Stunned by his words, Joanna reached for him. “Then do it,” she urged. “Is the taste of your own pride so bitter? Do it, Pace.”
“I am doing it,” he cried in frustration. “Or, I was, until I had to come looking for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I was saddling up to go home when the telegram came from your old man.”
“I thought you said it was from Rena.”
“It was, but she signed Matt’s name to it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Sure it does. She thought—”
Joanna smiled slightly. “She thought that if you thought Daddy was asking for your help, you might come home.”
“That’s what I figure.” Pace shrugged and retrieved his knife.
Joanna looked quickly away from the snake’s severed head. “I think we got off the subject. Where does all this leave us, Pace?”
He wiped the blade of his knife clean against his thigh. Grimly, he looked at her. “Nowhere.” He shoved the knife into the scabbard on his belt. “There’s not going to be any us.”
Chapter Nine
Joanna wasn’t touching him again. That was good, Pace told himself as they rode through the night. That’s the way he wanted…no, it wasn’t the way he wanted it, but it was the way things had to be.
Dammit, it was the way he wanted it. He’d been crazy to think she was meant for him.
His own words echoed in his mind. There’s not going to be any us. Hell, she hadn’t even argued with him. If that kiss they’d shared had meant anything to her at all, she would have argued with him, wouldn’t she?
Instead, she’d turned away and started stacking twigs for a fire. Pace had cleaned the rabbit and snake. Joanna hadn’t spoken while the meal cooked. Pace had thought it wise to leave her to her silence. He’d left it up to her about eating the snake, too; she’d deliberately stuck with the rabbit.
She hadn’t said anything later, either, when Pace took one of the blankets from the bedroll and bedded down against the opposite wall of their rock enclosure. She’d shaken out the other blanket, laid it back down over the ground sheet where it had been, and slept with her back to him.
He didn’t understand her. Hell, he didn’t understand himself. He had wanted her fiercely. The feel of her in his arms, the taste of her…those things he would carry to his grave. He’d been so damned certain that he’d been holding his destiny in his arms when he’d held her.
But he had surely been wrong. He’d been thinking with something a lot farther south than his brain when he’d come up with that piece of nonsense.
Her light sigh was barely audible over the quiet sound of the horse’s progress across the barren ground.
“Are you still mad?” she asked, surprising him.
Pace glanced at the stars. A quick calculation told him this was the first time she’d spoken in about twelve hours, and she asked if he was mad. “No,” was all he said.
It was dawn before she spoke again. “Tell me something.”
“What’s that?”
“Why did you say there wouldn’t be any us?”
Pace stiffened. “Drop it, Jo.”
Her voice was quiet, calm. “No, I don’t think I will. You wanted me.”
“What makes you think that? Just because I kissed you?”
“Uncle Pace, dear, from where I sat, it was pretty obvious.”
Pace choked on a swallow. She’d been sitting on his lap. She couldn’t mean…
“I was on your lap, if you recall.”
What the hell was he supposed to say to that?
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” she said. “You wanted me. The, uh, evidence was…unmistakable. You’ve decided that it is not wrong for Daddy and Rena to be married, so your being Rena’s brother can’t be a problem when it comes to you and me. You don’t have a wife somewhere waiting for you. You haven’t mentioned having a woman in your life at all. So explain to me what the problem is.”
“What is it you want from me, Jo?”
“A reasonable answer.”
Pace gave a harsh laugh. “What the hell does reason have to do with anything?”
“At least we can agree on that.”
“You’re the one trying to talk this to death, the one who wants a reason.”
She sighed again. “No, you’re right. Nothing about any of this is reasonable. It’s not reasonable for me to know a man all my life, to love him as my favorite uncle, and then one day look at him and…”
Pace’s hands tightened on the reins as he told himself to keep his mouth shut, but the exercise was futile. He couldn’t keep himself from asking, “And?”
“And have everything change.”
Pace swallowed. “Nothing’s changed, Jo.”
“Everything’s changed,” she countered softly. She leaned against his back and slid her arms around his waist.
Pace kicked the buckskin into a trot as if to ride away from her touch. When it didn’t work, he sent the horse into a cantor. Joanna only held on tighter.
Was that why he’d done it, he wondered, to feel her holding him tight? Of course not. He’d been taking the horse from walk to trot to cantor and back to trot since the night they left the cave.
Eventually, before the horse could work up a lather under the warming rays of the morning sun, Pace reined him back to a walk again. And still Joanna held him. Maybe she was just tired.
The land looked flat, but looks deceived. They came up over a slight rise and the ground before them fell away in a series of long, sweeping steps at the edge of the mesa they’d been crossing all night. In the distance where the land flattened out again, maybe three miles away, he saw signs of man.
Pace swore and kicked the horse down the slope. Skylined as they were on the edge of the plateau, with the morning sun at their backs, he knew they’d be visible for miles.
That’s what I get for thinking about Jo when I should have been paying attention, he told himself harshly. Inattention like that had gotten more than one man killed.
When he was sure they were below the horizon and no longer outlined against the morning sun, he drew the horse to a halt and dug his field glasses out of his saddlebags.
Joanna had tensed the instant he’d kicked the horse. Now she peered over his shoulder. “What do you see?”
“A house and barn.”
“Out here?” she asked, incredulous. “What could anybody raise out here but jackrabbits?”
“Not down there,” he said, still studying the buildings through the binoculars. “There’s plenty of grass down there and on up into those hills to the west. More than enough for a few head of cattle or horses.”
“Do you see anybody? Did they see us?”
The place looked deserted, but distance made it impossible for Pace to be certain. “I don’t see a soul, but that doesn’t mean anything.” He swore silently. The terrain offered not a single inch of cover for at least a mile in every direction from the house and barn, and then, only on the west side. From where Pace and Jo sat just below the edge of the mesa, there was no cover at all between them and the house.
Pace weighed his options and didn’t much care for any of them. They needed a place to sleep. Yesterday, sleeping in the heat of the afternoon had been miserable.
It was already hotter than it had been this time yesterday. This afternoon was going to be worse. The buildings below offered the only shade in sight. Jo was too fair skinned to spend another full morning exposed to the scorching Chihuahua sun. If those buildings were as deserted as they looked, they could take shelter there until dusk.
If the buildings were not deserted…
Pace wrapped the reins around the saddle horn and swung his right leg over the horse’s ears to dismount.
“What are you doing?” Jo demanded.
He grasped her by the waist and moved her into the saddle. “I’m going to go check it out.”
“On foot?” she cried.
“I believe,” Jo said tightly, “that we’ve had this conversation once before. I said it then, and I’ll say it now. I won’t leave you here.”
“Stay out of the mountains if you can,” Pace went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “It’s too easy to get lost in the mountains. Keep heading north and west. You’ll climb, but when you cross the divide you’ll cross on a mesa. From there head due west. You should start to recognize the country within a few hours. By the end of the first day after the land starts sloping down, you’ll be able to cross the border and hit Douglas. Wire the ranch from there and have someone come get you.”
Joanna looked away from him and out across the land beyond. “Anything else?”
Her apparent detachment puzzled him, maybe even stung a little, but it was better this way. He took a sip from the canteen, then replaced it. “I think that about does it.”
“Okay.” She glanced around her, but wouldn’t look at him. “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. I sit here on the horse and wait for you to walk approximately three miles into an unknown situation and possibly get yourself killed, then I ride off. Is that about it?”
“It probably won’t come to that. The place is probably deserted.”
“And you’re willing to bet your life on that?”
Her voice and manner might be calm, but Pace was no longer fooled. She was about to explode. “I’m not some wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn who can’t take care of himself,” he told her. “Even if the damned place isn’t deserted, the people are probably harmless.”
“And if they’re not?”
“Then I’ll deal with it.”
“On foot. While I sit up here safe and sound.”
“Dammit, Jo, I won’t take you into possible trouble if I can help it. If shooting starts, I’ll be damned if I’ll have you shielding my back again with your body and taking another bullet in my place!”
She looked at him then, and he wished she hadn’t. Green had never seemed like a hot color before, but her eyes blazed with a dozen emotions, the most obvious of which was sheer rage.
Joanna struggled to hold in her anger. She squeezed her eyes shut and tilted her face to the sky rather than let go and scream at Pace.
“Do you think,” she said as calmly as she could, “that I am actually capable of letting you walk into a possible deathtrap alone while I sit here and do nothing but watch? Do you think I could live with myself if I had to go home and tell the rest of the family how many times you saved my life, and that I did nothing, nothing when you needed help? That I wasn’t even there because I stayed on the hillside where it was safe?”
“Dammit, Jo.”
She opened her eyes and glared at him. “Don’t tell me dammit, Pace Colton. I was raised to stand up for myself and not let someone else fight my battles. All my life I’ve been taught by example that a woman doesn’t stand behind her man where it’s safe, she stands shoulder to shoulder with him and faces whatever comes, and whether you like it or not, you are mine, just as I’m yours. In case that isn’t plain enough for you,” she bit out, “I’m in love with you! And in case you haven’t been listening to your own heart, you’re in love with me, too!”
Her words both cut him to ribbons, leaving him to bleed to death, and at the same time, they healed every wound he’d ever had. They terrified him; they made him feel strong. They robbed him of thought, of breath, of everything but the overwhelming need to claim her as his for all the world to see. He could no more stop himself from reaching up and pulling her from the saddle and into his arms than he could stop the relentless march of the desert sun across the sky.
He would never know what happened after their lips met. He only knew that he kissed her hard, desperately, and she kissed him back the same way. Something inside him broke free and soared, and he thought maybe it was his soul, soaring with hers. When they were forced by lack of breath to part, they were wrapped in each other’s arms, on their knees beside the horse, and tears were streaming down Jo’s cheeks.
“Oh, Jesus, Jo, don’t cry.”
Love me! came her voice inside his head, inside his heart, while her lips did not move.
He could not deny again that she was his destiny, and in his silent surrender, he felt a triumph deep inside like nothing he’d ever felt in his life.
Love me! she cried silently again.
“I do,” he swore as he took her lips again. “God help us both, I do.”
With a glad cry straight from her heart, Joanna met his kiss and prayed that he understood that everything she had, everything she was, was his. The strength in his arms, the love in his kiss, and the power of her own feelings, made her tremble.
Pace felt her response and was humbled by it. He’d never known, never dreamed that anything existed that even came close to the emotions sweeping through him. Kneeling there on the desert floor beside a sweating horse, Pace Colton gave his heart and all the rest of himself for all time into the hands of the woman who was his destiny.
It was the horse that interrupted the heated kiss when he snorted against the sides of their faces. Pace and Joanna broke the kiss with laughter.
“Ah, God, woman.” Smiling, Pace smoothed loose hair from her cheek, wishing he’d taken the time to remove his gloves so he could feel her soft skin. “Two dozen cutthroats are searching the desert for us, we’ve got possible trouble just down the hill, and you’ve got me on my knees in the dirt. And if that’s not enough to confuse a man, I’ve never kissed a woman who wore a gunbelt across her chest.”
Joanna laughed, then sobered and searched the face of the man who had come to mean more to her than life itself. “I want it all, Pace.”
Pace, too, sobered. “Everything I have, everything I am is yours.”
“I want marriage, children, your children. I want a life with you.”
Pace’s heart pounded as he smiled slowly. “I’m relieved to hear it. I was starting to worry about having to become a kept man.” His smile slipped. “Your father—”
“My father doesn’t run my life, Pace. You should know that.” One corner of her mouth tipped up. “Besides, what can he say if we’re married before we get home?”
“He can, and will, say plenty. So will the rest of the family if you rob them of the pleasure of your wedding.”
“Our wedding, and face it, no one in this family has yet had a regular wedding. Half of them were married by an Apache shaman, and the other half said their vows practically at the point of a gun. I’d hate to break a long-standing family tradition, wouldn’t you?”
Pace laughed at her accurate yet misleading descriptions of Colton family weddings. “I don’t think we’ll need a gun.”
“The shaman, then?” she asked, her eyes turning soft and liquid. “Would you take me to him, Pace? To the old one up in the Sierra Madres? To Dee-O-Det?”
Pace felt a tingling of emotion at the base of his skull. All his life he’d shared a special bond of closeness with old Dee-O-Det. To think that Jo might understand…
He shook his head. “You don’t want that. We’ll find a preacher.”
“Don’t,” she whispered, placing her fingers across his lips. “Don’t deny me that part of you, Pace. I said I wanted everything. That means all of you, and you’re only half white. Do you think I don’t know how important the other half is? How can we build a life together if you don’t share that part with me?”
The tingling at the base of Pace’s skull trickled all the way down his spine and sent long fingers of emotion to wrap around his heart. He swallowed around a huge lump in his throat. “You humble me.”
“I love you,” she told him quietly.
“Enough to pay a vi
sit to a crusty old shaman?”
She smiled. “I believe I can fit that into my social calendar. Yes,” she added teasingly, “I love you enough for that.”
Pace couldn’t tease her back; his throat was too tight with emotion. He glanced away from the love in her eyes and was brought sharply back to necessary matters by the sight of the house and barn below. “Enough to stay here while I—”
“So much that I can’t stay here while you go down there,” she interrupted fiercely. “And aren’t we both going to feel silly when we get down there and find the place deserted? We go together, or I follow you. Either way, you’re not going alone.”
Once again riding double, they approached the house. Pace stopped about halfway there and used the binoculars again to study the place.
“Well,” he said after a minute. “How silly did you say we were going to feel?”
“It’s deserted?”
“Considering that nearly half the roof of the house is gone, I’d say even the mice have deserted the place.”
Joanna sagged against Pace’s back in relief. “What about the barn?”
“It’s in better shape than the house. Hell,” he muttered, “I hope my place isn’t this rundown.”
Joanna straightened. “Your place?”
“Mmm hmm,” he murmured as he watched through the binoculars for any sign of movement.
“What place?” she demanded. “I didn’t know you had a place of your own.”
He used the binoculars to scan the area between the buildings and the hills to the west. “Los Alamos. A ranch,” he muttered distractedly. “Or so I’m told. Along the border near Naco.”
“Why haven’t you told anyone about it?” she asked, incredulous. “You bought a ranch and you haven’t said a word?”
“I didn’t buy it, I won it in a poker game last year in Tombstone. And I’m not ready to go bragging about it, because it’s been deserted for years and probably looks just about like this place.”
He lowered the binoculars and scanned the area again. Seeing nothing to indicate that anyone was around, he cautiously nudged the horse forward at a walk.
Apache-Colton Series Page 194