Wyoming Woman. Elizabeth Lane
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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