Santana snapped open his pocketknife, then sliced the twine holding a bale of hay together. The horses were waiting patiently in their stalls, ears pricked forward, dark, liquid eyes assessing him, only Lucifer showing impatience by snorting and tossing his dark head.
Daylight was still a couple of hours away but Santana was up even earlier than usual. Restless. His elusive sleep interrupted with dreams of Regan Pescoli.
Either she’d been making love to him, staring up at him with a naughty smile and arched eyebrows as he’d stripped away her clothes and made love to her, or she’d been lost in the darkness and he’d been running through a dark, night-shrouded forest calling her name, catching glimpses of her as she vanished into a thicket of brittle, snow-covered trees.
He’d woken up in a cold sweat, that tingling sensation that warned him of danger, ever present.
Using a pitchfork, he spread hay into the waiting mangers of Brady Long’s small herd. He’d already exercised the horses as much as the small arena would allow and now was finishing up with the feed, measuring oats, tossing hay, making sure the water was running into the troughs, that the pipes hadn’t frozen in this last arctic blast that had left so much of the state crippled.
Sometimes he wondered why he’d come back to this part of Montana. It wasn’t as if he had any family left.
You just had to get the hell out of California, that’s why, and Brady Long offered you a job and a place to stay.
He opened another bale, smelling the fading scent of summer in the dry grass, then forked it into the next box where Lucifer waited patiently, as if he were the most well-mannered colt on the ranch.
“I’m not buying it,” Santana said to the black devil-horse, but his mind wasn’t really on the task at hand. He was just going through the motions, getting through his morning chores, waiting for daybreak and the phone to ring.
He finished up and walked into the predawn darkness. Usually this was his favorite time of day, just before the sun rose, when the stars lit up the sky, the air was clear, and there was a calm to the universe, a quietude and peace that disappeared with daylight.
This morning, however, the stars were obscured and a bitter wind swept through the cluster of buildings that made up the heart of the Lazy L, the sprawling ranch owned by Brady Long.
A single security lamp shed an eerie light onto the snow-covered landscape and for the first time in days no snowflakes danced and swirled in its bluish beam.
Thankfully, the snowstorm that had ripped through the heart of the Bitterroots had stopped. At least for a while. But he still hadn’t heard from Regan Pescoli.
And he’d caught the news last night that the police in Spokane had taken a woman into custody, believing her to be responsible for the deaths of several women and possibly even the serial killer who had terrorized this section of the Bitterroots. His first thought was that Regan was in on the bust, but a second later he negated that idea, as Alvarez had phoned him after the arrest.
He locked the door of the stable and hiked across the parking lot, a hundred yards through the drifting snow to his cabin with Nakita at his heels. The husky, full of energy, romped through the drifts, disappearing beneath the mantle of white, his tail all that was visible of him, only to reappear, eager for another foray in a new direction.
“You’re an idiot,” Santana reminded him, but he did smile as Nakita bounded on the small porch, snow covering his nose, whiskers, and thick gray fur. Nakita’s long tongue hung out of his mouth and he scratched at the door.
“I know, I know.”
Santana stepped into the cabin, three rooms with a sleeping loft tucked under the eaves of a steep roof. This tiny home was the original house on the Long homestead and well over a hundred years old. That was before copper had been found and mined in some of the surrounding properties and the Long family had gained all their wealth and built the cedar and stone lodge tucked into thickets of pine and spruce and overlooking Milton Creek, homage to Brady’s ancestor who first claimed these acres.
Though his cabin was drafty, insulated poorly, Santana preferred it to the suite of attic rooms in one wing of the main house, quarters that had been dedicated to the year-round staff. Living in the big house was fine for Clementine, the housekeeper, and her teenaged son, Ross, but not for Nate. When push came to shove he would pick privacy over grandeur any day of the week. Besides, he needed to be closer to the livestock. And farther away from Brady Long whenever his boss decided to show up.
Heat radiated from the wood stove crouched in a corner of the cabin’s living area. Somewhere in the last fifty years the compact space had been equipped with electric baseboard heat, but Santana liked the old stove with its glass window to view the fire burning inside. He figured the exercise he got sawing up the fallen trees on the property each spring and splitting the rounds was worth it.
Never once had Regan Pescoli been here. Nor had he spent any time at her house. It was as if they’d had some unspoken pact to stay out of each other’s private space. “Stupid,” he muttered under his breath. They’d both tried so hard to deny what was becoming more evident with each passing hour: that he’d fallen for her.
He hung his hat and jacket on a peg near the front door as Nakita nosed at his food bowl and lapped water wildly from his dish. Santana skimmed himself out of the weatherproof pants and boots before propping them up on the rock floor in front of the fire. After adding more logs to the stove, he fed the dog, cut a thick slice of brown bread for himself, and, after slathering it with butter, bolted it down, then warmed himself up in a shower.
One thought circled his brain: Regan’s missing.
Toweling off briskly, his face a mask of granite, Nate tried not to succumb to panic. But he couldn’t quite convince himself that everything was fine, that she was just busy or even avoiding him.
He threw on his clothes and headed back to the stove, feeling like something sinister was at stake.
Like a gust of wind blowing the stable door open and freaking you out yesterday? Face it, Santana, you’re on the edge of paranoia. Because of a woman. Something you swore to yourself you’d never do.
Settling onto the worn arm of his recliner, he found the remote for his television while his dog was already snoring softly on the rag rug in front of the fire. His muscles were tense as he turned on the morning news.
What was it Pescoli’s partner had said when she’d called and he’d asked concerning Regan’s whereabouts?
“If we knew that, I wouldn’t be calling you.”
Again that unsettling feeling crept through his guts.
Man, Santana, you’ve got it bad. You can’t get Pescoli out of your mind. What was it she’d said that she wanted? A relationship with no strings attached? Sounded good, didn’t it? Except now she’s under your skin. You can’t shake yourself free from her, and face it, you don’t want to.
His jaw tightened. It hadn’t been that long ago that he’d sworn no woman would ever get to him again. But Pescoli with her burnished hair that flamed red-gold in the sun and eyes that shimmered from green to gold had caught him off guard. She was athletic, smart as a whip, and had a wicked sense of humor that always surprised him.
And then there was the lovemaking.
Hard
