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minute all he’d had to deal with was figuring out which of two terrorists acts he was going to have to prevent—the assassination of a presidential candidate or a missile attack on the convention center—preferably while keeping his own cover intact. And the next…well, the woman had practically fallen into their laps.
Bronco was fairly sure Gil had had no idea who Lauren Brown was when she’d first contacted him on behalf of some ranch in Texas about buying his champion quarter horse stud. It wasn’t until the commander had run his customary background and credit check on her that he’d realized what he had. The opportunity had seemed to him God-given, the possibilities she presented beyond even his most optimistic dreams. Even then, smart paranoid that he was, Gil had held off on the final decision to go ahead with the plan until after he’d met the woman. Until he was sure she wasn’t the bait for some elaborate government trap.
A trap. Bronco let out a slow breath. McCullough was indeed riding into a trap, just not the one he’d been looking out for. Like Julius Caesar, whose betrayal had come, not at the hands of Cleopatra or any other woman, but through his closest and most trusted friend.
“He really is magnificent, isn’t he?” Lauren’s voice brought him back from that troubling place. She sounded almost wistful as she watched the stallion dip and weave like a kite at the end of a string, and Bronco knew she must be thinking of the innocent, even joyous quest that had brought her to this. She glanced over at him, and an unexpected smile of irony played around her lips. “I’d sure love to ride him, just once…” She left her words hanging there, sounding like a condemned prisoner’s last request.
No, she wasn’t at all what he’d expected.
What, exactly, had he expected of Lauren Elizabeth Brown, daughter of former U.S. attorney general Everett Charleton Brown? About to become First Daughter, if the polls were to be believed. About to be instantly recognized the world over, with every move, every breath, every step scrutinized and analyzed to death by both the legitimate and tabloid media.
He knew her parents had divorced when Lauren was ten, that her father had subsequently married Dixie Parish, of the folk-singing Parish Family, which counted among its many real-estate holdings that horse ranch in West Texas. He knew she’d been born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, that she was a graduate of Iowa University and Harvard Law School, and that she’d passed the bar on the first try. A bright lady with a bright future—a future that reportedly included marriage to an equally brilliant member of a fine old Des Moines law firm. The media were already salivating over the prospect of a White House wedding. Oh, yes, and there was one brother, Ethan, currently attending UCLA, scheduled to begin his senior year in the fall.
That was what Bronco knew about Lauren Brown—pretty much what the rest of the world knew. What surprised him was the discovery that he would like to have known more. A lot more.
For one thing, he wanted to know what had brought a big-city lawyer to a West Texas horse ranch hundreds of miles from the man she supposedly loved. Bronco had never been in love and didn’t expect to be, but he was pretty sure that if he ever did love a woman enough to want to marry her, he’d want her near him every day of his life. He’d want her voice and her laughter lighting up his days, and her body warming his bed at night. He’d want the scent of her in his sheets and in his pores. If a man and woman pledged to join their lives together, they should be together. And stay together. That was the way he saw it.
And he wanted to know why a woman raised in a Midwestern city looked so natural and right astride a horse in the mountains of Arizona. This was wild country, the land of his ancestors—Indee, the People. A beautiful land, but harsh and unforgiving of those who didn’t understand and respect her delicate balance. The bones of many strong men lay bleaching in forgotten canyons as mute testimony to that. And yet, this woman, tawny-haired and wraith-slender, seemed almost to belong in this sunburned landscape, as much at home here as the deer and antelope he’d hunted as a boy.
Close on the heels of that thought came another. As he studied her, it occurred to Bronco that in spite of the fact that she’d recently been forcibly abducted by armed men for purposes she could only guess at, she seemed almost happy. She rode with her body relaxed and graceful in the saddle, her face lifted to the warm wind and her eyes half-shut, her mouth softly smiling. As if, he thought as warmth stirred unexpectedly in his own body, in acceptance of a lover’s caress. But why, he wondered, fighting off the image of soft lips, slowly parting, did she seem so unafraid? Had she no concept of the peril she was in? Her apparent innocence irritated him, even as her innate sensuality stirred and excited him.
Irritated, stirred and excited was not what Agent Bracco wanted to be. Not ever, actually, but especially not now, not with so much at stake. He told himself he’d have to do a better job of keeping himself in balance, focused on the task at hand. He couldn’t afford to let himself be distracted just because that task happened to involve shielding and protecting an extraordinarily beautiful woman.
A grim smile stretched his lips as he watched the stallion prancing grandly along behind the little gray mare, so intent on establishing his own sexual dominion that he was oblivious to the lead rope that held him captive. It occurred to him that there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between a man and any other male animal when he allowed himself to be governed by his…testosterone.
For some reason, the words the woman had spoken earlier that morning came back to him, carried on the wind like the scent of a far-off storm: I should never have danced with you.
He looks so hard and dangerous when he smiles like that, Lauren thought. I wonder what he can be thinking.
A shiver passed through her in spite of the Southwestern sun that burned like a branding iron across her shoulders. Because the only thing she knew for certain was that she could never be certain what that man was feeling. What a consummate actor he was! What a talented liar!
She told herself she was upset because she’d misjudged him so badly. That as a lawyer she felt she ought to be more adept at reading people. But in her heart she knew better. The real source of her shame and betrayal lay in the accusation that pounded now inside her head in time to the horse’s hoofbeats.
Not, How could I have been so wrong about him?
But rather, How could I have been so attracted to him?
She couldn’t even look at him now. Whenever she looked at him, her heart would begin to hammer and her eyes burn hot and her mind cloud over with rage. She wanted to fly at him in a screaming spitting clawing fury.
Why, she asked herself, did she feel so ashamed? Because she’d watched him ride and admired his skill?
No, her honest heart answered her. Because you watched him ride and thought him beautiful.
Did she feel such anger because he’d danced with her and then betrayed her?
Again she was forced to hear her own truth: No—because you danced with him and your own body betrayed you.
With her face lifted to the wind and her eyes closed, she could see him standing beside her table at Smoky Joe’s, looking down at her with the little yellow flame from the candle in the globe lamp on the table burning in his eyes. And as she gazed into them, the boisterous crowd seemed to close in around them, surrounding the two of them with a wall of noise and heat and cigarette smoke and darkness, so that all at once she was aware only of him—of his heat, his masculine scent and the blackness of his hair, lying like a skein of silk across one shoulder.
She remembered how warm his hands had been, covering hers. She’d felt the wiry, coiled-spring tension in his hips beneath her palms, the swaying rhythm, blatantly sexy—and her body had grown hot. She’d lost track of the music and the steps of the dance until suddenly she’d found herself face-to-face with him. Face-to-face and chest to chest. Frozen, she’d felt his arms come around her, gathering her in, and the cool silk of his hair against her cheek, his heart thumping in counterrhythm to hers.
Had that been a lie, too? Could he control the timing of his own pulse? With this man, even that seemed possible.
They’d danced that dance and then another,