A Warrior's Vow

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“You don’t even want your dog to hear this,” Leeza said.

Daggert sighed, and the patronizing patience on his face fanned her fury. “You’ve decided the whole subject is taboo—at least you won’t talk to me about it. You don’t care to know the reasons why he may have decided to dislike me. Not you. Oh, you asked me last night, but you didn’t make any comment on my answer. Because you don’t care. Your mind is made up. It’s as obvious as the nose on your chiseled face that you’re making me a whipping boy. The more discomfort I feel, the more you like it. And you think the harder you push me, the more I’ll fall apart right in front of your golden eyes. Do you want to know why?”

He didn’t say anything, but his eyes had narrowed.

“I do,” she said, ignoring the sign of his growing anger. “I’ve had hours to study the question. And I think I have the answer. I think your whipping-boy complex stems from a deep-rooted fury at yourself because you didn’t manage to find someone. That you failed in your big search once. I don’t know who or what they meant to you, but it was—”

Leeza didn’t see Daggert move. She heard a low growl and a whoosh and then felt the wind being knocked out of her. For a full two seconds, she wasn’t even aware he’d lunged at her.

She focused on several things simultaneously: his muscled body pressing her against the boulder behind her. The knife he’d been using to tear the beef jerky being held against the hollow of her throat. And the tawny eyes she’d stupidly thought unreadable glaring into hers, filled with rage.

“Never talk about my son again,” he said. How had she thought his voice was like velvet? It was a razor, sharp and deadly.

She tried to nod, but his hand against her chin prevented movement.

So slowly it made her tremble, he lowered the knife’s point from her throat. But he didn’t release her. His eyes still burned with fury, but no longer, thankfully, with murderous intent. His knife hand trailed down her arm in a slow, strangely electrifying sensation. It was the very opposite of sensual, yet every nerve ending she possessed seemed attuned to his touch.

“Tell me you’re listening to me,” he growled.

“I—I’m listening.”

“Tell me you won’t do it again.”

“I won’t. Of course I won’t.” She could feel the heat of his body covering hers and sharp edges of the boulder digging into her shoulder blades. She registered the corded muscles in his legs against hers and, most of all, his arousal. “Please,” she murmured, not sure what she was asking him for.

“Please?” he whispered.

Her breath felt trapped inside her and she was fairly sure he could feel her heart thundering against his chest. He looked from her eyes to her lips, and something twisted on his face. His eyes closed and she had to bite back a whimper as she felt the anger draining from him.

When he opened his eyes again, she realized that while the anger might be ebbing, the tension in him hadn’t. But it was tension of another kind. A sort that met her head-on, man to woman.

“You have a smart mouth,” he said.

As if answering for her, her lips parted of their own volition.

She knew he was going to kiss her, and knew she should protest. Wanted to protest. Ached to find the means to tell him that he should back off and leave her alone. Instead, she leaned into his lips, meeting him halfway.

His mouth was as hot as his anger had been, and every bit as ruthless. He plundered her lips with determined purpose, a roughly banked passion. His tongue warred with hers, demanding capitulation. He was liquid and solid all at the same time.

She heard the knife clatter to the base of the boulder, then felt his hands strafing her body. He’d used those same hands to gentle the horses, but on her, he incited a riot.

She’d imagined running her hands across his broad shoulders, down the rippling muscles of his back, and didn’t know when she began doing so in reality. One moment she’d literally been as afraid as she’d ever been in her life, and the next she was matching his passion touch for touch, kiss for kiss.

His lips gentled and he uttered a low, pained groan. His hands on her body slowed, still exploring her curves, and somehow the new tenderness in his touch made her feel inexplicably confused. Passion she understood, at least to some degree. Tenderness she didn’t understand at all; it had never been a part of her life.

Daggert raised a hand to her face and molded it gently as he kissed her. And she could taste his withdrawal.

He pulled back from her, his eyes once again unreadable, his emotions masked. He straightened and ever so slowly ran the back of his hand over his moistened lips, still gazing at her.

She remained sprawled against the rock, a discarded rag doll with heaving breasts and glassy blue eyes. And she knew desire was written all over her.

He bent and picked up his knife. He pressed a button and slowly folded the blade back into the handle. It seemed a metaphor, and perhaps was.

Chapter 4

Leeza Nelson, former boardroom wizard, watched James Daggert stomp away from the lunch campsite and disappear around a huge boulder much like the one she sprawled against.

She lifted a shaking hand to her lips, half expecting them to be different somehow.

They were. They seemed fuller, more sensitive. Stunned.

Her lips felt stunned.

She felt stunned.

She was a veritable thesaurus of shattered—shocked, aghast, astonished and utterly confounded.

She’d been pushing him, needling him, trying to goad him into talking to her. She’d been trying to get him to finally acknowledge her as more than a nuisance. She would have been content to have him yell at her, or fall apart at the proverbial seams in obvious frustration. Anything to get him to speak to her, instead of being a silent rock riding in front of her.

Of all the things she hated in life, the worst was being ignored. She’d made a career and an entire life out of being the person most noticed, most sought after, most desired. Ignored wasn’t in her repertoire.

Until she’d begun this journey to search for Enrique.

But Daggert’s reaction to her prodding wasn’t what she’d expected. She would never have anticipated it in a million and one years.

In her high-rise office in Washington, D.C., she could dig at people with impunity; if they didn’t want to deliver what she wanted to know, they might not receive the dollars they sought from her. Needling was a seemingly necessary evil, and her right.

In those instances, however, whoever came knocking at her door was playing with fire. This time, she’d been the one taunting the flame.

Never in her wildest thoughts had she imagined she would rip at him with such uncanny accuracy. Nor would she ever have dreamed that such an attack would bring him to the point of murder.

Her hand lowered to her throat. Where she’d envisioned blood, perhaps a permanent reminder of the lesson “don’t play with fire,” Daggert hadn’t left so much as a mark. That he hadn’t branded her didn’t address his fury, but rather a measure of the icy control she’d glimpsed several times in the short while she’d spent following him in his search for Enrique.

But he’d demanded she never speak of his son. Not a nameless someone he’d been hired to find, not a stranger—his son.

Leeza closed her eyes. She let her body be warmed by the heat within the boulder, the sun beating down on the arroyo, and her own embarrassment.

She didn’t want to even think about what losing a child would do to a man’s psyche, to his heart. If she was right in her analysis of his dramatic response, James Daggert had once searched for his own missing son and either had not found him or had not managed to find him alive. Either case must bring the worst possible pain to a parent. It explained so much about the unusual tracker.

“Oh, I’m so very sorry,” she said aloud, and her voice seemed to echo in the narrow dry riverbed.

But Daggert wasn’t there to hear her, and she wasn’t apologizing for anything she’d done, but offering the absent man her heartfelt sympathy.

She’d lost her parents, a grief she still felt with every passing day. He’d lost his son. His child.

She forced herself from the boulder and stood, albeit shakily. The world hadn’t slipped on its very axis, as she felt it should have. The sun still beat straight down on the narrow, boulder-strewn arroyo, and the sand beneath her feet remained hot and slippery. The sky was still blue and the yellow chamisa bushes still smelled like skunks.

Daggert’s horse, Stone, pulled at some threads of grass on the bank about thirty feet away and whispered something to Belle. The mare nickered back.

Everything seemed normal, yet nothing was. Nor could it ever be again.

Enrique was missing. Had been for hours upon hours. Leeza knew she had lost him by pushing him too hard. And she was literally shaking in her boots, not wholly from guilt, not entirely from remorse, and not even in horror at Daggert’s furious response. She shook in a stunned reaction to his kiss.

A kiss.

“Just a kiss,” she said aloud.

Belle whickered.

“Okay, so it seemed like a lot more than a kiss.”

Stone gave a grunt.

“All right, a whole lot more than a kiss.”

Neither horse answered vocally, but Stone shook his head, his reddish-brown mane dancing in the air.

Leeza cautiously approached Belle and withdrew a notebook from her saddlebag, then her cell phone from the pommel, which Westerners aptly called a saddle horn.

Retreating to a different boulder, she penned her confusion in the notebook, jotting down her fears, her wishes about the next twenty-four hours. Never once did she mention her gigging James Daggert. Nor did she describe the kiss.

And she didn’t fill the rest of the notebook with her response to that kiss, as she could have.

Some things were better left unsaid.

When James Daggert hadn’t returned an hour later, Leeza broke down and tried some of the beef jerky from the pouch he’d discarded earlier. It still burned her tongue and made her stomach roil, but she knew the man was right about needing to keep up her strength, and she wasn’t about to dig in his saddlebags in search of something else to eat. If words could set off his fury, what might violating his privacy do? She was tempted, but didn’t want to bring on a confrontation.