Elizabeth Lowell by Reckless Love

seen.”
    Her fingers tightened on the herbs as the barb went home, but she was determined not to show that she’d been hurt.
    “Thank you,” she said huskily. “I just took a leaf from Cascabel’s book—hide in plain sight. The pony soldiers caught him way down south last year. He escaped from them. They went looking for him, expecting to run him down easily because there was no cover around. It was flat land with only a scattering of stunted mesquite. No place for a rabbit to hide, much less a man.”
    Ty listened in spite of his anger at having been deceived. As he listened, he tried to figure out why her voice was so appealing to him. Finally he realized that she no longer was trying to conceal her voice’s essentially feminine nature, a faintly husky music that tantalized his senses.
    And she was nineteen, not thirteen.
    Stop it,
he told himself fiercely.
She
’
s all alone in the world. Any man who would take advantage of that isn
’
t worthy of the name.
    “Because the soldiers knew there was no place to hide, they didn’t look,” she continued. “Cascabel is as shrewd as Satan. He knew that the best place to hide is in plain sight, where no one would ever look. So when he was convinced that he couldn’t outrun the soldiers and they would catch him in the open, he rolled in the dust, grabbed some mesquite branches and sat very still. The branches didn’t cover him, but they gave the soldiers something familiar to look at—something they would never look at twice. And they didn’t,” she concluded. “They rode right by Cascabel, maybe a hundred feet away, and never saw him.”
    “Probably because Cascabel looks a hell of a lot more like a mesquite bush than you look like a woman.”
    “That’s your opinion,” she said, “but we both know how trustworthy your eyes are, don’t we?”
    Ty saw the reaction that Janna tried to hide. He smiled, feeling better than he had since he realized how badly he had been fooled. If his brothers ever found out what had happened, they would ride him until he screamed for mercy. He had always been the one the MacKenzie men turned to for advice on the pursuit and pleasuring of the fair sex.
    He laughed aloud and felt his temper sweeten with every passing second. He was going to get some of his own back from the gray-eyed chameleon, and he was going to enjoy himself thoroughly in the process. She would rue the day she had fooled him into believing she was an effeminate boy.
    “If you’d been any kind of a woman,” he drawled very slowly, “I’d feel right ashamed of being fooled. But seeing as how you only
say
you’re a girl, and I’m too much of a gentleman to ask you to prove it...I guess I’ll just have to keep my doubts to myself.”
    “You? A gentleman?” she asked in rising tones of disbelief. She looked pointedly at his half-grown beard and soggy breechcloth. “From what I can see—and there’s darn little I
can
’
t
see—you look like a savage.”
    His laugh wasn’t quite so heartfelt this time. “Oh, I know I’m a gentleman for a fact,
boy.
And so do a lot of real ladies.”
    Mentally Janna compared herself to the sketch of her mother—loose, ragged clothes against stylish swirls of silk, Indian braids against carefully coiffed curls. The comparison was simply too painful. So was the fact that Ty had been taken with her mother’s image and couldn’t have been more blunt about the daughter’s lack of feminine allure.
    Unshed tears clawed at the back of Janna’s eyelids, but the thought that Ty might catch her crying appalled her. Without a word she dusted off her hands and brushed past him, refusing even to look at him, knowing that for all her scathing comments to the contrary, his eyes were uncomfortably sharp when it came to assessing her mood.
    When she was at the edge of the grassy area of the valley, she cupped her hands to her mouth and called out to Zebra, using the keening cry of a hawk. To human ears there was almost no