Apache Fire. Elizabeth Lane

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.

      Rose stole inside the bedroom to find her son still fast asleep beneath the soft lambs-wool blanket she had crocheted before he was born. Tenderly she bent over the cradle, her gaze caressing every delicate curve of his tiny face. She ached to gather him up, to hold him close and lose herself in the bliss of cradling his precious little body. But Mason needed his sleep, she reminded herself. He would be cross if she woke him too soon.

      As she glanced up, her eyes caught the last glimmer of sunset on John’s medal where it hung on its blue ribbon above her son’s cradle.

       Pride…Honor…Courage…Duty.

      The words mocked her as the image of John and his cohorts, riding down on a band of helpless squaws and papooses, flashed through her mind. She slumped over the cradle, her whole body quivering. If Latigo was to be believed—and the evidence of the scar was too strong to deny—John’s militia had gunned down Apache women and children with no more mercy than the Apaches had shown her own family.

      She had always believed John to be brave and honorable, and she had vowed to raise Mason by his father’s code. Now that code had crumbled away to reveal something she could not even pretend to understand.

      Rose struggled to rationalize what she had heard. How could she judge what John had done? Terrible things had happened on both sides of the conflict Even Latigo had said so. John and his fellow volunteers had done no more than repay the Apaches in kind, following the old biblical law of an eye for an eye. Was that so wrong, in view of what Apaches had done to her own family?

      Torn, Rose gazed down at her sleeping son—John’s son, too, she reminded herself. In a few years Mason would be old enough to ask questions about his father. How could she tell Mason the truth about his father when she knew so little of it herself? The quest for answers would be long and painful, Rose knew. And her search would have to begin now, before the trail grew too cold to follow.

      She had not known many members of John’s militia. Of those she had met, most of the older ones had died, and the younger ones had moved on. There was Bayard, but— no, she could not go to Bayard! Not now!

      Rose sighed raggedly as she realized her one sure source of knowledge lay downstairs, locked in the little room off the kitchen. For all his rough manners, Latigo was the one man she could count on to give her honest answers. He might hurt her. He might outrage and offend her, but he would not lie.

      Tomorrow he would be gone. She needed to talk with him now, tonight, while she still had the chance.

      Crossing the room, she raised the lid of the chest that stood against the far wall. Inside, John’s clothes lay clean and neatly folded. John was gone. Why had she kept them?

      Maybe this was why.

      Piling everything on the bed, she selected a cotton union suit, a soft gray flannel shirt, some woolen socks, and a pair of new Levi’s to give to Latigo.

      The thought of opening the door and seeing him there in the narrow bed, his black Apache eyes as fierce and alert as a hawk’s, sent a strange hot chill through her body. The man was everything she hated and feared. All the same, she burned to know the secrets that lay behind that bitter face, behind the anger, behind the sadness that seemed to steal over him at unguarded moments.

      Hurrying across the room, she discovered Mason awake and cooing. He smiled up at her as she lifted him.

      Then, she kissed one rosebud ear, clutching the fresh clothes under one arm and cradling her baby with the other, Rose made her way down the darkening stairs. This time, she vowed, she would ask all the difficult questions, and this time she would not turn away from the answers.

      

      Latigo’s pulse leaped at the sound of Rose’s footsteps. Strange, he mused, how he had already come to recognize the light, graceful cadence of her walk, the agitated rush of her breathing, the husky little catch in her voice when she spoke. Even blindfolded, he would know this woman from all others.

      Sitting up