Catch a Wild Heart

  Catch a Wild Heart

  Tremaynes of Apache Wells: Book Two

  Vivian Vaughan

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2000 by Jane Vaughan

  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 info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition June 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-852-1

  Also by Vivian Vaughan

  A Wish to Build a Dream On

  Storms Never Last

  Sweetheart of the Rodeo

  Branded

  No Place for a Lady

  Reluctant Enemies

  The Texas Star Trilogy

  Texas Gamble

  Texas Dawn

  Texas Gold

  Silver Creek Stories

  Heart’s Desire

  Texas Twilight

  Runaway Passion

  Sweet Texas Nights

  Jarrett Family Sagas

  Sweet Autumn Surrender

  Silver Surrender

  Sunrise Surrender

  Secret Surrender

  Tremaynes of Apache Wells Series

  Chance of a Lifetime

  Chapter One

  Texas, West of the Pecos—1880

  It should have been a simple task, Keturah Tremayne thought impatiently. Find two runaway boys. Now look where it had gotten her.

  “Nothing involving white eyes is ever simple,” she muttered to herself. Huddled in a rocky crevice a hundred yards or so above the valley the Comancheros had chosen for their camp, Ket rubbed her cramped leg.

  “Nothing,” she repeated. She had no liking for what she was about to do, but that didn’t change the fact that she had to do it. She had given Lena her word.

  True, the promise had been made before either she or Lena knew the boys had been kidnapped by Comancheros—a major obstacle, no doubt about it. But the fact remained—Ket had given her word. And she had to keep it, regardless that she would now be required to sneak into a camp of three dozen or more armed and dangerous men.

  Absently drying wet palms on her soft deerskin britches, Ket watched the men secure camp for evening. She studied every aspect of the layout, knowing they would not be foolish enough to let down their guard, not for a single second. Within a day’s ride of the Río Grande, where they would find sanctuary across the river in Mexico, they could be counted on to remain armed and alert.

  With each passing hour doubts about her ability to pull off such a difficult rescue increased. Who was she to think she could slip into that camp, free two dimwitted white-eyes boys, and get them all three out alive?

  “You’re our only hope,” Lena had written.

  Some hope, Ket thought now, awaiting nightfall. Her stomach filled with dread in direct relationship to the descent of the afternoon sun. From her perch high in the rugged cliffs of Puerto del Piasano, she watched the fiery golden disk disappear behind the serrated peaks of the High Mountains further west. The effect was startling. Alternate bands of gold, red, and darker shadows striated the valley. Campfires sparkled like brilliant jewels.

  Below her the riding stock had been watered in nearby Piasano Springs and staked for the night. A hush had begun to fall, as darkness encroached. She had spent the last few hours huddled here between two outcroppings, watching, waiting, biding her time.

  Now the Comancheros, many stumbling from drunkenness, had begun to settle on the ground for the night. Soon their bedrolls would spill from the mouth of the canyon out onto the cactus-strewn desert plain.

  Her hours of observation paid off, for she had located the missing boys, then observed as the Comancheros bound and deposited them along with other booty in the center of the camp near the largest bonfire.

  The fires would burn through the night, surrounded, of course, by the sprawling mass of armed men. The boys she had come to rescue wouldn’t have been more securely imprisoned inside a white man’s jail.

  Ket watched carefully, more distressed than she would have imagined herself being over the plight of two white-eyes boys.

  They seemed in good health, if weary from their weeklong ordeal. She’d been trailing them three days when their tracks merged with those of a single man; not half a day later, the three pairs of tracks had been overrun by a party of thirty-odd armed men and double that number of pack animals. A herd of domesticated horses, probably stolen from ranches along the Comanche Trail, were loose-herded on the far side of the camp.

  She could tell nothing about the single man the boys had taken up with, but it hadn’t taken her long to identify the captors as Comancheros.

  Their retinue gave them away—their tracks a mixture of shod and unshod ponies and heavily laden pack animals. Their haste and direction confirmed this conclusion. Making a beeline for the Mexican border, they traveled at double the expected speed for a party their size.

  It was, after all, late fall. The air was already cool and crisp. Winter fast approached. Normally Comancheros wrapped up their raiding activities and headed for Mexico before this time, not wishing to be caught in the vicinity of the major military outposts of Davis and Bliss by an early snowstorm.

  Their location for this camp further proved the point to Ket and added to her urgency. Equidistant between Fort Davis and the privately owned Fort Leaton, this site would be an overnight stop, at best. When pushed, Comancheros were known to camp a few hours, then push forward into the night.

  Time was short; the situation, desperate. Night guards would be especially alert. Secreted within the dark shelter, surrounded by her weapons, Ket dried her palms again as two men ascended the hills to either side of her. First watch. Large-brimmed sombreros covered their faces. More to the point, each wore two pistols and crossed bandoleers of bullets for their rifles. She must assume they also carried knives.

  Still she waited. Outmanned and outarmed, she must lay her plans with care and choose her time equally well. Impatience could mean death for the boys, death for herself. Let the darkness deepen and the men below fall asleep…

  Keturah’s dilemma had begun with a call for help she could not ignore. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. But wasn’t that the way with white eyes? Their intrusion into her life and the lives of her people had not been limited to this request to find two runaway boys.

  On the other hand, these weren’t just any runaway boys. Luke Tremayne was Ket’s half-brother, born to her white-eyes father and his flame-haired wife. Tres Robles, eleven, was the son of the only white eyes Ket trusted in this whole world, Nick Bourbon and his wife Lena.

  It was Lena who sent word to the Apachería that the boys had gone off to seek the old Tremayne home place, Apache Wells, and had not returned.

  “Your father and Nick are up in the Delawares,” Lena’s message explained. “They’ve taken most of the cowhands to help drive cattle down for the winter. Sabrina’s delivery date is near. You are our only hope to find the boys, Ket. We’ve no one else to turn to.”

  As skilled at tracking and as knowledgeable of the country as her father and as competent with weapons as any of Victorio’s warriors, Keturah Tremayne was the obvious choice for so difficult a task. Branded a half-breed by the white community and an orphan at the Apachería after her Apache mother had been murdere
d by white soldiers, Ket had forged her own individual lifestyle. There were those in both communities who said she had patterned her life after her father, whose vast wilderness skills were renowned in this wild country. She cynically denied such claims, even to herself. Especially to herself.

  Adding to Ket’s present dilemma, Lena and Nick had come to her aid more than once in her tumultuous twenty years. No, she could not ignore Lena’s request. She could only hope the Apaches holed up in the Diablo Mountains wouldn’t decide to raid Fort Davis before she found the two dimwitted boys and returned them to their mothers.

  The dozen or so warriors left at the Apachería, those who for whatever reason hadn’t followed Victorio to Mexico, had been gathered in war council for two weeks trying to talk themselves into raiding Fort Davis.

  “We need not ride all the way to Mexico to fight with Victorio,” Ket had heard them reason. “We can die as honorably and without that long ride right here at home.”

  Most of their women and many of the old men hoped the young warriors would eventually decide to go to Mexico to be with their great leader, Victorio. Most had remained behind with their sons, husbands, fathers. All would follow their men to Mexico. Though none spoke aloud of it, no one among them doubted that the time of the Chiricahua, indeed of all free Apaches, was nearing its final days. Whether the end came here in the Diablo Mountains or in Mexico mattered little to the haggard, haunted, and hunted vestiges of a once proud people. Perhaps they should all be together.

  Ket intended to follow her people to Mexico. Her decision had been reinforced recently when her cousin, called Emily by the white-eyes colonel and his wife who adopted and raised her, returned to the Apachería to be with her blood people at the end.

  Ket didn’t fear the dying. She had always known—they all had always known—that the People were born to die. She would be proud to die with them. They were, after all, half of her heritage, the only half she claimed. Having her cousin beside her would be appropriate and welcome.

  Beyond that she resisted analyzing her innermost heart. She knew her decision to leave this land was prompted by anger at the white-eyes soldiers who murdered her mother; anger at Sabrina, the flame-haired woman who had stolen her father; anger at her father for abandoning her to a life of virtual nonexistence.

  Although it didn’t matter to Ket whether the warriors raided Fort Davis, it did matter to Emily. After ten years with the white eyes, the fourteen-year-old was more white than Apache. But not to everyone. Ten years with the white eyes and Emily was suddenly not good enough to be courted by the young officer she fancied herself falling in love with. He had chosen a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl to court.

  “Love?” Ket had scoffed. To her, Emily’s claim was yet another example of the white man’s definition of love—betrayal.

  “She only wanted to love you,” Ket’s father had said the day Sabrina left the Apachería for good. Next thing Ket knew, her father had married the flame-haired woman.

  “Sabrina and I are in love,” he had tried to explain later. “One day you will understand.”

  Ten years later here Emily was, barely fourteen years of age, claiming to love a white-eyes soldier. Reba Applebee, Emily’s adoptive mother, had tried to soothe Emily, but it hadn’t worked, and Emily returned to the Apachería.

  “She doesn’t think I’m old enough to fall in love,” Emily told Ket with tears flowing down her cheeks. “She thinks I’m still a child, too young to know what love is.”

  Ket held her tongue. She didn’t tell Emily the truth, that Reba Applebee’s concept of love was surely the same as her own father’s had been.

  “I know I would have to wait a few years, Ket, but…Apache women marry at a younger age than I am now,” Emily had cried. “I’m not too young to know what I want. I’ve known white girls to marry at thirteen.”

  “It’s over, Emily,” Ket had said. “You will forget.” But Ket wouldn’t forget. To her this was the sort of treatment one should expect from all white eyes—betrayal.

  Betrayal. That’s what they meant by love. She couldn’t tell Emily that. Emily, broken-hearted that her dream would never come true, may have returned to her blood people, but she had not yet learned to hate the white eyes.

  “Please persuade them not to raid the fort,” she had pleaded with Ket.

  “You know little of our ways, girl. I am not Apache enough to speak my mind. Certainly not and have it heard.”

  “But you must try, Ket. I couldn’t stand for my…my other family to be murdered by my blood people. Or the other way…”

  Strangely, Emily had remained dear to Ket, when everyone else had abandoned and disappointed her. Without delving into the meaning, Ket knew it had something to do with the symbolic connection she felt with Emily, who shared a similarity with Ket’s own disparate situation. Half Apache, half white, Keturah Tremayne was all nothing.

  “I will try,” she promised. Then, while talk of war escalated, Lena’s urgent message arrived.

  Lena and Nick were Ket’s one link with the white world, which she had shunned since her mother’s death when she was a small child. Through Lena and Nick, she had kept up with Emily, even visited her at the Bourbons’ ranch, to which Emily had finally come for help in returning to the Apachería.

  Through Lena and Nick, Ket had also kept up with the comings and goings of her father, Tremayne, and his hated wife, Sabrina. Through Lena and Nick, she had come to know her half-brother Luke. Lena and Nick were as solid a foundation in Ket’s life as the red volcanic bedrock was to the Davis Mountains.

  So when Lena’s message arrived, she felt obligated to respond. Lena worried about the boys being alone in the mountains with the Ramériz brothers loose; they still threatened revenge against Tremayne for their father’s murder.

  Ket feared that a worse fate could befall the boys if warriors from the Apachería decided to attack the fort. What better way to provoke the citizens of Fort Davis than by killing the sons of the area’s leading ranchers?

  Not that she cared what happened to Luke Tremayne, but she couldn’t let Lena and Nick’s son cross paths with a band of warriors who were itching for revenge.

  Not that she cared what happened to Luke, Ket insisted. Yet, she did care. She didn’t actually like the boy, this half-brother, but for some unexplored reason, he fascinated her.

  Looking at him she saw vexing similarities. True, his complexion was fairer; but the eyes that shone from his boy-soft, sun-kissed white face were the same eyes that shone from her tawny face. Tremayne green eyes. She hated them. Yet, looking Luke in the eye always brought a queasy feeling to her stomach.

  And his hair, though not as dark as her own, was nevertheless dark enough, and wavy.

  Green eyes. Dark wavy hair. The two characteristics she could never hide. On her otherwise pure Apache face they became her nemeses, proclaiming her an outsider in every man’s world, a person who belonged nowhere, to no one.

  Unless to the Tremaynes, who did not want her.

  Chilled by the night and by her own ghosts, Ket reached to chafe her arms and felt the cold steel bullets in her bandoleers. The agony of her unrequited past faded into the reality that awaited her.

  Time to move. Time to rescue the boys and return to the Apachería before her two worlds collided.

  In the valley below, the bonfires had died to embers. Forms of sleeping Comancheros and their captives mounded across the plain like so many anthills.

  Tonight Ket wished that Luke had inherited his mother’s flaming hair; Luke’s mother, Sabrina, the hated soldier’s daughter who had stolen her father, had hair so red it must have been colored by spirits of the Underworld. Hair that red would glow in the firelight, lighting her way even as the stars above threatened to sabotage her mission.

  To avert immediate failure, Ket knew she must disarm the night guard who had taken position directly above her. Soundlessly, she removed her crossed bandoleers and placed them beside her rifle to retrieve later. She stretched her
scarred leg, burned in a ceremonial fire when she was ten, loosening it for the climb ahead, then slipped out of her hiding place.

  The guard never heard a sound. An arm around his throat, a strategic chop to his windpipe, and he was unconscious. She bound his hands and feet with leather straps she carried on her belt for such purpose, then tethered him to a stunted shinoak. His own bandanna proved a suitable gag.

  In less than three minutes Ket left the unconscious guard behind, stopped for her rifle and bandoleers, and headed down the mountain wearing his serape and sombrero over her deerskin britches and calico shirt. Her knee-high Apache moccasins made no sound when she reached the outskirts of the camp and threaded her way among the sleeping Comancheros. If any awakened, they would think her one of them, returning from a call of nature.

  Arousing the boys would be more difficult. One false move or sound from either and all would be lost. Tres Robles, levelheaded and mature for a white-eyes boy of his age, might react more sensibly.

  Luke was the first she came to. Stretching out beside him, as though she were lying down to sleep, she felt his wakefulness. Uncertain what he might do, fearing the worst, she brought her lips close to his ear and whispered, “It’s Keturah. Do as I say and don’t make a sound.”

  “Ket!” He didn’t yell the word. She only heard it that way.

  No sooner had she slit his bonds than he threw his arms around her neck, catching her off guard. “I knew you’d come, Ket.”

  Again the words made no more sound than a slight breeze blown directly into her ear, but she froze in terror that they would draw attention. After a moment she repeated, “Do exactly what I say.”

  This time he simply nodded.

  “Pull your hat down over your face, get up, and walk away. Slowly. Stay behind those far trees, enter that canyon directly beneath the rising moon, and wait.”

  He was gone before she finished speaking, and she curled up in his place, where she waited impatiently, listening for trouble. Her heart thrashed so loudly she knew it could surely be heard to the furthest reaches of this camp of miscreants. She had never felt such anxiety. Not for her own safety, but for the life of this boy. She told herself it was because he was a stupid, inept white eyes. An Apache boy ten years old would have been able to pull off the assignment in a minute. But a white eyes…