and, closer to her now, he could hear her strangely lifeless recitation of facts about her missing charge, the boy he’d been hired to find. “He likes to draw. He likes to swim. He likes pancakes. He likes puppies. He likes practical jokes. He likes to draw. He likes to swim. He likes…”
She was leaning forward over the saddle horn, still rocking slightly, muttering in a strange rhythm, seemingly unaware that they’d stopped. Her beautiful face was pasty and her knuckles even whiter.
Without a word, Daggert wrapped her horse’s reins around his wrist and dislodged her nerveless feet from the stirrups she’d had the men at the ranch raise a couple of inches so that she could pretend she was riding English style. She issued a small sound either of protest or of pain as her feet dangled free and blood rushed to them.
“Come on down now,” he said, holding up his hands to her.
“He likes to draw,” she murmured.
Daggert felt a cold knife slip into the hard casing surrounding his heart. “Daddy, see what I drew! It’s you, see?” A stick figure with long hair and a horse the size of a mountain had been the last picture Donny ever drew.
“Come,” he said to the woman.
She turned her gaze in his direction and he saw understanding slowly filter through her fatigue. “We’re stopping,” she said. It was a statement of profound need rather than a question.
“Come down,” he said, and when she didn’t move, he added, “I’ve got you.”
He saw her try to swing her leg over the back of the horse, but between that damned foolish way of hitching up her stirrups—trying to ride English style across a desert for hours—and the long day they’d put in, she couldn’t manage to make her muscles work for her.
He gripped her elbow and gave a sharp tug. She slid from the horse, straight into his waiting arms. As her mount sidled away, Daggert staggered back a step, the reins cutting at his wrist and pulling him sideways. But he didn’t release her. He held her to his chest, too aware of her trembling body cradled against his.
He could smell some elusive fragrance wafting from her hair, and above it, the familiar scent of sunshine and bone-dry September desert in southeastern New Mexico. She’d closed her eyes, and he was glad of that because he’d already discovered they were such an incredible blue that they hurt a man to look too deeply into them.
As feisty as she’d been all day, he half anticipated her demanding he get his dirty hands off her. Instead, she turned her head to his chest. “Oh, thank God,” she murmured. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Instinctively, his arms tightened around her.
He carried her a few paces, dragging the reluctant horse behind them, then gently sank to one knee to set her down on the lee side of a sandy mound. She murmured in protest as he pulled his arms away, but she didn’t open her eyes.
Daggert waited for a few seconds, making sure she wasn’t going to slump face first into the sand. She merely leaned her blond head back against the earth and sighed.
He unwound her horse’s reins from his wrist, and, ignoring the abrasion left by the leather ties, led the animal back toward Stone. After a quick survey of the area, Daggert loosely tied both horses to a scraggly branch of a scrub oak. He pulled one of the saddlebags free from Stone’s many packs and quickly withdrew both a canteen of water and some moistened towelettes.
The woman hadn’t moved from her sandy bed and only shook her head when he knelt beside her again.
“Go away, sadist,” she murmured.
“Here’s some water.”
“I’ll bet it’s poisoned,” she said. “You’d make better time if you left me for dead.”
“Drink,” he said. He lifted her cramped hands and frowned at the chafed skin on her palms and between her fingers. She’d obviously gripped both the saddle horn and the reins with that same fierce intensity she put into those knifelike glares he’d felt against his back most of the day.
He held the canteen to her lips and cupped the base of her neck in his hand. Her soft, fluffy cap of hair played with the fine hairs on the back of his hand. She resisted at first, then, as the cold liquid trickled across her lips and down her chin, she roused sufficiently to swallow. When she might have gulped it and caused her stomach to cramp, he pulled the canteen away.
“I’m going to wake up and this will all have been a nightmare. Enrique will be home, eating dinner. I won’t be out in the desert with some stranger who hates women,” she said clearly, if not very logically.
Daggert carefully sealed the water container and set it aside before opening one of the towelettes. With as much gentleness as he might have used on one of his animals, he wiped her brow, her cheeks and the hollow of her slender, sharply marked collarbone.
She moved a little, arching her back to accommodate him. He continued slowly, carefully, bringing her heat down and erasing the dust of a day’s ride from her lovely skin. Her color, he saw, was coming back, giving her a peachy glow in the dusky light. As he continued to bathe her with the cool cloth, he saw her fingers finally begin to relax.
“That’s nice,” she breathed. “I never would have suspected you had it in you.”
He unbuttoned the top button of her elegant blouse and dipped the cool cloth beneath the folds, drawing it near the swell of her breasts, up the arch of each shoulder and back down again.
She sighed once more.
He allowed his fingers to dip a bit lower, cooling her. Heating him.
Her eyelids opened abruptly and eyes as blue and deep as the coldest mountain lake met his squarely. “Enjoying yourself?” she asked.
He gave a final slow swipe before pulling his hand back. “I’m not dead,” he said.
“Something to look forward to, then,” she purred.
He pushed himself erect and walked away from her. He didn’t look back. If he did, he knew he would stare. Even exhausted as she was, her reserves depleted, Daggert knew that short of the silver screen, he’d never seen a woman as staggeringly beautiful and as perfectly formed as Leeza Nelson. As tall as a fashion model and as willowy as any young tree in springtime, she nevertheless filled out her snazzy clothes in all the right places.
And those eyes were as blue as liquid cobalt and as icy as a pond in late winter. One plunge and a man would either drown or feel reborn. Or be killed for getting too close to the edge.
And where everything else about her seemed sleek and elegant, her hair was a slightly mussed cap of blond wisps that seemed to call for his touch. When it had teased the back of his hand as he helped her drink the water, he’d had to force himself not to let his fingers tangle in that spun silk.
The only thing that didn’t match that picture of total perfection had been the brief, glittering blaze of fury he’d glimpsed in her when he’d countermanded her saddle choice early in the day.
Leeza Nelson, female magnate of some big-shot corporation back east, and one of the co-owners of the huge Rancho Milagro, a miracle foster children’s home in the middle of the desert, obviously wasn’t used to having anyone question her
