But she couldn’t keep her gaze from the man’s face.It was an artist’s dream—or a captive’s nightmare.His eyes were a vivid blue-green, like clean water playing over white sand, and his thick sandy hair seemed brushed with gold dust.Nothing else about him was poetic, though.
His face seemed carved from rock.Lines etched away from his eyes, and she knew they weren’t caused by laughter but by harder, unpleasant emotions.None of the features—the eyes, the mouth, the jaw—gave anything away as he studied her with cool indifference.He turned to Ben.“Why in the hell did you bring her here?”His voice sounded hoarse, almost rusty.
“She says she’s Randall’s daughter.”
Like a fly caught in a spider’s web, Shea watched, fascinated, as the man closed his eyes for a moment, as if trying to digest a particularly difficult piece of information, and then opened them.
He studied her closely, but with no definable difference in expression, and she wondered whether that granite face was capable of revealing anything.“He doesn’t have a daughter,” he finally said in that rusty whisper.
Ben shrugged.“She said she was.She was trying to get to Rushton.I thought it was too good an opportunity to pass up.”
Shea hated being talked about as if she weren’t there, like an object of curiosity rather than a person.But she stayed silent, still transfixed by the face that came as close to stone as one could.
The blue-green eyes turned back to her.“How can you be Randall’s daughter?”
“The usual way, I imagine,” she said, surprising herself with the tart reply.
“You’re a liar.”The accusation was stinging, like the sharp crack of a whip.
Shea stiffened.She didn’t lie.She had never lied.Her mother hadn’t permitted lies.But then, she thought with sudden bleakness, her mother had told the biggest one of all.She thought about defending herself and then stayed silent.She owed this man no explanation, no answer.
Ben stepped forward as if to give protection, but she couldn’t trust him.He had brought her here.
Shea looked at the man next to Tyler.He looked a little like Ben Smith, and she wondered whether they could be brothers.He also looked more approachable than Tyler.But then almost anyone would.
“I … I don’t know what you want, but I have some money.…” A revealing quaver was in her voice.
“What’s your name?”the man next to Tyler said.
Shea didn’t know what to say.She didn’t exactly know who she was, not anymore, or what these people wanted with the man she believed to be her father.She wasn’t sure she knew anything anymore.But that was something she wasn’t going to admit.She couldn’t show weakness, not to Tyler.He would jump on weakness, use it.Her only defense was a show of strength, no matter how difficult it was, how much she had to hide the tremors that shook her.She balled her fists to keep the shaking from showing.
“Damnation,” Tyler said.“Who in hell are you?”His voice held a hint of impatience.
Shea’s chin went up.
“Why did you say you were Randall’s daughter?Or are you one of his whores?”There was contempt in his voice, and Shea knew an anger she’d never known before.Hewas judging her father.He was judgingher.
She was grateful when her anger exploded, eclipsing the fear.“What right haveyouto ask anything?”
“Oh, you know who I am?”Softness crept into his voice, a softness that she sensed was deceptive.
But she couldn’t stop.She was too angry to be cautious, too angry to be afraid.She wouldn’t be afraid of a man who betrayed his country during war.“A traitor,” she said unwisely.
He fairly purred as he moved toward her.“Your … father tell you that?”
There was something menacing in the graceful way he walked.She stepped back, but the horse prevented no more than a few inches retreat.
She tried to jerk her gaze away from his eyes, which seemed to impale her.“You have no right—”
“I have every right, if you are who you say you are.”He stopped in front of her, and she had the impression of barely contained anger.She was tall, but she felt inconsequential in front of him.He was several inches over six feet, and his cotton shirt and denim trousers did nothing to hide a very hard, lean body.But it was the cold austereness of his face that really was intimidating.Intimidating and, in some primitive way, mesmerizing.She felt shivers snake up and down her back.
Suddenly, she was awash with conflicting sensations.She was afraid of him, but something in her was reacting to him in a way she had never reacted to a man before.Awareness.Perhaps that was it.She was aware of him, drawn by him as if he were a magnet.
His eyes gave no indication he felt anything at all, but she sensed fury, the way one senses a death-dealing storm.
Deep to her toes, she could feel the rage radiating from him.She was the one who should be angry.She was the one who had been kidnapped, terrified.But she perceived she could never come close to the emotion that seemed to rack Tyler with such intensity.
He moved around her and went to her horse.With a gloved right hand he took a knife from a back pocket and quickly cut her valise and drawing case free.He placed the drawing case on a log stump before opening it.
