The Rogue

by Janet Dailey

  Her dazed senses were aware of pounding hooves thundering past, but it took a full second longer before she realized the force that held her down was Holt. Flat on her stomach, tasting what seemed like a mouthful of gritty soil, Diana was conscious of his hard body spread protectively on top of her. By then the horses had stampeded by, but the sensation of danger still thudded in her ears.

  “Are you all right?” Holt levered himself off.

  Spitting out the grit from her mouth between gulps of air, Diana managed a breathy, “Yes.”

  Holt didn’t wait to see whether her answer was merely brave words or the truth. With a muffled curse, he was pushing to his feet.

  “The horses,” he said in a muttering explanation.

  As she rolled onto her back, Diana thought at first that he was referring to the stallion and mares until she heard the plunging, panicked sounds coming from the picket line. It was their own horses being stampeded into flight by the wild ones. The prospect of being afoot this far from the ranch drove Diana to her feet and sent her running after Holt.

  The pack horse was already racing into the night. A second was pulling at its knotted reins until the leather snapped, unable to take the strain. As it whirled to follow the other fleeing horses, Holt stood in its path, waving his arms to turn it back. Diana hurried to the three that were still tied, rearing and plunging in panic, and tried to calm them.

  “Whoa, boy, easy now.” Diana’s firm, soothing voice talked to the dodging horse.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Diana saw him grab for the reins as the horse bolted past him, and miss. The remaining horses were beginning to respond to her quieting words, still snorting and tossing their heads, eyes rolling, but no longer tugging at the reins. Holt moved swiftly but smoothly to the nearest horse, untying the reins.

  “You aren’t going after them in the dark?” Diana protested.

  “I might catch them.” Holt swung into the saddle. “They’ll be halfway back to the ranch by morning.” He didn’t immediately set out after their fleeing mounts, but reined the excited and prancing horse to the edge of the camp circle. Diana knew one rider could only hope to catch one horse, but two riders might possibly bring back both. Untying the reins of her gelding, she ducked under the picket line and mounted.

  “How’s Guy?” Holt called out.

  On the other side of the fire, Diana saw Rube bending over Guy, who was sitting up, his head cradled in his hands. She had forgotten all about the stallion knocking him to the side when it broke out of the arroyo.

  “He got his bell rung, but he’ll be all right,” Rube answered, turning to see Holt astride his horse. “Where the hell do you think you’re goin’?”

  “Two of our horses got loose.”

  “You ain’t goin’ after ’em now? You’ll break your goddamned neck!”

  There was more, but Holt was already turning his horse around and sending it bounding into the night shadows, with Diana right behind him. At the sound of hooves pounding after him, Holt glanced over his shoulder.

  Before his grim look could be put into words, Diana shouted determinedly, “I’m coming with you! You need me!” She was secure in the knowledge he couldn’t force her back to camp without turning back himself.

  Into the night they raced. The sliver of moon cast insufficient light to illuminate the ground. Blindly they galloped, only a sixth sense telling the horses of the footing beneath them. It was a reckless, heart-stopping ride, with Diana clinging to the saddle, never knowing whether the next stride would leap over an obstacle or descend a hollow.

  A black silhouette of a racing horse crested a rise ahead of them, head held to the side to keep from tangling its feet in the trailing reins. Their first objective had been sighted. Holt whipped his horse with the reins and Diana did the same. The escaping mount’s headlong flight had been reduced to a steady gallop. Within minutes, they overtook it.

  From her tomboy years, Diana knew the routine by heart. They approached on either side of the horse, forcing it to run straight rather than swerve away from its captors. Holt was on the side nearest the trailing reins. She saw him lean in the saddle to grab for them.

  A split-second later, her horse was falling and Diana was somersaulting over its head into the emptiness of night. A stifled cry of surprise was caught in her throat. She flew through the air for what seemed an eternity before hitting the ground, but it all happened in the blink of an eye.

  The jolting impact knocked the wind from her. Diana lay on the ground, the pain in her chest too intense for her to move. She had fallen free of her horse, which was thrashing a few feet away from her. It was rising to its feet shaking like a dog as she took the first painful gasp for air.

  The pounding hooves of more than one horse vibrated the ground beneath her. “Diana!” Holt called out to her.

  “Over here.” It was a weak, breathy answer.

  Yet somehow he managed to hear it. Within seconds he was kneeling beside her, a dark shadow looming over her. “Are you all right?”

  Diana had already tested the mobility of her limbs and could answer truthfully, “Nothing is broken. I just had the wind knocked out of me, that’s all. You caught the horse,” she observed shakily.

  “Yes,” Holt said in a terse response that indicated it was unimportant. “What happened?”

  “My horse fell,” she said, stating the obvious. She reached out with her hands. “Help me up.”

  As he pulled her into a sitting position, Diana gasped at the stinging pain in her left elbow. She reached to explore the cause and her fingers came away wet and sticky.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I hurt my elbow when I fell.”

  “Let me see.” When he reached to turn her elbow toward the faint moonlight, his forearm brushed against the pointed tips of her breasts. Her flesh tingled at the contact. His arm hovered there a fraction of a second longer than necessary, enough to make Diana aware that he was conscious of the intimacy.

  “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 breathin
g 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.

  Chapter X

  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.”