“I saw how women react to you,” she said. “Furthermore, I saw how you know how they react to you. You’re everything bad-boy wrong, which makes you everything desirable, and, yes, even knowing better than to fall for the sexy charm, I did.” She gestured toward the bed. “But it wasn’t fair to you to let it go that far. I’m sorry.”

He folded his arms over his chest and cocked his hip, which was risky since his jeans remained unbuttoned and low-slung. He squinted one eye as he looked at her. “In addition to being bad-boy wrong, etcetera, know what else I am? Smart. And I have a built-in, fool-proof manure detector, and everything you just said is pure bullshit.”

She was about to deny it, but he overrode her.

“You wanted me moving inside you just as much as I wanted to be. You didn’t call it off because your better judgment suddenly asserted itself or you got turned off by my alley cat ways.

“No, you called it off because you still don’t trust me. You’re scared. You think I’m either a paranoid lunatic who dreams up conspiracy theories or an embittered son with so much pent-up rage against my famous father that I tried to kill him.”

“That’s not true!” she exclaimed.

“No?”

“If I didn’t trust you, if I was still afraid of you, would I be here?”

“Then what is it, Kerra?”

Matching him in angry volume, she said, “I don’t know how this is going to end.”

“This what? This quarrel? This—”

“This whole thing. The way you laid it out last night, we’re in a precarious situation. If it’s as dangerous as you indicate, the outcome could be that we both wind up dead.”

He dropped some of the attitude. “A valid concern. But you knew that last night. Before you made the choice to stick with me, I made it clear that if you did, you’d be taking a huge risk.”

With my life, yes, but not with my heart.

Those were the words in her mind, but she didn’t say them out loud.

Simply looking at him now in his dishevelment made her mouth water. She wanted badly to put her hands on him, pull him to her, feel him inside her and appease this craving that was as wonderful as it was terrible. If she thought that having sex would fix the problem, she would do it, and happily.

But along with the sexual yearning, she was also emotionally drawn to the man who’d had to live in the large shadow of his father.

Trapper didn’t whine about it. He didn’t tell a sob story to elicit pity. In fact, he rebuffed anything that smacked of compassion and sadness for him. Nor did he seem jealous of The Major. Trapper didn’t vie for his father’s celebrity. He did everything he could to avoid it.

So while he thumbed his nose at propriety and rebelled against authority, Kerra sensed that underneath the charm, and flippancy, and screw-you attitude, was a boy who’d been abandoned at age eleven. Young John Trapper had been unable to compete with the allure of fame, which his father had chosen over him.

She knew better than to open this up to discussion, of course. Wounded animals bit the tender hand extended to them. He would hate her for perceiving and exposing the anguish he suffered day after day.

He was in mourning, not over the loss of a dead parent, but a living one.

If she were foolish enough to let her heart get entangled with Trapper, he would break it. That’s what she didn’t want to risk.

They both reacted to the sudden knock on the door, but in different ways. Trapper lunged across the bed, grabbed his pistol, and made it to the window in the same wink of time that Kerra took a startled breath and slapped her hand over her jumping heart.

“It’s Carson.” Trapper let the curtain fall back into place, slid the chain free, and unlocked the door.

The lawyer, whom Kerra had met the night before, came in carrying two sacks from a fast food chain in one hand. In the other he had a grip on a pair of plastic shopping bags. He took in the rumpled bed, Trapper’s open jeans, and her dishabille.

“Is my arrival untimely?” He turned to Trapper and scowled. “I hope. I owe you about five more interruptions.”

With no discernible self-consciousness, Trapper buttoned up his fly. “You bring us a car?”

“Isn’t that what you ordered?”

“What kind?”

“You have the audacity to be particular?”

“Well, I’d rather this one not be hot.”

“It isn’t.” Carson turned to Kerra. “I told him I was sorry about the SUV. Ungrateful bastard never accepts an apology.”

Her eyes met Trapper’s. “No, he doesn’t.”

Their gazes held until the tense silence became awkward. Carson chuckled. “I believe I did walk in on a scene. I love it.” He placed the carryout food sacks on the table beneath the window and tossed the shopping bags onto the bed. “There’s everything on the list you texted me. I took a stab at your size,” he said to Kerra. “Hard to tell in that baggy get-up you’re wearing.”

“I’m sure that whatever you got will be fine. Thank you.”

He motioned toward the table. “Y’all eat while it’s hot. I’ll sit here.” He sat down on the end of the bed. “I gotta make this quick. The missus followed so she could drive me back to Fort Worth. She’s waiting in the car.”

“She’s welcome to come in,” Trapper said as he divided the food.

“No way,” Carson said. “She doesn’t like you. Says you’re rude, and bad news, and you didn’t call her bridesmaid like you promised to.”

Kerra looked across the table at Trapper. He avoided looking back, biting into his breakfast sandwich instead.

Carson raised both hands in front of his chest, palms out, as though warding off something. “Really, truly, Trapper, don’t go out of your way to thank me for doing your shopping. Or for the breakfast. Or for driving out across the prairie last night during a snowstorm to rescue your ass. I mean, what are friends for?”

“Thank you. I’ll overlook that you arrived at the shack an hour and a half later than you said you would.”

“It was snow-ing.” Carson paused, then asked, “Do you think the preacher showed up there this morning?”

Trapper nodded. “Yep. With a posse.”

When they’d reached the line shack and Trapper had explained to Kerra how he planned to ditch the stolen vehicle and throw Sheriff Addison off their trail, she’d been flabbergasted.

“You manipulated Hank so well, even I believed you,” she’d told him. “How do you know he’ll tattle?”

“Because he always comes clean. He’ll have been on the phone with Glenn in a matter of seconds.”

He’d explained that Glenn and Hank would judiciously wait till morning to come to the shack and that by that time he and Kerra would be long gone. Through the windshield there had been absolutely nothing to see except for the darkness, dervishes of snow, and the vague outline of an inhospitable looking structure. “Long gone to where?” she’d asked.

That’s when he’d told her the second half of his plan, and they’d begun the seemingly interminable wait for Carson Rime, who’d had to rely on GPS coordinates to locate them. Trapper had kept the SUV’s engine running so they could use the heater. He had urged her to recline her seat and sleep while he kept vigil.

She had leaned her seat back as far as it would go, but she never went to sleep. She had been chilled and tired and plagued with the fear that she was engaging in something doomed to end in disaster.

The lawyer had finally found them. On the way back, he’d talked nonstop, telling anecdotes about his clients, until they’d reached the motel, which he’d designated as “perfect for their purposes.”

Now, Trapper polished off his sandwich, took a sip of coffee, and said to Carson, “Tell me about Thomas Wilcox’s daughter.”

“Name, Tiffany. She came along late in the marriage. He and his wife, Greta, doted on the kid. Which you’d think would make her a spoiled rich brat. But looks like she was everything a parent could hope for. Straight A student. Lots of friends.” He enumerated her achievements and told them she’d excelled at horseback riding. “The English kind. Little saddles, funny hats, fences to jump.”