Her aged, dented Taurus made it to the Armstrong ranch house. That was a good thing. And the weather wasn’t so hot that she was sweating in her suit, so that was also a good thing.

But beyond those two good things, Rosebud was grasping at straws. The whole situation had an air of unreality to it. Was she really about to have dinner—at his house—with the one-and-only Cecil Armstrong? With Dan Armstrong? Was she really this scared about it?

Oh, yeah, she was terrified. If she’d owned chain mail, she would have put it on under the jacket, but she didn’t, so she’d settled for a lower-cut-than-normal tank top in a soft-and-flirty pink under her gray suit. That was as close as she got to pretty when she was about to do battle.

She could do this. She was a lawyer, damn it. She’d argued a case before the South Dakota Supreme Court, for God’s sake—argued and won. She could handle the Armstrong men.

She grabbed her briefcase and put on her game face. But before she could get anywhere, the front door swung open and out stepped the cowboy of her dreams.

The white, button-up shirt was cuffed to the elbows, and the belt buckle sat just so on the narrow V of his waist. For a blinding second, she hoped he’d turn around and go right back inside, just so she could see what that backside looked like without a saddle or a sports coat to block the view. She thought she saw a loaded holster at his side, but she realized it was a cell phone. All that was missing was a white horse and a sunset to ride off into.

Just one kiss, she thought as she fought to keep a satisfied smile off her face. Kissing Dan Armstrong wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, would it?

“You’re right on time,” Dan said as he came down to greet her. When he shook her hand this time, he acted like he was one step away from kissing it.

Maybe two kisses. Darn it, this whole situation was driving her crazy. She fought the urge to swing her briefcase in between them like it was a guillotine. “I’m sure your uncle appreciates punctuality.”

Dan still had her hand. Warm, again, and still not sweaty. He wasn’t nervous. The realization made her even more nervous. “He probably does. But he’s not here.”

Relief flooded her system at the same time her heartbeat picked up another notch. “Oh?” Was it just the two of them?

The look in Dan’s eyes said yes, it was just the two of them. The gentle pressure his fingers were exerting on her wrist seconded the motion. “He’s at some fundraiser.”

She was going to have to draw the line at three kisses, tops. Any more than that, and this man would have her in a compromising position behind enemy lines. “You understand that no matter what party he tries to buy off, I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure he doesn’t get elected?”

“Completely.” No, there was no mistaking Dan’s feelings. He didn’t like his own uncle. But if that was true, what was he doing here, with her? Finally, he let go of her hand and stepped back. As his eyes skimmed her body, she saw his brow wrinkle. “This isn’t a business meeting, you know.”

Just her luck—he really was that observant. He’d noticed her suit—what were the odds he remembered it was the same one she’d had on two days ago? She jutted out her chin in defiance of all known fashion laws and bluffed her way past the blush she was sure she was working on. “You didn’t expect me to treat this as a social call, did you?”

“No, I guess I didn’t.” He offered her his arm. Chivalry was not only not dead, it was also apparently alive and well in his part of Texas. She ignored the flattered feeling that started to hum high in her chest. So what if it had been an awfully long time since any white man had done more than look down his nose at her? She was not going to let this “respect” thing go to her head. “Shall we?”

As they walked up the porch steps, Rosebud had the distinct feeling that she was walking into the jaws of hell, and the demon house would swallow her down in one big gulp. She fought the urge to cling to Dan’s arm. She wasn’t some weak female who needed a male protector. It wasn’t her fault if her fingers wrapped around his bare skin.

“Have you ever been here?” he said as he held the door for her.

“Never in. Just by,” she said as her eyes adjusted to the darkened interior of the foyer. Actually, it looked nothing like a dungeon. Everything was neat and clean—even the mounted buffalo head she could see in the parlor was dust-free. The rooms had a warm, almost feminine sensibility to them.

He nodded as he guided her down a long, dark hallway. “To hear Maria tell it, Cecil’s never set foot in any rooms but the dining room and his bedroom. I guess the rest of this place is like a museum.”

“Who’s Maria?”

“The housekeeper. She made us dinner tonight.” Dan pushed open a swinging door. “Oh, good. Maria, meet my guest, Rosebud Donnelly, the Lakota lawyer who’s suing Cecil. Rosebud, this is Maria Villerreal. She basically runs the place.” His tongue rolled the Rs right. She flushed hot, thinking of his tongue rolling anything.

“Señor!” Maria was a small woman with a thick accent who was in the middle of putting on her coat. She ducked her head to Rosebud. “It is an honor to meet you, señorita.”

“The pleasure is mine.” Again, this was not what she expected. A pristine mansion and kindly hired help? Maybe she had Cecil Armstrong all wrong.

“Dinner is in the oven, señor. Do you need anything else?”

Dan patted her arm, and Rosebud saw the girlish blush rise up. “No, Maria, it smells wonderful. You can head out—give my best to Eduardo and the boys, okay?”

“Sí, señor.” Maria held out her hand to Rosebud. “Señor Daniel is a good man, señorita.”

As opposed to…his uncle? The statement opened the door to about twenty questions. Dan couldn’t have been around that long, or she would have heard about his arrival before he showed up at her office. How long had Maria worked for Cecil? Clearly, Dan was working his charm on more people than her. That wasn’t a bad thing, either, she decided. This wasn’t any different than judging a date by how he treated the waiter—except, she reminded herself, this wasn’t a date. Now that Maria was out of the house, Rosebud had to remember that.

Dan pulled out a stool at the huge kitchen island and motioned for her to sit. She felt a little silly about the formality, but she couldn’t say no to that smile. “We’re eating in the kitchen?”

“The dining room is Cecil’s headquarters.” Dan got busy with plates and forks before he opened the oven. The scent of Mexican—good Mexican—filled the air. “The kitchen is a much nicer place, trust me. I hope you like tamales.”

Sounded like the dining room was the place she needed to be. Something occurred to her. “You call him Cecil?”

Dan paused, a sheepish smile on his face. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“You don’t like him very much, do you?”

“Not many people do.” He dug out some cheese and proceeded to garnish the tamales. A good-looking man who knows how to garnish, Rosebud thought in amazement. No, she caught herself. She would not be impressed. “You don’t like him.”

That was putting it mildly. “I’ve never actually met him. He’s your uncle.”

“And there’s not a damn thing I can do about that.” He sounded lighthearted, but the tension in his voice was unmistakable as he set her dinner before her. “I’d offer you a beer, but that suit says I’d be wasting my breath.” Here, just the two of them in a kitchen that smelled of warmth and goodness, she allowed herself to smile. His eyes latched on to her smile, and she froze. Did he think he recognized her from the valley? Or was he just staring? “Lemonade?” he finally said into the silence.

Disaster averted, she thought with a mental sigh. “I’d love some.”

“Tell me about your name.” He set the lemonade down in front of her, but he didn’t withdraw. Instead, he stood in the space between touching her shoulder and not touching her shoulder.

She looked up. No, there wasn’t any of that wariness she thought she’d caught a glimpse of. His eyes weren’t so stormy, she decided. They were more like the palest jade with just a hint of gray. A precious stone. “Is that the nice way of asking if I’m named after a sled?”

Jade probably didn’t sparkle as much as Dan’s eyes. “My mother loves Citizen Kane,” he said and then headed back to the stove to scoop out Spanish rice. “I bet you get that question a lot.”

Her mouth watered. Whatever else happened tonight, at least the food was going to be good. “Only from white people.”

His shoulders shook with laughter. “Guilty as charged.”

At least he had a sense of humor about it. That was a rare thing in and of itself, especially considering the past three years. She was used to dealing with that man’s lawyers, who held her in obvious contempt. When she was in college, she’d become familiar with white people who had an overdeveloped sense of liberal guilt. And the locals? They mostly treated her—or any Indian, for that matter—like dirty, dumb Injuns. Dan didn’t fit into any of those categories. “You don’t have to be all politically correct, either—Indian is fine. I think of myself as a Lakota Indian.”

He regarded her with a look that was between frank curiosity and open respect. “Duly noted. So are you named after a sled?”

She couldn’t help but grin widely at him. “I’m named after a distant relative who moved to New York in the ’40s, Rosebud Yellow Robe. Family legend is that Orson Welles named the sled after her—they both did radio shows for CBS back in the day.”

“Interesting.” His voice dropped a notch as he served dinner with a flourish. “And the Donnelly?”

She wasn’t much of a cook, and this was, hands down, the most delicious meal she’d had in ages. She forced herself to focus. If she wasn’t mistaken, that was a pretty slick way of asking if Donnelly was her maiden or married name. “A grandmother married a white man after the Civil War, and they had nothing but sons for a while.”

“Until you.”

She froze, the fork halfway to her mouth. Her appetite disappeared, leaving only uneasiness in her belly. Carefully, she lowered the fork back to the plate and cleared her throat. “I had a brother. He was one of the deaths deemed a suicide by the FBI.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his hand flex. Way to go, Rosebud scolded herself. Way to play the pity card. Way to use Tanner’s memory. Suddenly, she felt dirty. This whole situation was wrong. There had to be better ways to get to Cecil Armstrong. If she thought real hard, she was sure she could come up with something. Anything would be better than this intimate dinner with his nephew.

He finally spoke into the silence. “I’m goin’ to look into it.”

“You said that.” She tried to shrug this whole awkward conversation off but failed miserably.

He pivoted on his stool, put a hand on her shoulder and turned her to face him. “I mean it.”

She wanted to believe him, but she’d had too many men—white and Indian—break too many promises. Still, something about the way he met her gaze made her think that maybe, just maybe, this time would be different.

She was getting warmer. Just like when he’d shaken her hand, she could feel the slow burn moving from where he was touching her shoulder down her arm and across her chest. Despite the confusion that swirled in her head, she still felt the pull of sexual tension. She tested out a small smile and got an honest one in return as his hand drifted down to her arm and gave it a little squeeze. That burn got a lot less slow. Oh, boy. If she wasn’t careful, all this promising and smiling and touching would pull her right under. She was already a mess right now. She couldn’t afford something as distracting as sexual tension to further unscrew her head. “A man of his word?”

“Always.” His fingers trailed down her arm, leaving scorch marks under her jacket. He motioned to the food. “It’s goin’ to get cold.”

Luckily, dinner was still warm—and delicious. Eating it gave her a little time to get her thoughts organized, because the last thing she wanted to do was add the embarrassment of spewing half-chewed tamales across the kitchen island. Finally, the plates were nearly empty and she’d moved on to the lemonade. She decided to start with the least dangerous topic she could think of. “You’ll have to tell Maria that I said this was wonderful.”

“She’ll like that.”

“How long have you known her?”

“About a week.”

Okay, that answered her question about how long he’d been here. No wonder she hadn’t heard about his arrival. “Really? You seem like old friends.”

Maybe that grin wasn’t arrogant. Maybe that grin was just confident. “My mother raised me to be nice to everyone, regardless of whether they were the maid or the king of the world.” Then the grin slid right on over into arrogant. “Plus, I gave Maria a—what do they call it these days? A retention bonus. My uncle was still paying her the same wage he hired her at five years ago.”

That didn’t surprise her. “Your mother sounds like a wise woman,” she said, hoping she was using the right tense.

“She is. She’s the executive vice president. We run the Texas division of the company as a team—before this thing with Cecil pulled me up here, that is.” He began to rummage through the fridge. “I think Maria left a cake—interested?”

“Yes, please. Will your mother be visiting you here?” Because she’d kind of like to meet the woman who produced this charmer.

“She wouldn’t be caught dead in the same state as Cecil.”

It was interesting to watch him drift between hot and serious, chatty and silent. Dan didn’t exactly wear his heart on his sleeve, but she got the feeling he didn’t win a lot of poker games. “Sounds like a long story.”

“It’s not so much long as it is old. Mom picked Dad instead of Cecil. Cecil never forgave either of them. He didn’t even come to Dad’s funeral.”

“And you work for him?” It was out of her mouth before she could stop it.

Dan set a piece of cake in front of her, pulled up his stool and sat down. Only then did he turn to her, his eyes going right past serious and straight on over into dangerous. She wondered if other people made him look this dangerous, or if it was just her. “Let’s get something straight,” he said, sounding very much like a man who would take all comers. “I don’t work for Cecil. I inherited my father’s stake in the family business. I own half of this house, the water rights and the dam project. This is my company just as much as it is his.”

That nerve she’d hit was huge. She wondered if Cecil had the same interpretation of the situation. “But you’re helping him.”

He glared at her. All the charm was gone. “I’m helping my company.”

She had pushed this just about as far as she could, but she couldn’t quit. This was her in—Dan didn’t like his uncle, and he didn’t like the job the old man was doing. The chance that she could convince Dan to abandon the whole thing was small, but it was a chance she had to take. “Well, your company is going to flood my reservation.”

He looked away, like she’d won and he’d lost. But then he said, “Eminent domain.”

So he’d been doing his homework, and they both knew who the loser here was going to be. The government would give the reservation to Cecil because lower electricity rates were good for politicians and their reelections. It was a new twist on the old story—the white people needed the land more than the Indians did. And yet, she felt like she needed to comfort him. He actually looked miserable about the whole damn thing. Leaning over, she touched one of those forearms and said, “I won’t go down without a fight.”

Moving slowly, he set his fork down and took her fingers in his hand. Calluses rubbed against the length of her index finger, then moved on to her palm. If she hadn’t been sitting, her knees would have buckled. “I’m counting on that.” Oh, that wasn’t a threat—that was a promise, pure and simple. “But the question is, what kind of fight?”

She couldn’t help it. Three long years of loneliness threatened to swamp her altogether. She leaned into him, close enough that she could see a faint scar above his cheek, close enough that his short hair could tickle her nose. “You can check my briefcase. I don’t have a gun.”

He turned to her as he pulled her hand into his rock-solid chest. “Not here, anyway,” he murmured as his lips brushed hers. “You’re too smart for that.”

Huh? She was smart? She was the one sitting in Cecil Armstrong’s kitchen, kissing Cecil Armstrong’s nephew—a man she barely knew, a man she’d shot at, for God’s sake!

But how was he being any smarter? He knew—or thought he knew—that she’d put a hole in his hat, less than two inches from his skull! What kind of man came on to a woman he believed to be armed and dangerous? What kind of man worked for—with—Cecil Armstrong? What kind of man was Dan Armstrong?

Oh. My. God. The kissing kind, that’s what.

His touch wasn’t an act of aggression or domination, but more like he was asking for permission. Not the kiss of an enemy, but of something…different. Even though his fingers tightened around hers, he hung back, waiting for a sign. His other hand came up and stroked her cheek with the lightest of touches. Tension—the good sort—hit her like a small jolt of electricity, pushing her into him. That must have been what he was waiting for, because his tongue brushed her lips, and she forgot all about being smart. Instead, she remembered being a woman, remembered the feeling of desire as it surged from her mouth, flamed to her breasts and scorched down farther until she wanted nothing more than to see exactly how far this kiss could go.