Still studying the doors, Zeke curled a wonderfully strong arm around her shoulders. “There’s an answer to this riddle, Watson. Just give me a minute to come up with an explanation.”
Natalie smiled in spite of herself. At the most stressful of times, this man could always lighten her heart somehow. She looked up at him—at his sun-bronzed, chiseled face, brilliant blue eyes, and glistening sable hair—and she believed, truly believed for the first time in her life, that every woman on earth was destined to meet one man who had been created especially for her. She just hadn’t looked long enough or hard enough to find him.
“How does a burglar end up inside a building and have to break his way out?” he mused aloud. “He would have had to be in here when the place was locked up and the alarm was set.” He no sooner spoke than his gaze flew to hers. “The doors,” he said softly. “My brothers and I have been leaving them open to let in fresh air while we work in here.”
“And you think someone sneaked in?”
“It’s the only explanation I can come up with.”
“But you didn’t work here today.”
Zeke glanced behind him. “No, but my brothers did.” He pointed to the patched flooring. “That wasn’t done when I left yesterday. While Jake and Hank were here working, someone slipped inside, hid somewhere, and waited for them to leave.”
Natalie rubbed her arms and shivered, glancing uneasily around the room. “But, Zeke, your brothers would have left this afternoon sometime, and the alarm didn’t go off until around eleven. If the burglar was locked in here, what did he do all those hours?”
Zeke turned a slow circle to survey the room. “Good question. As far as you can tell, nothing’s been stolen. That rules out theft as a motive, and the place hasn’t been vandalized, the only other reason I can think of for someone to be in here.”
Natalie had no answers, which only added to her bewilderment when Zeke suddenly yelled for her father, who was in the bar area, looking at the wall repairs. “Get Natalie out of here, would you, Pete?”
Natalie frowned. “Why the sudden urgency for me to leave?”
“You should be resting.” Zeke grasped her elbow, led her outside, and plucked the keys from her hand. “I’ll see you when I get home. Okay?”
Standing on the shadowy sidewalk, Natalie sensed that there was something she was missing. As her father exited the club and came to stand beside them, she glanced at the entrance doors of the building. Then an awful thought struck her. “Oh, my God. You think the place has been booby-trapped?”
Pete peered through the gloom at Zeke’s face. “How’d you reach that conclusion?”
“It’s not a conclusion, exactly, more a safety precaution. After yesterday, I’m probably a little paranoid. It just strikes me as being strange that someone would hide in the building and wait so many hours before forcing the doors open to get back out. To be on the safe side, I want to look things over again.”
A chill moved over Natalie, and she looked anxiously at her father. Pete stepped closer to grasp her arm.
“He’s right, honey. I need to get you out of here.”
“Why can’t we just call the police?” she asked. “We can all wait outside until they’ve checked everything out. That’s their job, after all. They’re trained for things like this.”
“I’ll call them,” Zeke assured her. “But I don’t want you anywhere around while they’re checking things over.” He turned to her father. “Take her home, Pete. As soon as I’m finished up here, I’ll head home, too. If you’ll wait up, I’ll stop by to let you know what we find.”
Natalie didn’t see why she couldn’t wait on the sidewalk. Surely that would be safe enough. She felt her father’s hand tighten over her arm, his grip conveying urgency and fear. It hit her then, and her heart started to pound like a triphammer.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. “You think there could be a bomb in there. Don’t you?”
Zeke stared at the building for a moment. Then he drew his cell phone from his belt. “I don’t know what to think, Natalie. But I’m not going to rule out any possibility until the cops have checked the place over.”
Pete tugged on Natalie’s arm. “Come on, honey. Let’s get you out of here.”
“No!” Natalie refused to budge. “It’s my club, not Zeke’s. I can’t let him go back in there while I go home where it’s safe.” She laughed shrilly. “I mean—well—a bomb is far-fetched, but no telling what else he may have done. The ranges are hooked up to propane. What if he punctured the lines or—”
“Natalie,” Zeke said softly.
If he had yelled, she might have ignored him. But the low timbre of his voice made her fall silent. He stepped closer and cupped her chin in his hand. In the streetlights, his eyes glistened like sapphires. “I understand how you feel. Honestly. If I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t want to leave, either. But you have to think about Chad and Rosie.”
Her pounding heart stuttered a beat.
“They’ve already lost their father. What will happen to them if they lose you, too?”
Natalie remembered how frightened Chad had been when she’d been taken to the police station for questioning. He’d been afraid she might never come home, that he and Rosie would be left all alone.
Zeke bent closer. “You can’t take foolish risks. They need you too much.”
“But you can take foolish risks?” Natalie tried to imagine losing him, and just the thought made her feel panicky. She didn’t know when she’d come to love him so deeply and need him so much. She only knew she couldn’t face life without him now. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Zeke took her hand and led her around the corner of the building to Pop’s truck. He seemed to relax marginally when they were farther away from the structure. “I don’t want anything to happen to me, either,” he assured her. “But one of us needs to stay to lock up after the police have gone through the place again. I’m elected.”
“Why?” she cried. “Because you’re a man, and I’m a woman?”
“Yes.” He opened the passenger door of the truck. “Call me old-fashioned. Call me archaic in my thinking, if you like. I’m not wired to let the woman I love put herself in danger, plain and simple. You’ll go home and stay with the kids while I take care of this. I promise not to take any stupid chances.”
He caught her at the waist and bodily lifted her onto the truck seat. Natalie was still protesting as he fastened her seat belt. “I’m a grown woman, for heaven’s sake!” she cried when he started to shut the door. “You can’t just stuff me in the truck, pat me on the head, and send me home.”
Her father climbed in on the driver’s side and started the truck. “Nattie, you’re going home if I’ve got to hogtie you. Enough said.”
“I can’t believe this.”
Zeke leaned in and quickly kissed her. “We’ll fight about it later. All right? You’ve got two kids to think about. I don’t.” He gently kissed her again. “Go home and take care of them. As soon as I’m finished here, I’ll be along.”
He slammed the door before she could say more, and the truck was rolling forward before she could react. Natalie twisted on the seat, relieved to see that Zeke was already talking on his cell phone, hopefully to the police. She faced forward again and sent her father a glare. She was so angry she was shaking.
“This is absolute baloney. That’s my club. If anyone should stay, it’s me.”
Her dad pulled out onto Ninth and accelerated. At the stoplight, he flashed her a grin. “I like that boy. You’ve landed yourself a keeper this time, Nattie girl. Stop fussing and just marry the man.”
Natalie didn’t know what possessed her, but before she thought it through, she said, “You landed yourself a keeper once yourself. Why don’t you follow your own advice, stop fussing, and just marry her again?”
Her aim had been to make her father mad. Instead he only smiled and said, “I’ve been thinking along those same lines myself.”
&
nbsp; Zeke got home about two hours later. After parking his truck in the drive next to his house, he headed straight for the Westfields’. He saw Natalie coming to meet him as he started across the field. In the moonlight, she looked ethereal—like an angel floating over the grass. When they’d closed the distance between them to about twenty feet, she stopped to wait for him, her arms hugging her waist, her black hair trailing across her face in the night breeze.
“What’re you doing out here?” he asked.
“I was watching for your headlights.”
“You’re supposed to be resting.”
“I’ve been so worried I couldn’t shut my eyes, let alone sleep.”
Zeke slowed his stride. When he reached her, he couldn’t resist lifting the strands of hair from her pale cheek. Then, as if drawn to her by a magnetic force, he had to taste her mouth—just one slow taste. He leaned away to give her a wondering look when she didn’t kiss him back.
“I’m fine,” he assured her. “You shouldn’t have worried.”
“What did the police find?”
“I’m almost embarrassed to say. They didn’t find a damned thing.”
Her shoulders relaxed slightly. “Thank God. We just overreacted, then?”
“It seems that way. I guess it’s a case of too much, too late. Ever since I saw the damage to your car, I’ve been jumping at shadows. Tonight at the club, I saw those doors and convinced myself it was another attempt on your life. I didn’t want to be caught with my guard down again.”
“A burglar breaking out instead of in is definitely odd. Pop and I thought your theory was plausible. Better to be safe than sorry.”
“Monroe didn’t see it that way. He was totally pissed.”
“Monroe was there?”
Zeke looped his thumbs over his belt. “When I called them back, I must have been pretty convincing. Someone contacted him at home. He came in to check things out himself. I felt like a total idiot when they didn’t find anything.”
She took a deep breath and released it. Then she frowned slightly. “We need to talk, Zeke. I wasn’t happy about the way you handled that situation. You were very dictatorial.”
“Do we have to go there? As it turns out, there wasn’t any danger after all.”
“You did say we could fight about it later.”
Zeke preferred to make love to her. But he could tell by the stubborn set of her chin that it wasn’t in the stars. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be dictatorial.”
“Shoving me into the truck and ordering me to leave wasn’t dictatorial?”
“I didn’t shove you. I very carefully lifted you in. And I didn’t order you, exactly. I just asked you to go home.”
“Ha. A request isn’t what I heard.”
Okay, so it had been more along the lines of an order. Zeke thought about it, trying his best to see her side, but no matter how he circled it, he knew he’d react the same way again if the situation repeated itself. He loved her too much to do otherwise.
“Okay,” he conceded, “it was an order.”
“I’m not all right with that. I don’t appreciate being told what to do.”
Zeke rubbed beside his nose and dug at the dirt with his boot heel. “I’ll try not to do it again.” Until next time. “I understand, honestly. It’s just—”
“It’s just what?”
Zeke suspected that he was digging himself a very deep hole. “It’s just that where I hail from, no man worth his salt allows the woman he loves to be in danger if there’s any way he can protect her.”
“Women in the military fight in the front lines now, Zeke.”
“My woman won’t.” There it was—a hole big enough to swallow him.
She held up a hand near her temple as if to ward off anything more until she got that processed. “Wait a minute. Back up. Your woman? Are you referring to me?”
He gazed off at nothing, trying his damnedest to think of a way to rephrase that so it sounded better. Only that wouldn’t be honest. “I reckon I am. You’re a woman, and I’m thinking that you’re mine. If I’m mistaken about that, you’d best tell me so now.”
Her chin came up again. “I care very deeply for you, Zeke.”
Uh-oh. They’d reverted from loving each other to caring very deeply. Not a good sign.
“And I want to have a relationship with you,” she went on. “But that doesn’t mean I plan to be your possession—more precisely, a lesser being you can order around. I make my own decisions. I don’t need a man, however much I may care about him, to make them for me.”
“You can make your own decisions. I don’t have a problem with that at all.”
“Then why wouldn’t you allow me to make my own decision tonight?”
“Because that was different.”
“No, it wasn’t. I wanted to stay, and you wouldn’t let me. You made me feel like a child who couldn’t be trusted to make her own choices.”
Zeke rubbed beside his nose again. “Don’t blow this all out of proportion, Natalie. I’ve got some set ideas about a man’s role when it comes to protecting his loved ones. That’s it, plain and simple. It has no bearing on you making your own choices the rest of the time.”
“I’m afraid it does. I won’t be treated like a child. I endured it for almost eleven years, and I won’t again.”
“Are you comparing me to Robert?”
“Does the shoe fit?”
Zeke bit down hard on his back teeth. “You tell me.”
“You’re not going to back down an inch on this, are you?”
Zeke felt his temper rising. “Nope. You want to go buy a car? Fine. Go on the road to sing? Fine. You can make any damned decision you want, no objection from me. But I’ll be damned if I’ll let you enter a building that I have reason to believe may blow up. If that makes me dictatorial, then I’m dictatorial, and I’ll always be dictatorial. We can talk it to death all night, and that’s not going to change.”
“I see.”
Zeke had a bad feeling she was about to walk away, and the worst part was, he’d have to let her go. He couldn’t say what she wanted to hear and then go back on it later. That wasn’t the way he was made.
Just as he feared, she did an about-face and headed for home without another word. He watched her go for what seemed a small eternity, and then his Coulter temper hit boiling point.
“Okay, fine!” he yelled. “You win. The next time a building may blow to smithereens, I’ll kiss you for luck and send you in while I go stay with the kids! When I’m picking up the pieces later, I’ll feel fine about it because it was your decision to make! Will that make you happy?”
She spun back around. “You’re being deliberately obtuse, narrowing everything down to this one instance! I need you to tell me you won’t do it again. I can understand your not wanting me to go in the building, Zeke, but you had no right to treat me like a child!”
“If I thought of you as a child, I’d turn you over my knee right now for acting like one.”
That was the wrong thing to say. She doubled her fists and came storming back to him. Then again, he decided, maybe it had been exactly the right thing to say. She wasn’t walking away from him now, anyway.
She stopped about five feet from him. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“Did you just threaten to turn me over your knee?”
“I never threaten.”
“Well, then, make like a frog and jump on it.”
Zeke remembered that first morning when she’d flared at him in anger. He’d thought then that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever clapped eyes on, and his sentiments hadn’t changed.
“Well?” she challenged. “Put your money where your mouth is, cowboy. Don’t just stand there paying it lip service.”
Zeke struggled not to smile. He outweighed her by a hundred pounds. Now he knew where Rosie had gotten her gumption. “Natalie, this is silly.”
“What’s silly about it, that you made the t
hreat, or that I’m not running?” She was so angry her voice throbbed.
“I didn’t mean it as a threat. It was a figure of speech, nothing more. I’d never turn you over my knee.”
“I should hope not. You can probably do it, but you’d better pack a lunch if you plan to try.”
Zeke could see that he’d hurt her pride. He was also starting to realize that a lot more was troubling her than the incident tonight. Robert. Zeke had obviously resurrected some very unpleasant memories when he’d lifted her into that truck. Looking back on it, he guessed maybe he had treated her like a child. He hadn’t meant it that way.
“Can we agree on one thing?” he asked.
“What, that you’re bigger than I am?”
“That, too. I clearly am. But I was thinking more about the original bone of contention. If I give you my solemn oath that I’ll never interfere with your inalienable right to make your own choices and decisions, will you compromise on the protection issue and let me do my manly thing when a dangerous situation crops up?”
“Your manly thing?” she echoed.
“That’s essentially it, isn’t it, a man thing? I have a protective nature. I know it’s old-fashioned, but that’s the way my dad raised me, how I believe good men are supposed to react. I can’t promise you I won’t do it again. It’s instinctive for me, not a decision, not a choice, and I don’t think I can change it.”
“I’m not okay with that.”
“I’m sorry if it makes you uncomfortable.”
“That’s all you can say? It’s a deal breaker for me, Zeke.”
“Isn’t that a little like shooting the horse to cure hoof rot? When you look at the whole picture, it’s a minor thing, isn’t it? If I never act that way at any other time, don’t you think you can live with it every twenty years or so?”
“Every twenty years or so?”
“How many times over the next fifty years do you reckon we’ll be worried about bombs or gas explosions?”
She bent her head and toed the dirt with her sneaker. When she looked up at him again, her eyes ached with uncertainty. “Will you swear to me that you’ll never treat me that way again otherwise?”
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