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He positioned himself, gripped the icy edge of the roof and somersaulted off into space. His legs cleared the half door of Soldier Boy’s stall, but he’d thunked down so hard on his middle that every last molecule of air in his body was pounded out. He twisted in pain and landed on his butt, his back up against the stable door.
The stallion had wheeled around, his ears flattened, his hooves scraping with an incredible menace along the floor. If an animal could breathe fire, it was this one. Dropped to the floor, Matt couldn’t have moved to save his life.
Head lowered, legs stiffened, his mane bristling with wrath, Soldier had snorted, and come as close to foaming at the mouth as Matt ever wanted to see. His own mouth had gone as bone dry as his lungs were empty.
Over the past months he’d spent countless hours around horses in preparation for this assignment. He wasn’t going to go onto the Bar Naught without knowing his way around. In those weeks, he’d been bitten, kicked and thrown. He’d deliberately sought out the meanest critters he could find so nothing he might later encounter on the Bar Naught would take him by surprise. It was just the way he worked. He had to know it all.
He’d learned to ride and keep his seat in a dead run. He’d learned a few stunts and dislocated his shoulder, half mangled his hand when he got caught up in twisted, unforgiving reins.
But Soldier’s fiery temper made all Matt’s weeks of preparation seem useless. The pitched battle of wills between him and Soldier was oddly silent. A scene without sound except for Soldier’s wrathful breathing.
Matt had to establish dominance, but for too long a time he couldn’t get his lungs functioning to send oxygen to his muscles. For long seconds he could only sit there and cower, inviting his own destruction.
He fought for every breath, praying for the second time in one night. Just let me get out of this one…. Then Soldier let out an eerie sound and gathered his powerful muscles to rear back and rain down death with a killing lunge.
Beyond conscious thought, Matt brought his legs under himself and sprang at the horse, aiming his shoulder at Soldier’s head with every shred of strength left in his battered body. The blow connected, jarred even his own teeth, ricocheting through him as if he’d hit a brick wall. But Soldier hauled back and a grudging respect set in.
In the intervening hour, while the sheriff and his men departed and Halsey and Geary went about turning off all the floodlights, Matt had barely moved. By now, he’d smooth-talked himself into a guarded truce with Soldier Boy, managed to get back on his feet and even get a steadying hand on the stallion’s flank.
Now, facing Fiona Halsey’s rifle, Matt had zero inclination to give up the uneasy rapport he’d achieved with a stallion that would still as soon stomp him into a mud hole and kick it dry.
“Put your hands in the air and move away from the horse.” The sensual grit in Fiona Halsey’s Brit-cultured voice plucked strings Matt didn’t even know he had, made him weak-kneed.
He didn’t cotton to the sensation at all, which immediately put him out of a mood to do her bidding. Even to save his own hide.
If the tall, lush, lanky blonde with the complexion of an English rose had murdered once—and the stench of gunpowder clinging to the gun she still held gave the theory credence—then she had it in her to do it again.
His ribs ached like all billy hell. His shoulder was so stiff he could no longer feel it. Still and all, perverse as it was, maybe he was also a bit turned on by the fact that Fiona Halsey had his disbelieving heart in the crosshairs of her scope.
He left his hand resting where it was, in physical contact with the stallion, and gave Fiona Halsey his most charming grin.
He really didn’t want to die. “Suppose you disarm, and we’ll talk.”
“Suppose I don’t, and you do the talking.”
“I don’t do so well under the gun.” He smiled, stroking Soldier’s flank again. “So to speak.”
“Too bad.” Flinty-edged, her tone still struck him as powerfully seductive. He wondered, did that particular combination come with the royal genes, a couple of generations removed?
His nose itched from what seemed like protracted hours in the softly lit horse barn, but his eyes were attuned to the semidark and his focus homed in on Fiona Halsey’s splintered attention.
Riveted to the motion of his hand, she was equally unrelenting and steady in her dead-on aim. But for an instant he thought he saw confusion in her, jealousy flashing in her shadowed eyes—not for want of his hands on her, he thought, but because her beloved, wrecked Soldier Boy allowed his touch.
Everyone knew Soldier tolerated her least of all.
She tossed that silky curtain of deep blond hair without altering her aim one millimeter off dead center of his heart. “Are you mocking me?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he answered, solemn as a judge. Not a woman in possession of a deadly weapon he had no chance of taking from her. Standing outside Soldier’s stall, on the other side of the stall door, she could blow him to kingdom come before he could get anywhere near enough to disarm her.
His survival mechanism, the instincts by which he lived so as not to die, kicked into higher gear for the second time that night. He shook his head slowly. “The grandniece of an English peer, distant cousin to the queen herself?” He shook his head again, and discovered a splitting headache to go with his jammed shoulder and bruised ribs.
Her aim faltered for half a second. He’d succeeded in unnerving her, tossing off her obscure royal connections. He pressed this narrow advantage by using her name. “C’mon, Fiona. We both know you won’t pull the trigger.”
Her chin went up. “Try me.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt you’d kill me, but…” He shrugged. “You’re not going to do anything that would upset Soldier.”
“Soldier Boy,” she answered, the grit in her voice turned more lethal than sensual, “is already upset.”
“You should have seen him an hour ago.” But it occurred to him that provoking Soldier to a frenzied rage might serve her purposes. The thought congealed into a nasty suspicion that he must be very careful not to underestimate Fiona Halsey. “It wouldn’t take much to send Soldier over the edge, would it?”
“No.” She cocked a hip forward, agreeing…softly. Bitterly. Choked. “It wouldn’t take much at all.”
He found his weak-kneed self, the one reacting to her voice, suffering. What man wouldn’t want to spare her the turmoil of loving a horse who would never again return her emotional investment?
Fool. He should be baiting her into the stall, disarming her. What was he doing? What was the point of playing her—or letting her play him? Soldier’s flesh skittered under his hand, and the stallion threw his head up.
But there was a point in goading her, he knew. The smoking Remington made her suspect. The scope made it even more likely. She could have gone five hundred yards up the tree-lined lane leading into the main ranch house with the rifle, picked Everly off and made it back to her quarters in time to make it look as if she had never been gone. He went on stroking the massive animal she loved, subtly stoking her resentment that Soldier tolerated him at all while he offered up his theory.
“Here’s how I see it. You have to be worried about the possibility that I saw what happened. That I saw you do it.”
She stared at him, unblinking. “You think I shot Kyle?”
“Yeah. I do.” He nodded, appreciating her quickness, leading her farther down the path. “And I can appreciate your dilemma. Should you shoot me next, and have to call Hanifen back, or—”
“Or,” she interrupted, anticipating him, “maybe fire off a round and cause Soldier to trample you to death.” Her chin went up. “It would be a little less efficient than a bullet through the heart.”
“But really, not a bad trade-off in terms of explaining everything to Dex.”
She blinked. “It wouldn’t do to leave alive a witness to the murder.”
He nodded. The flint in her voice was backed by tempered steel at her core. If she’d decided to murder Everly, she was capable of it. If she had, Matt was toast. Somehow, in spite of the solid possibility, he doubted that she had done it. “You’d get away with all of it. Plays nicely, I think.”
“Except that your premise is fatally flawed. I didn’t shoot Kyle.”
“Really? Is that your gun?”
“Yes.”
“When’s the last time you used it?”
“Months ago. What difference does it make?”
“Then someone else shot Everly with your gun, princess.”
Her eyes narrowed. He knew them to be a stunning hazel-blue, but all he could see was an angry darkening. “Who—”
“Check it out, Fiona. You may have been the local debutante, but you’re not green. Are you telling me you can’t smell the spent powder?”
Whatever color there was in her face drained away. “I didn’t shoot—”
“I think you did.” But he really didn’t know. Her reaction could be taken in two completely exclusive ways. Either she’d shot Everly in the back and was now caught red-handed with the murder weapon, or she had only just now figured out that someone had neatly framed her.
It struck him that if Kyle Everly had an arsenal of weapons stashed somewhere on the Bar Naught, which was what Hanifen’s deputy had seemed to imply, weapons Fiona Halsey knew about, she would have been smarter than to used her own Remington.
She swallowed hard. He watched the pitching of her throat beneath the delicate, luminous skin of her neck in the low lighting of the stables. Rustling sounds, scrapes and hooves and clanking of the other Bar Naught horses, filled the silence.
“Who are you?” she demanded, her chin thrust forward.
Her question was more complicated than she knew. Matt answered more honestly than he’d had any intention of doing. “Whoever I need to be.”
He watched the shadows alter on her face, knew that her jaw tightened. “What were you doing hiding out in here?”
“Basically, I thought I’d be better off staying out of Hanifen’s way.”
“Just shy, I suppose.”
He cracked the smile, but the image of Everly dropping dead of a bullet in the back was not far from his mind.
She lowered the rifle a bit. If she truly wasn’t the one who had shot Everly in the back, then she had at least to suspect that she had the murderer in her sights. But she had a problem, he knew. She wasn’t willing or inclined to kill him, or she’d already have pulled the trigger. But if she turned her back on him to call Hanifen, he would either kill her or get away.
Why was she willing to stand here jawing with him?
Then the thought occurred to him that she had known all along that there was someone hiding out in the stables. She’d kept an eagle eye on the horses during the last few hours. He’d heard her come and go a couple of times before Hanifen and his men cleared out, making the rounds of stalls, calming the valuable animals by her presence and her soft, sultry reassurances.
She hadn’t come near Soldier’s stall. He’d sensed her nearby, smelled hesitation on her, but in his oxygen-deprived head, he’d chalked it up to Soldier’s inhospitable attitude. Now he had to wonder. He took the stab in the dark. “You knew before Hanifen and his boys left that someone was holed up in here with Soldier, didn’t you?”
Her chin pitched up. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Why didn’t you turn me in when you had the chance, Fiona?”
Her trigger finger flinched almost imperceptibly. Her shadowy eyes narrowed. “Maybe…No, you’re wrong. I didn’t know anyone was in here.”
“Maybe?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“I think you were.”
“You think?” she mocked him.
He turned his head slowly, minutely, back and forth. “You knew.” He knew, now, without a doubt. His stab in the dark had struck a nerve. He still didn’t get it. What possible reason could she have for not exposing an intruder’s whereabouts to Hanifen? For that matter, why wasn’t she persisting till he gave her straight answers as to who he was and what he was doing at the scene of a murder?
“All right, then,” she tossed back, at last releasing the firing pin, lowering the rifle butt-first to the ground. “Why do you think I kept my mouth shut?”
“It’s a mystery to me.” More so with every moment. Why put the rifle down now? “Maybe you aren’t at all sorry that he’s dead.”
“Hmm.” He heard heavy derision in that noise. “Maybe I wanted to find out who hated Everly more than I do.” She tossed her head, sent her long hair flying. For the first time he saw uncertainty edging in. She gritted her teeth “Maybe I wanted to help whoever did it get away. Maybe I wanted to kiss you—”
She cut herself off awkwardly. Her mouth clapped shut. “I mean—”
He knew what she meant. She knew what she meant. Maybe, she’d have kissed anyone who got rid of Kyle Everly for her. A sort of bounty. But in Matt’s perceptions—and hers, he thought—the meaning expanded, time slowed, and the air between them all but blistered.
His heart boomed. His blood pooled deep down. He’d spent his life keeping not only his passions but visceral reactions like this under impenetrable wraps, but he knew his gaze sharpened in spite of him, intensified, locked on her lips.
She couldn’t let her mistaken meaning go uncorrected. Her tongue swiped at her lips and she tried to take it back.
“Kiss whoever—” She swallowed. “I meant…not you.”
“I know what you meant.” He tried to put a stop to the slippery slope of sexual awareness sucking the air out of them both. “Did you hate him that much, Fiona? Enough to kill him?”
“Yes. But I didn’t.”
Stricken and still pale, shaking now, she fixed her gaze on Soldier Boy, avoiding the threat of a kiss between them. Then she turned and gave him a withering look. “When is the last time you had a tetanus shot?”
“Beats me. How long do those things last?”
She rolled her eyes. “Come with me. Or forget it. Take your chances. It really doesn’t matter to me.”
But he had the distinct impression that it would suit her very well if he if walked away and took his chances with a fatal case of lockjaw.
He followed her instead.
FIONA TURNED ON HER HEEL and led the way from the barn into a room outfitted with an examining table and stocked with veterinary supplies. Aware that he was following her, she switched on the glaring overhead lights. Her hands were shaking. She set the safety and put aside the rifle, then opened a gleaming white cabinet door and pulled out a vial containing a dose of tetanus booster.
Dear Lord, what was she doing?
She began to go through a drawer in search of a small syringe when he boosted himself up onto the small-animal exam table.
“That’s meant for animals under a hundred pounds.”
“Must not get a lot of use.” He pulled one arm out of his coat and began rolling up a sleeve.
“That’s not the point.” He didn’t belong there. Didn’t belong on the Bar Naught at all. In fact he didn’t have any business looking at her the way he was looking at her.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.” He meant that the table would hold up. She meant much, much more. Nothing was fine. Nothing had been fine for her or the Bar Naught in a very long time.
“Fiona—”
She looked straight into his dark brown eyes, noting the fringe of thick black lashes. “Don’t bother sweet-talking me, Guiliani.”
His pupils flared, otherwise she would not have known she’d caught him off guard. He was that good.
He blinked slowly. “If you know who I am, Fiona, then what was that all about in Soldier’s stall?”
“I didn’t know at first. Not for a while. Now that you’re under the lights—” Now that you made a fool of me, broke my heart cozying up to Soldier Boy— She cut off the thought and shrugged. “I know. That’s all.”
