A Little Time in Texas by Joan Johnston Page A

involved. He worried about abused kids and the homeless, too. That didn’t mean he was going to miss her when she was gone. Why, all they’d ever done was talk. He’d hardly even touched the woman.
    She would be dynamite in bed!
    All right. He admitted he’d had a few daydreams about her. Was it so bad to imagine what it would be like to make love to her? She was a beautiful woman. Her innocence appealed to him. What would it be like to be the first to touch her, to see and feel her responses to the kinds of pleasure a man and woman could share?
    She’s trouble.
    If he was being honest with himself, the truth was he felt something different with Angel than he had felt with any other woman. Maybe it was the protective instincts she aroused in him. Or the way she constantly challenged him and refused to knuckle under to his opinion. There was no doubt about it—she was different. What bothered him most was that he had actually thought once ortwice about what it would be like to have her around all the time. Angel had made him yearn for something he had professed not to need—a closer relationship with a woman.
    Somehow, in the darkness of that cave, he had formed a bond with Angel that he was finding difficult to untie. He had kept other women at bay with word and deed; Angel had simply slipped past all those fortified walls like fog slips through the mountains.
    Dallas hit the brakes, and the truck skidded to a stop as he observed the scenario at the opening of the cave.
    “What the hell?”
    He reached instinctively for his Colt revolver and swore heatedly when he realized that in his frantic concern for Angel, he hadn’t picked it up from beside the bed. Never, never had he forgotten his gun! That’s what comes of letting yourself get involved with a woman , he thought bitterly. The gun would have helped. But it didn’t really matter. He wouldn’t mind busting a few heads together.
     

    Angel took one look at the leering face of the man as he waved his flashlight back toward his friends, and she reached for the knife in her pocket. In the time it took him to refocus theflashlight on her, she was standing before him with her weight balanced on the balls of her feet, the knife held loosely in her hand. A stench, a sickly sweet smell emanating from the man, curled her nostrils. He was wearing some sort of sleeveless denim jacket that hung open. There was a great deal of flesh visible from the waist up, all of it hairy.
    “Now, now,” he said. “We don’t want anyone to get hurt, do we?”
    “No,” Angel agreed. “So I suggest you start backing up.”
    The man just laughed. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “Me and my buddies just want to have a little fun.”
    “Like shoats in a pigpen,” she muttered.
    “What was that?” he demanded. “You say somethin’ about pigs?”
    “I’m telling you to back up,” she said. “Or face the consequences.”
    He chuckled. “Little thing like you ought to know better than to try talking back to a big fella like me.”
    Angel moved without warning, slicing at the big man’s naked arm. The cut was shallow, but the stranger yowled as if she’d gutted him, and he dropped the flashlight to clutch his wound.
    Angel grabbed the light and ran while he was still grappling with his bloody arm.
    “She’s comin’ your way!” the man shouted to his friends. “Stop her! That bitch cut me with a knife!”
    Knowing she was armed kept the other three men at a distance. Angel never slowed down, just waved the knife at them, feinted as though she were going to attack, and then ran like the devil. By the time she reached the cave opening, the man she had wounded had reached his friends, and she could hear him exhorting them to go after her, ranting at them for their cowardice in the face of “one tiny little woman.”
    Once out of the cave, Angel used the flashlight to search for Red. He had drifted off a ways, munching grass—near four strange, menacing machines