Chosen To Die. Lisa Jackson
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shoved a hand through his hair and glared at the indoor arena where a particularly stubborn and nervous colt was staring back at him, challenging him.
Usually Santana could be easily distracted by animals. In his experience they were a helluva lot easier to deal with than people. More trustworthy. More constant. But this frigid morning, he couldn’t concentrate, his thoughts creeping ever to Regan.
Hell, he had it bad. And he hated it that she’d somehow gotten under his skin. You let her. You allowed a quick, no-strings-attached fling to develop into a full-fledged affair starting to border on a relationship.
His jaw tightened at the thought.
She was the worst woman he could have chosen to get involved with. The absolute worst!
He mentally castigated himself, calling himself a long list of names that grew progressively more derogatory. No woman in a long time had infiltrated his brain, or caused him to think about finding ways to get her into bed at all hours of the day. And Regan was a damned detective with the Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department, for crying out loud.
What did that tell you?
Avoid. Avoid. Avoid!
But he’d been drawn to her like a dying man in the desert to an oasis.
A glance through the window confirmed that the mother of a storm wasn’t letting up. Sub-zero wind howled through the deep ravines of this part of Montana. Ice glazed the outside of the panes and the snow was falling so thick and fast, he couldn’t see the lights glowing in his cabin only a hundred feet away.
Inside, the huge stable with its indoor exercise arena was warm, the heating system wheezing and stirring up the dust of last summer, while the familiar smells of saddle soap and horse dung, scents he’d known all his life, filled his nostrils. Horses shuffled in their stalls; one, the nervous mare, sent out a quiet whinny. Sounds and odors that usually calmed him. Truth be known, he felt far more akin to animals than he did to most men. Or women, for that matter.
Until damned Regan Pescoli.
With her two children.
Two finished marriages.
Their relationship, basically all sex, wasn’t the least bit romantic or conventional.
No vows.
No promises.
No strings.
No big deal.
Right?
So why was he edgy and restless? What was it to him that he couldn’t reach her? They’d gone days without speaking before, even, upon occasion, a week. Though not lately. In the past few months, they had been in contact nearly daily. Or nightly. And he wasn’t complaining.
He reminded himself that up here cell phone service was notoriously lousy, and that getting the NO SIGNAL message was nothing new. Even Brady Long, Santana’s pain-in-the-ass employer, heir to a copper fortune and not afraid to throw his money around, couldn’t get a cell tower built anywhere nearby. Which was usually just fine by Santana. A loner by nature, he didn’t have a lot of interest or faith in technology.
Except for this morning.
So what if you can’t get in touch with her? You know she’s got to be up to her eyeballs in police business. The damned Star-Crossed Killer is still on the loose and there has to be emergency after emergency in this blizzard, homes without electricity, cars sliding off the road, people freezing to death. She’s busy. That’s all. Don’t push the panic button.
Still, he felt it. That little premonition of dread that caused the hairs on the back of his neck to bristle and stomach acid to crawl up his throat whenever trouble was brewing. Not that he hadn’t caused his own share of heartache and misery, but nonetheless, he sensed bad things coming; had since he was a kid.
“It’s that damned native blood in ya,” his father had always muttered under his breath when Nate had mentioned the feeling. “On your mother’s side. Her great grandfather—or was it great-great?—was some kind of Indian shaman or some such crap. Could heal people with his touch. Cursed ’em, too. Well, according to yer mother. He was an Arapaho, I think, or was it Cheyenne? Don’t matter. He seen him a rattler or somethin’ in a dream once and that did it. He became the medicine man. Prob’ly had the same damned tingling sensation you do, boy.”
After these tarnished bits of insight, his old man had usually bitten at a plug of tobacco and chewed with great satisfaction, only to spit and wipe his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “All horseshit, in my book.”
Not that Santana had ever thought for a second his gut instincts had anything to do with his ancestry. But tonight he sensed something outside. Something dark and intimately evil. Something threatening. To Regan.
Clenching his jaw, he told himself to ignore it. He didn’t like the premonitions and didn’t admit to them, wasn’t going to take the kind of ridicule leveled at Ivor Hicks for his supposed alien abduction or Grace Perchant, a woman who bred wolf dogs and confessed to speaking with the dead, or Henry Johansen, a farmer who had fallen off his tractor fifteen years earlier, hit his head, and claimed he could “hear” other people’s thoughts. Nope, Santana would keep his mouth shut about his sensations rather than suffer the ridicule of the townspeople.
As for Regan, he’d catch up with her later, one way or another. He always did. Besides, it wasn’t as if they were married or even an item; that’s the way they both wanted it.
He walked to the indoor arena where Lucifer, still glaring at him, pawed the soft dirt. A big black colt with a crooked blaze and one white stocking, he had a nasty streak that some would call independence; others referred to it as just being ornery. Nate figured it was one and the same. Now the rangy colt’s nostrils were flared, his eyes white around the rims, a nervous sweat and flecks of lather visible on his sleek hide.
“It’s okay,” he said softly, when he knew deep in his gut it wasn’t. And the horse knew it, too. That was Santana’s talent, or “gift,” as it were. He understood animals, especially horses and dogs. He respected them for the animals they were, didn’t put any human traits on them and, from years of observation and experience, learned to work with them.
Some people called him “weird”; others compared him to a snake charmer or blamed it on his mixed heritage when the truth of the matter was he used common sense, determination, and kindness. He just knew how to work with them. Maybe it was part of the Arapaho in him, but probably not.
He grabbed the coil of rope from a hook on the wall, slipped through the gate of the arena, then walked slowly toward the beast as the gate clicked behind him. Another blast of wind shrieked through the canyons, rattling the windowpanes and causing a twitch to come alive in the big colt’s shoulder.
“Shh.” Santana kept coming. Steady. Calm. Even though deep inside he felt the same tension that the horse was exuding, a fear akin to the panic visible in Lucifer’s wild eyes. At any second the colt would bolt.
Thud!
The door to the stables banged open.
Santana froze.
And Lucifer took off like a shot. Zero to thirty in three short strides, hooves flashing and thundering, kicking up dirt as he galloped close enough to Santana that he could hear the colt’s breath, feel his heat as a gust of frigid Montana wind whistled and swirled into the room.
His dog, a large Siberian husky, sent up a howl loud enough to wake the dead in the next county, and all the horses in the stable snorted and neighed, fidgeting restlessly.
“Nakita, hush!” Santana commanded and the big dog reluctantly lay down, blue eyes still focused on Santana.
Lucifer, tail up, eyes rimmed in white, ran back and forth along the penned area. If he could have, the big colt would have jumped the top rail of the enclosure and galloped as far and fast as his strong legs would carry him, clear through the door and across Brady Long’s two thousand acres.
“Great,”