looked away from him, her gaze traveling around the parlor. The Mulroneys didn’t exist. She wouldn’t be selling the house to them today. That hope had evaporated along with all her other prospects. All she had now was a debt to the bank, employees who were depending on her, and an agency she couldn’t bear to lose. She had no choice but to swallow her pride and accept the terms of her grandfather’s will.
“I suppose I am,” she said.
“Scared?”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“Then maybe it isn’t worth it.”
“That wasn’t your argument yesterday.”
“Yesterday I wasn’t convinced there was any danger out there.”
“I’ll have to risk it, because I need the money. Besides—” she was angry suddenly, an anger that fueled her decision, turning it into a fierce resolve “—I don’t like it that someone thinks he can frighten me into giving him what he wants.”
Roark nodded, seeming to understand her determination without needing any further explanation, even admiring her for it, if the gleam in his eyes was any indication. “Then it looks like you and I are going on a cattle drive, Samantha Howard.”
She stared at him, chagrined. She had momentarily forgotten that the terms of her grandfather’s will required her to accept the protection of Roark Hawke. There was no choice about it, and she didn’t like it. Why? Certainly not because he was a private investigator.
Then what? Because he’s a cowboy. But how can you mind that when there will be others like him on the drive?
Oh, but they would be essential, with impersonal identities. She could distance herself from them, at least emotionally. But this man was something else altogether. She wasn’t even sure she liked him. No, she probably didn’t, despite his provocative effect on her. And she wouldn’t be able to distance herself from him. He would be close and constant, forever at her side through the long days and nights they spent out there in the wilderness.
He had to know what she was thinking. She could see that in the way those compelling blue eyes of his devoured her in the intense silence that stretched between them as they sat there regarding each other.
Roark finally ended the silence in a low, husky tone. “You’ll have to go all the way with me, you know.”
She swallowed, her mouth dry. “I will what?”
He chuckled. “The cattle drive, Samantha. You have to stick with it all the way to the rail line or lose the inheritance. That’s the stipulation, remember?”
Damn him. He’d gone and put a deliberate spin on his words and was now enjoying the result.
“You and I together,” he said softly.
A cowboy. Maybe only by avocation, but in soul and spirit Roark Hawke was a cowboy with all the raw, sensual appeal of his breed, along with a wicked smile and a sinful body that did things to her insides. And she had promised herself long ago that, no matter how susceptible she was to this combination, she would never permit it to hurt her again.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Samantha said in a steady voice.
That’s what she said, facing him with a cool, calm detachment, but all the while she feared more than the perils of a cattle drive. Roark Hawke was another kind of jeopardy. How was she ever going to survive him?
HER CRY OF DISBELIEF was so piercing that Roark held the phone away from his ear.
“You can’t be serious!” She rushed on with barely a pause to recover from her shock. “Being a PI is who you are, who we all are, and to give that up…”
He sat there in his swivel chair, one hand curled around the phone he’d restored to his ear, the other flipping through the day’s mail on his office desk as he listened to her. No use in attempting to explain himself until she had exhausted all of her arguments.
Roark had already shared his announcement with the other members of his family. He’d saved the most difficult call for the last, knowing that his youngest sister, Christy, was likely to treat it as a bombshell. He wasn’t wrong.
She finally came up for air after one last, mournful “Rory, why are you doing this?”
Christy wouldn’t understand his dilemma. She had always loved being a private investigator, had never wanted to be anything else, and couldn’t imagine any member of the family thinking about another career. But he tried.
“Honey, I’m a frustrated rancher who needs to devote time and energy to his spread. I can’t do that if I’ve got clients to serve here in the city.”
“Are you sure that’s all it is?”
It wasn’t. There was another issue in the picture, and the guilt related to it that had been eating at him for weeks now. Making him wonder how he could bear to go being a PI after his fatal mistake, whether he even deserved to be. But he couldn’t bring himself to talk about that.
“Very,” he lied. “Look, it’s not final yet.”
“It sounds like it is. What do Ma and Pop say? Have you told Devlin and Mitch yet? Talked to Eden about it?”
Christy was referring to their parents, who managed the home office of Hawke Detective Agency in Chicago, and their brothers and sister who, like them, operated branches of the agency in various parts of the country.
“They’ll support me in whatever I decide.”
Christy issued a sigh of reluctant resignation. “All right. I don’t like it, but you have my support, too.” He had known she would come around in the end. They were that kind of loyal, loving family. “What about the San Antonio office? Will you just shut it down?”
“I’m training a replacement.”
“But not family. It won’t be the same.”
No, Roark silently agreed after ending the call a moment later, it wouldn’t be the same. He regretted that. If it happened. He still had that tough decision to make, and he figured that a cattle drive, out there away from everything, would be a good place to deal with it. He promised himself that by the end of the drive he would have the answers, both for himself and his client. Providing, that is, he wasn’t too distracted on a personal level.
Samantha Howard. Oh, yeah, she definitely qualified as a distraction, a risky one for a man who needed to concentrate on what might be his last case.
Getting to his feet, Roark went to the window behind his desk. The agency’s fourth-floor location offered an appealing view of the city, but it wasn’t San Antonio that interested him as he stood there unconsciously exercising the fingers of his right hand. His mind was entirely occupied with the image of the woman he had escorted back to her office less than an hour ago. He couldn’t get her out of his head.
Not beautiful, he decided. Not in the conventional sense, anyway, but eye-catching all the same with her mane of burnished chestnut hair. The kind of hair a man longed to release from that tight coil so that it tumbled into his hands, his fingers sifting through its mass while those velvet-brown
