“Yeah,” Crider answered, sullen-voiced.
Hanifen went on. “I don’t want to hear any disrespect in regard to Fiona Halsey, either.”
“You gone all soft on her, Dex?”
“Shut your trap, Crider. That little girl and I go back a long way.”
“She’s not a little girl anymore.” The fool dug his hole deeper. “You gonna just let her get away with it?”
How, Matt thought, did the guy dare taunt Hanifen? But to his utter disbelief, Hanifen let the ridicule go.
“She’s not going to get away with anything.” He tossed his cigar butt into the yard. “Here’s what’s not going to happen. I am not gonna have the whole damned county down on my head for railroading the local princess.”
Chapter Two
The first time he met Fiona Halsey face-to-face, Matt found himself staring up the barrel of her cocked, .30-30 lever-action rifle. The Remington was a beauty, powerful enough to fell a moose from several hundred yards out. And it still had the faint acrid scent of burnt gunpowder.
“Back away from Soldier Boy,” she commanded, “and keep your arms in the air.”
He raised one arm but left the other on the scarred, discolored withers of the Arabian.
It was already some kind of natural miracle that Matt had survived the standoff with Soldier. He’d had about two seconds’ warning when, apparently for no real reason other than to amuse himself, Crider had elevated the searchlights attached to the sheriff’s second vehicle and started the beacon rolling.
Who knew? It was possible the fool still would not have caught sight of Matt even with the searchlight glaring full on. It was just as possible that even in the sweep of the beacon halfway up the mountain, Matt might not have been spotted.
He’d reacted as if his body weren’t stiff from the cold, crabbing his way back over the rooftop, expecting to hang out on the dark side of the roof for a while. The only trouble was, the floodlights on the paddock side of the barn had been turned on in the exhaustive search for clues, and now lit up not only his escape route, but the slant of the roof as well.
He had only one decent chance to escape detection and that was to duck into the stall of a killer horse named Soldier Boy. He estimated where he had to be to turn himself off the roof and into the stall and then he prayed for a second time in one night.
He positioned himself, gripped the icy edge of the roof and somersaulted off into space. His legs cleared the half door of Soldier Boy’s stall, but he’d thunked down so hard on his middle that every last molecule of air in his body was pounded out. He twisted in pain and landed on his butt, his back up against the stable door.
The stallion had wheeled around, his ears flattened, his hooves scraping with an incredible menace along the floor. If an animal could breathe fire, it was this one. Dropped to the floor, Matt couldn’t have moved to save his life.
Head lowered, legs stiffened, his mane bristling with wrath, Soldier had snorted, and come as close to foaming at the mouth as Matt ever wanted to see. His own mouth had gone as bone dry as his lungs were empty.
Over the past months he’d spent countless hours around horses in preparation for this assignment. He wasn’t going to go onto the Bar Naught without knowing his way around. In those weeks, he’d been bitten, kicked and thrown. He’d deliberately sought out the meanest critters he could find so nothing he might later encounter on the Bar Naught would take him by surprise. It was just the way he worked. He had to know it all.
He’d learned to ride and keep his seat in a dead run. He’d learned a few stunts and dislocated his shoulder, half mangled his hand when he got caught up in twisted, unforgiving reins.
But Soldier’s fiery temper made all Matt’s weeks of preparation seem useless. The pitched battle of wills between him and Soldier was oddly silent. A scene without sound except for Soldier’s wrathful breathing.
Matt had to establish dominance, but for too long a time he couldn’t get his lungs functioning to send oxygen to his muscles. For long seconds he could only sit there and cower, inviting his own destruction.
He fought for every breath, praying for the second time in one night. Just let me get out of this one…. Then Soldier let out an eerie sound and gathered his powerful muscles to rear back and rain down death with a killing lunge.
Beyond conscious thought, Matt brought his legs under himself and sprang at the horse, aiming his shoulder at Soldier’s head with every shred of strength left in his battered body. The blow connected, jarred even his own teeth, ricocheting through him as if he’d hit a brick wall. But Soldier hauled back and a grudging respect set in.
In the intervening hour, while the sheriff and his men departed and Halsey and Geary went about turning off all the floodlights, Matt had barely moved. By now, he’d smooth-talked himself into a guarded truce with Soldier Boy, managed to get back on his feet and even get a steadying hand on the stallion’s flank.
Now, facing Fiona Halsey’s rifle, Matt had zero inclination to give up the uneasy rapport he’d achieved with a stallion that would still as soon stomp him into a mud hole and kick it dry.
“Put your hands in the air and move away from the horse.” The sensual grit in Fiona Halsey’s Brit-cultured voice plucked strings Matt didn’t even know he had, made him weak-kneed.
He didn’t cotton to the sensation at all, which immediately put him out of a mood to do her bidding. Even to save his own hide.
If the tall, lush, lanky blonde with the complexion of an English rose had murdered once—and the stench of gunpowder clinging to the gun she still held gave the theory credence—then she had it in her to do it again.
His ribs ached like all billy hell. His shoulder was so stiff he could no longer feel it. Still and all, perverse as it was, maybe he was also a bit turned on by the fact that Fiona Halsey had his disbelieving heart in the crosshairs of her scope.
He left his hand resting where it was, in physical contact with the stallion, and gave Fiona Halsey his most charming grin.
He really didn’t want to die. “Suppose you disarm, and we’ll talk.”
“Suppose I don’t, and you do the talking.”
“I don’t do so well under the gun.” He smiled, stroking Soldier’s flank again. “So to speak.”
“Too bad.” Flinty-edged, her tone still struck him as powerfully seductive. He wondered, did that particular combination come with the royal genes, a couple of generations removed?
His nose itched from what seemed like protracted hours in the softly lit horse barn, but his eyes were attuned to the semidark and his focus homed in on Fiona Halsey’s splintered attention.
Riveted to the motion of his hand, she was equally unrelenting and steady in her dead-on aim. But for an instant he thought he saw confusion in her, jealousy flashing in her shadowed eyes—not for want of his hands on her, he thought, but because her beloved, wrecked Soldier Boy allowed his touch.
Everyone knew Soldier tolerated her least of all.
She tossed that silky curtain of deep blond hair without altering her aim one millimeter off dead center of his heart. “Are you mocking me?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he answered, solemn as a judge. Not a woman in possession of a deadly weapon he had no chance of taking from her. Standing outside Soldier’s stall, on the other side of the stall door, she could blow him to kingdom come before he could get anywhere near enough to disarm her.
His survival mechanism, the instincts by which he lived so as not to die, kicked into higher gear for the second time that night. He shook his head slowly. “The