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Leeza sighed as Daggert hefted the thick saddle pad, then the hated saddle, onto Belle’s back and cinched it securely. He packed her saddle as carefully as he had his own. When all was aboard the horse, with the exception of Leeza and her sleeping bag, he gave Belle a slice of apple.
The setter, apparently knowing Daggert’s ritual, came up, wagging his tail and whining at his master.
Daggert ran his hand down the dog’s soft neck. Leeza thought she’d never seen a man so completely comfortable around animals. It was as if he shared a telepathic communication with them.
“No use hurrying, Sancho. We have a half hour before full daylight, and if I know women—and contrary to your experience of me, I’ve known a few in my time—the lady won’t be ready, anyway.”
Leeza could have sworn the dog grinned as his feathered tail swept the earth. James ran his hands down the full length of the dog’s back, and Leeza wriggled even as the animal did.
Sancho barked.
Leeza groaned.
“She’s awake,” Daggert said. “Close your eyes now or her red pajamas will blind you.”
Daggert firmly believed that a good ninety-nine percent of the human population looked a bit worse for wear after a night out in the open. Not Leeza Nelson.
She looked as if she’d just stepped from a penthouse apartment, freshly showered, powdered and having had a manicure following a massage. Instead, she’d come around a scraggly mesquite bush and used towelettes for a bath. The only telltale sign that she’d been horseback riding most of the day before was her slightly stiff walk as she approached the campfire.
He pointed to the coffeepot, then poured some for her before she reached for it without a pot holder. She gave him a dazzling smile that made him wish he’d packed a Kevlar vest.
Not trusting her friendliness—she hadn’t struck him as a hail-fellow-well-met sort of person—he busied himself unrolling a chamois cloth and spreading out the items Sancho had collected the day before. He sat studying them.
“What’s all this?” Leeza asked brightly.
“Clues,” he said.
“Explain, please,” she said. Not a question, but a command, even if she had softened it. That do-it-my-way attitude again.
“Sancho brought them in last night.” He held up the branch of scrub oak the dog had carried in his jaws. He pointed to the thistles that had been embedded in his silky coat. “Russian thistle and tumble-weed. Broken, but still fresh, see? And these? Bits of chamisa. Another gum wrapper.”
“His path,” she said, a note of wonder in her voice. “That’s the path Sancho took—following Enrique?”
Daggert couldn’t help but look at her. Her logic wasn’t what snared him; it was the honest note of awe in her voice. Luckily, she wasn’t gazing back at him. She was beaming at his Sancho.
“You’re a good dog,” she said. “A very, very good dog.”
Sancho rose and came to her, tail beating against Daggert’s back.
Daggert was stunned. He’d never seen Sancho approach anyone other than himself. The mutt always seemed to maintain a purely business relationship on their mission, eschewing fraternization with the clients, just like his master.
Daggert found he preferred things that way. He pushed Sancho’s tail aside, but instead of moving away, the dog merely gave Daggert a happy grin and sat down beside the woman.
She looped an arm around his back, scratched at his ears and asked the dog, “So you know which way we’ll be going then?”
Daggert felt unreasonably irritated with Sancho’s defection, and the fact that she was talking to the dog instead of him.
“Thanks for saddling Lulubelle.”
“Call her Belle. That other name is stupid for a horse.”
“Noted,” she said. “And I guess we won’t talk about the fact that Enrique’s riding Dandelion.”
James tossed his cold coffee on the fire. “You’d better eat,” he said, handing her a plate of eggs and grilled toast he’d kept warm for her.
“Please. I’m barely to the coffee stage.”
“Give it to the dog, then,” he said.
“You want some of these eggs, boy?”
He did. She scraped the contents of her plate on to a flat rock.
“His name is Sancho.”
Sancho inhaled the food she’d set out for him, and wagged his tail at her.
“Apt,” she said. “Every Don Quixote needs a Sancho, right, boy?”
Daggert didn’t know which he disliked more, the ice queen with her barbed tongue or this falsely smiling tourist. And the damnable truth was he wanted to kiss her either way.
“I think we’re going to have to set a couple of ground rules,” she said, making his hackles rise. “I realize that I know nothing about tracking and that’s why you’re here. At the same time, you know nothing about Enrique, and that’s why I’m here. I see no reason we can’t work together harmoniously.”
Daggert stood up. He’d known the pretty smiles and the butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth routine was a sham, but darned if he hadn’t fallen for it, anyway.
He quickly rubbed their plates with sand, wiped them with paper napkins, which he tossed into the dying flames, and stowed them in one of his saddlebags. He poured the remaining coffee on the fire and folded the pot in a heat-resistant cloth, shoving it in with the plates.
He rerolled her sleeping bag into a tight bolster—the woman had obviously never camped a day in her pampered life—and secured it to the back of Belle’s saddle. He tossed handfuls of sand on to the remaining coals and scuffed more on to them with his boot.
She rose and dusted her jeans.
“We’re heading north,” he said, bending over and cupping his hands to give her a leg up.
“That’s the spirit,” she said, stepping into his hand. She put all her weight into it, instead of using it as a hoist. He tossed her upward, and she landed in the saddle with a low “Oof.”
“Thank you,” she said, as if he’d merely given her a boost. “It’s good to know we have a meeting of the minds here.” Though she spoke cheerfully enough, he didn’t meet her gaze.
He reached for her stirrups to lower them.
She shoved her boots into the footholds and pressed down. “I don’t think so, Mr. Daggert. I may be forced to ride on a western monstrosity, but I refuse the full discomfort.”
He decided that icy tone of voice fit her long, elegant body to a T.
“Suit yourself.” She’d be singing a different tune by midday.
“All the children at Rancho Milagro keep a journal. It was one of my partner’s ideas—a chance for the kids to download. I read Enrique’s before we set out,” she said. Her falsely cheerful note was back. Why did Daggert think her more dangerous when she used it?
He swung his leg over Stone’s broad back.
“Have you ever heard of a place called Cima La Luz?”
“In the mountains,” he said.
“Light Peak, right?”
He grunted an assent.
“I’m beginning to suspect you’re not a morning person.” When he didn’t answer, she continued, “I believe Enrique might be heading there.”
Daggert stared at her coldly. “You didn’t think it important to tell me that yesterday?” he asked finally.
Her smile faltered but she didn’t flinch. “You didn’t exactly give me a chance,” she said. Her eyes dared him to deny this.
“Lady, if you don’t kill yourself riding like that, I might just do it for you. Good thing we’re heading toward Cima La Luz or I’d flay you right now just for the sheer hell of it. But just out of curiosity, why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”
The flush that stained her cheeks gave him all the answer he needed. She’d been testing him.
He spurred his horse forward while giving Sancho a go-ahead whistle.
“I’m sorry,” she called from behind him.
Daggert ground his teeth.
By the time the sun was directly overhead, the last thought on Leeza’s mind was cheerful needling. Her fears for Enrique were escalating with each passing hour. Her guilt was on the rise, as well. And her irritation with one noncommunicative tracker was boiling like mercury in a burning thermometer.
She’d tried giving him the same silent treatment he’d accorded her. Unfortunately, that seemed to work perfectly for him. She’d babbled at him and he’d ridden ahead. She’d hidden her exhausted tears from him the night before, and blinked them back now, but doubted he’d care even if he did see them.
He didn’t seem the slightest bit affected by the elements, the cruel sun, the cold morning or the fact that Enrique had been missing for at least thirty-nine hours now. In fact, Daggert seemed so indifferent to his surroundings he might as well have been made from bedrock, as she’d first imagined him to be.
And why she found herself attracted to him, she couldn’t even begin to fathom. It must be a by-product of the worry she felt for Enrique, and the unfamiliarity of searching for a child who didn’t want to be found.
It was the hostage syndrome, she thought, where a captive transferred feelings of faith to her abductor. Patty Hearst had done it; so had countless others.
Except Leeza wasn’t a hostage, she’d come on this mission against the tracker’s express wishes. She’d demanded to be included.
She was forced to admit he would have made better time without her. Any discomfort she felt was her own fault entirely.
Given her nature, this did not make her feel remotely better.
“He can use that chip on his shoulder to light a forest fire,” she told Belle. She grinned, feeling a little giddy. “Okay, wait, I have another one. There once was a man named Daggert…that’s too hard. There once was a man named James, who never would talk to the dames.”
“Enjoying yourself?”
She blushed as she never had before. It wasn’t a gentle rise of color; it was a raging conflagration of embarrassment. She hadn’t seen him halt his horse, and had caught up with him, literally unaware. But she lifted her chin, met his eyes directly and said, “Immensely.”
“We’ll stop here for lunch,” he said, and dismounted.
“Fine. Good.” Her stomach growled at the mere thought of food. She’d been foolish to give her eggs to Sancho. But she wasn’t about to admit it. “Belle could use a break.”
“Right,” he said. “Want a hand down?”
“No, thank you. I’m perfectly capable.”
“Just keep hold of the saddle horn.”
It took her about five minutes to dismount and another five before she could let go of the saddle horn. “I’d kill him,” she murmured to Belle, “but then how would we find Enrique? And I’m not sure I could find my way back alone.”
She gratefully accepted the moist towelettes he handed her, and leaned against the large boulder he’d selected as a shady picnic spot. She’d been too tired—and too busy making up nasty Daggert limericks—to notice the terrain while riding. It had changed considerably since dawn.
Low foothills, sparsely covered with scrub pine and liberally dotted with cholla cactus and chamisa, gave way to taller mountains in the distance. She’d read somewhere, probably in the material that came when they were first considering buying Rancho Milagro, that the Guadalupe Mountains weren’t technically part of the Rocky Mountains proper. They belonged to an older range, from the Devonian Period, and were more similar in nature to the Appalachians than to the Rockies, filled with caves, such as the Carlsbad Caverns, and pocketed with numerous sinkholes. Beneath the Guadalupes, oil awaited recovery, and within them somewhere, a little nine-year-old boy needed rescue.
Daggert whistled for Sancho and set out a bowl of water for him.
Leeza waited for a cup this time and accepted the warmish liquid with as much gratitude as she had the towelettes. She remained standing as she drank this time; however, her bottom being so sore she’d have cried out at contact with the solid ground.
Apparently unfazed by the long ride, Daggert sat down Indian-style and used a long, curved knife to pry apart something in a deep pouch. A moment later he pulled out a long strip of beef jerky. Using the blade of the knife, he handed the piece up to her.
While she was a personal fan of beef, believing recent medical findings declaring red meat to be rich in iron and calcium, she couldn’t say she was remotely fond of it salted, dried and rendered into strips of peppered leather. Add jalapeños to it and it was pure torture.
She spat her bite into her used towelette.
Daggert used his knife to tear off another piece of jerky and tossed it to an eager Sancho.
Sancho caught the bit of beef with alacrity and gulped it down after slashing it only a couple of times with his white teeth. He sat on the pebbled sand and whined.
Daggert tossed him another piece, which the dog caught but set down. He whined again.
“What is it, boy?” Daggert asked.
The dog lifted his right paw as if wanting to shake hands, or as if he’d acquired a thorn.
Daggert checked the raised paw, apparently found nothing amiss and ruffled the dog’s neck. “Go ahead,” he said.
The dog looked from the beef to his master and whined as he again lifted his paw.
“What are you telling me, Sancho-dog?” Daggert asked.
Sancho barked in answer before finally eating the piece of jerky he’d set aside.
Daggert watched him, frowning, then tore another piece free and passed it up to Leeza.
She held up her hand. “Please. No.”
“Too hot?” he asked. “So you’re as tender mouthed as you are a tenderfoot.”
“I think I have this figured out,” she said. “In your mind, I’m the ‘disliked one,’ the one who caused Enrique to run away.”
Daggert looked at the dog nearby. He gave Sancho a nod and the setter answered with a swift bark before tearing away from the picnic site.
