Читать книгу A Warrior's Vow - Marilyn Tracy - Страница 9

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.