Apache Flame by Madeline Baker Page A

you
tell your old man?”
    “About what?”
    “About tonight. About having dinner with me.”
    “Oh.” A fresh wave of heat flooded her cheeks. “I told him I
was going to visit one of my students. To talk to his parents about his
grades.” It was something she did from time to time, so her father hadn’t
questioned her.
    “I see.”
    She lifted her chin, her eyes sparking with defiance. “You
didn’t expect me to tell him the truth, did you?”
    “No, I guess not. I don’t suppose Smithfield would be too
happy about your being here, either.”
    Alisha felt a sharp stab of guilt. “No.” Roger was a good
man. He was building them a house, planning for their future. Besides running
his own carpentry shop, he worked part-time at the mercantile. Tonight, he was
working late at the store, earning some extra money by taking inventory. She
should be there, helping him. At any other time, she would have been.
    “Why did you agree to have dinner with me, ‘Lisha?”
    “Why?” She blinked at him, a dozen answers scampering around
in her mind. “Why shouldn’t I?” she asked, unwilling to tell him the truth.
“What’s wrong with old friends having dinner together?”
    “Friends?” He looked mildly amused. “Is that what we were?
Just friends?”
    Another wave of heat swept into her cheeks as she recalled
the moonlit nights they had spent near the creek, the warm hugs, the long lazy
kisses, the hours they had spent making love…the promise he had not kept…the
child she had lost.
    The waitress arrived a short time later with their dinner.
Alisha stared at her plate, her appetite gone. Taking a deep breath, she
clenched her fists in her lap as she summoned the courage to ask the question
that had plagued her for the last five years.
    “Why, Mitch?” she asked. “Why didn’t you send for me?”
    He looked up from his plate. “What are you talking about?”
    “You promised. You promised to send for me. Why didn’t you?
I waited and waited.”
    He put his fork down and leaned across the table. “I sent
for you. And you wrote me back and told me you had married Smithfield.”
    “I never got a letter from you.”
    Mitch reached into his back pocket and withdrew a piece of
paper. It was badly creased and stained. He unfolded it carefully and handed it
to Alisha.
    She took it from him with a growing sense of trepidation,
her eyes widening as she read the faded words. The handwriting was
unmistakable. She didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to think that her
father was capable of doing such a low-down, despicable thing, but the proof
was in her hands.
    “I didn’t write this.” Alisha dropped the letter on the
table, not wanting to touch it a moment longer. She felt suddenly empty inside,
numb, as if everything she had ever believed in had suddenly been proven a lie.
    “No? Then who did?”
    “My father.”
    Well, Mitch thought, that explained a lot of things. Picking
up the letter, he crushed it in his hand. He had kept that cursed letter all
these years because he thought it had come from Alisha, because, painful as the
words had been, the letter and his memories were all he’d had left of her.
    A vile oath escaped his lips. He was tempted to march up to
the Faraday house and confront the old man face to face, demand to know why
Faraday had lied to him. Except that Mitch already knew the answer. He was the
illegitimate, half-breed son of a gambling man. He hadn’t been good enough for
Alisha then, and he probably wasn’t good enough for her now. But he was madder
than hell.
    “So,” he said, reining in his anger, “where does that leave
us?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You promised to marry me.”
    “That was a long time ago. I’m not the same girl I was
then.” She shook her head. “Besides, I’m engaged to Roger.”
    “I asked you first.”
    “Mitchy…” She spoke her childhood name for him without
thinking.
    His expression softened. “No one else has ever called me
that, you