Free The Rogue by Janet Dailey

covering the floor of his stall. The familiar smells of hay and horses, leather and saddle soap, brought a smile to her lips.
    Footsteps approached the stable door, accompanied by the sound of stirrups flapping from a carried saddle. Diana turned to greet the ranch hand entering the door, anticipating that it might be Rube Spencer or one of the other men who had worked a long time for the Major.
    It was Holt Mallory. His gaze touched, identified, and ignored her as he moved past her to the tack room. In that brief second, Diana was struck again by the feeling that his gray eyes were a hundred years old, that there was nothing he hadn’t seen or experienced. It was the same thought she had had the first time she met him. And, like the first time, a rush of intense dislike prickled her skin.
    Irritated by the way he hadn’t acknowledged her presence with a greeting, Diana followed him, pausing in the doorway of the tack room. She watched him swing the saddle from his shoulder and drape it over the wooden saddle rest. Wide shoulders tapered to a slim waist and hips. His tall frame carried not an ounce of unneeded flesh. She had the feeling a knife blade couldn’t penetrate those steel muscles.
    “I see you haven’t changed, Mrs. Cummings.” His back remained to her, his cold, drawling voice tauntingin its indifference. “You are still running around in tight pants with your blouse half-unbuttoned. Who are you after this time?”
    Her hand rushed defensively to her blouse front, fingers refastening the button that had slipped loose. Heat stained her cheeks while a fiery resentment blazed in her eyes.
    “No one,” Diana retorted, “and the name is Somers. I have legally reverted to my maiden name. I can see you haven’t changed, either, Holt. You are the same cold, arrogant bastard you always were.”
    He turned to face her. The years had molded his features into abrasively masculine lines. Gold glinted in the brown of his hair, visible beneath the curved brim of his Stetson hat. Diana studied him, his seemingly indolent stance masking a coiled alertness. He was as fascinating and as deadly as a swaying cobra before it strikes.
    “Why have you come back?”
    Diana found his question infuriating. “What a ridiculous thing to ask! This is my home!”
    “How long do you intend to stay?” Holt did not let her barely controlled anger deflect him.
    “This is my home,” she repeated. “I am not leaving.”
    “Haven’t you done enough damage?”
    “Damage?”
    “I warned you before about hurting the Major,” he informed her coldly. “He may be ill, but he isn’t blind. If you plan to continue your numerous affairs, you won’t be able to hide them from him. When that happens, you’ll answer to me.”
    “My affairs!” Her stricken look was telling. “What do you know about—”
    “Did you honestly think the sordid little tales about your marriage wouldn’t get back to this side of the state?” The muscles in his jaw hardened with contempt. “Wasn’t it your infidelity that your ex-husband used as his grounds for divorce?”
    “How . . . Who ...” Her mind was whirling. Shehad never dreamed that the ugly gossip had traveled this far.
    “This is copper country,” he reminded her. “The stories probably made the entire circuit of mining companies, considering your ex-husband’s involvement with them. The gossips had a field day when the rumors about the Major’s daughter reached here.”
    “Oh, God,” Diana moaned and turned aside. “They were lies. I never had an affair with anyone. Rand thought ... He ...” She looked back to Holt, holding her breath. “The Major—did he hear them, too?”
    Holt’s eyes had narrowed on her, sharply gray and assessing. “I imagine. I never asked.”
    It was an effort to hold her head up. “I’m surprised you didn’t tell him.”
    “I try to make things easier for the Major, not harder.”
    “Oh? Is that why you didn’t bother to inform me when the Major