The Cowboy’s Hidden Agenda

that would be worse.

But I haven’t lived! Not yet. I haven’t loved-really loved-a man. Loved him enough to want to spend my life with him, bear his children…die for him. There’s so much I haven’t done!

Yes, came the gentle reply. But you gave yourself the chance. You made the right choice, Lauren. Have no regrets.

The cleared slope before the cabin, all but deserted when she’d come through it with Bronco the night before, now seemed filled with the dark ominous shapes of heavily armed men. There were no lights. The cabin, so hospitably lit for her arrival last evening, was dark except for the last of the sunlight that had leaked through clouds on the western horizon to splash across the porch and down the steps.

It was oddly quiet, especially after the thunderstorm’s fury. There were no comments or mutterings from the men gathered before the cabin, just a rustle of movement as they made way for Lauren and her escort to move through. As he had the night before, Gil McCullough was waiting for them on the porch, and again as they approached he moved down the steps to meet them. Tonight, though, there was no welcoming smile, however false. No body language that spoke of confidence and authority. He looked oddly shrunken, Lauren thought, but at the same time seemed finely balanced as a hair trigger, taut as a trap about to be sprung.

Her escort halted at the base of the steps. Ron Masters’s fingers dug viciously into the flesh of her arms as he jerked her around to face his commander.

Her only thought was, My God, my God, what’s happened?

Dread made her queasy and weak in the knees. Even in the fading light, she could see that McCullough’s face was a mask of pain, as if he’d been terribly ill. He’d aged twenty years overnight.

McCullough spoke to her in a voice like windblown sand. “Your father is a very foolish man, Lauren.” She sucked in a breath but managed to hold back her retort. He regarded her for a moment while a smile tugged fruitlessly at the corners of his mouth. “At least I hope he is. I’d hate to think he cares so little for you that he’d throw your life away to save his political career.”

Still Lauren didn’t reply. Smoldering with anger and fear, she stared hard into McCullough’s eyes. Seared his image onto her retinas, into her brain.

Then suddenly his eyes narrowed and his face seemed to crumple with an anguish so naked she uttered a sharp gasp and jerked backward, an instinctive protective distancing.

“Do you know what they’ve done?” he rasped. “Your father’s people-his storm troopers, his Gestapo? They shot my wife.”

“No.” Lauren shook her head, and heard herself saying it over and over. “No, no…”

“My Katie. That little woman never harmed a soul in her life, and they gunned her down in her own front yard!”

“It’s not true,” Lauren stated flatly. “My father would never do such a thing. Never.”

“He authorized it.” McCullough’s voice was hard now, and cold as his eyes. “And I’m sorry, but it is true. Two sheriff’s deputies were right there and saw it happen. I got worried when I couldn’t get through to my wife, so I sent some of my men to see if they could find out what was going on. Ron, there, was one of ’em-he can confirm it. The fact is, Miss Brown, government storm troopers have occupied my ranch and shot down my wife in cold blood. This after I warned them what would happen to you if they took any such action against me. I’m afraid they’ve left me no choice.”

“No,” Lauren whispered, beginning to struggle against Ron Masters’s merciless grip. He jerked her so hard she nearly fell.

And suddenly, as if that small brutality had been a slap in the face, she felt the panic fade, felt herself calm. I won’t grovel, she thought. I won’t plead. If she was going to die, by God, she would do it bravely.

But you’re not going to die. You’re going to stay alive. No matter what it takes.

“You don’t have to kill me.” Her voice was quiet, breathless. “If you just let my father think you have-” she paused, encouraged by the thoughtful narrowing of Gil McCullough’s eyes “-then if it comes to that, I can testify to how well I was treated. I could even say I wasn’t kidnapped at all, that I just…that I went off with Bronco.”

A snicker close by her ear made her shudder as if something cold and slimy had crawled down her back. “Nice try,” Masters crooned against the side of her face, like a lover. But it’s killing he loves, Lauren thought. And she could smell his blood lust, a dark feral odor.

A new wave of terror swept over her. Defying it, she held herself straight and tall and tried desperately not to tremble. “Speaking of Bronco, where is my jailer?” she asked brashly, hoping it would sound merely curious, even a little contemptuous. “What, does he just always split when things get ugly?”

Masters gave a short cackle of laughter-was there a note of jealousy in it?-while McCullough’s face took on the affronted expression of a man whose child has just been maligned. “Bronco doesn’t ‘split,”’ he said stiffly. “He was…needed elsewhere. I sent him-” He broke off. For a second, maybe two, he stood frozen, listening, like a buck at a water hole catching the predator’s scent.

Then, in the sudden eerie quiet, Lauren heard it too, strange sounds far off in the distance. Like someone making popcorn, she thought, in another room in the house.

McCullough uttered a single sharp obscenity. And after that it seemed to Lauren that everything happened at once.

The compound, which had been so quiet and still, was suddenly, instantly, a hive of sound and motion. A muttering of sound that grew, like a wave rolling onto shore, then broke all at once into voices yelling instructions, shouts of alarm and of warning. A confusion of shapes and shadows, a moving picture that seemed to whirl around her as she was spun about and jerked roughly to and fro. Gil’s voice shouting orders she couldn’t quite make out. Pain in her arms and shoulders as she fought to stay upright in Ron Masters’s careless grip.

Then gradually, out of the noise and confusion, a new sound, a rhythmic thumping that was familiar to her. A horse’s galloping hoofbeats. And almost seeming to grow out of that, another driving pulsing beat that grew steadily louder, like crescendoing tympany-the chop-chop-chop of helicopter rotors.

Men dove out of the way as a horse and rider burst through the crowd. Lauren could feel a wave of heat from the animal’s body, smell his sweat and hear grunting sounds as he came to a bone-jarring stiff-legged halt, so close to the man who held her prisoner that he was jostled and had to jerk himself out of the way to keep from being trampled. She heard Masters swear.

Lauren’s heart gave a tremendous leap of hope and joy as horse and rider separated and became two individual shapes. Tears burned her eyes when Cochise Red lowered his head to bump her shoulder and whickered an affectionate greeting.

Johnny Bronco spoke to Gil McCullough. “They’re coming,” was all he said.

It was then that Lauren realized she wasn’t in Ron Masters’s hands any longer. That the fingers that held her now did so, not with bruising force, but with a firm and gentle touch. She turned her head to stare at the fierce warrior’s profile, and her breath caught. Bronco’s glittering black eyes were locked in silent struggle with the angry blue ones belonging to the man who stood facing him at the foot of the cabin steps-a struggle, Lauren sensed, that likely meant life or death. For her.

Then just like that, it was over. McCullough surrendered with a jerk of his head and a violent wave of his arm. “Go on-get her out of here!” he yelled as he stormed up the steps, making for the cabin door.

Bronco wasted no more time-he knew he didn’t have much left. He half threw Lauren into the saddle and clucked to the stallion, and he could feel ol’ Red already gathering himself for the takeoff as he vaulted up behind her. “Get down-get down,” he growled in Lauren’s ear, then leaned hard against her, pressing her down and covering her body with his as the stallion launched himself, as only a quarter horse can, from standstill into full gallop in one tremendous leap.

The noise of the choppers was deafening now, right overhead, all but drowning out the gunfire. Light streaked across the compound and danced among the pine trees, illuminating the smoke that had begun to collect there so that it resembled a blanket of ground fog. The acrid smell of powder drifted on winds driven by the choppers’ blades.

In the chaos and confusion of battle, Bronco knew, anything could happen. That was why his first thought had been to get the hell out of there, get Lauren as far away from the danger as he possibly could. And after that? After that, maybe he could think about how he was going to get her back to her father without giving himself up in the