been out in the open for almost twenty-four hours already. We have to catch up with him soon, and we won’t be able to if I’m busy picking you up off the ground.”
Though Leeza watched him warily, Daggert didn’t look at her as he bent over his own plate and resumed his careful eating. She dipped up a forkful of the pasta and tasted it. She was surprised at how delicious it was. If Daggert dared smile, she’d give the plate of pasta to his dog rather than continue to eat it herself, but he didn’t. He merely finished his dinner in a silence that almost felt easy.
And she was hungrier than she’d thought, for within seconds, her plate was empty, too.
“Thank you,” she said finally, relinquishing it into his hands. “You were right, I was hungry.”
He nodded and moved away from the fire, but not before Leeza had caught a sober look of something that might have been sympathy in his gaze. Sympathy or an almost reluctant compassion. For some odd reason, the notion of his possessing any compassion unnerved her. It was far easier to think of him as rude and bullying and harder than nails than to see him as a human being with human emotions.
After she’d warily used the meager facilities he’d set up behind a low scrub oak, and availed herself of some of the remaining hot water, she turned her back on him and carefully, stiffly, removed her coat, blouse and boots.
Never one for voyeurism, Daggert tried turning his gaze to the fire, but failed miserably when he heard the rasp of her jeans zipper. Her legs went on forever.
“Goddamn,” he said.
She stiffened but didn’t turn around. “What?”
“I burned myself,” he lied. Or was he telling the abject truth?
Amazing him, she pulled on a pair of red satin pajamas. She might as well have been at some fancy motel instead of camping out in the desert on a mission to find a runaway kid. What had possessed her housekeeper to pack such a ridiculous item?
“Good night,” she said, slipping into her sleeping bag.
“Right,” he said, feeling as if he’d fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole.
“Sleep well,” she murmured.
Thinking about her in that getup, he’d be lucky if he ever slept again.
Chapter 3
From atop the highest peak in the rising foothills, the hunter, as he thought of himself, was able to see for miles in all directions. With powerful binoculars at his eyes, he could easily discern Leeza Nelson in red pajamas that made her look as if she’d dressed herself in flame. He saw Daggert moving around the fire, banking it, careful as ever.
The tracker hadn’t been so careful four years ago, had he?
Turning his binoculars to the north, he spied the would-be fire of his newest prey. Everything in him itched to move forward, to catch the boy and teach him a lesson about crossing boundaries. He’d taught many before.
But he shifted his gaze back to the woman slipping into her sleeping bag. The hunter wondered if Leeza Nelson knew that people called Daggert the Cassandra of the desert, always crying murder and never finding enough evidence to prove it. He wondered if she’d heard that Daggert was the man everyone trusted and no one believed.
The woman should have given up by now, but she’d stayed with Daggert throughout the day, even if she posted in her saddle, English style.
She didn’t know about boundaries, either. Maybe it was time she was taught a lesson.
The man wondered if he should flip a coin. The woman or the boy? Heads the woman, tails the child. If he played his cards right—and he was one hell of a card player—he might have the opportunity to teach both of them.
He didn’t need a fire. His thoughts of what he would do to them warmed him thoroughly.
Leeza was wholly spent, tired in places she’d never been aware of before, yet sleep eluded her.
The night stars seemed heavy, as if straining against invisible reins to streak to the earth. She could pick out the Big and Little Dippers, Cassiopeia and the Seven Sisters. In another month she’d be able to find Orion’s belt, she knew a portend of the coming winter.
She’d shown Enrique the constellations one night about two weeks earlier. He’d studied them carefully, trying to see patterns in the myriad twinkling lights until he finally learned the few she could always find.
“My parents are up there,” he’d said.
Assuming he’d meant “in heaven,” Leeza had had to clench her hands in her lap to keep from wrapping her arms around the little boy who’d lost both parents at such an early age.
Just as she had.
But no one had coddled her. Not in any of the foster homes she’d been shuffled in and out of in her early years. Not in the tidy home John and Cora Nelson had brought her to when she was nine. Enrique’s age exactly.
“Emotionalism is a waste of time,” her adoptive father had said on more than one occasion, usually when her eyes were brimming with tears over some imagined hurt. “It reveals a lack of precise thinking.”
Looking at the stars now, out in the middle of a vast desert wilderness, inches from a hard stranger who was kind to his animals if not to the woman who’d hired him, Leeza found herself wishing that she’d drawn Enrique onto her lap and held him close. If she had given just that small measure of comfort, would he have opted to stay at the ranch and not run away into the darkness?
Her partners, Corrie and Jeannie, fellow orphans and sisters in heart if not blood, had entered the Rancho Milagro venture with their arms wide open for the children arriving at the foster-care facility. Leeza had agreed to become a partner in the project for two reasons: Jeannie had needed something to do after her husband and baby had been killed in a senseless accident, and because Leeza herself truly believed in the value of a firm guiding hand for children who were lost, for whatever reason.
She just hadn’t expected it to be so hard. She had assumed they would hire a few teachers, set the children on the straight and narrow, and guide them to understand how they all had an opportunity to make something of their lives. Much as John and Cora Nelson had done with her.
Instead, Jeannie had expected them to actually live on the premises, to give up their lives in Washington, D.C. and move to the remote location north of Carlsbad, New Mexico. Jeannie had come first, overseeing the renovation of the ramshackle place. Corrie came next, to find a new life for herself and the children she loved.
Finally, reluctantly, Leeza had arrived. She’d given the ranch a halfhearted try, but in truth, she was eager to get back to her business deals and mergers. The venture at the ranch seemed chaotic to her, out of control, and not just because the state and federal regulations kept them hamstrung. It was the children who created the biggest problem for Leeza.
Children scarcely out of diapers, angry teenagers and kids like sad-eyed little Enrique had been deposited at Rancho Milagro, the last stop in a string of broken homes and hearts. Each one seemed to weigh on Leeza’s soul, though she’d never admitted it before now. And little Enrique with his questing mind, that oddly shaped scar on his forehead—a permanent reminder
