his useless physical complaints aside, Latigo continued his furtive exploration of the kitchen. He glimpsed an open door, leading, he surmised, to another room in the house. To the right of the doorway— Latigo’s breath stopped.
On a bench beside the door, bathed in a shaft of morning sunlight, a young white woman sat nursing a baby.
Thunderstruck, he studied her through the screen of his lashes. Propriety, drilled into him by years in the white man’s world, warned Latigo that he had no business casting eyes on such a woman. But his gaze was drawn to her.
The top of her robe had fallen to one side, baring the slope of her shoulder and the ripe, satiny curve of her breast, concealed only where the baby’s round head lay dark against her creamy skin. Tiny sucking sounds drifted to Latigo’s ears, triggering an unexpected tightness around his heart, an unspoken hunger for the warmth and tenderness he had lost as a child and never known as a man.
Not that the sight was new to him. Chiricahua mothers nursed their children openly in the rancherias. But something about this woman, her tenderness, her vulnerability, struck a quivering chord of response. She reminded Latigo of a painting he had seen once in an old Spanish church, a careworn Madonna cradling her heavenly infant, her expression so poignant and knowing that it haunted him to this day.
In happier times John Colby’s widow would have been a radiant beauty, he mused, his eyes tracing one sunlit curl where it tumbled like a swirl of honey over her bare shoulder. But the desert was not kind to pretty, young white women. Hot sun and parched air burned the life out of them in a few short years. Hard work and childbearing usually finished the job by the time they were thirty. This one had already begun to fade. Still, there was something about her, a soft resilience like the luster of tumbled river stone.
But he had more urgent things to do than gape at a woman, Latigo told himself harshly. Right now, his most pressing concern was getting untied and finding a way out of this place.
He forced his gaze lower. That was when he noticed the heavy pistol lying on the bench beside her, its barrel glinting in a finger of sunlight. He went cold inside as the truth sank home.
This woman was both his rescuer and his jailer. She had cleaned and dressed his wound, then bound him hand and foot and kept guard with a pistol to make sure he didn’t escape.
Latigo cursed his own rotten judgment. He had made his first mistake in seeking refuge here, gambling his safety on the word and reputation of a white man he had not seen in years. And he had made his second mistake in trusting Colby’s fragile-looking young widow.
She had saved his life. But what good would that do him if she’d sent for the law—or worse, if she were associated with the bastards who had murdered the two government agents? Either way, he would be a dead man.
Latigo’s gaze lingered for an instant on the woman’s wistful Madonna face. Maybe she hadn’t betrayed him after all, his instincts whispered. Who knows what he might have said or done in the midst of his pain and exhaustion. Maybe he had frightened her, and she had tied him up to protect herself.
Maybe, but that was a chance he could not afford to take. Somehow he would have to win her confidence and persuade her to untie him—that, or untie himself. Once he got loose, it would be easy enough to get his hands on the gun and make a fast getaway.
Knowing there was little time to lose, he closed his eyes, moved his head slightly, and feigned a semiconscious moan.
Rose had been drowsing, lulled by her own weariness and the soothing tug of the tiny mouth on her nipple. At the low sound from the man on the floor, her eyes shot open. She jerked bolt upright, her frayed nerves screaming.
The Apache, Latigo, was stirring beneath the blanket. His long legs strained at the thick wool yarn her shaking hands had wrapped around his ankles. His eyelids opened, then swiftly closed.
Only then did Rose realize her breast was exposed. Hot faced, she flung a corner of the baby’s blanket over her bare shoulder.
The stranger’s eyes opened again. This time his feral gaze swept her defiantly from head to foot. Feeling as vulnerable as a nesting dove, Rose gulped back her fear and forced herself to speak calmly.
“I’ve sent a man into Tucson for the sheriff,” she lied. “Until he gets here, I suggest you keep still unless, of course, you want to open up that bullet hole and risk bleeding to death. I won’t bind it for you a second time.”
His obsidian eyes glinted like a captive hawk’s. “Did anybody see to my horse?” he asked, as if his own condition were of no importance.
“Your horse is in the corral with the others. There’s plenty of hay and water there.” That much, at least, was true. She had unsaddled the poor, spent animal herself and turned it in with her spare cow ponies. She remembered fingering the long, coiled whip as she carried the saddle to a dark corner of the barn. She remembered the worn boot, still tangled in the stirrup leathers.
“You were lucky.” Rose spoke boldly, even though the mere act of touching an Apache had all but drained her of courage. His bleeding body, so close, so real, had rekindled her nightmare in all its horror. Even now, it was the most she could do to meet his fierce black eyes without cringing. “From the looks of your shoulder, the bullet passed through without hitting anything vital,” she said. “But you’ve lost a dangerous amount of blood. That’s why you must keep absolutely still.”
“Is that why you’ve trussed me up like a bald-faced calf at branding time?” His sharp-edged words challenged her in English that was as fluent as her own. This Latigo, whoever he might be, was clearly no ordinary reservation Apache.
“I don’t intend to hurt you,” he said, his gaze flickering toward the pistol on the bench. “Just cut me loose, give me some food and water and a fresh horse, and I’ll be on my way. That’s the least you owe me.”
“Owe you?” Rose clutched her son beneath the blanket, remembering, now, what he had said about collecting on an old debt. “Your business was with my husband, not with me,” she declared coldly. “I’d never set eyes on you before last night. What could I possibly owe you?”
His black eyes narrowed. “The last ten years of your husband’s life.”
His words struck her with the impact of a slap. Rose stared at the man, rifling her memories for some spark of recognition and finding none.
“John never mentioned his life being saved by anyone, let alone an Apache,” she retorted, flinging the words with a bravado she did not feel.
He flashed her a contemptuous look. “For whatever it’s worth to you, Mrs. Colby, only half of me has the honor of being Apache. My mother was a Chiricahua, my father a Spanish Basque. But I’m telling the truth about your husband. I saved his life ten years ago when I led his company out of an ambush in the Dragoon Mountains.”
“The Dragoons?” Rose’s sleep-fogged mind searched what she knew of the past. When Cochise’s bloody uprising had flared in the mid 1860s, John Colby had helped organize a volunteer militia out of Tucson. As its captain, he had bravely led more than a score of forays against the Apaches. On one excursion along the Gila, he’d come across a seventeen-year-old girl wandering the desert in a state of shock, her family murdered and their wagon burned. A widower nearing fifty, he had taken the dazed young Rose Thomas home to his ranch and, a few weeks later, made her his bride. Within days of their marriage, he was riding patrol
