In the Arms of the Law

by Peggy Moreland

  But Megan’s body didn’t seem ready to wind down—she’d woken early as ever, even after staying up late to get caught up with her cousins. The life of a rancher could be every bit as hectic as that of a senior VP for LA Mode, Megan was learning. She wondered where ranchers went for R & R.

  She folded her body down to sit on the back stoop, the cool damp of the wooden step seeping through her pajama bottoms spattered with images of cartoon breakfast foods. Her red cardigan didn’t exactly match them, or the Lakers T-shirt she wore with them—not that the T-shirt matched the pajama bottoms, either—but she didn’t care. She didn’t have anyone to impress. Because, in case she hadn’t mentioned it, she was on vacation.

  And also celebrating. It had now been one week, two days, nineteen hours, thirty-eight minutes and—she glanced through the screen door behind her at the dilapidated clock hanging on the wall of the dimly lit mudroom—forty-two seconds since her divorce became final. And it had been that, plus a year, since her two-timing husband had left her for one of his undergraduate students. He was forty years old, and he’d decided a woman half his age would make him happier. What was it about men approaching midlife that they felt so threatened by women their own age?

  Good riddance to bad garbage, Megan thought. That’s a 180 pounds I never should have gained in the first place.

  And then she put her ex-husband—what was his name again?—right out of her mind. She was an independent woman again. Legally, emotionally, financially—in every way that counted. And thirty-five was certainly young enough start over. Starting right here, right now, she would live life only for herself. She would do what she wanted to do, be what she wanted to be, feel what she wanted to feel, the rest of the world be damned.

  She was going to have an adventure while she was in Red Rock this week, she thought, a total escape from her normal reality. Yes, she was a Los Angeleno, born and bred, through and through, and made no apology for her city slickness. But Violet’s suggestions had been serendipitous. Something about the Lone Star state called out to a newly independent person like Megan. People did things the way they wanted to do them in Texas. It was a land of self-sufficiency, of independence, of in-your-face, gonna-do-it-my-way behavior. It was exactly the kind of place she wanted—needed—to be right now.

  Funnily, her Texas cousins were city slickers, born and bred, too. But not through and through. No, all three of the Fortune triplets had left their hearts in Texas when they’d first visited as children, and one by one, they’d all moved out here. Steven, Clyde and Miles owned the Flying Aces Ranch together, but Steven, recently engaged, was building his own spread in nearby San Antonio that he and his future wife, Amy, would soon call their own.

  Still, as much as Megan felt the pull from this place for the moment, she was surprised her Fortune cousins had stayed here. There was no way she could live in a place like this permanently, she thought as she scanned the horizon for a sign—some sign, any sign—gimme a sign—of life…and found none. By the time her week in Red Rock was over, she’d be ready to go home to her beloved L.A. Back to sunny streets lined with lush palms and posh people. Back to the strobe lights and thumpa-thumpa-thumpa of her favorite dance clubs. Back to swanky Rodeo Drive, where she could drop thousands of her hard-earned dollars in a solitary afternoon.

  She smiled again, trying to imagine spending thousands of dollars during a full week in Red Rock. Nope, couldn’t do it. She’d have to work hard to spend even a hundred dollars here. Not that she’d come here to buy anything. She’d come for a little slice of adventure. A little fun. A little escape. And those were things she could have for free.

  If she could find them.

  As if cued by the thought, she heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the long drive of the Flying Aces that led to the county road a good half mile away. Even from a distance, she could tell it was one of those monstrous, impractical pickup trucks used less for ranch work than for proving the size of the masculine mettle—among other things—of the owner. But it was coming awfully fast for such a mellow morning, and it was much too early for visitors.

  Curious, Megan rose from the stoop to walk around to the front of the house. No sooner had she cleared the corner than she saw the source of the racket: a massive black pickup truck elevated on oversize wheels. Its rack of halogen lights blared on top and she raised her arm to shield her eyes from the glare. She heard music now, too—the pickin’ of a guitar behind the twangy yodel of some guy who was blue-oo-oo for his lady true-oo-oo.

  Who on earth…? she thought.

  The truck was still speeding toward the house, but whoever was driving cut the wheel at the spot where the driveway branched into two lanes. Instead of heading toward the back of the house, though, where the barn and outbuildings were, he veered to the left, which took him in front of the main house. He slowed long enough for someone in the passenger seat to dump a big bag of something heavy out the door onto the drive, then screeched out a U-turn and roared off, leaving nothing but dust and exhaust—and whatever was in that bag—in his wake.

  Megan was so befuddled by the quickness and weirdness of the event that she didn’t move at first. Then she made herself walk forward. She was still a good twenty feet from the bag that had been tossed from the truck when she realized it wasn’t a bag.

  It was a man. And judging by his crumpled, motionless body, he was dead.

  CHAPTER 2

  Nash Ridley’s first clue that he was indeed dead was the bona fide angel staring down at him when he opened his eyes. Never mind that she didn’t have wings. And never mind that she was wearing a ratty sweater and had her breakfast spilled all over her pants. Nobody with a face like hers could be anything but an angel.

  Even though heaven didn’t have any more light to it than a summer sunrise, he could make out her features clearly. Pale eyes, probably blue, but maybe green, and a riot of ash-brown curls spilling over one shoulder. And a full, luscious mouth that was any thing but angelic, the kind that made a man want to commit an easy majority of the seven deadly sins. Some of them more than once. Preferably while naked.

  And that was when it hit Nash that he couldn’t be dead. Because after the night he’d just spent, and the thoughts this angel was stirring inside his bleary brain, there was no way he’d be allowed into heaven at the moment.

  So if he wasn’t in heaven, where he didn’t belong, and he wasn’t in hell, where she didn’t belong, then where was he?

  For some reason, his brain couldn’t seem to form an answer to that question. It was probably too soaked with whiskey, because he’d been… Hmm. He couldn’t quite remember now what he’d been doing. Celebrating something, he recalled vaguely. Celebrating… Oh, yeah. His twenty-fifth birthday. It was all coming back to him now that his afterlife had flashed before his eyes.

  “Are you all right?” the angel asked. She stooped down and cupped her hand over his forehead, brushing back what he was sure must be some pretty chaotic black hair. “Oh, my God, you’re bleeding,” she added as she withdrew fingers smudged with blood.

  Well, hell, Nash thought. That dunking in the toilet the Dorfman brothers had given his head should’ve cleaned all that off.

  He started to assure the angel that he was fine, but he couldn’t get his mouth to form the words. Fortunately, she was joined then by Miles Fortune, one of his bosses—though he wasn’t sure how much longer that was going to be the case—who took one look at him and just about busted a gut laughing.

  “Miles!” the angel cried in horror at the other man’s reaction.

  Miles managed to curb his delight at seeing Nash in such a state long enough to say “What?” Then started laughing again.

  “How can you laugh at this poor man?” she demanded. “I thought he was dead when I first saw him.”

  “Dead drunk maybe,” Miles managed to say between guffaws.

  Now Nash took exception to that. He was not dead drunk. He hadn’t been dead drunk for hours. What he was at the moment was brutally hungov
er without the benefit of sleep. There was a big difference.

  “But he’s bleeding,” the angel said.

  “Which means he’s still alive, Megan,” Miles replied.

  Megan. Nash echoed the angel’s name in his head. But he didn’t have time for much contemplation because Miles bent over and grabbed him by the shoulders. The world jumped around for a few seconds, and Nash wasn’t sure, but he thought maybe he got turned inside out at one point, but he eventually landed on his feet—kind of—and was able to see again—sort of.

  “Dorfman brothers gave you a swirly again, did they?” Miles asked him.

  Nash managed to nod.

  “Suits you,” his employer said.

  Well, it had sobered him, Nash thought. Some.

  “Sorry, boss,” he said, both satisfied and amazed that he remembered how to talk. “Won’t happen again.”

  Miles chuckled again. “Yeah, well, it’s not every day a man turns twenty-five. It’s not like you make a habit of something like this. And it’s Saturday—your day off. Guess I know how you plan to spend it.”

  For some reason, the comment made Nash turn to look at the angel again. But the saintly concern had been replaced by faint condemnation, and that delectable, made-for-sin mouth was flattened by annoyance.

  Call him crazy, but the plan he’d started to make about seeing her naked at some point during the day was looking iffy.

  Fortunately, before he had a chance to ask her about it—well, it never hurt to make sure—his boss cuffed him around the neck and pulled him toward the front door.

  “Coffee,” Miles said. “That’s what you need right now, Nash. And lots of it. Lucky for you, Clyde’s in there brewing a fresh pot.”

  Drunk, Megan thought with distaste as she followed Miles and the limp cowboy into the kitchen. She’d been terrified he was fatally injured. Of course, had she experienced something like this back in L. A., the person tossed out of a moving vehicle undoubtedly would have been fatally injured. Here in Red Rock, though, it was evidently just an amusing pastime.

  She watched as Miles dumped Nash into a chair at the kitchen table at the same time Clyde pushed a cup of coffee in front of the man, the action so well orchestrated that she suspected the arrival of a drunk must be a regular occurrence here at the Flying Aces. Still, according to what Miles had said, this young cowboy Nash wasn’t a usual suspect for such a thing. Not that that made his behavior any more acceptable.

  She smiled her gratitude when Clyde brought her a cup of coffee, too, then greeted Steven, the third—and middle—of the triplets when he entered the kitchen. Even though they were family and Megan had grown up with them, it still gave her pause when she saw the three dark-haired, identical men in one room. But they were totally different in the personality department. Clyde was the dark, sedate one, Steven was the no-nonsense, responsible one, and Miles was the flirtatious, funny one.

  She turned her attention back to Nash, who seemed to be sitting up on his own now. He sipped his coffee carefully, his eyes closed. Now that Megan got a better look at him, she saw that he was actually kind of handsome, in a rugged, barroom-brawling, thrown-from-a-moving-vehicle kind of way. Miles had said he was twenty-five, but Megan didn’t think he looked it. Even shaggy and unshaven as he was, she would have pegged his age at a few years younger. There was something boyish about him, even with the cut on his forehead and an abraded cheek.

  Must have been some birthday party.

  She didn’t realize she’d spoken the observation aloud until Nash opened his eyes, met her gaze and said, “Well, the greased pig was probably overkill—especially coming on the heels of the scantily clad dancing girls—but all in all, it wasn’t too bad. Even with the Dorfman brothers crashing.”

  But Megan didn’t hear much of what he said after the word well, because she was too busy drowning in the midnight-blue of his eyes. Nor did she hear what her cousin Clyde said in reply, or what Miles added that made everyone laugh. She didn’t even much register the sound of the phone ringing, or notice Steven answering it. Because Nash smiled at whatever Miles had said, and the change that came over his face when he did was just…extraordinary. She realized that handsome was an adjective that in no way did him justice. Even hungover and beaten up, the man was staggeringly…something else. Splendid. Beautiful. Glorious. Magnificent. Sublime. All of the above.

  She gave herself a good mental shake to chase away her errant thoughts. Honestly. She really did need to get more sleep tonight. She obviously wasn’t thinking straight if she found some battered kid sublime.

  But as Nash continued to look at her, full on and unashamedly, Megan wrapped her sweater snugly around herself, gathering it tightly at the collar even though she was in no way cold. On the contrary, an odd sort of heat wound through her unlike anything she’d ever felt before. She tried to tell herself it was because of Clyde’s strong coffee, but somehow, she suspected it was something else entirely.

  Nash opened his mouth to say something—to her, Megan knew—but whatever it was got cut off by the announcement Steven made as he settled the phone back into its charger.

  “That was the sheriff,” he said to the room at large. But he was looking at Nash when he spoke, Megan noted. And he wasn’t looking happy. “One of those scantily clad dancing girls didn’t make it home last night, according to her sister. And the sheriff says the witnesses inside the bar all report that the last time anyone saw her, she was heading through the door with one Nash Ridley.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Nash ducked his head under the spray of the shower and held it there, hoping the hot rush of water would wash away the last of the haziness that lingered at the frayed edges of his brain. He couldn’t believe he’d been implicated in the disappearance of a dancing girl, when all he’d done was walk Brandi Norris to her car to make sure she got off safely, because by then, some of the guys were getting rowdy.

  Fortunately, there had been witnesses outside the bar, too, and they’d all vouched for the fact that Brandi had driven off alone and Nash had returned to the bar, where he’d stayed until the Dorfman brothers had hauled him up for a trip to the men’s, um, spa.

  But hours after the sheriff’s phone call to the Flying Aces, Brandi was still missing, so the sheriff was asking for volunteers to help look for her. Steven Fortune put out a call for all available bodies from the Flying Aces to join the search party, so Nash had naturally offered his own services. And after another dose of Clyde’s coffee and a shower, he was in a state to be of some use.

  He dressed in his usual workday uniform of battered blue jeans, battered chambray work shirt and battered cowboy boots, then settled his battered straw cowboy hat on his head.

  As he moseyed back to the big house from the outbuilding where all the ranch hands slept, he saw the group Steven Fortune had assembled preparing for the search. Some were on horseback, some stood near trucks, so apparently they were going to cast a pretty wide net for Brandi. Nash joined the group just as Steven started going over his instructions, so he caught the important stuff.

  “Now you all know what Brandi Norris looks like,” Steven was saying when Nash came to a halt near a handful of his co-workers.

  Which was true, Nash thought, because when Brandi wasn’t a scantily clad dancing girl, she was a waitress at Emma Mirabeau’s cafe, where just about everybody in Red Rock dined from time to time.

  Steven continued, “She stopped and tanked up at Ed Bartlett’s Amoco station just after eleven o’clock, and Ed said she came in to use the money machine while she was there. She also bought a ham sandwich and a bottle of grape Nehi, and Ed said it looked like she had a few hundred dollars on her when she paid with the cash she got out of the machine.”

  “So then she could have been a robbery victim?” one of the other ranch hands asked. “Doesn’t sound like she could have run out of gas somewhere.”

  “Maybe,” Steven said. “But that’s just speculation. Look, Brandi’s probably fine,” he quickly added. “Ther
e’s been nothing to suggest foul play. But what with that body that washed up out at Lake Mongo not too long ago, and the murder still unsolved, it’s making everybody a little wiggy. So we’re all gonna do our best to help find Brandi, because that’s the way things work in Red Rock. Somebody gets into a bind, we all pitch in to help out.”

  Which Nash was perfectly willing to do. But there was something about Brandi’s actions of the night before that bothered him.

  For one thing, he wouldn’t have thought she even had a few hundred dollars to withdraw from the bank. For another, he couldn’t think of one single thing in Red Rock that would require her to have that much cash on hand.

  “Now, I know it looks like rain,” Steven continued as he glanced up at the dark gray clouds that had formed over the last two hours, “but I think it’ll hold off for a bit yet. But let’s everybody not waste time, all right?”

  He started assigning partners for the search then, scattering Nash’s thoughts. But what really fried his brain—not to mention heated up some of his other body parts—was when his employer said, “Nash, why don’t you and Megan join forces? You know the area, and we don’t want her getting lost.”

  Nash hadn’t even realized Megan was among the group, but then he saw her standing off to the side, near Miles Fortune. He started to smile at her, but stopped when he realized she was still scowling at him with that same face she’d had earlier in the morning. Still, he would have been lying if he’d said he wasn’t happy about being coupled with her—so to speak.

  Which, he had to admit, was nuts for a lot of reasons.

  Number one, she was only visiting the Flying Aces and would be leaving soon. Number two, she was a relative of Nash’s employers, and he had no business trying to cozy up to a Fortune. Number three, she was an urban type from Los Angeles which meant the two of them had nothing in common. Number four, she probably didn’t know the difference between a working ranch and ranch dressing. And number five, she was old enough to be his… Well. His older sister. In fact, she was probably five or six years older than his older sister. And Nash’s big sister had always bugged the hell out of him while he was growing up.