Undercover Cowboy

by Beverly Bird

  Hell. He raked a hand through his hair and looked away first. He couldn’t get personally involved with her. He couldn’t. She would take everything far too seriously, he thought, more seriously than he knew he was capable of. And he already knew that the worst thing he could ever do to this woman was let her down. She’d been hurt too much in the past.

  Carly finally turned away again. He felt her movement rather than saw it. He told himself he was relieved.

  “I’m going to sleep,” she said softly.

  “Good idea.” He was startled to find that his voice was vaguely raw.

  “Yes. It is.”

  So they agreed on that much, at least. But as she left the kitchen, he looked at her back, and her long hair was wilder than ever now.

  Jack felt a spasming moment of regret.

  She didn’t come to breakfast the next morning.

  Jack’s eyes felt crusty and his neck hurt as he took his place at the table. He thought again that he was too old for this. He’d spent most of the night on the lumpy parlor sofa, getting up to investigate each time the old house had creaked and settled. And it had creaked and settled a lot. Sometime after midnight a dry wind had blown up to rattle branches against the eaves. By five o’clock this morning, he’d been profoundly grateful that there was only a handful of trees near the house.

  He hadn’t dared to sleep anyway. Not really, not deeply. He couldn’t risk Scorpion catching him doing it.

  He’d moved once or twice, into the barn for a short while, then to his car for a quick catnap. He’d been gambling that his roommate would think that he had a romantic liaison with one of the women and that was why he didn’t come to bed. Judging by Scorpion’s dark, furtive looks this morning, not only had the play worked, but he thought the woman was Carly.

  That, he thought, could come in handy. Maybe. He’d have to see how it played out.

  All in all, however, it had been a night of wasted vigilance. The assassin himself hadn’t stirred. Only Theresa had roamed uncomfortably, too pregnant to sleep, and she had finally come downstairs to start breakfast at five-thirty. At six, Jack had heard Carly in the kitchen. He had peeked into the hallway to see her take a cup of coffee and two large muffins into her office.

  Jack imagined that she was still in there now. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what she was doing. One look at the kitchen door was all it required, that and the burned-out generator beyond it.

  In spite of the fact that he knew he would use the Castagnes’ financial problems to his advantage if he had to, a new hatred flamed in him for the man who called himself Brad Patterson, for causing her this added measure of grief.

  Hell of a way to show you love her, buddy.

  Carly pushed back from her desk. She put her boots up on the blotter, balanced her empty coffee mug on her knee and closed her eyes.

  It wasn’t even seven-thirty yet, and already her head hurt as if a little man was in there whaling away with a tiny sledgehammer. A tiny hard sledgehammer, with nails sticking out of it.

  The door opened. Carly opened her eyes again as her sister came into the room.

  “So what are we going to do?” Theresa asked. She stood against the bookcase, resting her arms atop her belly.

  “There’s only one thing we can do,” Carly answered flatly. “We’ll have to float a check. We can’t live without electricity.”

  “Won’t the insurance pay for it?”

  “They would if I’d had a bunch of other stuff go wrong this year.” She’d paid the premium, thank God, but she’d just discovered that it didn’t do her any good. “We’ve got a huge deductible.”

  Theresa looked appalled. “Why did Michael get us a policy like that?”

  “Well, the premiums are cheaper. And theoretically, we could go years and years without needing that insurance, so it’s smarter to keep the monthly payments down.” Carly got to her feet. “Okay,” she went on, “here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll tell the guests that the repairman’s tied up for a couple of days and he can’t get out here. We’ll apologize six ways to Sunday. That’ll buy us at least enough time for me to get them off the ranch. Then electricity won’t be quite so urgent. You can stay behind this trip to take care of getting it fixed.”

  “Then who’s going to drive the cook wagon?”

  “I’ll have to use Mazie Montoro full-time this week.” He was one of those cowboys who preferred to roam and play it loose, working only when he had to. “I can’t spare Plank and Gofer from their horses,” she thought aloud. Not with six tourists adding to the already raucous confusion of a cattle drive. “This makes more sense even without what happened to the generator, Tee. I wasn’t too keen on you bouncing along with us in your condition anyway.”

  Theresa nodded. She hadn’t particularly wanted to go, but remaining behind bothered her also.

  “There’s nothing in the checking account?”

  “Not now,” Carly answered. She knew her sister hated writing checks, she’d once said it felt so criminal. “The money from the first guests already went to the IRS, and Michael hasn’t deposited the fees from those last two yet. Call him and make sure he has the money, then you can write the check. It’ll just be a matter of holding our breaths long enough for the checks to clear from Brad and Jack.”

  Jack.

  She turned quickly away from Theresa, not wanting her to see her expression. She didn’t want to and couldn’t quite stop herself from remembering the way he’d looked at her before she’d gone upstairs last night. But he hadn’t done anything about it. The only conclusion she could come to was that he’d decided she held no great allure after all.

  She was relieved. Of course, she was. It was the only emotion she would allow herself.

  He was attractive. She could admit that. But a voice in her head had been yelling loud and clear all morning—watch out! She’d sat here thinking about him long after she’d figured out what to do about the generator, and now she knew what to do ‘ about Jack Fain, too.

  Assuming she could work up the nerve.

  “Where are the guests?” she asked suddenly, looking back at her sister.

  “I told them to go out and tack their horses,” Theresa answered, startled. “Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

  “It’s perfect. Can you go keep an eye on them?”

  “Sure. Where will you be?”

  “Darling sister, you do not want to know.” If a slightly elastic check worried her, Carly couldn’t even imagine what she might think about this.

  “Carlotta…”

  “Go on,” she urged. “Everything’s fine. Just…uh, don’t let anyone come back in the house. For anything. Tell them I’ll be there in just a minute.”

  “What are you doing?” Theresa cried, thoroughly alarmed now.

  “I’m going to try to get a little extra insurance.” Or assurance, as the case might be, she thought.

  She waited until she heard Theresa go outside. Oh, God, this was so horribly, morally wrong! Or was it? Thanks to Michael’s flea-brained tourist idea, Jack Fain was living in her home. She was going to be at his mercy across a good many isolated, empty miles on the way to Kansas. If there was something funny about him, then she had to know. For her own protection, and for everybody else’s.

  It had nothing, nothing, to do with the fact that she was curious about him on a personal level.

  Except…well, he hadn’t really done anything to make her suspicious, she admitted. Nothing except ask her to leave a day early, but he’d never really had a chance to explain that. And then there was the way he’d taken charge last night with the fire. That just wasn’t something she’d expect a guest to do, but for all she knew he had some kind of job where he was accustomed to authority. Maybe he was just used to taking charge. For all she knew, he was a fire fighter.

  Okay, so explain that look. Explain why it seemed like he was warning you to shut up about the generator.

  Carly groaned. She was trying to justify this t
o herself, she realized, and it was unnecessary. This was her home, she thought again, her ranch, her ride. She was simply acting on gut instinct to protect herself and her family.

  She slipped up the stairs and went quietly down the hall to the room that Theresa had given to Jack and Brad. She glanced back over her shoulder guiltily and stepped inside.

  The first thing she noticed was that he hadn’t slept in his bed last night—or at least one of them hadn’t, and she doubted if it was Brad. He was supposed to be the one with body odor.

  A suitcase sat on the floor at the foot of the made-up bed. Carly took a deep breath and grasped it by the handle, setting it gently on the dresser. The sound of the locks springing open shot into the quiet room like gunfire.

  Inside were jeans, oxford shirts, underwear, socks. There was a bottle of cologne. It brought vivid images to her, images of his face and of his callused hand taking hers. They were so clear and palpable that she looked warily over her shoulder yet again, half-expecting to find him standing right there in the doorway.

  There was an electric razor. A lot of good that was going to do him on the trail, she thought. Where had the man’s head been when he’d packed? Just where exactly had he thought he was going? There was a bottle of aspirin. Carly ran her hands inside all the little side pockets. She found some loose change, and a pack of matches from a bar in Bangkok. Bangkok? A world traveler, and now he was on a ranch in Oklahoma?

  Finally she sighed. In all honesty, there was nothing really strange about any of it, she admitted. Outside of the matches, all his possessions seemed perfectly normal. And for that matter, she supposed a dude ride was something of a different vacation as well, so perhaps the matches fit.

  Impulsively, she moved to Brad’s suitcase on the opposite dresser. It was lying open. Glancing in, she saw that every single item still had a price tag on it, even his underwear and his toiletries.

  Now that seemed strange.

  Carly groaned. No, what it seemed like was that she was seeing big, bad bogeymen in shadows again, in all the shadows, and probably all they really were were dust bunnies. She went back and closed Jack’s suitcase, putting it on the floor again.

  “Mom?”

  Carly squealed. She jumped, clapped a hand to her heart and spun around. Holly was standing in the door, watching her with that wide, wide grin again.

  Oh, this was bad. Holly’s imagination would take flight with this.

  “What are you doing here?” Carly demanded inanely.

  “I live here.” Holly took a step into the room and looked around with exaggerated innocence. “Isn’t this Mr. Fain’s room?”

  “I…is it?”

  “Sure it is,” Holly said happily.

  “I thought I saw a mouse run in here. I was just checking.”

  “In his suitcase?”

  Carly’s heart kicked. “You didn’t see that.”

  “Yeah, I—”

  “No. You didn’t.” Carly gripped her daughter by the shoulders and turned her deliberately around, toward the hall again. “Promise me you won’t mention this to anyone. Not even Aunt Tee. Cross your heart. Please, Holly, I mean it.”

  Holly shrugged and stepped out into the hall. “Noooo problem,” she drawled, then she ran down the stairs.

  Carly scowled after her a moment, then she left the room as well, her knees fairly knocking together from the fright her daughter had given her. She went back downstairs to the kitchen, peering out the window. The guests were all in the paddocks, practicing their riding. Theresa stood watch over them like some kind of swollen gestapo.

  “Holly!” Carly called out, turning back into the downstairs hallway. She thought maybe she’d better have one last, quick word with her and explain…something, somehow. What?

  Holly didn’t answer anyway. Carly wandered toward the front of the house, glancing into rooms as she passed them. When she got to the parlor, she noticed that the sofa cushions were wrinkled and the bolster pillows were slightly askew.

  So this was where he had slept last night.

  She went in to adjust the pillows, then she noticed something brown sticking up from behind one of the cushions. She frowned and reached for it.

  His wallet.

  No, don’t, there was nothing upstairs, so leave it alone. This is a hundred times worse than peeping into his suitcase. But it was as if her hands had minds of their own.

  Carly opened the wallet. There was a driver’s license from Arlington, Virginia. Roughly three hundred dollars in cash. Assorted credit cards. An AT&T calling card, and a few receipts from an automated teller machine. She glanced at the balances and her heart skipped. He certainly wasn’t destitute.

  She was about to close the billfold again, feeling almost nauseated with guilt, when she noticed the crumpled, smudged edge of a photograph sticking out from the little plastic section for pictures. She flipped the plastic open and all the teller receipts fluttered out. The picture was way, way in the back.

  She scooped up the receipts again hurriedly and slid out the picture. It was old, black and white, and there were palm trees and water in the background. Florida, she thought. Or maybe the Caribbean. The man’s hair was combed in a style reminiscent of the early sixties. He wore baggy khakis and a T-shirt. A pack of cigarettes was stuck into one rolled-up sleeve. He had a wide, infectious, boyish grin.

  A kid stood beside him, holding a small fish. Carly looked closer and her heart kicked. The boy was Jack.

  For that matter, now that she thought about it, the man looked a great deal like him also.

  There was no woman in the picture, and there were no other pictures in the wallet. Despite the fact that both the man and boy were smiling, Carly felt an overwhelming sadness.

  She replaced the picture carefully and slid the wallet back behind the cushions again. She felt oddly shaken, even as she felt relieved.

  Chapter 6

  Jack felt eyes on the back of his head as he rode around the paddock. He had lost sight of Scorpion a moment ago when he had turned a corner—the assassin was somewhere behind him, and he didn’t like that much at all. Now he was sure that the man was watching him, perhaps wondering if and where he had seen him before.

  Cold spilled through him. Jack stiffened. The split-eared gelding felt it and moved faster.

  “Whoa, there, you ugly old beast.”

  Then they turned another corner, and he realized that it was Carly’s daughter sitting on the fence, staring at him. “Hey,” he said as he passed her.

  “Hi.”

  He reined in. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, nothing,” she said too fast, too innocently.

  “You coming with us to Kansas?” he asked, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say, and it was easier to keep Scorpion in sight if he was sitting here instead of riding around with him.

  Holly wrinkled her nose. “It’s boring.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t tell that to somebody who’s paying a whole lot of money to do it.”

  “Oh.” She thought about it, then she scrunched her face up. “Anyway, my mom’s probably going to make me.”

  Jack managed not to laugh at her expression, and was a little startled to find that he even wanted to. The kid was a pistol. “It’s rough being young, isn’t it?” he said finally. “Having to do all those things you don’t want to do?”

  Holly’s eyes widened into full-blown adoration. Uh-oh, Jack thought. If there was one thing he knew about himself, it was that he was nobody’s hero.

  “You got any kids?” she asked suddenly.

  Jack scowled. “No.”

  “No?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” he asked, feeling absurdly defensive.

  “Well, you’re old.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “What I mean, is, almost everybody your age has kids.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “How come?”

  Because I’d never do to a kid what my parents did to me. The thought fla
shed at him for the first time in a very long time, and it still brought a tense, residual pain.

  “Because I’m not married,” he said shortly.

  Holly brightened. “That’s good.”

  “Yeah?” he asked warily. “How come?”

  Because if he didn’t have a wife, Holly thought, and if he didn’t already have kids, then maybe he would want some. She grinned, thinking about finding her mom in his room, and about the way they’d both hung out in the kitchen last night after everybody else had gone to bed, except they hadn’t stayed there very long. But still, she thought, it was a start.

  “I think my mom likes you,” she blurted.

  Double uh-oh. There was no way to tell her that liking wasn’t exactly what was going on here, Jack thought. Nope, it was just good, basic, sexual attraction rearing its provocative little head in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “Your mom’s doing just fine without liking anybody,” he said flatly, gathering up his reins again. On that note, he thought, it was probably best to end this little tea party.

  Holly looked crestfallen and he felt a stir of absurd guilt for dashing her pipe dreams.

  “I wish she wasn’t, is all,” Holly went on wistfully. “I just wish I had a dad.”

  Jack shifted uncomfortably in his saddle. “Sometimes it’s better not to have one,” he said finally.

  “Like when?”

  “It’s better never to have one than to have one and lose him.” He finally managed to turn his horse away from her. “You can’t miss something you never had, right?”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  This had all started when people had begun sending their kids to preschool before they were even five, Jack thought sourly. Now the little urchins were way too smart for their own good.

  “Nothing happened to me,” he said shortly.

  “Do you have a dad?”

  “No.”

  “Ever? Did you ever have one?”

  “Until I was ten. Listen, kiddo, your mom’s going to come out here any minute and she’s going to be fried if I’m not going around in these silly little circles. Catch you later.”