Ultimate Heroes Collection

by Various Authors

  She’d fallen into bed the night before knowing that it was time to release Zack from his commitment to her, knowing that it was time to tell him goodbye. She’d prayed for blessed sleep to overtake her so she wouldn’t think about life without him, but sleep had been elusive.

  After tossing and turning for several hours, she’d finally gotten up with the driving need to do something, anything, to keep her thoughts away from Zack.

  She’d decided to pack up her dad’s clothing, but the moment she’d begun the job she’d been swept back in time, back to old insecurities and resentments.

  She sipped her coffee and tried not to think about what Zack had said to her. She didn’t want to examine the past. She should be grateful that she’d managed to get rid of Zack without baring her heart, without embarrassing herself with declarations of love for him.

  A knock on the front door pulled her from her thoughts. She got up from the table and went to answer. Sonny stood on the porch, his dusty cowboy hat in hand.

  She opened the door and started to invite him in as had become the habit. Then she remembered Brett was in jail, the danger had passed, and she stepped outside. She didn’t have to be a prisoner in her own home anymore.

  “Good morning, Sonny,” she greeted.

  “Morning,” he replied.

  “I’ve got some bad news for you,” she said. “We’re two men down today. Brett is in jail and not welcome on the ranch anymore and Zack has gone back to his place and won’t be working for us anymore.”

  Sonny frowned. “Even though it’s late in the season, you’re going to have to hire on some new hands.”

  “I know. I’ll put out the word around town and put an ad in the paper,” she replied, grateful he hadn’t asked any questions about either man who was no longer working for her.

  “Anything else I need to know?” he asked.

  She frowned thoughtfully. “Not that I can think of. You might have somebody cut away some of the weeds around the root cellar door this morning. I think I’ll do some cleaning out down there today.”

  He nodded. “I’ll take care of it myself right now.”

  “Thanks, Sonny. Other than that, just chores as usual.”

  He nodded once more, than plopped his hat on his head and took off walking around the side of the house where the root cellar was located.

  Kate remained on the porch, taking in the sweet morning-scented air, trying desperately not to think of Zack. She hadn’t wanted to fall in love with him, but he’d made it impossible for her not to.

  It wasn’t enough that she loved his dark, ruggedly handsome features. It wasn’t just that his broad shoulders stirred her, his kisses electrified her and a single heated gaze from him could create a throbbing warmth at the very center of her.

  As important as her physical attraction was to him, there was so much more to her love for him. She loved the way he touched her hand when he knew she was worried or upset. She loved the fact that she beat him consistently at gin rummy and he didn’t whine.

  She loved his gentleness, his sense of humor, but more importantly she’d grown to love his heart. She took another deep breath and fought the tears that once again pressed hot, the pain that crushed in her chest.

  Activity. That’s what she needed. Hard work would keep thoughts of him at bay. She went back into the house and after a hot shower dressed in worn jeans and a T-shirt.

  She pulled on a pair of boots, grabbed a flashlight and a garbage bag, then left the house and headed for the root cellar. Many nights her father had talked about needing to clean out the small, shelf-lined dungeon.

  Kate had only been down in the cellar one time before, when she was about twelve and a particularly vicious storm had blown up. She and her father had stood on the front porch and watched the twisting, boiling black clouds grow closer and closer. The storm was perilously close when a spiraling tail appeared, dipping toward the ground.

  “Come on, Katie girl, looks like it’s going to be a bad one.” Together they’d run for the cellar, just getting inside when hail began to pound the metal door.

  At that time Kate hadn’t been sure what frightened her more, the storm outside or the darkness of the cellar. But her dad had held her close and had soothed her with murmured words and soft assurances. The storm had passed without damage.

  The sun was bright and hot as Kate walked toward the cellar. True to his word, Sonny had cut away the weeds that had nearly choked the immediate area. The big, heavy door opened with a groan, exposing seven wooden steps almost straight down.

  She clicked on the flashlight, knowing that even with the door open, the sunlight wouldn’t illuminate all the areas of the tiny subterranean room.

  The smell of onions and potatoes mingled with earth and clay, creating an alien, but not unpleasant odor. She descended the stairs and shone the light in front of her.

  Bunches of onions hung in the corner and a nearly empty bin of potatoes was directly in front of her. The metal shelves along one wall held an array of canning jars.

  Canned tomatoes and green beans, jellies and fruit lined the shelves, all bearing handwritten labels written by Kate’s mother when she’d been a young bride.

  Had the lack of a mother in her life caused her to be too possessive, too selfish, where her father was concerned? She had to concede that it had.

  She couldn’t see what was on the top shelf. Spying a metal bucket, she overturned it and used it to stand on to discover a stack of old newspapers and empty jars.

  She stepped down and sat on the bucket, her thoughts drifting to her fight with Zack. She’d acted like a child, throwing accusations at him to still her own pain.

  Closing her eyes, she thought of those times when Zack had sat on the porch with Gray. “Look at me, Daddy,” she’d say as she’d pull some crazy stunt to get his attention.

  “Look at me, Zack,” she now whispered. Her eyelids popped open and she stifled a burst of laughter that quickly transformed into a moan of pain.

  Had she been trying to get her father’s attention or had it been Zack all along?

  From the moment he’d first appeared on her porch she’d suffered a childhood crush on the handsome teenage cowboy. Although she was realistic enough to recognize that life probably would have been easier for Gray had she been a son, if she looked deep in her heart she realized she’d always been certain and secure in her father’s love for her.

  It had been Zack’s attention she’d wanted, craved. She’d wanted him to see her as bright and brave, as a peer deserving his respect and admiration. It had never been about her dad. It had always been about Zack.

  Dear God, she had been in love with Zack before she’d been old enough to know what love was. She hadn’t resented his relationship with her father, she’d resented the fact that he wanted no relationship with her.

  She stood from the bucket, for a moment overwhelmed with the need to run to the West ranch, to find Zack and tell him everything she’d discovered about herself, about the past.

  But what good would come of it? a little voice whispered. Zack hadn’t told her he loved her, he hadn’t hesitated packing his bags and leaving. She sank down onto the overturned bucket. It was obvious he didn’t feel the same way about her. So what was the point of her telling him how she felt?

  A shadow passed in front of the light spilling down the stairs from the open door. She looked up in time to see something fly through the air and land on the ground near where she sat.

  “Hey, I’m down here,” she yelled toward the door at the same time she clicked on the flashlight to see what had been flung down the stairs.

  Her light shown on a burlap bag near where she sat. The bag undulated with movement. What the heck? She froze as several snakes tumbled from the bag. A rattling noise filled the cellar.

  Snakes.

  Rattles.

  With a sharp cry, she jumped up to stand on the bucket as half a dozen agitated rattlesnakes left the burlap bag.

  The cellar door
slammed shut.

  Zack tried to tell himself it was the fight with Katie that caused the heaviness in his chest and the feeling of impending doom that tensed his muscles.

  He’d arrived at his place before five and had spent the next two hours trying to put Katie Sampson back in his past where she’d been before contacting him from the hospital.

  By seven o’clock he was sick of his thoughts and his own company and had headed for the main house to have coffee with his dad and Smokey.

  Red was out for a morning horseback ride, but Smokey was in the kitchen clearing away the breakfast dishes. “You’re a surprise,” Smokey said in greeting as Zack entered the back door. “I thought you were staying close to the Sampson place.”

  “Problem solved, I’m officially unemployed once again.” Zack poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the large wooden table.

  Smokey poured himself a cup and joined Zack. “Problem solved?”

  Zack quickly explained to him about Brett’s arrest and finding Gray’s gun and the air horn in his footlocker. As he spoke, he steadfastly shoved away the disquiet he’d felt since driving away from Bent Tree Ranch.

  When he finished, Smokey shot him a sly glance. “When I saw you and Kate together at the town meeting, I thought maybe there was something else other than employment going on.”

  To Zack’s surprise he felt his cheeks burn and he gazed down into his coffee cup. “There was a little something going on,” he conceded.

  Once again heavy disappointment filled his heart. How could he explain to Smokey that he’d fallen in love with a woman who apparently didn’t exist? The disappointment was tempered by a shot of surprise.

  Love. He’d fallen in love with Katie Sampson. He hadn’t intended to, hell … he hadn’t wanted to, but he had. But she’d come at him with selfish childhood resentments that had stunned him and made him question just what kind of woman she really was.

  “So what are your plans now?” Smokey asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m not inclined to go back to work for Wild West.” He frowned thoughtfully. “For the last ten years I’ve drifted in and out of people’s lives as a bodyguard and haven’t built much of a life of my own.”

  “You’ll do well whatever you decide to do,” Smokey observed. “There was a time when I wasn’t sure you’d survive to see twenty.” Smokey laughed and shook his head. “You and Kate always struck me as two peas in a pod.”

  Zack scowled. “I’m nothing like Katie,” he protested.

  “Maybe not now, but when you were younger you and Katie had a lot in common. You both fought tooth-and-nail to get the attention of the people you loved and both of you chose some fairly negative ways to do it.”

  Reluctantly, Zack had to concede Smokey’s point. “There was a time I thought I was pretty invisible to this family,” he said.

  Smokey nodded. “That’s one of the side effects being part of a big family. Somebody is always getting lost in the shuffle. But, as mad as you’d get at everyone, you always knew your brothers and sister and your dad and me were there for you.”

  It was true. No matter where Zack had traveled, no matter how mad or upset he’d gotten, he’d always known deep in his heart that he had a strong, loyal family to support him. And Katie had only had her father and her own insecurities.

  His heart softened toward her, but he knew this new understanding changed nothing. She’d told him that as far as she was concerned he wasn’t Prince Charming material and she certainly hadn’t hesitated to kick him to the curb when the danger had passed.

  Time to move on, his head told him, although his heart mourned the thought of never holding her again, never tasting the sweetness of her lips. His heart ached with the knowledge that he’d never share her laughter or see the sleepy sexiness of her first thing in the morning.

  Maybe Jake would move into his place. Maybe the handsome blond cowboy was more Prince Charming material than Zack could ever be to her. A weight of depression settled on his shoulders but even that couldn’t still the vague sense of uneasiness that rippled deep inside him.

  “Hell of a thing,” Smokey said, breaking into Zack’s thoughts. “Who would have thought a drunk like Brett could have pulled off such a thing.”

  “In the end, he didn’t pull it off,” Zack replied. He finished his coffee and carried his cup to the sink. “Guess I’ll head on back to my place.”

  “Meredith should be coming back in town sometime later today. I’m cooking fried chicken for dinner in case you’re interested.”

  Fried chicken was Zack’s sister’s favorite meal. “Sounds good, I just might show up at dinnertime,” he said.

  Moments later he stepped out the back door and headed for his own place down the lane. As he walked, he realized he felt the same way now that he had as he’d driven away from Melissa’s house. His instincts screamed out that something wasn’t right.

  He’d ignored his instincts then and he tried to ignore them now. It wasn’t the same, he tried to tell himself. Whatever he felt now surely had to do with the fact that he’d come too close to loving Katie. It wasn’t his instincts screaming. It was sadness and grief over what might have been.

  With each step he took, he replayed the events of the night before, remembering Brett’s bewilderment when Sheriff Ramsey had shown him the air horn and the gun, remembering Brett’s drunken outrage when Sheriff Ramsey had accused him of murdering Gray.

  The man could barely get through a day without getting drunk. He could barely function in an ordinary way. Was this a man who could pull off a murder, plan a stampede and start a fire?

  No.

  The word thundered through him. How long had it been since Brett had looked in the bottom of his foot-locker? How easy would it have been for somebody to place those items there, set up the drunk who had a reputation for trouble?

  Too easy. Too damned easy.

  The wrong man is in jail. The knowledge ripped through him and on some level he recognized that this had been the source of his uneasiness since the moment he’d left Katie’s ranch.

  He’d needed to escape her and so he’d made himself believe that the guilty party was behind bars and there was no more danger to Katie.

  Danger screamed in his head. If Brett wasn’t the guilty one, then a murderer was still loose and Katie was on her own. He began to run toward his house and with each and every footstep a horrifying fear gripped him.

  He crashed through the front door of his house and grabbed his keys and his gun from the table. Within minutes he was in his truck and driving toward Bent Tree Ranch.

  Maybe Brett was guilty, he thought as he tromped on the gas pedal. Maybe with Brett in jail there was no danger to Katie. But what if they had all been wrong?

  In his line of work, Zack had known fear before, but he’d never experienced the kind of terror that gripped him now. His knuckles turned white as he squeezed the steering wheel, praying that he wasn’t already too late, that he’d find Katie still mad at him and packing up Gray’s clothes.

  Gratefulness swept through him as he pulled in and saw Katie’s car parked where it had been the night before.

  As he took the stairs of the porch to the front door, he saw Sonny in the distance. The man was heading away from the house and seemed to be in a hurry.

  Zack banged on the front door, impatient as he waited for a reply. Maybe she was still so mad at him she wouldn’t open the door. He didn’t wait any longer. He pulled his keys from his pocket and used the key that he’d forgotten to give back to her before he’d left this morning.

  The security system blinked at him as he entered the entryway and he quickly punched in the code that would shut it off. “Katie!” he called as he left the entry and headed down the hallway to the room where he’d last seen her.

  She wasn’t in any of the bedrooms and he hurried down the hallway toward the kitchen, his blood pounding audibly in his head.

  Let her be okay. Let her be safe. The two sentences were a mantra in his
head, repeating itself again and again. Just please, let her be all right.

  It took him only minutes to realize she wasn’t anywhere in the house. He stepped out onto the porch and looked around. She had to be someplace on the property. He refused to consider any other alternative.

  He stood on the porch, trying to figure in which direction to begin searching. Odd, that Sonny had appeared to be hurrying away from the side of the house. Even more odd that he’d been on foot. He was usually on horseback.

  Heart bumping, adrenaline flooding, he stepped off the porch and headed around the house. Nothing appeared to be amiss as he walked to the back.

  The back door was locked tight, all the windows seemed to be fine. Everything looked perfectly normal, but his anxiety level was off the charts.

  As he rounded the last corner of the house he saw the root cellar door. Somebody had recently cut the weeds away from the metal door that led into the ground. But that wasn’t the sight that chilled his blood. On top of the door lay a dozen concrete blocks … blocks that hadn’t been there the last time he’d walked by it.

  Why would somebody go to the trouble of putting so many of the heavy concrete blocks on the door? Surely they hadn’t been placed there to keep somebody out. The only reason for them to be there was to shut somebody in.

  Zack scrambled to remove the blocks, throwing them off the door helter-skelter, his heart once again crashing with an unsteady rhythm.

  When he had the blocks removed, he opened the door. “Katie?” he called.

  “Don’t come down here.” Her voice was low and held an unsteady intensity.

  He leaned down and peered down the stairs and the sight that greeted him shot ice through his veins. Katie stood on an overturned bucket frozen like a statue. Rattlesnakes writhed around the bucket. Their tails rattling to warn of imminent and deadly strikes.

  Chapter 17

  The moment the door opened overhead and she heard Zack’s voice, Kate had wanted to scream with joy, but she knew any sudden movement, any loud noise, could mean her death.