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ceiling. He lounged in the doorway now, one arm thrown casually around the flashing-eyed Spanish beauty in paint and finery. His free hand caressed the woman’s neck in a sensuous gesture that brought a blush to Catherine’s face.
    She was well aware of the physical aspects of the male body through her work at the hospital, but of man ’s baser needs she was totally ignorant. She quickened her steps around the amorous couple only to find a hand suddenly at her wrist. Her bowed head jerked up to encounter dark, slumberous eyes in a beard-stubbled, mustached face. The disgusting fumes of alcohol and a woman’s cheap cologne washed over her.
    “ Hey!” the slurred voice demanded, “You that spinster teacher I’m supposed to haul back to Cristo Rey?” The eyes blinked in an effort to focus, and she shrank as far away as the young man’s grip permitted. “Coward—-no, Howard, that’s it, isn’t it!” He executed a clumsy half-bow. “Be with you in a minute, Miss Coward—er. Miss Howard.”
    “ Please, there’s no hurry," she managed to reply and sped down the hall toward the bathroom with the couple’s intimate laughter echoing in her ears.

 
    CHAPTER 3
     
    “ S orry 'bout this morning, ma’am,” Lorenzo Davalos said, keeping his gaze trained on the greasewood-stunted terrain that was crisscrossed by wagon tracks.
    Catherine lifted one dubious brow, wondering if the man was sorry for his drunken behavior before her that morning or the aftereffects of the carousing night. She could a lmost believe Don Francisco’s stepson was referring to the latter, for his bloodshot eyes looked out of a bronzed face made a temporary pasty-white. She had to smile despite her vexation with the young man. “It must be a magnificent hangover.”
    The man, who m she estimated to be about five years younger than she, maybe twenty-one or so, winced as the buckboard he drove jarred over lava rock. “Murderous is more like it.”
    After the two-day journey on the stage and no sleep, she decided she probably felt little better than her escort, certainly as stiff as the giant saguaro cacti that stood against the rim of mountains—the Santa Ritas, Dragoons, and Huachucas, names that made a beautiful litany.
    She realized she no doubt looked every inch the spinsterish schoolma rm the young man had so ungallantly labeled her . . . the starched white linen waist and somber navy-blue alpaca jacket and skirt, the bland little bonnet that perched like some drab wren on her tightly bound hair.
    However, Lorenzo Davalos looked none too appealing either. For a man of so few years, he appeared to already be squint-eyed and saddle-hardened. Muffled in a serape that petty much hid his long wiry figure, he hunched over the wagon’s lines, saying as little as possible. A sweat-stained sombrero with a snake of silver bullion about its crown slouched low on his head, shading lazy eyes the color of molasses in a rough-cut face that resembled a relief map. An aristocratic nose—the one redeemable feature about the disreputable-looking man—jutted over the drooping mustache.
    With his butter-colored hair that curled riotously beneath the sombrero it was almost impossible for her to accept that he was a Mexican of pure Spanish lineage —and heir to the much coveted Cristo Rey.
    “ Don’t have too much to recommend me to a proper Easterner, do I?” he said, flicking her an amused glance.
    He had caught her studying him! She blushed and quickly looked away. “ I suppose I am more accustomed to a different mode of people, but then that is why I came west.”
    “ Why?” he asked between teeth clamped on a noxious cigarette butt as his eyes squinted against the glare of the late afternoon sun. “Why did you come west?”
    To find a husband? To live? One simply did not confess such preposterous reasons. “ Why, I suppose like everyone else who comes to the territory, Mr. Davalos—for adventure.”
    The young man ’s laughter was short. His