Wild Burn Read online

  Dedication

  For R.H.

  For N.K.

  For S.W.

  For S.C.

  For G.R.

  For A.M.

  For my editor, Sasha Knight.

  And for my mother.

  Chapter One

  Colorado Territory

  September, 1865

  When Moira Tully woke this morning, the last thing she expected to do before breakfast was stare down the barrel of a stranger’s revolver.

  The pale softness of dawn left a layer of fine mist hanging over the clearing—rather like cold, wet, gray fairy dust. Moments ago, it had been utterly quiet but for a few early-rising birds and the crunch of frost-tipped grass beneath the soles of her boots. Now, though, the silence was deafening.

  She’d forgotten her hat at the schoolhouse Friday afternoon and had spent the whole weekend without it, and she regretted its absence as sunlight began to spear through the tree trunks, making her want to shade her eyes with the flat of her palm. She didn’t dare move, however, stuck under the watchful gaze of his weapon as she was.

  What did one say to a dirty man holding one at gunpoint? She couldn’t offer him money, as she didn’t have any. She could plead for her life, yet begging to be spared didn’t appeal, not after— But that didn’t matter.

  She heard the birds chirp again, tentatively at first but growing more confident with each unwittingly musical phrase loosed from their dainty beaks. Which was when she realized she wasn’t afraid.

  How odd.

  She breathed deep, taking chilled air into her lungs and holding it, as though awaiting the release of benediction. But Moira didn’t require absolution from anyone, not anymore. These mornings in the clearing were as close as she came to spirituality nowadays, and no scruffy, unwashed, mean-eyed criminal was going to steal that peace from her.

  “Hullo,” she said, and smiled at him.

  Beneath the low brim of his dusty black hat, the man blinked. “Ma’am,” he drawled quietly. He didn’t lower the revolver.

  She pursed her lips, wishing she could do something with her heavy, useless arms as they dangled by her sides. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “You Irish?”

  His tone was free of judgment, but the question made her fingers want to curl into the folds of her simple morning dress. The gown was much too lightweight for autumn in the mountains, and the extra fabric hung awkwardly around her legs, as she’d neglected to harness herself into a crinoline before her jaunt to the clearing. Her hands fisted in the faded blue cotton. “I am, yes.”

  “There ain’t no railroad here.” His low voice came out rusty, as though he’d not spoken in a long while.

  She bristled. “No, there isn’t. I’m the only Irish in town,” she bit out.

  “What town?”

  It was her turn to blink. “Red Creek. You’re just outside Red Creek.”

  “Good,” he muttered, nodding. She couldn’t see his eyes under that hat of his, not really, but she had the feeling they were no longer focused on her.

  Clearing her throat, Moira glanced pointedly at his still-raised revolver. “Like I said, is there something I can help you with?” She kept a firearm hanging on a nail next to her bed, and usually simply looking at it made her feel safe from whatever dangers lurked nearby. Clearly, she should start carrying it with her, because the urge to pull a gun on the man in front of her was an angry need echoing just behind the beat of her speeding pulse. What would he do if she forced him to stare down the business end of her gun?

  What would Mother have done, for that matter, if she’d known Moira itched to shoot a man? Specifically, in that central spot between the second and third buttons of his dirt-streaked gray vest.

  Yes, Moira definitely planned to become more familiar with her little Colt after today. They’d be nigh inseparable, as she often wished they’d been five months ago…

  Mentally shaking herself, she risked movement to cross her arms over her chest, daring him to retaliate. A voice in the back of her head—a scared, quaking voice that made the hollows behind her ears tingle uncomfortably—wanted to know where this bravado was coming from, wanted to know why she wasn’t running away, on her knees, or fighting back. Why Moira only stood there, waiting.

  With a smooth, practiced move, the stranger twisted his wrist toward her, and she flinched backward, courage deserting her. But he merely showed her the pistol hadn’t been cocked. He carefully slid it back into the low-riding holster at his hip, which was shielded beneath his long black coat. “No.”

  “What?” She’d lost her train of thought, focusing instead on the relief slamming through her system as the immediate hazard of being shot passed.

  “You asked if you could help me with anything. The answer’s no.”

  His rough voice pinged along her nerve endings, rubbing her as raw as if she’d scraped bare skin against tree bark. “Then Red Creek is your destination?” she asked hesitantly.

  “For now.”

  Just what this mining settlement needed—another lawbreaker stumbling in from whatever state had had enough of his shenanigans. No true gentleman would pull a gun, primed or not, on a woman. Which made this man, the one cloaked in the shadow of the trees while sunlight beat into her stinging eyes, trouble walking.

  Before she could deliver a snappish retort on welcoming him to their small, problem-plagued community, he melted silently into the surrounding woods, gone as instantly as he’d appeared moments earlier. A shuddering breath escaped her, wracking her body until she bent at the waist to prop her hands on her knees. Thank goodness she’d forgone a corset this morning, in addition to her other stiff undergarments, or she’d likely have fainted dead away on the damp ground.

  So much for not being afraid. She huffed out a harsh laugh, her head hanging between shoulders caught somewhere between ironlike tension and total liquidity. All right. Now she knew: Moira did not enjoy having a gun pointed at her head. She could add it to the ever-lengthening list of life experiences she’d once never thought to have.

  Her hands were clammy and cold where she gripped her knees, and she stared down at the sodden hem of her dress. Her peaceful morning routine, where she’d stroll in a wide circle around the edge of the clearing as the sun broke over the tree line and turned the mountain mist into glittering, minuscule diamonds, was as ruined as her plain gown. She still had time to go home, bathe and transform herself from frowning, introspective Moira Tully into a perfectly coiffed schoolmarm—the former Sister Verity of Our Lady of the Bleeding Heart in Boston, Massachusetts.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, not for the first time wondering if she mightn’t have been better off staying with Mother and the other nuns. Even if she no longer had an ounce of faith living inside her.

  The sound of birds taking wing en masse had her straightening suddenly, her head whipping in the opposite direction to stare across the clearing just as a shot rang out from the tree line. A high-pitched whine whooshed past her left ear, a burning heat blossoming in its wake. Her vision blurred as she let her body follow her head. “What—?” She lifted a hand to the shell of her ear and hissed in pain when her fingertips touched on something warm and wet.

  Blood.

  Her ear throbbed as she clapped a palm over it, whirling to face the trees…only to find herself nose-to-bewhiskered-chin with the trigger-happy stranger. Big hands settled heavily on her shoulders, steadying her, but the moment he touched her she froze. Her spine stiffened, her lungs ceased to fill and the ringing in her injured ear increased tenfold. Her eyes, wide with shock, drank in the unrelenting panels of black and gray covering his broad chest and the smooth, tanned skin of his corded neck. The thick scruff of his beard started at his gorge and disguised the line of his jaw and ang
les of his cheeks. A few tiny flecks of white marred bristles so dark a brown as to be nearly black, and then her gaze was drawn uncontrollably upward.

  Sun-darkened skin stretched taut over high cheekbones, a straight nose. Deep-set eyes the color of Chinese jade glared menacingly down at her from under angry brows, still shadowed beneath the wide brim of his dusty hat, and weary lines fanned out from the corners of those striking, black-lashed eyes. Dark, lank hair—hinting at wavy thickness would it have been clean—straggled past his collar.

  She couldn’t determine his age or whether he was handsome, but his scent pervaded her nostrils, a mix of stale sweat and well-worn leather, of man and horse and hard-packed earth. It terrified her even as it relaxed her in his hold.

  His mouth was moving, she realized. And because she found herself staring at that firm lower lip, visible above the scruff on his chin, she yanked herself away from him and pressed a hand to her stinging ear once more. “You shot me.”

  “I—”

  But she was too furious to let him speak. “You bloody shot me, you bastard!” Red seeped through her fingers and down her forearm, staining the dull blue of her sleeve, ratcheting her temper a notch higher. “What the hell d’you think you were doin’?”

  That arresting mouth of his twitched. “Got your Irish up, I see.”

  She narrowed her gaze on him and fought to control the rough edges of her accent. “Think you’re clever, do you?”

  “No, ma’am.” He tugged absently on the brim of his hat.

  “Why did you shoot me?” Blood continued to drip down the side of her neck.

  “I didn’t shoot you.”

  “My left ear begs to differ.”

  His head dipped slightly in acknowledgment. “I didn’t mean to shoot you. It was the Indian across the clearing I aimed at.”

  Moira shied away from him, dread coiling low in her stomach. “No, you didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.” She ignored the growing numbness in her ear as she stumbled through the short grasses of the clearing. The tribe of Cheyenne that had recently settled outside Red Creek was located just beyond that stand of trees. She often saw women and children, with their beautiful blue-black braids and warm dark eyes, wending through the sturdy tree trunks in the early dawn hours, and if that criminal shot one of them…

  She broke into a run.

  Though her skirts nearly felled her, she made it to the tree line. “Hullo? Is anyone there?” She wove through the trees, studying the ground for footprints or blood. Or a body. “Is someone hurt? Hullo? Hullo!”

  Strong fingers wrapped around her elbow, stopping her search before she could delve deeper into the ever-brightening woods. “Stupid woman,” he whispered in her uninjured ear. “Don’t you know any better than to run toward a scalper?”

  “But there’s a tribe here.”

  “I know.”

  “They’re peaceful!” No matter how hard she yanked, he didn’t release her.

  Instead, he banded a muscled arm around her waist, the front of his rangy body lightly aligning with her backside. “How do you know?”

  She bit her lower lip, her temples beginning to pound as the ache in her ear increased, and this new throbbing had nothing to do with having a man so dangerously, terrifyingly close to her person. Nothing. “There’s children in the encampment. And women. They’re…they’re Cheyenne.”

  He stiffened. “My point exactly.”

  Again, she tried to extricate herself from his hold, even as she looked around the forest with fresh eyes. Maybe everything she thought about the tribe was wrong. She’d only recently arrived to this vast wilderness, after all, and she knew only what she had witnessed thus far. There had been no violence—not by the “wild” Indians outside Red Creek, nor during her stagecoach ride from the train station in Iowa, no matter the dire warnings she’d heard about the bloodthirsty natives who preyed on white settlers.

  But this stranger’s lip-curling distaste had to be ignored. He was a filthy gunslinger who pulled his weapon on a defenseless woman, and a man such as that wouldn’t bat an eye at shooting an Indian child. “You’re wrong about this tribe. And if you hurt one of them, so help me—”

  “You’ll what?” His mouth brushed the sensitive skin at the curve of her jaw. An accident. What else could it be but an accident, brought on by enforced proximity? Fear clogging her throat, she resumed her struggle.

  He released her, and she whirled on him, taking in the permanent furrow between his brows and dark smudges of fatigue beneath his pale green eyes. “Who are you?” she whispered.

  His lips formed a pinched line, his scowl deepening. “My name is—”

  That was when they heard the moan.

  Chapter Two

  The pained moan merely made Delaney Crawford’s bad morning that much worse. It sounded off to his right, exactly where the scalper had been standing when Del did his job and put a round in that Indian’s copper hide.

  The sun had only been up an hour, and already he’d gotten to work. Wouldn’t the sheriff of Red Creek be pleased.

  Snatching the percussion revolver from its holster, he let the smooth grip heat in his palm, its weight as familiar to him as the hat on his head, and stalked silently toward noises of what he hoped signaled encroaching death. The brave had crawled behind an overgrown bramble bush, his head lolling against a tree trunk as he pressed one hand to the oozing hole Del’s gunshot had left in his shoulder.

  Del stood over him and cocked his pistol. “Not quite dead,” he said in the Cheyenne’s native tongue.

  The man inhaled, obviously in pain, and glared up at him. “Just…speak English…if you plan…to kill me,” he growled between panting breaths. “I do not…need to hear you…butchering my language too.”

  The precision with which the scalper spoke English, complete with sarcastic inflection, had Del pausing. And that pause was just long enough for the redhead to come up behind him and gasp in horror.

  The foolish woman was going to get herself killed. “Stay back.”

  “You stay back,” she spat as she shoved Del aside, barely avoiding getting shot again when her shoulder bumped his gun hand with his finger curled around the tempting trigger. She knelt at the Indian’s side. “Mr. White Horse, are you all right?”

  “You know him?” Torn between keeping the Remington locked on his enemy and uneasily sliding it back into his hip holster, Del eyed the top of her head as he might a battle-ready rattlesnake. He rarely miscalculated, but… “How?”

  “He’s my neighbor.” The woman didn’t deign to look at him as she reached beneath her skirts to tear free part of her muslin shift, wadding up the clean fabric and pressing it determinedly against the brave’s shoulder. “Mr. White Horse? It’s Moira Tully.”

  Moira Tully. Every syllable of her name was as Irish as her freckles. Those freckles made Del…uncomfortable, and Del was a man well used to discomfort.

  He’d had his head down, gazing tiredly at the undisturbed brush covering the forest floor, when first he’d heard her footsteps in the clearing. She had been trudging a slow path along the line where tree met grass, not five feet away, but her presence had startled him. Startled him so much that adrenaline and fatigue collided inside his skull and had him pulling his Remington on a lone woman.

  A man didn’t live through an entire war by thinking first and drawing later.

  With his gun trained on the smooth, pale skin of her forehead, Del had been unable to do anything other than stare at her. Her face was the most lovely shape, round with an angular jaw and sharp chin. Her Irish blood sang loud and clear before she’d even opened her wide, pink mouth—the rich auburn hair and cornflower-blue eyes gave her away more than any rolling lilt ever could.

  Not to mention the freckles.

  Oh, the freckles. As though God had taken a handful of ground cinnamon into His palm and blown fine flecks of the powdery substance all over her pretty features. From her hairline to her delicate throat and disappearing into the wilting linen c
ollar of her ill-fitting dress, there were freckles.

  Her freckles made his mouth water.

  He’d felt an unnatural level of relief when he had stepped back into the moss-covered oaks, but instinct reared its ugly head once more when the savage had appeared in the stand of trees. As the Indian raised his hand, Del straightened his gun arm, aiming in the space of a single breath.

  Then the damn woman had stood up. And Del shot her.

  Nicked her, actually, just along the creamy curve of cartilage exposed by her upswept hair—though the amount of blood seeping from the wound concerned him. But instead of acting solicitous, he’d argued with her and allowed her to dash hell-for-leather across the clearing toward the Cheyenne war dog he’d so expertly felled.

  He studied the slim line of her back now as she bent over her Indian neighbor. The fabric molded so naturally to the shape of her spine. No corset. No concealing layers. Just the supple muscle and smooth freckled skin he felt certain lay hidden beneath her dress.

  Del scrubbed a hand over his suddenly dry mouth, holstering his weapon. Never had it been more obvious that his days as a Southern gentleman were long gone, and his manners with them. The remembered feel of her lithe body pressed snugly against his, when he’d snatched her to him… It burned him, and he was brutally aware of two things.

  First, he hadn’t bedded a woman in over a year.

  Second, if he’d ever had any chance of bedding this woman, that chance shriveled up and died the second he’d shot White Horse.

  “Miss Tully?” the Indian grunted. “Are you…are you bleeding?”

  The back of Del’s neck heated. Here lay a Cheyenne male, found on the outskirts of Red Creek, and five minutes ago, he would have blithely assumed his next hunting job had simply…started early. Except this man wasn’t a scalper.

  His miscalculation began to blister, reviving battlefield memories he’d fought to suppress since last November, and he itched for action. “What can I do?” The insides of his eyelids felt gritty. He needed sleep, and he needed a hot meal, and most desperately of all he needed to not feel as though he’d blundered unforgivably.