

  Case ducked the veiled question.

  “What about Ute and Lola?” he asked.

  “It’s not the same. Oh, we all get along real well, and Ute would fight to the death for Sarah, but…” Conner shrugged. “My sister doesn’t fret about them the way she does about me or you.”

  “I think she values your hide one hell of a lot more than she values mine.”

  Conner hesitated, then shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Yet the boy’s steady green eyes said that he thought the older man was wrong.

  I should have run when the running was good, Case told himself.

  Then he thought of the land calling to him and knew he couldn’t run. At that instant he understood what it felt like to be a wolf in a trap.

  Nowhere to run.

  Nothing to fight but himself.

  A lot of wolves died that way, bleeding to death when they gnawed off their own legs in a desperate try for freedom.

  14

  Disgusted, Case leaned on the shovel and stared down at the cold hole he had dug at the base of a finger of red rock. It looked a lot like the other holes he had dug in the past two weeks.

  Empty.

  Before he had started digging, there were signs that the ground had been a camping spot. But it was impossible to tell whether the rock had been blackened by a campfire three years ago, or thirty, or three hundred.

  Or three thousand. The dry air of the stone desert preserved everything from wood to bones to broken pottery.

  I’m a damned fool to be digging holes when I could be building a cabin of my own to live in, he thought.

  A cold wind wailing up the nameless canyon seemed to agree with him.

  He was a fool.

  Sweaty and naked to the waist despite the wind, he picked up the shovel and went back to work. The steel edge grated against a combination of dirt, sand, and rubble that was anywhere from the size of
a penny to that of a pony.

  I could be catching a few mustangs of my own, he thought. There’s some promising horseflesh running loose out there.

  With Cricket as a stud, and a few good mares from California or Virginia, a man could breed some fine animals.

  The sound of something heavy being dragged toward Case scattered his thoughts. He straightened from digging and looked up the canyon.

  “Damnation, Sarah!” he yelled, “I told you to leave the big stuff for me.”

  “You should see—what I left—up there,” she panted.

  Despite the wind and the frost that still sparkled in the shadow of north-facing rocks, she wore only doeskin pants and a shirt with a thin camisole beneath. Her pants were scarred by brush and stained from plain hard work.

  Her jacket was hanging over a low bush about a hundred yards down the canyon, near the first hole he had dug. Her hat was on top of the jacket. From certain angles, the bush looked enough like a hunched-over man that Case had reached for his belt gun twice.

  Even knowing what was really there didn’t keep him from starting when he caught a glimpse of the man-shape from the corner of his eye.

  Sarah dragged her prize another few yards and dropped it with the wood she had gathered while he was digging. For a minute she just breathed hard and looked at the mound of firewood.

  “There should be enough for both packhorses, plus my own little mustang,” she said.

  “Shaker is a better packhorse than a mount. Her trot would jolt teeth loose.”

  “How do you think she got her name?”

  He looked at the mound of firewood. The last piece she had added wasn’t a branch—it was the whole trunk.

  “You should have left that log for me with the rest of the big stuff up the canyon,” he said.

  She ignored him.

  He wasn’t surprised. He had discovered in the past two weeks that Sarah was very good at ignoring what she didn’t want to discuss.

  Sex was number one on her list of things to ignore.

  Maybe I should just trip her, sit on her, and force her to listen, he thought. If I do it now, I sure wouldn’t have to worry about getting her clothes dirty.

  In all, she was almost as dusty as he was. When she wasn’t pawing through a pile of rubble from whatever hole he was digging, she was dragging downed wood back to where the horses grazed.

  Sarah stretched her back, sighed, and reached for the crosscut saw that Ute had “found” along with the ax.

  “I’ll saw that last one up,” Case said.

  “You dig. I’ll saw what I can.”

  His mouth flattened. As far as he was concerned, she worked as hard as two men.

  “What about resting?” he asked mildly.

  “What about it?”

  “I’m tired.”

  Immediately she was contrite. She set aside the saw and hurried toward him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I keep forgetting about your wounds.”

  So did he, but he saw no reason to mention it. He liked the concern in her expressive eyes as she came toward him. He liked the willowy strength of her body and the unconscious swing of her hips when she walked.

  He liked every bit of her too much.

  He kept remembering how she had felt and tasted at dawn, hot silk in his hands and honey on his tongue.

  All that woman going to waste.

  No sooner did the thought come to him than he pushed it aside. What the hardworking widow did or didn’t do about men and sex was none of his business.

  Now, if only I can convince my dumb handle of that, he thought dryly.

  But he doubted he could. He came to a point like a bird dog whenever Sarah walked by. The only thing that made the situation bearable was that she didn’t notice her effect on him.

  Or if she did, she didn’t let on.

  “Case? Are you feeling all right?”

  He looked down into her beautiful misty gray eyes and realized that she had been talking to him while his mind had been somewhere else entirely.

  Below his belt.

  “Put the shovel down,” she said firmly. “It’s time to rest. We’ll have an early lunch. You sit there under the—”

  The scream of bullets ricocheting through the canyon cut off the rest of her words.

  Case grabbed Sarah and rolled between two pillars of rock before the echoes came back.

  “My shotgun is—” she began.

  His hand covered her mouth.

  Here I am, facedown in the dirt again, chewing on his gritty leather glove, she thought. How come I always end up on the bottom?

  But there was a difference this time, and she knew it to the marrow of her bones. He was using his body to shield her rather than to overwhelm her.

  Motionless, together, they listened.

  The distant sound of shod hooves somewhere on the canyon rim came back on the wind.

  “Maybe five hundred yards off,” he murmured into her ear. “One mule. Maybe another horse. Can’t tell.”

  “How can you—oh, that’s right,” she muttered. “Moody doesn’t shoe his mustangs.”

  In his mind Case constructed a picture of the lower part of the canyon. They were at the head of a treelike, branching network of dry canyons. Lost River Canyon was the main trunk. About where the little side canyon they were in bent south to merge with another, larger branch canyon, there were several places up on the rim where a man could lie in ambush.

  No more sounds came to Case or Sarah on the wind. When she would have spoken again, he muffled her mouth with his hand.

  She bit the base of his thumb.

  Gently.

  Heat went through him like a firestorm.

  Judas priest, he thought. Of all the times for her to get playful.

  Jaw clenched, he concentrated on listening for distant sounds rather than on the nearby soft breaths of the woman lying beneath him.

  Case heard exactly what he didn’t want to hear. Hoofbeats and the rattle of rock as mustangs or mules scrambled down a steep slope.

  He rolled aside.

  “Stay here and stay low no matter what happens,” he said softly.

  “Where are you going?” she asked in an equally soft voice.

  “After my rifle.”

  “Where is it?”

  “At the base of that pillar,” he said, pointing.

  “I’ll belly crawl to it.”

  A hard, strong hand clamped over the back of her right thigh, pinning her in place.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked in a low, furious voice.

  “Just what I said—getting your rifle.”

  “Stay here.”

  “My leg isn’t wounded,” she objected. “Yours is.”

  Case gave Sarah a look that would have etched steel.

  “Stay here,” he said softly.

  Her mouth flattened, but she stayed where she was.

  “Whatever happens, don’t show yourself,” he said. “The first one who sticks up his head gets a bullet between the eyes. Patience is the game.”

  “I understand,” she said very quietly. “I won’t move from here.”

  “Promise me.”

  “Yes.”

  A cold steel weight pressed against her right hand. A glance told her that it was his six-gun.

  “If you see something you don’t like, shoot it,” he said. “Beyond a hundred feet, the gun pulls a bit to the left. Over two hundred feet, shift the barrel one inch to the right. Anything farther away than that, ignore. Understand?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “There’s a round in the chamber,” Case added very quietly. “Try not to shoot me by mistake.”

  “I don’t shoot what I can’t see.”

  “That would be a comfort if you weren’t angry enough at me to skin me out for a rug.”

  Her teeth flashed against her dusty skin.

  “A mighty fine rug you would make, too,” she murmured. “I’m sure tired of that dirt floor.”<
br />
  “If you don’t shoot me, I’ll cut you some flooring planks up in the mountains.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  She couldn’t see his face, but she sensed the amusement buried inside him.

  Someday I’m going to sneak up on that man’s blind side and catch him smiling, she vowed.

  He left the cover of the red pillars like a hunting cat—on his belly. Using the insides of his feet, his elbows, and the sheer power of his body, he wriggled forward.

  Never once did he raise his head above the level of the brush and rubble surrounding him. His dusty clothes and skin blended perfectly with the landscape.

  Sarah had to squint to be certain that it was Case she was watching, rather than shadows cast by wind-stirred brush.

  No wonder he’s such a good hunter, she thought. He can sneak close enough to reach out and grab the game by the throat.

  Case vanished.

  A chill went over her. She blinked and blinked again. She saw nothing.

  He was gone as completely as a flame blown out.

  At that instant she understood with chilling certainty how he had survived the night when three attackers hadn’t.

  Yet despite his unnerving skill on the stalk, he had come very close to dying out there in the night. Some of the men he was stalking were as expert as he was.

  Sweat gathered coldly in the small of her back. Part of her fear was for Case. Part of it was for herself. She didn’t like the idea of a shadow creeping up on her and killing her before she even had a chance to scream.

  Very slowly she inched the six-gun up along her side until she could sight over its barrel. The gun was too heavy for her to hold in place for long. Blindly she felt around for pieces of stone. When she had enough, she built a small mound for the barrel of the pistol to rest on. Sighting over it, she watched the land.

  And she waited.

  A rifle shot split the silence. Instantly there was return fire from the direction in which Case had vanished. Bullets screamed off rock and ricocheted through the narrow canyon.

  Even as Sarah flinched, she lined up the barrel of the six-gun with the lower part of the canyon and prayed that Case wasn’t hurt.

  The sound of a running horse came up the canyon. The stone walls of the canyon caused each hoofbeat to echo and reecho, overlapping the sounds, making it impossible for her to be certain where the horse was.

  Abruptly Case’s head and rifle showed for an instant over the brush. He fired, levered in another bullet, fired and levered and fired again. The bullets were so closely spaced they sounded like a single burst of thunder.