Apache Fire

Off the kitchen was a small, unoccupied servant’s room with a bed. Rose stopped the bleeding as best she could. Then she picked up Latigo’s stockinged feet and slid his body carefully across the tiles. The isolated room had only one tiny window, high and securely barred. Its heavy door could be locked from the outside. When she was not tending to his needs, she could shut him in and feel safe.

But she would get the pistol and keep it close at hand whenever the door was open, she resolved. She could not afford to let Latigo get the best of her again.

She raced back to John’s office. There she took a moment to check on her sleeping son and retrieve the Peacemaker, which she thrust into the sash of her robe as she hurried back to the kitchen.

Panting with effort, she dragged Latigo’s body into the tiny room and turned down the bed. A beam of morning sunlight trickled through the window to fall across his inert legs. It was only then that Rose noticed his dust-caked cavalry trousers. Something fluttered in her stomach as she assessed his condition. Yes, she swiftly concluded, for the sake of hygiene and comfort, his dirty clothes would have to come off.

First she gingerly peeled away his remaining boot, then his threadbare stockings, resolving to burn them at first opportunity. Then, gritting her teeth, she bent over him to undo his belt buckle and the fastenings of his trousers. The uncivilized wretch had been bare skinned beneath his shirt. The lower part of him would likely be the same, Rose reasoned, steeling herself as she worked the stubborn buttons through their holes. But what could it possibly matter? After all, she was no longer a blushing schoolgirl. She had been a wife, a mother, a helpless man’s nurse.

“Do you do this to all your prisoners?”

His rough whisper jolted her like a swig of white lightning. Rose gasped as her startled glance met his eyes. Her hand flashed for the pistol. In an instant she had jerked the weapon out of her sash and was aiming it at his chest.

He grinned groggily. “You…won’t need the gun, Mrs. Colby,” he mumbled. “I’m not a man to object if a pretty woman wants to take down my britches.”

“I’m just trying to get you to bed!” Rose snapped, her cheeks flaming as his grin broadened. “But now that you’re awake, you might as well do the job yourself.” She edged backward, brandishing the pistol. “Go on. Get those filthy trousers off. Then climb between the sheets and stay there. If nothing else, I’ll see that you live to hang!”

“I’m touched by your concern.” His expression had hardened again. His right hand fumbled awkwardly—too awkwardly—with the first of four remaining buttons. A spasm of pain rippled across his face as he tried to reach downward with the arm on his wounded side. “Unfortunately,” he muttered through clenched teeth, “I happen to be left-handed.”

“Take all the time you need.” Rose thumbed back the hammer of the gun, ignoring his thinly veiled plea for help. Oh, she knew what he was thinking. Get her to come closer, then overpower her and grab the pistol. But this time she wasn’t falling for his tricks. This time she was the one in charge.

Cursing under his breath, Latigo managed to undo the first button, then the second. On the third, he hesitated. His eyelids drooped, then blinked open as if he were battling waves of unconsciousness. Was it a performance, designed to lure her into lowering her guard?

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But it wouldn’t make any difference if you did get the gun. You’re too weak to go anywhere. You’ve proved that by passing out twice. You need me, Latigo.”

“Need you?” His eyes glinted sardonically. “A minute ago you were threatening to see me hang.”

“Did you kill those two government agents?”

“No.”

“If that’s true, you have nothing to fear from me.” Rose’s grip tightened on the pistol. Her hand was trembling, and she knew that Latigo had noticed.

“Nothing to fear?” His tongue moistened his dry lips. “How do I know there isn’t already a price on my head, and you’re just waiting to collect it? A widow woman, even on a big ranch like this one, could find herself in need of money—”

“Go on,” she interrupted icily. “Get those pants off.”

“Anything to oblige a lady.” A mocking smile flickered across his face. “But I’m warning you, don’t expect to see—oof!” His words ended in a grunt as he tried to brace himself on one elbow and inch his trousers down over his hips with his free hand. He was truly in pain, Rose realized, noticing the ashen ring around his lips as he sank back onto the floor. But she could not let herself feel pity for him. This man was a wild, wounded animal who could be every bit as dangerous as he looked.

“I’m waiting.” She willed herself to keep her gaze impassive, to keep the pistol pointed squarely at his chest.

He lifted his head, his slitted eyes chilling in their contempt. “It seems you have a choice, Mrs. Colby.” He spat out each word as if it were snake venom. “Either you can allow me to stand up and let gravity take its course, or you can trust me enough to get down here and give me a hand.”

Rose hesitated, every instinct screaming flight as the intimacy of the small room closed around her. “Get up, then,” she said. “But no tricks, not if you want to live.”

“You wouldn’t shoot me,” he said. “Hell, you couldn’t shoot anybody—a woman like you, soft, pampered—”

“Don’t bet your life on it!” Rose snapped in sudden fury. “You don’t know me! You don’t know anything about me!”

“And you don’t know much about me, either, lady.” He grimaced, clenching his teeth with the effort of hefting himself to his feet. “If you did, you’d put that big horse pistol away and—damn!” He staggered to his feet, one hand clutching the bedpost for support, the other holding up his unbuttoned pants.

“The trousers,” she said. “Get them off and get into bed before you end up on the floor again.”

“I’d advise you to turn your back. I may not dress as decorously as most men you know, and I wouldn’t want to offend your womanly—”

“Turn my back?” Rose’s sweat-slicked grip tightened on the pistol. She swallowed the dryness in her throat. “I’d just as soon turn my back on a snake!” she said. “Go ahead, I’ve seen a man before—and a better man than you, I’ll wager!”

The whites of his eyes flashed dangerously. Then without another word, he turned his back on her and let his trousers drop to the floor.

Rose stood thunderstruck, unable to avert her eyes from the full sight of him. She had tolerated her husband’s aging physique and grown used to it over the years. She had even come to accept his appearance as an example of the way any man would look without his clothes.

Until now.

Latigo’s naked body was as sleek as a cougar’s, tapering from powerful shoulders to a lean, sinewy waist. His long legs were crowned by high, taut buttocks, and his muscles flowed in feline curves, coiled strength beneath skin that captured the light like molten copper.

Rose’s hand slackened around the pistol. He was magnificent. Even with the ugly, bloodstained bandage marring his shoulder, Latigo, mixed-blood Apache and possible murderer, was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

“If you’re waiting for me to turn around—”

The edge in his voice shocked Rose back to reality. Her breath jerked. Her fingers seized on the pistol just in time to save it from clattering to the floor.

“Get into that bed.” The words emerged as a shaky whisper. “Go on, you arrogant, disrespectful, presumptuous—”

A small but piercing wail from beyond the kitchen ended her tirade. Her baby was awake and crying, and his needs pulled at her instincts with a power no mother could resist.

Latigo’s broad shoulders had tensed at the cry, but he did not turn his head. Rose kept her eyes on him as she backed warily toward the door. “Get into bed and rest,” she ordered. “I’ll be back later with something for you to eat, unless I decide you deserve to starve.”

A rough chuckle—or was it a growl?—rumbled in his throat but that was all. He was still standing next to the bed, his splendid back held rigid in an unspoken statement of disdain as Rose closed the door, slipped the bolt and fled on trembling legs to the sanctuary of her little son.

Latigo heard the bolt click into place. Then, giving in to waves of dizziness, he crumpled into the bed.

Crisp and fragrant, the clean sheets enfolded him like a shroud, their fineness one more reminder that he didn’t belong in such a place. He’d have been better off taking his chances in the desert At least he might have died in peace there, leaving his bones to be bleached by the sun and nosed by passing coyotes. Instead, here he was, caged and cosseted like a house cat, lying behind a bolted door, in a pretty white woman’s house.

Rose. That was the name that panting bull had called her. Rose Colby. She looked like a rose, all right, even smelled like one as she leaned over him, fragrance spilling from between her lovely, milk-swollen breasts. For all his weakened condition, it had been as much as he could do to keep from pulling her down on top of him and burying his face in that warm, satiny cleft.

Damn the woman!

Latigo’s vision swam as he lay on his back and gazed up at the small, barred window. He hated being closed in, where he couldn’t see the sky or feel the wind! He had to get out of here. And once he did, he vowed, he would die rather than let the whites lock him up in their jail.

Half in panic now, he raised his head and struggled to move his legs. They lay like inert slabs, defying all his efforts to rouse them. John Colby’s widow was right, he realized, sinking back onto the pillow in black resignation. He was too weak to go anywhere.

For now, he would bide his time, Latigo resolved. He would submit meekly to Rose Colby’s ministrations. He would allow her to feed him, to nurse his wound and to ravish his senses with her unsettling womanly presence.

But he would not lower his guard for so much as a heartbeat. Any slip—an open door, an unguarded moment—could be his key to freedom, and he would be ready to seize it. Get the gun, steal a horse and head straight for the Mexican border—that’s what he would do at first opportunity.

And heaven help Mrs. John Colby if she tried to stop him.

Chapter Four

Latigo woke to a spill of amber light through the barred window of the tiny room. Sunset. He muttered a bewildered curse. Had he slept for a day? A week? His blurred mind had lost all sense of time which, for him, could make the difference between life and death.

A mélange of mouth-watering smells drifted through the crack beneath the door. Chicken soup, richly laced with garlic and onions. Freshly baked bread. Hot coffee. Latigo’s empty belly growled in ravenous response to the delicious aromas. If the violet-eyed Widow Colby had chosen to torture her prisoner, she could not have devised a more exquisite punishment, unless she were to—

His thoughts scattered as the bolt clicked open on the other side of the door. In a flash he was fully awake, every muscle tense and quivering.

As he struggled to raise his body, the door swung open. Latigo’s breath stopped as he saw Rose Colby standing on the threshold, the light making a halo of the sun-colored hair that she wore in a loose bun.

She hesitated, then stepped into the room. Only then did he notice that she was carrying a tray with a bowl, a spoon and thick, buttered slices of bread on a china plate. Latigo’s vacant stomach emitted another loud rumble, causing her left eyebrow to twitch in wary amusement.

“I, uh, see you’re hungry.” She was wearing a calico apron over a faded chambray gown that narrowed enticingly at her slender waist. She looked young and tender and vulnerable.

“How long have I been asleep?” Latigo eased his painracked body upward as she put the tray down on the nightstand and bent close to adjust the pillow behind him, washing his senses with the subtle aroma of lavender soap. He imagined reaching up and tugging the pins from her hair, letting it fall around his face in a cascade of fragrant, golden silk. He imagined fondling it, smelling it, tasting it.

But those kinds of thoughts were crazy, he reminded himself harshly. Rose Colby was a white woman, pretty, pampered and spoiled. She wouldn’t condescend to spit on a man like him, let alone allow him to touch her. His time would be better spent figuring out what she’d done with the pistol and how he could get his hands on it.

“You’ve been asleep for nearly twelve hours, and I can see it’s done you a world of good,” she said briskly, pulling a chair up to the bed and sitting down. “Are you able to feed yourself?”

“Won’t know till I try.” He inched higher in the bed, the friction of fabric against bare skin reminding him that he was naked beneath the bedclothes. “Give me the tray,” he said. “I’ll manage.”

“In a minute.” She unfolded a linen napkin from the tray and spread it over his lap to protect the bedding from spills.

“You’re being awfully good to me, Mrs. Colby,” he ventured. “Why?”

She glanced up sharply. “Maybe I’m curious. Or maybe I just like a good story, and I do intend to get one, you know.” Her answer was flippant, almost careless, but her trembling hands jiggled the spoon in its bowl as she lifted the tray and set it across his legs. She was still afraid of him, Latigo calculated, even though she was trying her damnedest not to show it. Colby’s widow had courage, he conceded, for a white woman.

Dizzy with hunger, Latigo took the spoon awkwardly in his right hand and dipped it into the soup broth.

“It’s all right,” he muttered, determined that she would not see him spill. “Go about your business. I’ll manage fine.”

She waited in stubborn silence. When she did not leave, he focused his attention on raising the spoon to his mouth. But it was no use: he was as weak as a newborn colt. The soup dribbled from the shaking spoon and splattered back into the bowl.

“Here.” Her warm fingertips brushed his knuckles as she slipped the spoon from his hand. Latigo watched uneasily as she picked up the bowl and raised it close to his face.

“Don’t worry,” she said with an air of crisp bravado. “I’m an old hand at this. I had to feed John this way for four months before he…passed away.”

She dipped into the soup and thrust the first spoonful between Latigo’s parted lips. The delicious warmth trickled down his throat, jolting his deprived system to ravenous hunger. He gulped eagerly, noisily, shamelessly, as fast as she could spoon the precious liquid into his mouth.

She fed him with a practiced efficiency, but he could not help noticing that her hand trembled as she raised the spoon to his lips. Her gaze flickered away at every meeting of their eyes. Was she truly afraid of him or only repelled by his dark Apache features? Latigo could not be sure. He only knew that winning her trust would be like gentling a high-strung mustang mare. He would have to approach her gently and cautiously, and he could make no false or sudden moves that would startle her away.

Meanwhile, there was food and warmth and beauty here, and he could not resist savoring it all. Latigo filled his belly with nourishment and his eyes with the sight of Rose Colby, and little by little, he began to feel like a man again.

Rose put the bowl and spoon down on the tray, shaken by Latigo’s darkly intense gaze. “You can manage the rest,” she said, breaking off a hunk of bread and sopping it in the dregs of the broth. “Here—you’re going to be fine. I can tell you’re already feeling better.”

He accepted the bread in his elegantly long fingers, eating slowly now that the worst of his hunger had been slaked. “I’m obliged to you, Rose Colby,” he said. “And now, if you have any common sense, you’ll fetch my boots and clothes and give me leave to ride out of here.”

“You’re not strong enough yet,” she said. “You wouldn’t last an hour in the saddle.”

“Why should you care? I’ve invaded your home, held you at gunpoint, been as surly as a three-legged coyote with the mange—”

“I care because you saved John—at least that’s what you claim.” Rose caught the dark flash of his eyes. “If you’re telling the truth, I owe you for my son’s life as well as my husband’s.” She exhaled nervously. “I want you to tell me how it happened.”

Latigo had finished his meal. A twinge of pain flickered across his face as he sank back against the pillows. Rose stood up, lifted the tray from his lap and placed it on the nightstand, her breast brushing his shoulder when she leaned over him. Her face felt prickly hot as she lowered herself onto the edge of the chair. “Go on,” she said. “I’m waiting.”

“Do you want the pretty version of the story, or do you want the truth?” His hard eyes glittered with irony. A dark knot of premonition tightened in the pit of Rose’s stomach.

“Tell me the truth,” she said.

“You may not like it.”

“Go on. Tell me how you met John, and how you saved him.”

A cactus wren piped its evening song through the open window. Latigo hesitated, swallowed, then spoke slowly into the silence that followed.

“Your husband’s company had a reputation for fighting Apaches who couldn’t fight back,” he began, his voice as expressionless as book print. “Old ones, young ones, women—it didn’t matter as long as they were Apaches. This time they’d been chasing a bunch of Diablo’s squaws they’d spotted out foraging in the brush. They’d followed the women up a box canyon, bent on Lord knows what—”

“No!” Rose burst out in spite of her resolve to listen. “That can’t be true! John’s militia fought armed Apaches on the warpath! He was a hero. He was even awarded a medal by the territorial governor. I have it upstairs.”

“You wanted the truth.” His eyes had narrowed to piercing slits. “Do you have the courage to hear it?”

Rose stared down at her clenched hands, passionately wishing she had never asked him to tell her this story, wishing she had sent him on his way to take his chances in the desert.

“Go on,” she said, willing her voice to be as emotionless as his.

Latigo exhaled sharply. “One of the men in the company told me what happened. They’d managed to kill one woman and wound her baby when Diablo and his braves started shooting from the rocks above. The women scattered, and the Apaches blocked off the mouth of the canyon with a rockslide they’d rigged. By the time we came along, they had your husband’s company pinned down with rifle fire and were closing in to finish them off.”

Rose listened numbly, her hands clenched in her lap. The story was preposterous, of course, she told herself. John Colby had been a brave and chivalrous man, while this Latigo had shown her no sign of being anything but a lying desperado.

“I was leading a scouting party two hours ahead of the main column,” he continued in the same dispassionate tone. “We heard shots and guessed what had happened. There were only four of us, and we knew there was no time to get help. But one thing was in our favor—I knew the country, and I’d been in that canyon before. There was a way out, a side branch, hidden by rocks. The other scouts set fires to create a diversion while I went in after the trapped men. I had to save them. It was my job.”

“And you led them out, I suppose. You saved John and the whole company all by yourself.” Rose’s pulse hammered as she challenged him. “You’re lying!” she snapped.

“Lying?”

“John would never have pursued a band of helpless women and babies! And your story—it’s too neat, like something out of a dime novel! You didn’t save my husband’s life or anyone else’s! You’re making it all up so I’ll feel obligated to—”

The blaze of cold fire in his eyes shocked her into silence. “Your husband was wounded when a bullet grazed his left thigh,” he said. “I bandaged it myself. The wound wasn’t deep, but it would have left a scar.”

“No, you couldn’t possibly…” Rose remembered the raw, pink groove, newly healed, along John’s upper left leg. She had seen it whiten with time. She had touched it every day as she tended his all-but-lifeless body.

“Listen to me, Rose Colby.” The last rays of the dying sun blazed their reflected fire in his eyes. “I don’t know where you were during the Apache wars, but nothing about that time was noble or heroic. It was dirty and bloody and just plain, damned awful, and each side was as bad as the other.”

“My parents were massacred by Apaches,” Rose whispered, gazing out the window at the bloodred sky. “We were on the way to Prescott, and I’d left our camp to gather some nopales. I came back just in time to see them die. John’s company found me the next day, wandering through the brush, half out of my mind.”

He stared at her as if seeing her for the first time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

“You were part of it, too,” she lashed out at him. “You were with the army, fighting against your own people. If things were as bad as you claim, why didn’t you leave?”

Something hard slipped into place behind his eyes. “Let’s just say that I had nowhere else to go.”

Chilled by the cold finality in his voice, Rose stood up and reached for the tray. “You can rest the night here. I’ll give you breakfast in the morning and enough food and water to get you to the mountains.”

“And a gun. I’ll find some way to pay you for it.”

“You can have some of John’s old clothes,” she continued, ignoring his demand. “They should fit well enough. I had to burn yours, except for the boots—” “You’re not listening to me, Rose.”

Her breath caught at his use of her given name. “No,” she said. “No gun. Supplies are one thing, but what if I’m wrong about you? What if you really murdered those two men? How can I, with any good conscience, give you the means to kill others?

“Anyway, your story doesn’t make sense to me.” Rose paused in the doorway, the tray balanced on her hip. “Why should white men ride onto the Apache reservation and shoot down agents from their own government?”

“Does it make any more sense to you that I would shoot them?” he asked. “I was responsible for their safety! I would have been the first one blamed.”

“Unless you’d somehow managed to be shot along with them.”

“From behind?”

Rose had no answer for that. She set the tray on the kitchen table and turned back toward the door, still hesitant. Lock him in and walk away, her common sense argued. She had already heard enough of this stranger’s talk to shake her world.

“Was there something else you wanted?” he asked.

The edge in his voice unnerved her. “No,” she said. “I only meant to tell you there’s water in that clay pitcher on the dresser, and there’s a necessity under the bed if you need it. Be careful getting up.”

He gazed at her in mocking, slit-eyed silence. Flustered, Rose spun away, swung the door shut and jammed the bolt into its slot. Then she wilted against the wall, eyes closed, heart slamming her ribs.

How could she let the man unsettle her so? Everything he said, everything he did, threw her off balance, causing her to question things she’d always been sure about, leaving her vulnerable, exposed and shaken.

Even now, his image flashed through her mind as she had last seen him—Latigo, half Apache, half devil, sitting up in bed, his beautiful, tawny chest and shoulders naked except for the dressing on his wound, the bedclothes scrunched around his hips—his jet-black eyes seeing her secret thoughts, thoughts no decent woman should be having.

It was as if, suddenly, she no longer knew what she believed, or even who she was.

Her thoughts flew to the baby. She had left him upstairs, fast asleep, less than an hour ago. He could be awake and crying, needing her.

Rose crossed the kitchen to the hallway and raced upstairs, urgently needing the comfort of her child in her arms. Mason was her anchor. He was her link to reality, to John and to her own duty.