Stealing Thunder

  Love was dangerous for a McKenna.

  Suddenly Ella was in his arms, and Tiernan wasn’t certain if he’d pulled her there or if she’d thrown herself against him. All he knew was the rightness of the close contact. Of the certainty that this was meant to be. That he was meant to hold her. Kiss her.

  And then he was.

  Her lips were soft and dewy. A cry deep in her throat signaled her need, and without thinking, he responded, deepening the kiss until he tasted her soul. Mouths linked, bodies pressed together, he imagined them joined as one, unfettered by anything but pure emotion and raw desire.

  He had never experienced anything quite like that with another woman. There had to be a reason for it.

  Fate. Something he couldn’t avoid.

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for your loyalty, for keeping Harlequin Intrigue in your hearts for twenty-five years and for continuing to read my Intrigue stories since Double Images was published in 1986.

  I have been lucky enough to write all different types of stories for the Intrigue line. I started with romantic mysteries, progressed to romantic suspense and romantic thrillers and now write mostly paranormal romantic suspense or thrillers. I’ve always appreciated the opportunity to stretch and exercise my creativity within the line.

  Stealing Thunder is my forty-ninth Intrigue and the first in a new branch of the McKennas. I hope you enjoy it and all my Intrigue novels to follow.

  Good reading,

  Patricia Rosemoor

  PATRICIA ROSEMOOR

  STEALING THUNDER

  Thanks to the writers who are always willing to brainstorm with me—Marc for the movie set and Sherrill, Cheryl and Rosemary for the big finish.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Patricia Rosemoor has always had a fascination with dangerous love. She loves bringing a mix of thrills and chills and romance to Harlequin Intrigue readers. She’s won a Golden Heart from Romance Writers of America and Reviewers’ Choice and Career Achievement Awards from Romantic Times BOOKreviews. She teaches courses on writing popular fiction and suspense-thriller writing in the fiction writing department of Columbia College Chicago. Check out her Web site, www.PatriciaRosemoor.com. You can contact Patricia either via e-mail at [email protected], or through the publisher at Patricia Rosemoor, c/o Harlequin/ Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279.

  Books by Patricia Rosemoor

  HARLEQUIN INTRIGUE

  707—VIP PROTECTOR†

  745—THE BOYS IN BLUE

  “Zachary”

  785—VELVET ROPES†

  791—ON THE LIST†

  858—GHOST HORSE

  881—RED CARPET CHRISTMAS†

  924—SLATER HOUSE

  958—TRIGGERED RESPONSE

  1031—WOLF MOON*

  1047—IN NAME ONLY?*

  1101—CHRISTMAS DELIVERY

  1128—RESCUING THE VIRGIN*

  1149—STEALING THUNDER

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Tiernan McKenna—A horse wrangler. He wants to find justice for a victim he didn’t know because of something he couldn’t control in his past.

  Ella Thunder—The history teacher is driven to learn the truth about her father’s death.

  Joseph Thunder—Why was the shaman really killed?

  Harold Walks Tall—How was his death connected to Joseph’s?

  Marisala Saldana—What did the Lakota actress know before she lost her mind?

  Nathan Lantero—The activist may have political reasons to want to shut the movie down.

  Leonard Hawkins—Does the casino owner know more than he’s willing to admit?

  Jimmy Iron Horse—The head of tribal police seems more interested in threatening Ella than in finding a murderer.

  June 22, 1919

  Donal McKenna,

  Ye might have found happiness with another woman, but yer progeny will pay for this betrayal of me. I call on my faerie blood and my powers as a witch to give yers only sorrow in love, for should they act on their feelings, they will put their loved ones in mortal danger.

  So be it,

  Sheelin O’Keefe

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Prologue

  Bitter Creek Reservation, South Dakota

  “Come out and meet your accusers, sorcerer!”

  The deep voice rumbled through the crowd. Thirteen-year-old Ella Thunder felt a cold lump in her chest as her father jerked her away from the window and the sight of angry faces surrounding the house. Half the people who lived on the rez awaited him.

  “Go to your room, Ella!”

  Trembling, Ella backed into the doorway of her bedroom, but she refused to go inside. She wouldn’t abandon her father!

  A rugged man with features as craggy as the South Dakota Badlands, Joseph Thunder radiated power as he stepped toward the front door. Ella only hoped his power was strong enough to save him.

  “Joseph, no,” Mother said, her delicate white hands catching on her husband’s muscular bronze arm. “They’re beyond reason! We should have left once the rumors started.”

  Ella had heard the disgusting rumors. How her shaman father was secretly doing bad things. How he’d taken Nelson Bird’s mind from him because Nelson had caught him.

  Lies!

  “Out, sorcerer!” thundered the voice. “Before we burn down your house!”

  As Father reached for the handle, Ella rushed past him and threw herself against the door. “No!” Her heart was beating as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. “Let me go. I’ll tell them they’re wrong!”

  “Ah, Ella. There was never a braver girl.” Father’s dark eyes filled with sadness, and he kissed the top of her head. “Someday you’ll have great need for that bravery, to get you through a journey of terrible danger. But not this day. This day is mine alone to suffer.”

  She fought him, but she couldn’t stop him from pulling her away from the door. A lump in her throat threatened to choke her, and her eyes burned.

  Mother’s blue eyes filled with tears as she pleaded, “Joseph, please do something. Use your power to stop them!”

  The request shocked Ella and made her recognize the depth of Mother’s desperation. Her mother believed in Christian teachings, not in the mystical powers of the Lakota.

  “Some things are predestined and no power is strong enough to stop them.”

  Ella knew her father never used his power for himself, but only to help others—and wondered if that was a personal decision, or something not of his choosing, that he was bound to.

  His forehead drawn into a scowl, Father stepped out onto the dirt road and spoke to the crowd. “Don’t let wild talk overcome your good sense!”

  Seeming as if they were struck speechless by this horror, the grandparents huddled together at the kitchen table, holding on to her younger sister, Miranda, as if waiting for the judgment call of the crowd.

  Ella wasn’t going to wait. She ran out into the street in time to hear Roderick Bird, Nelson’s older brother, accusing her father.

  “What you did to Nelson is proof enough for me that you practice sorcery!”

  “I did no evil to Nelson—”

  “Liar!” came a chorus of voic
es.

  “You’ve brought disease and poverty to the rez,” one woman yelled, “so we have no future!”

  “The future is in the earth beneath your feet,” Joseph said. “You must believe—”

  “Get him!”

  The crowd surrounded her father and dragged him toward the church. “No!” Ella screamed, trying to reach him. “No!”

  “Leave Joseph alone!” Mother yelled. “He is innocent!”

  But the crowd was too frenzied to listen. Wearing a venomous expression, Ami Badeau shoved Ella out of the way, and an elbow to her chin from another woman made her see stars. She tripped over a rut in the road and fell to her knees. Dazed, she saw Mother chase the crowd.

  This wasn’t happening, Ella thought, her chest squeezing tight. Their neighbors…people who’d come to Father for help when they were sick or needed spiritual or practical advice…they weren’t themselves. Their faces had changed, their eyes burned with madness. Only her father’s apprentices Leonard Hawkins and Nathan Lantero, who was also her cousin, appeared sane.

  “Let him go!” Leonard yelled.

  “Stop and think what you’re doing!” Nathan added.

  Jimmy Iron Horse, Father’s third apprentice, was part of the angry crowd. He shoved Nathan out of the way. “We know what we’re doing! Getting rid of a sorcerer who is bringing his evil to the rez!”

  Nathan and Leonard physically tried to get to Father, to stop the mob, but they were only two and were easily shrugged away.

  It was up to her to do something! Ella thought, vaguely noting the green tinge to the sky. She scrambled to her feet, but the earth itself seemed to have shifted, and the air felt thick, as if it was trying to hold her back.

  As if someone had cast a spell…

  Concentrating on parting the dense air like she would a curtain, she plunged into the crowd. Voices rose into a chant, and she smelled smoke. She shoved one dancing woman out of the way and squeezed past another who was singing a death chant. Then she stumbled into the open circle where her father was already bound to a post, his hands behind him, wood stacked around his legs, the track of a raven—a long line intersected with an upside down V—drawn on his forehead in black. Father appeared stricken at her presence.

  Ella locked gazes with him. What should I do? Tell me!

  Go, Ella, get out of here!

  No, I won’t!

  Her heart thumped with a strange beat. As men with burning torches approached, Jimmy Iron Horse among them, her head went light. The flicker of something powerful and scary blossomed inside her.

  Ella let go and felt her mind opening….

  The sky darkened…the clouds stretched…the earth rumbled….

  “No, Ella!” Father yelled. Even hunted and bound he was aware…one with the earth as was she. “It’s not time! You’re not ready for this! Nathan, stop her before she is destroyed!”

  Hands gripped her hard and whipped her around and the earth tilted. She looked up into a distorted face and blinked to make her cousin come into focus.

  “Nathan! Help me free him!”

  “We’re not strong enough to stop this, Ella.”

  She kicked Nathan hard. His grip loosened just enough to let her pull away from him. She turned to see the kindling already burning. Flames licked her father’s body. The smell of flesh and hair scorched her senses.

  “Nooo!”

  Ella launched herself toward him, bare hands beating at the flames, ignoring the heat shooting up one arm as her sleeve ignited. Nathan tackled her and rolled her along the ground, smothering the flames.

  Father!

  The word echoed over and over in her mind as Nathan covered her eyes so she couldn’t watch her father burn.

  Chapter One

  Black Hills, South Dakota, 15 years later

  A wave of homesickness as wide and deep as the Irish Sea swept through Tiernan McKenna as he sat his roan gelding Red Crow and studied the Bitter Creek Mustang Refuge—grassy meadows amidst winding rugged canyons, ragged rock spires backing pine and cedar forest.

  The trees gave the Black Hills their name, because from a distance, the foliage made the mountains look black. Missing the rolling land and lush green valleys of the Emerald Isle, Tiernan gazed out over the valley below, where mustangs grazed. Nothing like the Thoroughbreds he’d worked with all his life, horses he’d trained and ridden, these horses were feral.

  He’d thought this was what he wanted—a complete change from his old life, a way to get out of his brother Cashel’s shadow, a chance to cowboy. He’d grown up watching old American Westerns on the telly. Cimarron, The Magnificent Seven, High Noon, Billy the Kid—those were only some of the movies that had entranced him. So here he was in the American West and ironically, an historical Western film called Paha Sapa Gold was just starting to shoot in the Black Hills, mostly on refuge land, thereby infusing the organization with sorely needed money.

  Longing seared Tiernan as he gazed out on the film’s camp in the distance. There were trailers for the production staff and the stars behind the supposed Main Street, though mostly facades like cardboard cutouts represented the town. The only interior sets here were the jail and the saloon. The remaining interiors would be shot in an L.A. studio.

  On adjoining reservation land backed by ragged pinnacles of rock, a dozen tepees made up the Lakota Sioux village set. And up in the hills—Tiernan wasn’t certain if it was reservation land or refuge—was the sealed-off entrance to an old gold mine. He’d heard the production company was planning to use that, too, since Paha Sapa Gold referred to the Custer Expedition’s search for gold in the Black Hills despite it being Sioux land.

  In the flat below were two side-by-side fenced pastures, empty now, that would hold the horses to be ridden in the film. They would come both from the MKF Ranch where he worked and from the reservation. Even the refuge mustangs would be used as a wild herd in a couple of scenes.

  Too bad he wasn’t part of that—the old films had fascinated him, had enticed him to make his move from Ireland to America. Well, that and not wanting to answer to Cashel anymore. Whether it was horses to train or psychic abilities to control or women to woo, Tiernan didn’t want to be second best to his older brother anymore. He needed to be his own man, wherever that would take him.

  So, after considering long and hard, Tiernan had left Ireland to make a life of his own. Second cousins had taken him in, had allowed him to test himself, to see if this life really was for him. While satisfying, the reality of it—the hard, dirty, unromantic work of cowboying, the answering to yet another relative—took the luster out of those films he’d loved so much. He’d thought that, like the silver-screen cowboys, he would find a way to make his own mark, on his own terms.

  Now he realized he’d been telling himself a fairy tale.

  Now a confused Tiernan didn’t know what he wanted.

  Now, missing his brothers Cashel and Aidan despite himself, missing Ma and Da, missing the green countryside and near-daily rains that brought life to Ireland’s estates separated by hedgerows and limestone fences and paved roads, he wasn’t so certain.

  Had he made the biggest mistake of his life in leaving behind everything he knew and loved?

  McKenna pride wouldn’t allow him to admit it, to go crawling back—he had to make a go of it here. He had to prove to himself that he would find that elusive something that would give him the mantle of responsibility and make him feel like his own man.

  Riding out on the Bitter Creek Mustang Refuge run by his cousin Kate and her husband, Chase Brody, alone on his day off, Tiernan felt even more lost as he was swept up in a timeless, borderless land without end—nothing but raw nature in every direction, not even a road in sight. The sensations filling him were simply overwhelming.

  For all he knew he could be days—weeks, months—from civilization…he could simply imagine it….

  Below, the feral horses stirred, then were instantly on the move. Flight instinct kicking in, they roared down the valley
as one unit—grays and chestnuts and bays and sorrels and Pintos and Paints. His own mount danced and squealed, and a wave of psychic energy that nearly obliterated his vision engulfed Tiernan as he fought to keep the gelding under control. He shook away the dark, sought the reason in the opposite direction, looking to the forested red cliffs, expecting to see a mountain lion, the only real predator to threaten the herd.

  Nothing jumped out at him, neither man nor beast, but once infected with the fear, he knew something—or someone—was out there.

  About to take his mount down to the valley to look for the danger, he was startled to hear his name yelled from behind.

  “Tiernan, wait! I want to talk to you!”

  He turned in the saddle and saw Kate Brody riding straight for him. Kate was one of his second cousins, her mother being a McKenna, and them having the same great-grandparents. Feisty and outspoken, she was a veterinarian, able to sit a horse or doctor it as well as anyone he’d met.

  The smothering sensation of a moment ago flitted away like the morning mist. “A good afternoon to you,” he said as Kate drew alongside him, her freckled face wreathed in a smile, her wild red hair poking out from under her brimmed hat.

  “I have great news. It’s Quin—he just got the call. He’s going to be chief of police of Blackwood, which is only thirty-some miles north of here. Everyone’s so excited!”

  “How grand for him.”

  “For us all. That means he’ll stay and not disappear again.”

  Tiernan was closest in age to Kate’s youngest brother, Quinlan Farrell, who’d been a federal agent working mostly undercover until he’d recently returned to his home state with his wife-to-be, Luz Delgado. The Farrells were throwing a big engagement party for the couple. Quin had been hoping for a lawman’s job in a smaller venue and now he had one. Well, good for him. Tiernan could appreciate a man wanting to cut his own path rather than follow the one his family set out for him. Quin was lucky his family was so supportive of his choice.