Front Range Cowboys (5 Book Box Set)

by Evie Nichole

  “Weatherby is still too arrogant to realize what he’s doing,” Cal muttered. “I went over to talk to him, but I don’t think it did any good if we had more stock appear last night.”

  “Well, Bob told us just to brand the stock we knew were ours.” Ty looked disturbed. “So, we went ahead over to the Collins place where you had told us to stash some of that stock that got involved in this crap a week or more ago. You remember?”

  “Of course.” Cal was beginning to think that there was something bad coming that he wasn’t ready for.

  “There was someone inside the Collins house!” Ty said with grave seriousness. “We chased them, but they had a truck. I don’t think that there’s anything missing. There was a window broken in the back door. That’s how they got in. We took a look around before we boarded up the windows, but I don’t think there’s anything stolen.”

  “Thanks, Ty.” Cal clapped the man on the shoulder.

  Ty snorted. “People didn’t used to act this way on the range, Cal. This is wrong. This is city behavior. You know?”

  “I do know. And you’re exactly right.” Cal wondered what they’d been looking for at the Collins house. This meant he needed to have a chat with Jesse about her home. That wasn’t a pleasant thought. Then Cal turned back to Ty. “Hey, did you guys board up the broken window and lock up?”

  “Yes.” Ty nodded. “We’ve been taking care of that place for so long now that we kind of still think of it as ours, Cal.”

  “I know what you mean,” Cal told the foreman. Then he watched Ty head back toward a knot of hands standing near one of the corrals. He would hand out assignments for the day, and things would proceed in the way that they should without Cal having to do much in the way of planning or organization. Not unless there were changes. Those had to come from Cal.

  For now, that left Cal with the task of speaking to Jesse. He headed into the barn to find her. He was not surprised to find her tacking up her mare when he arrived in the aisle. She already had the horse out and was brushing the mare’s smooth coat.

  “I’m not trying to run away,” she told him with a grin. The look she tossed him was warm, and it made him want to scoop her up and carry her back inside his place. “I just really want to get home and change clothes. A quick shower at Laredo’s was fine, but I want clean clothes. I smell horrible.”

  “You smell amazing,” Cal corrected.

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re an idiot. That proves it.”

  “I have to tell you something.”

  She slung her saddle over the mare’s back and then paused before pushing her cinch over the seat where it could hang down on the mare’s right side. “Is this one of those things where I really don’t want to know, but I have to know, so you’re going to tell me no matter what?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Does it have to do with my horses?”

  “No.”

  Now she looked positively green with dread. “My house?”

  “Unfortunately.” Cal sighed. He hated being the bearer of bad news. Sometimes it felt like this was all he ever had to hand out. “The boys went over to get the stock we had stashed on your grazing land and found someone prowling inside your house.”

  “Inside the house?” She gaped at him as though she could not imagine it. “Why? What were they looking for?”

  “I think you’re the one who will have to answer that.” Cal shrugged. “The boys said they didn’t think it looked like anything had been stolen, but they don’t know what you’ve got in there.” Then Cal remembered one last thing. “They did board up the back window. That’s how the prowler got in. They broke out a back door window and opened it that way.”

  “I need a dog,” she muttered. “A really mean dog. You know?”

  “I know you need to be careful.” Cal sighed. “Can you wait and let me ride over with you? I hate the thought that you could be walking into a situation where some crazy people looking for God knows what are waiting for you inside that house.”

  Cal had not actually thought that through until he said it out loud. Even the idea of her getting herself into that situation was abhorrent. He moved toward his gelding’s stall. He pulled the horse out and started tacking up.

  “I don’t get a say in this, huh?” She sounded more amused than pissed off, so he didn’t even pause in his task of putting his saddle on his horse.

  “Fine.” Jesse’s mutter was followed by half a dozen other muttered comments that were completely unintelligible.

  “If you want to be mad, you’re going to have to do it in a voice that carries,” he told her. He had no doubt that his words would poke at her. He’d meant them to, even though it was all in fun.

  Suddenly, he felt a hard dandy brush smack him right between the shoulder blades. Surprised, he turned to stare and realized that Jesse was standing there with a belligerent expression on her face.

  He bent over and picked up the brush. “I think you dropped something.”

  “Oh, I did?” She made a face and threatened to send another one flying his direction. “Because I believe I actually threw that at you. And if you don’t watch it, I’m going to put the next one right up against your hard head.”

  “Oh, really?” He set the brush aside and went back to saddling his horse. “You know, Dad would have been furious at all of this horseplay in the barn.”

  This time it was a handful of hay that came sailing his direction. Cal turned just in time to catch a face full of the stuff. He choked and brushed at his face as his nose tickled, and he felt as though he was going to sneeze himself right out of the barn. Then another pile of hay smacked him in the face. It was clinging to his cowboy hat and to his clothes. His horse even turned around to see who had started what amounted to a food fight.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Jesse said with a comical attempt at fake hostility. “I threw hay at you.”

  “Rusty wants to know why you’re wasting all of this food.” Cal picked a piece of hay from his shirt and fed it to the gelding. “I’m going to send you a bill for it.”

  “Oh, really?” The sparkle in her dark eyes made him catch his breath.

  Of course, that was right before she reached into the feed stall and picked up an entire flake of hay, which was much like a slice of bread. She threw it like a Frisbee, and it smacked him right in the belly before exploding all over the floor and his clothes. Cal coughed, and Rusty shifted uneasily as his face and side were covered in hay. Then the horse started trying to use his very flexible lips to try and eat some of the carnage.

  Suddenly, Jesse was laughing. “Look at him! He’s trying to suck that stuff into his mouth. Don’t you feed that poor horse?”

  Cal took pity on poor Rusty and helped him get a mouthful of the food bomb. “I suppose if you asked any of these horses, they would tell you that we starve them.”

  “Kind of like kids,” she agreed. “And for the record, I don’t really need you to go over there with me. I can take care of myself, Cal. That’s the thing with owning my own ranch. I have to be able to stand on my own two feet. Don’t you think?”

  “Not when it comes to stuff like this.” Cal was not going to be swayed about this situation. “This is when ranchers help each other. You don’t have a foreman. You don’t have regular staff or grooms or whatever it is you’re going to hire. You’re not there yet. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Suddenly, the smile disappeared from her face. What had he said? Cal could not be sure, but whatever it was, it was enough for her to get upset. She finished saddling her horse and slipped the mare’s bridle over her head. Then, without another word to Cal, Jesse led Mora outside and mounted up.

  Cal poked Rusty. “I think I said something bad. Did you catch that?”

  The horse had no comment, and Cal couldn’t blame him. Why did he always put his foot in his mouth and not even know how or why? He had to hurry to pull Rusty’s bridle over his head. Then he led the horse out in front of the barn.

&nb
sp; Mounting up was a quick process, but when Cal looked around, he couldn’t even see which direction Mora had gone. Cal sighed and spurred Rusty away from the barn in the usual direction they took when they rode back and forth between the Hernandez ranch and the Collins place.

  It didn’t take long for Rusty to catch up. It wasn’t that Jesse was trying to sprint for home. She just had the mare going at a pretty good ground-eating lope across the open fields. Rusty finally managed to match pace with the smaller mare, and Cal tried to catch a glimpse of Jesse’s face.

  There were no words between them until they got to the hill overlooking Jesse’s ranch. Finally, she reined the mare to a halt and sat there for a moment. Cal pulled up beside her and waited. He wasn’t sure if he needed to apologize, and that kind of pissed him off. There was almost nothing worse than feeling like he’d done something wrong but had no idea what. In his mind, he’d been speaking his mind in a way that was still respectful.

  “I’m not an idiot.” Jesse finally spoke, but her words didn’t make any sense at all to Cal. “I know that I haven’t really decided what I want to do with my ranch. Okay? I know I haven’t hurried to hire staff, because I’m not entirely sure what kind of staff I need. You don’t have to poke at me and act like that makes me incapable of taking care of my own concerns.”

  Suddenly, Cal realized what had happened. He sighed and leaned forward to brace his forearms on his saddle horn. “That wasn’t what I meant, Jesse. I wasn’t trying to insinuate that you’re incapable because you haven’t done those things.”

  “I’m not there yet?” she said sharply. Turning her head, she gave him a narrow-eyed glare. “What else does that mean? Like I’m trying to live up to some ridiculous standard that exists in your head but not mine? I don’t want to run the Hernandez ranch, much less the Hernandez Land & Cattle Company. I want to run the Collins Ranch. And I’m pretty sure that, after a decade of being one more subsidiary of our big fat neighbor, the Collins Ranch is going through a bit of an identity crisis.”

  “I respect that,” Cal told her. “I really do.” He reached across the distance between them and touched her hands where they were clenching the restless mare’s reins. “I just want you to realize that I’m here for you. And yes. Maybe when it comes to your safety, I get a little caveman. All right? You mean everything to me, Jesse. Everything. Don’t you get what that means?”

  There was dead silence between them. He did not look away from her beautiful face. He could see it sinking slowly into her expression. His words were plain because he wanted her to understand beyond a doubt exactly what he meant.

  “The idea,” he continued, “of you walking into that house and running into some low-life thugs who want to rob you or steal your parents’ papers or anything else, that’s more than I can handle.”

  “Papers,” she whispered.

  Cal was confused. What was she talking about? “Papers? What does that mean?”

  “You said steal my parents’ papers,” Jesse muttered. “There aren’t any official papers. Not really. But there are journals and letters and things!”

  Jesse suddenly put her heels to Mora’s sides. The little mare took off as though she had been launched from a gas-propelled catapult. Rusty jumped a little as he was abruptly left behind. Cal had no choice but to follow along in Jesse’s wake as though he had a clue as to what they were doing. He had to get to her before she went barging into that house and found something she did not expect.

  Chapter Twenty

  The house felt abnormally still when Jesse walked into the back door. She brushed her fingers over the cardboard that Ty and the other ranch hands had used as a temporary repair on the tiny square windows set into the back door. She stepped carefully around the glass scattered over the kitchen floor. She was going to have to come back in here and sweep up in a little while. But first she needed to see if her worst fears had come true.

  Ty had been right. There was nothing missing. At least nothing obvious had been touched or even moved. The furniture was exactly the way that Jesse had left it. Over the last few months, she had begun to declutter a little bit. But that was only natural since she had just about everything from the days of her parents living in this house. Jesse didn’t need years’ and years’ worth of magazines or her mother’s crocheting supplies. There had been a lot of trips to the thrift store and donations made to the local school rummage sale since Jesse moved in.

  Now she rested her hand gently on the back of the sofa and tried to see the room as someone who was looking for something very particular. Moving toward the credenza where the tiny television rested, she opened the drawers. They had been tossed. The contents had most certainly been rifled through. Any notebooks or any kind of stray papers were gone. Even the pad of sticky notes that Jesse kept in the top right drawer to write down any phone numbers she saw on the television ads was gone. What did they think they were going to find?

  “No,” Jesse whispered. “They didn’t really know what they were looking for. Whoever came in here was just following orders.”

  “Jesse?”

  She heard boots in the kitchen and knew that Cal was right behind her. Not waiting for him to appear, she headed straight into the dining room and went to the buffet. She knelt in front of the double doors.

  Before heading over to Cal’s the other night, she had put everything back exactly the way it had been. It was difficult to believe that it had been almost forty-eight hours or even more since that moment. It felt like centuries had passed. Joe Hernandez was dead. She would never be able to ask him for the truth about his relationship with her mother.

  “Jesse?”

  “In here,” she called back to Cal. “The dining room.”

  Cal’s boots tromped on the hardwood floors as he headed across the front foyer and into the dining room from the direction of the living room. He was moving slowly and deliberately. She knew that he was looking for evidence of intruders, but Jesse knew that anything they’d left was probably miniscule. They hadn’t made a mess. They hadn’t had to.

  Jesse pulled the doors open and leaned into the small, dark space. She spotted the silverware immediately. The big rosewood box had been the last thing she had put away before going to find Cal. Now she pulled it out once more. If anyone had looked inside here, they would have seen that silverware and the wedding china right behind it. Jesse could almost believe that poor Amelia had purposefully tucked all of her correspondence into the back corners.

  “Oh.” Jesse felt her heart seize in her chest. The ribbon holding that first box of cards and letters closed had been slit with a knife. “Oh, please, no.”

  “What’s wrong?” Cal squatted down beside her. “What is that thing?”

  “My mother kept every card and letter she ever got.” Jesse held the box in her lap and opened it. “They were in here looking for notes. I can’t believe they didn’t take this.”

  He frowned and reached for the card on top of the pile inside the box. “How do you know what they were looking for?”

  “All of the pads of paper and even my sticky note pile are gone from the credenza in the living room. They had to be hired thugs or something. They were just told to come in here and dig around looking for this stuff. I’m sure of it.”

  “But why?”

  “I’m not sure.” Jesse pulled out the second box. The ribbon holding it closed had been slit. “But they don’t appear to have taken these.”

  “I guess they didn’t figure cards from other people fell under the heading of notes or letters.”

  “They’re fools,” Jesse whispered. “My mother’s journals are in here, Cal. I bet that’s what they were looking for. You just have to dig to the back.”

  Jesse reached into the buffet and pulled out box number three. The ribbon was still intact. She had a mental image of a couple of rough-and-tumble cowboys squatting here on the floor and being annoyed out of their minds that they were poking through a woman’s pink poodle-themed pasteboard box filled wi
th birthday cards from three decades ago.

  Cal gently untied the ribbon on box number three. “Have you looked through these?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I just wonder why she hid them.” Cal’s low murmur poked at something in Jesse’s memory.

  Jesse sat back on her heels and stared at the buffet. Cal was right. Her mother had been hiding these things. There was no way her father would have ever had a reason to look in here. Jesse had occasionally explored in places like this, but she could often remember her mother telling her that the buffet was off-limits because of the expensive china plates stored here. They had belonged to Jesse’s great-grandmother. The old rose vine pattern around the edges had fascinated Jesse, but she had never paid much attention to what else might have been stored back here.

  “I guess I need to take a look at this stuff.”

  Cal reached for the box in her lap. “Can I help you?”

  “You want to?” Jesse tilted her head to one side and tried to imagine what he might find. “What if we find cards from your father to my mother?”

  “Then, that’s what we find.” Cal’s lips were a thin line, and his blue eyes were like the surface of a calm lake. “It’s not like I have illusions about my father, Jesse. He was a man who kept his secrets close. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad thing to find out what some of those were.”

  “If you think so.” Jesse could think of no other reason to prevent him. “Have at it, I guess.”

  The two of them began pulling out cards and making smaller stacks around them. Jesse stared up at the dining table. This promised to be a huge job. In fact, she could see them sitting here doing this for the rest of the day. So much for that shower she had wanted so badly only an hour ago. Now all she could think about was finding what those men had been sent here to collect.

  “Let’s use the table,” Jesse suggested. “You take one end, and we’ll make stacks.”