Kathleen Creighton

The Cowboy’s Hidden Agenda

A book in the Into The Heartland series, 2000

Dear Reader,

Once again Intimate Moments is offering you six exciting and romantic reading choices, starting with Rogue’s Reform by perennial reader favorite Marilyn Pappano. This latest title in her popular HEARTBREAK CANYON miniseries features a hero who’d spent his life courting trouble-until he found himself courting the lovely woman carrying his child after one night of unforgettable passion.

Award-winner Kathleen Creighton goes back INTO THE HEARTLAND with The Cowboy’s Hidden Agenda, a compelling tale of secret identity and kidnapping-and an irresistible hero by the name of Johnny Bronco. Carla Cassidy’s In a Heartbeat will have you smiling through tears. In other words, it provides a perfect emotional experience. In Anything for Her Marriage, Karen Templeton proves why readers look forward to her books, telling a tale of a pregnant bride, a marriage of convenience and love that knows no limits. With Every Little Thing Linda Winstead Jones makes a return to the line, offering a romantic and suspenseful pairing of opposites. Finally, welcome Linda Castillo, who debuts with Remember the Night. You’ll certainly remember her and be looking forward to her return.

Enjoy-and come back next month for still more of the best and most exciting romantic reading around, available every month only in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

Yours,

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

Chapter 1

It was a coyote’s wail that broke the fragile bonds of sleep. Lauren opened her eyes to find a thin silvery light streaming through the window bars above her cot-whether from the moon or approaching dawn she had no way of knowing. They’d taken away her watch, along with her shoes.

But they hadn’t bound or gagged her. Thank heaven for small favors. She’d actually enjoyed, if that was the word, a fairly comfortable night on the narrow metal-frame bed, soothed to sleep by the familiar lullabies of lowing cattle and whickering horses. In the old saddle house they’d chosen for her temporary prison, the comforting smells of leather and wool and horse sweat and liniment had taken her back to places of her childhood, to those rare and wonderful long-ago summers of freedom on the Tipsy Pee Ranch.

For that small kindness she supposed she had her jailer to thank-though her stomach clenched and her heart bumped in frustrated anger at the idea of being in the small est way beholden to him. Him. The Indian. The one they called Bronco.

If only… The words hurled themselves like trapped sparrows against the barriers of her mind. If only…

But what could she have done differently? How might she have steered her course away from this disaster?

You know the answer to that, her mind replied. You should have stayed home in Des Moines, taken the firm’s job offer, married Benjamin and never come to Texas at all.

No! Her heart rejected that with a silent cry that was also a plea for understanding. I had to do it. If I’d stayed, part of me-maybe the best part-would surely have died.

So if she truly did believe that coming back to West Texas, to the Tipsy Pee Ranch, had been the right thing to do, where had things gone so wrong? How had she come to be locked up in a makeshift prison somewhere in Arizona with an Apache cowboy named Bronco for her jailer?

As if the very intensity of her thoughts had conjured him up, there was a loud creak and a whisper of cool air, fragrant with mesquite and juniper, and a man’s shape was silhouetted against the window bars. A voice spoke softly, raising the fine hairs on her skin.

“Rise and shine, Laurie Brown. You decent? If you are, I’ll turn on some light.”

Grudgingly she sat up, and even though she was fully clothed, pulled the rough woolen blanket around her. One hand went automatically to her hair, fingers raking through it to comb it away from her face. The aroma of coffee taunted her.

“I’m decent.” She bit the words off like a miser handing out tips, resenting every one. “How about you?” His chuckle was barely a ripple in the darkness.

Light stabbed at her eyes, and she turned her head away from its source, away from him, not wanting to look at him, remember his face or the things she’d thought and felt when she’d first laid eyes on him. Embarrassing, foolish things…

“Next up, comin’ outta chute number three-Johnny Bronco, up on Ol’ Number Seven. This is a local boy, ladies and gentlemen-”

As if too volatile to be contained a moment longer, horse and rider erupted from the gate, interrupting the announcer’s drone like a shout. All around the dusty arena the spectators seemed to draw and hold their collective breath.

Almost against her will, Lauren moved closer to the steel pole-and-bar fence; in spite of her lifelong love affair with horses-or perhaps because of it-she’d never cared much for rodeos. But as she braced a hand on the crossbar and ducked her head to get a clearer view, her pulse began to pound in almost perfect sync with the thud of the bronc’s hooves on the baked earth. She’d never seen a man ride an exploding bomb before.

As always, it was the horse that drew her attention first-though he was no great beauty, a rusty black with the scruffy jug-headed look of a wild mustang; the mean eyes, laid-back ears and bared teeth of a born outlaw. He didn’t just buck with the rhythmic crow-hopping motion of the average bronc, either. This one was a real high roller, employing the wickedly erratic corkscrew action of a Brahma bull.

No way a man could stay up on such a beast for eight seconds, she thought in the instant it took her to transfer her gaze from horse to rider. Then she, like the crowd around her, caught her breath and forgot to let it go again.

Johnny Bronco. Had she heard the announcer right? Could that really be his name? If so, Lauren thought, no man had ever been more aptly named. Like the horse, he was no great beauty-the same powerfully compact hard-muscled body, the same dark angry look, with hair as long and black and coarse, worn in a ponytail that snapped the air in time with the mustang’s tail, like two flags whipped by the same wind. A man too wild and rough-hewn for beauty. And yet…together man and horse were somehow transformed. Together they were beautiful.

To Lauren time seemed to slow, as around horse and rider the dust rose and caught the sunlight, becoming a swirling golden cloud, a medium more dense, yet more forgiving than air. Within it the two appeared to twist and turn with the effortless grace of dancers, so that the gritty battle of wills between man and animal became more like a form of epic ballet.

A buzzer sounded, shattering the fantasy. Lauren jerked back from the fence as the bronc hurtled past, the rider gripping the bucking strap with both hands now that the required eight seconds had passed. She felt the spatter of coarse sand against her jeans, smelled the sweat of man and animal, tasted the grit of dust, heard the grunts of effort, the slap of leather against horsehide and the announcer’s voice on the loudspeaker:

“Nice ride! Ladies and gentlemen, how ’bout a nice hand for the hometown boy!”

Needing no encouragement, the spectators cheered and stomped the aluminum-and-wood bleachers, while out in the arena the two pickup riders moved in on either side of the still-agitated bronc. While one leaned over to release the bucking cinch from the black mustang’s flanks and grab hold of his halter, the other moved into position to pluck the rider from his back. Once more Lauren stepped up to the fence, in time to watch Johnny Bronco slip deftly onto the back of the pickup horse, then to the ground. She found herself grinning in admiration as she watched him make his way back to the chutes, walking with the cowboy’s loose-legged stride, slapping away dust and tipping his hat to the crowd in a cursory self-conscious way. Not a man accus tomed to or comfortable with the limelight, Lauren surmised. It was something she understood.

And then suddenly, when he was almost to the fence, he raised his head and seemed to look straight at her. As if he’d sensed my presence…as if he felt my eyes on him…

As quickly as the thought formed in her mind she squelched it, feeling vaguely furtive and embarrassed, as if she’d been caught indulging in an inappropriate private act in public. The romantic lurking inside her had popped up again, in spite of all her efforts to deny-or at least ignore-it. What? she scoffed at herself. Just because the man was obviously Native American, did she automatically assume him to be possessed of heightened spiritual perceptions? Naive nonsense.

But she felt her smile fade as the cowboy’s jet-black eyes went on staring into hers. And once again she drew a breath and forgot to let it go.

He had broad cheekbones, a chin with a slight but definite cleft, and full lips curved in a natural sneer. But it was the eyes that made him seem exotic and somehow dangerous-black and bright as chips of obsidian, with eyebrows that began low beside an arrogant nose and swept up and out from there like a raven’s wings, giving him the fierce wild look of a warrior chieftain leading his hordes into battle across a windswept plain.

The smallest of movements scattered the exotic pictures in her mind. The cowboy’s head and shoulders had realigned themselves ever so slightly, a subtle acknowledgment of her silent scrutiny.

Her embarrassment warmed to a conflagration. It had only been a second, she knew it had, but she felt guilty about staring, as if she’d invaded his privacy in some obscure way.

Then, when he was almost past her, the sneer softened for an instant into a smile. For that instant it seemed to her as if the smile was inside her and touching all her senses at once: she felt it like a warm breath against her skin, heard its music like the tinkle of wind chimes, smelled its fragrance and tasted its sweetness like aching memories of long summer days in childhood. Just for an instant…

Then he was reaching for the top bar and pulling himself up and over the fence with the fluid grace of a wild animal. It was then, with her perceptions returning to dusty sweaty reality, that Lauren realized the spurs on his boots had no rowels.

The breath she’d forgotten a while back gusted from her along with a little exclamation of surprise. A bareback bronc rider without spurs? What was that? She knew competitors in that event, assuming they managed to avoid being bucked off for the mandatory eight seconds, were judged in part on how vigorously they employed their spurs to the animal’s neck and withers. Which was a big part of why Lauren didn’t care for the rough-stock events. Timed events, like roping-now that was different. She considered a well-trained working quarter horse a wonder and a joy to behold, sheer beauty on four hooves, and never tired of watching horses and riders working together in perfect sync. But as far as she was concerned, the bucking events were just so much macho…well, bull. Grown men trying to show one another how tough they were by tormenting bigger, faster and stronger animals, and risking life and limb in the process. What could be dumber than that? But here was a man who’d just taken one of the most breathtaking rides she’d ever seen, and without once resorting to the barbarity of spurs!

“Ma’am?” A short distance away, the man called Bronco had dropped to the ground beside the fence and paused to regard her with those fierce brows pulled down in a frown and a question.

Lauren had to wait for the crowd’s roar as a new rider burst from the chute, a moment that seemed to take forever, tethered as she was to those terrible eyes. When it had subsided, it was all she could do to hang on to her poise as she made a gesture toward his scuffed dust-caked boots and tried to explain. “I was just noticing you don’t wear spurs. How’d you get that horse to buck like that?”

It seemed another interminable time before he answered her. A time in which his face remained absolutely deadpan, only those obsidian eyes moving as they subjected her to a thorough and frank appraisal. “Horse and I have an understanding,” Johnny Bronco finally drawled.

His voice was a surprise-warm and deep, but with an unexpected roughness to its texture. Like a bearskin rug.

“An understanding…”

Under those forbidding brows, his eyes glittered now with something she’d have sworn was amusement. “He makes me look good, I don’t hurt him. That way we both come out ahead.” He touched a finger briefly to the brim of his white cowboy hat before he turned.

As she watched him walk away, his contestant’s number flapping between his broad shoulders, Lauren discovered that she was smiling, and that, for no apparent reason, her heart was beating hard and fast.

An understanding…

He’d spoken almost those same words to her yesterday, she remembered, moments after she’d tromped on his instep with the heel of her cowboy boot. Just after he’d subdued her with embarrassing ease.

“Let’s you and me come to an understanding, Laurie Brown,” he’d whispered in her ear in that skin-shivering voice that she imagined must resemble the warning growl of an alpha-male wolf. “You don’t give me trouble and I don’t hurt you. That way we both come out of this unbloodied.”

She thought she must have begun hating him at that moment.

“Brought you some breakfast,” he said now, his tone so indifferent, his face so empty of expression she wondered if she’d imagined that chuckle. He placed a foil-covered paper plate on the foot of the cot and held out a heavy crockery mug, adding, “Coffee?” with aloof courtesy, like a waiter.

Lauren took the mug and curled her hands around it, judging for a moment its weight and the heat of its contents and considering its possible effectiveness as a weapon.

It was a fleeting thought. Gazing into the shimmering black liquid, she saw instead a pair of glittering eyes, and was sure that her captor would already have read the notion in her mind. She remembered all too well the feel of his hands on her arms, the hard press of his body, like something not made of human flesh, bone and sinew, with reflexes quicker than thought. She remembered pain, too bright and sharp to bear but gone before she even had time to gasp. And still not something she cared to experience again anytime soon.

She ducked her head and sipped the steaming brew, then shuddered and thrust the mug away. “I take it with cream and sugar.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said dryly as he moved to the door in that silent gliding way that was so different from the cowboy’s swagger she’d seen yesterday, watching him cross the rodeo arena. He paused with a hand on the door latch. “This morning you’ll drink it black. And you’ve got ten minutes to do it in. I’ll be back to take you to the john, then we ride.”

“Ride!” Lauren rose, clutching the blanket to her chest with one hand, the mug of coffee with the other. “Ride where? Where are you taking me?” Oh, how she hated the stark hope and fear in her voice.

A moment later she wondered if that might have been what made him hesitate, then turn his head to regard her along one shoulder. His dark gaze swept over her once, up and down, before he replied in a dispassionate tone that made her think, for some reason, of cops and military officers. “You’re being moved to a secure location.”

“Secure!” Jangling with adrenaline, she cast a wild look around her. “Who do you people think I am-Houdini?” And how, she thought hopelessly, will anyone find me then? At least they can trace me this far. People knew I was coming here to see, of all things, a man about a horse…

“Miss?”

Lauren started as a hand touched her elbow. She turned slowly, reluctant to leave behind the image of the black-ponytailed bronc rider nimbly dodging a collision with two miniature cowboys chasing each other through the sparse crowd with war whoops and whirling lariats. One frame stayed in her mind, though, as she faced the bronze-skinned barrel-chested man who’d spoken to her. It was that of a gloved hand resting briefly, almost tenderly, on a child’s dark head, and a chuckle drifting back to her on the dust-spangled wind.

“Miss,” the barrel-chested man said again, in a firm but deferent tone that identified him unmistakably as officialdom-even before Lauren noticed the red ribbon emblazoned with “Official” attached to the pocket of his white Western-style shirt. “I’m gonna have to ask you to move away from the fence, if you would. We don’t want to see anybody get hurt. If you’ll take a seat in the bleachers…”

“Sorry,” Lauren said cheerfully, dusting her hands as she yielded to the guiding hand on her elbow. “Actually-” and she flashed a smile at the official “-I’m looking for someone. Gil McCullough. You wouldn’t happen to know where I can find him, would you? I’m supposed to talk to him about a horse.”

“Gil?” The official’s eyes and body language registered surprise. Clearly he’d pegged her as a flatlander and a tourist in spite of her scuffed boots, well-worn jeans and light- blue long-sleeved shirt, Western-style but plain-working ranch-hand clothes. Probably her blond hair, she thought, and wished she’d thought to stuff it all up inside her hat and out of the way. In this crowd she stood out like a sore thumb-which, come to think of it, probably explained why the bronc rider had noticed her. So much for the notion of kindred souls.

“Well,” the official said affably, “he’s got a’ plenty of ’em.” He jerked his head in the direction of the campers and horse trailers parked in rows behind the arena. “That’s his outfit over there-white trailers with the big ol’ orange sun on ’em? Just go on over there and ask around. Somebody’ll know where he’s at.”

Lauren murmured her thanks, but instead of looking toward the trailer, her eyes were searching the hard-baked landscape and the clumps of cottonwoods that skirted it for some sign of the cowboy known as Bronco. But he appeared to have vanished into the crowds milling around the bucking chutes and refreshment stands. Or maybe, she thought, he’d simply been swallowed up in the shimmering heat waves, like a desert mirage.

A collective gasp rose suddenly from the crowd in the bleachers as a rider bit the dust-hard. The official headed for the arena fence as the announcer’s voice provided reassurance-“He’s okay, ladies and gentlemen, he’s okay. Let’s give the man a big hand-that’s all the reward he’s gonna get today.”

While the crowd cheerfully applauded the hapless rider, Lauren went off to find the man she’d come all the way to Arizona to see. With any luck, if she could manage to talk McCullough down enough on his asking price, tomorrow she’d be heading home to West Texas with one of the best quarter horse studs east of the continental divide for company.

“…expecting company-”

“What?” Lauren interrupted, and gave her head a shake, momentarily confused at hearing the word in her mind spoken out loud and panicked to realize she hadn’t any idea of the context.

Bronco’s eyes gave her no clue. “We’d just as soon you not be here when it arrives.” He glanced at his wrist. “Your ten minutes are now eight. If you plan on breakfast before we mount up, I’d suggest you get to it.” He thumbed the latch and pushed open the heavy wood-plank door.

The chilled air made Lauren gasp, lending a note of panic to the question she’d meant to ask with more dignity and calm:

“Are you going to kill me?”

Bronco halted as if she’d thrown something at him, one foot still on the plank step, the other already on the ground. Then he pivoted slowly back to face her. With his arms braced, one on the door, the other on the frame, he appeared to bar the way as if he actually thought she might try a break for freedom.

In contrast to the tension and the unspoken dominance in his posture, his chuckle sounded almost friendly. “Kill you? Why would we do that? You’re worth too much to us alive.”

“Worth what? Us? We? Wait-” Who are you people?

But the door had closed between them, and her only answer was the heavy thunk of the steel bar dropping across it.

Lauren stood and stared at the rough boards while her heart bumped painfully against her breastbone and her eyes burned in their sockets. Silent sobs scoured her throat. But though her jaws cramped and her body trembled with the strain, she held them back. She would not cry. If she did…well, for one thing, she’d never forgive herself.

Besides, something told her that once she gave in to the fear she was beaten. She didn’t know who these people were or why they’d taken her prisoner, or why they thought she’d be of value to them, but as long as she was alive and kept her wits about her, they hadn’t won. No sir. It would take a lot more than being locked up in a saddle house to defeat Lauren Elizabeth Brown! Hadn’t her aunt Lucy told her once that she was descended from a woman who’d survived an Indian attack by setting fire to her own homestead, then tying her baby up in her apron and climbing down into a well? And come to think of it, hadn’t Aunt Lucy herself, all of five feet tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet, once thwarted her own kidnappers by setting fire to the Chicago high-rise they were holding her in?

She could almost hear Aunt Lucy’s funny rusty-nail voice saying, “Just don’t lose your head, Lolly Brown. Keep your wits about you, and you’ll be all right.”

Keep your wits about you. Think, Lolly, think!

Lolly. She hadn’t thought of that childhood nickname in years. Her brother Ethan had begun calling her that because when he was little he couldn’t pronounce the name Lauren. She remembered how she’d hated it when he’d learned that stupid song: “Lollypop, Lollypop, oh, Lolly Lollypop…” She’d punched him good for singing it, too, more than once. But nobody had called her that since…oh, Lord, it must have been since she was ten or eleven years old. Yes, it had been-the year her parents divorced, the year she’d gotten her first horse, Star. The year Dixie had come to live with them. The year…

Then the memories were tumbling in on her, memories of the one time before in her life when she’d known fear like this. When she’d felt as utterly and desperately alone. This wasn’t the first time she’d been taken and held against her will.

That other time, of course, she hadn’t been alone. Even now, sixteen years later, she could feel Ethan’s small hand creeping into hers, feel his warm body snuggling against her for warmth and comfort, hear his quivering voice whispering, “Lolly? Will you sing me a song?” even though he knew she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Ethan-her baby brother-twenty-two years old now, and a premed junior at UCLA. But she could still remember as if it were yesterday the overwhelming burden of responsibility that had made her feel even more alone. This time, at least, she had only herself to think about.

Oh, but that’s not true.

No, it wasn’t true at all. Because suddenly she knew why she was here, locked in this saddle house on an Arizona horse ranch. She knew why she was worth something to these people, even if she didn’t know exactly who they were.

It was because they knew who she was.

“Hi, I’m Lauren Brown-we spoke on the phone? About that bay stud you have for sale?”

Gil McCullough’s vivid blue gaze narrowed as it swept over her in openly masculine appraisal, producing a charming fan of creases in the tanned skin at the corners of his eyes. He held the hand she’d offered just a beat longer than necessary, while his smile broadened to reveal strong vaguely predatory teeth.

“Well, hello, Lauren Brown. I sure do remember our phone conversation, but tell you the truth, I wasn’t expecting to see you till tomorrow.” And yet his tone said plainly he didn’t mind all that much that she’d come early. It was a ploy Lauren recognized, designed to disarm her and at the same time put her on the defensive.

In fact, the man McCullough was himself a type she recognized, and about what she might have expected from the brief conversation she’d had with him on the phone. He was big, lean and weathered, with a full head of silver-gray hair worn in a crewcut, a cowboy’s squint and a strong clean-shaven jaw. A handsome man, which she also could have guessed, given his supreme self-confidence and slightly seductive tone on the telephone. The only surprise was an almost military bearing that set him well apart from the ranchers she’d come to know back in Texas. Most of them, neighbors of the Tipsy Pee, were rump-sprung, stove-up and gimpy-legged by the time they were fifty, from too much time spent either on top of or getting thrown off some four-legged beast or other. She’d have to peg Gil McCullough as more the executive type, one who’d come to ranching as a hobby after acquiring his wealth in some other more dependable line of work. The type who patrolled his lands and herds from four-wheel-drive vehicles and sleek single-engine airplanes. In any case, an alpha male through and through, absolutely certain of his dominance over men and women alike.

Fortunately Lauren wasn’t intimidated by such men. Or attracted to them, either. She couldn’t be and have much hope of surviving-and thriving-in the legal profession. She’d managed to do both those things by meeting such men head-on, armed with her own arsenal of brains and self-assurance-tempered, when necessary, with a judiciously applied veneer of feminine charm.

“When necessary” meant she wasn’t above employing a healthy dollop of that charm now. Which was why, before answering, she took off her hat and finger-combed her blond hair back from her damp forehead as she slanted a smile to meet the rancher’s mildly rebuking frown. “Well, now, Mr. McCullough-”

“Aw, call me Gil, honey-please.”

“Well, Gil, honey,” she said softly, teasingly, “you know, you weren’t very forthcoming about giving me a price. I figured I’d better get on over here and talk to you face-to-face, see if we can agree on the numbers before I take a look at the horse.”

McCullough laughed playfully, showing those formidable teeth. “Well, yeah, but that’s the idea, don’t you see? You’ve got to come see ol’ Cochise Red before I tell you my price.”

Lauren laughed, too, even producing a dimple. “Oh, but that’s not fair. See, I know what you’re up to. You’re trying to get me out there to see him so I’ll fall in love with him. Get me so set on having him, I’ll agree to any price!” Several of the men lounging in the cottonwood shade near the camper laughed, and someone called, “She’s got your number, Gil.”

McCullough drew himself up in mock offense, a subtly aggressive posture disguised as banter. “You bet I am. Hey, listen-let me tell you something. Cochise Red’s one helluva horse. Whoever gets him’s gonna have to pay me what he’s worth. And tell you something else-whoever meets my price is gonna get their money’s worth.”

“Oh, I believe you, Gil,” said Lauren earnestly. “Everything I’ve seen and heard so far tells me I’m probably going to get my heart broken, but-” she sighed heavily and ducked her head in order to settle her hat back in place “-you have to understand, if it was my money I was spending…” She looked up again, and this time injected wistfulness into her smile. “But unfortunately, it’s not up to me. I’m just the agent for the Parish family-I thought you understood that. I’m authorized to go only so high, and if your asking price is beyond my limit, well, much as I hate to think I’ve come all this way for nothing, there’s just no point in taking it any further. Sorry to have bothered you, Mr. McCullough. Maybe we can do business another time.” She tilted her head in a little nod of farewell, then pivoted and began to walk away, hips swaying, fingertips tucked in the pockets of her jeans, head down, watching her boots scuff through the dust. A picture of dejection, with a tinge of sex appeal.

She’d gone maybe five steps-which was a couple more than she’d estimated it would take-when McCullough fell into step beside her and draped a fatherly arm across her shoulders. She halted instantly, and he took the arm away when she turned.

“Ah, hell,” he said, and appealed briefly to the cloudless sky as if for guidance, his squint perplexed. “You know what, I’d really hate for you to come all the way from Texas for nothing. What you and me need to do is sit down somewhere, have us a cold beer and a nice dinner, and talk. What do you say?”

“Well, I-”

“Tell you what.” His hand was on her shoulder again, his head lowered close to hers. “Right now I’ve got to go find my heeler-sounds like they’ve started in on the steer wrestlin’, and that means team ropin’s comin’ up next. But why don’t we-”

“You rope?” Lauren was surprised; she hadn’t taken him for the working type.

McCullough winked, showing those teeth again. “I like to keep my hand in now and then.” He reached out to waylay a cowboy with a contestant’s number on his back coming from the direction of the arena. “Hey, Dub, seen Bronco anywhere?”

The cowboy jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Last I seen he was over at the stock pens.”

McCullough laughed. “Talkin’ the steers into lettin’ him rope ’em, I imagine.”

“Bronco,” said Lauren, when the cowboy had shared the joke and the laughter and moved on. “Is that the same one I just saw up on a bareback bronc?”

“That’s the one.”

Lauren smiled as McCullough walked her on, his arm friendly across her shoulders. “Does he rope as well as he rides?”

“Honey,” the rancher drawled, “anything involving a horse, there’s nobody in this world better. Tell you what,” he added more briskly, giving her a quick squeeze before releasing her, “why don’t you meet me for dinner tonight? A lot of the rodeo crowd, they like to get together evenings at Smoky Joe’s-know where it is? Can’t miss it-just out side of town on the highway. You’ll hear it before you see it. ’Bout eight o’clock? Good-we’ll see you there.”

And he left her to go angling off toward the livestock pens with that curiously military stride, now and then nodding to acquaintances as he moved through the crowd.

Left behind, Lauren exhaled in an exasperated gust. Then she shrugged and glanced at her watch. Maybe she’d stick around and watch the team-roping before heading back into town. After that she’d see about checking into a motel, maybe catch up on the sleep she’d missed last night before it was time to put on her war paint and strap on her armor and head for the showdown with McCullough.

She smiled to herself, exhilarated at the thought of the battle ahead. She knew McCullough’s type. If she played him right, the stallion Cochise Red was as good as hers.

Chapter 2

Bronco stood with his back and one foot propped against a corral fence post and watched the eastern sky turn from indigo to purple to mauve, to a gaudy shade of salmon streaked with gold. Ordinarily sunrise was his favorite time of day-something in his genes, he guessed, remnants of an ancient reverence of his father’s people for the Creator Sun. But this morning the appearance of that molten sliver brought him no joy. This morning it was only a prod and a portent: Time to go-bad times coming. He and the woman must be well away before they got here.

Lauren Brown. He knew Gil figured she was his trump card, but Bronco knew for a fact that taking her would prove to be the biggest mistake McCullough ever made. He also knew there was no point in trying to tell the commander that; Bronco had run into officers like him before. A smart man but arrogant, and a fanatic on top of it-a bad combination, especially when combined with some real power. It was such men, Bronco believed, who made the decisions that lost wars and turned the tides of history.

By this time, though, he himself was pretty fatalistic about the whole thing. The commander had been dead-set on this plan, and now that he’d put it in motion, Bronco figured there wasn’t much anybody could do to stop it. A bad business, destined for a bad end-for somebody. Bronco meant to make damn sure it wasn’t him.

He glanced at his watch, then looked over toward the small split-log building with the reflected glow of pinkish-yellow light showing in its barred window. After a moment he straightened and pushed away from the fence post. Her ten minutes was up. He slapped his gloves once against his Levis, then drew them on and headed for the saddle house. On the way he couldn’t help but notice that his boots were hitting the hard dirt in the same rhythm as the song inside his head, the one that kept singing: She’s bad news…bad news…bad news.

But the picture in his mind that went with the song didn’t look like bad news. It was the picture of Lauren Brown walking into Smoky Joe’s last night, looking like a Texas sunflower…

Johnny Bronco’s Saturday-night routine was a well-established tradition at Smoky Joe’s Bar and Grill. He’d generally arrive around seven o’clock, choose his favorite table along the back wall near the rest-room door and order a hamburger medium well along with the first of what usually amounted to about six beers. He’d work on the burger and the beers between trips to the dance floor and the men’s room and trying to hit on any good-looking women that happened to be in the place, until along about eleven, twelve o’clock when he’d pick a fight and get himself thrown out on his butt. The regular patrons of Smoky Joe’s didn’t seem to mind this, had even come to expect it as an essential part of the evening’s entertainment, and the management didn’t hold it against him as long as nothing got broken and nobody got hurt.

Anyway, people around there tended to cut Johnny Bronco quite a bit of slack, just as they had way back in the days when he’d been the hometown football hero, all-conference wide receiver and all-time leading scorer for the White Mountain Mustangs. Locally, there were two things a man could do that would pretty much guarantee him universal respect: be good with a football or be good with horses. Johnny Bronco happened to be both. It was a pretty sure bet that after the kind of show he’d put on out at the rodeo arena that afternoon, he wasn’t going to have to pay for very many of those beers.

The regular crowd in Smoky Joe’s had been so enthusiastic in their congratulations, in fact, that by the time Lauren Brown walked in at eight-fifteen Bronco was well ahead of the game. There were three long-necked bottles lined up on the table in front of him and a fourth cradled against the front of his bright red dancin’ shirt, and he was grinning and keeping time with the heel of his boot as he watched the energetic bunch on the dance floor muddle through the steps of “Elvira.”

He knew the minute she walked in. He’d been watching for her, of course, but even if he hadn’t, she’d have been hard to miss. He’d already noticed she was tall for a woman, reed-slender in her snug-fitting jeans and expensive stack-heeled boots and a waist-length scoop-necked knit shirt the color of sunflowers. She was the kind of woman who looked her best astride a horse-or a man, for that matter. Long strong legs, round firm breasts-not too big, just the right size to fill a man’s hands with nothing going to waste. And then there was that hair-a thick curving fall to her shoulders, the exact shade of winter grass on a cold sunny day in the high country. He could almost smell its fresh sweet fragrance, see it ripple when the wind caught it.

Bronco checked his watch again and smiled to himself. Fifteen minutes late-just enough to let McCullough know she wasn’t at his beck and call, not quite enough so that he’d be able to justify getting pissed off about it. Hell, she’d just bat her baby blues and show him her dimple, and ol’ Gil would have no choice but to chalk it up to feminine privilege. A dangerous combination for a woman-headstrong and smart. Bronco knew he’d do well not to underestimate her.

He reminded himself of that now as he lifted the bar away from the saddle-house door. He was half expecting her to ambush him with the coffee mug; he hadn’t missed the way her eyes had sharpened when he’d handed it to her, or the barely imperceptible tensing of her wrists as she’d tested its weight. She was gutsy, that one, on top of headstrong and smart.

He was relieved when he found her more or less where he’d left her; he’d had to hurt her once, and it was something he hoped never to have to do again.

She was sitting on the cot with her overnight bag on her knees. He could see her knuckles whiten on the handles when she saw him, as if she wanted nothing in this world so much as to chuck it at him. He couldn’t blame her for that, or the fact that her voice, when she spoke, was taut with rage.

“You went to my motel room?”

Bronco grunted. “Well, I didn’t personally.”

“I suppose you-they-somebody checked me out?”

He twitched a shoulder. “Didn’t have to. You know those Motel 6 kind of places-they’re generally pay in advance.”

“So, you-they just cleaned it out. Packed up my things.” Her voice burned with frost, in sharp contrast to the warm pink blossoming in her cheeks. “You went through everything?”

Bronco didn’t bother to answer that, just lifted a pair of saddlebags from a sawhorse near the door, smacked them once to get rid of some of the dust and tossed them to her. “If there’s anything in there you want to take along, better put it in here. And do it fast. We’re leavin’. Now.”

She threw him a look of pure hatred, which strangely enough he found exhilarating, rather like watching a bolt of lightning rip across a slate-black sky. He hid his smile from her, though; it wasn’t going to do either of them any good to make her madder than she already was.

He stood and leaned against the door with his arms folded across his chest and watched her transfer the contents of the overnighter to the saddlebags. He was trained to be observant, and it struck him that her movements weren’t quite coordinated, as if she was trembling violently inside. And not all from anger, he imagined. There was fear there, too, as hard as she might try to hide it. He tried to imagine what it must be like for her, one minute to be going about her business and then without warning to find herself forcibly taken prisoner, with no idea why or what it was all about or what was going to happen to her. He thought she was holding up pretty well, considering.

Although, as smart as the lady was, he wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she’d gotten the whole thing figured out by now.

Finished with her packing, she rose and put herself to rights, shaking each foot to settle the pant legs down over the tops of her boots, jamming her shirttails any which way into the waistband of her jeans, skimming back her hair and fastening it with a rubber band she’d retrieved from the saddlebags. Efficient, Bronco observed. No nonsense, no fuss, and a surprising lack of vanity for so beautiful a woman. For a woman soon to become one of the world’s most famous and recognizable.

“Ready?”

She was standing before him with the saddlebags over one shoulder, storm-cloud eyes almost level with his. He was aware of a disturbance in his insides as he gazed back at her, a sensation that felt oddly like thunder rolls.

“Got a jacket?” he drawled, keeping his eyes veiled.

She cut him a look that was pure acid. “Are you nuts? It’s August. This is Arizona.”

He didn’t argue with her. He’d find something for her to wear. She was going to learn soon enough how chilly a summer monsoon could be at seven-thousand-feet elevation.

Instead, he opened the door and held it for her with mocking gallantry, which she acknowledged with a look that for once he couldn’t quite figure out.

“I should never have danced with you,” she muttered bitterly as she passed him.

To that, Bronco could only add a fervent, if silent, Amen.

He wasn’t quite sure why he was doing it; he did know for sure it wasn’t going to make his bosses happy. But hell, he was Johnny Bronco, and if he didn’t try to hit on the prettiest girl in the place at least once tonight, people were going to think something was wrong with him.

He placed the fourth beer bottle, now empty, on the table, lining it up precisely with the three already there, then pushed back his chair. He wove through the noisy crowd, rocking his body slightly in time to the heavy country beat, aware of the glances and smiles that followed him on his way. But his step was steady, a self-confident swagger; if he kept to his usual timetable, the effects of the alcohol weren’t due to kick in until beer number six. That was still a good two hours off. This was party time.

McCullough saw him coming and waved him over, relaxed and jovial. Lauren turned to see who was moving up behind her, and when she did, her hair rippled across her shoulder blades like a sea of long grass when the wind touches it. Bronco saw the flare of recognition in her eyes, heard the sharp hiss of her breath. Then she was facing forward again while he traded greetings and shot the usual masculine bull with Gil.

But he’d marked the subtle changes in her body-the stillness, the tension, a certain awkwardness that hadn’t been there before-that let him know she was aware of him in ways she hadn’t been aware of Gil McCullough. Like a mare when she senses the stallion’s presence. He felt a similar current go through his own body, like a charge of electricity-unnerving in itself, but more so because it wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t part of the charade.

Nor could he have pretended his accelerated heartbeat when he braced his hands on the back of her chair and leaned close to her to make himself heard above the crowd noise. It was an angle calculated to give him a nice view of her breasts and the sweet valley between them, a view he’d availed himself of with more women than he’d ever care to account for. He tried to recall whether it had ever caused his pulse to quicken and his temperature to rise the way it was doing now.

“Would you like to dance?” he growled with his lips close to her ear.

She leaned away and turned her head to look up at him. “Do you dance as well as you ride?” She said it lightly, and both the comment and the body language were meant to be flirtatious. But somehow to Bronco they didn’t look or sound true, as if she hadn’t had much practice at it.

Which wasn’t something anybody would have said about him. “You’ll have to judge that for yourself,” he drawled, dropping his eyelids to half-mast. He straightened, moved back a step and held out his hand.

For a moment that seemed a lot longer she looked into his eyes, while his heart hammered against his breastbone and his knowledge of the trouble he was walking her into pulsed like a strobe light in his mind.

Lady, can’t you tell when the wolves are gathering? Get the hell outta Dodge while you still can! Forget about that horse you want so badly. Just get in your truck and drive on back to Texas. Can’t you sense the danger you’re in?

Then again, he thought, maybe she did sense it, just didn’t have enough experience with that sort of thing to know what it was that was making her feel so tense and edgy.

She opened her mouth in indecision, then threw a questioning look at McCullough, who waved her on with an overdone joviality that rang as sour as her flirting did.

“Ah hell, honey, you can go ahead. I’m an old married man.” But the look he sent Bronco carried another message: Screw this up for us, boy, and I’ll kill you myself.

Bronco stretched his lips in a smile. “I don’t bite.”

“Oh, well, then forget it,” she joked, giving her head an airy little flip. Her hair swept forward across her shoulder, and Bronco caught a whiff of green apples.

She said something to him as they were making their way toward the dance floor, something he couldn’t quite hear with all the noise. He said, “Beg pardon?” and moved in close behind her, putting his hands on her bare arms. He felt her flesh twitch beneath his fingers, like the hide of a nervous horse.

She nodded her head toward the dance floor, where the band was doing its best to organize a crowd already too boozed up for coordination into something resembling a line. “I’ve never done this before-line dancing.”

He gave her arms a squeeze that was meant to encourage, nothing more. But he felt her heat warm him as if somebody’d turned the sun on and hit him full in the chest with it.

“It’s easy,” he said, and even he was startled at the growl in his voice. “Just keep your eyes on the person in front of you and do whatever they do.”

The song had started, and the wooden dance floor vibrated to the more-or-less synchronized stomping of several dozen pairs of boots. Holding Lauren lightly by her upper arms, Bronco guided her into one of the swaying, dipping, turning lines.

“Give it a couple beats to get the rhythm,” he rasped with his lips close to her hair, and knew a moment’s light-headedness from the scent.

She nodded and he let go of her. She fixed her eyes on the overstuffed backsides of the couple in front of her-tourists in fancy Western clothes all duded up with embroidery and fringe, and just as obviously lost as she was. After a few bars of trying her best to follow their giggling and stumbling, she looked over at Bronco, lips wry and eyes shining with laughter, and lifted her hands in a hopeless shrug.

Without missing a beat, Bronco stepped over in front of her, at the same time guiding her into position behind him. He placed her hands on his hips, covered them with his own and held them firmly in place there as he moved through the sequence of steps, hip waggles, leg kicks and all. It took only a few beats before she was moving with him as naturally as breathing.

Though his own breathing could hardly be described as natural. Having her there behind him, knowing she was so close, her body almost but not quite touching him, made his skin shiver and his spine contract and the fine hairs on the back of his neck lift with awareness. And that wasn’t the only thing that was lifting. The stirrings elsewhere in his body were downright uncomfortable, given the tightness of his jeans.

His only regret was that he couldn’t see her. And yet…he could see her. With his eyes closed he watched her slender body pick up the rhythm, move with innate grace and in perfect harmony with his, her laughter like sunbeams, illuminating the pictures in his mind. Except that, in those pictures, she was naked in his embrace, and around them all was warmth and light and peace, a world in perfect harmony…

…until the dance steps called for a pivot, and he turned but she didn’t, and he found himself face-to-face, chest to chest with her, with her hands still clamped on his belt. Her little “Oh!” of dismay was like a thunderclap. A wakeup call.

While he stood staring at her with his fingers wrapped around her elbows and his senses in dangerous disarray, the crowd around them began to clap and whoop and holler. The line dance had ended. The band segued into a slow country standard, and after a moment’s hesitation she moved-just a little, but it was enough. Enough to bring her right into his arms.

What could he do? He hadn’t meant to take it any further than that, but against his better judgment he went ahead and danced with her again-not only that one, but the next. But the perfect harmony he’d felt with her before was gone. He’d handled live explosives with less constraint. All the while he was holding her body close to his he kept telling himself, What in the hell were you thinking? You know who this is. You know what you’re going to have to do…

He thought, I never should have danced with her…

Bronco’s own quarters were in the foreman’s cottage, in the shade of a big cottonwood about halfway between the main house and the horse barns. Normally he shared it with Ron Masters, the ex-navy demolitions expert who was McCullough’s second in command, but since Masters was currently busy up at the high base camp getting ready for unwelcome visitors, he figured it would be okay to let his prisoner come in to use the john. By a bachelor’s standards it was clean enough-a less objectionable choice, anyway, than the bunkhouse could have afforded her.

He went in with her while he checked for escape routes and potentially lethal weapons, then left her with the succinct warning, “Five minutes-then I’m comin’ in after you.”

While he waited for her, he took a sweatshirt out of a drawer and a poncho from the closet. He laid the poncho out on his bed, placed the sweatshirt in the middle of it and rolled them both into an oblong bundle the right size for tying onto the back of a saddle. Then he leaned across the bed, fingered back the window shade and looked out.

Though the sun was up, it was early yet. The air coming through the dusty screen was still cool and smelled of juniper and wild grass. There were no signs of life from the main house; McCullough had left last night to follow Ron and pick him up after he’d dumped Lauren’s truck and trailer. They’d be going straight on to the base camp after that. He could just see the back end of Katie McCullough’s SUV parked in the semicircular drive in front of the house, though, and that worried him. He hoped it didn’t mean she’d changed her mind about going to stay with her mother in El Paso until after the dust had settled. The last thing he wanted was for this to turn into another Ruby Ridge.

Time was running out.

The thought had no sooner entered his mind when he heard the faint click of the bathroom-door handle. He was there waiting beside the door when it opened.

His prisoner didn’t say anything, just glanced at him as she moved past him, carrying the saddlebags over one arm. She smelled of mint toothpaste. Her hair looked damp around her forehead and her face had a just-scrubbed look. Her shirt was rather fiercely tucked into the waistband of her jeans, giving her slender curves more definition than they should have had, a taut and tidy look he found unexpectedly erotic.

Shutting out thoughts he had no business thinking, Bronco watched her move into his bedroom, easing into his personal space the way a familiar melody comes to the mind.

“So this is where you live?” She asked the question with casual curiosity, as if she was some easy woman he’d picked up in a bar and brought home for the night and this was the morning after. Her eyes traveled around the room, taking in the neatly made twin beds and the rolled-up bundle on his, then came back to him. “Nice digs.” Her lips twitched in an aborted attempt at a smile. “Not exactly what I expected.”

Bronco grunted, feeling as if she’d sucker-punched him. It was an old wound, and he reacted with reflexive anger, lashing coldly at her, “It’s a room. What were you expecting-a tepee?”

He regretted the remark when he saw her flinch. What the hell was the matter with him? She hadn’t meant it like that, and he knew it.

He was glad she didn’t try to flounder through some guilt-ridden apology. She leveled a shaming look at him, then said quietly, “Night before last I saw you get dead drunk, start a brawl and get tossed into the parking lot, remember? This room-beds all made, that squeaky-clean bathroom in there-they don’t exactly go with that ‘drunken Indian’ image, do they? You don’t fit that image.” And though her eyes narrowed in speculation when she said it, there was something else there, too-a whisper of suppressed excitement in her breathing, a certain tension in her body.

Bronco felt himself go quiet and wary. “Well, now, what kind of image do you think I fit?”

“I don’t know,” she said softly, thoughtfully.

“I’m just a plain ol’ horse wrangler,” Bronco muttered, turning to retrieve the rolled-up poncho so she couldn’t see his eyes. Acting-playing a part-was one thing, but outright lying didn’t come easy to him and never had. “Believe what you want-”

She broke in with a snort of anger before he’d finished. “Yeah, right. And this is just a horse ranch, Gil McCullough is John Wayne and I’m Maureen O’Hara, and that’s why I spent last night locked in a tack room with bars on the windows while a bunch of people I don’t even know cleaned out my motel room. What do you think I am, stupid?” Her voice trembled, and the tears she had yet to shed shimmered in her eyes.

“No, I don’t think you’re stupid,” Bronco said evenly as he took her arm. What he did think-about her and the whole damned mess-didn’t bear looking at too closely. “Time to go. Come on.”

It surprised him when she struggled against his grip, twisting to look at him. “Who are you people? What’s this all about? What do you want with me?”

You’ll find out soon enough, he thought grimly as he hustled his captive out the door of the cottage and down the wooden steps. A whinny rose from the corrals behind the stables. His body tensed and he paused, listening. He heard nothing out of the ordinary, but a thrill of urgency rippled down his spine as he tightened his hold on her and quickened his step.

She went with him unresisting for several paces. But her voice, when she spoke again, had gone tense and quiet. “It’s about my father, isn’t it?” He didn’t answer her. After a moment he heard her take a deep breath. “Well, whatever you people are planning, it’s not going to work. My father won’t let you get away with this. He won’t be blackmailed, either.”

This time Bronco did reply, on an exhalation that was almost prayerful. “Laurie Brown, for your own sake, I sincerely hope you are mistaken.”

A council of war was taking place in a seventh-floor room at the Watergate in Washington, D.C. Present were the acting U.S. attorney general, Patricia Graham; Henry Vallejo and Vernon Lee, heads of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI, respectively; and last but not least, the former attorney general, now the top con tender for his party’s nomination for president of the United States, Everett Charleton Brown, known to friends and family as Rhett.

Three of the four people in the room were seated around a table littered with coffee cups and the sort of mess created by people in the process of deciding among equally untenable options. The fourth, Rhett Brown, was up and pacing. He hadn’t slept, and looked it. He knew his hair was rumpled, his tie askew, and that he needed a shower and a shave. He could have used a toothbrush, too; his mouth tasted like the bottom of a Dumpster, after too many cups of coffee and the Philly steak sandwich he’d forced himself to eat late last night against his better judgment.

He looked at his watch and his heart ached. How much longer could he put off calling Dixie? Don’t tell anyone, they’d said, with the usual warning of dire consequences if he disobeyed that directive. But how was he going to get through this without Dixie by his side? He’d have to tell her soon. She had a right to know. To prepare herself for the worst.

The worst. His mind slammed shut on that thought. Cold to the depths of his soul, he pivoted to face the group at the table.

“Okay-” he huffed out a breath and drove a hand through his hair “-we know what they want.” Their demand had made that clear. They wanted him out of the presidential race. They meant to keep Lauren until after the national convention, to insure that he would refuse the nomination. And after that…what then? He ground his teeth thinking about it. “So. Let’s summarize. What do we know about these people, these…Sons Of Liberty? Who, where, what, why and how many.”

Not, he thought, that it mattered much how many they were. Look at Oklahoma City. How many had it taken to destroy more than two hundred lives? How many would it take to kill one small person? Just one. Lolly, his precious little girl.

Pat Graham looked at him. The burnt-umber eyes that were a legacy of her African-American heritage lit with compassion. A veteran of the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s, she knew all about pain and fear and loss. Rhett couldn’t imagine anyone he’d rather have succeed him as attorney general, or anyone he’d rather have beside him now. How many years had they worked together on the weapons-control project? She’d begged to be put on it in the beginning, he remembered, when he’d considered it too inflammatory a position for a woman. With her courage and passion she’d made him ashamed of that view. Illegal-weapons trafficking wasn’t just a political hot-button issue to Pat Graham. She’d grown up in a south-central L.A. neighborhood where the slaughter of children with assault rifles and semiautomatic handguns had become so common that it seldom even made the evening news anymore. To her, keeping guns off the nation’s streets and out of the hands of its children was a true crusade of the heart.

She swiveled back to the table and nodded at the FBI director. “Vern, you want to do the honors?”

Vernon Lee cleared his throat and shuffled through papers already in rumpled disarray. “Okay. We know they call themselves SOL.” He pronounced it “soul” and went on to explain, “That’s Spanish for sun. That’s their signature, their logo-the rising sun. The good news is-” he leaned back in the upholstered chair, leaving one hand palm down on the papers in front of him “-we know quite a bit about them. The leader of the group is a man named Gilbert McCullough-ex-marine, war hero, spent five years as a POW in Vietnam. Supposedly he’s a legitimate rancher out in Arizona now-owns several thousand acres of land, most of it pretty rugged. Raises cattle and horses. And runs a fair-size militia on the side. Actually,” he added almost as an afterthought, “SOL is one of the better run of these kinds of groups. Well organized, well trained, well disciplined.”

Vernon leaned forward again, forearms on the tabletop, hands clasped. “And that’s the bad news, I’m afraid. They’re careful. They don’t make mistakes. They cover their tracks. We believe McCullough’s goal is to eventually arm and unite all the various militia groups in that part of the country under one supreme commander-himself. That’s an ambitious undertaking for a man who never achieved a military rank above sergeant. Also expensive. We believe the group is directly responsible for a large number of bank robberies and truck hijackings in the Southwest and upper Midwest, but so far we can’t prove it. They’ve learned from others’ mistakes, it seems. They pay their taxes, for example, stay on the good side of local authorities. Up until now they’ve been real careful not to give us any excuse to go after ’em.”

Rhett rubbed at his burning eye sockets. Well, he thought, we sure as hell have an excuse to go after them now. And if we do, and if we make one mistake in the process, I’ll bury my only daughter.

He drew a steadying breath. “Okay. Give me an idea what the situation is out there. Local law enforcement-” He stopped as the head of ATF made a soft inarticulate sound. “Sorry, Henry, what was that? This is your bailiwick, after all.”

Up till now Henry Vallejo had been sitting with his chin tucked against his barrel chest, watching his fingers turn a pencil end over end. He shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. “We don’t believe local law can be trusted. It’s highly likely some are members of SOL themselves. We know for sure some are sympathetic to the cause. The code of the Old West, you know. Those people out there do love their guns.”

Rhett frowned. “You suspect, or you know that for a fact?”

“Fact.” Henry squirmed uneasily and glanced at Vernon Lee. “Uh…our intelligence sources have confirmed it.”

“Intelligence sources?” Rhett felt his chest quiver with a new excitement as he moved in beside Henry and leaned down close to him, gripping the table with his hands. “Are you telling me you’ve infiltrated this group? You have a man on the inside?” He looked across the table at Pat, who raised her eyebrows. He transferred the look to Vernon Lee. Vernon shrugged. Henry cleared his throat. No one appeared to be breathing. “Henry,” said Rhett, his voice turning soft and dangerous as he came back to the ATF Director, “are you telling me you knew about this? Before last night? You knew they planned to kidnap my daughter?”

At the look on Rhett’s face, Henry reared back in alarm and held up a hand. Pat Graham pushed back her chair. “Rhett-”

“You knew? And you let it happen? You stood by and let these people kidnap my daughter?”

“Look, I’d only gotten the word from my guy the night before. There wasn’t anything he could do, not without jeopardizing his own position-”

“Jeopardizing his position? What the hell’s the matter with you?”

The ATF man was on his feet and facing him. So was Pat Graham, who had taken Rhett’s arm in a calming grip. Which, since she was five-two and 110 pounds on a good day, was a little like a Jack Russell terrier trying to corral a Great Dane.

Vallejo’s face was flushed. “Look, Rhett. I know how you must be feeling. But think about it. You know how long it takes to get a man in position with one of these groups-they’re paranoid as hell. This man is one of the best agents we’ve got. I couldn’t risk him. For what? We keep your daughter from being taken-this time. What then? These people are hell-bent on keeping you out of the White House. As far as they’re concerned, you are the great Satan. They’ll stop at nothing-and I mean, nothing-to keep you from accepting that nomination. How many people do you figure would die if they pull off an Oklahoma City at the Dallas Convention Center? Are you prepared to pay that price for your daughter’s safety?”

As if suddenly realizing what he was asking, Vallejo halted and put a sympathetic hand on Rhett’s arm. “This way we have a shot at getting the whole organization, Rhett, don’t you see? We can bring them down. Put the whole operation out of business. It’s the chance we’ve been waiting for.”

“And my daughter?” Rhett asked in a dead-soft voice.

“My man will do everything he can to keep her safe. I promise you that.”

Rhett’s eyes burned into Vallejo’s. His fingers closed around the other man’s forearm in a grip of iron. “You promise. He’ll keep her safe. You trust him to be able to do that, this man of yours?”

“I’d trust him with my own life. More importantly, with my daughter’s life,” Vallejo said softly. “He’s the best there is.”

After a long tense moment, Rhett let out the breath he’d been holding. Around him, three others did likewise. “Okay.” His mouth was dry as ashes, his voice a croak. “So, when do we move on them?”

Vallejo looked at his watch. “We’re getting our people in position now. As soon as my man lets me know she’s safely away, we’re good to go.”

God help you, Rhett thought, his mind holding fast to the knowledge that somewhere out in the Arizona wilderness, an unknown man held his daughter’s life in his hands. God go with you-whoever you are.

Chapter 3

Bronco heaved a silent sigh of relief as the last of the McCullough ranch’s horse barns and outbuildings sank from sight behind the crest of a juniper-studded hill. He wouldn’t feel safely away until they’d reached timber, but there was at least a measure of comfort in knowing that they were beyond visual range of the ranch and the road leading to it.

He studied the sky, taking note of the thunderheads gathering over the Superstitions, every nerve ending in his body straining for sounds he didn’t want to hear. But he heard only the call of a mourning dove, the screeches of scrub jays feeding among the junipers. He altered his touch on the reins imperceptibly, and Sierra, the long-legged Appaloosa mare he was riding, dropped back even with Linda, the slower stockier gray he’d chosen for his prisoner. Meanwhile the magnificent blood bay at the end of a lead rope adjusted his pace to a graceful trot. Bronco didn’t spare him a glance; he knew the stallion would follow willingly. That was why he’d made sure both saddle horses were mares-Cochise Red would consider them his by right.

With the worst of the pressure off, at least for the moment, Special Agent John Bracco of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms took a moment to study the woman who had complicated his life so unexpectedly.

Other than the fact that she looked every bit as good on a horse as he’d thought she would, Lauren Brown wasn’t what he’d expected-not that he’d had a lot of time to form expectations one way or the other. This thing had come upon him with the speed and unpredictability of an avalanche. One minute all he’d had to deal with was figuring out which of two terrorists acts he was going to have to prevent-the assassination of a presidential candidate or a missile attack on the convention center-preferably while keeping his own cover intact. And the next…well, the woman had practically fallen into their laps.

Bronco was fairly sure Gil had had no idea who Lauren Brown was when she’d first contacted him on behalf of some ranch in Texas about buying his champion quarter horse stud. It wasn’t until the commander had run his customary background and credit check on her that he’d realized what he had. The opportunity had seemed to him God-given, the possibilities she presented beyond even his most optimistic dreams. Even then, smart paranoid that he was, Gil had held off on the final decision to go ahead with the plan until after he’d met the woman. Until he was sure she wasn’t the bait for some elaborate government trap.

A trap. Bronco let out a slow breath. McCullough was indeed riding into a trap, just not the one he’d been looking out for. Like Julius Caesar, whose betrayal had come, not at the hands of Cleopatra or any other woman, but through his closest and most trusted friend.

“He really is magnificent, isn’t he?” Lauren’s voice brought him back from that troubling place. She sounded almost wistful as she watched the stallion dip and weave like a kite at the end of a string, and Bronco knew she must be thinking of the innocent, even joyous quest that had brought her to this. She glanced over at him, and an unexpected smile of irony played around her lips. “I’d sure love to ride him, just once…” She left her words hanging there, sounding like a condemned prisoner’s last request.

No, she wasn’t at all what he’d expected.

What, exactly, had he expected of Lauren Elizabeth Brown, daughter of former U.S. attorney general Everett Charleton Brown? About to become First Daughter, if the polls were to be believed. About to be instantly recognized the world over, with every move, every breath, every step scrutinized and analyzed to death by both the legitimate and tabloid media.

He knew her parents had divorced when Lauren was ten, that her father had subsequently married Dixie Parish, of the folk-singing Parish Family, which counted among its many real-estate holdings that horse ranch in West Texas. He knew she’d been born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, that she was a graduate of Iowa University and Harvard Law School, and that she’d passed the bar on the first try. A bright lady with a bright future-a future that reportedly included marriage to an equally brilliant member of a fine old Des Moines law firm. The media were already salivating over the prospect of a White House wedding. Oh, yes, and there was one brother, Ethan, currently attending UCLA, scheduled to begin his senior year in the fall.

That was what Bronco knew about Lauren Brown-pretty much what the rest of the world knew. What surprised him was the discovery that he would like to have known more. A lot more.

For one thing, he wanted to know what had brought a big-city lawyer to a West Texas horse ranch hundreds of miles from the man she supposedly loved. Bronco had never been in love and didn’t expect to be, but he was pretty sure that if he ever did love a woman enough to want to marry her, he’d want her near him every day of his life. He’d want her voice and her laughter lighting up his days, and her body warming his bed at night. He’d want the scent of her in his sheets and in his pores. If a man and woman pledged to join their lives together, they should be together. And stay together. That was the way he saw it.

And he wanted to know why a woman raised in a Midwestern city looked so natural and right astride a horse in the mountains of Arizona. This was wild country, the land of his ancestors-Indee, the People. A beautiful land, but harsh and unforgiving of those who didn’t understand and respect her delicate balance. The bones of many strong men lay bleaching in forgotten canyons as mute testimony to that. And yet, this woman, tawny-haired and wraith-slender, seemed almost to belong in this sunburned landscape, as much at home here as the deer and antelope he’d hunted as a boy.

Close on the heels of that thought came another. As he studied her, it occurred to Bronco that in spite of the fact that she’d recently been forcibly abducted by armed men for purposes she could only guess at, she seemed almost happy. She rode with her body relaxed and graceful in the saddle, her face lifted to the warm wind and her eyes half-shut, her mouth softly smiling. As if, he thought as warmth stirred unexpectedly in his own body, in acceptance of a lover’s caress. But why, he wondered, fighting off the image of soft lips, slowly parting, did she seem so unafraid? Had she no concept of the peril she was in? Her apparent innocence irritated him, even as her innate sensuality stirred and excited him.

Irritated, stirred and excited was not what Agent Bracco wanted to be. Not ever, actually, but especially not now, not with so much at stake. He told himself he’d have to do a better job of keeping himself in balance, focused on the task at hand. He couldn’t afford to let himself be distracted just because that task happened to involve shielding and protecting an extraordinarily beautiful woman.

A grim smile stretched his lips as he watched the stallion prancing grandly along behind the little gray mare, so intent on establishing his own sexual dominion that he was oblivious to the lead rope that held him captive. It occurred to him that there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between a man and any other male animal when he allowed himself to be governed by his…testosterone.

For some reason, the words the woman had spoken earlier that morning came back to him, carried on the wind like the scent of a far-off storm: I should never have danced with you.

He looks so hard and dangerous when he smiles like that, Lauren thought. I wonder what he can be thinking.

A shiver passed through her in spite of the Southwestern sun that burned like a branding iron across her shoulders. Because the only thing she knew for certain was that she could never be certain what that man was feeling. What a consummate actor he was! What a talented liar!

She told herself she was upset because she’d misjudged him so badly. That as a lawyer she felt she ought to be more adept at reading people. But in her heart she knew better. The real source of her shame and betrayal lay in the accusation that pounded now inside her head in time to the horse’s hoofbeats.

Not, How could I have been so wrong about him?

But rather, How could I have been so attracted to him?

She couldn’t even look at him now. Whenever she looked at him, her heart would begin to hammer and her eyes burn hot and her mind cloud over with rage. She wanted to fly at him in a screaming spitting clawing fury.

Why, she asked herself, did she feel so ashamed? Because she’d watched him ride and admired his skill?

No, her honest heart answered her. Because you watched him ride and thought him beautiful.

Did she feel such anger because he’d danced with her and then betrayed her?

Again she was forced to hear her own truth: No-because you danced with him and your own body betrayed you.

With her face lifted to the wind and her eyes closed, she could see him standing beside her table at Smoky Joe’s, looking down at her with the little yellow flame from the candle in the globe lamp on the table burning in his eyes. And as she gazed into them, the boisterous crowd seemed to close in around them, surrounding the two of them with a wall of noise and heat and cigarette smoke and darkness, so that all at once she was aware only of him-of his heat, his masculine scent and the blackness of his hair, lying like a skein of silk across one shoulder.

She remembered how warm his hands had been, covering hers. She’d felt the wiry, coiled-spring tension in his hips beneath her palms, the swaying rhythm, blatantly sexy-and her body had grown hot. She’d lost track of the music and the steps of the dance until suddenly she’d found herself face-to-face with him. Face-to-face and chest to chest. Frozen, she’d felt his arms come around her, gathering her in, and the cool silk of his hair against her cheek, his heart thumping in counterrhythm to hers.

Had that been a lie, too? Could he control the timing of his own pulse? With this man, even that seemed possible.

They’d danced that dance and then another, and with each note, each measure, it seemed to her, their bodies had moved infinitesimal fractions of inches closer together, until it felt as if they would melt into each other’s pores.

He’d guided her with a touch so light and sure she wasn’t even aware of it. She’d followed him effortlessly, as if they’d been moving together, dancing together for years, a lifetime. She’d felt weightless, light as cottonwood fluff floating on a summer wind. At the back of his neck, her fingers had begun of their own volition to explore the dark mystery of his hair, while on her back she’d felt his fingers moving, slowly navigating the bumps and hollows of her spine.

And then suddenly, just like that, it had ended. Bronco had taken her back to McCullough’s table and left her there with polite but cursory thanks. Lauren had been so shaken she’d barely registered the conversation from that point on, was only dimly aware that she’d nodded acceptance of McCullough’s asking price for Cochise Red without so much as an argument and agreed to go out to his ranch and take a look at the stallion the following day.

She didn’t see what started the fight. All at once, it seemed, Smoky Joe’s had erupted in bedlam. There was a roar of sound, and the crowd surged like a single entity toward the back of the room, toward the area near the dance floor.

Unaccustomed to violence of any kind, Lauren uttered an exclamation of alarm as she started to rise. Gil McCullough, who had begun to swear matter-of-factly in a low voice, gestured for her to stay put and at the same time waved a couple of his men, who’d been leaning against the bar nearby nursing long-necked bottles of beer, over to the table.

About then the crowd parted raggedly and Johnny Bronco emerged, struggling and swinging clumsily in the grip of two beefy-looking guys wearing black cowboy hats and vests that said “Smoky Joe’s” across the back. Before Lauren had time to draw breath, they’d hustled Bronco out the front door.

The two Smoky Joe’s employees walked back into the bar, dusting their hands and grinning, waving to mixed cheers and boos from the crowd. They gave a thumbs-up to a couple of uniformed deputy sheriffs sitting at the bar, who merely smiled and shook their heads before returning to their burger and fries. McCullough leaned back in his chair and spoke to his men.

“See he gets home,” he growled in an undertone, then turned back to her with a smile of apology. “Ol’ Bronco’s the best damned horse wrangler west of the Mississippi, but he can’t hold his liquor worth beans. Never could. It’s a racial thing, I guess. He’s a half-breed Apache, you know.”

Lauren sat silently, sipping her beer. She didn’t reply, partly because she was still too shaken by the close and unaccustomed brush with violence, but also because the comment made her intensely uncomfortable. Her firsthand knowledge of Native Americans was limited, but she disliked the term half-breed, and had been raised to consider blanket statements about race objectionable on general principles.

Unperturbed by her silence, Gil shook his head. “It’s a sad story, a sad story. Unfortunately not a very unusual one in this part of the country. He grew up around here, you know.”

Lauren nodded; she remembered the rodeo announcer saying he was a “local boy.”

“Yeah, ol’ Johnny was quite a hero in these parts a while back.”

“Really?” Lauren murmured, interested in spite of herself. The beer was warming her insides, easing her pulse back to normal. She focused on her companion’s clean-shaven face and close-cropped gray hair, and tried to block out the images that wanted to linger in her mind-images of a dark angry face, hard-edged features crisscrossed with strands of long black hair…

“Football,” Gil clarified after taking a small drink of the beer he’d been nursing most of the evening. “Best damned wide receiver I ever saw-hands like a magician. All-conference, all-state his senior year-had colleges lined up to offer him scholarships.” He shook his head again and made a smacking sound with his lips. “What a waste.”

“What happened?”

The rancher shrugged. “The drinking got him. Finally either flunked out or got kicked out-depends on who you hear it from. Bronco, he doesn’t like to talk about it much. He always was wild, drank too much even when he was in high school. Came by it naturally-his old man was a drunk, died in a car accident when Bronco was in junior high. Kid never had a chance.”

“He must not be doing all that badly,” Lauren remarked with an edgy shrug. “You hired him.” And then she wondered why she felt a need to defend a man she didn’t know at all, especially from a man who obviously knew him very well.

Pictures flashed in lightning-quick succession through her mind: Bronco up on Old Number 7, whirling in slow motion in a golden fog of sun-shot dust; a pair of scuffed and well-broken-in boots, spurs without rowels; a wry smile in a dark face, and the words spoken in a soft deep voice. Horse and I have an understanding…

“I hired him because when it comes to horses, he’s the best there is,” Gil said as if he’d seen the images in her mind. But his narrowed eyes had a speculative glint that made her squirm inwardly as he watched her. As a lawyer she knew that feeling. It was the one she got when she thought she might have given away too much. Showed the opposition a few too many of her cards. “And because I thought the kid had had some bad breaks,” the rancher went on in a voice with added undercurrents. “I helped him straighten himself out after he got kicked out of the military. Haven’t regretted it yet.”

“Well…” Lauren could think of nothing else to say. She suddenly felt depressed without the least idea why. “I think I’m going to have to call it a night,” she said to Gil. “It’s been a long day.” That’s all it is, she thought. She’d driven more than five hundred miles to get here and had very little sleep, and now the beer. She was just tired.

She settled on a time to meet with Gil the following day and jotted down directions to his ranch. Mindful of the lateness of the hour and the rowdy nature of the crowd, he graciously walked her to her truck, which, since she was pulling a fair-size horse trailer, she’d parked far out on the periphery of the parking lot.

As she crossed the hard-baked dirt, bleached by the light of mercury lamps to the color of old bones, she thought about the man who’d been dumped there only minutes before.

“Don’t worry about Bronco,” Gil said as she unlocked her truck. “My boys’ll see he gets home all right.”

Unnerved by the ease with which the rancher seemed to read her mind, she said dryly, “I’d just hate to think he was somewhere on the road right now.” She climbed behind the wheel and Gil closed the door. He waited with typical Western gallantry until she’d started the engine, then touched the brim of his hat.

“Drive safe now.”

“Yeah, thanks, I will. See you tomorrow.”

He left her with a wave and headed off across the parking lot, but Lauren didn’t watch him go. Nor did she immediately put the truck in gear and pull out onto the highway. Safely, blessedly alone, she sat and stared through the windshield, cringing inwardly as she opened the door on her own self-doubts.

What’s wrong with me? How could I have been so attracted to a man who’s clearly nothing but bad news?

It must be some sort of wild gene, she thought, passed down to her from that pioneer ancestor, the one Aunt Lucy had told her about. How else to explain it? She was Lauren Brown, a bright sensible Iowa attorney, a good girl, one who’d always done the right thing, lived by the rules, lived up to everyone’s expectations. She was engaged to marry the perfect man, a good man, not to mention handsome, witty and kind.

Why, then, had Benjamin never made her feel the way she’d felt tonight, dancing with Johnny Bronco?

Johnny Bronco. What a name! Romantic notions aside, what he was was a half-Indian cowboy with a drinking problem, a propensity for violence and a undeniable way with horses and women. The last man in the world she’d ever let herself get mixed up with. What could she possibly see in a man like that? What could they possibly have in common?

As if in reply, once again a wave of remembered sensation swamped her. Oh, how vivid it seemed-the slide of silken hair through her fingers, the faint smell of leather and sweat, his body heat soaking into her breasts, his hand moving like a magician’s, scattering shivers like pixie dust down her back. Even now, just the memories made her breathing quicken, her nipples harden, her skin prickle and chafe against the restrictions of her clothing.

Awash with longing, throat aching and eyes burning, Lauren angrily threw the truck into gear and drove out of Smoky Joe’s parking lot into the Arizona night.

I should never have danced with him. The thought chilled her even now as she lifted her face to the hot August wind.

She opened her eyes when the gray mare abruptly slowed, then halted. Just ahead, Bronco was waiting for her beside a rock pile, in the shade of a massive bull pine.

Without her noticing, the land had changed dramatically. They’d been climbing steadily, she realized now, and the rolling hills dotted with juniper and sage, mesquite and palo verde had given way to sparse stands of piñons intermingled with bull pines and clumps of scrub brush.

While Cochise Red snuffed the ground and whickered an impatient greeting to the gray mare, Bronco placidly waited for Lauren to come to him, then reached out and took her reins. “We’ll rest here a bit. Give the horses a breather.”

For a moment she sat where she was, glaring resentfully at him while sweat pooled in the hollow of her throat and crawled in a chilly trickle between her breasts. But in a way it was almost a relief to look at him, to see him the way he was today, a vivid flesh-and-blood reminder that he wasn’t the man she’d thought he was. The fantasy rodeo rider in a graceful pas de deux with a bucking bronc, the Saturday-night charmer in the red shirt and flowing black hair. Maybe they were parts of the whole and maybe they were no more than clever disguises, but how could she ever know for certain? The only thing she did know was that this man, this Bronco, bore no resemblance whatsoever to the smiling man she’d danced with two nights ago. In his bleached blue shirt and saddle-worn jeans, with his long hair vanished into a neat club at the nape of his neck and his sweat-stained hat tilted low on his brow, he wore the lean and merciless look of a hunting wolf-or a born outlaw.

Once more, in spite of the heat, Lauren shivered.

Perhaps sensing her rider’s unease, the gray mare sidestepped nervously as she dismounted. Lauren spoke to her softly and gave her a reassuring slap on the withers as she moved away from her.

“You mad at her about something?”

She started, then halted, despising herself for trembling inside as Bronco suddenly appeared beside her, one hand on the gray mare’s bridle, blocking her way.

“Mad?” she said in a voice taut with confusion. “No, I was just… She seemed nervous. I was letting her know it was okay.”

“Let me ask you a question.” Now he spoke in a crooning tone. His hand lay gentle on the mare’s sweat-darkened neck. Lauren focused on that hand and tried to ignore the way her breath caught in her throat as he moved up beside her. “If I was to slap you on your bare skin, exactly the same way you just slapped her, you think you’d like it?”

Her mouth dropped open, but with no hope of a reply.

“Her hide’s as sensitive as yours is,” he went on in that thick seductive murmur. His hands moved on the mare’s neck with a caressing touch, like a lover’s. “She can feel a gnat when it lands on her back. Think what a slap feels like.”

As if she understood, the little mare turned an ear toward him, then her head, and blew a gust of breath against his shoulder. When she playfully nibbled his shirtsleeve, Bronco’s answering chuckle was almost indistinguishable from the sounds the animal made.

“Ever watch the way horses do with each other? They nuzzle. Just touch each other gently with the softest part of their lips. That’s the way you want to touch a horse. You stroke her nice and easy, light little massages like a horse’s nuzzle-see there?”

Lauren nodded, but it was a lie; both he and the horse were a blur. His voice retreated to a distant hum; she felt light-headed. In her mind’s eye she saw his hands, all right, those same hands, but the sleek shiny hide beneath the fingers wasn’t sweat-streaked dappled gray, but a rich deep mahogany.

A voice intruded, Gil McCullough’s voice, droning on and on about the accomplishments, pedigree and breeding track record of the stallion, Cochise Red. But Lauren wasn’t listening. Her heart and all her senses had been hijacked by the magnificent animal cavorting out in the middle of the ring, showing off with a stallion’s flare. The animal-and the man riding him. Oh, but they were beautiful together.

They seemed inseparable, man and horse, like something in mythology, two parts of the same being-the stallion’s body, powerfully and compactly built for short bursts of unbelievable speed, lightning-quick turns and bone-jolting stops, and the man’s as compact and strong, but lean and supple as a whip, with hands as gentle as a lover’s. The man rode leaning well forward over the stallion’s neck, long straight hair mingling with the coarse black mane, and the stallion’s ears flicked as if the man spoke to him in a language only they understood.

Smiling, heart pounding in sheer exhilaration, Lauren turned to Gil McCullough. “Not fair! You knew I wasn’t going to leave here without him once I’d seen him.”

McCullough laughed. “You know what they say-all’s fair in love, war and horse tradin’. Tell you what, let’s you and me go on up to the house, have something cold to drink while we tend to the paperwork.” He waved to Bronco out in the ring, then turned to stroll with her up the hard-baked slope toward the Spanish-style ranch house, which floated like a white ship in a sea of neat green lawn.

They went into Gil’s study, where his wife, a petite middle-aged blond woman introduced to Lauren as Katie, brought them tall glasses of iced tea with lemon. A short time later Bronco came in, accompanied by another man, this one oddly dressed for a ranch hand, Lauren thought, in what appeared to be combat fatigues. There was something hard and cold about his eyes, something that made her uneasy when he looked at her.

McCullough asked her for the keys to her truck. “Ron here’ll get your trailer backed around to the ramp while we’re finishing up the paperwork,” he told her as he handed her keys to the man in fatigues. “Soon as we’re done here, Bronco’ll get ol’ Red loaded up and you’ll be set to go.”

Lauren felt excitement vibrate through her. That magnificent animal was hers-well, okay, Dixie’s. But she could hardly wait to get him home to the Tipsy Pee. She wondered how long it would take her to get up the courage to actually ride him.

She’d had no warning at all. Not the slightest uneasiness, no chilly little frisson or premonition of danger.

She’d laughed as she handed the check to Gil, passing a hand over her brow and joking about the number of zeros. “Well,” she’d said then, taking a deep breath, “I guess I’d better be off. I have a long drive ahead of me.”

Even now, with her eyes closed, she could see Gil’s smile, hear him saying, “Oh, I don’t think you’re going to be goin’ anywhere just yet, Lauren Brown. You’ll be staying on here with us for a while.” And feel again that first little chill, as if someone had drawn an ice cube along her spine.

Though she still had not really understood what was happening. Her eyes had flown first to Bronco-in appeal, for confirmation of the unbelievable. It had been a reflexive thing. But she had found his face impassive, his eyes unreadable as onyx.

“Want you to go along with Bronco here,” Gil had said almost gently. “He’ll take you to your quarters, see you’re comfortable.” As if she’d been a homesick child on the first day of summer camp.

Her mouth had dropped open then, but no sound had come out. She wondered, even if she had screamed, if it would have made any difference. Who would there have been to hear her? McCullough’s wife? That sweet middle-aged woman Katie-was she a party to this…whatever it was?

What in God’s name did they want with her? Was she being kidnapped? Robbed? Or… But beyond that her shocked mind simply refused to go.

Without a sound, Bronco had moved in beside her and taken her arms. Instantly, mockingly, her mind flashed back to the night before, to the dance floor in Smoky Joe’s-same hands, same body, same wiry strength, same all-enveloping heat. The irony of it was so shocking she gave a small incensed gasp. Bronco muttered something she couldn’t hear, and then she was moving, moving against her will, her feet going along with her body as if they’d had no other choice.

Had there been a choice? If she’d had presence of mind to go limp, what would it have gained her? Only, she was certain, the indignity of being carried. No, she’d had only one chance, and that had come later, outside, when Bronco had paused for some reason at the place where the lawns ended in a low stone wall and two steps dropped down to the hard-baked dirt. It was then, operating on pure gut instinct, that Lauren had seized the moment and stomped down with all her strength on his instep.

Her valiant effort produced only a muffled grunt. Instead of releasing her, Bronco’s grip on her arms tightened. There was a flash of blinding breath-stopping pain, and his voice, whispering the warning against her ear, so soft it sounded obscenely like an endearment. “Let’s have an understanding-you don’t try to get away, and I don’t have to hurt you.”

And then, in a more normal voice, a lazy almost insolent drawl, he’d said, “Look here, Laurie Brown, where do you think you’re gonna go? Look around you.”

That was when she realized her truck and horse trailer were gone. They had been taken from her along with her freedom, and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.

But she wasn’t giving up. She’d wait…and she’d watch. When the moment came, she’d be ready.

“Are you okay?”

Lauren opened her eyes and found herself clinging to the gray mare’s saddle, engulfed in a wave of dizziness. Bronco’s arm slid around her, under her arm and folded across her rib cage.

“You need to sit down for a minute?”

She felt as though she couldn’t breathe, as though he’d taken all her oxygen. She managed to gasp, “Don’t touch me!” fighting the weakness, feeble with rage.

He let go of her with a little snort of laughter and muttered, “Suit yourself,” then stepped away. She was left clinging to the saddle, feeling weak-kneed and childish.

“Am I allowed to go to the bathroom?” she asked, teeth clenched.

His reply came from the other side of the gray mare. “Doubt if you’ll find a bathroom, but you’re welcome to use a bush.”

Her heart pounded. Was this the moment? How quickly could she mount up-more quickly than he could grab the reins? Don’t be stupid. He’s got a faster horse than you have, and he knows the terrain. Be patient, Lauren. This is not the time.

As she stalked into the brush she heard Bronco call, “I’d check real good for rattlers if I were you.”

Chapter 4

The phone call came that evening during dinner at the gracious brown-brick Georgian home of Pat Graham, in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., where Rhett and Dixie had gone to await developments out West. The attorney general left the dining room to take the call in her study, and when she returned her face was grave.

Rhett reached for Dixie’s hand. “News?” he asked quietly.

“That was Vernon,” Pat said as she seated herself. Her movements were slow and careful, and her eyes didn’t quite meet those of her guests. She placed her napkin across her lap. “They heard from the Navajo Tribal Police. A sheep-herder named Billie Chee reported finding your daughter’s truck and trailer around noon today abandoned on the Big Reservation near Window Rock. Vernon’s people are going over it now.”

Rhett nodded; he’d been prepared for something of the sort but felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach nonetheless. “From what you’ve told me about these people, I doubt they’ll find much,” he said flatly. “Any word from McCullough’s ranch? Do they know where he’s holding her?” Curled inside his, Dixie’s fingers felt like ice.

Pat Graham picked up her knife and fork, stared at her plate for a moment, then carefully laid the utensils back down. “Vern and Henry both have their people out there in force. They’ve had the place under surveillance since about eight this morning, local time.” Rhett made a sharp sound. The attorney general glanced at him. “Nobody’s gone in or out since then, but that doesn’t mean much. McCullough would have been expecting something of the sort, I’m sure. He wouldn’t keep Lauren there-most likely moved her out during the night. They could have her stashed just about anywhere by now-there’s a lot of wide-open country out there.”

Dixie clapped a hand over her mouth. Unable to sit still, Rhett pushed back his chair. “I need to be out there,” he muttered, driving a hand through his hair. “I can’t just…sit here, while my daughter’s out there somewhere-God knows where-held hostage by some damn…militia!” He was standing, now, gripping the back of Dixie’s chair. He wondered why it didn’t snap in his hands.

Pat rose, too, and leaned toward him, bracing her hands on the white linen tablecloth. “Rhett, I know how you must feel.” Her umber eyes were intent, her voice low and earnest. “But I can only advise you very strongly not to do that. We cannot have the media getting hold of this. We’d be putting your daughter in grave danger if we do. SOL’s instructions were very emphatic on that point. You must proceed with the campaign schedule as if nothing’s wrong, right up till the convention.”

Rhett expelled a breath. “Where I will regretfully decline the nomination for president.”

Pat nodded. “Once you’ve done that, your daughter will be released unharmed. So they say.”

Pacing, Rhett uttered a profanity. “They can’t be al lowed to get away with this,” he growled. “Think what it would mean-hell, it amounts to a coup! The end of our political system as we know it, the rule of law, the will of the majority-”

“Rhett.” Dixie caught his hand and held on to it.

He halted and passed a shaking hand over his eyes. “She’s my child, my little girl. I don’t know what I’d do if…” He sought Dixie’s eyes, like chips of an autumn sky, and clung to them as if they were the light of hope.

“We’re going to get your daughter back,” the attorney general said with quiet conviction.

Rhett threw her an angry look. “Seems to me you’ve got to find her first. Is Vernon certain she’s not at McCullough’s?”

She hesitated a beat too long. “Not absolutely certain, no. And there’s no way they can be until they get in there. But rest assured, he and Henry will take no overt action until they know your daughter is out of harm’s way.”

“Pat, this isn’t a damn press conference,” he snapped, then immediately followed that with a heavy, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He closed his eyes, breathing deeply.

Only once before in his life had the future seemed so black, so terrifying, ironically also a time when he’d feared his children might be lost to him forever. Sixteen years ago, and it seemed like yesterday. Back then, too, it had looked as if he might be forced to make an unthinkable choice. Back then the choice had been between his children and Dixie, the woman who had become as essential to him as the air he breathed. Now, as then, the stubbornness inherent in his nature insisted there had to be another possibility. A third choice.

“This man Henry’s got on the inside-the one he says is going to keep my daughter safe. What have you heard from him? Seems to me if anybody’d know where Lauren is being held…” He paused at something in the attorney general’s eyes. “What?”

The woman’s face was a study in mute sympathy. “I wish I knew. At last report he hadn’t checked in since the night before Lauren was taken. Henry hasn’t heard from him in almost forty-eight hours. We don’t even know if he’s-”

“Alive?” Rhett finished for her.

Pat shrugged and looked away.

They arrived at the entrance to the camp around midnight, by the light of a full moon. Bronco suspected Lauren had been dozing in the saddle for the past hour or so, but she came wide awake when he spoke to the sentry. As they rode close together through the barbed-wire gates, she murmured in a voice slurred with exhaustion, “Where are we?”

He allowed himself a wry smile, knowing she couldn’t see it in the moonlight. “Welcome to Liberty.”

“Liberty?” Though her face was turned toward him, its expression was hidden from him by shadows. He could only hear her confusion in her voice.

He didn’t even try to keep the irony out of his. “That’s the sovereign and independent nation of Liberty. The laws of the oppressive and totalitarian regime known as the United States of America have no dominion here.”

“You people have your own country?” She had missed the irony. No longer sounding the least bit sleepy, her voice cracked on the last word.

He gave it some thought, debating whether to point out to her that, as a matter of fact, his people were indeed a sovereign nation. “Well, now, I’m not sure whether you could call Liberty a country, at least not yet, but we have declared our independence from the U.S. of A., yes, ma’am.”

“Why?”

He intoned, “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights-”’

“You’re quoting me the Declaration of Independence?” Lauren squeaked, edging toward outrage before adding sourly, “And, anyway, it’s ‘inalienable rights.’ At least get it right!”

“You sure about that?” Bronco pretended surprise.

“Yes, I’m sure. It’s ‘inalienable’-everybody knows that.”

Her tone-huffily superior-amused him. “Well, now,” he said somberly, “maybe you ought to look it up before you go and bet the farm on that.”

“Bet! Who said anything about a bet?”

“So, you’re not sure.”

“Of course I’m sure-I’m a lawyer, dammit! Don’t you think I know the Declaration of Independence?”

“And I’m a revolutionary,” Bronco countered in an even tone. “We take our creeds pretty seriously. And by the way, it goes on to say that ‘whenever any form of government becomes destructive to those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government…as shall seem to them most likely to effect their safety and happiness.’ End of quote. That’s all we’re doing here-exercising our rights as set forth by our founding fathers.”

“Your founding fathers! You just said you people declared yourself independent of the ‘U.S. of A.’ What, you get to pick and choose what parts you want to keep?” She was wide awake now and becoming more and more incensed by the minute. So incensed, in fact, that Bronco wondered if maybe it was some kind of protective mechanism kicking in, so she wouldn’t have to think about the position she was in and how scared she was.

He, on the other hand, was enjoying himself more than he had all day. More, in fact, than since he’d had the in credibly bad judgment to dance with the woman at Smoky Joe’s.

He watched the dark shapes of rabbits bounding through the silvery meadow like fish jumping in a moonlit ocean, and said serenely, “That’s about the size of it. Throw away the stuff that doesn’t work, keep what does. What’s wrong with that?”

“Well…sure.” Her tone was grudging. “But you don’t do it with violence!”

“Who said anything about violence?”

“Oh, I suppose I’m here because you asked me nicely to please come and help you blackmail my father out of the presidential race! And what about that guard back there? You think I didn’t notice he had a gun? A very big gun.”

The shadow of a hunting owl brushed silently past them and the rabbits vanished. But an instant later Bronco heard a high-pitched squeal, cut ominously short. “He has a gun,” he said mildly. “He’s exercising his constitutional right to bear arms.”

Apparently too preoccupied to have noticed either the owl or the rabbits, Lauren turned her face toward him. In the moonlight her eyes looked like soot smudges on blue marble. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?” she said in a cold contemptuous voice. “That’s all you militia types care about. Guns. You know what my father stands for.” Swearing angrily under her breath, she shifted around to face forward again.

A moment later the gray mare broke into a gallop. Not as if the woman was seriously trying to escape, Bronco realized. More likely her horse had picked up on some unconscious need to blow off steam. It was a condition he more than understood, but even so he wasted no time catching up with her. He’d hate for the sentries tracking their progress across the meadow with infrared cameras, high- powered binoculars and night-vision scopes to get the wrong idea.

“Lady, it’s too damn late and too damn dark to be doin’ that,” he scolded as he took hold of the mare’s bridle and slowed them back to a walk. “It’s a rough trail. Take it easy. You may’ve been napping in the saddle since dark, but the horses are dog tired and so am I.”

She glanced at him and didn’t say anything, and he was glad he couldn’t see the look in her eyes.

Actually, he decided he rather liked having her mad at him. He’d a lot rather have her riled up than the way she’d been this morning when he’d found her hanging on to the gray mare’s saddle, looking about one good gulp of air away from breaking down.

Bronco wasn’t exactly known for his tender heart, except where horses were concerned, and it had surprised him more than he cared to admit how close he’d come to gathering her into his arms right then and there. How much he’d wanted to stroke his fingers through that hair of hers that reminded him of a high-country meadow in the wintertime and tell her if she’d just trust him, everything was going to come out all right.

He’d thought about telling her the truth right then, just to keep her from trying anything stupid, if nothing else. Thing was, he didn’t know whether he could trust her. In the end he’d decided he couldn’t take the chance that she might, in some small way, maybe with a look or a gesture, give him away. He’d been under a long time-too long. The number-one commandment of the undercover operative-Thou shalt not blow thy cover-was so ingrained in him it was a natural part of who he was. He wasn’t even sure there was still the capacity for truth in his soul.

They crossed the rest of the meadow in silence. Lauren kept her eyes fixed on the road-no more than a track, really, gravel or trampled grass in places, marshy in low spots where water had collected from a recent thunder shower-and tried not to think about what lay ahead. Liberty. She shuddered and wished she could find something amusing in the irony of that. But her sense of humor had deserted her. Everything she could recall reading about militia organizations involved well-publicized acts of violence, and her circumstances seemed far too perilous for levity.

It occurred to her, though, that under different circumstances the night might have held a certain magic. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine it, a moonlight ride through a high-country meadow with a man who stirred her senses and ignited the romantic fires in her soul-fires she thought she’d snuffed out long ago, but that, it now appeared, had only been temporarily banked.

A pine-scented breeze stirred her hair, and she opened her eyes to find that the man riding beside her, prudently close enough to grab her mount’s bridle if she tried to run away, was still Johnny Bronco-a charming lying renegade Apache with nothing less than the violent overthrow of the U.S. government on his agenda. The last man on earth she’d have chosen to be alone with on a lovely moonlit night.

But the instant the thought formed in her mind, she knew there was something wrong with it, something that didn’t fit, something she’d overlooked. But as she chased it through the chaos in her mind, trying her best to pin it down, the stallion, Cochise Red, suddenly bugled a warning. Beneath her she felt the gray mare tense and tremble with her own shrill reply. A moment later, dark shapes emerged silently from the trees to surround them with guns at the ready. Welcome to Liberty.

The armed guard escorted them through a forest of tall pines, a ghostly landscape of deep shadows and slanting streaks of moonlight that seemed eerily busy in spite of the quiet, as if unseen beings lay watching, listening, marking their passing. Overhead the trees made soft swishing sounds in the breeze. The nighttime chill seeped through the sweatshirt Bronco had given her and into her bones, and deep inside she began to shiver.

The forest ended at a wide, upward-sloping stretch of bare ground that gleamed like a snowfield in the moonlight. At the far end of the clearing, tucked under the overhang of a looming escarpment and probably almost invisible from above, stood a house-just a cabin, really-made of logs. Incongruously charming, it had a wide porch that extended across the front, a stone chimney at one end and, opposite that, a long extension that looked as though it might once have been an open-sided shed, enclosed now with walls of rough-cut logs.

The cabin door stood open, and Lauren could see the man who waited silently on the porch outlined against the soft glow of light from inside. Gil McCullough. She knew him at once, even from a distance, by his faintly military stance-feet apart and firmly planted, arms confidently folded across his chest-and by the pewter shine of his crewcut hair.

The militia leader started down the steps as Bronco brought all three horses to a halt just below the porch and slid lightly from the saddle. Lauren noticed that only one of their armed escort was still with them; the others had melted soundlessly away. The remaining guard waited a short distance away, eyes watchful in his blackened face, automatic weapon cradled in his arms, while Bronco spoke briefly in an undertone to McCullough.

Then Bronco slipped past the gray mare’s head, clucking to her as he slid his hand along her neck. He gathered the reins from Lauren’s slack fingers and, with one arm resting on the pommel of her saddle, said in the same gentle tone he’d used with the horse, “Are you gonna get down offa there or not?”

But Lauren sat frozen in the saddle, glued to it by pride and the steadfast resolve that she would sooner die where she was than ever let him know-let any of them know-how stiff and saddle sore she was. She was accustomed to riding, but she’d never spent nearly eighteen solid hours in the saddle before.

“Need a hand?”

“No, I don’t need a hand.” Her voice matched the bone-chilling cold in her heart; if she’d never fully understood the term “cold-blooded murder” before, she did now. “If you would, please, get out of my way?”

Bronco instantly stepped back with a gesture of mocking gallantry. Summoning every ounce of willpower she had, Lauren gripped the saddlehorn, swung her leg around, disengaged her boot from the stirrup and eased herself to the ground.

When she did, it seemed as though every muscle from her waist on down screamed in agony. A groan pushed against her clenched jaws and a gasp lay locked inside her chest as she let go of the saddle and slowly turned.

“A little stiff?” Bronco inquired.

“A little.” She said it lightly, striving to keep her breathing inaudible.

She was also trying, under the guise of brushing herself off and setting her clothing to rights, to stretch the stiffness out of her legs. With three men watching her, she would not walk up that hill bow-legged and rump-sprung. She wouldn’t.

But the minute her clothing shifted and the air hit the four spots on her body-two on the insides of her knees and two more on her backside-that had been rubbed raw by the friction of the saddle, they began to burn like fire. Exhausted tears sprang to her eyes. She was sure she’d never been more miserable, or in more pain, in her life.

The next thing she knew, Bronco was taking her arm, guiding her up the slope to the foot of the steps with such gentleness, such subtle solicitude, that she felt bewildered, almost undone.

What was this? Compassion? Sympathy? Kindness? From her jailer? Perversely, instead of gratitude, now it was anger that made her eyes sting with helpless tears. To feel beholden to her kidnapper seemed the final insult-salt on her wounded pride.

Furious and seething, she jerked her arm from Bronco’s grip just as he was presenting her to Gil McCullough like the spoils of some great conquest.

McCullough chuckled; she could see the arrogant gleam of his teeth in the moonlight. “Well, Lauren. Welcome to Liberty. I guess you’re probably tired and hungry after your long ride. Come on inside-there’s a pot of stew keepin’ warm on the stove. After you’ve had something to eat, we’ll talk about living arrangements.” And as he spoke in warm cordial tones, he was taking her arm, moving her along beside him as if, Lauren thought, she was an honored guest being invited in for dinner.

It was an illusion that was shattered a moment later when the armed guard in his camouflage clothes and blackened face moved in on her other side.

Suddenly irrationally frightened, she looked for Bronco and just caught a glimpse of him as he was leading the three horses across the cleared slope and into the trees. Of course, she told herself, he’d see to the horses before his own needs-any good wrangler would. She had no idea why she suddenly felt so bereft without him when a moment ago she’d bitterly resented so much as the man’s helping hand on her arm.

“We’re primitive here, as you can see,” Gil was saying in an apologetic tone. “This is a wilderness survival training camp, so we’re a little bit lacking in the amenities, but we’ll do our best to see you’re comfortable. Since you’re apt to be with us for a while, we’d like for you to feel at home.”

Speechless, Lauren could only stare at him. He gazed blandly back at her and motioned for her to precede him.

She entered the cabin cautiously, walking as if the floor under her feet might vanish; nothing seemed real to her. The cabin and its contents were so incongruous that for a moment she felt as though she was dreaming in weird double exposure, or had somehow fallen into overlapping worlds. Modern military juxtaposed against a backdrop of the Old West-steel folding tables and chairs, a laptop computer, ham radio outfit, battery packs, charts and maps and miscellaneous equipment, the purposes of which Lauren could only guess, occupied most of the space in a room constructed of rough wood planks, old and weathered to a silvery gray. A modern stainless-steel kettle shared space on a cast-iron wood-burning cookstove with an old-fashioned enameled coffeepot. The light in the room was the cold blue of modern Coleman lanterns, but the smells that permeated the cabin were the pungent down-home aromas of grass-fed beef and simmering coffee.

“I expect you’d like to wash up before you eat.” Gil motioned toward the back wall of the cabin opposite the door, where an enameled pot and basin sat atop a wooden dry sink in front of the room’s only window. As he spoke he was moving among the steel tables and chairs, his attention already returning to whatever it was he’d been involved in when interrupted by her arrival. He seemed completely relaxed and unconcerned by her presence.

And why not? He’d know she posed no danger or flight risk. What could she do, where could she go, one woman in the middle of a camp filled with men, in the middle of a wilderness, in the middle of the night? And that was even assuming she could somehow get past the armed guard planted like a medium-size tree in front of the doorway.

Burning with resentment and trembling with fatigue and helpless fury, Lauren crossed the plank floor on legs she feared might buckle at any minute. The water in the pot was warm. She dipped some into the basin with a large ladle that was hanging on the side of the pot and lowered her hands into it, trying not to weep with the sudden longing for a whole tubful in which to immerse her aching body. In spite of her efforts a few tears mingled with the water in her cupped hands as she leaned over the basin to wash her face. And what a blessed relief it was-both the lovely warm water and the tears. Safe tears, camouflaged by the process of washing.

Feeling somewhat restored, she dried her hands and face on a towel she found hanging on a nail beside the window. A glance at Gil told her he was engrossed in his laptop, so she wandered over to the cookstove and lifted the lid from the stew pot. She’d already decided, childishly perhaps, that she would not speak to her captors unless asked a direct question. A small defiance, but it seemed important to her to retain even the tiniest measure of self-determination and control.

A rough wooden cupboard beside the stove yielded stainless-steel bowls, mugs and eating utensils. Lauren ladled a hefty helping of stew, thick and rich with chunks of beef, potatoes, onions and green peppers, into a bowl, filled a mug with coffee that looked almost as thick as the stew and went back to the sink. Leaning her backside against it, she took a sip of the coffee and thought wistfully of cream and sugar, then set the mug on the sink behind her and dug her spoon into the stew.

“Why don’t you sit down?” Gil said, glancing up from his computer and pulling out a folding chair next to him. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Lauren thought of the places on her body that were burning like fire, two of which were located exactly where that metal chair would meet her bottom. “I’m fine,” she said distantly.

Gil aimed a glance at her over the tops of rimless glasses, then shrugged and muttered, “Suit yourself,” as he went back to his laptop. A moment later, though, he looked up again. This time he took off the glasses and placed them on the table, then sat and regarded her thoughtfully.

Lauren did her best to ignore the silent scrutiny, forcing herself to think, instead, about how unexpectedly good the stew was, trying to identify the seasonings, wondering who’d made it. But in spite of her efforts, her heartbeat quickened when Gil got up from his chair, picked up a lantern and went down two steps into the long shed that was attached to the cabin.

Splashes of illumination revealed a long wooden table and benches, as well as shadowy piles of boxes and cartons of varying shapes and sizes-presumably the shed served the camp as both mess hall and storage facility. Lauren kept spooning stew into her mouth as she watched Gil pause, then bend over to open a wooden crate. She saw him take something out of the crate, and when she saw what it was, the stew turned to ashes in her mouth.

No. Oh, please, no-not that. Anything but handcuffs!

She didn’t think she’d spoken aloud, but McCullough must have seen the horror on her face, because on the way back into the cabin he set the lantern on the table and held up a hand. In a tone that was part testy, part soothing, he said, “Now, don’t get excited. Doggone it, I hadn’t intended on doing this.” Halfway between her and the guard at the door, he paused and regarded her with his head tilted to one side. After a moment he made an impatient gesture, as if she’d just asked him a troubling question, one he couldn’t answer.

He cleared his throat in an embarrassed sort of way, which Lauren might have enjoyed if she’d been in a frame of mind to think about anything except her fear. “As you can see, we’re not exactly set up here for prisoners of war. We haven’t got a, um…any kind of stockade or anything like that. This cabin is about as secure a location as we’ve got, and it’s not going to be practical to keep you here for…obvious reasons. What I was gonna do was put you in a tent, post a guard, and that would be that.” His perplexed look darkened to a frown. “But now, doggone it, I’m thinking I might have underestimated you. Truth is, you know, I just don’t believe I can trust you.”

Yes! Lauren cravenly thought. Yes, you can-you can trust me. Please don’t handcuff me. Please… But except for a disdainful snort, pride kept her silent.

“I know you’re a smart girl,” Gil went on with a wry little half smile. “What I’m afraid is, you might be just smart enough to think you can figure a way out of here.” His smile changed to a fatherly frown. “I don’t even want to think about what might happen if you were to do that. The last thing we want is for anything bad to happen to you. So I guess you could look at this as a safety precaution-that’s your safety I’m talking about, you understand? At night, mainly. Just to make sure you don’t try anything smart. Okay? You understand?” As if, Lauren thought, he really did want her to.

She thought of the cot in the saddle house, the comforting smell of horses and leather. How relieved she’d been that they hadn’t tied her up.

From a distance she could hear Gil’s voice explaining. “As soon as you’re done eating, Ron here is going to take you to your quarters, get you settled in.” And he was handing the cuffs to the man silently standing at the door.

It was then that Lauren caught the glitter of blue eyes and just managed to hold back a gasp of recognition. She hadn’t known him before with his face blackened, but now she realized that the guard was the same man she’d last seen in McCullough’s living room, when Gil had handed him the keys to her truck. The man with the ice-cold eyes. The man whose look had made her shiver.

She wasn’t shivering now. She just felt frozen. Numb.

Then all at once her mind filled with the image of Bronco’s face-his fierce warlike eyebrows and strangely alluring smile. Without stopping to wonder why, she found herself focusing on that face and that smile with all her energy, all her will. For reasons she could not fathom, she could hear his warm bear-rug voice in her mind, saying, “Rise and shine, Laurie Brown.”

Gil’s hand was gripping her arm; the bowl was being taken from her useless fingers. She felt herself being led like a lamb to where Ron Masters waited-waited with cold eyes gleaming in his sooty face like a hungry wolf’s. Terror-mindless, unreasoning, no doubt a product of exhaustion and all that had happened to her-rose in her throat.

Fingers bit into the flesh of her arms. Though she knew it was futile, she dug in her heels and pulled against them with all her strength as she sucked in a breath for a scream.

At that instant, when she was only a heartbeat away from hysteria, from complete humiliation, the cabin door opened and there was Bronco, with her saddlebags slung over one shoulder.

For a long moment he stood motionless in the doorway, framed against a backdrop of moonlight, casually blocking their exit. No one spoke, but Lauren saw his eyes glitter, then turn hard. And deadly.

Chapter 5

He didn’t say anything; it was not his way.

There was a strangely vibrant silence as Bronco slowly eased the saddlebags from his shoulder. It was a deliberate motion, planned as a distraction, a focus for his concentration. Standing with his feet planted a little apart but keeping his body relaxed and his features impassive, he weighed the saddlebags in one hand while his mind surrounded and confined his anger, condensed it into a pinpoint and then stored it safely away in a remote corner of his consciousness.

This was an exercise he’d learned long ago during his turbulent times, when he’d been hell-bent on self-destruction. It had been a long time since he’d had to resort to it. He wasn’t sure what had called up in him that dark and lethal rage at the moment he’d seen the woman’s terror-stricken face, those liquid beseeching eyes, and Ron Masters’s fingers pressing into the flesh of her arms. He wouldn’t allow himself to dwell on the cause. What mat tered was that the anger did not control him any longer. These days it was his to control.

Gil finally broke the silence. “You’re just in time. Masters was about to show our guest to her quarters. That her gear? Ron’ll take it-go on over and help yourself to some stew.” He spoke in a clipped voice, and Bronco had an idea it was guilt that was mostly responsible for the brusqueness. Whatever else he might be, Gil McCullough was not a cruel man.

Instead of handing over the saddlebags, Bronco casually hefted them back onto his shoulder. “That’s okay, I got it,” he drawled. His eyes slid past the woman and settled on Masters.

Masters, now, that one was mean-mean as a snake. And Bronco had heard stories about his track record with women. His eyes flicked to the steel bracelets dangling from Ron’s hand. “What’re those for?” He kept his voice quiet, but with an edge of steel as hard as what those cuffs were made of.

Ron’s lip curled, showing a glare of white teeth in his blackened face. But before he could answer, Gil broke in, speaking too quickly and with that hint of beligerence.

“I was just explaining to Lauren-they’re as much for her safety as anything else. There’s a big ol’ wilderness out there. Hate to think what might happen if she decided to make a run for it…” He jerked his head toward the moonlit vista beyond the open door and left his thought unfinished.

But Bronco knew what was on his mind. Out there somewhere, tucked away in all those trees, were four or five dozen men he wouldn’t turn his own back on, much less entrust with the safety of a female hostage. A young beautiful female hostage.

He reached over and plucked the cuffs from Ron Masters’s hands. “I don’t think they’re gonna be necessary,” he said easily, “but just in case…” He tucked them into his hip pocket and grinned. And for the first time, allowed himself to look closely at his prisoner.

He’d braced himself for it, but even so, the look on her face hit him like a fist to the midsection. Fear, exhaustion, gratitude, hope, anger, resentment and pride-it was a lot to contain in one pair of eyes. It looked to him as if hers were about to spill over, and, he thought if that happened, the shame might be more than a woman with her pride could take.

Meanwhile, Gil was blustering, “Well, now…” while Ron made a sound something like a growl. From the woman sandwiched between them came only a soft intake of breath.

Bronco aimed a look at Gil and raised his eyebrows. “You did put me in charge of the prisoner, Commander. Are you relieving me of that duty, sir?”

McCullough snorted and shook his head. His eyes narrowed the way they did when he was mulling something over, weighing options. The air sang with unvoiced emotions, silent battles.

Through it all Bronco waited, relaxed and confident. He knew McCullough. And knew who he trusted.

He knew he was right when Gil finally drew himself up and thrust out his chin. “Okay, Johnny-” he gripped Lauren’s arm and thrust her at Bronco with uncharacteristic roughness “-she’s your responsibility. Anything happens to her, I’ll have your ass-understood?”

“Understood, sir.” He curved his fingers around her arm and felt her tremble the way a wild mare trembles when she’s fresh-caught and snugged up on a short lead, with nowhere to go and no way of knowing what’s going to happen to her next.

“I had the men pitch her tent up by the spring,” Gil said dismissively, already back among his maps and plans. “Rigged her a latrine, too. You’ll see it when you get up there.”

Bronco nodded; he could feel Masters’s seething anger as he guided Lauren past him. He felt it follow him out the door, across the thick plank porch and down the steps. He knew he’d made an enemy tonight, but that didn’t particularly bother him. One more reason to watch his back. Another reminder that he couldn’t afford to let his guard down-ever.

At the bottom of the steps he let go of Lauren’s arm long enough to pick up his bedroll and gear. When he had them tucked under his arm and went to reach for her again, she shook him off and pulled her arm away like a child in a sulk.

He paused and looked at her in surprise; he found the defiance a little hard to figure out, considering a few moments ago she’d been scared out of her wits and on the verge of tears. “You know where you’re going?” he asked mildly.

She glared back at him in stony silence. He shook his head and gave his bedroll a hitch; he was starting to think maybe those handcuffs weren’t such a bad idea, after all.

“Look,” he said, keeping his voice low so the two men in the cabin doorway couldn’t hear it, “since you don’t know where we’re going, you can’t very well lead. And I’m sure as hell not going to let you at my back. Now, you can walk along beside me like we’re out for a nice stroll in the moonlight and I can take your arm as a common courtesy, or I can tow you along on a lead rope like a balky mule. Which is it gonna be?”

Lauren, who had fixed her gaze on a spot about a foot to the left of his shoulder, didn’t reply. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him, didn’t trust herself to speak; she felt too fragile, too frightened, too confused. Every reasoning part of her had rebelled against her heart’s appalling response to Bronco’s just-in-the-nick-of-time return-that surge of hope and joy, the trembling, weak-kneed relief. What was that all about?

Oh, this was dangerous-dangerous and wrong. He was one of them, her captor, the enemy! She’d read about such things-hostages becoming dependent on, even forming emotional attachments to their captors. She’d only been a captive for a day! Was her character so weak, her courage so lacking? She felt profoundly disappointed in herself.

A sound from the cabin jerked her glance upward. Adrenaline surged through her like an electrical charge. Reason be damned; survival instincts took over, forcing a breath from her body along with a whispered “Okay.”

Bronco’s fingers wrapped around her arm. He jerked her out of the way as Ron Masters brushed past them, so close Lauren could feel his body heat…smell his scent, something feral and indefinably menacing.

“Smart choice,” Bronco muttered dryly. He gestured with the saddlebags toward the side of the cabin. “It’s this way.”

A stroll in the moonlight. The moon was in the west, just beginning its downward arc, so brilliant it cast their fore-shortened shadows before them as they climbed. Beyond the cabin the ground rose sharply to skirt the rock formation, alternately bare rock and a thick spongy carpet of pine needles. The air was cool and smelled of pine and damp earth. Overhead a breeze was a constant sound in the treetops. It was a sound Lauren had read about, but never actually heard before. She found it indescribably lonely.

She tried focusing on the sound as a way to mask the discomfort of her sore legs. But she was too tired, and the pain was too intense. And in the end the pain created its own kind of anesthesia, blocking out everything else-the fear, the anger, the bewilderment and humiliation, the powerlessness and frustration. She plodded numbly along, conscious only of pain.

And of Bronco’s fingers on her arm. Yes, maybe that most of all.

Once she slipped on some loose gravel, and his fingers tightened as he held her upright. “Almost there,” he murmured. She pressed her lips together and nodded; she’d heard him use the same tone when soothing horses.

But his words brought her back to full awareness, and she saw that they were following a pipe, wrapped with insulation and laid across the surface of a granite slope. From somewhere up ahead she could hear the happy sound of water trickling over stone. A few steps more and the pipe ended in a natural spring, and below it the overflow made a glimmering trail across rock made spongy with moss and lichen. Bronco muttered, “Watch your step,” as he steadied her across the treacherous slope, which ended in a level grassy area, a tiny meadow ringed with pines.

She could almost have touched the tent before she saw it, since it was made of camouflage material and tucked in the deep shadows just at the edge of the trees. She waited, numb and silent, while Bronco dumped the saddlebags and bedroll on the ground and unzipped the flap, then ducked his head and shoulders into the tent. A moment later the cool light of a battery lantern spilled through the opening. He picked up her saddlebags and tossed them into the tent, gestured with his hand and said, “In you go.”

Enfolded in numbness, a curious calm that seemed to have no connection to her rapidly beating heart, Lauren moved through the opening. Inside, she straightened and drew a deep breath.

Okay, it wasn’t so bad-big enough to sleep four comfortably, she imagined. And it appeared that efforts had been made in consideration of her needs. A puffy sleeping bag had been spread out at the far end. Next to it was a plastic storage bin with a lid-she supposed that was for whatever belongings she’d brought with her.

There was a small folding table and a folding canvas stool, a large plastic bucket and a plastic jug-for water, she assumed. The lantern hung from something overhead. Perhaps it was because she was so tired, weary in every muscle and bone, but the tent seemed a welcoming comforting place to her, almost cozy. She was conscious of a treacherous sense of safety, almost of relief.

Until she realized that behind her, Bronco had come into the tent and brought his saddlebags and bedroll with him.

“You…” Her voice was gravelly from prolonged disuse. And now also from shock. She cleared it and began again. “What’re you doing? You’re not sleeping in here, are you? With me.”

He paused to give her a long silent look. Then he dropped the saddlebags to the floor and reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out the handcuffs. He faced her, casually balancing his bedroll on one hip, the cuffs dangling from one finger of the other hand as he jerked his head, indicating each in turn, and said softly, “Which is it gonna be?”

Lauren closed her eyes. Of all the things that had happened to her in the past couple of days, this seemed the most unbelievable. The most untenable. That she could be sharing sleeping quarters-a tent-with this man. Johnny Bronco.

“Let’s get something straight, Laurie Brown.” His voice was quiet, but not the soothing one she’d heard before. Now it had sharp edges and uneven facets, like hand-hewn obsidian.

Opening her eyes, she saw that he’d knelt and was spreading his bedroll on the floor in front of the tent’s opening. When he paused to look at her, one forearm resting on his knee, the same hardness, the same multitude of facets were in his eyes.

He spoke slowly and deliberately, as if to a misbehaving child. “You are safe with me. And that is the only place you are safe. While you are here in this camp, you will stay with me at all times. You do not step one foot outside this tent unless I am with you. Do I make myself clear?” When she didn’t answer he repeated it slowly, with emphasis. “Do you understand?”

She heard the note of urgency in his voice, but pride made her ignore it. She even, in some remote part of her consciousness, recognized that the concern was for her, but fatigue kept her from wondering about why that should be. Instead, though it took all the strength she had left, she held herself straight and steadied her voice with a crusting of frost. “Perfectly. And if I should wake in the night and need to use the latrine?”

“Wake me.” The words were sharp and unequivocal as gunshots. His task completed, he rose, flashlight in hand, and held back the tent flap. “And speaking of which, I expect you want to make use of it before you turn in. If you’re ready, I’ll take you now.” He stared at her, stone-faced, waiting.

To be taken to the toilet like a child. Lauren no longer knew whether it was exhaustion or anger that was making her tremble so. Layer upon layer of humiliation, and each new layer sapped her strength a little more, eroded a little further her will to resist. Tomorrow, she thought as she muttered a stiff thank-you and took a step toward him. When I’m not so tired…

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

She halted in weary confusion. What now? It seemed a peculiar thing to constitute a last straw, but suddenly tears long postponed seemed only one quick breath away.

Bronco nodded toward the covered plastic bin. “You’ll probably find paper in there. Might want to take it with you.” His voice was gentle again, with an edge of gruffness that might have been embarassment, or sympathy. But if any such emotion had softened his hard unyielding features and black obsidian eyes, she would never know, because on the last words he stepped through the opening and left her alone.

Alone. It occurred to her that was the first time she’d been alone since she’d awoken before dawn in the saddle house on McCullough’s ranch. Until this moment she hadn’t realized how desperately she wanted to be alone-really alone, with the privacy to give in to overwhelming emotions, to react to incredible events, to cry if she felt like it. It seemed privacy, like freedom, was a commodity not fully appreciated until it was taken away.

Sniffling, feeling incredibly sorry for herself, she located several rolls of utilitarian-looking toilet paper in the plastic bin. She selected one and joined Bronco outside.

It was quite dark there in the shadows of the pines. He used the flashlight’s beam as a pointer, jabbing it into the grove behind the tent. “It’s over there. Watch your step.”

“I see it.” Impatiently she struck out for the spotlighted swath of camouflage without waiting for him to take her arm. She drew comfort from that small defiance.

And although walking brought renewed discomfort from the raw places on her legs and buttocks, oddly enough she found in the pain a restorative to her battered spirit. It seemed to act as a stimulant, like a slap or a dash of cold water in the face, helping to clear her mind and sharpen her focus.

The latrine was a three-sided enclosure consisting of blankets hung on ropes strung at head-height between small trees. Bronco pulled back the blanket and looked everything over thoroughly before he stepped back and waved her in.

“Checking for rattlers?” she asked tartly. He merely grunted and handed her the flashlight.

Inside the enclosure she was surprised-and relieved-to discover a portable chemical toilet similar to those found in boats and RVs. Compared to what she’d been expecting, it seemed a luxury, right up there among the comforts of home.

It occurred to her to wonder what Bronco would do when he felt the need to answer nature’s call. With bitter irony she wondered, since she was supposed to stay with him at all times, if she would accompany him to the latrine? Would he leave her tethered to a tree like a dog in front of a supermarket?

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, but since it seemed bad form to test the goodwill of the one person charged with her health and safety, she limited herself to a muttered, “This has got to be a violation of the Geneva Convention.”

From somewhere on the other side of the blanket she heard something that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Rhett Brown’s voice had gone quiet and deadly. He felt his wife’s hand on his arm, stroking it gently. She knew he hadn’t slept for two days and nights, and that, strong as he was, his control was wearing thin. He listened to the voice on the telephone, then snapped, “Well, get a warrant, get in there and find out if she’s there, dammit!” Again he listened to the voice telling him things he didn’t want to hear. “I don’t care how many weapons they’ve got stashed away down there. Just find my daughter!”

He slammed the receiver down and turned just slightly. Dixie came into his arms and he held on to her as if she were the only thing keeping him from blowing apart into a million pieces.

“They don’t even know where she is,” he whispered raggedly. “ATF hasn’t heard from their agent since she was taken. They don’t know if he has her or not, and they don’t want to go in on their warrant until they know for sure she’s safe. The whole thing could blow up in their faces any minute.”

“Rhett, the convention opens day after tomorrow in Dallas. What if they don’t find her? What if-”

“Hell, I don’t care about the convention! You think the nomination means anything to me if it costs me my…if anything happens to…oh, God.”

“We’re gonna get her back,” Dixie whispered in her soft Texas accent, holding him as tightly as he held her. “I know we will.” After a moment she sighed, and he felt her head beneath his chin. “I just wish we could tell the others-Wood, Lucy. You need them, Rhett. They should be with you right now.”

“I have you. Thank God I have you.”

“We’re gonna get through this. We’ll get through it somehow. And Lauren’s gonna be okay. She’s strong and she’s smart,” Dixie said. “She’s gonna be okay, I just know it.”

John Bracco lay awake in the thinning gray light that precedes dawn, listening to the sounds his prisoner made as she slept. He knew she had to have been both physically and emotionally exhausted, but in spite of that she’d spent a restless night, whimpering intermittently like a child with bad dreams. As a consequence, his own slumber had been fitful, but he didn’t let that trouble him. He’d been trained to go for several days at a stretch without sleep, if need be.

It came to him that it had been a long time since he’d shared sleeping quarters with a woman. Since his return to the Arizona mountains of his troubled youth, he’d kept his sexual encounters brief and businesslike, with a minimum of emotional involvement-at least on his side. Intimacy was too risky for a man undercover; he accepted that as just another part of the job and didn’t waste time and energy on regrets. It wasn’t his way.

He had to admit, though, there were times when he’d thought about the simple pleasure of holding a woman in his arms while she slept, of waking with her warmth in his sheets and her scent on his pillow, even if long-term relationships weren’t in his cards.

With the coming of daylight, he allowed himself the luxury of studying the woman without her knowledge-an invasion of her privacy that he acknowledged with only a twinge of guilt. Even in this, the first light, he could see that she was lying on her side. He let his eyes follow the outline of her body from shoulder to waist to hip, a trail more gentle than voluptuous. But why was that so exhilarating a journey nonetheless?

And now…yes, he could see that she was facing him, the shadowed oval of her face only hinted at, nested in the slightly darker tumble of her hair as she rested her head on her folded arm in lieu of a pillow.

And why was it, though he’d never been particularly drawn to blondes, that he found himself remembering again the wild-grass color of it, the way it reflected back the sunlight in rippling waves when the wind caught it?

From there it was only the space of a single thought to a reprise of her green-apple scent, the softness of her hair against his cheek as they danced to a slow song at Smoky Joe’s, a memory still so vivid that he could feel her body’s shape in his arms and the thump of her heartbeat against his chest. Odd, when he could seldom recall even the color of a woman’s eyes the morning after he’d made love to her.

Don’t even go there, he cautioned himself. She was off-limits for all sorts of reasons, both personal and professional.

Ah, he told himself, but he was merely curious about her, this daughter of the man who, unless Agent Bracco failed in his duty, was likely to become the most powerful human being on the planet. He wondered what sort of person she was, this daughter for whom a father would give up unimaginable power and fame. And what it must be like to grow up so privileged, so valued, so cherished.

Shadows of childhood demons hovered on the edges of his consciousness as he checked the illuminated dial of his wristwatch. They fled completely, though, when the woman suddenly stirred, as if she’d sensed even that slight movement. He lay absolutely still and watched her come awake in the space of a few heartbeats, sensed the changes in her breathing, the infinitesimal differences in the atmosphere of the tent-the electricity of tension, awareness…alarm.

“Good morning.” He spoke softly, in the same tone he might have used to introduce himself to an unbroken mustang, but wasn’t surprised when, in spite of his caution, she jerked her head and shoulders upward and gave a small gasp of fear. He said nothing else, giving her a chance to sort it out, remember where she was, who he was and what had happened to her.

He knew the moment it all came back to her, the moment when her shoulders relaxed into lines of…not defeat so much as acceptance. She shifted her legs, keeping them bent at the knees in order to remain under the sleeping bag as she sat up.

He was not prepared for the next sound she made-a sharp involuntary cry of pain. At the same time she froze, her body cramped, as if she was afraid to move in any direction.

Bronco didn’t have to ask what was wrong; they’d spent a long day in the saddle yesterday, probably eighteen hours straight. “Little sore?” he asked in a casual tone, mentally kicking himself for not having thought of it before. However, figuring it wouldn’t be in character for her abductor to be too free with sympathy, he went briskly on, “Best thing to do is walk it off. You’ll feel better after you start moving around.”

At first she didn’t seem to have heard him. She was rocking herself slightly, eyes glazed, all her concentration turned inward on herself and her pain. Then, in a voice so low he could barely hear it, she confessed, “I don’t think I can.”

“Sure you can. Might be a little uncomfortable at first-”

And then he stopped. Because suddenly he really did understand. Lord help her, she wasn’t just muscle-sore from being so long in the saddle, she had saddle sores. And from the way she was acting, they were third degree. In rapid sequence his mind replayed images of the previous night, their arrival at the camp, the way she’d hung on to the saddle sort of hunched up and breathing hard, the way he’d goaded her. It brought him no joy, remembering every move she’d made, every step she’d taken, up and down the cabin steps, climbing the hill to her tent. He knew from personal experience what a bad case of saddle sores was like. When he thought what it must have cost her to keep him from knowing…

Empathy flooded him. Distilled through his guilt, it emerged as anger.

Quicker than thought, he left his bedroll and was across the tent and down on one knee beside hers. “Let me see ’em,” he commanded. He swore when she shook her head. “I said let me-”

“No.” And she ground out the word between clenched teeth. “I’m fine. Damn you, leave me alone.”

Bronco rocked back on his heel and looked at her for a long moment. She stared past him, jaw set like concrete. He said dangerously, “Lady, I will haul you out of there if I have to. We can do this easy, or we can do it hard, but I am going to have a look at those sores. What’s it gonna be?” Her eyes flicked at him; he thought of the sting of a rawhide whip. “I’m going to count to three. One…”

At that she let out a breath in an infuriated gust and muttered under her breath, “You sound like my mother.” She moved back slightly and looked away, but not before he saw her cheeks ripen to a dusky pink. She cleared her throat. “I’m not…wearing pants.”

Bronco’s heart gave an unexpected lurch, but he only grunted. “Good thing, or else how am I gonna see your legs? Come on, haul ’em outta there.” As encouragement he snagged the sleeping bag’s zipper and pulled it down with a prolonged metallic growl.

Still she hesitated, looking mulish and somehow childlike in her resistance, but now he felt a surprising impulse to laugh. He resisted it and, instead, looked at her from under his lashes and said mildly, “You think I’ve never seen a woman’s legs before? What, one look and I’m suddenly gonna turn into a sex maniac? I’ll tell you something, Laurie Brown. I’ve seen a whole lot of legs, and trust me, it’d take some a lot more spectacular than yours to make me lose control. Come on-out.”

He was watching her closely, so he knew he didn’t imagine it when he saw the corners of her mouth twitch.

With a deliberation that bordered on insolence, she peeled back the sleeping bag. Even more slowly unfolded her legs, biting her lip, breathing suspended. Then at last, rolling her eyes, looking anywhere but at him, she leaned back on her hands in grudging surrender.

“Thanks,” Bronco said dryly. It had been such a subtle striptease that he couldn’t quite decide whether it was intentional or not. And if it was, whether that was as dangerous a notion as he suspected it might be.

He noted that she’d worn his sweatshirt to sleep in, along with, it appeared, underpants and socks. Since he’d watched her pack pretty much everything she’d brought with her from Texas into those saddlebags and knew it hadn’t included any sort of nightgown, he had to wonder what she normally wore to bed. Just underwear? Nothing? Another dangerous thought. He pushed it from his mind and concentrated on his examination.

He’d told her the truth, as far as it went; there wasn’t a pair of legs in this or any other world that was going to make Johnny Bronco lose control. Though he had to admit, when it came to fantastic legs, hers were right up there. But oddly enough it wasn’t the legs that intrigued him so much as her embarrassment about showing them. He found her awareness of him intensely erotic. He could feel his heart begin to thump.

A moment later, though his heart still banged against his rib cage, every erotic thought had fled. Instead, as he stared at the oozing silver-dollar-size patches on the insides of her knees where the skin had literally been rubbed away, he felt chilled and sick. My God, he thought. What she must have suffered. In silence. An unaccustomed emotion filled his chest-more than admiration, more than respect, almost…awe.

“Those are gonna have to be doctored,” he said flatly, confident that his voice, like his features, would give away nothing. He sat back on his heel again, his forearm once more draped across his knee, and met her eyes. He found them bright as stars, blazing defiance. “You got ’em on your butt, too?”

She responded in a valiant whisper, “You are not looking at those.”

After a long electric moment, it was he who looked away and let out an audible breath. Damn. Now what was he going to do? The medical supplies were in the cabin. To get her taken care of, he was either going to have to make her get dressed and go down there with him, or he was going to have to leave her while he went to fetch what he needed. He didn’t care for either option. The thought of her walking all the way down that hill with her jeans rubbing against those sores made him feel light-headed. On the other hand, to leave her alone in a tent, unguarded, seemed, at the very least, risky.

Then he remembered the handcuffs.

He’d put them on the floor of the tent beside his bedroll along with his boots and the flashlight, things he liked close at hand in case he needed them in a hurry. He reached for the cuffs now, laid them across his lap while he pulled on his boots. Fully dressed, he rolled his bed, pushed it away from the entrance and stood up. From there he regarded his prisoner, keeping his face devoid of all expression as he told her, “I’m going to have to go get something to put on those sores. Under the circumstances, I think it’s best if you stay here.”

She nodded, but her eyes were fixed on the stainless-steel bracelets dangling from his left hand. She’d dragged the top half of the sleeping bag back over her knees, covering her legs but leaving her feet and ankles peeking out. They looked vulnerable and delicate as a child’s. He fastened his gaze on them so he wouldn’t have to watch her face. “I won’t be gone long, but just to be on the safe side…”

She caught her breath and blurted out in a rush, “It’s not really necessary to handcuff me, is it? I mean, my God, where am I going to go? You saw-I can barely even move. I won’t try to run away, I swear.” Please, her eyes begged him; her pride wouldn’t let her say the words. Please don’t.

Bronco stared at her in a crackling hissing silence. Dammit, what was he supposed to do? He knew she wasn’t going to run-all logic told him she wouldn’t. Couldn’t. But in his gut…what if she did? He’d been wrong about women before. What if? If anything happened to her, not only would his ass be grass and his career toast twice over, but what was infinitely worse, he’d never forgive himself.

He gave a soft sarcastic snort. “What, am I supposed to take your word for that? Just…leave you here on your honor?”

She nodded eagerly, her eyes luminous and pleading. “I promise, on my word of honor. I won’t go anywhere. Not even to the latrine. Swear to God. Please-can’t you just trust me?”

It was the word trust that got him. He let go a laugh that was like the sound of a whip striking leather. “Lady, I haven’t trusted a woman since I was seven.” He knelt and with a deft twist of cold steel, snapped the cuffs on her ankles.

Then he was outside the tent and moving fast, leaving it and the woman behind him as quickly as he could. He felt cold through and through. And unbelievably shaken-by the words he’d spoken even more than by what he’d done.

…since I was seven. Ah, God…how could it be? It was as if no time at all had passed. He was that seven-year-old boy, running across the summer-scorched earth while the desert wind dried the tears on his cheeks to a salty crust. Inside he’d felt so cold-cold and small and unworthy. Just like he did now.

He could hear his voice, asking through shameful childish tears, “Why, Mama? Why are you leaving me? Why do you have to go away?” But in his heart he’d known the answer.

It was because she didn’t love him. Because he wasn’t good enough, brave enough, strong and handsome and smart enough to deserve her love. He knew it must be so. Because if she loved him, how could she leave him?

That was the day he’d started running. And he’d gone on running, chased by a demon of his own making: a steadfast belief in his own unworthiness. He’d run and run-eventually with a football in his hands, often as not with a bottle of booze, sometimes the steering wheel of a fast car-until one day, with his back against the wall and nowhere left to run, he’d been forced to confront the demon face-to-face.

There’d been only two possible outcomes of that battle. If the demon had won, it would have destroyed him completely. Instead, he’d stood the test and exposed it for the lie it was.

It had been a battle hard fought and hard won, and the man he’d become, John Bracco, knew he owed many debts to many people who’d believed in him even when he’d lost all belief in himself. He knew that one of those people was Gil McCullough, and that he was about to repay the debt with betrayal.

Bronco paused for a few moments where the trees ended, to recover both his breath and his senses. To remind himself that the boy with salt tears on his cheeks was only a memory, as was the woman with soft brown hair and sad blue eyes he’d once called Mama. He listened to the voices of the wind whispering in the pines, of the hawk circling overhead, of the stallion, Cochise Red, calling to his mares in the log corral on the edge of the meadow. When his spirit and his breathing felt quiet and strong again, he continued down the cleared slope to the cabin.

He knew the second he stepped inside that something was wrong. It was in the air, just barely discernible to the senses, like an odor, a puff of smoke, a breath of wind, though at first glance everything seemed as it should be. McCullough was in the corner hunched over the radio, while Ron Masters stood behind him looking on, one hand braced on the back of his chair, the other on the tabletop. Gil didn’t look up when Bronco came in, but Ron shot him a dark glance that sent a little frisson of warning down Bronco’s spine.

The two men on KP duty nodded unsmiling greetings as they went about preparing the first meal of the day for fifty or so hungry men-stirring oats into the pot of water simmering on the wood-burning cookstove, setting stacks of tortillas to warm on racks above, heaping pans full of crumbly sausage and scrambled eggs and putting them in the oven to keep hot, pouring coffee from the enameled pot into insulated containers. The smells of sage and fresh coffee made Bronco’s stomach growl, reminding him he hadn’t eaten since early the day before.

He poured himself a cup of coffee and strolled across the cabin to join Ron and Gil at the radio. “Trouble?” he asked, sipping the black brew while his stomach protested audibly.

This time Gil glanced at him while Ron straightened and planted himself at his commander’s elbow, with feet apart, arms folded across his chest. The macho body language amused Bronco. Even so, he would never make the mistake of underestimating Ron Masters.

Gil’s eyes were glittering with anger, but instead of answering Bronco’s question, he made a jerking movement with his head toward the back of the cabin and raised his eyebrows, asking a question of his own.

“She’s secure.” Without looking in that direction Bronco was aware of the hungry gleam in Masters’s eyes, the cold little smile that was almost…anticipation.

Gil nodded, appearing distracted. Ron provided the reason, saying with obvious relish, “Feds have the ranch surrounded.”

Bronco gave a casual shrug. “What’d you expect?” Gil snorted a mirthless laugh while Masters shook his head. “Katie okay?” Bronco asked then. He knew how Gil felt about his wife.

McCullough’s eyes lost their brightness as he released tension in an exhalation. “She knows better than to try to reach me-they’ll have everything tapped. Why she insisted on staying…I wanted her to go to her mother’s, but she said-” his voice became a singsong imitation of a woman’s “-she wasn’t about to have the FBI tromping around her house, pawing through her things while she wasn’t there to keep an eye on ’em.” He gestured toward the silent radio. “I’ve got my people looking into how she’s doing.” He shot a glance at Bronco. “Just hope she keeps that Irish temper of hers in check.”

Bronco nodded. He knew who Gil meant by his “people.” A couple of White County sheriff’s deputies, the same pair who’d been in Smoky Joe’s the other night and who he knew for a fact were loyal members of SOL.

He wondered how much time he had before all hell broke loose.

Chapter 6

Johnny Bronco didn’t carry a gun.

That was one of the conclusions Lauren came to after a thorough search of his saddlebags and bedroll. Left hobbled and alone, she’d wasted perhaps a minute feeling sorry for herself, after which she’d gotten down to business. The first order of which was to find herself some sort of weapon. If she could find one, something she could hide away, she’d bide her time…

He hadn’t had a gun on him when he’d left the tent, she’d swear to that. Because where would he have hidden it? In those Levis that hugged his hips and thighs like skin, or under the faded blue shirt, washed so thin it allowed the subtle sculpting of the muscles in his back to show through?

An ankle holster, perhaps? But she’d watched him pull on his boots, and hadn’t seen any evidence of such a thing.

So, if he had a gun, a weapon of any kind, she reasoned, it must be here among his things.

The search hadn’t taken long; how many hiding places did a tent offer? Which was a good thing, Lauren thought, considering how hard it was to navigate even the short distance from her sleeping bag to his. With her ankles cuffed together she had to improvise a sort of crablike movement, scuttling on her side while attempting to keep the insides of her knees from touching each other. It wasn’t pretty, and she worked up a good sweat, but it got the job done.

The first thing she did was roll out his bedroll, which, unlike her puffy zippered modern sleeping bag, consisted of a thin waterproof pad and a single woolen blanket that, even with the added bulk of the poncho, would roll up tightly enough to tie onto the back of a saddle. She took the pad, blanket and poncho, one at a time, and shook them. That netted her nothing but some golden dust motes to swirl in the shafts of sunlight that were just stabbing through the pine trees.

Next, she hitched herself onto the blanket, gingerly pulled the saddlebags across her lap, unbuckled the flaps and dumped all the contents onto the blanket beside her. She wasn’t careful; so what if he knew? Serve him right for leaving her.

One by one she explored and returned each item to the saddlebags. First the clothing: several pairs of socks, rolled into hard little bundles; two pairs of plain white briefs; one plain white T-shirt, an extra pair of jeans and two more long-sleeved cotton shirts; two large bandanna-type handkerchiefs. All these, which were very clean and neatly rolled, she shook out and then carefully rerolled-except for one of the shirts. Some unforeseen impulse made her bring it to her face, bury her nose in the soft folds and inhale the clean-laundry smells of strong detergent and desert sunshine.

Yes, she thought, as her breath caught, that was part of the scent she remembered, dancing with him. Indefinably stirred, she hurriedly wadded up the shirt and stuffed it back into the bag.

From the odds and ends on the blanket beside her, she picked out a bar of soap wrapped in a clean washcloth. It was green with whitish streaks in it and had been about half used up. She held that to her nose, as well, prepared this time for the jolt of recognition. It smelled faintly herbal.

Yes-that’s part of it, too. He’d smelled so good-of soap and clean laundry, desert sunshine and new sweat, traces of horse and a hint of tobacco smoke from the bar.

She paused, frowning. Something about that seemed wrong. Something… But she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

And then a crow began to squawk indignantly somewhere in the pine trees, reminding her of the task at hand and the passing of time. She stuffed the remaining items back into the saddlebag-the soap once again wrapped in its washcloth, a toothbrush and battery-operated shaver, a plastic-bristled hairbrush.

Finally, only one last item remained. She hesitated, then reached for it, picked it up and held it in her hands. Turned it over, felt the smooth texture of old leather with her fingertips. His wallet, slightly curved, molded to the shape of the masculine buttock against which it normally rested. Did she only imagine that it felt warm, almost as if it had only just come from that intimate contact?

No, she thought. I can’t. It’s unconscionable. It couldn’t possibly conceal a weapon. There’s no earthly reason for me to look in his wallet.

But all’s fair in love and war-and this was definitely war!

With her heart thumping, she opened the wallet. And found herself staring at an Arizona driver’s license. How weird to think of Johnny Bronco with a driver’s license! She associated him with horses, and getting tossed out of a saloon on his backside, and Gil McCullough saying to his men, “See he gets home.”

John Bracco. So that was his name. Not Johnny Bronco, after all. And no surprise there. It was such a theatrical name, come to think of it, not a real name at all.

How weird it felt, strangely disorienting, sobering, to see the man summarized like this-like his clothes, all rolled into one neat package. To Lauren, raised by society’s rules, educated to believe in its conventions, trained in the practice of law, this commonly accepted proof of identity seemed like a verification of his humanness. It made him real, finally. Not only that, it made him ordinary. Not the Indian mystic on horseback, the cowboy charmer in the honky-tonk bar. Not a misguided revolutionary quoting the Declaration of Independence, or heartless kidnapper. Only a human being. A man named John Bracco.

There were credit cards in that same name-American Express and a VISA that was also an ATM card-and a discount card for a supermarket. A social-security card. And tucked away out of sight behind an expired hunting license, a tattered military ID. Forty-seven dollars in cash and two folded-up credit-card receipts for gasoline-and a single photograph.

It was a black-and-white snapshot, old, the corners softened and bent, of a man and a boy. The man was narrow-hipped and barrel-chested and had the broad cheekbones and faintly Asiatic features of the Apache. He wore dark jeans and a long-sleeved dark Western-style shirt, with a lighter-colored bandanna tied around his neck, and a light-colored straw cowboy hat with the brim rolled almost to a point in front. He was smiling, and he faced the camera with a cocky impatient air, as if he was only humoring the photographer for that one moment, no more. Come on, take the picture already. One hand rested on the head of a boy, probably six or seven, with thick straight black hair chopped short but defying discipline. The child had fierce dark eyes and a shy sweet smile.

Half-breed. The word flashed unwanted into her mind, shaming her. It was a hateful term, as bad as any of the ethnic slurs she’d been taught all her life to loathe and reject, but in spite of that, she couldn’t make it go away. Half-breed.

All right, since it wouldn’t leave her alone, she would think about it, plunge into the enigma that was John Bracco.

He was half Apache, half white-she already knew that. For some reason-and at that moment she couldn’t think why-she’d just assumed it was his father who was white, his mother Apache. But the man in the photograph was almost certainly Bronco’s father, the drunk who had died in a car crash, according to Gil McCullough, when Bronco was twelve. Probably, Lauren mused, it was his mother who had been the photographer, indulged by her menfolk out of love and familial obligation. Lauren had seen the same smiles, fixed and long-suffering, on her own father’s and brother’s faces.

Where was his mother now? McCullough hadn’t mentioned her. So what had become of her? As she stared down at the photograph in her hands, Lauren was seized by a certainty that the answer to that question was somehow important.

“Find what you were looking for?”

She started violently and uttered a sharp swear word, one her own prim-and-proper mother would never have tolerated but still one of the most satisfying available. Instinctively, she had flattened the photo against her chest as if to hide it from view. I won’t apologize, she thought. I won’t.

“Dammit, you scared me.” She glared indignantly at Bronco, crouched in the tent opening with a cardboard box balanced on one knee. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people.”

“Looks to me like maybe I should,” he said mildly as he set the box to one side, clearing the way for his own entry. He rose but had to duck his head as he came through the opening.

Lauren followed him with her eyes, heart thumping, primed for battle.

But he barely glanced her way and didn’t acknowledge the photograph at all. Instead, he crouched beside the box once more and began taking things out of it, one by one. His movements were unhurried, businesslike. Did she only imagine the unnatural stillness, as if he held himself, his temper, his emotions, even his life force, under a tight rein? The thought sent pulses of excitement through her, and her heart, already beating hard and fast, seemed to thunder in her ears.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Her voice came with less force behind it than she might have wished. Trying to recapture her bravado, she shoved her feet belligerently toward him and waggled them back and forth.

He did glance at her cuffed ankles finally, then, taking his time, let his gaze travel upward from there until it reached her face. A shiver rippled over her skin, as if his fingers had made that slow journey rather than his eyes.

The tilt of his warlike eyebrows was sardonic. “I didn’t forget. I’m thinking maybe I ought to leave ’em on you, considering…” He nodded toward the saddlebags still draped across her thighs.

“What did you expect me to do?” she snapped. “Sit here and twiddle my thumbs?”

To her surprise he gave a soft grunt of laughter. “You’re pretty mouthy for a prisoner of war, you know that?”

Her laugh was a sarcastic echo of his. “Oh. A prisoner of war. Is that what I am? Okay, if that’s the case, I demand the rights to which I am entitled under the Geneva Convention. Food, medical attention, access to sanitary facilities, humane treatment…” She ticked them off, one by one, on her fingers.

Without comment, he handed her an insulated mug with a lid, set one aside for himself, then took the saddlebags from her lap and placed them just out of her reach. There was no expression whatsoever on his face as he picked up his wallet from the blanket beside her and held out his hand for the photograph.

She hesitated, curiously reluctant to give it up. Instead of doing so immediately, she turned it so he could see it and touched the image of the boy with the tip of her fore-finger. “This is you, isn’t it?” Without waiting for his reply, she moved her finger until it rested on the man’s dark shirt. “And this is your father?”

“That’s him.” Bronco’s voice, like his face, held no expression. Long straight lashes veiled his eyes as he took the photo from her and returned it to its place in the wallet, closed the wallet and slipped it back into the saddlebags.

That done, he took a key from his pocket and made an imperious gesture with it toward her ankles. “Let’s have ’em.”

She shifted her feet and, as he bent over them, felt her skin prickle with awareness-in anticipation of his touch.

But in less than an instant she felt the tension on her ankles released and he was already moving away from her, tucking the cuffs into his back pocket. She murmured, “Thank you,” with exaggerated courtesy as her pulse slowly returned to normal.

“What was his name?” This she managed in a casual conversational manner as she picked up her coffee.

Bronco was once again occupied with taking things out of the box and didn’t look up, so she was surprised when he answered, “John.” And after a moment added, “He was Big John, I was Johnny.”

Lauren acknowledged that with a vague sound while removing the mug’s screw-on lid. Then for a moment she said nothing at all but simply sat gazing at what she’d uncovered. It smelled like strong coffee, but it was the color of caramel. Could it be? It was. Cream. She took a cautious sip. And sugar.

The mug and its contents wavered and disappeared in a haze of unexpected tears. She wanted to hurl the whole thing at him. How dare he remember! How dare he be kind! And what was she supposed to do, thank him? She wanted to hate him. She had to hate him. Didn’t she? He was her kidnapper! What did it say about her if she began to like him?

Casting about in the emotional jungle that had taken the place of her brain, looking for any distraction, she came once more to the photograph. His mother. Ask him about his mother.

Before she could, Bronco’s voice penetrated the humming in her ears. She blinked him into focus and barked testily. “What?”

He was crouched before her, balanced on one knee with a first-aid kit in one hand, a foil-covered plate in the other. “I said, which do you want first, food or medical attention?”

Grudgingly, she took the plate and lifted an edge of the foil. A spicy aroma invaded her nostrils, making her mouth water and her stomach growl. She decided the wounds could wait.

It occurred to her that she was about to share a meal with a man, in a tent, while wearing nothing but underpants and a sweatshirt, and that normally her mental response to that would have been, so what? She was as covered as she’d ever be at a public pool or a trip to the beach. In college she’d lived for two semesters in a coed dorm where, according to her best recollection, she’d consumed large quantities of pizza in the company of members of the opposite sex while dressed pretty much as she was right now. Besides, Bronco didn’t appear to care one way or the other about the way she was dressed, so why should she?

And if all that was so, why did she still feel so…bare?

The only possible conclusion she could come to was that the awareness was all on her part. Probably residual effects of that appalling attraction she’d felt when she’d first danced with him in Smoky Joe’s Bar and Grill. And hadn’t she known then that he was bad news? Hadn’t she told herself that charming Johnny Bronco was the last man on earth she should have anything to do with if she knew what was good for her? The embers of that traitorous flame needed to be smothered once and for all.

“This looks like a good place to start,” she said, peeling back the foil to reveal four plump tortilla rolls. She picked one up and bit into a greasy and utterly delicious mixture of scrambled eggs and sausage. She chewed with her eyes closed, trying not to croon, then nudged the plate in Bronco’s direction. “Have some-they’re good,” she murmured graciously.

Yes, she thought, that’s much better. Hating him was too dangerous. Too…passionate. She’d read that all passions were related to one another, and that there was only a fine line separating hate from…other things. Maybe it would be better to think of him as…what? Brother? Uncle? Priest? Eunuch?

Bronco felt a frown building inside him as he watched his prisoner devour the sausage-and-egg burrito. Dammit, he wished he knew what she was thinking; she looked way too pleased with herself for his liking. The way she kept humming and moaning over her food, licking the grease off her fingers and wiping her lips with the back of her hand. Reminded him of something his grandmother Rose used to say: “You know the food’s good when people sing to it.”

He didn’t think the burritos were all that good. It was more like she was making a show of it for his benefit. And that gleam in her eyes that looked so much like laughter…it just didn’t seem to him that a hostage, POW or whatever, ought to be enjoying herself quite so much. What was going on in that fertile brain of hers? He reminded himself again that he’d do well not to underestimate her.

“That was good,” she said with a replete sigh as she dropped the last bite of tortilla back onto the plate and wiped her fingers on the front of her…of his sweatshirt. “Now let’s have that medical attention.”

Bronco hurriedly swallowed his last bite of burrito and wiped his fingers on his pants, then reached for the first-aid kit. “Sure you want to do this?” He gave her a mocking look. “So soon after eating? You’re not gonna throw up, are you?”

He didn’t know what made him keep needling her. Especially as, based on the way she’d managed to keep those sores a secret from him yesterday, she probably had a higher pain threshold than most of the tough guys he knew. He supposed he was just trying to get a rise out of her, get her mad at him again-though why that was he didn’t know, either.

Anyway, if that had been his intent, it didn’t work. Lauren smiled serenely at him and murmured, “I have a pretty strong stomach. What’ve you got in there?” She leaned closer, peering over his arm with exaggerated interest as he opened the box of medical supplies.

He scowled at its contents. He wished she wouldn’t get so close. His heart was pounding again. “Ointment or spray?”

“Oh…ointment, I think. Don’t you?”

What did she think he was-a damn doctor? He thrust the tube at her and concentrated on the search for sterile gauze pads and adhesive tape. After a moment he looked up and saw that she was just sitting there, holding the tube of ointment and biting her lip. “Well,” he growled, “are you gonna do it, or you want me to?”

She exhaled in a rush and handed the tube to him. “I think maybe you’d better do it.” And then she leaned back on her hands and let her legs fall naturally apart, feet almost together, knees slightly bent. Without any reluctance at all. Completely relaxed, or so it seemed to him.

And what had become of that awareness, that shyness he’d found so erotic such a short time ago? It shamed him to admit there was a part of him that now missed it and wanted it back.

As for him, he felt like an adolescent boy confronting his first nude female body. His pulse pounded in his ears, his tongue felt too big for his mouth, and his breath seemed composed of cotton wool. The musky scent of her woman’s body made his head swim.

Though the sweatshirt she wore-his sweatshirt-was long on her and covered her to below her hips, the feminine secrets just beneath its edge seemed the more tantalizing for being hidden from his view. He could only imagine the drape of velvety skin over pelvic bones, soft mound delicately cushioned with curls…

What he could see was more than enough to overload his senses. The skin on her inner thighs was pearl-white, almost translucent, like the insides of some shells; the faint dusting of pale hair along their tops was like a furring of gold dust. He could imagine how soft they must be, what they would feel like brushing against his cheek, sliding like warm silk over his lips, like oil melting on his tongue…

He leaned toward her, and his long hair fell forward over his shoulder and brushed against her thigh. He stared at it-black on white.

Her fingers closed around his wrist.

The effect that had on him was nothing at all like what it should have been, would have been if any other prisoner in his charge had done such a thing. Under similar circumstances, any other prisoner would, in the blink of an eye, have found himself facedown on the floor of the tent with his wrist pinned between his shoulder blades and Bronco’s knee in the small of his back. Instead, Bronco felt as though he’d just taken a jolt from a high-voltage electrical prod-tingly all over and weak as a baby.

He stared down at her fingers-her strong horsewoman’s fingers, her somewhat grubby, not at all delicate but some how altogether feminine fingers-wrapped around his bony olive-toned masculine wrist. His throat closed; he couldn’t speak.

“Wait.” Obviously she wasn’t similarly handicapped, although her voice did sound breathless, as if she’d had to run to catch him. And as if the voice had issued them a direct order, his eyes snapped to her face.

“What?” he barked, angry with himself, angry with her.

“I was just thinking…before you do that, what I’d really like to do-and I guess this comes under the heading of sanitary facilities-what I really need to do, is bathe.”

“Bathe?” He uttered it like a word in an alien tongue. All his powers of reason were focused on her eyes, which were so bright they seemed colorless to him, like light reflecting on deep water.

“As in wash? Shower? I assume you must have some sort of provision for cleanliness in this camp?” Her voice was dry, sardonic.

But Bronco noticed that her fingers were still wrapped around his wrist. Now that the initial shock had passed, they felt warm, incredibly good. A sweet forbidden pleasure.

Regret and self-discipline made a knot in his chest as he shook himself free of her-literally and figuratively. “The men bathe in the creek-the one in the meadow. That’s if they bathe at all. This is a survival training camp, not Club Med.” He jerked his head toward the five-gallon plastic bucket. “For you, there’s plenty of water in the spring.”

“Uh-huh.” He could see her putting it together, chewing on the inside of her cheek. Her shoulders rose, then fell as she drew and exhaled a breath. “I don’t suppose you could warm-”

“Not a chance. You bathe cold or not at all.”

“But,” she protested, “that water must be like ice!” The resentful glare she gave him filled him with a prickly sense of relief. He was comfortable with her anger.

Once more in control, he said placidly, “I suppose if you want, you could draw a bucketful now and set it in the sun. It’d probably be warm enough by tonight.”

“Gee, thanks,” she muttered scathingly. She managed to stand up with surprising grace, considering the location of her sore spots and the fact that she was trying to keep the sweatshirt pulled down over the parts of herself she didn’t want him to see. He was starting to wonder about that on-again off-again modesty of hers.

“I am not putting clothes on this body until I’ve had a bath. I haven’t had a bath in two days. I’m dirty, I’m itchy, and I stink.” As she said that she was stomping angrily, if a bit stiffly, across the tent to where she’d left her things. She scooped up her saddlebags and the bucket and turned to face him, standing very straight, chin up and head high. There was a patch of bright pink on each cheek, and her eyes blazed fire.

It struck Bronco then-even with raw sores on her legs, his baggy sweatshirt hanging halfway to her knees and her hair all over the place the way she’d slept on it-that Lauren Brown was probably the most magnificent-looking woman he’d ever seen.

“Well?” she said, imperious as the queen of Sheba. “Since I’m not allowed to ‘set one foot outside this tent’ without you, would you be so kind as to accompany me to the latrine?”

“Sarcasm isn’t becoming in a woman,” Bronco said conversationally. “Did you know that?” He held the tent flap open and made an exaggerated gesture, waving her through. “After you, Your Highness.” She stalked past him, head high, and he decided it wouldn’t be wise to chuckle.

He did, however, comment on the fact that she was barefooted. That got him a dirty look-an unwise move on her part, since in that one moment when she wasn’t watching where she was putting her feet, she stepped down hard on a pinecone.

“Want me to carry you?” Bronco inquired helpfully over Lauren’s hiss of pain.

Her reply was a furious mutter that included, among the more repeatable words, “Over my dead body!” This time he did allow himself the gut-relaxing luxury of laughter.

Outside the blanket-enclosed latrine, she halted and shoved the bucket at him, narrowly missing hitting him in the chest with it. “If it’s not too much to ask,” she simpered with nauseating sweetness.

“Ma’am,” Bronco responded earnestly, “I’d be happy to go and get you some water, but if I do, I’m gonna have to ask you for your clothes.”

“What?”

“I’ll just take that off your hands right now.” And he lifted her saddlebags from her arm and transferred them to his own shoulder. “You can go on inside and take off your shirt and toss it out to me. Soon as I have it, I’ll be on my way.”

She was staring at him openmouthed, and from the looks of her eyes, she was about ready to self-combust. He gazed placidly back at her. She whispered, “That’s outrageous.”

He shrugged. “Up to you. It’s either that or we take a hike up there together. I just figured you’d rather not do that, with your sore butt and bare feet, but if you’d rather…”

She gave him a look that would have killed him dead where he stood, if she’d had any witching powers in her at all. Then she lifted the blanket and with an angry flounce disappeared behind it. A moment later his sweatshirt came sailing over the top of the enclosure.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said as he reached up and snagged it. “I’ll be back quick as I can.”

He truly meant that. Because he knew it wasn’t going to take her long to figure out-if she hadn’t already-that all she really needed to do if she wanted to make a run for it was wrap one of those blankets around her, go on back to the tent and help herself to some of his clothes. He was gambling on her being too smart to try it, but with women, you never knew.

Inside the latrine, Lauren crouched in her underpants, shivering in the shady early-morning chill and seething with fury. Boiling mad on the inside, goose bumps on the outside. I hope he dies, she thought with much grinding of teeth. I hope he falls in the damn spring and drowns.

She didn’t mean it. Even the thought made her feel panicky-lonely and frightened. Arrogant and odious as Bronco was, without him where would she be? A picture flashed into her mind, of Ron Masters’s cold eyes and cruel smile; she could still feel his fingers pressing into the flesh of her upper arm. She looked down and her stomach turned as she saw the bluish-purple marks those fingers had left on her skin. She shivered again, and this time the cold went clear through to her heart.

She began to feel terribly alone, there in the shade of tall pine trees. It was quiet. Too quiet… The kind of quiet that made what sounds there were-the occasional bird’s call or squirrel’s chatter-stand out with crystal clarity by contrast. Now and then a breeze stirred the trees, bringing with it distant sounds-men’s voices, calling to one another, laughing; ambiguous clanks and thuds; the shrill ripple of a horse’s whinny. It seemed to her that Bronco had been gone a very long time.

Lauren paced. She couldn’t sit-with nothing to pad it, the closed lid of the portable toilet was too hard for her sore bottom.

She thought of her family-her dad, and Dixie, who had to be the best stepmom anybody’d ever had-and how much she loved them and how worried they must be. She wondered what they were doing to get her back, and whether anyone else even knew she was missing. She won dered if they’d told Ethan, busy with his summer college classes out in California, or Aunt Lucy and Uncle Luke and her cousins, Rose Ellen and Eric, back on the farm in western Iowa, or Uncle Wood and Aunt Chris and their kids in Sioux City. And Aunt Gwen, nearly a hundred now and fragile as blown glass, whom Dixie called the Family Treasure.

She wondered who would have the task of informing her mother, out there in her two-million-dollar house in California that had missed by an eyelash falling into the Pacific Ocean during the last El Niño. It had been a long time since she’d thought of her mother. Remembering her now made her think of Bronco’s mother, and how she hadn’t had a chance to ask him about her. She would, though, when he came back.

Right on cue she heard the faint crunch of footsteps on pine needles. Her heart gave a lurch. Hating the breathlessness of fear in her voice, she called out, “Bronco-is that you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Horrible man-he sounded amused.

Clutching an edge of the blanket to her chin, Lauren peered around it. “About time,” she said sourly. She’d never let him know how glad she was to see him.

“Stopped off at the tent-thought you could use this.” And he thrust something at her-a bundle made up of a towel with the corners tied together. She hesitated, then took it from him and untied the knot. Inside was the green soap, still wrapped in its washcloth, and one of the breakfast coffee mugs. “For dipping,” Bronco explained with the casualness that comes from personal experience. “If you pour it over you, you don’t dirty the whole bucketful.”

Staring down at the bundle, she nodded, too confused by the mixture of gratitude and resentment inside her to speak.

After a long and strangely tense moment, Bronco set the bucket filled with crystal-clear water inside the enclosure, swung her saddlebags off his shoulder and dropped them on the pine needles beside it. Then he turned and walked away.

He’d just about made it back to the tent when she let out the first screech. He paused, listened, then walked on, smiling and shaking his head. He wouldn’t have thought such a well-brought-up lady lawyer would even know such words.

Chapter 7

He waited for her, pacing in the dappled shade in front of the tent where he could keep an eye on the blanketed enclosure, and using every ounce of willpower he could muster to keep himself from thinking about what was going on inside it.

He tried, instead, to think about what might be happening right now down there at the ranch, where the full forces of the federal government had one feisty little Irish lady holed up and surrounded, but that wasn’t much better. Thinking about that made him feel stirred up inside-nothing he could quite pin down, just out of sorts. Like a horse with cockleburrs in his tail. He tried telling himself it was the FBI that was making him so edgy-couldn’t trust those guys not to make a mess of things. But in his heart he knew he didn’t really trust his own people any better, and besides, what was bothering him went a whole lot deeper and was a lot more complicated than interagency rivalry. It had more to do with things like honor, loyalty and duty. The problem was, it wasn’t all that clear to him just now exactly where his lay, and whether in fact a couple of those might be coming into direct conflict with each other.

About one duty, though, he had no doubts whatsoever. He watched, outwardly relaxed, inwardly alert as she came toward him, picking her way barefoot across the pine-needle carpet, mindful, this time, of those lurking cones. She had her winter-grass hair twisted and tucked into a loose knot of some sort that clung to the nape of her neck in defiance of gravity, and her skin looked rosy and wholesome as a child’s.

And again he knew that peculiar sensation inside, that unfamiliar sense of awe.

“Feelin’ better?” he asked without expression.

Lauren grumpily muttered something about “freezing to death” as she brushed past him and into the tent. But there was sparkle in her eyes and an uncertain tilt about her lips, a kind of wariness, he thought, as if she was trying hard not to let on how good she felt.

He chuckled, because he knew firsthand how exhilarating a wash in ice-cold spring water could be. And then, of course, there was the way her cold-hardened nipples poked out sharp and clear against the material of her T-shirt, leaving him to imagine the firm round breast-shape underneath, and to think again those forbidden thoughts about how nicely they’d fill up his hands. He’d caught a whiff of the green-apple shampoo she’d used, and for just a moment, like a gust of a freshening breeze blowing through him, he felt what it would be like to hold her in his arms at that moment, with her body cool and soft and sweet as rain upon his skin. And then…to feel her grow soft and warm and pliant beneath him, like fine leather in the sun…

After she’d recovered from her bath and gotten herself dressed and her sores doctored and bandaged, Bronco took her with him down to the corral to see to the horses. He chose to take her there the long way around, through the timber and over the saddleback ridge, avoiding the cabin and the clearing, as well as the woods nearby where the men had their bivouacs. The way he saw it, the less those guys saw of his “prisoner,” the better.

Walking along with her through the woods, stepping in and out of sunshine, stirring up hot summery smells of pine sap and pollen dust, he couldn’t help but think again how enjoyable it might be to be doing so under different circumstances. Very different circumstances.

Ah, but it was only in his mind. And only for a moment. John Bracco was well aware that he had a job to do, one that to anyone other than an ex-army ranger might have seemed on the edge of impossible. His job was to keep this woman safe-keep her alive, if it came down to that-and somehow do that without letting her or anyone else know he was on her side. He couldn’t even let himself be too nice to her, lest she or McCullough start getting ideas.

Getting ideas. That was something he’d better not do, either. Because the truth was, even if things had been different, even if there had been no Sons of Liberty, no kidnapping, no cover to protect at all costs, the likes of Lauren Brown were not for him. A yellow-haired, pale-skinned, freckle-faced white woman, well-educated and from a nice well-to-do family, would never steal his heart away.

No, sir. For Bronco knew from hard experience that if he ever was foolish enough to give his heart to such a woman, she would surely break it.

He was aware of her, though, there was no denying that, in all the ways he was usually aware in the presence of an exceptionally beautiful woman, plus a few that were new to him.

He was aware, for example, of her quietness-which he’d noticed yesterday, too, on the ride from McCullough’s ranch. This was new to him because in his experience, beautiful women were seldom quiet. Even when they weren’t actually speaking, there was just something about them, something in the way they moved, the way they held themselves, a certain electrical current that seemed to telegraph, Look! Look at me! He was well aware that Lauren’s silence might have had something to do with the fact that she was mad at him again, but he didn’t think so. In Bronco’s experience, there were few things louder in this world than the silent treatment from a beautiful woman.

No. This woman’s quietness was different. Bronco had been raised among a people who appreciate the beauty and purpose of silence, and who see no reason to fill it with speech unless there is something that needs to be said. In adulthood he’d learned that most white people are afraid of silence. In the presence of others they try to vanquish it with meaningless conversation; alone they use almost any means to hold it at bay. Radio, TV, stereo headphones and if nothing else is available, their own bodies-tapping toes, cracking knuckles, clearing throats, whistling.

But not this woman; she seemed perfectly at ease with her own silence and his. He found that most interesting.

Lauren’s thoughts were anything but quiet. So many were crowding her mind, demanding attention, that she had to be very still and devote all her concentration just to listening if she wanted to sort them out.

She thought how good it felt to be clean again. And warm. And she thought how odd it was to feel good about anything at all, under the circumstances.

But she did feel good, amazingly good-with soothing ointment and gauze pads protecting her sore places, the sun hot between her shoulder blades, the fragrant crunch of pine needles under her feet and the breeze drying her hair in soft wisps that tickled her cheeks and forehead. It was beautiful here on this wooded ridge, looking down on a meadow dotted with wildflowers and threaded by a creek that reflected the sky like a bit of blue ribbon dropped on the lawn and forgotten.

It was hard to remember that she was where she was because she’d been abducted by violent and dangerous men bent on political blackmail, at the very least. Hard to remember that she was a prisoner of the man walking so companionably beside her, and that things could easily turn very bad for her if all didn’t go as her captors wished.

But she didn’t feel like a prisoner, at least not right now. She didn’t feel endangered. And that, she realized, was probably because her jailer wasn’t acting at all like a jailer. He wasn’t holding her or restricting her in any way, wasn’t touching her at all, or even looking at her. He just seemed relaxed and easy in her company-as he’d been yesterday, she remembered, on the ride up here.

But then, of course, he could afford to feel easy. He knew she wouldn’t attempt to run or fight him. She’d have to be an idiot to try when she knew he’d only catch and overpower her with humiliating dispatch.

She thought about that. The reminder of her powerlessness should have made her angry all over again, but confusingly it didn’t. Instead, she found herself thinking about his quietness, the fact that he didn’t talk unless he had something he needed to say. It was oddly comfortable, she found, to be with someone who didn’t seem to mind silence.

She slid her eyes sideways under the cover of her lashes to look at her companion without being observed doing so. Her heart gave a lurch and immediately she thought, What, are you out of your mind? Comfortable? Johnny Bronco?

She suddenly saw herself walking beside some exotic untamed creature-a black panther, perhaps, or a mustang stallion-something sleek, dangerous and in no way hers to control. His body moved with the fluid grace and oiled-spring precision of a wild predator. His long black hair hung loose on his back and lifted lazily in the breeze, caught the sun and struck it back in sparks of blue fire, like the wings of a blackbird in flight. Beneath the brim of his Stetson, flawless skin gleamed like the hide of a healthy animal.

Comfortable? Johnny Bronco was about as comfortable as a summer monsoon-and, she thought, as predictable.

“Something on your mind?” Between the high hard wedges of cheekbones and the angry sweep of eyebrows, black eyes glittered at her with the uncompromising fierceness of Genghis Khan.

Lauren’s runaway heart stumbled. “N-no!” And she was stammering like a schoolgirl. “Of course not.” It was not a lie; her mind was completely blank. For the moment she could think of nothing but the hypnotic fire of those eyes. And heat-as though she’d ventured too close to an inferno.

Bronco shrugged and looked away. And she could once again feel the air moving through her lungs, sweat welling up in her pores, a cooling breath of wind on her cheeks. Her heartbeat steadied and her brain cleared, and she cursed herself ten different ways for being such an idiot.

Something on your mind? What a question-as if there weren’t at least a dozen things she’d wanted to ask him!

She didn’t know what on earth had gotten into her, to freeze up, fumble around like a tongue-tied child. Especially since even as a child Lauren had never been one to find herself at a loss for words. It was Ethan who had been the shy one-though her little brother had proven to have unexpected reservoirs of courage…

At the very least, she thought with regret, I could have asked him about his mother.

Bronco said no more for a time. He held his head high as he walked and gazed with narrow-eyed intensity across the meadow, but there was a heavy feeling inside him-like a lead weight lying in the pit of his belly. He’d seen the look of fear in her eyes-couldn’t mistake that for anything else.

Seeing that look had shocked him, first because he couldn’t think what he’d done to deserve it. Strange as it might have seemed under the circumstances, he felt un justly accused, not to mention tried and convicted. After he’d bent over backward to go easy on the woman, to help her out, make her as comfortable as he possibly could, given his own impossible situation. What had he done to make her suddenly look at him as if he’d turned into a witch before her eyes?

That was the first reason for the shock Bronco felt when he saw the fear in Lauren Brown’s eyes. The second was the realization that he didn’t like it.

For the rest of the way down the slope to the corrals, he tried to think of something to say to her, some casual conversational tidbit that would restore the broken thread of communication between them. He no longer felt comfortable with her silence. Now it gnawed at him, like a mouse hidden away somewhere inside the walls of his consciousness, doing untold damage while he was helpless to do anything to stop it. But making small talk-if you didn’t count flirting with pretty women-had never been one of Bronco’s talents.

Cochise Red bugled a greeting-or a challenge-as they drew near. The stallion and both mares were standing at the old split-log corral fence in its sun-dappled clearing, like eager children waiting in line at an amusement-park ride, tossing their heads and muttering their impatience at being kept waiting.

Lauren gave a glad little cry when she saw the horses and made a beeline for them, while Bronco went to get the feed bags out of the log storehouse nearby. He watched her without seeming to while he dipped grain from the barrels, pocketed brush and currycomb, looped lead ropes over his shoulder, approving of the quiet way she went to them, her hands reaching through the fence to find the favorite scratching places under their jaws. He liked the gentle way she slid her hands along their necks, massaging beneath the heavy fall of manes-no slapping, he noticed. He liked the way she laughed, unperturbed when the stallion nipped im patiently at her shirtsleeve. Watching all this, Bronco felt the tensions inside him ease, the knots of regret and confusion loosen.

“Here-make yourself useful,” he said, tossing her the brush and currycomb while he went to untie the gate. And he didn’t miss the tiny catch in her breathing when she bent to pick them up out of the dust.

Then he was angry with himself for forgetting about her sores, and angry with himself even more for being angry. What was the big deal? Saddle sores were common as dirt in this part of the country. What was she to him, after all, but a job and a responsibility and an unwanted pain in the neck, one that was threatening the cover it had taken him years to establish? Nobody ever said he had to be so tuned in to her needs that he noticed every little thing. From now on, he promised himself, he was going to quit doing so much thinking about her. He’d try to tune her out-well, at least turn down the volume. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have anything else on his mind.

To Lauren’s way of thinking, there was nothing in this world quite as soothing as grooming horses. She loved the sun burning hot on her shoulders, the busy crunchcrunch-crunch from muzzles buried deep in feed bags, the lazy swish of tails, the feel of firm muscle and warm hide, dust and burrs disappearing and coats turning glossy beneath her fingers, her mind free to wander. Normally she was quite content to go wherever it wanted to take her, and often under those circumstances, problems that had perplexed her found solutions, complicated events got planned, scheduling difficulties ironed themselves out.

Today, though, with all the usual relaxing elements in place, for some reason that liberation didn’t come. Her mind stuck with her with the annoying tenacity of a shy child clinging to its mother’s legs. She blamed this on Bronco.

Of course it was his fault. Impossible to ignore him when he was right there with her every minute, moving around, sometimes within her range of vision, sometimes just beyond it. But in or out of range, she was always aware of him. She could feel him there, sense his every movement. Her body could sense it, too, and responded, whenever he came too close, with all the usual preparations for flight or defense: quickened heartbeat, skin prickles, dry mouth and shallow breathing. Why? It did no good to tell herself there was no danger, that by his own assurances she was safe as houses with Johnny Bronco; her body wouldn’t listen.

Furious at what she considered a double betrayal-a mind that wouldn’t take flight and a body that wouldn’t listen to reason-Lauren worked with even fiercer concentration than usual, brushing the hide of the little gray mare until it gleamed like pewter.

She started on the rangy chestnut mare and was acutely aware when Bronco picked up the currycomb and began working on the animal, too, on the opposite side. To cover her edginess, she scolded the mare roundly for rolling in the dirt, and to her confusion, was both warmed and annoyed when she heard Bronco chuckle. But she wouldn’t meet his eyes across the mare’s sunbaked back. Instead, she leaned over and worked her way down the flanks and across the belly, while her overzealous heart pumped more heat into her cheeks.

Then only the stallion remained. Lauren moved cautiously to the beautiful bay horse’s side, her heart thumping wildly against the walls of her chest. Cochise Red-what a magnificent animal he was. So much power, that incredible vitality. She could feel it surging just beneath that sleek red hide of his. She began to brush it with long smooth strokes, while the stallion whickered his appreciation and turned his head to nibble at her shoulder.

Ever notice how horses do with each other? They just nuzzle with their lips real gently, like this…

The voice was no more than a murmur in her mind, like the lazy hum of a hot summer day, but it seemed to fill her up, blotting out everything else. She was unaware that she’d leaned closer to the stallion’s body until she felt his heat and vitality envelop her. Eyes closed, she moved her hands along his neck, under the fall of mane, and beneath her fingers the warm hide became human skin, copper-brown and slick with sweat, and the coarse black mane cascading over her arms was human hair, a man’s hair, sun-warmed and fragrant with the smell of green herbal soap.

“You about done there?” Bronco stood at the stallion’s shoulder, holding a coil of rope in one hand as he gently scratched under the horse’s jaw with the other.

Lauren nodded, too dazed and dry in the mouth for speech. Keeping her face averted so he wouldn’t see and wonder about her scarlet cheeks, she turned away from the stallion and let the brush drop to the ground beside the corral fence. When she dared to look at the man and horse again, Bronco had tied the lead around the stallion’s neck. He handed her the rope and nudged the gate open with his hip, motioning with his head for her to take the horse on through.

Though he knew it probably wasn’t necessary, Bronco put leads on the two mares, as well. When he came up even with Lauren just as they reached the edge of the meadow, she gave him a quick edgy look. But at least this time he didn’t see any fear in her eyes.

He looked at the sky where the day’s thunderheads were already beginning to gather into billowing white mounds.

“We’ll get ’em watered,” he said, “then turn ’em loose. Let ’em graze awhile.”

He could feel Lauren’s eyes turn toward him. “Won’t they run away?”

He met her glance and smiled. “They’ll run, but how they gonna get away? This whole place is fenced.” All five thousand acres of it. Which had always seemed a shame to Bronco.

“What if you want to catch them?”

He shrugged. “They’ll come to me.” He could feel Lauren looking at him like she found that unbelievable, but it was the simple truth, not bragging. Horses came to him-it was a fact. They always had.

“Gil told me you were the best horse wrangler there ever was,” she said after a moment as if she’d heard his thoughts. “Is that true?”

Again he shrugged. He didn’t consider it a question that needed answering.

They walked a ways in silence, listening to the swish of grass against the legs of their jeans, watching grasshoppers jump up out of their way and go skimming across the meadow ahead of them. Then Lauren said in a musing tone, “Gil told me he hired you after you got…discharged from the service.”

Bronco acknowledged that with a wry snort. This was his cover, well rehearsed and often repeated-safe enough ground. “Kicked out, you mean.”

“He said you’d had some bad breaks.”

“Yeah, well-” his smile was easy, even a little bit cocky “-Gil talks too much.”

Again he could feel her eyes on him, for what seemed a long measuring time. Then she said, “Is that why you’re doing this?”

“Doing what?” And now he felt a quietness inside himself, and the first vibrations of warning.

“This-” she kicked with sudden anger at a hummock of meadow grass “-this crazy revolutionary start-your-own-country militia stuff. Or whatever you call it. Is it because you think you owe something to Gil McCullough?”

He looked at her, but she was glaring at her boots. He could see the bright flush in her cheeks. He said, “What makes you think I don’t believe in the cause as much as he does?”

She lifted her head then and met his eyes in open chal lenge-and, oh, he wished she hadn’t. He was reminded of the leaden blue of monsoon rain clouds, with flashes and flickers of lightning hidden in their depths. “Do you?”

“Yes, ma’am, I sure do.” But he knew even as he said it that it was too quick, too glib. And he watched her eyes turn silvery bright with speculation as she considered whether to believe him or not.

Having reached her own conclusions, she shook her head and said softly, “If you say so.” She looked away again and after a moment went on in that musing tone, as if she was trying to figure it out in her own head, “You’re not the type. I don’t know why, but there’s something about you. You just don’t…fit.”

This time his snort was mildly derisive. “Fit? Fit what-some romantic idea you have of what a revolutionary’s supposed to be like?”

Her eyes lashed at him, and he felt their sting like a summer squall. “I don’t find anything the least bit romantic about people who go around blowing up government buildings.”

“Who?” He felt genuinely outraged. “We haven’t done any such thing!”

“Well,” she snapped, “it’s probably only a matter of time. Anyway, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Guns, bombs, violence, fear, intimidation-the usual weapons of power and control-that’s what it’s always about.” She paused for a beat or two, then played her ace, making her point with it. “You don’t even carry a gun.” She glanced at him, waiting for him to deny it. He didn’t. For lots of reasons, but mostly because it was one of those clashes between conviction and duty that he’d have had a hard time explaining, even to himself.

They’d come to the creek at a natural ford, a place where the water was wide and shallow, with a rippled sandy bottom and sloping banks, and quiet eddies where dragonflies darted and hovered among the cattails. The grass here was trampled, and patches of muddy earth showed the imprint of deer hooves. The mares forgot their manners and forged ahead, pulling against the limits of their leads as they waded into the stream and began sucking greedily at the clear cold water.

Bronco waited until they’d taken the edge off their thirst, then clucked to the mares, bringing them close to the bank so he could remove their lead ropes without getting his boots wet. Meanwhile, Cochise Red, who’d patiently stood watch while his mares drank their fill, tossed his head and danced impatiently. Bronco took the lead from Lauren’s hands, murmured, “Easy,” as he slipped the rope from the stallion’s neck, then waved him away with a soft laugh. “Go get ’em, boy.”

He turned, coiling rope, to find Lauren watching him. She was standing on the creek bank with her arms loosely folded across her breasts and the wind blowing back her hair, and he thought suddenly of the stories his grandmother Rose used to tell him, of Changing Woman and how the People came to be. And though the sun was hot on his shoulders, he felt a shiver go through him.

Maybe, he thought, it was because her eyes had that silvery speculative look again. Still trying to figure him out. What made him uneasy was the thought that she might just be smart enough to do it.

“Something on your mind?” he asked, and the uneasiness made him gruff and snappish. The last time he’d asked her that, he remembered, she’d looked at him like he’d just sprouted devil’s horns.

This time, though, he saw no fear in her eyes, but only a certain wariness, as if she had herself cocked and ready to deflect anything he might send back at her.

“I was just wondering,” she said, jutting her chin at him. “What do you believe in, Johnny Bronco? Do you believe in anything-besides horses, I mean?”

He laughed out loud.

He laughed to cover his discomfort because she’d gotten way too close to the truth-the truth of who he used to be, anyway. It had been a long time since he’d thought about that Johnny Bronco, the one who hadn’t believed in anything-least of all himself. Why was it that today he seemed unable to think of anything else?

Why was it that, just when he was faced with his most crushing responsibility, his greatest professional challenge and personal danger, for the first time in recent memory his perceptions of his own reality were blurring and wavering, in a way that was most alarming for a man working under deep cover. Who was he? What did he believe in? Those were questions he couldn’t afford to think about, lest they get in the way of who he pretended to be, what he pretended to believe in. If he started having difficulty remembering which was which, he was in big trouble.

So it was for his own sake, as much as to satisfy his prisoner’s curiosity, that he decided it might be a good idea to let her in on some of his personal history. While he was at it he’d remind himself of things he couldn’t afford to forget.

“What do I believe in?” He took off his hat and slapped it against his pant leg while he pretended to think about it.

And Lauren, watching him, thought suddenly, Why am I even asking? I can’t believe anything he tells me, anyway. She turned and took a few steps away from him in utter frustration.

But she halted when she heard him say-and she could have sworn it had the ring of truth-“I don’t know, but you’re right about this much. I do owe Gil McCullough a lot. He gave me a chance when nobody else would.” She turned slowly back to him and saw that he’d taken his hat off and was squatting on the creek bank, dipping his handkerchief in the stream. He rose, twisting the square of red cloth into a rope. “It’s for damn sure I owe more to him than I do to a government that’s been cheating, killing, starving, stealing and lying to my people for the last couple hundred years.” He met her eyes with dark defiance as he tied the rolled bandanna around his forehead.

Her breath caught. Faint as the sound was, he heard it and jerked his chin toward her. “You tell me-why should I owe any allegiance to the United States government after what they’ve done to us-the Apaches, all of us Indians?”

She shook her head; she had no answer for him. And even if she’d had one, how could she have spoken when her heart was a hot pulsating lump in her chest?

He came slowly toward her and it took every ounce of courage she possessed to stand her ground and not take a step backward. “My Apache ancestors were some of the last holdouts against the U.S. Army-you probably knew that, right? Did you know they used to hide out in these mountains? Right around here, where we are now. That was when they were being hunted to the last man…”

The last man? Then how was it that one of those men was standing before her now, with the fierce proud look of the warrior and his long black hair blowing in the wind?

“So there’s something fitting, me being here, I guess.”

He’d halted a short distance away from her, close enough to touch, if she’d dared to reach out her hand. Close enough that she could feel his heat, smell his sweat, see the gold-dust shine of it on his skin. A flesh-and-blood man, not a ghost. A modern-day man with a wry little half smile on his lips and the anger fading from his eyes, only to be superceded by something that stirred her awareness like a hand brushed lightly the wrong way over her skin. Instead of fear, she felt a vague uneasiness, and at the same time a familiar melting in her heart that could only be sympathy.

But she didn’t want to feel sympathy! She should not feel sympathy. Not for her abductor-her jailer! She could not-must not-allow herself to fall victim to hostage syndrome.

“You should have worn your hat,” Bronco surprised her by saying, still regarding her with his head slightly tilted and that crooked smile on his lips. “That fair skin-” he reached out and touched her nose with one finger, so lightly it tickled “-you’re gonna get burned. Better take mine.”

She didn’t look down at the dusty white Stetson he offered, but kept her head high and her chin up as she raked her hair back from her forehead with one hand and replied unevenly, “Then you’ll get burned.”

He laughed; it was his easygoing charmer’s laugh. “Naw, I don’t burn. We ‘redskins’ just turn darker. You take it.” He placed his hat on her head with a careless gesture and turned away before she could object. Though she couldn’t have, anyway-words of any kind would have stuck in her throat.

Resigned but still vaguely upset, she resettled the hat with clumsy hands. When she dared to look at Bronco again, she saw that he’d moved a short distance down the creek and was seating himself cross-legged on the grassy bank. After a moment, since it seemed awkward to do anything else, she walked over and, much more slowly and carefully than he, also settled cross-legged in the meadow grass.

Bronco lifted an arm to shade his eyes and looked up at the sky. “Getting on toward noon,” he said. “You hungry?”

Lauren was beginning to feel the first pangs, but she hated to think about going back to the tent-or to the cabin, which was worse. Here in the open meadow she had at least the illusion of freedom. She glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the cabin, which was out of sight behind a rock formation that jutted into the meadow like the prow of a ship. Far in the distance and barely audible above the insect hum and the chuckle of running water, she could hear an occasional shout, vague thumps and rumbles of activity that filled her with unease.

She turned back to Bronco. “When do they…when do these people eat?”

He shrugged as if it wasn’t something that concerned him much. “Couldn’t tell you. I don’t spend much time here, if you want to know the truth. Not since Gil quit running cattle on the open range. That’s what this used to be, you know-a cow camp. Ranchers used to graze cattle up here in the high country on federal permits-that was before the environmentalists put a stop to it. We’d come up here in the summertime for the roundup and branding.” He looked at her sideways, one eye squinted shut, his smile wry. “Not much use for a horse wrangler up here now.”

Lauren listened and nodded, but inside she felt restless, edgy. She didn’t want to be interested in this man. But she was. She told herself it was just her way. She was interested in people. She couldn’t help it.

The sun was high and hot and she was getting hungry and thirsty, but she still didn’t want to go back to the camp. She got stiffly to her feet and moved to the edge of the creek bank. The water slid by like liquid glass, so clear and clean she could see tiny tadpoles darting about in the shallows. She lowered herself gingerly, balanced on the balls of her feet, and let her fingers trail in the water. She shook them, then touched the cool moisture to her lips.

“Thirsty?” Bronco’s voice seemed very close.

She nodded. “Is it safe to drink?”

He gave a short laugh. “Is it polluted, you mean? Who knows? It’s never bothered me. I guess you take your chances.”

Lauren didn’t bother to answer. To her the water looked clean and she was thirsty. She cupped her hand and brought it to her lips, but got only a sip-most of the water wound up on her shirtfront.

“There’s two ways to do that,” came a lazy drawl from behind her. “You can stretch out on your belly and scoop one-handed, or you can use two hands-like this.”

Though the stubborn and childish part of her didn’t want to, she turned her head and watched him demonstrate, keeping her eyes on this hands. When he lifted them to his face, her eyes followed and she said seriously, “I thought I’d use your hat.”

Bronco’s laugh was short and sharp; she couldn’t account for the little sting of pleasure it gave her. “You do and you owe me a new hat.”

Her heart fluttered as she pretended surprise. “Come on-they do it in the movies all the time.”

“There’s a lot of things in the movies you won’t catch me doing,” he said dryly. “Jumping on a horse from the top of a building, for one. That’s just plain stupid-and the horse doesn’t like it much, either.”

He watched the smile that hovered over her lips as she turned away to hide it from him, just enough of one to make him think about how long it had been since he’d seen her really smile. And how beautiful she was when she did.

Regrets filled him-and then were forgotten as it occurred to him that she was pondering a small dilemma: How was she going to get herself a drink without showing him her backside? Basically, as he’d told her, she had two choices-she could stretch out flat on her belly, which was going to involve some complex maneuvering and result in her being altogether vulnerable; or she could lean way over from her present position on her knees and give him a view that made his mouth go dry just thinking about it.

To his undeniable delight, she chose the latter option. He knew he ought to look away-for the sake of common courtesy, as well as his own peace of mind-but he didn’t. Pretending complete lack of interest, he stretched himself out on his side with his elbow planted in the grass and his head resting on his hand and watched from under his eyelashes as blue denim stretched over her round firm bottom. The day suddenly got humid as a sweat lodge, and thunder grumbled in the pit of his stomach.

“Better not let my hat fall in that creek,” he drawled in a voice that sounded like a big daddy bullfrog.

She straightened up and sailed the hat back to him, then went back to dipping her hands in the creek. And this time there was almost defiance in the way she poked that bottom up in the air, as if she knew well and good what kind of effect it was likely to have on him, and was doing it to make him suffer.

Damn her. What he ought to do, he decided, was turn her over his knee and- Oh, Lord. Funny, he thought, how her boldness was just as much a turn-on to him now as her shyness had been earlier. Then again, maybe it wasn’t so strange, and the two were only different sides of the same thing-her awareness of him as a man. It was a dangerous notion. Intoxicating as peyote.

He was thinking he might need to take a quick dip in that creek, just to cool himself off.

Chapter 8

Her thirst quenched, Lauren straightened, smoothing water over her face and neck like oil. She gave Bronco a sideways look and said, “I’m curious. If you hated the U.S. Army so much for what they did to your ancestors, why did you join?”

Shoot, thought Bronco, if that wasn’t just like a lawyer. Ask him a question from a conversation so far back he could hardly remember it-probably just trying to trip him up. Erotic thoughts scattered like pollen on the wind, and as before, there was a part of him that felt disappointed at their going.

“I was young and stupid,” he snapped. Then, his irritation dissipating as quickly as it had come, he added philosophically, “And out of options.” He pushed himself to a sitting position and slapped his hat once on the leg of his Levis before he handed it back to her, along with a wry smile. “I was a pretty wild kid.”

“Gil said you had a problem with alcohol.” She pitched that at him boldly, then waited for his response.

He looked at her for a moment while he considered what it would be, and decided on a line drive up the middle. “Runs in the family,” he said evenly. “My old man was a drunk.”

If he’d hoped to shock her, he was disappointed. She fielded it with a nod, without even flinching. “Gil told me your dad was killed in an automobile accident.”

“Seems like Gil told you a lot of things about me.” He offered her the half smile again, sort of as a peace offering.

“I think he was trying to warn me off,” she said dryly, then threw him a quick glance and added before he could get in a smart remark, “Not that he needed to.”

Bronco gave a short huff of laughter and replied in a tone as sardonic as hers, deliberately misunderstanding which way she’d meant that remark. “Ol’ Gil looks out for me.”

He got to his feet and took his time stretching out his kinks so he wouldn’t have to look at her. “As far as my old man goes, the best thing you could say about him is at least he didn’t kill anybody besides himself.”

“I take it he’d been drinking?”

He nodded. “As always. His luck finally ran out. I was in…seventh grade, I guess.” He made a show of thinking about it. “Yeah, that’s right, because he’d have been my math teacher the following year.”

He expected Lauren to be surprised by that; he knew the kind of preconceived notions most people had about Indians. She didn’t let him down.

“Your dad was a teacher?”

He turned to find her squinting up at him, shading her eyes with one hand. Her skin had already dried to a rosy matte velvet that made him think of ripe peaches. “Both my parents were,” he said matter-of-factly.

Her careful exhalation was like a whisper barely heard. “So, your mother was a teacher, and she was-”

“From Portland, Maine,” he finished for her. “A fine old New England family-their name was Livingston, I believe. She was fresh out of college when she met my father-came out here to teach the poor little Indian children.” He wanted to look away but didn’t. Instead, he locked eyes with her and dared her to ask…

“What happened to her?”

As quiet as her voice was, he heard the quiver of emotion in it. And as carefully as he’d guarded against it, he felt an answering vibration begin in his own chest. This was dangerous ground, forbidden ground. In a way, sacred. And yet something in him acknowledged that he could have avoided going there if he’d truly wanted to.

He gave a shrug, a small one, just a slight dip of his head. “One day she left. Went back to Maine.”

“Just like that?” Her voice had gone hollow with her disbelief. “She just left you? Left her own child?”

Bronco nodded, still holding her gaze, giving no quarter. “When I was seven.”

“My God, why?” And he could hear the vibration in her voice growing stronger, giving him the impression that she was trembling.

Perhaps that was why-although he’d meant to laugh it off, to be flippant and smile-he frowned and said almost gently, “I wondered that myself-I think I might actually have asked her. I don’t remember what she said. My dad told me she was unhappy out here, that she missed her home and family back in Maine.” Now he did manage a smile, but there was nothing at all of humor in it. “But no matter what he said, I knew it must be my fault. I must have done something. I’d been a bad boy, or I wasn’t a good enough son, or-” he broke off when he heard Lauren’s small stricken gasp. “Hey,” he added softly, “I was seven years old. What can I say?”

He was good at hiding pain-he’d had a lot of years to get good at it. Plus, he had an ancestral reputation for stoicism to maintain. So why did he have the distinct feeling, one that grew stronger the longer she stared at him, that this woman wasn’t one bit fooled? Gazing back at her, he felt the years falling off him like worn-out clothes, until he was left to stand before her, naked as a newborn baby. And as vulnerable.

Fear crept into his heart, and like a cadre of vigilant militia forces, anger rushed to surround and vanquish the intruder, as it had rushed to his defense so many times in the past. He felt the familiar heat and turmoil rising inside him and slowly flexed his fingers and clenched them into fists, beginning the exercises that would take the anger away and send it to a safe and quiet place.

Then he heard Lauren’s voice, like a soft sweet wind. “Funny-” she murmured.

“What’s funny?” His voice was a snarl.

“Your mother-”

But that was as far as she got. Bronco’s body went rigid and still, and his hand shot out reflexively, motioning her to silence.

“What-”

“Stay there.”

Leaving his bewildered prisoner crouched in the grass, he moved swiftly to higher ground-a mound of gravelly debris washed down by monsoon cloudbursts from the rocky point that stood between them and the main camp. From there he could see what his ears had already forecast: three all-terrain vehicles rocking and jouncing across the meadow toward the main gate, leaving faint dust plumes and the snarl of engines behind. He shaded his eyes with his hand, trying to see who was leaving in such a great hurry, but he was too far away to tell with any certainty. Nevertheless, he was sure Ron Masters was one.

All traces of anger, fear and vulnerability had vanished. His mind felt calm and quiet.

It would happen soon. When it did, he must be ready.

“What’s happening out there? Talk to me, man, talk to me.” Rhett Brown’s hand gripped the telephone receiver so hard Dixie wondered that the plastic didn’t crack under the strain.

He’d been waiting for word-any word-pacing like a caged animal. She’d never seen him like that before. And yet she understood. It was the helplessness-that was the worst part. The feeling of being utterly and completely powerless. How ironic it was, she thought, that a man possibly destined to become the most powerful man on earth should be reduced to such a state.

He was listening now, his body tense, face set in gaunt lines that betrayed all the fear and strain and uncertainty of the past few days. As he listened he put out his arm, and Dixie moved out of old habit into its comforting shelter. She put her arms around him and pressed her face against his shoulder, and her heart ached when she felt his body tremble.

“My God-” his voice cracked “-how could you let this happen?”

Then he listened again for a long time, offering only monosyllables himself and those in leaden tones, while Dixie waited with her hand against his thumping heart, her body as rigid as his and every nerve vibrating with suspense.

It seemed to her half a lifetime before Rhett placed the receiver back in its cradle. It took him two tries.

“Bad news?” she whispered, cold inside. Numb with dread.

“There’s been a shooting.” He was staring past her out the window, squinting hard as if there was something out there of great interest to him, but he couldn’t quite make it out. “At McCullough’s Ranch.”

Dixie’s eyes were locked on her husband’s face. “Not-”

His head moved-one quick, hard shake. “No, not Lau ren.” His arms encircled her and pulled her close so that she heard the rest as a whisper of exhaled breath. “Not Lauren…”

“Rhett, what happened?”

It was a while before he answered her. In the quietness she heard the busy chick-chick-chick of the sprinklers in the horse pastures, the haunting cry of a mourning dove from somewhere down in the river bottom and the high-pitched whinny of a colt calling to its mother out in the paddocks. She was glad they were here; it was always so peaceful on the Tipsy Pee, and she knew Rhett found some comfort in being here in Texas, that much closer to the last place his daughter had been seen alive, in the last place she’d called home, before…

But Dixie wouldn’t let herself think of that. She wouldn’t even consider the possibility that Lauren, that bright beautiful wonderful young woman she loved like her own flesh and blood, might never come home again.

“They’re calling it a mistake,” Rhett said, his voice a growl. “No one seems to know exactly who’s responsible-the FBI and ATF are blaming each other, naturally. I told you they’ve had the main compound surrounded and the whole place under surveillance?” Dixie nodded. “The situation was that the ATF wanted to go in with their warrant to search for illegal weapons, on the assumption their man had already gotten Lauren safely away from SOL. The FBI-at my request, through the attorney general-has been holding off until they heard something definite from the ATF’s man. Meanwhile nobody’d gone in or out of the place, which in itself is suspicious.” He exhaled restlessly, trying to force himself to relax.

Dixie leaned back in the loose circle of his arms, and his hands slipped to her shoulders. “Last night…” he began, and had to pause to clear his throat. He was still looking past her out the window, and she could see a muscle working in the side of his jaw. How hard this must be for him, she thought. These were his people. He would hold himself responsible.

“Last night,” he went on in a hard determined voice, “apparently a couple of local sheriff’s deputies showed up and demanded to be allowed into the ranch-said they’d been asked by ‘concerned relatives’ to check on Mrs. McCullough to make sure she was all right. Claimed they hadn’t been able to reach her in a while. Which seems reasonable, except that, according to the information already given to ATF by their man on the inside, these two deputies were known to the members of SOL. As I understand it-” Rhett slowed and spaced his words as if summing up a complex scenario for a jury “-the two deputies got into an altercation with federal agents within view of the ranch house. Whereupon Mrs. McCullough, who knew the deputies as friends and did not know the agents from Adam, came to their aid with a shotgun.”

“Oh, God.”

Rhett nodded; his face was grim. “When ordered to put down the weapon, she refused and, instead, opened fire. She got off one round before they took her down.”

Dixie whispered, “Is she-?”

He shook his head. “As of this morning she’s out of surgery, but still in critical condition. Apparently-” he took a deep breath “-the bullet severed her spine.”

Dixie closed her eyes, but opened them quickly when she heard her husband’s soft anguished swearing, and laid her hand along the side of his face. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said in a tense grating voice. “It wasn’t. Those people took our daughter. They’ve threatened to kill her. If they-”

“But this woman was innocent!”

“You don’t know that. And even if she is innocent, it’s her husband who’s to blame for what’s happened to her, not you! If he hadn’t taken Lauren…” She fought for breath, for calm. He didn’t need her falling apart on him, not now. He needed her strength. Especially with the national convention due to convene in Dallas tomorrow.

She drew the calming breath she needed and asked the only question that mattered: “What does this mean…for Lauren?”

Rhett stared back at her with eyes almost black with fear. He didn’t answer.

Lauren resigned herself to spending the afternoon cooped up in the tent. Which she had to admit was a lot closer to the way she’d have expected a prisoner of war to be treated. But it was still hard to take after being allowed to enjoy an illusion of freedom all morning.

As for that, the time spent with the horses and Bronco in the meadow now seemed a strange and contradictory interlude. Looking back on it, she felt a lovely little burn of pleasure, like the feeling she’d get after a great day spent skiing or at the beach when she knew she’d had more sun than was good for her, but so much fun it was worth it. And yet, when she remembered conversations, specific words, expressions and gestures, she found her emotions leapfrogging from one mood to another. And it was a lot like trying to catch a frog, she thought; no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t quite hold on to one.

It was true that some of the things Bronco had told her had made her sad, but there’d been something exhilarating about it all, too, a thrilling sense of discovery. And was it really sympathy she’d felt for the little boy whose mother had gone away and left him, or had it been more like…kinship? She remembered the scalp-prickling tingle of recognition she’d felt when he’d told her, the deep inside ache of bewilderment and anger. That was me-me, too! she’d wanted to cry out to him. I know what it feels like to have your mother go away and leave you behind!

She’d been on the verge of telling him that when they’d been interrupted, and then Bronco had whistled to the horses and rushed them all back to the camp with great urgency. After a stop at the latrine, he’d zipped her into the tent and warned her to stay put or else, then had left to go down to the cabin to get her some food. And now she felt a restless frustrating disappointment, a sense of something important left undone.

Oh, yes, and there’d been those moments of fear, hadn’t there? But why was it she couldn’t remember exactly what it was she’d been afraid of? Was it possible it hadn’t been fear she’d felt at all, but rather some crazy sort of excitement? The kind that called up memories of a certain long-ago summer night, fireflies winking in the humid darkness, dock lights reflecting on black lake water and little girls whispering and giggling, running through the woods that separated their camp-Camp Kawea? was that the name?-from the boys’ camp nearby. She’d been thirteen that summer, her one and only summer-camp experience, memorable mainly because of the humiliating crush she’d developed on the boys’ swim instructor. Most of that summer had slipped through the cracks of her memory long ago, but she still remembered the sweet delicious heart-thumping apprehension.

And could that have been, she wondered now, because it was the last time she’d allowed herself the luxury of breaking the rules? She didn’t think she’d ever been a difficult child, even before her mother’s selfish pursuit of happiness had taken her off to that cliff house in California with the director of the Des Moines children’s museum.

And then, just as Lauren was entering what should have been her rebellious years, her dad had begun his first run for governor, and the last thing she’d wanted to do was give his political enemies ammunition that could be used against him in an election campaign. The years had gone by and one campaign had followed another, and she’d gotten used to living in the public eye, used to being the model daughter in the perfect middle-American family. She’d al ways believed that was who she really was. Until recently. She wasn’t sure she knew who the real Lauren Elizabeth Brown was anymore.

What’s wrong with me? Who am I, really?

She remembered, suddenly, sitting in her pickup truck in the parking lot outside Smoky Joe’s, feeling frightened and confused and so alienated from the person she’d always believed herself to be. Wondering how on earth she could be attracted to a bad hombre like Johnny Bronco, while even then her skin was growing hot and her heart beginning to pound and her breath quickening at just the memory of the way his hard supple body had felt lined up against hers.

And she remembered, suddenly, the way he’d looked this morning, standing in the meadow tying a rolled red bandanna around his forehead, with his long raven-black hair blowing in the wind and his eyes burning fierce and angry as a warrior’s. And the way she’d felt then-the strange violent lurch inside her, as if her heart had turned upside down.

Yes, Lauren thought, that was it exactly. She-or her whole world-had turned upside down. She didn’t know what to believe anymore.

The crackle of footsteps in the pine needles outside the tent sent her heart into her throat. Confusingly, it stayed there, hammering away, even after she heard Bronco’s voice growl, “My hands are full. Could you open up please?”

“Said the guard to the prisoner,” Lauren remarked sarcastically as she zipped open the tent flap. The surge of joy she felt at his return was so powerful the only thing she knew to do with it was to bury it in annoyance. “About time you got back. What took you so long? I’m starving.”

He stepped into the tent in one quick tense motion, bringing with him the smells of chili and of danger-Lauren wasn’t sure which it was that made her stomach churn and growl.

“Didn’t know if you like salsa or not,” was his only comment as he handed her a metal container of the pungent mixture of chopped tomatoes, peppers and cilantro, along with a foil-wrapped package that was warm to the touch.

She opened the foil. Burritos again-shredded beef, beans, rice and cheese this time. She sniffed and said sourly, “Since it looks like it’s the only veggies I’m going to get, I guess I don’t have much choice, do I?” She bit into a burrito, which was so delicious she had to fight to keep from moaning.

She stopped in midchew when Bronco pushed aside the tent flap and ducked down, preparatory to going out. “Where are you going?”

He paused and looked at her without straightening. He was wearing his hat again, with his hair vanished into a tight club tucked close to the nape of his neck, all but hidden inside his shirt collar. To Lauren he looked lean and lethal, like a panther on the prowl. “There’s a lot goin’ on in camp right now,” he said in a quiet voice. “I’ve got things to do.”

“And I’m just supposed to stay here?” The trembling fear and bitter disappointment she felt appalled her, and she chose once again to hide her humiliating emotions beneath a crackling crust of anger.

He straightened slowly, then came toward her.

Her breathing stopped; she swallowed the bite of burrito and it felt like a brick.

Crazy impulses went through her mind-and, oh, how glad she was that she was able to control them! What on earth would he have thought of her, and how would she have lived with the humiliation, if she’d followed the dictates of those impulses and thrown herself against his broad chest and begged him to stay?

But instead, she stood rock still and faced him, while her heart hammered against the base of her throat.

“You’re an intelligent woman,” he said softly. “I think you’ll stay here.”

And then he was gone.

As his footsteps rustled away into silence, Lauren’s legs buckled and she sank onto her sleeping bag with a sharp exhalation. She stared down at the food she still held in her hands-the bowl of salsa in one, and in the other, the foil wrappings in which nested three fat burritos, one with a bite out of it. Her stomach turned over. She would eat-she had to. She was hungry, and who knew when they’d feed her again? But how on earth would she swallow with this lump in her throat?

You’re an intelligent woman. Oh, sure. If she was so intelligent, how could she have forgotten for one minute the danger she was in or how truly alone she was? How could she have allowed herself to become emotionally dependent on the very man whose job it was to keep her prisoner? Stupid, Lauren, stupid. And weak.

Since the scolding seemed to be helping reduce the lump in her throat to manageable proportions, she ventured another bite of burrito and chewed mechanically while she thought about what Bronco had told her. There’s a lot going on, he’d said. What did that mean? Did it have anything to do with her? Probably, or why would Bronco be acting so…intense?

Something’s going on. I wonder…when will they come for me?

When they did come for her, she thought, it would almost certainly mean the end of this ordeal-one way or the other.

She took a small taste of the salsa. It was hot-very hot. She dipped the burrito in the salsa and bit into it. Tears sprang to her eyes. She sniffed and took another bite. She sat and ate burritos and salsa and thought about all the people she loved that she might never see again, while tears ran down her cheeks and dripped off her chin.

The evening news was on when Lucy Rosewood Brown Lanagan took her great-aunt Gwen her dinner tray.

“Anything interesting going on in the world?” Lucy inquired as she always did, placing the tray on the piano bench, which had been pulled up close beside the old lady’s wheelchair to serve as a table.

Gwen arched back as though it was a surprise to see Lucy there-as she always did. She gave her musical grace note of laughter when Lucy dropped a kiss on the top of her head, on curls as white and soft as dandelion fluff.

“The FBI shot somebody again,” she said loudly. At nearly a hundred, Gwen wasn’t a bit deaf, but for some reason seemed to think everyone else was.

Busy arranging the tray and utensils so her aunt’s cramped and gnarled fingers could grasp them easily, Lucy murmured, “Oh, dear. Who was it?”

“They said some rancher’s wife. Out in Arizona. Said it was supposed to be one of those militia groups holed up in there, but then all it turned out to be was this fellow’s wife.” She hitched herself up a little so Lucy could slip a pillow behind her back.

“That’s a shame,” Lucy said. She made a mental note to ask her husband, Mike, for details when he got back from his weekly trip to his office at the Chicagoan, the daily newspaper from which his nationally syndicated column originated. “Is she dead?”

“I don’t think so-not yet.” Gwen was busy refocusing her still-sharp eyes on the TV screen, where a commercial break had just ended. Now the correspondent was talking about the presidential race, working up to the national convention, which was due to begin tomorrow in Dallas. “Anyway, they said she shot first. Hush-” she interrupted herself “-look, there’s Rhett.”

Silently the two women watched the familiar dark head-which was beginning to silver a bit, Lucy noticed- work its way through a crowd at a fund-raising rally somewhere in the South-Mississippi, was it?-while the correspondent gave the figures from the latest polls.

Gwen arched her eyebrows at Lucy. “What do you think about your brother being president?”

Lucy shrugged. There was an ache in her throat. “I just keep thinking…I wish Mama and Daddy could have lived to see it. Well, I wonder who that is,” she said as the phone rang. It was the wrong time of day to be Mike or any of the children.

“Salesman, probably,” said Gwen. Another commercial had come on, and she concentrated her efforts on the task of picking up her soup spoon while Lucy went to answer the telephone.

It didn’t take her long. And when she returned to the parlor her heart was pounding, though she couldn’t have explained exactly why. “Guess who that was?” she said to Gwen, and went on to answer herself. “Speak of the devil-that was Rhett.” She gave a small huff of bemused laughter. “He wants us-Mike and me-to join him and Dixie down at the Parish ranch.”

“That’s in Texas!” the old lady exclaimed in the same tone she might have used to respond to a proposed jaunt to Mars. “What does he want you down there for?”

Lucy shook her head. “I don’t know, but he says he’s called Earl, too. He has something important to tell us, it seems, and he wants us all there. Isn’t that just like Rhett,” she added with a touch of asperity. “He always was so darn bossy.”

Gwen gave her a look of amusement; if anybody had a reputation for being bossy, it was Lucy. “I guess you’d better go, then, hadn’t you?” Her cracked voice still carried a lilt of laughter. “Me, I’m staying here. Kathy Andersen can look after me. Is Eric going with you?”

Lucy glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. Her son was due home from his summer job at Burger Heaven any minute. “I guess so,” she breathed, half in exasperation, “assuming he can get away. Oh, Lord, what is Rhett thinking of? I can’t just up and leave a farm in the middle of summer!”

Still fuming and fussing, she went off to call her husband. Lucy fumed and fussed partly because that was her way, but also because she felt a need to distract herself from the hollow feeling in her insides. Gwen would call it a premonition.

Lulled by the sultry late-afternoon heat and a belly full of burritos and salsa, Lauren had drifted off to sleep. Because of the burritos-or perhaps the salsa-her slumber was restless, plagued with dreams of horses-wild horses-and one wild rider, naked to the waist with long black wind-whipped hair.

Suddenly she sat up, trembling. Her chest ached and her throat was dry. In the distance she could still hear the sound of hoofbeats.

No-not hoofbeats! Thunder.

Lightning danced and flickered across the tent walls like an old-fashioned silent movie. Something-raindrops? pine needles?-pattered against the sides of the tent as a gust of wind hit and moved on with a howl like a banshee. The tent shuddered and so did Lauren. Born and raised in Iowa, she was fairly accustomed to violent weather. But up till now there’d always been solid walls and a strong sturdy roof to serve as a buffer between her and the forces of nature. She’d never actually been out in a thunderstorm before. It seemed a lot bigger, louder and scarier when she was perched on the side of a mountain with nothing between her and the violence but a thin nylon tent!

A tremendous cra-a-ack of thunder had her crouched in the middle of her sleeping bag with her arms crossed over her head. She thought about lightning. True, it would probably strike a tree before the tent, but what if it struck one very nearby? People got killed standing under trees, didn’t they? And what if it caught fire?

As if in answer to that, the heavens opened up. Wind-driven rain began pounding the tent with the force of a fire hose, and the frail structure shook like a rag in the jaws of a playful dog. Now she thought about flash floods. And whether the tent had been anchored down.

The thunder and lightning were almost continuous, the noise of the rain and wind so loud she couldn’t think about anything at all except how frightened she was. And Bronco.

Where in the world was he? Why had he left her here to deal with this alone?

Ashamed of her fear, Lauren chose to cling, instead, to anger. He was supposed to be looking after her! Keeping her safe! Some guard he was-and it would serve him right, she thought, if he came back and found his valuable hostage had been washed or blown away or roasted to a crisp by lightning. Serve him right.

A terrible thought came to her. What if something had happened to him? What if he’d been injured? There’s a lot going on right now. I’ve got things to do. What sort of things? The camp was crawling with men, dangerous men with guns. And Bronco didn’t carry one. And the horses! An animal terrified by the storm could easily kill or injure a man. Oh, God-if something were to happen to Bronco, who would protect her then?

The thunder seemed a little more distant now, the sound and fury of the rain and wind not quite as deafening. The storm was passing. But strangely, Lauren’s fear only intensified. Where was Bronco? Her heart hammered and her breath whimpered in her throat. Her jaws screamed with tension. Bronco, please come back.

It didn’t seem at all strange or unseemly to her then that she could wish so passionately for the man who should by rights have been her enemy.

She was pacing the sultry confines of the tent like a caged cat, thunder was rumbling away in the distance, and the rain had been reduced to fitful flurries when she heard at last the sound her ears had been straining for: the squishy crunch of boots on wet pine needles.

She gave a little whimper of relief and gladness that pride instantly turned into a humph of vexation. Over her dead body would that man ever learn how desperately she’d longed for his return! The words About time you showed up! were on her lips as the flap’s zipper whined along its grooves.

The flap was thrown back. But the man who stood in the tent opening wasn’t Bronco. Lauren felt the blood freeze in her veins as she stared into the cold blue eyes of Ron Masters.

Chapter 9

He was dressed in his usual combat fatigues. Even in the deep shadows of premature dark Lauren could see that his face was painted in green-and-brown blotches, a dark and sinister mask from which his eyes glittered like chips of cold steel.

Chills coursed through her; her heart raced with a primitive fear.

But his body filled the opening; there was nowhere for her to go. Even so, she took a step back and held her head high as she demanded, in a much steadier voice than she’d thought herself capable of. “What are you doing here? Where’s Bronco?”

Masters didn’t bother to reply. He stepped through the tent opening, and as she retreated farther, snaked out a hand and caught her wrist. She pulled against his crushing grip, resisting instinctively, with all her strength, oblivious both to pain and to the reality that resistance was hopeless-a reality that was driven home to her a moment later when she was jerked forward with a force that made her bite her tongue, then spun into the embrace of an arm that felt like iron, rather than human flesh and bone.

She gave a little grunt of pain. The shock of her bitten tongue brought tears to her eyes.

Ron Masters grunted softly, too, as he held her even more tightly. His voice was a hard rasp in her ear. “The commander said to bring you and he didn’t specify what condition. Keep that in mind in case you feel like puttin’ up a fight.”

Lauren said nothing; her whole being was focused on fighting the fear and the pain. Don’t let him know how afraid you are, her instincts whispered. This man’s cruelty feeds on fear. She concentrated on making her breathing slow and steady. She concentrated on the metallic taste of blood in her mouth and on keeping her knees from buckling. She concentrated on the sweet cool kiss of rain on her face when they stepped outside, and on the smell of the man-a mixture of gun oil and sweat.

She would not let herself think of Bronco. You’re on your own, she thought. It’s up to you to survive.

There were others waiting outside the tent. At least three that Lauren could see, all dressed and painted in camouflage, all carrying automatic weapons. This is it, this is real, she thought. The meadow, the horses, Bronco-that had been some strange sort of fantasy interlude, like being in a movie about a kidnapping. But these men-she had no doubt whatsoever that these men were killers. And she was their hostage.

Stay alive. For as long as you can, any way you can.

For Lauren time seemed to telescope. The journey from her sanctuary by the spring to the camp’s main compound seemed to take only minutes, but in that time so many things passed through her mind. She thought again of her family, of the life she’d had and of Benjamin, the nice respectable lawyer she was supposed to have married next spring-a White House wedding, in all probability. She thought again of the choices she’d made that had changed all that and brought her to where she was now. And was astonished to find that she felt no regret.

Even if I die tonight, leaving was the right decision.

Yes. Because to have stayed, to have taken the firm’s offer, to have married Benjamin, that would have been worse than dying. What could be worse than dying at the age of twenty-six? To have never really lived-that would be worse.

But I haven’t lived! Not yet. I haven’t loved-really loved-a man. Loved him enough to want to spend my life with him, bear his children…die for him. There’s so much I haven’t done!

Yes, came the gentle reply. But you gave yourself the chance. You made the right choice, Lauren. Have no regrets.

The cleared slope before the cabin, all but deserted when she’d come through it with Bronco the night before, now seemed filled with the dark ominous shapes of heavily armed men. There were no lights. The cabin, so hospitably lit for her arrival last evening, was dark except for the last of the sunlight that had leaked through clouds on the western horizon to splash across the porch and down the steps.

It was oddly quiet, especially after the thunderstorm’s fury. There were no comments or mutterings from the men gathered before the cabin, just a rustle of movement as they made way for Lauren and her escort to move through. As he had the night before, Gil McCullough was waiting for them on the porch, and again as they approached he moved down the steps to meet them. Tonight, though, there was no welcoming smile, however false. No body language that spoke of confidence and authority. He looked oddly shrunken, Lauren thought, but at the same time seemed finely balanced as a hair trigger, taut as a trap about to be sprung.

Her escort halted at the base of the steps. Ron Masters’s fingers dug viciously into the flesh of her arms as he jerked her around to face his commander.

Her only thought was, My God, my God, what’s happened?

Dread made her queasy and weak in the knees. Even in the fading light, she could see that McCullough’s face was a mask of pain, as if he’d been terribly ill. He’d aged twenty years overnight.

McCullough spoke to her in a voice like windblown sand. “Your father is a very foolish man, Lauren.” She sucked in a breath but managed to hold back her retort. He regarded her for a moment while a smile tugged fruitlessly at the corners of his mouth. “At least I hope he is. I’d hate to think he cares so little for you that he’d throw your life away to save his political career.”

Still Lauren didn’t reply. Smoldering with anger and fear, she stared hard into McCullough’s eyes. Seared his image onto her retinas, into her brain.

Then suddenly his eyes narrowed and his face seemed to crumple with an anguish so naked she uttered a sharp gasp and jerked backward, an instinctive protective distancing.

“Do you know what they’ve done?” he rasped. “Your father’s people-his storm troopers, his Gestapo? They shot my wife.”

“No.” Lauren shook her head, and heard herself saying it over and over. “No, no…”

“My Katie. That little woman never harmed a soul in her life, and they gunned her down in her own front yard!”

“It’s not true,” Lauren stated flatly. “My father would never do such a thing. Never.”

“He authorized it.” McCullough’s voice was hard now, and cold as his eyes. “And I’m sorry, but it is true. Two sheriff’s deputies were right there and saw it happen. I got worried when I couldn’t get through to my wife, so I sent some of my men to see if they could find out what was going on. Ron, there, was one of ’em-he can confirm it. The fact is, Miss Brown, government storm troopers have occupied my ranch and shot down my wife in cold blood. This after I warned them what would happen to you if they took any such action against me. I’m afraid they’ve left me no choice.”

“No,” Lauren whispered, beginning to struggle against Ron Masters’s merciless grip. He jerked her so hard she nearly fell.

And suddenly, as if that small brutality had been a slap in the face, she felt the panic fade, felt herself calm. I won’t grovel, she thought. I won’t plead. If she was going to die, by God, she would do it bravely.

But you’re not going to die. You’re going to stay alive. No matter what it takes.

“You don’t have to kill me.” Her voice was quiet, breathless. “If you just let my father think you have-” she paused, encouraged by the thoughtful narrowing of Gil McCullough’s eyes “-then if it comes to that, I can testify to how well I was treated. I could even say I wasn’t kidnapped at all, that I just…that I went off with Bronco.”

A snicker close by her ear made her shudder as if something cold and slimy had crawled down her back. “Nice try,” Masters crooned against the side of her face, like a lover. But it’s killing he loves, Lauren thought. And she could smell his blood lust, a dark feral odor.

A new wave of terror swept over her. Defying it, she held herself straight and tall and tried desperately not to tremble. “Speaking of Bronco, where is my jailer?” she asked brashly, hoping it would sound merely curious, even a little contemptuous. “What, does he just always split when things get ugly?”

Masters gave a short cackle of laughter-was there a note of jealousy in it?-while McCullough’s face took on the affronted expression of a man whose child has just been maligned. “Bronco doesn’t ‘split,”’ he said stiffly. “He was…needed elsewhere. I sent him-” He broke off. For a second, maybe two, he stood frozen, listening, like a buck at a water hole catching the predator’s scent.

Then, in the sudden eerie quiet, Lauren heard it too, strange sounds far off in the distance. Like someone making popcorn, she thought, in another room in the house.

McCullough uttered a single sharp obscenity. And after that it seemed to Lauren that everything happened at once.

The compound, which had been so quiet and still, was suddenly, instantly, a hive of sound and motion. A muttering of sound that grew, like a wave rolling onto shore, then broke all at once into voices yelling instructions, shouts of alarm and of warning. A confusion of shapes and shadows, a moving picture that seemed to whirl around her as she was spun about and jerked roughly to and fro. Gil’s voice shouting orders she couldn’t quite make out. Pain in her arms and shoulders as she fought to stay upright in Ron Masters’s careless grip.

Then gradually, out of the noise and confusion, a new sound, a rhythmic thumping that was familiar to her. A horse’s galloping hoofbeats. And almost seeming to grow out of that, another driving pulsing beat that grew steadily louder, like crescendoing tympany-the chop-chop-chop of helicopter rotors.

Men dove out of the way as a horse and rider burst through the crowd. Lauren could feel a wave of heat from the animal’s body, smell his sweat and hear grunting sounds as he came to a bone-jarring stiff-legged halt, so close to the man who held her prisoner that he was jostled and had to jerk himself out of the way to keep from being trampled. She heard Masters swear.

Lauren’s heart gave a tremendous leap of hope and joy as horse and rider separated and became two individual shapes. Tears burned her eyes when Cochise Red lowered his head to bump her shoulder and whickered an affectionate greeting.

Johnny Bronco spoke to Gil McCullough. “They’re coming,” was all he said.

It was then that Lauren realized she wasn’t in Ron Masters’s hands any longer. That the fingers that held her now did so, not with bruising force, but with a firm and gentle touch. She turned her head to stare at the fierce warrior’s profile, and her breath caught. Bronco’s glittering black eyes were locked in silent struggle with the angry blue ones belonging to the man who stood facing him at the foot of the cabin steps-a struggle, Lauren sensed, that likely meant life or death. For her.

Then just like that, it was over. McCullough surrendered with a jerk of his head and a violent wave of his arm. “Go on-get her out of here!” he yelled as he stormed up the steps, making for the cabin door.

Bronco wasted no more time-he knew he didn’t have much left. He half threw Lauren into the saddle and clucked to the stallion, and he could feel ol’ Red already gathering himself for the takeoff as he vaulted up behind her. “Get down-get down,” he growled in Lauren’s ear, then leaned hard against her, pressing her down and covering her body with his as the stallion launched himself, as only a quarter horse can, from standstill into full gallop in one tremendous leap.

The noise of the choppers was deafening now, right overhead, all but drowning out the gunfire. Light streaked across the compound and danced among the pine trees, illuminating the smoke that had begun to collect there so that it resembled a blanket of ground fog. The acrid smell of powder drifted on winds driven by the choppers’ blades.

In the chaos and confusion of battle, Bronco knew, anything could happen. That was why his first thought had been to get the hell out of there, get Lauren as far away from the danger as he possibly could. And after that? After that, maybe he could think about how he was going to get her back to her father without giving himself up in the bargain.

“Come on, Red, get us out of here,” he murmured. Crouched low over the woman’s body, he gave the stallion his head.

To Lauren it didn’t seem real, that twilight gallop through a tranquil meadow while behind her the world was exploding in a nightmare of sound and fury, fire and destruction and death. There was something surreal about it-like an amusement park thrill ride gone berserk.

She’d been riding horses since she was a child, but as many times as she’d ridden, she’d never ridden like this, racing a quarter horse-the fastest horse alive at short distances-flat out at full gallop. Oh, and it was terrifying. Exhilarating. Like riding a lightning bolt.

The sheer brute power of the animal beneath her filled her with awe. With her face against the stallion’s neck, she could hear his labored breaths and grunts of effort, feel his surging muscles and thundering heartbeats. And there was another heartbeat hammering against her back, and her own intermingled with it until she could no longer separate one from the other. Another body, strong as steel and supple as wire, as formidable as the stallion’s but in a different way, pressed hard against her and holding her firmly in the saddle…and his embrace.

Sandwiched like that, between the awesome power of man and horse, Lauren had never felt safer, more secure. Or more frightened. Not that she would fall. Bronco would never let her fall, she knew that. Yet…she felt as though the earth had slipped out from under her feet. She felt off balance, scared.

What’s happened? she kept thinking. What’s happened to me?

And for the first time in days the kidnapping was far from her mind.

At the far end of the meadow where the ground rose sharply and the trees began, Bronco straightened, with one arm still holding Lauren securely in the saddle, and spoke to Cochise Red with a touch and a murmured, “Ho, boy…” Excited as he was, the stallion fought the bit, tossing his head and dancing sideways as Bronco eased him to a walk.

Though Lauren hadn’t spoken, he could feel her body shivering. Her hair felt damp against his cheek. He didn’t know whether she was in shock or just plain cold, but either way he knew he had to get her into shelter and wrapped up in something warm pretty quick. But they couldn’t stop yet. Not here. Although he knew Red was pretty well winded and he was asking a lot of him, especially now that it was getting dark, he didn’t see how he had much choice. He had to get through the perimeter fence, put a ridge or two between them and the SOL camp.

Calming the big bay horse-and the woman, too-with soothing wordless sounds, Bronco signaled with a slight pressure from his knees, and they slipped into the shadows between the trees.

The sounds of gunfire had faded to a distant grumbling before they finally halted in the cover of timber. Bronco’s feet had barely touched the ground before Lauren came tumbling out of the saddle behind him. He turned, and she fell into his arms.

It never occurred to him not to hold her. She was wet, cold, trembling…probably in shock. He muttered something-he didn’t know what-as he reached one-handed to untie the blanket roll behind the saddle, somehow got it shaken out and wrapped around her. It was when he folded her back against him that she began to cry. Not quietly, either, but with sobs and wails, like a little child.

Bronco hadn’t had much experience with weeping women, but for some reason he wasn’t surprised or even all that upset to find one in his arms. He thought he should have been-especially this woman. What did surprise him was how altogether natural it felt to hold her, to stroke her hair, weave his fingers through it and cradle her head against his shoulder. To exhale soothing wordless whispers into its silky dampness and inhale its sweet green-apple scent.

The storm was only a squall and it passed quickly. To Bronco it seemed all too short a time before she quieted, then began to stir in the restless way that let him know she was already sorry she’d let herself cut loose like that. Regret was a heaviness in his muscles as he eased her away from him.

She quickly bowed her head and he could see her brush at her eyes and nose with jerky embarrassed movements, then give up and begin to yank on her T-shirt, trying to haul it out of the waistband of her jeans.

“Here,” he scolded, “don’t do that.” He untied his bandanna, pulled it off his neck and passed it to her. She croaked something he took for a thank-you and turned away self-consciously to blow her nose, though as dark as it was he couldn’t have seen much, anyway. He stood and waited while she mopped up, uncomfortable himself now, and the damp place she’d left on the front of his shirt a cold reminder of her warmth.

“You okay?” he asked when it sounded as though she was about done.

She nodded, and he could see her shift about, looking for someplace to put the bandanna. Before he could take it from her, she shoved it in her pocket and cleared her throat. “Sorry. Reaction, I guess.”

“Natural.” His voice was diffident, remote. “Don’t worry about it.”

Suddenly bereft, Lauren fought an urge to reach out and touch him, to feel again the strong hard body and warm arms that had so recently sheltered her. Her eyes strained against the darkness, but she could make out only a faceless shape topped by the pale blur of a white Stetson.

His voice came quietly from the shadows. “Think you can go on a ways?”

“Sure,” said Lauren. It didn’t occur to her then what an odd thing it was for a terrorist to ask his hostage.

“I’d feel better if we could put more distance between us and those choppers.”

She didn’t know what to say to that when she knew that in all probability those helicopters had come to rescue her. Of course, they might just as easily have killed her, instead, and that made no sense. Surely her father would never have allowed such an all-out assault, knowing she was still being held hostage. He’d never risk her safety that way. He wouldn’t.

A chill shook her as Gil’s awful words played again in her mind: He’d throw your life away to save his political career.

No. He wouldn’t. Not the Rhett Brown she knew. Not in a million years.

She drew a breath and said firmly, “I’m fine. Let’s go.” But in the next instant fear stabbed through her like a spear of ice, pinning her to the spot. Something-and it sounded like a herd of buffalo-was tramping, crashing through the brush, coming straight for them!

Her lungs filled with air and her jaw went rigid, but before she could give in to the instinct to run or scream, she felt Bronco’s hand on her arm, heard him murmuring to Cochise Red without any trace of alarm. Next she heard a low excited whinny, and two large dark shapes bulldozed through the darkness, stamping and snorting and whickering in joyful reunion.

“The mares!” Lauren gasped in astonishment. “How-”

“I turned ’em out when I saddled up Red.” Bronco’s voice was matter-of-fact. “Figured they’d have a fighting chance that way.” His body brushed against hers and she heard a soft grunt as he half leaped, half pulled himself into the saddle. His hand touched her shoulder, reaching for her. “Better if you ride behind now. Moon won’t be out of the clouds for a while yet, and we’re gonna need to take it easy in the dark.”

She said nothing until she was seated behind Bronco astride the stallion’s back with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders and the ends clutched firmly together in the middle of her chest. Inexplicably, her teeth had begun to chatter.

“Y-you knew this was c-coming?” she said in a low voice, as Bronco clucked to Cochise Red and they began to move at an easy walk through the dark forest. “You were prepared?” She felt him shrug.

“I had a good idea. Enough I thought it might be a good idea to get ready for Plan B.”

“Plan B… And that’s?”

He gave a little huff of mirthless laughter. “To get you out in one piece.”

Lauren said nothing for a time, though there were all sorts of confusing things tumbling around in her mind. Then she drew a shaken breath and whispered, “Why? I mean, your friends are being attacked, and instead of helping them, you save my life. Why would you do that?”

This time his whole body jerked with his snort of laughter. “Like I told you down at the ranch, Laurie Brown-you’re worth way too much to take a chance on gettin’ you killed.”

“But,” she cried, “Gil was going to kill me-or have me killed. He was ready to do it. I know he was. I could see it in his eyes.”

“He’d just found out his wife had been shot-what did you expect?” He paused for a moment, then went on in a voice soft with disgust. “You met Katie McCullough-nice lady. A real nice lady. Sweet as they come. And they shot her down.”

“I’m sorry,” Lauren whispered.

“What for? You’re not the one who did it.”

“No, and neither is my father.”

He acknowledged that with a grunt. They rode a distance in silence, and after a while the horse’s steady rocking gait began to soothe her, ease the tension from her muscles and the turmoil from her mind. “Well, anyway,” she murmured, swallowing a yawn, “for what it’s worth, I’m very grateful for Plan B.”

“You’re welcome.”

The words felt like pebbles in Bronco’s throat. Because he knew he didn’t deserve her thanks. The truth was, he’d come near blowing everything. He’d cut it too damn close.

From the beginning, ever since Gil had first told him about his plan to kidnap the candidate’s daughter, he’d been trying to walk a tightrope. Trying somehow to keep himself balanced between two opposing objectives: one, to keep his cover intact, and two, to keep Lauren Brown alive and healthy. To do one or the other would have been simple enough. To do both was proving to be a whole lot harder than he’d expected, thanks to those trigger-happy idiots-and he’d be willing to bet it was the FBI who was at fault-down at the ranch. His stomach burned when he thought about them shooting down Katie McCullough like that. They’d had a reason, of course-they always had a reason. Mistaken identity. She might have drawn on them, might even have shot first. Still didn’t make it right. And just one of the many reasons he didn’t carry a gun unless he had to.

Behind him, Lauren’s head had begun to bob with the rhythm of the horse’s gait. As they started down a steep slope, her face bumped against his shoulder. She abruptly jerked upright and said, “Sorry,” in a slurred voice.

“Almost there,” Bronco said as he reined the stallion in. He swung his leg over the saddle horn and slid to the ground, and instantly the mares were right there, bumping and jostling. Looking for their feed bags, he thought, el bowing them good-naturedly out of the way as he said to Lauren, “I’m gonna walk a ways-trail’s a little steep here. You be okay?”

“Sure.” And obviously she was trying to sound wide awake and chipper.

“You can move into the saddle if you want.”

She did so, and he took the reins and they started down the trail. Though it had been many years since he’d been over it, it was a trail he knew well.

They’d been going steadily downhill and had long since left the pine forest behind. Now a clearing sky bright with stars shed just enough light to hint at shadowy shapes of bull pines and piñons, and provide a glittery backdrop for the denser blackness of canyon walls. A brisk little wind blew down from the higher peaks, cool and fresh from the earlier rain, bringing with it the scent of damp earth and sage, juniper and pine. The smells of Bronco’s boyhood.

Up ahead he could hear the trickling sounds of running water-the stream that ran along the canyon floor, dry for most of the year, brought to life by the recent rain. Just before he reached it, the ground leveled out and became sandy grassy patches interspersed with thickets of young willows and piles of rocks and gravel washed there by flash floods. Not recently, though-the ground here was dry. The monsoon clouds had dumped their burden elsewhere tonight.

After pausing to fill his canteen and let the horses drink, Bronco led Cochise Red across the stream and up the bank on the other side. Here, where the ground was rockier and rose sharply once more to become sloping foothills splayed out at the base of steep canyon walls, he halted.

“We’ll leave the horses here,” he said, moving to the stallion’s side in case Lauren wanted help getting off. It came as no surprise to him that she didn’t. He unbuckled the saddlebags and slung them across his shoulder, then went to work on the girth. “We have a little bit of a climb.”

“Can I carry something?” Her voice was still slurred, groggy. Exhausted, he thought, and no wonder.

He was careful to be all brusqueness and business, though, when he told her to bring the canteen and to keep the blanket out of the weeds. Sympathy makes you weak, not strong, he told himself.

He reached toward her shadow-shape and found her arm. A small shock went through him when he touched her, felt her warmth and substance, smooth soft skin over firm muscle, nerves jumping and pulse racing against his fingertips. He felt a strange sense of recognition, and of pleasure, and longing.

“Can you see well enough to follow me?” he asked hoarsely.

There was a pause; he thought she nodded. Then she said, “Yeah, I think so.”

“Okay, then-stay close.” And he started up the zigzagging trail he knew would take them to the mouth of a cave about halfway up the canyon wall.

He had no trouble finding it. In a way it seemed like only yesterday, the last time he’d been here, though in reality it had probably been more like fifteen years. That was the thing about natural landmarks, he thought; in the short term mountains and canyons and rock formations didn’t change much. He went in first, just to make sure nothing-or nobody-had taken up residence there in the past dozen or so years. It felt unoccupied-nothing rustled or scuttled away into deeper shadows at his intrusion-and smelled like all caves do, just vaguely dank and fusty.

“Okay, you can bed down here,” he said gruffly, and turning, found that, instead of staying out on the edge where he’d left her, Lauren had followed him into the cave and was right there beside him. So close her clothing brushed his. He heard her breathing, rapidly after the climb, and felt her body heat.

His heart swelled and bumped against his throat. All at once he knew that he didn’t dare touch her. Not even to take her hand.

“There’s food in there,” he mumbled, dumping the saddlebags onto the floor of the cave at her feet. “If you’re hungry. I’ve got to go see to the horses. Be right back.” He didn’t wait for her reply, but lunged for the mouth of the cave and out into the cool starry night like a suffocating man craving air.

Down on the floor of the canyon, he unsaddled Red and rubbed him down, then took off his bridle and turned him loose to graze. But instead of immediately testing his freedom, the stallion turned his head and nibbled at Bronco’s shoulder, then gave a low-pitched nicker of concern.

Can he feel it? Bronco wondered. There was a strange vibration in his muscles, a quivering down deep in his insides, but whether of fear, excitement or some kind of warning he couldn’t have said. He’d never felt such a thing before.

“Go on, boy,” he murmured, sending the horse off with a wave. “You’ve earned a good roll…” He hoped ol’ Red wouldn’t go too far away. He’d probably have to go looking for him in the morning, but this was cougar country. A healthy horse could outrun a lion, but not when he was hobbled or tied.

He carried the saddle to a rock pile and heaved it onto a good-size boulder. Then, taking the bridle with him, he climbed back up to the cave.

Even before he went inside he could hear the soft even sound of her breathing. “Lauren?” he called in a whisper, already sure that she was asleep. A wave of emotion rippled through him, almost like a shudder. Again he wasn’t sure what name to give it-relief or disappointment.

The moon was just lifting above the clouds when Bronco settled himself with his back against the wall near the mouth of the cave. The cool gray light reached into the cave and across the floor to touch the head of the woman who slept there with her head pillowed on saddlebags. Like a spotlight, it shone on the fall of hair that cascaded over dark leather to pool on the sandy floor, and turned it into a river of silver.

Bronco stared at that pale hair until his vision blurred, and when he closed his eyes the image remained, as though it had been branded on his retinas.

Chapter 10

Lauren awoke with her body in a sweaty throbbing fever, and in her mind the fading memory of erotic dreams.

She wasn’t sure what had woken her until it came again-a high blood-stirring scream-and she recognized it instantly as a stallion’s bugling challenge, a clarion call to battle.

A quick glance around confirmed that she was alone in the cave, that whatever it was that had Cochise Red so excited, Bronco had already gone to investigate. She hoped it was relief that made her, with rapidly thumping heart, exhale a long slow breath and for a moment close her eyes.

It must be relief, relief that he wasn’t there to see her while her cheeks still burned, her body’s secret places still throbbed and every nerve felt supersensitized by the dream-caresses of a lover whose face she couldn’t quite remember. But-oh, be honest-there was something else, too, a vague sense of disappointment, of longing, of need.

She sat up and saw sunlight pouring into the mouth of the cave. Wobbly as a toddler woken too soon from a nap, she started to throw aside the blanket she’d slept in- Bronco’s blanket, the same one he’d placed around her last night just before he’d wrapped her in his arms. Then she paused, moving her fingers slowly in the blanket’s folds, feeling its coarse weave, the slight scratchiness of wool. She almost-almost-lifted it to her face; the impulse was there, in her nerves and muscles, ligaments and tendons. But she stopped herself in time. There was no need to do such a thing, when his scent was all around her, permeating the very source of her warmth and comfort.

When the stallion’s scream came again, she scrambled to her feet and lurched to the cave entrance. Dazzled by the sun’s brightness, it was a moment before she saw Bronco. He was climbing toward her up the trail, wearing just his jeans and white Stetson, with his hair tightly clubbed at the nape of his neck. A sheen of moisture gave his skin the look of oiled wood and made of his body a classic sculpture rendered in mahogany.

Her heart gave a terrifying lurch and she uttered a small but distinct gasp, which Bronco heard and mistook for alarm. He shook his head in reassurance as he offered her a succinct explanation. “Wild horses.”

This time Lauren’s gasp was of excitement and delight. “Really? Oh, my God. I didn’t know there were wild horses around here. Where? Are they…?” She was about to go plunging headlong down the trail to see for herself when he stopped her with another shake of his head.

“Can’t see ’em, but they’re out there somewhere. Red knows. He’s invaded another stallion’s territory.” Bronco grinned, which Lauren thought made him look rather endearingly like a proud father. “He’s ready to challenge the local chief for his brood mares. Did you hear him?”

“Woke me up.” She smiled back at him. And then felt vaguely foolish, standing there with the sun in her eyes, overheated and inexplicably breathless. She’d almost forgotten how potent that smile of his could be.

“I tied him up-the mares, too,” he said as he joined her on the ledge, which suddenly seemed too small and very crowded. “Don’t want to take a chance they might run off with the wild herd. It’s a long walk out of here on foot.” He offered her the canteen, cool and dripping, freshly filled from the stream on the canyon floor.

She took it from him, opened it and drank deeply. When she paused to catch the dribbles that had escaped down her chin, she discovered that Bronco was watching her narrowly. In response, her heart lurched…and quickened.

He frowned as he turned away. “I expect you’re hungry.”

She followed him into the cave, where he knelt and scooped up the saddlebags that had been her pillow. She wondered, as she watched him open one of the pouches, where he had slept-or if he’d slept at all. She wondered other things as she watched the elegant ripple and flow of muscle beneath glistening skin, such as what his skin would taste like, how it might feel on her tongue.

He glanced up as he handed her a vacuum-sealed pouch filled with some sort of liquid and, misinterpreting her expression, smiled wryly. “Doesn’t look like much, but it’ll fill your belly. It’s a protein drink designed for armies on the move.”

She nodded and took it from him, not trusting herself to speak even a single word. Her stomach growled as if mocking her; she didn’t feel as though she’d be capable of swallowing.

Bronco, meanwhile, was tearing open a package of tortillas with his teeth. He offered it to her and she took one, then ripped off a piece of the flat unleavened bread and put it in her mouth. Chewed mechanically and swallowed hard. Following Bronco’s example, she twisted off the seal on the plastic pouch and took a tentative drink. It tasted rather like a tepid vanilla malt.

“I’ve always wanted to try one of those milk shake diet plans,” she muttered. He laughed, and she felt incomprehensibly pleased.

But while he made himself comfortable, half leaning, half sitting on a sloping boulder, Lauren found herself suddenly a bundle of nerves, self-conscious and ill at ease in a way that brought back painful memories of her first boy-girl party.

Turning away from the disturbing sight of Bronco’s smooth chest and broad shoulders gleaming in reflected sunlight, she wandered slowly, nibbling tortilla and sipping protein drink with feigned nonchalance, exploring the cave’s cool shadows.

Though there wasn’t a lot to explore-the portion of the cave with a ceiling high enough to allow her to stand extended no more than eight feet from the entrance. Beyond that, smooth stone sloped unevenly down to meet the boulder-strewn floor, although there seemed to be narrow fissures that extended deeply into the canyon wall. It was while she was crouched down to investigate one of these fissures that Lauren made a wondrous discovery.

“Bronco,” she cried, “come look at this! Is this what I think it is?” Getting no immediate response, she turned and saw that he was sitting where she’d left him, silhouetted against the sunlit opening. He’d taken off his hat and turned his head to watch her.

“The paintings,” he said with an offhand shrug. “Yeah, I guess they are.”

She sat back on her heels and stared at him, both hunger and self-consciousness forgotten. “You knew they were here? You’ve been here before.” The last wasn’t a question, but feeding himself a remnant of tortilla, he nodded yes to both. She uttered an impatient and wondering “Huh!” as she crouched again to examine the sloping ceiling and trace the faint but unmistakable designs with fingers that didn’t quite touch the surface. Parallel wavy lines in smoky black, an orangy-red sun with rays, something that might have been a bird or an arrow or a streak of lightning.

“Oh,” she breathed, exasperated, “I wish I had more light.” She threw Bronco a look over her shoulder. “Are they really…”

She paused and he finished her question for her. “Indian? I guess so. They’ve been there a long time, anyway.” And he added almost nonchalantly, “We’re on reservation land here.”

There was something in his voice, something that calmed her excitement and replaced it with the wary quietness of curiosity. After a moment she turned away from the petroglyphs and moved unhurriedly back toward the front of the cave, saying with what she hoped sounded like no more than casual interest, “So you used to come here when you were a boy?”

Bronco’s smile was crooked. “I spent some time here.”

Lauren tilted her head, squinting in the brilliant sunlight as she settled against the cave wall opposite him. “Camping?”

He gave a soft ironic snort-a sound that was becoming familiar to her. “I guess you could call it that. Mostly I was running away.”

“What from?”

“I don’t know, from my life-myself, I guess. It was after my dad died. I was angry and didn’t know who to be angry at, so I decided to be angry at everybody. My grandmother Rose, she told me about this place. Said it was a good place for thinking.” He gave a laugh so sharp that it made her wince, then shrugged. “Don’t know how much of that I did here, but I guess it probably saved me from a fistfight or two. Who knows-reckless as I was, it may have even saved my life.” He rose restlessly and faced the sunlight, one hand braced on the rock above his head.

Gazing at his smooth and gleaming back, broad-shouldered and sculpted in boldly masculine lines-no sign of weakness there-Lauren felt a spreading softness inside, a gentle aching in her heart. Could it be…why would it be tenderness?

She cleared her throat, ending a perilous silence. “Have you always been Bronco?” she lightly asked. “Has anyone ever called you Johnny?”

He laughed as if the question had taken him by surprise and glanced at her over one shoulder. “My dad’s the one that started calling me Bronco when I was just a little baby-can’t tell you why. And I guess the name just stuck. My grandmother Rose, she calls me Johnny.” His smile faded and he closed himself away again, his voice growing distant. “Gil does sometimes. I think my mom probably did, too. I was too young to remember.”

Lauren opened her mouth, then closed it and looked away without asking any of the thousand questions that trembled on her tongue. She knew she couldn’t look any longer at that powerful male body while, bewilderingly, her impulse was to go to him, take him in her arms and comfort him like a small lost child. How incongruous was that? It made no sense at all!

“I have a cousin named Rose,” she offered chattily. “Well, actually, it’s Rose Ellen, and most people call her Ellie. She’s a few years younger than I am-right now she’s in college, or anyway, she’s supposed to be. If I know her, since it’s summer, she’s probably off on a boat somewhere, saving dolphins, or maybe it’s whales. She’s kind of a nature nut. She wants to be a zoo vet…” Lauren was babbling, grabbing desperately for harmless innocuous words with which to fill the space between them that had suddenly become too emotionally charged for comfort.

But oddly enough, and to her intense relief, Bronco actually seemed to be interested in what she was saying. “Where’s she live, this cousin of yours?” he asked as he settled himself once more in the mouth of the cave, this time out of the sun.

So she told him about her dad’s family farm back in Iowa, and her aunt Lucy and uncle Luke, the newspaper columnist, and her cousins Eric and Ellie. She even told him about her father’s pioneer ancestor, Great-great-goodness knows how many greats-Grandmother Lucinda, who according to family legend saved herself and her baby from maurading Indians.

“Oops.” Too late, she halted, a hand clapped to her mouth, cheeks flaming.

But Bronco only shrugged, though his grin was crooked. “Hey, my people got in a few licks, too. It happened. That’s the past, you can’t change it. How’d she manage this miracle?”

“Well,” Lauren said, her heart fluttering with laughter and an excitement she didn’t at all understand, “according to family legend, she set fire to her own house, then tied her baby up in her apron and climbed down the well and hid there while the fire burned all the way to the river…”

And the way she told it, Bronco thought, it did have the singsong quality of legend, reminding him of the stories his people told, handed down from generation to generation, unchanging and strangely comforting in their familiarity.

He asked her questions, being careful not to reveal how much he already knew, and she told him other legends of her family. How her aunt Lucy had found her future husband hiding out in her barn while fleeing from the gangsters and corrupt politicians who had firebombed his Chicago town house in an attempt to silence his public campaign against them. And how tiny Aunt Lucy defeated the bad guys who’d kidnapped her by setting fire to the empty high-rise they were holding her in. How her ex-marine uncle Ed, whom everyone called Wood, came to meet his wife, Chris, while in the hospital recovering from a truck accident in Bosnia, and how he’d managed to save Chris from a stalker even though wheelchair-bound.

“That’s quite a family,” Bronco said when she seemed to run out of stories. “And now just think-your old man’s on his way to being president.”

At that her eyes jerked away from his, focusing, instead, on her hands, clasped around one drawn-up knee. Her lips tightened and he could see her throat move with her efforts to swallow an angry retort. He felt a dangerous and powerful desire to comfort and reassure her, to bare his soul, to tell her everything. It was because he didn’t dare do so that he needled her sarcastically, instead.

“With a family tradition like that, guess we should have expected he’d try and make like a hero, sending in the troops to rescue his little girl. I’m surprised he didn’t come himself. Like the cavalry. Flags flying and guns blazing…”

He watched the color of anger flare in her cheeks, then slowly fade, and felt the cold burn of shame in his belly when she quietly replied, “Believe it or not, my father is an incredibly decent and honorable man.” Her lips quirked slightly, flirting with a smile. “And pretty darn boring, if you want to know the truth. Actually-” she shifted, as if physically casting off the unease that had crept between them “-the only exciting thing that ever happened in our family, before Dad went into politics, anyway, was when he and my mother got divorced. That was an interesting time. My brother and I were total brats-Dad didn’t know what to do, until Dixie showed up.”

“Dixie? That would be…?”

“My stepmom. She’s the best. She pretty much changed everything.” Again her gaze slid away and she grew silent, not with anger this time, but with remembering.

“What happened?” he asked, his voice suddenly tight and air-starved. Because this time it was out of his own need to know. “Between your parents.”

She shot him a look, and her voice went up a notch in pitch, as if the question had surprised her. “Why did they get divorced?” Then she went on, and he knew it wasn’t surprise, after all, that gave her voice that brittle quality. “My mother left us. She ran off with another man, that’s why.”

Bronco said nothing. A pulse thumped against the walls of his belly, and he slowly shook his head. He knew the sound in her voice now, very well. It was the sound of anger. Of hurt.

She laughed, a soft musical note that didn’t sound at all like the cry of pain it was. “Yeah, can you believe that? Ironic, isn’t it? Both of us, suffering from the same mother issues. I was going to tell you yesterday in the meadow, but I never got the chance.”

He cleared his throat, searched for something, anything, to say and at last came up with, “How old were you?” Even though he already knew, roughly.

“I was ten,” she said, confirming it. “Old enough to be angry, rather than upset by it all. My brother, Ethan, was younger-it was really hard on him. He sort of regressed to being a baby for a while-cried over everything, sucked his thumb…stuff like that. It was Dixie who brought him out of it. And then, after my dad won custody of us, my mother tried to take us, anyway.”

“What do you mean, she tried? She kidnapped you?”

“Well,” Lauren said dryly, “as I said, she tried. I-we ran away, Ethan and I.”

We ran away. Such a simple unadorned declaration. But Bronco understood, as he gazed in silence at the young woman before him, that even as a child she must have been a force to reckon with. How wise he’d been not to underestimate her.

“How come you didn’t want to live with your mother?” he asked. “I’d have thought…being a girl…”

“No.” The word was clipped, final. Then she shrugged and grudgingly explained, “I told you-I was angry with her.”

“Sounds to me like you still are.”

She lifted her head and stared at him, defiantly, almost, and didn’t reply. After a moment Bronco picked up a granite chip from the floor of the cave and hurled it into the sunshine. He listened to the skittering noises as gravel loosened by the larger stone went tumbling down the canyon wall, then said in a hard emotionless voice, “Both our mothers left us, but we haven’t got the same issues, you and me.” He could feel her look, so he turned to meet it. “When your mother left, you blamed her. When mine left I blamed myself.”

Her eyes seemed to darken the longer he looked into them, the way the world grows darker when the sun moves behind clouds. In a very small voice she said, “Why is that, I wonder?”

He thought, I don’t know, but it’s the difference between us.

After a moment Lauren said, “I’m curious. Why didn’t your father go after your mother? I mean, if she didn’t want to live out here, why couldn’t the two of you go and live with her somewhere else?”

Bronco held himself very still and stared at the canyon walls, studded with the dark blots of juniper and piñon pines, and it was a long time before he said, “I don’t know, but I think for my dad it was a matter of self-esteem. He didn’t believe in himself enough. Didn’t believe he could make it in the white man’s world.” And Bronco understood that, because he’d felt that way himself once upon a time. But no more. No more.

“And you?” Her voice had gone quiet again. “When you got old enough, did you ever try to find her?”

He laughed, a soft wondering sound, surprised at the ease with which she’d found her way to the center of his soul. “I did, you know.” He’d gone looking for her just after ranger school, so full of pride in his accomplishment, wearing his badge of honor-his brand-new black beret. Ready at last to show her he was worthy of her love. Ready at last to forgive…

“And?”

“I found out she’d died,” he answered gently. “The year before.” He couldn’t look at Lauren’s face, but her silence was eloquent enough.

When, after several long moments she still hadn’t spoken, he ventured an inquiring look at her along one shoulder. “What about you? You still keep in touch with your mom?”

Her expression hardened, becoming almost childlike in its stubbornness. “Not really,” she said. And her voice was as frozen as her face, belying the spot of color that burned bright and hot in each cheek. She rose to her feet, dusting her hands, not looking at him; clearly, as far as she was concerned, the conversation was over.

Which was altogether fine with Bronco. Why should he care if she got along with her mother? It was none of his business.

Though he could have told her that the burden of anger and unforgiveness she was carrying around with her was going to take its toll on her eventually in all kinds of ways, and that she’d be a whole lot happier letting go of it now while she still had a chance to make it right, instead of waiting, as he had, until it was too late. He could have told her, but he didn’t. He knew she didn’t want to hear it, not from him. Not right now.

“Time to move on,” he announced, giving the cave wall a slap as he squinted into the sunlight, gauging the length of the shadows along the canyon wall. He knelt and began rolling his blanket, glancing up long enough to inquire with exaggerated diffidence, “Want anything more to eat before I pack it away?”

She shook her head, as carefully polite as he was. “I’ve had enough. I would like to, um, freshen up a little, though, if that’s okay.” Her eyes looked past him, shielded and distant; impossible to know what she was thinking.

“You’ll have plenty of time to do whatever you need to do,” he said stiffly, “while I’m saddling ol’ Red.” He rose and waved her ahead of him. “After you.”

She obeyed in hostile silence. As he followed her down the steep and rocky trail, Bronco was thankful for her anger, or whatever the torment was that was occupying her mind, keeping it too busy to notice that what had just passed between them was another very odd exchange for a kidnapper to be having with his prisoner.

After relieving herself-remembering to check first, very carefully, for rattlers-and wetting her face, Lauren felt better. Though it would have taken a lot more than a splash of water to wipe the memory of Bronco’s voice from her mind, saying so softly, so gently, “I found out she’d died.”

She’d died. As she made her way back along the creek to where she’d left Bronco and the horses, she took deep breaths and shook her head sharply, like someone fighting off drowsiness. But the voice persisted. She’d died.

And just as stubbornly, she denied it. Not my mother. My mother is healthy as a horse! And, she reminded herself with a bitter little spurt of laughter, she takes very good care of herself. Oh, yes, she still had time. Plenty of time.

Yes, but time for what? Time to forgive? Ruthlessly Lauren pushed that thought aside. She didn’t want to forgive. She wasn’t ready to forgive. Not yet.

The stream that meandered along the canyon floor was tiny, almost nonexistent in places. But the sand was moist and cool, and near the shaded banks beneath the willows, watercress grew green and lush. Through a copse of young willows Lauren could see Bronco working with the horses, rubbing them down with handfuls of willow leaves. They’d obviously been rolling in the damp earth near the creek; she could hear singsong cadence of Bronco’s voice scold ing, pretending exasperation as he brushed away dirt and foxtail. And she found herself smiling.

When she realized what she was doing, the smile faded and, instead, she felt lost and confused, too confused even to feel frightened. She stood and watched him, recalling the way she’d felt this morning, waking up with his scent in her nostrils and the remnants of erotic dreams still pounding in her veins. And then seeing him, shirtless and so intensely male… Watching him now from a distance, she didn’t know what to feel. The lines between fantasy and reality were blurring. It was becoming harder and harder to determine what she should feel, what she did feel…even what she wanted to feel. And it seemed too great an effort to try. Even the attempt made her feel weary, defeated.

“Best if you ride behind again,” Bronco said, glancing at her as she joined him. “We can move faster that way.”

He’d put on a shirt, an old one of blue cotton, softened and faded almost to white by countless washings. The contrast of that fragile fabric with the powerful body beneath it seemed a gourmet treat for the senses. She wanted to touch him.

She watched him pause to test the tightness of the girth and run his hands once more along Cochise Red’s neck and withers and under the edges of the blanket, checking for nonexistent burrs. “Can’t one of us ride bareback?” she asked, tearing her eyes away from his hands and looking past him to where the mares were idly grazing, nibbling delicately at the sparse grass.

“You can if you want to.” He tilted his head and squinted at her from under the brim of his hat. “It’s a hot day-horses sweat. Personally, I’m not big on sitting all day in salt water. And you with those sores…”

She nodded, looking past him, silently acquiescent though her heart pounded mockingly against her ribs. Only when the silence had grown enough to become awkward did she drag her reluctant gaze back to him and found his eyes already there waiting for hers, resting on her face, studying it. But to what purpose? She had no idea what he might be thinking; his eyes were like darkened windows, giving her back her own reflection.

Then, as he had once before, he took off his hat and reached out to place it on her head. She reared back reflexively and put up her hands to intercept it, but he was too quick for her and pulled it away before she could. He made a clicking noise with his tongue-a scolding noise-and his eyebrows tilted into a frown, those fierce upward slashes like a raven’s wings.

“You’re gonna burn,” he said flatly. “You need a hat.”

“So do you!”

He shook his head; his features seemed carved of stone. But for once, for one moment, she thought she saw-could it possibly have been?-hurt in his eyes. “I told you-I don’t burn. You do.” He reached toward her again, and this time she didn’t try to stop him.

Stop him? She had all she could do just to stand erect and still. The simple vital functions of her body suddenly seemed like complex tasks, requiring all her concentration to perform. Breathe…relax…don’t blink, don’t tremble…oh, please don’t sweat…breathe… And all the while her heart was pounding thump-thump-thump, rocking her with the force of its concussions, like an overzealous drummer.

She was horrified to hear herself whimper; she absolutely could not hold it back. Closing her eyes, she felt his body heat, more intense even than the Arizona sun, the momentary coolness of his sweat on her brow, then the perceptible shadow of the hat’s brim across her eyelids.

Bracing herself, she opened them again and saw that he wasn’t there any longer, that he’d already turned from her and lifted himself without apparent effort into the saddle. He was reaching down, waiting to give her a hand up, and his face-his eyes-wore no expression at all. She felt unbelievably foolish. Childish and weak.

She lifted and resettled the hat to suit her, then placed her foot in the stirrup he’d vacated for her and her hand in his. A moment later, safely up on Cochise Red’s back and inordinately pleased at having accomplished that with a modicum of grace, because she felt a need to redeem herself for her momentary loss of poise, she said lightly, flippantly, “So what if I do burn? What’s it to you?”

She felt his body jerk with that sardonic little grunt that wasn’t quite laughter. “It’s in my best interests to keep you in undamaged condition.”

Cochise Red danced sideways, impatient to be off, and Lauren had to grab for the back of the saddle. “Oh, right- I’m so valuable to you.”

Instead of answering, Bronco clucked softly and signaled the stallion with barely perceptible movements of his hands and body, and they moved off at a brisk walk, heading upstream.

Lauren drew in and then exhaled a slow and careful breath. Desperate for a distraction, she fixed her gaze on the canyon wall, watched the ever-changing pattern of layered rock and scrubby vegetation flow unevenly past as she said in a faintly ridiculing tone, “Might I ask where we’re going?” When he didn’t reply, she persisted with growing acidity, “Is it too much to ask, to be told where you’re taking me now?” His silence drew her unwilling gaze like a magnet. She stared at the back of his neck, furious with the failure of her will and wishing devoutly that her eyes had the ability to shoot forth fire. “I mean, it looks to me like your-what do you call them? Sons of Liberty?-are pretty much his-to-ry.”

She was sorry the moment she said the words, hearing that smug and vindictive voice coming from her own mouth. Justified or not-and the man had kidnapped her-she felt small and ashamed. As she sat slumped behind him on the back of her bloodred stallion and watched the shadow cast by the hat he’d given her bob up and down across his broad shoulders, she was thinking of last night and the way he’d come charging to her rescue in the nick of time-yes, just like the cavalry!-and the way he’d ridden like the wind through darkness and gunfire, shielding her with his own body while he carried her away to safety, not even knowing what fate might have befallen his friends and comrades. She hadn’t even thanked him for that. He certainly didn’t deserve her sarcasm and ridicule.

Before she could apologize, Bronco said in a quiet oddly uninvolved voice, “History? I don’t think so. That was only a small part of the group-just a training camp for the militia, actually. The Sons of Liberty have cells-subsidiary groups-and bases of operation all over the country. They’re not finished yet-far from it.”

“Well,” Lauren retorted, “your leader certainly is.”

“You know for a fact?” Bronco asked, and then was silent.

Oh, Lord, Lauren thought, and miserably closed her eyes. He didn’t deserve that, either. Who would have supposed she possessed such a mean streak? Rocked by the motion of the horse’s unhurried gait and wrapped in a blanket of dry desert heat, she let her mind drift, carried along on streams of memory through all the conversations she’d had with Bronco, about Bronco, reprises of her own thoughts and observations and discoveries…

He’s a half-breed Apache-kid never had a chance.

Helped him straighten himself out after he got kicked out of the military.

I do owe Gil McCullough a lot. He gave me a chance when nobody else would.

I owe more to him than I do to the government that’s been cheating, killing, starving, stealing and lying to my people.

Hunted to the last man…

Ol’ Gil looks out for me.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, then cleared her throat and repeated it in a louder voice, but stiffly, too, self-conscious all of a sudden. “I’m sorry-I know how close you are to Gil McCullough.” Bronco didn’t reply, and his rigid back gave nothing away. After a moment she went on, haltingly at first, then warming to her theme as the words he’d spoken in her daydream came vividly to her mind. “I can understand why you feel such a strong loyalty to him, after everything he’s done for you. I mean, as you said, he was there for you when nobody else was. And I can see why you’d be attracted to a group like his. From your perspective, considering all the terrible injustices committed against your people over the years, why would you feel allegiance to the United States? In a way it’s surprising there aren’t more Indians involved in these antigovernment organizations. I’d think it would even be understandable-”

“We tried it on our own, remember?” Bronco cut in roughly. “We got our asses kicked.”

He added a grudging, “Hang on!” just barely in time to warn her before Cochise Red erupted into a gallop.

Chapter 11

He might have let the stallion have his head, anyway, just for the hell of it, here where the upper canyon opened onto a highland plateau, like a grassy blanket thrown across the shoulders of the Scared Mountain, shimmering in a haze of sunlight beyond the screen of timber. But Bronco’s heart was black and heavy, his thoughts as turbulent as the thunderheads piled up around him on all horizons. Instead of riding for the enjoyment of the speed and power of the great animal under him and the unexpected and forbidden pleasure of a lithe and slender woman pressed against his back, he raced to keep the demons of his own thoughts at bay.

I understand…why would you…why…

But he held them off, those thoughts, fought them as if his life depended on it. And maybe it did. Self-doubt had always been his mortal enemy; early in his life it had nearly destroyed him. Now, at the first hint of its return, he was determined to vanquish it with any means at hand.

He blamed that self-doubt, along with its distractions-the confusion in his mind and the fear in his heart-for what happened next. So focused was he on outrunning the anger and the fear that he didn’t see trouble coming until it was almost too late. Until he felt the powerful body between his thighs tense and gather itself and a moment later felt the shuddering expulsion of a stallion’s battle scream.

Like an echo the reply came, and then Bronco saw them, too. Wild horses!

Damn. This was trouble. Trouble he should have been able to avoid. He’d known the herd was apt to still be in the area. He should have been on the lookout for them.

“Uh-oh,” he said under his breath, and then to Lauren, “Hang on!” as the two mares galloped by in helter-skelter confusion, ears pricked and eyes wild, and Cochise Red flattened his ears and lowered his head to charge. He heard her sharp gasp, felt her hands clutch at his belt, then almost convulsively wrap themselves tightly around him.

Then he was too busy to think of anything except how he was going to bring that crazy horse back under control before he got them all killed. Red was well trained, but instinct was stronger than any training. Right now the stallion was oblivious to the presence of a saddle and two human beings on his back, didn’t know or care that his ability to fight was going to be limited by the steel bit between his teeth. The bloodlust had taken him; adrenaline was pumping, he was spoiling for battle, and nothing Bronco could do was going to stop him.

He could only hope the wild stallion had more sense.

Bronco could see him now, up ahead and off to the left, a rusty battle-scarred black just emerging from the dust cloud thrown up by his fleeing herd. As the stallion came racing out, head down and ears flattened, to meet this threat to his dominion, Bronco braced his thighs against the pommel of the saddle, rose high in the stirrups and gave forth with a bloodcurdling yell, at the same time waving both arms wildly, like someone hell-bent on flagging down a bus. The black veered suddenly, slowing his charge, then circled around, shaking his head uncertainly. Bronco yelled again and waved his arms, and the black wheeled and went galloping off after his herd.

After that, it took only some gentle words and strong hands to bring Cochise Red back under control. Bronco elected to let the big bay run himself out, burn off his unspent adrenaline, before he pulled him up, blowing and trembling and drenched with sweat, in the shade of some pines at the meadow’s edge. A moment later the mares joined them-to be met with an angry squeal, lashing hooves and flashing teeth. Bronco laughed out loud, full of a strange kind of euphoria, now that the crisis was over. He bent to stroke the stallion’s sweat-slick neck, murmuring reassurances as he prepared to dismount, but halted, body tensed and half-turned in the saddle, when he heard a faint sound.

Lauren. His heart leaped guiltily into his throat. In the excitement he’d all but forgotten her. Recovering, he inquired with no more than understandable gruffness, “You okay back there?”

Instead of answering, she asked in a high angry voice, “Why did he do that?”

“Red? You mean, just now, with the mares?” Bronco chuckled, pretending nonchalance. “Aw, he was just chastising them, keeping them in line-reminding them who’s their lord and master.” He swung his leg over the saddle horn and dropped to the ground, then turned to offer Lauren a hand.

That was when he saw how set and pale her face was, and the fear and confusion in her eyes. The euphoria left him, and he felt chastened and ashamed. “Come on,” he urged gently as he reached for her and eased his arm around her waist.

For a moment more she resisted, refusing to look at him and clinging obstinately to the saddle skirt. He gave her an encouraging tug; she made a small sound-a furious whim per. Then suddenly she changed her mind, transferring her hands from the saddle to his shoulders, and allowed him to ease her down and into his arms.

He pulled her into a one-armed hug-taking no chances, he still kept a firm grip on the stallion’s reins-and she laid her head against his shoulder and hid her face in the curve of his neck and jaw. For a long time they just stood like that, he with his cheek resting on her hair and his heart beating like a jackhammer, Lauren breathing unevenly and trying not to tremble. He wanted to stroke her, pet her, comfort her with soft words and hard kisses. But he couldn’t. Didn’t dare.

After a minute, calling up all the reinforcements he could muster of will, responsibility and honor, he gave her sweat-damp head a nudge with his chin. “Hey, what’d you do with my hat?”

She gave a sharp sniffly laugh and pulled away from him, briefly swiping her nose with the back of her hand. She didn’t say anything-didn’t have to; the tears shimmering in her eyes were punishment enough. Then, since he felt lousy and sorry and full of yearnings he couldn’t assuage, and because he didn’t know what else to do about them, he got angry.

“I don’t know what you’re so upset about,” he muttered, irrationally wounded. He turned his back on the woman and her accusing eyes and began to walk the stallion into the trees. Behind him he heard the crashing noises the mares made as they followed at a discreet distance and, after a suspenseful interval, the sound he’d been straining his ears for-the crunch of human footsteps in pine needles, hurrying to catch up.

“I’m not upset,” Lauren said as she stumbled into step beside him. But her voice was breathless, tense and trembling. “Try terrified. As in, scared out of my wits.”

Bronco glanced at her. His heart began to beat faster. “What for? You weren’t in any danger.” It was a bald faced lie and he knew it. Nevertheless he felt entirely justified in adding bitterly, “I’d think you could trust me just a little.”

Her bark of laughter made him wince. “Trust you? This from the man who kidnapped me?”

He swung around to face her, blocking her way. “I’m also the man who saved your life,” he retorted. “Don’t forget that.”

As she was staring at him, eyes wide and incredulous, cheeks flushed, seething, it occurred to him that it was probably the dumbest, most asinine conversation he’d ever had with a woman in his life. That it was making him feel-and act-about eleven years old. And that he didn’t have any idea in the world how to fix it.

All he seemed able to do was stare back at her, with his heart thumping and his breath like fire in his lungs, while thunder rumbled way off in the distance and the muggy monsoon heat rolled in around him.

And then, as he stared at her, it came to him gradually that the anger inside him had gone, and in its place was a great quietness. It was the quietness, the peace, that comes with certainty. Suddenly he knew, absolutely knew, what was going to happen-what had to happen-if he didn’t find some way to stop himself from kissing her.

Stop himself? It would have been easier to stop his own beating heart.

In the instant when he knew for certain what he was going to do, he sucked in a breath-and panic knifed through him like an Arctic blast. It was something like the way he’d felt-oh, long long years ago-the very first time he’d prepared to hurl his warm body into water deeper than he was tall. When he reached for Lauren, when he felt her body, lithe and resistant in the curve of his arm, he knew the same moment of utter certainty that he’d just done something incredibly foolish and possibly fatal. When he looked into her shocked eyes, felt her breath flow hot across his lips, he knew he was going to drown.

But then, as it had happened to him all those years before, just when things seemed farthest beyond recall, he knew an almost overwhelming sense of relief, redemption and joy.

Forgive me, he prayed, to no one, to everyone. And then he kissed her.

She did resist a little at first, breath gusting in a small shocked gasp, hands fisting against his chest, spine arching backward in the automatic but futile attempt to postpone the moment of contact with that unyielding body. But he must have known it was only instinctive, a reflex, like a horse shying away from the first touch of the saddle. Because he ignored it and, instead, pulled her lower body hard against him and swooped forward to claim her with a swift and fluid grace, like a cougar springing.

She felt the heat of his body, the coiled tension in his muscles, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach. She felt the strength ebbing from her own muscles, and instead of pushing against his chest, found herself clutching his arms, his shoulders, his neck, sure they were all that kept her from falling. She had one stunning glimpse of his warrior’s eyes, fierce and hot and black as coals, before his mouth came down and covered hers, and then, like a patient slipping under anesthetic, her mind simply left her.

Off it drifted, with its questions and confusion, its troubled doubts and self-disgust, leaving her in a state of utter peace and profound relief, where the only thing that mattered was what she felt, right now, this minute. No more asking herself, why? How could she feel this way about this man? The very last man she should feel anything for at all! For some reason she would probably never understand, her heart had chosen him. That was enough. In that single moment when his mouth claimed hers, she knew it was exactly what she’d wanted-had been wanting, des perately wanting-for a very long time. Probably from the first moment he’d touched her, there on the dance floor in Smoky Joe’s Bar and Grill.

With his mouth like a brand on hers and his tongue slashing across her lips like liquid fire, her gasp of shock became a whimper of need. Her lips opened; giddy and intoxicated, she sipped, savored, drank him in like a fine fiery brandy, with a little gasp at the first heady taste of him, then a deep-throated moan, a primitive sound of pleasure.

He growled in response and withdrew-but only for a moment, and only to search for a better fit, a truer melding. His lips returned to nip and tease. His tongue tormented her with gentle mastery. She heard her own voice whisper-not words, just sounds, sounds of encouragement and pleading-and his voice, guttural in response, soothing, promising.

She felt his hand, so gentle in her hair, so warm on her throat. Felt its moist heat seeping through the fabric of her T-shirt, its palm perfectly nesting her breast. She felt her knees begin to buckle, felt his arm there supporting her as they both began to sink, in a wholly natural way, toward the pine-needle carpet at their feet.

And then-just then-she heard another voice, a husky whicker. As if it was a signal bringing him out of a trance, Bronco drew a shuddering breath and turned away from her. The man who a moment ago had held her in an embrace the likes of which she’d never known and kissed her as she’d never been kissed before, kissed her and made her believe in heaven, the promised land, El Dorado, leaned now across the saddle skirt and supported his bowed head. He muttered something she couldn’t understand, until he gave his head a violent shake and repeated it in a louder harsher voice: “I can’t…do this.”

“No!” Lauren cried in shocked and trembling protest. “You can’t…you can’t undo it.”

He threw her one fierce black look, then gripped the reins and, ignoring a strident little whinny of protest, began to walk the stallion deeper into the timber. Tense and fighting for control, she hurried after him. “Don’t you dare walk away!” She sounded like a jilted schoolgirl and didn’t care. “You can’t do something like that and just…pretend it never happened.”

Without looking at her he mumbled thickly, “Yeah, well, it never should have happened.”

“Yeah, well, here’s a news flash for you-it did happen.” Oh, she was furious-breathless with fury. And frightened. Terrified that he meant it and that what had just happened to her might never happen again. “So what now, huh? What now?”

He stopped and turned his face to her, and it was like an effigy carved in stone. “I should never have let it happen. It’s my responsibility to see that it doesn’t happen again.”

For a few moments Lauren was speechless. Not even when he’d first kidnapped her had she felt such rage; she wanted to fly at him, scratch his eyes out, rip at that impassive face with her fingernails-until she looked again, more closely, at his eyes. For once unshielded, she could see reflected in them everything she was feeling and more-pain and passion, frustration, sorrow and bitter regret.

“Because of them?” she asked, her voice still high and taut, but with ebbing anger, the beginning of understanding. “Because of Gil? The cause? The…whatever you call ’em of Liberty? They barely exist anymore! Why should it matter?”

Why should it matter. Gazing at her, Bronco felt all but swallowed up in heaviness and turmoil. The storms in his soul were as violent as any he’d ever faced; he felt himself becoming lost in them, desperately in need of a compass. What had he done? He’d sworn to protect this woman, and instead, he’d done her grievous harm. Now she stood before him wanting to know why, and he couldn’t even offer her an answer. Not one that would make sense to her.

Still, he felt compelled to try, with as much of the truth as he could possibly give her. “It matters to me,” he said stiffly. “It’s personal-a matter of honor. I took you away from your family. I’ll see you’re returned to them in the same condition as when you were taken.”

“Too late,” she said softly, her smile small and crooked.

Too late. He returned her gaze in silence, while the turmoil inside him grew. Somewhere in the distance thunder rumbled, and he felt its echoes deep in his own belly.

She spoke, suddenly, in a voice too loud, too harsh. “Do you think this makes any sense to me?” Her eyes glistened dangerously. He watched them in dread, desperately afraid of what it was going to do to his heart when the first tear fell. “It makes no sense to me at all! Everything logical and reasonable in me tells me I shouldn’t feel what I feel for you. By all rights you should be the last man I’d ever find myself mixed up with. And believe me,” she added with a strange note of bitterness in her voice, “if ever there was a one for doing what she’s supposed to do, it’s Lauren Brown. Which doesn’t alter one bit the fact that I do feel…something for you-God, don’t ask me what!” She threw her hands up as her voice broke finally with a choked helpless sound. After a moment she drew a ragged breath and whispered, “All I know is…I don’t know how I’m going to get back on that horse with you.”

A growl came from deep in Bronco’s chest, barely audible even to him. But Cochise Red turned his head toward him and bumped his shoulder with his muzzle, then nibbled and snuffled his hair in mute sympathy. Something shivered through him-part laughter, part physical desire-and holding the breath that would have betrayed those things to her, he silently took Lauren’s hand and began to walk, bringing her along with him.

Presently he jerked his head toward the horse ambling beside him and said gruffly, “You can ride-I’ll walk.”

A high liquid sound of pure frustration made him glance at her in alarm, his heart thudding hard and fast against his ribs. But she had her head down and he couldn’t see much of her face, just the warm pink stain of sunburn, and the strands of blond hair that had worked loose from her ponytail, sweat-darkened and sticking to her neck and temples and the sides of her cheeks. He jerked his eyes away from her and held his breath while desire rumbled again in his belly and the turmoil inside him grew.

“Tonight…when we stop, wherever we stop, what then?” she asked softly, and without looking he knew her eyes were on him again. He didn’t answer, and she went on in a gentle musing tone, almost as if she was singing to him, a sad sweet song. “Will you do what you did last night-leave me your blanket and go off somewhere? I hardly think to sleep, so…what? To stand watch? Keep your lonely vigil? Only tonight, there won’t be any sleep for me, either-do you seriously think I could? Do you think I won’t lie awake counting my own heartbeats, straining my ears for your footsteps, every nerve jumping at the slightest sound? Will you do that to me?”

She finished in a choked whisper, and he realized then that he was no longer walking, that he had stopped and was facing her, still holding her hand. He realized, too, that although desire still boiled inside him, the turmoil had left his mind, and in its place, like an old familiar friend, had come that inner peace, the quietness he’d felt just before he kissed her.

In that quiet he heard the splash and chuckle of water, and knew he was very near the place where the stream that flowed down through the canyon began, cascading over boulders from springs high on the shoulders of the Sacred Mountain to pool temporarily here in natural basins. It was a place he knew well, a place to which he’d come many times before in search of refuge and healing for his soul. What he didn’t know was whether it was fate or purpose that had brought him to this place, at this time. It didn’t seem important for him to know.

He lifted his hand to her face and felt the warm velvet of her skin against his fingertips, the moist flow of her breath across his thumb. “No,” he said softly, “I won’t do that to you.” And silently added, Or to me.

He drew his hand down the side of her face to her neck and gazed deeply into her eyes, and saw in them the same storms that raged inside him. Taking her hand once more, he made a soft wordless sound and a slight head movement of encouragement, and they walked on together in silence, leading the stallion.

When they came near to the bottommost of the series of basins, Bronco secured Cochise Red to a fallen tree with a short lead rope. He untied the saddlebags, the poncho and bedroll and hitched them under one arm, then turned again to Lauren and silently held out his hand. She reached for it without a word or a moment’s hesitation, eyes clinging to his as if it wasn’t just her hand but her life she was giving into his keeping.

Her eyes were large and dark-and yes, there was fear in them, but the fear didn’t trouble him now that he understood what it was she was afraid of. And because along with fear, he also saw hope. And trust. Somehow, against all logic and reason, she trusted him, this woman he’d taken and held by force and against her will. That knowledge both exalted and humbled him.

How can I trust him? This makes no sense to me! Confusion was an aching mass inside her; she wanted to weep with it.

The truth was, she placed her hand in Johnny Bronco’s only partly because she did trust him, because at the center of the storm of confusion within her was a tiny core of certainty that he, and only he, could make the confusion go away. But the honesty in her forced her to admit the truth-she went with him mostly because there was a fire inside her, a pounding in her belly and a melting in her knees, a wanting so fierce she’d have given him her hand whether she trusted him or not and walked into hell with him, if that was where he chose to take her.

But it wasn’t hell he led her to. It was Eden.

Farther up the side of the mountain, sunlight shimmered on rocky cliffs and a hawk soared and screamed against a backdrop of billowing thunderheads. But here on the lowest level of the cascade, virgin forest crowded against the cliffs, creating a moist and shady bower where new young pine trees fought the decaying carcasses of their fallen elders for growing space between the moss-covered boulders, and ferns and wildflowers sprang from every crack and crevice.

Bronco led her through the rocks and fallen logs, following a trail he obviously knew well, then out onto a rocky apron where, over countless eons, water falling from a ledge above had worn away the rock to form a natural basin. Here he paused to lay the saddlebags and blanket down, then slowly turned her toward him.

Gently, so gently it hardly seemed as though he touched her at all, he took her face between his hands. Slowly, so slowly it seemed as if it would take her entire lifetime, he lowered his mouth to hers. His lips were soft, so soft on hers, his tongue sweet as sun-warmed honey. Her breathing stopped; her breath backed up in her lungs, and her body rocked with the force of her heartbeat. And then he pulled away.

Left suddenly bereft, she opened her eyes-and her wordless whimper of protest died. His black and glowing eyes were locked on her face while his fingers worked their way down through the buttons on the front of his shirt. Like one in a trance she watched him pull the shirttails from the waistband of his jeans, unbutton the cuffs and let the shirt drop to the ground in a pile of soft sky-blue. His chest glistened with sweat; she swallowed, certain she would experience the salt-slick taste of him on her tongue, and was surprised to find her throat as dry as dust.

One by one, never taking his eyes from her face, he removed his boots, his belt, his jeans, until he stood splendidly naked before her. Then he turned and walked to the edge of the basin. When he was ankle-deep in the water, he lifted his hands and pulled away the band that held his hair in its neat tight knot.

Utterly motionless, Lauren stood and watched him stride deeper into the pool. He walked without a trace of self-consciousness, his body so straight and strong, buttocks hard as rocks and all the muscles in his back glistening in the sun, and long hair streaming over his shoulders like strands of black silk. He’s beautiful, she thought, with no sense of surprise. So beautiful. She felt her legs trembling, and for reasons she couldn’t begin to understand, the sting of tears in her eyes.

He seemed to glide through the water to where the cascade fell from the rock overhang far above and then, standing with feet braced apart, lifted his face to the sky and flung his arms wide. Lauren caught her breath in awe as crystalline water drummed and splashed over his head and shoulders to ripple and foam away from his powerfully muscled thighs. It seemed a long time that he stood there, with the water streaming over his face and body like a veil, holding himself absolutely still, as though, she thought, he were making of himself some kind of holy offering. Then he turned to her and silently held out his hand.

She stayed where she was, tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and feet rooted solidly to the ground-not because of fear, although he’d never looked more fierce, emerging from the water in all his manly splendor, like some ancient river god, with his hair slicked back and plastered to his neck and shoulders like seaweed, exotic features etched in bold relief by sunlight and deep shadows. She stood motionless because she had lost faith in the capability of her legs to support her body, and silent because of her tongue’s inability to form words. She kept her eyes glued to his unsmiling face and was relieved beyond all reason when she felt his hands lightly touch her shoulders.

The air had become molten, too thick and heavy to be drawn into something as frail as lungs. And her heart, surely it would do itself an injury, banging so violently against the confines of her chest!

Somehow she held herself erect, not reaching for him, understanding that it wasn’t yet the time for touching, even though her body felt his magnetism like a planet feels the pull of the sun. She held herself still, proud that her trembling was only inside, as he slowly drew her T-shirt over her head and dropped it on the rocks beside her. The air felt oven-hot on her skin, but at its touch her nipples drew hard and tight.

Dropping to one knee, he drew off her boots, then her jeans, her underpants, her socks, and when she was as naked as he, rose in one swift fluid motion and took her hands. Smoldering eyes and swelling manhood betrayed the passion raging inside him, but his hands were gentle and cool as he led her, moving backward step by step, into the pool.

The water felt like ice to her heated body, but she didn’t gasp or shiver or cringe. She’d already sensed that there was something more spiritual than sensual about what was happening between them, and she would have stopped her own breath rather than disappoint him. Now, with the water’s cold scalpel slicing at her skin, stripping away the dust and sweat, the tiredness and anger and fear, she thought she understood the symbolism in that simple ritual of cleansing.

For herself, she felt as if an old skin had been scoured from her body, leaving her a shiny new one, pure and unscarred, vulnerable and untouched. Might it be possible- it seemed as though it could be-for them to cast off at the same time the trappings and encumbrances of their too-divergent worlds and become, at least for a time, just two human beings, stripped to their most elemental state: male and female-Man and Woman? And to come together as such, fresh and clean and new.

What his thoughts and purpose were she could only wonder, because he spoke not a word to her as he guided her under the falling water. Maybe she should have wondered, as well, why she went with him so trustingly-but she didn’t. Nor did she think it strange any longer that she should trust so implicitly the same man who had kidnapped and held her prisoner; it seemed to go with her new skin, that childlike sense of innocence.

She stood quiescent and utterly still beneath the water, with eyes closed and the drumming of the cascade drowning all senses, save that of touch. Oh, yes, touch. She felt the cold glide of water and Bronco’s hands. So gently, so surely, they touched her, pouring pure clean water over her, beginning with the top of her head and flowing downward over brow and temples, eyelids, cheeks, nose and lips. She felt them glissade along her jaw, slide on under and down her neck and throat, across her chest to her breasts, and smooth the water around them so sweetly that even though her nipples drew tight and hard as diamonds and her skin seemed showered with goose bumps, she didn’t shiver. She felt his hands skim the ticklish sides of her ribs and underarms, stroke down her arms, down, down to the very tips of her fingers, then back up again to the rounds of her shoulders, flatten across her back and briefly cup the nape of her neck before plunging down the long sensitive curve of her spine.

Beneath the surface of the water now, she felt his hands, felt one slide between her buttocks, the other across her belly and deep between her thighs. Fingers introduced cool pure water into all her body’s secret places-so subtly, so gently, she neither gasped nor moaned, but only melted.

“Open your eyes-look at me.” The command was harsh and guttural, and carried to her ears even above the drum and splash of the waterfall. Dumbstruck, she obeyed, though desire coiled and writhed in her belly and she couldn’t feel her legs at all.

She saw his face through a rainbow shimmer-a warrior’s face, fierce and dark with its angry slash of brows and bright obsidian eyes. And she wondered how it was that the same man could have a face so fierce and hands so gentle. Then his features grew blurry, and she felt his hands on the sides of her neck just below her ears, and his thumbs framing her face, holding it upturned and still. Her world darkened. Her eyes closed. And she fell, trembling at last, into his kiss…

Chapter 12

Bronco didn’t carry her back to the blanket on the pine-cushioned rock shelf at the edge of the pool. This woman was not and would never be his to conquer. He was as much in awe of her as he’d ever been of any human being, and to do her honor it seemed important to him that they come to this together, walking side by side, as equals.

He stepped before her onto the blanket and knelt down, still holding her hand. Then, gazing up into her shimmering eyes, he drew her slowly toward him. When she was astride his thighs, he guided her hand to his shoulder and left it there while he reached for her and urged her closer still. He touched his lips to the taut coolness of her stomach, and when her skin shivered beneath them like the hide of a nervous mare, he felt the hot surge of arousal deep in his own belly. Suppressing it, he gently parted the damp curls at her center and kissed her there, kissed her long and deeply, until her knees buckled. Then, with tender laughter he eased her down onto the blanket.

He held her as he’d once dreamed of holding her, with the desert heat spread over them like a blanket and thunder grumbling in the distance, and her body in perfect harmony with his. He held her and felt her chilled body grow warm and pliant, like fine leather in the sun. And he pleasured her with his hands and fingers, mouth and tongue, in all the ways he knew, until she sobbed like a child in his arms.

It was only then that he realized, to both his shock and amusement, that she was furious with him.

“Why did you…how can you do that?” she sobbed, gasping and hiccuping as she struggled in his embrace. “I want to…I want you to…I want you inside-”

But he stopped her there, smothering her sob and his own frustration and calming them both with his deep and drugging kiss. When she was limp and unresisting once more, he pulled himself away from her, and with his hands framing her face, gazed deeply into her eyes. “Can’t do that, darlin’,” he murmured huskily, though there was an ache in his loins and a building pressure behind his eyes…a fire in his belly, a thirst he couldn’t quench. “Wish I could. Sorry.”

After about two beats he saw her eyes brighten with understanding. And then her mouth popped open, and he knew-dammit, he knew-she was going to fight him on it. And because fighting her on any subject wasn’t what he wanted to do just then, he gave a chuckle to mask his pain and with his lips close to her ear, whispered, “As good as my hands and mouth felt to you-that’s how good yours’ll feel to me.” He watched her eyes widen, darken, and begin to glow as he took her hand and guided it to his aching loins.

He didn’t say anything more but just left it to a groan to convince her of the truth of what he’d told her.

It was only much later, when they lay entwined in the heat of the waning afternoon, drowsy and utterly drained, that Lauren felt her doubts return. They came into her con sciousness little by little, in a cowardly shamefaced way, like jackals slinking in the shadows at the edges of the campfire light.

The first stirrings of unease came, ironically, in the midst of pleasure as she was basking in the joy of discovery, sliding her hand with deceptive idleness over the smooth planes of Bronco’s body. His body was new to her; she wanted to know every inch of it, learn every nook and cranny, memorize every scar and flaw. Though while scars he had, in fascinating abundance, she had yet to find a flaw.

His skin was so smooth. The uniformity of its color and texture fascinated her. Her own pale hide abounded in freckles, spots and moles, irregularities of every kind and description, and seemed susceptible to every environmental influence known to man. Bronco’s skin, on the other hand, had the satiny and impervious feel of polished wood. She reveled in letting her hand glide across the undulations of his torso and the unyielding ridges of his chest, marveling at how smooth it was, almost devoid of hair. His face, too-his Native American genes were definitely dominant in that regard.

And that was when she felt it, those faint but unmistakable stirrings of unease. Something about that particular fact bothered her, but she couldn’t think what it was. It reminded her, though, of all the other times she’d felt that same puzzling uncertainty, without being able to pinpoint a reason for it. Just…something. Some little inconsistency she could never quite put her finger on. She remembered that only a day or two ago she’d been raging in silent fury about the duplicity of this man, certain he was the world’s most accomplished liar and never ever to be trusted.

And yet she did trust him, didn’t she? She certainly had trusted him, even to the point, only a short while ago, of being ready to throw aside all caution and common sense. Her hand stilled; her stomach churned. For the first time in days the question burned in her mind: What’s wrong with me?

Bronco’s arms tightened around her reflexively, then relaxed as she pushed herself up on one elbow in order to look into his face. His face. A warrior’s face-fierce, savage, hard. And yet, gazing down upon its exotic planes and sharply honed lines, she felt the bottom drop out of her stomach, and the parts of her body that still throbbed and tingled with the memory of his touch begin to swell in eager anticipation all over again.

Who are you? Johnny Bronco or John Bracco? Which one, of all the men you’ve shown me, is the real you?

“Something botherin’ you, Laurie Brown?” His voice was a warm growl, like the sleepy purr of a big cat.

She gave her head a small hard shake of denial that failed to cancel out her troubled frown. “I’ve always considered myself an intelligent person,” she said in a low voice, which tightened with embarrassment as she continued. “And fairly savvy, too. I’m not without experience. I know what’s what.”

Bronco’s eyes smiled back at her, black and gleaming as always, but soft now, like those of a healthy animal. “I’m sure you do.”

She caught a breath in a reflexive jerk of protest. “But I was ready to make love with you. Without protection. I wanted to. I would have.” What’s wrong with me?

“I wanted to, too,” he said gently, his fingers toying with the ends of her hair. “You don’t know how badly.”

“But you didn’t.”

He shook his head, and the softness left his eyes as he captured her hand and held it still against his chest. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

Inexplicable pain filled her, restricting her breathing. Trying to make light of it, she gave a high false tinkle of laughter. “Would it have been such a terrible thing?”

For a long time his eyes held hers, once more hard as obsidian and bright with facets that might have been anger…or pain. Beneath her hand his heart beat hard and fast and out of sync with her own. At last he said in a flat expressionless voice, “Maybe not terrible. I’ve got as much faith in your good health as I do my own. But…awkward for sure.” She felt his body shift and tighten, as if he’d physically hardened himself against her, though his voice remained quiet, almost gentle. “Lady, you are the president’s daughter-or going to be. I’m not about to return you to your loved ones pregnant.”

She could only stare at him; her face and throat felt swollen. Dimly she realized that his fingers were stroking the back of her hand, rubbing the third finger, the place where a ring would be. An engagement ring.

She felt the bump of his ironic laugh. “Can’t you see the headline? It’d read like a damn tabloid: President’s daughter bears half-breed Apache kidnapper’s child! No thanks.”

What could she say? There was no way to answer words so ugly and hurtful. Lauren held herself still and listened to their echoes inside her head, and finally focused on the one phrase he’d spoken that she could replay without pain. “Are you going to return me?” she asked in a small air-starved voice. When he didn’t immediately respond, she sat up slowly and, reclaiming her hand, used it to shield her breasts from his glittering gaze. “Am I ever going to see my family again?”

“You’ll see them.” He sat up, too, and in almost the same motion rose to his feet.

“When?” she cried, twisting around in order to follow him with her eyes, her heart stumbling even then at the savage beauty of his naked body. “When it’s too late?”

He was gathering up, putting on his clothes, and didn’t reply.

Bearing a platter of sandwiches, Lucy marched into the living room where the Brown family had gathered to await the latest news. Right behind her came her sister-in-law, Chris, with an enormous bowl filled with melon wedges and grapes. She was followed by Carmen, the housekeeper, carrying a pitcher of iced tea and wearing a look of patient suffering.

Though Lucy had only arrived at the Tipsy Pee that morning, it wasn’t in her to be idle. With Dixie fully occupied with seeing Rhett through this crisis, it seemed only natural that she should take over the supervision of the household. No one had tried to dissuade her; her own family was pretty much used to her bossiness, and the housekeeper seemed, if not thrilled by the invasion, at least resigned. Carmen had lived through a good many of life’s storms, large and small; she’d survive Lucy.

Setting the platter on a hastily cleared coffee table, Lucy gave the arrangement a quick inspection and nod of approval, then went to join her husband, who was over by the big front window keeping an eye on the media encampment that had sprung up near the main gate. So far, she was glad to note, it looked like just the usual candidate’s entourage. And the local law-enforcement people, augmented by a dozen or so FBI and ATF agents masquerading as ranch hands, seemed to be doing an adequate job of keeping the invasion out of the house and yard. So far. If the media ever got wind of what was really going on behind the fieldstone walls of the sprawling ranch house, Lucy thought, it would take the National Guard to keep them out.

As if he’d been thinking along the same lines, Mike slipped his arm around her and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. At almost the same moment, the study door opened and Rhett came into the room, with Dixie right behind him.

My God, he’s aged ten years, Lucy thought as she and Mike, her brother, Earl, and his wife, Chris, all gathered instinctively closer to one another. Closing ranks, she thought. Circling the wagons, as families do in troubled times.

For some reason that gathering, that closeness, made Lucy think of those who weren’t there. Mom and Dad, of course; she’d never missed them more. Mama, Daddy, your children sure do need you. Gwen, with her droll wisdom and lilting laugh.

And the children-how diminished and small their family group seemed without them. No wonder, Lucy thought wryly; young people seemed to take up such an inordinate amount of space. But, oh, what she wouldn’t give to have them all here right now, laughing and boisterous, arguing and eating-always eating-music thumping, long legs draped over furniture and clothing strewn across the floor. Eric was here, but he and his cousin, Caitlin-Earl, or rather, Wood’s and Chris’s daughter-had gone out riding with Carmen and her husband’s youngest granddaughter, Sara. They’d both be here when it counted, no matter what happened-at fifteen and sixteen they were old enough to share both the family’s triumphs and tragedies-but for now, let them enjoy the illusion of a carefree summer vacation a little while longer.

As for the others, they hadn’t even been able to reach Ellie, who was somewhere on a Mexican beach protecting sea turtles. Ethan wouldn’t be arriving until tomorrow. And Lauren-precious Lolly. What a lovely person she’d turned out to be-hard to believe, thought Lucy, that she’d once been such a god-awful brat. Losing her was unthinkable. Unthinkable.

“News?” Mike prompted softly.

Rhett scraped a hand back over his hair, and his arm found its way around Dixie. “The camp has been secured,” he said tonelessly. “There were casualties-they won’t say how many. But none among our people-that we do know. They found a considerable number of weapons, plus files and records that should lead to a whole lot more-maybe even the source. So ATF is happy.” He paused to take a breath while everybody else in the room held theirs. Then he plunged on. “They didn’t find Lauren or ATF’s undercover man, but they did find evidence she’d been held there, and by all indications, she’s being treated well. They even rigged up a private latrine for her, with a portable toilet.” A smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes flickered like a faulty lightbulb.

“So,” Mike said, “it looks like the ATF man got her away before your people got there.”

There was a fraction of a second’s pause before Rhett said heavily, “That’s one scenario.”

“What aren’t you telling us?” That was Earl, the ex-marine. Lucy could almost see him chomping at the bit, wanting to be doing something, wanting to be where the action was.

For a moment Rhett’s face darkened. Then he drew a shaky breath and his eyes looked lost and desperate. “Their leader, McCullough-they didn’t find him, either. It looks like he got away. The man that took Lauren…he’s still out there somewhere.”

Thunder was rolling around and bouncing off the mountain peaks by the time they’d left the last of the tall timber behind. Bronco knew by his watch there ought to have been at least a couple of hours left before sundown, but the thick overcast had brought a premature twilight-heavy, purple and oppressive. His moments of temporary insanity this afternoon had put them behind schedule; he knew there was no way in hell they were going to make it to his grandmother Rose’s before nightfall, or a cloudburst, caught up with them. And from the looks of those clouds and the sound of that thunder, it was even money which one was going to get there first.

One way or another, he was going to have to find them some kind of shelter. He had a place in mind, but it was still some distance away. The question was could they get to it in time. He thought about it, looking around to judge the terrain, which had flattened out considerably and was forested now mostly with juniper and sagebrush. Then he turned his head and said to Lauren, “Feel like a run?”

He felt her start, as if she’d jerked herself awake. He knew she’d been quiet back there, but brooding, he’d have thought, rather than dozing. “Sure,” she said, her voice slurred and thick.

“Hang on.” And he felt an undeniable pang of regret when she grabbed hold of the back of the saddle, instead of wrapping her arms around his waist.

She’d been careful to keep her distance from him after they’d left the spring, maintaining those torturing inches between them as if she thought he had thorns. Not surprising, he supposed, after the way it had ended. What did surprise him was how much he missed her now, how much he longed for the feel of her body against his. Somewhere along the line, his body had developed a craving for her, a need he felt in his muscles and bones, in his skin and pores. He was already wondering what he was going to do for the rest of his life without her.

The rain hit as they were climbing the last of the gently sloping foothills that undulated away from the base of the huge pile of boulders he and his friends had always called, without much imagination, the Rocky Hill. It hit hard, with great stinging drops that almost instantly became a suffocating curtain that left little room for air.

Bronco heard Lauren give a shocked little cry. “Hang on!” he yelled, and grabbed her hand and yanked it around him as he urged Cochise Red into a flat-out gallop that carried them the rest of the way to the foot of the hill.

Drenched and half-blinded by the water streaming into his eyes, he led the stallion with Lauren now in the saddle, up the zigzagging path that wound between the rocks. His destination was a single wedge-shaped boulder that stood out from the side of the mountain like an airplane wing-or, according to Grandmother Rose, an ironing board. Clucking and cajoling, he managed to coax the lathered-up horse in under the overhang. Lauren slid out of the saddle and dove for deeper shelter while he got Red calmed down and tethered to a boulder. Then he, too, headed for cover.

Then, for a few minutes all they could seem to do was gasp and swear and brush the water out of their eyes, while the rain poured all around them with a roar like a freight train, and lightning flickered and flashed and the thunder boomed so loudly and so near they could feel its vibrations in the ground beneath their feet.

“God!” Lauren gasped when she was able to speak. “What is this? I’ve never seen anything like this in my life!”

“Indians call this a male rain,” said Bronco with a half smile. “All sound and fury and not much use to anybody.”

She smiled her appreciation. “What’s a female rain?”

“Gentle,” he said. “Nurturing. It feeds the earth and makes things grow.”

“Ah.” For a long lingering moment her eyes rested on his face, and then she pulled them abruptly away. Even without touching her he felt her begin to shiver.

“Better get out of those wet clothes before you catch pneumonia.” He untied the poncho from the back of the saddle and gave it a shake. “Put this on. We’ll lay your clothes out on the rocks. Back in here where it’s dry there’s enough heat left in ’em-they’ll probably be dry by morning.”

She nodded, and he started to drop the poncho over her head-then stopped when they both realized her T-shirt was going to have to come off first. She hesitated for one awkward moment, then swiftly yanked the sodden thing up and off. “Okay.” It was a breathless whisper, felt rather than heard.

Proud of his stoicism, Bronco gazed silently at the hard tips of her breasts as he lifted the poncho and let it fall onto her bare shoulders.

“But,” she said in a jerky voice he could barely hear above the noise of the slackening rain, “you’re wet, too.”

“I’m fine,” he said, as gruff and macho as he could make it, valiantly suppressing his own shivers.

Apparently not well enough. Because the next thing he heard was, “You’re freezing.” And then, with shivers bumping the words, “I’m…c-cold.” He turned slowly to look at her. In the waning light beneath the overhang her face looked small and drowned, her eyes huge. “There’s room for both of us,” she said.

He held his breath as she tossed the T-shirt toward the nearest rock, then slowly bent and pulled off one of her boots. After a moment, almost in imitation, he pulled one off, too.

Then suddenly it seemed as if they couldn’t get their clothes off fast enough-either of them. Her breath came in desperate whimpers, his in soft grunts, and their shivers seemed to intensify even as the storm around them slackened. When they were both naked, she lifted the poncho and he ducked under it and came up with his mouth hard on hers, his arms wrapped around her chilled body and her breasts firm and cold against his chest.

What happened then he didn’t expect-could never have even imagined, much less prepared for. He felt something inside him, some fragile vessel of sanity and self-control, break, shatter, burst or simply disintegrate. And suddenly set free were all the feelings, all the passion, all the emotions he’d been keeping there, locked safe inside, set free to pour through him in a raging, devastating, terrifying flood. What was he to do with such feelings? He couldn’t possibly contain such emotions, control such passion. Not since he was a child had he been called upon to try.

Fear and longing tore through him and erupted in a gut- wrenching groan. Her body was so strong and vibrant, so soft and fragile in his arms. He couldn’t hold her tightly enough, touch her completely enough. Oh, how he wanted her. Wanted to be inside her, wanted her inside him, wanted her with a wild and desperate hunger. But how could he bear it if he hurt her now?

Her breath gushed in helpless whimpers as he reached for her, cupped her with his hand, felt with his fingers for her wet yielding softness. He drank in her whimpers with a growl of masculine triumph as he pushed deep, deep inside her, aching inside himself, needing to be inside her, needing…needing…

Her whimpers became a high continuous keening, and he felt her body come apart in his hands. He would have used those same hands, then, to hold her together and comfort her while she collapsed against him with soul-stirring sobs. That’s what he would have done. But the next thing he knew her arms were twined around his neck and her legs clasped around his hips, and her warm and still-pulsating feminine softness was pressed against his hot and throbbing shaft, and he desperately feared, was utterly certain, that he was lost.

No! With one wild anguished cry he summoned all his strength, all the tattered remains of his will and his honor. Throwing his head back until the cords of his neck felt like cast iron, he wrenched himself away from that sweet comfort and raised her high in his arms, lifting her onto a chest-high boulder and pulling her legs over his shoulders. Holding her open to him, he sank into her softness, buried himself in her, his face, his mouth, his tongue.

He held her while her body bucked and writhed, arched and tightened like a drawn bow. And then she screamed, a cry of feminine terror, total surrender and a wild and savage joy.

Shaken, he clutched her to him, rocking her and murmuring words of comfort and contrition into her hair. But sobbing, she slithered out of his grasp and downward along his body, and he felt the coolness of her tears on his fevered flesh-and then her mouth. And with a groan he gave himself up to her, knowing his only salvation lay in a quick and cataclysmic release.

Bronco watched the first rays of the sun streak across the shoulders of the Sacred Mountain and tried to think whether he’d ever done such a thing before-ever slept all night with a woman in his arms and watched the sunrise with the sweet scent of her in his nostrils and her warm breath pooling on his skin. He didn’t think so; if he had, he’d have surely remembered it.

He wasn’t aware of having made any noise, but Lauren stirred and gave a vocal yawn, a good-humored waking-up sound. She raised her head and looked at him with the untroubled gaze of a small child, and then casually, as if it was something she did every day of her life, leaned down and kissed him.

Before he could identify the unfamiliar flutterings that action generated in his heart, before the first drumbeats of response deep in his belly had time to find their own rhythm, she lifted her head and looked beyond him at the vista of the plateau spread out below and breathed a single word. “Wow.”

For a few minutes she didn’t say anything more, while the sun splashed gold across the purple land and edged the tattered scraps of last night’s storm clouds with coral, pink and mauve. And then she caught her breath. “Look. Is that…?” Far out on the lightening plateau, a cloud of dust rose and caught the sunlight and became a plume of gold.

“Looks like the wild horse herd,” Bronco said just as a piercing whinny from directly below them confirmed it.

“Oh,” Lauren whispered, “it’s so beautiful.”

Something clutched at Bronco’s heart-a longing for, a hope of, a tiny glimpse of heaven. With tightening throat he muttered, “I’ve always thought so.”

Her eyes came back to him, bright and full of smiles. Since he was beginning to realize she was one of those people who woke up fast, fresh as a daisy and ready to meet the day, he put a warning hand on her shoulder and said gruffly, “Careful-don’t sit up too suddenly.”

She cringed in the process of doing just that and squinted over her shoulder at the solid rock just inches above her head. “Oh, wow,” she said. “We’re a rock sandwich.”

Bronco laughed; he supposed she hadn’t realized when he’d squeezed them in here last night how narrow the crevice was. He’d forgotten himself. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “When I was a kid you could sit up in here. It’s gotten a lot smaller. Here-if we move farther out, we’ll be okay.”

He’d made their bed in the narrow space where a second slab of rock overlapped the upper side of the protruding boulder, leaving the sheltered place below for the horses. There hadn’t been a flat space large enough for two to stretch out under the overhang, anyway. The crevice had made a cozy enough bed, once he’d eliminated any possibility of rattlers.

Now, on his elbows he scooted himself and the blanket backward out of the crevice and onto the ledge. Lauren moved with him, pulling, tugging and straightening, until they were clear of the overhang. Then she stretched her arms over her head and drew her legs into a cross-legged sitting position.

“So,” she said, looking around with bright-eyed curiosity, “this is another one of your childhood haunts.”

He couldn’t answer immediately, distracted as he was by the incredibly arousing vision of her long pale legs and firm round breasts just barely covered by the drape of one of his old undershirts. As sudden and breathtaking as a punch in the gut came the memory of those legs coiled around him last night, and the whisper-soft brush of her thigh against his cheek, the scent and taste of her, that wild primitive cry.

“Let me guess. I’ll bet you called this Lookout Rock.” She was smiling at him, fresh and sweet as the new day.

Bronco shook his head, and not only because she’d guessed wrong about the name. He was feeling a little light-headed and having some trouble reconciling this morning’s Lauren, wholesome as milk and cornflakes, with last night’s mind-blowing, self-control-shattering wanton.

“In a way I guess it was a lookout,” he said, struggling to a sitting position himself. “But my cousins and I used to call it the Smoking Rock-not in the presence of any grown-ups, though.”

“Really? Smoking Rock…” She tilted her head, intrigued.

“We called it that,” Bronco drawled, half smiling, “because this is where we’d come to smoke the cigarettes we’d stolen from our elders. And eat the cookies we’d swiped from Grandmother Rose’s kitchen so she wouldn’t smell the tobacco on our breath.”

“Dang,” exclaimed Lauren, laughing, “you were a wild child.”

“Told you I was. Most all the stories you’ll hear people tell about me are true-and a lot more nobody knows about but me.” He listened to his own words and felt a cold shell creep back around his heart. After a moment he threw her a smile that now felt strained and tight. “What about you, Laurie Brown? You ever do anything bad when you were a kid? Not even bad, just…you know, naughty, a little wild and crazy.”

“Before I met you, you mean?” she said dryly, then frowned at her hands, laced together across the open space between her knees. “I think I was a spoiled brat when I was very small. But-” she drew herself up straight, in ironic demonstration of what she was saying “-I grew up fast after my folks split up. I became the classic ‘good girl,’ a model child. I did everything that was expected of me-valedictorian, college, law school…” She stopped, alarmed and suddenly fragile. She feared, if she spoke one more word, her face would crumple into tears.

The wave of emotion had taken her by surprise, coming out of nowhere just when she’d been feeling so happy, so carefree. But thinking of the child, the girl, the woman she’d been… So much had happened in so short a time, and she wasn’t that person anymore! And never would be again. And that realization filled her with a sudden sharp sense of loss, of regret and fear. Somehow, in her rush to escape from her old familiar life, she’d run herself into a blind alley, and now she didn’t know where to turn.

She became aware that Bronco had taken her hands, and that once again he was gently stroking her left ring finger.

His voice, normally so warm and deep, had a sharp and sandy edge. “Your engagement-was that expected of you, too?”

She pulled her hands away. “How did you know I was-”

He broke in with his familiar snort of laughter. “Shoot, it was in all the papers. Maybe a White House wedding, they said.”

Lauren looked away, words of explanation backing up behind the swelling in her throat. She swallowed, then swallowed again, before she heard him ask, “Why don’t you wear a ring?”

Then it was surprisingly easy to say, “I gave it back. Called it off.”

He wouldn’t leave it there but asked in that soft-rough voice, “How come?” She shook her head; tears had begun to stream silently down her face. “You decide you didn’t love him?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered, unable to look at him, wretchedly ashamed. “I thought I did. But I just realized one day that I wasn’t…happy. Not only that, I was miserably unhappy. Oh-” she brushed savagely, angrily at her cheeks “-I know how that must sound. Poor little overprivileged girl-the perfect life, the perfect family, the perfect fiancé-yes, even Benjamin was perfect! And I was unhappy? How dare I be unhappy! But I was. And in pursuit of happiness, I chucked it all-my job, my fiancé, my family… Oh God-” She clapped a hand over her mouth, cutting herself off in midsob. And she stared at him, awash in self-revelation, trembling with the shock of sudden understanding.

“That’s what she did,” she whispered, hollow and cold inside. Even her tears had stopped-she felt too frozen to cry. “That’s what she said-my mother-when she left us. She said she wanted, deserved, a chance to be happy. I guess I did exactly the same thing, didn’t I? God, it’s funny, all those years I tried so hard not to be like her-everyone said how selfish she was-so I was determined I wasn’t going to be like her. And in the end it turns out I’m just like her, after all. Isn’t that just too…ironic?” She tried to laugh, wanting desperately to cry, aching with self-loathing. Oh, how judgmental she’d been. How self-righteous. How steadfastly unforgiving.

“Don’t underestimate the pursuit of happiness,” Bronco said dryly. “It’s a powerful human imperative-right up there behind life and liberty.”

“I guess…I understand that now,” said Lauren in a whisper and a flood of freshening tears. “I just hope I get a chance to tell her someday…how sorry I am.”

There was a pause, and then Bronco reached behind him for the blanket and began rolling it into a tight bundle. “Time to go,” he said, and once again his voice was bear-rug soft and curiously gentle.

Lauren blinked the last of the tears from her eyes and rubbed them away with her fingers. She sniffed and asked, “Where, Bronco? Where are you taking me now?”

For a long time he looked at her, with eyes glowing black and deep, like a panther’s coat. Then…

“Home,” he said softly. “I’m taking you home.”

Chapter 13

The sun was climbing up a smoky sky splotched with gray and white clouds as they made their way across the plateau-taking a long slow time of it, it seemed to Lauren. What had appeared from above to be flat terrain had turned out to consist of undulating ridges separated by gulleys and washes and thickly dotted with cacti and numerous other species of inhospitable plant life. Though her impatience with their progress probably had more to do with the words Bronco had spoken to her just before they’d started out than their actual rate of travel.

Home. He was taking her home. He’d said so, and he had no reason to lie to her. Though where that home was or how he planned to get her there, she didn’t know; she couldn’t see him driving her up to her father’s doorstep, wherever he might be at the moment. The local police station seemed equally unlikely. On the other hand she couldn’t believe he planned to drop her off at the nearest phone booth or bus depot, either.

Home. The images in her mind and the longing in her heart evoked by that word had more to do with people’s faces than any particular place. She couldn’t wait to see them again-her father and Dixie, her brother and, yes, her mother, too. When this was all over, she told herself, just as soon as she could get to a telephone, she’d call. Yes, and tell her what? It had been such a long time; they were practically strangers. One phone call wasn’t going to mend sixteen years of anger and hurt, she knew that, but it was a start. It wasn’t too late. Now that this nightmare was all but over, once she got her life back, things would be different.

Different? Oh, everything was different now-for her. But what about Bronco? What was to become of him, this strange and contradictory man who’d kidnapped her, then saved her from almost certain death? Would he be in prison? Or assuming he was able to avoid capture, would he be off in some godforsaken wilderness camp planning further mayhem with another anti-government militia group? Or would he somehow manage to just go back to being John Bracco, half-Apache horse trainer with a driver’s license, credit cards and a drinking problem? And how could any of those scenarios possibly fit into her life?

The answer was simple and unarguable. They couldn’t. He couldn’t. No way. End of story.

The end. Lauren’s stomach turned over and tears stung her eyes. The pain in her heart was so sharp and terrible she gave an involuntary gasp.

That got her a soft, “You okay back there?” from Bronco. Concerned about her lack of a hat, he’d insisted she wear the poncho over her head like a burnoose as protection against the broiling sun. As a consequence, she was in imminent danger of death by steam-cooking.

She gulped two quick breaths and was able to reply in a grumpy tone, “I’m fine. If you don’t count suffocation.”

“Leave that thing on. Can’t have you getting sunburned.”

“What difference does it make? Oh, I forgot,” she jokingly said, “I’m so valuable.”

He gave his dry ironic snort and muttered, “Not anymore,” as Red, responding to an unseen signal, broke into a gallop.

Lauren laughed, a sudden sunburst of joy. No, not anymore. She was no longer a hostage. He was taking her home.

In disobedience of orders, she let the poncho slip below her shoulders and lifted her head to give the cooling wind access to her sweat-damp hair. She watched Bronco’s long black hair, loose on his back, gently lifting and falling against the soft cotton fabric of his shirt with the rocking rhythm of the stallion’s gait. And she couldn’t resist the impulse to lay her face against it and breathe in the warm masculine scent of him one more time. Oh, please-not the last time. She loved the smell of him-clean salt-sweat, human and horse; sun and earth and pine needles and a hint of herbal soap. She would remember that smell for the rest of her life.

The two mares cantered by, tails lifted to the wind, feeling their oats. Their belated arrival earned them barely a whicker from a subdued Cochise Red; the long trek through mountains and storms had taken its toll on the stallion.

“They’re still with us,” Lauren said, raising her voice above the rush of the wind, the horses’ grunts, the thump of hooves and the squeak of saddle leather. She’d feared they might have run off with the wild horses, though to her intense disappointment she’d seen no sign of the herd since sunrise. They’d be going back to the high country where the good grazing was, Bronco had told her, now that the storm had passed.

“Horses are herd animals,” he said now. “And we’re their herd. They’ll stay with Ol’ Red here-unless a better deal comes along.” He grinned at her over his shoulder. “They’re not a lot different from humans in that respect.”

Lauren punched him on the back. She was unprepared when he swore and brought the stallion to a shuddering bone-crunching halt. “What?” she gasped, blinking away tears of pain from a bitten tongue and a bruised pubic bone. Then, in the sudden quiet she heard a new noise-a rushing roaring noise.

Bronco had lifted himself high in the stirrups in order to see farther ahead. Now he settled back in the saddle, still swearing and shaking his head. “Damn,” he said. “Damn, damn, damn.”

“What is it?” Her breasts had shivered hard and tight, brushing against a body suddenly taut and twitchy with ill-contained frustration.

“Flood,” he replied succinctly as he urged Cochise Red forward at a cautious walk.

A few paces farther on she could see it for herself. See that the earth ahead of them ended abruptly at the edge of a deep gulley. The bank on which they stood was higher than the one on the far side, and at least twenty feet below, a torrent of yellow-brown water boiled and churned and roared by with the speed and noise of a runaway freight train.

“Flash flood,” Bronco said, his voice distant and tired. “All that rain yesterday-last night. I told you it was a male rain-no good to anybody. The soil’s baked dry-the rain comes too hard and fast to soak in. So it just runs off-from every slope and down every little ravine-until it all winds up here. A few miles farther down it’ll spread out and either soak into the sand or stand on the hardpan until it eventually evaporates. But that won’t do us any good.”

“We have to cross that?” Lauren asked in a small voice.

“Yeah,” he replied on an rusty exhalation, “we have to cross that. Except we can’t. So we’ll have to go around it-one way or the other.” He turned to look at her and she saw the bleak set of his features, the furious black glitter of his eyes. “It’s going to take time…”

Time they didn’t have. Though neither of them said so, the knowledge that they were running out of that precious commodity lay like a chasm between them. What day was it? She’d lost track and couldn’t bring herself to ask him. The convention-it must have started by now. The acceptance speeches would be on the final day. How would they possibly still get there in time? Oh, Daddy, I’m so sorry.

New sounds intruded on that vibrant space-a squeal of surprise, a frightened whicker.

Bronco jerked around in the saddle. He muttered, “Oh, hell,” and an instant later was on the ground and running toward the edge of the wash. Still clutching the back of the empty saddle, Lauren watched in frozen fascination as the hindquarters of the gray mare, Linda, sank from sight, while her front hooves still lunged and scrabbled futilely at the edge of the ravine. Then all at once, undercut by the flood waters, the entire section of bank gave way. With a terrified scream, the mare disappeared. And right behind her was Bronco, plunging feet-first down the slide, into the raging torrent.

Just that quickly it happens. The unthinkable. Lauren felt the searing pain of a scream rip through her throat, heard the echoes of her own voice hanging in the hot shimmering sunlight, crying out his name.

Then, somehow, she was in the saddle and the reins were in her hands, and the big red stallion was thundering along the edge of the wash while she strained to catch a glimpse of one black head in all that water. She could see the mare thrashing, struggling to stay upright-if she started rolling, she was as good as lost. But where was Bronco? She screamed his name over and over. “Johnny! Johnny!”

There he was! Yes-she could see him, churning through the water, arms reaching for the frantic mare. But then, before he could grab hold of her mane, the current caught him, tore him away and rolled him under.

“Bronco!” Searching frantically for a glimpse of him, Lauren raced Cochise Red flat out along the edge of the gully, racing the torrent, refusing to accept that Bronco could be gone. Gone so completely, so suddenly. Just that quickly the unthinkable happens.

Then, once again she saw him, clinging with all his strength to a clump of willows far out in the middle of the maelstrom. Crying his name, sobbing with relief, she reined the stallion to a halt and all but fell from his back. “Hang on, I’m coming!” she yelled, frantically trying to free the coil of rope that was tied onto the front of the saddle.

There-she had it in her hands. Now-she needed something to secure it to. A rock or a bush… She smacked her forehead with her palm. Of course-Cochise Red! He was a quarterhorse, bred and trained to work cattle, strong enough to hold steady against the pull of a bucking steer. Oh, but he was tired, bone weary. Would he be strong enough to hold against a flood? A swift look around told her she had little choice-there were no rocks close enough to snub a rope around, and all the bushes seemed pitifully small. It was the stallion or nothing-and if she did nothing, Bronco was going to drown.

In seconds she had the rope securely tied to the pommel of the saddle, and just for good measure, snubbed it twice around the horn. “Whoa, boy, hold steady,” she crooned, stroking Cochise Red’s neck. She didn’t know what commands to give him; she could only hope he’d understand.

Then she was running, uncoiling the rope as she ran. The bank wasn’t as high here, but the flood was much wider. Bronco seemed so far away. Would the rope even be long enough to reach him? Could she throw it that far?

He was waving his arm, shouting at her. “Hold on,” she yelled, “I’m coming!”

“Go…go!” The words carried to her above the roar of the water. “Don’t try it. Take Red and go!”

“Are you crazy?” Lauren shouted. “Just hold on. Don’t you dare let go!” Standing as close to the edge of the flood as she dared, she hurled the coil of rope with every ounce of strength in her body-and watched in dismay as it fell with a plunk-far short of its target. Sobbing with frustration and fear, she reeled it in and tried again-with the same result.

“Go!” Bronco yelled. “It’s too far! Take Red, follow the flood until you come to the road. Go, dammit! You have to get…to your father…in time. Please…just go!”

Lauren was no longer listening. She was sobbing, furious with him beyond all understanding, muttering over and over under her breath as she reeled in the rope one last time, “I’m not going to leave you. I’m not going to leave you…”

Okay, but she had to accept the fact that she wasn’t strong enough to throw the rope out to him. It seemed to her there was only one thing left to do: she’d have to take it to him. Oh, she couldn’t possibly swim against the current, she knew that-she’d only drown, and then where would Bronco be? But there was Red. The stallion was strong. If they started far enough upstream and swam hard across the current, they could make it to the middle of the flood before it carried them past the willows.

With no other options open to her, she didn’t waste time thinking about it. Climbing into the saddle, she backtracked Cochise Red along the edge of the gully, then dismounted and tied the free end of the rope around the base of the biggest strongest-looking bush she could find. Then, fervently praying, she lifted herself once more into the saddle and urged the stallion forward. Forelegs stiff and trembling, he plunged over the side of the bank. She leaned far over his neck, coaxing and encouraging, begging and cajoling. “Come on, big boy, we can make it…we can do it…”

And suddenly they were in that muddy churning torrent. She felt the water hit with unbelievable force, felt Red’s feet lose their purchase, and for a horrible heart-stopping instant believed that they were lost. Then all at once she knew that the stallion was swimming, swimming gallantly, powerfully, swimming for his life, and all she could do then was hold on and try as best she could to keep him headed in diagonal across the current, on a line toward the clump of willows.

The current was so swift! More quickly than she could have imagined, before she even had time to think about it, the willows were looming ahead, dark above the churning rapids. And then suddenly Bronco’s hand was reaching toward her, clutching at the stallion’s neck…at the saddle…at her. Through a muddy veil of water his eyes blazed at her, black and bright with fury.

“You idiot!” he gasped. “You should have left me!”

“Shut up! Just shut up!” she sobbed, her fingers tangled in his hair, in his shirt. “Did you think I’d leave you? Just shut up and hold on. We’re getting out of here.”

But to do that they’d have to pull themselves back along the rope, working against the current-and against Cochise Red, who was doggedly determined to continue on as he had been, swimming with the flow.

“Let him go!” Bronco shouted, struggling to get a better grip on the rope and on her. “It’s the only way. We have to let him go!”

Lauren gave a shriek of protest and shock, gulped water and came up choking and gagging to watch the stallion surge away from them, lunging and fighting against the waves-and then disappear from sight. But she had no breath for sobs, and no time for tears. Because almost in that same instant, the rope that was their only lifeline suddenly went slack, and she and Bronco, too, were being swept away with the flood.

After that she was aware only of churning water and Bronco’s arms around her and pain and exhaustion and terror-and something inside her. A voice, a spark, a rage that would not let her give up. And then, when she no longer believed it possible, the feel of something solid beneath her feet. She thought it must be a dream, a miracle, but she fought to hold it nonetheless, to gain a step, then another. Clinging to each other, half dragging each other, she and Bronco pulled themselves and each other inch by inch out of the clutches of the current. And then she was on her hands and knees, retching and vomiting muddy gritty water onto the sunbaked rocks.

A few feet away, Bronco lurched to his feet, swaying. “Why didn’t you…” he rasped, then crumpled to the ground.

Lauren crawled to him and gathered his head into her lap. She held him tightly cradled against her chest, sat and rocked him, peeling strands of sand-crusted hair away from his proud warrior’s face, crooning in a hoarse and half-drowned voice, “I won’t leave you, Johnny. I won’t leave you. I won’t leave you.”

“Johnny’s strong. He’ll be okay.” Grandmother Rose looked up, and for a moment her eyes glittered in her broad lined face like little black beads. Then they went back to watching her fingers cut strips from tin cans and roll them to make the “tinklers” that would adorn the large hand-woven basket near her feet. When completed, the bead-decorated basket, along with others made by Grandmother Rose’s daughters and daughters-in-law, would fetch a pretty penny from a mail-order catalogue company headquartered in Gallup. “He’ll take the sweat bath with his uncle Frank and cousin Roger,” she said. “Then he’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

Lauren nodded, but it was too great an effort to reply. She felt utterly drained, limp and bone weary. She thought she might never find the energy to speak a word or move a muscle again. She felt so good here-safe and comforted and warm.

She was sitting on a blanket in a “summer shed,” a shelter made of wooden poles, open to the breezes on three sides and thatched overhead and along the back wall with willow branches. It was surprisingly comfortable there in the shade, even in the midday heat. A few feet away Rose’s great-grandson Matthew slumbered peacefully in his “cradle board,” propped against the back of the shed. His mother, Roger’s wife, Rachel, had gone into Rose’s modest but modern prefabricated house to prepare lunch; the menfolk would be hungry when they emerged from the sweat lodge. Like Grandmother Rose, Lauren was dressed in a “squaw dress,” a voluminous soft cotton skirt with a loose-fitting matching top. Lauren’s was fuchsia; the old lady’s was turquoise blue. It, too, was surprisingly comfortable and cool.

From where she sat Lauren could see the brush corral in the shade of two gnarled cottonwoods, where Cochise Red and the little gray mare were being brushed, fussed over and fed handfuls of corn and hay by a half-dozen assorted-size boys in jeans and T-shirts, cowboy boots and cowboy hats. She and Bronco had come upon the two horses a little ways downstream from where they’d managed to drag themselves from the water, standing together with heads low and flanks heaving. Red’s saddle had been hanging half under his belly; the saddlebags and blanket were gone. Of the buckskin mare they had seen no sign.

Lauren’s eyes shifted to the sweat lodge, a canvas-covered frame that had been set up on the banks of what must normally have been a small meandering stream. Now it, too, was a churning freshet of muddy water, rushing down to join the main flood. She could hear it roaring in the distance, like the rush of wind through trees. She’d always liked that sound, but now, from this day on, it would remind her of terror and panic, the feeling of utter help lessness that comes with the certainty that death is imminent.

She gave an involuntary shiver. Bronco’s grandmother glanced at her, then, following her gaze, made a sound that reminded Lauren of his dry one-note laugh. “Yeah, that flood come down early this morning. Heard it when I woke up-still dark, but I knew what it was. Took out part of my garden, too. Good half of my peppers and most of the pinto beans.” She shrugged; what, after all, could be done about weather?

Then the old woman surprised Lauren by reaching for her hand, taking it up in fingers as smooth and dry as leather and giving it a gentle squeeze. “Johnny’ll be fine,” she said again, softly. And after a moment added as she went back to her task, “His soul’s troubled, but Frank can help him with that.” His uncle Frank was a shaman, Bronco had told Lauren. He was teaching his son, Roger, to be a shaman, too, which was a process that could take years.

Grandmother Rose glanced up, her bright black eyes almost hidden in the creases of her smile. “It’s not a bad thing, you know, to have a troubled soul. What’s bad is to have no soul to be troubled.” Her eyes shifted once again to her busy hands. “Johnny didn’t have a soul for a long time. His mother took it with her when she left.” Lauren must have made some small sound, because the old woman’s eyes darted back to her, wide open, and now as warm as black fur. Oh, how they reminded Lauren of Bronco’s eyes. “He’s got it back now, though, I can tell,” said Rose. “Maybe you gave it back to him.”

“Oh,” Lauren protested in a crackling voice, “I don’t…” Under the soft cotton dress her heart was thumping, and she no longer felt safe in the summer shed. She felt hot and scared. She’d been feeling scared ever since the realization had come to her, there on the edge of the flood, that she’d been willing and prepared to give up her own life to save Bronco’s.

As if she sensed how Lauren felt, Grandmother Rose veered abruptly away from that subject. At least, it appeared for a moment as if she had.

“Johnny’s mother wasn’t a bad person,” she said in a gossipy way. “She was a sweet girl-a real sweet girl, too kind-hearted for her own good. You ask me, I think she left because she got her heart broke one too many times.” She dropped another twist of metal into the pile that had collected in the dip of her skirts between her knees, then stirred her fingers through them, listening with satisfaction to the jingling sound they made. “She was a teacher, you know. She used to say it broke her heart to see them, those bright beautiful little children, so talented, eager and full of promise, wasted.” She looked at Lauren and now her eyes seemed sad. “So many of our children, you know, they grow up and the alcohol gets them. They get to drinking, get themselves killed on the highway, or they go on the streets and get killed there, like my cousin Lutie’s boy, Daniel. Got knifed in a bar fight in Albuquerque.” She shook her head and went back to cutting and twisting. “Couldn’t take it anymore, Grace couldn’t. She had to leave-went back home. She lived back there in the East, you know.” She looked up suddenly. “You from back East?”

Lauren shook her head. “Iowa.” To her, “east” meant New York, New England.

Grandmother Rose wrinkled her nose and said, “Huh. I was back East once. Long time ago, after my husband, George, got killed in Korea. They gave him a medal, and I had to go back there so the president could give his medal to me. All I remember was a whole bunch of trees. Never saw so many trees. Trees, trees, everywhere you looked. Drive down the road and it was like going down a long green hallway-nothing on either side but trees. Never could figure out which way was which-east, west or whatever-no mountains to guide you by. How a person’s supposed to know which way to go, I’ll never know. Funny thing is-” she paused to toss another jingler onto the pile with a tiny clink “-all those trees, and most of ’em won’t even grow out here at all. I tried it-brought a few home with me, watered ’em, took care of ’em. One or two struggled along for a while, but eventually they all died. But now, some trees, like those willows there-” she pointed up at the greenish-gray thatch overhead “-they grow just about anywhere. You give a willow enough water, it’ll grow wherever you plant it.” Her eyes slid sideways to twinkle at Lauren, and she smiled again in that sly way. “You so tall and slim you remind me of a willow, in a way.”

While Lauren was choking and trying to find an answer to that, Rachel came to the door of the house and called, “Grandmother, how’s Matthew doing? He still sleeping?”

“Like a baby,” Grandmother Rose replied with a cackle of laughter. “He’s such a good baby,” she said to Lauren. “Reminds me a lot of the way Johnny was when he was a baby.” She reached out her hand and again gave Lauren’s a squeeze, but this time it seemed to Lauren there was something urgent about it. “Johnny’s a good man, too. A good man.” She placed a hand on her ample chest. “I know it-in here.” Then she shook her head and added dryly, “Even if he’d like everybody to think he isn’t.”

In the darkness of the sweat lodge Bronco’s mind drifted with the rise and fall of his uncle’s voice singing the traditional songs. He no longer understood the words, but it was his hope, his prayer, that the soothing familiarity of the chants might cover his troubled spirit as the steamy heat enveloped his body, and cleanse it of confusion, doubt and fear as the sweat cleansed his body.

But as the ancient songs filled his ears, it was only im ages of the past that filled his mind, while his path through the present and into the future remained clouded, lost in darkness.

“You look troubled, nephew,” his uncle Frank said to him as they were emerging from their revitalizing dip in the flooding creek. “Your sweat did not restore you to peace and harmony?” He spoke sardonically, smiling a little; he knew very well that it had been many years since Bronco had participated in the traditions of his father’s people.

Bronco’s reply was equally ironic. “Peace and harmony?” he said. “What’s that?”

“Anything I can do to help?” They were walking back toward the brush corral now, leaving Roger to put the lodge to rights.

Bronco threw him a glance. His uncle’s broad face was serene, smooth and unlined-very little there to remind him of the father whose face he could barely recall. He drew a deep breath and was surprised to hear himself say on its exhalation, “I work for the government, Frank. Did you know that? The same government that hunted and slaughtered our ancestors and tried its best to destroy us. I guess…I’m having a little trouble with that.”

“I can understand that,” his uncle said with a hitch of his broad shoulders. After a moment he went on in a conversational tone, “My dad-your Grandpa George-he fought in Korea, did you know that?”

“Yeah,” said Bronco, “I guess I did.”

“Got killed over there. They gave him the Medal of Honor-Mama went back there to Washington, to the White House, to get it, shook hands with the president and everything.”

Bronco nodded; he’d heard the story many times. He thought it might have been one of the factors that had induced the army time and time again to give him yet one more chance.

They paused in the shade of the cottonwoods and looked out across the sun-blasted landscape. After a while his uncle said softly, “This land has seen a lot of changes since it was given to our ancestors by Changing Woman. Yes, people have tried to destroy us. Destroy our ways. But they haven’t succeeded.” He nodded his head toward the summer shed, where the bright dresses of the women stood out like flowers in a shady garden. “Our ways, our traditions, our language still survive. At the same time our people are learning to thrive in the white man’s world. We have our own industries-cattle and lumber, ski resorts and tourism. We have hospitals, stores and computers in our schools. The other stuff-” he hitched his shoulders as if throwing off a burden “-that’s the past. We don’t live in the past. We live in this world. It is this world we must live in harmony with.” He stopped and looked at Bronco with a smile. “That’s how I see it. For what it’s worth-if it helps you any.”

“It does,” said Bronco, and meant it. He gathered his damp hair in his two hands and swiftly twisted it into a knot, then untied the bandanna he’d knotted around his forehead. “Tell you what,” he muttered, embarrassed now, “right now I could use another kind of help.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“I need to borrow your truck for a few days. I’ll reimburse you for it.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Frank, his eyes twinkling as he jerked his head toward the brush corral. “I’ve got a mare comin’ in heat pretty soon. You leave that big red stud here for two-three weeks and you can have my truck-free of charge.”

“Deal,” Bronco said, laughing as they shook on it.

A moment later, though, as Bronco’s gaze drifted once again to the summer shed, his uncle said in a teasing voice, “Son, something tells me the U.S. government’s not the only thing that’s troubling you.”

Bronco’s reply was a gust of dry laughter. What could he say? He didn’t even know what to think about what had happened to him today. His mind had been in a turmoil ever since that moment of truth out there in the middle of the flood, when he’d realized he’d rather take a chance on losing his own life than let Lauren give up hers. And that it had nothing to do with duty, responsibility or honor.

His uncle Frank didn’t have anything more to say, either; both of them knew that kind of trouble was something a man had to work out for himself.

There was silence in the dusty brown Ford pickup as they drove away from Grandmother Rose’s, until Lauren turned to look back through a haze of dust at the brush corral under the cottonwoods. She looked for a long time, until the dirt road dipped into a dry wash and even the tops of the trees disappeared from view.

When she turned and faced forward again, Bronco cleared his throat and said gruffly, “Don’t worry about him. He’ll be there when you can get back for him. Be well taken care of, too.”

She nodded, and he could see her swallow a couple of times before she spoke. “I know. It’s just…hard to believe it’s really over.”

Bronco laughed-one brief dry note. “It’s not over yet. We’re still a long way from Dallas.”

Chapter 14

A long way. And to Bronco, not nearly long enough.

Can’t believe it’s over, she’d said. But for him, it wouldn’t really be over until Dallas, until he’d found a way to hand Lauren Brown over to her father or, at the very least, someone in authority who could get word to her father that she was safe, preferably in time to prevent the breakdown of the American political system. And then, if all went well, he’d never see her again. He’d slip away, reunite with SOL and continue his job of monitoring the country’s underground militia and forget he’d ever been so stupid as to fall in love with the daughter of the next president of the United States.

The president’s daughter! Even in his mind the words sounded incredible. The problem was, the words didn’t seem to be getting through to his heart. All his heart remembered was the way she’d looked at him, standing in the spring, eyes drenched and dark with trust…the lush scent of her body, the warm ripe feel of her in his arms, her sobs of passion and joy.

John Bracco had always believed he’d never know the joys of home, family and a lifelong mate. Loving a woman had seemed too great a risk. But now, all he could think about were this woman’s arms around him, the pounding of her heart against his ear, drowning out the rush and roar of the flood, and her voice, like a mantra of hope, I won’t leave you, Johnny. I won’t leave you.

“How far is it to Dallas?” Lauren asked.

Bronco’s heart gave a guilty leap as he glanced at her, though he knew there was no way she could know what he’d been thinking. His runaway pulse and singing senses would be invisible to her, safely hidden behind the impassive mask he’d carefully cultivated and conveniently blamed on his Apache heritage. “About a thousand miles,” he replied.

“I suppose flying’s out of the question.” Her tone was dry, and he answered her the same way.

“Without money, credit cards and picture ID, yeah, I’d say so.” And, he silently added, without the federal ID and ATF contact codes he’d kept safely hidden in a secret compartment in his electric shaver, now lost to the flood.

There was a long pause while the pickup rattled over a section of corduroy. When the road’s surface evened out enough to allow conversation again, Lauren said without conviction, “You could drop me off at the nearest police station.”

Bronco glanced at her. “Yeah, and you’d tell ’em what?” he asked quietly. “Some crazy story about being Rhett Brown’s daughter, and you were kidnapped recently by a secret militant antigovernment organization named SOL, but now you’ve managed to escape and survive a flash flood? You think they’re going to believe you? Unless this has leaked to the news media, which I doubt, how often has your picture been in the papers or on national TV recently? Even Gil didn’t know who you were until he ran a routine check to see if that check of yours was good.”

She made a soft sound and muttered, “So that was it.”

“You’d probably convince somebody eventually, but no telling how long that might take. In case you’ve lost track of what day it is, time is something we don’t have much of.”

He didn’t tell her that it might be worse for her if her story was believed. She had no idea, and neither did he, how many of these local law-enforcement people were either sympathetic to or outright members of SOL. He knew for a fact some were, and he wasn’t willing to take the risk. He hadn’t brought her this far only to dump her out of the frying pan and into the fire. She was his responsibility. He’d see her safely home-all the way home.

All that was true. But only his heart knew about the cold little shiver of rejection that had gone through him at the thought of giving her up into someone else’s keeping. Once he did that, it was truly over. He’d never see her again, unless it was on the evening news. Whether it was wise or not, he wanted to postpone that inevitable moment as long as possible.

He looks so bitter, so disappointed, Lauren thought. Because he’d failed in his purpose, the cause he believed in had been defeated, at least for the moment, and his compatriots were either dead, captured or scattered to the four winds.

But looking at him now it was so hard-impossible-to believe he could have been part of the paramilitary conspiracy to kidnap her and blackmail her father into giving up the presidential nomination. Oh, his warrior’s features were hard enough, his glittering black eyes fierce enough to make him seem capable of almost any kind of cruelty or violence. But she no longer saw him only with her eyes. And what her heart saw was the incredible gentleness of his hands, the soul-stirring sweetness of his smile, the passion of self-sacrifice in the voice that shouted from the flood to leave him there and go.

Her heart was pounding as she cleared her throat and asked hesitantly, “What about a phone?”

He gave a shrug and his huff of laughter. “You can try.”

Bronco leaned against the fender in the lengthening shade of his uncle’s pickup truck and glugged a grape soda while he watched Lauren feed quarters into a pay phone that teetered like a small forlorn tree on the edge of the dirt parking lot. The grape soda made him think of the past, the rare sweet indulgences of his childhood-the early years, the happy years, before. Watching Lauren made him think of the future, and how he was going to learn to survive all the bleak years…after.

He saw her cradle the receiver yet again and knew from the way she stood without moving and the dejected slump of her shoulders that she’d run out of options. He wasn’t surprised; at this point her whole family was probably holed up in a hotel room somewhere in Dallas, ready to share Rhett Brown’s big night. Or ready to rally around when he dropped the bombshell.

He’d tried to think who he might call, but without his ID numbers and contact codes, he’d never get through the security net to his contact at ATF. He felt a frustrating sense of failure at his own helplessness, cursed himself for not memorizing those damn codes. He’d had them memorized once upon a time, but they’d gotten more and more complex over the years, and he’d been undercover a long time.

As she approached, he observed with pangs of guilt and regret how gaunt and heat-frazzled she looked in Rachel’s borrowed clothes, jeans that were too big for her and a faded flowered cotton blouse. Uncle Frank’s pickup truck wasn’t equipped with air-conditioning.

“Any luck?” he asked gruffly, handing her a grape soda.

She shook her head. “Everybody’s in Dallas.” She took the bottle from him, gave it a funny little “Huh!” look and tilted it to her lips. After the first gulp she lowered it with a surprised laugh. “I haven’t had one of these since I was a kid.”

“Me, either.” He raised his bottle to her and she clinked hers against it. Then they both stood there while the sun went down behind the pickup truck, drinking grape soda and smiling at each other with their eyes. As far as Bronco was concerned, that grape soda was wasted money, because his mouth was bone-dry.

“So,” Lauren said, “I guess we should just keep driving.” Her eyes were closed, face lifted to the dying wind, and she was moving the moisture-beaded bottle across her forehead, down the side of her face, into the V of her blouse…

Bronco found that his throat had closed. He forced his voice through, but it was a hoarse and ragged remnant of the one he was used to. “Ah, I’ve been thinking about that. It’s late, it’s been a long day and we’re both tired.” He jerked his head toward the strip of blacktop highway and the forlorn row of tiny whitewashed cabins strung out along the other side under a faded sign that read Broken Arrow Motel. “I was thinking maybe we should get some rest-get an early start tomorrow morning.”

She glanced at the motel, a relic of the days before interstates, then brought her eyes slowly back to him, a droll sideways look shielded by demurely lowered lashes. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “Do you think they’d have a vacancy?”

Bronco laughed, then grew serious again. “More important, can we afford it?” He reached into the pocket of his jeans-also too big for him, borrowed from his cousin Roger-and drew out the fistful of cash Grandmother Rose had given him from her cookie-jar stash. A quick tally told him he had forty-seven dollars and change left after filling the truck’s gas tank and buying the grape sodas. He held up the bills, fanned like a hand of cards. “We get a choice. What do you want to do-eat or sleep?”

It might have been the blood pounding in his own head, but Lauren’s voice sounded oddly slurred and thickened as she replied, “A bed sounds awfully good.” And it seemed to him she swayed toward him just slightly.

He said softly, “We can probably afford…one.”

She nodded slowly, never taking her eyes from his face.

After a moment he said brusquely, “Well. Okay.” He stuffed the cash back in his pocket and went into the gas station’s hot dim little convenience store, where he spent five of their meager dollars on a box of graham crackers, a quart of milk, a disposable razor, a pocket comb and an Albuquerque newspaper.

Ten minutes later he had the key to the Broken Arrow Motel’s cabin number four in his hand.

“I can’t believe he didn’t ask for any ID,” Lauren said in a low voice as she waited for Bronco to unlock the door. She smiled for the benefit of the manager, who was standing in the office doorway in his undershirt and overalls, watching them through black horn-rimmed glasses and rubbing dubiously at his quarter inch of gray beard stubble.

Bronco gave a sardonic grunt as the key turned at last in the ancient lock. He gave a thumbs-up to the manager, who turned and went back to his grainy black-and-white TV and Wheel of Fortune.

“He’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth,” Bronco said dryly as he pushed the door open and waved her ahead of him.

The room was dark, with the curtains drawn and the only light coming from the open doorway. But it didn’t matter- Lauren wasn’t really aware of her surroundings, anyway. Dimly she registered the worn rust-colored carpet, flowered bedspread and curtains in seventies colors-orange, yellow and avocado green. Then the door closed behind her and she heard the rustle of plastic as Bronco set the bag of groceries he’d just bought on the small wooden table near the door. She felt for the lamp on the nightstand and discovered that she was trembling.

She couldn’t bring herself to turn around; uncertainty had made her too vulnerable. Yesterday-last night-seemed an age ago, the mountain spring and monsoon storm very far away. There’d been catastrophic events in her life since then, and life-altering revelations…

Bronco stood with the key in his hand and stared at the back of her bowed head. Even with her body hidden in shapeless borrowed clothes and her winter-grass hair clumsily braided, dull and in need of washing, he still thought her the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. So beautiful it made his eyes smart and his throat ache to look at her.

He ached because things were so complicated now between them, so impossible. He ached for the way it had been for a brief time, there on the Sacred Mountain, reduced to the most primitive elements-man and woman, earth and sky and water, and the fire inside. How simple it had all been then. No pain, just joy. Pleasure in each other. A need and a fulfillment. But now he knew it wasn’t simple at all, that there was a reckoning, a cost to be counted. Once he’d been afraid of hurting her, he remembered, doing her damage. Now, though he couldn’t see how he might have avoided it, he knew the damage to himself was just as great-maybe even greater. His heart would never be the same.

One of us has to end this, Lauren thought, or begin… It took every ounce of strength she had just to turn and face him.

And she saw his eyes. Saw them as she’d never seen them before, beneath the sweep of warrior’s brows, glowing deep and dark with pain, with vulnerability, with all that she’d ever hoped to see in a man’s eyes gazing back into hers.

She uttered a small cry-like a sob, except that she was smiling. Smiling through tears. And then somehow, without either of them seeming to move, she was in his arms and he was holding her-and she him-as if they’d never, either of them, let go. Then he was plunging his fingers into her hair, setting it free, filling his hands with it while his mouth scorched her eyelids, her mouth, the sides of her neck, her throat. And she was laughing and whispering his name, tugging and pulling at his shirt, wanting to feel his beautiful satiny skin and hard body against hers.

She pulled away from him, gasping and desperate, suddenly filled with panic. “You won’t…you can’t…” she sobbed, dashing tears from her cheeks. “Please don’t deny me this time. I don’t care-I want to feel you inside me. Please let me feel you inside me. Just once. Please, Johnny…”

He frowned-and how endearingly silly it looked with eyes so soft and gentle. “Just once?” he murmured, and she heard something hit the bedspread with a faint plop-plop. She tore her eyes from his face to stare at the two small packages lying on the bed. “There was a machine in the men’s room at the gas station,” he said in his warm bear-rug voice, stirring shivers over her whole body. “Wasn’t sure I should spend our food money on con-” Her kiss stopped him there.

She felt his muscles tense and his back bow as he lowered her onto the bed and followed her down. Once again they tore at each other’s clothes. And thank heaven for the snaps on his borrowed Western-style shirt, because she was far too impatient for the intricacies of buttons. Wrenching his shirt apart and lifting herself into its folds, she scored his chest with her teeth and laved it with her tongue like one famished. Yes, famished. They were like starving survivors, half-mad with hunger, desperate to fill and be filled, caring nothing for taste and texture, smell and touch.

All they wanted then was the quickest avenue, the swiftest access to that complete coupling they’d denied themselves thus far. And clothing was a frail and incon sequential barrier. Bracing himself on one hand, Bronco raked Lauren’s jeans over her hips, then left her struggling to free her legs while he yanked at his own stubborn jeans fastening. Barely freed of that restriction, barely sheathed, he felt her legs come around him and her body open to him, and then he was fitting himself to her yielding softness and at long last driving himself home. Too suddenly, too violently for her, he knew it must be-yet he heard her cry blend with his, felt it wrenched, as his was, from deep inside, and knew it for a groan of pure relief, of primitive triumph and savage joy.

It was an explosion-noisy, shocking, devastating, and quickly over. Over in a few thunderous heartbeats, and yet it seemed to John Bracco that in the space of those heartbeats his old life had passed and a new one begun. So this is what it feels like, he thought, awed and humbled, quaking inside.

“That’s once,” he whispered, leaning down to kiss Lauren’s tear-drenched eyes, the tip of her nose, her quivering lips. “For number two we’ve got all night.” Rolling onto his side, he gathered her into his arms and held her tightly against his heart, and felt neither wonder nor concern when she began to sob as if her heart was breaking.

Oh, yes, her heart was breaking, she was sure of it. How could it not be? No heart could possibly hold together when it was filled to bursting with overwhelming joy…and utter despair.

Morning came, incredibly, in spite of all Lauren’s efforts to convince herself the night could last forever. But, she wondered, which was the fantasy-last night or this?

This was Bronco, sitting at the little wooden table, naked except for a motel towel knotted around his hips, long hair streaming down his back, casually reading the newspaper and eating graham crackers dipped in milk. She watched him from the bathroom doorway as she toweled her hair dry, quivering inside with wonder as she thought about the Bronco she’d danced with that long-ago night, barely a week ago now, in Smoky Joe’s. That lying, beer-drinking, brawling charmer in the red shirt. Who is the real Johnny Bronco?

Confusion and anger welled up inside her-then broke apart like a wave on a rock in a breathtaking burst of revelation. The real Johnny Bronco? But wait-hadn’t she been with this man day and night for days? She’d seen him angry and joyful, tired and teasing, tough and tender, vulnerable and strong-and not once had she seen even a glimpse of that other Bronco. Suddenly she knew beyond any doubt that this man, the Bronco here with her now, the man who’d saved her life, made her angry, made her cry, made her fall in hopeless love with him, was the real one. The other Bronco-that, it seemed to her now, had been artificial, unreal. Almost like an actor playing a role.

In the folds of the towel she caught her breath in a gasp of shock, as with that realization so many others fell into place, like a toppling trail of dominoes. Beer-drinking? But he hadn’t smelled of beer! She remembered thinking how wonderful he smelled-of herbal soap and horses and leather and man. And his room at the ranch-almost military in its neatness. She’d thought then-no, she’d felt-nothing so tidy as thought-that there was something about Johnny Bronco that didn’t fit.

Something, a lot of things. Like the way he talked, sometimes like an educated man, sometimes like a cop or a soldier, almost never like a roughshod cowboy who’d been kicked out of just about everywhere, including the U.S. Army!

And what about that shaver? This morning she’d stood and watched him scrape away a week’s worth of beard with bar soap and a throwaway razor, and had teased him about maybe needing tweezers, instead. Why would a man with almost no beard carry an electric shaver with him in his saddlebag to a wilderness camp? What could that possibly mean? Her mind, nurtured on spy novels and James Bond movies, instantly conjured up intriguing possibilities. She hadn’t found a gun-maybe the shaver had actually been a weapon of some kind!

Oh, all right, that was another of her romantic notions. But it didn’t change the fact that there were things about John Bracco that didn’t add up.

In the space of a few moments her suspicion had hardened into certainty: the man she loved was not who he seemed to be.

He looked up just then and saw her watching him, and his eyebrows dipped low in a frown. As if to compensate for that, his voice was low, almost gentle, as he asked, “Just about ready to go?”

“Just about.” She nodded toward the paper, which he’d quickly folded away, as if, she thought, to shield it from her eyes. “Is that the article on the raid? I read it while you were in the shower.” She paused, looking into his eyes, straining to see beyond their glittering black surface. “You must be relieved to hear Gil McCullough managed to get away.” But, she thought, he doesn’t look relieved, or angry, or triumphant. Instead, he looked worried.

For a long moment he stared at her, a moment filled with silence and suspicion. Then, “Yeah,” he said, and sweeping the folded newspaper from the table, dropped it into the wastebasket near his feet. He picked up the carton of milk and offered it to her, and when she shook her head, drank the last few swallows and dropped it on top of the newspaper. “We’d best be going,” he said softly. “It’s a long way to Dallas.”

The Dallas Convention Center was a circus of activity, simmering in the heat of late afternoon. Flags and banners and red-white-and-blue bunting floated in the sunshine like streamers at a carnival. In the crowd milling about the com plex was an atmosphere of celebration, but of anticlimax, too. The job they’d come to do had been done; the party had chosen its candidate and now it was party time.

Bronco and Lauren sat in Frank’s dusty pickup, parked in a passenger-loading zone just outside the ring of security that surrounded the convention center. And security was heavy, no doubt about it. Bronco was glad to see that nobody seemed to be taking any chances, and he wondered how much of that had to do with the fact that Gil McCullough was still out there somewhere and now carrying a serious grudge.

“This is as far as I go,” he said to Lauren, though his eyes were fixed on the gleaming bronze statues of longhorn steers that marched across a landscaped area near the main entrance. He couldn’t look at her. For his sake and for hers, he couldn’t let her see the desperation in his eyes. He knew she had feelings for him. Maybe even thought she was in love with him, which was probably natural enough after all they’d been through together. But she’d get over it, now that she was back where she belonged. Of that he had no doubt whatsoever.

He couldn’t let himself doubt that. If he did, he’d never be able to let her go.

“Then I guess it’s time to say goodbye,” Lauren said. Though she didn’t look at him when she did, fixing her gaze, instead, on some big bronze statues of cattle. She couldn’t let him see her eyes, knowing they’d surely reflect her new determination and resolve. She knew what was on his mind, knew perfectly well he planned to drop her off and then slip away to rejoin his precious SOL. Well, he might not know it, but he hadn’t seen the last of Lauren Elizabeth Brown-no way, José.

Protected and fortified by that conviction, she moved in a strange sort of unreality, feeling nothing at all, not even the door handle in her hand. “So long. Thank you for everything…” She left the words floating behind her as she slipped from the truck, aware that she’d closed the door, but not hearing it slam. Weightless as a balloon, she drifted across the street, not feeling the pavement under her feet. People moved around her, but she didn’t really see them. They were like shadows, flitting on the edges of a dream.

Bronco watched her cross the concourse on a wavering track that would take her inevitably out of his life. Forever. His eyes were fixed on her with such intensity that they burned in their sockets-as her image was burned on his retinas and on his heart. Forever.

So focused was his attention on the woman that he failed to notice immediately the two figures moving in a purposeful diagonal intended to cut her off before she could reach the net of security around the convention center. When he did, alerted by some sixth sense-whether instinct or training he’d never know-he wasn’t even conscious of surprise. Somehow it seemed natural, even expected, that they should all wash up together in this same place, like debris from the same flood.

But even before those thoughts had formed in his mind, he was moving to intercept them-the man he’d called his friend and commander, Gil McCullough, and his lieutenant, Ron Masters.

He couldn’t help but notice they were dressed in Dallas camouflage now-brand-new Western-style suits, boots and cowboy hats. He didn’t think Lauren had noticed them at all.

“Hey, Gil. Ron,” he said, and watched the two men jerk, halt and spin toward him, and Ron’s hand reach inside his jacket. A few yards away he saw Lauren stop and turn a dazed look toward him, as if she’d been sleepwalking and awoken too suddenly.

“Johnny!” In fractions of seconds, McCullough’s gaunt face registered shock, then gladness…dimmed with suspicion as he took in the significance of Bronco’s presence there…and finally dissolved into grief-stricken rage. His lips pulled back from clenched teeth and tears glittered in his eyes as he grated out hoarsely, “I trusted you, boy. I gave you a chance.”

“I know,” Bronco said quietly. “I know.” He was motioning to Lauren-Go! Run! But he could see her frozen there, eyes staring, like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck.

Then he looked at Ron Masters. Ron’s teeth were bared, too-in a smile. And the glitter in his eyes wasn’t tears, but the cold madness of a killer. And the gun he’d pulled from his jacket was in his hand now and pointed straight at Lauren.

Despite the flood of adrenaline raging inside him, Bronco’s voice was calm. “Give it up, Ron. You can’t win this one. It’s all over.” And he was moving swiftly toward Lauren, knowing he couldn’t move swiftly enough, even if he’d had wings.

He saw Ron’s eyes flare with a cold deadly light and felt himself hurling through the air. He prayed he’d get to Lauren in time to stop the bullet.

He heard Gil’s voice scream, “No!” and an instant later the deafening sound of the gunshot. His arms closed around Lauren and they went down hard together, the impact with the ground so stunning it was a second or two before he knew they hadn’t been hit. His whole body braced for a second shot, and when it didn’t come, he looked over his shoulder just in time to see Gil McCullough, hands still clutching Ron Masters’s arms, crumple slowly to the ground.

Dimly, Bronco heard shouts, footsteps running from all directions. Ron Masters stared down at the body at his feet, then looked quickly from side to side, assessing his position. He jammed the gun back inside his jacket and took off running.

“You okay?” Bronco said to Lauren as he eased away from her. When she nodded, he pulled himself to his feet and took off after Ron. Took him out with a flying tackle and a couple of the moves he’d learned in ranger school. Seconds later he was on his knees in a pool of blood, and Gil McCullough’s head was in his lap.

Gil was trying to speak to him. “Take it easy,” Bronco growled. “You’re gonna be okay. Just take it easy.”

“You…were like a son to me, Johnny.”

“I know,” Bronco whispered. “I know.” After a moment he put his hand over Gil McCullough’s eyes and gently closed them.

Lauren pulled herself slowly and painfully to a sitting position. She felt hollow. Cold. As if they belonged to someone else, she held up her scraped hands and stared at them, then gaped in surprise at the torn knees of her jeans. Her chin was throbbing-she touched it absently with a finger.

All around her people were running, shouting. People were reaching down to help her to her feet, asking questions. A short distance away she could see Bronco, crouched over Gil McCullough, who wasn’t moving. She called to him, shaking off the hands that were trying to help her. “Bronco-Johnny!”

Then at last he was there beside her, holding her by the arms, but not gently. His face was that of a stranger as he thrust her into the hands of a man in a dark suit with the words, “This is Rhett Brown’s daughter. Get her to him-now!”

With a startled exclamation, the man in the suit pulled a photograph out of his jacket pocket and stared at it, then at Lauren, then at the photo again. The next thing she knew she was surrounded by men in suits and she was being hurried along, hurried away from the scene faster even than she could walk. And no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t catch even one more glimpse of the man known as Johnny Bronco.

In a hotel room somewhere in Texas, Agent John Bracco was watching television. The evening news was on, with a recap of the convention that had just wrapped up in Dallas. The sound was turned low on the presidential candidate’s acceptance speech, and Bronco’s eyes were fixed on the people standing behind him on the podium. Rhett’s entire family were there, it looked like. His brother and sister and their spouses, his dark-haired wife, Dixie, and his two blond children-tall good-looking Ethan, tall beautiful Lauren, with a scrape on her chin.

He was staring at that scrape and his heart was knocking against his ribs when he heard a knocking at the door. The maid, he supposed, with the extra towels he’d asked for. Just to make sure, though, he looked through the peephole. He growled, “What the hell?” and yanked open the door. He caught a whiff of green apples as Lauren walked calmly past him and into the room.

He carefully closed the door. Then, for a minute or two he didn’t say anything. He was too busy fighting the joy that threatened to engulf him, and afraid his voice might squeak like a boy’s if he tried to speak. When he was sure he could do it calmly-but not looking at her, walking away from her, stalling for time-he said, “How did you find me?”

Her voice was soft and ironic, without a tremor. “I may not be the president’s daughter yet. But I am the daughter of the former attorney general. I have my resources.”

He gave his short dry huff of laughter. “I knew I shouldn’t have underestimated you.”

There was a moment of silence. When she spoke again it was in a whisper, and now her voice did tremble. “Why couldn’t you just have told me?”

He turned and looked at her then. Her eyes were brimming with tears and her chin was jutted out at a belligerent angle. The scrape on her chin made her expression seem unbearably poignant to him. He shrugged and said in a voice that was gravelly with guilt, “Ah, you know-thou shalt not blow thy cover.” Knowing it was a cop-out. Knowing it was nowhere near enough.

“I knew something about you wasn’t right.” She was suddenly fierce and angry. “I told you, remember? It just took me a while to figure out what it was.”

He’d always been more comfortable with her temper than her tears. Smiling, he said, “What gave me away?”

“You smelled good,” she said with a grudging sniff, and couldn’t resist smiling back-with triumph. “No booze.”

Bronco made a tsking sound with his tongue. “Never should have danced with you,” he murmured, reaching out a hand to touch her chin. And then his fingers just naturally curved on around her jaw to the back of her neck, under the wild-grass ripple of her hair.

“That’s my line,” she protested, resisting him. But only very briefly.

It was much later when she was finally able to pull herself away from him again. She didn’t want to-she’d come prepared to stay, unless, of course, he’d thrown her out the door. But she was back firmly rooted in reality now, and there were things she had to know.

“So what happens now?” she asked him, her heart trembling inside her. “Do you go back? Undercover?” And if you do, how will I ever live until you surface again?

He shook his head. His voice sounded dry as dust. “Can’t-not after my picture was splashed all over the evening news. Not with SOL, anyway.” He paused, then took a breath and said brusquely, “I’m sort of thinking about local law enforcement. Thought maybe it’s time I gave something back to my father’s people. My people.” He coughed. Made a small gesture with his hand, but didn’t touch her. “What about you? You ready to go back to being the good little girl?” His smile was crooked. “After all, you’re gonna be the president’s daughter.”

Her face hurt when she tried to smile. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see about that.” Then she shrugged and looked away. I won’t ask, she thought. I can’t ask. Some things were just impossible for a woman with an ounce of pride. “I don’t know,” she said dully. “Go back to being a lawyer, I guess. It’s what I know, what I’m good at.”

There was a long, long pause. Pulses pounded and hopes and fears sang in the air between them like the whine of locusts on a summer evening.

Then Bronco spoke softly, “Apaches need lawyers too.”

Lauren’s eyes snapped to his face, his fierce and beautiful warrior’s face. And in his glowing black eyes she saw it at last-the look of love and longing she’d hoped for, prayed for, risked so much for and come so far to find.

KATHLEEN CREIGHTON

has roots deep in the California soil, but has relocated to South Carolina. As a child, she enjoyed listening to old timers’ tales, and her fascination with the past only deepened as she grew older. Today, she says she is interested in everything-art, music, gardening, zoology, anthropology and history-but people are at the top of her list. She also has a lifelong passion for writing, and now combines her two loves in romance novels.

***