The Cowboy’s Hidden Agenda Read online

  He reminded himself of that now as he lifted the bar away from the saddle-house door. He was half expecting her to ambush him with the coffee mug; he hadn’t missed the way her eyes had sharpened when he’d handed it to her, or the barely imperceptible tensing of her wrists as she’d tested its weight. She was gutsy, that one, on top of headstrong and smart.

  He was relieved when he found her more or less where he’d left her; he’d had to hurt her once, and it was something he hoped never to have to do again.

  She was sitting on the cot with her overnight bag on her knees. He could see her knuckles whiten on the handles when she saw him, as if she wanted nothing in this world so much as to chuck it at him. He couldn’t blame her for that, or the fact that her voice, when she spoke, was taut with rage.

  “You went to my motel room?”

  Bronco grunted. “Well, I didn’t personally.”

  “I suppose you-they-somebody checked me out?”

  He twitched a shoulder. “Didn’t have to. You know those Motel 6 kind of places-they’re generally pay in advance.”

  “So, you-they just cleaned it out. Packed up my things.” Her voice burned with frost, in sharp contrast to the warm pink blossoming in her cheeks. “You went through everything?”

  Bronco didn’t bother to answer that, just lifted a pair of saddlebags from a sawhorse near the door, smacked them once to get rid of some of the dust and tossed them to her. “If there’s anything in there you want to take along, better put it in here. And do it fast. We’re leavin’. Now.”

  She threw him a look of pure hatred, which strangely enough he found exhilarating, rather like watching a bolt of lightning rip across a slate-black sky. He hid his smile from her, though; it wasn’t going to do either of them any good to make her madder than she already was.

  He stood and leaned against the door with his arms folded across his chest and watched her transfer the contents of the overnighter to the saddlebags. He was trained to be observant, and it struck him that her movements weren’t quite coordinated, as if she was trembling violently inside. And not all from anger, he imagined. There was fear there, too, as hard as she might try to hide it. He tried to imagine what it must be like for her, one minute to be going about her business and then without warning to find herself forcibly taken prisoner, with no idea why or what it was all about or what was going to happen to her. He thought she was holding up pretty well, considering.

  Although, as smart as the lady was, he wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she’d gotten the whole thing figured out by now.

  Finished with her packing, she rose and put herself to rights, shaking each foot to settle the pant legs down over the tops of her boots, jamming her shirttails any which way into the waistband of her jeans, skimming back her hair and fastening it with a rubber band she’d retrieved from the saddlebags. Efficient, Bronco observed. No nonsense, no fuss, and a surprising lack of vanity for so beautiful a woman. For a woman soon to become one of the world’s most famous and recognizable.

  “Ready?”

  She was standing before him with the saddlebags over one shoulder, storm-cloud eyes almost level with his. He was aware of a disturbance in his insides as he gazed back at her, a sensation that felt oddly like thunder rolls.

  “Got a jacket?” he drawled, keeping his eyes veiled.

  She cut him a look that was pure acid. “Are you nuts? It’s August. This is Arizona.”

  He didn’t argue with her. He’d find something for her to wear. She was going to learn soon enough how chilly a summer monsoon could be at seven-thousand-feet elevation.

  Instead, he opened the door and held it for her with mocking gallantry, which she acknowledged with a look that for once he couldn’t quite figure out.

  “I should never have danced with you,” she muttered bitterly as she passed him.

  To that, Bronco could only add a fervent, if silent, Amen.

  He wasn’t quite sure why he was doing it; he did know for sure it wasn’t going to make his bosses happy. But hell, he was Johnny Bronco, and if he didn’t try to hit on the prettiest girl in the place at least once tonight, people were going to think something was wrong with him.

  He placed the fourth beer bottle, now empty, on the table, lining it up precisely with the three already there, then pushed back his chair. He wove through the noisy crowd, rocking his body slightly in time to the heavy country beat, aware of the glances and smiles that followed him on his way. But his step was steady, a self-confident swagger; if he kept to his usual timetable, the effects of the alcohol weren’t due to kick in until beer number six. That was still a good two hours off. This was party time.

  McCullough saw him coming and waved him over, relaxed and jovial. Lauren turned to see who was moving up behind her, and when she did, her hair rippled across her shoulder blades like a sea of long grass when the wind touches it. Bronco saw the flare of recognition in her eyes, heard the sharp hiss of her breath. Then she was facing forward again while he traded greetings and shot the usual masculine bull with Gil.

  But he’d marked the subtle changes in her body-the stillness, the tension, a certain awkwardness that hadn’t been there before-that let him know she was aware of him in ways she hadn’t been aware of Gil McCullough. Like a mare when she senses the stallion’s presence. He felt a similar current go through his own body, like a charge of electricity-unnerving in itself, but more so because it wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t part of the charade.

  Nor could he have pretended his accelerated heartbeat when he braced his hands on the back of her chair and leaned close to her to make himself heard above the crowd noise. It was an angle calculated to give him a nice view of her breasts and the sweet valley between them, a view he’d availed himself of with more women than he’d ever care to account for. He tried to recall whether it had ever caused his pulse to quicken and his temperature to rise the way it was doing now.

  “Would you like to dance?” he growled with his lips close to her ear.

  She leaned away and turned her head to look up at him. “Do you dance as well as you ride?” She said it lightly, and both the comment and the body language were meant to be flirtatious. But somehow to Bronco they didn’t look or sound true, as if she hadn’t had much practice at it.

  Which wasn’t something anybody would have said about him. “You’ll have to judge that for yourself,” he drawled, dropping his eyelids to half-mast. He straightened, moved back a step and held out his hand.

  For a moment that seemed a lot longer she looked into his eyes, while his heart hammered against his breastbone and his knowledge of the trouble he was walking her into pulsed like a strobe light in his mind.

  Lady, can’t you tell when the wolves are gathering? Get the hell outta Dodge while you still can! Forget about that horse you want so badly. Just get in your truck and drive on back to Texas. Can’t you sense the danger you’re in?

  Then again, he thought, maybe she did sense it, just didn’t have enough experience with that sort of thing to know what it was that was making her feel so tense and edgy.

  She opened her mouth in indecision, then threw a questioning look at McCullough, who waved her on with an overdone joviality that rang as sour as her flirting did.

  “Ah hell, honey, you can go ahead. I’m an old married man.” But the look he sent Bronco carried another message: Screw this up for us, boy, and I’ll kill you myself.

  Bronco stretched his lips in a smile. “I don’t bite.”

  “Oh, well, then forget it,” she joked, giving her head an airy little flip. Her hair swept forward across her shoulder, and Bronco caught a whiff of green apples.

  She said something to him as they were making their way toward the dance floor, something he couldn’t quite hear with all the noise. He said, “Beg pardon?” and moved in close behind her, putting his hands on her bare arms. He felt her flesh twitch beneath his fingers, like the hide of a nervous horse.

  She nodded her head toward the dance floor, where the
band was doing its best to organize a crowd already too boozed up for coordination into something resembling a line. “I’ve never done this before-line dancing.”

  He gave her arms a squeeze that was meant to encourage, nothing more. But he felt her heat warm him as if somebody’d turned the sun on and hit him full in the chest with it.

  “It’s easy,” he said, and even he was startled at the growl in his voice. “Just keep your eyes on the person in front of you and do whatever they do.”

  The song had started, and the wooden dance floor vibrated to the more-or-less synchronized stomping of several dozen pairs of boots. Holding Lauren lightly by her upper arms, Bronco guided her into one of the swaying, dipping, turning lines.

  “Give it a couple beats to get the rhythm,” he rasped with his lips close to her hair, and knew a moment’s light-headedness from the scent.

  She nodded and he let go of her. She fixed her eyes on the overstuffed backsides of the couple in front of her-tourists in fancy Western clothes all duded up with embroidery and fringe, and just as obviously lost as she was. After a few bars of trying her best to follow their giggling and stumbling, she looked over at Bronco, lips wry and eyes shining with laughter, and lifted her hands in a hopeless shrug.

  Without missing a beat, Bronco stepped over in front of her, at the same time guiding her into position behind him. He placed her hands on his hips, covered them with his own and held them firmly in place there as he moved through the sequence of steps, hip waggles, leg kicks and all. It took only a few beats before she was moving with him as naturally as breathing.

  Though his own breathing could hardly be described as natural. Having her there behind him, knowing she was so close, her body almost but not quite touching him, made his skin shiver and his spine contract and the fine hairs on the back of his neck lift with awareness. And that wasn’t the only thing that was lifting. The stirrings elsewhere in his body were downright uncomfortable, given the tightness of his jeans.

  His only regret was that he couldn’t see her. And yet…he could see her. With his eyes closed he watched her slender body pick up the rhythm, move with innate grace and in perfect harmony with his, her laughter like sunbeams, illuminating the pictures in his mind. Except that, in those pictures, she was naked in his embrace, and around them all was warmth and light and peace, a world in perfect harmony…

  …until the dance steps called for a pivot, and he turned but she didn’t, and he found himself face-to-face, chest to chest with her, with her hands still clamped on his belt. Her little “Oh!” of dismay was like a thunderclap. A wakeup call.

  While he stood staring at her with his fingers wrapped around her elbows and his senses in dangerous disarray, the crowd around them began to clap and whoop and holler. The line dance had ended. The band segued into a slow country standard, and after a moment’s hesitation she moved-just a little, but it was enough. Enough to bring her right into his arms.

  What could he do? He hadn’t meant to take it any further than that, but against his better judgment he went ahead and danced with her again-not only that one, but the next. But the perfect harmony he’d felt with her before was gone. He’d handled live explosives with less constraint. All the while he was holding her body close to his he kept telling himself, What in the hell were you thinking? You know who this is. You know what you’re going to have to do…

  He thought, I never should have danced with her…

  Bronco’s own quarters were in the foreman’s cottage, in the shade of a big cottonwood about halfway between the main house and the horse barns. Normally he shared it with Ron Masters, the ex-navy demolitions expert who was McCullough’s second in command, but since Masters was currently busy up at the high base camp getting ready for unwelcome visitors, he figured it would be okay to let his prisoner come in to use the john. By a bachelor’s standards it was clean enough-a less objectionable choice, anyway, than the bunkhouse could have afforded her.

  He went in with her while he checked for escape routes and potentially lethal weapons, then left her with the succinct warning, “Five minutes-then I’m comin’ in after you.”

  While he waited for her, he took a sweatshirt out of a drawer and a poncho from the closet. He laid the poncho out on his bed, placed the sweatshirt in the middle of it and rolled them both into an oblong bundle the right size for tying onto the back of a saddle. Then he leaned across the bed, fingered back the window shade and looked out.

  Though the sun was up, it was early yet. The air coming through the dusty screen was still cool and smelled of juniper and wild grass. There were no signs of life from the main house; McCullough had left last night to follow Ron and pick him up after he’d dumped Lauren’s truck and trailer. They’d be going straight on to the base camp after that. He could just see the back end of Katie McCullough’s SUV parked in the semicircular drive in front of the house, though, and that worried him. He hoped it didn’t mean she’d changed her mind about going to stay with her mother in El Paso until after the dust had settled. The last thing he wanted was for this to turn into another Ruby Ridge.

  Time was running out.

  The thought had no sooner entered his mind when he heard the faint click of the bathroom-door handle. He was there waiting beside the door when it opened.

  His prisoner didn’t say anything, just glanced at him as she moved past him, carrying the saddlebags over one arm. She smelled of mint toothpaste. Her hair looked damp around her forehead and her face had a just-scrubbed look. Her shirt was rather fiercely tucked into the waistband of her jeans, giving her slender curves more definition than they should have had, a taut and tidy look he found unexpectedly erotic.

  Shutting out thoughts he had no business thinking, Bronco watched her move into his bedroom, easing into his personal space the way a familiar melody comes to the mind.

  “So this is where you live?” She asked the question with casual curiosity, as if she was some easy woman he’d picked up in a bar and brought home for the night and this was the morning after. Her eyes traveled around the room, taking in the neatly made twin beds and the rolled-up bundle on his, then came back to him. “Nice digs.” Her lips twitched in an aborted attempt at a smile. “Not exactly what I expected.”

  Bronco grunted, feeling as if she’d sucker-punched him. It was an old wound, and he reacted with reflexive anger, lashing coldly at her, “It’s a room. What were you expecting-a tepee?”

  He regretted the remark when he saw her flinch. What the hell was the matter with him? She hadn’t meant it like that, and he knew it.

  He was glad she didn’t try to flounder through some guilt-ridden apology. She leveled a shaming look at him, then said quietly, “Night before last I saw you get dead drunk, start a brawl and get tossed into the parking lot, remember? This room-beds all made, that squeaky-clean bathroom in there-they don’t exactly go with that ‘drunken Indian’ image, do they? You don’t fit that image.” And though her eyes narrowed in speculation when she said it, there was something else there, too-a whisper of suppressed excitement in her breathing, a certain tension in her body.

  Bronco felt himself go quiet and wary. “Well, now, what kind of image do you think I fit?”

  “I don’t know,” she said softly, thoughtfully.

  “I’m just a plain ol’ horse wrangler,” Bronco muttered, turning to retrieve the rolled-up poncho so she couldn’t see his eyes. Acting-playing a part-was one thing, but outright lying didn’t come easy to him and never had. “Believe what you want-”

  She broke in with a snort of anger before he’d finished. “Yeah, right. And this is just a horse ranch, Gil McCullough is John Wayne and I’m Maureen O’Hara, and that’s why I spent last night locked in a tack room with bars on the windows while a bunch of people I don’t even know cleaned out my motel room. What do you think I am, stupid?” Her voice trembled, and the tears she had yet to shed shimmered in her eyes.

  “No, I don’t think you’re stupid,” Bronco said evenly as he took her
arm. What he did think-about her and the whole damned mess-didn’t bear looking at too closely. “Time to go. Come on.”

  It surprised him when she struggled against his grip, twisting to look at him. “Who are you people? What’s this all about? What do you want with me?”

  You’ll find out soon enough, he thought grimly as he hustled his captive out the door of the cottage and down the wooden steps. A whinny rose from the corrals behind the stables. His body tensed and he paused, listening. He heard nothing out of the ordinary, but a thrill of urgency rippled down his spine as he tightened his hold on her and quickened his step.

  She went with him unresisting for several paces. But her voice, when she spoke again, had gone tense and quiet. “It’s about my father, isn’t it?” He didn’t answer her. After a moment he heard her take a deep breath. “Well, whatever you people are planning, it’s not going to work. My father won’t let you get away with this. He won’t be blackmailed, either.”

  This time Bronco did reply, on an exhalation that was almost prayerful. “Laurie Brown, for your own sake, I sincerely hope you are mistaken.”

  A council of war was taking place in a seventh-floor room at the Watergate in Washington, D.C. Present were the acting U.S. attorney general, Patricia Graham; Henry Vallejo and Vernon Lee, heads of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI, respectively; and last but not least, the former attorney general, now the top con tender for his party’s nomination for president of the United States, Everett Charleton Brown, known to friends and family as Rhett.

  Three of the four people in the room were seated around a table littered with coffee cups and the sort of mess created by people in the process of deciding among equally untenable options. The fourth, Rhett Brown, was up and pacing. He hadn’t slept, and looked it. He knew his hair was rumpled, his tie askew, and that he needed a shower and a shave. He could have used a toothbrush, too; his mouth tasted like the bottom of a Dumpster, after too many cups of coffee and the Philly steak sandwich he’d forced himself to eat late last night against his better judgment.