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A Warrior's Vow
Marilyn Tracy


Pampered, pretty Leeza Nelson had reluctantly agreed to watch over her friends' orphanage ranch in New Mexico. So when one of the children ran away, it was up to her to find him.But journeying into the wilderness with dark, brooding Apache tracker James Daggert was more than the sophisticated city girl had bargained for. The mysterious man vowed to bring the child back safely, but sparing Leeza from his pent-up desire was a promise he refused to make.As they raced to save the boy from a serial killer - the same man who had murdered Daggert's child - Leeza knew it was only a matter of time before she lost the battle of wills against her passionate warrior protector and surrendered, body and soul.






He unfastened her top button and dipped the cool cloth beneath the folds of her elegant blouse.


“That’s nice,” Leeza breathed. “I never would have suspected you had it in you.”

Daggert continued slowly, carefully, bringing her heat down after the day’s brutal ride through the hot New Mexico desert. Her color was coming back, giving her a peachy glow. He drifted his fingers over the swell of her breasts and up the arch of her shoulders and back down again.

She sighed.

He allowed his fingers to dip lower, cooling her.

Heating him.

Her eyes opened abruptly, and a gaze as blue and deep as the coldest mountain lake met his squarely. “Enjoying yourself?” she asked.

He gave a final slow swipe before pulling his hand back. “I’m not dead,” he said.

“Something to look forward to, then,” she purred.


Dear Reader,

This is a month full of greats: great authors, great miniseries…great books. Start off with award-winning Marie Ferrarella’s Racing Against Time, the first in a new miniseries called CAVANAUGH JUSTICE. This family fights for what’s right—and their reward is lasting love.

The miniseries excitement continues with the second of Carla Cassidy’s CHEROKEE CORNERS trilogy. Dead Certain brings the hero and heroine together to solve a terrible crime, but it keeps them together with love. Candace Irvin’s latest features A Dangerous Engagement, and it’s also the first SISTERS IN ARMS title, introducing a group of military women bonded through friendship and destined to find men worthy of their hearts.

Of course, you won’t want to miss our stand-alone books, either. Marilyn Tracy’s A Warrior’s Vow is built around a suspenseful search for a missing child, and it’s there, in the rugged Southwest, that her hero and heroine find each other. Cindy Dees has an irresistible Special Forces officer for a hero in Line of Fire—and he takes aim right at the heroine’s heart. Finally, welcome new author Loreth Anne White, who came to us via our eHarlequin.com Web site. Melting the Ice is her first book—and we’re all eagerly awaiting her next.

Enjoy—and come back next month for more exciting romantic reading, only from Silhouette Intimate Moments.






Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Editor




A Warrior’s Vow

Marilyn Tracy










MARILYN TRACY


Marilyn’s books, which range in subject matter from classic women-in-jeopardy scenarios to fallen angels fighting to save the universe, have placed on several bestseller lists and earned her such awards as Romantic Times Career and Lifetime Achievement Awards, and Best of Series. She claims to speak Russian with fair fluency, Hebrew with appalling mistakes and enough Spanish to get her arrested at any border crossing. She lives with her sister in Roswell, New Mexico, where the only aliens they’ve seen thus far are the critters in their new home, a converted railroad warehouse.


For Dick Satterlee, a gentle warrior,

who is surely playing the guitar in a far better place.

And hopefully far better guitar.

With love…




Contents


Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17




Chapter 1


“You could talk to me,” Leeza called out. “I’ll bet that’s allowed in the great tracker rule book. Something easy, like, ‘How are you faring back there?’ Not much of a commitment. You can just shout out your response anytime now.”

The man riding in front of her didn’t turn around or acknowledge her in any way. His horse, Stone—undoubtedly named after the man’s heart—swished his tail as if he, at least, was aware a bedraggled woman followed behind and had been doing so for countless hours.

Leeza Nelson wished she could summon up a straight back and a glare on the off chance the man riding in front of her would turn around and actually say something to her. But he wasn’t likely to wonder how she was holding up, and she wasn’t remotely able to sit up straight anymore. Every inch of her body ached and she’d lost all sensation in her bottom some five hours and thirty confusing mesquite bushes back.

The tracker she followed like a cowed pup didn’t seem to care that she felt worried sick about a nine-year-old jokester named Enrique, missing now for almost a full day. Tracker James Daggert had made it obvious her presence would only slow him down and that her lack of experience at riding western style was nothing but a nuisance.

From the moment she’d announced her intention of accompanying him to search for the missing boy, this high-dollar tracker, Daggert, had made it abundantly clear that Leeza Nelson’s wants and needs were one step lower than the desires of a desert mouse carrying the Hanta virus.

She was aware that as far as Daggert was concerned, she’d foisted herself into the mission, and she could put up or shut up.

This tracker extraordinaire was after only one thing, apparently: finding little Enrique. When they’d set out on this incredible trek, Daggert’s single-minded focus on the mission had made her feel grateful that she’d contracted the right man for the job. As the head of her own financial corporation, she knew the value of finding the best person to do each specific task.

Daggert’s resistance to her accompanying him had vaguely pleased her, for she had considered his reluctance might indicate a dedication to his task. That she’d been unwilling to go along with his edicts revealed her own determination to find the child.

But now, five hours later, she’d decided the man wasn’t dedicated, he was an unadulterated sadist.

“I hate this,” she muttered to her horse’s twitching ears. “I hate New Mexico. I hate horses. And right now, I hate little Enrique for running away. For that matter, I hate sunshine, dry grass, open fricking terrain, and most of all, I hate, positively hate James Daggert.”

Her horse, a beast with the unlikely name of Lulubelle, whickered.

Stone, James Daggert’s horse, gave a whinny in response.

Daggert reined in his horse and let loose an earsplitting whistle.

Lulubelle took another couple of steps and stopped abruptly, still some fifteen feet behind Stone.

Leeza rocked in the saddle, one half a gasp away from sliding to the ground in a puddle of defeat. Pride alone kept her on the horse. The evil tracker she’d hired to search for Enrique would probably leave her lying facedown in the dust if she did fall off.

“I’ll show him,” she growled to the equally evil beast she straddled. “If he thinks Leeza Nelson will ever admit defeat, he’s got another think coming.”

The horse didn’t answer aside from stomping one huge hoof.

On the northern horizon, a brown blur raced toward the man. The ball of brown soon proved to be James Daggert’s dog, a dark setter with liquid brown eyes, named Sancho. Leeza was sure James Daggert had never had a nodding acquaintance with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, for though he would probably fit some gothic notion of a romantic figure, he was not one to tilt at windmills in his lady’s name. A dreamer he was not.

The sable-coated dog came to a shuddering stop and gazed up at his master with slavish adoration. His tongue lolled from his grinning mouth and his eyes never wavered from the man sitting ramrod straight in his saddle.

The tracker tossed something down that the gorgeous animal caught in midair, his tail beating a breeze above the dry New Mexico grasses. He gave a sharp bark.

Incredibly, the man murmured something to the dog. Sancho wagged his tail even harder. It was the first time Leeza had heard Daggert’s voice since starting out on their search for Enrique shortly after nine o’clock that morning. The deep, mellifluous, curiously gentle tone didn’t match the hard visage of the man. And yet it did—at least with the setter and the monstrously large horse, Stone.

“Oh, I get it,” she snapped. “You’ll talk to your horse and your dog but not to me. And if you say the dog has more sense, I’ll brain you.”

James Daggert didn’t say anything.

Big surprise.

Mentally, Leeza shot an arrow of pure fury directly between his shoulder blades. He didn’t shift his muscled back one iota.

He gave a flick of his hand and his dog shot off toward the far horizon.

Leeza urged Lulubelle ahead to flank Stone, determined to make the man speak to her. She’d tried almost everything else, so this time she turned a glittering smile in his direction, forcing herself to be pleasant, to charm the man into talking to her. “Does your dog have Enrique’s scent?”

Daggert’s eyes turned in her direction and he gave her an unreadable look before shifting his gaze back to the desert ahead of them. He could have been a rock carving of an Indian warrior, and she suspected his heritage was indeed Native American. It showed in his deeply tanned face, his long black hair. But the granite-hard expression chiseled on those sharp features came from the unapproachable man himself. Under that long-sleeved cotton shirt his shoulders seemed like chunks of boulders, his back as straight as a cliff face.

His jet-black hair wasn’t covered by a cowboy hat, and he’d tied it back in a ponytail held by a strip of leather. Despite the heat of the noon sun, James Daggert seemed oblivious to its effects, as if he were truly carved of stone.

Then, as though he’d known she was still gaping at him, he turned his head to look at her directly. The only thing that spoke of any Caucasian heritage could be found in his eyes. Tawny, almost amber colored, they glittered like gemstones and were as enigmatic and alluring.

He didn’t appear angry or irritated. But the shock of meeting his unusual eyes and finding that indecipherable expression turned on her made Leeza’s knees literally quake. A shaft of purely visceral heat shot through her. For a woman used to reading all types of people quickly, with assurance and uncanny accuracy, she found herself wholly out of her depth.

He sees through me, she thought with a shiver of true fear.

She forced her back to straighten a little and summoned a small smile. Be friendly to the man. You need him. “Have you had the dog long?”

He said nothing. His gaze shifted from her eyes to her mouth, lingered there for a moment, then moved slowly back up again. For some reason, the look made that shaft of heat spread.

If she hadn’t heard him speaking English very clearly at the ranch earlier, she might have assumed the man didn’t speak her language. And she then thought, with some shock, that perhaps she didn’t speak his—the language of tracking, of searching for a missing person.

Years ago, Leeza had sworn she wouldn’t squirm around any man, and she wasn’t about to make an exception for this tracker. “A Gorden setter, right?”

Leeza registered the fact that Daggert deliberately turned his gaze away from her and urged Stone to a brisk walk.

Gritting her teeth, she did the same.

“He’s a remarkable dog,” she stated stubbornly.

James Daggert paid her less attention than he would have a flea on that Hanta-virus-bearing mouse.

“The children back at Rancho Milagro have yellow Labrador mixes,” she said. “Enrique loves them.”

Daggert didn’t so much as glance in her direction.

“You know, you don’t have to talk to me. I couldn’t care less, in fact,” she lied. “But I know little Enrique. I could probably tell you a thing or two that might help us find him. Like where he might be going? However, you’re the great tracker genius, so I’ll concede the issue.

“I’m not even complaining about having to sit on this wildly uncomfortable western-style saddle you made the hands at the ranch put on this horse, despite the fact that I’m used to riding English. But I’ll tell you what I really don’t get—”

He leaned forward suddenly and his horse broke into a hard gallop. Within seconds, he was at least a football field’s length ahead of her.

She sighed. “What I don’t get is why you make my knees turn to water just looking at you.”

Her horse nickered, as if laughing at her.



Seeing the shadows lengthen across the desert and knowing the night would soon plummet them into darkness, Daggert pulled back on Stone’s reins and waited for the woman to catch up to him.

She did, but she didn’t stop as her horse came abreast his. Her shoulders were slumped and her head drooped. Her eyes were open but glassy with exhaustion. Her lips moved, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. The eager horse and spent woman moved on past him.

He urged Stone forward and grabbed hold of her slackened reins. If her horse had seen a snake or had stumbled even once, she’d have tumbled off. As it was, with his stopping the horse, she nearly slid down, anyway.

He swore beneath his breath and swiftly dismounted. He dropped Stone’s reins to the ground, knowing the big horse wouldn’t move so much as a step away. Keeping hold of her horse’s reins, he circled the mare and reached up for Leeza Nelson.

She was still muttering, and, closer to her now, he could hear her strangely lifeless recitation of facts about her missing charge, the boy he’d been hired to find. “He likes to draw. He likes to swim. He likes pancakes. He likes puppies. He likes practical jokes. He likes to draw. He likes to swim. He likes…”

She was leaning forward over the saddle horn, still rocking slightly, muttering in a strange rhythm, seemingly unaware that they’d stopped. Her beautiful face was pasty and her knuckles even whiter.

Without a word, Daggert wrapped her horse’s reins around his wrist and dislodged her nerveless feet from the stirrups she’d had the men at the ranch raise a couple of inches so that she could pretend she was riding English style. She issued a small sound either of protest or of pain as her feet dangled free and blood rushed to them.

“Come on down now,” he said, holding up his hands to her.

“He likes to draw,” she murmured.

Daggert felt a cold knife slip into the hard casing surrounding his heart. “Daddy, see what I drew! It’s you, see?” A stick figure with long hair and a horse the size of a mountain had been the last picture Donny ever drew.

“Come,” he said to the woman.

She turned her gaze in his direction and he saw understanding slowly filter through her fatigue. “We’re stopping,” she said. It was a statement of profound need rather than a question.

“Come down,” he said, and when she didn’t move, he added, “I’ve got you.”

He saw her try to swing her leg over the back of the horse, but between that damned foolish way of hitching up her stirrups—trying to ride English style across a desert for hours—and the long day they’d put in, she couldn’t manage to make her muscles work for her.

He gripped her elbow and gave a sharp tug. She slid from the horse, straight into his waiting arms. As her mount sidled away, Daggert staggered back a step, the reins cutting at his wrist and pulling him sideways. But he didn’t release her. He held her to his chest, too aware of her trembling body cradled against his.

He could smell some elusive fragrance wafting from her hair, and above it, the familiar scent of sunshine and bone-dry September desert in southeastern New Mexico. She’d closed her eyes, and he was glad of that because he’d already discovered they were such an incredible blue that they hurt a man to look too deeply into them.

As feisty as she’d been all day, he half anticipated her demanding he get his dirty hands off her. Instead, she turned her head to his chest. “Oh, thank God,” she murmured. “Thank you. Thank you.”

Instinctively, his arms tightened around her.

He carried her a few paces, dragging the reluctant horse behind them, then gently sank to one knee to set her down on the lee side of a sandy mound. She murmured in protest as he pulled his arms away, but she didn’t open her eyes.

Daggert waited for a few seconds, making sure she wasn’t going to slump face first into the sand. She merely leaned her blond head back against the earth and sighed.

He unwound her horse’s reins from his wrist, and, ignoring the abrasion left by the leather ties, led the animal back toward Stone. After a quick survey of the area, Daggert loosely tied both horses to a scraggly branch of a scrub oak. He pulled one of the saddlebags free from Stone’s many packs and quickly withdrew both a canteen of water and some moistened towelettes.

The woman hadn’t moved from her sandy bed and only shook her head when he knelt beside her again.

“Go away, sadist,” she murmured.

“Here’s some water.”

“I’ll bet it’s poisoned,” she said. “You’d make better time if you left me for dead.”

“Drink,” he said. He lifted her cramped hands and frowned at the chafed skin on her palms and between her fingers. She’d obviously gripped both the saddle horn and the reins with that same fierce intensity she put into those knifelike glares he’d felt against his back most of the day.

He held the canteen to her lips and cupped the base of her neck in his hand. Her soft, fluffy cap of hair played with the fine hairs on the back of his hand. She resisted at first, then, as the cold liquid trickled across her lips and down her chin, she roused sufficiently to swallow. When she might have gulped it and caused her stomach to cramp, he pulled the canteen away.

“I’m going to wake up and this will all have been a nightmare. Enrique will be home, eating dinner. I won’t be out in the desert with some stranger who hates women,” she said clearly, if not very logically.

Daggert carefully sealed the water container and set it aside before opening one of the towelettes. With as much gentleness as he might have used on one of his animals, he wiped her brow, her cheeks and the hollow of her slender, sharply marked collarbone.

She moved a little, arching her back to accommodate him. He continued slowly, carefully, bringing her heat down and erasing the dust of a day’s ride from her lovely skin. Her color, he saw, was coming back, giving her a peachy glow in the dusky light. As he continued to bathe her with the cool cloth, he saw her fingers finally begin to relax.

“That’s nice,” she breathed. “I never would have suspected you had it in you.”

He unbuttoned the top button of her elegant blouse and dipped the cool cloth beneath the folds, drawing it near the swell of her breasts, up the arch of each shoulder and back down again.

She sighed once more.

He allowed his fingers to dip a bit lower, cooling her. Heating him.

Her eyelids opened abruptly and eyes as blue and deep as the coldest mountain lake met his squarely. “Enjoying yourself?” she asked.

He gave a final slow swipe before pulling his hand back. “I’m not dead,” he said.

“Something to look forward to, then,” she purred.

He pushed himself erect and walked away from her. He didn’t look back. If he did, he knew he would stare. Even exhausted as she was, her reserves depleted, Daggert knew that short of the silver screen, he’d never seen a woman as staggeringly beautiful and as perfectly formed as Leeza Nelson. As tall as a fashion model and as willowy as any young tree in springtime, she nevertheless filled out her snazzy clothes in all the right places.

And those eyes were as blue as liquid cobalt and as icy as a pond in late winter. One plunge and a man would either drown or feel reborn. Or be killed for getting too close to the edge.

And where everything else about her seemed sleek and elegant, her hair was a slightly mussed cap of blond wisps that seemed to call for his touch. When it had teased the back of his hand as he helped her drink the water, he’d had to force himself not to let his fingers tangle in that spun silk.

The only thing that didn’t match that picture of total perfection had been the brief, glittering blaze of fury he’d glimpsed in her when he’d countermanded her saddle choice early in the day.

Leeza Nelson, female magnate of some big-shot corporation back east, and one of the co-owners of the huge Rancho Milagro, a miracle foster children’s home in the middle of the desert, obviously wasn’t used to having anyone question her commands. He’d only had to be around her for fifteen minutes back at the ranch to know she issued them like royal edicts, a half smile of authority on her princess lips, when no smile existed in her eyes.

He’d found just a little too much pleasure in watching her fight to keep her finely boned face from revealing her anger. And he had far too much interest in speculating what her do-as-I-tell-you mouth might feel like beneath his.

Daggert had to give her credit. She’d ridden for eight hours straight without a single complaint—except about his silence. She’d left her comfortable ranch, following a complete stranger, a man who many called crazy and worse, to look for a runaway boy who’d been only recently deposited at the ranch.

Leeza could have stayed put and called in a host of law enforcement types—Lord knew that with one of her ranch partners married to a federal marshal, she could have had her pick of half a dozen agencies. She could have simply waited with the others at Rancho Milagro, trusting fate to deliver the little boy back home safely. She could have directed the ranch hands to scour the land, searching for the boy who had undoubtedly already run away from a dozen different foster homes.

But Leeza Nelson hadn’t done any of those things. She’d sent the ranch hands searching in the predawn hours. She’d directed law enforcement to check bus stations and highways. And she’d decided she needed to find the boy herself, with the aid of one half-breed Apache, a notorious tracker named Daggert. That she’d taken the trouble to find the best told him a lot about her.

And the set look on her lovely face as she’d refused to back down when he’d announced he worked alone had told him something, as well.

“Not this time,” she’d said coolly. And any man in his right mind would have shivered and asked for a parka right about then.

She hadn’t pleaded, or cajoled him into agreeing; she’d just ordered a horse saddled and a pack prepared. She’d given orders like a general on a campaign and had only shot him that one furious glare at his countermanding her saddle choice.

He’d made it clear he wasn’t going to slow down for her, that if she was determined to force herself on him, he wasn’t going to nursemaid her. If he was going to find this little boy, he couldn’t afford to stop and smell flowers along the way.

And damned if she hadn’t matched him step for grueling step all day.

And despite her overt weariness, she’d still summoned enough spunk to slap him down when he’d slipped his hand beneath her blouse.

With his back to her, he smiled. The lady had grit, he’d give her that, even if she didn’t have the faintest notion of what was what. His smile faded. She was under the impression that she’d hired him to find her missing runaway. That was true, in a way, but there was far more to it than that.

He’d have done it for free, as half the people of Carlsbad would have told her if she’d asked. He was the person everyone called when someone was missing. Not because he was lucky, but because he was relentless. And because he had another agenda.

He loosened her saddle and slid it from the mare’s back. He did the same for Stone, setting all the packs to the south side of the sandy arroyo he’d chosen for the night’s camp, a place safe for that evening, as no storms threatened. It was September and even in drought years rain always fell in that month, the transition from summer into autumn. They’d had rain the night before the boy ran away and they would again in the next four days. Knowing that wasn’t magic on Daggert’s part; it was courtesy of the National Weather Service.

“Hello?”

He turned in her direction.

She was on her cell phone. She’d spent the better part of the first stage of their journey with the little black instrument pressed against her ear, jabbering into it as if it and not people might conjure up the missing boy.

Daggert went back to setting up the camp as she leaned forward, apparently seeking better reception. She’d better have a great conversation tonight, for the Guadalupe Mountains were renowned for interrupting cell phone service. Unless on cliff sides or in high mountain meadows, wireless communication was almost nil in the Guadalupes, and there wasn’t any other kind shy of smoke signals.

“No, not a sign of him,” he heard her say.

Daggert didn’t even bother to shake his head. There had been plenty of signs of Enrique’s progress; he just hadn’t pointed them out to the lady from back east. A piece of a tortilla covered with ants. A chewing gum wrapper. Hoofprints from the boy’s horse—noted because Rancho Milagro used the same farrier that most of the county did, and this particular blacksmith liked to bend one horseshoe nail backward, leaving his distinct signature every time a horse stepped on anything but pure asphalt.

Daggert and the woman were still quite a way behind their prey, but narrowing the gap considerably. The boy hadn’t been able to push his horse very swiftly in the dark the night before. With luck they might catch up with him by noon the following day.

“Okay, you know my number. Call me if you hear anything,” she said, and hung up without a farewell. A no-frills woman. A woman used to running things her way. And probably getting them her way, as well.

Daggert thought that, given a couple of millennia, they might actually find they had a few things in common.

“Are we really stopping for the night?” she asked him with more than a hint of accusation in her tone. “Shouldn’t we just take a rest and keep looking?”

He shook his head and continued setting up camp. Again he felt a reluctant stab of admiration. Grit? The woman had more than mere grit. She had class. She couldn’t have ridden another step, but here she was, ready to get back out there.

Better than she did, Daggert understood the need to continue the search, no matter the hour, no matter the lack of light. The ice princess only believed Enrique Dominguez had run away from Rancho Milagro.

Daggert knew she didn’t have a clue what dangers lurked out there. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, she didn’t know she had come in contact with lions, tigers and bears. She had no way of knowing that no one, especially little Enrique, was safe from the dangers lurking in the Guadalupes.

She didn’t have the foggiest notion of what might have befallen the boy just a few yards outside the fence surrounding the massive headquarters of the children’s home—not from rattlesnakes and other animals, though those were prevalent enough. Worse things than nature and nature’s creatures lurked among grasses, stunted trees and thorny shrubs.

But Daggert wasn’t about to tell her what really scared him. He didn’t want to have a hysterical woman on his hands. Not that Leeza Nelson seemed the type for histrionics. But she was still laboring under the idea that the boy she followed was simply running away from a foster care situation, if not—if the ranch hands were to believed—from Leeza Nelson personally.

Daggert knew that accepting such an easy explanation for the boy’s continued absence was almost like selecting his gravestone. Daggert should know, he’d lost his own son that way.

Having finished taking care of Stone, he tended Leeza’s mare. He hummed a little as he worked and, between the brushing and the tuneless susurration, both horses relaxed their bunched muscles and gently whickered their thanks.

He decided he couldn’t call the mare by her given name; Lulubelle was a ridiculous handle. Noble creatures demanded dignified names. He ran his hand down her withers and on down her legs, feeling the powerful muscles ripple beneath his palm. No sign of her being winded, no overt indication of lather, no swelling… Like Stone, she was in prime condition. “I’ll call you Belle,” he told her. “You’re as beautiful as your rider.”

Belle nodded her head as if agreeing with him.




Chapter 2


In the fading light, Leeza watched Daggert touching Lulubelle, and knew a pang of something akin to envy. The man ran his hands over the horse as a lover might, firmly, with sure intent and deliberate strokes. He knew just where to touch the beast to gentle her, to soothe her, to make her understand his wishes. He applied light pressure to her knee joints and, one by one, she lifted her legs for him. He stroked her neck, whispering to her, and she swayed into his embrace. His hand traveled every part of her and she trembled beneath his touch.

By the time Daggert turned around, Leeza’s mouth had gone dry once more, but this time exhaustion had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Her face, usually schooled to reveal nothing, must have showed her every thought because he checked his stride, and his golden eyes seemed to sharpen.

At that moment, she couldn’t have spoken if her life depended on it. He looked every inch the warrior she’d imagined him when she’d stepped out on the veranda earlier that day and coolly announced she was accompanying him on the search for Enrique Dominguez.

But there was more than the warrior in his eyes now. His frozen stance reminded her of something feral, wild. A black wolf, perhaps—wary, dangerous and dominant. The sudden heat in his gaze only underscored the impression. Then he moved again, his stride fluid and muscled, deliberately turning his gaze away from her.

She wondered if she’d imagined what had just happened, then questioned if he’d provided the show with the horse just to drive her crazy. She shook her head. He couldn’t have. He would have to have eyes in the back of his head to know she’d sat there slack-jawed, imagining the touch of his hand on her body instead of the horse’s.

She’d simply been affected by the day’s intense heat.

The difficult ride.

The worry over Enrique.

And the fact that she was wholly out of her element.

Her reaction was nothing more than these things. Absolutely nothing.

But none of those reasons explained away the fire his gaze had lit inside her.

To her relief, Daggert’s dog, Sancho, came running up then, his long, black-spotted tongue lolling. He spat out a branch of some kind at his master’s feet and barked twice before sitting down and panting heavily.

Leeza blushed when Daggert pulled a plastic bowl and cup from one of his packs and poured a little canteen water into each. She’d drunk directly from the canteen. He set the bowl down for the dog and quickly quenched his own thirst. When Sancho barked, he shook his head and picked up the bowl.

“Fire first, dinner later,” he told the dog gently.

He carefully replaced the items in his packs before beginning to gather large river rocks from the arroyo’s sandy banks. The dog settled down in the sand beside the saddles, lay his head on Daggert’s tooled leather seat and gave a great sigh. Like his master, the dog didn’t glance her way.

Leeza looked up to find Daggert standing less than six inches away from her. She hadn’t heard him move. He held out his hand.

She looked at his callused palm as if it might hold snakes. He waited. She placed her stiff fingers in his and was startled by the contact. He might as well have kissed her, so intimate was the sensation of their fingers touching. She could feel the heat of his skin, the roughness of his calluses and some indefinable psychic energy emanating from him.

And when his fingers wrapped around hers and he effortlessly pulled her to her feet, inches from his rock-hard body, she felt the impact arrow through her. She tried removing her hand, but he didn’t release her. She gave him a startled glance and found he was staring at her with a fixed, almost hard look. A wolf’s look.

A flutter of fear and unbridled need made her breath catch.

And still he held her hand, not squeezing it, but not letting her go, either.

“That’s hilarious,” she drawled, but she felt something inside her quaking, both with that strange fear and something else she’d never experienced before.

He said nothing, though he continued to look at her as if forcing her to read his thoughts, understand the meaning of his touch. Abruptly, he let her go.

Her hand hung in the air for a moment, as if he’d hypnotized her and no power on earth would let her lower her limb. Then she jerked it down to her side. It seemed to tingle, but she resisted the urge to look at it. Or at him.

Daggert stacked the river rocks in a circle for the night’s campfire. Even as he performed the methodical task, he felt the woman’s presence. When he’d turned from her horse to see her watching him, with a fire flickering in her gaze and her lips parted and her fingertips resting against her pulsing throat, he’d felt a fuse light inside him. Who’d have thought such a cool customer would have such a look in her eyes?

Could it be she didn’t even know it? Her mouth had snapped shut and her eyes had widened as if she saw something in his face. Maybe she’d spent so many years playing the ice princess that she’d convinced herself she was just that.

He’d told her he wasn’t dead, but until he’d held her in his arms, even if just to keep her from falling down, he might as well have been six feet under. When little Donny died, something in him had been murdered, too. The crippling guilt and scarcely checked rage had turned him away from everyone, everything he knew.

He should have made sure Donny hadn’t walked home alone from his friend’s house. He should have found the boy in minutes. He should have tracked the fiend who’d taken his only son. He should have found the monster and eviscerated him.

Sometimes Daggert wondered if he’d have been okay if his ex-wife had blamed him, too. But she hadn’t. She’d nearly drowned in her grief, but she hadn’t blamed her tracker husband, hadn’t ever said a word to imply she harbored anything but sympathy for his torment. But even with her acceptance, Alma hadn’t been able to get past the terrible pain rioting just below the surface of James Daggert. He’d understood when she gave up one day and left him in the canyons of his own despair. She deserved a life, deserved to find some measure of happiness. He sure as hell couldn’t give it to her anymore.

He thought of the woman who had ridden behind him all day, and of her determination to find Enrique. The fleeting thought that she might not give up on him flashed through Daggert’s mind. He shook his head. That was crazy thinking.

Still, he found some grim satisfaction in knowing he wasn’t dead to sensation, that his body, if no other part of him, could still be swamped with restless need, however painful. He smiled wryly, suspecting he’d be hurting plenty by the conclusion of this particular mission.

He thought about her sad little litany of surface facts about Enrique Dominguez, the way she’d repeated them like a talisman against her exhaustion. He’d done the same with Donny. Not reciting all the little things he knew about the boy—those were carved in his heart—but details about his death.

The fact that no one had seen anyone unusual that day was significant all by itself. A little boy on his way home from a friend’s house didn’t wind up some forty miles away, mangled beyond recognition. Daggert knew that people had seen someone, all right—someone they knew. But because they knew him, they’d forgotten they’d seen him. Because he belonged there. Like fences, like flowerbeds, like grass.

Someone Donny knew. Someone Daggert knew.

Everyone became suspect. Everyone became potential child killers. And his litany became, “Who is it? Who do I know who’s capable of murder? Who did everyone see that day and not even notice? The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker?”

He understood the need to focus. He understood litanies. They drove fear away and kept despair at bay.

After he laid the fire and lit it, he pulled out his collapsible water buckets, filled them and set them down in front of the horses. He doled two scoops each of molasses oats into canvas feed bags, and after the horses had drunk their fill, slipped a makeshift chuck-wagon on to each horse’s head.

He hoped he and the woman would find the boy the next day, not just for the child’s sake. He hadn’t planned on feeding two horses, and had brought enough oats for one, for only five days. At this rate, they would last only three full days without supplemental supplies, and it took nearly that long to reach the upper mountains.

The only sounds that could be heard were the distant cry of a nighthawk, horses munching oats and the fire crackling in the chilly desert night. Into that companionable quiet, he heard Leeza ask, “What do you want me to do?”

“Sit,” he said, pulling two dinner packets from one of his saddlebags. “Watch out for goat heads.”

“What?”

“Stickers. Shaped like goat heads.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

Daggert set a pot of water on the broad, flat rocks he’d placed in the middle of their fire circle. At some three thousand feet on the high desert plain, water wouldn’t take long to boil.

He added the already cooked meals in their little plastic bags to the churning water. When they were heated through, he plucked them from the pot with his pocketknife and, slicing them open, dumped the contents on to the aluminum plates he’d set out earlier.

As he worked, Leeza didn’t say a single word, not even muttering snide comments when she thought he couldn’t hear her, as she had much of the day. He turned to look at her and found her staring at the flames, silent tears coursing down her beautiful face.

He briefly closed his eyes. Even if he were the most talkative man in the world, he wouldn’t have known what to say now. He said nothing, pretending he hadn’t seen her anguish, and dug in one of the packs again, withdrawing a container of salt and pepper and a couple of napkins.

The race for space travel had vastly improved simple pleasures on earth. Even the sorriest excuse for a cook could rustle up a decent meal with freeze-dried ingredients or precooked entrées, a pot of hot water and a few spices carefully packed in a plastic bag. Within minutes, he set a plate of beef stew out for Sancho and two more of pasta primavera for Leeza and himself.

With a wary glance at her, he held out her plate. Most signs of tears were gone, but she didn’t respond.

“You’ll feel better if you eat something,” he said.

She reached for the plate then, and he let out a pent-up breath as he handed her a fork. She stirred the pasta around but didn’t make any move to eat. “Enrique’s only nine,” she said.

He waited. Donny had been seven. He would be seven forever. “He’s growing up, Alma. Let him walk home alone.”

“And he’s afraid of thunder.”

Daggert forked in a mouthful of pasta and chewed silently. “Daddy? You won’t let the lightning hurt me, right?”

“He plays practical jokes.” She gave a watery chuckle. “He put a paper sack filled with dry leaves in the back of a dresser drawer so I’d think there was a rattlesnake in it when I opened the drawer. It worked.”

She was silent as Daggert took several bites, then said, “Everyone thinks Enrique dislikes me.”

Daggert stirred the fire, and the coals in his memory. “You’re too hard on him, James. He’s just a little boy.”

“Do you want to know why?”

He set his knife aside.

“They—everyone from my best friends to the housekeeper—thought I was too hard on the children. All the children. But mostly Enrique.”

“Why?”

“Do you mean why does everyone think I’m too hard, why was I too hard or why Enrique in particular?” she asked.

“You choose,” Daggert answered, amazed at her ability to split meanings.

“You sound like a psychiatrist.”

He didn’t say anything, thinking she couldn’t know how ironic that sounded, due to the fact that a host of psychiatrists hadn’t been able to put him together again. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men… One of Donny’s favorite nursery rhymes.

“Okay, I don’t believe anything can be accomplished without hard work. And it’s my experience that children need strict rules and guidelines. It’s how I was raised, and I’m fully aware of the benefits of such a firm hand at the helm. And why Enrique in particular? Because he’s smart, because he’s lazy. Because he’s vulnerable, and vulnerability only makes victims.”

“Being vulnerable is a liability, then?”

“I’m tired,” she said suddenly, and handed him the plate of uneaten food. “I think I’ll pass on the rest of this session.”

He handed her plate back. “It was a hard ride and a long day. You’d better eat something.”

“Really, I couldn’t.”

“But you will.”

She gave him a cold look that let him understand he’d have to wrestle her down and force-feed her before she’d concede.

He sighed. “Lady, I won’t have time tomorrow to take you back to the ranch when you faint from hunger. You don’t have enough meat on your bones to go a day without food. It’s a matter of simple mathematics. The boy already has a twelve-hour head start on us. Add another eight or nine hours and the kid’s been out in the open for almost twenty-four hours already. We have to catch up with him soon, and we won’t be able to if I’m busy picking you up off the ground.”

Though Leeza watched him warily, Daggert didn’t look at her as he bent over his own plate and resumed his careful eating. She dipped up a forkful of the pasta and tasted it. She was surprised at how delicious it was. If Daggert dared smile, she’d give the plate of pasta to his dog rather than continue to eat it herself, but he didn’t. He merely finished his dinner in a silence that almost felt easy.

And she was hungrier than she’d thought, for within seconds, her plate was empty, too.

“Thank you,” she said finally, relinquishing it into his hands. “You were right, I was hungry.”

He nodded and moved away from the fire, but not before Leeza had caught a sober look of something that might have been sympathy in his gaze. Sympathy or an almost reluctant compassion. For some odd reason, the notion of his possessing any compassion unnerved her. It was far easier to think of him as rude and bullying and harder than nails than to see him as a human being with human emotions.

After she’d warily used the meager facilities he’d set up behind a low scrub oak, and availed herself of some of the remaining hot water, she turned her back on him and carefully, stiffly, removed her coat, blouse and boots.

Never one for voyeurism, Daggert tried turning his gaze to the fire, but failed miserably when he heard the rasp of her jeans zipper. Her legs went on forever.

“Goddamn,” he said.

She stiffened but didn’t turn around. “What?”

“I burned myself,” he lied. Or was he telling the abject truth?

Amazing him, she pulled on a pair of red satin pajamas. She might as well have been at some fancy motel instead of camping out in the desert on a mission to find a runaway kid. What had possessed her housekeeper to pack such a ridiculous item?

“Good night,” she said, slipping into her sleeping bag.

“Right,” he said, feeling as if he’d fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole.

“Sleep well,” she murmured.

Thinking about her in that getup, he’d be lucky if he ever slept again.




Chapter 3


From atop the highest peak in the rising foothills, the hunter, as he thought of himself, was able to see for miles in all directions. With powerful binoculars at his eyes, he could easily discern Leeza Nelson in red pajamas that made her look as if she’d dressed herself in flame. He saw Daggert moving around the fire, banking it, careful as ever.

The tracker hadn’t been so careful four years ago, had he?

Turning his binoculars to the north, he spied the would-be fire of his newest prey. Everything in him itched to move forward, to catch the boy and teach him a lesson about crossing boundaries. He’d taught many before.

But he shifted his gaze back to the woman slipping into her sleeping bag. The hunter wondered if Leeza Nelson knew that people called Daggert the Cassandra of the desert, always crying murder and never finding enough evidence to prove it. He wondered if she’d heard that Daggert was the man everyone trusted and no one believed.

The woman should have given up by now, but she’d stayed with Daggert throughout the day, even if she posted in her saddle, English style.

She didn’t know about boundaries, either. Maybe it was time she was taught a lesson.

The man wondered if he should flip a coin. The woman or the boy? Heads the woman, tails the child. If he played his cards right—and he was one hell of a card player—he might have the opportunity to teach both of them.

He didn’t need a fire. His thoughts of what he would do to them warmed him thoroughly.



Leeza was wholly spent, tired in places she’d never been aware of before, yet sleep eluded her.

The night stars seemed heavy, as if straining against invisible reins to streak to the earth. She could pick out the Big and Little Dippers, Cassiopeia and the Seven Sisters. In another month she’d be able to find Orion’s belt, she knew a portend of the coming winter.

She’d shown Enrique the constellations one night about two weeks earlier. He’d studied them carefully, trying to see patterns in the myriad twinkling lights until he finally learned the few she could always find.

“My parents are up there,” he’d said.

Assuming he’d meant “in heaven,” Leeza had had to clench her hands in her lap to keep from wrapping her arms around the little boy who’d lost both parents at such an early age.

Just as she had.

But no one had coddled her. Not in any of the foster homes she’d been shuffled in and out of in her early years. Not in the tidy home John and Cora Nelson had brought her to when she was nine. Enrique’s age exactly.

“Emotionalism is a waste of time,” her adoptive father had said on more than one occasion, usually when her eyes were brimming with tears over some imagined hurt. “It reveals a lack of precise thinking.”

Looking at the stars now, out in the middle of a vast desert wilderness, inches from a hard stranger who was kind to his animals if not to the woman who’d hired him, Leeza found herself wishing that she’d drawn Enrique onto her lap and held him close. If she had given just that small measure of comfort, would he have opted to stay at the ranch and not run away into the darkness?

Her partners, Corrie and Jeannie, fellow orphans and sisters in heart if not blood, had entered the Rancho Milagro venture with their arms wide open for the children arriving at the foster-care facility. Leeza had agreed to become a partner in the project for two reasons: Jeannie had needed something to do after her husband and baby had been killed in a senseless accident, and because Leeza herself truly believed in the value of a firm guiding hand for children who were lost, for whatever reason.

She just hadn’t expected it to be so hard. She had assumed they would hire a few teachers, set the children on the straight and narrow, and guide them to understand how they all had an opportunity to make something of their lives. Much as John and Cora Nelson had done with her.

Instead, Jeannie had expected them to actually live on the premises, to give up their lives in Washington, D.C. and move to the remote location north of Carlsbad, New Mexico. Jeannie had come first, overseeing the renovation of the ramshackle place. Corrie came next, to find a new life for herself and the children she loved.

Finally, reluctantly, Leeza had arrived. She’d given the ranch a halfhearted try, but in truth, she was eager to get back to her business deals and mergers. The venture at the ranch seemed chaotic to her, out of control, and not just because the state and federal regulations kept them hamstrung. It was the children who created the biggest problem for Leeza.

Children scarcely out of diapers, angry teenagers and kids like sad-eyed little Enrique had been deposited at Rancho Milagro, the last stop in a string of broken homes and hearts. Each one seemed to weigh on Leeza’s soul, though she’d never admitted it before now. And little Enrique with his questing mind, that oddly shaped scar on his forehead—a permanent reminder that man’s inhumanity to children persisted no matter how many laws were changed—his quirky sense of humor and those too-old eyes, had gotten under her skin more than the others.

Was that the reason she’d ridden him harder, pushed him with greater determination? So much so that she’d driven him away from the ranch of miracles?

Exhaustion and fear had brought unfamiliar tears earlier that night. Luckily, the rock-hard Daggert hadn’t seen them, or if he had, he’d pretended otherwise. Now her worry over the little runaway had driven her grief deep inside again, to a lonely place of roiling emotions, with no relief or release.

She would find him. She had to. That’s all there was to it.

She reviewed the situation with a cold dispassion. Mentally evaluating any given situation was an exercise she’d learned early in childhood, and had been drilled into her by her adoptive parents. Mental precision kept fear at bay.

Bracingly, she told herself that a day’s absence was not so long on a very big ranch. And Enrique had a coat, a blanket and a horse named Dandelion.

And though he couldn’t know it, he had her, a really smart dog and a master tracker named James Daggert going after him.

“Damn it, lady, go to sleep.” Daggert’s voice was strangely soft. “You’re doing the best you can.”

She closed her eyes against the weight of the stars, her fears for Enrique and the closeness of the man lying not two feet from her. Her last conscious thought was to wonder how Daggert had known she was awake. And how he’d known to say the one thing that would allow her to relax enough to sleep.

She woke what seemed seconds later to the sound of something creeping around the camp. Even as fear made her breath catch in her throat, hope that it might be Enrique flooded through her. But on the very real chance it was a bear, she opened her eyes the merest bit.

At first she couldn’t see anything in the darkness, then she made out James Daggert’s silhouette against a wall of dimming stars. She thought he might be praying, he stood so still, facing the thinnest slice of predawn light on the horizon. He drew a deep breath and expelled it slowly. His exhalation hung in the air, and for some reason, it was a lonely sight—man, stars and cloud of warm breath against a black sky.

The chill of the September morning nipped at her cheeks, and she huddled in her sleeping bag, realizing she’d actually slept all night. As the sky lightened, she watched Daggert move about the camp.

He packed his things neatly and with considerable skill. He studied the camp with the eyes of a drill sergeant inspecting a parade troop. She’d seen his attention to detail the day before, but watching him when he was unaware of her gave her the opportunity to see that nothing about his movements was wasted. He was, in his way, an efficiency expert.

She wondered if the precision was a matter of survival. It certainly was in her world. Lack of attention to every nuance of a venture was the ruination of a venture capitalist, and she was one of the very best.

Leeza suspected Daggert left nothing to chance because lack of forethought on his part might mean certain death for him or the person he sought.

His horse nickered at him and he whispered for Stone to be quiet.

Leeza, buried in her warm sleeping bag, smiled beneath the covers.

She’d never taken the time to watch a man prepare for his day. Any encounters she’d had in the past had ended with a yawn, a polite good-night and the firm shutting of her door as her companion departed. Waking up with a man seemed too great an intimacy, too close to an emotional entanglement.

Not that she was technically waking up with James Daggert. She stopped smiling.

The horse nickered again and Daggert moved toward him, running his broad palm over the large, rangy sorrel. He murmured something and the animal rumbled in appreciation.

“Soon, old man,” Daggert said softly.

Leeza could hear true affection in his voice, as if he and the horse had been through many rough times together and the dangers they’d faced had forged an unbreakable bond between them. Watching them, she tried imagining feeling the powerful muscles rippling beneath her palm. Instead, her mind substituted Daggert’s bare shoulders. She closed her eyes.

“Good morning, Belle, you beauty, you.”

Her eyes flew open. And she blushed, realizing that velvet voice hadn’t been addressing her, but rather her horse.

The renamed Belle pawed the ground, as if answering him.

Leeza sighed as Daggert hefted the thick saddle pad, then the hated saddle, onto Belle’s back and cinched it securely. He packed her saddle as carefully as he had his own. When all was aboard the horse, with the exception of Leeza and her sleeping bag, he gave Belle a slice of apple.

The setter, apparently knowing Daggert’s ritual, came up, wagging his tail and whining at his master.

Daggert ran his hand down the dog’s soft neck. Leeza thought she’d never seen a man so completely comfortable around animals. It was as if he shared a telepathic communication with them.

“No use hurrying, Sancho. We have a half hour before full daylight, and if I know women—and contrary to your experience of me, I’ve known a few in my time—the lady won’t be ready, anyway.”

Leeza could have sworn the dog grinned as his feathered tail swept the earth. James ran his hands down the full length of the dog’s back, and Leeza wriggled even as the animal did.

Sancho barked.

Leeza groaned.

“She’s awake,” Daggert said. “Close your eyes now or her red pajamas will blind you.”



Daggert firmly believed that a good ninety-nine percent of the human population looked a bit worse for wear after a night out in the open. Not Leeza Nelson.

She looked as if she’d just stepped from a penthouse apartment, freshly showered, powdered and having had a manicure following a massage. Instead, she’d come around a scraggly mesquite bush and used towelettes for a bath. The only telltale sign that she’d been horseback riding most of the day before was her slightly stiff walk as she approached the campfire.

He pointed to the coffeepot, then poured some for her before she reached for it without a pot holder. She gave him a dazzling smile that made him wish he’d packed a Kevlar vest.

Not trusting her friendliness—she hadn’t struck him as a hail-fellow-well-met sort of person—he busied himself unrolling a chamois cloth and spreading out the items Sancho had collected the day before. He sat studying them.

“What’s all this?” Leeza asked brightly.

“Clues,” he said.

“Explain, please,” she said. Not a question, but a command, even if she had softened it. That do-it-my-way attitude again.

“Sancho brought them in last night.” He held up the branch of scrub oak the dog had carried in his jaws. He pointed to the thistles that had been embedded in his silky coat. “Russian thistle and tumble-weed. Broken, but still fresh, see? And these? Bits of chamisa. Another gum wrapper.”

“His path,” she said, a note of wonder in her voice. “That’s the path Sancho took—following Enrique?”

Daggert couldn’t help but look at her. Her logic wasn’t what snared him; it was the honest note of awe in her voice. Luckily, she wasn’t gazing back at him. She was beaming at his Sancho.

“You’re a good dog,” she said. “A very, very good dog.”

Sancho rose and came to her, tail beating against Daggert’s back.

Daggert was stunned. He’d never seen Sancho approach anyone other than himself. The mutt always seemed to maintain a purely business relationship on their mission, eschewing fraternization with the clients, just like his master.

Daggert found he preferred things that way. He pushed Sancho’s tail aside, but instead of moving away, the dog merely gave Daggert a happy grin and sat down beside the woman.

She looped an arm around his back, scratched at his ears and asked the dog, “So you know which way we’ll be going then?”

Daggert felt unreasonably irritated with Sancho’s defection, and the fact that she was talking to the dog instead of him.

“Thanks for saddling Lulubelle.”

“Call her Belle. That other name is stupid for a horse.”

“Noted,” she said. “And I guess we won’t talk about the fact that Enrique’s riding Dandelion.”

James tossed his cold coffee on the fire. “You’d better eat,” he said, handing her a plate of eggs and grilled toast he’d kept warm for her.

“Please. I’m barely to the coffee stage.”

“Give it to the dog, then,” he said.

“You want some of these eggs, boy?”

He did. She scraped the contents of her plate on to a flat rock.

“His name is Sancho.”

Sancho inhaled the food she’d set out for him, and wagged his tail at her.

“Apt,” she said. “Every Don Quixote needs a Sancho, right, boy?”

Daggert didn’t know which he disliked more, the ice queen with her barbed tongue or this falsely smiling tourist. And the damnable truth was he wanted to kiss her either way.

“I think we’re going to have to set a couple of ground rules,” she said, making his hackles rise. “I realize that I know nothing about tracking and that’s why you’re here. At the same time, you know nothing about Enrique, and that’s why I’m here. I see no reason we can’t work together harmoniously.”

Daggert stood up. He’d known the pretty smiles and the butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth routine was a sham, but darned if he hadn’t fallen for it, anyway.

He quickly rubbed their plates with sand, wiped them with paper napkins, which he tossed into the dying flames, and stowed them in one of his saddlebags. He poured the remaining coffee on the fire and folded the pot in a heat-resistant cloth, shoving it in with the plates.

He rerolled her sleeping bag into a tight bolster—the woman had obviously never camped a day in her pampered life—and secured it to the back of Belle’s saddle. He tossed handfuls of sand on to the remaining coals and scuffed more on to them with his boot.

She rose and dusted her jeans.

“We’re heading north,” he said, bending over and cupping his hands to give her a leg up.

“That’s the spirit,” she said, stepping into his hand. She put all her weight into it, instead of using it as a hoist. He tossed her upward, and she landed in the saddle with a low “Oof.”

“Thank you,” she said, as if he’d merely given her a boost. “It’s good to know we have a meeting of the minds here.” Though she spoke cheerfully enough, he didn’t meet her gaze.

He reached for her stirrups to lower them.

She shoved her boots into the footholds and pressed down. “I don’t think so, Mr. Daggert. I may be forced to ride on a western monstrosity, but I refuse the full discomfort.”

He decided that icy tone of voice fit her long, elegant body to a T.

“Suit yourself.” She’d be singing a different tune by midday.

“All the children at Rancho Milagro keep a journal. It was one of my partner’s ideas—a chance for the kids to download. I read Enrique’s before we set out,” she said. Her falsely cheerful note was back. Why did Daggert think her more dangerous when she used it?

He swung his leg over Stone’s broad back.

“Have you ever heard of a place called Cima La Luz?”

“In the mountains,” he said.

“Light Peak, right?”

He grunted an assent.

“I’m beginning to suspect you’re not a morning person.” When he didn’t answer, she continued, “I believe Enrique might be heading there.”

Daggert stared at her coldly. “You didn’t think it important to tell me that yesterday?” he asked finally.

Her smile faltered but she didn’t flinch. “You didn’t exactly give me a chance,” she said. Her eyes dared him to deny this.

“Lady, if you don’t kill yourself riding like that, I might just do it for you. Good thing we’re heading toward Cima La Luz or I’d flay you right now just for the sheer hell of it. But just out of curiosity, why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”

The flush that stained her cheeks gave him all the answer he needed. She’d been testing him.

He spurred his horse forward while giving Sancho a go-ahead whistle.

“I’m sorry,” she called from behind him.

Daggert ground his teeth.



By the time the sun was directly overhead, the last thought on Leeza’s mind was cheerful needling. Her fears for Enrique were escalating with each passing hour. Her guilt was on the rise, as well. And her irritation with one noncommunicative tracker was boiling like mercury in a burning thermometer.

She’d tried giving him the same silent treatment he’d accorded her. Unfortunately, that seemed to work perfectly for him. She’d babbled at him and he’d ridden ahead. She’d hidden her exhausted tears from him the night before, and blinked them back now, but doubted he’d care even if he did see them.

He didn’t seem the slightest bit affected by the elements, the cruel sun, the cold morning or the fact that Enrique had been missing for at least thirty-nine hours now. In fact, Daggert seemed so indifferent to his surroundings he might as well have been made from bedrock, as she’d first imagined him to be.

And why she found herself attracted to him, she couldn’t even begin to fathom. It must be a by-product of the worry she felt for Enrique, and the unfamiliarity of searching for a child who didn’t want to be found.

It was the hostage syndrome, she thought, where a captive transferred feelings of faith to her abductor. Patty Hearst had done it; so had countless others.

Except Leeza wasn’t a hostage, she’d come on this mission against the tracker’s express wishes. She’d demanded to be included.

She was forced to admit he would have made better time without her. Any discomfort she felt was her own fault entirely.

Given her nature, this did not make her feel remotely better.

“He can use that chip on his shoulder to light a forest fire,” she told Belle. She grinned, feeling a little giddy. “Okay, wait, I have another one. There once was a man named Daggert…that’s too hard. There once was a man named James, who never would talk to the dames.”

“Enjoying yourself?”

She blushed as she never had before. It wasn’t a gentle rise of color; it was a raging conflagration of embarrassment. She hadn’t seen him halt his horse, and had caught up with him, literally unaware. But she lifted her chin, met his eyes directly and said, “Immensely.”

“We’ll stop here for lunch,” he said, and dismounted.

“Fine. Good.” Her stomach growled at the mere thought of food. She’d been foolish to give her eggs to Sancho. But she wasn’t about to admit it. “Belle could use a break.”

“Right,” he said. “Want a hand down?”

“No, thank you. I’m perfectly capable.”

“Just keep hold of the saddle horn.”

It took her about five minutes to dismount and another five before she could let go of the saddle horn. “I’d kill him,” she murmured to Belle, “but then how would we find Enrique? And I’m not sure I could find my way back alone.”

She gratefully accepted the moist towelettes he handed her, and leaned against the large boulder he’d selected as a shady picnic spot. She’d been too tired—and too busy making up nasty Daggert limericks—to notice the terrain while riding. It had changed considerably since dawn.

Low foothills, sparsely covered with scrub pine and liberally dotted with cholla cactus and chamisa, gave way to taller mountains in the distance. She’d read somewhere, probably in the material that came when they were first considering buying Rancho Milagro, that the Guadalupe Mountains weren’t technically part of the Rocky Mountains proper. They belonged to an older range, from the Devonian Period, and were more similar in nature to the Appalachians than to the Rockies, filled with caves, such as the Carlsbad Caverns, and pocketed with numerous sinkholes. Beneath the Guadalupes, oil awaited recovery, and within them somewhere, a little nine-year-old boy needed rescue.

Daggert whistled for Sancho and set out a bowl of water for him.

Leeza waited for a cup this time and accepted the warmish liquid with as much gratitude as she had the towelettes. She remained standing as she drank this time; however, her bottom being so sore she’d have cried out at contact with the solid ground.

Apparently unfazed by the long ride, Daggert sat down Indian-style and used a long, curved knife to pry apart something in a deep pouch. A moment later he pulled out a long strip of beef jerky. Using the blade of the knife, he handed the piece up to her.

While she was a personal fan of beef, believing recent medical findings declaring red meat to be rich in iron and calcium, she couldn’t say she was remotely fond of it salted, dried and rendered into strips of peppered leather. Add jalapeños to it and it was pure torture.

She spat her bite into her used towelette.

Daggert used his knife to tear off another piece of jerky and tossed it to an eager Sancho.

Sancho caught the bit of beef with alacrity and gulped it down after slashing it only a couple of times with his white teeth. He sat on the pebbled sand and whined.

Daggert tossed him another piece, which the dog caught but set down. He whined again.

“What is it, boy?” Daggert asked.

The dog lifted his right paw as if wanting to shake hands, or as if he’d acquired a thorn.

Daggert checked the raised paw, apparently found nothing amiss and ruffled the dog’s neck. “Go ahead,” he said.

The dog looked from the beef to his master and whined as he again lifted his paw.

“What are you telling me, Sancho-dog?” Daggert asked.

Sancho barked in answer before finally eating the piece of jerky he’d set aside.

Daggert watched him, frowning, then tore another piece free and passed it up to Leeza.

She held up her hand. “Please. No.”

“Too hot?” he asked. “So you’re as tender mouthed as you are a tenderfoot.”

“I think I have this figured out,” she said. “In your mind, I’m the ‘disliked one,’ the one who caused Enrique to run away.”

Daggert looked at the dog nearby. He gave Sancho a nod and the setter answered with a swift bark before tearing away from the picnic site.

“You don’t even want your dog to hear this,” Leeza said.

Daggert sighed, and the patronizing patience on his face fanned her fury. “You’ve decided the whole subject is taboo—at least you won’t talk to me about it. You don’t care to know the reasons why he may have decided to dislike me. Not you. Oh, you asked me last night, but you didn’t make any comment on my answer. Because you don’t care. Your mind is made up. It’s as obvious as the nose on your chiseled face that you’re making me a whipping boy. The more discomfort I feel, the more you like it. And you think the harder you push me, the more I’ll fall apart right in front of your golden eyes. Do you want to know why?”

He didn’t say anything, but his eyes had narrowed.

“I do,” she said, ignoring the sign of his growing anger. “I’ve had hours to study the question. And I think I have the answer. I think your whipping-boy complex stems from a deep-rooted fury at yourself because you didn’t manage to find someone. That you failed in your big search once. I don’t know who or what they meant to you, but it was—”

Leeza didn’t see Daggert move. She heard a low growl and a whoosh and then felt the wind being knocked out of her. For a full two seconds, she wasn’t even aware he’d lunged at her.

She focused on several things simultaneously: his muscled body pressing her against the boulder behind her. The knife he’d been using to tear the beef jerky being held against the hollow of her throat. And the tawny eyes she’d stupidly thought unreadable glaring into hers, filled with rage.

“Never talk about my son again,” he said. How had she thought his voice was like velvet? It was a razor, sharp and deadly.

She tried to nod, but his hand against her chin prevented movement.

So slowly it made her tremble, he lowered the knife’s point from her throat. But he didn’t release her. His eyes still burned with fury, but no longer, thankfully, with murderous intent. His knife hand trailed down her arm in a slow, strangely electrifying sensation. It was the very opposite of sensual, yet every nerve ending she possessed seemed attuned to his touch.

“Tell me you’re listening to me,” he growled.

“I—I’m listening.”

“Tell me you won’t do it again.”

“I won’t. Of course I won’t.” She could feel the heat of his body covering hers and sharp edges of the boulder digging into her shoulder blades. She registered the corded muscles in his legs against hers and, most of all, his arousal. “Please,” she murmured, not sure what she was asking him for.

“Please?” he whispered.

Her breath felt trapped inside her and she was fairly sure he could feel her heart thundering against his chest. He looked from her eyes to her lips, and something twisted on his face. His eyes closed and she had to bite back a whimper as she felt the anger draining from him.

When he opened his eyes again, she realized that while the anger might be ebbing, the tension in him hadn’t. But it was tension of another kind. A sort that met her head-on, man to woman.

“You have a smart mouth,” he said.

As if answering for her, her lips parted of their own volition.

She knew he was going to kiss her, and knew she should protest. Wanted to protest. Ached to find the means to tell him that he should back off and leave her alone. Instead, she leaned into his lips, meeting him halfway.

His mouth was as hot as his anger had been, and every bit as ruthless. He plundered her lips with determined purpose, a roughly banked passion. His tongue warred with hers, demanding capitulation. He was liquid and solid all at the same time.

She heard the knife clatter to the base of the boulder, then felt his hands strafing her body. He’d used those same hands to gentle the horses, but on her, he incited a riot.

She’d imagined running her hands across his broad shoulders, down the rippling muscles of his back, and didn’t know when she began doing so in reality. One moment she’d literally been as afraid as she’d ever been in her life, and the next she was matching his passion touch for touch, kiss for kiss.

His lips gentled and he uttered a low, pained groan. His hands on her body slowed, still exploring her curves, and somehow the new tenderness in his touch made her feel inexplicably confused. Passion she understood, at least to some degree. Tenderness she didn’t understand at all; it had never been a part of her life.

Daggert raised a hand to her face and molded it gently as he kissed her. And she could taste his withdrawal.

He pulled back from her, his eyes once again unreadable, his emotions masked. He straightened and ever so slowly ran the back of his hand over his moistened lips, still gazing at her.

She remained sprawled against the rock, a discarded rag doll with heaving breasts and glassy blue eyes. And she knew desire was written all over her.

He bent and picked up his knife. He pressed a button and slowly folded the blade back into the handle. It seemed a metaphor, and perhaps was.




Chapter 4


Leeza Nelson, former boardroom wizard, watched James Daggert stomp away from the lunch campsite and disappear around a huge boulder much like the one she sprawled against.

She lifted a shaking hand to her lips, half expecting them to be different somehow.

They were. They seemed fuller, more sensitive. Stunned.

Her lips felt stunned.

She felt stunned.

She was a veritable thesaurus of shattered—shocked, aghast, astonished and utterly confounded.

She’d been pushing him, needling him, trying to goad him into talking to her. She’d been trying to get him to finally acknowledge her as more than a nuisance. She would have been content to have him yell at her, or fall apart at the proverbial seams in obvious frustration. Anything to get him to speak to her, instead of being a silent rock riding in front of her.

Of all the things she hated in life, the worst was being ignored. She’d made a career and an entire life out of being the person most noticed, most sought after, most desired. Ignored wasn’t in her repertoire.

Until she’d begun this journey to search for Enrique.

But Daggert’s reaction to her prodding wasn’t what she’d expected. She would never have anticipated it in a million and one years.

In her high-rise office in Washington, D.C., she could dig at people with impunity; if they didn’t want to deliver what she wanted to know, they might not receive the dollars they sought from her. Needling was a seemingly necessary evil, and her right.

In those instances, however, whoever came knocking at her door was playing with fire. This time, she’d been the one taunting the flame.

Never in her wildest thoughts had she imagined she would rip at him with such uncanny accuracy. Nor would she ever have dreamed that such an attack would bring him to the point of murder.

Her hand lowered to her throat. Where she’d envisioned blood, perhaps a permanent reminder of the lesson “don’t play with fire,” Daggert hadn’t left so much as a mark. That he hadn’t branded her didn’t address his fury, but rather a measure of the icy control she’d glimpsed several times in the short while she’d spent following him in his search for Enrique.

But he’d demanded she never speak of his son. Not a nameless someone he’d been hired to find, not a stranger—his son.

Leeza closed her eyes. She let her body be warmed by the heat within the boulder, the sun beating down on the arroyo, and her own embarrassment.

She didn’t want to even think about what losing a child would do to a man’s psyche, to his heart. If she was right in her analysis of his dramatic response, James Daggert had once searched for his own missing son and either had not found him or had not managed to find him alive. Either case must bring the worst possible pain to a parent. It explained so much about the unusual tracker.

“Oh, I’m so very sorry,” she said aloud, and her voice seemed to echo in the narrow dry riverbed.

But Daggert wasn’t there to hear her, and she wasn’t apologizing for anything she’d done, but offering the absent man her heartfelt sympathy.

She’d lost her parents, a grief she still felt with every passing day. He’d lost his son. His child.

She forced herself from the boulder and stood, albeit shakily. The world hadn’t slipped on its very axis, as she felt it should have. The sun still beat straight down on the narrow, boulder-strewn arroyo, and the sand beneath her feet remained hot and slippery. The sky was still blue and the yellow chamisa bushes still smelled like skunks.

Daggert’s horse, Stone, pulled at some threads of grass on the bank about thirty feet away and whispered something to Belle. The mare nickered back.

Everything seemed normal, yet nothing was. Nor could it ever be again.

Enrique was missing. Had been for hours upon hours. Leeza knew she had lost him by pushing him too hard. And she was literally shaking in her boots, not wholly from guilt, not entirely from remorse, and not even in horror at Daggert’s furious response. She shook in a stunned reaction to his kiss.

A kiss.

“Just a kiss,” she said aloud.

Belle whickered.

“Okay, so it seemed like a lot more than a kiss.”

Stone gave a grunt.

“All right, a whole lot more than a kiss.”

Neither horse answered vocally, but Stone shook his head, his reddish-brown mane dancing in the air.

Leeza cautiously approached Belle and withdrew a notebook from her saddlebag, then her cell phone from the pommel, which Westerners aptly called a saddle horn.

Retreating to a different boulder, she penned her confusion in the notebook, jotting down her fears, her wishes about the next twenty-four hours. Never once did she mention her gigging James Daggert. Nor did she describe the kiss.

And she didn’t fill the rest of the notebook with her response to that kiss, as she could have.

Some things were better left unsaid.

When James Daggert hadn’t returned an hour later, Leeza broke down and tried some of the beef jerky from the pouch he’d discarded earlier. It still burned her tongue and made her stomach roil, but she knew the man was right about needing to keep up her strength, and she wasn’t about to dig in his saddlebags in search of something else to eat. If words could set off his fury, what might violating his privacy do? She was tempted, but didn’t want to bring on a confrontation.




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