The Cowboy's Hidden Agenda

Then the memories were tumbling in on her, memories of the one time before in her life when she’d known fear like this. When she’d felt as utterly and desperately alone. This wasn’t the first time she’d been taken and held against her will.

That other time, of course, she hadn’t been alone. Even now, sixteen years later, she could feel Ethan’s small hand creeping into hers, feel his warm body snuggling against her for warmth and comfort, hear his quivering voice whispering, “Lolly? Will you sing me a song?” even though he knew she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Ethan—her baby brother—twenty-two years old now, and a premed junior at UCLA. But she could still remember as if it were yesterday the overwhelming burden of responsibility that had made her feel even more alone. This time, at least, she had only herself to think about.

Oh, but that’s not true.

No, it wasn’t true at all. Because suddenly she knew why she was here, locked in this saddle house on an Arizona horse ranch. She knew why she was worth something to these people, even if she didn’t know exactly who they were.

It was because they knew who she was.

“Hi, I’m Lauren Brown—we spoke on the phone? About that bay stud you have for sale?”

Gil McCullough’s vivid blue gaze narrowed as it swept over her in openly masculine appraisal, producing a charming fan of creases in the tanned skin at the corners of his eyes. He held the hand she’d offered just a beat longer than necessary, while his smile broadened to reveal strong vaguely predatory teeth.

“Well, hello, Lauren Brown. I sure do remember our phone conversation, but tell you the truth, I wasn’t expecting to see you till tomorrow.” And yet his tone said plainly he didn’t mind all that much that she’d come early. It was a ploy Lauren recognized, designed to disarm her and at the same time put her on the defensive.

In fact, the man McCullough was himself a type she recognized, and about what she might have expected from the brief conversation she’d had with him on the phone. He was big, lean and weathered, with a full head of silver-gray hair worn in a crewcut, a cowboy’s squint and a strong clean-shaven jaw. A handsome man, which she also could have guessed, given his supreme self-confidence and slightly seductive tone on the telephone. The only surprise was an almost military bearing that set him well apart from the ranchers she’d come to know back in Texas. Most of them, neighbors of the Tipsy Pee, were rump-sprung, stove-up and gimpy-legged by the time they were fifty, from too much time spent either on top of or getting thrown off some four-legged beast or other. She’d have to peg Gil McCullough as more the executive type, one who’d come to ranching as a hobby after acquiring his wealth in some other more dependable line of work. The type who patrolled his lands and herds from four-wheel-drive vehicles and sleek single-engine airplanes. In any case, an alpha male through and through, absolutely certain of his dominance over men and women alike.

Fortunately Lauren wasn’t intimidated by such men. Or attracted to them, either. She couldn’t be and have much hope of surviving—and thriving—in the legal profession. She’d managed to do both those things by meeting such men head-on, armed with her own arsenal of brains and self-assurance—tempered, when necessary, with a judiciously applied veneer of feminine charm.

“When necessary” meant she wasn’t above employing a healthy dollop of that charm now. Which was why, before answering, she took off her hat and finger-combed her blond hair back from her damp forehead as she slanted a smile to meet the rancher’s mildly rebuking frown. “Well, now, Mr. McCullough—”

“Aw, call me Gil, honey—please.”

“Well, Gil, honey,” she said softly, teasingly, “you know, you weren’t very forthcoming about giving me a price. I figured I’d better get on over here and talk to you face-to-face, see if we can agree on the numbers before I take a look at the horse.”

McCullough laughed playfully, showing those formidable teeth. “Well, yeah, but that’s the idea, don’t you see? You’ve got to come see ol’ Cochise Red before I tell you my price.”

Lauren laughed, too, even producing a dimple. “Oh, but that’s not fair. See, I know what you’re up to. You’re trying to get me out there to see him so I’ll fall in love with him. Get me so set on having him, I’ll agree to any price!” Several of the men lounging in the cottonwood shade near the camper laughed, and someone called, “She’s got your number, Gil.”

McCullough drew himself up in mock offense, a subtly aggressive posture disguised as banter. “You bet I am. Hey, listen—let me tell you something. Cochise Red’s one helluva horse. Whoever gets him’s gonna have to pay me what he’s worth. And tell you something else—whoever meets my price is gonna get their money’s worth.”

“Oh, I believe you, Gil,” said Lauren earnestly. “Everything I’ve seen and heard so far tells me I’m probably going to get my heart broken, but—” she sighed heavily and ducked her head in order to settle her hat back in place “—you have to understand, if it was my money I was spending…” She looked up again, and this time injected wistfulness into her smile. “But unfortunately, it’s not up to me. I’m just the agent for the Parish family—I thought you understood that. I’m authorized to go only so high, and if your asking price is beyond my limit, well, much as I hate to think I’ve come all this way for nothing, there’s just no point in taking it any further. Sorry to have bothered you, Mr. McCullough. Maybe we can do business another time.” She tilted her head in a little nod of farewell, then pivoted and began to walk away, hips swaying, fingertips tucked in the pockets of her jeans, head down, watching her boots scuff through the dust. A picture of dejection, with a tinge of sex appeal.

She’d gone maybe five steps—which was a couple more than she’d estimated it would take—when McCullough fell into step beside her and draped a fatherly arm across her shoulders. She halted instantly, and he took the arm away when she turned.

“Ah, hell,” he said, and appealed briefly to the cloudless sky as if for guidance, his squint perplexed. “You know what, I’d really hate for you to come all the way from Texas for nothing. What you and me need to do is sit down somewhere, have us a cold beer and a nice dinner, and talk. What do you say?”

“Well, I—”

“Tell you what.” His hand was on her shoulder again, his head lowered close to hers. “Right now I’ve got to go find my heeler—sounds like they’ve started in on the steer wrestlin’, and that means team ropin’s comin’ up next. But why don’t we—”

“You rope?” Lauren was surprised; she hadn’t taken him for the working type.

McCullough winked, showing those teeth again. “I like to keep my hand in now and then.” He reached out to waylay a cowboy with a contestant’s number on his back coming from the direction of the arena. “Hey, Dub, seen Bronco anywhere?”

The cowboy jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Last I seen he was over at the stock pens.”

McCullough laughed. “Talkin’ the steers into lettin’ him rope ’em, I imagine.”

“Bronco,” said Lauren, when the cowboy had shared the joke and the laughter and moved on. “Is that the same one I just saw up on a bareback bronc?”

“That’s the one.”

Lauren smiled as McCullough walked her on, his arm friendly across her shoulders. “Does he rope as well as he rides?”

“Honey,” the rancher drawled, “anything involving a horse, there’s nobody in this world better. Tell you what,” he added more briskly, giving her a quick squeeze before releasing her, “why don’t you meet me for dinner tonight? A lot of the rodeo crowd, they like to get together evenings at Smoky Joe’s—know where it is? Can’t miss it—just outside of town on the highway. You’ll hear it before you see it. ’Bout eight o’clock? Good—we’ll see you there.”

And he left her to go angling off toward the livestock pens with that curiously military stride, now and then nodding to acquaintances as he moved through the crowd.

Left behind, Lauren exhaled in an exasperated gust. Then she shrugged and glanced at her watch. Maybe she’d stick around and watch the team-roping before heading back into town. After that she’d see about checking into a motel, maybe catch up on the sleep she’d missed last night before it was time to put on her war paint and strap on her armor and head for the showdown with McCullough.

She smiled to herself, exhilarated at the thought of the battle ahead. She knew McCullough’s type. If she played him right, the stallion Cochise Red was as good as hers.

Chapter 2

Bronco stood with his back and one foot propped against a corral fence post and watched the eastern sky turn from indigo to purple to mauve, to a gaudy shade of salmon streaked with gold. Ordinarily sunrise was his favorite time of day—something in his genes, he guessed, remnants of an ancient reverence of his father’s people for the Creator Sun. But this morning the appearance of that molten sliver brought him no joy. This morning it was only a prod and a portent: Time to go—bad times coming. He and the woman must be well away before they got here.

Lauren Brown. He knew Gil figured she was his trump card, but Bronco knew for a fact that taking her would prove to be the biggest mistake McCullough ever made. He also knew there was no point in trying to tell the commander that; Bronco had run into officers like him before. A smart man but arrogant, and a fanatic on top of it—a bad combination, especially when combined with some real power. It was such men, Bronco believed, who made the decisions that lost wars and turned the tides of history.

By this time, though, he himself was pretty fatalistic about the whole thing. The commander had been dead-set on this plan, and now that he’d put it in motion, Bronco figured there wasn’t much anybody could do to stop it. A bad business, destined for a bad end—for somebody. Bronco meant to make damn sure it wasn’t him.

He glanced at his watch, then looked over toward the small split-log building with the reflected glow of pinkish-yellow light showing in its barred window. After a moment he straightened and pushed away from the fence post. Her ten minutes was up. He slapped his gloves once against his Levis, then drew them on and headed for the saddle house. On the way he couldn’t help but notice that his boots were hitting the hard dirt in the same rhythm as the song inside his head, the one that kept singing: She’s bad news…bad news…bad news.

But the picture in his mind that went with the song didn’t look like bad news. It was the picture of Lauren Brown walking into Smoky Joe’s last night, looking like a Texas sunflower….

Johnny Bronco’s Saturday-night routine was a well-established tradition at Smoky Joe’s Bar and Grill. He’d generally arrive around seven o’clock, choose his favorite table along the back wall near the rest-room door and order a hamburger medium well along with the first of what usually amounted to about six beers. He’d work on the burger and the beers between trips to the dance floor and the men’s room and trying to hit on any good-looking women that happened to be in the place, until along about eleven, twelve o’clock when he’d pick a fight and get himself thrown out on his butt. The regular patrons of Smoky Joe’s didn’t seem to mind this, had even come to expect it as an essential part of the evening’s entertainment, and the management didn’t hold it against him as long as nothing got broken and nobody got hurt.

Anyway, people around there tended to cut Johnny Bronco quite a bit of slack, just as they had way back in the days when he’d been the hometown football hero, all-conference wide receiver and all-time leading scorer for the White Mountain Mustangs. Locally, there were two things a man could do that would pretty much guarantee him universal respect: be good with a football or be good with horses. Johnny Bronco happened to be both. It was a pretty sure bet that after the kind of show he’d put on out at the rodeo arena that afternoon, he wasn’t going to have to pay for very many of those beers.

The regular crowd in Smoky Joe’s had been so enthusiastic in their congratulations, in fact, that by the time Lauren Brown walked in at eight-fifteen Bronco was well ahead of the game. There were three long-necked bottles lined up on the table in front of him and a fourth cradled against the front of his bright red dancin’ shirt, and he was grinning and keeping time with the heel of his boot as he watched the energetic bunch on the dance floor muddle through the steps of “Elvira.”

He knew the minute she walked in. He’d been watching for her, of course, but even if he hadn’t, she’d have been hard to miss. He’d already noticed she was tall for a woman, reed-slender in her snug-fitting jeans and expensive stack-heeled boots and a waist-length scoop-necked knit shirt the color of sunflowers. She was the kind of woman who looked her best astride a horse—or a man, for that matter. Long strong legs, round firm breasts—not too big, just the right size to fill a man’s hands with nothing going to waste. And then there was that hair—a thick curving fall to her shoulders, the exact shade of winter grass on a cold sunny day in the high country. He could almost smell its fresh sweet fragrance, see it ripple when the wind caught it.

Bronco checked his watch again and smiled to himself. Fifteen minutes late—just enough to let McCullough know she wasn’t at his beck and call, not quite enough so that he’d be able to justify getting pissed off about it. Hell, she’d just bat her baby blues and show him her dimple, and ol’ Gil would have no choice but to chalk it up to feminine privilege. A dangerous combination for a woman—headstrong and smart. Bronco knew he’d do well not to underestimate her.

He reminded himself of that now as he lifted the bar away from the saddle-house door. He was half expecting her to ambush him with the coffee mug; he hadn’t missed the way her eyes had sharpened when he’d handed it to her, or the barely imperceptible tensing of her wrists as she’d tested its weight. She was gutsy, that one, on top of headstrong and smart.

He was relieved when he found her more or less where he’d left her; he’d had to hurt her once, and it was something he hoped never to have to do again.

She was sitting on the cot with her overnight bag on her knees. He could see her knuckles whiten on the handles when she saw him, as if she wanted nothing in this world so much as to chuck it at him. He couldn’t blame her for that, or the fact that her voice, when she spoke, was taut with rage.

“You went to my motel room?”

Bronco grunted. “Well, I didn’t personally.”

“I suppose you—they—somebody checked me out?”

He twitched a shoulder. “Didn’t have to. You know those Motel 6 kind of places—they’re generally pay in advance.”

“So, you—they just cleaned it out. Packed up my things.” Her voice burned with frost, in sharp contrast to the warm pink blossoming in her cheeks. “You went through everything?”

Bronco didn’t bother to answer that, just lifted a pair of saddlebags from a sawhorse near the door, smacked them once to get rid of some of the dust and tossed them to her. “If there’s anything in there you want to take along, better put it in here. And do it fast. We’re leavin’. Now.”

She threw him a look of pure hatred, which strangely enough he found exhilarating, rather like watching a bolt of lightning rip across a slate-black sky. He hid his smile from her, though; it wasn’t going to do either of them any good to make her madder than she already was.

He stood and leaned against the door with his arms folded across his chest and watched her transfer the contents of the overnighter to the saddlebags. He was trained to be observant, and it struck him that her movements weren’t quite coordinated, as if she was trembling violently inside. And not all from anger, he imagined. There was fear there, too, as hard as she might try to hide it. He tried to imagine what it must be like for her, one minute to be going about her business and then without warning to find herself forcibly taken prisoner, with no idea why or what it was all about or what was going to happen to her. He thought she was holding up pretty well, considering.

Although, as smart as the lady was, he wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she’d gotten the whole thing figured out by now.

Finished with her packing, she rose and put herself to rights, shaking each foot to settle the pant legs down over the tops of her boots, jamming her shirttails any which way into the waistband of her jeans, skimming back her hair and fastening it with a rubber band she’d retrieved from the saddlebags. Efficient, Bronco observed. No nonsense, no fuss, and a surprising lack of vanity for so beautiful a woman. For a woman soon to become one of the world’s most famous and recognizable.

“Ready?”

She was standing before him with the saddlebags over one shoulder, storm-cloud eyes almost level with his. He was aware of a disturbance in his insides as he gazed back at her, a sensation that felt oddly like thunder rolls.

“Got a jacket?” he drawled, keeping his eyes veiled.

She cut him a look that was pure acid. “Are you nuts? It’s August. This is Arizona.”

He didn’t argue with her. He’d find something for her to wear. She was going to learn soon enough how chilly a summer monsoon could be at seven-thousand-feet elevation.

Instead, he opened the door and held it for her with mocking gallantry, which she acknowledged with a look that for once he couldn’t quite figure out.

“I should never have danced with you,” she muttered bitterly as she passed him.

To that, Bronco could only add a fervent, if silent, Amen.

He wasn’t quite sure why he was doing it; he did know for sure it wasn’t going to make his bosses happy. But hell, he was Johnny Bronco, and if he didn’t try to hit on the prettiest girl in the place at least once tonight, people were going to think something was wrong with him.

He placed the fourth beer bottle, now empty, on the table, lining it up precisely with the three already there, then pushed back his chair. He wove through the noisy crowd, rocking his body slightly in time to the heavy country beat, aware of the glances and smiles that followed him on his way. But his step was steady, a self-confident swagger; if he kept to his usual timetable, the effects of the alcohol weren’t due to kick in until beer number six. That was still a good two hours off. This was party time.

McCullough saw him coming and waved him over, relaxed and jovial. Lauren turned to see who was moving up behind her, and when she did, her hair rippled across her shoulder blades like a sea of long grass when the wind touches it. Bronco saw the flare of recognition in her eyes, heard the sharp hiss of her breath. Then she was facing forward again while he traded greetings and shot the usual masculine bull with Gil.

But he’d marked the subtle changes in her body—the stillness, the tension, a certain awkwardness that hadn’t been there before—that let him know she was aware of him in ways she hadn’t been aware of Gil McCullough. Like a mare when she senses the stallion’s presence. He felt a similar current go through his own body, like a charge of electricity—unnerving in itself, but more so because it wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t part of the charade.

Nor could he have pretended his accelerated heartbeat when he braced his hands on the back of her chair and leaned close to her to make himself heard above the crowd noise. It was an angle calculated to give him a nice view of her breasts and the sweet valley between them, a view he’d availed himself of with more women than he’d ever care to account for. He tried to recall whether it had ever caused his pulse to quicken and his temperature to rise the way it was doing now.

“Would you like to dance?” he growled with his lips close to her ear.

She leaned away and turned her head to look up at him. “Do you dance as well as you ride?” She said it lightly, and both the comment and the body language were meant to be flirtatious. But somehow to Bronco they didn’t look or sound true, as if she hadn’t had much practice at it.

Which wasn’t something anybody would have said about him. “You’ll have to judge that for yourself,” he drawled, dropping his eyelids to half-mast. He straightened, moved back a step and held out his hand.

For a moment that seemed a lot longer she looked into his eyes, while his heart hammered against his breastbone and his knowledge of the trouble he was walking her into pulsed like a strobe light in his mind.

Lady, can’t you tell when the wolves are gathering? Get the hell outta Dodge while you still can! Forget about that horse you want so badly. Just get in your truck and drive on back to Texas. Can’t you sense the danger you’re in?

Then again, he thought, maybe she did sense it, just didn’t have enough experience with that sort of thing to know what it was that was making her feel so tense and edgy.

She opened her mouth in indecision, then threw a questioning look at McCullough, who waved her on with an overdone joviality that rang as sour as her flirting did.

“Ah hell, honey, you can go ahead. I’m an old married man.” But the look he sent Bronco carried another message: Screw this up for us, boy, and I’ll kill you myself.

Bronco stretched his lips in a smile. “I don’t bite.”

“Oh, well, then forget it,” she joked, giving her head an airy little flip. Her hair swept forward across her shoulder, and Bronco caught a whiff of green apples.

She said something to him as they were making their way toward the dance floor, something he couldn’t quite hear with all the noise. He said, “Beg pardon?” and moved in close behind her, putting his hands on her bare arms. He felt her flesh twitch beneath his fingers, like the hide of a nervous horse.

She nodded her head toward the dance floor, where the band was doing its best to organize a crowd already too boozed up for coordination into something resembling a line. “I’ve never done this before—line dancing.”

He gave her arms a squeeze that was meant to encourage, nothing more. But he felt her heat warm him as if somebody’d turned the sun on and hit him full in the chest with it.

“It’s easy,” he said, and even he was startled at the growl in his voice. “Just keep your eyes on the person in front of you and do whatever they do.”

The song had started, and the wooden dance floor vibrated to the more-or-less synchronized stomping of several dozen pairs of boots. Holding Lauren lightly by her upper arms, Bronco guided her into one of the swaying, dipping, turning lines.

“Give it a couple beats to get the rhythm,” he rasped with his lips close to her hair, and knew a moment’s light-headedness from the scent.

She nodded and he let go of her. She fixed her eyes on the overstuffed backsides of the couple in front of her—tourists in fancy Western clothes all duded up with embroidery and fringe, and just as obviously lost as she was. After a few bars of trying her best to follow their giggling and stumbling, she looked over at Bronco, lips wry and eyes shining with laughter, and lifted her hands in a hopeless shrug.

Without missing a beat, Bronco stepped over in front of her, at the same time guiding her into position behind him. He placed her hands on his hips, covered them with his own and held them firmly in place there as he moved through the sequence of steps, hip waggles, leg kicks and all. It took only a few beats before she was moving with him as naturally as breathing.

Though his own breathing could hardly be described as natural. Having her there behind him, knowing she was so close, her body almost but not quite touching him, made his skin shiver and his spine contract and the fine hairs on the back of his neck lift with awareness. And that wasn’t the only thing that was lifting. The stirrings elsewhere in his body were downright uncomfortable, given the tightness of his jeans.

His only regret was that he couldn’t see her. And yet…he could see her. With his eyes closed he watched her slender body pick up the rhythm, move with innate grace and in perfect harmony with his, her laughter like sunbeams, illuminating the pictures in his mind. Except that, in those pictures, she was naked in his embrace, and around them all was warmth and light and peace, a world in perfect harmony…