Free She Can Run by Melinda Leigh Page A

muscled limbs, the kind of hard physique that made a woman feel soft and utterly feminine.
    She realized with a pang of regret that they should go. Find somewhere else to hide. Somewhere she wasn’t tempted to let her defenses down again.
    “He’s not mean.” Katie’s answer pulled Beth out of her thoughts.
    “No, he isn’t.” Beth’s heart squeezed at the surprise in her daughter’s voice.
    Katie continued, “He’s kinda like Uncle James.”
    It had taken James a while to relate to the kids. Like Jack, the older man had never had any children of his own. After her aunt’s death, James had closed himself off. But he’d cared, and eventually Ben and Katie softened his hardened heart. James and the kids had grown close.
    “So you’re OK staying here with Jack for a while?” Emerging into the sunlit warmth of the barnyard, Beth stopped and turned to face Katie. Her daughter blinked up at her.
    “It’s nice here.” Katie draped one arm around Henry’s neck. The dog turned and licked her face. “And I don’t want to leave Henry. We don’t have to go away, do we?”
    Beth closed her eyes and swallowed the lump in her throat.
    They really should go. Things here weren’t turning out quite the way she’d planned. With a sigh, she raised her eyelids. Katie’s lower lip trembled. Beth’s resolve crumbled.
    Jack might be curious, but she didn’t think he posed any danger to them. Not the life-or-death kind she was worried about right now anyway. Still, she should keep her distance.
    “No, sweetheart.” Beth smiled. “We can stay, for a while anyway.”
    Katie’s grin made Beth’s heart ache. “Good. It’s pretty here.”
    A hoof banged against wood.
    “We’d better get the horses their breakfast.”
    Katie turned and skipped toward the barn door.
    Eventually she’d have to take her little girl away from here. This wouldn’t last forever. Nothing good ever did.
    Just as her daughter passed into the barn’s shadow, Beth paused, her gaze inexplicably drawn to the thick woods on the far side of the pasture. A naked and vulnerable feeling settled over her, as if she were being watched. The hair on the nape of her neck rose in primitive warning. She pivoted to scan the rest of her surroundings. The only sign of life were thumbnail-sized white butterflies hovering over dandelions in the weedy pasture. She inhaled deeply through her nose and blew the breath out through her mouth.
    “What’s wrong, Mommy?” Her daughter’s voice drew Beth’s attention back to the barn entrance, where the little girl waited, eyes opened wide as she read her mother’s anxious expression.
    Beth smoothed the alarm from her face. “Nothing, honey. Nothing at all.”
    But as she joined her daughter, goose bumps rose on her arms, and her gaze was pulled back to the dark fringe of forest.

     
    He lowered the binoculars and sank deeper into the underbrush. The woman couldn’t have seen him. Not only was he too far away to be visible to the naked eye, he was completely concealed behind thick foliage like a hunter in a deer blind.
    Yet she’d seemed to look right at him.
    He raised the binoculars again and watched her turn her attention back to the little girl. After a moment of conversation, they both vanished into the barn.
    Sure looked like her, but that wasn’t his call.
    He had his orders. Follow up on all promising inquiries. Make visual contact. Obtain photos. Report.
    On to step three. He had two more possibilities that still needed to be checked out.
    He pulled the high-powered digital camera from its case, screwed the super telephoto lens into place, and attached the tripod. Even though the image would be small, with twenty-one megapixels of resolution, the photo could be cropped and enlarged. By the time he was done editing the shots, he’d be able to count the crows’ feet around the woman’s eyes.
    He aimed the camera at the barn door and adjusted the settings. He settled in and waited for her to