Elizabeth Lowell Read Online Free PDF Page A

displeasure, but her hands were careful as he cleaned the blood-encrusted cuts on Ty’s chest. Two of them were ragged, puffy and already inflamed. She bit her lip against the pain she knew she must be causing him despite all her care.
    “Sorry,” she whispered helplessly when he grimaced.
    He heard the distress in the youthful voice and felt like gathering that slender body into his arms and giving comfort. The thought both surprised him and made him uncomfortable. He definitely wasn’t the type of man who liked boys. Abruptly he grabbed the narrow wrists and held them away from his body.
    “That’s good enough,” he said brusquely.
    “But I’m not fin—” Janna’s words ended as though cut off by a knife.
    Into the taut silence came the sound of a rock bouncing and rolling down the slope.
    Ty’s hands shifted with shocking speed. In an instant she found herself jerked over his body and then jammed between his broad back and the face of the cliff.
    Naked and weaponless but for the knife, Ty waited to see what scrambled up over the rockfall and into the piñon-filled hollow.
     

Chapter Four
     
     
    A soft nicker floated through the air as a horse scrambled over the last of the rockfall and into the hollow.
    “What the hell?” Ty whispered.
    Janna peeked over his back. “Zebra!”
    “Boy, can’t you tell a horse from a zebra?”
    “Better than you can tell a girl from a boy,” she muttered.
    “What?”
    “Let me out,” she said, pushing against his back.
    “Ouch!”
    Instantly she lifted her hand and apologized. He grunted and moved aside so that she could crawl out over his legs. Zebra walked up to the edge of the piñon grove, pushed her head in and nickered again.
    “Hello, girl,” Janna said softly, rubbing the velvet muzzle. “Did you get lonesome without me?”
    Zebra whuffled over her fingers, nudged her hands, and kept a wary eye on Ty all the while. When he moved, her head came up and her nostrils flared.
    “Be still,” Janna said. “She’s not used to people.”
    “What does she think you are?”
    “A bad-smelling horse.”
    He laughed softly. The sound made Zebra’s ears twitch. He began talking in a gentle, low voice.
    “You’ve got a better nose than my daddy’s best hound ever did,” he said. Without looking aside he asked Janna, “How long have you owned her?”
    “I don’t.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t own her. She likes me, that’s all. Some horses enjoy people, if you approach them the right way.”
    “And some horses damn near get people killed,” he said. “I was about ten seconds away from dropping my loop on Lucifer’s neck when Cascabel jumped me.”
    Her heart hesitated, then beat faster. Despite Lucifer’s refusal to approach her, she thought of him somehow as her own horse. “How did you get so close to him?”
    “I’m a fair tracker when I’m not half-dead,” Ty said dryly.
    “The shamans say that no mortal man will ever capture Lucifer. He’s a spirit horse.”
    Ty shook his head. “That old boy is pure flesh and blood, and he sires the best colts I’ve seen west of the Mississippi. Lucifer’s my ticket to the future that the Civil War took away from the MacKenzie family. With him I’m going to found the kind of herd that my daddy always wanted. He would have had it, too, except for the war. The four MacKenzie brothers rode off to battle on his best horses. They saved our lives more than once.”
    Janna saw Ty’s mouth harden. He shrugged as if to throw off unhappy memories. Into the silence came the rumble of distant thunder and the scrape of branches stirring beneath a wind that smelled of moisture.
    “Hope it rains soon,” he said, looking up at the massed thunderheads. “Otherwise that big dog’s tracks are going to lead Cascabel right to us.”
    “It will rain.”
    The confidence in Janna’s voice made Ty turn and look at her intently.
    “How do you know?” he asked.
    “I just...know,” she said slowly. “I’ve lived with