The Cowboy’s Hidden Agenda

fact that she’d recently been forcibly abducted by armed men for purposes she could only guess at, she seemed almost happy. She rode with her body relaxed and graceful in the saddle, her face lifted to the warm wind and her eyes half-shut, her mouth softly smiling. As if, he thought as warmth stirred unexpectedly in his own body, in acceptance of a lover’s caress. But why, he wondered, fighting off the image of soft lips, slowly parting, did she seem so unafraid? Had she no concept of the peril she was in? Her apparent innocence irritated him, even as her innate sensuality stirred and excited him.

Irritated, stirred and excited was not what Agent Bracco wanted to be. Not ever, actually, but especially not now, not with so much at stake. He told himself he’d have to do a better job of keeping himself in balance, focused on the task at hand. He couldn’t afford to let himself be distracted just because that task happened to involve shielding and protecting an extraordinarily beautiful woman.

A grim smile stretched his lips as he watched the stallion prancing grandly along behind the little gray mare, so intent on establishing his own sexual dominion that he was oblivious to the lead rope that held him captive. It occurred to him that there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between a man and any other male animal when he allowed himself to be governed by his…testosterone.

For some reason, the words the woman had spoken earlier that morning came back to him, carried on the wind like the scent of a far-off storm: I should never have danced with you.

He looks so hard and dangerous when he smiles like that, Lauren thought. I wonder what he can be thinking.

A shiver passed through her in spite of the Southwestern sun that burned like a branding iron across her shoulders. Because the only thing she knew for certain was that she could never be certain what that man was feeling. What a consummate actor he was! What a talented liar!

She told herself she was upset because she’d misjudged him so badly. That as a lawyer she felt she ought to be more adept at reading people. But in her heart she knew better. The real source of her shame and betrayal lay in the accusation that pounded now inside her head in time to the horse’s hoofbeats.

Not, How could I have been so wrong about him?

But rather, How could I have been so attracted to him?

She couldn’t even look at him now. Whenever she looked at him, her heart would begin to hammer and her eyes burn hot and her mind cloud over with rage. She wanted to fly at him in a screaming spitting clawing fury.

Why, she asked herself, did she feel so ashamed? Because she’d watched him ride and admired his skill?

No, her honest heart answered her. Because you watched him ride and thought him beautiful.

Did she feel such anger because he’d danced with her and then betrayed her?

Again she was forced to hear her own truth: No-because you danced with him and your own body betrayed you.

With her face lifted to the wind and her eyes closed, she could see him standing beside her table at Smoky Joe’s, looking down at her with the little yellow flame from the candle in the globe lamp on the table burning in his eyes. And as she gazed into them, the boisterous crowd seemed to close in around them, surrounding the two of them with a wall of noise and heat and cigarette smoke and darkness, so that all at once she was aware only of him-of his heat, his masculine scent and the blackness of his hair, lying like a skein of silk across one shoulder.

She remembered how warm his hands had been, covering hers. She’d felt the wiry, coiled-spring tension in his hips beneath her palms, the swaying rhythm, blatantly sexy-and her body had grown hot. She’d lost track of the music and the steps of the dance until suddenly she’d found herself face-to-face with him. Face-to-face and chest to chest. Frozen, she’d felt his arms come around her, gathering her in, and the cool silk of his hair against her cheek, his heart thumping in counterrhythm to hers.

Had that been a lie, too? Could he control the timing of his own pulse? With this man, even that seemed possible.

They’d danced that dance and then another, and with each note, each measure, it seemed to her, their bodies had moved infinitesimal fractions of inches closer together, until it felt as if they would melt into each other’s pores.

He’d guided her with a touch so light and sure she wasn’t even aware of it. She’d followed him effortlessly, as if they’d been moving together, dancing together for years, a lifetime. She’d felt weightless, light as cottonwood fluff floating on a summer wind. At the back of his neck, her fingers had begun of their own volition to explore the dark mystery of his hair, while on her back she’d felt his fingers moving, slowly navigating the bumps and hollows of her spine.

And then suddenly, just like that, it had ended. Bronco had taken her back to McCullough’s table and left her there with polite but cursory thanks. Lauren had been so shaken she’d barely registered the conversation from that point on, was only dimly aware that she’d nodded acceptance of McCullough’s asking price for Cochise Red without so much as an argument and agreed to go out to his ranch and take a look at the stallion the following day.

She didn’t see what started the fight. All at once, it seemed, Smoky Joe’s had erupted in bedlam. There was a roar of sound, and the crowd surged like a single entity toward the back of the room, toward the area near the dance floor.

Unaccustomed to violence of any kind, Lauren uttered an exclamation of alarm as she started to rise. Gil McCullough, who had begun to swear matter-of-factly in a low voice, gestured for her to stay put and at the same time waved a couple of his men, who’d been leaning against the bar nearby nursing long-necked bottles of beer, over to the table.

About then the crowd parted raggedly and Johnny Bronco emerged, struggling and swinging clumsily in the grip of two beefy-looking guys wearing black cowboy hats and vests that said “Smoky Joe’s” across the back. Before Lauren had time to draw breath, they’d hustled Bronco out the front door.

The two Smoky Joe’s employees walked back into the bar, dusting their hands and grinning, waving to mixed cheers and boos from the crowd. They gave a thumbs-up to a couple of uniformed deputy sheriffs sitting at the bar, who merely smiled and shook their heads before returning to their burger and fries. McCullough leaned back in his chair and spoke to his men.

“See he gets home,” he growled in an undertone, then turned back to her with a smile of apology. “Ol’ Bronco’s the best damned horse wrangler west of the Mississippi, but he can’t hold his liquor worth beans. Never could. It’s a racial thing, I guess. He’s a half-breed Apache, you know.”

Lauren sat silently, sipping her beer. She didn’t reply, partly because she was still too shaken by the close and unaccustomed brush with violence, but also because the comment made her intensely uncomfortable. Her firsthand knowledge of Native Americans was limited, but she disliked the term half-breed, and had been raised to consider blanket statements about race objectionable on general principles.

Unperturbed by her silence, Gil shook his head. “It’s a sad story, a sad story. Unfortunately not a very unusual one in this part of the country. He grew up around here, you know.”

Lauren nodded; she remembered the rodeo announcer saying he was a “local boy.”

“Yeah, ol’ Johnny was quite a hero in these parts a while back.”

“Really?” Lauren murmured, interested in spite of herself. The beer was warming her insides, easing her pulse back to normal. She focused on her companion’s clean-shaven face and close-cropped gray hair, and tried to block out the images that wanted to linger in her mind-images of a dark angry face, hard-edged features crisscrossed with strands of long black hair…

“Football,” Gil clarified after taking a small drink of the beer he’d been nursing most of the evening. “Best damned wide receiver I ever saw-hands like a magician. All-conference, all-state his senior year-had colleges lined up to offer him scholarships.” He shook his head again and made a smacking sound with his lips. “What a waste.”

“What happened?”

The rancher shrugged. “The drinking got him. Finally either flunked out or got kicked out-depends on who you hear it from. Bronco, he doesn’t like to talk about it much. He always was wild, drank too much even when he was in high school. Came by it naturally-his old man was a drunk, died in a car accident when Bronco was in junior high. Kid never had a chance.”

“He must not be doing all that badly,” Lauren remarked with an edgy shrug. “You hired him.” And then she wondered why she felt a need to defend a man she didn’t know at all, especially from a man who obviously knew