“The paintings,” he said with an offhand shrug. “Yeah, I guess they are.”

She sat back on her heels and stared at him, both hunger and self-consciousness forgotten. “You knew they were here? You’ve been here before.” The last wasn’t a question, but feeding himself a remnant of tortilla, he nodded yes to both. She uttered an impatient and wondering “Huh!” as she crouched again to examine the sloping ceiling and trace the faint but unmistakable designs with fingers that didn’t quite touch the surface. Parallel wavy lines in smoky black, an orangy-red sun with rays, something that might have been a bird or an arrow or a streak of lightning.

“Oh,” she breathed, exasperated, “I wish I had more light.” She threw Bronco a look over her shoulder. “Are they really…”

She paused and he finished her question for her. “Indian? I guess so. They’ve been there a long time, anyway.” And he added almost nonchalantly, “We’re on reservation land here.”

There was something in his voice, something that calmed her excitement and replaced it with the wary quietness of curiosity. After a moment she turned away from the petroglyphs and moved unhurriedly back toward the front of the cave, saying with what she hoped sounded like no more than casual interest, “So you used to come here when you were a boy?”

Bronco’s smile was crooked. “I spent some time here.”

Lauren tilted her head, squinting in the brilliant sunlight as she settled against the cave wall opposite him. “Camping?”

He gave a soft ironic snort-a sound that was becoming familiar to her. “I guess you could call it that. Mostly I was running away.”

“What from?”

“I don’t know, from my life-myself, I guess. It was after my dad died. I was angry and didn’t know who to be angry at, so I decided to be angry at everybody. My grandmother Rose, she told me about this place. Said it was a good place for thinking.” He gave a laugh so sharp that it made her wince, then shrugged. “Don’t know how much of that I did here, but I guess it probably saved me from a fistfight or two. Who knows-reckless as I was, it may have even saved my life.” He rose restlessly and faced the sunlight, one hand braced on the rock above his head.

Gazing at his smooth and gleaming back, broad-shouldered and sculpted in boldly masculine lines-no sign of weakness there-Lauren felt a spreading softness inside, a gentle aching in her heart. Could it be…why would it be tenderness?

She cleared her throat, ending a perilous silence. “Have you always been Bronco?” she lightly asked. “Has anyone ever called you Johnny?”

He laughed as if the question had taken him by surprise and glanced at her over one shoulder. “My dad’s the one that started calling me Bronco when I was just a little baby-can’t tell you why. And I guess the name just stuck. My grandmother Rose, she calls me Johnny.” His smile faded and he closed himself away again, his voice growing distant. “Gil does sometimes. I think my mom probably did, too. I was too young to remember.”

Lauren opened her mouth, then closed it and looked away without asking any of the thousand questions that trembled on her tongue. She knew she couldn’t look any longer at that powerful male body while, bewilderingly, her impulse was to go to him, take him in her arms and comfort him like a small lost child. How incongruous was that? It made no sense at all!

“I have a cousin named Rose,” she offered chattily. “Well, actually, it’s Rose Ellen, and most people call her Ellie. She’s a few years younger than I am-right now she’s in college, or anyway, she’s supposed to be. If I know her, since it’s summer, she’s probably off on a boat somewhere, saving dolphins, or maybe it’s whales. She’s kind of a nature nut. She wants to be a zoo vet…” Lauren was babbling, grabbing desperately for harmless innocuous words with which to fill the space between them that had suddenly become too emotionally charged for comfort.

But oddly enough, and to her intense relief, Bronco actually seemed to be interested in what she was saying. “Where’s she live, this cousin of yours?” he asked as he settled himself once more in the mouth of the cave, this time out of the sun.

So she told him about her dad’s family farm back in Iowa, and her aunt Lucy and uncle Luke, the newspaper columnist, and her cousins Eric and Ellie. She even told him about her father’s pioneer ancestor, Great-great-goodness knows how many greats-Grandmother Lucinda, who according to family legend saved herself and her baby from maurading Indians.

“Oops.” Too late, she halted, a hand clapped to her mouth, cheeks flaming.

But Bronco only shrugged, though his grin was crooked. “Hey, my people got in a few licks, too. It happened. That’s the past, you can’t change it. How’d she manage this miracle?”

“Well,” Lauren said, her heart fluttering with laughter and an excitement she didn’t at all understand, “according to family legend, she set fire to her own house, then tied her baby up in her apron and climbed down the well and hid there while the fire burned all the way to the river…”

And the way she told it, Bronco thought, it did have the singsong quality of legend, reminding him of the stories his people told, handed down from generation to generation, unchanging and strangely comforting in their familiarity.

He asked her questions, being careful not to reveal how much he already knew, and she told him other legends of her family. How her aunt Lucy had found her future husband hiding out in her barn while fleeing from the gangsters and corrupt politicians who had firebombed his Chicago town house in an attempt to silence his public campaign against them. And how tiny Aunt Lucy defeated the bad guys who’d kidnapped her by setting fire to the empty high-rise they were holding her in. How her ex-marine uncle Ed, whom everyone called Wood, came to meet his wife, Chris, while in the hospital recovering from a truck accident in Bosnia, and how he’d managed to save Chris from a stalker even though wheelchair-bound.

“That’s quite a family,” Bronco said when she seemed to run out of stories. “And now just think-your old man’s on his way to being president.”

At that her eyes jerked away from his, focusing, instead, on her hands, clasped around one drawn-up knee. Her lips tightened and he could see her throat move with her efforts to swallow an angry retort. He felt a dangerous and powerful desire to comfort and reassure her, to bare his soul, to tell her everything. It was because he didn’t dare do so that he needled her sarcastically, instead.

“With a family tradition like that, guess we should have expected he’d try and make like a hero, sending in the troops to rescue his little girl. I’m surprised he didn’t come himself. Like the cavalry. Flags flying and guns blazing…”

He watched the color of anger flare in her cheeks, then slowly fade, and felt the cold burn of shame in his belly when she quietly replied, “Believe it or not, my father is an incredibly decent and honorable man.” Her lips quirked slightly, flirting with a smile. “And pretty darn boring, if you want to know the truth. Actually-” she shifted, as if physically casting off the unease that had crept between them “-the only exciting thing that ever happened in our family, before Dad went into politics, anyway, was when he and my mother got divorced. That was an interesting time. My brother and I were total brats-Dad didn’t know what to do, until Dixie showed up.”

“Dixie? That would be…?”

“My stepmom. She’s the best. She pretty much changed everything.” Again her gaze slid away and she grew silent, not with anger this time, but with remembering.

“What happened?” he asked, his voice suddenly tight and air-starved. Because this time it was out of his own need to know. “Between your parents.”

She shot him a look, and her voice went up a notch in pitch, as if the question had surprised her. “Why did they get divorced?” Then she went on, and he knew it wasn’t surprise, after all, that gave her voice that brittle quality. “My mother left us. She ran off with another man, that’s why.”

Bronco said nothing. A pulse thumped against the walls of his belly, and he slowly shook his head. He knew the sound in her voice now, very well. It was the sound of anger. Of hurt.

She laughed, a soft musical note that didn’t sound at all like the cry of pain it was. “Yeah, can you believe that? Ironic, isn’t it? Both of us, suffering from the same mother issues. I was going to tell you yesterday in the meadow, but I never got the chance.”

He cleared his throat, searched for something, anything, to say and at last came up with, “How old were you?” Even though he already knew, roughly.

“I was ten,” she said, confirming it. “Old enough to be angry, rather than upset by it all. My brother, Ethan, was younger-it was really hard on him. He sort of regressed to being a baby for a while-cried over everything, sucked his thumb…stuff like that. It was Dixie who brought him out of it. And then, after my dad won custody of us, my mother tried to take us, anyway.”

“What do you mean, she tried? She kidnapped you?”

“Well,” Lauren said dryly, “as I said, she tried. I-we ran away, Ethan and I.”

We ran away. Such a simple unadorned declaration. But Bronco understood, as he gazed in silence at the young woman before him, that even as a child she must have been a force to reckon with. How wise he’d been not to underestimate her.

“How come you didn’t want to live with your mother?” he asked. “I’d have thought…being a girl…”

“No.” The word was clipped, final. Then she shrugged and grudgingly explained, “I told you-I was angry with her.”

“Sounds to me like you still are.”

She lifted her head and stared at him, defiantly, almost, and didn’t reply. After a moment Bronco picked up a granite chip from the floor of the cave and hurled it into the sunshine. He listened to the skittering noises as gravel loosened by the larger stone went tumbling down the canyon wall, then said in a hard emotionless voice, “Both our mothers left us, but we haven’t got the same issues, you and me.” He could feel her look, so he turned to meet it. “When your mother left, you blamed her. When mine left I blamed myself.”