Colton Cowboy Protector

by Beth Cornelison

  Tracy sat at the entry gate to the ranch, wiping away tears as fast as they filled her eyes. She couldn’t read the rental car’s GPS device for the moisture blurring her vision.

  Where do you want to go? the screen read.

  The ache in her chest swelled. “I want to turn around and go back,” she said with a sniff. “But I can’t.”

  Fumbling for the rental car papers, she looked for the address of the rental agency where she would return the vehicle. She started tapping the address onto the electronic keyboard when a low thundering noise rumbled through her open window. She raised her head and checked for storm clouds, but the Oklahoma sky was a bright, clear blue. The sound got louder, and as she scanned the highway for hot rods or large trucks, a movement in the rearview mirror snagged her attention.

  A horse was galloping up behind her at a full run. The rider’s head was down, and he hunched forward over the horse’s neck, clutching his mount’s mane. Startled, and somewhat alarmed by the sight, she blinked hard to clear her eyes. Everything about the horse’s speed and the cowboy’s tense position screamed trouble.

  Then she recognized the gelding, the black cowboy hat, the dark, unruly hair of the rider.

  “Jack...” she whispered with a shuddering breath. What was wrong? Why—?

  “Tracy!” he shouted as he rode past her and reined Buck in front of the car, blocking the driveway.

  Limbs trembling, she clutched the steering wheel and gaped at him in dismay. What in the world? He’d ridden bareback, not even bothering to saddle Buck, and now he swung off the gelding in a smooth motion and rushed to the driver’s-side door.

  “Tracy!” he gasped, out of breath from his jarring pursuit. “Don’t...don’t go.” He snatched open the car door and pulled her arm to coax her out.

  Unsnapping her seat belt, she slid out of the front seat and narrowed a concerned gaze on him. “Jack, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  “Not wrong...” he panted. “Right. I fell...” He paused as he swallowed hard and dragged in a lungful of air. “I fell in love with you.”

  “I— What?” She felt fresh tears fill her eyes, and she held her breath, almost afraid to move for fear she’d shatter the moment and it would be lost.

  “Stay.” His fingers gripped her shoulders, and the desperation and sincerity that lit his eyes stirred a flutter under her ribs.

  “Wha—”

  “You belong here. You belong with me.”

  Her eyes widened in surprise, and her mouth opened in a silent question.

  Jack grunted in frustration and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Let me start over.” He drew and released a cleansing breath. “I don’t want you to leave, Tracy. I love you. Seth loves you. You belong with us, not in Denver.”

  “But...”

  “You were happy here. Weren’t you?” For the first time a flicker of uncertainty flashed in his gaze, and she quickly nodded, assuaging his doubt. Even as she admitted the truth, though, her own uncertainty lashed at her.

  “B-but...I’m jinxed, Jack. I’ve brought trouble and tragedy to everyone I love. You were almost killed because of me. I can’t bear the idea of anything happening to you or Seth because of me.”

  He scowled at her and shook his head. “Don’t be crazy. There’s no such thing as a jinx. What you brought me and my son was a second chance to be a complete family. You brought love and happiness and laughter. We need you, Tracy. Don’t go.”

  “I don’t want to leave, but—”

  “But nothing, Trace.” He framed her face with his hands and pressed his forehead to hers, their bodies touching head to boots. She felt the tremor that rolled through him as he feathered kisses across her cheeks. “Say you’ll stay. Say you’ll be part of our family and grow old with this stubborn, surly cowboy.”

  The shock and joy of the moment overwhelmed her. Her emotions tangled and knotted in her throat, choking her voice, while happy tears spilled from her eyes.

  When she didn’t answer, he leaned back from her, a dent of worry in his brow. “Tracy?”

  Again her mouth opened and closed without a sound.

  His hands slid from her shoulders to grasp her hands, and whipping off his cowboy hat, he dropped to one knee. “Tracy McCain, I love you and want you in my life. Please say you’ll stay. Say you’ll marry me.”

  Joyful laughter bubbled up from her soul, and despite the grip her happy tears had on her throat, she squeaked out, “yes!”

  * * * * *

  Read on for an extract from COWBOY OF INTEREST by Carla Cassidy

  Chapter 1

  Nick Coleman needed to get drunk. Not buzzed, not loopy, but brain-dead, blackout drunk. It was the only respite he might find from the vision burned into his head of seeing Wendy Bailey’s dead body stuffed under the floorboards of an old shed on the ranch where Nick worked.

  He’d been responsible in his plan to drink himself into oblivion. He’d contacted his good friend Chad Bene from a neighboring ranch to pick him up, bring him here to the Watering Hole and then make sure Nick got back to his bunkhouse on the Holiday Ranch safe and sound.

  Chad nursed a soda while Nick motioned to the waitress for a second beer. “You know, getting stupid drunk isn’t going to change things, except that tomorrow you’re going to wake up and feel as though you’ve wrestled with the biggest, meanest bull in the entire county,” Chad observed.

  “But at least maybe tonight I’ll sleep without nightmares,” Nick replied. It had been three days since Wendy’s body had been found, along with six older skeletal remains. It had been three long nights of sleep haunted by the visions of the vivacious black-haired, blue-eyed twenty-three-year-old who had blown into town two months before and instantly attached herself to Nick like an affectionate little sister.

  And now she was gone…dead. According to the coroner, she had been stabbed twice in the chest. She had been murdered. If that wasn’t horrific enough, Nick knew he was the prime suspect in her murder.

  Janis Little, the waitress serving their small two-top table, brought Nick a fresh cold bottle of beer and gave him a quick, sympathetic pat on his shoulder before going back behind the bar to serve other awaiting customers.

  At least Janis apparently didn’t see him as a murderer, he thought, but that didn’t take away any of the heartache and horror he’d lived with for the past couple of days. He couldn’t believe that Wendy was dead. She’d had a light too bright to be snuffed out. He couldn’t believe that anyone would have wanted to take her life.

  “Dillon has the whole ranch basically shut down as a crime scene area,” Nick said. He opened the beer, took a deep swallow and then continued. “He’s actively working Wendy’s case but has called in a forensic anthropologist from Oklahoma City to help with the investigation into the seven skeletal remains. She’s supposed to arrive sometime next week.”

  Chad shook his head. “I still can’t believe all those bodies were hidden under the shed. If they’re just skeletons, then their murders had to have happened some time ago. I wonder if Cass knew anything about them.”

  “We’ll never know, since Cass is dead.” Nick took another drink, and for a few minutes the only sound was the raucous noise of the popular bar on a Friday night.

  Thinking about Wendy was almost as painful as thinking about Cass Holiday. Nick had been a sixteen-year-old runaway when he’d been brought by a social worker to Cass Holiday’s sprawling ranch to work.

  Over the past fourteen years, Cass had been his surrogate mother, his mentor and the best thing that had ever happened to him. Then, a little over two months ago, she’d been killed in a tornado that had ravaged the Oklahoma countryside.

  She’d been hit in the head by a tree branch. Her body had been found between her big ranch house and the bunkhouse where her cowboys lived. They all believed she’d been on her way to warn them about the approaching vicious weather when she’d been struck down.

  For the dozen cowboys Cass had nurtured from troubled teens to good, r
esponsible ranch hands and upstanding, confident men, nothing had been the same after she was gone.

  “Why don’t we go shoot a game of pool?” Chad suggested and gestured toward the back room, where three pool tables were located. Two were in use, but one was vacant.

  “You’re not going to distract me from my mission of drunkenness,” Nick replied wryly. “Besides, shooting pool has never been my thing.”

  “It’s a stupid mission, Nick,” Chad replied. “If you want a mission, then you should be spending your time helping to find out who killed Wendy.”

  Nick frowned. “I’m not on the police force. I’m a person of interest in the case.”

  “There’s no way I think that Dillon really believes you had anything to do with Wendy’s murder,” Chad protested. “He hasn’t even brought you in for questioning yet.”

  “Yet being the key word in that sentence. He will. I’m sure I’m at the top of his list. The problem is Wendy and I spent a lot of time together, and as far as anyone can tell, I was probably the last person who saw her alive.”

  Nick took another drink of his beer and wished he’d never met Wendy Bailey. If he hadn’t have met her then he wouldn’t be hurting over her loss right now.

  “She was missing for almost a month,” Chad continued. “From what I’ve heard, they haven’t even been able to pinpoint the exact time of death. Everyone thought she’d just left town. Her motel room was empty and her car was gone.”

  “I thought she’d left town,” Nick agreed. “I was surprised and a little hurt that she hadn’t told me goodbye, but she was an impulsive free spirit who I figured just heard the call of a new adventure and went for it. When they found her she was wearing her café work T-shirt, so she was probably killed on Friday night after her shift and after she visited me at the ranch.”

  “Obviously somebody went to a lot of trouble to make us all believe she’d just moved on. Her car and personal items have never been found.” Chad frowned as Nick downed the last of his second beer and motioned to Janis for another.

  “Stop giving me dirty looks,” Nick said. “I’m only just now starting to get a little bit of a buzz.”

  “You’ve always been a lightweight drinker, and the way you’re slamming back the beers, I figure within a half an hour or so there will be at least three of us pulling you out from under the table and carrying you to my truck. And just so we’re clear, if you throw up in my truck, I’m beating the hell out of you tomorrow when you get sober.”

  Nick was surprised by the small burst of laughter that escaped his lips. “You and what army?” he replied. Chad was half a foot shorter than Nick’s six-two and weighed at least twenty-five pounds less.

  Janis arrived with the third beer and the two men once again fell silent. Nick brooded, drank and listened to the ancient jukebox where somebody had paid a quarter to hear an old sad George Jones song.

  Nick had no idea why Wendy Bailey had glommed on to him in the initial days of her arrival in Bitterroot. They’d met at the café, where she’d gotten a job as a waitress, and before Nick knew it, they were sharing a pizza or going to a movie together or just sitting under the stars and talking.

  Nick had never had siblings and found his role of surrogate big brother to her a surprisingly pleasing one. He’d known if she’d grown more comfortable with some of the younger crowd in town she would have drifted away from him, and that would have been okay, but she’d never gotten the chance.

  In the first week of Wendy’s disappearance, Daisy, the owner of the café, had printed up posters indicating that Wendy was missing. She was adamant that Wendy wouldn’t have just left town without telling Daisy she was going. Even after chief of police Dillon Bowie had checked out Wendy’s motel room and found it empty, Daisy had been hard-pressed to believe that the waitress had just up and left town with no notice to anyone.

  Daisy had been proved right. Wendy hadn’t left town. She’d been murdered. Like Cass’s death, Wendy’s murder was a tragedy on a hundred different levels, and for Nick it was a personal loss in a stream of losses that had begun in his dysfunctional youth.

  “So what did you tell Penny you were doing tonight?” he asked Chad in an effort to stop his mood from plunging to new depths, if that were even possible.

  “I told her the truth, that a friend needed me tonight and I’d talk to her sometime tomorrow.”

  “She’s a keeper. You going to marry her?”

  Chad grinned. “If she’ll have me. I’ve already bought an engagement ring, but I haven’t given it to her yet. I’ve got to figure out some amazing way to officially propose. Penny won’t settle for anything except amazing.”

  “Then, why is she with you?” Nick replied with a forced lightness.

  “Ha-ha,” Chad replied. His gaze went over Nick’s shoulder at the same time an unfamiliar female voice spoke Nick’s name.

  “Yes, I’m Nick Coleman,” Nick replied.

  He half rose from his chair and turned to see a petite woman with long chestnut-colored hair and blue-green eyes.

  Before he could say another word, her arm reared back and her small fist connected with his left eye, a perfect center smash that drove him back into his chair.

  “What the hel—” he sputtered.

  She swung at him again, her eyes swimming with tears as her arms windmilled in an attempt to connect with him.

  He jumped up out of his chair, vaguely aware that everyone in the crowded tavern had frozen, their attention on Nick and his pint-size attacker.

  Nick had never seen the woman before. He had no idea what her problem was, but there was no way he intended to just stand there and get pummeled in public. Especially by a woman. He already felt the pressure of his eye swelling from the sucker punch she’d managed to land.

  He grabbed her and trapped her arms at her sides, but she immediately started to use her feet as weapons. She kicked and thrust her knee upward in an attempt to make dangerous bodily contact with him.

  Nick would never hit a woman, but he definitely needed to take control of the situation. He heard the low rumble of male laughter coming from the crowd, laughter that assured Nick he’d be fodder for the gossip mill the next day.

  With Wendy’s murder, there was already enough gossip swirling around town with his name all over it. Nick drew a deep breath, dodged another knee to his groin, then finally managed to pick her up and throw her over his shoulder like a sack of squirming potatoes.

  She smelled like lilacs and vanilla, he thought, even as she kicked and screamed and beat her fists on his back. He carried her through the bar and out the front door. He put her down on the sidewalk and then stepped back a safe distance from her.

  “Lady, what in the hell is your problem?” he demanded.

  For a long moment, she looked stunned, and tears streamed down her face. “It was you,” she finally said. “It was you who murdered my sister.”

  It was only then that Nick realized the small firecracker standing before him, the pretty woman who had hit him hard enough to swell his eye almost shut, was Adrienne Bailey, Wendy’s older sister.

  * * *

  Adrienne stared up at the tall cowboy with his darkening eye and was appalled by her own actions. She’d never hit another person in her entire life. She’d just wanted to get a look at the man she believed had killed her sister, but the moment he’d turned to face her she’d completely lost her mind.

  Anger and grief had taken control of her senses, and she’d reacted with raw, unbridled emotion, something she’d never done before in all of her thirty years.

  Although still driven by rage and sorrow, a deep embarrassment now swept over her. She backed away from him and quickly swiped the tears from her eyes.

  “I didn’t mean to… I’m sorry…” Those were the only words she got out before she turned and ran down the sidewalk.

  “Adrienne, wait!” he called after her. “I didn’t kill Wendy. Do you hear me? I cared about her and had nothing to do with her death.”


  Liar.

  The derogatory name rang in her head as she headed for her car in the distance, cursing the heels that kept her from running all out. Tears started falling once again, but this time she didn’t bother trying to swipe them away, even as they trekked down her cheeks and blurred her vision.

  Liar!

  She glanced behind her only once to make sure he wasn’t following her. Seeing that the sidewalk behind her was empty, she slowed her pace, gulping in deep breaths in an effort to gain control of herself, but it didn’t work.

  When she reached her car, she threw herself into the driver’s seat and locked the doors, then lowered her head to the steering wheel and allowed herself to cry until she couldn’t cry any longer.

  When chief of police Dillon Bowie had contacted her the day before to tell her about Wendy’s death and that a positive identification had been made by Wendy’s boss at the café where she’d been working, Adrienne had gone through the first two stages of grief in the matter of an hour.

  She started her car and pulled out of the parking space and headed for the Bitterroot Motel, where she’d checked in just an hour or so before. Wendy had been living at the motel at the time of her disappearance. Adrienne’s unit was two doors down from the one that now sported crime scene tape across the front.

  Her initial reaction to Chief Bowie’s phone call had been immediate denial. Wendy couldn’t be dead. Murder happened to other people, but not to Wendy. She was too full of energy, too filled with the joy of life to be dead.

  But she’d known that Wendy had been in Bitterroot, Oklahoma, and it had also been a month since she’d heard from her little sister.

  Denial had transformed into a grief so all-consuming that she’d barely been able to think or do what needed to get done to leave her home and travel to the small town. It had been only this morning that she’d finally managed to pack up her car and make the drive from her home in Kansas City to Bitterroot.

  She’d arrived much later than she had expected. By the time she had checked into her motel room and unloaded her things from the car, her grief had been overwhelmed with growing rage, a rage focused on the man she believed responsible for Wendy’s murder—Nick Coleman.