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him an opportunity to strike? Look, I know that’s a very real possibility, that the threat is there, but I want you to know I’m going to stick close to you. I’m going to see to it that, whoever he is, he doesn’t touch you.”
    It would be easy to lie, to let him think this was exactly what had her so unhappy. But why bother when tomorrow he would see the truth anyway? All right, so her pride was going to suffer, but it was better to get it out in the open now.
    “That should be what’s worrying me, but it isn’t.” Samantha drew a slow breath, released it and confessed her fear. “It’s the horse.”
    He was clearly perplexed. “Are we talking about a particular horse?”
    “Yes, the one I’m going to be expected to mount tomorrow morning when we move those cattle out.”
    He stared at her. “Are you telling me you don’t ride? That you’re about to join a cattle drive, and you have no experience in the saddle?”

    “Let’s just say I’m not comfortable in the saddle. That I hate being in the saddle and that the horse, any horse, knows it.”
    “How can that be when you grew up on the Walking W? Or was I misinformed about that?”
    “Yes, I was raised on the ranch, and I was taught to ride. I wasn’t given any choice about that. But there was never a moment when I wasn’t plain scared up there in those stirrups. You can imagine how my grandfather liked that.”
    “Yeah, Joe Walker wouldn’t have appreciated a granddaughter who wasn’t at home in the saddle. I guess that explains why the two of you ended up being alienated, why you didn’t visit him in the hospital or attend his funeral. Or does it?”
    It didn’t begin to explain Samantha’s estrangement from her grandfather, barely touched on the reasons for her intense dislike of everything connected with ranching. But those wounds were too deep, too personal to discuss with Roark Hawke. She avoided the subject by giving him another truth. One she shared in an angry voice.
    “I did try to visit him when I learned he was ill. But he made it clear through his lawyer that he didn’t want me there. I shouldn’t have been surprised. To the end he was too stubborn to want anything from me, especially my sympathy. That’s how it was with us.”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    No, and you didn’t know that I was at his funeral. Or as close anyway, Samantha remembered, as she could bring herself to go. Unnoticed by the mourners, she had watched her grandfather’s burial from a hill overlooking the cemetery before fleeing from a scene she could no longer handle. The memories had simply been too painful. But Roark didn’t have to hear this either.
    “A real joke, isn’t it?” she said grimly. “I’ve got to climb up on a horse—a horse, mind you, that isn’t going to like me being on his back any more than I want to bethere—and pretend I know what I’m doing while I escort two hundred unwilling cows through a howling wilderness. Now that qualifies as funny, don’t you think?”
    “You’ll manage.”
    “You sound very sure about that.”
    “Why not?” His gaze traveled from her face down the entire length of her figure, his appraisal so slow and thorough that Samantha could feel herself flushing. “You have a body built for the saddle.”
    And other things. That’s what his hot eyes seemed to be telling her. Before she could stop him, he reached out and captured her hands, imprisoning them in his own big hands as he bent his head to inspect them.
    “And you have a pair of hands meant for holding reins. Strong hands, I’d say.”
    His touch was warm and steady and far too provocative.
    “What you learned as a girl will come back to you. You won’t have forgotten those lessons, whether you liked them or not. And if this time around you have a little patience with yourself…yeah, you’ll manage just fine.”
    His easy confidence in her was hard to resist, his husky voice and deep, blue-eyed gaze even