can spare you a meal,” she said. Then she’d send him and his dog on their way. She didn’t need the kind of tension this stranger—any stranger—in her home could spark. “But I really don’t need the help.”
Something in the pasture caught the dog’s interest. A low, rusty growl issued from his throat. He shifted. The movement strained the bandanna at his neck, exposing a hairless necklace of shiny red skin. She gasped. Without thinking, she knelt by the animal. The dog promptly hid behind the man’s legs. “What happened to your dog?”
The man shrugged and looked away. “Some drunk yahoo had him tied with a rope in the back of his pickup and turned a corner too sharply. Blue here went over the side, but the jerk didn’t notice. Took me a mile to get his attention. I thought for sure the dog was dead.” He smiled crookedly, but his eyes were cold and hard. The look warned you didn’t want to get on this man’s wrong side. “I convinced his owner he didn’t want him anymore. Other than the fact he can’t bark, Blue’s as healthy as can be.”
When the man reached down to help her up, she realized how close he was…how isolated the ranch was…how vulnerable she was. She shot up too fast. Dizzy, she lost her balance. He caught her elbow. She snatched it out of his grasp and stumbled a few paces back, landing on her butt.
He lifted both his hands in surrender. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She was making things worse by the minute. He thought it was his looks that were scaring her, but her action was pure instinct. She couldn’t stand anyone touching her. Not after fifteen years of being poked and prodded against her will. Bancroft and his threats this morning had made her tenser than usual.
This time, she got up slowly and dusted off the seat of her jeans while she rounded up her scattered thoughts.
“I just lost my balance is all. I’m sorry.” She puffed out a long breath. “Look, why don’t I—”
A whinny of terror rent the air.
The dog shot forward to respond. A motion of the man’s hand stopped him cold. Crouched low on his haunches, muscles shaking, Blue waited for permission to herd.
Without thinking, Ellen raced toward the pasture behind the barn. Her leg muscles protested. She ignored their complaint. Her vision couldn’t adjust to the rapid change of focus and began to blur. She shook her head. Not now!
A thunder of hooves stampeded her way from the far end of the main pasture. What had set the horses off? Luci veered right as the fence approached. C.C. swerved left. But head high in the air, Apollo kept running straight.
“No, Apollo, no!” She blinked madly to refocus. “You can’t jump. Not with that leg.”
Trying to stop him, Ellen flagged her arms. But he was wild with panic and paid her no heed. She could do nothing to stop him.
The chestnut horse tried in vain to jump. Somehow, he caught his right front leg between the top and the second rail as he crashed into the fence. Wood cracked as his full weight barreled into the rails, but held. His panic doubled. He fought and lunged and skidded in the mud with his hind feet, but remained stuck.
Ellen stopped in her tracks. “Whoa, Apollo, whoa. It’s okay, boy.” Slowly, knowing that a fast approach could alarm him even more, she talked to him in a soothing voice. “Well, you’ve got yourself in quite a fix. How are we going to get you out of there?”
The mad scrambling to free himself only got worse.
“Back away,” the man behind her said in a low, assertive voice.
“I can’t leave him like this. He’ll hurt himself more.”
“In his mind, he’s in a life-and-death situation. His leg’s caught and he’s got a predator rushing at him.”
“I’m not a predator. He knows I won’t harm him.” But did he? Was a week long enough to trust someone with your life when you’d suffered abuse?
“He’s in a panic. He’s not thinking.” The voice stroked her as surely as a caress. She shivered. “He’s reacting with nature’s programmed response for survival. Flight. To calm him enough to free his leg, you’re going to have to make him think the threat is moving away.”
In a twisted way, what he said made sense. But she couldn’t just leave Apollo like this. He needed help. He needed it now. She took a step forward. Apollo’s head whipped from side to side, looking for escape. He pulled on his trapped leg, scraping skin and jamming the limb in tighter. One back foot skidded from under him and thwacked against a post. She stopped.
“Apollo.” Her heart wrenched with helplessness. “Let me help you.”
“Back away,” the man said. There was something compelling, seductive almost, about the sandy scrape of his voice.
Suddenly, she was back in the nursing home, strapped to a bed, fighting for her life. Just like Apollo. Garth’s drawling voice had tried to control her and she’d had to battle it with every ounce of her will. Now, the need to move away from the danger this man presented made her muscles twitch. What she wanted, what she had to do, dueled inside her.
Reluctantly, she took a step back, moving closer to the stranger with the gritty voice, giving Apollo the relief she herself had not found.
She kept her gaze fixed on the struggling chestnut horse, ready to rush in should the situation change.
Slowly, the panic in his eyes ebbed. His breathing slowed. His ears flicked back and forth. Then he stood still. With a groan and a puff, Apollo pulled his leg free. Unbalanced, he scampered backward, fell on his hip, then rolled onto his side. Almost immediately, he was back on his feet and running with a jagged gait toward the shed. There he stopped. Huffing and puffing, he scanned the area, then bellowed.
Luci, the dappled gray mare covered by a crust of mud, answered, and ambled toward the frightened horse. Her presence seemed to calm him. He glued himself to her side. C.C., the Appaloosa, grazed his way closer to them, but kept his distance.
“I need to look at his leg,” Ellen said, hitching a foot on the lower rail of the fence.
A hand on her elbow held her back. “Give him a minute to calm down, then I’ll go fetch him for you.”
She twisted, turning away from the touch that shot through her like a firecracker. “That’ll make things worse. Luci’ll freak when you get close and that’ll send Apollo into another panic.”
“What’s her story?”
Ellen glanced at the mare grazing peacefully. “She’s a track reject. She was beaten over the poll by a male trainer because she was afraid of the starting gate.” She snorted. “Like that was going to help. I can’t wear a hat around her. She doesn’t let a man get within ten feet of her.”
The silence beside her was midnight deep. Ellen had to fight the urge to look back at the man with the damaged face and seductive voice. But she felt him—almost as intimately as if he were a lover. His presence pressed against her with a magnetic force that felt oddly familiar and had her holding her breath, waiting for something. What, she wasn’t sure.
“If I can get past her and bring in Apollo, will you reconsider me for the job?”
“Why
