Fire and Rain by Elizabeth Lowell

was sharp, bright, running through quartz like sunlight through springwater. Your brother took one look at it and started hunting for Mad Jack's mine."
     "Cash never told me about that."
     "I asked him not to tell anyone, even you. Last thing I need is a bunch of weekend warriors digging holes in my land."
     "You're serious, aren't you? The gold you have really came from Mad Jack's mythical mine?"
     "The mine might or might not be myth," Luke said dryly. "The gold was real, and so was old Mad Jack Turner."
     "What makes Cash think the gold came from your ranch?"
     "The gold that was passed down through the family looks a lot like the gold from other mines in the area – same proportion of tin or silver or lead or copper or whatever. And then there's our family history backing up the assay. Case had a brother who married a girl he'd found running wild in mustang country. She was Mad Jack's friend. The country she ran in was just south of here. Since Mad Jack went everywhere on foot, it stands to reason that his mine is somewhere nearby. At least, that's what Cash figured seven years ago. He's been hunting that mine ever since, every chance he gets."
     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