The Cowboy’s Hidden Agenda

contrast. Now and then a breeze stirred the trees, bringing with it distant sounds-men’s voices, calling to one another, laughing; ambiguous clanks and thuds; the shrill ripple of a horse’s whinny. It seemed to her that Bronco had been gone a very long time.

Lauren paced. She couldn’t sit-with nothing to pad it, the closed lid of the portable toilet was too hard for her sore bottom.

She thought of her family-her dad, and Dixie, who had to be the best stepmom anybody’d ever had-and how much she loved them and how worried they must be. She wondered what they were doing to get her back, and whether anyone else even knew she was missing. She won dered if they’d told Ethan, busy with his summer college classes out in California, or Aunt Lucy and Uncle Luke and her cousins, Rose Ellen and Eric, back on the farm in western Iowa, or Uncle Wood and Aunt Chris and their kids in Sioux City. And Aunt Gwen, nearly a hundred now and fragile as blown glass, whom Dixie called the Family Treasure.

She wondered who would have the task of informing her mother, out there in her two-million-dollar house in California that had missed by an eyelash falling into the Pacific Ocean during the last El Nino. It had been a long time since she’d thought of her mother. Remembering her now made her think of Bronco’s mother, and how she hadn’t had a chance to ask him about her. She would, though, when he came back.

Right on cue she heard the faint crunch of footsteps on pine needles. Her heart gave a lurch. Hating the breathlessness of fear in her voice, she called out, “Bronco-is that you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Horrible man-he sounded amused.

Clutching an edge of the blanket to her chin, Lauren peered around it. “About time,” she said sourly. She’d never let him know how glad she was to see him.

“Stopped off at the tent-thought you could use this.” And he thrust something at her-a bundle made up of a towel with the corners tied together. She hesitated, then took it from him and untied the knot. Inside was the green soap, still wrapped in its washcloth, and one of the breakfast coffee mugs. “For dipping,” Bronco explained with the casualness that comes from personal experience. “If you pour it over you, you don’t dirty the whole bucketful.”

Staring down at the bundle, she nodded, too confused by the mixture of gratitude and resentment inside her to speak.

After a long and strangely tense moment, Bronco set the bucket filled with crystal-clear water inside the enclosure, swung her saddlebags off his shoulder and dropped them on the pine needles beside it. Then he turned and walked away.

He’d just about made it back to the tent when she let out the first screech. He paused, listened, then walked on, smiling and shaking his head. He wouldn’t have thought such a well-brought-up lady lawyer would even know such words.

Chapter 7

He waited for her, pacing in the dappled shade in front of the tent where he could keep an eye on the blanketed enclosure, and using every ounce of willpower he could muster to keep himself from thinking about what was going on inside it.

He tried, instead, to think about what might be happening right now down there at the ranch, where the full forces of the federal government had one feisty little Irish lady holed up and surrounded, but that wasn’t much better. Thinking about that made him feel stirred up inside-nothing he could quite pin down, just out of sorts. Like a horse with cockleburrs in his tail. He tried telling himself it was the FBI that was making him so edgy-couldn’t trust those guys not to make a mess of things. But in his heart he knew he didn’t really trust his own people any better, and besides, what was bothering him went a whole lot deeper and was a lot more complicated than interagency rivalry. It had more to do with things like honor, loyalty and duty. The problem was, it wasn’t all that clear to him just now exactly where his lay, and whether in fact a couple of those might be coming into direct conflict with each other.

About one duty, though, he had no doubts whatsoever. He watched, outwardly relaxed, inwardly alert as she came toward him, picking her way barefoot across the pine-needle carpet, mindful, this time, of those lurking cones. She had her winter-grass hair twisted and tucked into a loose knot of some sort that clung to the nape of her neck in defiance of gravity, and her skin looked rosy and wholesome as a child’s.

And again he knew that peculiar sensation inside, that unfamiliar sense of awe.

“Feelin’ better?” he asked without expression.

Lauren grumpily muttered something about “freezing to death” as she brushed past him and into the tent. But there was sparkle in her eyes and an uncertain tilt about her lips, a kind of wariness, he thought, as if she was trying hard not to let on how good she felt.

He chuckled, because he knew firsthand how exhilarating a wash in ice-cold spring water could be. And then, of course, there was the way her cold-hardened nipples poked out sharp and clear against the material of her T-shirt, leaving him to imagine the firm round breast-shape underneath, and to think again those forbidden thoughts about how nicely they’d fill up his hands. He’d caught a whiff of the green-apple shampoo she’d used, and for just a moment, like a gust of a freshening breeze blowing through him, he felt what it would be like to hold her in his arms at that moment, with her body cool and soft and sweet as rain upon his skin. And then…to feel her grow soft and warm and pliant beneath him, like fine leather in the sun…

After she’d recovered from her bath and gotten herself dressed and her sores doctored and bandaged, Bronco took her with him down to the corral to see to the horses. He chose to take her there the long way around, through the timber and over the saddleback ridge, avoiding the cabin and the clearing, as well as the woods nearby where the men had their bivouacs. The way he saw it, the less those guys saw of his “prisoner,” the better.

Walking along with her through the woods, stepping in and out of sunshine, stirring up hot summery smells of pine sap and pollen dust, he couldn’t help but think again how enjoyable it might be to be doing so under different circumstances. Very different circumstances.

Ah, but it was only in his mind. And only for a moment. John Bracco was well aware that he had a job to do, one that to anyone other than an ex-army ranger might have seemed on the edge of impossible. His job was to keep this woman safe-keep her alive, if it came down to that-and somehow do that without letting her or anyone else know he was on her side. He couldn’t even let himself be too nice to her, lest she or McCullough start getting ideas.

Getting ideas. That was something he’d better not do, either. Because the truth was, even if things had been different, even if there had been no Sons of Liberty, no kidnapping, no cover to protect at all costs, the likes of Lauren Brown were not for him. A yellow-haired, pale-skinned, freckle-faced white woman, well- educated and from a nice well-to-do family, would never steal his heart away.

No, sir. For Bronco knew from hard experience that if he ever was foolish enough to give his heart to such a woman, she would surely break it.

He was aware of her, though, there was no denying that, in all the ways he was usually aware in the presence of an exceptionally beautiful woman, plus a few that were new to him.

He was aware, for example, of her quietness-which he’d noticed yesterday, too, on the ride from McCullough’s ranch. This was new to him because in his experience, beautiful women were seldom quiet. Even when they weren’t actually speaking, there was just something about them, something in the way they moved, the way they held themselves, a certain electrical current that seemed to telegraph, Look! Look at me! He was well aware that Lauren’s silence might have had something to do with the fact that she was mad at him again, but he didn’t think so. In Bronco’s experience, there were few things louder in this world than the silent treatment from a beautiful woman.

No. This woman’s quietness was different. Bronco had been raised among a people who appreciate the beauty and purpose of silence, and who see no reason to fill it with speech unless there is something that needs to be said. In adulthood he’d learned that most white people are afraid of silence. In the presence of others they try to vanquish it with meaningless conversation; alone they use almost any means to hold it at bay. Radio, TV, stereo headphones and if nothing else is available, their own bodies-tapping toes, cracking knuckles, clearing throats, whistling.