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  Sarah

  The Merry Widows, Book 3

  Raine Cantrell

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1998 by Theresa DiBenedetto

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition January 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-68230-949-0

  Also by Raine Cantrell

  A Corner of Heaven

  Calico

  Darling Annie

  Desert Sunrise

  Gifts of Love

  Silver Mist

  Tarnished Hearts

  The Homecoming

  Western Winds

  Whisper My Name

  The Kincaids

  Once a Maverick

  Once an Outlaw

  Once a Lawman

  Once a Hero

  Clan Gunn

  Fire and Sword

  Silk and Steel

  Magic and Mist

  The Merry Widows

  Mary

  Catherine

  Sarah

  Novellas

  A Time for Giving

  Apache Fire

  Miss Delwin’s Delights

  More than a Miracle

  The Bride’s Gift

  The Secret Ingredient

  For all my readers.

  Chapter One

  On a late January night when thick, ugly clouds hunkered across a full moon, Rio Santee crouched on a rooftop of the newest Indian mission school.

  He had relearned the lessons of childhood that night was his friend, but it was a cruel moon. A hunter’s moon. The cruelty lay in that it made all things vulnerable—the hunter and those he hunted.

  They were victims, all.

  But his need was such that he could not abide a longer delay. The men who hunted him might know he would come here. Even now, they could be waiting outside the box canyon. He had lost them two weeks ago, then come here. Two weeks when he had hidden by day, and by night prowled the mission seeking what he had lost.

  He had watched and waited with the infinite patience that was his people’s legacy. No longer would he walk the white man’s path as his Irish grandfather had taught him.

  For behind the stone walls, within one chamber, was where his heart lay. His life, all reason for living was locked within the walls.

  Tonight he would steal back what had been stolen from him. A hunted man had little choice but to become a thief.

  Rio was no more than a shadow as the biting winter wind sent clouds scudding across the sky to dapple the adobe and stone buildings on the canyon floor. He seemed oblivious to the cold in his thin wool shirt and buckskin pants. He was one with the darkness.

  Yet, moving or stilled, there was an intensity that set him apart. Like all night creatures, his senses were fueled by fear and excitement.

  He was aware of every breath, of the pulsing in his veins, a raw quickening that indicated the end of his yearlong search was near.

  One year. He wanted to howl his grief, his denial of stolen time. A bloodlust filled him as powerfully as the smell of his own warm sweat. His hand swept down to touch the handle of the knife sheathed at his side.

  He couldn’t fail. Not as he had in the past. But that was a thought path he refused to walk. The way was clear before him. It was time.

  With a lithe roll he went over the edge of the roof, his fingertips hugging the rough stone as he hung for a moment, then silently dropped to the ground. He turned immediately and drew his knife.

  The wooden shutter he faced was poorly made, the gap wide where the inside bar secured it shut He used his knife to raise the bar. It wedged an opening for his fingers to slip inside. He caught and held the bar up as he eased open one side of the shutter. Sliding the knife into its sheath, he peered into the room.

  There wasn’t enough moonlight to cast a shadow on the interior of the room. The darkness was absolute.

  His breathing was shallow but controlled, and so at odds with the thudding pounding of his heart. A cloth headband absorbed his sweat. If he were caught now, he would be killed and everything lost to him.

  With extreme caution he lifted the bar free and set it on the ground. Like the shadow he had been likened to he slid over the windowsill. There in the dark he stood for a few moments, listening to the sleeping breaths of twenty young Indian boys.

  Among them were his two sons. Half-breed Apaches forced to live among those of other tribes who hated them.

  His soft-soled moccasins helped him move silently into the center of the room. He counted off the wooden bedsteads until he came to the first one he wanted.

  Rio closed his eyes briefly. He was afraid to utter a prayer. The overwhelming emotions of standing this close to his firstborn son in more than a year stole his strength.

  They had stripped him of everything—beloved wife, children, home and his wealth of horses. Memories flooded his mind until he stood and shook like an aged man with a wasting sickness.

  His pride, his dual heritage and the precious peace he had fought to gain and believed his, were all gone.

  But he could give those gifts back to his sons.

  Now was not the time to savor the thought, or dream of what would be. Now was the time for the warrior.

  From his cloth belt he removed strips of rawhide and a length of cloth. His hands trembled as he leaned over his sleeping son and covered his mouth.

  The twelve-year-old’s struggles were no match for the man and were quickly subdued.

  Rio could not take the chance to whisper to his son and calm his fear. He cursed the thinness of his child’s body as he gagged and bound him in minutes. Wrapping the boy in his blanket, Rio carried him to the window where he lowered Lucas to the ground. Every move he made had been planned without wasted motion.

  He hadn’t planned on the pain it caused him to bind and gag his child, yet he made his way back to the bed where he quickly bundled the boy’s clothes. Another trip to the window to set the bundle outside and then he searched out his younger child’s bed. His was closer to the door.

  With the lightest of touches he discovered the boy still slept belly down, arms and legs flung to the four bed corners as if he would embrace all he could, even in his sleep.

  Rio’s body tensed with the effort to hold back his need to gather this smaller boy to his body and just hold him. Delay was deadly. Once more he quickly set about gagging then tying him, too.

  Soft mewling noises escaped the gag. Rio froze. In the next bed the boy mumbled in his sleep, then rolled over, facing away from them.

  Fear raked Rio like roweled spurs, to be so close to winning their freedom. He tossed clothing on the boy’s legs and wrapped him in a blanket, hurrying to the open window. While he lowered his son to the ground, the boys in their bed stirred as the cold night air filled the room. Urgency to be away filled Rio.

  Still without speaking he made two trips to take each boy outside the high-sided canyon to where he had hidden two horses. Stolen, like everything he possessed. But these were horses first stolen from him.

  He searched the shadows, forcing himself to patience. He had to be sure there was no one waiting to shoot them down. But the night wind whispered only of its biting cold.

  Rio hunkered down before his sons. He
untied their gags, speaking softly to them as he then worked to free their bonds.

  “Lucas, I have come for you as I promised.” He offered the boy the canteen. “We will travel quickly and in silence.” He saw Lucas nod as he sipped the water. “Dress now.”

  While Lucas obeyed without question, Gabriel, the younger, thew his arms around his father’s neck. He pressed his lips against Rio’s ear.

  “I told him, Father, that you would come for us. I told him over and over, but Lucas did not believe me.”

  “But I am here now, and he knows you spoke the truth.” Rio felt the child’s smile form against his cheek. He held the boy tight for a moment more, then gave in to the need that forced him to set the child away. “Dress quickly now. We ride hard and long this night.”

  Lucas, taller, thinner than Rio remembered, turned from him without a word.

  Rio needed no words to know his son blamed him. He thought he knew the depth of his rage, but it had been smaller measured against the feeling that swept through him now. He helped his sons to mount double. He tucked the spare blanket around them to cut the chill of the wind and tied their bundled clothing behind the saddle.

  He touched each boy’s shoulder. A little over a year, and in that time, the trust between them and his oldest son had been destroyed. He was helpless to stop himself from thinking about it, just as he had been helpless to stop it from happening.

  He mounted his own horse, a mountain-bred mustang mix, its steel-dust color and the boy’s dun of the same strain, animals barely a year away from their wild range. He could depend upon the horses to warn him of danger. He fought the urge to set his heels against the horse’s sides and race away. He kept both animals to a walk. A loose stone in the silent night would make a sound that carried far. Nor could he have the horses go lame.

  Rio kept to the deepest shadows against the towering upthrust of rock. He hated the fear gnawing inside him.

  Rio glanced behind him. This had been too easy. He couldn’t trust his own timing and planning. He had expected someone to be waiting for him to try to free his sons. The men that hunted him knew of his boys, knew he would go to them.

  True, it had taken him almost a year to discover which mission school they had been sent to. But those who trailed him had been led to many such places, no matter how carefully, how cunningly he laid false trails for them. He wished in all this time they had grown tired of hunting for him, but it was a wish born without substance. They would never give up until he was dead. He was the only one who stood against their greed and murder.

  Darkness was his only friend, the only aid he had to their escape and to keep them hidden. Darkness and silence. Later he would have time to talk to his sons, later the healing would begin.

  But would his sons forgive him? Would they ever understand the grief that had stolen his reason and for a while, his very will to live?

  He had no answers, for they were questions he dared not ask his sons now.

  Despite the biting cold wind that cut through his clothing, sweat broke out on his skin. He rode on with a growing belly-tightening anxiety that gripped him in its fist without a sign of easing as time and miles slowly passed. He rode with a numbing exhaustion, his constant companion for months. How much of an alarm the mission school would raise over the two missing boys was anyone’s guess. There was no choice but to keep moving.

  Briefly then, his hand touched the wooden stock of the rifle, secure in the saddle boot. This and his knife were the only weapons he had to protect his sons. He glanced behind at them, saw they were riding with eyes closed.

  The faint dawn tinting the sky saw them through the Zuni Mountains west of Alamitos on the northwestern side of the New Mexico territory. Within an hour they reached the edge of the Malpais lava beds. The trail through the treacherous beds led south.

  Rio pulled up. He scanned the land around and behind him. Once through the territory, he could cross to Mexico. There in the Sierra Madres, or a hundred miles east to the Candelaria Mountains, he would find a safe camp. These Mexican mountains offered sanctuary to Victorio, Geronimo and, long before, to other bands of Apache warriors. No, the whites called them renegades, and the men who hunted him would see him branded the same.

  Victorio had died down in those mountains over a year ago. But there were others who raided on both sides of the border. None, he admitted to himself, cut the bloody swath of death that Victorio’s revenge had taken. He could well understand what led Mangas’s war chief to split the band and leave the reservation for good. If he had found women and children dead on their gathering forages, scalped for the bounty paid on their Apache hair, he too would have sworn to avenge them. The promised beef never came, nor the blankets, and with their weapons taken, the warriors could not hunt for meat, had no skins or furs for warmth. They had to watch their women and children perish. All for the broken promises made to them.

  He had never lived on the reservation or with any of the roving bands. War had never been his path. His grandfather had seen to that There was no reason for his rancheria to be attacked, all that he loved destroyed. His place of peace, where he loved, was gone.

  With a start, Rio turned aside the dark thoughts haunting him and once more studied the land. His glance showed both sons watching him now, and he smiled to show his pride in their silences.

  He led off on a path that followed a dry, sandy watercourse. The sand left only a vague depression of their horses passing, which the wind and coming rain would wipe away.

  Off to the east the wall of the mesa rose, towering black against the light of a cold, gray dawn. Huge black blocks of lava tricked the eye into believing there was no path through the lava flow, but he knew of a path few men alive could find.

  At the path’s end were trees and water in a hidden island of grass. While the eruption of EI Teinero and Mount Taylor had desolated the country with its river of fire, there were a few places where the lava flow had split into separate streams. It was there that the islands were formed.

  Rio pulled up to study the land around him. He needed more light, for one misstep would send the horses plunging through blisters of apparently solid rock that might be eggshell thin. The broken lava that lay beneath the surface in vast caverns could slice man or animals to shreds.

  And he didn’t trust the silence.

  The growing light revealed land like an ugly, twisted snake, enormous ropelike rock that wound south for miles. It was a dreaded place, and he hoped for those who followed him, it would remain so.

  Rio studied the trail, then slid from his saddle, dropping his reins to ground-tie his horse. He motioned to Lucas to remain quiet as he stepped away. The path was narrow, one made by animals. Deer, antelope, bear, his eyes skimmed their tracks as he walked carefully, searching for any sign that another man had passed this way.

  Caution was part of his nature, always, from his earliest memories. Now that caution meant his life and that of his sons.

  The twists and bends of the path took him out of sight of the horses. There was brush, stiff, wiry, filled with thorns, clumps of prickly pear and a few scattered pines. He walked another hundred yards or so before he was satisfied that no one had recently passed this way.

  On his return, he saw that Gabriel still slept. Lucas had his dark brown eyes fixed on him as he made his way to the boy’s side. Rio gazed into blank, staring eyes with no expression for a father to read. His shorn hair, darker than Rio’s straight brown hair, was the same thickness and shade as his mother’s. Lucas had her eyes, too, both in color and shape, but his nose, straight and thin as a blade, was Rio’s, as was the boy’s mouth.

  Rio stood there. One hand held the reins to his own horse, the other hand clenched at his side. He tried to think of something to say, but his parched throat and the ache within would not allow him to speak. His heart was full, his gaze—unknowingly—pleaded with his son.

  The boy continued to stare at him.

  Rio turned away and mounted. Agony rode with him as h
e followed the path.

  There comes a time when a man believes everything is finished. That is a false belief. It is only the beginning. His grandfather’s words. He had thought of their meaning a great deal this past year. It was all he wanted. A new beginning.

  His grandfather had also told him that time was a healer. But time was a thief, too. Time had robbed him of years, and of memories with his sons.

  Judging by the look in Lucas’s eyes, Rio didn’t think his son was going to forgive him. Not that the boy had a choice. Rio had taken that from him and from Gabriel.

  Time. He needed time and a quiet place where no one hunted him.

  He constantly looked over his shoulder to search the rim as they dropped down into a hollow. There was no sign of life. That didn’t mean someone was not there. He wished he had his father’s field glasses. He wished for many of the things he had counted as his, but they were gone, and all he had was himself to depend on.

  Lost in his thoughts, Rio almost missed the opening. He had gashed a mark low on the boulder opposite a crack in the lava. The brush screened the angled opening. From where he sat on his horse, it appeared too small to allow a horse through.

  Once more he studied his back trail. He was uneasy. Every sense told him they were safe. His eyes saw no movement. He heard no sound above the howl of the wind. He inhaled deeply several times but caught no scent of smoke indicating a fire nearby.

  He did not know of any man who would travel the lava beds unless he was running from something. If he had been driven to the lava itself, he would be lacerated by the glasslike shards and die there.

  Rio stared once again at the crack in the wall. A note of added caution whispered through him. He watched the horses, for their mountain-bred senses could be trusted more than his own. Neither horse showed alarm.

  His gaze traveled up to where the rock appeared to curve over the slitted opening. It would shield those below from any gunfire from the rim. But the way before him was narrow, in some places so narrow he had to ride with one foot free of the stirrup.