“Maybe I was wrong,” Rae told Sully, keeping her voice low as she brought in a bag of fresh feed for the horses.
“About Rawlings being responsible?” Sully asked, taking the bag from her.
Personally, Sully was suffering no such bouts of indecision. He was certain that the man they were watching was the guilty party, even though the partial fingerprints he’d managed to secure and send off to Valri hadn’t yielded a criminal record or an alias.
“No, about his being able to stretch this game of his out until he feels secure enough to take off with the money. Apparently, he’s more patient than I thought.” She looked at Sully. “If you were him, where would you hide the money?”
“A lot of places come to mind,” he answered. Opening the bag, he began distributing the feed in the different stalls. “We could easily spend the next six months tossing every square inch of this ranch without finding it.”
She made sure that none of the stalls had been overlooked. She glanced toward Sully. “I thought you were an optimist.”
“No, I’m a realist. Don’t worry, Rachel,” he assured her, his voice softening, “Rawlings is going to slip up. The sheriff’s got his deputies taking turns watching the bunkhouse at night in case Rawlings decides to sneak off with the money then. And I’m keeping an eye on him during the day.”
Rae sighed. “Yeah, me, too.” But that didn’t alleviate her restless feeling.
All in all, Rae had to admit to herself that she had mixed feelings about all this. On the one hand, she had a real desire to prove that Rawlings had been the one who’d killed Wynters. The first step was to catch the ranch hand making off with the money that Wynters had stolen from his employer.
But on the other hand, she knew that once that happened, once they had their proof and caught Rawlings red-handed, then this would all be over. Sully would go back to his home and to his life in California. There’d be no more need for him to remain here.
The quiet, withdrawn man he’d been when he first arrived was gone now. He’d disappeared completely the second he had stumbled across Wynters’s buried body. It was obvious that Sully Cavanaugh thrived on being a detective, on solving crimes and putting perpetrators away. As a rule, that kind of a thing didn’t happen here. It was waiting for him back in California.
Thinking about that caused a huge knot to form and grow right in the pit of her stomach no matter how much she struggled to ignore it.
* * *
“Maybe I should move into the bunkhouse,” Sully said a few days later. He’d been thinking out loud while he and Rae were attempting to saddle break one of the yearlings.
The comment had come out of the blue and caught her totally off guard. She forgot about the yearling for a moment.
“Why?” she asked.
“Well, that way I could keep a closer eye on Rawlings. With me there, there’s no doubt that he’ll feel hemmed in. Maybe he’ll take off sooner, leaving when he thinks I’m asleep. It could be just the thing to get this to move forward.”
Here she was, feeling torn again. Sully had a point, but did she really want this to move any faster than it was?
“Rick’s deputies are taking turns watching the bunkhouse,” she reminded him.
“Having an extra set of eyes on Rawlings close up wouldn’t hurt,” Sully told her.
Rae knew she should just agree and go along with it. Anyone remotely interested in bringing this matter to a close would have approved of Sully’s idea.
“I don’t want you to move into the bunkhouse,” she told him.
Sully had only half heard her, and what he heard didn’t make sense. He blinked, replaying her words in his head. They still didn’t make any sense.
“What?”
“I don’t want you to move into the bunkhouse,” she repeated more firmly. “I want you to stay where you are,” she told him, her eyes meeting his. “With me,” she added, her voice lowering.
He looked at her for a long moment, and for the life of her, Rae couldn’t begin to guess what Sully was thinking.
And then his mouth curved slightly. “I guess I’m not in a position to disregard the foreman.”
Rae knew she was interfering with the case. Knew, too, that she had no right to do that, but she didn’t care. She wanted to hang on to the little bit of sunshine she’d found in her life for as long as she could. It would be gone all too soon, and they both knew it.
“Damn straight you’re not,” she whispered to him. Glancing around to see if anyone was watching them—she included the deputy as well as Rawlings, and neither one seemed to be—she allowed herself one tiny moment of freedom and kissed Sully.
Rae pulled back before Sully could deepen the kiss because she knew if he did, she would wind up making love with him right here and now in one of the horse stalls. She was not about to jeopardize everything Sully was striving to do just for the fleeing satisfaction of being with him one more time, at least not unless it was behind closed doors.
That night, it was.
* * *
Sully lay beside her in her room when their lovemaking was over. Each time they did it, it seemed to get more aggressive than the last time. He found that catching his breath was proving to be a little more challenging each time they made love.
Turning his face toward Rae, he said, “You really wear me out, Mulcahy. I’m not sure I can keep up with you after putting in a full day’s work.” Reluctantly, he rose and pulled on his jeans. He wanted to be prepared just in case he had to move fast.
But all he really wanted to do was stay in bed with her.
Ever leery of having all this end at a moment’s notice, fear spread an icy blanket over her.
“Is that your way of saying you don’t want to do this anymore?” she asked him.
Her question surprised him. “No,” he told her, crossing over to where he had tossed off his boots, “that’s my way of saying that that I’m going to need to look into buying some vitamins,” he said with a disparaging laugh.
And then, glancing out the window and catching a movement out of the corner of his eye, he froze.
Rae had just thrown on the oversize shirt she slept in. Seeing the look on Sully’s face, she instantly asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Gabe’s on the ground. Rawlings just knocked him out.” Sully tossed the words over his shoulder as he ran from the room and down the stairs.
After grabbing her jeans, she pulled them on while following right behind Sully. She was running before his words had even sunk in.
On the first floor, she paused only long enough to grab something from the side table before flying out the door in Sully’s wake.
Sully ran to the bunkhouse. Rawlings was gone. Gabe was lying unconscious, facedown on the ground. Sully saw that there was a gash on the back of the man’s head.
Just like there’d been with Wynters.
Blood was pouring out of the deputy’s wound.
Sully felt for a pulse. He breathed a sigh of relief when he found one. It wasn’t strong, but it was definitely there.
Reaching into his pocket for his cell phone, he quickly called the sheriff.
“Santiago.”
“We were right. Rawlings made his move. He knocked Gabe out. Gabe needs medical attention.”
“Where are you?” Rick demanded. From the sound of his voice, Sully guessed that the man was hurrying to his vehicle.
“In front of the bunkhouse. I saw Rawlings taking off after hitting Gabe’s head with something heavy.” He looked down at the deputy. “Probably with the same thing he used on Wynters.”
“I’m on my way,” Rick told him, adding, “I’ll grab the doc.”
The call terminated.
Only when Sully turned to tuck his phone back into his pocket did he realize Rae was gone.
“Damn it, woman,” Sully cursed, frust
rated.
He couldn’t just leave the unconscious deputy out here bleeding, but he didn’t have a good feeling about this.
Rae had gone to bring Rawlings in.
* * *
She was playing a hunch. Rawlings had shown time and again that he wasn’t much of a woodsman. It had rained yesterday, not hard, but enough. A lot of the roads were still muddy, which meant that the fleeing murderer would leave a trail that even a myopic five-year-old could follow.
Rawlings had already killed one man, and for all she knew, he could have just killed another. She was not about to let him get away with it if she could help it.
He had to be stopped.
The money didn’t matter to her. It wasn’t about the money, although she didn’t approve of stealing. However, wantonly killing another human being mattered a great deal to her. She couldn’t just let him get away. Rawlings worked on the ranch she oversaw, which to her meant that she was responsible for him and for everything he did while he worked for her.
She needed to catch him before someone else inadvertently cornered him and Rawlings wound up killing someone else—maybe even Sully—in order to get away.
She forced herself to block out everything except focusing on catching Rawlings.
Desperate to get away, Rawlings was fleeing in his truck. But the terrain was uneven and hilly, made that much harder to traverse because of the mud. And it was raining again.
She guessed at his escape route, following the newly made tracks. Because the road was so hard to navigate, Rae pursued the inept ranch hand on horseback.
She made better time than he did.
It didn’t take her long to catch up to him. She saw him up ahead. His truck had gotten stuck in the mud.
A whining noise grew louder, alerting her that the vehicle wasn’t going anywhere. Its front wheels were only managing to get deeper and deeper embedded in the mud.
Rae dismounted, leaving her horse as she drew closer to Rawlings. Fixated on the truck’s dilemma, he was oblivious to her presence.
“Going somewhere?” Rae asked, raising her voice above the sound of the engine.
Startled, Rawlings glared at her, cursing and telling her what she could do with her question.
The sound of a handgun being cocked registered above the truck’s noise. It stopped him mid-curse.
The weapon was the one thing she had thought to grab before she flew after Sully when he left the house.
She had it trained now on Rawlings. “Get out of the car,” she ordered.
“You’re not going to shoot me,” Rawlings taunted haughtily.
The next second, he let loose a guttural shriek that telegraphed his fear, and he winced as he automatically ducked. Rae had sent a bullet whizzing by exceedingly close to his right ear.
“I wouldn’t bet on it if I were you,” Rae calmly told the ranch hand. “The one thing Miss Joan did before putting me in charge of this ranch was make sure I learned how to shoot anything with a trigger and how to get whatever I aimed for. In this case, I was aiming just to the right of your ear. But I can aim closer if you’d like that instead.”
Rawlings was visibly shaking now. “I’ll give you half,” he told her, never taking his eyes off the gun in her hand. “There’s a lot of money in these bags of his, and I’ll give you half of everything if you just let me drive out of here.”
She couldn’t believe that he had actually said that. How depraved did he think she was?
“Sorry, no deal,” she told him.
“Okay,” he cried breathlessly, his eyes wild as he tried to think. “I’ll give you all of it. All of it,” he stressed. “If you just let me go. Think about it. All that money. Think what you could do with it. You could live like a queen.”
“I never wanted to be a queen,” she told him in a flat, uninterested voice. The rain was making the nightshirt she’d thrown on stick to her body. She didn’t make for a frightening figure. “I’m taking you in for Jefferson Wynters’s murder.”
He looked totally confused. “Who the hell is that?” Rawlings asked.
“That’s the man you knew as John Warren,” she told him. “The man you killed so you could steal the money that he stole.”
He was beginning to resemble a caged animal looking for a way out. “I didn’t kill him,” Rawlings protested.
She wasn’t about to get into this with him. “He looked pretty dead to me.”
Rawlings was breathing harder now. As he spoke, he tried to move closer to her. “That was an accident. He tripped, fell backward and hit his head on a rock.”
“And the stab wounds?” Rae asked. “Were they an accident, too?”
Rawlings had the look of a man who knew he was cornered. Who knew that he had absolutely nothing to lose. With another gut-wrenching cry that sounded more animal-like than human, Rawlings ducked his head down and lunged for Rae like a football player executing a desperate tackle to block what looked like the winning play.
He caught Rae off guard, knocking the gun out of her hand. It went flying at the same time that he had knocked the air right out of her lungs.
“You stupid bitch! You just couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” he cried.
He whirled around to grab the gun from the ground.
Chapter 21
Rawlings scrambled up, the gun clutched in his hand. Adrenaline shot through him as he took a step a couple of steps back and aimed the gun at Rae, dead center.
His eyes seemed to glow as he announced, “Guess it’s time for you to say goodbye, you no-good—”
Rawlings didn’t get to finish his sentence. Instead, a round of curses emerged. They mingled with the sound of gunfire and some indistinguishable shriek of pain as a bullet pierced Rawlings’s shoulder. Falling to his knees, the ranch hand dropped the handgun.
The man’s head spun around like a top as he tried to figure out what had just happened and who had fired at him.
The next second, Rawlings didn’t have to wonder. He had his answer.
Keeping his weapon trained on Rawlings, Sully quickly made his way over to Rae.
Rae struggled to get back to her feet. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see you,” she cried.
“What the hell were you thinking, taking off like that?” Sully demanded, his eyes still on Rawlings, but he allowed himself a second to quickly look over Rae to check her for any wounds.
Rae pretended to frown. “Maybe I should rethink what I just said,” she amended.
But he wasn’t about to engage in any banter. He was furious—and Rae had scared him to death with her disappearing act.
“He almost killed you!” Sully snapped, the vivid scenario of what could have happened playing itself over and over in his head.
“I was trying to keep him from killing anyone else,” she retorted, speaking up in her own defense.
“But you were supposed to wait for backup,” he informed her angrily. “You know that.”
A fake smile curved her mouth. “Where’s your backup?” she asked.
About to retort an answer, Sully suddenly cocked his weapon, bringing everyone’s attention back to the immediate scenario. The ranch hand had started to inch away, apparently hoping that Rae would distract the other man long enough for him to get away.
Sully’s eyebrows narrowed. “You take one more step and you’ll have to learn how to walk without legs because I’ll break them—and then I’ll show you what happens when I really get angry,” he threatened evenly.
“All right, all right,” Rawlings cried, raising his hands up over his head.
Rae released a shaky breath, willing herself to relax. It had been touch and go for a few moments there. “How did you find me?” she asked Sully.
He spared her a look. He wanted to hug her to him, but that would have to wait until he’d taken care of Rawlings.
“I followed his car tracks, same as you. You’re not the only one who knows how to track, you know,” Sully informed her.
He turned his attention exclusively to Rawlings. Taking out a pair of handcuffs, he told the wrangler, “Put your hands behind your back.” When Rawlings refused, Sully pulled his hands back for him. Snapping the cuffs on the man, Sully said, “Jack Rawlings, you’re under arrest for the murder of Jefferson Wynters and the attempted murders of Deputy Gabriel Rodriguez and Rachel Mulcahy.”
“I didn’t kill anyone!” Rawlings shouted, trying to yank his hands away.
But the effort was fruitless.
“I’m not arguing with you. Get in the car—the back seat of the car,” Sully emphasized when it looked as if Rawlings was going to get in on the passenger side in the front of the vehicle. Moving quickly, Sully secured the man in his seat.
“And you get in the front,” he proceeded to tell Rae.
She glanced over to where the horse she’d ridden was standing. “I’ll ride Starlight back,” she began to tell Sully.
He cut her off. “The hell you will. I’m not taking a chance on you suddenly getting dizzy and falling off the horse because this lowlife hit your head.”
“I can’t just leave Starlight here,” she protested.
He knew there was no arguing her out of this. “We’ll tie the horse’s reins onto the rear of the truck—don’t worry, I’ll drive slow,” he said, anticipating her next protest. “Although,” he amended, wrinkling his nose in disgust as he hauled out the bags of money that Rawlings had stashed in his truck, “this smell is enough to make me go as fast as possible.”
Suddenly getting a pungent whiff, Rae nearly gagged.
“What is that smell?” she cried, startled. And even as she asked, it came to her.
Sully had already figured it out, as well as where Wynters had hidden the bags of money and why no one had found them. The smell was very distinct.
“That’s why no one found where Wynters hid the money.” He looked at his prisoner in the back seat. “You saw him digging up the money the night of the party, didn’t you?” It wasn’t a question. The smell on the bags was strong enough to erase all doubt. Sully glanced toward Rae. “The money was hidden in the bins of fertilizer. No one wants to sink their hands in manure unless they absolutely have to,” he told her. He had to give Wynters his due as far as resourcefulness went. “Actually, that was pretty clever,” Sully conceded.
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