She looked at his callused palm as if it might hold snakes. He waited. She placed her stiff fingers in his and was startled by the contact. He might as well have kissed her, so intimate was the sensation of their fingers touching. She could feel the heat of his skin, the roughness of his calluses and some indefinable psychic energy emanating from him.
And when his fingers wrapped around hers and he effortlessly pulled her to her feet, inches from his rock-hard body, she felt the impact arrow through her. She tried removing her hand, but he didn’t release her. She gave him a startled glance and found he was staring at her with a fixed, almost hard look. A wolf’s look.
A flutter of fear and unbridled need made her breath catch.
And still he held her hand, not squeezing it, but not letting her go, either.
“That’s hilarious,” she drawled, but she felt something inside her quaking, both with that strange fear and something else she’d never experienced before.
He said nothing, though he continued to look at her as if forcing her to read his thoughts, understand the meaning of his touch. Abruptly, he let her go.
Her hand hung in the air for a moment, as if he’d hypnotized her and no power on earth would let her lower her limb. Then she jerked it down to her side. It seemed to tingle, but she resisted the urge to look at it. Or at him.
Daggert stacked the river rocks in a circle for the night’s campfire. Even as he performed the methodical task, he felt the woman’s presence. When he’d turned from her horse to see her watching him, with a fire flickering in her gaze and her lips parted and her fingertips resting against her pulsing throat, he’d felt a fuse light inside him. Who’d have thought such a cool customer would have such a look in her eyes?
Could it be she didn’t even know it? Her mouth had snapped shut and her eyes had widened as if she saw something in his face. Maybe she’d spent so many years playing the ice princess that she’d convinced herself she was just that.
He’d told her he wasn’t dead, but until he’d held her in his arms, even if just to keep her from falling down, he might as well have been six feet under. When little Donny died, something in him had been murdered, too. The crippling guilt and scarcely checked rage had turned him away from everyone, everything he knew.
He should have made sure Donny hadn’t walked home alone from his friend’s house. He should have found the boy in minutes. He should have tracked the fiend who’d taken his only son. He should have found the monster and eviscerated him.
Sometimes Daggert wondered if he’d have been okay if his ex-wife had blamed him, too. But she hadn’t. She’d nearly drowned in her grief, but she hadn’t blamed her tracker husband, hadn’t ever said a word to imply she harbored anything but sympathy for his torment. But even with her acceptance, Alma hadn’t been able to get past the terrible pain rioting just below the surface of James Daggert. He’d understood when she gave up one day and left him in the canyons of his own despair. She deserved a life, deserved to find some measure of happiness. He sure as hell couldn’t give it to her anymore.
He thought of the woman who had ridden behind him all day, and of her determination to find Enrique. The fleeting thought that she might not give up on him flashed through Daggert’s mind. He shook his head. That was crazy thinking.
Still, he found some grim satisfaction in knowing he wasn’t dead to sensation, that his body, if no other part of him, could still be swamped with restless need, however painful. He smiled wryly, suspecting he’d be hurting plenty by the conclusion of this particular mission.
He thought about her sad little litany of surface facts about Enrique Dominguez, the way she’d repeated them like a talisman against her exhaustion. He’d done the same with Donny. Not reciting all the little things he knew about the boy—those were carved in his heart—but details about his death.
The fact that no one had seen anyone unusual that day was significant all by itself. A little boy on his way home from a friend’s house didn’t wind up some forty miles away, mangled beyond recognition. Daggert knew that people had seen someone, all right—someone they knew. But because they knew him, they’d forgotten they’d seen him. Because he belonged there. Like fences, like flowerbeds, like grass.
Someone Donny knew. Someone Daggert knew.
Everyone became suspect. Everyone became potential child killers. And his litany became, “Who is it? Who do I know who’s capable of murder? Who did everyone see that day and not even notice? The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker?”
He understood the need to focus. He understood litanies. They drove fear away and kept despair at bay.
After he laid the fire and lit it, he pulled out his collapsible water buckets, filled them and set them down in front of the horses. He doled two scoops each of molasses oats into canvas feed bags, and after the horses had drunk their fill, slipped a makeshift chuck-wagon on to each horse’s head.
He hoped he and the woman would find the boy the next day, not just for the child’s sake. He hadn’t planned on feeding two horses, and had brought enough oats for one, for only five days. At this rate, they would last only three full days without supplemental supplies, and it took nearly that long to reach the upper mountains.
The only sounds that could be heard were the distant cry of a nighthawk, horses munching oats and the fire crackling in the chilly desert night. Into that companionable quiet, he heard Leeza ask, “What do you want me to do?”
“Sit,” he said, pulling two dinner packets from one of his saddlebags. “Watch out for goat heads.”
“What?”
“Stickers. Shaped like goat heads.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
Daggert set a pot of water on the broad, flat rocks he’d placed in the middle of their fire circle. At some three thousand feet on the high desert plain, water wouldn’t take long to boil.
He added the already cooked meals in their little plastic bags to the churning water. When they were heated through, he plucked them from the pot with his pocketknife and, slicing them open, dumped the contents on to the aluminum plates he’d set out earlier.
As he worked, Leeza didn’t say a single word, not even muttering snide comments when she thought he couldn’t hear her, as she had much of the day. He turned to look at her and found her staring at the flames, silent tears coursing down her beautiful face.
He briefly closed his eyes. Even if he were the most talkative man in the world, he wouldn’t have known what to say now. He said nothing, pretending he hadn’t seen her anguish, and dug in one of the packs again, withdrawing a container of salt and pepper and a couple of napkins.
The race for space travel had vastly improved simple pleasures on earth. Even the sorriest excuse for a cook could rustle up a decent meal with freeze-dried ingredients or precooked entrées, a pot of hot water and a few spices carefully packed in a plastic bag. Within minutes, he set a plate of beef stew out for Sancho and two more of pasta primavera for Leeza and himself.
With a wary glance at her, he held out her plate. Most signs of tears were gone, but she didn’t respond.
“You’ll feel better if you eat something,” he said.
She reached for the plate then, and he let out a pent-up breath as he handed her a fork. She stirred the pasta around but didn’t make any move to eat. “Enrique’s only nine,” she said.
He waited. Donny had been seven. He would be seven forever. “He’s growing up, Alma. Let him walk home alone.”
“And he’s afraid of thunder.”
Daggert forked in a mouthful of pasta and chewed silently. “Daddy? You won’t let the lightning hurt me, right?”
“He plays practical jokes.”