Twice in a Lifetime

by Merline Lovelace

  Her…and Jake Henderson.

  With that thought buzzing around in her head like a bee with no place to light, she retrieved her purse, cell phone, and car keys from her bedroom.

  By the time Rachel wheeled her sporty little convertible into the airport parking lot later that morning, the furrow in her brow had deepened to a distinct crease.

  She found an empty spot and sat for a moment, dangling both wrists over the leather-wrapped wheel. The acrid tang of aviation fuel drifted through the air and crowded out the clean, sharp scent of the pines blanketing the mountain slopes around the city. Rachel barely noticed the fumes. Her thoughts were all on Jake.

  Damn! She’d had no idea how easy it would be to turn up so many scraps of information about the man. Or what a disturbing picture the bits and pieces would form when quilted together into a whole. All it had taken was a few well-placed questions about the ranching industry, with casual references to Jake sprinkled in here and there.

  Hal Tomlinson, her aunt’s very friendly and very talkative pharmacist, told Rachel that Jake recently bought his wife’s cousin’s like-new hay baler. Rather than let it go for pennies at auction when his neighbor was forced to sell out, Henderson paid the top dollar for the baler. Fifteen thousand dollars, Hal recounted. In cash.

  When Rachel stopped at the Feed and Grain to pick up more potted mums, Sam Westerby let drop that Jake purchased a champion red Brangus bull a few months back for an undisclosed but reportedly astronomical sum.

  The owner of the new and used bookstore who supplied Rachel with a bag of thrillers for Alice mentioned the new truck Henderson had ordered for the Bar-H.

  The last piece of information she gathered came from Patty Hall, who trimmed an inch or so off Rachel’s shoulder-length, blunt-cut brown mane. The bubbly stylist went into great detail about the annual Fourth of July barbecue Jake and his brothers traditionally threw for their friends and neighbors. This year’s feast must have set the Hendersons back a big chunk of bucks, Patty surmised. It was particularly well attended given that it was the first one since Ellen’s death…and hosted by the sexiest widower in northern Arizona.

  A divorcee of several years standing, the stylist made no bones about her interest in Jake. She kept close track of his infrequent visits to town and had already heard that he’d danced with Rachel at the fair. Patty interpreted that as a signal that he was finally emerging from his self-imposed isolation and was now fair game.

  Jake was fair game, all right. In more ways than one. That fact was confirmed mere moments after Rachel greeted Russ Taggart. Short, athletic and aggressively muscled, the fair-haired FBI agent filed off the plane with the others. His dark eyes took on a glittery sheen when he spotted Rachel.

  Shifting his leather carryall to his right hand, he slipped a hand under her elbow and guided her through the milling throng. He waited only until they’d gained the relative privacy of the concourse to share the results of his computer queries.

  “On the surface, your boy Henderson looks squeaky clean. Honors graduate of the University of Northern Arizona, promoted to captain during his tour in the marines, past vice president of the Arizona Cattlemens Association. Owns his ranch free and clear. Pays his state and federal taxes on time. No arrests, no outstanding warrants, not even a citation for jaywalking, although he did get hauled before a local judge as a juvie.”

  “What for?”

  “The records were sealed, but I pried the information out of the county clerk. He and his brothers chased down a couple of thugs who’d jumped a friend.”

  Rachel had worked with Taggart enough to know he’d never just skim the surface. From the way his eyes gleamed with intensity, he’d found something in Jake’s more recent past that had snagged his attention.

  “Come on, Russ. Spill it. What other information did you pry loose?”

  “Henderson’s made some hefty purchases in the past twelve months without dipping into his cash reserves. He’s also made two large, unsourced deposits into his operating account.”

  “You got into his bank accounts? I thought that took a court order.”

  Taggart smiled. “We have our ways, Rache.”

  “Right.”

  The air around the FBI operative seemed to vibrate. Despite his casual attire of jeans, open-necked white shirt, and a lightweight sports coat, he emanated the same fiercely controlled energy he’d displayed when he’d first taken charge of the task force. He was on the hunt…and this time he’d ID’d a potential quarry.

  A queasy sensation swirled in the pit of Rachel’s stomach. The idea of Jake Henderson as Taggart’s quarry didn’t sit well. She couldn’t believe he was in any way involved with the lost millions. Okay, she didn’t want to believe it.

  He’d gotten to her last night in a way no other man had. What’s more, he was an old friend of her Aunt Alice. Rachel refused to believe her instincts and those of her aunt could have missed the mark so widely.

  “No other bills from the missing shipment have popped up,” she reminded Taggart. “If Jake deposited a large wad of cash from that run, more serial numbers would have been reported before now.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Weaving through the crowd, Taggart aimed for the rental car desks just beyond the baggage carousels. “The banks in the U.S. Federal Reserve system have been alerted to watch for notes with that particular sequence, but your average clerk handles thousands of bills every day. If Henderson’s feeding them in slowly, they could go unnoticed for who knows how long.”

  Rachel shook her head. “I just don’t see it, Russ. He’s not the criminal type. Certainly not the kind who’d get involved in a scheme that resulted in the death of four people.”

  That earned her a hard glance. “Neither was Timothy McVeigh…on the surface.”

  “I didn’t know the Oklahoma City bomber personally,” she replied stiffly. “I do know Jake Henderson. One of his brothers is a DEA agent, for Pete’s sake. The other is an assistant U.S. district attorney.”

  Taggart slowed to a halt, his dark eyes raking over her. “You said on the phone Henderson was just an acquaintance. Why are you jumping to his defense like this?”

  “He’s a little more than a mere acquaintance,” she admitted with a shrug.

  “How much more?”

  “I dated his brother some years ago.”

  “The DEA agent or the attorney?”

  “Neither. The youngest one, Sam.”

  She had to admit she hadn’t reacted to the youngest brother with anywhere near the heat she had to the oldest. Rachel shoved aside the memory of Jake Henderson’s lean, muscled frame pressed against her as Taggart reiterated the bottom line.

  “The fifty-dollar bill Henderson passed is our only lead to the missing forty million. I’m going to be on him like ticks on a dog.”

  “Don’t you think you should ask him where he got it before you start painting him as a coconspirator?”

  “And alert him to the fact that he’s under investigation? Not hardly.”

  “Then what’s the plan?”

  “The computer queries are only the start. I intend to find out anything and everything there is to know about your boy before I approach him.”

  With an exasperated huff, Rachel set the record straight. “He’s not ‘my’ boy.”

  “I stand corrected. Now can we…?”

  He broke off as her cell phone pumped out a lively version of “Ode to Joy.” Sure that it was Alice wondering what in the world had delayed her, she dragged the instrument out of her purse and flipped up the lid.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Rachel.”

  The deep voice certainly didn’t belong to her aunt. Talk about timing!

  “Hi, Jake.”

  Her response lit dark flames in Taggart’s eyes. “Henderson?” he mouthed.

  When she nodded he practically crawled onto her shoulder to listen.

  “I got your mobile number from Alice,” Jake was saying. “Hope I haven’t caught you at a
n inconvenient time.”

  “No. I’m, er, just running some errands.”

  “That’s what your aunt said.”

  A strained silence fell, made even more uncomfortable by the fact that Russ Taggart was listening to every word his unsuspecting quarry uttered.

  “Sam called to say he’s getting away earlier than anticipated,” Jake continued after a moment. “He and Molly are driving in this afternoon with the girls.”

  “That’s nice,” she replied inanely.

  Honestly, how in the world was she supposed to collect her thoughts with Taggart breathing down her neck and Jake’s deep, leather-smooth voice tingling in her ear?

  “I thought maybe you and Alice might like to come out to the Bar-H tonight for dinner. You could see Sam in his altered state and I could make amends for not getting into town to visit Alice in the hospital.”

  “I, uh…”

  “Say yes,” Taggart hissed.

  Shooting him an evil look, Rachel hunched her shoulder. “When you talked to my aunt, did she say whether she felt up to an evening out?”

  A smile crept into his voice. “She said she’s gone through every mystery novel in the house and has trounced you so many times in gin rummy that you refuse to come back for another beating. She’s willing if you are.”

  “Well, I…”

  “Say yes,” Taggart ordered again.

  “I’d love to see Sam after all these years,” she finished with another glare at the agent.

  “Good. Say around seven?”

  “Seven it is.”

  Rachel had barely flipped the phone shut before the FBI agent rocked back on his heels. A smirk decorated his face.

  “Not ‘your’ boy, huh? From the sound of it, he’d like to be.”

  “Get real. He invited me and my aunt to a family dinner. That doesn’t sound like a come-on to me.”

  Taggart didn’t argue the point. “Whatever his reasons for asking you out to his place, it’s a great chance for you to nose around.”

  Once again the ruthless, intent FBI operative, he rapped out a series of terse instructions.

  “Keep your eyes and ears open. Get close to the man, draw him out as much as you can. Just don’t tip our hand.”

  Replying tartly that she’d think about it, Rachel left him at the rental car desk.

  Taggart watched her stride away, his mind racing. It hadn’t stopped churning since her call last night.

  Excitement clutched at his insides, rushed through his veins. One of the bills had finally surfaced. At a damned county fair, of all places.

  He’d waited months for one to turn up, sweated blood to make it happen. The money didn’t matter to him, not anymore, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep until he’d tracked that fifty to its source and closed this damned case once and for all. Which is exactly what he intended to do—with or without Rachel Quinn’s help.

  Chapter 4

  Keep your eyes and ears open.

  Get close to the man.

  Don’t tip your hand.

  Taggart’s instructions sizzled and spit like hot oil in Rachel’s mind as she gripped the wheel of her aunt’s turquoise and silver ’68 Chevy Impala. Like a venerable matron, the chrome-laden sedan rolled majestically along the road that ambled south through silvery scrub and piñon.

  Rachel barely noticed high desert landscape or the snow-capped peaks bathed in red-gold glow to her right. Absorbed in her thoughts, she would have missed the turn for the Bar-H completely if her aunt hadn’t pointed out the break in the barbed wire. It was marked by a simple arch made of weathered pine poles.

  “This is it. My, look at that.”

  Her niece speared a quick glance at the tin artwork hanging from the wooden crossbar. The metal sculpture depicted a heard of running cattle framed against a backdrop of jagged peaks. Unlike the mass-produced cutouts that had sprung up on farms and ranches throughout the West, this piece had obviously been crafted by an artist. It was probably the work of Jake’s sister-in-law. The artsy one. Reece… No, Marsh’s wife.

  The sedan thumped over the cattle guard. Chewing on the inside of her cheek, Rachel aimed the car down a dirt and gravel road that cut straight west, toward the mountains. With every crunch of the tires, her nerves tightened. She shouldn’t have agreed to this dinner. The idea of accepting Jake’s hospitality under false pretenses didn’t square well with her conscience. The idea of eating his food while she pumped him for information bothered her even more. She was a safety analyst, for heaven’s sake. Not a modern-day Mata Hari.

  She was also a government employee, she reminded herself sternly, her eyes on the cluster of buildings set almost in the mountains’ shadows. She’d performed analysis after analysis on fragments of aircraft components after last year’s fatal crash, probing for clues to what caused it. She had to get past this guilt for bringing a cloud of suspicion down on Jake. More to the point, she had to stop obsessing over the jolt of pure, sensual pleasure that had shot through her when he’d taken her in his arms.

  The fair atmosphere had magnified that brief contact all out of proportion, she decided. She was a sucker for silky cool night air and colored lights, that’s all. Taken in conjunction with toe-tapping music and the aromas of sizzling fajitas and hot, buttery corn-on-the-cob, it was no surprise she’d experienced a sort of sensory spike. With that thought fixed firmly in her mind, Rachel slowed for another cattle guard before pulling up at the sprawling, two-story adobe ranch house.

  The moment she opened her car door and stepped into the dusk, her senses spiked again. The evening air carried the same brisk chill it had last night. Pinks and reds and golds blazed above the mountain peaks, every bit as colorful as the fair lights. The honeysuckle that climbed the beamed porch shading the adobe ranch house put out a scent as sticky sweet as cotton candy.

  There was no way the din that assaulted her ears could be considered musical, however. Like the wails of a hundred lost souls, a chorus of mournful cries rose from portable corrals set up in the open area beyond the barns and sheds. A half-dozen separate pens held calves of white-faced Hereford, black Angus, and a rusty, all-red breed Rachel didn’t recognize. The milling calves bawled incessantly, their keening sobs a solid wall of noise.

  Wincing at their ear-splitting cries, Rachel slammed her car door and went around to extract her aunt’s walker from the back seat. The calves squalled even louder when they spotted the geranium-red shirt she wore with her tan linen slacks. Butting their heads through the corral bars, they added the machine-gun rattle of metal to their pitiful sobs.

  “What on earth’s the matter with them?” she asked as she helped her aunt out.

  “They’re missing their mommas,” Alice informed her Eastern-bred niece. “They’ve just been brought in from the pastures and are going through the weaning process before they’re shipped off to feeder lots.”

  “Poor babies!”

  “Those ‘babies’ weigh upwards of four hundred and fifty pounds,” was the dry response. “Time for them to be taken off their mama so they can rebuild their strength for the next spring’s calf crop.”

  “A calf a year? Isn’t that a little rough on the girls?”

  “They wouldn’t come into heat if they weren’t ready to reproduce. Their hormones tell them when it’s time to mate, just as ours do.”

  Rachel had taken enough biology classes in her science major to appreciate the power of the chemical messengers synthesized and secreted by the endocrine system. She’d never experienced that power with such devastating potency, however, until the front door opened and Jake Henderson stepped out onto the porch.

  One glimpse of his tanned, rugged face and Rachel realized she had more in common with a herd of cows than she wanted to admit. Those blasted hormones could really do a number on the female of any species. Particularly when a certain male of the same species smiled and came down the front steps with a lean, easy grace to greet his guests.

  He must have just taken a shower. His hair was
still damp. Rachel had plenty of time to once again admire the dusting of silver in its black sheen while he pitched a friendly greeting over the mewling calves.

  “Hello, Alice. Glad to see you’re maneuvering so well.”

  “It takes more than a busted hip to keep me down.”

  Alice thumped her walker up the flagstone path. Jake’s glance swept past her and collided with Rachel’s. He smiled down at her with a look that warmed his blue eyes and, in the process, melted her insides.

  “I’m glad you came.”

  So was she, until she remembered why.

  Her humming endocrines cooled their jets. The smile in Jake’s eyes would die an instant death if he knew the real reason she was here. Half wishing she’d never glanced at the bill he’d pulled out of his wallet, Rachel followed her aunt through the door he held open for them.

  The raucous din inside the house matched the noise outside. Squeals, high-pitched shrieks, and the teeth-gritting wail of sirens almost drowned an exasperated parental command.

  “Take those things outside!”

  More shrieks followed the admonishment, accompanied by the bang of something hitting a wall. Seconds later, two pint-sized intergalactic warriors wielding noisy ray guns barreled around the corner and careened down the tiled hall.

  “Watch it!”

  With the agility of a man used to dodging cattle, Jake whipped past Alice. He scooped one warrior up under his arm and caught the other by the straps of her bunny-pink corduroy jumper a half second before she crashed into the walker.

  “Got ya!” the towheaded girl shouted gleefully, aiming her weapon at the squirming bundle under Jake’s arm. Her neon yellow gun barrel spewed a shower of blue sparks. Electronic pops and whistles screeched from the handle.