by Jean Barrett
“I’m going to hug Shep for taking pity on us,” Samantha confided to Roark when they arrived at the site for that night’s camp.
Roark, chuckling, jerked his head in the direction of the nearby creek along whose banks the longhorns were already crowding. “I think his decision had more to do with the availability of water than any compassion for our backsides.”
“Well, this backside is so exhausted I don’t think it can take another minute in the saddle. On the other hand, I’m not sure I have enough strength left to get out of the saddle.”
Roark had already dismounted with maddening ease. “Here, let me help.” He stood by her stirrup, offering his hand to her.
“I can manage,” she insisted.
But her body, unsteady with fatigue, betrayed her as she started to climb down, threatening to tumble her from the mare’s back. She would have collapsed on the ground if Roark hadn’t caught her as she slid from the saddle. The next thing she knew she had been dragged to her feet and was solidly in his arms.
Samantha instantly forgot how stiff and sore she was. Forgot everything but her traitorous senses clamoring for the man who held her. For his long, lean body pressed tightly, securely against hers, searing her flesh even with the barrier of their clothing between them. For the scent of him, all male in its mixture of horse, sweat and musk. And for his bold, sensual mouth that hovered promisingly just above hers.
“Tell me you want this as much as I do,” he said gruffly, his deep blue eyes pinned on her with the intensity of a hungry predator. “That nothing else matters.”
In this moment nothing else did matter. She didn’t care about the past or the future. All she knew was that she wanted more than the sight, scent and feel of him. She wanted his flavor as well. Wanted what she had missed since their night in the canyon. His mouth devouring hers.
It didn’t happen. The cell phone clipped to his belt trilled sharply, demanding his attention. With a muttered oath, Roark released her and reached for the phone. Samantha didn’t know whether to feel regret or relief. Both emotions were at war inside her, and had been from the start.
When he answered the call, she could hear an excited voice at the other end. “Wendell?” she asked, mouthing the name. Roark nodded and angled his head toward her, holding the instrument so that they could both listen. There was no risk of being overheard. Ramona was busy over at the cook truck getting supper underway. The rest of the outfit was occupied with watering and settling the herd for the night.
“What have you got for me, Wendell?”
“Something you’re going to like,” the young trainee informed him triumphantly. “All my work in Purgatory finally paid off. See, I got to talking to this woman in one of the bars there. I swear there are more saloons in that town than gas stations. Anyway, it turns out she’s a friend of Ramona Chacon. Amazing how a few beers oiled her tongue. Guess what she told me about your Ernie?”
Wendell proceeded to gleefully tell them Ramona’s secret, how she’d had an affair years ago with the director of the Western Museum and that Ernie was his illegitimate son. There was a silence when he breathlessly finished his story.
“Hey, you still there?”
“Still here,” Roark assured him. “It’s just that, uh, we learned all this from Ramona herself this morning.”
“You already know?”
Samantha heard the disappointment in Wendell’s voice and felt sorry for him. Roark made an effort to soothe him.
“It’s all right, Wendell. It’s still good work. Did you get into those caves yet?”
“Yeah, I went out there this morning. Creepy places. No snakes, but I could feel the ghosts of all those Native American ancestors that were supposed to have lived in them. If they left anything behind, though, it’s long gone.”
“Any evidence of digging in them?”
“Not a sign. Hang on a minute. There’s another call coming in.”
Roark turned to Samantha while they waited. “I still say the answer is in that ravine. It must be there somewhere, and whatever it is, there’s a chance it’s connected with Ernie Chacon.”
“Why Ernie?”
“Have you forgotten that Shep told us your grandfather sent Ernie packing? What if Joe found him messing around that ravine and ordered him to keep away from the ranch? And if Ernie did discover something, say in the caves there, it could be another reason for wanting the Walking W in his father’s control. Because if Frank Costello was grateful to his son for the property, there’s every likelihood he would permit him the freedom of—”
“I’m back,” Wendell said. “It was just a question on the billing for the Adams case last month. Oh, there is one more thing I got from this woman in the bar, but, heck, I suppose you already know that, too.”
“Let’s have it, Wendell.”
“I guess the lady gets around, because she claimed to also be a good friend of your trail boss’s wife.”
“And?”
“The wife told her she’s worried about her husband. It seems that the guy is in financial trouble. The serious kind.”
Samantha and Roark turned their heads to exchange glances of sudden, eager interest. She knew Roark must be thinking the same thing she was. Shep Thomas. Was it possible?
Chapter Ten
Roark urged his trainee to explain. “Just how serious, Wendell? Did you get any details?”
“Oh, yeah. The guy is a gambler, and now he owes the wrong people. The sort that don’t make idle threats.”
Shep Thomas a gambler? Samantha thought. She found the information hard to believe. It just didn’t belong with the straight-arrow image the trail boss had always projected. But then individuals seldom fitted the molds into which society was forever casting them.
“The wife told this friend,” Wendell continued, “that Shep had asked his boss for a loan before his death but that Joe Walker had turned him down. Said her husband didn’t know how he was going to cover his debt and that he’s been plenty worried about it since. You sure you didn’t hear this already?”
Roark assured him they hadn’t.
“Well, I’m sorry I saved it for last, but I didn’t see how it could be useful. I mean, it’s not like Shep Thomas benefits from Walker’s will if his granddaughter fails to inherit.”
“Is that everything, Wendell? What about the new batch of photos?”
“I took a lot of them like you asked, shot those ravine walls from end to end. As soon as they’re developed, I’ll send them on. The results should be waiting for you at your next stop after this one. That would be Willow Creek, wouldn’t it? You have anything more you want me to look into?”
“Keep checking into Ernie’s background. And while you’re at it, start asking around about the other members of our outfit. I’m not ruling out any of them.”
Roark made sure that Wendell had all of their names, thanked him and rang off. He turned to Samantha, a speculative look on his rugged face. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“About the stranger Shep met back in Lost Springs and again in Edgerton the other evening? Could it be?”
Roark nodded. “One of those good people pressuring him for the money he owes them, or someone who doesn’t want to give him a loan he’s trying to negotiate to pay the crowd he owes. Either way it explains the secret he’s been hiding and why he’s been looking so miserable.”
“Yes, but Wendell is right. This can’t have any connection with my inheritance or all that’s been happening on the drive. Anyway, we don’t know for sure that what Wendell was told is true. It could have been just a lot of unfounded gossip from someone who’d had too many beers.”
“Anything is possible, Samantha, when a man is desperate. And that’s something that will have to wait to be explored, because right now Cappy is over there giving us a look that says he’s wondering why we’re standing around doing nothing while he and the others are handling all the work. Come on, we’ve got some horses that need to be unsaddled.”
THEY WERE CAMPED that night in the vicinity of another town, Donovan, Colorado, this time. A county seat, according to Dick Brewster. None of them, including the horse wrangler, were interested in visiting the place, which in any case was several miles distant from their camp. They were all too tired to do anything but lounge around the fire after an early supper of fajitas and fried rice.
All but Roark and Shep, that is. Leaving Samantha where she would be safe in the group by the fire, Roark had gone off toward the cook truck to treat himself to a sponge bath behind the blanket Ramona always strung on a line for that purpose. He and Samantha hadn’t discussed the heated moment interrupted by Wendell’s phone call. Nor had he tried to touch her since then. In order not to think about that, to save herself from anguishing about a situation that seemed to have no solution for them, she focused her mind on Shep.
She was worried about the trail boss. All through supper he had been silent and hollow-eyed. Afterward, he had taken his canteen of water and wandered off on his own. There was a long slope just below the campsite. It ended on the lip of a wide, deep canyon. She could see Shep down there now. He stood in the twilight on a ledge overhanging the canyon, sipping from the canteen and gazing vacantly into the abyss.
He was such a solitary, brooding figure that Samantha’s heart ached for him. A gambler in debt or not, she liked Shep, had liked his wife, too, and she grieved for his torment. Her sorrow was so strong that when he turned away from the canyon and started back up the hill, moving as slowly as an old man, she could no longer stand it.
Getting to her feet, she glanced in the direction of the cook truck and decided that Roark had no reason to object. It wasn’t as if she intended to be alone with Shep, only to speak to him privately within sight of the others. Perfectly safe.
Samantha met the trail boss on the brow of the hill. He looked up, surprised to find her there. She wasted no time in explaining her presence.
“Shep, if you’re in trouble I’d like to help.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You owe money, don’t you? A lot of money. At least I think that’s why you’ve been sick with worry.”
Shep had always been polite to her, gentle even. It was a shock now to see the haunted look on his face turn to a mean scowl. “How do you know I’m in debt? Have you and Hawke been snooping?”
He could be forgiven his ugly anger. The stress of his plight was responsible. “It doesn’t matter how I know. It’s true then.”
“What of it?”
“I know what it’s like to owe money and not know which way to turn. There’s nothing I can offer you now, but if you can hold out until the drive is ended and I inherit my grandfather’s estate, then I can—”
“How?” he snarled. “By selling the Walking W to some developer who’ll divide it into building lots? That’s what ambitious Realtors like you do, isn’t it?”
Under a strain or not, he wasn’t being fair. Samantha had spent her first years in real estate with another agency, working hard, learning the business before she borrowed a sum to open her own agency. Not to destroy properties but to put them in the hands of people who would treasure them.
“I probably will have to sell the ranch, yes, but—”
“Yeah, that’s all the Walking W means to you.”
He thrust his face into hers as he said it, and that’s when Samantha realized the canteen he carried didn’t contain water. The fumes of a breath thick with alcohol blasted her. Shep Thomas, a man she’d had every reason to believe was a teetotaler, who hadn’t touched the beer at Dick Brewster’s party, was drunk on what smelled like cheap whiskey.
He was also in a dangerous mood. Samantha realized she’d made a mistake in approaching him. She started to back away, but his hand closed around her wrist, holding her in a tight grip. Shep Thomas had suddenly become a menacing stranger.
“You’re not entitled to that ranch, Samantha. Not feeling the way you do about it.”
Her mouth opened to demand her release, but Samantha never got the words out. Without warning, a voice as hard as granite coldly informed the trail boss, “I wouldn’t like to hit a man when he looks like he’s all liquored up, but if you don’t let her go, Thomas, you’re going to find yourself flat on your back. Now.”
Shep hesitated only a second, and then he dropped Samantha’s arm. She spun around to find Roark looming above them, legs braced apart, a formidable expression on his lean face. He didn’t look at her. His gaze remained locked on Shep. For a taut moment the trail boss met the challenge in Roark’s eyes. Then he surrendered by dropping his own gaze.
“It wouldn’t be a good idea for you to ever touch her again,” Roark advised him with a lethal softness.
Shaking his head in an effort to clear it, Shep muttered an apology, though Samantha had the feeling he didn’t really understand what he had said or done. He was still in a fog when he brushed past them and headed back to the campsite, hopefully to climb into his bag and sleep off the whiskey he’d consumed.
When they were alone on the path, Samantha started to thank Roark for another of his timely rescues. He never gave her the chance. Catching her by the same wrist that Shep had grabbed only a moment ago, he pulled her behind a tall fir at the side of the path. The thick tree screened them from the others in the outfit, although none of them seemed to be paying any attention to what was happening on the slope.
“That was a real smart thing you did,” Roark said, lashing her with his anger. “Coming down here on your own to meet him like that.”
She looked up into his face and then down at the fingers that encircled her wrist like a steel band. “Now, I wonder why,” she asked him coolly, “you feel entitled to bruise the same wrist that you just warned Shep never to touch again?”
“Damn it, don’t avoid the issue,” he said, but his hand loosened its hold on her wrist and slid away.
“The issue is, you may be my protector, but you’re not my jailer.”
“No, the issue is that the man was threatening you.”
“You saw yourself he’d been drinking and didn’t know what he was saying. He wouldn’t have hurt me,” she insisted, refusing in her own anger to admit Shep had frightened her. “Why would he, when I was offering to help him, and once he accepts that—”
“When are you going to realize that someone wants you out of the way?”
“Not Shep. Not when we agreed he has no motive.”
“That was your conviction, Samantha, not mine. And Shep Thomas, now that I’ve had time to think about it, does have a motive. A damn good one.”
“I can’t imagine what since he doesn’t benefit from my grandfather’s will, except for that modest cash legacy which he must have already received.”
“And which probably doesn’t begin to cover his gambling debt. But what if there’s a way for him to make a lot of money, a fortune even? Those caves, Samantha. What if it’s Thomas who’s discovered there are treasures there?”
“Then why wouldn’t he have already helped himself to them?”
“Time. Providing there are valuable relics buried there, whoever is after them would need both time and freedom to excavate them. Hell, you’ve made no secret of your decision to sell the Walking W as soon as you inherit it. And where would that leave Shep Thomas? Either out of a job or under the watchful eye of a new occupant. But if the Western Museum gets the property, there’s every likelihood the ranch will continue to operate under the current foreman. At least for the present. And with an absentee owner, which the museum would be, Thomas would be free to mine those caves without outside knowledge or interference.”
Samantha thought about it. Roark’s theory was certainly possible. It would even explain the trail boss’s uncharacteristic rancor over what he regarded as her heartless intention to sell the ranch. But in the end she couldn’t bring herself to believe Shep Thomas was capable of any desperate act, especially murder, to get what he wanted.
“All right, Shep is frustrated
,” she said, “and, yes, liquor made him mean tempered, but I can’t convince myself he isn’t basically a decent man who would never intentionally hurt anyone.”
Roark’s jaw tightened in an expression of impatience. “You’ve said yourself you don’t know him all that well. When are you going to understand that people aren’t always what they appear to be?”
“And you would know all about that, wouldn’t you?” she said, referring to what he had confided to her the night they had spent below the cliff dwellings.
It was a thoughtless reminder of how Roark had misjudged the client who had murdered his wife, and the words were scarcely out of Samantha’s mouth before she deeply regretted them. How could she have been so cruel?
No longer was it just his jaw that was tight with emotion. His whole face had hardened. Deeply ashamed, she was prepared to apologize. Before she could, his hands shot out and gripped both her arms just below her shoulders. She expected him to actually shake her and was startled when, instead, he pulled her up against his solid length.
“What are you—”
“Be quiet,” he ordered her. “You’ve said enough.”
She couldn’t have managed to utter her challenge in any case. He was clasping her so strongly the breath was squeezed out of her. What air she had left in her lungs was entirely robbed by his mouth when it swooped down and captured her own.
There was something so entirely possessive in his kiss, so punishing in its ferocity that Samantha was shocked. She knew she ought to be livid. Was livid. No woman, whatever anger she had invoked, deserved to have her mouth ravished like this.
But if there was anything intentionally brutal in Roark’s kiss, it almost immediately vanished, becoming instead so intimate and loving, so persuasive in its probing hunger that she forgave him his initial assault. She even forgot she was supposed to object to it when her senses rioted under the intensity of the kiss.