The Undercover Cowboy

by Lori Wilde

  “No,” she croaked. “Not anymore.”

  “But you were?”

  “Once. A long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “Nine years. I’ve been good. Great even . . .” Her voice grew wispier, thin as smoke.

  “Are you on any medications?” he asked.

  “Not currently.” She paused, her breath chugged.

  “Breathe deeply and hold it,” he said.

  She inhaled sharply, but he could hear that she was only breathing from her upper chest and not her diaphragm.

  “Breathe from your belly,” he coached.

  “I can’t,” she said. “It feels like I’m trying to suck air through a straw.”

  Jelly beans and jawbreakers, he was compounding the problem. “All right,” he soothed. “Just hold your breath.”

  Suddenly, the elevator was utterly quiet and Kade realized he was holding his own breath too. Somehow, the silence heightened all his senses. “Now blow out your breath like you’re trying to blow out birthday candles. Get all the air out of your lungs.”

  He exhaled forcefully to demonstrate, and she followed suit, finished with a gasp and a cough.

  “Good job.”

  “You sound like a doctor,” she said, adding, “or a cop.”

  The hairs at the back of his neck lifted. Did she know? Simmer down, Richmond. You’re tipping your hand.

  She was leaning against him, arms wrapped over her chest, squeezing herself in tight. Her knees were trembling so hard her entire body shook.

  “Here.” Gently, he put a hand to her shoulder. “Let’s sit down.”

  “Okayokayokayokay.”

  She was wound up like Foamy the Squirrel. He guided her to the floor, sinking down with her to the bottom of the elevator. He could feel tension coursing through her muscles.

  “You’re not alone. I’ve got you.” He slid his arm around her and she dropped her head to his shoulder. “That’s right. Let go, sweetheart.”

  Sweetheart? Cowboy, you’re sliding in deep.

  But she was quivering and crumpled, and she strummed every heroic bone in his spine. This was not good.

  “You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe,” he chanted, felt his heart beating in time to his words.

  Danger. He was treading on dangerous ground.

  But his body didn’t give a damn.

  From the darkness, the song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” burst into the elevator. Kade jumped. “What the hell?”

  He heard Allie fumble with her purse. “It’s my mother.”

  “‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ is your ringtone for your mother?” he mumbled.

  “It’s my ringtone for everything.”

  “Seriously?” Was Miss Rose-Colored Glasses really that cheery? The more he learned about her, the less likely it seemed that she was involved with the art thefts. Still, she had accepted a job with Thorn . . . reason enough to keep his eye on her.

  “Shh,” she hissed, her cell phone flashing luminously in the blackness, and then in a chirpy tone said, “Hey, Mom.”

  “Where are you?” her mother asked, speaking so loudly that Kade could hear her. “Are the lights out where you are? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Allie said. “Why are you yelling?”

  Her mother lowered her voice and Kade had to tilt his head closer to Allie and her phone to pick up what her mother was saying. “The lights went out. This is the first time the blackout has hit here in Fort Worth. I called to make sure you’re okay. Are you in the dark?”

  “No,” Allie lied glibly.

  Hmm, Kade mused. So, she wasn’t above lying.

  “Mom,” Allie said. “I gotta go.”

  “Congratulations again on your new job. I can’t wait to hear all about it.”

  “Bye, Mom.” Allie punched the end button. Sat with the cell phone in her lap. The light illuminated her face. A frustrated, rueful smile crossed her lips. “Sorry,” she said. “My mother is a tiny bit overprotective.”

  “How tiny?” he asked.

  “Not very.” She laughed and met his gaze above the puny light from her cell phone screen. “Did you just start a running joke with me?”

  He lifted one shoulder, couldn’t resist matching the heat of her warm smile. “Looks like your panic attack has passed.”

  “Mom’ll do that to me,” she said.

  “What? Snap you out of a panic attack?”

  “Yes.” Allie rolled her eyes. “I can’t afford to show her the slightest sign of weakness or . . .”

  “Or?”

  Allie shook her head, her soft curls bouncing around her shoulders. “She’ll smother me.”

  “Only child?” he guessed.

  “Yes, but it’s more than that.”

  “Oh?” he said, trying not to look like he was milking her for information.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We may be here awhile,” he said. “No telling how long the blackout will last. We could be here all night.”

  Her breathing quickened and her body stiffened beside him.

  Bright move, Richmond. You’re scaring her back into a panic attack. “But it will most likely only last a few minutes,” he amended.

  “How few?” she asked.

  He chuckled, delighted that she could rouse her sense of humor under the circumstances. “I wish I could give you a firm answer.”

  She sighed and sank her back against the elevator wall.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Not you too,” she groaned.

  “Me too?”

  “I can take care of myself, Mom.”

  He wasn’t so sure about that. Not from what he’d seen so far. He shuddered to think what might have happened if he hadn’t intervened with the longhorns and the creep in the bar.

  “I know you haven’t seen me at my most kickass,” she said, reading his mind. “But I’m resilient. Unfortunately, because I’m small, people see me as a dainty, helpless thing and they often feel the need to rush in and save me without giving me a chance to save myself.”

  “Is that comment directed at me?”

  She crinkled her nose, looking like an adorable, blonde Easter bunny. “Well, you are trapped in an elevator with me because of your Sir Galahad syndrome.”

  “My what?”

  “Seriously, you know it’s true. Don’t even try to deny it. I mean, c’mon.” She held up two fingers. “Twice in one day? Either you have a thing for perceived damsels in distress, or you really like me.”

  Kade grunted. She had a point. On both counts. “Are you saying you didn’t need me to push you out of the way of that stampede?”

  “That’s right.”

  “If I hadn’t shoved you aside, you would be in the hospital right now, and that’s best-case scenario.”

  “Oh, my.” She laughed, low and winsome. “You do think a lot of yourself, don’t you? Any number of things could have happened. None of which have anything to do with you.”

  “Like what?” he challenged.

  “The cattle could have swerved and missed me.”

  “Clearly, you don’t understand the nature of the herd mindset.”

  “Clearly,” she said, pulling her spine up a bit stiffly, “you don’t understand me.”

  “Gotta plead guilty on that charge.” He jammed fingers through his hair, tossed his head. “The cattle would not have swerved.”

  “Did you know the Mythbusters did a piece where they put bulls in a china shop, and not a single piece of glass got broken? Apparently, animals with hooves can pivot a full 360 degrees, which means they can turn sharply in one quick motion, graceful as a pirouetting ballet dancer.”

  “That doesn’t mean they could have avoided you in a stampede when there was nowhere for them to pivot to.”

  “Okay, fine. Let’s assume you’re right. They’re about to flatten me and you aren’t around.”

  The image of her little body, smashed and bleeding, lying in the middle of Ma
in Street popped into his head. Kade grunted.

  “I might have jumped aside,” she said.

  “You had your eyes closed!”

  “I was listening,” she said compassionately, as if he were a backward child who couldn’t grasp the multiplication tables.

  “For what?” he sputtered, flabbergasted.

  Her enigmatic smile was filled with delight and otherworldly wisdom. “Why, the Voice that tells me what to do.”

  That look on her face, the quality of her tone, the shift in her body language, all knocked the pins out from under him. She believed that nonsense. He felt both incredulous and strangely jealous of her capacity to believe.

  And trust in that belief.

  “Don’t look at me as if I’m crazy,” she said. “Just because you’ve never experienced contact with a higher source doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, unable to keep sarcasm from burning a hole in his throat. “You’re entitled to believe whatever you want. Just like I’m entitled not to believe it.”

  She giggled, actually giggled at him.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Oh, Rick, you just don’t get it. I don’t believe . . . I know.”

  He raised a hand, an eyebrow, and his doubts as he waved dismissively. “Whatever.”

  “Are you so closed-minded about everything?”

  “When it comes to woo-woo stuff . . . let’s just say I’m a realist.”

  She made a noise that sounded a lot like pity.

  Seriously? She was feeling sorry for him? Kade bristled. Her cell phone screen dimmed, winked out, plunging them back into total darkness.

  “I should have charged it before I left work,” she muttered.

  “I’ve got my phone. But let’s leave it off for now. We might need it later and I don’t know how much battery life I have left.”

  They sat in silence. In darkness. Touching shoulders. Breathing at the same pace and tempo. It felt good. Intimate. Special.

  Honestly, too special and too intimate.

  “That long story about why my mother is so overprotective,” she said. “Would you like to hear it?”

  “Why not? We’re not going anywhere.”

  She leaned her head on his shoulder again, the pressure light and rewarding. She smelled of sunshine and rainbows and he supposed if unicorns were real they would smell like her—honest, genuine, sweet . . . special.

  Kade realized with a start that she was about to tell him one of her most life-altering experiences. No hesitation. Simply open up and talk. So easy . . . just like that. Again, he was struck by competing emotions. Envy that she was so in touch with her feelings and didn’t fear expressing them, and frustration at how naively she confided in a stranger.

  “Not everyone you meet is your friend,” he cautioned.

  “I know that.” She snuggled closer. “But you are.”

  “How the fu—” He broke off before he dropped the f-bomb. He respected her too much to use it around her and that rattled him. “You just met me. How can you know I don’t mean you any harm?”

  Her voice was shiny and warm in the hot elevator, soft as melted butter and full of things that scared him. Things like hope, belief, and love.

  “That inner voice that you were making fun of told me that you could be trusted.”

  “Allie,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me your darkest secret.”

  “It’s not really a secret. I just don’t talk about it much because the past is the past and it doesn’t really matter now except to explain why my mother is so helicoptery.”

  He started to tell her that she didn’t owe him any explanation, but damn it all, he had a job to do. While he was ninety-nine percent sure she wasn’t in cahoots with Thorn, she was working for him. If Kade handled things right, he could use Allie as his eyes and ears inside the inner workings of the art gallery.

  But what if he was wrong? What about that one percent chance that Allie was an art thief who was turning the tables on him? What if his cover had been blown and Thorn had hired her to distract him? Maybe that was why she’d stopped dead in the street in the middle of the stampede in the first place. Maybe the whole thing had been a setup to lure him out.

  Was he really that cynical? What about the guy at the bar? Had that just been a show for his benefit as well? Christ. He’d been working vice for too long. He suspected everyone of everything.

  “When I was twelve,” Allie began, “I was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer.”

  The word “cancer” sliced through him like a knife, cold and sharp and deadly. “Al,” he said, “that sucks.”

  “Hey.” She laughed, a happy sound in the small elevator. “You just gave me a nickname.”

  “No one else calls you Al?”

  “Allie is a nickname,” she said. “Short for Alexandria.”

  “Not Alex?”

  “A couple of people call me that. Mostly, just Allie.” She paused a moment, laughed again. “And now, Al.”

  It felt pretty damn cozy. Sitting close together in the dark. Him, giving her a new nickname. Her, pleased with it.

  Except it was a false intimacy. He was lying to her. She didn’t even know his real name. Jelly beans and jawbreakers. Why had he met her while he was undercover? He could really like this woman.

  “So the cancer,” he prompted. “It’s in remission?”

  “Better than that.” Her voice was a beehive, humming with happy honey.

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s gone completely.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither did the doctors.” She laughed. If there were such things as unicorns, they would sound like Allie, full of glee and sparkly light. “When I was first diagnosed, the doctors ran a battery of tests. Told my parents to brace for a long, protracted ordeal—chemotherapy, radiation, bone marrow transplants—lasting months, years.”

  “I can’t imagine how hard that was on them. And you.”

  “My parents were destroyed,” she admitted. “And in an emotional tailspin. They got a second opinion. And a third. Then they wrangled an appointment at the Mayo Clinic, but it took six weeks to get in.”

  “And you?” he asked, hearing his voice thicken, felt his gut constrict. “How did you take the news?”

  “I decided it wasn’t true,” she said with so much optimism and spunk it sank a knife in the center of his heart. “I imagined myself happy and healthy and whole. I cut out pictures from magazines of all the things I intended on doing with my life and pinned them to a corkboard in my bedroom. Every night before I went to sleep I would whisper over and over, Cancer free, cancer free, nothing bad can come to me.”

  “Wow,” he said, stunned by her ingenuity. “Who taught you to do those things?”

  “My inner Voice,” she said.

  He couldn’t see her face, but he could feel her smiling into the darkness and that tugged at his heartstrings.

  “That’s why I trust the Voice so implicitly.”

  “After all the chemo and radiation and bone marrow transplants, the cancer vanished?”

  “That’s just the thing,” she said. “I never had to have any treatment. By the time we arrived at our appointment at the Mayo Clinic, there was no evidence of cancer. I’d had a spontaneous healing. Everyone’s minds were boggled. But even though the medical establishment can’t explain it, spontaneous regression does happen in one out of every one hundred thousand cancers or so, although they don’t know how or why.”

  Stunned, Kade sat there absorbing the story. After a moment, he said, “I’m glad you were one of the lucky ones.”

  “Me too. Thing is my parents never really trusted that the cancer was gone for good. My mom’s mother died of inflammatory breast cancer when mom was twelve, and she has a real fear she’s going to lose me to cancer. She coddles me. I understand, and I love her to pieces, but sometimes . . . well, I’m afraid it’s stunted me a tiny bit.”

  “How tiny?” he a
sked.

  She laughed, bright as roses in winter. “Not very. I just moved away from home for the first time and I’m almost twenty-four. Unfortunately, my roommate moved in with her fiancé after they got engaged last week, and I need to find a new roommate soon or I’ll have to move back home. I’m hoping this new job will tide me over until I can either get a permanent position somewhere or find another roommate.”

  “Not that I’m defending your mother’s overprotectiveness, but given your history, I can see why she’s having a hard time letting go, and why you are so . . .” He trailed off.

  “So what?” she prodded.

  “Never mind.” He shouldn’t have started this. Why had he said that?

  “No, really, go ahead. You won’t hurt my feelings. Why I am so . . . what?”

  “Sweet, innocent, trusting.”

  “You don’t know me well enough to make those assumptions,” she said.

  “Granted, but you asked.”

  “Thank you for your honesty, even though I think you’re off base. Although I admit it’s not the first time I’ve been accused of being too trusting. But that’s okay. I’ve got faith enough for both of us.”

  What did she mean? Was she insinuating he had trust issues? Okay, yeah, he did have a few trust issues. Nature of the beast. He was a cop. He knew firsthand what an ugly place the world could be.

  Her hair was trailing over his bare arm, tickling his skin. God, she was driving him insane and she didn’t even know it.

  “Um,” she said. “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean for it to sound like I could supply your faith for you. I can’t supply anything for you. I mean, we barely know each other. It’s not like we’re dating or anything. We’re just neighbors. We’re—”

  “Attracted to each other.”

  She gulped audibly, slid her hand from his. He couldn’t see her face, but he could feel her bend her legs to her chest and sink her head to her knees. “Yes.”

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve felt anything this potent,” he confessed, then clamped his jaw closed. Dammit! He shouldn’t have told the truth. Should have just kept his big mouth shut. Honesty was not always the best policy.

  “How long?” she whispered.

  “Never,” he admitted. Shut up, dill weed!

  “Me, either,” she said.

  The next thing he knew, she was in his lap. He couldn’t say for sure whether he’d pulled her there or if she’d jumped into his lap, but there she was. His arms went around her waist and her arms went around his neck, and he kissed her, or she kissed him, or it was some kind of cosmic, simultaneous kiss.