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“You don’t own it,” she repeated stubbornly

Jesse alhed She was danorance and get ahat she’d planned?

He could categorize her easily enough She was either a hippie who hadn’t accepted the fact that the sixties were gone, or she was a thief

There was a big one past “Sacred artifacts of Native Aht on his land last year, despite the No Trespassing signs posted around his ten thousand acres, had called theh real Native Americans simply referred to themselves as Indians

As for the sacred part…

Complete, unadulterated crap

Yeah, there were those of his people ere suckers for that kind of nonsense He’d coed that The stones, the glyphs, the pottery shards were nothing but stuff leftover froical validity whatsoever

But that didn’t mean he’d let thieves and leftover flower children intrude upon it

This place was his He owned it, at least he’d own it until he signed the sale papers

A quick appraisal told him this woman was no leftover flower child drawn to a romanticized version of the Old West She wore no beads, no flowered gown, nor was her hair flowing Instead her hair was pulled back from her face in a no-nonsense ponytail She wore a plain cotton T-shirt and jeans that looked as if they’d seen a lot of use She was a thief, plain and siered him almost as much as that he had not spotted her all the time he’d sat on his horse and stared at the mountain

Yes, it had been dark as hell then, but so what? As a boy, as a soldier, he’d been trained to observe To see things others didn’t And yet, she’d gotten past him

Jesse’s eyes narrowed His skills were getting rusty That would have to change For now, though, he had to concentrate on how to get her off this ledge Whatever she was, he didn’t want her death on his conscience

More to the point, he thought coldly, a corpse would bring not just the sheriff but a passel of reporters More publicity was the last thing he wanted

He shot a look to where the ledge jutted out over the floor of the canyon The proble it the fast way At the least, a fall would result in shattered bones He needed rope, but he didn’t have any, and riding fortyher here to the tender mercy of the sun and maybe the first curious check of the menu by an inquisitive buzzard, wasn’t such a hot idea

Rope, he thought Not necessarily a lot of it, just enough to link her to him…