Undercover Cowboy

by Beverly Bird

  “I’m sure. He’s not thinking straight. He’s too eager. He’s retired now, and he wants her. Also keep in mind that he doesn’t think I can come after him this time.”

  “He’s got to know we’ll send somebody. For that matter, so will the guys he turned on.”

  “It’ll take them a week or more. They won’t panic right away. Scorpion’s been reliable, the cream of the crop, for eleven years. They’ll assume something happened to make him change his flight plan, that he’s just being cautious. When he doesn’t show up next week, that’s when it’ll occur to them that he might have turned on them.” He paused, thinking. “As for us, well, he probably doesn’t think any of our other agents are good enough to nail him.”

  Jack stood abruptly. “You might want to start shopping for that watch.”

  “My word is as good as gold,” Paul said grandly.

  “On second thought, skip the gold. Just make sure that baby’s water- and sand-proof.” Florida, he thought again. Soon now. And that, too, was a good way to wrap things up, to come full circle.

  He left the bar, whistling a tuneless version of the national anthem.

  Carly Castagne dropped the first piece of toast on the floor. She scorched the second. Her sister watched as she grabbed it and hurled it, still smoking, in the general direction of the kitchen sink.

  “You’re going to be fine,” Theresa said soothingly. “Just go out there and tell them hello, and that we’re glad they’re here, then teach them all how to ride.”

  Carly shot her sister a disbelieving look. Theresa was almost childlike in her innocence and optimism. She amazed her, because Carly, on the other hand, had never failed to see bogeymen lurking in shadows in all her thirty-three years. She was a realist, she thought. Life was hard, so you did whatever you had to do to survive. Even when it hurt.

  This hurt. Or, at least, it pinched very uncomfortably.

  She crossed the kitchen to look out the window. Four tourists were standing beside the first cattle pen, grinning like fools. Two had arrived last night, and two had come this morning, and so far Theresa had dealt with them, showing them to their rooms and getting them settled. But now Theresa was looking at her expectantly, and it was time for Carly to take up the reins.

  She pressed her fingers to her temples. “I’m really not very good with people,” she muttered in a last, halfhearted protest.

  “You’re not good with men,” Theresa clarified.

  Carly winced and dropped her hands. It was a fine point, but indisputably true. She’d already lost a husband and a father. Granted, her father had died on her. There was little she could have done about that.

  “You’ll be fine,” Theresa said again.

  Carly took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. The thing was, she had no choice. Either her beloved ranch ran as a dude operation for the summer, or it would go to the highest bidder.

  She stood a moment longer, her gaze flicking over the ramshackle fences and outbuildings of Seventy Four Draw. The cattle ranch had been in their family for generations. Cholesterol-conscious America was trying to make sure it didn’t last generations more. The fact of the matter was that people just weren’t eating as much beef as they used to, and Seventy Four Draw was good for very little else but producing beef. The ranch just wasn’t bringing in enough money anymore to cover costs and pay Uncle Sam, too.

  Damn the IRS. But she knew that damning them wasn’t going to help in the least. Unless she started making payments to them, they were going to force a tax sale on her by September.

  Oh, Daddy, how could you do this to me? I’m only one person. I can’t do it all. I need you now and where are you? Planted six feet under without a care in the world.

  Their parents had passed away within six months of each other, and it had been her father’s dying wish that Carly take care of his ranch. But it was much more than a one-woman job, she thought, especially with beef prices plummeting and the IRS breathing down her neck.

  Theresa was no help. She was seven months pregnant, and in the middle of a divorce. She had come running home from Tulsa, expecting that the Draw would take care of her as it always had. As for Michael, their brother, he worked in Oklahoma City and rarely set foot on the ranch at all. He was their idea man. It had been his brainstorm for Carly to take-tourists along with her the next time she drove cattle up to auction in Kansas.

  “Okay,” she whispered aloud, forcing her feet to the kitchen door. “I can handle this.” Then she veered suddenly for the back stairs instead.

  “Where are you going?” Theresa asked, startled.

  “I can’t go out there like this, smelling like calf poop.” She had spent the better part of the morning wrestling with an orphan who had been born last night, trying to get him to nurse from a bottle when all his instincts told him to insist upon the real thing.

  “You’re procrastinating, Carlotta,” Theresa chided.

  Carly winced. Carlotta. Where had her father been on the day her mother had decided to name her that? It was just another classic example of him letting her down.

  She bounded up the stairs, but when she reached the hallway there, she hesitated. She lifted a hand to knock on her daughter’s closed bedroom door, then she lowered it again reluctantly. There really wasn’t time now. If she knocked, she really would be procrastinating.

  At the moment her daughter, Holly, was just another bogeyman in the shadows, she thought, sighing. A beloved bogeyman, but a problem all the same. She wanted so badly for Holly to go on this next cattle drive with her. At seven, eight, even ten years old, Holly had loved going on the auction trips. Then eleven had come, and suddenly, it wasn’t cool to go on trail rides with your mom anymore. It was cool to wonder who your father was and why he’d left you. But Carly couldn’t tell her that. The truth of the matter was that Brett Peterson had taken off after the first buxom blonde to cross his path, and how did you explain that to an eleven-year-old?

  You didn’t, she thought, her heart squeezing.

  To be fair, Brett hadn’t known she was pregnant when he’d gone trotting off after the blonde. And she had never thought it was worth the bother to chase him down and tell him. She had filed for divorce, had taken back her maiden name and had given the same one to her daughter, and she had put the whole marriage behind her. It was, after all, the sensible way to deal with bogeymen. And it had never been an issue until Holly had grown up enough to blame her mother for the fact that Brett hadn’t stayed.

  Oh, honey, if life were only that one-sided, that easy.

  Against all her better judgment, Carly knocked. Without waiting for an answer, she opened the bedroom door and stuck her head inside.

  “Hey.”

  Holly was sitting Indian-style on the bed, a Walkman in her lap, the cord trailing up and around her neck, disappearing beneath her long, sable hair. She looked up at Carly and pried off one earphone.

  “What?” she demanded.

  Carly cleared her throat. “Those people are here. The guests.”

  “So?” Holly asked sullenly.

  “So I was wondering if maybe you wanted to come downstairs and take a look at them.”

  “What for? They’re stupid.”

  Carly realized she’d have a hard time arguing with her on that score. She kept her mouth shut and shrugged.

  “Why would anybody pay money to sweat and get dirty and drive a bunch of steers to Kansas? That’s stupid, “ Holly repeated.

  “Yeah, well, maybe when they start getting sweaty and dirty, they’ll realize that.” And then maybe they’ll all go home, she thought. And then I’m right back to square one with the IRS.

  Carly groaned aloud. “It might be good for a laugh,” she tried.

  Holly only shook her head and dropped the earphone back into place.

  A realist knew when she was beaten, Carly thought. Temporarily beaten. She’d try again later.

  She left Holly’s door and went on to her own room. She struggled out of her jeans and her T
-shirt as she headed for her closet, then she stopped dead as she passed in front of her vanity mirror.

  Had what had happened with Brett been her fault?

  She crossed her arms over her chest and scowled. She had no hips to speak of, she thought. It was a moderately small wonder that her underwear stayed up. She tugged on her panties and that was a mistake because without her arms crossed over her breasts she was faced with a good look at them as well. What there was of them. She sighed, dropping her arms to her sides.

  She was too thin. There was no flesh on her—she was all muscle and lean lines. And she was flat-chested. Except for her long, dark hair and the green eyes she’d inherited from her Irish mother, she thought she could easily pass for a boy—one who badly needed a haircut and who had pretty eyes.

  Would Brett have stayed if she had been somehow…different? Would he have stayed if she had been softer, more feminine, more pliant?

  “Carlotta!” Theresa’s voice floated up the back stairs. “They’re waiting!”

  Carly dragged a clean shirt and a fresh pair of jeans out of her closet. She thought she should probably put a bra on as well, although God knew there wasn’t much there to jiggle around. She dressed again, then she leaned sideways for one last glimpse in the mirror.

  The sad truth of the matter was, when you were only one woman and you had sixteen hundred cows, thirty-four horses, eighteen chickens and three roosters, four ranch hands, a prepubescent daughter and a pregnant sister all looking to you for answers, who had time to be worrying about their appearance? Don’t forget the IRS, she reminded herself darkly.

  She smoothed her hair back from her forehead, flattening all the little wisps that had already come free from her braid. She licked her finger and rubbed at a smudge of dirt on her forehead. She ran for the stairs and hit the kitchen again at a jog, then she glanced out the window again and skidded to a stop.

  “Now what?”

  “What do you mean?” Theresa asked. She had been washing dishes, and she dried her hands to come look out the window herself.

  The four original tourists were still there, but now there were two strangers as well, two men. They’d come out of nowhere. Either they were tourists with twelve hundred dollars apiece in their pockets, dropping into her barnyard like manna from heaven, or they were drifters looking for work.

  Well, they’d have no luck here, Carly thought. She could barely pay the people she had, and had dropped two of them to part-time just last week.

  She yanked open the back door. Suddenly she was doubly convinced that her world was going to hell in a handbasket.

  Chapter 2

  The reality of Carlotta Castagne hit Jack like a wrecking ball in the solar plexus.

  She came through the back door, almost bouncing with energy. That was his first impression. His second was that age had not detracted from her beauty at all.

  Her innocence was gone, he realized, but the sense of her was the same, and so much stronger than in the photograph. It was something rich yet simple, honest and good. Her eyes told stories now, where they had simply been bright and eager in that photograph taken so many years ago.

  She was smaller than he would have expected, and thinner. She moved like a hot, summer wind, and she made him want things he had always been very sure no man could ever have.

  At least, not a man like himself.

  Jack felt a subtle change in Scorpion’s stance and forgot the woman for a brief moment. There was suddenly a hunger and an alertness about the assassin, and Jack felt it like a physical touch. He realized that his own heart was beating hard as he waited for something to happen.

  Nothing did. Not yet.

  He hooked a finger over the brim of the battered cowboy hat he had bought off a stranger in the airport. He eased it down a little farther on his forehead. The only thing he figured Scorpion might recognize about him was his eyes—and then only if he stared directly into them. Jack thought it would pretty much be an instinctual thing, but even so, he wouldn’t risk it.

  “Did either of you talk to Michael?” Carlotta demanded, looking at him and Scorpion.

  Michael?

  “Of course,” Scorpion lied smoothly. Then again, Jack thought, maybe he had.

  “You did?” Carlotta repeated, clearly startled. “He didn’t tell me. Did you pay him?”

  “I did,” Jack offered quickly.

  “Me, too,” said Scorpion.

  In that moment, Jack knew that if the assassin had come back here to collect this woman, she didn’t know it. She didn’t seem to recognize him, anymore than Scorpion recognized Jack with his eyes shadowed—a near impossibility since this was the first time Jack had ever entered the field looking like himself. Scorpion knew that the agency had had a man on him all these years, but he had met that man in too many guises to be sure which one was real.

  Jack hoped.

  He had tailed the assassin in the form of a shaggy, blonde surf bum in Honolulu, and a scar-faced mercenary in South Africa. Scorpion had “killed” a louse-ridden Brazilian peasant in S?o Paulo. As busy as Jack had been changing his appearance, Scorpion had been even more industrious—he had endured cosmetic surgery several times over the years, and now not even Carlotta Castagne seemed to see past the changes. Jack watched her closely as she looked at the assassin and all her expression revealed was a little harried annoyance, too genuine to be forced.

  Then again, maybe he was being gullible again, as in S?o Paulo.

  Jack found himself hoping strongly that that wasn’t true. Not only because harboring such doubts about his own impressions said a great deal about his nerve and his foolhardiness in pursuing this chase, but because it would shatter his preconceived image of her. He realized that he wanted her to be honest.

  “Well, then,” she went on, looking around at the others. “Welcome to Seventy Four Draw. I’m Carly Castagne, and I’m going to explain what you can expect over the course of the next week or so.”

  Carly, Jack noted. She didn’t use Carlotta. It suited her.

  He listened with half an ear, still paying more attention to Scorpion. He had taken over the assassin’s tail in a small motel on the outskirts of Oklahoma City at three o’clock yesterday morning. At dawn today, Scorpion had finally made a move, arranging for a rental car, coming here. Jack was both relieved and chagrined to find other people hovering in the barnyard. Something was going on, and with any luck he could slide right in as though he had always intended to be a part of it.

  That was the up side. The down side was that it made locking horns with Scorpion this last and final time a far more dangerous proposition with so many innocent people underfoot. It changed things, made them hairier. Gone was the possibility of a short wrap-up to this thing, like a shoot-out in Carlotta Castagne’s corral. He doubted if so many people would all manage to neatly duck, if one of them wouldn’t manage to get him- or herself shot.

  Gone, too, was the possibility that he could just stroll into their bedroom with his gun drawn, since Carly didn’t even seem to know the man and Jack doubted if Scorpion was going to make it into her bedroom any time soon. He’d have a few problems to work out with her first.

  Damn it.

  Jack turned his attention to his surroundings. The ranch was a cluster of barns and outbuildings that had seen better days. He recognized one of them from the photograph—at least he was reasonably certain it was the same barn. The eaves were the same. The buildings were locked together like puzzle pieces by a series of weathered three-board fences and gates. Inside the paddocks, dusty, orange-red earth showed through scrubby patches of grass. The air felt as if it hadn’t rained in a long time.

  The house was big and white with peeling paint. There was an old, idle windmill out on the horizon. It looked for all the world as he had imagined Oklahoma to look. Odd, he thought, that of all the places he had been and seen over the years, the Dust Bowl had never been one of them.

  “I figure it’s going to take us five days to get the cattle int
o Kansas,” Carly Castagne was saying, “and I have to make sure you all can ride first. Still, with a little effort, we should be able to squeeze it all into eight days.”

  Jack looked her way again sharply. Cattle? Kansas? Ride? What the hell had he walked into?

  “Uh, what’s the big deal?” he asked, fishing cautiously. “Just put us on some horses and off we go. Right?”

  Her eyes narrowed again. They could do that in a flash, he realized, giving a sensation of heat again. They were green, as it turned out, and they were easily the prettiest thing about her. She seemed to study him for an inordinately long time.

  “Going is one thing,” she said finally. “Getting there is another. If I just ‘put you on some horses,’ I doubt very much if any of you would even get so far as the ranch boundaries. So what we’re going to do is begin with some intensive riding lessons, and hopefully you’ll all learn enough that we’ll be able to leave here on Friday morning.”

  “For Kansas,” he clarified.,

  She looked at him impatiently. “Of course, for Kansas.”

  “On horses.”

  “It’s a long walk otherwise.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ve never even been near a horse before,” Scorpion said. “What happens if it takes us longer to learn to ride and we can’t leave until Saturday?”

  Jack stiffened.

  What is it, buddy? Do you want an extra day to touch base with your ladylove and whisk her off into the sunset with you? Then again, that idea had some merit. If Scorpion whisked her off, none of them would be going anywhere on horses.

  “I have to get these cattle into Fort Dodge by Wednesday,” Carly Castagne explained. “Saturday just doesn’t leave me enough margin for error.”

  “Just out of curiosity, how many cows are we talking about here?” Jack asked.