Caleb reached up and brushed her cheek with his fingertips, leaving a trail of warmth in the cold rain. Then he swung up on Trey’s back.
«I’m not going to stop short of the summit,» he said. «We need every bit of daylight to get over that pass.»
Even as Willow started to say something, Caleb merged with the rain and vanished. The horses filed out in the driving rain, with Deuce limping in the rear.
After the first thirty minutes, Willow stopped listening forComancheros and looking over her shoulder every few minutes. After the first hour, she stopped checking to see that the Arabians were following. They were keeping up well enough, but Willow didn’t know how much longer the mares would be able to go on. Despite the slow pace, they were breathing as though they had been trotting for hours. True to Caleb’s prediction, Deuce kept on coming despite his game leg, walking quickly enough to overtake the slowest mare.
They climbed steadily, relentlessly, until Willow couldn’t remember a time when the land hadn’t tilted steeply in front of her. Willow alternated between a headache and a lightheadedness that made her fear for her health. Beneath heavy curtains of rain, the dark shape of spruce trees appeared more frequently among pines and aspen. Every few minutes she peered through the sheets of water to where Caleb was, clinging to his presence as the only certainty in a world gone the color of rain.
Thunder boomed occasionally, but no longer startled Willow. They forded a stream and climbed a forested, rolling ridge on the far side. Gradually the route leveled out somewhat, then ascended into another grassy park. A clean, racing creek boiled down the center of the clearing between shrub-covered banks. Caleb crossed the water and turned upstream. The land rose steadily beneath the horses’ feet once more, making even a slow walk an effort.
Once, when it was very steep, Caleb dismounted. Willow followed suit before she led Ishmael toward the rain-shrouded figures ahead. After thirty feet she went to her knees and swayed dizzily.
Caleb appeared from the rain and caught Willow up in a hug. «You should be riding, honey. You’re not used to the altitude.»
«It didn’t bother me — this much — in Denver,» she panted.
«You were four thousand feet lower in Denver. We’re almost two miles high here.»
Willow looked at Caleb with dazed eyes. «No wonder — my horses —»
«Yes,» he said. «But they keep on going just the same. Like you.»
For the first time Willow noticed the bruise on his forehead.
«You’re hurt!»
«I’m all right. You’re dizzier than I am and there’s not a mark on you.»
The relief in Willow’s hazel eyes was as transparent and intense as her concern had been. Caleb held her even closer, savoring her emotion. It had been a long, long time since anyone but Willow had worried about him.
«Thank you,» he said finally.
«For what?»
«For coming back after me when bullets were flying and a lot of men would have cut and run. For having the sense to know I’d need the saddlebags and the courage to bring them to me. For laughing when other women would have cried or whined or yelled at me. For being a hell of a good trail partner.»
Willow’s eyes widened in the instant before she looked away from Caleb, feeling lightheaded again. The blaze of his whiskey-colored eyes warmed her as no fire could have.
«That’s very kind of you,» she said huskily.
«I’m not a kind man.»
«Yes, you are. I know I’ve caused you trouble. Because of my stubbornness about the Arabians, you’ve had to risk your life again and again.» Willow smiled wearily and glanced up at him from beneath her eyelashes. «So when I want to scream or yell or whine, I think of what it would be like without you and I keep my mouth closed.»
Caleb laughed and held Willow even closer. He heard her ragged sigh, felt her body leaning trustingly against his, and tried not to think about a man called Reno.
She’s far too good a woman for a rounder like Matthew Moran.
No sooner had the thought come than it crystallized into a vow within the silence of Caleb’s mind. Willow’s capacity for courage and loyalty and passion deserved better than a man who seduced and abandoned young girls. At the very least, Willow’s deep sensuality deserved better than a man who left her alone for so long she forgot how to kiss.
But not how to respond. She hadn’t forgotten that. The memory of her headlong passion and soft, sultry body was an ache and a wild hunger within Caleb.
No woman who loved another man could respond like that — so quick, so deep. She’ll be mine before she sees her fancy man again. I’ll seduce Willow so completely that when he’s dead, she’ll turn to me instead of mourning a fancy man who isn’t worth a single one of her tears.
She can’t love him. She simply can’t.
Caleb bent and caught Willow’s mouth beneath his own, sealing the silent vow. The kiss was unlike any he had ever given a woman, tender and yet so deeply passionate he felt as though he was sinking into Willow, sipping from her very soul. When he finally lifted his head once more, she was trembling. He carried her to Ishmael and put her in the saddle. The look he gave her was as intense as the kiss had been.
«Stay close to me,» he said almost roughly.
Before Willow could answer, Caleb had turned away. He mounted Trey, turned the big horse upstream, and began leading the way toward the remote, difficult notch in the ramparts that his father had named Black Pass.
Wind moaned down from the unseen heights, ruffling the horse’s long manes. Caleb knew what waited on the far side of the pass, for his father had fallen in love with the series of high valleys leading down into an immense park. The park was known to white men, for eventually it provided a much more accessible passage between high peaks and mountain ranges than Black Pass. The side valleys leading up to Black Pass were unknown to white men. Even Indians avoided them, for game could be found in far easier places. Ancient tribes, however, had used the pass for their own reasons. No man knew what those reasons were, but the ghostly trail still remained, whispering of men long dead.
Caleb turned aside from the stream, for beavers had built several dams, killing the pines and gnawing down the aspens for a thousand feet in all directions, turning the meadow to a shallow lake. Several creeks came in. A few miles beyond, another valley joined the first, isolating the ridge whose flank they had been following in order to stay beyond the reach of the bog that edged the beaver pond.
After an hour the beaver dams receded behind the horses. The meadow narrowed to no more than fifty yards across, then forty, then ten. The route climbed up, leaving the stream to cut its way through solid rock below them in a canyon far too steep for a horse. The forest thinned, vanished into a kind of scrub, then reappeared as they descended the shoulder of the mountain into another valley where they could walk beside the stream once more.
Soon the route began climbing again. Mountains closed in on either side and the land pitched up beneath the horses’ hooves. The forest crowded in, but somehow Caleb always found a way around deadfalls and aspen groves where the trees were so tightly interwoven they offered no passage to a man, much less a horse. The sound of the stream became deep-throated and the way steep.
Caleb checked his compass every time a side creek came in, searching for the brawling little ribbon of water that would lead to another, higher valley, and from there to yet another and another until finally the highest level of the notch was reached and the divide was crossed.
There were no pines now, only spruce, fir, aspen, and a stunted form of willow that grew in avalanche chutes and in the small, boggy meadows cut by the stream. Caleb sensed the increasing openness of the country around him, the falling away of lesser peaks and ridges as the horses climbed up the backbone of the continent. His father had said the view from the top was as breathtaking as the altitude. Caleb had no way to check his father’s observation. Rain fell steadily, obscuring anything farther than a few hundred feet away.
Lightning danced on the heights of an invisible peak, sending thunder belling repeatedly down the mountain, violent cannonades that sounded like explosions and rifle fire mixed together. Heads down, ears back, the horses
