A Warrior's Vow

She felt stunned.

She was a veritable thesaurus of shattered—shocked, aghast, astonished and utterly confounded.

She’d been pushing him, needling him, trying to goad him into talking to her. She’d been trying to get him to finally acknowledge her as more than a nuisance. She would have been content to have him yell at her, or fall apart at the proverbial seams in obvious frustration. Anything to get him to speak to her, instead of being a silent rock riding in front of her.

Of all the things she hated in life, the worst was being ignored. She’d made a career and an entire life out of being the person most noticed, most sought after, most desired. Ignored wasn’t in her repertoire.

Until she’d begun this journey to search for Enrique.

But Daggert’s reaction to her prodding wasn’t what she’d expected. She would never have anticipated it in a million and one years.

In her high-rise office in Washington, D.C., she could dig at people with impunity; if they didn’t want to deliver what she wanted to know, they might not receive the dollars they sought from her. Needling was a seemingly necessary evil, and her right.

In those instances, however, whoever came knocking at her door was playing with fire. This time, she’d been the one taunting the flame.

Never in her wildest thoughts had she imagined she would rip at him with such uncanny accuracy. Nor would she ever have dreamed that such an attack would bring him to the point of murder.

Her hand lowered to her throat. Where she’d envisioned blood, perhaps a permanent reminder of the lesson “don’t play with fire,” Daggert hadn’t left so much as a mark. That he hadn’t branded her didn’t address his fury, but rather a measure of the icy control she’d glimpsed several times in the short while she’d spent following him in his search for Enrique.

But he’d demanded she never speak of his son. Not a nameless someone he’d been hired to find, not a stranger—his son.

Leeza closed her eyes. She let her body be warmed by the heat within the boulder, the sun beating down on the arroyo, and her own embarrassment.

She didn’t want to even think about what losing a child would do to a man’s psyche, to his heart. If she was right in her analysis of his dramatic response, James Daggert had once searched for his own missing son and either had not found him or had not managed to find him alive. Either case must bring the worst possible pain to a parent. It explained so much about the unusual tracker.

“Oh, I’m so very sorry,” she said aloud, and her voice seemed to echo in the narrow dry riverbed.

But Daggert wasn’t there to hear her, and she wasn’t apologizing for anything she’d done, but offering the absent man her heartfelt sympathy.

She’d lost her parents, a grief she still felt with every passing day. He’d lost his son. His child.

She forced herself from the boulder and stood, albeit shakily. The world hadn’t slipped on its very axis, as she felt it should have. The sun still beat straight down on the narrow, boulder-strewn arroyo, and the sand beneath her feet remained hot and slippery. The sky was still blue and the yellow chamisa bushes still smelled like skunks.

Daggert’s horse, Stone, pulled at some threads of grass on the bank about thirty feet away and whispered something to Belle. The mare nickered back.

Everything seemed normal, yet nothing was. Nor could it ever be again.

Enrique was missing. Had been for hours upon hours. Leeza knew she had lost him by pushing him too hard. And she was literally shaking in her boots, not wholly from guilt, not entirely from remorse, and not even in horror at Daggert’s furious response. She shook in a stunned reaction to his kiss.

A kiss.

“Just a kiss,” she said aloud.

Belle whickered.

“Okay, so it seemed like a lot more than a kiss.”

Stone gave a grunt.

“All right, a whole lot more than a kiss.”

Neither horse answered vocally, but Stone shook his head, his reddish-brown mane dancing in the air.

Leeza cautiously approached Belle and withdrew a notebook from her saddlebag, then her cell phone from the pommel, which Westerners aptly called a saddle horn.

Retreating to a different boulder, she penned her confusion in the notebook, jotting down her fears, her wishes about the next twenty-four hours. Never once did she mention her gigging James Daggert. Nor did she describe the kiss.

And she didn’t fill the rest of the notebook with her response to that kiss, as she could have.

Some things were better left unsaid.

When James Daggert hadn’t returned an hour later, Leeza broke down and tried some of the beef jerky from the pouch he’d discarded earlier. It still burned her tongue and made her stomach roil, but she knew the man was right about needing to keep up her strength, and she wasn’t about to dig in his saddlebags in search of something else to eat. If words could set off his fury, what might violating his privacy do? She was tempted, but didn’t want to bring on a confrontation.

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