More Than A Cowboy
“It’s about nine miles to the southwest of here, and yeah, I know the trails. And it’ll be dawn by the time we reach the point where we really have to bushwhack, so…don’t worry.” Tess smiled to herself. Somewhere in those weeks of custody and nursing, cat-loving Liza had lost her professional objectivity. She was as anxious as a mom sending her only daughter off for her first time at summer camp.
Not that Tess wasn’t worried, as well. If they couldn’t give Zelda the wide, wonderful world she deserved—if the cat couldn’t learn to survive in that world—neither of them had the heart to stuff her back in a cage. Which left only…another kind of injection. Sleep without waking.
And even if she succeeded in reintroducing Zelda to the wild this summer, Tess still had other worries.
Like the imminent arrival of half a dozen line-camp cowboys, who were paid to keep their eyes wide open for anything strange going on in their territories.
Like the chance of being caught in what they—and her father!—would see as a gross betrayal of their way of life.
If they caught her aiding and abetting lynx, they’d see her as Tess-turned-traitor. Tess on the side of the tree huggers and the despised government bureaucrats—and against her neighbors, her family, her friends.
And she could argue till she was blue in the face that lynx and cows were perfectly compatible, that the cattlemen had nothing to fear but fear itself. But ranchers were as stubbornly conservative at heart as…cats.
So here she was in the middle, walking her usual tight-rope between what she loved and those she loved. Anyway you cut it, it was bound to be a nerve-wracking summer.
And on top of that—in my spare time—I’m supposed to be finishing my dissertation! Tess reminded herself with a grimace. For the past year, she’d studied beavers in a riverine habitat. This summer she needed to analyze her data and write up her conclusions, if she wanted to earn her doctorate, and be qualified for a field biology position with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service next fall, which she most certainly did.
“Now, you’re going to keep her caged for at least three days?” Liza fretted.
“As long as she and I can stand it.” Tess would have to camp near the cage till she freed the cat. It was spring after all, with the black bears awakening from their winter fasts. Though lynx weren’t part of their usual menu, bears were omnivorous, and they sure knew how to take apart any container with food inside. Tess wouldn’t dare leave Zelda trapped and defenseless.
Thinking of that, she went back to the pickup, unracked her rifle, then settled it into its saddle scabbard.
“What’s that for?”
Tess smiled at her friend’s note of alarm. Liza was from Massachusetts. She’d only come west after graduation from vet school. Apparently, like many easterners, she viewed firearms solely as lethal weapons. Instruments of heartbreak and destruction.
Tess took the view of the tough and capable Western men who’d raised her. A rifle was simply a tool that a responsible person used responsibly. No more or less dangerous than a car or a threshing machine. The only thing she’d ever killed with a gun was a tin can, but still… “I brought along some red-pepper spray in case of bears. But I’ve always wondered if that really works—or just turns ’em into furry buzzsaws. So this is for backup.” Which, please God, she wouldn’t need.
“O…kay.” Liza didn’t sound convinced, but then it wasn’t she who’d be sleeping alfresco forty miles from the nearest kindly policeman. “And you’ve got the chickens?”
“Right here.” Tess loaded the cooler that held four flash-frozen roasting chickens into the left basket hamper on Cannonball’s back. “And I’ve already stashed another fifty in the kerosene freezer at the cabin.”
She’d claimed the highest, tiniest, most tucked-away cabin on Suntop’s summer range for herself for the next three months. Her father and sisters were used to her jaunts into the wilderness, so they hadn’t been all that surprised when she’d announced that she intended to live in the mountains for the summer, rather than stay at the Big House on the ranch. No distractions or socializing wanted or needed while she hammered out her dissertation, was the excuse she’d given—and they’d bought it.
She’d driven up a few days ago to this trailhead and packed in everything she’d need at the cabin for the period, including a three-month supply of frozen birds. “Well. All we need now is the star of this show.”
Liza sighed, nodded, and turned toward the Jeep. Murmuring soothing endearments, she used a noose pole and a pair of elbow-length leather gloves to immobilize the growling lynx, then injected her with the sedative.
She brushed angrily at her lashes as Tess closed the basket lid over the curled-up sleeping cat. “You’ll tell me if she needs anything? Goes off her feed or…”
“She won’t run too far away,” Tess assured her, though she was by no means sure. “Zelda’s grown to love her chicken dinners. She’ll stick around till she knows she can feed herself.”
Or she wouldn’t.
But then, didn’t freedom always come with risk? Tess had always found the risks worth facing. Three days from now, when she opened the cage door, she figured Zelda would agree.
“SO, ZELDA, what do you think? Is it starting to feel like home?” On her way to the pool where she washed each morning, Tess had stopped to check out her charge.
The lynx lay in feline loaf-of-bread position at the front of her cage, fore paws tucked demurely under her breast, back paws folded beneath. With her yellow eyes half closed, she seemed relaxed as any tabbycat, although she was pointedly ignoring her visitor. The comical two-inch black tufts on her ears twitched at the sound of Tess’s voice, then her gaze returned to the massive fallen tree beside her cage…to the dark hole beneath its mossy trunk.
“You’re right. It would make an excellent den,” Tess assured her in a soft voice. “Location, location, location.” She’d chosen this site with care—an old-growth spruce forest, because lynx typically denned in such deep, dark places with their excellent cover. A hundred yards to the west stretched a wide swath of younger trees where, years before, an avalanche from the peaks above had scoured the slope. Time had patiently reseeded the scar, and now it was covered with wildflowers and twelve-foot saplings. Tess’s research over the past month had told her that lynx favored that sort of terrain for hunting. The smaller trees let in the sunshine, which nourished the flowers and grass, which drew the snowshoe hares. And the lynx who loved them.
“One of these days, if the DOW ever gets its act together and provides you with a boyfriend, this would make a perfect den for kittens,” Tess told the cat. “Which reminds me, Liza meant to check you again, to make sure you aren’t in a family way.” The vet had intended to palpate the lynx after she’d sedated her.
“I remember tucking you into your basket while we were jabbering away about rifles and bears. But I don’t remember Liza examining you. Did we just get distracted? Or did she do it while I was fussing with the pack mare?”
The lynx turned to give her a haughty stare over the wonderful double-points of her neck ruff, which resembled a Victorian gentleman’s gray-and-white-barred side whiskers, edged in formal black.
“Guess you wouldn’t remember, since you were asleep,” Tess reflected. “And I reckon you figure it’s none of my business anyway.”
The lynx stood to stretch magnificently, forelegs, then back. She stalked away on her oversize paws—furry snowshoes that were designed to let the cat run atop the fluffiest powder. Her black-tipped stub-tail stilled as a gray jay swooped low past the cage, then quivered with furious attention when the bird landed on a nearby branch.
“Soon,” Tess assured her, standing and stretching, too. She could have chatted happily for hours, but it was safest for Zelda if she lost her tolerance for people. Her best chance for a long, healthy life in these mountains was to shun all humans, friend and foe alike. For that reason, Tess had pitched her tent fifty feet to the west, within easy earshot if a bear came calling, but otherwise out of sight.
She shouldn’t linger now. She sighed as she collected her rifle and her kit. “Better get ready,” she advised the lynx. “Today’s the day.”
She’d wait till noon, when a lynx normally would be dozing. This time, instead of giving Zelda her chicken inside the cage, she’d show it to the lynx—then set it at the entrance to her proposed den. She’d open the cage door and walk away.
If all went as Tess hoped, Zelda would step out timidly into freedom. Then, overwhelmed by the sudden expansion of her world, made nervous by the too-bright light of noon, she’d snatch up the chicken and scuttle into cover beneath the fallen tree. She’d spend the rest of the day there, eating and gradually growing accustomed to a feeling of safety and rich possession. The den would begin to take on her scent.
Meantime, Tess would collapse Zelda’s cage and carry it away.
By twilight, when her instincts urged Zelda to come out and prowl, maybe the burrow beneath the tree would already feel like a haven, a home to return to. A place where food had been provided before. Where she’d find it again and again, in the following days, thanks to Tess and her cache of frozen chickens.
And so her life in the wild would begin.
Ducking under and around ancient trees, then between head-high thickets, Tess came at last to the stream, which angled across the slope. For most of its course, the brook ran shallow and clear—icy-cold from the snows above, narrow enough to step across. But at this point it paused in its chuckling journey and widened to a pool—another reason Tess had chosen this site for Zelda’s den.
She set the rifle and her kit to one side and knelt, then unbuttoned the top button of her shirt. Then the next. An absent smile curved her lips as she pictured Zelda’s spotted, big-footed kittens crouching on the rocks beside her, peering fascinated into the pools. Ears pricked as they searched for minnows.
An excellent place to raise a family.
CHAPTER FOUR
YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, Adam had driven his truck up to the trailhead north of Sumner line camp. From there he had made several trips, backpacking a summer’s worth of books and supplies two miles downhill to the cabin.
Too tired to head back at the end of the day, he’d stoked the wood-burning stove and stayed on, figuring he’d return to the valley in the morning. There was still plenty to be done before the cattle drive started. Plus, tomorrow night he’d meet Gabe in Durango—go over final thoughts and plans for this investigation.
Sumner line camp was Adam’s old stomping ground from three summers ago. Last time he’d lived at this cabin, he’d been mourning Alice. A two-year engagement that should have ended with a wedding had ended instead in betrayal. His ring returned with a pretty apology, and her lukewarm hope that they could still be friends.
But if Alice didn’t want to build a home and family with him, Adam could do without her friendship. Without any reminder of her—or what might have been.
Stung by her loss and the part his job had played in their breakup, he’d even considered quitting the police, going back to his Colorado roots to start life over again as a cowboy. He’d spent that summer up here in the high country, relearning that he needed more of a challenge in his life than a herd of cantankerous cows.
That September he’d gone back to New Orleans, back to the force, with a renewed dedication.
And with his heart on the mend, he’d sworn to himself that he’d never risk it again. Since Alice, Adam had devoted himself to loving women well—but never seriously.
Still, sleeping in his old bunk, he found a ghost of that summer’s loneliness had crept upon him in the night. Flooded with memories both painful and pleasurable, he’d woken at dawn. Instead of heading back, he’d gone out walking. Wandering miles farther than he’d intended, he came at last upon a stream.
And heard a woman’s voice.
Pure wistful imagination, Adam assured himself. Nothing but the babble of running water weaving around the remnants of last night’s dreams.
Whatever its source, it trailed off after a minute. He shrugged and walked on, eyes on the stair-stepping run of narrow pools. If a lover was too much to wish for, then maybe there were trout?
A movement ahead caught his eye and he looked up.
And there she was.
A dark-haired woman kneeling on a rock, both hands cupped as she dipped them to the pool.
He sucked in a startled breath and froze.
Her hands scooped water and splashed it on her face. She made a muffled, laughing sound—it had to be freezing—then smoothed her palms over her tousled hair, brushing it back off her brow. Her fingers met at the nape of her neck—she laced them and stretched her spine. Small, high breasts rose with the sinuous movement and Adam bit back an instinctive groan.
Again she bent to the pool. Bathed her face and swan neck. “Yow!” Drops of water glistened on her throat and the curves that the flaring halves of her shirt revealed.
Enchanted, he moved closer—
And stepped on a branch. Crack!
She didn’t glance toward the sound, but turned smoothly away, reached—and swung back again. A rifle swung with her, rising, seeking…
At the sight of that rounding bore, years of hard-earned reflexes kicked in—Adam dived for cover. He hit the ground good shoulder first, then rolled. A bolt of lightning slammed across his chest, sizzling sternum to shoulder point. “Shit! Merde!” If he’d rebroken his collarbone! Or had she shot him? But no, he’d heard no retort.
“You’re…not a bear.” She’d risen to peer into the bushes where he’d landed.
“Dammit!” One minute he’d been whole and well, nothing but flirtation on his mind.
And now? Adam drew a shaking breath and pushed up out of a drift of last year’s leaves. Pain played a savage piano riff down his ribcage. “Hell!” He hated feeling helpless. If she’d shoved him back to the bottom of the hill he’d been scrabbling up with such effort…
“Or maybe you are.” She’d shifted her rifle up and away, but not so far it couldn’t quickly swing back. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“Did I—?!”
“Well, I don’t like being snuck up on,” his tormentor said reasonably. The corners of her mouth curled, then straightened again. “’Specially not in spring, when the sow bears have cubs.” Cradling the rifle across her left forearm, she reached casually for her buttons, fumbled at the lowest one, single-handed.
“Put the gun down before you drop it,” he growled, rising stiffly to his knees.
Her slate-green eyes narrowed. Her hand paused in its effort. “No need.” A pulse fluttered in the damp hollow of her throat.
So her coolness was a front. The cop in him was glad she was wary of a strange man, even though her grip on the gun set his alarm bells to jangling. “Look, I’m turning around. So set the gun down nice and easy and use both hands, okay? Much safer for both of us.”
He turned his back and seized the moment to run his own hands up his ribs. Painful, but no new jagged bumps where they’d mended. He fingered his collarbone and winced. Likely pulled a muscle as rebroken the bone, but—the hell with it. If he couldn’t cowboy this summer, then he couldn’t do the job he’d promised Gabe. He swung around again.
Caught in the act of fastening her top button, she froze as their eyes collided.
The moment stretched out…his breathing quickened. Possibilities spun in the air like dust motes sparked by the sun.
Her fine eyes widened and he knew she read his thoughts, knew she wanted to look away. Was too proud to let him win this silent clash.
With calm deliberation she finished her task, while a dusting of rose painted her high cheekbones.
“What are you doing up here?” he asked suddenly. She hadn’t just dropped out of his dreams.
She wore running shoes, not serious hiking boots. He scanned the rocks around her feet and found no sign of a backpack. Just a canvas overnight kit. “You’re camping up here?” By herself?
But then, her reluctance to put down that gun showed a woman on her own. If she’d had a companion, a mate, she’d have simply set it aside and called for backup. So…definitely alone. Adam’s eyes flicked to her left hand—ringless—and he felt a surge of unabashedly male satisfaction.
“I’m…” She drew a knuckle along her top lip. Her long lashes fluttered as she glanced away, then looked back again.
Adam cocked his head and waited. Whatever came next would be a lie.
“I’m doing research up here. Beaver.”
He almost shouted his laughter aloud. “Beaver.” A couple of flat rocks made a path across the pool and he stepped across, trying not to grin. So you can’t lie worth a damn. I’ll remember that. “There’s no beaver this high up.”
“That’s what I’m…verifying. I’m a wildlife biologist.” When lying, it was best to stick as close to the truth as possible, Tess had always heard. Still, this stranger wasn’t buying it. “Doing a thesis on beaver and tamarisk trees,” she babbled on. That part was true, anyway, although her research location had been Utah, not the San Juans. “The way one affects the other, and how both affect their environment. Water quality. Bird food. Habitat. Fire conditions.”
“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.