Page 1 of A Rogue Cowboy's Kiss

ONE

Falcon paused,hands on his thighs, gasping for air. The torrential rain was icy cold, barely above freezing, and the wind was knifing through him. He was cold all the way to his gut, but it didn’t matter. He’d been this cold many times. He felt like he lived in this level of cold, and it had never stopped him before.

He would never stop.

Never stop hiding, and never stop hunting.

He’d been so close a dozen times, and the ghost had always slipped through his fingers.

But today…today felt different.

Something was humming inside Falcon, an energy that felt intoxicating and poisonous at the same time.

He looked up at the trail ahead of him. He’d been climbing for hours, following the faint trail of clues he’d been uncovering for almost twenty years.

He saw, up ahead, a glint, and he stiffened.

He pulled out his binoculars and saw there was a hut up ahead. Small. Wooden. Blue trim.

Son of a bitch.

It was really there. But was it the hut he’d been looking for?

He paused to consult his spirit guides, to hear the truth inside him that he’d learned to listen to. In the dark places he’d spent much of his life, he’d learned to find relief in places that he never would have expected, like tapping into the higher truth and guidance that didn’t judge him for being the man he was.Is this the place?he asked.

Yes.

The answer was clear and unequivocal. His guides didn’t give him much, but most of the time, when it really mattered, he could get a sense of yes and no if he asked the right question.

There had been no doubt about the answer they gave him this time.

This was it. This time, it would end.

He shoved his binoculars in his pocket and pulled out his gun, stepping off the trail into the wet underbrush and moving out of sight.

Years of living on the edge of humanity had taught him to blend into the vegetation, as he moved silently and swiftly up the mountain, closing in on the cabin that he hoped like hell held the man who had consumed him since he was ten.

The Harts, his found family, had told him so many times to give up, to build a home on their Oregon ranch, to let himself live.

He wanted to. Every damned night, he dreamed of that ranch, of waking up in a bed, in a home. Of walking out the front door and being able to breathe. To be with the horses. To have dinner with people he cared about every night, not just when he skated into town on the back of a shadow.

He dreamed ofher.Every damned night.

But he couldn’t choose that for himself. He couldn’t walk away from this life. This was all that mattered to him.

The sun was setting, casting the stormy mountain into long shadows as he forced his exhausted body to forge ahead.

He reached the clearing beside the hut and crouched, watching, waiting. Was he home? Was thismonsterhe’d been playing cat and mouse with for so long there? Waiting for Falcon? Was this a trap that would end Falcon? Or the prize that would finally set him free?

Falcon reached out with his mind, and he could feel the undercurrent of dense energy surrounding the house. He didn’t know the energy signature of the man he’d been hunting, but this felt like what he would have imagined it to be.

Falcon waited in the underbrush for several hours, watching for any sign that the hut was occupied.

There was no movement. Not even a whisper.

So Falcon waited some more, patient. Willing to wait for the end of this quest that had been his life for two decades.

It was after three in the morning when Falcon finally eased from the bushes, sliding through the shadows hiding from the moon, working his way to the hut.

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