He gave her one brief, furious look, then stomped on the brakes, swearing under his breath. The SUV swerved to the side of the road and jerked to a halt. He turned his head to glare at her along his shoulder, and not even the sunglasses could hide the frustration burning in his eyes. After a long pause, he threw a glance over his shoulder, made a tire-squealing U-turn and headed the SUV back into town.

Roan was about as close to losing his temper as he ever got, though if he’d been honest with himself he’d have to admit the burr under his saddle probably wasn’t anger at all. At the moment, though, he didn’t give much of a damn about honesty. What he cared about was keeping it together, and anger seemed a whole lot easier to deal with than some of the other stuff rattling around inside him.

Stubborn woman, he thought, and wouldn’t let himself think about the anguish, courage and vulnerability that were there in her voice too.

Wouldn’t let himself think what a high-caliber slug would have done to her head but for a split-second quirk of Fate.

Wouldn’t let himself picture it, anyway. He was definitely thinking about it when he pulled up in front of the little clapboard house. All his senses were on hair-trigger alert and the short hairs rising on the back of his neck. He wondered how in the hell he was going to be able to check out the house without leaving Mary alone and unguarded in the car.

As it happened, while he was silently grinding his teeth and pondering the matter, she took it out of his hands. Almost before the SUV stopped rolling, before he had any idea what she had in mind, she opened up her door and jumped out. By the time he got the motor turned off and the keys out of the ignition and his own door open, she was already halfway across the raggedy dandelion-studded grass, right out in the open, unshielded, unguarded.

With fear and fury propelling him, he caught up with her in about two strides. He grabbed her arm-ignoring her gasp of outraged protest-and steered her away from the front steps and around the side of the house to the back, where he shoved her down beside the stoop and told her to stay there while he did a sweep for intruders. He was almost as surprised as she was when she obeyed him. He could feel her seething about it, though, when he came back and hauled her up the steps and shielded her with his body while she unlocked the door.

Inside the kitchen, he locked the door and pulled down the shades, this time making sure to keep a good firm grip on her arm in case she had any more ideas about dashing off without waiting for him to check things out first. Again, it didn’t make her happy; this time the look she gave him when he told her to stay put while he had a look around probably should have turned him to stone.

“You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” he said mildly when he met her in the living room, feeling a little more relaxed now he’d made sure there weren’t any hitmen lurking in her closets or under the bed. Somehow it didn’t surprise him that she hadn’t obeyed his order to stay in the kitchen.

“No,” she snapped, “I’m not.” She had her arms folded and one hip stuck out, and everything about her but the color of her hair screamed, Red-Headed Woman-Handle with Care!

It was an attitude Roan was well acquainted with, having spent a good part of his life in the company of red-haired females, but what he wasn’t prepared for was the little hot spot that opened up in the bottom of his belly, like a slumbering coal flaring to life.

“I’m through being meek and mild,” she bit out between heaving breaths, her eyes spitting green-gold fire, and the thought, Meek and mild? You’ve got to be kidding! flashed through his mind. But the urge to break into a grin vanished when she continued, and he saw the fire in her eyes was just one shaky step away from tears. “I’m tired of…of letting some-some man run my life. Like I’m a little child who needs to be told what to do. Okay, I’ve let it happen, but no more. I’m not a child, I’m a grownup, dammit. I decide whether to go or stay, whether to hide or not. My choice.”

“Fine,” he said, keeping his voice stern, grateful for the sunglasses that wouldn’t let her see what was in his eyes. He folded his arms and faced her across a barrier of space so charged with electricity it seemed almost to hum. “You’re right. You choose. Tell me what you want to do. Do you want to stay here, wait for Diego DelRey or his hitman to come for you? Or do you want to come stay out at my ranch where I can protect you?”

She stared at him through a long, vibrating silence, while the fire in her eyes slowly died. Finally… “I want to stay with you,” she whispered.

The naked longing in her face hit him like a fist in the gut. Reaching for her was a reflex. But she’d already turned away from him, jerky as a mechanical doll.

Stupid, Mary thought. Stupid! Oh God, Oh God, I hope I didn’t let him see….

But she had. She knew she had. She hadn’t missed the way his face…at least the part of it she could see…had changed. She was only glad he was wearing sunglasses, so she hadn’t had to see the pity in his eyes.

“I’ll just be a minute,” she muttered breathlessly as she fled like a coward to her bedroom.

She meant it, too-about taking a minute to pack; she had it down to a science. She began to pull clothes out of drawers and dump them into the suitcase she’d hauled out from the bottom of her closet, pausing long enough to call back to him, “I think I saw a cat carrier in the garage…maybe you could-”

She heard a growled, “I’ll get it,” then the thump of boots on hardwood.

She heard the kitchen door slam. And all the fight and defiance went out of her like air from a balloon. She let the pile of clothes slip from her arms and gripped the edges of the suitcase that was lying open on the bed, leaned on her hands, bowed her head and closed her eyes, weighed down by an overwhelming sense of grief and loss.

I don’t want to do this.

The packing thing she may have had down pat, but the leaving…that was another matter. She thought of all the places she’d left…all the people, most of the time just when she was beginning to get to know them…never long enough to feel that sense of home…of belonging. She had a sudden fierce urge to pick up the suitcase and heave it through the nearest window.

No more. I don’t want to leave again. Not this town. This is where I want to belong.

How insane was that, when this was the town where she’d been assaulted, nearly raped, arrested and charged with murder? Where, but for the sake of a sympathetic judge, she would right now be in jail?

All right, maybe not the town, but the people. Kind people, like Miss Ada and Betty. People who need me, like Susie Grace.

And Roan. You know very well this isn’t about the town, or the people. It’s about one person. Roan.

How insane was that, to fall for the sheriff who’d arrested her and put her in jail for a murder she hadn’t committed?

It was all too much…everything coming down on her at once, happening way too fast. She could feel emotions looming, piling up in her like snow on a precipice. It wouldn’t take much to bring it all tumbling down on her. And so what? she thought recklessly. Let it come. She would welcome it. After everything that had happened to her, after the long, long struggle to outrun Destiny, it would be almost a relief to finally let it sweep her away…

Without a car cluttering up the garage, Roan was able to find the cat carrier without too much difficulty. After sweeping off the worst of the dust, he carried it into the kitchen and left it there while he went to see how Mary was coming along with her packing.

He found her standing in the middle of her bedroom, frowning at a half-filled suitcase on the bed in front of her. She looked no less emotionally fragile than when he’d left her, so he knocked softly on the door frame and eased into the room much the way he’d have entered the cage of a sleeping lioness.

“Found the carrier,” he said, keeping his voice to a neutral mutter. “Now all I need’s the cat. Any idea where I might find him?”

She jerked around, her hair in tumbled disarray, her mouth forming an O of distress. “Oh-oh God. He could be anywhere-curled up asleep somewhere…hunting…visiting the neighbors… He always comes home when he knows I’m here, though. He’ll be here-I know he will. If we wait-”

“Mary…” He said it with a sigh, knowing the battle that was coming. “The longer we wait, the less chance we have of getting you out of town undetected. We can’t-”

She held up a hand. “No-don’t. Don’t even say it.”

Well, he’d known she was going to fight him on it, and she didn’t disappoint him. Her eyes were getting the shimmer again-the fire-and-rain thing that grabbed him in some deep-down part of himself that didn’t know how to say no.

“I’m not leaving without him, Roan. I mean it.”

“Mary-” He put his hands on her arms, gently stroking. Meaning only to comfort her…make her see reason. Honest to God.

She shook her head rapidly, further dislodging her hair from its haphazard moorings and sending strands of it snaking across her face, giving her the wild look of someone fighting her way through a tempest. “He’s not even mine,” she said furiously. “He’s Queenie’s stupid cat. I know he’s hateful and ugly, but she left him with me. I’m responsible for him. I can’t just leave him here. What if someone comes for me and…and hurts him? I can’t…” The words trailed off.

For a moment she simply stared at him, a strange fierce light in her eyes. He’d seen it before, that look, during his skydiving training. It was the look of someone about to jump out of an airplane…terrified, but committed. Then, to his utter astonishment, she reached up and took off his sunglasses. For another few seconds she burned that look into his eyes…then hooked a hand around his neck, leaned up and kissed him.

He barely felt the soft pillowing of her mouth against his before it burst like ripe fruit in the sun, flooding him with her warm, sweet essence. The taste and smell and feel of her woman’s body blew through him like summer winds, and remembered heat and sweat and desperate lust of the golden summers of his youth collided with the cold and barrenness of the recent past to form a storm cell within him of epic intensity. It slammed into him with a concussion like thunder. Heat raced through his blood, electricity crackled along his skin.

For a moment, stunned, he merely took what she offered. Then suddenly he was plundering deeper, greedily…driving his hands into her hair while his mouth bore down on hers, demanding more…and more still wasn’t enough. There was desperation in the way his mouth devoured her, recklessness in his exploring hands, fostered by a need greater than anything he’d ever known before.

But then…he’d never been hungry for so long, and this was a need only a starving man could know.

She tore her mouth from his at last and clung to him, sobbing…gasping for breath. Holding her, he returned to his senses slowly…first to discover they were both shaking, then that his hand was molded to the shape of her breast and his work-roughened skin separated from the delicate silkiness of hers only by the thinnest layer of lace. Not surprisingly, the sweater she was wearing had been no barrier to him at all.

“I’m sorry.” She gulped the words in a tear-thickened voice, not pulling away from him but lowering her face so his lips, already burning with thirst for her, could only find solace in the smooth moist skin of her forehead.

Breath gusted from his chest and stirred her hair. “Mary…”

She gave her head a quick, hard shake…pressed her hand against him, trembling-pushing him away or imploring him to stay? He could feel the battle raging inside her as she said with a heart-rending travesty of a laugh, “That wasn’t-I know there must be rules against you…against us doing this.”

“Probably,” he said, laughing with her, in too much turmoil himself to realize how much she wanted him to deny it. “I don’t think the situation’s come up before.”

He caught only a glimpse of her ravaged face before she turned away from him. One glimpse of pride and despair, hope and grief… And it hit him then, like a nightmare he hadn’t had in so long he’d forgotten how terrible it could be-a sense of loss like a huge dark hole opening up in front of him where his future ought to be.

I can’t lose this woman. Even if it means my job, my career. I’m not going to let her go.

Before the thought had completely formed in his mind his hand lashed out, caught her by the arm and spun her back to him. She came against his chest with a force that drove a gasp from her lungs, and his mouth was there to take it from her. She made a sound-a cry, a whimper, a sob-and he took that, too. Took it, and gave her back everything that was inside him he hadn’t been able to find words to say.