And... Tess grinned to herself. And Granny better not find the house a mess when she got back or she'd have all their hides. She didn't expect her kin to live in squalor just because they figured it was beneath them as males to do housework.

  The house had been clean, too, when she returned. Well, not immaculate, but at least livable. But each time summer approached, her father and brothers had turned grumpy and non-communicative toward Tess—not that they were much better the rest of the year. Their resentment had niggled at her until one summer she had discussed it with Granny.

  Granny's voice seemed to float on the night air. "Why, honey, they ain't mad 'cause you're takin' off and leavin' them with all that extra work. They're bent out of shape 'cause they think you oughta be grateful you've got three big men in your life to protect you and tell you what to think and do. So you oughta work your little tail off makin' them comfortable in 'preciation of that. Heck, Tess baby, I'm the one they take offense to. I told them just how the cow was gonna eat the cabbage and they don't take kindly to bein' bossed around by a female."

  Recalling Granny's tiny stature and the great, hulking bodies of her father and growing brothers, Tess laughed into the night. No, Granny never took any guff from the men in her family, especially her own son and grandsons.

  "If you're gonna lay there and laugh and play with that animal all night, I'm gonna move my bedroll where I can get some sleep."

  She turned on her side and cupped her hand under her head. "I thought you were already asleep."

  "Do I sound like I'm asleep?"

  "No. In fact, you sound more awake than you have all day. At least now you're talking instead of grunting. I thought maybe you'd gone mute."

  "Ain't had nothin' to say."

  "I noticed."

  "Look, I didn't plan to have company on this trip, so don't expect me to act like we're having a polite conversation at an all-day tea party. I've got things on my mind."

  "Why won't you discuss them with me? Don't you think it would be easier if you share your worries?"

  "Talkin' about things doesn't solve problems. A man's gotta get out and take some action—use his own brains and muscles to find a solution."

  "His," she emphasized. "I don't suppose it ever occurred to you that a woman might have something to add that might help you find a way out of a problem. Especially a woman you claim to love."

  "Claim to!" He rose to a sitting position and glared across the fire. "You listen to me, Tess Foster! I'm not about to play games with you. If you doubt my feelings just because I want to protect you and take care of you..."

  "And just what do you call the way you've been acting all day, if not a game? You've treated me like a naughty child you'd really like to take over your knee and spank. You've been trying to get me angry enough with you that I'll turn around and go home."

  "Which is where you should've stayed," he gritted. "Hell." He lay back down and clasped his fingers behind his head as he stared up at the sky. "Maybe a spankin' would've been easier."

  "Wanna try to do it now?" she drawled.

  "No. You know darned well what would happen if I came over there and laid a hand on you right now."

  A shiver of desire crawled over her when Stone turned his head and looked at her. Reflected flames from the firelight danced in his hooded eyes, mirroring the banked passion she'd been fighting ever since this morning.

  "If there's been any game-playin' on my part, darlin'," he murmured, "it's been a game of self-preservation. You know darned well I want to make love to you—strip you down until there's not an inch of you I can't touch or kiss. Fill myself with you and fill you with me. But that's one step I'm not prepared to take."

  "Why not?" she whispered.

  "Damn it, you know why!"

  "Because I still haven't decided whether to stay here or return to my own time," she responded, the desire his words stirred up giving her voice a throaty tone.

  "Yes," he gritted. "It'll be hard enough for me to let you go loving you as I do now—having the memories I do of you now. If those memories included making love to you... you're not some woman I can just take my ease with and leave a five-dollar gold piece on the dresser for, Tess."

  "Can't we at least talk about it?"

  "No!" His voice softened as he pointed at the sky. "Look. That star there."

  She glanced up, where another shooting star cascaded across the sky. This one streaked across the black, moonless night in a curve, instead of plummeting to the earth and winking out. She smiled and closed her eyes to make a wish. When she opened her eyes again, the star was gone.

  The next morning, Tess stood and stared around in the dim, pre-dawn light. So he'd left her. Figured she would give up and go back to the ranch. She should have anticipated that. Good grief. Had he taken her horse?

  Her eyes found a darker gray shape in the morning mist rising from the ground, and she sighed with relief when the gelding raised its head and nickered to her. Lonesome stood up and stretched, then sat down and cocked a leg to scratch his neck.

  "Uh-oh," she said to the dog. "You missed your bath this week, didn't you, and now you've picked up fleas. Well, you'll just have to put up with them today. I'll give you a bath this evening, after we camp again. Now you've got a job to do in a little while."

  She leisurely stretched the kinks from her muscles, then squatted to dig in her backpack. She stuck a granola bar in her shirt pocket and made a necessary trip into the bushes. Ten minutes later she urged the gray gelding after Lonesome's wagging tail as he snuffled at the ground and followed the tracks left by Stone's horse.

  "Traitor," Stone grumbled from his vantage point at the top of a ridge. Darn that dog.

  He gave a sigh of resignation and urged his horse out from the stand of cottonwoods. Waiting until Tess glanced up and shaded her eyes against the rising sun so she could see him, he nudged his heels on the horse's flanks and turned it around.

  Tess loosened her reins and the gray gelding leapt into a frisky canter. She shook her head, auburn tresses swirling behind her as she passed Lonesome and took the lead. As soon as she caught up to Stone, she pulled the gelding down into a sedate walk and reached into her shirt pocket.

  "Want half?" she asked as she tore the wrapping off the granola bar and broke it in two.

  "What is it?"

  "A breakfast bar. The fire was cold, so I don't guess you fixed yourself anything to eat this morning."

  "I've got some jerky in my saddlebags."

  "Okay." Tess bit the bar. "Ummmm," she murmured. "This one's got raisins and chocolate drops."

  He swallowed against the moisture in his mouth and stared ahead resolutely. Feeling something nudge his arm, he glanced down to see Tess's palm extended, the other half of her breakfast bar in her hand.

  He gave in and reached for the raisin-studded bar, fully expecting her to make a snide comment. Instead, she brushed her hand against her denim-clad leg and leaned back in the saddle to tilt her face up to the sun.

  "It's going to be a beautiful day," she said. "I hope it's a little cooler than yesterday, though. I've got a sunburn on my nose."

  "Don't you have a hat?"

  "Oh. Yeah, I do." Tess turned in the saddle and zipped open one of the outside pockets on the backpack tied behind her saddle. She pulled out a blue cap and plopped it on her head. Turning to him, she peered out from beneath the bill.

  "Thanks. I forgot I had this with me."

  "Who're the Cowboys?" he asked, reading the inscription on the hat.

  "Who're the Cowboys? Why, they're a football team," she said in a saucy voice. "I had one of my old friends from law school send me this cap all the way from Texas. Just because I live in New York doesn't mean I don't know a good football team when I see one. 'Course you can't tell New Yorkers that. I almost got thrown out of the bar during the Super Bowl game this year against Buffalo."

  "What the heck's football?"

  For the next hour Tess explained the finer points of the only sports game she had ever had an interest in to Stone. Baseball, she informed him, was about as exciting as watching grass grow. But now football...

  In the middle of explaining a Hail Mary pass, she suddenly swallowed her words and gasped in astonishment when they rode onto the top of a ridge. Down below them, spread out in a multitude of roan, palomino, black and white and various shades of brown, grazed a herd of horses. Several colts frolicked among the herd, but for the most part the horses grazed on a carpet of knee-high grass.

  Stone and Tess both immediately reined their horses around and disappeared beneath the ridge top.

  "Do you think they saw us?" she whispered as she slid to the ground.

  "The wind was in our favor," he said as he joined her. "You did pretty good. You got out of there in a hurry before they spotted us."

  "Thank you, kind sir."

  Twenty-Five

  After tethering their horses, Stone and Tess crept back up to the ridge. Lonesome, seeming to understand the necessity for caution, crawled up beside Tess and watched the herd below with pricked ears. While she scratched behind the dog's ear, she studied the horses spread out on the valley floor.

  "Look how beautiful they are," she whispered. "Doesn't it seem a shame to capture them?"

  "A wild horse doesn't have nearly as romantic a life as you'd think," Stone answered in a quiet voice. "The ones we manage to send to the army post will be well cared for."

  "We? Can I take that to mean you're actually going to let me help?"

  "Since you're sticking around like a burr on my horse's tail, I might as well make use of you. But this is one time you'd better do just like I tell you. That stallion's not gonna give up his mares easy."

  "Oh, look how beautiful he is!" She breathed a sigh as the snow-white stallion reared and pawed the air. He dropped back to earth, then began a sweeping circle around his herd.

  "He's getting ready to move them out," Stone said.

  "Shouldn't we do something about catching them?" Tess asked.

  When she started to scoot back down the hill, Stone stopped her with a stern look.

  "Stay quiet, darn it! What do you think we could do right now? Ride down there shouting and screaming and scatter them all over creation? How many horses do you think we'd get that way?"

  "But... but they're leaving!" She glanced up to see Stone shaking his head, a look of barely concealed intolerance on his face. "Well then, what are we going to do?"

  "You, Miss Greenhorn, are going to do—like I said—exactly what I tell you to. Wild horse herds travel in a circle, even most of the time when they're being chased. But I don't think this herd will move far from that valley. This late in the summer a lot of range is dried up. There's good grass here and that stream down there has plenty of water."

  "I see," she mused. "They'll probably come back here tomorrow to graze."

  "Early tomorrow. Probably even before dawn. Then they'll leave again about this time, so they can keep on the move. We'll have to be ready for them. We won't get two chances at this herd, because I know that stallion. He's been on this range for years, and he's smart. That's how he's managed to hold onto a herd that large."

  "Look! Oh, Stone, look!"

  She pointed at the herd, which was now strung out along the valley floor as it followed a lead, paint mare. The white stallion, not satisfied yet with the speed of his herd, swept back and forth in the rear, nipping and snorting at the slower mares with colts.

  "Yeah, they're pretty," he said.

  "No. I mean, sure they are. But look at that black horse on the edge of the herd."

  "That mare's not from wild stock," he said. "The stallion must have stolen her from someone's ranch."

  "She looks like Sateen." She sighed.

  "Who the heck's Sateen?"

  "My mare back at the stable. She probably wonders what's happened to me, although I hadn't been able to take her out as much as I wanted to this past summer."

  "Too busy with your social life, huh?" he said, frowning.

  "That and my career," she admitted. "That case I was handling had me working sixty or more hours a week, and even most weekends, since I had to keep up with the other cases I couldn't foist off on one of the younger attorneys."

  "I've been meaning to talk to you about that. Women shouldn't be attorneys. They've got no business tryin' to get killers or robbers off—standing up in court defendin' slime."

  The white stallion disappeared over a far ridge as she turned to him. "For your information, Mr. Chisum, if it weren't for attorneys, there'd be a heck of a lot more injustice than there already is in this world! How many people do you know who are smart enough to defend themselves in court? To read the laws and make sure their rights aren't being violated? And I'm not a criminal attorney—I'm a corporate lawyer!"

  "Maybe they ought to simplify the laws, then," he growled. "And I don't see what the difference is—a damned lawyer is a damned lawyer! Why didn't you tell me before that day in the bedroom what you did for a living?"

  "You never asked!" Try as she might, she couldn't come up with anything stronger than that inane comment. Her anger blazed higher. Good grief, was her mind already stagnating? She'd always been good at thinking on her feet—giving as good as she got when another attorney played devil's advocate with her while they discussed a case.

  "Just what exactly have you got against lawyers?" she spat, her eyes narrowed.

  "I saw men I knew were guilty walk out of a courtroom more than once while I was sheriff down in Texas—men I'd arrested myself and knew had done the crime. All I could do was wait until they pulled something else and haul their asses back to jail again. The next time I got them, it was usually for a heck of a lot worse crime than they'd committed the first time. Once..."

  Stone bit off his words and turned away. "Come on. We've got work to do before those horses come back."

  She grabbed his arm when he started to stand. "Stone, wait. Finish what you were going to say." She studied his hooded eyes, catching a glimmer of pain in the brown depths. "Please," she added in a softer voice.

  He took a deep breath and stared past her, his gaze unfocused. "She was just a whore. That's what they said, just a whore. Her name was Polly, and she worked one of the saloons. One of her... her..."

  "Tricks," she supplied.

  "Tricks?"

  "Uh... that's what they're called back where I come from. The men who pay for a prostitute's service. Tricks or johns."

  "One of her customers," he continued, "decided an hour wasn't enough for him. He snuck out down the back stairway with Polly and took her out to the bunkhouse on the ranch where he worked. The guy who owned the saloon was pissed off as hell when he found her gone, since he didn't figure he'd ever get paid for that time. So he came into my office hollering that one of his girls had been kidnapped.

  "By the time I got out there, almost every one of those six cowboys had had a turn. Polly was half out of her mind with pain, and bleeding all over the place."

  "Oh, my God." Tess covered her mouth, fighting the rising gorge in her stomach.

  "After I got Polly to the doc, I took a couple of deputies back out there and hauled them all in. 'Course, at their trial they all claimed she'd been willing. Their fancy-pants lawyer convinced the jury that a whore couldn't be raped, and they all walked."

  "And P-Polly?"

  "Her mind was gone. She sat up on the witness stand like a zombie, and they finally sent her to some institution. Later on the ringleader of the bunch made a try for a rancher's daughter he ran across out riding the range one day. But the rancher was just over the hill and he heard her scream. He killed the son of a bitch—gut-shot him and watched him die before he looped his rope around the man's feet and dragged him into town to my office."

  Stone focused on her face at last. "You know what the hell happened then?"

  "The rancher probably had to stand trial," she forced herself to say.

  "Yeah. And he spent a year in prison for manslaughter. Another damned lawyer convinced that jury the rancher didn't have to kill the rapist—he could have just wounded him and still saved his daughter!"

  "But Stone, for every case like that, there are thousands of cases where criminals get what's coming to them. Didn't a lot of the men you arrested end up paying for their crimes?"

  "Most of them," he admitted grudgingly. "And even the rest of those cowboys got what was coming to them."

  "What happened?"

  "Turned out they were running a rustling ring on the side. They got caught. One of them let enough slip in a drunken binge for us to figure it out. We were waiting for them when they made their next raid and caught them with the running iron, rebranding the cattle."

  He chuckled wryly. "They swung for that—-every one of them. Funny, isn't it? Who'd ever think stealing cattle was a worse crime than rape?"

  "Now, you listen here, Stone." She found herself warring with her emotions. Her legal mind saw the problem with this argument, though her total sympathy was with the two women attacked and traumatized. But loyalty to her profession meant she had lo at least try to make him see the other side.

  "You didn't have any witnesses—any proof—at that first trial for those cowboys. At the other one I imagine you had a whole posse of witnesses. That doesn't make the law wrong. It just means we have to be careful we follow the rules of the law. In the end, that protects all of us."

  "Oh, I see. You're saying it's my fault. I should've known enough to take a couple of witnesses with me when I went out after Polly. We could've sat outside the window and listened to her scream for a while, then been able to back her up in court!"

  "No! Darn it... I mean..."

  "I know what you mean," he finally admitted. "It just chaps my ass to no end when a criminal walks free. Come on, honey. Let's see if that legal mind of yours can help me figure out how to trick those mares into heading into a trap."