The Enemy's Daughter

When five hands went up, including Chuck and Barney’s, he had to laugh. “If Cookie can keep up with you guys, he must be some cook. I’ll be right back.”

Chuckling, he strode out, but his smile died the second the door to the dining hall closed behind him and he headed for the house thirty yards away. He was taking a chance, making a move when Lise and the cook were both there, but what other choice did he have? With the roundup starting in a matter of days, he was running out of time.

Another agent would, in all likelihood, have had a game plan in place before he even thought about stepping into the house, but Steve had never operated that way. He was a roll-with-the-punches, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants kind of guy, which was what made him a damn good agent. He didn’t act—he reacted—and nine times out of ten, his instincts were right on the money.

That didn’t mean the old ticker wasn’t pumping out the adrenaline as he approached the door. Every nerve ending was on alert, his muscles tense, though he liked to think he hid it well. His gait easy and relaxed, he opened the back door as if he had every right in the world to be there.

Not sure what to expect, he stepped inside and found himself in a small back hall. Stairs directly in front of him gave access to the upstairs, and to the right, a swinging door obviously led to the kitchen. Through the door, he could hear pots and pans rattling as Cookie sang to himself in an off-key baritone.

So he hadn’t heard him come in, he thought with a soundless sigh of relief. Now, where the hell was Lise?

Standing perfectly still, he cocked his head and thought he caught the faint strains of what sounded like the weather channel coming from a television upstairs. Pleased, he smiled slowly, his gray eyes glinting with satisfaction. So Cookie was tied up in the kitchen with the dishes, and Lise was upstairs. He couldn’t have planned it better if he’d tried. He couldn’t do a search now, not when either one of them could walk in on him at any second, but at least he could discover the floor plan. Then if he had to search the place in the middle of the night, he wouldn’t run into a lamp or something and wake the household.

The question was, which way did he go first? Hesitating, he stared down the hall, then to his left, and wondered which led to the study. He knew there was one—last night when Tuck had returned to the bunkhouse and joined the poker game, he’d mentioned that he’d been talking to Lise in the study. It was there, no doubt, that Simon had concealed records of his illegal activities.

Five minutes, Steve thought grimly. He didn’t care how well the bastard had hid them, give him five minutes and he felt sure he could find them.

Tossing a mental coin, he decided to explore through the door to the left, but before he could make a single move, he heard a noise at the top of the stairs. Freezing, all senses on alert, he glanced up, ready to explain that he was there for biscuits and didn’t know where the kitchen was. But the words never left his mouth. He took one look at Lise in her nightgown and robe, her waist-length auburn hair flowing past her shoulders, and his mind went completely blank.

Chapter 2

She had no right to look so captivating so early in the morning, he thought with a frown. After all, it wasn’t as if she’d been expecting him and had set out to knock the air out of his lungs. The gown and robe she wore covered her body like a sack and were hardly flattering. But still, he was somehow seduced. It was her hair, he told himself. A woman with hair like that could tempt the devil himself. And Lord knew, he was no saint. All too easily, he could picture her naked in his bed, her fiery locks spread out, giving him tempting views of her body as she smiled and held out her arms to him.

Then his gaze lifted to her face, and he realized it was a hell of a lot more than her hair that attracted him. She had an innocence about her, a total lack of awareness of her own beauty that he found incredibly appealing. With no effort whatsoever, she reached out and grabbed his attention just by breathing, and she didn’t even seem to know it.

But he did, and alarm bells were going off all over the place in his head. Watch it, a voice cautioned in his ear. Remember who the lady is and why you’re here. You may have to seduce her before it’s all said and done. If you don’t keep your head about you, you may end up losing it. This is Simon’s daughter, for God’s sake!

It took nothing more than that to pull him up short. Silently cursing himself for momentarily losing sight of his mission, he jerked himself to his surroundings—and his very precarious position. If she’d come down five seconds later, she’d have caught him boldly exploring the house.

He watched surprise widen her eyes, then suspicion, and didn’t give her time to wonder any longer just what the devil he was doing in her back hall. Turning on the charm to distract her, he grinned at her. “Well, if it isn’t my lucky day. Good morning, boss lady. Were you looking for me? All you had to do was whistle, and I’d have come running.”

Stopping dead in her tracks at the sight of him, Lise felt the physical stroke of his eyes and couldn’t, for the life of her, understand how he made her so breathless with just a look. Growing up around cowboys, she’d seen his kind all her life. She knew better than to take anything he said seriously.

Not, she reminded herself, that she had any personal experience with flirtatious cowboys. The ones she knew had never even noticed she was a woman, and that had always been fine with her. She knew bull when she heard it, and she’d always wondered how the women in town and at parties could fall for one load of manure after another.

Now she knew.

Caught in the trap of his boyish grin, her heart was fluttering like a schoolgirl’s, and that irritated her no end. Her delicately arched brows snapping together in a scowl, she growled, “Stuff it, Trace. What are you doing in my house?”

Not appearing the least bit offended, he held up the empty biscuit pan he’d brought with him from the bunkhouse and winked at her. “The boys want more biscuits. I’d rather have you.”

She should have laughed at his outrageousness and put him in his place—it would have been no more than he deserved. But there was something about the glint in his eye that made her all too conscious of the fact that she stood before him in nothing but her nightgown and robe. Her mouth suddenly as dry as the outback itself, all she could manage was a nod toward the door on his right. “The kitchen’s through there,” she said hoarsely. “Excuse me. I need to get dressed.”

Turning, she fled up the stairs, leaving Steve staring after her in a way that may have flattered her immensely if she’d only turned around and looked. She didn’t.

“Did I hear somebody say something about biscuits?”

Jerking his gaze from the top of the empty stairs, Steve turned to find a short, rail-thin Aboriginal watching him with small black eyes that missed little. Obviously, the man had seen Steve gazing after Lise like he’d never seen a female in her nightclothes before.

His smile rueful, Steve made no apologies for his behavior. “There’s something about a woman who can put me in my place that really turns me on,” he said honestly. Holding out his hand, he grinned. “Hi. I’m Steve Trace. You must be Cookie. Do you think you could give my mama your recipe for biscuits? I’ve never eaten anything like them in my life.”

He spoke nothing less than the truth, though he would have said the same thing if the biscuits had been as hard as rocks. In order to do his job, he needed to gain the confidence of everyone who could help him discover more information about Simon, and Cookie was right at the top of the list. A trusted servant who had his own room inside the house, he, unlike the cowboys, was in a position to know everything that was going on with Simon and his daughter.

He wasn’t, however, a pushover. If he was flattered by Steve’s compliment, he didn’t show it. He shook his hand, but only briefly. “I don’t give out my recipes,” he said curtly. “Come in the kitchen. I just took another pan of biscuits out of the oven.”

Not waiting to see if he followed, the other man pushed through the swinging door, leaving Steve silently swearing behind him. His last chance to look around now gone, he was left with no choice but to step into the kitchen.

Standing in front of the mirror, Lise adjusted the collar of her cotton blouse for the third time in thirty seconds, only to realize that she, Lise Meldrum, was primping! “Oh, God!” she whispered. Horrified, she swore and quickly dropped her hand, leaving her collar just the way it was.

“Quit being a ninny,” she scolded her image in the mirror. “The man’s playing with you and you’re falling for it. Look at yourself, for heaven’s sake! You’ve got lip gloss on!”

Wincing, she couldn’t deny it. She’d definitely taken pains with her appearance, but not because she was trying to look pretty for Steve Trace, she assured herself. She was going into town later for supplies for the roundup, that was all, and she didn’t want to look like a hoyden. What was wrong with that? It wasn’t as if she was dressing for Steve. She had work to do in the study that would keep her busy all morning, and the trip to town and back would take all afternoon. If she was lucky, she’d be able to avoid him not only for the rest of the day, but from now until they left for the roundup. After all, organizing a roundup took a lot of work, and even though she’d been doing it for years, it didn’t get any easier. Between now and the morning when horses and men were loaded into trucks to begin the trek across the bush to the wildest regions of the station, she’d work every night until midnight and be up at dawn. She had too much to do to waste a single second between now and then thinking about Steve.

Her chin set at a determined angle, she turned from the mirror, and hurried downstairs to the study. She had letters and e-mail to answer from charities and youth organizations she contributed to every year in her father’s name and that took all of her attentions. By the time she finished, it was noon and time to leave for town. Quickly dialing the bunkhouse she wasn’t surprised when Tuck answered. They spoke every day, rain or shine, about what needed to be done that day, and she didn’t know how she would have run the place without his help.

“I’m leaving for Roo Springs in five minutes,” she told him. “Send one of the boys over to go with me. I’ll need help loading everything.”

“Sure thing,” he said easily. “Oh, and don’t forget to add metal fence posts to the list,” he reminded her before she could hang up. “After that storm we had last winter, we’re bound to need them.”

“I forgot about that,” she said, quickly jotting a note at the end of the extensive list of supplies she had to buy. “At the rate we’re going, I may have to make two trips to town and back just to haul everything.”

“Take the diesel,” he suggested. “It holds more.”

“Good idea. As soon as I gas it up, I’ll be ready to go.”

Her mind on everything she had to do, she checked one last time with Cookie to make sure she had his final list, then grabbed the keys to the diesel truck from a hook by the back door. The second she stepped outside the blistering heat of the day hit her in the face.

And she loved it. She always had. She’d been born and raised there, and the heat and wind and grit was as much a part of her as the color of her eyes. Given the chance, she would have parked herself in the porch swing and relaxed just by watching the wind blow. As usual, however, she didn’t have the time. Tomorrow, she promised herself, and climbed into the truck to drive it over to the gas tank behind the barn.

She had a little over a quarter of a tank of gas, but it was over a hundred miles to town, and there was no place between there and home to buy anything. She had a cell phone, of course, if she got into trouble, but she could just hear Nate and Tuck and the rest of the boys, as she liked to call them, if she ran out of gas on the way to town. They’d never let her hear the end of it.

“I must be living right. Is that smile for me, boss lady?”

Caught up in her reflections, Lise jerked her attention to her surroundings to find Steve leaning against the pickup bed on the opposite side of the truck. Watching her pump gas, he had that little grin on his face that she swore he wore just to irritate the hell out of her.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

But even as she asked, she knew. He was the most expendable cowboy she had, the one who didn’t know his way around the ranch yet and hadn’t a clue how things were done in the bush. And no one had time to teach him. Which was why he was the perfect one to go with her to town. He was big and strong and could load the truck without breaking a sweat—and he could be gone for hours and would never be missed.

“And here I thought you’d be thrilled we were going to spend the day together,” he replied teasingly, flashing his dimples at her. “Now I’m hurt.”

A quick retort sprang to her tongue, but she bit it back, refusing to give him the satisfaction. No, she told herself grimly. She wasn’t going to let him push her buttons so easily. So she ground her teeth on the sassy words and said instead, “I don’t have time for your jocularity. Get in the truck, Trace. It’s time to go.”

“Whatever you say,” he said with an easy grin. “You’re the boss.”

It was, Lise decided, going to be a long day.

It wasn’t, however, until she slid behind the wheel and joined him in the cab of the truck that she realized just what she’d been set up for. The diesel wasn’t one of those little midget trucks that was only big enough for two small people. It was big and roomy and had a cab that could, if necessary, hold up to four regular-size adults.