The Maverick. Carrie Alexander

like gunshots in the clear mountain air. Wind whistled through the twisted pines, catching at the curly wisps of her uncontrollable hair. Although Luke didn’t turn, she recognized the rearing-mustang tattoo on his tanned left biceps. It matched her own tattoo—the one that only Luke knew about.

      Sophie licked her lips, her police training kicking in as her hand went automatically to the holstered sidearm hanging from her gun belt. As if a gun could protect her from the lethal Salinger charm!

      “Sir,” she said. Her voice grated like pebbles under a boot heel; she swallowed and tried again. “Sir, I want you to step off the bike. I need to see your license, proof of insurance and regis—registra—tion…”

      Her voice faded. Her vision blurred, her ears buzzed. Luke had swung his leg over the motorcycle and stood. He was taller than she remembered, more formidable. The shocking reality of his presence slammed into her with all the force of a runaway boulder tipped off the grandest of the Tetons. She could not believe that he was here. After all these years, he was standing right in front of her.

      Then he turned to face her, and he was not at all the Luke Salinger she remembered.

      CHAPTER TWO

      IT’S THE EYES. Sophie’s stomach dropped. Such flat steel-blue eyes couldn’t belong to Luke Salinger. There was no fire, no spirit, no passion—only the cold-blooded stare, appraising her without a spark of recognition.

      A silent cry ripped loose from the bonds of her tight control. What had happened to Maverick? Where was the man she’d once loved with all her heart?

      Gone away, grown up, never coming back.

      Her shock bottomed out. She realized that she’d been staring for too long and licked her dry lips. “Luke Salinger,” she said with no inflection and just a faint tremor.

      He nodded.

      Sophie felt disconnected from reality, as though she were weightless, as insubstantial as smoke. Yet Luke was the mystery here. She remembered a time when purpose had burned in his eyes, lighting them like a neon sign, charging himself and her and all the rest of the Mustangs with such an excess of energy that trouble was bound to follow.

      The spark was gone. He was deadened.

      Miserable but trying not to show it, she swiped her hand across her pants before extending her palm. “I need to see your license, registration and proof of insurance.”

      He removed a flattened billfold from his back pocket and slipped the driver’s license from its plastic sleeve. Taking the card, she examined it carefully, her eyes flickering between Luke’s watchful gaze and the name and photo on the ID. The license had been issued in California. She read the address. Los Angeles? It wasn’t easy to imagine the Luke she used to know putting up with the plastic superficiality she imagined ran rampant on the coast. But then, this man was a stranger to her. For all she knew, the Luke who’d despised the greed of conspicuous consumption had become a status-conscious spendthrift who shopped Rodeo Drive and ate goat-cheese pizzas at a hundred bucks a pop.

      Except that he didn’t look soft and pampered. He was tough, rugged, stringent.

      Physically, he’d changed, but not by much. Although he hadn’t thickened the way most men did by their mid-thirties, he’d…hardened. The muscles in his arms and legs and the broad chest beneath an expensive but battered brown leather vest and white sleeveless T-shirt appeared to be as hard as iron. Forged in fire, she thought, glancing briefly into his face. Aside from the shock of his unrecognizable expression, he was as handsome as ever. Only now his skin was tanned and weathered, drawn tight over strong cheekbones and jaw. Not a single strand of gray had sprouted among the dark hair barely restrained by a blue bandanna.

      The Luke Salinger she remembered had been more boy than man. That was no longer the case. But the old attraction trickling through her veins was terribly familiar.

      Sophie cleared her throat, desperate to distract herself. “Please move away from the bike. Stop. Wait there for just a moment, please.” She stared at her feet as they turned and walked her back toward the patrol car without any conscience decision from her addled brain. Luke’s indifference flummoxed her. Even after fourteen years, was it possible for him to have completely forgotten her? The one thing Luke had never been was lukewarm.

      Punch Fiorelli had been watching them, frowning. “Uh, say, Sophie?” Sheepishly he scrubbed a hand across his big, firm belly. “We weren’t going much past the speed limit. You wouldn’t give tickets to two old Mustangs, now, wouldja, honey?”

      She said, “You’re in the clear, Punch,” and slumped behind the wheel of the black-and-tan patrol car, boneless as a jellyfish. It was a minute before she gathered herself together and examined the license with a more objective eye. Hesitating to call it in to the dispatcher, she tapped the laminated card against the steering wheel, watching through the windshield as Punch approached Luke and began talking, gesturing at her car. Luke shrugged, nodded. Punch slapped him hard between the shoulder blades, a slap that would have made most men flinch.

      Luke didn’t waver. He was looking in Sophie’s direction. Between the distance and the glare of sunshine on the glass, he shouldn’t have been able to see her face very well. But she knew with a panicky certainty that he did see her. He saw inside her, to her dreams and fears and secrets. And he…

      He didn’t care.

      Her last shreds of hope, already as brown and brittle as fallen leaves, disintegrated into crumbled bits of nothing. Whatever had happened to change Luke into a stranger, it was clear now that his return had come too late for both of them.

      Sophie closed her hand around his license and other papers and reached for the radio mike, intending to have him run through the computer for additional outstanding warrants. He’d changed immeasurably. It was possible that he was a fugitive wanted in six states other than Wyoming.

      “YOU DO REALIZE that you were speeding when you drove through town,” Sophie said in her curiously toneless voice, tipping up her chin to glare at him from beneath the flat brim of her trooper hat. “I’m going to issue you a citation.”

      “A fine welcome,” Luke said, flippant, uncaring.

      Her eyes narrowed. “By your own choice.”

      She was different…yet the same. Little Sophie Ryan, with the tough-girl attitude that would forever be betrayed by her Cupid’s-bow mouth, the girlish sweep of her lashes and rampant curls the color of butter-brickle ice cream. At the same time she was strangely alien to him in her police uniform with its stained shirtfront and the badge on the pocket and the holstered gun she kept touching as though it were a lucky rabbit’s foot.

      Did he scare her?

      The thought disturbed him. Her betrayal being what it was—a knife in the gut no matter how many years had passed—he still didn’t care to come across as the kind of man she had to fear. He knew Sophie’s heart. So tender and damaged. Intimidation wasn’t his game.

      What was hers?

      She licked her lips, a nervous reaction he remembered well. She’d licked her lips, her eyes like saucers, the day he’d asked if she wanted to take a ride on his bike. She’d been barely sixteen, too young and uncertain to be as jaded as she’d put on. Straight off, he’d seen beyond her cocky attitude to the wounded psyche of a girl who was as untethered and searching as he.

      “Can you step over to the patrol car, sir?”

      Punch seemed anxious. “Hey, now, Soph—”

      “No problem,” Luke said, holding up his hands and walking away with Sophie cautiously trailing him. He couldn’t see her expression very well because of the hat, but he could feel the worry and confusion—and maybe attraction—emanating from her. He responded with equally mixed emotions in spite of their past, to such a degree he began to wonder if he’d sped through town in order to attract Deputy Ryan’s attention. Of course he hadn’t known she’d be on patrol, but just the same…

      Apparently,