Wind River Wrangler (Wind River Valley #1)(25)

“Oh, geez,” she muttered, grimacing as she slowly lowered herself to the ground. “My legs are killing me.” She looked up to see him grin a little. The gleam in Roan’s eyes made her very aware she was a woman and he was a man. Leaning down, she rubbed the insides of her legs near her knees. They felt tender.

Roan pulled the reins over Charley’s head and let them drop to the green grass. The horse was ground-tied trained and wouldn’t move from the spot. “What you don’t want to happen is that the skin inside of your knees has been rubbed raw. Is any skin broken? You should check.”

Hotly aware of Roan’s closeness, she tenderly touched her Levi’s inside her knees. “No . . . they feel okay. No broken skin. Yet . . .” Straightening, she grinned up at him. “But my thighs . . . I feel like a chicken that got its drumsticks ripped apart,” she said, laughing.

His mouth twitched. He opened one of the saddlebags on his horse and pulled out a bottle of water, handing it to her. “Yeah, that pretty much says it all, Tenderfoot. Drink all of this. Need to keep you hydrated. City people don’t realize even when they ride a horse, they’re sweating a lot more than normal. You lose water and that’s not good.” His gloved fingers met hers. Damned if Roan didn’t feel momentary sparks of heat in his fingertips. There was such joy shining in Shiloh’s eyes, the change in her was startling. Mesmerizing. Roan felt like he was meeting another woman, not the one he’d met earlier at the airport.

“Come on,” he said gruffly, lifting his hand. “Follow me.” Roan led her over to beneath the sprawling limbs of a very old cottonwood tree. He gestured for her to sit down on the lush grass beneath it. He sat down, back resting against the rugged-looking grayish trunk. Shiloh plopped down, removed the green baseball cap, her ponytail loosened between her shoulder blades. The crimson tendrils only enhanced the natural pinkness in her cheeks. Roan purposely pulled his gaze away from her mouth. The woman was calling to him on every level—intellectually, physically, and emotionally—and yet, she’d made no obvious sign or signal to him. She was probably caught up in the wild, natural beauty of the West.

Sipping from the canteen of water, Shiloh sighed, gazing around. “Will the horses be okay out there? You haven’t tied them up.”

“They’re ground-tied trained,” Roan murmured, tipping his head back, slugging down half the bottle of water he’d pulled from one of his horse’s saddlebags. His Adam’s apple bobbed.

Shiloh couldn’t help but stare at him. His flesh was deeply tanned and the red bandanna around his thick, strong neck only emphasized the maleness of him. He tipped his Stetson back on his head, one knee drawn up, his elbow resting on it. With the leather chaps on, he reminded her of a long-ago knight dressed in a coat of armor. But more to the truth, Shiloh felt walls around Roan. Why? Compressing her lips, she decided to ask.

“Are all black ops guys walled up?” she asked, sliding him a glance. There were small fanlike lines at the corners of his eyes, telling her he was outside a lot, squinting against a harsh sun.

Tipping his head in her direction, Roan caught and held her curious gaze. “Now, where did that question come from?” he teased. “What do you mean?” He saw the seriousness in her gaze and he hadn’t been expecting such a surprising observation from her. He saw her cheeks grow pink with blush.

“It’s just a feeling I get from you,” she murmured, a little defensive. “I was thinking because you were in black ops, that you had to hide in different ways, and that was the reason for feeling you were guarded?” She boldly searched his amused gray gaze.

He drank the rest of the water and capped the bottle, considering her explanation. “When you’re an operator, Shiloh, you can’t allow your emotions to get in the way of what you’re doing. You put them away. Out of the way.”

Her brows fell. Shiloh felt sorry for him. “Really? I mean, men are human. So are operators. Doesn’t it bother you to always hide your feelings?” She watched his mouth curve into a slight, sour smile.

“Let me put it another way. If you had the barrels of AK-47s staring back at you, and the guys at the other ends of those weapons wanted to kill you, what would you do? Would you go hysterical? Let your emotions get the better of you?” He took off his hat, wiping his sweaty brow with the back of his arm, and settled the hat on his head once more. “Or”—he pinned her with a hard look—“would you ignore how you felt and focus on what you had to do to defend yourself, shoot back and kill them instead of them killing you?” He saw her face go blank for a moment, saw some emotion he couldn’t interpret deep in her green eyes as she mulled over his questions.

“I guess,” she said, and shrugged a little, staring down at the bottle between her hands, “I don’t know how to put my feelings aside.” She lifted her chin, holding his calm gray gaze. “Is there such a thing? Can you really do that?”

“Sure you can. It’s training, Shiloh. That’s all it is. You find out real quick that if you let your emotions run you, you aren’t going to be thinking clearly enough to survive.”

“Wow,” she muttered, thinking about that. “I’ve never not run on my emotions.”

“But you haven’t, until lately, ever been threatened with a life-and-death situation. Right?”