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doing here, kid?” When she didn’t answer, he asked Jeb, “Who is she?”
    Jeb tried to suppress his amusement, but he couldn’t quite manage it. He knew sparks were going to fly, and there was little doubt whowould get burned. It would serve the feller right, he thought.
    “Why, she’s the gal you been lookin’ for,” Jeb answered innocently.
    Chase turned back to the girl, anger overcoming all sense. “Sonofabitch!” he swore furiously. “I ought to tan your hide!”
    Jessie stepped back, her hand automatically going to the gun on her hip. “I wouldn’t try it, mister,” she told him in a cold, calm voice. “I wouldn’t even think about it if I were you.”
    Chase eyed her warily. He hadn’t noticed the gun before, seeing only that delicate oval face, a face that for some annoying reason had come to his mind often over the past week and a half. The time he’d wasted looking for her, this girl, not Rachel’s faceless daughter but this little hoyden in boy’s clothes. Christ, he wanted to get his hands on her!
    Chase continued to boil, but he managed to get his anger under the surface. “Would you really shoot me, kid?” he asked.
    “You better believe she would,” Jeb volunteered from behind him.
    Chase softened his expression and repeated in his most beguiling voice, “Would you, Jessica?”
    Jessie didn’t know what to make of this about-face, but she wasn’t mollified. Part of her anger was a defense, for she had lied to this man and they both knew it. But most of her anger was because he had no business shouting at Jeb.
    “Just stay away from me, and you won’t have to find out.”
    “Then I guess I’ll keep my distance,” he conceded, leaning back against the wall. “But you will agree you and I are due for some straight talk?”
    “No,” she answered flatly. “I don’t owe you any talk, but what I got to say you better pay attention to. Don’t you ever badger Jeb again. He works for me, and he doesn’t have to answer your questions. He doesn’t have to give you the time of day if he doesn’t want to. You don’t work here, so you got no business interrupting his work. Is all that clear to you, mister?”
    “Perfectly,” Chase replied, undaunted. “And since you’re the one with the answers, why don’t you tell me why you lied to me.”
    Jessie glared at him. “Because I don’t want you here!” she snapped. “And that’s all you need to know.”
    She turned on her heel and started out of the stable, but Chase stopped her with the ominous cocking of his gun and the icy warning, “Just hold it right there, shortfry.”
    She was not more than a foot away from him, and she turned around to look at him in disbelief. She stared for a moment at the gun he was aiming at her, and then her expression changed to contempt. “You wouldn’t,” she stated flatly. “How would you explain shooting me to your precious Rachel?”
    With that she passed on through the stable doors. Chase angrily put his gun away. Jeb’s scratchy chuckling only made him angrier. In fact, he couldn’t remember when a female had ever made him so mad, and he wasn’t going to put up with it.
    He went after Jessie, catching up with herhalfway between the stable and the house. Too late she heard him coming up behind her, and before she could react, he had jerked her to a stop, getting to her gun before she could and throwing it across the yard.
    “We’ll talk,” Chase said brusquely.
    “The hell we will!” Jessie shouted each word just a little louder than the last. Before she had finished, she was swinging a fist at him.
    Chase caught her wrist and jerked it up behind her back, then went for the other one and did the same, leaving her feet kicking at him. “You were only half-right back there,” he told her sharply. “It’s not that I wouldn’t dare shoot you, kid. It’s that I wouldn’t want to. But I’m not opposed to giving you a richly deserved spanking if you don’t settle