SLOAN STARTED TO RUN WITHOUT HAVING ANY clear idea where she was going. She shoved Cruz to move him out of her way, but he backed up quickly to keep himself between her and the front door.

“Sloan, stop! Where are you going?”

“I heard you with the Englishman, Cruz. Or should I call you Hawk?”

Cruz’s face turned ashen. “Wait. I can explain.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can,” she said with open sarcasm. She paled as a thought came to her. “Am I supposed to die for having seen the Englishman?”

“No. Christ, no! Let me explain-”

“I don’t want to hear anything you have to say, Hawk.” She tried to brush past him again, but his hands came up to frame either side of her face. He forced her to look up into his eyes.

She didn’t believe what she saw. He couldn’t be hurting. He couldn’t be in pain. She was the one who had just had her heart torn out.

“I love you. I have always loved you,” he said. “This other business has nothing to do with us.”

Her eyes flashed with disdain. “I’m sure Tonio would have told me the same thing-if he had lived long enough to explain himself.”

“Dear God. Please, Sloan, listen to me.”

She jerked herself from his grasp and backed away from him. “I see I’m Sloan now. What happened to your precious Cebellina? I guess pretty love words aren’t necessary any more to keep the blinders on my eyes. Don’t follow me, Hawk. I never want to see your face again!”

While he stood watching her in stunned disbelief, she fled past him out the front door. His bayo was still tethered to the rail out front and she grabbed the reins, leaped into the saddle, and kicked him into a gallop.

An instant later Cruz came out of his stupor and realized that not only was Sloan leaving him, she was doing so in the worst spring storm they’d had in years. Lightning flashed, reminding him of the danger.

He raced outside in time to see her gallop through the fortress gates. He ran to the stable, taking time only to slip a bridle on the fastest horse he had, a half-broken buckskin stallion, before he slipped onto its bare back and headed after Sloan.

He yanked the buckskin to an abrupt halt outside the fortress walls. Lightning flashed again and he saw hoofprints in the mud, already filling with rainwater. He heaved a sigh of relief when he realized she wasn’t headed in the direction of Three Oaks. It looked as though she had decided to go to Golden Valley, where her sister Bay lived.

He grasped a handful of black mane and tightened his legs on the buckskin’s ocher sides before spurring the half-wild stallion. The animal responded by rearing in protest, neighing its refusal to be dominated by either man or nature, before it bolted away from the fortress into the black abyss created by the storm.

Sloan hadn’t planned a particular destination when she had fled the hacienda. She was merely running and had given the stallion his head. It was only when the bayo began to tire that she realized she was headed toward the huge live oak where she and Cruz had first kissed. If there was a more dangerous place to be during a thunderstorm, Sloan didn’t know where it was. Yet she was so overwhelmed by Cruz’s betrayal she truly didn’t care right now whether she lived or died.

It was only now that he had betrayed her that she realized she loved Cruz Guerrero with a depth of soul and spirit she had never imagined possible when his brother had broken her heart. Though that wound had somehow healed, she was certain this one never would.

When she reached the ancient live oak, she was awed by its majesty in the face of the elements. Its gnarled branches took on grotesque proportions in the flashes of white light, refusing to bow to the wind’s demand, while its leaves rustled a furious defiance. She pulled the exhausted bayo to a halt beneath the glorious oak and sat there, shoulders back, chin high, recklessly waiting for lightning to strike.

There was something exhilarating about flaunting the fates, daring them to end her life. She raised her face to the drops of rain that fell like tears from the giant tree and let them mingle with her own. Suddenly, her face contorted and her jaws opened wide for the inhuman howl of pain that wrenched its way out of her mouth.

Cruz heard the ululating wail of human agony carried on the wind and spurred the stallion to even greater speed. A moment later, a flash of lightning revealed Sloan’s silhouette on horseback beneath the towering oak. Cruz wanted to howl himself. How dare she take such a chance with her life! She belonged to him!

He knew she must have seen him in the same bolt of lightning, yet she remained beneath the natural lightning rod she had chosen for her resting place.

Cruz cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Cebellina! Get away from the tree!” But the wind captured his warning and carried it away.

She did not move.

And so he had no choice except to join her in her death-defying venture.

When he reached her, he yanked the buckskin to a sitting stop and shouted over the wind, “You are gambling with your life. Come away from here, and we will talk.”

“Don’t like the odds, Hawk? Maybe you had better leave, then. You see, my luck hasn’t been too good lately and-”

He grabbed the bayo’s reins to lead him away from the danger, but Sloan saw what Cruz was attempting to do and simply slid out of the saddle. Cruz had only gone a few steps before he realized what she had done.

Once the stallion no longer had a rider to control him, he attacked the half-wild buckskin Cruz was riding. Cruz’s mount half-reared and kicked at the bayo with its hind legs. The bayo danced skittishly away, pulling at the reins and forcing Cruz around so the two stallions faced one another.

In an instant the air was charged with expectancy, the storm forgotten as the two great beasts arched their necks, nostrils flaring, ears flattened against their heads as they tested one another in an instinctive effort to establish supremacy.

The bayo reared, stripping the reins from Cruz’s hand, and pawed the air, trumpeting a challenge that was quickly answered by the half-wild buckskin.

Sloan saw the danger to Cruz and, acting without thought to her own safety, rushed forward to try and catch her horse’s reins and bring him back under control. As she reached out a hand for the trailing leather, the bayo reared again and its hooves struck her on the hip, sending her tumbling to the ground.

The pain was excruciating. Sloan barely had time to acknowledge it, however, before she was blinded by a piercing white light. She felt her eyebrows being singed as she threw up her hand to cover her face. For an instant the hairs stood up all over her body. A deafening crack of thunder followed.

When the sound had at last shuddered to a stop after a series of rumbling echoes, Sloan’s face wrenched in an agonized expression of remorse and relief. By some miracle she had survived the bolt of lightning that had struck the magnificent oak.

Then she heard the sharp crack of splitting wood.

The live oak had been cleaved by the lightning, but the ancient tree had only been strong enough to withstand for a short time the pull of gravity that began to take its toll.

Sloan watched in horror as a fissure opened down the length of the tree and fully a quarter of the giant oak started its plunge downward to crush her. She tried to escape, but found it hard to move quickly with her injured hip.

She saw Cruz shaking his head to clear it. He was on the outer edge of the area where the branches would fall.

“Cruz! Look out!”

Cruz had been thrown from his horse by the repercussion from the lightning bolt. At the same moment he heard Sloan’s warning, he identified the awful sound of wood splintering and sensed, rather than saw, the heavy branches of the shattered oak on their downward arc.