“Oh, Daniel…”

At that moment, Lonnie came swaggering back to them, thumbs hooked in his belt, hat tipped back. His bullying stance. He planted himself in front of Brooke but looked down at Daniel as he spoke. Probably to make himself feel even bigger, Brooke thought.

“Okay, here’s what’s gonna happen. You two tell me that lion’s such a big pussycat, so what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna go in there and get that cat into its cage. You understand me?”

“We won’t do it!” Daniel yelled before Brooke could reach for him and get a hand over his mouth to shut him up.

Lonnie gave a snort of laughter and looked at his buddies, who were all suddenly looking at the ground, the trees, anywhere but at Lonnie, Brooke or Daniel. “Well, okay, let me tell you what’s gonna happen if you don’t. If you don’t get that cat into that cage, we’re gonna shoot it. How’s that?”

Daniel gave a gasp of pure outrage. “You can’t!”

Lonnie leaned over until his face was on a level with Daniel’s, showing his teeth in a mirthless smile. “You wanna bet? The lion attacked. We had no choice but to shoot it, to save your lives.”

“That’s a lie,” said Daniel in a trembling voice, and Brooke pulled him against her side. His body was hot and sweaty; she wondered how she could feel so cold.

“The word of four officers of the law says otherwise,” Lonnie said with a shrug, rocking back on his heels. Again, he looked at the other deputies, and in his self-confident smile and their obvious discomfiture, Brooke suddenly saw the truth.

Daniel’s right-they’re going to kill Lady. No matter what happens, regardless of what Daniel and I do, they’re going to shoot her down and claim it was to save us from being attacked.

It’s always the same. Something terrible, something awful is going to happen to me. And I can’t do anything to stop it.

I-a woman-am powerless.

“Well, looks like I got here just in time.”

Brooke gave a violent start as Daniel jerked away from her with a glad cry. “Tony!”

She clamped a hand over her mouth, smothering a small whimpering sound that might have been relief or fear. Somewhere inside her were ringing bells and joyful songs to equal anything of Daniel’s, and that in itself was a fearful thing. But drowning out the unexpected gladness she felt at the sight of the man strolling toward them, laden down with his usual array of cameras and bags, was the doubt…the fear. The question, what can he possibly do against four armed deputy sheriffs?

Lonnie had moved to intercept him, one hand held up like a cop stopping traffic. “Hey-where do you think you’re going? You got no business here.”

“This is going to make a helluva story on tonight’s news,” Tony said, ignoring him, and although he had several cameras draped over his shoulders and around his neck, he was looking down at the small object he held in one hand. A cell phone. And as he was rapidly stabbing buttons on it with his thumb, he glanced up to add a gleeful, “Terrific follow-up to the story about the killer cat. News flash-Deputies Shoot Pet Cougar in Cold Blood!”

“Hey! You ain’t bringing those cameras in here.” Lonnie’s face was flushed dark with anger. “You hear me? You take one more step and I’m gonna take ’em offa you myself.”

Tony smiled. It was his sweet, face-transforming smile, and Brooke, watching, felt something crack and shift inside her. It felt oddly like ice melting.

“Hey,” Tony said in his easygoing way, “you’re welcome to ’em. You should probably know, though, that if you damage anything, I’ll be filing a lawsuit against the department, the town and the whole damn county the minute the courthouse opens up this morning. And see-” he squinted his eyes and shrugged his broad shoulders “-the thing is, it won’t matter, anyway, because I just sent a video of that interesting threat you made to Mrs. Grant and her son here, to my editor’s computer.” He held up the cell phone and gazed at it with apparent awe. “Amazing what you can do with a cell phone nowadays.”

“Cool…” said Daniel on a gleeful exhalation.

Brooke sucked in a breath as Lonnie made a growling sound and took a threatening step toward Tony.

Once again, Al Hernandez interceded. “Come on, man. Don’t make it worse,” he said to Lonnie as he stepped between the two men. He held up a placating hand to Tony. “Look, all we want to do is take the cougar into custody until the hearing. That’s all, okay? Just like we’d do if there was a dog that bit somebody. It’s a matter of public safety. The only reason we didn’t do it before now is because we didn’t have the facilities to hold a dangerous animal like that lion.”

“And now you do?” Tony looked and sounded like an interested news reporter. “Mind telling me what arrangements have been made, then, for the animal’s safety?”

Lonnie snorted and turned away, his face a study in fury and frustration. Al was staring nervously at the cell phone in Tony’s hand. “Ah…well, we, uh…”

“Yeah,” Tony said softly, “that’s what I thought.”

At that moment, the cell phone in his hand began to play the opening notes of “The William Tell Overture.” A smile broke over his tough-guy features, and to Brooke, it seemed like the sun breaking free of clouds. He thumbed the phone on and said, “Whitehall.” He listened, and his expression grew somber. “Yes, sir, he certainly is.” He held the phone out to Lonnie. “Deputy Doyle? It’s for you.”

Lonnie took the phone and held it about the way he would have if it had been full of live killer bees. He lifted it to his ear, and there was at least an attempt at bravado, with his deep and abrupt, “Yeah. This is Deputy Sheriff Lonnie Doyle-whom I speakin’ to?” Then, looking like he’d been whacked upside the head with a shovel, he spoke in a considerably higher and thinner tone as he pivoted, turning his back on his fascinated audience. “Yessir. Uh…no, sir. No, sir. Yessir, I do understand…”

Brooke felt something warm and solid come to fill the empty space next to her and realized it was Tony. Realized, too, that she still had one hand clamped hard across her mouth. She took it away and looked at him and gave a shivery laugh. “Who-”

“Sshh…” he said, with a slight warning shake of his head, not looking at her but somehow managing to make her feel cloaked in warmth and safety just by being there.

Swallowing her questions and holding inside herself a new sense of wonder, she watched Lonnie take the phone away from his ear. When he turned, his teeth were bared, his face a mask of rage. He looked as though he would have liked to hurl the offending cell phone at the three of them, but once again, it was Al Hernandez who interceded, taking the object from him and handing it back to Tony.

“This ain’t over,” Lonnie growled, stabbing a finger at Tony, then Brooke. “You hear me? We ain’t done, not by a long shot.” He stomped over to his sheriff’s department SUV, climbed in and slammed the door.

Al threw Brooke a wary glance and went after his partner, getting in on the passenger side. As the SUV bounced back down the lane and through the barn’s open breezeway, the other two deputies got into the pickup truck with the cage in the back and followed.

As the sound of the two vehicles faded and a mild morning breeze swirled their dust into eddies, Brooke turned silently and blindly against Tony’s broad chest.

He didn’t know which surprised him the most: the fact that she’d done it, or that it felt so natural when she did. His arms went around her, and her head came to rest on his shoulder, and her body seemed to fit against his as if they were two broken halves put back together again.

She was trembling in waves, the way someone did when they were crying and trying not to, trying at least not to let anyone else know. He wanted to stroke and comfort her, but the cell phone in his hand was getting in the way. Then somehow it wasn’t, as Daniel happily relieved him of it without being asked. And that was another source of wonder to Tony-the fact that not even Daniel seemed to find it odd that a strange man had his arms around his mother.

“Hey,” Daniel said, “this isn’t a iPhone. It doesn’t even have a camera.”

Tony let go a gusty breath of laughter. “Okay…busted.”

Daniel let out a squawk. “You mean you-”

“Yeah. Sorry. I lied.”

Brooke lifted her head to gaze at him with drenched and incredulous eyes. “Dear God-that was a bluff?”

“Yeah…” At least, he thought he said something like that. His vision was filled with her eyes, swimming with tears, like sunlight on water, thick lashes clumped together and her mouth all blurred and soft. His senses were overwhelmed with the sweet warmth of her breath and the clean scent of her skin, and the vibrant and graceful curves of her body, nestled against his. It was all he could do not lift his hands to cradle her face and bring it softly…sweetly…gently to his.

Then she was laughing, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth, and he came to himself and reared back with mock outrage. “I’m a professional photojournalist. You think I’d sink so low as to have a camera in my phone?”

Her laughter became something that sounded more like a whimper. “Remind me never to play poker with you,” she said as she turned to lace her fingers through the fabric of the chain-link fence and rest her forehead on her arm.

“I’m a lousy poker player, actually,” Tony said softly, and it took all the will he had not to move close behind her and lay his hands over hers and bury his face in her hair. “A lousy liar, too-normally. I don’t know what got into me.”

“Well, you did one helluva a job when it counted,” she said on a rueful little coda of laughter.

And Daniel crowed, “See? I told you she cusses sometimes.”

“Daniel,” his mother said in a careful tone, the one mothers everywhere used as their first warning, “don’t you think you should go and let Hilda out?”

Tony snapped his fingers. “That’s who’s missing.”

“Yeah,” Daniel said, and his face grew dark with anger, “Lonnie made us lock her in the house. He said he’d shoot her if she got in his way.”

“She’s…very protective of us,” Brooke said in a low voice as Daniel went running off to the house. “And she really doesn’t like Lonnie.”

“Interesting,” Tony murmured, and he moved up beside her to search the apparently empty compound with narrowed eyes. “Where is she?”

“Hiding. Over there in those rocks. I’ve never seen her do that before. She senses…” She turned her head to look at him over one braced arm. “Thank you for what you did this morning. You saved Lady’s life. I’m sure of it. But-” the muscles in her face flinched, and she finished in a whisper, “-this won’t be the end of it. I’ve never seen Lonnie so mad. He’s going to be back.”

“He sure does have a hate on for that cougar.” He managed to keep his tone light while oily coils of anger were writhing in his belly.

“Oh,” Brooke said as she turned, “I’m sure he blames her for Duncan’s death.”

They walked slowly back toward the house, side by side. “Seems to me,” Tony said, “it would make more sense for him to blame you. Since you’ve been charged with killing him.”

“Yeah…” Her forehead furrowed with the little watermark frown as she studied the ground in front of her. “Doesn’t make much sense, does it?” She gave her head a little shake and looked up at him. “You know what else doesn’t make sense? How you managed to get hold of a judge and still get over here so fast. It couldn’t have been fifteen, maybe twenty minutes after Daniel called you.”

“Oh,” Tony said. And then he added, “Well,” to buy himself time, while nasty little bubbles of guilt burned in his chest like the aftereffects of a bad meal. “I didn’t actually get hold of the judge. That would have been your lawyer-what’s his name? Mr. Henderson?-he called him.”

“Okay…” Brooke said slowly. “But then, you had to call him, didn’t you? And you’d have to look up his number, and it couldn’t have been easy to reach him, since it was before office hours in the morning…right?”

Memories of childhood flooded him, of being grilled by his mother or sisters after being caught in some misbehavior, and then worse, of being caught in the lies he told to try and save himself. The fact that the desire he’d felt for this woman still sang through his body made the memories weirdly discomfiting. He ran a hand over his scalp and tried to smile. “Actually…I had help. I’ve been staying with a friend…in town and, uh…”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry-I didn’t realize-”

Warmth flooded his chest as he saw her cheeks turn pink with embarrassment and understood the conclusion she’d jumped to. “A guy,” he said gently. “His name is Holt Kincaid.” And then it was his turn to feel the heat of embarrassment as her eyes widened with new understanding. “No-wait,” he added, laughing. “It’s not that kind of friend. No-he’s just…He had business in town, and we ran into each other, and with all the media in town for your, uh-Anyway, there weren’t any motel rooms to be had, so we’ve been sharing. That’s all. It’s not what…” His words dried up under her steady blue gaze.