Rafe knew every minute of travel stole a moment of his daughter’s life. With the dust-brown warriors riding a grudge against every white man, there was no ridge that he could cross without a careful study of the country around it. Much as it galled him, he had to take time to cover his own trail when it was possible. Already he had doubled back, and changed directions twice.
It nagged at him that the Apache knew his name. Rafe had had little trouble with the Indians. But that Apache wanted him dead.
A slow man to rile, Rafe barely contained his fury. Beth was the one who had paid. He rode on to the town of Hillsboro, for he had heard of a doctor there. He made a wide swing around the town to avoid crossing Percha Creek.
Any stranger riding into town in his condition was sure to draw attention. A man dragging a travois behind his horse drew the curious out to the boardwalks lining the main street of Hillsboro.
Almost every stone-and-adobe building was shaded by giant cottonwood trees. He searched the shadows as he rode, especially the alleys between the bank and hotel, cafe and saddlery, each one between the stores and saloons.
It was nothing he had not done before, but now he was doubly wary.
He filed away the fact that the lone man sitting in a chair tipped back against the outer wall of the saloon paid more than passing attention to his arrival. News could not have traveled this fast of the attack on the army detail, or of the fact that out of the forty men he rode into that canyon with, only five had ridden out.
It set in his mind that he was not to be one of the survivors. There was nothing he could do about it now. His child’s life was what mattered, not learning who wanted him dead.
He drew rein before the hitching rail of J. P. Crabtree’s Dry Goods Emporium.
“Where can I find the doctor?” Rafe demanded as he stepped inside.
P. J. Crabtree, standing behind the counter, eyed the savage-looking stranger striding toward him. The man’s bloodstained clothing told a tale, and P.J. had never been one to pass up an opportunity to have the who, what and wherefore on a stranger.
“You’ve ridden a piece.”
“Gavilan Canyon,” Rafe returned. “Army detail I was with came under attack.”
“Apaches. Damn that Victorio. He’s plumb hell.”
“Ain’t my worry. I need the doctor.”
“Last I know, Doc Sieber’s drinking his lunch over at the Paradise.”
“Drunk?”
“Usually is these days. Lost his wife two months ago. She caught someone stealing his supplies and was shot Doc, he was up in the hills patching up some miners. Had a cave-in. But say, fella, your wounds don’t look like they need doctorin’. I get a real fine liniment here that’ll cure most of what ails you. Make it myself.”
Rafe shot the balding man a cold, forbidding look. “I don’t need him for myself.” He rapidly sorted his options, glancing back toward the open door. “Where is the nearest sober doctor?”
“Tall order. Mighty tall order. Sober, now? Might be one southwest, at Silver City. Or over east, at Caballo. Hear they had some trouble there. Both a far piece to ride.”
P.J. leaned out over the counter, but couldn’t see more than a fine-looking horse hitched at his rail.
“What the devil do you folks do when the doctor’s drunk and you need help? My little girl was wounded during the fighting.”
“Hell now! Why didn’t you say that right off? You go on up to the merry widows. They’ll fix her up, if she ain’t dying.”
“She’s not going to die.” Rafe stared at the paunchy man, whose faded red shirt was littered with food stains, and met his pale blue eyes with the force of his own. He knew saying the words did not make them true. But he had to believe them. Yet the thought of taking his daughter to a brothel—for what else could it be?—set ill with him.
“You sure these widows have some medical skill? She’s hurt bad.”
“You ask for Mary. She’ll know what to do. She nursed men after the mine cave-in at Kingston. Helped more than a few since she come to town. Nursed her husband, too, I hear. ‘Course, he died, but folks said she took mighty good care of him while he lived. That was near to a year—”
“Where?” Rafe heard the edge of desperation in his voice. He didn’t like the sound of this, but what choice did he have? Beth couldn’t travel another ten miles, much less thirty or more miles, until he found a competent doctor. If he was not terror-stricken at the thought of losing his child, he might have found some humor in a brothel filled with merry widows.
“Ride out south of Main Street. Take the road to Lake Valley. Can’t miss the place. Sets back a way from the road. Farmhouse got a fresh coat of whitewash this summer. If you reach the Orchards’ stage corral, you’ve gone too far.” But this last was said to the man’s back.
“Don’t blame you none, fella. Ain’t too many men walk away from Apaches and live to tell about it. But a girl…” P.J. shook his head. He slipped his thumbs under his suspenders. Folks would be coming by any minute. He would save his opinions until then.
Rafe hurried outside to his daughter. He crouched near the hitching rail, brushing aside the hair clinging to Beth’s forehead. Her hair was as dark as his, and just as curly.
She lay as he had placed her on the quickly rigged travois. It was the best transport he could manage for her. Their packhorses had disappeared along with the Apaches. Even the shavetail captain had remarked about the Indians’ disappearance once Beth fell.
Rafe didn’t care what had made them leave. He was thankful they had gone.
Beth’s eyes remained closed. Her breathing ragged. It tore at his heart to see her so lifeless. He wiped at the streaks left by dirt and her tears. One hand he closed into a fist, the other trembled, touching his child’s cheek.
He lifted the blanket. Pain twisted inside him.
Why? Dear God, why?
Beth lay on her side, the thin legs beneath her torn skirt drawn tight to her belly. Her small hands gripped the edge of the blanket, slung and tied between tent poles, that formed the bed of the travois.
Blood seeped from the bandage he had wrapped around her shoulder. The broken arrow shaft protruding from her small body was an obscene sight.
If the arrow had pierced his own flesh, Rafe wouldn’t have thought twice about yanking it free. He had done so a time or two.
But this was his Beth…too precious, too small, and too newly reclaimed for him to cause her more pain.
“It’s a wild land. Savage. Not fit for a decent woman to live in. I’ll not raise my child here. She’ll die. We will all die for your stubborn, arrogant insistence we make our home in these forbidding mountains.”
Rafe swallowed bile and guilt along with the haunting words. He slowly eased the blanket up to cover Beth.
“You won’t die, baby. I won’t lose you a second time.”
With a graceful movement, he rose and mounted. Despite the driving need to hurry, he kept Rebel to a walk so that Beth wouldn’t suffer any more jostling.
He rode with the thong off his gun, his hat pulled low, always aware of the curious gazes of the silent townspeople who watched his slow progression south.
If this widow saved his daughter’s life, he’d stake her to a dowry that would make an eastern banker take notice and forget her past. He would never miss the money. Hell, he thought, he would give it all away to see Beth a pink-cheeked, laughing child again.
Stranger things had happened in the territory than finding help at a brothel.
Strange things happened in big cities, too. Like a man believing that a lady’s declarations of love and marriage vows meant more than whispered lies.
Valerie…
Rafe bolted the door shut on his past.
Beth was his future. She was all that mattered. All he would ever allow himself to care about.
The gray skies of morning had not delivered their promise of rain, but kept the day steeped in twilight.
Mary sat in a wing chair in the front parlor. She leaned closer to the side table scattered with sewing notions, where the lamp’s glow aided her in snipping the thread above the knot.
Setting aside her embroidery scissors, she held up the completed doll. Dark brown satin stitched eyes framed by a feathering of lashes stared back at her. Red berry juice stained the muslin cheeks, and the wide smile invited one in return.
Flipping over the tiny pink-checked calico skirt, Mary touched the lace collar below a face meant to convey tiredness, with half-moon stitches to indicate closed eyes. The mouth drooped a bit. Did she look sad?
Pounding on the front door startled her. She darted a look around the room, touching on the sparse furnishings of the formal parlor suite.
Sarah and Catherine were away from the house, repairing the back pasture fence. They would never hear her if she called out.
Mary did not understand where the sudden fear came from.
The repeated battering on the door held an urgent summons she could not continue to ignore. Unaware she still held the doll, Mary went out into the hall.
Standing off to the side of the door, beneath the front porch’s overhang, Rafe cradled Beth’s too-warm body against his shoulder. His shirt and vest were stiff with caked sweat, blood and dust. He caught himself swaying.
The house beneath the giant cottonwoods was solidly built and freshly whitewashed, with Apache plume and columbine planted on either side of the steps. Off to the side, behind the house, stood a barn and corral. Four horses moved restively within the pole enclosure. A steel-dust Appaloosa nickered to his horse. It was a fine-looking animal, but something about it nagged at him.
When the door finally opened, his fist, holding his rifle, froze in midair.
Rafe, momentarily taken aback, wondered if he did have the right place.
His first thought was that the lovely woman looked more like a schoolmarm than a fancy woman. His second, that she had the saddest eyes he had ever seen. Eyes the color of new spring grass should sparkle.
Hers held a wealth of sorrow and shadows.
Rafe swept a quick look that raked her from head to toe. The faded gown, the patched apron, the neatly braided hair, added up to cleanliness and pride that glowed like a beacon from her wary stance.
He knew the exact moment she spotted the wound on his arm. The wariness remained, but now was tempered with compassion.
“They say in town I’d find help for my daughter with the widows.”
Mary looked from the upraised rifle to the hand gun. She clung to the slightly opened door when she looked at his face. Beneath the brim of his hat, the dark slash of his brows was a warning, like the guarded look in his eyes.
“Help? What kind of help?”
He stepped to the side, revealing the blanket-clad bundle he held.
Mary’s gaze shifted from the strong, clean-cut features of his bronzed face to the edge of the blanket, where the child’s head was exposed.
“Bring her in,” Mary ordered. She pressed against the door to allow space for the tall, gun-toting stranger to pass inside.
Broad shoulders tapered to a narrow waist and lean hips beneath a sun-faded blue shirt and a hide vest. Dusty black denim clung to his legs. The boots had seen use. The gun he wore was no more obvious than the guns of other men, but it seemed to her that it belonged where it was.
He would, Mary decided, look undressed without it. She stared at the knife sheath at the small of his back. Both he and the child had the weary, dust-laden look of heavy travel. His ripped, bloodstained clothing told of fighting.
Mary wasted no time asking foolish questions.
There were men who lived by violence, and those who had no choice. But where was his wife, that he had come seeking help for his child?
“Take her upstairs. First door on your left,” she directed. Mary closed the door, with the strangest feeling that she had made some irrevocable decision by letting him inside.
Not him. The child.
Shaken to find that he had turned around and was keeping a bold stare upon her, Mary did not look at him, but only on the child.
“Bullet or knife, or is she ill?”
Rafe hit the first stair. Beth stirred and moaned. The blanket fell back, exposing the broken arrow shaft.
“Dear God.” Mary lifted her hands to her mouth. She suddenly realized that she still held the doll.
Beth could not lift her head, but her eyes were open. For a moment, she stared at the woman. Her gaze lowered to the doll.
“Muffy.” The word was a ragged murmur, as if it had sapped all her strength to speak.
“Ah, Beth, that’s—” Rafe’s husky voice broke. He relived those horror-filled moments when he had been helpless to save his child. His gaze found that of the woman’s over his daughter’s head. “She lost her doll in the fighting.”
Rafe had told Beth the same, unwilling to explain his reluctance to touch the blood-soaked cloth, no matter how much the doll meant to her. He never wanted violence to touch his child. He couldn’t stop the thought that Valerie had cursed him with her last, water-filled breath.
“Name your price. I’ll buy it.”
Mary had to look at him then. Pulled forward by an irrepressible need to be near the little girl, she listened to him repeat his blunt offer.
“I’ll buy the doll, you, and anything I want or need.” They were not the words he spoke, but the ones Mary heard in her mind, and saw the truth of it in his eyes.
“The doll is not for sale.”
His mouth tightened, disturbing the full, sensuous line of his lips.
“I said to name your price. Don’t let appearances fool you.”
“I never have.” A lie, Mary, such a lie. You did once. “I shall make a gift of the doll to your daughter. That is, if your wife won’t object.”
“She’s dead.”
Cold. Flat, hard words holding hidden meanings. Mary shivered. A winter’s storm would be warmer than this man’s eyes.
“Poor sweeting,” she whispered to the child. “If you want her to be your Muffy, that is who she’ll be.”
“Won’t your daughter object?” Rafe asked.
A blunt question that demanded a blunt answer.
“I have no daughter. I have no child.” Mary’s admission was made in the same flat, cold voice that he had used.
She stood on tiptoe to tuck the soft-bodied doll between the child’s arm and the man’s back. Her fingers trailed marks in the dust on his leather vest. Mary stepped back. She was uncomfortable with his position, towering over her. But she took with her the scents of sage and cedar, leather, sweat, horse and blood.
“Hurry,” she whispered, alarmed by the child’s glazed eyes, flushed cheeks.
But she didn’t turn away. Two matching pairs of gray eyes stared at her. Stared and pinned her in place.
One pair, beneath dark, slashing brows, held a hunter’s wariness. The other pair, even fever-glazed with pain, held a calm far too deep for the child’s years.
Yet it was a calm that steadied her.
“Go on,” Mary urged. “I’ll be there soon.”
“Those four horses in the corral. Who do they belong to?”
“To us. The widows.” Later she would wonder what possessed her to add, “The merry widows of Sierra County.”