The Touch of Fire » (Reprint)

Linda Howard is the award-winning author of many New York Times bestsellers, including Drop Dead Gorgeous, Cover of Night, Killing Time, To Die For, Kiss Me While I Sleep, Cry No More, Dying to Please, Open Season, Mr. Perfect, All the Queen’s Men, Now You See Her, Kill and Tell, and Son of the Morning. She lives in Alabama with her husband and two golden retrievers.

Rafe McCay has a bullet in his side and a bounty hunter on his tail. Since there are few doctors in the Arizona Territory, he takes what he can get…literally. Pointing a gun at Dr. Annie Parker, he abducts her into the mountains so she can tend his wounds. In this dangerous wilderness world, Rafe wakens in Annie a woman’s hungry desire, as Annie finds a man wounded in soul as well as body. Her healing touch brings him new hope, but the secrets of the past still pursue them.
The exhilarating journey they must take together teaches both the true meaning of danger…and of enduring love.

Publishers Weekly

After four years on the run, outlaw Rafferty (Rafe) McCay's face wears ``the remote expression of a man who had seen and caused so much death that it no longer touched him.'' Annie Parker is the lone doctor in boomtown Silver Mesa, a woman with a ``worn, weary look'' but with ``softness in her brown eyes'' and healing magic in her hands. An unlikelier pair could not be found, yet fate and a gunshot wound throw them together in Howard's ( Angel Creek ) new novel, set in Arizona territory in the 1870s . When Rafe forces Annie to come along and tend his gunshot wound, what begins as a kidnapping flowers into passion and love, but Howard's set-up is so obvious that her protagonists' coupling--the only real touch of fire in this book--is never really in doubt. Minimal tension provided by several run-ins with bounty hunters leads to the maximal tension of myriad graphic sexual encounters. Slowed down by redundancy and verbosity, Howard's tale wends its way cross-country towards its rather inevitable happy conclusion, with one truly moving segment wherein Rafe and Annie risk their lives to treat a settlement of seriously ill Apaches. (Oct.)