Wild Burn

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 angles 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.