Murphy laughed and started gathering Whip’s supplies.
BY the time Whip returned to the mercantile leading the thin black packhorse, his supplies were waiting. Within an hour everything was loaded and ready to go.
Whip swung into the saddle of his big, smoke-colored trail horse and grabbed the packhorse’s lead rope. He rode out with a storm building around him, tracking the girl with frightened eyes and a walk like honey.
It was sunset when Whip rode down a wooded draw into a clearing. At the far edge of the clearing a cabin was waiting, the cabin he had seen in his dreams.
And the girl he had dreamed was waiting, too.
But Shannon had a dog the size of Texas by her side, a shotgun in her hands, and an expression on her face that said she didn’t want a damn thing to do with the man called Whip Moran.
2
Shannon stood in the doorway of the cabin and looked into the eerie radiance that came to the high country during a stormy sunset. All around her thunder rumbled and echoed like distant avalanches. She could smell the storm coming down the mountainside. She could taste it. She could feel it in the freshening wind.
But the fierce thunderstorm didn’t worry her nearly as much the lone man riding out of the sunset.
Lord, that’s one big man the storm is pushing toward me.
The rider was mounted on a silver-gray horse that was the exact color of the stranger’s eyes back in Holler Creek. When the rider turned to check on the progress of his packhorse, the long leather lash coiled over his right shoulder gleamed in the twilight.
Whip.
Is it really him? Cherokee said nobody alive could handle a long lash like the man called Whip.
But what brings him here?
The answer was a memory of Whip’s clear, quicksilver glances following her, touching her like ghostly caresses.