Undercover Cowboy

by Beverly Bird

  Jack took the bullet near his first scar, and it made his own shot go wide. He felt it as he had the last time, pain exploding, then receding. Cold, then fire, then cold again. It threw him back, sprawling him in the dirt, but this time, painfully, he was able to push himself upright again.

  Carly screamed, then she helped him to sit. She was saying something to him. He heard her as though from very far away. But Brett’s voice seemed clear, thunderous, growing even louder as the assassin came down the slope toward them.

  “Drop your gun, Jack,” he said gently. “You can’t shoot it. You know you can’t shoot me. I’ve been your ‘buddy’ for too long now. Drop your gun and hand Carly over. You’re at a disadvantage now, my friend. Don’t make anyone get hurt. Anyone but you, that is. Come on, be a hero.”

  Jack dragged his arm up again. At least, he thought he did. But it felt as though there were no bone in there, no muscle inside any longer.

  “That’s always been your problem, Gemini,” Brett went on conversationally. “It’s the single thing you really do wrong. You don’t shoot fast enough. You always have to think about it first. You’re too soft.”

  He had to shoot now, Jack thought. It was all that mattered. If he died later, so be it, but he had to get this one precious shot off. He had to kill him.

  His gun was too heavy. Jack couldn’t find the trigger. It took all his strength to remain sitting up, even though Carly braced him. She was shaking, and each of her tremors seemed to rock through him as well, bringing excruciating pain.

  Jack moved his neck, but he couldn’t quite see her clearly anymore. His vision pulsed oddly, graying and fuzzing over with each beat of his heart.

  Plant the tree, he thought. Even if you die, tell her. Tell her you love her. She needs to know that. You both need for her to know.

  But in the end it was still easier for him to find the trigger. He finally shot and a stunned look of disbelief crossed Brett’s face as the assassin staggered backward.

  “You did it!” Carly cried.

  Jack shot again, and one more time for good measure. Then he sank slowly back into the dirt, his strength and his adrenaline gone.

  Of course he had done it. The assassin had overlooked one very important, very driving factor.

  There was no way in hell he was going to let him take the cowgirl.

  Chapter 20

  Carly watched the minute hand on the desk clock in her office. When it finally slid down to the six, she reached for the telephone again, feeling fragile.

  She’d been calling every half hour. She intended to keep calling until they told her what she needed to know.

  The line picked up. “Doctor’s Hospital.”

  “I’m inquiring about a patient’s condition,” she said in a rush. “Jack Fain, and no, I’m not family.” She’d said the same thing four times already and knew the routine. But this time she got a different answer. “Mr. Fain has been released.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Have a good evening.”

  “No! Wait!” She sat straighter in the desk chair. “Fain,” she repeated. “F-A-I-N.”

  “Yes, ma’am. He’s been released.”

  “No. You’ve got the wrong patient.” She dragged in air, steadying herself. “He was still in surgery thirty minutes ago.”

  There was a short silence, broken only by the click of computer keys in the background. “He was in recovery thirty minutes ago,” the woman said finally.

  “But you told me—never mind.” Surgery, recovery, what difference did that make? “People don’t walk out of a hospital the same day they’re operated on!”

  This time the operator’s pause was longer. “No, one wouldn’t think so.”

  “So will you please check again? I just need to know how he’s doing.”

  “Hold on.” Hollow silcnce filled the line. Carly eased back in her chair again, trying to relax.

  But she couldn’t. She had a very bad feeling about this. Had he died after all, in surgery? Everything in her chest clenched.

  She should have gone to the hospital with him. She had intended to, but when the helicopters had finally arrived, they had been full of men in suits who’d monopolized her attention. They’d loaded Jack into one chopper and Brett into another, and they’d begun grilling her six ways to Sunday about what she had witnessed. By the time she’d grown angry and exasperated with them, one of the choppers lifted off again, taking Jack away.

  They’d brought her back to the Draw in one of the others. Now she sat in a silence that had an eerie feeling to it. It was pure and too perfect, except for the monotonous ticking of the clock.

  Carly waited for the operator to come back on the line. Come on, lady, come on. But the line remained empty and her mind wandered again.

  Holly and all the others were still in Buffalo. Theresa had taken the truck to pick up those who wanted to come back to the ranch. Michael would make travel arrangements for those who simply wanted to go home.

  Life would go on, Carly supposed.

  In the next moment she knew that hers was going to go on without Jack Fain. The operator came back on the line, and her words sent a jolt through her, the kind that hit her right in the throat then reverberated downward until there was nothing left inside her, no air, just a shimmering, hollow sense of loss.

  “My records are correct, ma’am. Mr. Fain is gone from this hospital. He was transferred twenty minutes ago.”

  “Transferred,” she whispered.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t have that information.”

  Carly hung up very slowly, without pressing her. She knew she wouldn’t get any more answers. She doubted very seriously if the woman even knew anything more herself. Apparently, Jack’s “agency” took care of its own.

  There are organizations that only the President knows of.

  He’d been transferred.

  He was gone, without a trace.

  The ache was worse than she had thought it would be. The emptiness was deeper than she had thought it could go. She’d told herself she could handle this, but she hadn’t been prepared for this terrible sense of loss.

  Michael made a surprise trip to the ranch on the following Saturday to help pick up the pieces of his ill-fated tourist idea. Carly sat in the kitchen, watching him scribble on a notepad. He was fair-haired like their mother, handsome and tightmouthed, clearly hating the necessity of being back in that house. Carly made a snap decision not to tell him what Rawley had told her about his scholarship. It would only add to his bitterness. And for what? Gabriel was gone.

  But there were other things, she thought, that really needed to be resolved and put to rest.

  Holly came to her room that night after Michael left. On her way down the hall to her own room, she paused in Carly’s doorway. She dragged her bare toe along the carpet and finally crossed her arms over her chest in a belligerent gesture that Carly knew all too well.

  Carly groaned inwardly, but Holly’s voice was soft, without any of the accusation that usually went with the arm-crossing.

  “Do you think Mr. Fain will come back?”

  Carly flinched. “I don’t know.”

  “He might come back.”

  “Probably not, though.” Maybe he would find himself another Scorpion to chase. But she knew better than to allow herself to hope he would come back to the panhandle. She knew better than to yearn, to hope, to ache for a man to love her.

  “But he liked you,” Holly pointed out helpfully.

  Not enough. Carly decided to take the bull by the horns. “I think you and I are going to be alone together for a long, long time, honey,” she said carefully. “And maybe it’s best if we both just…well, you know, look at the bright side of it.”

  Holly’s forehead creased. “That’s what he said. He said to make the best of things.”

  Carly’s heart thumped. “He did?” Apparently the two of them had had some cozy chats that she didn’t know
about.

  “Yeah,” Holly answered. “So what’s the bright side?”

  Carly thought fast. “Well, there won’t be any whiskers in the bathroom sink after some guy shaves.”

  Holly surprised her by laughing. “Only a slob would do that.”

  “There are no tears,” she went on. No laughter. “No arguments.” So you can never win one. She blew out her breath and shook her head. “Never mind.” Then she thought of something else that really needed to be said.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about your…your father, and, well…I think he really did love me.” In his own sick, twisted fashion, she thought. “Holly, I didn’t drive him away. I want you to know that. He just…he didn’t want to live here in the middle of nowhere, I guess. He had bigger…dreams.”

  Holly blinked in surprise. “He did? Like what?”

  “I’m not sure, but he wanted me to go to Dallas with him.”

  “So how come you didn’t go?” Holly got that accusatory look on her face again.

  “Because your grandfather needed me here.” And that, too, was true, as far as it went. No matter what else Gabriel Castagne had been, he had loved his ranch, had been fiercely possessive of his family, and Carly knew that he had loved her mother. So she would remember that, and work at putting the rest of it behind her.

  “That’s it? That’s all it was?” Holly asked incredulously.

  “Yeah.”

  “So how come you didn’t tell me before? How come you just said he left us?”

  “I thought you were too young to understand.”

  Her face turned mutinous.

  “And it hurt me to think about it, to talk about it,” Carly went on.

  Holly’s glare flickered, then settled into a more mild scowl.

  “And…I had to figure it out for myself.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Carly smiled softly. “You don’t have to.”

  Holly finally shrugged. “Well, I’m going to bed.”

  And that, Carly thought, was that. Oh, to be as resilient as a kid!

  Holly turned away from the door, then she paused again. “Mom, I really think Mr. Fain is going to come back. He doesn’t like to wear a suit.”

  Carly sighed. She didn’t even want to know where that had come from. And she’d scrubbed her heart clean enough for one night. She wasn’t going to try to explain to Holly all the many reasons why Jack probably would not return.

  “We’ll see,” she said emptily.

  To her surprise, Holly laughed again. “See, I told you you always say that. Yeah, I think I’ll just wait and see.”

  Carly was standing on top of a hundred bales of hay on the back of a flatbed truck when Holly proved to be right. She looked up and saw a car pull into the barnyard, and it wasn’t a rental one this time, unless the Oklahoma companies were suddenly renting white Lexuses with Virginia tags.

  It was the heat, she told herself. That was why she felt faint. It was all this exertion in the dry, thin air. That was why she suddenly found it hard to breathe. She had absolutely no explanation for the tears that tried to sting her eyes.

  Jack got out of the car and shut the door lazily. He crossed his arms over his chest and moved toward her slowly. He had shaved, and he wasn’t wearing a suit.

  It was her first bizarre impression. She had gotten so used to looking at his gradually growing beard all those days on the trail that somewhere along the line she had forgotten what had first appealed to her about him. Now she saw again the jaded character etched into little lines around his eyes, that I’ve-seenit-all-and-I-prefer-to-think-it’s-funny set to his mouth.

  Carly moved carefully to the edge of the hay to look down at him. “Lost?” she asked when she could manage her voice.

  One corner of his mouth kicked, then it moved into a full-blown smile. “Not now.”

  Carly’s heart slammed. Don’t read anything into it, don’t you dare. She’d had her fill of seeing what she wanted to see, of hearing what she wanted to hear, and hiding from the rest. She wouldn’t play that game anymore.

  So what was he doing here?

  She tugged her leather gloves up carefully and bent to get a good grip on the wire holding one of the bales together. She had to do something. She couldn’t look at him anymore. She couldn’t bear it.

  “Are you all healed?” she demanded.

  He’d almost forgotten the mental dexterity it required to keep up with her. Jack finally grinned. “More or less. It’s been four weeks.”

  “Thirty-two days, but who’s counting? Catch.”

  She swung the bale up and outward. It sailed through the air toward him and caught him squarely in the chest. It barreled him over, landing on his legs, flattening him on the hard, dusty ground.

  Jack sat up, spitting hay dust, gaping at her. “What was that for?”

  “There’s work to be done and no one to do it. So are you just going to stand there—” looking like heaven “—or are you going to pitch in this time and do something to help?”

  Suddenly he understood. “I’m sorry.”

  “You ought to be.”

  He got up, then he ducked as another bale came sailing toward him. She was really throwing them now. He dodged out of the way of the next one and the next. Well, he thought, she had every right to be angry, but not at him.

  “I couldn’t sway them,” he called up to her. “I did try.”

  “Yeah?” she challenged him. She stopped in midmotion and put her hands on her hips. “Did you point out that the twister—the ‘act of God’—couldn’t have scattered my herd if I had taken them down into that chasm?” Her temper was building. Oh, God, it felt good. For thirty-two days there had been nothing inside her.

  But who was counting?

  “You’re the only one who can tell them that, Jack,” she went on. “And you’ve been God knows where. They couldn’t find you to verify it. That’s what they told me. They think I’m trying to cheat them or something, and they won’t pay me for anything they don’t consider their fault. I’ve never cheated anyone in my life! They said their assassin didn’t scatter my herd, that the tornado did it. So that’s that. That herd was one of the last hopes I had.” She had finally been forced to file for bankruptcy, a reorganization plan. Michael was working frantically to use the stay of execution to save them…somehow.

  Jack understood then that the IRS hadn’t been the only wolf at her door. Losing those steers had blown her whole house down.

  And she had let him do it. She’d let him keep them on high ground, even knowing it would break her.

  “Why?” he asked hoarsely.

  She didn’t pretend to misunderstand him, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Well, I sure didn’t do it for your employer.”

  Yeah, Jack thought, he definitely loved her.

  “We’ll get it back,” he managed.

  “What?”

  “The money for the herd.”

  “It’s too late now.”

  “No.” It was never too late, and you were never too old. If nothing else, he had learned that. “We’ll just threaten to sue and raise a general clamor. They need an excuse before they admit culpability. That’s the way it works.”

  We? No, she definitely wouldn’t read anything into that. Carly felt her eyes begin to burn again. She shook her head and snatched her gloves off to rub them.

  “Forget it. You can’t beat Uncle Sam.”

  “Uncle Sam is just like everyone else. He won’t give an inch until he has to.”

  “Whatever.”

  Jack cautiously closed the distance between himself and the truck again. “Are you okay?” She looked different, he thought. Thinner than usual. And there were dark smudges under her eyes.

  Carly shrugged. She wanted to touch him. She balled her hands into fists and hugged herself, sticking them under her arms so she wouldn’t leave the flatbed and give in to the urge.

  “Is it money?” he asked. “Is that what’s wrong?” />
  She hesitated, shook her head. “Not entirely.”

  “What then?”

  Why were they talking about this? she wondered wildly. She didn’t want to talk about her father. She wanted to know why he was here. But she heard herself say, “Maybe I’ve just been wondering if all this is worth the fuss.” She waved a hand.

  All this? The ranch? “You never struck me as a quitter,” he said cautiously.

  “You don’t know me.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “No. You were the one who said you couldn’t get to know somebody—” love somebody “—within a few days.”

  She didn’t love him.

  She didn’t need him.

  She started to cry.

  At first Jack was just appalled. Then he was stunned. She had cried before. But not like this. Never like this, in great chugging breaths, fighting it, dragging her arm across her eyes. He climbed up to her, but she scrambled away. He finally caught up with her near the cab, pinned her down on the hay and leaned over her to look down into her green eyes.

  “Where is everybody?” He struggled to hold her.

  “Who?” she snapped.

  “Holly, Theresa, the cowboys. Everybody.”

  “Here and there.”

  “On the ranch?”

  “No. Laid off, in town, all over. Why? Get off me.”

  Good enough, Jack thought. He closed his mouth over hers.

  Carly fought him harder. “Are you crazy?” she demanded, tearing her mouth away.

  “Nope. I might have been, but then I found you.”

  “Leave me alone!” She wouldn’t listen to this. She didn’t dare.

  “Is that what you want?”

  No, no, no! She set her jaw stubbornly, refusing to answer.

  “I didn’t think so,” he murmured.

  He found her mouth again, and this time she didn’t twist away. There was so much he needed to say, so much he had to tell her. But he’d always been rotten at putting his heart into words, and he didn’t want to change. He just wanted someone who understood him in spite of it. Someone who knew him better than he knew himself. And now, he thought, he had found her.