Painted by the Sun

by Elizabeth Grayson

  As he handed her out, Shea turned to him. "So what did you make of Emmet catching Lily beneath the kissing ball?"

  Emmet's actions had surprised Cam a little, but he hadn't "made" anything of them. "That's what kissing balls are for, isn't it?" he said with a shrug.

  "Oh, indeed," she agreed with him.

  Still, he heard something he couldn't quite identify in her tone. "Why else would he kiss her?"

  Shea raised one eyebrow in answer as if to say he'd missed something important. He fumbled for a moment, wondering what that was. "Did you want me to catch you under the kissing ball?" he guessed.

  Shea gave a gust of delighted laughter. "Oh, Cam!" she chuckled, shaking her head.

  "Well, it might not have been so bad cornering you for a Christmas kiss," he defended himself, realizing it was true. It had been a long time since that night in the kitchen, and he hardly had to be reminded how much he'd liked kissing her. He'd held her more than once since then—and teased her and comforted her. But he hadn't kissed her. He hadn't so much as tasted those plush rosy lips or plumbed the depths of that soft, sweet mouth. He hadn't had the opportunity.

  But now it was dark between the buildings. The streets were deserted. And it was still Christmas.

  They'd climbed barely half a dozen stairs when Cam paused. Shea paused on the step above him. As she did, he curled his hand around her wrist and drew her toward him. When she realized what he intended her eyes widened but she came to him quite willingly.

  Her lips themselves were cold, but the soft inner margins were warm and lush and so damnedably inviting he couldn't help but sample deeper. He had meant this to be a simple kiss, something delicate and fleeting, a Christmas greeting passed from mouth to mouth. Instead, the kiss welled with a delicious, soul-enhancing magic.

  The communion between them that night in the kitchen had been a surprise. Because they'd become confidantes, champions, friends, this kiss was a revelation. Each of those connections amplified the wonder and intensity between them. The wonder and intensity of the needs this kiss stirred up in him.

  Cam pressed Shea back against the wall, suddenly hungry for her, for the feel of her hips and belly and breasts against him. He longed to run his hands along the curve of her back and draw her against—

  "Cam!" Shea gasped with laughter and wriggled against him. "You can't just ravish me here on the stairs!"

  Despite her protest, her breathing was fast and nearly as unsteady as his and he saw the soft sensuality in her face. She hadn't wanted him to ravish her on the stairs, but she hadn't prohibited ravishing someplace else. Her bedroom came to mind, that small, simple bedroom, that iron bed made up with sheets that smelled of lavender. He grabbed her hand and started up the steps again.

  Halfway to the top he jerked to a stop. Alarm shot deep into his belly. Footsteps had been tramped into the newly fallen snow. A faint drift of smoke and kerosene tweaked his nostrils.

  "What is it?" Shea murmured.

  He squeezed her hand, then flicked back his duster and pulled his pistol. He climbed the stairs noiselessly and paused when he was level with the landing. The door to the studio stood open not quite halfway.

  A familiar humming tuned up inside of him.

  Shea crowded up close behind him. "I locked that door before I left. I swear I did."

  Cam shoved her none too gently against the wall. "Stay here," he mouthed, then stole up the last few steps.

  He rushed the door, kicking it hard enough to send it banging back on its hinges. The noise was thunderous. He waited, hanging at the lip of the landing, but nothing shifted, nothing stirred.

  He burst inside and pressed flat against the wall of the reception room. His hands were slick as he clung to the sleek, polished grip of his pistol and probed the thick, black caverns of these familiar rooms. He strained his senses for any hint of movement, but all he could hear was the ragged roar of his own breathing and a faint crunch of something beneath his boots.

  There was no one here, but above the smell of spilled lamp oil came the stench of some lingering malevolence. His skin tightened and crept with gooseflesh.

  "What is it?" Shea hissed, looming up in the doorway.

  Cam swung on her, his heart resounding like a spiker's hammer. He jerked his pistol skyward, when he realized who it was.

  "Light a lamp," he ordered, and holstered his gun.

  Shea crossed to the reception desk and struck a match. As she raised the lamp, illumination flared across the ceiling and down the walls. Shea whimpered with distress at what she saw.

  The place had been ransacked, willfully demolished. Here in the reception area the chairs were overturned and the portraits had been ripped from the walls. Shards of glass from the frames sparkled like a carpet of stardust. That carpet led directly into the studio.

  Shea rushed ahead, raising her lamp and gasping at the carnage. Beneath the skylight her camera lay on its side, the box crushed and the legs of the tripod lying broken on the square of rug. The velvet posing chair had been slashed and was leaking drifts of stuffing onto the floor. The plaster column lay strewn across the rug like something from a Grecian ruin.

  Cam was still taking in the wreckage when he heard Shea cry out, "Mary, Mother of God! They dumped my boxes of negatives!"

  Her glass plates spilled across the floor in a hundred shattered images, an acre of glittering mosaic. A host of broken memories.

  Shea rushed directly to one particular box and righted it. "The children!" she cried and staggered to her knees amidst the shimmering glass. "Oh, God! I've lost the children!"

  She wept as she picked through the shards around her, clasping fragments of the children she'd found and photographed and treasured. The orphan train children. Shea's lost children.

  Cam went and bent beside her, stroking her hair, the bow of her back. "Take care, love," he murmured. "You'll cut yourself."

  He gathered her up as gently as he could, stood her on her feet, and shook the crumbs of glass from her skirts. He righted the posing chair and steered her into it.

  She looked at him, her eyes wide and wet with a grief that went well beyond the destruction here. "The children are gone," she whispered. "All my children. Every one."

  He heard the heartbreak in her words echoing down a decade of regret. He put his arms around her.

  "I'm sorry, Shea," he murmured, holding her, rocking her as if she were broken, too. "I know how precious those children were to you." He knelt beside her for a very long time, stroking her, letting her cry, giving her the simple comfort of his closeness. Knowing it was all he could offer when she'd lost so much.

  After a good long time she quieted and he sopped up her tears with the pads of his thumbs. "I need to check the other rooms," he murmured and rose to stand over her. "Will you be all right while I go do that?"

  Shea sniffed and nodded.

  Finding another unbroken lamp, Cam set off. The bedroom was tumbled as if it had been searched, but nothing seemed missing or broken beyond repair. But the moment he stepped inside the darkroom, a haze of smoke and the chill of that strange malevolence enveloped him.

  Gooseflesh chased along his skin as he scuffled through the charred debris to the pile of ashes crumpled in the corner. When he braced his palm against the wall and bent to examine them more closely his hand came away dark and gritty with soot.

  For a moment he stared at his blackened fingertips. Remembering another fire, another loss. An old and painful tragedy.

  The room dipped and swirled around him, and he was there again—riding.

  Riding hard. Riding fast.

  Smoke.

  Oh, God, smoke.

  Smoke rising from my town. Fire at the end of my street. Flames roaring through my mother's house.

  My mother's house.

  Let them be safe.

  Orange flames licking up the walls.

  Let them be safe.

  The house enfolded in flame, screeching, crumbling. Vaporizing.

  Pl
ease let them be safe.

  Women huddled in the yard. Singed hair and smoking clothes. Two of them. Two.

  Thank you. Thank you.

  Dismounting. Running toward them.

  Are they all right? Please let them be all right.

  Catching Mother in my arms. Holding close, holding fast. Lily lying in the grass. Hurt.

  Please not hurt.

  Bending over her, reaching out.

  Her face. Oh God, my sister's face.

  Cam crumpled to his knees there in Shea's darkroom, gasping for breath. His throat ached raw with smoke. Sweat soaked his clothes, crawled down his chest, slid down his neck and ribs and back. He couldn't stop shivering.

  He curled in upon himself and did his best to breathe in and out. He'd had this before. He knew what this was. He knew it would pass.

  He didn't think it would ever pass.

  He squeezed his eyes closed and fought to steady himself. He was sane outside of this. Somewhere.

  That sanity returned by slow degrees. Cam became aware of the small, smoky room around him, of the studio beyond it, of Shea waiting. Dear God, how long had she been waiting?

  He pushed to his feet and stood there quivering. He was hollow inside, wasted, spent—and this wasn't even his tragedy. It was Shea's, and he needed to go and see to her.

  When he finally picked his way out of the darkroom, Shea was crouched on the floor again sorting through the shattered photographic plates. She'd gathered some of the largest pieces on one of the rubber developing trays and was looking for more she could salvage.

  He knelt beside her and stilled her hands. "Shea," he said as gently as he could, "whoever did this set a fire in the darkroom, too."

  "A fire?" she echoed, as if she wasn't quite able to believe that someone would set a fire deliberately. "But we store ether in there. Ether's terribly flammable." A new fear flickered across her face. "There could have been an explosion."

  "Yes," he said and tightened his grip on those slim, vulnerable wrists. What would have happened if she'd been at the studio when the vandals arrived? Would she have been hurt? Might she have been killed?

  He drew her closer, becoming unaccountably aware of her pulse beating beneath his fingertips, the warmth of her flesh, the flow of her breathing. He drew her nearer still. "I think they wanted to destroy the place, to put you out of business."

  She let out a ragged sigh. "Well, they've succeeded, then. My portrait camera is broken beyond repair. Most of my lenses are gone..."

  "Can you get the things you need to start again?"

  "Start again?" she asked, looking lost. "It would cost the sun and moon to start again."

  For the first time since he'd known her, Shea Waterston seemed lost, utterly defeated. Somehow Cam couldn't allow that.

  "We'll get you what you need," he promised. "We'll find a way for you to keep the studio going."

  He drew her closer, needing to hold her, needing to protect her. Needed to know she was safe. He needed it the same way he needed to be sure about Rand, sure about Lily—almost as if Shea belonged to him.

  He wanted to go on holding her, but Shea eased away. She climbed to her feet and rose to stand over him. "I'm going to get the broom."

  "Shea," he began, halting her, "have you had any kind of trouble here at the studio."

  "Trouble?"

  "Has anyone threatened you? It's possible drunken cowboys did all this, but I don't think that's who it was."

  "You don't?"

  Cam rose and went to her. "Has anyone who's come to the studio made you uncomfortable?"

  "Beyond Sam Morran?"

  "He hasn't been back to bother you, has he?"

  Shea shook her head. "But someone did steal a photograph at the opening," she reminded him. "And I woke up one night a week or two ago, thinking someone had tried the door."

  Cam's new protectiveness warred with irritation. "And you didn't tell anyone about it?"

  "And just who would I have told, Cam?"

  "You could have gone to the sheriff," he suggested. "Or come to me."

  "And what would I have said? That I got spooked being here by myself?" She compressed her lips, and he could see she was disgusted with herself for being skittish.

  Cam knew Shea Waterston was no shivering miss who pulled the covers over her head. "So what did you do?"

  "That night?" She smiled a little ruefully. "I made sure my rifle was loaded and looked around. The door rattled a time or two, but it might have been the wind. There were footprints in the snow the next morning, but anyone could have made them."

  He couldn't argue with her, yet the missing picture, her midnight visitor, and now this destruction worried him far more than he cared to admit.

  "You need to report this to the sheriff," he insisted. "It wasn't the bogeyman who came tonight."

  "No," she acknowledged, staring with deep sadness across the floor carpeted with shattered glass. "I suppose not."

  "I've been picking through these broken plates hoping I could salvage something, but it's hopeless." Then she sighed, squared her shoulders, and turned. "This time I really am going to go get the broom and dustpan."

  While Shea was gone, Cam looked at the pieces she'd set aside. She'd been gathering up bits of the children from the orphan trains, and he found himself scanning the floor for more of them.

  But instead it was a large fragment of a portrait that drew his attention. He was intrigued by the subject's narrow, long-fingered hands and the competence with which they were holding his pistol. It was the gun the man was holding that sent cold swooping into the pit of his stomach. For a moment he simply stared at it, trying to rearrange the image somehow, convince himself he wasn't seeing what he thought he was.

  "Shea," he called out, hoping she wouldn't hear the tremor in his voice. "What plates are these you'd kept?"

  She came back into the studio with her broom. "I sent almost all the landscapes to New York. I'd been keeping the children's negatives here with me, and the rest were portraits I made this summer and fall."

  "Pictures you took here in Denver or up in the mountains?"

  "Both," she answered. "Why?"

  Now that he looked more closely at the fragment of negative, Cam could see the picture hadn't been taken in the studio. The subject was seated on some sort of rustic bench. But again, it was the gun that drew him. He would have recognized it anywhere.

  It was a double-action Navy Colt pistol, with gold fittings and silver chasing along the barrel. The grip was of mother-of-pearl, polished to a moonstone sheen. The gun was half of a commemorative set his troops had given him when he'd made major back in the spring of 1863. He'd sworn he'd treasure the pair of them always, but always hadn't lasted as long as he thought.

  Cam took one last look at those long elegant hands, at the gun that they were fondling—the twin to the one he was wearing on his hip. Without even being able to see his face or the color of his hair, Cam knew who this man was. His name was Wes Seaver, and if Seaver was here in Denver, Cam's past was catching up to him.

  Chapter 12

  Shea opened the studio door one morning several weeks after Christmas and found a big wooden box on the landing. When she stepped out to examine it, she found the crate unmarked, unlabeled. Clearly it wasn't the photographic equipment she'd been expecting from New York.

  She glanced down to where Mr. Nicholson was sweeping the walk in front of his store. "G'morning, Abe," she called to him. "Did you see who left this box for me?"

  Nicholson paused and shook his head. "Haven't seen anyone 'cept Mrs. Franklin going into her shop. Must be the weather."

  Shea glanced at the gray, fleecy sky. They'd have snow before nightfall. She could feel the cold, damp bite of it in the rising wind.

  Frowning, she looked down at the pine box, then nudged it with her toe. Something rustled inside—something alive.

  Shea stepped hastily backward. It had been nearly three weeks since someone ransacked her studio, and neither Cam no
r the sheriff had been able to discover who it was. Had the same person left this box for her? Was this another threat?

  The faint rustling came again. Were there snakes inside the box? Or rats?

  Her skin crawled with the possibilities. For an instant she considered going for the sheriff, then she straightened with an exasperated sniff. "Don't you be a fool, girl," she admonished herself. "Just open the damn box, and have done with it."

  She went inside to get her hammer—and her Winchester. Then, bracing one knee to hold the top in place, she pried out the nails around the edges. The whine from the nails set Shea's teeth on edge, and the movements of whatever was inside the box became more agitated. Once she'd pulled them all, Shea took up her rifle and flipped open the top.

  A huge calico cat leaped gracefully onto the floor of the landing.

  Shea stumbled back against the door frame. "Rufus!" she squeaked.

  Rufus looked her up and down—and hissed.

  Shea laughed, feeling both foolish and relieved. It was just Ty's cat!

  Setting her rifle aside, she hunkered down and extended a hand. Rufus hissed and swiped at her.

  Giving up on making friends with Rufus, Shea examined the box more closely. Inside was a tattered piece of blanket, a chipped pottery bowl, and a hastily folded paper.

  She opened the note and read the scrawled, uneven letters:

  DEER SHA

  PLEZE FEED MY CAT.

  TYLER MORRAN

  They must be gone, Shea thought on a sharp wave of concern. Though she'd spoken to Ty directly only half a dozen times since Christmas, she kept up with him through her son. As long as Ty and his father were in Denver, as long as Rand and Ty were friends, she was able to keep an eye on him. If there had been trouble, she was near enough to help. If he'd needed money or food or medicine, she'd have found a way to provide it.

  Now that tough, brave, self-sufficient, and vulnerable boy was out of her reach. He was at the mercy of a father who was so wrapped up in his own misery that he could barely acknowledge the world at large, much less his son.

  Shea couldn't even be certain where the two of them were. They'd gone back to the mountains, she supposed, back to the mining camp. But why would they go in the dead of winter? Had they run out of money? Were they one step ahead of the law?