It might have been the blood pounding in his own head, but Lauren’s voice sounded oddly slurred and thickened as she replied, “A bed sounds awfully good.” And it seemed to him she swayed toward him just slightly.

He said softly, “We can probably afford…one.”

She nodded slowly, never taking her eyes from his face.

After a moment he said brusquely, “Well. Okay.” He stuffed the cash back in his pocket and went into the gas station’s hot dim little convenience store, where he spent five of their meager dollars on a box of graham crackers, a quart of milk, a disposable razor, a pocket comb and an Albuquerque newspaper.

Ten minutes later he had the key to the Broken Arrow Motel’s cabin number four in his hand.

“I can’t believe he didn’t ask for any ID,” Lauren said in a low voice as she waited for Bronco to unlock the door. She smiled for the benefit of the manager, who was standing in the office doorway in his undershirt and overalls, watching them through black horn-rimmed glasses and rubbing dubiously at his quarter inch of gray beard stubble.

Bronco gave a sardonic grunt as the key turned at last in the ancient lock. He gave a thumbs-up to the manager, who turned and went back to his grainy black-and-white TV and Wheel of Fortune.

“He’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth,” Bronco said dryly as he pushed the door open and waved her ahead of him.

The room was dark, with the curtains drawn and the only light coming from the open doorway. But it didn’t matter- Lauren wasn’t really aware of her surroundings, anyway. Dimly she registered the worn rust-colored carpet, flowered bedspread and curtains in seventies colors-orange, yellow and avocado green. Then the door closed behind her and she heard the rustle of plastic as Bronco set the bag of groceries he’d just bought on the small wooden table near the door. She felt for the lamp on the nightstand and discovered that she was trembling.

She couldn’t bring herself to turn around; uncertainty had made her too vulnerable. Yesterday-last night-seemed an age ago, the mountain spring and monsoon storm very far away. There’d been catastrophic events in her life since then, and life-altering revelations…

Bronco stood with the key in his hand and stared at the back of her bowed head. Even with her body hidden in shapeless borrowed clothes and her winter-grass hair clumsily braided, dull and in need of washing, he still thought her the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. So beautiful it made his eyes smart and his throat ache to look at her.

He ached because things were so complicated now between them, so impossible. He ached for the way it had been for a brief time, there on the Sacred Mountain, reduced to the most primitive elements-man and woman, earth and sky and water, and the fire inside. How simple it had all been then. No pain, just joy. Pleasure in each other. A need and a fulfillment. But now he knew it wasn’t simple at all, that there was a reckoning, a cost to be counted. Once he’d been afraid of hurting her, he remembered, doing her damage. Now, though he couldn’t see how he might have avoided it, he knew the damage to himself was just as great-maybe even greater. His heart would never be the same.

One of us has to end this, Lauren thought, or begin… It took every ounce of strength she had just to turn and face him.

And she saw his eyes. Saw them as she’d never seen them before, beneath the sweep of warrior’s brows, glowing deep and dark with pain, with vulnerability, with all that she’d ever hoped to see in a man’s eyes gazing back into hers.

She uttered a small cry-like a sob, except that she was smiling. Smiling through tears. And then somehow, without either of them seeming to move, she was in his arms and he was holding her-and she him-as if they’d never, either of them, let go. Then he was plunging his fingers into her hair, setting it free, filling his hands with it while his mouth scorched her eyelids, her mouth, the sides of her neck, her throat. And she was laughing and whispering his name, tugging and pulling at his shirt, wanting to feel his beautiful satiny skin and hard body against hers.

She pulled away from him, gasping and desperate, suddenly filled with panic. “You won’t…you can’t…” she sobbed, dashing tears from her cheeks. “Please don’t deny me this time. I don’t care-I want to feel you inside me. Please let me feel you inside me. Just once. Please, Johnny…”

He frowned-and how endearingly silly it looked with eyes so soft and gentle. “Just once?” he murmured, and she heard something hit the bedspread with a faint plop-plop. She tore her eyes from his face to stare at the two small packages lying on the bed. “There was a machine in the men’s room at the gas station,” he said in his warm bear-rug voice, stirring shivers over her whole body. “Wasn’t sure I should spend our food money on con-” Her kiss stopped him there.

She felt his muscles tense and his back bow as he lowered her onto the bed and followed her down. Once again they tore at each other’s clothes. And thank heaven for the snaps on his borrowed Western-style shirt, because she was far too impatient for the intricacies of buttons. Wrenching his shirt apart and lifting herself into its folds, she scored his chest with her teeth and laved it with her tongue like one famished. Yes, famished. They were like starving survivors, half-mad with hunger, desperate to fill and be filled, caring nothing for taste and texture, smell and touch.

All they wanted then was the quickest avenue, the swiftest access to that complete coupling they’d denied themselves thus far. And clothing was a frail and incon sequential barrier. Bracing himself on one hand, Bronco raked Lauren’s jeans over her hips, then left her struggling to free her legs while he yanked at his own stubborn jeans fastening. Barely freed of that restriction, barely sheathed, he felt her legs come around him and her body open to him, and then he was fitting himself to her yielding softness and at long last driving himself home. Too suddenly, too violently for her, he knew it must be-yet he heard her cry blend with his, felt it wrenched, as his was, from deep inside, and knew it for a groan of pure relief, of primitive triumph and savage joy.

It was an explosion-noisy, shocking, devastating, and quickly over. Over in a few thunderous heartbeats, and yet it seemed to John Bracco that in the space of those heartbeats his old life had passed and a new one begun. So this is what it feels like, he thought, awed and humbled, quaking inside.

“That’s once,” he whispered, leaning down to kiss Lauren’s tear-drenched eyes, the tip of her nose, her quivering lips. “For number two we’ve got all night.” Rolling onto his side, he gathered her into his arms and held her tightly against his heart, and felt neither wonder nor concern when she began to sob as if her heart was breaking.

Oh, yes, her heart was breaking, she was sure of it. How could it not be? No heart could possibly hold together when it was filled to bursting with overwhelming joy…and utter despair.


Morning came, incredibly, in spite of all Lauren’s efforts to convince herself the night could last forever. But, she wondered, which was the fantasy-last night or this?

This was Bronco, sitting at the little wooden table, naked except for a motel towel knotted around his hips, long hair streaming down his back, casually reading the newspaper and eating graham crackers dipped in milk. She watched him from the bathroom doorway as she toweled her hair dry, quivering inside with wonder as she thought about the Bronco she’d danced with that long-ago night, barely a week ago now, in Smoky Joe’s. That lying, beer-drinking, brawling charmer in the red shirt. Who is the real Johnny Bronco?

Confusion and anger welled up inside her-then broke apart like a wave on a rock in a breathtaking burst of revelation. The real Johnny Bronco? But wait-hadn’t she been with this man day and night for days? She’d seen him angry and joyful, tired and teasing, tough and tender, vulnerable and strong-and not once had she seen even a glimpse of that other Bronco. Suddenly she knew beyond any doubt that this man, the Bronco here with her now, the man who’d saved her life, made her angry, made her cry, made her fall in hopeless love with him, was the real one. The other Bronco-that, it seemed to her now, had been artificial, unreal. Almost like an actor playing a role.

In the folds of the towel she caught her breath in a gasp of shock, as with that realization so many others fell into place, like a toppling trail of dominoes. Beer-drinking? But he hadn’t smelled of beer! She remembered thinking how wonderful he smelled-of herbal soap and horses and leather and man. And his room at the ranch-almost military in its neatness. She’d thought then-no, she’d felt-nothing so tidy as thought-that there was something about Johnny Bronco that didn’t fit.

Something, a lot of things. Like the way he talked, sometimes like an educated man, sometimes like a cop or a soldier, almost never like a roughshod cowboy who’d been kicked out of just about everywhere, including the U.S. Army!

And what about that shaver? This morning she’d stood and watched him scrape away a week’s worth of beard with bar soap and a throwaway razor, and had teased him about maybe needing tweezers, instead. Why would a man with almost no beard carry an electric shaver with him in his saddlebag to a wilderness camp? What could that possibly mean? Her mind, nurtured on spy novels and James Bond movies, instantly conjured up intriguing possibilities. She hadn’t found a gun-maybe the shaver had actually been a weapon of some kind!

Oh, all right, that was another of her romantic notions. But it didn’t change the fact that there were things about John Bracco that didn’t add up.