bells to jangling. “Look, I’m turning around. So set the gun down nice and easy and use both hands, okay? Much safer for both of us.”
He turned his back and seized the moment to run his own hands up his ribs. Painful, but no new jagged bumps where they’d mended. He fingered his collarbone and winced. Likely pulled a muscle as rebroken the bone, but—the hell with it. If he couldn’t cowboy this summer, then he couldn’t do the job he’d promised Gabe. He swung around again.
Caught in the act of fastening her top button, she froze as their eyes collided.
The moment stretched out…his breathing quickened. Possibilities spun in the air like dust motes sparked by the sun.
Her fine eyes widened and he knew she read his thoughts, knew she wanted to look away. Was too proud to let him win this silent clash.
With calm deliberation she finished her task, while a dusting of rose painted her high cheekbones.
“What are you doing up here?” he asked suddenly. She hadn’t just dropped out of his dreams.
She wore running shoes, not serious hiking boots. He scanned the rocks around her feet and found no sign of a backpack. Just a canvas overnight kit. “You’re camping up here?” By herself?
But then, her reluctance to put down that gun showed a woman on her own. If she’d had a companion, a mate, she’d have simply set it aside and called for backup. So…definitely alone. Adam’s eyes flicked to her left hand—ringless—and he felt a surge of unabashedly male satisfaction.
“I’m…” She drew a knuckle along her top lip. Her long lashes fluttered as she glanced away, then looked back again.
Adam cocked his head and waited. Whatever came next would be a lie.
“I’m doing research up here. Beaver.”
He almost shouted his laughter aloud. “Beaver.” A couple of flat rocks made a path across the pool and he stepped across, trying not to grin. So you can’t lie worth a damn. I’ll remember that. “There’s no beaver this high up.”
“That’s what I’m…verifying. I’m a wildlife biologist.” When lying, it was best to stick as close to the truth as possible, Tess had always heard. Still, this stranger wasn’t buying it. “Doing a thesis on beaver and tamarisk trees,” she babbled on. That part was true, anyway, although her research location had been Utah, not the San Juans. “The way one affects the other, and how both affect their environment. Water quality. Bird food. Habitat. Fire conditions.”
“Really.”
He was so lean and beautifully put together, that his size came as a shock. When he stopped before her, she had to tip her head back to meet his gaze. Eyes blue as a mountain midnight and dancing with laughter. Somehow she knew now he’d never hurt her. Still, that laughter made him… Dangerous. As instinct whispered, she stooped for her gun.
Their heads nearly cracked as he crouched along with her. “Allow me, cher.”
Like she had a choice?
When they rose again, the rifle was firmly in his possession. “Nice piece.” He cracked it open, removed its bullets, closed it and gravely handed it over. “Bit heavy for beaver, isn’t it?”
“I study beaver. I don’t shoot them.” And wherever he’d come from—there was a touch of the deep South in his low, lazy voice—it was someplace where they’d failed to teach him that it was rude to confiscate a woman’s bullets. Patronizing, if not downright paranoid.
“Ah. And do you have a name?”
She’d liked him grizzly-bear grouchy more than she liked him laughing at her. “I do,” Tess agreed airily, then glanced around for her kit, leaned down to collect it. When she straightened, she found her snub had bounced right off him. His smile had only deepened.
The man had a smile to give a woman pause. A lush bottom lip that was finely carved and…mobile. The upper was severe, yet oddly sensitive, as if he hardened it more in pain than cruelty. His angular jaw was blue-black with beard shadow; he hadn’t shaved this morning. And, as Tess noted this, the nape of her neck prickled, as if those bristles brushed deliberately, deliciously across it. A hot wave washed up her thighs.
She tossed her head and turned aside, cheeks warming, too. Get a grip, girl! So she hadn’t had a serious relationship—any sort of relationship—for almost a year now; that didn’t mean she had to show her lack here. Not to a man who was bound to be trouble.
Trouble in more ways than the usual if he turned uphill, she realized belatedly. Thirty yards of bushwhacking would bring him to Zelda’s cage.
A more logical course was to follow the path along the stream, she told herself. She’d set him an example, heading west along its bank. Once out of sight, she could cut up through the new growth to where she’d picketed her horses. Swinging back to face him, she retreated in a casual backward drift while she asked, “And what are you doing up here?”
He had no pack or bedroll, and only an idiot would hike the San Juans this time of year without them. But though he might be irritatingly self-assured, this was no fool.
It was too early for line-camp men. Besides which, cowboys never traveled on foot. So that left—precisely what?
“Spent the night at Sumner cabin.” His weight shifted as if he had half-decided to follow her.
“Oh. So you know Kaley and Tripp?” Sumner cabin had belonged to Kaley Cotter’s spread, the Circle C. Then a few years back she’d married her neighbor, rancher Tripp McGraw. Their combined grazing allotments stretched to the south and east of this spot. If the McGraws vouched for this man, then he couldn’t be quite a rogue, no matter what he seemed to be.
“I do.” And she knew them, too, Adam realized with satisfaction as he changed his mind about following her. That meant when he described his rifle-toting babe to Tripp McGraw, he’d learn her name. How to find her.
Because whatever she thought—and damned if she didn’t look relieved as she murmured a noncommittal, “Ah,” then flipped him a jaunty wave and turned off to the west—this wasn’t the end of their acquaintance.
This was only the beginning.
Still, missing her already, he couldn’t resist calling after her, “Hey!” Beautiful!
She swung back around, her dark brows tipped up like a crow’s wings in flight.
“Your bullets, you forgot them.”
“Oh…yeah.” She dug into a pocket of those snug jeans he’d been trying not to stare at. Held up something in her closed fist that rattled. And gave him her killer smile. “Well, keep ’em. Plenty more where those came from.”
So I’ll consider myself warned, he promised her silently.
A warning he was bound to ignore.
“CUZ, YOUR TASTE in dogs is headed south,” Adam declared, sauntering over to Gabe’s parked pickup. “Way south.” The big red hound gazing dolefully over its tail-gate took his insult for a compliment and waved his tail. “He looks like a melted bloodhound. A sawed-off, melted bloodhound.”
“Touch of basset in there somewhere,” Gabe agreed, stepping down from his truck. “All those bags and droops. Still, pretty is as pretty does. This is Watson. Belongs to a friend of mine.”
“Watson…” Adam presented his knuckles for the obligatory snuffle and sniff, then snatched them back as an enormous pink tongue took a swipe at him. “As in Sherlock’s shorter, dumber partner?”
“The very same.” Gabe nodded at the cab of his truck. “Care to eat in your place or mine?”
“Mine, unless you want drool all over your rear window.”
Gabe had suggested that they meet at a diner in Durango, but Adam had vetoed that, voting instead for this rendezvous