One Lucky Cowboy

by Carolyn Brown

  Slade hit the buttons on his cell phone and handed it to her.

  "Mr. Luckadeau?" a deep voice answered.

  "It's Ellacyn Hayes. Since I'm the bait in this trap, I want to ask a favor."

  "And that would be?"

  "Before you carry him away I want to talk to him. I don't even have to be alone with him, and I don't care if he's cuffed or hog-tied."

  "You got it."

  "Thank you—and one other thing. I called my best friend. She's aware that I'm in Baton Rouge and John was in Greenville, Mississippi when I talked to her. So I'm sure he's on the way. When are your agents going to be in play?"

  "They checked in ten minutes ago."

  "Thank you," she said.

  "No, it's me who's thanking you. If he talks, we get Ramona."

  "If he doesn't talk, what do you do with him? Does that mean he's still a threat to me? After all, it's just his word against mine."

  "You won't have to worry about that."

  "Then good-bye, Agent August."

  "Good-bye, Ellacyn."

  Slade looked across the room. "Which reminds me. I understand where the Jane came from; it's your middle name. Where'd you pick up Day?"

  "I stuttered when Nellie asked me my name. I started to say Hayes and wound up stuttering out the name Day instead. It worked. I was just glad she never asked to see my driver's license for verification."

  Slade slapped his bare leg. "Damn it all to hell on a silver poker. That's where I went wrong. If I'd snooped in your purse, I could have gotten rid of you that first day and I wouldn't be laid up in a hotel room when my hay needs baling."

  "I don't imagine the ranch will shrivel up and die while you are gone. Matter of fact, I bet they don't even miss you. Nellie can run that place better than you can any day of the week," she said.

  "Same back at you. I bet the oil company and your ranch didn't miss you either," he said through gritted teeth.

  "You are right. Both can run smoothly without me. I'm sure Paul is ripping off millions just like always, but his days are numbered. The ranch has some fine hired help that's always run it efficiently. I can't wait to get back and be a bigger part of it."

  He was speechless.

  "No comebacks?" she asked.

  He shook his head. The thought of going home to Ringgold without her left a hole the size of a crater in his heart. He'd admitted to a physical attraction. Hell, any man who didn't give her a long second look must either be gay, blind, or both. But an attraction was something a man could get past; a hole in his heart left him dead.

  "Hey look, they're playing Double Jeopardy next. Want to watch it while we eat? Then I'll go lie by the pool, maybe even do a few laps to work off part of the food."

  He nodded and swallowed hard past the grapefruit sized lump in his throat.

  The movie had been playing for ten minutes when the food arrived. She pulled up a chair to the table where the young man put the food and began to eat without missing a single scene. Ashley Judd's character was framed for murdering her husband, slimy character that he was, and went to jail, leaving her son in the care of her best friend.

  Slade ate and realized why Jane looked so familiar. She was a ringer for Ashley, except that her hair was a few shades lighter and her eyes a different color. The mouth was the same. The cheekbones and chin similar; the same general build. He'd been wrong when he thought she looked like his mother or Marilyn Monroe. It had been Ashley all along.

  The character she played in the movie reminded him of the spunk Jane had. She'd argued with him as much as Ashley did with Tommy Lee Jones. Wasn't it the most ironic thing in the universe that he'd finally realized that Jane was the very kind of woman he wanted to spend his life with, only to find out that she was rich beyond his league and would never be interested in someone who sweated and worked everyday for a living.

  You just said she was too damned independent for you, his conscience reminded him. Make up your mind and either go after her or get over her. You can't have it both ways.

  When the movie ended, she looked over at Slade. "Would you ever do that? Would you let your wife go to prison just to save your financial sorry ass?"

  "When I have a wife I'll love her more than money," he said.

  "Fair enough. Let's go swimming. It's been five hours since we checked into the hotel. I reckon John has had time to race his double-crossing sorry ass down here. Let's go take him down."

  "So I've got a financial sorry ass and he's got a double-crossing sorry ass? What's the difference?" Slade asked.

  "Depends."

  "On what?"

  "You figure it out. I'll get changed in the bathroom. Or I can strip down right here and you can cover up the family jewels with your hat," she teased.

  Damn that crazy Cowboy Way movie anyway. The image of Slade in nothing but scruffed-up boots and a black felt hat hanging much lower than the top of his head kept playing over and over in her head as if the replay button on the remote had gotten stuck.

  "You take the bathroom, then, and I'll hurry. Wouldn't want to damage your innocent little eyes," he said.

  They rode the elevator down to the pool area and Jane stretched out on a lounge chair. She wondered which of the people arriving not long after she did were FBI agents. Surely not that elderly lady in a black one-piece bathing suit. Granted, she didn't have an ounce of cheesy cellulite on her legs and that gray hair could be a very good dye job, since there were few wrinkles in her face. She kept company with a younger man that could possibly be her son with those streaks of silver in his temples. Or was he just posing as such? Ramona had posed as John's sister. It was difficult to know what was real and what was an illusion. She didn't know if she'd ever trust anyone again.

  The gray hair reminded her of Griffin Luckadeau and she wondered what Lizzy was doing that day. Was she playing in a blow-up swimming pool or riding her pony in the pasture? Were her cousins calling her a skunk because of those two bratty kids that Kristy birthed?

  "What happened to Lizzy's mother? Did she die?" she asked Slade, who'd claimed the chair next to hers.

  "No, she married Griffin and then decided she wasn't cut out for ranching. She had signed the pre-nup saying that she couldn't have any part of the ranch and said she didn't care about the ranch. She just wanted to be married to Griffin. I think she just wanted to be the star of a big fancy wedding. Then she got pregnant six months after they were married. She'd promised Griff she'd stay home with the babies when they got around to having a family, so she quit her job at the bank in Saint Jo. She was quite a bit younger than Griff and she wanted to party and chase around with her friends. A baby puts a damper on that real quick. When Lizzy was about two months old, Dian came in and said she was leaving for California and taking Lizzy with her. Griff bought her off. Wrote a check for fifty thousand dollars if she'd give him complete custody of his daughter."

  "Is that legal?" Jane asked.

  "They call it a settlement. She went with her friends and has never come back."

  A man slipped between the two chairs and squatted. Slade felt something hard and cold press against his ribs and looked down to see a gun under a linen napkin.

  The man held the gun steady and looked at Jane. "Hello, darlin'."

  "Well, hello to you. So you finally found me," she said. "Where's Ramona? Up in the room sleeping off a romp in the king-size bed?"

  "Ramona is taking care of business. Your little call to Celia let me know where I could find you. I was right. You might give up your credit cards and your phone, but you couldn't stay away from your best friend so I stuck to her like glue. It didn't take you long to find another man did it, Ellacyn?"

  "Cheating fools are a dime a dozen. You can kick any bush between here and the Pacific Ocean and a hundred will come running out willing to sleep with you for a million dollar life insurance policy," she said in a calm voice.

  John ignored the slam and kept his own tone soft and sweet. "Paul is worried out of his mind. How could you
run out on me like that?"

  "How could you have sex with your sister on the night before you were to marry me?"

  "She's not my sister. She's my friend. If I'd told you I had a friend so close that I wanted her to be my best man you'd have had a fit, so we decided to lie about her being my sister," John said.

  "So it wasn't incest. It was still unfaithful, wasn't it?"

  Slade pretended he didn't feel the cold metal on his bare skin and let the scene play out, hoping the whole time the man didn't have a hair-trigger finger. Nellie might be sorry she'd guilted him into this trip if the next time she saw him he was lying in a casket with his hands crossed over his chest covering a bullet hole in his heart.

  John chuckled. "You got me on that one, but it's time to go home and face the music. We'll be leaving now. Your friend is going to stand up at the same time you do and I'm going to follow you out the front door. When you are in my car, I'll take this gun away from his liver."

  "Kill me here. I'm not going anywhere with you and Slade could take that gun away from you and make you eat it if he wanted to. He's just playing with you like a cat with a mouse," she said.

  "Why would I kill you, darlin'? I still plan on marrying you. So what if you had a little lapse in judgment and got angry because I was fooling around with Ramona? I promise it won't ever happen again. Paul and I have been talking. We'll have a simple little ceremony at the courthouse. He's already rescheduled our honeymoon in Cancun. We fly out tomorrow morning right after the wedding. I'll see to it you don't run again. It's either that or an insane asylum for the rest of your life. Paul has that kind of power, or didn't you know that? Now, stand up or he dies. Or better yet, I shoot him, shoot you and how ever many others I can hit before I run out of ammunition. I can get away with no problem and they'll call it a random shooting. I rather like that idea. Paul will still pay me for the assassination and they'll never get the man who killed that cute little dark-haired girl over there in the kiddy pool."

  "I heard you and Ramona that night talking about how you were going to kill me and collect the insur ance money."

  "And you heard right. Don't take it personal, darlin'. It's just business. Don't cross me again," he said.

  A waiter appeared in front of Jane with a cell phone. "Miz Ellacyn Hayes?"

  She nodded slowly. Where were those damned FBI agents, anyway?

  "Phone call from your friend, Celia."

  "I don't want to talk to her. Go away," she said.

  "You tell her that. It's my job to bring phones or messages, not deliver news," he said gruffly.

  She took the phone and in the coldest voice possible said, "Hello."

  "This is Agent Fennigan. I'm five feet behind you at a table with another man. Is the man squatting down between you and Mr. Luckadeau the man we're looking for?"

  "That's right," she said.

  "Do whatever he says. Where's he taking you?"

  Jane pretended she was talking to Celia and hoped the agent would understand her form of code. "Celia, you think you're so damned smart letting him find out about where I was. With friends like you, I damn sure don't need enemies. You'd shoot a woman in the back as they were leaving, you bitch," she said as hatefully as she could. Her hands were clammy and she had the sudden urge to hum. She'd never forgive herself if John pulled the trigger and shot Slade or that child that reminded her of Lizzy Luckadeau. She handed the phone to the waiter and said, "Here, take this damn thing and if she calls again, don't bring it to me."

  John told them in a very conversational tone to stand up and walk to the front door. Jane was to loop her arm in Slade's, to remember that John got trigger happy when he was spooked and that he didn't have any qualms about shooting Slade in the back. She envisioned gun battles and dead bodies on the short walk from the pool to the front lobby.

  The takedown was so anticlimactic, she was almost disappointed. Two agents simply walked up behind John and put a gun barrel in each side of his back. He dropped his gun and raised his hands slowly.

  "John Farris, you are under arrest for attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and…" the agent rattled off a long list of infractions. When he finished, the other one read John his rights.

  "You still want some time with him?" the first one, a short man with a bald head and heavy jowls, asked.

  "No, I found out what I wanted to know already. It wasn't personal. It was just business," she said.

  John smiled sweetly at her. "Darlin', I don't know what this is. I love you. I just wanted to take you home and marry you. Tell them the truth. I made a mistake. Forgive me. I love you, Ellacyn."

  "Don't let him get in touch with Paul Stokes. I want him to think that John is still chasing me," Jane said.

  "I am darlin'. I will chase you until the day I die. I never forget a woman who does me wrong." His eyes were lifeless and cold as ice.

  "Get him out of my sight."

  "You got it, lady. And thanks."

  They put him in the car and Jane shivered in spite of the humid heat trying to suffocate her. She began to hum and then everything started spinning. Slade caught her as she fainted.

  "I'll take her up to the room. She'll be fine. You've got my number," he told the men. He didn't watch as they drove away with John in the car.

  He laid her gently on the bed and went to the bath room, where he wrung out a cloth in cold water. He laid it gently on her forehead and whispered, "Jane."

  She shut her eyes even tighter and shivered. "Is it over?"

  "It's over. Are you all right?"

  She began to hum again.

  He recognized the tune as one from the Martina McBride CD they'd been listening to earlier: "Help Me Make It Through the Night."

  Slade stretched out beside her and took her hand in his. "I thought for sure he was going to get trigger-happy and put a hole in my gut. How in the hell did he slip up on us so slick?"

  She made no effort to remove her hand, glad for the warmth of his touch. "He was dressed like a waiter. It's his job to be slick."

  The words to the Martina tune came to his mind. The singer talked about it being sad to be alone and asking for him to help her make it through the night. She said she didn't want to be alone. At that moment, Slade could think of nothing scarier in his own world than being alone. He didn't know who was going to help who, but they both needed another soul and a warm body to get through the night. Tomorrow would be a different story. Time would have done its job in getting them past the experience, but right then, they both needed each other.

  He drew her close to his side and held her tightly. Her heart raced even yet and she continued to hum as if that would erase every single horrible memory from her mind. He kissed her gently on the lips, drawing a bit of her lower lip into his teeth and nibbling ever so gently.

  "Slade?" she mumbled.

  "Yes," he said.

  "What are you doing?"

  "I'm making love to you."

  "Why?"

  "Because I want to."

  "Slade?"

  "Yes?"

  "I want you to."

  The very warmth of his breath made her insides quiver. She knew what they were doing was one hundred percent wrong and the consequences would be horrible but she couldn't stop it; didn't want to.

  "You kiss really good," she said between fast heart beats and quick short gasps as she tried to control her fevered body, still in shock from the ordeal.

  The next time his mouth claimed hers she tasted beer and steak mixed together from the meal they'd shared. She forgot all about John and Paul and Ramona as he removed her bathing suit top so gently that she wondered how he'd gotten it over her head without breaking the kiss. His breath on her bare skin brought a soft moan. When he picked up her fingertips and kissed each of them separately she thought she'd die with wanting him.

  Her imaginary guardian angel perched on her shoulder and told her that she was making the biggest mistake of her life, that she should put a stop to what she and Slade were
about to do. She reminded herself again that she hadn't used birth control in more than a week, but nothing seemed to matter except satisfying that dull, aching need filling her whole being. The one telling her that she was alive; that she could live without looking over her shoulder even if just for a few days; that she needed to be loved to prove that she was truly alive.

  He slipped her bathing suit bottom down slowly from her hips, kissing her belly button on the way. When he planted kisses from her inner thighs to her toes she gasped. Jane wanted him to get on with the job, not play around, but at the same time she wanted him to go slow so she could savor every single moment of the experience.