by Diana Palmer
A few days after he was fired, their brand-new young Salers bull was found dead in a pasture. To Christabel, it seemed uncannily like foul play. The bull had been healthy, and she refused to believe Judd’s assertion that it was bloat-causing weeds that had killed him and left four other bulls in the same pasture alive. After all, Jack Clark had vowed revenge. But Judd brushed off her suspicions, and even told Maude he thought she was trying to get attention, because he’d ignored her while he was dickering with the film people. That had made her furious. She’d told their foreman, Nick Bates, what she thought, though, and told him to keep an eye on the cattle. Sometimes Judd treated her like a child. It hadn’t bothered her so much before, but lately it was disturbing.
* * *
Judd turned up early Saturday morning two weeks later in his big black sport utility vehicle, accompanied by a second burgundy SUV which was full of odd people. There was a representative from the Texas film commission and a director whom Christabel recognized immediately. She hadn’t realized it was going to be a famous one. There was also an assistant director, and four other men who were introduced as part of the crew, including a photographer and a sound man.
She learned that the star of the film was an A-list actor, a handsome young man who’d sadly never been on a horse.
“That’s going to limit our scenes with your livestock,” the director told Judd with a chuckle. “Of course, Tippy Moore has never been around livestock, either. You might have seen her on magazine covers. They call her the Georgia Firefly. This will be her first motion picture, but she was a hit at the audition. A real natural.”
Judd pursed his lips and his black eyes lit up. “I’ve seen her on the cover of the sports magazine’s swimsuit issue,” he confessed. “Every red-blooded man in America knows who she is.”
Christabel felt uncomfortable. She glanced at Judd, all too aware of his interest, and could have wailed. They were married, but he took no notice of her at all. He was fond of her, he indulged her, but that was as far as it went. He hadn’t even kissed her when they were married. It was sobering to realize that in two months, it would all be over. She’d tried everything to make him notice her, even teasing him about a boy at school who wanted to marry her. That had been a lie, and he’d caught her in it. Now he didn’t believe anything she said. She studied his tall, sexy physique and wondered what he’d say if she walked into the study one night while he was going over the books and took off all her clothes.
Then she remembered the terrible scars on her smooth back, the ones her drunken father had put there with a short quirt when she was sixteen. She’d tried to save her poor horse, but her father had turned on her. She could still remember the pain. Her back had been in shreds. Judd had come to see her father on business that Saturday morning, when he was working at the Texas Ranger post in San Antonio. So much of the memory was hazy, but she recalled clearly how Judd had come over the corral fence after her father, with such silent menace that her father had actually dropped the quirt and started backing away. It hadn’t saved him. Judd had gone for him with those big fists, and seconds later, the drunken man was lying in the dirt, half insensible. He’d been locked in the tack shed seconds later.
Judd had picked her up in his arms, so tenderly, murmuring endearments, yelling hoarsely for Maude, their housekeeper, to call the police and the ambulance service. He’d put her in the ambulance himself and ridden into the hospital with her, while her invalid mother wept bitterly on the porch as her husband was taken away. Judd had pressed charges, and her father had gone to jail.
Never again, Judd had said coldly, was that man going to raise his hand to Christabel.
But the damage had been done. It took weeks for the wounds to heal completely. There was no money for plastic surgery. There still wasn’t. So Christabel had white scars across her back in parallel lines, from her shoulders to her waist. She was so self-conscious about them that despite her teasing, she’d never have had the nerve to take off her clothes in front of Judd, or any other man. He only wanted to get rid of her, anyway. He didn’t want to get married. He loved his job, and his freedom. He said so constantly.
But he knew who Tippy Moore was. Most men did. She had the face of an angel, and a body that begged for caresses. Unlike poor Christabel, whose face was passable, but not really pretty, and whose body was like the poor beast’s in the story of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.
Judd and the director, Joel Harper, were talking about using one of the saddle-broken horses for a scene, and the advisability of having their foreman, Nick Bates, around during shooting.
“We’re going to need set security, too,” Harper said thoughtfully. “I like to use local police, when I can, but you’re out of the city limits here, aren’t you?”
“You could get one of our Jacobsville policemen to work here when he’s off duty,” Judd suggested. “Our chief of police, Chet Blake, is out of town. But Cash Grier is assistant chief, and he’d be glad to help you out. We worked together for a few months out of the San Antonio Ranger office.”
“Friend of yours?” Harper asked.
Judd made a rough sound in his throat. “Grier doesn’t have friends, he has sparring partners.”
Christabel had heard a lot about Cash Grier, but she’d never met him. She’d seen him around. He was an enigma, wearing a conservative police uniform with his long thick black hair in a ponytail. He had a mustache and a little goatee just under his lower lip these days, and he looked...menacing. Crime had dropped sharply in Jacobsville since his arrival. There were some nasty rumors about his past, including one that he’d been a covert assassin in his younger days.
“He knocked Terry Barnett through a window,” Christabel recalled aloud.
Harper’s eyes opened wide.
Christabel realized that they were staring at her and she flushed. “Terry was breaking dishes in the local waffle place because his wife, who worked there, was seeing another man. He caught them together and started terrorizing the place. They say he ran at Grier with a waffle iron, and Grier just shifted his weight and Terry went through the glass.” She whistled. “Took thirty stitches, they said, and he got probation for assault on a police officer. That’s a felony,” she added helpfully.
Judd was glaring at her.
She shrugged. “When you spend time around them, it rubs off,” she explained to Harper with a sheepish grin. “I’ve known Judd a long time. He and my father were...business partners.”
“My uncle and her father were business partners,” Judd corrected easily. “I inherited my uncle’s half of the ranch, she inherited her father’s.”
“I see,” Harper said, nodding, but his thoughts were on the film he was going to make, and he was already setting up scenes in his mind for a storyboard. He was considering logistics. “We’ll need someone to cater food while we’re working,” he murmured. “We’ll need to set up meetings with city officials as well, because some of the location work will be done in Jacobsville.”
“Some of it?” Christabel asked, curious.
Harper smiled at her. “We’re shooting some of the movie in Hollywood,” he explained. “But we’d rather locate a ranch setting on a working ranch. The town is part of the atmosphere.”
“What’s the movie going to be about?” Christabel wanted to know. “Can you tell me?”
He grinned at her interest. He had two daughters about her age. “It’s a romantic comedy about a model who comes out West to shoot a commercial on a real ranch and falls in love with a rancher. He hates models,” he added helpfully.
She chuckled. “I’ll buy a ticket.”
“I hope several million other people will, too.” He turned back to Judd. “I’ll need weather information—it’s going to cost us a fortune if we start shooting at the wrong time and have to hole up for three or four weeks while the weather clears.”
Judd no
dded. “I think I can find what you need.”
“And we’ll want to rent rooms at the best hotel you have, for the duration.”
“No problem there, either,” Judd said dryly. “It isn’t exactly a tourist trap.”
Harper was fanning himself with a sheaf of papers and sweating. “Not in this heat,” he agreed.
“Heat?” Christabel asked innocently. “You think it’s warm here? My goodness!”
“Cut it out,” Judd muttered darkly, because the director was beginning to turn pale.
She wrinkled her nose at him. “I was only kidding. Law enforcement types have no sense of humor, Mr. Harper,” she told him. “Their faces are painted on and they can’t smile...”
“One,” Judd said through his teeth.
“See?” she asked pertly.
“Two...!”
She threw up her hands and walked into the house.
* * *
Christabel was just taking an apple pie out of the oven when she heard doors slam and an engine rev up. Judd walked into the kitchen past Maude, who grinned at him as she went toward the back of the house to put the clothes in the dryer.
“I made you an apple pie,” Christabel told Judd, waving it under his nose. “Penance.”
He sighed as he poured himself a cup of black coffee, pulled out a chair and sat down at the small kitchen table. “When are you going to grow up, tomboy?” he asked.
She looked down at her dusty boots and stained jeans. She could imagine that her braided hair was standing out in wisps around her flushed face, and she knew without looking down that her short-sleeved yellow cotton blouse was wrinkled beyond repair. In contrast, Judd’s jeans were well-fitting and clean. His boots were so polished they reflected the tablecloth. His white shirt with the silver sergeant’s Texas Ranger star on the pocket was creaseless, his dark blue patterned tie in perfect order. His leather gunbelt creaked when he crossed his long, powerful legs, and the .45 Colt ACP pistol shifted ominously in its holster.
She recalled that his great-grandfather had been a gunfighter—not to mention a Texas Ranger—before he went to Harvard and became a famous trial lawyer in San Antonio. Judd held the record for the fastest quick-draw in northern Texas, and his friend and fellow Ranger Marc Brannon of Jacobsville held it for southern Texas in the Single Action Shooting Society. They often practiced at the local gun club as guests of their mutual friend Ted Regan. A membership at the club was hundreds of dollars that law enforcement people couldn’t usually afford. But former mercenary Eb Scott had his antiterrorism training school in Jacobsville, and he had one of the finest gun ranges around. He made it available at no cost to any law enforcement people who wanted to use it. Between Ted and Eb, they got lots of practice.
“Do you still do that quick-draw?” she asked Judd as she sliced the pie.
“Yes, and don’t mention it to Harper,” he added flatly.
She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Don’t you want to be in pictures?” she drawled.
“About as much as you do, cupcake,” he mused, absently appreciating the fit of those tight jeans and the curve of her breasts in the blouse.
She shrugged. “That would be funny. Me, in pictures.” She studied the pie, her hands stilled. “Maybe I could star in a horror movie if they put me in a bathing suit and filmed me from behind.”
There was a shocked silence behind her.
She put a slice of pie on a saucer and added a fork, sliding it in front of Judd.
He caught her hand and pulled her down onto his lap. “Listen to me,” he said in that deep, tender tone he used when little things were hurt, “everybody’s got scars. Maybe they don’t show, but they’re there. A man who loves you won’t care about a few little white lines.”
She cocked her head, trying not to let him see how it affected her to be so close to him. She liked the spicy aftershave he wore, the clean smell of his clothes, the faint whiff of leather that came up from the gunbelt.
“How do you know they’re white?” she asked.
He gave her a worldly look and loosened the tie at his collar, unbuttoning the top buttons of the shirt to disclose a darkly tanned chest with a pelt of curling black hair. She’d seen him without his shirt, but it always unsettled her.
He pulled the shirt and the spotless white undershirt under it to one side and indicated a puckered place in his shoulder, from which white lines radiated. “Twenty-two caliber handgun,” he said, drawing her hand to it. “Feel.”
Her hand was icy cold. It trembled on that warm, muscular flesh. “It’s raised,” she said, her voice sounding breathless.
“Unsightly?” he persisted.
She smiled. “Not really.”
“I don’t imagine any of yours are that bad,” he added. “Button me up.”
It was intimate, exciting, to do that simple little chore. She smiled stupidly. “This is new.”
“What is?”
“You never let me sit in your lap before,” she reminded him.
He was looking at her with an odd expression. “I don’t let anybody sit in my lap.”
She pursed her lips as she got to his collarbone. “Afraid I might try to undress you?”
His chest rippled, but when she looked up, his face was impassive. His eyes were glittery with suppressed humor.
“That wouldn’t do you much good,” he commented.
“Why not?”
One black eyebrow arched. “You wouldn’t know what to do with me when you got my clothes off.”
There was a clatter of falling potatoes on the floor.
Judd and Christabel stared toward the door where Maude was standing with both hands on the edges of her apron and potatoes still spilling out around her feet.
“What the hell is your problem?” Judd asked darkly.
Maude’s eyes were like saucers.
“Oh, I get it,” Christabel said, grinning. She had one hand on Judd’s shoulder and the other on his tie. “She thinks I’m undressing you. It’s okay, Maude,” she added, holding up her ring finger. “We’re married.”
Judd gave her a royal glare and gently dumped her out of his lap and onto the floor. She grinned at him from the linoleum. He leaned back in the chair and finished adjusting his shirt. “I was showing her one of my scars,” he told Maude.
Maude had picked up the potatoes and she was trying very hard not to say anything stupid. But that innocent remark produced a swell of helpless laughter.
“Now don’t do that,” Christabel groaned, getting up. “Maude, it was very innocent, and he really was showing me his scar.”
Maude nodded enthusiastically and went back to her potatoes. She cast a quick, amused look at Judd, who had a forkful of apple pie suspended in midair and was glaring at her.
“Sure he was,” Maude agreed.
Judd’s eyes narrowed. “I’m armed,” he pointed out.
Maude put down her knife and potato and spread out her arms. “Me, too,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows.
Judd glowered at her, and at Christabel, who was grinning from ear to ear. “Now I know where she gets it from,” he told Maude.
“He’s just jealous because he can’t make jokes,” Christabel said wickedly.
Judd gave her a measuring glance and went back to his pie.
2
That night, after Judd had gone back to his apartment in Victoria where he was stationed, Christabel lay awake for hours worrying about Tippy Moore and Judd’s odd reaction to the news that she was going to be in the movie. He seemed fascinated by the woman, just from her photographs, and it was obvious enough to be painful. He might hold Christabel on his lap and reassure her about her scars, but it was impersonal. He’d never even touched her in an inappropriate way, despite her efforts.
Her mind
went back to that Saturday long ago when her life had changed so drastically. She could smell the scents of blood and leather, feel the whip on her back...
* * *
Through waves of pain, she heard a deep, gravelly voice cursing steadily. It was the only sound audible, although five other cowboys were standing around her with grim faces and stiff postures where she lay. The corral was dusty, because it hadn’t rained, and there were traces of hay in her disheveled blond hair. She was lying on her stomach and her blouse was in ribbons. Blood seeped from the deep cuts in her back. There had been hard thuds and groans from somewhere nearby, followed by sounds of a door slamming. A minute later, she felt someone kneel beside her.
“Christabel, can you hear me?” Judd’s voice asked harshly at her ear.
Her dark eyes opened, just a slit. It was hard to focus, but she remembered that Judd Dunn was the only person who ever called her by her full name. Everybody else called her “Crissy.”
“Yes?” Was that her voice? It sounded weak and strained. The sun was so bright that she couldn’t get her eyes open.
“I’m going to have to pick you up, honey, and it’s going to hurt,” he said curtly. “Grit your teeth.”
She swallowed hard. Her back felt raw. Her blouse was sticking to the lacerated skin and she could feel the hot, wet blood cooling as it soaked the fabric. It had a funny smell, like metal.
Judd’s strong arms slid under her legs and around her rib cage as carefully as he could. He swung her up, trying to avoid gripping the torn flesh. Her small breasts were pressed hard against the warm muscle of his chest and she sobbed, trying to stifle the sound as pain lanced through her viciously.
“What about...Daddy?” she choked.
His black eyes flashed so violently in that lean, tanned face that two of the cowboys climbed the corral fence to avoid him. “He’s in the tack room,” he said shortly. “He’ll stay there until the sheriff’s deputies get here.”