Only 05 - Autumn Lover

a name?” she asked abruptly.
    “Hunter.”
    “Hunter,” Elyssa repeated slowly, as though testing the sound on her tongue. “Is that your name or your profession?”
    “Does it matter?”
    She closed her lips against the retort that was on the edge of her tongue. She had been told often enough that she was like her dead mother, impulsive and intelligent in equal and sometimes conflicting parts.
    This man’s deep stillness brought out in Elyssa a reckless desire to pry beneath his composed surface to the heat and seething life of him.
    But life had taught Elyssa that recklessness could be very costly.
    Warily Elyssa measured the cool reserve in Hunter’s eyes. A deeply feminine part of her wondered where he had been and what had happened to take from his soul all but ice and distance…and an echo of pain that cut her like a razor.
    Why should I care about this man’s past ? Elyssa asked herself fiercely. He evaded whichever Culpepper was on guard out in the pass, and that’s more than Mac with all his hunting skills managed to do .
    That’s all I should care about. Hunter’s skill .
    Yet it wasn’t all Elyssa was concerned about, and she was too intelligent not to know it. This man drew her as no other ever had.
    Nervously she licked her lips and took another deep breath.
    I should tell him to leave .
    “Do you want the job?” Elyssa asked, before common sense could make her change her mind.
    Black eyebrows rose in twin, oddly elegant arcs.
    “That fast?” Hunter asked. “No questions about my qualifications?”
    “You have the only qualifications that matter.”
    “Guns?” Hunter asked sardonically.
    “Brains,” she retorted.
    Hunter simply looked at her, waiting silently for a better explanation.
    “I didn’t hear shots,” Elyssa said, “so you got past whichever Culpepper was sitting at the opening to the valley or in the pass itself, all set to empty saddles.”
    Hunter shrugged, neither confirming nor denying Elyssa’s words.
    “How did you sneak by the dogs?” she asked.
    As she spoke, she looked around for the black-and-white border collies that usually were the first warning of any strangers near the ranch house.
    “I came in downwind of them,” Hunter said.
    “You were lucky.”
    “Was I? The wind has been blowing down out of the canyon behind the house for days.”
    Silently Elyssa conceded that Hunter was right. The autumn wind had been usually steady. For the past week it had flowed down the many canyons of the Ruby Mountains in a cool rush that smelled of piñon and rocky heights.
    Then she realized that Hunter was watching her as closely as she was watching him.
    “What makes you think I’m not a member of the Culpepper gang?” he asked calmly.
    “Too clean.”
    The corners of Hunter’s eyes tilted slightly, heightening the faint lines.
    Elyssa had a feeling that was as close as this man came to a smile, so she smiled in return.
    Although Elyssa didn’t realize it, the smile transformed her. It gave an animation to her face that was startling.
    Whereas before she had been a fairly pretty blond female with wide eyes and a pleasant voice, now Elyssa was a temptress with hair the color of moonlight, blue-green eyes radiant with sensual possibilities, and a body that set a man to thinking about what it would be like to get past all the buttons and muslin to the sultry flesh beneath.
    Abruptly Hunter looked away.
    “Missy, why don’t you tell me more about the job? Then I’ll decide if I want it.”
    His voice was clipped, almost rough. As he spoke, he snapped the reins between his fingers. It was the action of a man who wanted to be going about his business without further interruptions.
    Missy. As though I was a child , Elyssa thought.
    The word and the gesture rankled. It reminded Elyssa of her English cousins. They had been haughty and dismissive of the ill-born American girl who just happened to be a blood relative.
    But not the right kind of blood. Not all of it.
    In her cousins’ eyes her plainsman father had been little better than a savage.
    “I’m not a little miss,” Elyssa said, no longer smiling.
    Hunter shrugged.
    “You look real little from here,” he said.
    “You’ll sleep in the ranch house with us,” Elyssa said curtly.
    He nodded with absolute indifference.
    Elyssa wondered what Hunter would have done if she had told him that he would sleep in her bed. Then she looked at his remote, watchful eyes and doubted that anything she said would