LITMIR.BIZ

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Rachel most. She had persuaded Luke to help her carry the trunk that contained her painting supplies into some rocks above the wash, where people passing on the road would not see it, but everything else remained stacked near the mired buggy, at the mercy of weather and thieves. Rachel could only hope it would be safe until she could send someone to bring everything safely back to the ranch.

      Her arms tightened around the sheep man’s ribs as the horse swerved to avoid a badger hole. At the sudden pressure, Luke’s sinewy body went taut with resistance. In the hour they had been riding together, he had scarcely linked one syllable with another. His silence told her in no uncertain terms that he was not pleased to have her along. Well, fine. She wasn’t exactly happy to be here, herself. By rights she should be at home with her family, sitting down to a mouth-watering banquet prepared by Chang, the Tolliver ranch’s aging cook who was a true artist in the kitchen. When she closed her eyes, Rachel could almost taste the garlic-seasoned roast beef, the mashed potatoes dripping with gravy, the carrots drenched in herbed butter and the flakiest buttermilk biscuits this side of heaven. A lusty growl quivered in the pit of her stomach. She willed herself to ignore the unladylike sound. Why should she care whether Luke had heard? His opinion of her was already so low that nothing she did could make him think any worse of her!

      Hungry as she was, Rachel knew better than to ask Luke when they were going to stop and eat. The wretched man did not appear to have brought any food with him; and in any case, she was not about to give him the satisfaction of hearing her complain—not about her empty belly or the chill of the spring wind through her wet clothes or the darts of pain that lanced her shoulder with every bounce of the trotting horse. The shoulder did not seem to be broken—if it were, she knew she would be in agony. But it hurt enough to tell her that something was wrong.

      Struggling to ignore her discomfort, Rachel gazed across the scrub-dotted foothills, toward the place where the land sloped downward to end in a sheer cliff that dropped sixty feet to the prairie below. Years ago, her father had told her, the Cheyenne and Sioux had used this place, and others like it, for driving buffalo. It had been a brutally efficient means of hunting. The warriors had only to surround a herd, stampede the terrified animals over the cliff and butcher their broken bodies at the bottom. The meat and hides from such a slaughter could supply a band for an entire season.

      The buffalo were gone now, and the children of the hunters had long since been pushed onto reservations. But now, as her eyes traced the line of the cliff, Rachel could almost see the hurtling bodies, hear the death shrieks and smell the stench of fear and blood. With a shudder, she turned her gaze away. This was not a good day for such black thoughts. Not when she had problems of her own to deal with.

      With the storm rolling eastward across the prairie, the sky above the Big Horns had begun to clear. Fingers of light from the slanting, late-afternoon sun brushed the snowy peaks with a golden radiance, as if heaven itself lay just beyond the thinning veil of clouds, and all a mortal needed to do was reach out and touch it.

      Heaven was far beyond her reach today, Rachel mused wryly. With the buggy wrecked, her belongings scattered, her hair and clothes a sodden mess and this dark, brooding sheep man holding her a virtual prisoner, her current predicament seemed more like the place that was heaven’s opposite.

      But it was no use crying over spilled milk, that’s what her mother would say. Time was too valuable to waste fretting over what could no longer be helped.

      Rachel missed her lively, practical mother. She missed her father’s quiet strength and the high-spirited antics of the twin brothers she adored. She wanted desperately to go home. But the stubborn, irascible stranger who guided the horse had made it clear that his precious sheep came first. She would not be reunited with her family until the miserable creatures were safely in the shearing pens on his own small ranch.

      The sheep, about three hundred head of them not counting the lambs, spread over the landscape like a plague of ravenous gray-white caterpillars. Rachel had never cared for the dull-witted creatures. True, the baby lambs were cute and lively, but they soon grew up to be brainless eating machines that stripped the grass from every inch of open range they crossed. Rachel despised the sight of them, the sound of them, the sour, dusty smell of them.

      The dogs, however, were a different matter.

      She watched in fascination as the two border collies darted among the sheep, nipping at the flanks of the stragglers, keeping the whole herd moving along together. Sometimes Luke spoke to them in a low voice or commanded them with simple hand gestures. For the most part, however, the dogs seemed to know exactly what they were doing and needed no direction. Rachel had always liked dogs, and these two alert, intelligent animals were as fine a pair as she had ever seen.

      “Your dogs are magnificent,” she said, watching the darker of the two chase a straying lamb back toward its mother. “Did you train them yourself?”

      “Shep and Mick came with the sheep when I bought them,” Luke said tersely. “I was the one who had to be trained.”

      It was a civil enough answer, but there was a dark undertone in Luke’s voice, a hidden tension in his muscular body, as if something were lurking below the surface of everything he said and did. She had held a gun on him, Rachel reminded herself. She had treated Luke Vincente with as much contempt as he had treated her. But there was more at work here, she sensed, than simple animosity. There were things she didn’t know, things she needed to understand for her own safety.

      Rachel held her tongue for a time, hoping Luke would volunteer more. But when he did not speak again, her impatience got the better of her.

      “I’ve been at school in Philadelphia for the past three years,” she said. “You and your sheep certainly weren’t around before I left.”

      He sighed, as if resigning himself to a conversation he did not want to have. “I came here two years ago. My property butts onto the northwest corner of your family’s ranch, where those reddish foothills jut out onto the prairie.”

      “In that case, I’m surprised my father hasn’t tried to buy you out,” Rachel said. “At a fair price, of course.”

      Luke shrugged. “He has. Not in person, but through that little weasel of a land agent who comes sniffing around my place every few months.”

      “Mr. Connell is a good man,” Rachel said. “My father has been dealing with him for years, and he’s never cheated us out of a penny…even though he does look a bit like a weasel.” She suppressed an impish smile. “What did you tell him when he made an offer on your land?”

      “That I wouldn’t sell. Not even for a fair price.”

      The edge in his reply was not lost on Rachel. “But why not?” she demanded. “You could run sheep in Nevada, or Colorado, or New Mexico, and nobody would care a fig! Why set up a sheep ranch smack in the middle of cattle country, where three-quarters of the people you meet are going to hate you?”

      “Maybe because there’s no law that says I can’t.” He spoke in a flat voice that defied her to argue with him. “Do you play poker, Miss Rachel Tolliver?”

      “Some.”

      “I won my land in a poker game while you were probably still in pigtails,” he said. “Some rough years came and went before I was able to live on it. But it was my own piece of the earth. Whatever happened to me, it was always there, like a beacon to get me through the bad times.”

      Rachel wondered about those bad times, but she knew better than to ask too many personal questions. Luke Vincente, she sensed, was a very private man who would not show his scars to unsympathetic eyes.

      How old was he? she found herself wondering. He had the flat-bellied, lean-hipped body of a man in his early thirties and his hair carried only a light touch of silver. But his creased, windburned face had a hard set to it, as if his eyes had seen more than his mind wanted to remember.

      “I understand how you must feel about the land,” she said.

      “Do you?” he asked, clearly implying that Rachel would not know what it was like to get anything the hard way. She

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