"Did the big storm catch you on the wrong side of Picture Wash?"

Carla’s soft question sank slowly into Luke’s churning thoughts. All that hadn’t been said sank in, as well – her hesitation even to speak to him, her concern that he had been out in the open when thunder rolled down from the peaks and the earth shuddered, and her yearning simply to hear his voice answering her own.

Luke knew just how painful that yearning was, for he had been haunted in exactly the same way. He had heard Carla’s voice on the wind, in the darkness, in the silver veils of rain sliding over ancient cliffs. More than once he had awakened in the night, certain that he had only to reach out to feel her softness and warmth curled alongside his body; but his seeking hands had found only darkness and the cold, rust-colored earth of the remote canyon where he had camped.

"No," Luke said softly. "I was back in one of those side canyons where the cliffs make an overhang that keeps out the rain."

"Like September Canyon?"

"Yes. Did Cash tell you about that place?"

"No. You did, when I was fourteen and you gave me a fragment of Anasazi pottery you had found along September Creek. I still have the shard. It’s my…talisman, I guess. It reminds me of all that once was and all that might yet be."

Carla looked past Luke and the ranch house walls, seeing the canyon whose existence had haunted her almost as much as Luke. Both the canyon and the man were aloof, distant, compelling. Both of them fascinated her.

Luke’s breath came in and stayed, for there was such yearning in Carla’s voice and face that it made his throat close.

"Cash promised to take me to September Canyon when he comes in August," she continued. "I’ll taste the rain winds and hear water rushing over stone, and I’ll see in every shadow a culture that was old before Columbus set sail for India and found the New World."

"I never found any ruins," Luke said finally. "I know they’re there, probably way up September Creek or Picture Wash or maybe even Black Springs…" His eyes took on a faraway look in the moments before he shrugged and returned to eating. "The ranch takes too much time for me to have much left over for chasing legends."

"I’m surprised Cash hasn’t found any Indian ruins. He must have crawled over every square inch of the Rocking M."

Luke shook his head. "Not a chance. There are parts of this ranch that no one has ever walked, white or Indian. Besides, Cash has been poking around hard rock country. He’s a granite and quartz man. Most ruins are found way up washes or creeks that wind between sandstone walls. No gold to be found there. Beautiful country, though. Wild as an eagle and damned near as hard to get to."

"The Anasazi and their natural fortresses…" Carla focused on Luke with intense, blue-green eyes, grateful to have found a neutral subject that interested both of them. "Have you ever wondered what frightened the Anasazi so much that they withdrew to those isolated canyons?"

"Other men, what else? You don’t go to all the trouble of building your towns halfway up the face of a sheer cliff, risking the life of every man, woman, and child as they climb up and down to tend the crops or draw water, for any animal less dangerous than man."

"In the end running and hiding didn’t do the Anasazi any good. The ruins remain. The people are long gone."

"Maybe," Luke said softly. "And maybe it’s like mourning the passing of the Celts. They didn’t die so much as they became something else. I think some of the Anasazi came down out of their fortresses and changed into something else. I’ll bet Anasazi blood flows in Ute and Apache, Navaho and Zuni and Hopi. Especially the Hopi."

Carla looked at Luke curiously. "You sound like you’ve studied the Anasazi."

"Self-defense." He looked up at her and grinned. "You asked me so many questions after I gave you that piece of pottery, I had to dig pretty deep for answers. Cash must have mailed me most of the university library."

She laughed, then shook her head. "Poor Luke. I must have pestered you half to death. You were incredibly patient with me."

"I didn’t mind the questions. When it was too dark or wet or frozen to work, I’d sit and thumb through those books, looking for answers and finding more questions than even you had."

Luke’s long fingers caressed his coffee cup absently as he remembered the long, quiet evenings. Carla watched his hand with unconscious longing.

"When the snow piled up in the canyons," he continued, "I’d sit and think about people who lived and died speaking a language I’ve never heard and never will, worshipping unknown gods, building stone fortresses with such care that no mortar was needed, block after block of raw stone resting seamlessly next to its mates. However else the Anasazi succeeded or failed as a people, they were craftsmen of the kind this earth seldom sees. That’s a good thing to be remembered by."

Luke lifted his coffee cup in a silent salute to Carla. "So you see, your curiosity about that little piece of pottery I gave you opened up a whole new piece of history for me. I call it a fair trade."

"More than fair," she said, her voice husky with memories. "You gave me a world at the very time my own had been jerked out from under my feet."

Luke frowned, remembering the unhappy, fragile fourteen-year-old whose eyes had held more darkness than light. Not for the first time, he cursed the fate that took from a girl her mother and her father in one single instant along an icy mountain road.

"Cash gave you the world," Luke said quietly. "I just sort of came along for the ride."

Carla shook her head slowly but said nothing. She had already embarrassed herself once telling Luke of her love for him; there was no need to repeat the painful lesson. She had been only fourteen when she had looked into his tawny eyes and had seen her future.

It had taken her seven years to realize that she hadn’t seen his future, as well.

"Sit down and have some coffee," Luke said. "You look…tired."

Carla hesitated, then smiled. "All right I’d like that. I’ll get a mug."

"We can share mine," he said carelessly. "I’ll even put up with cream and sugar, if you like."

"No need. I taught myself to like coffee black."

What Carla didn’t say was that she had learned to like black coffee because that was the way Luke drank it Even after the disaster three years before, she had sat in her college apartment sipping the bitter brew and pretending Luke was sitting across from her, drinking coffee and talking about the Rocking M, the mountains and the men, the cotton-wood-lined washes and stands of pinon and juniper, and the sleek, stubborn cattle.

When Carla put her hand on the back of a chair that was several seats away from Luke’s, he stood and pulled out the chair next to his. After only an instant of hesitation, she went and sat in the chair he had chosen for her.

"Thank you," she said in a low voice.

Behind Carla, Luke’s nostrils flared as he once again drank in the scent of her, flowers and warmth and elemental promises she shouldn’t keep. Not with him.

Yet he wanted her the way he wanted life itself, and he had no more anger with which to keep her at bay. He had only the truth, more bitter than the blackest coffee. With a downward curl to his mouth, he poured more of the black brew into his mug and handed it to her.

"Settle in, sunshine. I think it’s time you learned the history of the Rocking M."