Cowboy PI by Jean Barrett Page A

weather that made her shiver. Or nerves. Whatever the explanation, she was relieved when they reached the facility at the end of the path.
    “You go first,” Samantha instructed her companion, handing her the flashlight.
    Ramona disappeared inside the privy. Samantha waited outside, wishing she would hurry. When the woman finally reappeared, she returned the flashlight with a warning.
    “The batteries must be weakening. I’m afraid it’s getting kind of dim.”
    So dim, Samantha discovered, that managing the privy was a challenge once she was inside and with the door closed. After making use of the facility, she was able to wash her hands using the basin and a can of water one of the staff had provided on a shelf.
    By this time the flashlight was worthless. She switched it off and tucked it into a pocket of her coat. They didn’t really need it, anyway. The glow from the moon would be more than adequate enough to light their way back to the house.
    That’s what she thought until she stepped out of the privy and found Ramona nowhere in sight. What had become of her? Had she returned to the house without her?
    “Ramona,” she called softly, “are you there?”
    There was no answer. And Samantha suddenly missed the reassuring beam of the flashlight. She also decided that the night seemed much too quiet, so quiet that she could hear nothing but the sound of her own breathing. She didn’t like it. Didn’t like how heavy the shadows were in that grove of trees off to her right, shadows that could conceal a menace lurking in their depths.
    She was being silly again. But she couldn’t shake hersense of uneasiness, the eerie feeling that she was being watched, that she was no longer alone out here. The feeling became a certainty when one of those dark shadows moved, detaching itself from the others.
    Samantha didn’t pause to learn the identity of that furtive shadow or why Ramona hadn’t waited for her. Swinging around, she fled up the path as if every nightmare from her childhood were at her heels. She was so fearful of the thing behind her that she didn’t concern herself with what might be in front of her. Until she flew around the corner of the house and smacked into a wall that hadn’t been there before. A towering wall of living, breathing flesh.
    She knew it was flesh, because when she raised her hands to defend herself against her attacker, they encountered a chest. A hard, totally bare male chest. She was dragged up against its heat when a pair of strong hands gripped her upper arms to steady her. Gasping, she struggled against his hold.
    “Easy,” he said.
    Samantha went still. She recognized his voice.
    “What were you running from?”
    “Something back there under the trees.”
    “What?” Roark demanded sharply.
    “I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. Maybe it was human, maybe not.”
    Her relief that Roark was here had been both enormous and sweet, but, aware now that she was still pressed against his naked chest, Samantha experienced another kind of danger. One from which she needed to disengage herself. “I’m all right now,” she insisted. “It was probably just an animal. You can let me go.”
    He released her. “What in hell are you doing out here, anyway?”
    “I needed to visit the privy.”
    “Then you should have had me go with you. That’s what I’m here for, remember?”
    “I didn’t go out alone. Ramona was with me.”

    “Where is she?”
    “I don’t know. She seems to have dis—”
    “Here I am,” Ramona said, trotting around the corner of the house.
    “Where on earth have you been? Didn’t you hear me call you?”
    “I’m sorry. There was a nightjar singing in one of the trees, and I stepped around the other side of the house to see if I could catch a glimpse of—” She broke off, as if she realized that Samantha was upset and that Roark had arrived on the scene and was looking far too rigid standing there. “Is something wrong?”
    “Samantha spotted something