Passion to Protect Read Online Free Page A

think you can make it back up on your horse again?” Jake asked.
    Swallowing hard, she nodded. “If you can hold her still.” She limped over to the mare. “It’s all right, Queen. It’s okay, sweetie,” she crooned, until the horse accepted her presence. Before remounting, she forced herself to take time to stroke the silken neck, keeping her voice soft yet assured, and her hands gentle and steady. Earlier she’d allowed herself to get so worked up that she’d forgotten everything she knew about working with horses, and it had cost her dearly. She couldn’t afford to make the same mistake again.
    Feeling the mare relax beneath her touch, she reached up, grabbing the saddle horn and cantle, then swung aboard in one swift, sure motion. Though the movement had her head spinning again, she swallowed back a groan and leaned over the horn, imagining herself a rock in one of Yosemite’s wildest rivers, a stationary object that pain and panic flowed past.
    Jake leaned close to hand her the reins. “You’re hurting, Liane, and a head injury’s nothing to fool with. We need to get you back home.”
    Straightening, she forced herself to ignore the worry in his voice. “Listen, Jake, I’m really glad you’re here. But if you came all this way just to tell me to turn around, you’re wasting your breath.”
    “Wouldn’t be the first time,” he reminded her. “But it’s not safe here—”
    “Which means my family’s in danger.”
    “Which means,” he insisted, “that your dad’s more than likely found someplace to take shelter with the kids. Someplace off the trail, where we could ride right past him.”
    “I know every cave and overhang, all the spots he uses when a sudden storm comes up. I’ll find them, Jake, I know it. And after I finish hugging them all within an inch of their lives, I swear I’ll never let them out of my sight again.”
    A gust of wind had the trees swaying, their scraping, rattling branches making crazy shadows as heat lightning strobe-lit the dark sky.
    “It’s getting worse,” Jake said. “There’s no way your father would want you out in this.”
    The urgency in his tone had her on alert. “Is there something you aren’t telling me? Something you’ve found out?”
    “I haven’t been able to reach anybody—too much static. But I don’t like this wind. It gets high enough, it’ll bring down a lot of this dry timber and feed the fires.”
    “We’re wasting time here. Let’s get moving.” As she spoke, she heard her voice going cold and felt herself stiffening, the way she always did around him since her return. Because she’d understood almost from the day she’d moved back to her dad’s house last year that Jake Whittaker was more than an uncomfortable reminder of the past. He was a danger to her, with his handsome face and hard, masculine body, a body so defined and sculpted that the briefest glimpse of him in a tight T-shirt was enough to weaken her knees. And enough to rekindle a memory so bittersweet, it tasted of her own tears.
    But there was more, far more than a body born to tempt her, from his willingness to help her dad out at a moment’s notice to the way the two of them would get to grinning—though that deep, open laugh that she remembered had been another of the casualties of last summer’s fire. Jake was so good-natured around her kids, too, happily putting up with Cody’s tendency to talk the ears off anyone who would listen and gently teasing smiles out of her shy daughter. Seeing them together reminded her all too painfully of how often he’d daydreamed aloud of someday having a big family of his own to make up for losing his own parents at a young age.
    She’d known instinctively that he was the sort of man who could entice her to forget the years that lay between them, the sort of man who could sneak back into her heart if she didn’t pay attention. But she could never risk forgetting how the man she’d eventually gone on to marry had