Cavanaugh Cowboy

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Yeah.” As she started to get back in behind the steering wheel, Sully told her almost conversationally, “But if you happen to see buzzards circling this area, I’d take it as a personal favor if you came back.”

  Rae looked at him. “By then it’ll probably be too late,” she answered matter-of-factly.

  The next moment, the sound of the truck’s engine starting up pierced the otherwise quiet atmosphere. Two minutes later, she was gone.

  Sully looked at the posts that were lined up on the ground beside carefully cut lengths of lumber, a sledgehammer, a shovel and what appeared to be enough boxes of nails to build a small city.

  It looked as if he had everything he needed, he thought. Time to earn his keep. Sully picked up the shovel and got started.

  * * *

  This work was hotter than he’d thought it would be. Sully held out as long as he could, but when rivulets of sweat all but sealed his shirt to his body, he peeled the shirt off and then continued working on the fence bare-chested.

  That was the way Rae found him when she returned a little while later.

  Her breath involuntarily caught in her throat as she absorbed the sight: the stranger’s body glistening with perspiration, the muscles in his upper arms straining with each movement he made. The man had abdominal muscles that looked as if they had been chiseled out of rock, and for the first time since she was fifteen years old, Rae’s mind suddenly went numb.

  The next moment, because there was someone else in the truck with her, she managed to slowly regulate her breathing and collect herself.

  “Who’s that?” Jack Rawlings, the passenger in the truck, asked.

  “Someone who’s not afraid of work,” she replied, taking no pains to hide her displeasure with her passenger.

  Getting out of the truck, she strode up behind Sully. “Maybe you should put that shirt back on, Cavanaugh,” she told him.

  Caught off guard, Sully swung around. He looked at Rae and then at the man with her. “You have a dress code out here?” he asked the woman, keeping an innocent expression on his face.

  “No, other than making sure you keep your pants on,” she informed him. “But that sun is pretty merciless around this time of day. If you don’t put your shirt back on, you’re probably going to watch your skin start peeling off before evening.”

  He shrugged off her so-called concern. “Don’t worry about it. I’m pretty resilient.” Sully looked around the foreman’s shoulder at the man standing just behind her, taking all this. He made an assumption. “I thought you said there were two other men working on the ranch.”

  “There were. There are,” Rae said, correcting herself. “But apparently the other one—Warren—decided to take off, at least according to Rawlings here.”

  “He did,” the other man, a rather dusty, jowly-looking man who appeared to be somewhere in his late forties, said. The years hadn’t been kind to him, and he looked as if he knew it and resented the fact. “When I woke up this morning, he was gone.”

  Taking a time-out, Sully leaned against his shovel. “Are his clothes gone?”

  Jack Rawlings looked at him blankly. “What?”

  “Warren’s clothes,” Sully repeated. “Are they gone, too?”

  The man looked irritated. “I dunno. I guess so,” he mumbled. And then he seemed to take offense. “Hey, I don’t go looking through a man’s things,” he protested, looking at Rae rather than this offensive newcomer. “That’s private.”

  “You’re right,” Sully agreed. “I just meant that if this missing wrangler didn’t take his things with him, maybe he’s not really missing. Maybe he’s just somewhere else on the ranch.” He directed his conversation to Rae. “It’s a big ranch.”

  That was all relative, Rae thought. “Not compared to the other ranches around here.”

  He wasn’t familiar with the area, but he supposed that she would know better than he did. But that didn’t change his initial assumption.

  “Still, a man could go somewhere and not be seen.” His eyes swept over the wrangler Rae had brought back with her, and then returned to Rae. “You’ve got several structures from what I can see, not to mention all this wide-open acreage. Could this Warren be on another part of the ranch, doing something you assigned him to do?” Sully asked.

  Rather than answer him, Rae turned her eyes on Rawlings. The wrangler raised his shoulders in complete frustration. “I don’t know. Maybe. All I know is he wasn’t there when I woke up and he didn’t leave me no note to tell me where he was at. Not that he would,” the wrangler added in what Sully took to be disgust.

  “Maybe someone should look around for him before deciding that the man just took off for good,” Sully suggested to Rae, picking up his shovel again. “But that’s just my opinion.”

  “And a pretty good one. You heard the man,” Rae said, turning toward the wrangler. “Start looking.”

  “What, he’s my new boss now?” Rawlings asked resentfully, jerking his thumb at Sully and looking disgruntled.

  “No, but I am, and I just gave you a direct order,” Rae pointed out, looking at Rawlings expectantly.

  “That’s going to take me forever on foot,” Rawlings protested.

  Rae took off a key from her key ring and then held it out to the wrangler. “Go back and get the other truck. And try not to drive it into a ditch,” she warned. “It belongs to Miss Joan.”

  “What she gonna do if something happens to it?” Rawlings asked sarcastically.

  “Trust me,” Rae answered, looking up into his eyes. “You do not want to find out.”

  Rawlings frowned as he took the key from her. “I’ll be careful.”

  “Wise decision,” she told him.

  Taking the key and putting it into his pocket, Rawlings started to go off in the direction of the bunkhouse. Just before he left, the wrangler glanced over his shoulder and glared at the newcomer. When Sully glanced his way, Rawlings ducked down his head and quickened his pace.

  “I don’t think I made any points with your man,” Sully told her as he got back to digging holes for the posts.

  Although she didn’t want to, Rae found herself staring at the way the man’s muscles strained and seemed to bulge with every movement he made with the shovel. It took considerable effort to draw her eyes away.

  She replayed what he had asked earlier when Rawlings had told her that the other man had taken off. It raised questions in her mind.

  “What did you say you did before you came here?” she asked.

  “I didn’t say.” Pausing for a second, he spared her a glance. “You didn’t ask,” he reminded her in case Rae thought he was being flippant.

  “I’m asking now,” she told him, waiting.

  “A little of this, a little of that,” he said vaguely.

  Some people reacted strangely when they found out that he was a detective with the Aurora police department, so it wasn’t the first thing he volunteered when he was asked.

  “Do this and that have a name?” Rae asked him pointedly.

  “Yes,” he answered, his breath growing a little short as he dug yet another hole. He was grateful that there were only two more holes left to dig.

  “So are you going to tell me what you did, or are you waiting for me to say ‘pretty please?’” Rae asked. When she saw his mouth curve in a deep smile, she decided she’d had enough of playing games. “What the hell were you?”

  “A detective,” Sully answered. Crossing his arms and resting them on top of the shovel handle, he added, “I still am.”

  Chapter 4

  Rae looked at the man who was working up another sweat before her with renewed interest. “A detective?”

  Because of what he was doing, it took Sully a second before he could answer. “Yes.”

  She tried to reconcile the image of the man before her with the one he’d jus
t told her about.

  “You’re one of those people other people hire to find someone?” she questioned.

  “No,” he explained patiently as he continued digging the last post hole. The ground around here felt as if it was made out of clay. Hard clay. Trying to dig a hole in it was both a challenge and at times felt like exercise in futility.

  With every move he made, he could feel the muscles in his arms vigorously protesting. “I’m one of those people who works for the police department,” he answered.

  That made even less sense to her than her first assumption. “You work for the police department,” she repeated.

  “That’s...what... I...said.”

  Maybe he was in worse shape than he thought, Sully decided. Digging shouldn’t be taking this kind of a toll on him. He stopped for a minute longer to catch his breath and then resumed digging.

  Rae moved around so that she was directly in front of this so-called police detective in wrangler’s clothing. “If you’re telling the truth—”

  He stopped dueling with the cement-like soil to look at her. At this point, he was up for only one battle at a time. It was either digging or matching wits with this foreman.

  “Why would I lie about that?” Sully asked.

  “Okay,” she amended. “You’re a police detective.” She granted him that, although part of her was still dubious. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

  He looked accusingly at the shovel and then decided maybe he was better off digging. With luck, Rae would get tired of this and leave him to do the work.

  “Right now, trying to dig a hole in this soil and wondering what the hell is in it to make it almost completely impenetrable,” he answered.

  Rae frowned, waving away his response. She could see what he was doing, and that wasn’t what she meant. “Sections out here in this area are really hard to dig in, but that’s not the point right now.” Taking hold of the handle of his shovel, she held it fast so he was forced to stop digging altogether—not that he minded all that much. “What are you doing here, Cavanaugh?” she repeated with more feeling. It didn’t make any sense to her, and she hated things that didn’t make sense. “Forever isn’t exactly on the map as a prime vacation spot.”

  “I’m not out here on a vacation,” Sully informed her. “I’m out here to clear my head.”

  “You said you were from California. There have got to be places you could do that in that are closer to home,” Rae pointed out.

  His eyes met hers. She continued looking at him, waiting for an answer. The woman was pushy, he’d give her that. She was also getting on his nerves.

  “Maybe I don’t want to be closer to home,” he countered. “Now, if you’re through interrogating me, I’d like to get back to work.”

  That wasn’t entirely true, he thought, but it was better than butting heads with this woman.

  But Rae refused to back off. “Why don’t you want to be closer to home? What happened?”

  If she still had a home—and a family—nothing would have made her leave. She would have fought to stay. She couldn’t understand someone willingly abandoning his home.

  Okay, he’d been polite enough. Time to mark his territory, Sully thought. “That, Ms. Mulcahy, is none of your business. It has nothing to do with how well I work or how fast I can get things you need done.”

  Annoyed, Rae decided to back off for the time being. She could be patient. She’d get the information she wanted another way.

  “Prickly sort, aren’t you?” she commented. “All right, I’ll leave you to it, then. And when you finish digging that hole, start putting the poles up. I’ll be back later.”

  “Looking forward to it,” Sully told her. There was no emotion in his voice to give her any indication how he actually meant that.

  Rae opened her mouth to make a retort, then decided there was no point. Instead she got into her truck without another word and drove back to the bunkhouse.

  * * *

  After considerable effort, Sully finished digging the last hole. Taking a five-minute break, he next turned his attention to properly sinking the new posts into the holes he had dug.

  He quickly discovered that doing that on his own was a lot more challenging than he’d initially thought. The problem arose because the object was to make sure that the post was straight once the dirt was firmly packed around it.

  After two failures, he tried a third time.

  Sully once again leaned the pole against his shoulder as he grappled with refilling the hole. He had finally gotten the first pole in position when he heard the sound of a truck approaching.

  He blew out a breath, not sure if he was relieved or annoyed at the interruption.

  “Looks like the boss lady’s checking up on me,” he muttered under his breath.

  He would have preferred getting at least one—if not more—of the poles up before Mulcahy came back, but obviously there was nothing he could do about it now, Sully thought.

  However, when the truck pulled up next to him, it wasn’t Rae who got out of the cab. Instead, it was the man she had introduced as Jack Rawlings and another, taller man who got out on the driver’s side.

  Pausing, Sully dragged the back of his wrist across his forehead in an effort to wipe away the sweat before it dripped into his eyes and stung.

  He did a quick assessment of the man next to Rawlings. He was about half a head taller than Rawlings, but he looked even more out of shape. Soft and pudgy-looking—in Sully’s estimation the so-called wrangler appeared as if he would have been more at home behind a desk.

  “I take it you’re the missing wrangler,” Sully said to Rawlings’s companion.

  “Missing?” the man repeated, confused. When he squinted, looking from Sully to Rawlings, his eyes all but disappeared. “I wasn’t missing. I just had something to do, that’s all.” He glanced again at the man beside him, clearly annoyed and yet somewhat afraid of showing it. “You told this guy I was missing?”

  It was apparent that Rawlings didn’t do well with blame. “You weren’t in your bunk when I woke up. How’m I supposed to know you didn’t take off?”

  “The last time I looked, you weren’t my ex-wife,” John Warren all but snapped. He backtracked a little as he added, “I don’t have to ask your permission to go somewhere.”

  In Sully’s estimation, this could turn ugly given enough fuel. He didn’t want to get caught up in the middle of that.

  “Hey, guys, I could use a hand here,” Sully said, calling the wranglers’ attention to the pole that was still propped up against his shoulder. “If one of you could just hold this upright and straight, the job would go a lot faster.”

  It was plain by the look on Rawlings’s face that everything was going to rub the man the wrong way no matter what was said. “You her junior foreman now?” Rawlings challenged belligerently.

  “I’m just trying to get the job done,” Sully answered. Thinking that being nice to the wrangler wasn’t working, he had nothing to lose by putting Rawlings in his place. “Maybe if you put down that giant chip on your shoulder, you could move a little faster.”

  Rawlings looked incensed, and for a split second, it seemed as if the wrangler was going to launch himself right at him, Sully thought.

  But obviously at the last moment, common sense—and the fact that Sully was close to a foot taller than he was—prevailed.

  Rawlings frowned, glaring at Sully. “This isn’t over, you know,” he warned.

  “Didn’t think it was,” Sully replied mildly. It took effort, but he forced himself to get back to the immediate problem he was dealing with. “Now can one of you hold this?”

  It was obvious that Rawlings wasn’t about to make an effort, so Warren stepped up. “I’ll do it,” the no-longer-missing man volunteered.

  “Thanks,” Sully said.

  When Warren wrap
ped his arms around the post, Sully picked up the discarded shovel. Within moments, he was attempting to evenly shovel dirt around the pole. Although this job was a lot less taxing than digging the holes had been, Sully could swear he felt calluses forming on the palms of his hands.

  “Hey,” Warren called over to the man who had supposedly gone looking for him. When Rawlings, who had just sunk down on the ground some distance away from them, looked in their direction, Warren told him, “We could use some help over here.”

  But Rawlings didn’t budge. “Looks like you’ve got it all under control to me.”

  “Then maybe you should get your eyes checked,” Sully told the inert man in an even voice, one that gave every indication that he expected to be listened to.

  He wasn’t here to win any popularity contest, Sully thought. Right now, he just wanted to get a job done, one that Miss Joan’s foreman had assigned to him. He had no idea what Rawlings’s problem was, but he wasn’t about to let it get in the way of their getting this job done.

  “Now get over here and help Warren hold this pole in place so that it looks straight and I can get it put into the ground properly.”

  “C’mon, Rawlings,” Warren appealed to the other wrangler. “The sooner you help, the sooner we’ll get all these posts in the ground so we can all get back to the bunkhouse.”

  Again Rawlings wasn’t about to take the blame. “Hey, I’m not the one who took off,” he snapped.

  “You’re also not the one who did any work today,” Sully reminded the antagonistic wrangler. His voice was low and civilized. But there was no mistaking that the man behind the calm voice could only be pushed so far and no more.

  Swearing and muttering some unintelligible things under his breath, Rawlings joined them and grudgingly put his back into it.

  * * *

  After she’d made sure that both Rawlings and the “missing” Warren were on their way to help Cavanaugh, Rae made a beeline for town and Miss Joan’s diner. She had questions that needed answering, and it seemed that she was only going to get those answers from one source.