This was home.
So many of her most pleasant memories of her parents were built on the firm foundation of these mountains. Every summer and fall on the way to and from their grazing allotment they used to camp right here where the creek bowed. Her mom would cook something delicious in a Dutch oven and after supper her dad would gather her and Matt and Jesse around the campfire and read to them out of his favorite Westerns.
She smiled softly. Her memories had begun to fade in the six years since her parents had died in a wintry roll-over accident, but she could still hear Frank Harte’s booming voice ring through the night and see his broad, callused hands turn the pages in the flickering firelight.
She missed them both so much sometimes. Matt did his best. Both her brothers did. She knew that and loved them fiercely for working so hard to give her a good, safe home for the past six years.
Matt had only been twenty-two, Jesse seventeen, when their parents died, and she knew a lot of men would have figured a grieving twelve-year-old girl would have been better off with relatives or in the foster care system. Their aunt Suzie over in Pinedale had offered to take her in, but Matt had been determined they would all stick together.
It must have been so hard for him. She thought of how rotten she’d been sometimes, how often she’d snapped at him when he told her to do her homework or make her bed.
You’re not my mother and you can’t make me.
She owed him big-time for putting up with her. Someday she would have to find a way to repay him.
She sighed, resting her chin on her knees. She was reluctant to leave this peaceful spot, even though she knew she should probably go check on the stew and see if the ranch hands had eaten their boots yet.
When she walked away from camp a half hour earlier, Jake and Sam Lawson had been snoring in their tent in a little before-dinner nap after beating the brush all day. But they were probably awake now and wondering where she’d wandered off to.
She smiled at the thought of the two bachelor brothers, who were in their early sixties and had worked for the ranch her entire life. They treated her like a favorite spoiled niece, and she loved them both fiercely.
And then there was Slater.
A whole flock of magpies seemed to flutter around in her stomach whenever she thought of the lean, hard cowboy leading the cattle drive. This was the longest she had ever spent in his company, and she had to admit she had spent most of the day watching him out of the corner of her eyes.
The few times he’d caught her watching him, he had given her that half smile of his, and she felt like a bottle rocket had exploded inside her.
He made her so nervous she couldn’t think straight. What was it about him? She’d been around cowboys all her life and most of them were simple and straight-forward—interested in horses, whisky and women, not necessarily in that order.
Zack seemed different. Despite the way he joked with the older cowhands, there was a sadness in his eyes, a deep, remote loneliness that probably made every woman he met want to cuddle him close and kiss all his pain away.
She rolled her eyes at the fanciful thought. If a woman wanted to kiss Zack Slater, it wasn’t to make him feel better. He was totally, completely, gorgeously male, and a woman would have to have rocks for brains not to notice.
Well, she couldn’t sit here all night mooning over Zack Slater. Not when she had work to do.
Just as she started to rise, the thick brush ten yards upstream on the other side of the creek begin to rustle with more than just the breeze. A few seconds later, a small mule deer—no more than a yearling doe, probably—walked out of the growth and picked her way delicately to the water’s edge. After a careful look around, she bent her neck to drink and Cassie watched, smiling a little at the ladylike way the doe sipped the water.
The deer so entranced her that she almost missed another flicker of movement, again on the opposite side of the creek, at the halfway point between her and the deer. She narrowed her eyes, trying to figure out what other kind of animal had come to the water, then inhaled sharply. She caught just a glimpse of a tawny hide and a long swaying tail as something slunk through the brush.
A mountain lion!
And he had his sights on the pretty little doe.
Even though she knew it was all part of the rhythm of life—hunter and hunted, another link on the food chain and all that—she couldn’t bear to watch the inevitable.
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then changed her mind and jumped to her feet, waving her arms and hollering for all she was worth. As she’d hoped, the doe lifted her head from the water with one panicked look, then bounded back into the trees with a crash of branches.
“Ha, you big bully,” she said to the cougar. “Find your dinner somewhere else.”
The big cat turned toward her and she could swear there was malice in those yellow eyes. With a loud, deep growl that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand at attention, the animal turned, his long tail swaying hypnotically.
Uh, maybe drawing attention to herself with a cougar on the prowl wasn’t exactly the best idea she’d ever had.
“Nice kitty,” she murmured in a placating tone. “Sit. Stay.”
The big cat paced the bank on the other side, staying roughly parallel to her. For the first time Cassie began to feel a real flicker of fear, suddenly not at all sure the eight-foot-wide creek would be enough of a barrier between them if the cat decided she made a better snack.
Moving slowly, she scooped up a softball-sized rock, just in case, and began backing toward camp and the men.
She had only made it a few yards when the cat tensed his muscles as if to spring back into the brush. Before she could breathe a sigh of relief, he turned at the last minute and spanned the creek in one powerful leap. With a strangled shriek, she threw the rock but it only glanced off the cougar’s back before landing in the water with a huge splash.
Cassie didn’t wait around to see if her missile found a target. She whirled and took off for camp, heart racing and adrenaline pumping through her in thick, hot waves. The cat was gaining on her. She knew it and braced, expecting jagged teeth to rip into her flesh at any second. This was it, then. She was going to die here in these mountains she loved, all because of her stupid soft heart.
And then, when she thought she could almost smell the predator’s breath, fetid and wild, and feel it stir the hair at the back of her neck, a gunshot boomed through the twilight.
For an instant time seemed to freeze and she became aware of the total silence on the mountainside as the echo died away. A few moments earlier the evening had buzzed with activity but now nothing moved except the soft wind rustling the new leaves of the aspens.
She stopped, gratitude and relief rushing through her, then shifted her gaze to see which of the ranch hands had come to her rescue. She wasn’t at all surprised to see Slater just lowering a rifle.
What did surprise her was the yowl behind her. To her shock, the cat wasn’t dead, just royally teed-off. Apparently he decided he’d had enough of interfering humans. With a last angry screech exactly like one of the barn cats tangling with the wrong cow dog, the mountain lion skulked back into the trees.
She whirled back to Zack. “You missed him!”
“I shot into the air.”
“Why?” she asked, incredulous.
He shrugged those broad shoulders. Despite the fierce need to pump every ounce of air to her oxygen-starved cells now that the danger had passed, her heart skipped a beat at how big and strong and wonderful he looked leaning there against a rock. “I saw you scare away his prey. You can’t blame the guy for going after the consolation prize.”
She