Searching For Love (Contemporary Cowboy Romance) (Carson Hill Ranch series: Book 2)

by Rose, Amelia

  Carey laughed at her playful game, kissing her once and nodding his head. “That sounds like a good idea. Are you sure you don’t want to sleep first? I don’t mind staying up.”

  “No, you did the last part of the driving. I’m good and rested. But before you crash, are you familiar with this kind of gun? I’ll pass it off to you when I go to sleep.” Amy watched Carey’s face for any reaction, prepared to explain why it would be necessary. Carey took her firearm and felt its weight in his hand turning it over.

  “Yup, we all have to carry them out here on the ranch in case of animal attack. I was only giving you a hard time about your holster earlier. I usually wear one just like it. Not in my boot, of course, that’s a new one for me, just on my belt.” He kissed her one last time and hugged her tightly, then sent her off in the direction of the showers as well, pointing to his bedroom door and telling her she could get some clothes from his closet to change into while he retrieved their bags from the truck.

  As the household, or what was left of it with the drovers and crew gone, settled in for some much needed sleep, Amy kept watch in a chair by the window, walking the interior of the house from time to time to check for anything out of place. She doused the lights to keep anyone outside from seeing in, and checked the locks on each door and window as she passed. Instead of feeling tense at this position of being in harm’s way again, she felt oddly at home, like she was doing the job she was meant to be doing instead of the job she’d reluctantly taken after being shot in the line of duty. This was what being a cop felt like again.

  She checked on every sleeping person, too, walking carefully between the beds in the upstairs room to make sure that everyone was still in place. As she moved from room to room on the second floor, the sound of breaking glass followed by a sharp thud made her spring into action. She reached the landing at the top of the stairs just as Carey woke up and began screaming.

  The flames that had been launched through the window with the homemade Molotov cocktail splashed across the antique rug in the living room, sending its fiery liquid searing over Carey’s flesh. She flew down the stairs and dragged him to the floor, smothering him with the blanket he’d been sleeping under.

  “Get up!” Amy yelled after nothing more than smoke came from Carey’s clothes. “Help me roll up this rug!” They shoved the furniture out of the way and began rolling the rug in heavy turns as the fire licked at their hands and faces. Once fully rolled, they stomped on the center of the tube-shaped rug to put out any remains of the burning gas. Finally, they dragged it into the kitchen where it wouldn’t catch the hardwood floor if it was still burning, letting it rest on the cold tile floor, close enough to the sink where it could easily be doused with water.

  The others ran down the stairs at the sounds of screaming, and Amy directed Anders to call Sheriff Matthews. He ran to comply as Meg retrieved several small bags of ice from the kitchen for Carey’s burns. She handed them off to Carey and a look of horrified guilt crossed his face when he touched her own-bandaged hand. Meg smiled feebly, telling him it was okay.

  “How bad is it?” Amy demanded, her voice shaking a little now that the adrenaline that threw her into motion was beginning to wear off. “Let me look.” Instead of turning on the overheard lights and letting their attacker know where they were all congregated, she had Meg hold a flashlight over the bright pink skin that was already beginning to blister in places, bits of blackened, charred skin showing through where the chemicals had burned the hottest.

  Anders returned with the phone in his hand just as Amy finished putting a loose dressing over Carey’s injured arm, dabbing a bit more burn cream on the spots that ran down his cheek and his collarbone where burning drops of liquid had scorched his skin. Anders swayed slightly, looking sick when he saw the burned skin but he managed to sit down solidly before falling. The smell of burning fuel and melted carpet fibers made him start to cough and wheeze slightly.

  “He needs some fresh air,” Carey cautioned the others, sitting up in concern as his younger brother gasped for air. “This smoky room isn’t good for him. Take him to another room, and get his inhaler!”

  “We’ll go upstairs and open a window just a little bit,” the housekeeper offered. “We won’t open it much, but I’ll have him sit on the floor so he can breathe it in.” The staff went with Anders to an upstairs bedroom, shutting the door behind them to keep the burning smell and smoke from following them in. Carey turned his attention back to Amy, who continued to dab ointment over his burns.

  “You know, I think you just wanted to get my shirt off me,” Carey joked faintly, wincing as she pressed down too hard in one spot above his collarbone. “I mean it, if that’s what you wanted, all you really had to do is ask.”

  “I’ll remember that for next time,” she managed to say, trying not to tear up at the obvious pain she was causing him. “I hope I won’t need anything as terrifying as a fire bomb to get you undressed in the future.”

  “And I hope that’s not what it takes to get you to put your hands on me,” he surprised himself by saying. Amy’s eyes met his and she blinked back the tears, grateful that Carey could make jokes at a time like this, and even more so that he could make a pass at her, too. It meant he was probably okay.

  “Try and stop me, cowboy,” she said with a wicked grin, more to ease her own nerves than Carey’s pain-ravaged ones. “But for now, you need to take these.” Amy held up a small bottle of pain pills from the first aid kit, and held out her bottle of water.

  “No, it’ll make me fall asleep,” he protested. “Someone has to stay awake with you. And then there’s Anders upstairs still coughing…”

  “The sheriff will be here soon,” Amy argued. “Now, you get some rest. I’ll wait for him.”

  Carey nodded grimly, knowing that Amy was making sense. “Fine, I’ll take these, but not for another twenty minutes. That means I’ll be falling asleep right around the time the sheriff gets here.”

  “You are incredibly stubborn, you know that?” Her words were meant to scold him, but Carey could tell there was a softness underneath that was all for him. He nodded, trying not to grimace in pain but failing when the raw nerves suddenly flared up again beneath the skin. “Now are you ready to take them?”

  Carey finally nodded, giving in as a sheen of pain-induced sweat covered his injured skin, its saltiness further aggravating the burning feeling. He downed two of the pills and handed the bottle back to Amy. She felt helpless watching him cradle his arm, but knew better than to touch him and risk hurting him even more.

  “Hey, why don’t you tell me a story? You know, to take your mind off it?” She suggested brightly.

  “What kind of story?” He asked, catching his breath.

  “I don’t know. What’s your favorite thing about the ranch?” Amy asked, keeping him talking. “Tell me what you like best about living here.”

  “All the beautiful scenery,” he said softly, letting his eyes lose focus for a second. “There’s just so much…pretty…out here.”

  “Nice try, mister, but stay with me here. Those pills haven’t kicked in yet, this is your own brain doing the zoning in and out. Hey! Snap up!” Amy snapped two fingers near Carey’s ear, making his eyes come back into focus. She knew he was falling out, mostly from the stress of a long day and the long drive, the lack of sleep finally catching up to him. She knelt on the floor next to the couch near where his head sank against his pillow, then kissed him softly, avoiding touching any of the angry patches of burnt skin. He kissed her back longingly but during their kiss, he drifted off, his mouth going slack beneath her lips as he finally stopped feeling the pain.

  Chapter Nine

  Sheriff Matthews didn’t arrive until the early hours of the morning and was appalled at Carey’s condition. “That settles it, we’re now looking at more than just vandalism and discharging a firearm. This is at least assault, if not attempted murder. That gives me more than enough reason to call in a team and help bring this guy in.” />
  “The sooner, the better, Sheriff. Just let me know what we can do,” Carey began, trying to sit up. Amy put a hand on Carey’s chest to stop him as the sheriff rose up out of his chair to do the same, coming to stand in front of Carey with his hands planted on his gun belt.

  “You’re not going anywhere, Carey. Your father would kill me if I let any harm come to you, if he doesn’t skin me alive for the way you look already. If I’d caught that son of a bitch, Mack, the first night he showed up causing trouble, you wouldn’t be laying here practically turned inside out.”

  “Do you have any idea what brought this on, Sheriff? Why does Mack have it in for the Carsons?” Amy asked. Sheriff Matthews and Carey exchanged a silent look, but Carey’s face remained unchanged. It must be all right to fill her in then.

  “Well, ma’am, Mack runs a less than savory establishment over in Hale. I can’t tell you how many bar fights my deputies and I have busted up in there, and there’s been talk for a long time that he was running drugs through that place, but we could never pin it on him. We even started to think he was trafficking through there for a cartel south of the border. But this particular riot he’s causing seems to be about two of his ‘waitresses’, who went missing last week. Again, I never could pin anything on him because I didn’t have any complaining witnesses and because the girls both checked out as being over eighteen, but we think he was prostituting them from his bar. That’s the local rumor, anyway.”

  “And you’re sure their ID checks out?” she asked. “It’d be a whole lot easier to shut him down on suspicion if you had any reason to believe they presented fake IDs. The alcoholic beverage board would be your inroads, not the alleged prostitution. If they were using fake IDs, ones that the owner might have even made for them, then he has under-aged girls serving alcohol. That’ll shut down his bar and cost him his liquor license right there.” Matthews took the hint, his eyes lighting up at this new angle of investigating the bar owner.

  “You know, now that you mention it, they do look awfully young. I think we’d better have a deputy do some background checks into his two employees. Where’d you say you were from, Miss…?”

  “Amy McDade,” she answered, sticking out her hand for a handshake. “I’m with the Detroit Police Department, I just came down here for two weeks with the ‘city slickers’ who join the Carson Hill cattle drive. But I ended up offering to help Carey drive back here when he heard there was some trouble.”

  The sheriff took her hand in his and greeted her warmly. “It’s nice to have you in our part of the country, I just wish it was for sightseeing instead of holing up inside this house. If it’s all right with you, Ms. McDade, how would you feel about volunteering for the Williams County Sheriff’s Department while you’re here? We’re spread out so far over this entire region that we can’t possibly have enough people, especially not with something like this going on.”

  “I’m happy to help, as long as I won’t be in the way,” Amy agreed, her eyes lighting up in a way that they hadn’t in ages. The thought of getting back out in the fray was alluring, especially when a small part of her brain reminded her it was only temporary. It’s not like agreeing to go back out on my regular street patrol. This is just helping out, she told herself eagerly. The sheriff said they were undermanned, this is practically my civic duty.

  “Not at all, just let me go make a couple of calls and check out your status with your home jurisdiction, then it’ll be official. I’ll feel better leaving someone out here that’s authorized as part of our unit, at least during the day. Given how this coward likes to sneak around, though, we’ll make sure to double up after dark. Do you have your firearm on you?” he asked, his eyes moving over her briefly as he looked for a telltale bulge of a holster.

  Amy reached in the hem of her jeans for the second time since arriving at Carson Hill and retrieved her handgun, passing it to the sheriff handle first, after checking the safety. He took it, tossed it lightly in his hand to feel its heft, and nodded approvingly. He returned it to her, promising to gather a few larger pieces of artillery to leave with both Amy and Carey.

  Matthews went outside to check the perimeter of the immediate property for any signs of where Mack may have headed, leaving Amy and Carey in the living room. “Well, well, ‘Deputy’ McDade…I like it,” Carey teased before looking up at her shyly. “It’s kind of…hot.”

  “How is ‘Deputy McDade’ hotter than ‘Officer McDade’? I’ve been Officer McDade the whole time you had your tongue in my mouth, and it didn’t seem to turn you on as much.” She crossed her arms and gave him an icy stare, pretending to be insulted at her demotion.

  “In my defense, you neglected to mention the part about being a cop for most of the time that said tongue was enjoying ravaging said mouth,” he answered, looking smug. “In fact, I only found out about the cop part when you managed to get yourself pulled over for speeding.”

  “True, I’ll own up to that,” she casually replied, coming over to where Carey rested on the couch and stepping one foot over his legs, straddling him as she leaned over him. “But now, somehow, I’m ‘hot’ because I wear a uniform and carry a gun?”

  “Nope.” She raised an eyebrow at him suspiciously, staring him down as he answered. “You were already hot. The uniform just makes you scorching.”

  “You know, I’ve just been made a deputy in this county. I can put you in handcuffs,” Amy said with a growl in her voice.

  “I was really hoping you’d say that,” Carey shot back, a wide-eyed expression on his face as he took her face in his hands and kissed her, mumbling something about having been a bad boy as their lips met. “But you didn’t tell me the charge, Deputy McDade. Don’t you have to tell me what I’ve done wrong?”

  “You’re guilty of wearing too many clothes, but tell me if I hurt you,” she answered, taking her mouth from his as she nibbled her way down his neck, her fingers fumbling with the buttons on his shirt. He responded by grabbing her hips and pressing her against him, shrugging out of his shirt and being careful of his bandaged arm as Amy finished unbuttoning it.

  Carey ran his fingertips under the hem of Amy’s t-shirt, rubbing light circles against the overly warm skin of her back before sliding it upward, lifting her shirt off as she pulled her arms through. He took in the sight of her, her skin glistening in the faint glow of light that came from under the kitchen door. He ran his hands over the pink lace of her bra, watching her face as he took her perfect round breasts in his hands.

  He let his hands move along the slope of her ribs and around to her back, about to reach for the clasp on her bra when a noise outside the door made them freeze. They looked first at each other and then at the door, before Amy pulled her gun and held it in one hand, deftly working her way back into the t-shirt Carey held out to her with her other hand.

  She smoothed the fabric down on the front of her shirt just as Sheriff Matthews re-entered the house. He froze when he saw the gun in her hand, and looked somewhat confused that Carey was now shirtless, looking to each of them for an explanation.

  “Sheriff,” Carey began. “I’m sorry, we thought you left.”

  “Apparently,” the grizzled, grey-haired lawman said with a knowing, amused look. “No, I was just checking the area outside the house for any sign of Mack but I didn’t find anything. I don’t think he’s coming back around tonight, his little firebomb was probably all he had prepared. After all, if he thought everyone was asleep when he threw it, he probably assumed the rug would catch and send the whole house up in flames before anyone woke up enough to stop it. I bet we won’t hear from him any more today, but I’d also bet you a good sized pile of money that he’s probably hiding out and plotting his next move.” The elderly sheriff walked to the door, his old injury causing him to limp in a more pronounced way than before. He turned and smiled with one hand on the doorknob. “Come lock up after me, and you two have a good day now, you hear?”

  After he left and Amy turned the deadbolt, she returned to
the couch to find Carey covering his face with his hands. “That was almost as bad as being walked in on by your parents…only instead, it was the cops! Why do I feel like a fifteen-year-old kid who was caught with his hand down someone’s shirt in the movie theater?”

  Amy couldn’t help but laugh at the situation, covering her own embarrassment at the same time. “Oh, come on, it wasn’t that bad. We’re adults, not kids. And besides, we weren’t really doing anything that embarrassing. It’s not like he walked in right as you were throwing me down naked on the…” Her face froze, her last word hanging in mid-air. A horrified expression replaced her happy one.

  “What? Amy, what is it?” Carey demanded, gripping both her wrists in his large hands.

  “…the rug,” she finished slowly, concentrating on her words. “Carey, is the sheriff a good friend of your family’s? The kind of friend who would come out here a lot, stay for dinner, that kind of thing?”

  Carey’s confusion was hard to hide. “Not really. I mean, we’ve known him forever, but he has a lot of ground to cover and it’s a pretty good trek to his office, practically across the county. We really only see him when we go into town. But what are you talking about? What’s wrong with the rug?”

  “Carey, he knew about the rug,” she said, whispering as though Matthews was listening outside. “He knew that the bomb was supposed to land on the rug.” She pointed with her hand to where the rug had been only an hour ago. “But we rolled it up and took it to the kitchen right after we put out the fire. It was already gone when he got here, so how did he know that Mack would try to catch the rug on fire? All Matthews was able to see was a gleaming wood floor, he wouldn’t have known there used to be a rug here.”

  “I don’t want to believe what I think you’re saying,” Carey said in a hushed tone, looking at the floor as though he could will it not to be true.