The Wildest Heart

“Well?” he said in the same husky voice, and I thought that secretly he was laughing at my stunned, stupefied expression.

I found my tongue at last. “Do I look like the screaming type?” I demanded tartly, sitting up in bed with the covers held closely against my shoulders.

“Not now,” he said, the sun wrinkles creasing at the corners of surprisingly hazel eyes, as he noticed my instinctive movement.

“Well, since we have that out of the way, suppose you tell me what you’re doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night, Lucas Cord?”

“You been studyin’ my wanted posters? Either that, or you’re a good guesser.”

“I’m in no frame of mind to engage in pointless banter!” I exclaimed furiously. “I don’t know how you got in here, but I’d thank you to say whatever you came to say and leave the same way!”

“Had the notion you might have somethin’ you wanted to say to me.”

The creases appeared again. A deep groove etched itself in one cheek when his lips curled in a mocking, one-sided smile that did not reach his eyes. I suddenly had a feeling that he did not smile often. There were green flecks in his eyes, like tiny fires, and I was being ridiculous, staring at him as if I had never seen a man before.

“How did you…”

In the same soft voice, he said, “I watched you take that little strip of red silk. Knew you’d probably ask Marta about it.” He grimaced. “She has a long memory, that old woman! She told you, huh?”

He had been watching my face, and I suppose my expression gave me away. But his cool, impudent manner annoyed me, and I think he knew that, too. “I’m sorry,” he said, suddenly, running his fingers through his long hair. For a moment, his guard slipped, and something almost boyishly apologetic showed in those strange eyes of his. “Your pa always used to tell me I ought to learn better manners. As it turned out, I didn’t get the chance to. Shouldn’t have busted in here this way, but I guessed you suspected somethin’, and so I—”

“Suspected! Do you take me for a complete idiot?” The memory of his assignation with Flo made me angry enough to interrupt him, completely forgetting to choose my words carefully. “I’ve learned enough about you to know very well what you were up to! And if Flo Jeffords is fool enough to be taken in, let me assure you I am not! What could you be thinking of? Are you trying to punish her for something that happened long ago, or is it revenge on Todd Shannon, even if it’s indirect, that you hope to get?”

His face had hardened, lips thinning. And when his eyes narrowed I could see why people had said he had a dangerous look. Right now he looked lethal. His words were cold, thrown like stones in my face, although his tone was just as quiet, “What’s Flo to you? Thought she was exaggerating, just like she always did, when she told me Shannon was sweet on you, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe he has gotten to you after all. Was your concern for Flo for his sake, Miss Dangerfield?”

I said through gritted teeth, “I don’t care how much you and Todd Shannon hate each other. Yes, and you can kill each other, for all I care! But don’t use someone else as an instrument for your revenge! Flo’s an unhappy, confused young woman, and she doesn’t need you to complicate her life further!”

I thought I saw a flicker of surprise in his eyes. “Why do you bother about her? Why, she don’t even like you!”

“That makes no difference!” I said heatedly. “Can’t you see that? If you have a quarrel with Todd Shannon, why don’t you find him and face him like a man? Get it over and then maybe everyone else around here can live in peace!”

“You think it could ever be as easy as that?” His voice sounded bitter. “Christ—how little you know! I’d have faced Todd Shannon before, if I could have gotten close enough to him, but that ain’t his way of doin’ things. He put a price on my head—bounty money—same as he did to my pa. Why should he dirty his bullets on an Indian? That’s Shannon’s way. Let someone else do his dirty work for him. He almost killed my mother and had my father killed from ambush, the same way he’d like to see me killed, if I don’t get to him first!” Lucas Cord took a step towards the bed, and then, swearing under his breath, he stopped. I sat there silently, watching him pace like a caged animal to the far end of the room, and then back again to face me.

“Why don’t you go away, then? You’re young enough to make a new life for yourself, to make a new start. Why did you have to come back? In time Shannon would forget about you. He’d forget…”

“He ain’t the type to forget anythin’!” Those hazel cat’s eyes stared angrily into mine. “An’ neither am I, come down to it. Shannon stole most of the lands he claims as SD property from my pa and by rights it should belong to my mother! But they said Alejandro Kordes was an outlaw, because he kept fightin’ for somethin’ he believed in. Said all the records, the grant deeds datin’ all the way back to the Spanish king had been lost or destroyed in the war. Some people remembered that the Kordes family had called this land theirs for years and years before the goddamn Anglo came to steal it, an’ Shannon got around that by sayin’ he married a Kordes. That any claim to the land was hers, as passed through her to him. You askin’ me to forget all that? Or the time I was railroaded to that hellhole island they called a jail? Or the times I bin shot at by Shannon’s hired bounty killers?”

“You’re as full of hate as he is!” I said accusingly. “You’d use any methods you can think of to get back at Todd Shannon, wouldn’t you?”

“An’ if I did, what’s it to you?”

I tried to keep my voice even. “You’re here to start a war. It was you who cut that fence, wasn’t it? But why? Why now?”

“Maybe I wanted to get Shannon’s mind off his new partner.” The curiously husky quality of his voice was even more apparent when he lowered it.

I stared uncomprehendingly at him. “For heaven’s sake! You didn’t know anything about me. I can’t see the point in any of your actions!”

“Seems to me, whether you realize it yet or not, that you’re the key to settlin’ things once an’ for all. Your own pa saw it, only he didn’t get the chance to talk to you, like he’d hoped.”

“I?” My voice had risen, and I bit my lip. “I’m afraid you’re talking in riddles. What have I got to do with any of this? I’ve b

een here less than a month and all I know about this feud that seems to be so important to all of you is that it began a very long time ago and should be over and forgotten by now. And what little I have been told came to me secondhand. How can you say that I can settle matters?”

He was rubbing the heel of his hand abstractedly over a beard-stubbled jaw while he studied me, and I had the impression that he was judging me in some way; trying to gauge my reactions to his next statement.

In that instant when we stared measuringly at each other, I defiantly and he thoughtfully, I found myself comparing him to Todd Shannon. Lucas Cord wore faded jeans, with knee-high Indian moccasins. His shirt, which had once been blue was equally faded, and open at the throat. Instead of the string tie that Todd invariably wore, this man wore a carelessly knotted red bandanna. What gave him the right to sneak into my bedroom at night, like a thief? What had he meant when he said curtly that I was the key to ending the feud? Worst of all, it was ridiculous that I should be sitting here, with my bedcovers drawn up to my neck like a frightened virgin, actually conversing with the man!

I think he must have read something in my face that made him change his mind about what he had been going to say to me. “You ain’t ready to listen yet, are you? Right now you’re mad at me for bein’ here.”