“You look about as flummoxed as a goat on AstroTurf,” Chris drawled, leaning back in the guest chair.
Wes pushed his hair back with both hands. “Rob Wyatt had more enemies than you could shake a stick at, and that’s putting it lightly. Feels like every stone I turn over leads to more riddles.”
“Thought he was in oil. Doesn’t that narrow it down some?” Chris asked, scratching his cheek.
“He was one of the biggest private petroleum players in the U.S., but he had his fingers in all kinds of pies.” Wes glanced down at the documents on his desk, his brows pulled together. “Nuclear energy, aerospace, commodities—you name it.” He leaned forward. “I have a contact who’ll swear on his mama’s eyes that Rob was involved with the cartels.”
“No shit?” Chris whistled.
“No shit,” Wes confirmed grimly, poking at a stack of photos. “Problem is that makes narrowing down the list of suspects damn near impossible.”
“But there’s a big difference between disliking a man and going so far as to kill him and his son. That’s two different buckets of possums,” Chris pointed out. “How many people really hated Rob Wyatt’s guts that bad?”
“He was a hard-ass, sure. I never liked the man, but kill him?” Wes shook his head. “It was more like the other way around.”
“Well, you were also dating his only daughter,” Chris pointed out. “I like to think I’m a nice guy, but I know for a fact I’ll be a complete bastard to the first guy that makes a run for either one of my girls. You look like a bum today, by the way.”
Wes picked at his t-shirt absently. He was dressed down compared to Chris’s button-down and khakis, but then he usually was. On a normal day, he wore jeans, a tee, and maybe a cargo shirt if the weather warranted, but as Wes rubbed his hand down a week’s worth of beard growth, he realized Chris was probably right. He’d been so focused on gathering intel and worrying about Sammy, he hadn’t really been bothering with much else.
“You talk to Sam about any of this yet?” Chris asked, leaning back in the chair.
“I call just about every other day, but she hasn’t answered.” Wes scrubbed a hand over his beard, aggravated. “Hannah tells me she just needs some time. Grant told me if I ride out to the ranch one more time uninvited, I’ll leave with an ass full of buckshot.”
Chris sputtered on his beer. “Never thought I’d see the day when the great Wesley Elliott would be reduced to riding past his dream girl’s house, just a get a glimpse of her!” he crowed.
“Shut the hell up.” Wes tossed his bottle cap at him. “I just miss her is all.”
“Well, what’s new?” He shrugged. “Been that way for a long time now.”
And that’s exactly why Wes wanted to wait to see her again when he had something meaningful to offer. Wes figured if he cracked the conundrum of who had done this to her and her family, it’d make an otherwise difficult conversation that much easier. They hadn’t really spoken since that afternoon in Afghanistan. As good as it’d felt to be with her again then, the chasm between them was widening into a deeper ravine with each passing week of silence.
Chris leaned forward. “So what have you unearthed so far?”
“Someone set a guy named Earl Childress up as the convenient patsy in the car accident that killed Rob and Ry. But Childress never fought it, which made me wonder if he’d been paid off to take the fall.” Wes showed him a folder full of Earl’s bank documents and financial statements. “Childress never received the kind of money big enough to justify being a fall guy—nothing worth killing over or dying over.”
Chris flipped through the paperwork. “He had no heirs? No family?”
Wes picked up a dog-eared photo of Childress smiling next to a woman wearing a cocktail uniform. She was holding a tacky bouquet next to a neon ‘just married’ sign and the dazed grin of someone who’d just won the lottery. “He was survived by a bitter ex-wife he met and married at the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino in the early nineties after he won a few grand on a lark. She said those winnings were the best thing to ever happen to him, and nothing good came out of it in the long run, so that dead-ended.”
“Sounds like every other down-on-his-luck roughneck there ever was.” He set the folder aside. “What else do you know?”
Wes picked up reams of paperwork on Wyatt Petroleum and Industries. “Rob’s single heir to the throne was Samantha, inheriting all his major holdings with the exception of the ranch. That was put into a trust for Ryland. So unless Sam wanted her daddy dead, there was no motive to kill him over money. She’s the only person who really stood to gain outright.”
“And I’d argue the day my daddy and brother died was the day I lost everything anyway.”
Wes’s head snapped up at the sound of Samantha’s voice, rough and sweet all at once, like raw sugar. She stood inside the doorway to Wes’s office like an apparition—beautiful, if not a little too gaunt. She might have seemed otherworldly had it not been for the jeans and the denim shirts she favored when she was at the ranch. Wes wanted to launch across the room and grab her up but Chris beat him to it.
“Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit!” Chris said with a broad smile, scooping Sam up in a big bear hug. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes!”
“Christopher Fields—” she smiled down at him. “Who said you could retire from the Cowboys before I got to see you play?”
Chris grinned up at her, pleased as punch. “Aw, hell, honey—I was only in the NFL for a few cups of coffee before my old knees gave out,” he set her down gently. “It’s great to see you again after so many years, Sammy.”
She patted him on the shoulder. “I hear you’re a daddy now to two little girls.”
Chris nodded with a laugh. “They drive me absolutely crazy half the time, but I don’t know what I’d do without them.”
“Let’s just hope they’re better looking than you,” Alejandro de Soto remarked as he stepped into Wes’s office.
Chris’s eyes widened as he glanced from Sam to Alejandro. “Well, shit. Ain’t this some kind of reunion?” he murmured, dazed. “You two workin’ together now or something?”
“More like I’m just trying to keep this one out of trouble,” Alejo replied as the two men shook hands.
“How’s that going for you?”
Alejo’s mouth twisted as he looked down at Sam. “Guess.”
“Same as it ever was,” Chris replied with a chuckle. “You and Wes were the only two guys who could ever get Sammy so riled up, she could spit.”
Speaking of Sam…
Wes reached her before she could fend him off, pulling her close and dropping a kiss on her mouth before she could protest. The kiss was short but exhilarating, like touching a current of electricity in the best way possible. Wes pressed her lower lip with his thumb, smiling down at her even as she flashed him with a dark you-won’t-get-away-with-that look.
Oh yes, I will… he smiled. Wes let her push him back a step with the head of her cane, though he fought every instinct not to pick her up again and kiss the living daylights out of her.
“Why do I get the feeling you want to beat the hell out of me with that cane?” Wes asked, tucking a silky dark strand of hair back over her shoulder.
“Because I’m seriously considering it,” she replied succinctly, shooting him a caustic look.
“Uh oh.” Chris’s eyes bobbed between them. “Wes, you in tro-uuuble…” he sing-songed.
Alejandro leaned against the wall, crossing his arms, like he couldn’t wait to watch what happened.
“What brings you to Austin, darlin’?” Wes asked. “You finally ready to put me out of my misery?”
Sam ignored the comment, turning instead to Chris and Alejo. “You boys mind giving me and Wes a moment?”
“Sure thing, Sammy,” Chris replied quickly with a nod. He thumped Alejo hard on the back. “You look dry as a powder house, de Soto; let’s get you a beer while these two sort their shit out,” he said, leading him out.
She rounded on Wes the moment the door snicked shut. “Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing, Wes Elliott?”
*
March—Evening
Austin, Texas
S A M A N T H A
“If you wanted to see me, darlin’, all you had to do was call,” he said as he approached her with a high-wattage smile that could have singed the eyeballs of a less-pissed-off woman.
“How is it that I don’t see you in years, and all of the sudden you’re calling my house every night like some lovesick teenager?” Sam asked as he came toward her. “First you’re in Afghanistan—right where I don’t want you—”
“If I remember rightly, you had me exactly where you wanted me in Afghanistan,” he interrupted with a smoldering look that made her feel agitated, turned on, and angry in equal measures. “But after sex as hot as that, who could blame me?” he drawled. She alternately loved and hated the way he spoke to her, his words heated and slowly spoken, like they were coming off a low simmer.
With a little maturity, the charm Wes exuded as a young man was now a raffish, electric charisma that was beyond appealing. He knew exactly what to say and how to say it, and it didn’t help that even mussed and rugged, he still looked and sounded like her favorite weakness. But she wouldn’t be taken in by him again. She’d fallen for every trick in Wes’s book. And no matter how appealing, no matter how provocative, Sam knew exactly how it felt to fall back to the earth when he left for the next big thing. She wasn’t fooling herself. She didn’t give a damn how spectacular his cheekbones were.
Sam shoved her cane head hard against his chest just as he moved to pull her into his arms. She took advantage of his surprise long enough to maneuver him back against his desk.
“Why the hell are you looking into my family’s business, Wes? What gives you the goddamn right?”
He knocked the cane out of his way before yanking her close. His amber eyes flared gold with emotion as he gripped her, hands warm on her skin.
“You know the one thing that haunts me, Sammy? Of all the things I’ve seen and done?” Wes pushed her down into one of his guest seats before kneeling slowly in front of her. “It was walking away from you,” he admitted. “So if there’s a sliver of a chance I could help you figure out the person responsible for the worst thing that ever happened to you, I jumped at the chance to help. I want to try to set things right between us, Sammy.”
“You can’t set it right, Wes!” she countered angrily. “You can’t undo what’s been done—we can’t go back.”
“Then why did you sleep with me?” Wes’s hands slid down her thighs before he pushed them open, gently nudging his way between her knees. Even through the jeans, she felt the insidious, delicious, ultraviolet warmth of his body. He was close—too close—his sandalwood scent intoxicating…
No. It was too easy with Wes—too easy to slide into the slipstream of yearning and urgent need—where time with him curved into a seamless world of great heights with no sharp edges. But she knew better.
“Closure, Wes,” Sam answered brutally. “I slept with you for closure.”
She wanted to lacerate him with the truth, and she could see immediately that she’d succeeded. Wes flinched, rocking back on his heels.
“You’re a shitty liar, Sammy,” he told her, coming back with a vengeance. Wes gripped her knees and yanked her forward as he wedged between her legs. He reached one hand behind her neck and brought her face to his. She managed a strangled what the f— before Wes sealed his mouth over hers.
The kiss was half-angry and half-desperate, like the world was ending and he wasn’t entirely sure he’d get to do this again. Sam struggled minutely, the sound of her rebuke dying in her throat as Wes caught her tongue with his, changing the reproach into an altogether different conversation.
Sam kissed him like she had when she was young, like picking up the rhythm and timing to an old song she’d loved once. She knew all the words, each riff and refrain—the bridge, the chorus. Wes groaned into her mouth, finding and catching her tongue, his grip changing as he gathered her to him, bringing her even closer, tighter to his body like she was his favorite thing.
There wasn’t a past between them. No future. Just this. This instantaneous recognition between their most visceral selves. This was Wes—her Wes—gorgeous and flirtatious, wildly inappropriate and dazzling, sexy without really trying.
He drew back, his hair tousled from her fingers, eyes gleaming. “No such thing as closure between us, Sammy,” he rasped, threading his fingers through her hair as she caught her breath and wondered where the hell her mind had gone. “Love me or hate me, darlin’, but I ain’t going anywhere this time, and this is how I’m going to prove it to you.”
That statement snapped her right back into reality. A reality in which Wes was digging through dirt he had no right to turn over. She didn’t want to take any more trips down memory lane with him, no matter how tempting he was or how good he made her feel. Sam didn’t want to be reminded of how deeply she’d loved him once—with everything—feeling with the kind of abandon she’d never let herself experience since then.
Besides…being angry at him was easier.
“You don’t know me anymore,” she insisted, drawing back from him. “There’s nothing to prove.”
“We both know that’s bullshit, darlin’,” Wes answered, his look scorching. “You won’t rest until you know what happened to your father and Ry. And this is the one thing I can do to help you—this is what I’m good at—” his eyes dropped back to her mouth. “This is how I prove I mean it this time.” Wes leaned in fractionally, and Sam could feel the old gravitational pull of their attraction again. She felt herself being drawn in by their history, the lack of conclusion that left the question there in the open…could it work? Could it happen for them after all this time?
Sam shook her head, willing the fog in her mind to disperse. “How did you know anything about this?” she asked when he was just a breath away.
Wes’s eyes snapped back up to hers. She saw the brief flash of something. Was it guilt? Remorse? Just a reaction to being caught out?
“Were you just digging around looking for a way back in, or did you get lucky and make the most of information you shouldn’t have had access to in the first place?”
Wes leaned back from her. He looked rough and tumble, skin a little flushed from the kissing, hair wild from her fingers. But he also looked completely unrepentant. This was the Wes she knew. He was just a more intense, seasoned version of the wily, irreverent boy she’d fallen for a lifetime ago.
“The file Jack gave Carey,” he admitted. “But before you go off calling me an opportunist, I’d like to be clear on something: Are you here right now because you’re angry with Jack for reopening the wound, or are you angry with me for looking into it?”
She told herself to count to ten before replying.
She made it to three.
“I’m angry at both of you for butting into my life when you have no business, no right getting involved—”
“So do you want to know what I’ve found out or not?” he interrupted, standing slowly. “That’s why you’re really here, isn’t it?”
Sam pressed her lips together.
Wes leaned back against his desk, his long legs crossed at the ankles. “Want to know what Childress’s last words were before the lethal injection?” he asked, his voice just this side of taunting.
“Why should I give a damn?”
“He said, ‘I’m sorry about the boy,’” Wes continued, ignoring her reply.
She blinked, her heart constricting. The lawyers never told her. Mack hadn’t mentioned it. Probably in some misguided attempt to protect her from the knife twist.
“Ry was never supposed to be there, Sam,” Wes continued carefully, knowing how that statement would slice her.
I don’t want to hear this.
But everything already hurt. What was a little more? She willed him to continue w
ithout her asking him to open the wound up more.
Wes must have seen the look in her eye, because he obliged. “Ry was at the state fair that night with some friends. He overdid it on the hot dogs and cotton candy before he went on the rides. Got sick all over the place. So Rob picked him up early to take him home on his way back to the ranch after the parents called him.”
Her father had been heading home for the roundup. That was the night before she and Rita were scheduled to leave for Europe—to meet him in London. She wondered if Wes even realized that little fact.
Her heart was beating like a dove trapped in a cage. “You’re saying Ry was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she whispered.
Wes nodded slowly, grief making the corners of his mouth turn down. “So I kept thinking—why would Childress show remorse for one, not the other. Then I wondered why the CIA looked into it in the first place. The local sheriff’s department would have investigated first, since that stretch of highway was part of their jurisdiction. If they’d found foul play, then maybe the case would have gotten kicked up to the Texas Rangers, maybe even the FBI, given Rob’s status, but the CIA?” He shook his head. “No reason for them to get involved unless it was within their interests to do so. That could only mean one of two things, Sammy: Your dad was either working with them or doing something he wasn’t supposed to.”
She wasn’t listening. She was reliving the long walk down a fluorescent-lit hallway in the sheriff’s station, Mack on one side and Rita on the other. She remembered Uncle Grant coming out of the double doors to the morgue, eyes red-rimmed with grief as he shook his head at Mack. She’d tried to process the meaning before he strode forward, grabbing her up and shielding her with his big body as if he could protect her from what he had to tell her. But she knew it then—that it wasn’t some horrific dream. The truth crashed in on her without Uncle Grant having to say anything, and Sam’s shoulders heaved as she’d choked on her sobs, loud and harsh in the silence of the morgue. Grant had wept with her, the rough tearing sound of their combined grief reverberating against the linoleum.
Fearless: Complicated Creatures Part Three Page 19