Best of Cowboys Bundle

by Vicki Lewis Thompson, Barbara White Daille, Judy Christenberry, Christine Wenger, Shirley Rogers, Crystal Green, Nina Bruhns, Candance Schuler, Carole Mortimer

  With that, she flung open the door and stalked out into the flying snow, pulling the hood of her coat up and slamming the old Stetson Hawk had given her on top of it.

  After a few moments she heard the door close, and Hawk’s boots crunched swiftly after her. “I only have the Winchester. We’ll need to stay together.”

  “Where do you think they’re headed?” she asked as they saddled the horses.

  “The highway, I expect. I put in a quick call to the sheriff. He’s going to send his men to check from that side.”

  She pressed her lips together. “Good idea.” She should have thought of that. She had to calm down so she could think straight. But she was just so incensed. The idea that someone would go to these lengths to deliberately hurt Fitz and Hawk, and now her—the unfairness of it made her blood boil.

  As she spurred Jasper into the sea of frigid white, determination drove her on and fury kept her warm.

  “Can you see any sign of their tracks?” she asked Hawk as they criss-crossed the pasture where the steers had been penned.

  “Everything’s been covered up by the new snow,” he said, studying the ground with a scowl.

  “They planned that,” she said with a frustrated sigh.

  “Yep. Our bad luck it happened on New Year’s Eve while we were distracted.”

  “You think?”

  Something in her tone must have made him look up. “You mean they planned it, like on Christmas?”

  She reined in Jasper and clamped her teeth. “What I think is, it’s a pretty strange coincidence Teresa called last night to stir up trouble between us.”

  Redhawk’s jaw went slack. “How would that have helped them?”

  “She knew it would cause a fight. But being New Year’s Eve and all, she also knew you with your romantic streak would make things right before we went to bed, even if you’d been planning to guard the herd. She knows you very well.”

  She’d rendered him speechless.

  Good. They could ride faster if they weren’t talking.

  She spurred Jasper. “Which way to the highway?” she called.

  Tonopah jumped to catch up. “This way,” Hawk said, and took the lead without further comment on her theory. Which was fine. It was another thing she hadn’t really thought out. “Just follow my trail,” he told her.

  Which was easier said than done. The snow was coming down faster now, big puffy flakes the size of tea biscuits, making it impossible to see more than five feet in front of her. She did her best to keep Tonopah’s swishing tail in sight, but then the snow would swirl up and he’d disappear for a minute or two.

  This time it had been about five minutes. She’d relied on Jasper to instinctively know where the other horse was, but maybe that was wishful thinking.

  “Hawk?” she called loudly, praying he was still in front of her. She tried not to panic when he didn’t answer.

  Hawk had always told her to stay put if she ever got lost or anything happened to her out in the desert. He said it was a lot harder to find and rescue a moving target than one that stayed in one place and made itself conspicuous. But how did you make yourself conspicuous in the middle of a snowstorm?

  She shouted his name again. And was answered only by the deafening sound of silence.

  It was eerie how silent it could be in the wilderness. Of course, there was usually some wind, the call of birds soaring high in the sky, the scurry of small animals over the ground and the rustle of sage and grass and piñon needles.

  But today, it was as though she and Jasper were floating somewhere deep in the vast silence of outer space; that’s how little sound there was. The world was muffled and cloaked, as if nothing else existed in the universe but the two of them.

  “Rhiannon!”

  Thank God. “Hawk! I’m here!”

  Out of nothingness he appeared, black duster whirling behind him, riding out of the white void like a primitive god from the mists of time.

  “Damn it, woman!” He galloped around her, Tonopah rearing as he reined him in. “Tighten this around your saddle horn,” he ordered gruffly, and flung her the lasso end of a long, coiled rope.

  She gladly did as she was told. “Any sign of the cattle yet?”

  “Nothing. Not that I can see anything in this mess. The highway should be that way, though.” He might as well be pointing at the moon for all she was turned around.

  “I’m right behind you,” she assured him, more than grateful for the impromptu umbilical cord connecting them.

  It took over three hours to make it to the highway, since they went at a snail’s pace, searching for any indication of the herd’s passage. But there was no sign. They didn’t even find a broken twig.

  On the bright side, by the time they arrived at the barbed wire fence and the shiny black ribbon of asphalt bisecting the endless white, the snowstorm had slowed to a fine dusting of ice crystals sparkling in the little bit of midday light.

  They trotted along the road’s verge up to the far property line and back, hoping to find where the steers had been loaded into trucks.

  “Maybe they used the chute on the ranch road,” she suggested. That’s the one they’d used the day she arrived at Irish Heaven, when Redhawk had mistaken her for one of the rustlers.

  “Maybe,” he said, but his tone was doubtful. “Let’s ride back to the ranch that way and check it out. It’ll be easier on the horses anyway.”

  A few minutes later they ran into one of the deputies the sheriff had sent out to patrol the fence. Hawk flagged him down.

  The cruiser pulled over, and the deputy rolled down the window. Rhiannon didn’t recognize him.

  “You spot anything, Jackson?” he called.

  Hawk eased Tonopah up to the vehicle. “No trace of them. You?”

  The deputy shook his head. “Barely a car on the road today, even after the plow came through. No trucks. No cattle.”

  Hawk jetted out a breath. “I just don’t get it.”

  “You sure those steers were stolen? Maybe they just wandered off in the storm…”

  Frowning, Hawk pushed his Stetson back on his head and leaned down to brace his forearm against the saddle horn. “Not unless one of them learned how to unlatch a gate and open it while I wasn’t looking.”

  “It was left open after they’d gone?”

  “Closed, actually.”

  Rhiannon figured that had been a slap in the face. The tossers had wanted them to know it was no accident.

  “Sheriff’s got a deputy watching the Lost Man, too. If he sees anything suspicious out there he’ll bring ’em in for questioning.”

  “But I thought he’d ruled them out as suspects,” she said, pulling Jasper up alongside Tonopah.

  The deputy shrugged. “There’s no solid evidence it’s them. But the sheriff’s been around these parts a long time. He’s got a pretty good nose for who’s trouble. I guess there’s some history there.”

  “What kind of history?” she asked, suddenly alert.

  “Dunno, exactly,” he said. “Haven’t seen the file, since it’s not really my case. I’m just putting in some overtime today.”

  “That was interesting,” she said excitedly, after the deputy had resumed his patrol and they’d turned their mounts onto the dirt road leading back to the ranch. “I wonder what he meant by history?”

  “I’d guess probably someone at the Lost Man has an arrest record,” Hawk said, stretching his knee out and rotating the shoulder of the arm he still had in a sling.

  Rhiannon watched his painful movements, her anger spiking. He must be hurting like crazy. He shouldn’t be out in this cold weather or even riding a horse at all, not with his injuries. He should be at home, curled up by a warm fire drinking hot chocolate and watching college football on the telly with Fitz, like every other male in America was doing on New Year’s Day.

  Suddenly she gasped. “Oh, no!”

  “What?” Hawk said, lifting his head from scrutinizing the sides of the road.

/>   “My God! We left Fitz by himself. All this time!”

  Hawk’s eyes clapped onto hers and he said one succinct swearword.

  “How could we have forgotten?” she said, guilt swamping over her in a deluge.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” Hawk said, nevertheless looking worried. “He was still asleep when we left. It’s only about noon now. He probably stayed in bed, after the drinking we did last night.”

  “I hope so,” she murmured, and urged Jasper into a trot. She sent up a fervent prayer that her uncle was fine and hadn’t wandered off in the snow in a lapse of common sense.

  But alas, that prayer wasn’t answered. When she and Hawk galloped up to the ranch house twenty minutes later and ran inside, Fitz was nowhere to be found.

  Chapter 16

  “T his is all my fault,” Rhiannon lamented when Hawk met her in the kitchen after she’d combed the house and he had searched the outbuildings.

  The empty stall he’d discovered in the barn had made Hawk’s heart quail.

  “He’s taken Crimson,” he told her. “God knows how far he’s gotten by now.”

  She put her knuckles to her mouth and made a choking noise. “What are we going to do?”

  “You wait here in case he comes back,” he told her firmly. He wasn’t taking a chance on losing both of them in this weather. “I’m going out after him.”

  She jumped to her feet. “I’ll go with you.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed to get her attention. “No. You won’t. I need you here in case he returns. If I’m not back in two hours, call the sheriff to get Search and Rescue out here. Can you do that?”

  Reluctantly she nodded. “Find him, Redhawk. Please find him.”

  “I will.” Or he’d die trying. It had stopped snowing, but was still bitterly cold. The old man wouldn’t survive a night out in the open, and that was one guilt Hawk couldn’t live with.

  Swiftly he gathered a few emergency supplies and a couple of blankets, which he tied onto his saddle as Rhiannon made him a sack of sandwiches and a thermos of hot coffee. He grabbed them, gave her a kiss and jumped on his horse.

  Last time he’d wandered off, Fitz had headed toward the mountains. Hawk figured that direction was as good as any to start with.

  Again he crisscrossed the wild, open territory between the ranch house and the canyons, hoping to pick up the old man’s trail from after it stopped snowing. An hour later he found a wandering string of hoofprints he immediately recognized as Crimson’s distinctive gait. With a heartfelt prayer of thanks, he turned Tonopah’s head to follow the tracks.

  After a short time he came to with a start of realization. Crimson’s weren’t the only furrow and tracks in the deep snow. He hadn’t noticed before because he was concentrating so hard on not losing the trail while steering Tonopah clear of dangerous obstacles under the snow as they hurried across the plateau.

  But for a moment the angle of the sun and shadow changed, and a wide cluster of parallel ruts became clearly visible, even under the thick layer of new snowfall.

  The herd!

  Fitz had found the stolen cattle! And along with them, no doubt, the rustlers.

  Instinctively, Hawk reached for his rifle, terrified of what he might find ahead. But mindless of the dangers, he spurred Tonopah into a gallop. This time he had them.

  And it was one fight he didn’t intend to lose.

  Rhiannon forced herself to eat, though the sandwich and tea tasted like sawdust and dishwater. And it took all of fifteen minutes to accomplish.

  Now what?

  She was so frightened for both Fitz and Hawk she was literally shaking. Maybe she should stoke the fire so the house would be warm and toasty when the men returned.

  Because they would return soon. They must.

  She went into the living room and stuck several more pieces of wood into the stove, carefully closing the glass door afterward. As she knelt on the floor, she suddenly spotted something sticking out from under the sofa. Some sort of papers?

  She pulled them out. It turned out to be a manila file with some sort of legal contracts in it. Contracts for…the sale of Irish Heaven!

  Her heart stopped as she searched for a date. When could this have—? Her eyes widened. Wait. The contract was dated over twenty-five years ago! With a sigh of relief, she caught sight of the selling price. Wow. Fitz had gotten a real bargain on the ranch. It was a long time ago, but still, the price seemed a pittance for the size of the property.

  She sat back on her heels, taking it all in and wondering what would have made Fitz seek out the old record of sale. Living in the past must really have—

  That’s when she noticed the name of the seller. Collin Lloyd.

  She frowned. Why did that name sound so familiar? Lloyd…Could Collin Lloyd be Jeremy Lloyd’s father? Or—

  All at once she remembered where she’d heard it before. Not Collin Lloyd, but Lloyd Collins! That was Fitz’s archrival back when he and Rhiannon’s da were boys. In the story he’d told last week about the dolmen treasure…

  Suddenly the breath froze in her lungs.

  the saints!

  Could he have been trying to warn her by telling that story? Even in his deteriorating state of dementia, had Fitz been desperately trying to communicate something? But what? Had he confused the name of a real childhood rival with a present enemy who was also trying to steal something from him?

  But Jeremy Lloyd was already one of the prime suspects for the rustling.

  Then it struck her.

  Motive.

  She looked down at the contract in her hands and realized that Fitz had wanted to show them the reason for the rustling. Jeremy Lloyd must have felt his father was somehow cheated when he sold Irish Heaven to Fitz. As it indeed appeared from the price.

  That was why this particular ranch had been singled out by the rustlers—Jeremy Lloyd was calling the shots. And that was also why the attacks had gotten so vicious and personal.

  It was personal.

  And she could only guess to what lengths the younger Lloyd would go to reclaim his inheritance.

  Could that include murder?

  The answer was obvious. He’d already shot Redhawk and left him to die of exposure. What would stop a man capable of that from murdering a helpless old man in a snowstorm? He wouldn’t even have to shoot him. Just make sure no one found him before he froze to death.

  She cried out at the horror of the thought. “No!”

  She had to do something! Quickly!

  She sprinted for the phone and rang the sheriff’s office, getting the dispatcher.

  “Is the sheriff there, please?” she said frantically.

  “I’m sorry, he’s out on a call. Can—”

  “What about Burton Grant?” she interrupted. “Is he there? He has to call Search and Rescue. Fitz O’Brannoch has wandered off from the ranch and is lost somewhere out on the plateau.”

  The dispatcher made appropriate noises as she dialed Burt’s extension. “I’m sure Deputy Grant will see a search party is put together right away.”

  When Burt came on the line she anxiously explained the situation, and her suspicions about Lloyd.

  “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “Arizona has some of the best Search and Rescue squads in the country. I can have a team out there within an hour or two.”

  “Tell them to hurry,” she said, and hung up.

  Making a quick decision, she grabbed her coat and gloves and headed back out to the barn to resaddle Jasper. Hawk wasn’t going to like it. He got really tetchy when she disobeyed a direct order. But someone had to warn him—so he didn’t walk right into a trap.

  And she was the only one available.

  It shouldn’t be too difficult to follow his trail. It had stopped snowing completely, so Tonopah’s hoofprints should be clear as day, leading her right to him. And with any luck to Fitz, as well.

  She just prayed she’d reach them before it was too late.

 
Hawk followed Crimson’s tracks all the way up to the cliffs. The rustlers must have sought shelter in one of the many canyons when the blizzard blew up. It was a little out of their way, but it made sense. If the truck couldn’t get through because of weather, they were sure to be caught if they held the stolen cattle anywhere near the highway. In the canyons, they could hole up as long as needed, in relative safety. After all, who would think of looking on Irish Heaven itself for the rustlers and their booty?

  As he followed Fitz’s trail, it was joined from either side by two other horsemen. Hawk’s pulse doubled. There were no overt signs of a struggle, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t hurt the old man, or threatened him. He gripped the reins so hard Tonopah jumped.

  “Sorry, boy,” he soothed in a low voice, stroking the horse’s neck. Poor devil was all out of breath. They’d been going nonstop since dawn. If they didn’t get to rest soon, he’d fall over.

  The furrows in the snow led Hawk right to the mouth of what he knew to be a sizable box canyon. But the entrance was fairly inconspicuous. Which told him the rustlers were pretty damn familiar with Irish Heaven territory if they knew how to find it.

  Grabbing his rifle, he left Tonopah to rest amidst a small group of junipers and went on foot to find the animal trail leading up the cliffs. There always was one. He found it and climbed a ways up, then crawled on his stomach to the edge of a ledge that looked down into the bowels of the box canyon.

  What he saw made his blood boil.

  Jeremy Lloyd. Talking and laughing with three other men, one much older than the others. Hawk’s stolen cattle were milling and lowing at the far end of the canyon, about fifty yards away. Fitz was nowhere to be seen.

  Hawk scooted back and took several deep breaths, battling the urge to just lift his rifle and shoot the bunch of them. However, besides the obvious downsides to killing, dead men couldn’t tell him what they’d done with Fitz. Aside from which, with his arm injured as it was, aiming accurately would not be so easy. He might shoot an innocent steer.