More Than A Cowboy

“Really.”

He was so lean and beautifully put together, that his size came as a shock. When he stopped before her, she had to tip her head back to meet his gaze. Eyes blue as a mountain midnight and dancing with laughter. Somehow she knew now he’d never hurt her. Still, that laughter made him… Dangerous. As instinct whispered, she stooped for her gun.

Their heads nearly cracked as he crouched along with her. “Allow me, cher.”

Like she had a choice?

When they rose again, the rifle was firmly in his possession. “Nice piece.” He cracked it open, removed its bullets, closed it and gravely handed it over. “Bit heavy for beaver, isn’t it?”

“I study beaver. I don’t shoot them.” And wherever he’d come from—there was a touch of the deep South in his low, lazy voice—it was someplace where they’d failed to teach him that it was rude to confiscate a woman’s bullets. Patronizing, if not downright paranoid.

“Ah. And do you have a name?”

She’d liked him grizzly-bear grouchy more than she liked him laughing at her. “I do,” Tess agreed airily, then glanced around for her kit, leaned down to collect it. When she straightened, she found her snub had bounced right off him. His smile had only deepened.

The man had a smile to give a woman pause. A lush bottom lip that was finely carved and…mobile. The upper was severe, yet oddly sensitive, as if he hardened it more in pain than cruelty. His angular jaw was blue-black with beard shadow; he hadn’t shaved this morning. And, as Tess noted this, the nape of her neck prickled, as if those bristles brushed deliberately, deliciously across it. A hot wave washed up her thighs.

She tossed her head and turned aside, cheeks warming, too. Get a grip, girl! So she hadn’t had a serious relationship—any sort of relationship—for almost a year now; that didn’t mean she had to show her lack here. Not to a man who was bound to be trouble.

Trouble in more ways than the usual if he turned uphill, she realized belatedly. Thirty yards of bushwhacking would bring him to Zelda’s cage.

A more logical course was to follow the path along the stream, she told herself. She’d set him an example, heading west along its bank. Once out of sight, she could cut up through the new growth to where she’d picketed her horses. Swinging back to face him, she retreated in a casual backward drift while she asked, “And what are you doing up here?”

He had no pack or bedroll, and only an idiot would hike the San Juans this time of year without them. But though he might be irritatingly self-assured, this was no fool.

It was too early for line-camp men. Besides which, cowboys never traveled on foot. So that left—precisely what?

“Spent the night at Sumner cabin.” His weight shifted as if he had half-decided to follow her.

“Oh. So you know Kaley and Tripp?” Sumner cabin had belonged to Kaley Cotter’s spread, the Circle C. Then a few years back she’d married her neighbor, rancher Tripp McGraw. Their combined grazing allotments stretched to the south and east of this spot. If the McGraws vouched for this man, then he couldn’t be quite a rogue, no matter what he seemed to be.

“I do.” And she knew them, too, Adam realized with satisfaction as he changed his mind about following her. That meant when he described his rifle-toting babe to Tripp McGraw, he’d learn her name. How to find her.

Because whatever she thought—and damned if she didn’t look relieved as she murmured a noncommittal, “Ah,” then flipped him a jaunty wave and turned off to the west—this wasn’t the end of their acquaintance.

This was only the beginning.

Still, missing her already, he couldn’t resist calling after her, “Hey!” Beautiful!

She swung back around, her dark brows tipped up like a crow’s wings in flight.

“Your bullets, you forgot them.”

“Oh…yeah.” She dug into a pocket of those snug jeans he’d been trying not to stare at. Held up something in her closed fist that rattled. And gave him her killer smile. “Well, keep ’em. Plenty more where those came from.”

So I’ll consider myself warned, he promised her silently.

A warning he was bound to ignore.

“CUZ, YOUR TASTE in dogs is headed south,” Adam declared, sauntering over to Gabe’s parked pickup. “Way south.” The big red hound gazing dolefully over its tail-gate took his insult for a compliment and waved his tail. “He looks like a melted bloodhound. A sawed-off, melted bloodhound.”

“Touch of basset in there somewhere,” Gabe agreed, stepping down from his truck. “All those bags and droops. Still, pretty is as pretty does. This is Watson. Belongs to a friend of mine.”

“Watson…” Adam presented his knuckles for the obligatory snuffle and sniff, then snatched them back as an enormous pink tongue took a swipe at him. “As in Sherlock’s shorter, dumber partner?”

“The very same.” Gabe nodded at the cab of his truck. “Care to eat in your place or mine?”

“Mine, unless you want drool all over your rear window.”

Gabe had suggested that they meet at a diner in Durango, but Adam had vetoed that, voting instead for this rendezvous at a scenic overlook above the city. Maybe it wasn’t as comfortable, but when working undercover, a wise man lived his role from the get-go. A fool broke cover unnecessarily—and sometimes didn’t live long enough to regret it.

Not that Adam was expecting that level of trouble here in sleepy southwestern Colorado. Whoever he was hunting was a catkiller, not a mankiller. But all the same, why take a chance on someone linking him to a top biologist with the Division of Wildlife? This part of the state was enormous in size, but not so blessed with population. Strangers were noticed.

So from now till hunt’s end, he’d be Adam Dubois, freebooter and line-camp man, just a smiling Cajun cowboy, drifting through life. Not a care in the world. No worry to anybody.

“You babysitting?” he inquired in the truck, while he traded one of the cold Coronas he’d brought for a roast beef sandwich.

“Nope. Watson’s for you. He’s on loan from a friend in Montana, a biologist with the Forest Service. That hound’s the best lynx tracker in the lower forty-eight.”

“No.” Adam frowned at the dog in the truck ahead. With his chin propped on the tailgate, the brute gazed at them pitifully. His woebegone face was wrinkled in concentration, as if he were trying to levitate a sandwich and call it home. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Adam had had a dog once upon a time. A gangly, knock-kneed yellow mutt he’d found on the street. He’d been a grab-bag of every breed you could name, but brave? Damn, but that dog had been gutsy, and with a great sense of humor to boot. Johnny, he’d named him. Johnny-Be-Good. They’d shared the same bed from the day he’d found Johnny to the day the social workers had dragged Adam off to his first foster home.

They’d promised they’d give him his pet back in a week or so, but that had all been a soothing lie. By the time Adam had realized this and gone looking for his friend, hunting through every pound in New Orleans a thirteen-year-old could find, the dog was…gone. He blinked his eyes rapidly in the waning light and scowled. “Last thing I need up there is a chow hound.”

Last thing he needed was a dog, or anybody else, tripping up his heart. That was one lesson he’d learned and learned very well. First with his dad, then his mom, then Johnny, then most lately with Alice. Alone was the safe way—the only way—to travel.

“Besides,” he continued into Gabe’s disapproving silence, “the only dogs that are welcome on the summer range are working dogs. Cattle dogs. Any mutt that runs the cows is sure to be shot.”

“He minds his manners. Heels, comes, sits and all the usual. When Watson isn’t eating or tracking, he’s sleeping, according to Tracy. He wouldn’t get in your way.”

“He’d take up half the cabin I’ll be living in, and five’ll get you ten he snores. No thanks.”

His cousin shrugged and bit into his sandwich. Some hundred miles to their west, the sun was a blood orange, squashing itself past a jagged line of purple mountains. A splash of fiery juice, then it squeezed on down. The ruddy light cooled instantly to blue. Down in the valley, the city twinkled.

“It’s a pretty big area you’ll be patrolling,” Gabe observed mildly, at last. “The lynx are spread out over some two thousand square miles, and no telling which one of them our guy’ll decide to stalk next. Reckon it’d be like hunting for an ant in a sandpile, if you don’t know where to look. At least Watson could point out the cats, then you’d take it from there.”

Adam shrugged and sipped his beer. The dog drooled in the twilight. “Think he’s still operating out there?” Adam asked finally, to break the edgy silence.

“’Fraid so. We’re down to forty-four animals. Collar YK99M3, a male from our original batch, stopped signaling last week. Last heard from ten miles north of Creede.” Gabe sighed and reached for the rolled map he’d brought from his truck. Unscrolling it across the dash, he tapped an inked-in asterisk with a tiny notation beside it. “He vanished right there. And that one really hurt. He was one of the lynx I flew up to the Yukon to collect and bring back here. A big healthy two-year-old with a white bib on his chest like a housecat, and paws like catcher’s mitts. Freed him myself. He looked so…right…floating off into the woods, the day we let him go. Home and free.”

Gabe rubbed a hand across his face. “Dang it to hell! How anybody could bring something that pretty down… Why they’d ever want to…”

Adam grunted his sympathy. That was something a homicide cop often wondered, seeing the aftermath of killings in the city. The good and the beautiful willfully smashed. Ruthlessly brushed aside. Such a waste, such a shame. Any time you could stop it, you felt a little bit better, a little bit bigger. Like you’d done your part, fighting the good fight. Making the world safer for the fragile things that mattered.

Taking the map from his cousin, he spread it over the steering wheel and squinted in the dusk. Checked its mileage scale, then grimaced. Damn, but the West was big! Distance took on a whole different meaning out here. He’d known it already, but looking at it now, peak after peak, range upon range… And roaming out there somewhere in all that craggy wilderness, a bunch of forty-pound cats…

And whoever was stalking them.