Baby? A misnomer if ever he’d heard one, but the voice was right. It was a husky voice. A boy’s voice.
Lucas knotted his hands into fists and strode quickly to the stall. The horse sensed his presence before the kid standing next to it and whinnied with alarm.
Too late, Lucas thought grimly.
He’d found them. The rider and the beast that had ridden him off the road.
The kid, back to the aisle, was still oblivious, holding on to the stallion’s bridle with one hand, speaking softly to the creature as he stroked its ears with the other.
“Such a charming picture,” Lucas snarled, clapping his big, callused hand over the boy’s.
“Hey,” the boy said indignantly.
“Hey, indeed,” Lucas said with grim satisfaction, and swung the kid around.
It was him, all right. Beat-up ball cap. Grimy T-shirt. Dirty jeans, dirtier boots…
Except, when the kid’s cap fell off, Lucas’s jaw dropped.
The rider wasn’t a boy.
She was a woman.
CHAPTER TWO
A WOMAN?
Maybe not. Maybe she was a teenaged brat. It was difficult to tell.
The rider’s face was smeared with dirt, one streak angling across a sharp cheekbone, another across the bridge of her nose. Her hair, a long, heavy braid of inky-black, fell over her shoulder and across her breast.
Lucas’s gaze followed the path of that braid…and knew she was most definitely a grown woman.
Her T-shirt was sweat-soaked. It clung to her body, the cotton wet and all but translucent as it molded her rounded breasts and taut nipples.
Lucas’s body reacted, enraging him even more. To be damned near ridden down, then laughed at by an adult female, and now to have an atavistic reaction to that female…
He heard the harsh rasp of her indrawn breath. Instantly he cupped her jaw and silenced her scream before it started.
“Do not,” he said grimly, “do anything you’ll regret.”
She stared at him through wild eyes. He let it go on for a long moment, relishing every instant before he finally spoke.
“Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me, amada.” He smiled thinly. “I’d hate to think our meeting was not as memorable for you as it was for me.”
Something flashed in the depths of those amazingly blue eyes. She remembered him, all right.
Except, this time he was the one laughing, she was the one in danger. And she knew it. What he’d seen in her eyes was fear.
Good. A woman might well show fear when confronted by a man her horse had almost trampled.
The big stallion snorted and shifted his formidable weight with surprising delicacy on hooves the size of dessert plates. Lucas moved his grasp to the woman’s arm and dragged her toward him.
She didn’t make it easy. Her lean, feminine body was surprisingly well-muscled, especially when she dug in her boot heels, but she was no match for him. Not in size or weight or tight-lipped anger. A couple of seconds and he had her trapped between him and the wall.
“It was an accident.”
“Ah. You do remember me after all.”