by Sheryl Lynn
“You’re right, you need help. I’ll figure out a way to pay him.”
Joey clamped his lips tight. For a moment he looked like a bronco in midbuck who realized he’d thrown his rider.
He wore a man’s body, but inside he was still a boy. He’d loved their grandfather completely. As far as Joey was concerned, Garth Rifkin had walked on water and no man living could hold a candle to him. Losing Grandpa and the ranch was a double blow that still had him reeling. Emily desperately wanted him to understand neither she nor Grandpa had betrayed him.
The telephone rang, and both of them jumped. Emily picked up the handset. A mechanical voice in-formed her of a collect call; would she accept the charges? Even before the caller spoke his name, Emily knew Tuff was calling from the jail.
“No, absolutely not, I will not accept the charges.” She hung up with a bang.
“Tuff’s calling me, not you,” Joey said.
“And I’m paying for the calls. He can write a letter.” She hurried out of the kitchen before they lapsed into another squabble.
Joey called to her back, “He wouldn’t be in jail in the first place if you hadn’t called the law! It’s all your fault. Everyone knows you hate him. You and the sheriff are out to get him.”
Sometimes she felt engaged in a struggle for Joey’s very soul, with Tuff being the devil tempting the impressionable boy with shiny vice and easy money.
If she could find evidence Tuff was indeed a murderer, then the struggle would end. Joey would realize the truth, and Tuff would go away to prison, out of their lives forever.
A shower did much to cool her body and temper. She combed her hair, leaving it hanging down her back to dry loose. She dressed in a pair of ragged cutoffs and a gray knit halter. Barefoot, she went downstairs to start supper.
Reb Tremaine sat at the kitchen table.
He looked her up and down, making her aware of her bare legs and bare belly. The halter was more modest than a bikini bra and didn’t expose any cleavage, but she felt underdressed anyway. Her belly muscles contracted.
She faltered, wanting to run upstairs and throw on a long shirt and blue jeans. Wanted to run away from those bright blue eyes that seemed to strip her naked, exposing her loneliness.
She strode determinedly to the refrigerator. The kitchen belonged to her—her turf, her rules. She’d dress any darn way she pleased. “I guess you’re hired, Mr. Tremaine, but in case Joey—”
“Reb,” he said, his voice low but strong.
“Pardon?”
“‘Mister’ doesn’t fit. Call me Reb.”
She pulled a bowl of chicken marinating in buttermilk from the refrigerator. “Reb. Let’s get a few things straight. I own the Double Bar R, not Joey. I’m not rich, so the pay is lousy and there aren’t any benefits.” She pointed out the window at a ramshackle log cabin nestled in the shade of the cottonwood trees. “That’s the bunkhouse. You stay there. It’s a mess, so you’ll have to clean it up. I don’t have time. When you come in my house, your hands and boots best be clean. Other than for meals, you stay out of here unless you’re invited. Joey’s your boss, and so is Claude Longo. He’s the manager.” She pointed east. “He lives on the other side of the ridge near the cattle pens. He’s an old bear, so if he says jump, don’t wonder if he means it.”
“Whatever you say, Emily.”
“That’s ‘Mrs. Farraday’ to you. And don’t you ever mess with me. I have enough problems. If you screw up just once, you’ll be out of here so fast you’ll think a tornado grabbed you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her high-handedness should have chased him away. She decided he must be desperate for work. Except he didn’t look desperate or even annoyed. His calm acceptance made her aware of taking out her frustration with Joey on him. Shabby behavior, wholly beneath her.
She slid damp curls off her cheeks. “It’s been a long day,” she said lamely. “I’m not usually so…grouchy.”
Reb Tremaine smiled. A closed mouth, lopsided pull of wide, supple lips. A sensual, promising smile full of ancient knowledge. A hot thump hit her low in the belly again, and her chest tightened, making her heartbeat sound against her eardrums. Fleeting images tantalized her: his mouth hot and wet and hungry against her breast; his long-fingered hands hard against her backside, clutching her thighs. She slid her tongue over suddenly dry lips. The temperature seemed to rise twenty degrees, and a thin line of sweat seeped between her breasts. She turned abruptly, focused on the chicken—and felt his gaze searing her back.
“Joey says you cook fine. You ran a restaurant.”
A nice voice, low without harshness.
She put a clamp on her wayward thoughts. Heat and worry overtired her, played tricks with her headthat was all, nothing more. Daniel was still her husband in spirit, and she didn’t want to let him go. Someday, maybe, but not today, and certainly not with a silky-voiced drifter with heel-shot boots and sexy eyes.
“My husband owned the restaurant. I cooked for him.”
“Joey says your fried chicken can make a mime sing.”
Emily glanced over her shoulder, wishing Joey would say such nice things to her face. Reb still smiled. She liked his smile. It would be easy to like him. A dangerous cowpoke, she decided, in more ways than one. She kept her smile to herself.
When the meal was on the table, Joey appeared. Head down, gaze fixed on his plate, Joey ate as if it were his last meal, piling in triple helpings of fried chicken and enough fixings to feed four normal people. Reb did her cooking justice, as well.
Later Joey led Reb to the bunkhouse. Emily watched them through the kitchen window. When Joey opened the door and turned on the lights, she grimaced. The roof leaked, the floors were buckled and the bathroom was rusted with cracked fixtures and a stubborn sink. The old cabin should have been torn down long ago.
Joey and Reb emerged, lugging a mattress. They propped it against the porch railing and beat it, raising a cloud of dust. She lifted her gaze to the ceiling. Two bedrooms sat empty upstairs. Even considering having Reb living in the house, separated from her by a thin wall, made her shudder. Weakness settled in her knees.
Absolutely no strangers in her house. Period.
THE NEXT MORNING Reb appeared at the kitchen door at six o’clock sharp. She gestured for him to come inside, but kept her eyes averted. She’d had an interesting dream last night involving a hot tub filled with champagne, a room glowing from a thousand candles and Reb Tremaine.
As he passed near her, she smelled soap. His face looked warm from a fresh shave. His hair was still damp and it gleamed blue black, like the shiny wing of a magpie. He looked more handsome today than he had yesterday. Even handsomer than in her dream.
“Good morning, Mrs. Farraday,” he said, taking his seat. As he scooted his chair to the table, his shoulders strained the thin cotton of his long-sleeved shirt.
She bit back the urge to apologize for the old bunkhouse. After all, she had warned him. “Did you sleep okay?”
“Like I had a clean conscience.”
Reb’s dry, teasing tone made her smile.
From his seat at the table, Joey looked up sharply. She guessed he begrudged her being friendly with the hired hand.
She served up a breakfast of bacon, sausage, fried potatoes, biscuits, gravy and scrambled eggs. Joey drank a quart of milk and half a pot of coffee. Reb drank orange juice and the other half of the coffee. Neither man spoke while he ate, which suited Emily. She had other things on her mind.
Joey finished and stood. He ate like a grizzly bear, but he was lean as a greyhound and his hard-ridden clothing fit like a rumpled old skin.
“We’ll be over at the holding pens with Claude,” he said. “Have to repair the chutes.”
She stacked the plates. “I’ll bring you lunch.”
“You going out searching again today?”
His question caught her off guard. She’d made no secret about believing Tuff had murdered a man andburied the body on the ranch. This
was the first time Joey had brought up the subject, though. He’d steadfastly insisted Tuff was guilty of nothing more than rowdiness and the only reason he ever got into trouble was because the sheriff disliked him. Emily drew her head warily aside. “Why?”
For a moment it looked as if Joey had something to say. He grabbed his broad-brimmed hat off a peg, and jammed the hat on his head. “Just be careful,” he muttered as he walked toward the door.
Reb picked up his hat. “Thank you for breakfast, ma’am.”
She met his eyes. A mistake. Until he’d shown up on her front porch, she hadn’t been aware of missing a man in her life. Now she yearned for the feel of a warm body by her side. She wanted to feel hot skin against skin, to grow giddy with the heady power gained from seeing helpless lust in a man’s eyes. She hungered for the taste of desire and the intoxicating scents.
The longer Reb stared into her eyes, the more she felt convinced he recognized her loneliness and her need.
Only after the door had closed behind him did she notice she was holding her breath. Light-headed, she swiped her wrist across her brow. It was only six-thirty in the morning and already far too hot.
Chapter Two
In her bedroom Emily sat at her desk. Morning sun battered the bank of three windows, and oven-dry air seeped through the screens. Colorado summers were blessedly short, but as fierce as they were beautiful. Heat surrounded the house like a blanket and climbed the stairs to fill the bedrooms. Emily shook her head against daydreams of ice blue swimming pools and shimmering waterfalls.
She picked up a bill from the Humbolt hardware store. “Past due” had been scrawled in red ink across the letterhead. “Final notice.” It had arrived in yesterday’s mail. Emily hadn’t a clue as to what had happened to the original bill.
She carried it downstairs, called the hardware store and asked to speak to the owner.
“Hello, Mr. Bollander, Emily Farraday here,” she said when he came on the line. “I have a bill for eight hundred and forty-three dollars. It says past due, but I don’t know what it’s for.”
“Tools.” His voice held a harsh note she was beginning to accept as a regional patois, at least in regard to her. All her grandfather’s old friends treated her as if she’d murdered him in his sleep.
“Mr. Bollander, I’m doing my best to square my grandfather’s accounts, but I need to know what I’m paying for. I can’t find the original receipts.”
“What are you saying, young lady? I’m sending you bills for nothing? I’ll have you know, Garth Rifkin and I did business nigh fifty years. He never had no complaints about the way I run my outfit. Do you?”
She had plenty, but ignored the bait. “No, sir,” she said, struggling to keep her manner mild. “But I have to keep records for tax purposes. I’m more than willing to pay the bill. That’s not the issue. All I’m asking is if you could please send me copies of the receipts so I can reconcile the books.”
“Claude signed for most of it. Talk to him.”
She supressed a groan. After her grandfather’s first stroke, he’d turned over the purchasing and bookkeeping to Claude Longo. Claude considered calculators and computers potentially dangerous contraptions, and his head figuring left much to be desired. When he remembered to give her receipts or bills, they’d usually been residing in his pockets for weeks.
Realizing further attempts to straighten out this matter over the telephone would serve only the store owner’s twisted sense of justice, she gave up. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Bollander.”
“Don’t you be taking no more time, young lady. I want that bill paid in full. I give credit where I think it’s due, but you ain’t due.”
“You’ll get your money.”
“Darn right I will, one way or t’other.” He snorted loudly. “Thieves don’t get far in this country. You remember that.” He hung up on her.
“Thieves don’t get far in this country,” she mocked at the dead connection.
When Grandpa died, the ranch had been in debt, behind on its taxes, out of insurance and missing almost a third of the land and assets named in the will. Yet people thought she’d inherited a fortune. Just as they thought her husband had been rich and had left her a wealthy widow. The few people who knew the truth about her finances weren’t, unfortunately, the type of people who spent endless hours engaged in gossip.
The unfairness of it all dogged her as she climbed the stairs to her bedroom and wrote out a check to the hardware store. Anticipating the argument she’d have with Claude over the receipts gave her a stomachache. She paid the telephone bill, too. It included nearly two hundred dollars in collect calls from the jail. Her stomachache turned into a cramp. Two hundred dollars would buy an automatic dishwasher, and cut down on the hours she spent in the kitchen. Even locked up, Tuff was a menace. She wondered if there was a way to block his calls completely.
After she’d finished paying the bills, she escaped the hot house. Hoeing weeds out of the garden and picking beans and lettuce for supper loosened some of the tension in her neck and shoulders. Anxiety lingered like a quivering, aching little animal low in her chest. Tuff had to stay in jail while awaiting sentencing on a drunk-and-disorderly charge, but he could get probation and be out in a week.
She looked to the forest on the far side of the creek. Ponderosa pines towered over stands of oak and mountain ash. A few stately spruces gleamed slate blue under the harsh sunlight, and aspen groves made patches of cool white and bright green. Treacherous beauty. The forest was full of small caves and rock formations where Tuff could have hidden a body.
When the chores were done, she caught Strawberry and led her into the barn. While she saddled the horse, Copper joined her. He sat, wagging his tail, his eyes bright with anticipation. Being of a lazier temperament, the roan mare grunted pitifully while Emily tightened the cinch.
“Oh, Strawberry,” Emily said, kneeing the mare in the ribs to make her stop holding her breath. “Maybe you’re right. There are a million places where Tuff could have buried a body. It’s useless trying to find it.”
Except Tuff knew she knew. The first thing he’d do when he got out of jail would be kill her. He’d bury her up in the mountains so no one would ever find her body.
Something was missing from inside her older brother. Whether from an accident of birth, or some secret terror twisting his psyche, he lacked whatever it was that made a normal person realize actions had consequences. Tuff didn’t care about whom or what he hurt. No, he certainly wouldn’t think twice about hurting her. Even worse, Emily doubted if anyone would spare two minutes looking for her.
TUFF RIFKIN WANTED Emily dead. “Disappear her. Make it look like she ran off.”
The way Tuff had said those words—with a broad smile and his black eyes as flat and soulless as daubs of paint—played over and over in Reb’s head.
Seated in the old-fashioned kitchen, surrounded by the savory smell of roast beef and garlic, Reb watched Emily stir gravy. Each movement of her arm caused an accompanying little twitch in her left hip, as if she moved to some inner music.
Disappear her. The phrase had been spoken with a smile that belonged in Hollywood. Tuff Rifkin was a good-looking man with a lean, sculpted face, expensively barbered brown curls and large white teeth. He had an easy charm about him, as personable as a politician on a campaign and as quick-witted as a con artist. He appeared to be enjoying his stay in jail, treating the county lockup like a five-star hotel while lording it over the stone-faced deputy as if maitre d’ were part of the deputy’s job description. Remembering the way the deputy had wordlessly brought the canned sodas Tuff requested made Reb want to laugh in amazement.
Emily glanced over her shoulder, her face solemn.
Her drop-dead gorgeousness was an unexpected twist. Reb had never taken a job before where the target owned the ability to steal his breath and muddy his thinking.
She turned back to the stove, and he lowered his gaze to her suntanned legs. Muscles made alluring curv
es in her calves before tapering sharply to sculpted ankles. Her thighs were long and smooth, firmly feminine.
Tuff had crudely stated, “Got a body you hate to waste on a relative, you know?” As if a hit man needed the added incentive of wasting a beautiful body.
She carefully brought the pan of gravy to the table. She set it on a trivet in front of her brother, and urged him to begin serving himself.
Her face matched her body. Framed by a cascade of dark brown curls, it was the winsome, full-mouthed, doe-eyed face of an angel.
Even angels could fall. No sense getting personal when the chances were good he’d have no choice except to take her down. Reb made himself look at his hands resting folded atop the table.
As she slid onto her chair, she gave him a sideways glance and a smile. She handed him a bowl of mashed potatoes. “Dig in, Reb.” She’d put food on her plate only after he and Joey had taken what they wanted.
Her hospitality shamed him. The rise of conscience surprised him as much as it disturbed him. Targets, he flung harshly at the small, insistent inner voice, noth ing but targets who deserve what they get.
“Do you have gloves?” she asked. She looked pointedly at his right hand.
Reb turned his hand palm up, revealing an angry red blister on the web between his thumb and forefinger. He’d spent most of the day hammering nails into hard, resisting wood. “I forgot them.”
She gave her brother a reproachful glance. Joey shoveled carrots and onions onto his plate. She’s got sad eyes, Reb thought, and immediately tried to squash it. He didn’t want his thinking traveling in that direction, didn’t want to imagine what might make her smile or laugh. Or what might make her eyes sparkle with joy—or desire.
“I bet you won’t forget them again,” she said. “I’ll bandage that for you after supper.”