Wild Fire (Wild State) (4 page)

She glanced up at her father, but said nothing. Rafferty placed a comforting hand on her upper back, and she leaned into him.
 

Tear tracks on her face
. Moving slowly so as not to startle her, Del scratched a finger under the cat’s chin and was rewarded with an immediate, and loud, purr. His smile widened. “What about your kitty, does she have a name?”

“
He
,” the girl corrected immediately. “His name is Augustus.”

“That’s a big name.”

Light brown eyes narrowed on him. “He’s a big cat.”

Del chuckled, charmed by her. “That he is.” After donning his hat once more, he stepped away from the wagon to assess the train of people, animals, and possessions that trailed behind. “How many are there?”

Rafferty glanced over his shoulder. “To be honest, I don’t know. We all met on the road. Penny”—he indicated his daughter with a nod—“and I live thirteen or so miles south of here, fairly isolated. They’re not our neighbors, but my guess is twenty, twenty-five.”

Even the twenty was more spare beds than were available in Red Creek. From the looks of it, none of these people intended to return to their homes. They’d packed up everything they could, refugees from nature’s fury. “I hate to ask, but how long y’all fixin’ to stay?” It was a factor in determining where to place them—if they should stay, or if he should send them on to Denver.
 

Rafferty’s jaw clenched beneath dark stubble and his eyes, the same golden brown as Penny’s, glinted in the hot summer sun. “I buried my wife on my land this spring, Sheriff. You can bet your ass I’m going back to it.”

Making a split-second decision, Del pointed toward the small cabins in the distance, opposite the direction from which the wagons had entered town. It was in one of those cabins that he’d made love to Moira for the first time, he remembered with a pang in his chest.
 

Ice. Just be ice
.
 

“There’s a clearing beyond those cabins, just up the hill and through the woods. It’s narrow and rocky, but your wheels should be fine.” He looked directly at Rafferty. “We have a peaceful tribe of Cheyenne living near there. That gonna be a problem for anyone?”

Rafferty shook his head. “Not me. And, given all we’ve been through the past couple days, I don’t see it being a problem for anyone else, either.”
 

“Good. That tribe is under my protection.” He glanced again toward the assembled wagons. “Any trouble from one of your folks, and you’re moving out. Don’t care what time of day or night it is.”

Rafferty’s shoulders stiffened. “Those aren’t
my
folks.”

Oh, but they were. The families lined up behind him waited quietly while Rafferty and Del conversed, watching the exchange and ready to listen to whatever direction Rafferty gave them. The man had somehow gotten to the head of the wagon train between his home and here, and Del suspected that had nothing to do with how fast his horses moved. His smile was grim. “They are now.”
 

“Oh, for Christ’s s—”

Penny tugged at his sleeve. “Papa?”
 

Rafferty’s expression softened, and he leaned down. “What is it, darlin’?”

“Augustus is hungry.”

To Del, it seemed more as if Augustus was napping, but Rafferty easily read between the lines. He dropped a kiss on top of Penny’s head, petted behind the cat’s ears—causing another loud bout of purring—and shifted the reins of his team to both hands once more. “We’ve got to set up camp first. Then we’ll feed Augustus.”

Content with that answer, Penny nodded and tightened her arms around the hungry, sleepy cat.
 

“A clearing, you said?”

Again, Del gestured down the main road. “Swing to the right of the cabins when you reach them. The trail’s new, easy to spot. You can’t miss the clearing once you’re on the trail.” In the spirit of neighborliness, he and John had widened one of the walking paths between the Cheyenne encampment and town this past spring, making it easier for John to transport the resources the tribe traded for goods. “I’ll check on you when I can. Come back into town for supper, all of you. They’ll be serving at both the boardinghouse and the saloon tonight.”

“Thank you. I…I’ll be sure to pass along the message to everyone.” With a flick of the reins, Rafferty, Penny, Augustus, and their wagon were no longer Del’s problem—at least not for the time being.

A problem was exactly how he saw Rafferty and his band of ragtag followers. Ever the lone predator able to survey a situation from the outside and remain unmoved by the tumult from which those with emotional loyalties suffered, Del had a talent for dealing with problems.
 

It wasn’t that he didn’t like people, but more that he’d prefer not to deal with them. Being sheriff had stolen that option from him.
 

Moira was the exception to that rule. Hell, she was the exception to all his rules, and always had been. In the moments when he wished for peace—no midnight knocks on his front door, no drunken brawls outside the saloon, no matrons forcing invitations on him for Sunday dinner—that peace was incomplete without his wife by his side.

He pictured, with visceral clarity, how she’d straddled him in their bed that morning. How her moan had trembled across his lips.
 

No, there was no peace for him without Moira. None at all.

As Del stepped back onto the boardwalk in front of the jailhouse, listening to the jangle of harnesses as the wagons rolled toward the edge of town, the small hairs at his nape stood on end.
 

Moira stepped through the swinging doors of the Ruby Saloon, a couple of storefronts down from the jail. No doubt she wanted a glimpse at the commotion caused by the parade of wagons and their rattling wheels.

The sight of her stopped his breath.

She wore an apron over her cotton dress of deep teal, the color reminding him of the waters of the Port Royal Sound not far from his boyhood home, a small working plantation outside Savannah. Her sleeves had been rolled past her elbows, and she wore no collar in deference to the blistering July heat. A sleek braid coiled at her nape kept her dark red hair in check, though a few escaped strands stuck to the perspiration at her temples.

A knot formed in his gut as he looked at her, seemingly unaware of his presence.
 

Stunning. She was stunning, inside and out, and his chest ached at the sight of her.

He tried to imagine himself in Rafferty’s predicament—widowed, homeless, father to a small tear-stained child who likely had very little comprehension as to what was going on around her—but his mind froze on the very first concept:
widowed
.
 

What would he do if he lost Moira?
 

Three months, Rafferty had said. His wife had passed away three months ago. Del wasn’t sure he’d even be standing three months after Moira died.
 

His heart thudded heavily, an aching drumbeat against his ribs that demanded his attention. The need to go to her knotted his insides, but he ignored the complaints of his body, a body which, for almost a year, had been so attuned with hers they might as well have been one—one body, one person. One soul.

She turned her head and looked at him, as if she’d known all along he stood there watching her. The tension in his stomach dispersed, dissolving into thousands of prickles of sensation that skimmed his spine before seeping into his bones.

This was the problem with ice. Eventually, it melted.

Unable to acknowledge the gulf between them, he gathered the reins from where he’d tied his mount to the post, swung into the saddle, and rode in the direction of the mining settlement a few short miles from their house. When he and the miners had left a couple of hours ago, smoke was beginning to choke the air, and the menacing pops and snaps of encroaching flame were audible, if one listened carefully.
 

A warm breeze whipped across his face as he rode faster, then faster still, until he drew his horse to a halt on the slight ridge before the road forked. One track bore the distinct marks of wagon wheels—from Rafferty and his followers. The other wound in an almost serpentine pattern, kissing the tree line and mimicking the path of the creek that gave Del’s town its name. Nestled within those trees was the settlement. After this morning’s evacuation, they’d left behind nothing more than a collection of holes in the ground where tent stakes used to be and a network of pine boards laid down to prevent trenchfoot during the rainy season.
 

Del didn’t need to ride any farther to know what it looked like now, this very minute. He could see the black and gray plumes of smoke, hear the faint roar of hungry fire as it devoured those pine boards.

The settlement was gone.
 

His eyes stung as the deadly wind whipped him with dust and ash. Fighting the wildfire wasn’t an advisable option, but fleeing was. Before nightfall, the roaring wall of flames would take Lucia Matthews’s long-empty house where it stood between the settlement and his and Moira’s home, and then it would claim that, as well.

Everything beautiful in his life was burning to ash around him, and there was nothing he could do to stop the flames.

Digging in his heels, he urged the horse back down the road. They were now racing to beat the clock.
 

***

T
he July heat made her dress cling to her in unkind places as she stacked books on the kitchen table. It had taken her less than an hour to pack their clothing and essentials into her trunks. Kitchen utensils and cookware had been placed in empty crates Delaney rummaged from a corner of their small barn. She’d wrapped breakables in bedding, filling a barrel to the brim with cotton and porcelain. Her pistol lay neatly atop it all.

Everything she packed quickly disappeared through the door and into the bed of the wagon her husband had parked outside. Load after load, he silently removed the trappings of their life together, not looking at her. Not saying a word.
 

He hadn’t spoken since he’d collected her from the saloon on his return after his mad dash out of town on horseback. “Gotta empty the house,” he said, before tugging her up behind him on his horse.

Empty the house they did. They were lucky. As newlyweds, they didn’t possess much in the way of furniture. The house itself had taken all of Delaney’s carpentry skill, and while he’d promised her he would build her more furniture as time passed, she was grateful now to have such a lack of
things
.
 

The bed would stay, as would the heavy kitchen table, but the chair and writing desk were already in the wagon, along with the copper bathing tub. The chickens were crated, and the cow tied by her halter to the back of the conveyance. There was little left to rescue, once Del stowed her books.

Acting like the coward she suspected she was deep down where it counted, she abandoned the books to their fate at his hands as she heard him on the porch and moved quickly into the front room to do a final sweep. If he didn’t want to talk, then neither did she.

She wasn’t sure she
could
talk. What had been the topic of a forthright conversation between her and Juno in the saloon’s upstairs parlor now seemed frightfully difficult to broach when faced with the fear of failure as a wife.

A lone item atop the mantel caught her eye. It was a photograph of them on their wedding day. They’d been slickly attired, seated side by side on a bench outside the chapel, expressions serious, but just as their image was taken, Del had leaned over to kiss the notch he’d put in her ear the day they’d met. Her chin had dropped, her face angled closer to his, and a secretive little smile had curled her lips as her eyes fluttered shut.

That was the moment the photographer had captured. The few seconds when he kissed her. When she smiled.
 

“I love you.”
 

She whirled with a gasp, clutching the photograph to her chest. “Del.”

He stood in the doorway separating the living room from the kitchen, hat tipped back and sleeves rolled up to reveal brawny, deeply tanned forearms, and watched her steadily. “You know I love you, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And I…I gotta believe you love me.”

Her body lurched toward him, in tandem with her heart. “Oh, Delaney. Yes. Of course I love you.”

He scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck, and she stumbled to a halt a foot away from him when he said, “It doesn’t feel like an ‘of course’ these days, Moira. Doesn’t feel like something I can—”

A lump formed in her throat. “Something you can what?”

Sighing, he reached out and took the photograph from her. She watched, unable to breathe, as he stroked a gentle fingertip along her jaw—the image version of her, that is. “Something I can
trust
.”

A pained noise escaped her, but she didn’t speak. She couldn’t.

He continued to study the photograph, his expression trapped somewhere between sadness and frustration. “At first, I thought it was shooting Matthews that had you pulling away from me, but that stopped making sense after a while.” As if reluctant, he handed back the photograph. “Where’ve you been the past few months, honey?”

She slipped the picture into the hidden pocket of her skirt. “I’ve been…here,” she finished lamely.

Wrong thing to say.
His eyebrows lowered. “You said you were broken inside.” A world of hurt lived in his voice. “That’s what you said, right before you told me you didn’t know how to do ‘this.’ What is ‘this,’ Moira? Marriage? Us?”

Where was her courage, the strength that had her confessing all to a prostitute this morning? “I don’t think I can have children.”

In the silence that followed, doubt flayed her. This was why she’d kept quiet, why she had tried—and failed—to protect her heart from his disappointment in her shortcomings as a wife. Childbearing was the most natural thing in the world, and yet her body appeared to have rejected nature, denying them the gift she wanted most to offer her husband.