Wyoming Woman

If she had played her cards more sensibly, she might be headed for the ranch right now on the back of her brother’s horse. Luke would be rid of her; she would be rid of him; everybody would be happier. So why hadn’t she spoken?

But Rachel knew why. The horror she had witnessed, coupled with the shock of recognizing her adored brother, had left her mute.

As she gazed back toward the hilltop where the four riders had disappeared, a sense of pervading blackness crept over her. For months she had looked forward to home—to the grand sweep of mountain peaks and prairie sky and the smell of coffee on the crisp morning air; to friends and family, to sunny days filled with hard work and laughter and love. But home had changed, Rachel realized. And something told her it would never again be the carefree place she remembered.

Luke lowered the lamb to the ground, then stood back to watch as it tottered toward its anxious mother. A ghost of a smile tugged at his lips as it butted for her teat, clamped on and lost itself in the bliss of nursing. This one, at least, would be all right for now. But how many others would be maimed by those bloody snares? How many precious animals would he lose before the summer was over? This range war was not of his making. But each day of it was chipping away at his livelihood and slowly draining his spirit. He had never asked for anything except to be left alone. Even that simple wish, it appeared, was not to be granted.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that Rachel had emerged from the sagebrush and was making her way down the slope toward him. Water and mud had plastered her clothes against her skin, outlining every delicious curve and hollow of her voluptuous little body. Her wind-tangled hair blazed like fire in the fading light. Filthy, disheveled and undoubtedly sore, Rachel Tolliver still walked as if the whole world were gathered at her feet, awaiting her pleasure.

For a long moment, Luke allowed his eyes to feast on her proud beauty. Then, still reluctant, he tore his gaze away. She was a cattleman’s daughter. Worse, she was a rich cattleman’s daughter, as strong-willed and demanding as she was beautiful. He would wager that the proper Miss Tolliver believed the sun, the moon and the stars revolved around her pretty little head, and that anything she wanted could be had by batting those lush golden eyelashes at the right man.

Luke knew about such women. He knew far more than he wanted to remember. Some things, in fact, he would give almost anything to forget.

The memory of Cynthia’s luscious face and lying words came back to haunt him now, just as they had haunted him for the four years he had spent in the hellhole of the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

…I’m so frightened, Luke. The way he looks at me, the way he brushes against me…my own father! He’s come after me before, and he’ll do it again. You have to help me, Luke. Somehow you have to stop him… Then we can be together for the rest of our lives….

Lord, what a gullible fool he had been!

“Oh, will you look at that!” Rachel had come up alongside him. Her muddy hands clasped in delight as she watched the frantically nursing lamb. She had an infectious smile that crinkled her eyes at the corners, deepened the dimples in her cheeks and showed her small, pearl-like teeth. A smile like that could get a woman anything she wanted, he thought. Anything.

“Look at his tail go!” she exclaimed, laughing. “It’s whipping around like a little windmill! How on earth did you manage to find his mother?”

“They found each other. I just hung on to the lamb and followed my ears.” Luke kept his voice flat, resisting the temptation to return her smile. She was one of the enemy, he reminded himself. Worse, she was everything he had grown to despise in a woman. Even for this brief time, he could not let himself warm to her.

“Will he be able to walk the rest of the way with his mother?” she asked, still watching the lamb.

“He’s too weak for that. We’ll need to take him on the horse again. Sorry.” The last word came out sounding more like a barb than an apology. The truth was, the thought of pampered Rachel holding the muddy, squirming lamb in her arms gave him an odd feeling of pleasure.

“As long as you let him finish eating, that’s fine. Since he figured out that fingers don’t give milk, he’s been impossible!”

She arched like a languorous cat, reaching backward to massage her weary spine. The motion strained the buttons of her form-fitting jacket, pulling the fabric tightly against her breasts, outlining her taut nipples.

Luke stifled a groan and averted his eyes. The little minx knew exactly what she was doing, he told himself. To such a woman, seductive behavior would be an instinct, as natural as breathing. No matter that the only man in sight was one she would spit on under most circumstances—a man so far below her in class as to be unworthy of notice. She would enjoy arousing him, making him want her, then walking away with a toss of her fiery little head and leaving him with the devil’s own fire between his legs.

Well, let her do her worst, he thought. He would not give Miss Rachel Tolliver the satisfaction of knowing the effect she had on him. Soon their journey would be finished. He would give her a quick bite to eat, then send her off on old Henry, a horse that would return home as soon as she let it go. With luck, they would never cross paths again.

“How much longer?” She ended her stretch with a light shake of her shoulders. “I don’t like the look of those clouds.”

Luke followed her gaze to the west, where a bank of slate-colored clouds was spilling in over the Big Horns. He sighed, biting back a curse. He’d assumed the weather would stay clear. The last thing he’d counted on was a second storm moving in before nightfall. Anxious as he was to get rid of Rachel, he could hardly send her home in a downpour.

A scowl passed across his face as another thought struck him—one that suddenly made everything worse.

“What is it?” She was studying him, her expression so open and earnest that it caught Luke off guard.

“Your family,” he said. “What will they do if you don’t show up? They’re bound to be out looking for you.” He did not add that, from what he’d heard, any man caught trifling with Morgan Tolliver’s precious daughter would do well to make his peace with heaven.

Rachel did not answer his question. Her gaze flickered away from his, then dropped to her hands, as if she were weighing the consequences of lying to him.

“Rachel?”

Still she was silent. He stared at her for the space of a long breath, then exhaled with mixed relief as the truth sank home. “They’re not expecting you, are they?” he said. “You were driving that rented buggy home from Sheridan to surprise them. That’s why you chose to come with me instead of waiting by the wash. You’d have been stranded if you’d stayed.”

She looked up at him again, and he saw the flash of anxiety in her beautiful blue-green eyes. He was an untrusted stranger, and he had just discovered that no one would be searching for her or riding to her rescue. For better or for worse, she was at his mercy, and she knew it.

“Tell me I’m right, Rachel,” he said.

Her expression hardened. Only the white-knuckled clasp of her hands betrayed her. “You’re wrong,” she said. “If I’m not back at the ranch before dark, there’ll be two dozen armed men out looking for me, including my father and brothers. They won’t rest until they know I’m safe.”

The first glimpse of her vulnerability had moved him. Now it angered him. “Damn it, woman, what do you take me for?” he exploded. “Do you think I’d be crazy enough to touch one hair of your precious Tolliver head? Do you think I’d even want to?” He glowered at the sky, where the darkening clouds mirrored his emotions. “If you’re so all-fired worried, why didn’t you take your chances back there, with those four cowboy friends of yours? You could be halfway home by now.”

Without waiting for an answer, Luke swung his gaze back toward her. She looked even more frayed than she had before, her eyes too large in a face that seemed too small and pale.

“Did you know them, Rachel?” he demanded, resolving to show her no mercy. “Is that why you didn’t show yourself?”

She glanced away, hesitating a second too long before she shook her head. “They were masked. I couldn’t see their faces. And I didn’t know what they’d do if they found me.”

“So you decided you’d be safer with a sheep man.” Luke made no effort to keep the edge from his voice. “Should I be flattered?”

“Stop it!” The worn thread of her patience snapped. “Can’t you understand that none of this mess is my doing? I’ve been away at school. Except for a few days at Christmas, I haven’t lived in Wyoming for almost three years!”

“That doesn’t change who you are, Rachel,” Luke said quietly.

Her head went up sharply, nostrils flaring like a blooded mare’s. “I’m proud of who I am,” she said. “I love my family and I love this land. But today…” The words trailed off as she studied the boiling clouds. “Today I feel as if I’ve wandered into somebody else’s nightmare and can’t find my way out.”

“And I’m your bogeyman.” He spoke without emotion.

She shook her head. “It’s not just you. It’s everything. I want to wake up. I want to open my eyes and find this place the same as it was three years ago, before you came here.”

“You’re saying I should leave so you can have your nice, peaceful life back.”

Either she’d missed the irony in his voice or she was choosing to ignore it. “My father would gladly buy you out, Luke. You could go somewhere else, with plenty of money to make a new start.”

“Just like that.” Luke would have laughed at her naiveté if he hadn’t been choking on his own fury. “You’ve never had to fight for anything in your pampered little life have you, Miss Rachel Tolliver? You can’t even imagine what it’s like to want something so much that you’d spill your own blood to get it, and to hold onto it.”

She raked her hair back from her face with restless fingers. “Maybe not,” she said in a taut voice. “But I know enough to recognize a stubborn fool when I see one.”

“And I know enough to recognize a woman who thinks she can rearrange the people around her like furniture, to suit her own pleasure. Anyone who’s spoiling her pretty view will be shown the door. Well, this time it’s not going to work.”

“Especially not with a man who’s bent on self-destruction!”

Without waiting for his response, she stalked down the slope to where the lamb had finished nursing and was tottering away from the ewe on uncertain legs. Bending down, Rachel caught the small creature around its chest and scooped it into her arms. As she turned back to face him, a ray of amber sunlight slanted through the clouds to touch her windblown hair. For an instant her face was haloed by living, moving flame. Luke was no artist, but if he could have taken brush to canvas he would have chosen to paint her exactly as he saw her now—as a rescuing angel with blazing hair and a wounded lamb cradled in her arms.

But Rachel Tolliver was no angel, he reminded himself. She was a willful, self-centered minx who demanded life on her own terms and gave no quarter to anyone else’s point of view. The sooner she was off his hands and back with her own kind, the better for them both.

The vision dissolved as she moved, striding back up the hill toward him. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’ve had enough rain for one day.”

Luke mounted and reached down for her. She passed him the lamb, then seized his free arm and allowed him to swing her up behind him. She was light and strong, like lifting a bird, he thought as she scrambled into place on the horse’s withers. Light and strong and tough. And while she’d been pushy and temperamental and annoying, not once had he heard her whine.

Passing her the lamb, he whistled to the dogs and urged the buckskin to a trot. Overhead the skies darkened and rumbled, showing a thin streak of red above the mountains, like a bed of glowing coals glimpsed through the grate of an iron stove. The sheep were moving fast now, driven by the pressing dogs and by a sense of urgency that seemed to hover in the air around them all. Luke felt it, too, and he pushed the animals harder. He had been away from the ranch too long. There was evil afoot, his instincts shrilled. He needed to get back home before it was too late.

Chapter Five

T he lamb had fallen asleep, its milk-swollen belly as taut as the skin of a drum. Rachel balanced its warm weight between her breasts and the rock-solid expanse of Luke’s back. Her free hand gripped Luke’s belt as the tall buckskin pushed across the open flatland behind the sheep.

“I know this country,” she muttered, bracing her self as the horse lurched up the side of a wash. “The boundary of your ranch can’t be more than a mile from here.”

“We’ve already passed it. You’re on my land now.” There was an edge to Luke’s voice. He had said little since they’d remounted, and Rachel had been too tired to start what would surely turn into another argument. But she’d felt the tension in him. She had sensed the black weight of his thoughts, and she had been torn between the need to understand more and the fervent wish to wake up in her own bed, to the happy discovery that this whole day had been a horrible dream and there was no such person as Luke Vincente.

“You won’t have to hold on much longer.” The strain came through in his voice. “If it’s any comfort to you, there should be a hot meal ready when we get to the ranch house.”

Rachel’s empty stomach growled at the mention of food, but her thoughts had already darted to another matter. Hot food meant there would be someone waiting at the ranch—a wife, most likely, since Luke didn’t strike her as the sort of man who would hire a cook. And if there was a wife, there could be children as well—beautiful children, she imagined, with fierce obsidian eyes like their father’s. No wonder Luke was so protective of his own. No wonder he was so determined to stay and fight off all comers.

Where she gripped his belt, she felt his sinewy body shift against her hand. His aura surrounded her, setting off a shimmer of heat, as if his fingertips had brushed her bare skin. The leathery, masculine aroma, which had lain dormant in her nostrils, suddenly stirred, triggering a jolt of awareness. It had been there all along, she realized, this slumbering sense of his maleness. Why now, of all times, did it have to wake up and kick her like a mule, leaving her warm and damp and tingling?

Was it because she’d just surmised that he was married and therefore forbidden? Ridiculous, Rachel told herself. She had branded Luke Vincente as forbidden from the moment she found out he was a sheep man. It made no difference whether he was married or not. Nothing had happened between them. Nothing would happen. The whole idea was unthinkable.

Laden with the smell of rain, a chilly wind whipped Rachel’s hair across her face. By now the sun was gone. Inky clouds, back-lit by flashes of sheet lightning, rumbled across the twilight sky. The sheep flowed through the hollows like patches of fog, their bells clanging eerily in the darkness. There was little need for the dogs to hurry them now. The urgency to reach home before the storm broke was driving them all.

Luke’s tense silence had begun to gnaw at Rachel’s nerves. “Are these all the sheep you have?” she asked, forcing herself to make conversation.

He sighed, sounding drained. “There are just under a thousand head in all, so you’re only seeing about a third of them. I don’t usually run so many of them together. After what happened today, you won’t have to ask why. But we’re…shorthanded now. There wasn’t much choice.”

The catch in his voice was barely perceptible, but the impact of the emotion behind it struck Rachel like a slap. Whatever was happening here, she sensed, she had barely glimpsed the surface of it. The truth was larger and uglier than she had ever imagined.

“When I was growing up, I loved the open range,” she said, thinking aloud. “Even as a little girl, I could ride for miles, go anywhere I wished, and feel perfectly safe. This was a happy place, Luke Vincente…before the trouble with sheep men started.”

A bolt of lightning flashed across the indigo sky. As thunder cracked behind them, she felt Luke’s muscles harden beneath his damp shirt. “You’re not a little girl anymore, Rachel,” he said. “If you don’t like what’s happened here, you can go back East and make a life for yourself. Marry well. Have a family, and keep that happy place in your memory. As long as you don’t come back here, it will never change.”

The bitterness in his voice stung her. “I don’t intend to go back East,” Rachel answered crisply. “The ranch is part mine. It’s my home, and I’ve returned to stay.”

Luke made a derisive sound under his breath. “What about that fancy eastern schooling you mentioned? Why waste so much expense and trouble if all you want to do is come back here and be a cow-girl?”

“I studied painting and sculpture,” she said, ignoring his sardonic undertone. “Three of my paintings are already in a gallery, and the owner is interested in doing a show based on images of life in the West. With luck and hard work, I can have a successful career right here in Wyoming.”

Luke was silent for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “Images of the West!” he snorted. “I can just picture that. The chuck wagon at sunset! Buckaroos around the old corral!”

“Stop insulting me, Luke,” Rachel said quietly. “I’m not the naive little fool you think I am.”

“You want images, Rachel Tolliver?” he said, his vehemence swelling. “I could show you images that would burn themselves into your mind for the rest of your life! Animals shot, trapped, crippled, or lying dead around a poisoned water hole. And more—more than a fine lady like you would even want to think about.”

Rachel flinched against the leaden impact of every word he spoke. Another image flashed through her mind—a hand tugging down a crimson neckerchief to reveal a dark young face. A face she loved.

She had heard enough of Luke’s bitter words to make her stomach churn. But far worse was the idea of what he had left unsaid. He had intimated, with a cutting scorn, that she was too gently reared to deal with the full truth of what was happening. But Luke didn’t know the half of it. He had no idea of what she’d seen, or how the sight of her darling brother’s face had left her gasping for breath like a fish flung out of its element.

She had to know. She had to know everything, even if it broke her heart to hear it.

“Tell me,” she demanded, her fingers tightening around the worn leather strap of his belt. “I want to hear the worst.”

“Why trouble your pretty head with such an ugly story?” Luke’s defiant question infuriated her. Only the lamb, so warm and peaceful between their bodies, kept her from shouting at him.

“This country is my home and my family’s home,” Rachel said in a level voice. “Whatever’s going on here, I need to understand it.”

Thunder filled the silence as she waited for Luke to answer. When he outlasted her patience she pressed him again.

“We’ve had a few sheep in these parts since I was in pigtails,” she said. “I can’t say there was ever any love lost between sheep men and ranchers. But what I saw today—there was never anything like that before! What in heaven’s name happened? Was it something you did?”

He laughed at that, a deep, bitter release that quivered through his taut body, so that she felt it more than heard it. “I’d pay good money for the answer to that question, lady. All I’ve ever asked of my neighbors was that they leave me alone. As long as I kept my sheep off their land, most of them, including your father, did just that—until about three months ago. That was when the raids started.”

A vision of the masked riders flashed through Rachel’s mind. Had it been Jacob or Josh she had seen with them? Was it possible that both of them were involved in this mess? And what about her father? Morgan Tolliver was a peaceful man, but if pushed far enough he was capable of anger. Was he capable of violence as well?

Rachel’s fingers tightened around Luke’s belt. She felt dizzy, as if she were spinning in space with nothing solid to support her. For months she had dreamed of coming back to the safe, secure place she called home. But the home she remembered was gone, to be replaced by a nightmare world of danger, doubt and uncertainty.

“Do you have any idea who’s behind the trouble?” she forced herself to ask. “Have you recognized anyone—any of the raiders?”

He shook his head, and she felt an unexpected surge of relief. “Most of the time I don’t see them. But when they do show themselves, they always have their faces masked. The fact that they care that much about being recognized makes me think they’re locals—and there’s a bunch of them, more than just the ones you saw today.” He whistled to direct a dog toward a straying ewe. The wind swept his raven hair back from his face.

“When I saw them up close, they struck me as very young,” Rachel said, filling the pause. “Just boys, I’d guess, out to stir up some mischief.”

Luke’s body stiffened. “They may be young, but they’re too well organized to be just boys. Somebody’s behind them. Somebody with enough money to pay them or enough influence to stir them up.”

Like my father, Rachel thought. She knew better than to speak the words aloud, but even the idea was terrible enough to create a dark, hollow feeling in her chest.

“As for the so-called mischief—” Luke cleared his throat, but when he spoke again, his voice was still low and gritty. “I have three herders working for me, a father and two sons. They’re from Spain by way of Mexico, good men. Fine men.” Luke swallowed hard. Rachel felt the strain in him, the scream of raw nerves, and she sensed that, whatever he had been holding back from her, she was about to hear it.

“Three nights ago, the old man, Miguel, was out on the range with part of the herd. He’d bedded down for the night in his sheep wagon when he heard riders coming over the hill. They were making enough noise to rouse the devil, he told us later. Probably drunk, or making a good show of it. Miguel ordered his dogs—the two you see here—to move the sheep out fast. He was going to get his horse and follow them, but he realized the riders were too close, so he ran back to the sheep wagon and barricaded himself inside.”

“Dear heaven,” Rachel whispered, bracing her emotions for what she was about to hear.

“There were five of them, all masked,” Luke said. “Five against one old man. When Miguel wouldn’t come out of the sheep wagon, they lit a dry branch from the campfire and threw it on the roof.”

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