Free Fire and Rain by Elizabeth Lowell Page B

my own had been jerked out from under my feet."
     Luke frowned, remembering the unhappy, fragile fourteen-year-old whose eyes had held more darkness than light. Not for the first time, he cursed the fate that took from a girl her mother and her father in one single instant along an icy mountain road.
     "Cash gave you the world," Luke said quietly. "I just sort of came along for the ride."
     Carla shook her head slowly but said nothing. She had already embarrassed herself once telling Luke of her love for him; there was no need to repeat the painful lesson. She had been only fourteen when she had looked into his tawny eyes and had seen her future.
     It had taken her seven years to realize that she hadn't seen his future, as well.
     "Sit down and have some coffee," Luke said. "You look tired."
     Carla hesitated, then smiled. "All right. I'd like that. I'll get a mug."
     "We can share mine," he said carelessly. "I'll even put up with cream and sugar, if you like."
     "No need. I taught myself to like coffee black." What Carla didn't say was that she had learned to like black coffee because that was the way Luke drank it. Even after the disaster three years before, she had sat in her college apartment sipping the bitter brew and pretending Luke was sitting across from her, drinking coffee and talking about the Rocking M, the mountains and the men, the cottonwood-lined washes and stands of piñon and juniper, and the sleek, stubborn cattle.
     When Carla put her hand on the back of a chair that was several seats away from Luke's, he stood and pulled out the chair next to his. After only an instant of hesitation, she went and sat in the chair he had chosen for her.
     "Thank you," she said in a low voice.
     Behind Carla, Luke's nostrils flared as he once again drank in the scent of her, flowers and warmth and elemental promises she shouldn't keep. Not with him.
     Yet he wanted her the way he wanted life itself, and he had no more anger with which to keep her at bay. He had only the truth, more bitter than the blackest coffee. With a downward curl to his mouth, he poured more of the black brew into his mug and handed it to her.
     "Settle in, sunshine. I think it's time you learned the history of the Rocking M."
    ~8~
    "This land wasn't settled as fast as the flatlands of Texas or the High Plains of Wyoming," Luke said. "Too much of the Four Corners country stands on end. Hard on men, harder on cattle and hell on women. The Indians were no bargain, either. The Navaho were peaceable enough, but roving Ute bands kept things real lively for whites and other Indians. It wasn't until Black Hawk was finished off after the Civil War that whites came here to stay, and most of them weren't what you would call fine, upstanding citizens."
     Carla smiled over the rim of the coffee mug. "Didn't the Outlaw Trail run through here?"
    "Close enough," admitted Luke. "One of my great-great-greats supposedly was riding through at a hell of a pace, saw the land, liked it and came back as soon as he shook off the folks who were following him."
     "Folks? As in posse?"
     "Depends on who you talk to. If you talk to the MacKenzie wing of the family, they say Case MacKenzie was just trying to return that gold to its rightful owner. If you talk to other folks, they swear that Case MacKenzie was the one who cleaned out a bank and hit the trail with sixty pounds of gold in his saddlebags, a full-blooded Virginia horse under him and a posse red hot on his trail.
     "Who do you believe?"
     "Well, I leaned toward the outlaw theory until I showed your brother the MacKenzie gold."
     "You still have it?"
     "About a handful. Enough that Cash could see right away that it wasn't placer gold. He went back and checked old newspapers. Seems the bank had been taking deposits from the Hard Luck, Shin Splint and Moss Creek strikes. Placer gold, all of it. Smoothed off by water into nuggets or ground down to dust in granite streambeds. The gold my ancestor carried