“And you fell in love?”
Navarro nodded.
“What happened?”
“We were together for a couple months when her dead husband’s brother, the marshal’s deputy, got wind of who I was. He pulled a gun on me, in a Denver eatery. Cordelia got between us, took a bullet in the neck. She died in my arms.”
Karla ran a slender index finger around the rim of her glass as she studied it. “What a romantic tragedy.”
Navarro lowered his head and ran a rough hand over his damp hair. “Not so romantic. Just a tragedy.”
“And the deputy?”
“Killed him on the spot. It was self-defense, but that doesn’t matter when you kill a lawman. So I ran out. Left her there. Never been back to Colorado.”
“There wasn’t anything you could have done.” He sat stiffly, hands on his thighs, staring at the table. Finally, he grabbed his glass, threw the whiskey back, and stood. “I’ve had a hard day, and I’m goin’ to bed.”
“Oh, please, Tommy. Don’t kick me out. I don’t want to go back to the house tonight. I don’t want to be alone!”
“You can’t stay here.” He picked up his plate and tossed it into the wreck pan on the range.
“I’ll sleep on the floor.”
Navarro turned to her, drawing his mouth wide to speak. She gazed up at him with such heartbreak and beseeching that he let the objection die in his throat.
He sighed. “All right. You can have the cot. I’ll sleep in the hammock.” He pointed an authoritative finger at her. “But you’re out of here at sunrise. This ain’t proper, and if the old man finds out, he’ll likely have me tarred and feathered and run out of the country!”
Tarred and feathered, hell. Men were strung up for lesser offenses than sharing sleeping quarters with young women. He’d get her up at first cock crow, send her back to the house. She’d have calmed down by then.
Later, after he’d been lying in the hammock for an hour, unable to sleep and thinking about Cordelia, he heard a click. He reached for the gun beneath his pillow, but stopped. The click came from the door, which opened slowly. Karla stepped out.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“Can’t sleep.” Before he knew what she was doing, she’d rolled over him and, distributing her weight evenly, snuggled up against his shoulder.
“Hey, what in the hell are you doing?”
“I’m lonely and I want to sleep on your shoulder.”
Navarro didn’t say anything. He lay there awkwardly, wrapping one arm around her shoulders because he didn’t know what else to do with it. His muscles tensed. She didn’t say anything, either, but her chest rose and fell as she breathed. Her shoulders quivered, and he felt a wetness on his chest, where her face lay against it. She sniffed back tears.
“I’m sorry, Karla.”
“I’m going to ride out and find him tomorrow. I’m going to bring him back and I’m going to tell my grandfather that if he doesn’t let us marry, I’m leaving.”
“Where would you go?”
“Anywhere Juan wants to go.”
“Juan’s a vaquero. He rides from job to job, just like the rest of us saddle tramps.”
“He’s not just a saddle tramp. He writes poetry.”
Navarro sighed.
They lay there for a long time. Finally, she quit crying and rested her head against his cheek. He felt the brush of her eyelashes against his face as she blinked. Her breath was a faint rasp through her parted lips. Her breasts pushed against his side. Smelling the lilac water she’d washed with, the faint pumpkin aroma of her hair, he ran his hand down her back, feeling the womanly curve of her.
A discomfiting warmth rose within him.
“I can’t sleep all shut in like this,” he grumbled, dropping his right foot to the floor.
As he slid out from beneath her, she said, “Where you going?”
“Inside. And you’re going home.”
“Tommy . . .”
“You heard me.” His voice was stern. “Git!”
She sat up and looked at him defiantly. “I won’t ever go back there.”
“You don’t have anywhere else to go. Now git!”
She struggled to her feet, wrapped her blanket around her shoulders, and stalked off the porch in a huff. “You’re a bastard, Tommy!”
“Yes, I am.” With that, he went into the cabin and slammed the door behind him.
It took him another hour to fall asleep. He didn’t know how much time had passed before boots thumped on the porch. Someone pounded on the door.
“Tommy!” Dallas Tixier called.
Navarro lifted his head from the pillow, groggily glanced around the shack. Golden light poured through the sashed windows, winking off the bottle and empty glasses on the table. For the first time in years, he’d slept past dawn.
“What is it?” Navarro growled.
“It’s the senorita,” Tixier said. He threw open the door and peered in, his bushy black brows knit beneath the brim of his high-peaked sombrero. “She’s flown the coop.”
Chapter 5
Navarro and five other riders were mounted and waiting before the big house. The sun hadn’t yet climbed above the horizon, and the clear sky above the ranch was lighter than the land. The smell of mesquite smoke still peppered the fresh air.
After Pilar had discovered Karla’s empty bed, she’d awakened the old man. Still in his pajamas and slippers, he’d ordered the hands, just rising in the bunkhouse, to scour the grounds. When they’d found no sign of the girl, and had discovered the Arabian gone, Tixier had fetched Navarro.
The house’s stout oak door opened and Vannorsdell walked out, tucking his shirt into his baggy riding denims. “I can’t believe she’d pull such a stupid stunt,” the old rancher said, as Jorge Amado handed him the reins of a black quarterhorse gelding, saddled and waiting. The rancher grunted and wheezed as he climbed into the saddle. He turned to Navarro, who wore a white cotton shirt with blue pinstripes, suspenders, and bull-hide chaps over blue denims. “Doesn’t look like she slept in her bed at all last night. What in the hell do you think she’s up to?”
“Looks to me like she went after her Don Juan.”
“Do you think she’s really that goddamn crazy in love with that bean eater?”
Navarro shrugged. “You know Karla.”
“If that crazy girl started out when she told Pilar she was going to bed, she’s a good seven, eight hours ahead of us.”
“I tracked her from the corral to where she left the main ranch trail, heading south. With any luck we’ll ride out a few miles and run into her, heading back.”
“And when we do, I’m gonna tan her hide,” Vannorsdell said, gigging the black across the yard and riding abreast of Tom. The other hands fell in behind. The old man grumbled, “Worrying me like this, pulling me away from my work . . . I have a meeting up at the Circle M later this morning.”
When they’d trotted through the main gate, Navarro, the best tracker of the bunch, galloped out ahead of the pack, Vannorsdell staying about twenty yards behind. The stocky old man was an awkward rider. Although he prided himself on his abilities, he rode like he was riding a pinwheeler, as though he were always about to chin the moon, his bolo tie whipping over a shoulder, one arm flopping back like a broken wing. He never had fallen, however—at least, not when Navarro was around. Together they’d ridden every swale and ridge line on the old Dutchman’s sixteen-thousand acres.
The girl’s trail wasn’t hard to trace, following, as it did, the old horse trail leading straight south through a notch in the Alder Bluffs, then angling west along Copper Creek. Navarro rode with his jaws set. Just like a girl to do something this impulsive and downright dangerous.