Renegade Man Read Free Page B

You’ve got sixty
seconds to clear out of—”
    “It’s you!”
    “What?”
    Her wide-eyed
gaze dropped to his long, narrow feet, slid up his skintight black wet suit,
paused at the knife strapped to his thigh, scooted on past his one-
hundred-pound leaded weight belt and settled on his face, framed by the
close-fitting black hood. “I don’t believe it. Jonah Jones!”
    He blinked the
water from his lashes and stared hard at her. With her hair plastered against
her head and streaming down her shoulders like sargasso seaweed, she didn’t
look particularly familiar. Yet the way she said his name told him who she was.
Dismayed, they stared at one another, regarding each other across a distance of
twenty years. Pain that had long been dormant flickered in the eyes of one,
twinges of uncomfortable guilt in the other’s.
    “Ritz,” he
drawled finally.
    Her mouth
tightened. “Rita-lou.”
    He ignored her.
His cynical green gaze took in the strong, wide mouth, the dark slashes of her
brows and the deep pools of her eyes, contrasting startlingly with her pale
hair. “The last time we talked, you had dropped out of Western High and—”
    “Gotten pregnant
and left town.”
    “Had gone to
work for the Kingsleys,” he finished firmly. He didn’t bother to keep the
contempt from his voice. “1 was lumber jacking for their lumber mill that
summer, Ritz—if you remember.”
    He remembered.
All too well. She’d been standing in the doorway to the Kingsley carriage
house, which had been converted to living quarters for the help. She hadn’t
changed out of her black uniform with the white cuffs and collar. She had
always looked remote, untouchable. But she had never looked so remote as she
had that evening, when she had told him it was over between them. He remembered
feeling awkward, feeling like digging his boot toe in the lush green grass,
running his finger inside his suddenly tight collar and begging. But he hadn’t.
And he wouldn’t now. It had simply been a schoolboy crush, and he was long over
her.
    She cocked her
head and studied him. “So where’d you go after you left Silver City?”
    His smile was
chilling. “I joined the navy and saw the world. And you?”
    She didn’t even
bother to smile, nor did she answer. She wrapped her arms around herself.
    “You’re
shivering like an Eskimo. Let’s get you out of those clothes.”
    “Thank you, but
I’ve been dressing and undressing myself for a good thirty years or more.”
    She stomped out
of the creek, water sloshing in her tennis shoes. He watched her sun-brown legs
and the enticing sway of her derriere, hugged by the wet shorts. She was even
prettier than she had been in school, and he’d thought then that he’d never
seen anything prettier. But that girl couldn’t begin to compare with the woman
walking away from him.
    Purely a sexual
attraction, he told himself, following her onto the bank and through the dense
growth of trees. But that attraction had been done with twenty years ago.
    In grade school,
he remembered, she had been a real scrapper, always with a smudge of dirt
somewhere on her face. Then, in junior high, he had noticed how she had
suddenly grown breasts—and grown even more standoffish. Now, as a mature woman,
her hips had widened in delicious proportion to those breasts.
    Dangerous
thoughts, since he certainly didn’t need a busybody in his vicinity. Best to
let this encounter end as it had begun—explosively. He knew better than to let
himself become distracted by a woman. Men had gotten killed over women. Samson
had gotten blinded over Delilah, John the Baptist had lost his head over
Salome, and—
    And damn! Now he
had real trouble to deal with: two rifles trained on him and Ritz!
    The center
horseman, flanked by his two gun-toting mounted henchmen, leaned forward and
braced himself on the pommel with hands that were as wrinkled and tough as a
dry chamois skin. “You two have wandered off the main road. This here’s
Kingsley