Daggert stirred the fire, and the coals in his memory. “You’re too hard on him, James. He’s just a little boy.”
“Do you want to know why?”
He set his knife aside.
“They—everyone from my best friends to the housekeeper—thought I was too hard on the children. All the children. But mostly Enrique.”
“Why?”
“Do you mean why does everyone think I’m too hard, why was I too hard or why Enrique in particular?” she asked.
“You choose,” Daggert answered, amazed at her ability to split meanings.
“You sound like a psychiatrist.”
He didn’t say anything, thinking she couldn’t know how ironic that sounded, due to the fact that a host of psychiatrists hadn’t been able to put him together again. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men… One of Donny’s favorite nursery rhymes.
“Okay, I don’t believe anything can be accomplished without hard work. And it’s my experience that children need strict rules and guidelines. It’s how I was raised, and I’m fully aware of the benefits of such a firm hand at the helm. And why Enrique in particular? Because he’s smart, because he’s lazy. Because he’s vulnerable, and vulnerability only makes victims.”
“Being vulnerable is a liability, then?”
“I’m tired,” she said suddenly, and handed him the plate of uneaten food. “I think I’ll pass on the rest of this session.”
He handed her plate back. “It was a hard ride and a long day. You’d better eat something.”
“Really, I couldn’t.”
“But you will.”
She gave him a cold look that let him understand he’d have to wrestle her down and force-feed her before she’d concede.
He sighed. “Lady, I won’t have time tomorrow to take you back to the ranch when you faint from hunger. You don’t have enough meat on your bones to go a day without food. It’s a matter of simple mathematics. The boy already has a twelve-hour head start on us. Add another eight or nine hours and the kid’s been out in the open for almost twenty-four hours already. We have to catch up with him soon, and we won’t be able to if I’m busy picking you up off the ground.”
Though Leeza watched him warily, Daggert didn’t look at her as he bent over his own plate and resumed his careful eating. She dipped up a forkful of the pasta and tasted it. She was surprised at how delicious it was. If Daggert dared smile, she’d give the plate of pasta to his dog rather than continue to eat it herself, but he didn’t. He merely finished his dinner in a silence that almost felt easy.
And she was hungrier than she’d thought, for within seconds, her plate was empty, too.
“Thank you,” she said finally, relinquishing it into his hands. “You were right, I was hungry.”
He nodded and moved away from the fire, but not before Leeza had caught a sober look of something that might have been sympathy in his gaze. Sympathy or an almost reluctant compassion. For some odd reason, the notion of his possessing any compassion unnerved her. It was far easier to think of him as rude and bullying and harder than nails than to see him as a human being with human emotions.
After she’d warily used the meager facilities he’d set up behind a low scrub oak, and availed herself of some of the remaining hot water, she turned her back on him and carefully, stiffly, removed her coat, blouse and boots.
Never one for voyeurism, Daggert tried turning his gaze to the fire, but failed miserably when he heard the rasp of her jeans zipper. Her legs went on forever.
“Goddamn,” he said.
She stiffened but didn’t turn around. “What?”
“I burned myself,” he lied. Or was he telling the abject truth?
Amazing him, she pulled on a pair of red satin pajamas. She might as well have been at some fancy motel instead of camping out in the desert on a mission to find a runaway kid. What had possessed her housekeeper to pack such a ridiculous item?
“Good night,” she said, slipping into her sleeping bag.
“Right,” he said, feeling as if he’d fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole.
“Sleep well,” she murmured.
Thinking about her in that getup, he’d be lucky if he ever slept again.
Chapter 3
From atop the highest peak in the rising foothills, the hunter, as he thought of himself, was able to see for miles in all directions. With powerful binoculars at his eyes, he could easily discern Leeza Nelson in red pajamas that made her look as if she’d dressed herself in flame. He saw Daggert moving around the fire, banking it, careful as ever.
The tracker hadn’t been so careful four years ago, had he?
Turning his binoculars to the north, he spied the would-be fire of his newest prey. Everything in him itched to move forward, to catch the boy and teach him a lesson about crossing boundaries. He’d taught many before.
But he shifted his gaze back to the woman slipping into her sleeping bag. The hunter wondered if Leeza Nelson knew that people called Daggert the Cassandra of the desert, always crying murder and never finding enough evidence to prove it. He wondered if she’d heard that Daggert was the man everyone trusted and no one believed.
The woman should have given up by now, but she’d stayed with Daggert throughout the day, even if she posted in her saddle, English style.
She didn’t know about boundaries, either. Maybe it was time she was taught a lesson.
The man wondered if he should flip a coin. The woman or the boy? Heads the woman, tails the child. If he played his cards right—and he was one hell of a card player—he might have the opportunity to teach both of them.
He didn’t need a fire. His thoughts of what he would do to them warmed him thoroughly.
Leeza was wholly spent, tired in places she’d never been aware of before, yet sleep eluded her.
The night stars seemed heavy, as if straining against invisible reins to streak to the earth. She could pick out the Big and Little Dippers, Cassiopeia and the Seven Sisters. In another month she’d be able to find Orion’s belt, she knew a portend of the coming winter.
She’d shown Enrique the constellations one night about two weeks earlier. He’d studied them carefully, trying to see patterns in the myriad twinkling lights until he finally learned the few she could always find.
“My parents are up there,” he’d said.
Assuming he’d meant “in heaven,” Leeza had had to clench her hands in her lap to keep from wrapping her arms around the little boy who’d lost both parents at such an early age.
Just as she had.
But no one had coddled her. Not in any of the foster homes she’d been shuffled in and out of in her early years. Not in the tidy home John and Cora Nelson had brought her to when she was nine. Enrique’s age exactly.
“Emotionalism is a waste of time,” her adoptive father had said on more than one occasion, usually when her eyes were brimming with tears over some imagined hurt. “It reveals a lack of precise thinking.”
Looking at the stars now, out in the middle of a vast desert wilderness, inches from a hard stranger who was kind to his animals if not to the woman who’d hired him, Leeza found herself wishing that she’d drawn Enrique onto her lap and held him close. If she had given just that small measure of comfort, would he have opted to stay at the ranch and not run away