A Warrior's Vow

She was aware that as far as Daggert was concerned, she’d foisted herself into the mission, and she could put up or shut up.

This tracker extraordinaire was after only one thing, apparently: finding little Enrique. When they’d set out on this incredible trek, Daggert’s single-minded focus on the mission had made her feel grateful that she’d contracted the right man for the job. As the head of her own financial corporation, she knew the value of finding the best person to do each specific task.

Daggert’s resistance to her accompanying him had vaguely pleased her, for she had considered his reluctance might indicate a dedication to his task. That she’d been unwilling to go along with his edicts revealed her own determination to find the child.

But now, five hours later, she’d decided the man wasn’t dedicated, he was an unadulterated sadist.

“I hate this,” she muttered to her horse’s twitching ears. “I hate New Mexico. I hate horses. And right now, I hate little Enrique for running away. For that matter, I hate sunshine, dry grass, open fricking terrain, and most of all, I hate, positively hate James Daggert.”

Her horse, a beast with the unlikely name of Lulubelle, whickered.

Stone, James Daggert’s horse, gave a whinny in response.

Daggert reined in his horse and let loose an earsplitting whistle.

Lulubelle took another couple of steps and stopped abruptly, still some fifteen feet behind Stone.

Leeza rocked in the saddle, one half a gasp away from sliding to the ground in a puddle of defeat. Pride alone kept her on the horse. The evil tracker she’d hired to search for Enrique would probably leave her lying facedown in the dust if she did fall off.

“I’ll show him,” she growled to the equally evil beast she straddled. “If he thinks Leeza Nelson will ever admit defeat, he’s got another think coming.”

The horse didn’t answer aside from stomping one huge hoof.

On the northern horizon, a brown blur raced toward the man. The ball of brown soon proved to be James Daggert’s dog, a dark setter with liquid brown eyes, named Sancho. Leeza was sure James Daggert had never had a nodding acquaintance with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, for though he would probably fit some gothic notion of a romantic figure, he was not one to tilt at windmills in his lady’s name. A dreamer he was not.

The sable-coated dog came to a shuddering stop and gazed up at his master with slavish adoration. His tongue lolled from his grinning mouth and his eyes never wavered from the man sitting ramrod straight in his saddle.

The tracker tossed something down that the gorgeous animal caught in midair, his tail beating a breeze above the dry New Mexico grasses. He gave a sharp bark.

Incredibly, the man murmured something to the dog. Sancho wagged his tail even harder. It was the first time Leeza had heard Daggert’s voice since starting out on their search for Enrique shortly after nine o’clock that morning. The deep, mellifluous, curiously gentle tone didn’t match the hard visage of the man. And yet it did—at least with the setter and the monstrously large horse, Stone.

“Oh, I get it,” she snapped. “You’ll talk to your horse and your dog but not to me. And if you say the dog has more sense, I’ll brain you.”

James Daggert didn’t say anything.

Big surprise.

Mentally, Leeza shot an arrow of pure fury directly between his shoulder blades. He didn’t shift his muscled back one iota.

He gave a flick of his hand and his dog shot off toward the far horizon.

Leeza urged Lulubelle ahead to flank Stone, determined to make the man speak to her. She’d tried almost everything else, so this time she turned a glittering smile in his direction, forcing herself to be pleasant, to charm the man into talking to her. “Does your dog have Enrique’s scent?”

Daggert’s eyes turned in her direction and he gave her an unreadable look before shifting his gaze back to the desert ahead of them. He could have been a rock carving of an Indian warrior, and she suspected his heritage was indeed Native American. It showed in his deeply tanned face, his long black hair. But the granite-hard expression chiseled on those sharp features came from the unapproachable man himself. Under that long-sleeved cotton shirt his shoulders seemed like chunks of boulders, his back as straight as a cliff face.

His jet-black hair wasn’t covered by a cowboy hat, and he’d tied it back in a ponytail held by a strip of leather. Despite the heat of the noon sun, James Daggert seemed oblivious to its effects, as if he were truly carved of stone.

Then, as though he’d known she was still gaping at him, he turned his head to look at her directly. The only thing that spoke of any Caucasian heritage could be found in his eyes. Tawny, almost amber colored, they glittered like gemstones and were as enigmatic and alluring.

He didn’t appear angry or irritated. But the shock of meeting his unusual eyes and finding that indecipherable expression turned on her made Leeza’s knees literally quake. A shaft of purely visceral heat shot through her. For a woman used to reading all types of people quickly, with assurance and uncanny accuracy, she found herself wholly out of her depth.

He sees through me, she thought with a shiver of true fear.

She forced her back to straighten a little and summoned a small smile. Be friendly to the man. You need him. “Have you had the dog long?”

He said nothing. His gaze shifted from her eyes to her mouth, lingered there for a moment, then moved slowly back up again. For some reason, the look made that shaft of heat spread.

If she hadn’t heard him speaking English very clearly at the ranch earlier, she might have assumed the man didn’t speak her language. And she then thought, with some shock, that perhaps she didn’t speak his—the language of tracking, of searching for a missing person.

Years ago, Leeza had sworn she wouldn’t squirm around any man, and she wasn’t about to make an exception for this tracker. “A Gorden setter, right?”

Leeza registered the fact that Daggert deliberately turned his gaze away from her and urged Stone to a brisk walk.

Gritting her teeth, she did the same.

“He’s a remarkable dog,” she stated stubbornly.

James Daggert paid her less attention than he would have a flea on that Hanta-virus-bearing mouse.

“The children back at Rancho Milagro have yellow Labrador mixes,” she said. “Enrique loves them.”

Daggert didn’t so much as glance in her direction.

“You know, you don’t have to talk to me. I couldn’t care less, in fact,” she lied. “But I know little Enrique. I could probably tell you a thing or two that might help us find him. Like where he might be going? However, you’re the great tracker genius, so I’ll concede the issue.

“I’m not even complaining about having to sit on this wildly uncomfortable western-style saddle you made the hands at the ranch put on this horse, despite the fact that I’m used to riding English. But I’ll tell you what I really don’t get—”

He leaned forward suddenly and his horse broke into a hard gallop. Within seconds, he was at least a football field’s length ahead of her.

She sighed. “What I don’t get is why you make my knees turn to water just looking at you.”

Her horse nickered, as if laughing at her.

Seeing the shadows lengthen across the desert and knowing the night would soon plummet them into darkness, Daggert pulled back on Stone’s reins and waited for the woman to catch up to him.

She did, but she didn’t stop as her horse came abreast his. Her shoulders were slumped and her head drooped. Her eyes were open but glassy with exhaustion. Her lips moved, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. The eager horse and spent woman moved on past him.

He urged Stone forward and grabbed hold of her slackened reins. If her horse had seen a snake or had stumbled even once, she’d have tumbled off. As it was, with his stopping the horse, she nearly slid down, anyway.

He swore beneath his breath and swiftly dismounted. He dropped Stone’s reins to the ground, knowing the big horse wouldn’t move so much as a step away. Keeping hold of her horse’s reins, he circled the mare and reached up for Leeza Nelson.

She was still muttering, and, closer to her now, he could hear her strangely lifeless recitation of facts about her missing charge, the boy he’d been hired to find. “He likes to draw. He likes to swim. He likes pancakes. He likes puppies. He likes practical jokes. He likes to draw. He likes to swim. He likes…”

She was leaning forward over the saddle horn, still rocking slightly, muttering in a strange rhythm, seemingly unaware that they’d stopped. Her beautiful face was pasty and her knuckles even whiter.

Without a word, Daggert wrapped her horse’s reins around his wrist and dislodged her nerveless feet from the stirrups she’d had the men at the ranch raise a couple of inches so that she could pretend she was riding English style. She issued a small sound either of protest or of pain as her feet dangled free and blood rushed to them.

“Come on down now,” he said, holding up his hands to her.