Samantha wasn’t worried. Poor weather or not, they were making excellent time. Nor did she question the unfamiliar quality of Alex’s voice, low and soothing. She was much too busy with the thoughts that attacked her mind, whirling at her from every direction like the snow.
It was nearly here. The end of the cattle drive. She had begun the long haul with timidity and self-doubt, but she was no longer that woman. The trials of the drive had strengthened her, taught her new skills and a confidence in herself. Roark had been right about that.
The snow was coming faster now, collecting on the backs of the lumbering cattle pushing steadily forward in front of her. The boughs of the pines, laden with it, began to droop. Samantha paid it little attention. Scarcely listened to Alex at her side.
“I knew if you got this close, Sam, you wouldn’t be able to give up. That even without Roark, you’d find some way to complete the drive. So in the end I made use of your need.”
Roark, she thought. He had believed in her. Had helped her to believe in herself. Even to finally respect the ranching she had always feared and loathed. Why hadn’t she appreciated that about him?
“Cappy just hated throwing in the towel, so I figured he would back me. All I had to do was plant the idea, and the old man would be hot for it. Which he was.”
What was Alex going on about now? She wished he would just be quiet and let her sort out her confusion. The end of the drive. He was talking about the end of the drive. Why wasn’t she happy about that? Happy about the new Samantha Howard? Why was she so miserable?
Because the end of the drive will mean the end of Roark and you. You’ll part and go your separate ways.
Isn’t that what she wanted? To be free of the temptation
of a man who valued everything she had resisted all her life? Everything that had made her unhappy.
But she wouldn’t be happy without Roark. How could she be when he was everything she needed? When she couldn’t bear the prospect of a future without his love?
Oh, why hadn’t she understood this back at the canyon when he had told her the truth about Hank Barrie, and she had pushed him away in anger and kept him there? Never seeing that Hank was just a bittersweet memory without substance. That Roark Hawke was the only reality.
It was this reality, and the full acknowledgment of her love for him, that shook Samantha out of her reverie. She looked around with a sudden awareness of what was happening. The snow was coming faster now, a swirling curtain of white. Just off to her left, emerging from the haze, was a precipice. Where had that come from?
And what did it matter? Only one thing mattered now. Roark. She neither wanted nor needed anything else. Not the inheritance, not to prove herself by pushing relentlessly on like this to Alamo Junction. They weren’t important.
“I’m going back,” she announced to Alex. How could she have left Roark like that under the truck, ridden away to satisfy what essentially had been a selfish motive? She was going back to him, and she’d spend the rest of her life making it up to him for her terrible error. If he let her.
“No, Sam, I can’t let you do that. Not after all the trouble I went to to cut you out of the herd.” Alex grinned at her, enjoying his metaphor. “See, I couldn’t take the chance of Roark getting free in time to take you on to those stock cars. I needed for us to be alone.”
What was he trying to tell her? Whatever it was, she realized for the first time that it wasn’t innocent, that she ought to have been listening to him more carefully. Sensing that something was very wrong, she experienced both alarm and anger.
“Get out of my way!” she ordered him, intending to
turn her horse. But as she started to swing Dolly around, Alex caught the animal by its bridle, preventing her retreat.
“I hate to do this, Sam,” he apologized. “You know how much I always cared for you. No, it’s true. I never meant for you to be anything more than scared off, or maybe just injured enough to put you out of the running. But whatever I did, you just wouldn’t give up, would you? Now I don’t have any choice about it.”
Samantha stared at him in shock and horror. He was a stranger suddenly. An Alex she didn’t know, with a twisted mouth and a vicious gleam in a pair of eyes that had never looked at her before with anything but gentleness.
“Of course,” he said, “that business with the truck was meant to hurt you, not trap Roark. But if it hadn’t worked out the way it did, Roark ending up under the truck and you wanting to complete the drive, I would have just figured out some other way to stop you. I know, it’s confusing, isn’t it? I wish there was time to explain everything, but there isn’t.”
His bigger, stronger horse was crowding Dolly now, squeezing her toward the long drop at the sharp edge of the narrow trail.
“No one will ever be able to prove it was anything but an accident, Sam. Just like Shep’s sad accident.”
Dolly, as frightened as Samantha, tried to back away, but the larger horse blocked her escape, kept pressing them toward the precipice.
“Cappy!” Samantha screamed.
“No good, Sam. He’s at the front of the herd, remember? Too far away. He wouldn’t hear you, anyway. Haven’t you noticed the old man’s hearing is no longer what it should be?”
The snow continued to fall, making the trail slippery. As treacherous as the man who was determined to kill her. Who must have been responsible for everything—her grandfather’s fall in the ravine, the rattlesnake planted in the mansion back in San Antonio, the shadow in the night
at the Morning Star Ranch, the stampede, the figure who had shot at them in the narrow gorge, the stalker in the fog. All of it Alex McKenzie.
An Alex who would destroy her if she didn’t act. But when she attempted evasive tactics, trying to fall back or move ahead, he anticipated her, cutting her off. And all the while working her toward the edge.
In desperation, she dug her heels sharply into Dolly’s side, this time surging forward, managing to break free. But only for a moment. The herd was directly in front of her, stopping her flight. And Alex was right behind her.
Samantha would never know if the heifer’s action was merely a result of panic or an animal obeying a primal instinct to rescue the woman who had so often rescued her. Whatever the explanation, Irma, who as usual was at the tail end of the herd, twisted around and charged into Alex’s horse. Butting his mount so forcefully that it reared back in fear, unseating its rider.
Samantha seized the opportunity to pivot Dolly and started to race back down the trail. Too late. Springing to his feet, Alex caught her by the leg as she passed, dragging her from her horse.
T
HE SNOW IN THE PASS
was blinding at times, hindering their progress. But Roark kept telling himself that the cattle, who never moved with speed, anyway, would also be slowed by the snowfall. He and Dick would overtake the herd. They
had
to overtake the herd. He wouldn’t let himself believe otherwise.
They were riding as hard as the slushy trail permitted, but it wasn’t fast enough for Roark. He kept urging his horse to quicken its pace, heedless of the dangerous conditions. Heedless, too, of his injured leg, which was throbbing now. He ignored the pain. Nothing mattered but reaching Samantha.
God, don’t let him touch her. Let her stay safe until I
can get to her. Where are you, sweetheart? Where are you?
They had reached the summit of the pass, and there was still no sign of them. Straining forward in the saddle, he peered through the snow, cursing its veil. Where were they? He kept searching, searching for—
There!
Heart slamming against his ribs, he saw them. Samantha and Alex were struggling on the brink of the precipice. Obeying Roark’s ferocious command, the roan leaped forward with a last burst of speed.
Roark didn’t wait for Dick. Didn’t wait to rein in his horse and dismount. Reaching the scene, he launched himself from the saddle while the horse was moving. A startled Alex, releasing Samantha, whirled around at the instant Roark smashed into him.
The two men went down on the ground, locked in combat. But Alex was no match for Roark. Not in Roark’s fierce state of rage. The younger man landed two ineffective blows, then collapsed like a deflated balloon when Roark delivered a furious, decisive punch to his jaw.
And then Dick was there, lariat in hand as he crouched beside the stunned Alex. “Looks like I’ve got an ornery steer here that needs lassoing,” he said, busying himself knotting the rope around Alex.
Roark got to his knees, looking around wildly for Samantha. She was there. She was all right. She came to him, dropping to her own knees, and he reached for her, folding her in his arms.
“Your leg,” she said.
“Never felt better,” he lied, because it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the woman in his arms. He covered her face with feverish kisses, his nerve endings on fire with each one of those kisses.
“I was turning around and coming back to you,” she said between their kisses.
“Were you?”
“I was. I realized that nothing would be worth anything without you. And, Roark?”
“What?” His mouth caressed her cheek, wet from the snow.
“I could manage just fine on a ranch. Don’t you think? I mean, I’m pretty good now on a horse.”
“And you’re not bad at herding cattle, either.” The tip of his tongue teased a particularly inviting area in the hollow of her throat.
“Maybe I could even learn to rope a steer.”
“Why not, when we have the rest of our lives for me to teach you?”
He might have been tempted to teach her other things in that moment, even with the snow collecting around them, even with a grinning Dick looking on. If, that is, a thundering Cappy, who had ridden back along the line of stalled cattle, hadn’t interrupted them.
“What in cowpat’s name,” the old man demanded, staring in disbelief at the couple on the ground clinging to each other, “is going on here?”
“A cattle drive, Cappy,” Roark assured him, lifting both himself and Samantha to their feet. He found he could manage the leg when he was standing, at least as far as his horse. “And I think if we get moving, we can still make those stock cars.”
Samantha looked at him, eyes wide. He nodded back with certainty, his heart swelling with his love for her. But that love would have to wait to be expressed.
“We don’t have any time to waste,” he said, “because once we’ve delivered these cows, we have a wedding to talk about.”
He prayed Samantha would have no objection to that. And she didn’t.
Chapter Fourteen
The savory aroma of barbecuing beef came from the pits out back, mingling with the fragrance of flowers on the warm Texas air. The blossoms were everywhere, entwined in the latticework of the arbor where the ceremony was to take place, decorating the porch of the ranch house and heaped lavishly in baskets on the picnic tables under the live oaks where the fixings for the banquet were already being spread.
For all Roark knew, even Irma might be wearing a garland around her neck. Not that Samantha’s beloved heifer was present, but everyone else was.
The yard was filled with people consisting of guests from San Antonio, a sizable share of Purgatory’s population, neighboring ranchers and the entire Hawke clan, who had flown in for the occasion. The crowd included a pair of fiddlers and a caller for the square dances to follow the banquet. This was to be an old-fashioned Western wedding in every respect.
It was all here and waiting. Everything, that is, but the bride. Where is she? Roark wondered, beginning to worry in earnest.
To his enormous frustration, no one in the yard seemed to be concerned that she was missing. “Gave me a little wave and took off in her car,” Dick informed him when Roark asked him if he’d seen Samantha. “Yeah, she was
alone. I don’t know, about fifteen minutes ago maybe. Hey, man, you’d better have a beer with Cappy and me. You’re looking like a nervous bridegroom.”
He had similar responses from all of them. None of them could explain her mysterious absence, and none of them doubted she was anything but safe and would turn up in plenty of time for the ceremony.
Roark was out of his mind with worry and ready to go after her, wherever that was, when his mother and father appeared on either side of him, linking their arms with his.
“Come up on the porch and sit with us,” Moura Hawke urged.
He knew what was his mother was after. She wanted him to rest his leg. The leg didn’t need resting. It had healed nicely, without complications. “Ma, I don’t have time to relax. I’ve got to find out what’s happened to Samantha.”
Casey Hawke chuckled. “Now, son, you don’t think your bride’s run out on you, do you?”
Roark was beginning to wonder if he
was
being jilted at the altar. Samantha had told him she was happy with his decision to concentrate on ranching, even though her faith in him had restored his belief in himself as a PI. Told him she was prepared to live here on their spread and, like him, commute to San Antonio a couple of days each week to supervise their real estate and private investigation operations. But what if she had reconsidered? What if she had decided that she couldn’t endure an existence as a rancher’s wife? The possibility scared the hell out of him.
It continued to gnaw at him as his insistent mother and father dragged him off to the porch where they settled side by side on the wide seat of the old swing while he perched unwillingly on the porch railing facing them.
“It was all about money and glory,” Casey said. “But then it usually is. At least the money, anyway.”
“What are you talking about, Pop?”
“Alex McKenzie.”
“That sheriff of yours is such a nice man,” Moura said, indicating the rotund figure of Tom Poltry on the far side of the yard. “He told us that much, which I understand he got from the Colorado sheriff, who finally got it out of McKenzie, but he left the rest for you to tell us.”
“Ma, this isn’t the best time for me to—”
“You have to, dear. We’re just dying to know the details.”