Mason entered the house, but the combination of irritation and sexual frustration was eroding his personal discipline."Something got your shorts in a bunch?"Martina DeRosa, his housekeeper, was setting up the big coffee pot in the kitchen. She raised one eyebrow."Sorry. It flew out of my hands.""Uh-huh." She gave him one of her up and down looks. "The expression on your face says different. Don't tell me it's that female out there.""I'm not telling you a thing. Anyway, she's got nothing to do with anything. She's here to do a job. Period."Martina snorted. "Fine. Whatever you say. But you've got the same expression on your face you had when you came back from Dallas a year ago. And you had it all through dinner. You better hope I'm the only one who noticed you've got a stick up your butt.""Don't you know mouthy housekeepers get fired?" he snapped."You'd be lost without me, and you damn well know it. Mason, it's about time you found yourself a woman and settled down, and

Before lunch, she approached Stick with a request."All right if I borrow one of the horses to ride? I know what I'm doing," she added quickly when she saw the look of skepticism on his face. "I can ride as well as my men, I promise you." And she desperately needed something mindless to clear out her brain. Something to relieve the tension gripping her body that was as much Mason as the job.He shrugged. "All right with me, if the boss signs off on it."She tried to catch Mason alone, but as soon as they finished eating, he retreated to his den and closed the door. A sure sign he didn't want company. Restless, she wandered out into the yard, seeking an alternative to being shut up in the bunkhouse with her team.The hands were hard at it, moving the calves they'd separated from their mothers into larger of the two corrals. According to Mason, tomorrow they'd begin the branding process. Enjoying the pastoral scene, she leaned her arms on the top rail of the corral to watch the scene

Mason's cock was hard as a spike, and he was so aroused he was afraid it would break through his jeans and his balls would explode. He had entertained the false hope that once he got his hands on Kris Gauthier again, it would satisfy the intense craving he'd been harboring for a year and that would be that, But the gods were having a huge laugh at his expense. Not only was his craving not appeased, it had ramped up to an unbelievable level.She tasted as sweet as she had all those months ago, her scent as intoxicating. Maybe more. He was stunned by the thought he might never get enough of this woman, and then where would he be? This couldn't go anywhere except where it was right this moment. The disastrous destruction of his engagement had left him bitter about relationships. So what if he grew old alone. It was better than opening himself up to pain again.Deliberately, he closed his mind to that train of thought. He had the hottest woman he'd ever met naked before him. He didn't pl

As the chopper lifted smoothly into the air, Mason again admired the efficiency and cool poise with which Kris handled the bird. She was all business, focused on managing the flight and controlling the sleek machine. He loved to watch the smooth play of muscles in her arms as she worked the controls and the deftness of her touch.Her face was impossible to read, shielded as it was by her aviator shades and the bill of her ball cap. But nothing in the movements of her body or her posture betrayed the slightest degree of tension. It seemed, once she sat in the pilot's seat, she blocked everything else from her mind. A skill he was sure she'd learned before being accepted as a Nightstalker.Below him, he could see Ray and Ted cantering across one of the fenced pasture sections. He was pleased to note that a wrangler had directed them around the areas with cattle to those acres that were empty. Soon, they were beyond the arable land and into the wild of the landscape, where they slowed t

They were all deployed tonight, every one of them. Mason had convinced Kris to include him, using his time in the military as a bonus, and she had grudgingly agreed. The air between them was tense, more so than it had been since the moment she'd set foot on his ranch. The vibes they gave off had to do with a lot more than sexual hunger, but he damn sure didn't want to dig into what it was.Not tonight, for sure, when they all needed to block out everything except what was about to happen.Kris flew everyone on the team—all six members—out to the last of the cleared pastures at dusk and parked the chopper behind a large copse of trees. While Lane waited in the chopper with the monitoring program on his computer, the rest dropped to the ground and took cover in the dense copse, waiting for word to move. Each of them was armed, and each had night vision goggles.He was stunned to see Kris take up a position with them, a rifle cradled in her arms. When he opened his mouth to say somethi