Luke leaned forward and took the coffee mug from Carla's fingers. He told himself that he hadn't meant to brush his hand over hers as he freed the mug, but he didn't believe it. He also told himself that he couldn't taste her on the mug's thick rim, and he didn't believe that, either. He took a sip, looked at her and smiled a slow, lazy kind of smile.
"You've been snitching chocolate chips from the cookie batter, haven't you?"
Carla made a startled sound, then flushed, realizing that somehow she had left a taste of chocolate on the mug.
"I'm sorry. I'll get my own cup."
"No," Luke said softly, holding Carla's chair in place with his boot, making it impossible for her to push away from the table and stand. "I like the taste of … chocolate."
He watched the sudden intake of her breath and the leap of the pulse in her neck. When he looked at her mouth, the pink lips were slightly parted, surprise or invitation or both. Her eyes were wide and her pupils had dilated with sudden sensual awareness.
Luke drank, watching her over the rim, putting his mouth where hers had been and savoring the coffee all the more because of it. When he put the mug back in her fingers, he turned it so that when she lifted the mug to drink, her mouth would touch the same part of the rim his had.
"Drink," Luke said softly, "and I'll pour some more."
Unable to look away from him, Carla brought the mug to her mouth. When the warm rim brushed her lips it was as though Luke had kissed her. Carla's fingers trembled suddenly, forcing her to hold the mug with both hands as she sipped. The betraying tremor didn't escape the tawny eyes that were watching her so intently. When she lowered the mug and licked her lips, she heard the soft, tearing sound of Luke's quickly drawn breath. He took the mug from her again, poured coffee, sipped and then returned the mug to her.
"Case MacKenzie liked more than the land around here. He found a girl whose daddy hadn't been fast enough with a gun or lucky enough with a miner's pick. Mariah Turner had inherited water rights to Echo Canyon Creek, Wild Horse Springs and Ten Sentinels Seep, and mineral rights to a lot more country. She also had every outlaw in the whole damned territory camped on her doorstep."
Carla closed her eyes and relaxed slowly as she listened to Luke's deep voice talk about people who had lived more than a century ago, people to whom the Four Corners country was a landscape both intimately encountered and nearly unknown, a wild place where white history was nonexistent and Indian history was so old that most of it had been long forgotten.
"I've seen pictures of Mariah," Luke said. "I know why the outlaws were circling around howling at the moon. She was all woman. But she had more than a good body and a pretty face. She had the kind of guts that make a man want to catch moonlight and bring it to her in his cupped hands like water, just to see her smile."
Luke sipped coffee while Carla watched, her breath held, tasting in her mind the coffee that was sliding over his tongue, wishing she could be that close to him just once before she died. Watching her, sensing what she was thinking, Luke handed the mug back to her and continued speaking.
"Mariah held on to the land and played outlaws off against one another like a nineteenth-century Queen Elizabeth, letting no man get the upper hand in her life. For two years the outlaws fought for her favors – and made sure that no man got close to her without being killed – and then her worst fears came true. An outlaw who was better with a gun than any of the others rode into her valley. The other outlaws couldn't take the man head-on and he was too quick and too wary to take by ambush."
"What happened?"
"Mariah was lucky. The man was Case MacKenzie."
"The one with the saddlebags full of gold?"
"The same." Luke smiled. "He didn't plan to get married. He didn't even plan to fall in love. Yet before long he was writing notes to himself, talking about hair that was the color of dark mountain honey and sunlight all mixed together." Tawny, intent eyes moved over Carla's hair. "Like your hair. Your eyes are like Mariah's too, clear and direct. And your mouth is like hers. The kind of mouth that makes a man want…"
Luke let his voice die away. He took the mug and sipped again, forcing himself not to say any more. The hint of chocolate left by Carla was sweeter than any kiss he had ever tasted.
"Maybe you've got Turner blood in you, sunshine. The more I look at you, the more you remind me of Mariah." Luke sighed and rubbed his neck with his right hand, cursing the luck that had him living with a woman he wanted and must not take. "Mariah was the woman Case had been looking for in more ways than one. He had been trying to find Mad Jack Turner's son, to give him his share of his father's gold. Well, it was too late for Johnny Turner, but not for his daughter, Mariah. The gold was just what she needed to improve the Rocking M's beef stock, hire honest hands and make the place a real ranch instead of an outlaw roost."
Luke laughed softly, remembering his father and grandfather telling the same story to him years ago. "And while Mariah was at it, she improved the human stock, too. She had eight children by the man no one could kill, the husband she called her 'beloved outlaw.' One of the kids was Matthew Case MacKenzie, my grandfather's father. Then came Lucas Tyrell MacKenzie, then my father, Samuel Matthew MacKenzie, and then me, Lucas Case MacKenzie. And the Rocking M came with the MacKenzie name, passed on to whichever son had the sand to make a go of ranching in this country."
Carla looked at Luke's face, burned by wind and sun, dark from days without shaving, marked by fine lines radiating out from the corners of his eyes, lines left by a lifetime of looking into long distances and sunlight undimmed by city smoke. In his faded blue chambray shirt, worn jeans and scarred cowboy boots, Luke could have easily stepped out of the pages of his own family history.
"I'll bet you look like him," Carla said softly.
"My father?"
"No. The beloved outlaw. Case."
Something in Carla's voice made desire leap fiercely within Luke, but it was unlike any desire he had ever known. It was not only her sweet body and soft mouth he wanted; he also felt an almost overpowering need to hold her and be held by her in return, to hear her whisper that he was her beloved outlaw, the one man whom she had been born to love.
The one man she must not love, for he could not give her the life she deserved.
"I envy Mariah," Carla continued slowly. "She gave her outlaw everything a woman wants to give her man, and in doing so she became a part of the land every bit as much as the ancient ruins or the Indians who drew on Picture Cliff and then disappeared. Everyone always talks of the West as though it only belonged to cowboys and Indians and outlaws. It belonged to the women, too. In their own way, they fought just as fiercely for the land as any man ever did. I would like to have been a part of that."
"Don't kid yourself, schoolgirl," Luke said sardonically. "No matter how they start out, women end up hating this land, and with good reason. The country grinds them up like they were corn rubbed between two rocks."
"It didn't grind up Mariah Turner MacKenzie."
Luke shrugged and drank coffee. "She was one in a million. I've never envied any man anything, but I envy Case MacKenzie Mariah's love. He found a woman with enough sheer grit to take on this brutal, beautiful land and never cry for mama or silk sheets or the company of other women. Hell, I take it back – Mariah was one in ten million."
"A lot of women lived in the West," Carla said evenly. "More than a fifth of the homestead claims were taken out by women who were alone."
Luke's eyebrows came up. "I didn't know that."
"Of course not. Men write history."
He smiled slightly, a flash of white against the dark beard stubble. Then the smile faded and he pinned Carla with his eyes. There was no desire in his glance now, no fire, nothing but the cold sheen of hammered metal.
"Case's son wasn't lucky. Matthew MacKenzie married a Denver girl. She was the youngest of a big family and she spent the first ten years of the marriage having babies and crying herself sick for mama. Two of her kids survived. By the time they were in their teens, she was back in Denver."
Luke took a sip of coffee and rotated the mug absently on the tabletop. Carla watched, afraid to speak, sensing that he was trying to tell her something but he didn't quite know how to go about it.
"Divorce was out of the question in those days. The two of them simply lived separately – he was on the ranch, she in the city. The boy, Lucas Tyrell MacKenzie, grew up and inherited the Rocking M," Luke continued. "He was my grandfather. He married the daughter of a local rancher. She had three kids and was pregnant with a fourth when her horse threw her. By the time he got her to a doctor, she and the baby were both dead. Eight years later my grandfather married again. Grandmother Alice hated the Rocking M. As soon as my father was old enough to run the place, my grandparents moved to Boulder."
Carla listened without moving, hearing echoes of old anger and fresh despair in Luke's voice; and worst of all, the silent, unflinching monotone of a man who knew he could not have what he most wanted in life.
"Dad and his two brothers lived on the ranch. One after another they went to Korea. One after another they came home, married to women they had met, where they took their military training."
Luke lifted the coffee mug again, realized it was empty and set it aside. He didn't need it. The rest of the MacKenzie story wouldn't take long to tell.
"It was a disaster," he said calmly. "It had been hard enough to find a woman who would tolerate life on an isolated cattle ranch even in horse-and-buggy days. In the days of suburbia and flower children and moon shots, it was impossible. One of my uncles moved off the ranch and into town; his wife quit drinking and he started up. My other uncle refused to move to town. His wife made his life living hell. My two cousins and I used to sleep in the barn to get away from the arguments. One night my aunt couldn't take it anymore. My uncle had hidden the car keys, so she set out on foot for town. It was February. She didn't make it."
Luke's lips twisted down in a hard curve. "In any case, she got her wish. She never saw the sun set behind the Fire Mountains again."
A chill moved over Carla's skin. She had heard enough bits and pieces about Luke's past to guess what was coming next. "Luke, you don't have to tell—"
"No," he interrupted, watching Carla with bleak yellow eyes. "I'm almost done. My mother hated the Rocking M from the moment she set foot on it. But she loved my father. She tried to make a go of it. She simply wasn't tough enough. At first we didn't even have a phone for her to talk to her family or friends. No women lived nearby. Nothing but kids and the kind of work that has broken stronger women than my mother ever was, even on her best day.
"One night the wind started screaming around the peaks and she started screaming right along with it. A week later her parents came for her. They took her, my sister and my cousins – both girls – and they went back east, saying the Rocking M wasn't a fit place for females. I never saw my sister again. She was seven. All I have of her is some old pictures and the doll I was mending for her. When they took her away I was out chasing strays. I didn't even get the chance to say goodbye. Afterward Dad set out to drink himself to death. He was a big man. It took him years, but he finally made it."
"What about your mother?" Carla asked unhappily.
"I hear she remarried. I never saw her again."
Carla looked into Luke's bleak amber eyes and felt her own heart turn over with a need to hold him, comfort him, give him some warmth to offset his cold memories.
"Luke," she whispered.
Without thinking Carla pushed back from the table and went to Luke, taking his face in her hands, feeling the beard-roughened warmth of his cheeks against her palms. He sat motionless, but his eyes blazed within his silence. He made no effort either to pursue or to withdraw from her touch.
"Luke, I…"
Carla's voice died because she didn't know what to say.
"Luke," Carla breathed, bending down to his mouth, almost touching it with her own, trembling.
She had little experience to guide her, only her own need to know the heat and textures and taste of this one man. She could feel the rush of his breath over her lips, smell the coffee he had recently drunk, sense the warmth that waited for her finally within her reach. With aching slowness she lowered her head until her mouth brushed over his. She repeated the caress again, another brushing motion, and then again and again, and each time she lingered longer, pressed against his mouth a bit more, until finally she could feel the hardness of his teeth behind the warm resilience of his lips.
It was good, so very good, but it wasn't enough. Carla remembered how it had been to taste Luke. Hot, wildly exciting, transforming her in the few seconds before the kiss had become too adult, too hard, demanding more of her than she had dreamed at eighteen; but she had dreamed many, many times since then, and running through her dreams like streamers of fire had been the memory of his taste, the electric intimacy of his tongue caressing her own, the hard length of his body imprinted on her own softness.
Remembering how it had been three years ago, Carla slowly opened her mouth until she could touch Luke's lips with just the tip of her tongue. She felt the shock wave of sensation that went through him at the caress, making his powerful body tremble. A small whimper escaped from the back of her throat when she tried to breathe and found she couldn't; she was held in the vise of the sensual instant, wholly focused on the sensations spreading from the tip of her tongue throughout her body.
The sound of surprise and discovery that Carla made sent another shock wave moving through Luke, shaking him.
"Sunshine," he whispered, "Baby, don't…" He had no breath to finish, for she had taken it from him with another gliding caress of her tongue.
The sound he made then was not unlike hers when she discovered she couldn't breathe. She trembled and moved her mouth again, instinctively fitting it more closely to his, touching his lips with her tongue, finding warmth, seeking the greater warmth she knew lay within.