Cowboy PI by Jean Barrett Page B

the way his Adam’s apple bobbed slowly in his tanned throat, like a pulse rising and falling. The sight was as fascinating to her now as it had been then. And as arousing.

    Samantha quickly lowered her gaze, only to discover another action she had observed before. The big hand that had been resting lightly on the pommel of his saddle was now busy making fists as he slowly, repeatedly closed and unclosed his fingers. Was he even aware he was doing it? Roark noticed the direction of her attention. “Does this bother you?”
    It did, but not in the way he meant.
    “It’s not a nervous habit,” he went on to explain, “though by now I guess it is an unconscious one. I broke the bones of this hand a few years back, and sometimes the fingers go a little stiff on me. It helps to exercise them like this.”
    “An accident?”
    “Thrown from a bronc in a competition I entered up in Montana. I thought I was rodeo material. I found out the hard way I wasn’t.”
    Samantha’s response was immediate and explosive, surprising both of them in its fierceness. “A rodeo!” she cried before she could stop herself. “You could have been killed! People are killed in rodeos!”
    “Hey, relax. You’ve startled the horses. It was a rodeo, Samantha, not a war.”
    He thought she was overreacting. He didn’t know. Nor could she bring herself to tell him. “Yes, that was a little excessive,” she murmured. “Sorry.”
    He stared at her, and she could feel him wondering. “Tell me about it, Samantha,” he urged her. “Tell me what happened between you and your grandfather that’s left you with this legacy of loathing for everything connected with his world. I’d like to understand.”
    Things that had to do with ranching, he meant. Things like rodeos. That particular subject she wouldn’t discuss, because it meant opening herself to a pain that was too private, too unbearable. But the rest?
    Yes, she decided, maybe it was time he knew. Maybe she wanted him to stop thinking of her as less than shewas. Or maybe it was just the spell of the moonlit night they shared that invited confidences, made it easy to talk to him.
    “My grandfather was a hard man,” she said. “I don’t think he ever stopped resenting my mother for being a daughter and not the son he wanted. And then when she married my father, who was a teacher instead of the rancher he expected her to choose…”
    “More to resent, huh?”
    “Oh, he took her back on the Walking W when my father died and she had nowhere else to go, no money, no job skills and with a daughter of her own to raise. But he made her pay for that. She earned her way as his housekeeper—that was long before Ramona—and I hated watching her forever trying to please him and always failing. My mother was a gentle woman. My grandfather didn’t see that. He saw her as weak willed, and in the end he broke her spirit.”
    “But not yours.”
    “My mother was a lesson to me. A cruel one. I promised myself I wasn’t going to be like her. That I would never be dependent on Joe Walker.” Samantha sighed. “And yet here I am on this cattle drive doing just that.”
    “While not forgiving either him or anything he represented.”
    “Meaning he’s dead and gone, and I should just let it go, is that it?”
    “I didn’t say that, Samantha. I can understand the issues you have with your grandfather, but to hate ranching and everything associated with it just because of how much he valued it—”
    “He more than valued it,” she cut him off sharply. “It was like a religion to him. It is with ranchers. It’s that way with you, too, isn’t it? In your blood. Which is why—”
    “What?”
    “Nothing.”
    She turned her head away and was stubbornly silent.Painfully silent. Gazing at her, Roark sensed that she hadn’t told him everything. There was more. He didn’t press her, though. He understood about secrets and the need sometimes to hold them inside. He had his own deep ache he was