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Ellie Lundquist felt a sudden chill. A cloud had passed over the noonday sun, darkening the once bright day, and she shivered in her light cotton shirt.

“Where to next?” she asked in a deliberately cheery voice. “We could go out to the graveyard. Or we could see if some of the relatives would talk to us. Or we could...”

“I think I’ve had enough for today,” Tanner said slowly. “It’s after one. Let’s get something to eat. What about the restaurant across the street?” He nodded in the direction of Pete’s Fireside Cafe.

Ellie followed his gaze, looking at the faces turned out toward them. “No,” she said. “That’s not the place to go if you’ve had enough for one day.”

“All right.” He accepted it without question. “Got any alternatives?”

“I need to check my horses. I have them stabled out at Maude’s. If we show up there she’s bound to offer us lunch. Plus more advice than we could ever want.”

“I’m used to advice.’’

“You just don’t take it,” she supplied.

He smiled that cold, wolfish grin. “Not if I can help it. I prefer to make my own mistakes.”

“Okay, let’s go to Maude’s. If you want,” she kept her voice carefully diffident, “we could go for a ride up into the hills.”

“On that old slug you rode yesterday?”

“Mazey’s a wonderful horse,” Ellie protested. “Anyway, I have three horses. You could ride Hoover. He’s got a little more energy.”

“I don’t know if I think you’re much of a judge of horseflesh.” They were walking back toward the big black car, the eyes from Pete’s Fireside Cafe following them.

“And you are?” she shot back, incensed.

He shrugged. “I know my way around a horse.”

“I think you’ve been standing at the back end too long,” she said sweetly, yanking open the car door.

His laugh was a short, rusty sound of surprise. “Ellie, you amaze me,” he said, sliding in beside her. “What an image!”

She switched on the ignition, grinding the starter unnecessarily, and pulled out into the street without looking. Fortunately traffic in Morey’s Falls was nonexistent. It would have been extremely embarrassing to have collided with another car with Tanner as witness. Not to mention Lonnie’s brooding gaze from the front window of the Gazette office. She had to learn not to react to Tanner’s deliberate goading. She had to be cool, friendly, helpful, and let his taunts slide off her back.

It was easier said than done. For some reason she was vulnerable to the man, in ways she hadn’t been vulnerable to anyone in years. Tanner saw straight through to that vulnerability and used it, and her.

She lifted her foot slightly from the accelerator and forced herself to loosen her tight grip on the leather-covered steering wheel. She plastered a pleasant smile onto her face as she headed out toward Maude’s rambling ranch house. “Where do you live, Tanner? What do you do for a living? You can’t walk all the time.”

She didn’t have to look at him to know that a cynical grin had stretched across his too-handsome face. “Welcome wagon time again, Ellie?”

She ignored the gibe. “I’m just making friendly conversation. Besides, I’m curious.”

“I live in New Mexico. A little town up in the Sangre de Cristo mountains that you never would have heard of.”

“What do you do there?” She allowed herself a brief glance in his direction.

His grin broadened. “I live on a horse ranch, Ellie. I’m partners with the man who should have been my father. We raise the best quarter horses known to man. And yes, I’ve spent more than my share of time at the back end of a horse.”

“And your partner doesn’t mind you taking off like this?”

It was the wrong question. His face darkened for a moment, and he reached for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket with impatient fingers. “He knows when it’s necessary.”

“And it doesn’t matter how long you’re gone?” she pushed.

“It matters.” He lit the cigarette and blew a long stream of smoke into the pristine interior of the Judge’s car, watching for her reaction.

“Then you can’t very well stay here indefinitely.”

“I can stay here just as long as I need to,” he said in a low, rough voice. “And not a minute longer.” He stared out at the scrubby landscape. “Alfred’s dying.”

He’d surprised himself by saying that, she could tell by the sudden grimness around his mouth. He hadn’t surprised her. She had a way about her that invited confidences. People told her things they never expected to tell anyone. Usually they didn’t mind when they found they’d been indiscreet. She could tell Tanner minded like hell.

“Alfred’s the man who should have been your father?” she prodded gently.

He leaned forward and stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. Two of his cigarette butts already rested there, staking his claim to what had once been the Judge’s. “Alfred is everything Charles Tanner wasn’t. My mother and I moved in with him when I was a wild fifteen-year-old and Marbella had had too many of the wrong men for the wrong reasons. He gave us a home, he gave us love, he gave us a future.” He leaned back against the seat. “It took him five years to talk Marbella into marrying him. She’d decided she wasn’t worth the kind of love Alfred was offering her, and it took him a long time to convince her.”

“So he was your father,” Ellie said softly. “Your stepfather, at least.”

“Marbella died in a car accident two weeks before they were set to get married,” he said in a short, unemotional voice.

“But you stayed on?”

“No. I left Alfred to grieve on his own. I took off the afternoon of the accident and didn’t come back for a year and a half. I wasn’t even sure Alfred would let me come back. But he did.”

“Where’d you walk that time?” Her voice was deliberately prosaic.

Some of the tension seemed to leave him. “I’d never seen New England. It seemed as good a direction as any. Anyplace but Montana.” There was a long silence, broken only by the powerful hum of the Buick’s engine.

“But now you’re here.”

He shrugged, and his hand strayed toward the cigarettes again, then dropped onto the seat beside her. “Alfred gave me a future when I needed it. I’ve got to give him the only kind of future he’ll have. I’ve got to make sure the ranch will be safe, that it’ll be in good hands.”

“You’ve got to be sure that you won’t take off again.”

His eyes met hers for a brief, startled moment. “Exactly,” he said. “Alfred’s had two strokes, and he could have another any time now. He’s holding on by the skin of his teeth, and his last months are misery, not knowing what’s going to happen to everything he’s worked for. I owed it to him to come up here, to the last place on earth I’d ever want to go, and make peace with the past. And why the hell am I telling you all this?” he added with sudden savagery.

“Because I’m easy to talk to?” she suggested softly.

“Because you’re a nosy busybody.” He reached for his cigarettes.

She didn’t even flinch. “You know, you shouldn’t smoke those things. You’re not really a smoker—when you’re preoccupied you forget all about needing them.”

She should have known better than to have twitched the tiger’s tail. He turned the full force of those cold blue eyes on hers, and she felt like shivering all over again. “And you, honey, are not really lame. You limp when you remember you’re supposed to be the martyred cripple, and the rest of the time you do just fine.”

The fact that she deserved it didn’t help the pain slicing through her. For all the physical and emotional anguish she’d been through in her thirty years, she’d never had anyone be deliberately cruel to her. The shock of it took her breath away, and she quickly turned her face back to the road, gripping the steering wheel with shaking hands.

She could feel her eyes fill with sudden, stinging tears, and she tried to blink them away. Her mouth trembled, and she bit down on her lip, hard, as she turned down Maude’s dusty driveway to the rambling little ranch house that had served the old woman as home for over eighty years.

She pulled to a stop and switched off the car. “We’re here,” she announced brightly, praying he wouldn’t notice her absurdly childish reaction to his random cruelty. She reached for the door, hoping to get away from him, to dash the demoralizing tears from her eyes before he noticed, but he was too fast for her.

He caught her wrist, drawing her back, and her resistance was just so much wasted effort. He could see her tear-filled eyes, her trembling mouth, her stupid, babyish behavior, and color flooded her pale cheeks.

“I’m being ridiculous. I’m sorry,” she began, embarrassed, but he stopped her, his fingers touching her mouth to silence her.

His eyes were no longer cold. “You’re sorry?” he echoed. He pulled back his hand, and there was a fleck of blood on his fingers. She must have cut her lip when she’d bit down. His other hand was still holding her wrist, and she felt it tighten around her, felt the infinitesimal pull, and she was ready to move with it, toward him, when he suddenly released her.

He pulled back and reached for the car door. “Maybe,” he said, “I’m more like my father than I thought.”

This time she stopped him, her hand catching his arm, feeling the warm flesh and bone and sinew beneath his skin. “What do you mean?”

“Taking potshots at helpless children,” he said. “Maybe you should keep as far away from me as you can.”

“I’m almost thirty-one, Tanner.”

“That doesn’t keep you from being a child in some ways. You’ve lived in a cocoon here in Morey’s Falls. One moment of random violence and you’ve been protected ever since. You’re not equipped to face the real world and mean, rotten men like me.”

“If I’m still a child,” Ellie said quietly, her tears long gone, “then it’s time I grew up. And you’re not a mean, rotten man, Tanner.”

He leaned across the seat, and before she could realize his intent his mouth had brushed her lower lip, softly, barely touching. When she looked at him again the blood was on his mouth, not hers. “Honey,” he said, “I’m one of the worst.” And before she could say anything more he’d opened the door and slid out into the bright sunlight.

Maude Gilles was standing there, just outside the car, her dark, sprightly eyes an interested witness, no doubt, to the past few moments between her two visitors. She was shorter than Tanner remembered, and older. The merciless glare of the early-afternoon sun played up every wrinkle in her seamed, lined face, making her appear as old as time. She had to be under five feet, and her long, thick white braids hung past her tiny shoulders.

Ellie had wasted no time climbing out of her side of the car. She had the cane in her hand and a stubborn look of defiance around her mouth. “Hi, Maude. We came for lunch.”

He didn’t miss the look that passed between the two women. A very slight expression of inquiry passed over Maude’s face, answered by an imperceptible shake of Ellie’s head. He filed it in the back of his brain for further study, grimacing in annoyance as he watched Ellie limp forward, leaning heavily on the damned cane.

‘“Bout time, too,” Maude announced. “I was wondering when I was going to see the two of you. My spies tell me you’ve been wandering all over town.”

“Who are your spies, Maude?” Tanner asked with deceptive laziness.

“Jamie, I suppose,” Ellie supplied calmly, almost as if the tense moments in the front seat of the Buick hadn’t happened. “He helps out around here, feeds the horses, takes Maude shopping and fills her in on all the gossip. What’d he tell you, Maude?”

“Just that the two of you were as thick as thieves. The old ladies in town are worried about you. They think Tanner here is clouding your mind.”

“The spawn of the devil,” Tanner said in a pleasant tone of voice. “I don’t think Ellie’s mind is too clouded.”

“It’d take more than a good-looking young stud like you to do it,” Maude said bluntly. “More’s the pity. Come along in. You’ll have to make do with peanut butter sandwiches, but I guess you’ll both survive. I’m glad you came, Ellie. Jamie said Shaitan didn’t touch his food. Of course that fool boy didn’t dare get close enough to see if something was the matter. Why you have to keep a horse like that is beyond me.”

“I’d better go see....”

“Ellie, he’s waited this long....” Maude might just as well have been talking to herself. Ellie had taken off in the direction of the barns, limping slightly, barely using the cane. “Damn the girl,” the old woman said under her breath. “What about you, Tanner? Are you going with her or are you going to help me make lunch?”

Tanner looked down, way down into those fierce little eyes. “What do you think?”

“I think you’d be a fool to spend time with an old lady when you could have a pretty young thing like Ellie. And I expect your mama didn’t raise no fools.”

He laughed. “You’re right. But it’s a close decision.”

“Lunch will wait. She’ll be in the stalls to the left in the big barn. You can’t miss her. Watch out for Shaitan, though. If anyone’s a spawn of the devil that creature is.”

“I’ll be careful.”

The barn was dark and shadowed after the bright sunlight, and a wave of familiar smells washed over him. Fresh straw, horseflesh, leather and saddle soap. He stopped for a moment, letting the smells surround him with a comforting blanket of memory. This was solid, real, this was waiting for him in New Mexico.

He was more than used to the sudden surge of homesickness. He’d felt it often enough, but usually not quite so soon. He’d be on the trail, in the midst of some wilderness or the center of a city, and a longing for home would sweep over him. He’d start, then and there, for New Mexico.

But he wasn’t used to having it happen so soon. He’d only been gone ten days this time. He usually didn’t feel that pull for months and months. Maybe there was hope for him after all.

He saw Mazey’s broad, bay rump in the shadowy stall, next to a narrower, chestnut gelding. Ellie was two stalls over, her voice a low, soothing murmur as she talked to the biggest, blackest, meanest-looking, most gorgeous stallion he’d ever seen in his entire life. Covetousness swept over him, wiping out all previous emotions, and he started forward.

“Don’t come any closer.” Ellie’s voice stopped him. She was edging out of the stall, her strong, narrow hands running over the high, beautifully muscled back of the black as she went. He stopped where he was, too much of a horseman to disobey, but his hands itched to touch that smooth back.

Ellie shut the door of the stall behind her and walked toward him. The cane was under her arm, and she was once more forgetting to limp.

“Shaitan doesn’t like strangers,” she said, gesturing toward the barn door.

Tanner didn’t move. “According to Maude, he doesn’t like friends either.”

“That’s right. He doesn’t like anyone but me. You go near him, Tanner, and he’ll savage you. What he doesn’t accomplish with his teeth he’ll finish with his hooves once he gets you down. He’s had a bad time of it with people, and I’m the only one he trusts.”

A small, cautious smile curved his mouth. “You think you’ll have the same luck with me?” he said softly. She didn’t reply, and he looked over her shoulder to the beautiful shape of the stallion. “He’s too much horse for you, Ellie.”

“You touch him,” Ellie said again, “and what he doesn’t do I will. I’ll cut your heart out, Tanner.”

“Tsk, tsk. That’s not the way to earn my trust.”

“The hell with your trust,” she said fiercely.

“Is he all right?”

“What do you mean? Oh, you mean because he didn’t eat? He was just in a mood. As soon as I showed up he chowed down. He loves me.”

He stared down at her defiant face. “Just because he loves you doesn’t mean he can’t be very dangerous. Love doesn’t always mean safety.”

The barn was oddly quiet, silent but for the soft whirrup of the horses, the muffled sounds as they lipped their hay. “I know,” she said, looking into his eyes with her direct, fearless gaze. “But sometimes safety’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Do you want some lunch?”

I want you, lying in the straw, wrapped around me, he thought, keeping his face absolutely expressionless. “Peanut butter sandwiches?” he said. “I can’t wait.”

She didn’t let him near Shaitan again. The day clouded over, threatening rain, and Shaitan was terrified of thunderstorms. Maude kept plying the two of them with fresh-baked bread, coffee that was almost as strong as Tanner’s wicked brew and anecdotes about Morey’s Falls before 1972. She never mentioned Charles Tanner—she didn’t have to. Instead, she gave Tanner a feel for the town his family had come from for generations, and he listened with complete fascination.

It was one of the few pleasant things he could take away with him, Ellie thought, sitting at the table and watching him surreptitiously. Most of his search would turn up tragedy, depression and despair. At least Maude was showing him a part of his more distant past that wasn’t tainted with murder.

For the time being his defenses were lowered, just enough for her to guess what he might have been like if he’d lived a normal life. Those eyes of his were no longer coldly challenging, no longer deliberately seductive. They were simply eyes, of a beautiful blue shade, and the lashes shielding them were wickedly long. His dark-blond hair was pushed back, his expression was both relaxed and intent, and his mouth was curved in a slight smile that held no threats. His skin was deeply tanned from years in the bright sun, and lines fanned out from his eyes, lines that couldn’t have come from smiling.

His hands were wrapped around a mug of Maude’s coffee. Ellie remembered the feel of those long, hard fingers on her wrist, touching her cut lip. She remembered the brief, tantalizing feel of his mouth on hers, and she shivered.

“I’ve got to be heading back,” she said suddenly. “Bridge club is at my house tonight, and if I don’t make tracks nothing will be ready. As it is I’ll barely have time to get Tanner home.”

“You don’t need to ‘get Tanner home,’” he drawled. “I’m perfectly capable of walking.”

“Don’t be silly, boy. Your family’s place is on the other side of town; it must be ten miles from here,” Maude said. “Besides, this is a lonely stretch of road. I don’t like you being out here alone. There’s too much bad feeling still simmering around here. No need to ask for trouble.”

“You think someone’s gonna shoot me in the back?”

“You forget, Maude knows this town and the people in it a lot better than you do,” Ellie said. “And I wouldn’t put it past several of them to do just that.”

“I guess I’d better run for cover then.” Tanner’s voice was cool and remote. “I could always skulk along the side of the road and dive into the underbrush if someone came along. Except that there isn’t much underbrush around here. I guess I’ll have to risk it. We can’t have Ellie late for her bridge game.”

“Cut it out, Tanner.” Ellie rose and carried her empty coffee cup over to the old iron sink. She almost picked up his, and had to force herself not to. She wasn’t going to wait on him, do for him, on any level. It was too tempting, too dangerous. “It’s very simple—you can drop me off home and take the car out to your place. I won’t be needing it, and you can drive it tomorrow morning so that we can get an early start.”

“No thanks.”

Ellie sighed, leaning over to kiss Maude’s withered cheek. “We’ll argue about it in the car. Thanks for everything, Maude. You’re a great lady.”

“No,” said Maude, “I’m not. You’re the good one around here.”

To Ellie’s surprise Tanner came over and kissed Maude too. Ellie held her breath as Maude blinked back tears of surprise and emotion. She hadn’t seen Maude cry in years. Maybe she’d never seen Maude cry. “Thanks, Maude,” he murmured, smiling at her, that rare, sweet smile that he’d bestowed on Addie Pritchard and no one else.

Ellie, watching that smile, felt a knife of longing twist inside her, one that she didn’t dare let Tanner see. Without a word she headed out the door, letting the screen door slam shut behind her. This time she remembered to limp.