Defending the Rancher's Daughter

by Carla Cassidy

  “Oh, Zack. I’m so sorry.” She’d never seen him so vulnerable. Now she understood his strong reaction when he’d heard about George’s crime. He’d always been so strong, so emotionally together, and this glimpse of him in pain drew her to him. She couldn’t help but wonder exactly what this Melissa had meant to him.

  He raked a hand through his hair and took a deep sigh. “I heard that car backfire and saw you standing at the truck with your white blouse and suddenly I was in the depths of my nightmare.”

  “Tell me about your nightmare.”

  He looked at her, his green eyes dark and tortured. “You don’t need to hear about all this,” he protested.

  “Maybe not,” she agreed, “but maybe you need to talk about it.”

  He averted his gaze from her and instead stared down at the ground at his feet. “I was with her for three months. When she filed for divorce, her husband threatened to kill her, and since he was a violent man who’d regularly abused her in the past, she took his threat quite seriously.”

  “And so you were assigned to protect her.”

  He nodded. “Tanner sent me out on the job. Melissa did everything she could to get the divorce finalized. She felt that once the divorce was a done deal, he’d move on and leave her alone.”

  He stretched his legs out in front of him and once again tipped his head back, staring overhead. “Despite everything that she’d been through, she was one of the strongest, most optimistic people I’d ever met. She was full of plans for the rest of her life. She was going to open up an antique business and get a dog. She was going to do all the things she’d been unable to do while under the thumb of her husband.”

  He stood abruptly, as if finding it impossible to sit. He walked to the side of the tree and leaned with his back against the broad trunk, his face dappled in shadow.

  “Two days before the divorce would have been finalized, she heard from her husband’s friends and relatives that he’d taken off, left town. His best friend told her that he’d packed up everything he owned and had left for Arkansas where he had an old girlfriend.”

  Katie wanted to say something, anything, to alleviate the tortured depths in his voice, but she didn’t know what to say, knew that nothing she said could fix this or make it better, easier for him.

  “Anyway, the bottom line is that she told me to go home and that she didn’t need protection anymore. She believed what everyone told her, that the danger was gone.”

  His voice was positively wretched now. Kate stood, finding it impossible to remain seated while he relived what must have been one of the worst experiences of his life.

  She wanted to take him in her arms, but his tense body forbade her touch. Whatever demons he fought, he appeared determined to fight them alone.

  She stood in front of him, his gaze holding hers intently. In his eyes she saw the ghost of the woman he’d tried to save and enough pain to fill up a wide prairie.

  “Reluctantly, even though my instincts told me otherwise, I left her. I was almost back to Cotter Creek when a police officer I’d become friendly with called me to tell me she’d been gunned down by her husband.” He closed his eyes and took another deep breath.

  She had to touch him. She couldn’t stand seeing him this way. His pain resonated inside her, forcing her to lean into him and to wrap her arms around his neck, to pull his head down to her shoulder.

  They stood that way for long minutes, neither of them speaking. His heart thundered against hers and after a bit of time she felt some of the tension start to ebb from his body.

  She now understood why he’d quit the family business, why he’d been reluctant to get involved with protecting her. The fact that he had, despite his heartbreak, in spite of his pain, filled her heart with guilt almost too great to bear.

  He finally moved out of her embrace and once again sat on the bench. She joined him there and waited for him to speak again.

  “The nightmares started a week after her death.” His voice was low but steady and without the intense emotional stress that had been in it moments before. “Even though I wasn’t there when she was killed, I see it in my dream. I see her get out of her car and she’s wearing a white dress. A shot rings out and the front of her dress turns bloody as she falls to the ground.”

  Kate ran a hand down the front of her white blouse. So this explained his reaction to the car backfire. A shot, a woman in white and deadly results.

  “Were you in love with her?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer for a long moment. “No. I loved her, but I wasn’t in love with her, not in a romantic sense. I just feel so responsible.”

  “Responsible? How could you be responsible? She’d sent you away.”

  “But I shouldn’t have left,” he said, the torment back in his voice, back in his eyes. “I should have listened to my instincts.”

  She placed a hand on his arm, felt the taut muscles beneath her fingertips and searched deep inside herself, finding the place that had haunted her since her father’s death.

  “The morning that Dad went for his last ride, he asked me to join him. But I was still half asleep. I didn’t feel like going and so I told him no.” Her heart constricted painfully as she remembered that morning and the fateful decision she’d made.

  “After he was found, I kept thinking that if I’d gone with him, then he wouldn’t be dead. Of course, that’s not true. Somebody wanted my father dead and if it hadn’t happened that particular morning it would have happened on some other morning.

  “Zack, you can’t blame yourself for Melissa’s death. You had no choice but to leave. Unless you were willing to spend the rest of your life guarding her, you probably couldn’t have stopped what happened. If it hadn’t happened on that particular day at that particular time, it would have happened sooner or later.”

  He stood abruptly. “There’s been too damned much death lately.” He hit the tree trunk with the palm of his hand. “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here and get back home.”

  Together they left the park and got into his truck. It was a silent ride back to the ranch, although not the same kind of tense silence they had shared driving to the city.

  There had always been a part of her that had questioned whether Zack was capable of any kind of emotional attachment. When he hadn’t visited her father in the month that he’d returned to town, she’d suspected that his feelings for Gray hadn’t been as strong as her father’s had been for him.

  Even years ago when Jaime Coffer, the girl Zack had dated had left town, he hadn’t seemed affected by the loss. He’d never shown any real attachment to his own family members, except maybe Smokey, who he obviously admired.

  But any question she’d had about Zack’s capacity to care about another human being had been answered by what he’d shared with her.

  “Tell me what your brothers and sister are up to,” she said when they had driven about halfway home. She had the feeling he would welcome small talk.

  “You know Tanner and Anna are in Europe on their honeymoon and are supposed to be back sometime next week.”

  “Is Joshua still in New York?” Joshua, the youngest of the West clan, was two years older than Kate.

  “Yeah, he’s knocking them dead on Wall Street as a stockbroker.” A faint smile curved his lips, a welcome sight after the trauma of his memory. “We have bets on how long it will be before he leaves the city behind and returns to his roots.”

  “And Meredith?”

  “She was on an assignment in Texas for a couple of weeks and now I think she’s in South Dakota somewhere.”

  “Does she still have a bad haircut?”

  Zack laughed. “There’s that Katie trait of always speaking your mind.”

  She welcomed his laughter. “What? You’ve never noticed that your sister’s hair always looks like its been cut by a chain saw?”

  He laughed again and cast her a warm glance. “As a matter of fact, you used to remind me a little bit of Meredith. As the only gi
rl in our family, she was spoiled and temperamental, hotheaded and dramatic.” He shot her another look of amusement. “And I remember a night when you used a pair of pinking shears to cut your hair.”

  She laughed at the memory and pulled the ponytail holder from her hair, allowing the thick strands to fall around her shoulders. She’d been about ten at the time and had decided if she looked like a boy maybe her dad would love her more. “When I got finished and saw myself in the mirror, I cried for a week. I couldn’t believe what I’d done to myself.”

  “At least you didn’t color it purple or pink,” he replied.

  “What about Clay? Where is he?” she asked, getting back to his siblings.

  “Last I heard he was in New Orleans on an assignment.”

  “Are you all ever home at the same time?”

  “Holidays we try to be home together, but it doesn’t always work out that way.”

  They fell silent once again. Kate tried to imagine what Christmas must be like in the West household. It must be wonderful with the entire family together, wonderful and maybe a little bit crazy.

  She didn’t want to think about what her next Christmas would be like. Christmas was for family and she’d be all alone.

  They had just turned into the entrance to home when Zack looked at her again. “Thanks, Katie,” he said softly.

  “For what?”

  “For everything you said earlier.” He pulled up in front of the house, parked and shut off the engine. He turned to face her. “I didn’t realize until you said it how badly I needed to hear somebody say that it wasn’t my fault, that I probably couldn’t have stopped the murder no matter how hard I tried.”

  “I didn’t say that just to make you feel better. I said it because it’s the truth.” She touched his arm lightly. “Come on, let’s get inside and I’ll rustle us up some dinner.”

  “When we get inside the front door I want you to stay there while I check the rest of the house.” In Zack’s simple statement the reality of her situation came back to haunt her.

  Somebody wanted her dead. And if they didn’t figure out who and why, she’d probably end up like Melissa and Gray.

  “I’ve arranged for a security system to be put in tomorrow morning,” Zack said an hour later as they sat at the table eating the burgers Katie had fixed for dinner. “Once the system is up and running, then during the days I’ll go back to working outside with the men knowing you’re safe inside the house.”

  “You don’t have to tell me to make sure the security is on all the time and to not allow anyone inside the house when you aren’t here.”

  “Good, then I won’t tell you that.” He reached for another handful of potato chips. It was amazing to him that he felt lighter, more clear-headed than he had since Melissa’s death.

  The trauma of her death had festered in him like a boil and by talking about it with Katie the boil had been lanced and the patient was going to live.

  “Isn’t the town council meeting this week?”

  “Saturday night,” she replied.

  “I think we should go. I’ve been much too absent from the town business in the past.”

  “Okay. The meetings always start promptly at seven and usually end around ten.” Anything else she might have said was interrupted by a knock on the door. She got up, but Zack stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.

  “I’ll get it,” he said. As he left the kitchen he grabbed his gun from the counter where he’d placed it.

  He peered out the window and saw Sonny standing on the porch. He opened the door and greeted the older man.

  “I need to check in with Kate,” Sonny said. “There’s some ranch business we need to discuss.”

  “Sure, come on in. We were just finishing up supper.” Zack escorted the man into the kitchen where Katie had begun to clear the table.

  “Oh, good,” she said at the sight of her manager. “I was hoping you’d come by.” She gestured him into a chair at the table, then sat across from him.

  Zack leaned against the refrigerator and listened as the two discussed the delegation of chores, the health and well-being of both animals and crops.

  Zack was struck by Katie’s decisiveness, her business acumen, as he listened to the conversation. A grudging admiration filled him. She’d grown so much in the past five years. It was difficult to compare the strong, rational woman she’d become to the headstrong, tempestuous girl she had been.

  Her compassion when he’d shared with her the details of Melissa’s death had been heartfelt and welcomed. Somebody would be lucky to have a woman like Katie as a life partner, sharing both the good times and the bad.

  He frowned, disturbed by these kinds of thoughts. Funny, he had been worried about how she might react to their love-making and he was the one who was finding it difficult to forget. He was the one who was suddenly thinking things about Katie Sampson he shouldn’t be contemplating.

  They had been brought together due to strange circumstances. She didn’t need him in her life as a lover. She needed him to keep her alive and he’d do well to remember that was the only reason he was back in her life.

  “Even though I know we’re short-handed right now, sooner or later something is going to have to be done about Brett,” Sonny said, bringing Zack back to the conversation.

  “What’s going on with Brett?” Zack asked, for the first time inserting himself into the discussion.

  “He was so hung over this morning I couldn’t get much of any work out of him until afternoon. And when he’s drunk or hung over, he’s surly as hell.”

  Katie frowned thoughtfully. “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Maybe you should put him on some sort of probation for a couple of weeks,” Sonny suggested. “I hate to do without him altogether, but since your dad’s death he’s gotten worse than ever.”

  “Maybe I should talk to him,” Zack offered.

  Katie shook her head. “No, it’s my job. I’ll handle it.” She looked at Sonny. “I think we’re done here for tonight. At least for the time being, I won’t be out around the ranch, so I’d like a report from you every evening.”

  Again Zack felt a tinge of admiration for her. It would have been easy for her to allow him to take care of the difficult task of talking to Brett, but she wouldn’t shirk her duty. Gray would have been proud of her.

  Sonny got up from the table. “Is there anything else I can do?” He looked at Katie, then toward Zack. “I’m assuming you aren’t just working as a ranch hand around the place, that you’re working as a member of your family business because of the fire that happened the other night.”

  “I’m here with Katie because I’m her friend,” Zack replied.

  “Good enough,” Sonny said, and turned to leave the kitchen. Zack followed him to the door and after saying goodbye, locked up behind him.

  He returned to the kitchen to find Katie washing the few dishes they had used for supper. He picked up a dish towel and began to dry.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Not only do I have a friend, but he actually dries dishes.”

  “It was easier to tell Sonny I was here as a friend rather than try to explain the complicated relationship we’ve shared.”

  She rinsed a plate and handed it to him. “It has been complicated, hasn’t it?”

  “More so in the past than now.”

  She eyed him curiously. “And how do you see our relationship now?”

  Not for the first time he felt shaky ground beneath his feet where she was concerned. “Still under construction,” he finally replied.

  She nodded, as if she found his assessment agreeable, then handed him the last plate to dry. “What time will somebody be here in the morning to put in the security system?”

  “Early.” He dried the plate, put it into the cabinet, then folded his dish towel and set it on the counter.

  She drained the dishwater, then dried her hands. “I think maybe I’ll go take a bath.” She raised her shoulders, then dropped them, as if easin
g tension. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Sounds like a good idea. While you’re doing that, I’ll check the place, make sure everything is locked up tight for the night.”

  They left the kitchen and parted ways in the hallway. She disappeared into the bathroom and a moment later he heard the water running in the tub.

  He tried to keep visions of Katie in a tubful of bubbles out of his mind as he went from room to room, checking windows to make certain the house was secure.

  It was just after eight and he wondered how long it would be before she went to bed. Soon, he hoped. The last thing he wanted to do was to sit in the living room with her.

  Under construction. He supposed that described his relationship with Katie as well as anything. He’d come into this expecting her to be the same demanding, spoiled girl she’d been. She’d proved herself to be anything but that.

  After checking all the doors and windows, he got his linens from the hall closet to make up his bed on the sofa. The water shut off in the bathroom and once again his head filled with a vision of Katie.

  He sat on the sofa and instead tried to focus on what little they’d learned from Jimmy Wainfield. The fact that Joe had fallen and somehow been knocked unconscious might be nothing more than a coincidence.

  Knowing how Gray had died, it was easy to imagine somebody fighting with Joe, knocking him out, then running over him with the tractor.

  But Zack couldn’t make the leap to see what on earth Joe and Gray had in common. Who might have wanted to kill both men? And what had been the motive?

  He leaned back and rubbed the center of his forehead, grappling to make sense where none was forthcoming. It was difficult to believe that what had happened to Joe had anything to do with what had happened to Gray. Still, he made a mental note to check to see what other ranching accidents had taken place in the last couple of months.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there when he heard the door to the bathroom open and close and realized Katie had gone into the spare bedroom.

  A moment later, she appeared in the doorway of the living room and the expression on her face drove all thoughts of sex out of his head.