Wild Fire (Wild State) by Edie Harris

ONE

    Colorado Territory
    July 1866

    I t was an eerie thing, to see fire in daylight.  
    Not just fire, but twenty-foot flames, scorching hot and crackling with power. Trees turned to blackened matchsticks, grasses to sooty ash, yet high above the smoke the clear blue sky remained so pristine as to pain the eyes.  
    The smell of burning that he so hated invaded Sheriff Delaney Crawford’s nostrils as he stood on a hilltop overlooking what had once been a thriving farm. Only a couple of hours ago, a fence had marked the last acres of flat plains before the geography shifted into stark mountaintops. Now that fence was destroyed, and the landscape was black and gray with startling patches of green where the wildfire hadn’t managed to steal all of nature’s beauty.  
    The heat from the flames and the exertion made Del’s homespun stick uncomfortably—clinging to his arms, along his ribs, below his sternum. He wanted nothing more than to dive into the small pond behind his house and bask in the cool relief it would offer.
    After devouring the landscape, the fire—painted in living shades of amber and scarlet that danced against the cerulean sky—had climbed up a brush-covered rise to the north of where he now stood. In the hours before the flames had claimed Tucker McCade’s farm, Del and a handful of men from the town of Red Creek nearly ten miles to the northwest had stripped McCade’s small cabin of its belongings, led the livestock behind a hill away from the fire’s trajectory, and emptied the barn of equipment that would be too dear to replace all in one go.  
    The animals were safe, the tools of McCade’s trade intact, and all personal effects currently being hauled via wagon toward McCade’s brother’s homestead long miles to the south, halfway between Red Creek and Denver City. There was nothing else to be done here.
    Loosening the reins of his mount from where he’d tied them to a downed tree, Del wrapped the leather across his palm and glanced again at the destruction spread out before him. “Well, hell.”  
    Beside him, atop his own horse, Del’s deputy sheriff lifted his broad shoulders in a shrug. “That is your interpretation.”  
    John White Horse was a man of few words—and most of them sarcastic. Since making the Cheyenne native his deputy nearly a year ago, Del had found the young man to be intelligent, loyal, and a regular pain in the ass. More often than not, John acted the part of Del’s conscience, or at least reminded Del that he had one, tarnished though it may be.  
    And when John wasn’t available to fill the role, Moira was. A regular angel on his shoulder—except when her Irish was up.
    He felt his lips twitch with the need to smile.  
    That need quickly faded as he remembered how his wife had stiffened in his arms that very morning as he came up behind her in the kitchen, his lips brushing her ear, her throat, her nape. It happened more and more often of late, Moira holding herself apart from him. Sometimes physically, sometimes just deep inside.
    That distance was beginning to gouge at his heart.  
    But he didn’t have time to think of his heart, not when he could still taste ash on his tongue. “It’ll hit the mining settlement by tomorrow morning, unless the winds change.” Removing his low-brimmed black hat, Del scrubbed a hand through sweat-damp hair in desperate need of a trim. He’d have to ask Moira to pull out the shears and snip the dark, tangled strands that kept falling into his eyes. “And the winds won’t change, will they?”
    John shook his head as he adjusted the pack strapped behind his saddle. “The fire will follow the tree line across the ridge. After the settlement comes the homesteads—yours included—then the town.”
    The thought of the house he’d built for Moira, with its pretty window boxes and cheerfully yellow front door, reduced to a charred husk—much like Tucker McCade’s cabin—made his jaw clench. “Evacuation,