Fire and Rain

8

"This land wasn’t settled as fast as the flatlands of Texas or the High Plains of Wyoming," Luke said. "Too much of the Four Corners country stands on end. Hard on men, harder on cattle and hell on women. The Indians were no bargain, either. The Navaho were peaceable enough, but roving Ute bands kept things real lively for whites and other Indians. It wasn’t until Black Hawk was finished off after the Civil War that whites came here to stay, and most of them weren’t what you would call fine, upstanding citizens."

Carla smiled over the rim of the coffee mug. "Didn’t the Outlaw Trail run through here?"

"Close enough," admitted Luke. "One of my great-great-greats supposedly was riding through at a hell of a pace, saw the land, liked it and came back as soon as he shook off the folks who were following him."

"Folks? As in posse?"

"Depends on who you talk to. If you talk to the MacKenzie wing of the family, they say Case MacKenzie was just trying to return that gold to its rightful owner. If you talk to other folks, they swear that Case MacKenzie was the one who cleaned out a bank and hit the trail with sixty pounds of gold in his saddlebags, a full-blooded Virginia horse under him and a posse red hot on his trail."

"Who do you believe?"

"Well, I leaned toward the outlaw theory until I showed your brother the MacKenzie gold."

"You still have it?"

"About a handful. Enough that Cash could see right away that it wasn’t placer gold. He went back and checked old newspapers. Seems the bank had been taking deposits from the Hard Luck, Shin Splint and Moss Creek strikes. Placer gold, all of it. Smoothed off by water into nuggets or ground down to dust in granite streambeds. The gold my ancestor carried was sharp, bright, running through quartz like sunlight through springwater. Your brother took one look at it and started hunting for Mad Jack’s mine."

"Cash never told me about that."

"I asked him not to tell anyone, even you. Last thing I need is a bunch of weekend warriors digging holes in my land."

"You’re serious, aren’t you? The gold you have really came from Mad Jack’s mythical mine?"

"The mine might or might not be myth," Luke said dryly. "The gold was real, and so was old Mad Jack Turner."

"What makes Cash think the gold came from your ranch?"

"The gold that was passed down through the family looks a lot like the gold from other mines in the area – same proportion of tin or silver or lead or copper or whatever. And then there’s our family history backing up the assay. Case had a brother who married a girl he’d found running wild in mustang country. She was Mad Jack’s friend. The country she ran in was just south of here. Since Mad Jack went everywhere on foot, it stands to reason that his mine is somewhere nearby. At least, that’s what Cash figured seven years ago. He’s been hunting that mine ever since, every chance he gets."

Luke leaned forward and took the coffee mug from Carla’s fingers. He told himself that he hadn’t meant to brush his hand over hers as he freed the mug, but he didn’t believe it. He also told himself that he couldn’t taste her on the mug’s thick rim, and he didn’t believe that, either. He took a sip, looked at her and smiled a slow, lazy kind of smile.

"You’ve been snitching chocolate chips from the cookie batter, haven’t you?"

Carla made a startled sound, then flushed, realizing that somehow she had left a taste of chocolate on the mug.

"I’m sorry. I’ll get my own cup."

"No," Luke said softly, holding Carla’s chair in place with his boot, making it impossible for her to push away from the table and stand. "I like the taste of… chocolate."

He watched the sudden intake of her bream and the leap of the pulse in her neck. When he looked at her mouth, the pink lips were slightly parted, surprise or invitation or both. Her eyes were wide and her pupils had dilated with sudden sensual awareness.

Luke drank, watching her over the rim, putting his mouth where hers had been and savoring the coffee all the more because of it. When he put the mug back in her fingers, he turned it so that when she lifted the mug to drink, her mouth would touch the same part of the rim his had.

"Drink," Luke said softly, "and I’ll pour some more."

Unable to look away from him, Carla brought the mug to her mouth. When the warm rim brushed her lips it was as though Luke had kissed her. Carla’s fingers trembled suddenly, forcing her to hold the mug with both hands as she sipped. The betraying tremor didn’t escape the tawny eyes that were watching her so intently. When she lowered the mug and licked her lips, she heard the soft, tearing sound of Luke’s quickly drawn breath. He took the mug from her again, poured coffee, sipped and then returned the mug to her.

"Case MacKenzie liked more than the land around here. He found a girl whose daddy hadn’t been fast enough with a gun or lucky enough with a miner’s pick. Marian Turner had inherited water rights to Echo Canyon Creek, Wild Horse Springs and Ten Sentinels Seep, and mineral rights to a lot more country. She also had every outlaw in the whole damned territory camped on her doorstep."

Carla closed her eyes and relaxed slowly as she listened to Luke’s deep voice talk about people who had lived more than a century ago, people to whom the Four Corners country was a landscape both intimately encountered and nearly unknown, a wild place where white history was nonexistent and Indian history was so old that most of it had been long forgotten.

"I’ve seen pictures of Marian," Luke said. "I know why the outlaws were circling around howling at the moon. She was all woman. But she had more than a good body and a pretty face. She had the kind of guts that make a man want to catch moonlight and bring it to her in his cupped hands like water, just to see her smile."

Luke sipped coffee while Carla watched, her breath held, tasting in her mind the coffee that was sliding over his tongue, wishing she could be that close to him just once before she died. Watching her, sensing what she was thinking, Luke handed the mug back to her and continued speaking.

"Marian held on to the land and played outlaws off against one another like a nineteenth-century Queen Elizabeth, letting no man get the upper hand in her life. For two years the outlaws fought for her favors – and made sure that no man got close to her without being killed – and then her worst fears came true. An outlaw who was better with a gun than any of the others rode into her valley. The other outlaws couldn’t take the man head-on and he was too quick and too wary to take by ambush."

"What happened?"

"Marian was lucky. The man was Case Mac-Kenzie."

"The one with the saddlebags full of gold?"

"The same." Luke smiled. "He didn’t plan to get married. He didn’t even plan to fall in love. Yet before long he was writing notes to himself, talking about hair that was the color of dark mountain honey and sunlight all mixed together." Tawny, intent eyes moved over Carla’s hair. "Like your hair. Your eyes are like Marian’s too, clear and direct. And your mouth is like hers. The kind of mouth that makes a man want…"

Luke let his voice die away. He took the mug and sipped again, forcing himself not to say any more. The hint of chocolate left by Carla was sweeter than any kiss he had ever tasted.

"Maybe you’ve got Turner blood in you, sunshine. The more I look at you, the more you remind me of Marian." Luke sighed and rubbed his neck with his right hand, cursing the luck that had him living with a woman he wanted and must not take. "Marian was the woman Case had been looking for in more ways than one. He had been trying to find Mad Jack Turner’s son, to give him his share of his father’s gold. Well, it was too late for Johnny Turner, but not for his daughter, Mariah. The gold was just what she needed to improve the Rocking M’s beef stock, hire honest hands and make the place a real ranch instead of an outlaw roost."

Luke laughed softly, remembering his father and grandfather telling the same story to him years ago. "And while Marian was at it, she improved the human stock, too. She had eight children by the man no one could kill, the husband she called her ‘beloved outlaw.’ One of the kids was Matthew Case MacKenzie, my grandfather’s father. Then came Lucas Tyrell MacKenzie, then my father, Samuel Matthew MacKenzie, and then me, Lucas Case MacKenzie. And the Rocking M came with the MacKenzie name, passed on to whichever son had the sand to make a go of ranching in this country."

Carla looked at Luke’s face, burned by wind and sun, dark from days without shaving, marked by fine lines radiating out from the corners of his eyes, lines left by a lifetime of looking into long distances and sunlight undimmed by city smoke. In his faded blue chambray shirt, worn jeans and scarred cowboy boots, Luke could have easily stepped out of the pages of his own family history.

"I’ll bet you look like him," Carla said softly.

"My father?"

"No. The beloved outlaw. Case."

Something in Carla’s voice made desire leap fiercely within Luke, but it was unlike any desire he had ever known. It was not only her sweet body and soft mouth he wanted; he also felt an almost overpowering need to hold her and be held by her in return, to hear her whisper that he was her beloved outlaw, the one man whom she had been born to love.

The one man she must not love, for he could not give her the life she deserved.

"I envy Marian," Carla continued slowly. "She gave her outlaw everything a woman wants to give her man, and in doing so she became a part of the land every bit as much as the ancient ruins or the Indians who drew on Picture Cliff and then disappeared. Everyone always talks of the West as though it only belonged to cowboys and Indians and outlaws. It belonged to the women, too. In their own way, they fought just as fiercely for the land as any man ever did. I would like to have been a part of that."

"Don’t kid yourself, schoolgirl," Luke said sardonically. "No matter how they start out, women end up hating this land, and with good reason. The country grinds them up like they were corn rubbed between two rocks."

"It didn’t grind up Marian Turner MacKenzie."

Luke shrugged and drank coffee. "She was one in a million. I’ve never envied any man anything, but I envy Case MacKenzie Marian’s love. He found a woman with enough sheer grit to take on this brutal, beautiful land and never cry for mama or silk sheets or the company of other women. Hell, I take it back – Marian was one in ten million."

"A lot of women lived in the West," Carla said evenly. "More than a fifth of the homestead claims were taken out by women who were alone."

Luke’s eyebrows came up. "I didn’t know that."

"Of course not. Men write history."

He smiled slightly, a flash of white against the dark beard stubble. Then the smile faded and he pinned Carla with his eyes. There was no desire in his glance now, no fire, nothing but the cold sheen of hammered metal.

"Case’s son wasn’t lucky. Matthew MacKenzie married a Denver girl. She was the youngest of a big family and she spent the first ten years of the marriage having babies and crying herself sick for mama. Two of her kids survived. By the time they were in their teens, she was back in Denver."

Luke took a sip of coffee and rotated the mug absently on the tabletop. Carla watched, afraid to speak, sensing that he was trying to tell her something but he didn’t quite know how to go about it "Divorce was out of the question in those days. The two of them simply lived separately – he was on the ranch, she in the city. The boy, Lucas Tyrell MacKenzie, grew up and inherited the Rocking M," Luke continued. "He was my grandfather. He married the daughter of a local rancher. She had three kids and was pregnant with a fourth when her horse threw her. By the time he got her to a doctor, she and the baby were both dead. Eight years later my grandfather married again. Grandmother Alice hated the Rocking M. As soon as my father was old enough to run the place, my grandparents moved to Boulder."

Carla listened without moving, hearing echoes of old anger and fresh despair in Luke’s voice; and worst of all, the silent, unflinching monotone of a man who knew he could not have what he most wanted in life.

"Dad and his two brothers lived on the ranch. One after another they went to Korea. One after another they came home, married to women they had met, where they took their military training."

Luke lifted the coffee mug again, realized it was empty and set it aside. He didn’t need it The rest of the MacKenzie story wouldn’t take long to tell.

"It was a disaster," he said calmly. "It had been hard enough to find a woman who would tolerate life on an isolated cattle ranch even in horse-and-buggy days. In the days of suburbia and flower children and moon shots, it was impossible. One of my uncles moved off the ranch and into town; his wife quit drinking and he started up. My other uncle refused to move to town. His wife made his life living hell. My two cousins and I used to sleep in the barn to get away from the arguments. One night my aunt couldn’t take it anymore. My uncle had hidden the car keys, so she set out on foot for town. It was February. She didn’t make it."

Luke’s lips twisted down in a hard curve. "In any case, she got her wish. She never saw the sun set behind the Fire Mountains again."

A chill moved over Carla’s skin. She had heard enough bits and pieces about Luke’s past to guess what was coming next. "Luke, you don’t have to tell – "

"No," he interrupted, watching Carla with bleak yellow eyes. "I’m almost done. My mother hated the Rocking M from the moment she set foot on it But she loved my father. She tried to make a go of it She simply wasn’t tough enough. At first we didn’t even have a phone for her to talk to her family or friends. No women lived nearby. Nothing but kids and the kind of work that has broken stronger women than my mother ever was, even on her best day."

"One night the wind started screaming around the peaks and she started screaming right along with it A week later her parents came for her. They took her, my sister and my cousins – both girls – and they went back east, saying the Rocking M wasn’t a fit place for females. I never saw my sister again. She was seven. All I have of her is some old pictures and the doll I was mending for her. When they took her away I was out chasing strays. I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye. Afterward Dad set out to drink himself to death. He was a big man. It took him years, but he finally made it."

"What about your mother?" Carla asked unhappily.

"I hear she remarried. I never saw her again."

Carla looked into Luke’s bleak amber eyes and felt her own heart turn over with a need to hold him, comfort him, give him some warmth to offset his cold memories.

"Luke," she whispered.

Without thinking Carla pushed back from the table and went to Luke, taking his face in her hands, feeling the beard-roughened warmth of his cheeks against her palms. He sat motionless, but his eyes blazed within his silence. He made no effort either to pursue or to withdraw from her touch.

"Luke, I…"

Carla’s voice died because she didn’t know what to say.

"Luke," Carla breathed, bending down to his mouth, almost touching it with her own, trembling.

She had little experience to guide her, only her own need to know the heat and textures and taste of this one man. She could feel the rush of his breath over her lips, smell the coffee he had recently drunk, sense the warmth that waited for her finally within her reach. With aching slowness she lowered her head until her mouth brushed over his. She repeated the caress again, another brushing motion, and then again and again, and each time she lingered longer, pressed against his mouth a bit more, until finally she could feel the hardness of his teeth behind the warm resilience of his lips.

It was good, so very good, but it wasn’t enough. Carla remembered how it had been to taste Luke. Hot, wildly exciting, transforming her in the few seconds before the kiss had become too adult, too hard, demanding more of her than she had dreamed at eighteen; but she had dreamed many, many times since then, and running through her dreams like streamers of fire had been the memory of his taste, the electric intimacy of his tongue caressing her own, the hard length of his body imprinted on her own softness.

Remembering how it had been three years ago, Carla slowly opened her mouth until she could touch Luke’s lips with just the tip of her tongue. She felt the shock wave of sensation that went through him at the caress, making his powerful body tremble. A small whimper escaped from the back of her throat when she tried to breathe and found she couldn’t; she was held in the vise of the sensual instant, wholly focused on the sensations spreading from the tip of her tongue throughout her body.

The sound of surprise and discovery that Carla made sent another shock wave moving through Luke, shaking him.

"Sunshine," he whispered, "oh, baby, don’t…"

He had no breath to finish, for she had taken it from him with another gliding caress of her tongue.

The sound he made then was not unlike hers when she discovered she couldn’t breathe. She trembled and moved her mouth again, instinctively fitting it more closely to his, touching his lips with her tongue, finding warmth, seeking the greater warmth she knew lay within.

Luke tried not to lift his arms, tried not to close them around Carla, tried not to turn and ease his legs between hers, tried not to pull her down until the soft weight of her was astride his thighs. But it happened anyway, the catching and the holding, the turning and the pulling down. It all happened in sweet, slow motion despite his desperate reluctance to allow any part of it to happen at all. His body simply ignored the commands of his mind, for the shy gliding of her tongue had taken away his ability to remember yesterday and foresee tomorrow.

There was enough self-control in Luke not to frighten Carla as he had three years ago, but not enough to turn her away as he knew he must. Like a mountain lying in wait for dawn, poised in the instants between darkness and light, Luke let Carla come to him – first the faint hint of warmth, then the delicate pressure of sunshine sliding down his body to rest in his lap, sending heat radiating through him. He whispered her name again, a word more felt than heard, for it was breathed from his mouth into hers.

The piercing sweetness of hearing him say her name was greater than anything Carla had dreamed, making her shiver and cry out, a cry that went no farther than the dark warmth of Luke’s mouth. Moments later he felt the gentle scalding of her tears against his lips and was racked by emotion himself. To be wanted like that was more than he had believed possible, even in his hottest dreams.

Trembling, pressing closer and closer to the heat and power of Luke’s body, Carla touched his tongue with her own, wanting the taste of him to rill her mouth as it had once before. She felt the sudden, fierce clenching of his thighs as she settled more fully onto his lap, pressing lightly against him with her breasts and hips and belly. And still the kiss stayed gentle, almost fragile, balanced on the blazing edge of fire.

She wanted to tell him that it was all right, that this time she wouldn’t turn and run if he kissed her back, kissed her hard, kissed her as though he were dying of thirst and she was a clear spring for his taking. But she said nothing, for in order to speak she would have had to end the kiss…and that she could not do. She had dreamed of this too long, too completely, dreaming all the way down to her soul.

So Carla kissed Luke as she wanted to be kissed, tasting him deeply, feeling the sweet abrasion of beard stubble at the edges of his lips and beneath her palms, pressing closely, sinking into him, trembling, feeling him tremble in return. His mouth opened as he both allowed her greater freedom and took her own mouth in return. His tongue slid between her teeth, tasted her in wild silence, found every hidden softness of her mouth and then slowly, slowly began an intimate rhythm of penetration and retreat.

The languid stroking was repeated by his big hands smoothing up and down her back, her legs, easing her closer, shifting her hips with gentle pressures, lifting her body into more perfect balance with his; and all the while he continued the complete seduction of her mouth, making it wholly his. Her tongue moved in rhythm with his, she tasted of him, her breath tore as his did, and the small sounds of passion he drew from the back of her throat were the essence of his own desire.

Luke’s hands clenched and his short nails raked with sensuous precision down Carla’s spine. He felt the breaking of her breath, the wild shudder of her body, the involuntary arching of her hips into his. He tried to bite back a cry of pleasure-pain as she rocked softly against his aroused flesh, but a groan escaped his control; and she drank the passionate sound as he had drunk her own small cries.

The warmth of Luke’s hands followed the slow unbuttoning of Carla’s blouse, and as each button came undone his teeth sank gently into her tongue, distracting her. She would have let him undress her anyway, distraction or no, for her skin was on fire and her clothes were stifling her and she wanted to be as naked as her tongue sweetly tangling with his.

Luke had just enough self-control left to know if he unhooked Carla’s bra, he wouldn’t stop undressing her until she was wholly nude, her body open to him, and he was naked within her. With hands that shook, he pushed aside the soft folds of cotton blouse and smoothed his palms over her breasts once, lightly.

He might as well have taken a whip of fire to her. She shivered, transfixed, and her nipples hardened to his soft touch.

Knowing he shouldn’t, helpless to prevent himself, Luke slid a long finger beneath each bra strap and slowly caressed her the hollow of Carla’s collarbone to the warm slope of her breasts. He hesitated, groaned almost soundlessly and eased his fingers farther down, beneath the warm lace, stroking slowly, savoring the rise of warm, firm flesh, the satin areola, the velvet of her nipples. Sweetly, in the same rhythm as his tongue mating with hers, he flicked back and forth over the tight peaks beneath the lace until they were as hard as the male flesh thrusting hungrily between his thighs.

A soft, ragged moan was torn from Carla’s lips, a sound Luke took into his own mouth, devouring it as he wanted to devour her. For long, rasping seconds he plucked her velvet nipples until she quivered wildly and her hips rocked in silent pleading against his hard flesh. He freed one hand and let it slide over her belly, tracing the zipper of her jeans without opening it, sliding down and down until he could feel her humid heat resting in the palm of his hand. He moved slowly, rocking with her, wanting her until it was like dying not to take her.

With a sound of anguish Luke ended the kiss, freeing his mouth without freeing Carla’s body from his caressing hands. She trembled violently, breathing as raggedly as he was, her eyes dark with the first passion she had ever known.

"I want you," Luke said harshly, flexing his hand into Carla’s secret warmth, shuddering when she moaned. "But that’s all it will ever be," he continued through clenched teeth, understanding finally the dimensions of his own personal hell. "Wanting. No rings and vows, no babies and color snapshots and scrapbooks to put in with the old albums. No happily ever after. I’ll grind no modern woman into bits on the Rocking M. I’ll leave no more children to be raised without mothers. The MacKenzie line will end with me."

Shocked, trembling, trying not to cry, Carla felt Luke’s pain more deeply than her own.

"But I want you to know this," he continued, his voice savage, his eyes blazing with all he would never know, never do, never be. "No matter who you marry or how many lovers you take, no matter how long you live, no man will ever want you the way I do."

With a swift, powerful movement Luke stood, lifting Carla and setting her aside in the same motion.

"Stay away from me, sunshine. If you come to me again like this I’m afraid I won’t have the strength to say no. Then I would take you and hate you and myself and the ranch that’s as much a part of me as my soul."