Rachel Phillips Terhune came instantly alert.
She'd been riding since first light. Now she was near the fork of turning back or spending the night in the open. Only it was hard to quit when she hadn't sighted as much as a calf.
But considering her horse’s interest in something on the far side of this rise, maybe her luck was about to change. Before they crested the rise, she halted, listening.
Nothing.
The hair on the back of her arms and neck prickled.
She pulled her rifle from the holder Shag had added to her saddle. Dandy eased, surefooted, through thin underbrush between cottonwood and willow. With her senses strained for a rustle that did not come, she almost missed the sign.
Remnants of a small fire, scattered. One horse. Scuff marks of boots on the hard earth.
She examined the ground from Dandy's back. Before he'd died, Pa had taught her to read sign. There was evidence of only a small fire, enough to heat coffee, maybe cook a meal. Likely someone drifting through. She had no problem with that. As long as they didn't take her cattle, her horses or any more of her men.
Rachel's precise reining guided Dandy through the brush so quietly their progress couldn’t be separated from nature’s mutters. But when they cleared the trees' cover where the creek detoured into a shaded pond, she realized someone had heard her coming.
Two yards into the pond, a man crouched so the water hit him just below the armpits. His face was to her, but his body was sideways, narrowing the target. His extended arm paralleled the water, along with the revolver aimed straight at her. That didn't concern her overly much, since she had a rifle aimed at him.
They stared at each other. Neither moving. Neither saying anything. She'd never seen him before. She'd have remembered.
The man had dark hair. Black even, but that might be from the water that molded it to his head and the back of his neck. His skin was tanned. Not just his face and neck and lower arms, but parts generally covered by a shirt. His face was composed of unrevealing angles--squared off jaw, slash of unsmiling mouth, straight, bold nose. The only hint of emotion came from the V of dark brows. A frown of concentration, she decided. Deadly concentration. The gleam of cold, fierce eyes added to her conviction that if it came to shooting, he'd do his damnedest to make his revolver stand up to her rifle.
She squelched a shiver. Fear leaves no room for thinking, Pa used to say. It seemed a long time, but it probably wasn’t, before the stranger bent his elbow, pointing his revolver skyward.
Rachel eased out a slow breath. She would tell this man what hospitality to expect on Circle T land and what would not be tolerated. She'd done that a dozen, two dozen times.
No words came. She just kept looking.
The V of the stranger’s brows deepened, the gleam of dark eyes glinting out at her like a reflection of sunlight on moving water.
And when he slowly stood, she still kept looking.
As the water sluiced from his broad chest, down his back, along his lean flanks and the top of his thighs.... As he slowly turned and faced her front on... Naked.
His nakedness struck her like the jolt of whiskey her father had administered when she'd broken her arm. Like the whiskey, it hit hard and hot, deep in her gut, then flushed warmth and tingles through her body.
But she wasn't thirteen now. She was twice thirteen. A woman, married and widowed. A woman surrounded by men near all her life, and who’d run this ranch four years. A woman who should be well past the sight of a naked man sending tingles and warmth through her. Reaching to parts of her body she mostly ignored and never expected to tingle. Only, she realized with a sort of dazed fascination, she'd never seen a man full naked before.
Stripped of jacket and vest, sure. Down to their undergarments now and then. But even those times Edward had come to her bed to exercise a husband's rights, it had been in the dark, and with the scratch of fabric covering his stout, hairy body. So even if she'd kept her eyes open, she'd have seen nothing.
And if she had seen anything, instinct told her it would not have been this. Water and sunlight gilded the man's tanned skin to bronze, like one of those statues in her mother’s prized picturebooks. Rachel could see on the stranger the same long rope of muscle in shoulders and arms, the same tapering shape of chest, the same curved power of thighs.
But there was a definite difference from those pictures.
Rachel Phillips Terhune might never have seen a man full naked before, but she had been watching animals reproduce as long as she'd lived, and she knew the function of this change. This stranger was reacting the way Warrior reacted to a mare in season.
Unlike the mares, who most often sidled and pranced in nervous response, she sat rock still, watching the man's body change.
Get out of here! Run away! Shoot him!
Frenetic orders from a horrified internal voice ricocheted inside her head without bestirring a single muscle.
For God's sake, at least close your eyes!
Her eyes stayed wide. But the reality of what she saw began to blend and mix with images from a corner of her mind she'd never encountered before. Images of the man and her. Of bodies and sensations. Of touches and kisses. Of heat and....
Her gaze jerked to the stranger's face, and she saw her imaginings reflected in midnight eyes.
Her trance shattered like a skin of ice under a hoof.
She wheeled Dandy and rode like hell.
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