by Cait London
“Kenneth Ragnar. He’s got the look of a bodyguard. He was with Greer at the airport. Apparently, he’s living with her.”
Leona didn’t waste a heartbeat. Reaching into her tote bag, she retrieved her cell phone. She stared at Owen as she waited. “Okay, Tempest. Marcus’s father is on the coast, guarding our mother, and no one told me.”
Owen smiled when he heard a bubble of laughter from Tempest.
She frowned at him. “Let me talk to Marcus. Yes, right now.”
Leona explained quickly to Owen, “Kenneth Ragnar is Marcus Greystone’s biological father and Tempest’s father-in-law, that’s who he is. And no one told me he was with my mother. He’s not married, by the way.”
“Maybe she’s dating,” Owen offered lightly, thoroughly enjoying Leona’s steamy, frustrated look. “Just because you’re the oldest, dear heart, doesn’t mean that your mother needs your permission to date.”
Leona glared at him. “Marcus? What’s this about your father staying at my mother’s place?”
Though Owen forced himself to watch the road, he couldn’t stop his grin as a male roar of laughter erupted from Leona’s cell. Clearly, Marcus wasn’t upset by her tone. Leona breathed in deeply and held her breath as he spoke; Owen settled in to enjoy the fireworks.
“You mean that you and Neil got your pointy little heads together…. I know your father is tough and able. That’s not the problem here. The both of you decided that my mother needed a protector? You think she needs one? You fixed her up, Marcus, and you know it. You just wait until I talk to Neil. Why wasn’t I told? What? You think that—”
Leona glanced warily at Owen and lowered her voice. “Okay. Backup plans are good. I understand. Tempest already told you that Owen is sitting beside me, huh? She just felt her little way into this pickup cab and tapped into Owen sitting next to me…. Okay. Good-bye, and just don’t keep any more stuff from me, or you’ll pay, brother-in-law.”
Leona’s smile was almost evil as she added, “Huh? You’re nauseated? Oh, that’s too bad. It’s probably just a little something you ate. Nothing to worry about.”
She clicked her cell phone closed. “Men. Marcus is having morning sickness. Mr. CEO and running-my-life is already feeling the effect of his wife’s pregnancy before either one of them know about the baby. I’ll bet Tempest and Claire will be feeling full of energy and tiptop for the next nine months. Neil and Marcus won’t be, the big babies.”
“You’re scaring me, honey.”
“I’ve been fending off my brothers-in-law for months now. They mean well, but sometimes I feel like I’m being taken over. I’d say a little payback is due…. Oh, Owen, it is really a scary time.” Sniffing delicately, Leona looked out the window at the overgrown brush and trees bordering the road. “At least your sister is in good hands. Kenneth Ragnar can be trusted. He won’t let anything happen to her—or my mother.”
Owen opened his hands on the steering wheel and gripped it again. The Aislings were very fond of the word “protector.” Neil was apparently Claire’s, and Marcus was Tempest’s. Owen hoped that left him as Leona’s protector. Owen Wolf Shaw, labeled “Protector” and permanently attached to one Leona Chablis. But then “Chablis” really belonged to another man…“Leona Shaw” made her all his….
He blinked at the winding road ahead of him, stunned by the thought of a marriage to Leona. But, the picture the thought conjured was good. In fact, mighty appealing.
One brief, barely audible sniff caused Owen to glance at Leona. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Her bottom lip quivered, and she looked shattered. “My sisters are going to…to have babies.”
Leona was crying. What to do…what to do? This wasn’t just any woman, but Leona…His Leona.
“Oh, honey.” Owen followed his instincts and quickly pulled off the road, cutting the engine. After putting Max back in the pickup’s bed, he gathered Leona into his arms and held her as she cried. She seemed so fragile, and yet, she terrified him. What if he couldn’t help her?
Owen struggled to find the right words to soothe her. “Babies are good things, right? Ragnar is protecting your mother and Janice. Your sisters have their husbands—”
Leona snuggled closer and sniffed. “Protectors. Neil and Marcus and Kenneth are all very protective.”
Protectors. Owen struggled to find the correlation between the label and Leona’s brothers-in-law and Kenneth. “You like them, don’t you? What’s the problem?”
“I adore them. They’re all absolutely perfect.”
“‘Adore,’” Owen repeated softly, as if feeling his way around a new territory. He smoothed Leona’s back and rocked her against him. “Adore” was a very big word—that’s what he did, adore Leona. Did Leona adore him? If so, how much? This relationship business was like moving through a mine field. Finally, he asked, “What’s the problem then?”
Leona shivered and held him tighter. “I don’t know…. Everything is changing. They’re having babies—I’m going to be an aunt…. Don’t say anything to them, just now. I’m not certain who knows what yet…They’ll have girls, both of them…With Aisling’s green eyes and red hair. Tempest’s daughter is going to need constant watching. She’ll be into everything, and—Oh, Owen, I’m going to be an aunt. How can I babysit when we can’t live too close together and our thoughts mesh and—”
Owen watched a squirrel race up an oak tree. He tried to understand with everything else going on, the threats to her and her family, why Leona was crying about the coming babies. “I think…this will work out.”
She lifted away to stare at him. “Do you really, Owen?”
“Uh-huh.”
Of course he had no idea, but Leona was now smiling at him as if he were ten feet tall. “Thanks. I knew you’d say the right thing,” she said.
With the canopy of the trees overhead, the old tobacco barn in the field, and racing thoroughbreds grazing nearby, the setting seemed just right for his next words.
“I guess that leaves you—and me, doesn’t it? Just you and me?” he repeated for emphasis. Owen couldn’t understand his woman—that’s how he thought of Leona, as his girlfriend, his woman. Yet somehow, he’d just passed a test he didn’t know about.
“Maybe,” she answered lightly, as if they hadn’t made love last night and the night before. Leona tilted his head between her hands and studied him.
Tightening his arms around her, he lifted her to his lap; he ignored her delighted grin as he dived in for a kiss to prove just what they were together.
“That was nice,” Leona said as she cuddled closer to Owen, her head on his shoulder. The static silence around him caused her to look up at his face. “What’s going on?”
Owen watched her closely as his open hands roamed the length of her body. “There’s not much room in here. That steering wheel is only a couple of inches from your back, and I’m taking up the rest of the room.”
As Leona eased her hand inside his shirt, Owen slowly, firmly gathered her against him as she drifted peacefully in the September sunshine. His silence palpitated now, those gray eyes watchful. When she lifted her head to brush her lips against his, his hand went to her bottom, rolling her even closer. “What are you doing, Owen?”
“Experimenting.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “With me?”
“Uh-huh. You know, we’ve been doing it your way—nontraditional.”
“You’ve been very kind not to press the issue. You can be very sweet, like just now.”
“No one has ever called me ‘sweet’.” He looked at her. “You trust me, don’t you?”
While she did, Leona couldn’t admit everything at once. She’d only known Owen for six days, and he was still a mystery. “In some ways.”
“When a woman trusts a man like this, it’s instinct, isn’t it? Or have you sensed something I don’t know about?”
“Yes, in some ways, I trust you completely. What’s this all about?”
Owen eased her back into the passenger seat. I
n a playful gesture he might have done to his sister, he reached over and wagged Leona’s head back and forth. “Just something I’ve been considering.”
“Did I pass?”
“I haven’t tested it yet.”
“Tell me,” she demanded.
“You’ll have to get it out of me—later.”
Leona stared at him. “You like to make me wait, don’t you?”
“Yep. Sometimes.”
After Owen parked the pickup at the end of his graveled driveway, he got out and stood with his hands on his hips, scanning the rolling green hills, the fields surrounding the farm. When Leona came to stand beside him, he crouched to run his hand over the gravel on the driveway, picking up a long thin stick, broken in two places. “Someone’s been here.”
“Are you sure it’s not deer? I saw them out in the field the other night.”
Max started sniffing the ground and, with a bark, raced off in the direction of the pond.
Owen didn’t answer, but indicated the gravel on the other side of the rough driveway. “That gravel has been turned, too…. The width runs across in a solid pattern that suits a tire, not a deer track. The gravel is pressed down, so the vehicle was heavy—like an SUV. He’s probably been in the house. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
He stood suddenly and began to stride toward the pond.
“I am not staying here,” Leona muttered, and took off at a run after Owen. She grabbed the back of his belt and hung on.
Owen slowed slightly. “This isn’t a good place for you.”
“Or for you either. How do you expect to get that laptop without diving equipment?”
“The old-fashioned way. Diving buck-naked.”
When Leona and Owen came to the knoll overlooking the pond, they stopped. Max was sitting and staring at the water.
Mist seemed to spiral upward, the pond warmer than the morning’s chill. The usual ducks and geese were at one end.
But in the center of the pond, a body floated, facedown.
Ten
“ROBYN WHITE’S DEATH APPEARS TO BE AN ACCIDENTAL drowning—unofficially.” The deputy coroner stood up from the Shaws’ kitchen table.
Ray Fielding delivered his sentences in the chopped manner of an old television detective. Slightly balding and carrying too much weight around his midsection, Fielding stood ramrod straight, like a man with a military background.
He reached for the coffee Leona had made and took a last sip. “Thanks. Looks like Ms. White came down here to feed the geese. Somehow she got in the water and got tangled up in that old fishing line. We’ll have to run tests, of course, but I’d say it happened sometime early this morning. Just for the record, you say you came out to check the horses last night, and she wasn’t here?”
“Everything seemed okay. I didn’t walk down to the pond…I just checked on the horses and left.” Owen omitted his suspicions about the camera placed in his barn. He didn’t want to bring up his father’s missing revolver. He was certain who had it—the same man who had messed with Janice’s mind in Montana and here in Kentucky. If he was the same man as Leona suspected, Owen wanted to personally settle that debt.
Leona took Owen’s hand. “Owen stayed the night with me. I’ll sign whatever legal statement you need.”
She’d already moved in to protect Owen earlier, when he’d hesitated about stating his whereabouts last night. He suspected that Leona would have backed him up, no matter what he’d told the deputy coroner. It was a good feeling to have his woman behind him.
Owen glanced at the ambulance just pulling out of his driveway, lights flashing and siren blaring. He curled his hand around the cup of hot tea Leona had made for him, and absorbed the warmth. The sight of Robyn, tangled in that fishing line, lying facedown in the pond with a scarf floating out beside her, had chilled him more deeply than the cold water.
“Robyn liked to—used to like to feed those geese at sunrise. We’ve only been here over two weeks. We’ve been pretty well tied up with getting settled in and fixing up the house. I didn’t know any line was in the pond, or I would have taken it out.”
“Your horses watered down there. The mud was beat-up pretty bad. Did Ms. White ever feed them special treats?”
“Sometimes.”
“Mm. When horses want something, they can nudge pretty hard. That big Percheron tried to nudge me before you put the horses in the barn. He might have gotten her in the water, but the line did the rest. She was so tangled in it that she couldn’t move. You say that Ms. White had her own car, but it isn’t here. We’ll need to know who dropped her off and talk with them. We’ll check around the apartment she kept in town…see if anyone can help us out. If you hear of anything that might help us give me a call. Here’s my card.”
The deputy coroner jotted a note and snapped his case closed. He looked at Leona who stood with Owen, her hand on his shoulder. “Too bad you decided to stay in town, Shaw. You might have saved her. We’ll know more later and will be in touch. Better do something about that chill. You’re shivering. You’re lucky you didn’t get tangled up in that line when you were hauling her in.”
Fielding shook Owen’s hand. “I have all the information I need for now.” He turned to Leona. “Ms. Chablis, my wife loves your shop, but my credit card doesn’t,” he stated with a grin.
Leona shook his hand. “Tell Sylvia that I’ve got a sale coming up soon, and there are a lot of things in her size.”
His grin widened. “Maybe I’ll just skip that part. Ms. Chablis…. Shaw, I’ll be in touch. Looks like you’re doing lots of work here. My wife’s folks used to talk about this place. The old Stillings woman, who owned it, was quite a character. She said she was related to Daniel Boone and that he fought some big hand-to-hand Indian fracas down there by the pond. Every time she told the story, the number of dead Indians increased.”
“That happens.” Owen’s dark tone indicated he’d heard other magnified accounts.
Leona and Owen walked out to stand on the front porch with the coroner. Fielding glanced around Owen’s property. “Shaw, there’s been some car theft around this area. Usually high-priced stuff. I don’t think you’ll have to worry about your farm pickup, though. Or about break-ins like some of the wealthy homes hereabouts. But this place sat empty for a few years, and the real-estate agents said it had been used for parties. The mess made the agents mad as hell…. But just keep on the lookout for anything unusual, okay?”
“Sure.”
Leona and Owen watched Fielding drive away.
“Do you think there’s anything to that story about the pond and the spirits that Janice heard?” Owen asked quietly.
“Maybe. There are mediums for the dead. She could be one. But I doubt it.”
“So do I.”
Owen noted Leona’s icy hand in his and the way her body trembled as she leaned against him. He put his arm around her; the sight would have been enough to make any woman faint, but Leona had been very calm, if strained.
The static silence from her now ricocheted around him. He glanced around the property and found no apparent danger. “Okay, what’s going on?”
Her fingers dug into his hand. “Just get me inside.”
Once inside the door, Leona turned to Owen. She held him tight, and her body quaked in his arms. Against his throat, she whispered unevenly, “Just hold me.”
“Leona, we couldn’t have saved Robyn. She was already dead when I pulled her out.”
“When Robyn couldn’t manage Janice anymore, manipulate her, he was done with her. From the way you said she acted before Janice left, Robyn was desperate. She knew if she failed, she had to kill herself. Isn’t that what she said? ‘You’ve killed me?’ She was probably spying and telling him everything. That was my scarf around her throat. I’d put it over the mirror at my house, and it was missing. It’s a signal to me. He’s coming after me. If he gets to me, one way or the other, my whole family is at risk….”
“Nothing is going to happen to you o
r your family.” Owen held Leona tighter and buried his face in her hair.
It was a promise he’d keep, even if it meant his life.
“You are not going out there without me, Owen.”
Early-afternoon sunlight danced on the pond, the depths murky as Leona gripped Owen’s arm. He was determined to retrieve his old laptop, to see if Janice had really thrown it into the water. Leona was just as determined not to let Owen be harmed. “You don’t know what’s in that pond—more line or old farm equipment, or—”
“I told you to stay in the house. How is this going to work if I can’t trust you to do what I say?” Owen hefted the rake he intended to use and jammed the handle into the mud.
“Oh, I’m not leaving you alone out here.”
“Then I’d better hurry.” He scanned Leona’s tense expression. “Are you okay? Feel anything out here?”
“No, but—”
Owen kicked off his worn, comfortable moccasins; he stripped off his shirt and tossed it to her. His jeans lay crumpled at her feet. In the next instant he was holding that rake and wading into the water.
He didn’t seem to hear her threat, “If you aren’t out of there by the time I count to twenty, I’m coming in.”
When Owen’s head slowly submerged and bubbles broke the surface, Leona held her breath. Chilled despite the warm September day, Leona wrapped her arms around herself. She scanned the woods, the stream running just beyond that barrier, then looked toward the river. The pond added the third side to the potentially deadly triangle. Just what had happened to Robyn? Could it happen to Owen?
“If ever I wanted to be a medium for the dead, it would be now.”
The trees seemed to rustle with a light breeze. Everything inside Leona stilled and waited. Just maybe she could—“Robyn?” She called. “What happened? Who is he? Where is he?”
At her side, Max started to bark excitedly. “Be quiet, Max.”
Leona settled inside herself and waited for what would come. Then she heard an eerie whisper. “Leona…”
The masculine whisper circled her. “Leona, come to me….”