«Damn it, Willow, I said I would be back. Don’t you believe me?»
Startled, she opened her eyes. «Of course I believe you.»
«Then what’s wrong?»
«Nothing,» she said, smiling almost sadly. «Not the way you mean. It’s just that…» Her voice faded. «Suddenly I realized that I love this clean, wild land, even if it isn’t very safe.» She smiled with lips that wanted to tremble. «The idea takes a little getting used to.»
Caleb studied Willow with a sudden, fierce intensity, but said only, «If you wanted to be safe, you should have stayed home.»
«Yes,» she whispered. «I know. Don’t worry, Caleb. Whatever happens is on my head, not yours. I might not have known what I was coming to, but I knew what I was leaving behind.»
Caleb waited.
Willow said nothing more. She simply looked out over the land and measured the bittersweet pleasure of having realized part of her dream of finding a new home, only to discover that the land might not be possible for a woman living alone. It wasn’t like the more gently made country of her childhood. Yet the gentle land had been ravaged beyond her ability to bring it back.
«What are you thinking?» Caleb asked quietly.
«I was tired of the wounded, worn land,» Willow said slowly. «I wanted to see the Mississippi rolling broad-shouldered down to an unknown ocean. I wanted to see a treeless plain stretching from horizon to horizon with buffalo a great brown river winding through shoulder-high grass. I wanted to see the Rockies thrown like a magnificent stone gauntlet across the plains.»
Willow’s voice faded as she thought of other things she had wanted, to see a face that was kin to her or at least not enemy, to see her favorite brother, to laugh with him, to remember a time when she wasn’t alone. She wanted…She shook her head slowly, for she wanted things that had no words, simply a longing as deep as her soul and as endless as night.
Slowly, Willow let out her breath and accepted that, whatever happened, she was more alive here than she would have been in West Virginia. Nothing had ever called to her in quite the way the mountain landscape did, except the man who rode beside her. Like the mountain, Caleb was hard, unexpected, often baffling. And like the mountains, being with him offered moments of warmth and wild beauty. She turned and smiled gently at him.
«Go do what you must,» Willow said softly. «I’m all right now.»
Caleb hesitated before he pulled a big pocket watch from his pants and handed it to Willow. «Give me fifteen minutes head start. Then come on at a smart trot.»
Willow’s fingers tightened around the watch. The metal was smooth, burnished, and radiated the heat of Caleb’s body into her cold hand. Memories exploded in her, memories of being kissed, of his beard brushing against her sensitive skin, of his powerful body molded to hers, of his hand between her legs, shocking and caressing her in the same searing instant. Sensations rippled through her, making her tremble.
To have come so close with both the land and the man, and then to know how easily both could be lost…Willow bit her lip and bowed her head.
«Don’t worry,» Caleb said, moved despite himself by Willow’s fear and her fight against giving in to it. «I won’t be far off. If you hear gunfire, go to ground and wait for me to find you.»
«What if — what if you don’t?»
«I will. I didn’t live this long to be killed by some no-account, drunkenComanchero.»
Caleb tugged his hat down and lifted the reins. His big horse moved off at a canter, leaving Willow alone. Motionless, she watched while Caleb cast for sign along the left side of the clearing, working back and forth until he vanished in a depression in the wide, gently rolling park. He reappeared a few minutes later, only to drop from sight once more.
When the fifteen minutes were up, Willow drew the shotgun from its scabbard, laid the weapon across her lap, and started down thelefthand side of the basin at a hard trot. The horses strung out behind her, prodded by Ishmael to keep the pace.
It was two hours before Caleb rejoined Willow and rode by her side through the grass at the edge of the forest. The land was still open, still spacious, a wide, wide river of grass flowing between lofty dams of stone.
«See anything?» she asked.
«Tracks,» he said succinctly. «Four horses. One shod. They’re either hunting deer, hunting us, or hunting someone else.»
«How can you tell?»
«They were doing the same thing I was doing — casting around for sign.»
«Where are they now?»
«They split two and two. One set of tracks cut to the left behind us. The other cut off to the right along a branch of the river. There’s a good pass at the head of that branch. If it weren’t for those two gunnies, I’d have brought us in that way. It’s closer to where we’re going. As it is, we’ll go over the divide in a few days.»
«The Great Divide?» Willow asked breathlessly.
Caleb smiled at her excitement. «Comancheroscrawling all over and you hardly turn a hair, but you get excited over one more mountain pass.»
«All my life the rivers have gone to the Atlantic Ocean. To see water that’s going to the Pacific…» Willow laughed with delight. «I know it’s foolish, but I can’t help it. I grew up with letters from my brothers telling me about China, where a whole city is made of dhows tied together in the harbor, and the Sandwich Isles, where the waves are bigger than the barn before the rebels burned it, and Australia, where there’s an ocean reef bigger than the Thirteen Colonies put together, and all I ever saw was West Virginia sunrises, chickens scratching in the kitchen garden, and a haze over the hills.»
Caleb grinned, intrigued by Willow’s excitement. «Sounds like wanderlust runs in your family. No wonder you had the gumption to come looking for your fancy man when he wrote for you.»
«I’d have come anyway,» Willow admitted. «I couldn’t bear home anymore. There was nothing left but memories of a better time.»
Willow fell silent after that. Caleb didn’t try to lure her into more conversation. It was safer that way, both for his alertness and for keeping the distance he knew was necessary between himself and Reno’s woman. It was far too easy to like Willow, to enjoy her laughter and her silences, to remember what it had been like to feel her body soften and turn to warm, sweet honey in his arms.
Fancy woman. That’s all she is. Sweet Jesus, why can’t I remember that when I look at her? Why is she under my skin and in my blood?
The answer was as simple and as indelible as the instant his hand had slid between thin layers of cotton and felt the sultry woman heat of her licking over his fingertips. He had never had a woman want him that much, that fast, that hot. The memory of it hardened him in a bittersweet rush, leaving him achingly aware of just how much a man he could be with a woman like Willow Moran.
Caleb wrenched his attention from what he couldn’t have to the huge mountain park spreading away on three sides. From time to time he slowed the pace to a walk and checked their position against the peaks. Once he took a compass, a pencil, and his father’s frayed, leatherbound journal from his saddlebags. After a few minutes he drew out his own journal. He compared the compass readings with the lines he had written three years ago, compared his drawing with the peaks to the left, and nodded. Although he had not ridden this side of the peaks before, he knew where he was.
«Where are we headed?» Willow asked, coming alongside.
It was the first word either of them had spoken in several hours. Neither one had found the silence uncomfortable. They were accustomed to their own company.