McKettrick's Choice - Linda Lael Miller [112]
Lorelei was seated on a rock, eating her supper, when Holt appeared, crouching beside her. His manner was easy, but she sensed a certain tension in him, too. He hadn’t wanted to approach her, she concluded, but for some reason, he’d done it anyway.
“How are you holding up, Lorelei?” he asked, very quietly.
She looked into his face, against her better judgment, and felt the same quivery jolt she always did. “I’m all right,” she said carefully. Holt was easier to deal with, she’d learned, when he was giving orders or issuing some challenge. She knew how to handle his temper, but when he was kind, or pretending to be, she was at a loss. She set her fork down on her tin plate, her supper half-finished. “When will we be in Mexico?”
He gestured toward the south. “See those low hills in the distance? We’ll cross them in the morning. Be in Reynosa by noon or so, if we don’t run into any trouble.”
“And once we’re there?”
He turned his hat in his hands, pondering it. “We’ll leave the wagon in town and ride out to a ranch I know of. Buy the cattle we need.” He paused, drew a deep breath, then thrust it out audibly. His gaze came reluctantly to her face. “The trip back will make this part look easy, Lorelei. It’s only right to tell you this—we’re bound to tangle with the Comanches.”
Lorelei shivered involuntarily, and she knew he’d seen it. “I’ve been expecting them right along,” she admitted.
“They’re keeping an eye on us,” Holt said, still watching her intently. “Right now, we don’t offer much sport, and they’re probably still a little spooked because we passed the night at that mission. Once we’ve got the cattle, though, they’ll want a share—and they’ll come after it.”
If Lorelei had been talking to anybody but Holt McKettrick, she would have put both hands over her face and wept for sheer terror and exhaustion, but her pride straightened her spine and made her jut out her chin. Her throat had gone dry as a dead man’s bones in a desert, though, and anything she tried to say would have come out as a humiliating croak.
“If you’re scared,” Holt said, with a gentleness that was very nearly her undoing, “that just shows you’ve got good sense.”
Lorelei swallowed. “Are you?” she asked, in a ragged whisper. “Scared, I mean?”
One side of his mouth quirked upward in that trademark grin. “I’m the trail boss,” he said simply. “I can’t afford to be scared.”
“I don’t see how you can help it,” she admitted.
“It’s a matter of riding herd over my thoughts,” he said. “Some of them stray into some bad places, but I just drive them back onto the trail. When this is over, maybe I’ll sweat a little, but right now I have to keep my mind on the work at hand. Trouble is a certainty, but when it sneaks up on a man, he’s got nobody to blame but himself.”
“I’ve never met anybody like you,” she said. It wasn’t a compliment, precisely, but it wasn’t an insult, either. It was a pure statement of fact.
He grinned again, inclined his head toward Rafe, who was hunkered on the ground, playing cards with the Captain and some of the cowboys. “Haven’t you?” he challenged.
Lorelei studied Rafe, then turned her attention back to Holt. “I think he’s much nicer than you are,” she said frankly. “More reasonable, too.”
He laughed. “That’s because you’ve never crossed him,” he said, rising gracefully to his feet again. “If you ever meet up with his wife, Emmeline, you might ask her how ‘reasonable’ he is.”
Lorelei looked up at Holt. She’d never meet Emmeline or any of the other McKettricks, most likely. Never set eyes on Holt’s daughter, Lizzie, or the Triple M. Knowing that filled her with an inexplicable sadness.
“Once you’ve got the cattle and helped your friend Mr. Navarro, what will you do?” she asked. Her cheeks flamed the minute the words were out of her mouth, but she’d said them on