Читать книгу More Than A Cowboy - Peggy Nicholson - Страница 10

YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, Adam had driven his truck up to the trailhead north of Sumner line camp. From there he had made several trips, backpacking a summer’s worth of books and supplies two miles downhill to the cabin.

Too tired to head back at the end of the day, he’d stoked the wood-burning stove and stayed on, figuring he’d return to the valley in the morning. There was still plenty to be done before the cattle drive started. Plus, tomorrow night he’d meet Gabe in Durango—go over final thoughts and plans for this investigation.

Sumner line camp was Adam’s old stomping ground from three summers ago. Last time he’d lived at this cabin, he’d been mourning Alice. A two-year engagement that should have ended with a wedding had ended instead in betrayal. His ring returned with a pretty apology, and her lukewarm hope that they could still be friends.

But if Alice didn’t want to build a home and family with him, Adam could do without her friendship. Without any reminder of her—or what might have been.

Stung by her loss and the part his job had played in their breakup, he’d even considered quitting the police, going back to his Colorado roots to start life over again as a cowboy. He’d spent that summer up here in the high country, relearning that he needed more of a challenge in his life than a herd of cantankerous cows.

That September he’d gone back to New Orleans, back to the force, with a renewed dedication.

And with his heart on the mend, he’d sworn to himself that he’d never risk it again. Since Alice, Adam had devoted himself to loving women well—but never seriously.

Still, sleeping in his old bunk, he found a ghost of that summer’s loneliness had crept upon him in the night. Flooded with memories both painful and pleasurable, he’d woken at dawn. Instead of heading back, he’d gone out walking. Wandering miles farther than he’d intended, he came at last upon a stream.

And heard a woman’s voice.

Pure wistful imagination, Adam assured himself. Nothing but the babble of running water weaving around the remnants of last night’s dreams.

Whatever its source, it trailed off after a minute. He shrugged and walked on, eyes on the stair-stepping run of narrow pools. If a lover was too much to wish for, then maybe there were trout?

A movement ahead caught his eye and he looked up.

And there she was.

A dark-haired woman kneeling on a rock, both hands cupped as she dipped them to the pool.

He sucked in a startled breath and froze.

Her hands scooped water and splashed it on her face. She made a muffled, laughing sound—it had to be freezing—then smoothed her palms over her tousled hair, brushing it back off her brow. Her fingers met at the nape of her neck—she laced them and stretched her spine. Small, high breasts rose with the sinuous movement and Adam bit back an instinctive groan.

Again she bent to the pool. Bathed her face and swan neck. “Yow!” Drops of water glistened on her throat and the curves that the flaring halves of her shirt revealed.

Enchanted, he moved closer—

And stepped on a branch. Crack!

She didn’t glance toward the sound, but turned smoothly away, reached—and swung back again. A rifle swung with her, rising, seeking…

At the sight of that rounding bore, years of hard-earned reflexes kicked in—Adam dived for cover. He hit the ground good shoulder first, then rolled. A bolt of lightning slammed across his chest, sizzling sternum to shoulder point. “Shit! Merde!” If he’d rebroken his collarbone! Or had she shot him? But no, he’d heard no retort.

“You’re…not a bear.” She’d risen to peer into the bushes where he’d landed.

“Dammit!” One minute he’d been whole and well, nothing but flirtation on his mind.

And now? Adam drew a shaking breath and pushed up out of a drift of last year’s leaves. Pain played a savage piano riff down his ribcage. “Hell!” He hated feeling helpless. If she’d shoved him back to the bottom of the hill he’d been scrabbling up with such effort…

“Or maybe you are.” She’d shifted her rifle up and away, but not so far it couldn’t quickly swing back. “Did you hurt yourself?”

“Did I—?!”

“Well, I don’t like being snuck up on,” his tormentor said reasonably. The corners of her mouth curled, then straightened again. “’Specially not in spring, when the sow bears have cubs.” Cradling the rifle across her left forearm, she reached casually for her buttons, fumbled at the lowest one, single-handed.

“Put the gun down before you drop it,” he growled, rising stiffly to his knees.

Her slate-green eyes narrowed. Her hand paused in its effort. “No need.” A pulse fluttered in the damp hollow of her throat.

So her coolness was a front. The cop in him was glad she was wary of a strange man, even though her grip on the gun set his alarm bells to jangling. “Look, I’m turning around. So set the gun down nice and easy and use both hands, okay? Much safer for both of us.”

He turned his back and seized the moment to run his own hands up his ribs. Painful, but no new jagged bumps where they’d mended. He fingered his collarbone and winced. Likely pulled a muscle as rebroken the bone, but—the hell with it. If he couldn’t cowboy this summer, then he couldn’t do the job he’d promised Gabe. He swung around again.

Caught in the act of fastening her top button, she froze as their eyes collided.

The moment stretched out…his breathing quickened. Possibilities spun in the air like dust motes sparked by the sun.

Her fine eyes widened and he knew she read his thoughts, knew she wanted to look away. Was too proud to let him win this silent clash.

With calm deliberation she finished her task, while a dusting of rose painted her high cheekbones.

“What are you doing up here?” he asked suddenly. She hadn’t just dropped out of his dreams.

She wore running shoes, not serious hiking boots. He scanned the rocks around her feet and found no sign of a backpack. Just a canvas overnight kit. “You’re camping up here?” By herself?

But then, her reluctance to put down that gun showed a woman on her own. If she’d had a companion, a mate, she’d have simply set it aside and called for backup. So…definitely alone. Adam’s eyes flicked to her left hand—ringless—and he felt a surge of unabashedly male satisfaction.

“I’m…” She drew a knuckle along her top lip. Her long lashes fluttered as she glanced away, then looked back again.

Adam cocked his head and waited. Whatever came next would be a lie.

“I’m doing research up here. Beaver.”

He almost shouted his laughter aloud. “Beaver.” A couple of flat rocks made a path across the pool and he stepped across, trying not to grin. So you can’t lie worth a damn. I’ll remember that. “There’s no beaver this high up.”

“That’s what I’m…verifying. I’m a wildlife biologist.” When lying, it was best to stick as close to the truth as possible, Tess had always heard. Still, this stranger wasn’t buying it. “Doing a thesis on beaver and tamarisk trees,” she babbled on. That part was true, anyway, although her research location had been Utah, not the San Juans. “The way one affects the other, and how both affect their environment. Water quality. Bird food. Habitat. Fire conditions.”

“Really.”

He was so lean and beautifully put together, that his size came as a shock. When he stopped before her, she had to tip her head back to meet his gaze. Eyes blue as a mountain midnight and dancing with laughter. Somehow she knew now he’d never hurt her. Still, that laughter made him… Dangerous. As instinct whispered, she stooped for her gun.

Their heads nearly cracked as he crouched along with her. “Allow me, cher.”

Like she had a choice?

When they rose again, the rifle was firmly in his possession. “Nice piece.” He cracked it open, removed its bullets, closed it and gravely handed it over. “Bit heavy for beaver, isn’t it?”

“I study beaver. I don’t shoot them.” And wherever he’d come from—there was a touch of the deep South in his low, lazy voice—it was someplace where they’d failed to teach him that it was rude to confiscate a woman’s bullets. Patronizing, if not downright paranoid.

“Ah. And do you have a name?”

She’d liked him grizzly-bear grouchy more than she liked him laughing at her. “I do,” Tess agreed airily, then glanced around for her kit, leaned down to collect it. When she straightened, she found her snub had bounced right off him. His smile had only deepened.

The man had a smile to give a woman pause. A lush bottom lip that was finely carved and…mobile. The upper was severe, yet oddly sensitive, as if he hardened it more in pain than cruelty. His angular jaw was blue-black with beard shadow; he hadn’t shaved this morning. And, as Tess noted this, the nape of her neck prickled, as if those bristles brushed deliberately, deliciously across it. A hot wave washed up her thighs.

She tossed her head and turned aside, cheeks warming, too. Get a grip, girl! So she hadn’t had a serious relationship—any sort of relationship—for almost a year now; that didn’t mean she had to show her lack here. Not to a man who was bound to be trouble.

Trouble in more ways than the usual if he turned uphill, she realized belatedly. Thirty yards of bushwhacking would bring him to Zelda’s cage.

A more logical course was to follow the path along the stream, she told herself. She’d set him an example, heading west along its bank. Once out of sight, she could cut up through the new growth to where she’d picketed her horses. Swinging back to face him, she retreated in a casual backward drift while she asked, “And what are you doing up here?”

He had no pack or bedroll, and only an idiot would hike the San Juans this time of year without them. But though he might be irritatingly self-assured, this was no fool.

It was too early for line-camp men. Besides which, cowboys never traveled on foot. So that left—precisely what?

“Spent the night at Sumner cabin.” His weight shifted as if he had half-decided to follow her.

“Oh. So you know Kaley and Tripp?” Sumner cabin had belonged to Kaley Cotter’s spread, the Circle C. Then a few years back she’d married her neighbor, rancher Tripp McGraw. Their combined grazing allotments stretched to the south and east of this spot. If the McGraws vouched for this man, then he couldn’t be quite a rogue, no matter what he seemed to be.

“I do.” And she knew them, too, Adam realized with satisfaction as he changed his mind about following her. That meant when he described his rifle-toting babe to Tripp McGraw, he’d learn her name. How to find her.

Because whatever she thought—and damned if she didn’t look relieved as she murmured a noncommittal, “Ah,” then flipped him a jaunty wave and turned off to the west—this wasn’t the end of their acquaintance.

This was only the beginning.

Still, missing her already, he couldn’t resist calling after her, “Hey!” Beautiful!

She swung back around, her dark brows tipped up like a crow’s wings in flight.

“Your bullets, you forgot them.”

“Oh…yeah.” She dug into a pocket of those snug jeans he’d been trying not to stare at. Held up something in her closed fist that rattled. And gave him her killer smile. “Well, keep ’em. Plenty more where those came from.”

So I’ll consider myself warned, he promised her silently.

A warning he was bound to ignore.

“CUZ, YOUR TASTE in dogs is headed south,” Adam declared, sauntering over to Gabe’s parked pickup. “Way south.” The big red hound gazing dolefully over its tail-gate took his insult for a compliment and waved his tail. “He looks like a melted bloodhound. A sawed-off, melted bloodhound.”

“Touch of basset in there somewhere,” Gabe agreed, stepping down from his truck. “All those bags and droops. Still, pretty is as pretty does. This is Watson. Belongs to a friend of mine.”

“Watson…” Adam presented his knuckles for the obligatory snuffle and sniff, then snatched them back as an enormous pink tongue took a swipe at him. “As in Sherlock’s shorter, dumber partner?”

“The very same.” Gabe nodded at the cab of his truck. “Care to eat in your place or mine?”

“Mine, unless you want drool all over your rear window.”

Gabe had suggested that they meet at a diner in Durango, but Adam had vetoed that, voting instead for this rendezvous at a scenic overlook above the city. Maybe it wasn’t as comfortable, but when working undercover, a wise man lived his role from the get-go. A fool broke cover unnecessarily—and sometimes didn’t live long enough to regret it.

Not that Adam was expecting that level of trouble here in sleepy southwestern Colorado. Whoever he was hunting was a catkiller, not a mankiller. But all the same, why take a chance on someone linking him to a top biologist with the Division of Wildlife? This part of the state was enormous in size, but not so blessed with population. Strangers were noticed.

So from now till hunt’s end, he’d be Adam Dubois, freebooter and line-camp man, just a smiling Cajun cowboy, drifting through life. Not a care in the world. No worry to anybody.

“You babysitting?” he inquired in the truck, while he traded one of the cold Coronas he’d brought for a roast beef sandwich.

“Nope. Watson’s for you. He’s on loan from a friend in Montana, a biologist with the Forest Service. That hound’s the best lynx tracker in the lower forty-eight.”

“No.” Adam frowned at the dog in the truck ahead. With his chin propped on the tailgate, the brute gazed at them pitifully. His woebegone face was wrinkled in concentration, as if he were trying to levitate a sandwich and call it home. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Adam had had a dog once upon a time. A gangly, knock-kneed yellow mutt he’d found on the street. He’d been a grab-bag of every breed you could name, but brave? Damn, but that dog had been gutsy, and with a great sense of humor to boot. Johnny, he’d named him. Johnny-Be-Good. They’d shared the same bed from the day he’d found Johnny to the day the social workers had dragged Adam off to his first foster home.

They’d promised they’d give him his pet back in a week or so, but that had all been a soothing lie. By the time Adam had realized this and gone looking for his friend, hunting through every pound in New Orleans a thirteen-year-old could find, the dog was…gone. He blinked his eyes rapidly in the waning light and scowled. “Last thing I need up there is a chow hound.”

Last thing he needed was a dog, or anybody else, tripping up his heart. That was one lesson he’d learned and learned very well. First with his dad, then his mom, then Johnny, then most lately with Alice. Alone was the safe way—the only way—to travel.

“Besides,” he continued into Gabe’s disapproving silence, “the only dogs that are welcome on the summer range are working dogs. Cattle dogs. Any mutt that runs the cows is sure to be shot.”

“He minds his manners. Heels, comes, sits and all the usual. When Watson isn’t eating or tracking, he’s sleeping, according to Tracy. He wouldn’t get in your way.”

“He’d take up half the cabin I’ll be living in, and five’ll get you ten he snores. No thanks.”

His cousin shrugged and bit into his sandwich. Some hundred miles to their west, the sun was a blood orange, squashing itself past a jagged line of purple mountains. A splash of fiery juice, then it squeezed on down. The ruddy light cooled instantly to blue. Down in the valley, the city twinkled.

“It’s a pretty big area you’ll be patrolling,” Gabe observed mildly, at last. “The lynx are spread out over some two thousand square miles, and no telling which one of them our guy’ll decide to stalk next. Reckon it’d be like hunting for an ant in a sandpile, if you don’t know where to look. At least Watson could point out the cats, then you’d take it from there.”

Adam shrugged and sipped his beer. The dog drooled in the twilight. “Think he’s still operating out there?” Adam asked finally, to break the edgy silence.

“’Fraid so. We’re down to forty-four animals. Collar YK99M3, a male from our original batch, stopped signaling last week. Last heard from ten miles north of Creede.” Gabe sighed and reached for the rolled map he’d brought from his truck. Unscrolling it across the dash, he tapped an inked-in asterisk with a tiny notation beside it. “He vanished right there. And that one really hurt. He was one of the lynx I flew up to the Yukon to collect and bring back here. A big healthy two-year-old with a white bib on his chest like a housecat, and paws like catcher’s mitts. Freed him myself. He looked so…right…floating off into the woods, the day we let him go. Home and free.”

Gabe rubbed a hand across his face. “Dang it to hell! How anybody could bring something that pretty down… Why they’d ever want to…”

Adam grunted his sympathy. That was something a homicide cop often wondered, seeing the aftermath of killings in the city. The good and the beautiful willfully smashed. Ruthlessly brushed aside. Such a waste, such a shame. Any time you could stop it, you felt a little bit better, a little bit bigger. Like you’d done your part, fighting the good fight. Making the world safer for the fragile things that mattered.

Taking the map from his cousin, he spread it over the steering wheel and squinted in the dusk. Checked its mileage scale, then grimaced. Damn, but the West was big! Distance took on a whole different meaning out here. He’d known it already, but looking at it now, peak after peak, range upon range… And roaming out there somewhere in all that craggy wilderness, a bunch of forty-pound cats…

And whoever was stalking them.

“You really think he’d be useful?” The mutt had a home and an owner, after all. He was only on loan. No commitment necessary, beyond opening his cans for the next three months.

“Show you something.” Gabe slid out of the truck, strode over to his own, and leaned in its open window. He pulled out a battered Stetson, then offered it to the dog. “Kitty, Watson! See the kitty?”

The dog pranced and nosed the hat, yodeling his approval. That hollow banging was the sound of his tail, slamming the sides of the pickup.

“Nice kitty. No, boy, sit. Staaay.” The dog sat with an anguished yelp and Gabe brought the hat to Adam’s window. “Lynx hatband,” he noted, pointing to its greasy circlet. “Tracy found it in an antique store. It’s got to be fifty years old at least.”

“And she trained him on that? You sure he’s not chasing mothballs?”

“He’s found plenty of lynx in the Mission Mountains. They’re doing a census up there and he’s accounted for most of ’em, at least in Tracy’s section. Distract him for a minute and I’ll show you.”

Adam sighed, grabbed a bag of potato chips and went to the hound. Stood glumly by while the dog inhaled one chip after another, then wiped his hands on his jeans as Gabe returned from the dark. “Now what?”

“Let’s finish our supper.”

They ate, talking when the mood hit them, but mostly in comfortable silence. The same way they’d ridden the range as kids, not so far from where they now sat. Adam said finally, “Had my own notion about how we could nail this creep. Most economical way of making a collar.”

Gabe turned to prop his shoulders against his door. “How’s that?”

“We do a sting. Instead of searching the mountains for the bad guy, we sucker him to us.”

“I like it, but how?”

“You said, back in N’Orleans, that the one thing these cats haven’t done is have kittens. Is it still that way?”

“So far, I’m afraid so. Oh, we’ve seen signs of courting behavior. According to their satellite signals, the males have been moving around for the last six weeks, searching for ladies. But with only forty-four lynx remaining, they’re spread so thin on the ground, and they only have a one-week window to find each other, while the females are fertile…”

“So nobody’s scored yet?” Adam demanded dryly.

Gabe shook his head. “No. Not that we know of. We’ll try to contact as many of them visually as we can this summer, especially any females whose signals go stationary. Maybe a queen will den up with kittens, though if she does, she’ll keep them well hidden. It’ll be next winter before we know for sure. We’ll snow-track them then. Look for juvenile footprints following a female’s.”

“But kittens, that’s what the pro-lynx camp wants, right? It’s the proof that your repopulation program is starting to work.”

“Exactly, but—”

“So kittens are the last things the anti-lynx camp wants to see in Colorado. There’s your bait.”

“How are they bait when we haven’t got any?”

“You already report on the DOW Web site your cats’ latest doings. Their latest sightings.” Even their pictures, when someone lucked into a telephoto shot. This was pure foolishness, in Adam’s book, drawing attention to potential victims, but try to tell that to a pack of politicians and bureaucrats. He supposed the Division hoped that publicizing the lynx re-intro program would get the public behind it. And maybe that wasn’t such a bad notion, considering the DOW was spending a million or more of the taxpayers’ money.

“So…” He tapped the map northwest of Trueheart, Colorado. “You post on your Web site that one of your females has moved to this location, where I’ll be waiting. That she’s been spotted and she’s knocked-up for sure. Set to drop a passel of kittens any day now.”

“They only have three or four, usually.”

“Fine. Four imaginary kittens. You plant them in my backyard, and I guarantee you, your perp will come hunting. If he’s smart enough to buy his radio direction finder off the Internet, then he’s bound to be checking your Web site for the latest news on his quarry. Heck, if you report every time one disappears, then he can read his own score sheet. Better believe he’s tuning in.”

Gabe rubbed his jaw. “It might work… I think it would work. Now all I have to do is persuade my boss to try it.”

“Your problem, friend.” Adam drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Meantime, you gonna show me ol’ Watson’s stuff?”

He lounged against the hood of his truck, while Gabe loosed the dog and commanded him to ‘fetch the kitty!’ Nose to the ground, tail waving, the hound snuffled off into the night.

“Did you lay a drag trail?” Adam inquired. By the sound of his snorts, the dog was circling the parking area.

“No need, with his nose. There’s enough of a breeze to carry an air scent. Once he gets downwind…”

“If he doesn’t find his hat, you send him back to Montana. How’s that for a deal?”

“You’re on,” Gabe agreed with a smirk.

They waited some more. Adam didn’t mind, if it ended this nonsense. He could just picture the other hands’ faces if he showed up with Watson in tow for the cattle drive. A dog with ten pounds of ear, and no cow sense? It would take him all summer long to live that one down. Cowboys loved to tease and a newcomer was fair game. Come on, Watson. Lose the kitty.

“You know any women over towards Trueheart?” he asked, to pass the time. The Monahan family ranch lay east of Durango, while Trueheart lay northwest, but on the odd chance…

Gabe cocked his head at him. “Lonesome already? Well, there’s Kaley Cotter.” It was Gabe who’d found Adam the Circle C line-camp job with Kaley’s brother, three summers ago. “But you met her. That was the year she came back, wasn’t it? And I hear she’s married since then.”

“To Tripp McGraw,” Adam reminded him. He’d be riding for the McGraws this summer. “No, this is somebody else. Met her in passing, but didn’t catch her name. Hair dark as…” Wishing he’d never spoken, Adam jerked a thumb at the starry sky. That dark.

That velvety, when finally he buried his face in it, but how did he know that already? He stirred with impatience, then forced himself back to stillness.

“Then there’s Lara Tankersly, one of Ben Tankersly’s daughters,” Gabe continued. “I slow-danced with her once, at a shindig over in Cortez. Didn’t sleep well for the next year. But she moved to San Antonio shortly thereafter, and she’s a cornsilk blonde.

“Then, speaking of blondes, there’s a café in Trueheart called Michelle’s Place, and Michelle’s—” Gabe broke off as Watson came blundering out of the dark, gripping the hat by its brim. “Well, well, what have we here? Good boy! Whatta guy, whatta nose! Good fella!” He thumped the hound on his side as he accepted the trophy, then straightened with a grin. “And who needs a woman when you’ve got this for company?”