Uneasily, Willow looked at the open space stretching before her, mile upon mile of beautiful grassland that must certainly be a natural gathering point for people riding through the rugged mountains, looking for easy passage.

«Pretty, isn’t?» Caleb asked, watching the land with a faint possessiveness. «You can’t see it from here, but there’s a year-round stream coming down off that rocky ridge. A man could put a house in over there and have a clear field of fire on three sides and country only a mountain goat could cross on the fourth. The water is sweet and plentiful.»

The mixture of emotions in Caleb’s voice made Willow turn from the land to him. He loved the land. Even as he described its dangers, his voice caressed its possibilities.

«If a man built his house in the right place, he wouldn’t have to get shot to fill a bucket.» Caleb continued. «Cattle could graze the high country in summer and hay could be cut from the lowlands for the winter. After a few years of hard work, a man would have himself as fine a spread as any Virginia gentleman ever did.»

Willow looked at the country again, but this time through Caleb’s eyes, seeing places to be ambushed or to hide, places that could be defended and others that would be easily overrun.

«Do you always think like that?» she asked.

«I’ve wanted to raise cattle for ten years. It’s just a matter of finding the right place and getting the money to begin.»

«No, I meant do you always think about fighting?»

Caleb gave Willow a sideways look that was part amusement and mostly disbelief. «Southern lady, anyone who wants to survive out here thinks like that. It’s second nature, like remembering landmarks infrontand in back of you, because everything looks different going than it did coming. But coming or going, this is as pretty a land as God ever made, and wild enough to be home to the devil himself. If a man doesn’t keep his eyes peeled and his ears pricked out here, he’ll end up stone cold dead.»

«Then why do you want to ranch here?»

Caleb’s smile offered neither comfort nor real humor. «Back East and in California, other men already own the good land. Not here. Here a man can have as much good land as he’s willing to fight for. I’m not a bad fighter, Willow, and not a bad hand with cattle, either.»

«Is that what you want — to homestead land here and be a rancher?»

Caleb nodded absently, again watching the country rather than the woman who was watching him.

«You can find some mountains and parks like these a few days south of the San Juan country,» he said. «The grazing is fine, but you’d be combing Apaches andComanches out of your hair every sunrise, and your cattle would have more arrows than a porcupine has quills. Not much pleasure in that, or profit.»

For the space of several breaths Willow looked at the land, then back at the hard-faced man who was watching every shift of breeze through forest and grass, his clear gaze sifting each motion to find one made by man. Or rather, men.

Comancheros.

Uneasiness prickled through Willow. She hadn’t expected the West to be civilized, but she hadn’t really understood what such a total lack of civilization meant, either. In some ways it was rather like being at war. Constant vigilance was needed, for inattention could be fatal. That didn’t bother Willow greatly, for she had become used to living on edge during the war. She had become good at listening for sounds, at sleeping lightly, at sliding away into the forest with her mother at the first hint of danger.

But this wide, wild, extraordinary land wasn’t like her farm. Here she was dependent on Caleb’s strength, fighting skills, and knowledge in a way that frightened her.

He warned me it would be like this, Willow toldherself. Hetold me in plain English.

She shivered as the echoes of a past conversation whispered through her mind oncemore. WhereI’m taking you there’s no law at all. Out in those mountains a man takes care of himself because no one else will do it for him.

And a woman? What does she do?

A woman finds a man tough enough to protect her and the kids she’ll bear him.

It seemed far more than a handful of days since Willow had heard and disregarded Caleb’s warning, thinking that whatever lay ahead couldn’t be more dangerous than the war she had already survived. It seemed a lifetime since she had ridden out of Denver’s rude comforts into a land that grew more wild with each westward step.

Yet, even knowing that, she wouldn’t have traded one of those steps for the safety of the East she had left. Despite the danger, there was something in the wild horizons of the Rockies that lifted her heart and made her soul sing.

Willow closed her eyes and absorbed the small sounds of the land around her. One of the horses snorted and stamped. A saddle creaked as Caleb shifted his weight. A bird called off in the meadow. There was no smell of smoke, of sawn lumber, of turned earth. The breeze carried scents untainted by man, becoming a river of life rushing softly around her, caressing her.

«Damn it, Willow, I said I would be back. Don’t you believe me?»

Startled, she opened her eyes. «Of course I believe you.»

«Then what’s wrong?»

«Nothing,» she said, smiling almost sadly. «Not the way you mean. It’s just that…» Her voice faded. «Suddenly I realized that I love this clean, wild land, even if it isn’t very safe.» She smiled with lips that wanted to tremble. «The idea takes a little getting used to.»

Caleb studied Willow with a sudden, fierce intensity, but said only, «If you wanted to be safe, you should have stayed home.»

«Yes,» she whispered. «I know. Don’t worry, Caleb. Whatever happens is on my head, not yours. I might not have known what I was coming to, but I knew what I was leaving behind.»

Caleb waited.

Willow said nothing more. She simply looked out over the land and measured the bittersweet pleasure of having realized part of her dream of finding a new home, only to discover that the land might not be possible for a woman living alone. It wasn’t like the more gently made country of her childhood. Yet the gentle land had been ravaged beyond her ability to bring it back.

«What are you thinking?» Caleb asked quietly.

«I was tired of the wounded, worn land,» Willow said slowly. «I wanted to see the Mississippi rolling broad-shouldered down to an unknown ocean. I wanted to see a treeless plain stretching from horizon to horizon with buffalo a great brown river winding through shoulder-high grass. I wanted to see the Rockies thrown like a magnificent stone gauntlet across the plains.»

Willow’s voice faded as she thought of other things she had wanted, to see a face that was kin to her or at least not enemy, to see her favorite brother, to laugh with him, to remember a time when she wasn’t alone. She wanted…She shook her head slowly, for she wanted things that had no words, simply a longing as deep as her soul and as endless as night.

Slowly, Willow let out her breath and accepted that, whatever happened, she was more alive here than she would have been in West Virginia. Nothing had ever called to her in quite the way the mountain landscape did, except the man who rode beside her. Like the mountain, Caleb was hard, unexpected, often baffling. And like the mountains, being with him offered moments of warmth and wild beauty. She turned and smiled gently at him.

«Go do what you must,» Willow said softly. «I’m all right now.»

Caleb hesitated before he pulled a big pocket watch from his pants and handed it to Willow. «Give me fifteen minutes head start. Then come on at a smart trot.»

Willow’s fingers tightened around the watch. The metal was smooth, burnished, and radiated the heat of Caleb’s body into her cold hand. Memories exploded in her, memories of being kissed, of his beard brushing against her sensitive skin, of his powerful body molded to hers, of his hand between her legs, shocking and caressing her in the same searing instant. Sensations rippled through her, making her tremble.