Patricia Potter (27 page)

She knew her childhood had been a strange one, and that it had made her see things differently than other people. Her mother, who had desperately wanted a boy so she could name him George for Willow’s father, had died when Willow was born. Willow had grown up without the nurturing of a mother, and she’d grown up quickly. She’d also become playmate to the boys who boarded at the school, and then big sister and finally a substitute mother. She’d played with them, reasoned with them, and taught them, and she’d learned a great deal about people.

She’d learned that giving trust to a boy considered “bad” usually brought rewards. She’d learned that fighting often hid loneliness. She’d learned that nearly everyone wanted love, even when they protested against it. Perhaps those who did were the ones who wanted, and needed, it most of all. And she had, in those years, learned how to breach most defenses.

Time. Patience. Love. They’d worked with Chad, who had trusted no one for years, and Estelle, who had known nothing but abuse, and even Brady.

Jess had had more time to strengthen his defenses, but they were beginning to crumble, one at a time. She thought something quite magnificent would emerge.

Or was it too late? A little voice pierced her optimism. She still knew so little about him. She still didn’t know why he had taken up the gun, or how he felt when he—

But she wouldn’t think about that, not just then.

She scolded herself for daydreaming. One more week, and school would be out for a month for the harvest. She would have time then to spend with Jess, to learn more about him.

Willow took one last look out the window, and her gaze was caught by movement at the corral. She watched as the object of her thoughts vaulted atop his saddleless horse and left the corral, out of her sight. She flung on a nightrobe and nearly ran to the front door, flinging it open just in time to see man and horse become a fast blur. Jess was leaning forward over the horse’s neck, his legs hugging the sides of the horse. They were so together, so in harmony, and they were beautiful to watch. There was an untamed wildness about both of them, an aura of complete freedom as if they were at one with the wind. She felt an ache rise within her. She could never capture the wind, never hold it within her grasp.

He might settle for a day or two, but then freedom would call again.

T
HE FRESH EARLY
morning air brushed Lobo’s face, drying the water from his quick wash. The first touch of the sun felt good and cleansing. He relished the feel of the horse under him, of the understanding that flowed between them. They were two creatures who respected each other and knew each other and responded to each other. He tried to wipe everything else from his mind.

After Newton’s men had left the previous night, Lobo had taken watch on the hill overlooking the ranch until Brady spelled him during the early morning hours. They would do the same that night.

The decision further committed Lobo to the ranch, and again he felt the wrench of his stomach that told him he was getting in far too deep. Yet he didn’t know how to extricate himself, not without leaving everyone on the ranch exposed to the rage of a thoroughly unpredictable Alex Newton.

But he dismissed that for now, his body and mind absorbing the earthy pleasures of a new day, the smell and sound and feel of natural things, uncomplicated, satisfying things.

He raced the pinto until he knew it was tiring, and then he slowed, enjoying the familiar feeling riding without leather separating him from the horse. He almost always used a saddle now because it allowed him to carry necessities.

When he was with the Apache…

There had been few good days then, and those few had been like this one, when he could steal a few hours of freedom, when he could escape suspicious eyes. They had never trusted him, because he had never taken an Apache wife or joined in their ceremonies. But he had proved himself a warrior when at twelve it was kill or be burned.

The old woman had died, the woman who’d owned him. He’d been both glad and sorry. Glad because he hated her. Sorry because he knew what her death meant to him. He was old enough now to be trouble; the work to be extracted from him was no longer worth the trouble of constant guarding. And it had been a long time since this family of Apaches had taken a live captive.

So Dog Boy had done the only thing he’d known to do, challenge the son of the chief. Life was the prize.

The Apaches had laughed. Sano, the son of the chief, was thirteen and a head taller than the boy slave. He’d also already had years of training as a warrior; an Apache boy was instructed in the ways of the warpath almost since infancy.

But Sano accepted. It would be good sport, he said.

His arrogance had been his weakness, and the Dog Boy had learned to detect weaknesses. He had also learned how to use a knife, having prepared countless numbers of hides. And he had stark desperation on his side.

The fight was long. A rope was tied around one wrist of each boy, and both were given knives. Dog Boy was quick; he’d learned to dodge feet and hands, and despite long years of hunger, the wiry body was deceptively strong from hard work.

His disadvantage was size. He knew he couldn’t allow Sano to land a blow or get on top of him. So he dodged in and out, as much as the rope binding them allowed, nicking and cutting his opponent. Sano became careless in rage, lunging and leaving himself open. And then Dog Boy’s knife went into his heart.

There had been silence, a sudden pall, when seconds earlier there had been taunting cries. The chief stared down at his only son, his hand reaching for his own knife, and Dog Boy thought he would die. But then the hand fell and the Apache turned away.

He had become the property of the chief, and his status had changed. No longer did he do women’s work. He helped with the horses, was even trained in using the bow and arrow, though he was never allowed near the few rifles they owned. But he was always watched, guarded, mistrusted, until two years later when some soldiers attacked the camp and he killed several of them. He did it only to save his own life, not because they were the Apache’s enemies, but from then on he climbed another plateau. The Apache band needed every warrior, and now he was trained as one. While still watched and not wholly trusted, he was no longer guarded day and night. He’d killed whites and, by doing that he’d become Apache.

There had been times he could have escaped, but he had no place to go. There was no family. He had no more in common with the soldiers or white settlers than he did with the Apache. Part of him, perhaps, even came to think of himself as Apache. He raided with the others, taking Mexican captives and selling them, and although he never raped a woman, he tested his manhood on a woman captive who seemed to have no objections. She lay quietly under him, and though he felt physical relief, he also knew self-disgust and a terrible emptiness. He never used a captive again.

The fact that he didn’t rape captives or take an Apache for wife set him even further apart from the others. If he hadn’t been so cunning and deadly a fighter, Lobo knew he would have been killed. As it was, he had been challenged to fights to the death by other Apaches. He fought for his pinto, a colt he’d stolen from a ranch, and a woman who’d preferred Lobo over another even though Lobo had no personal interest. Then came that last raid by soldiers. The numbers were overwhelming, the surprise complete.

Lobo was introduced to yet another kind of life, one in which he was again looked upon with distrust and derision and often stark hatred. But he learned not to care about anything or anyone except, perhaps, his pinto.

And he hadn’t. He’d never given so much as a damn about anyone since his brother was left to die alongside an Apache trail. He’d never taken responsibility for anyone. And now he suddenly had. Through some absurd series of events he found himself responsible not only for one other person, but for a passel of children and misfits, not to mention a woman with the bluest eyes he’d ever seen.

He stopped by the river and allowed the pinto to drink. She would be gone from the ranch now, gone to teach school. The thought brought back the old yearning, the hunger to learn, but he could never ask her. That would be the greatest humiliation of all.

Damn. He wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anything, and she might as well be the sun, she was so far out of reach.

W
ORD TRAVELED QUICKLY
in the little town of Newton.

“Did you know…”

“I heard…”

“A gunfighter? At Miss Willow’s?”

“Now she’s gone too far…”

“I can’t believe…”

“But I have it on the best authority.”

“Jest don’t seem right, her being the schoolmarm and all.”

“Naw…it’s jest another rumor.”

“One of Newton’s men told me hisself.”

“Is she crazy? I heard tell he lived with Apaches.”

“More Indian than white’s what I heard.”

“Took on a whole mess of Newton’s men, I hear tell.”

“Why, now, do you s’pose he did that? Miss Willow ain’t got the money to pay
his
kind.”

“Yeah, why?”

“Hmmm.”

A town meeting was called for that night.

W
ILLOW DIDN’T LINGER
after school. Rushes of anticipation assaulted her as the day wore on, and grew more intense toward dismissal time.

When the last child, except the twins, had left, she hurriedly closed the door and started for the buckboard as she cast a hasty, anxious glance toward Sullivan’s office.

He’d said he was coming the previous night, and he hadn’t, which meant he had some kind of emergency. But she knew he wasn’t going to give up. And she didn’t particularly want to argue about Jess in front of the whole town of Newton.

Not, she had assumed quickly enough, that they didn’t already know about her new ranch hand.

Surreptitious glances kept coming her way—at recess, and when parents came to pick up their children. They were there now on the faces of some of the loiterers on the street.

There would, she suspected, be another town meeting.

But at the moment she didn’t care. She’d weathered many of them before, and nothing mattered except the safety of her family and…Jess.

Before she could mount the wagon, a grim-faced Sullivan strode over to her. “Are you all right?”

“Of course,” she replied.

“Mrs. Corbett had a baby yesterday.”

“I suspected as much.” Willow smiled. “Boy or girl?”

He looked at her suspiciously. “A girl.”

“Both of them fine?”

“Yes. But I want to talk to you about—”

“I know,” Willow said, “and I’m not changing my mind.”

“You know the whole town is talking about it.”

“Since when do you care what the whole town talks about?” she said, a bit more snap in her voice than she intended.

“When I agree with it,” he replied stiffly.

“Sullivan,” Willow started carefully, “Jess helped Brady all day yesterday, and some of Newton’s men came last night, obviously intending to burn the barn. He stopped them.”

“Jess?” Sullivan said, his voice rising toward the end of the name. “Jess? His name is Lobo, Willow,
Lobo.”

“Jess is his real name.”

“Jess?” he said again in disbelief.

“Before he was captured by the Apache.”

Sullivan lifted one eyebrow in surprise. “Did he say any more? His last name?”

She shook her head.

“Jess? Well, I’ll be damned.”

Willow couldn’t help the smile of satisfaction on her face. She’d finally disconcerted him.

“Did he say anything else? Like how many men he’d killed?” Sullivan asked in an acid tone.

“He asked me if I wanted to know.”

“And do you?”

“No. I don’t care what he did before.”

Sullivan glared at her. “Don’t you?”

“If you’d been stolen from your family and raised by Apaches, maybe you’d have done some of the same things he’s had to do to survive,” Willow said.

“That doesn’t make them right, Willow, nor does it justify what he does now.”

Willow looked at him steadily. “You usually don’t judge people.”

“I care about you. I care about those kids.”

“And two of them might be dead if he hadn’t saved them.”

He sighed. “I can’t even begin to guess at his motives, Willow, but men like him don’t change. Nor do they live long.”

Willow felt herself stiffening, and she felt again that fear that had been hovering around her since Jess’s revelation about his true identity. She knew Sullivan’s last observation was right, but she defended herself with anger of her own. “And you, Sullivan, are you really living?”

His gray eyes turned dark. “What do you mean?”

“I mean Marisa.”

A muscle twitched in his jaw. “What about Marisa?”

“It’s obvious the way you two feel about each other, but you won’t do anything about it.”

“I won’t saddle her with an invalid.”