Читать книгу A Warrior's Vow - Marilyn Tracy - Страница 8

“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.