The Rogue (18 page)

“You must have scraped it when you fell. We’ll have to clean it when we get back to camp,” Holt announced and moved a few inches away from her.

It was dangerous to play with fire. Yet like a moth, Diana was attracted to the flame, knowing her wings would be singed, but not caring. But the flame had turned cold. She suppressed the impulse to arouse its heat.

Tucking her legs beneath her, Diana started to rise. A wave of weakness buckled her knees and she had to clutch at Holt for support.

“I’m shakier than I realized.” She tried to laugh away her momentary collapse, make it light so she could ignore the firm strength of the arms that held her. “I’ll be all right as soon as I catch my breath.” She leaned against him, letting him take her weight.

“We’ll go back to camp.”

“We still haven’t caught the other horse,” Diana protested.

“We don’t stand much of a chance of finding it in the dark, not now. Besides, one fall is enough. The next time you might break your neck,” Holt told her roughly.

Her head was tipped back to better see his face. The brim of his hat shaded his eyes, but she could see the tautness of his lean jaw. A yearning shivered through her.

“Would you care, Holt?” she asked in an aching whisper.

Her question brought a long moment of utter stillness as he gazed down at her. Then his fingers were brushing granules of sand from her cheek and curling
into her hair. His head moved downward.

An inch from her lips, he growled, “What do you think?”

There was reluctance in his kiss, as if he resented the fact that he found her physically desirable. It mattered little, as his kiss provided fuel for the smoldering embers of their passion. White-hot flames melted them together. There was a searing, sweeping urgency to their embrace, an insatiable lust that transcended physical bounds.

It was a wild coming-together. Afterwards, Diana lay in his arms, awash from the primitive delights that had swept her high on a tidal wave of pure passion. Holt’s breathing was slowly returning to normal, but she could hear the uneven thud of his heart beneath her head. It excited her to know she had driven him as insanely mad with desire as she had been.

And it had been against his will, too. Diana wasn’t a fool. She knew that, because of Guy, Holt wished her to the ends of the earth, but the potent attraction between them had been more than either of them could deny.

Almost of its own volition, her hand glided slowly and smoothly across the flat muscles of his stomach to the hardened wall of his hair-roughened chest, a caress there hadn’t been time for before. She moved her head slightly in the cradle of his arm to watch the play of her fingers across his tanned flesh. Absently, Diana’s lips touched his collarbone. She inhaled the warm, male scent of him. It was like a drug, and she was becoming addicted to it.

At the light touch of her lips to his skin, the hand at her waist tightened its grip, relaxing after a second to lightly caress her hipbone. His free arm crossed over to gently massage her shoulder, not interfering with her hand as it explored his chest.

It was all the invitation Diana needed. Turning more fully into his arms, her mouth began to languourously taste the salty flavor of his skin. His hands fastened on her waist and shoulder to pull her up and above him,
the sensitive tips of her breasts brushing the cloud of dark hairs on his chest.

Gray eyes, dark like burnt silver, scanned her features. Their look held experience, most of it hard. Diana wanted to beg him not to speak and destroy the wonder of their lovemaking as his callous words had done the last time. His jaw was clenched in a forbidding line.

When he spoke, the words came out in a grudging mutter. “I want you again, Diana.”

“Holt.” She said his name in an aching sigh that echoed his wants.

Drawing her up more, his mouth sought the valley between her breasts, lazily and sensuously investigating its every shadow before slowly following the swelling curve of a breast to its darkly pink bud. Her fingers curled into his shoulders as Holt let his tongue leisurely explore it. With equally unhurried interest, he repeated the same attention to her other breast.

Easing her down, he made his way to the hollow of her throat and found the pleasure point along her neck that sent shivers of delight down her spine. He nibbled her ear lobe and with tasting kisses searched out each feature of her face, leaving her lips ’til last. Then he teased them until they trembled with the need to know the fullness of his kiss.

When he kissed her, a steady flame burned them, hotter and stronger than the fiery but brief combustion that marked their previous union. This time everything was in slow motion, as if they wanted to savor each precious second of the gratification of their desires. Words would have only spoiled the silent worshipping of their bodies.

The stars were crystal-bright in the night sky. The silence during their lovemaking had carried into its aftermath. It seemed all wrong now. Diana’s troubled eyes watched Holt’s dark shape moving around the horses. When he approached leading the horses, she made a project of tucking her blouse into her jeans.

“Your horse is lame,” Holt stated flatly. “You’ll have to ride Guy’s.”

His shuttered expression made Diana shiver. “Is it serious?” She walked to her horse, scratching its forehead.

“It doesn’t seem to be; looks like a pulled muscle in his left foreleg. There’s very little swelling and he’s willing to put weight on it, although he does favor it.” With the explanation made, Holt handed her the reins of the third horse. “Here. We’ll have to take it slow on the way back, so we’d better get started.”

There was no reference to the reason why they had lingered in the night. Holt seemed to be pretending that they had never made love. Diana wasn’t able to allude to it, either.

Mounting the third horse, Diana reined it behind the gamely limping horse Holt led. As Holt had said, its injury necessitated a slow pace. That allowed Diana too much time to think. Which wasn’t good. Her thoughts kept focusing on the lean figure riding in the
lead, a man as raw and untamed as the land they rode through.

Diana didn’t know how many long minutes had dragged by when a horse whinnied from the darkness to their left. Holt’s horse whickered an answer. They both reined in at the sound of trotting hooves approaching.

“It’s the pack horse,” murmured Diana when its shape became distinguishable.

“It must have gotten lonesome and come back for some company of his own kind,” Holt surmised. “Catch his rope.”

It shied briefly when Diana reached for the rope dangling from its halter, but didn’t attempt to elude her a second time as it nuzzled the neck of her horse. With both missing horses in tow, they started out again for the camp, a distant glow of light in the night’s darkness.

The light grew steadily brighter. Several hundred yards away, Diana could make out the two figures by the fire: one wizened and bent, sitting close to the fire; and the second tall and supple, standing and staring out into the night, impatience and tension in his posture. How could she have forgotten Guy?

Her gaze slid to Holt’s wide shoulders. He rode easily in the saddle. There was no squaring of the shoulders, no indication at all that he was mentally bracing himself for a meeting with his son. How long had they been gone? Diana wondered. Long enough, she was sure, to make Guy suspicious. She felt trapped by the tangled web of her emotions.

As they neared the camp, the sound of their horses brought Guy striding out to meet them, his expression a glowering mask of challenge. He grabbed at the bridle of Holt’s horse to stop his short of the picket line.

“Where have you been?” he demanded.

“Catching our horses.” Holt dismounted with an unconcern Diana envied.

“What took you so long?” Guy wasn’t satisfied with
the answer as his narrowed gaze studied Holt’s bland features.

“Yeah.” Rube echoed his curiosity, following Guy at a slower pace. “I practically had to hogtie him to keep him from goin’ out lookin’ for ya. If ya hadn’t come back just now, I probably would have.”

“Diana’s horse fell,” Holt said, as if that was the reason for the delay. At the stricken look of concern that flashed onto Guy’s face, Holt’s mouth quirked in a taunting line. “She wasn’t hurt,” he added before Guy could take the first step toward Diana, “only her horse. Do you want to take a look at that left foreleg, Rube, and see what you think?”

Handing the reins of the injured horse to Rube, Holt stepped back to take the pack horse’s lead from Diana. Guy was already at her side, reaching up to help her dismount. There was no way she could avoid his assistance.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” Diana heard the brittle quality in her voice. The very last thing she wanted to talk about was herself and what had happened out there. “But what about you? How are you?”

It was the wrong moment to hand the reins and lead rope to Holt. Diana caught the expression of contempt etched in his features and whitened under it.

“I’m okay, just a headache and a bruised shoulder.” Guy flexed his right arm and winced. “You look chilled. Better come over by the fire and warm up.”

Agreeing that she was cold, Diana allowed him to lead her to the campfire. Neither Holt nor Rube followed until the horses were unsaddled and bedded down for the night. Until then she had to listen to Guy relate the apprehensions he had felt when he learned she had gone after the horses with Holt. She also had to conceal the truth—that his alarm had been justified. The instant Holt and Rube joined them, he fell silent.

“Come here, Diana,” Holt ordered. She stiffened, aware of the accusing look Guy shot her, all his doubts and fears returning in a flash.

“Why?” she questioned warily.

“I want to look at your arm,” Holt reminded her dryly and held up the compact first-aid kit.

“Your arm?” Guy repeated. “What’s wrong with your arm? I thought you weren’t hurt.”

“I scraped my elbow.” Diana had forgotten all about it, so minor had it been. “It’s hardly serious.”

“But it should be cleaned and disinfected,” Holt insisted.

She couldn’t disabuse his common sense. She hesitated as he sat down in front of the fire, then walked the few steps to kneel beside him, offering her left elbow for his inspection. The impersonal touch of his fingers pushed aside the torn material of her blouse sleeve. Diana stared into the fire rather than at the dark head bent near her elbow.

Holt turned away to open the kit. “Slip your arm out of the sleeve.”

It was a logical request, Diana knew, since the torn fragments of her blouse would merely hamper his attempt to clean the abrasion. Guy made a muffled sound of protest, but Diana was already unbuttoning her blouse and pulling her left arm free of the sleeve. As a concession to Guy’s modesty, she pulled the loose side of her blouse across her front, as if Holt did not know her body more intimately than Guy did.

Holt took no notice of her action. With an efficiency of time and technique, he cleaned and applied disinfectant to the abrasion. Finished, Holt returned the first-aid kit to the saddlebag. Diana was left with the sensation that she had just been treated by a stranger.

“Thanks.” Some of his coolness was reflected in her voice.

As Diana was slipping her arm back into the sleeve, Rube remarked, “If you ask me, you was lucky to get by with just a scrape. You could get yourself bad hurt chasm’ horses out there in the dark. I didn’t give you a goddamned chance in hell of findin’ ’em after that stallion scattered ’em. You coulda knocked me over with a feather when I seed you leadin’ both of’em in.”

“We were lucky, I guess,” Holt conceded.

“Lucky?” Rube snorted. “We all was lucky. Lucky that all our horses didn’t take off for parts unknown. I thought we was gonna have a goddamned stampede on our hands when that stallion came chargin’ through here.”

“There was absolutely no warning,” Guy recalled. “The stallion caught us all unprepared. I can’t get over his cunning. He just came up to the barricade and knocked it down without any hesitation. Then he attacked us. When he came charging at me, I thought he was going to kill me. He even tried to scatter our horses so we couldn’t chase him.”

“Don’t be attributing intelligence to something that was purely instinct,” Holt said. “The stallion knew he had entered the arroyo, and the entrance was the only way out. He charged you because, like the barricade, you were in his way. Our horses merely panicked in the confusion. There was no attack.”

“There is somethin’ in what you say,” Rube admitted. “But it ain’t necessarily true that a wild stallion won’t attack, ’cause he will. You talk about hell on four feet. You saw what he did to the Major’s stud.”

“As powerful as that white stallion is, why hasn’t he challenged one of the mustang stallions for his herd? Why raid our ranch? It doesn’t make sense when there are wild mares in these hills,” Guy said.

“Well, now, there just might be an answer to that.” Rube crouched near the fire, rocking back on his heels. “When I was mustanging as a boy, some of the old-timers told me that some of the finest, well-built wild stallions they ever saw ran without mares. They reckoned as how these rogue stallions figured they was too good for ordinary mares. Could be that’s how this white stallion figured it, too, until he got him an eyeful of the Major’s blooded mares. An’ there ain’t no wild stallion that won’t do a bit of stealin’ of domestic stock if’n he gets the chance.”

“That’s quite a theory,” Holt said with mocking skepticism.

“I never said it was a fact,” Rube defended. “But that’s what they told me. Could be just a tall tale, for all I know. I just passed it on for whatever it was worth. I never claimed it was gospel.”

“True or false, the fact remains we’re going after the mares at daybreak. There’s been enough talk and excitement for one night.” Holt said. “It’s time we tried to get some sleep.”

No one argued with his suggestion, least of all Diana. The saddles were positioned around the fire as headrests. Diana lay down as close to the radiating warmth as possible, draping the stiff and coarse saddle blanket over her shoulders. She exchanged good nights with Guy and Rube, but offered none to Holt when he remained silent.