by Lynn Bulock
Holly was still waiting for an answer. “I sure can. Because for everything like that I’ve seen, there have been a couple more that happened the other way.” Holly seemed to be about ready to argue with him, but she pressed her attractive lips together in a straight line instead and stayed silent. Jake was even more thankful for that than he’d been when they missed the deer. He wasn’t ready to argue with Holly again about anything.
The next twenty minutes or so were spent in relative silence in the car. Holly didn’t seem inclined to push the point she’d been making, and Jake certainly wasn’t going to spark any discussion. So they rode along the quiet roads while he scanned the area behind them in the mirrors. Nothing following them that he could see. He knew from the discussions he’d overheard that Holly and Rose had set up a network of protection with the local authorities. Sam Vance had also assured him that where they were going, they’d be looked after.
It was a comfort to pull up to the gates of the Double V Ranch and know that his speculations on their destination had been right. The place was pretty isolated, and looked solid. Mike Vance had been just enough younger than Jake that he hadn’t known him in the years they’d both gone to school in Colorado Springs. He’d been closer to Jake’s cousin Quinn’s age, and though the two of them hadn’t ever been best friends or anything, Jake knew that Quinn didn’t have a bad word to say about Holly’s older brother. In true Bureau fashion, when it looked like they might be staying with Mike Vance, Jake had checked him out.
Mike came up looking like a solid, serious guy, a good businessman and rancher. Just like anybody else with a three-hundred-acre spread—small for today’s market—he was struggling to make a living. But he seemed to be determined to do it. And family appeared as important to him as it did to Jake. If the Vance family was anything like his own, Jake knew that anybody who messed with the baby sister was in for a very hard time.
“Let me get out and handle the gate,” Jake said, hand already on the door latch.
Holly nodded. “Go ahead.” Jake managed the gate and she drove through, stopping the Jeep on the other side while he made sure the gate was closed tight behind them. He was sure there were probably several other gates between the outside world and any stock that Mike ran on the place, but even as a city boy he knew how ranchers felt about folks who left gates wide-open. No sense offending his host straight off.
“We’ll go to the main house and let Mike know we’re here,” Holly said once Jake settled himself back in the passenger seat. “Then we’ll head out to the cabin.”
“Cabin?” This was a new one on him. Jake had just assumed that if they were staying at the Double V, they’d be staying in the main house with Holly’s brother. He was single, and it was a good-size ranch house.
“Cabin. It’s small, out on the ridge away from the main house. I expect back in the old days it was a line shack, but it’s gone through at least a couple renovations since then. I can’t promise all the comforts of home, but we’ll get by.”
“I hope so. Does this cabin have running water? Electricity?”
“Plenty of both. You don’t think I’d drag you out here in the middle of nowhere without the things you need to convict Barclay, do you, Jake?” Holly’s voice was soft, but he could hear a note of irritation in it.
“Not really. You’ve never let me down yet. It’s just hard to imagine a twenty-first-century cabin, I guess.”
“Mike’s worked on it some from time to time, and when you were talking about getting away yesterday, I called him. Between what he’d already done and what I could swing in a little over a day, it will serve our needs.” Holly sounded pleased with herself now.
They were pulling up to the main house, where the circular gravel drive in front held a battered but still serviceable pickup truck and two cars. On the front door was a large evergreen wreath, and there were lights in the windows that made the place look rustic but welcoming.
“Nice place. It looks like a picture postcard just waiting for the Christmas snow,” Jake said, meaning every word of it.
“Yeah, well you better hope we don’t get any of that snow if you want to get back to Colorado Springs whenever you want for the trial. This is a working ranch, and nobody’s going to take time to plow a road for the city folks to get back home.” Holly knocked on the front door, not waiting for Jake’s reply.
Jake hadn’t thought about the animal occupants of the house, and what kind of ruckus might be raised by knocking on the door. Judging from the barking going on, the Double V had a dog pack. He tried not to step away from the door, hoping the beasts weren’t as ferocious as they sounded.
The man who opened the door was tall and dark, looking a little older than the thirty-one Jake knew him to be. The skin around his dark eyes was crinkled from sun and wind, and his face creased in a smile when he saw Holly. “Hey, you two finally made it. Come on in.”
Before anybody could walk in, two large furry bodies streaked out, and Jake steeled himself for all the possibilities. What he wasn’t expecting was that the largest dog would bound up to Holly and ignore him completely. “Hi, King. How’s my buddy? Did you miss me?”
“You’ve only been gone about twelve hours and he’s my dog, Holly,” her brother pointed out. Looking down at the beast, he grimaced. “But yeah, you can tell he missed you.”
“King only pretends to be Mike’s dog because he lives here. He’d be mine in a heartbeat if I stayed out here for more than a day at a time.”
“I’d argue with her, but she’s right,” Mike said, stepping around the dog and his sister to Jake. “Molly, the Australian shepherd over there, now she’s all mine. But it looks like she’d make friends with you if you gave her half a chance.”
Mike had a firm handshake when Holly introduced him, and he looked Jake straight in the eye. “You’ve done plenty to make my life miserable in the last two days. I certainly hope you’re worth it.”
Jake, not used to seeing much emotion out of Holly, wasn’t prepared for the shriek she gave, or the mostly playful way she launched herself at her brother. If the dog was upset at her berating his master, he sure didn’t show it. Even Molly stayed closer to Jake, interested now in the hand he’d put out in greeting. “Mike, what are you doing? This is my boss! Do you want me to come out here and sponge off you because I’m unemployed? Knock it off.”
“Sure. But you have to admit that this has been a pain, Holly. I haven’t gotten anything worthwhile done since yesterday noon between waiting for the guys you called to do stuff to the cabin, and driving you around….” He sounded every bit as put upon as Jake knew he would have been if Colleen had asked a big favor of him. And Mike had the same indulgent, loving expression on his face Jake would have worn in a similar situation.
“And you’ll thank me for it later, I know.”
“I expect Holly to have charged out anything major to the Bureau,” Jake said. “I know some of this stuff isn’t anything you’d have done on your own, and we couldn’t use any of the local safe houses for the high-tech stuff we’re doing.”
“We’ll talk about that later. Right now I’m having too good a time using it as leverage on my sister,” Mike said with a grin. “Come on in and have a cup of coffee and some of Dorothy’s Christmas cookies. Bringing cookies back from Mom’s yesterday put my housekeeper in a competitive mood, and you can’t leave me here with a kitchen full of goodies.”
He motioned toward the back of the house and visitors and dogs all followed him into a large, well-lit ranch kitchen where a woman in her fifties was taking cookies off a baking sheet and laying them out on racks on a long heart-pine table. The room smelled of cinnamon and sugar and was filled with warmth from the oven. King and Molly headed to a couple of round plaid beds in the corner, settling in with contented canine sighs.
Jake took a deep breath in the fragrant room. He knew that the long hours of the trial prep had knocked a couple pounds off of him, but he suspected that a few days at the ranch faced with Doroth
y’s cooking and he could stop worrying about his suits hanging on him for the trial. In this cozy kitchen it was hard to remember that they were here to keep from losing their lives over a tense legal battle. He’d give them half an hour, Jake decided, to socialize and enjoy this oasis. Then they had to head to the cabin and start work on nailing Barclay again.
Holly could tell that Jake was anxious to get out to the cabin and get settled, but neither Mike nor Dorothy was cooperating with his timetable. First they had coffee and cookies, and then Dorothy realized that the visitors hadn’t stopped anywhere for dinner on the way to the ranch.
“And here I went, spoiling your dinner with Christmas cookies,” she said, looking positively sheepish. “I didn’t even think that at nearly eight at night you hadn’t had dinner.”
“Don’t worry about it, Dorothy,” Holly told her, watching Jake’s bemused expression. “We had a big lunch, and ate later than usual. When Aunt Lidia found out we wouldn’t be stopping by the Stagecoach again before Christmas, she insisted on sending over lunch. There was enough for at least four people.”
“She doesn’t know where you were going, does she?” Mike’s eyes narrowed.
“Definitely not. I just told her we were going to be too busy with trial prep to get out of the office again. Officially, that’s the story for everybody except Mom, Rose and Sam.”
“What about your family, Jake? Do they know how to get hold of you in an emergency?” Holly watched her brother grilling Jake just like he used to grill her dates in high school. She doubted that Jake would be as intimidated. If anybody intimidated him on the ranch, it appeared to be King, who had come and planted himself next to her at the table, watching everyone intently while they talked.
“My family’s taken care of. I used the same system I normally use when I’m out of town on Bureau business.”
Dorothy was still poking around the kitchen, unable to sit down and sip her cup of coffee with everyone else. “I imagine it’s something terribly complicated and technical, with your work in computers. Do you use secret code?”
Jake’s laugh was open and honest. “Not exactly. I usually write down a phone number and an address if need be on a slip of paper, seal it in a plain white envelope and give it to my dad. That way he has a contact in a real emergency, and if he doesn’t have any reason to use it, he gives me back the envelope unopened when I come back into town.”
Dorothy looked deflated. “And here I thought it was going to be something exciting.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Mrs. Miller,” Jake told her. “Where my family is concerned, I’m not much for excitement. It’s nice to give my folks enough information so that my mother doesn’t worry about my job, even though the most dangerous thing I usually do on my out-of-town trips is deconstruct somebody’s hard drive.”
Holly watched him sit at the big pine table and marveled once again that there were so many sides to Jake. There was the suave, brilliant computer expert that everyone saw at work when he came out of his office long enough to actually be seen. Then there was this Jake, who didn’t show up in the limelight much, but just might be her favorite side to his complex personality. Definitely the plainspoken family man with his long, slender fingers wrapped around a steaming china mug of coffee outshone the guy she had seen at parties with his accessory blond and a champagne flute full of ginger ale. If she were only sure that this was the real Jake, she could fall in love with the man.
Holly’s thoughts almost made her gasp out loud. Fall in love with Jake Montgomery? No matter how perfect he seemed at any time, that just wasn’t an option. And it certainly wasn’t the kind of thoughts she should be entertaining when they were getting ready to spend days together in that cabin up on the ridge. She got up from the table so quickly the others focused on her in unison.
“Is something wrong, dear?” Dorothy asked.
“No, just looking at the time,” Holly said, trying not to stammer. “We really need to be heading out if we’re going to get anything done tonight.”
“Let me pack you some sandwiches then, and a few more of those cookies. And make Mike give you at least two more blankets from the closet. That cabin will be cold tonight.”
With Dorothy’s instructions, everyone was up and moving. Holly looked over at Jake as he brought his coffee cup to the sink along with his empty cookie plate. He had the strangest look on his face, almost as if he’d heard her thoughts about falling in love with him. Holly knew she was beginning to blush up to the roots of her hair.
Things got even more uncomfortable when they had their coats on again and were headed out to the Jeep. King insisted on going along, and even nudged Jake out of the way when he opened the passenger door, the big Shepherd poised to take his normal place next to Holly.
“No, I don’t think so,” she told the dog, who looked up at her, plumed tail thumping the ground. “You have to stay here with Mike.”
“I don’t mind,” Jake said, but his tone was hard to decipher. He hadn’t looked comfortable around the dogs in the house; if she didn’t know better, Holly would have said this was something her normally fearless boss didn’t deal with well.
“Are you sure?” Holly asked. The dog gave a soft whine, looking between the two of them. “We can always send him back in the morning if things don’t work out.”
“That might be for the best. Until then, well, Dorothy said it was cold in the cabin, and as long as he sleeps on your bed I can take an extra blanket,” he said with a grin.
Her bed? Holly did a mental inventory of the cabin, realizing one thing for the first time. She’d been so focused on making sure Jake had electricity for the computer, and enough light to work with, and all of the technical details taken care of that she’d neglected the more human side of the arrangements. There was one bedroom in the cabin, with one bed. Suddenly her indecision evaporated. “Hop in, King,” she told the dog, who gave a joyful little bark and bounded in between the front seats. She was going to need all the company she could get when Jake saw the close quarters they’d be sharing for the next few days.
Chapter Six
“I don’t think that dog likes me,” Jake said, looking down at King, who sat by Holly’s feet in the main room of the cabin. It was really the only room in the cabin, when you got down to basics. True, it was a good-size room, but it was the only one besides the single bedroom that took up half the second story, perched like a loft above the living room. That and the tiny bathroom made up the whole cabin.
At least there was plenty of running water, and a generator or something, because the light switches were there and worked when you threw them. A large, rustic desk in one corner near the flagstone fireplace proved the perfect place for the computer, which hummed to life as soon as Jake set it up. There was a good chair at the desk, easing any tension in his back from the ride out to Cripple Creek, and the slightly battered leather couch Holly sat on with King at her feet looked very comfortable. The dog, however, still watched Jake intently. He wasn’t growling, but he didn’t appear to be man’s best friend, either.
Holly leaned back on the couch, still burrowing her fingers into the dog’s fur between his ears. “Nonsense, Jake. King’s my buddy. He likes you just because I do, right, boy?” The dog’s tail thumped as Holly spoke to him, but Jake still wasn’t sure about the look the big beast gave him.
“What are you going to do with him at bedtime? For that matter, what are you going to do with me at bedtime? I took the grand tour of the place, and there’s only one bed in that bedroom. Being the gentleman that I am, I have to insist you take the bed.”
“You’re too kind. And normally I’d take you up on it, but when I’m at the ranch, King usually insists on sleeping next to me.”
Smart dog, Jake thought, watching the big animal lean back into Holly’s caresses. “So why does that mean you won’t take the bed?”
Holly looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. Maybe there was something about the whole situation he was missing. “Dogs
don’t climb ladders. Or open-backed steep stairs that look like ladders. He’d get up there okay, I imagine, but he’d never get down. And he’s way too big to carry, even for you.”
She had him there. Just the thought of hauling eighty pounds of dog down a ladder didn’t do a thing for him. Especially this dog, who kept looking at him as if he were prime rib. “So I either act like a hound and take the bed away from a lady, or make friends with a hound and let you sleep up there alone?” He gave her a smile he hoped was charming.
For some reason, his charm never worked on Holly. Maybe that was part of why he was beginning to find her so enticing. She did smile back at him, anyway.
“That about sums it up. For tonight you take the bed. You have to be as tired as I am, or worse. Tomorrow morning maybe we’ll go back to the main house for breakfast, and I’ll convince King to stay over there with Mike. He’ll get bored just following me around the cabin here anyway, won’t you, guy?” The plumed tail thumped again, and Jake couldn’t help envying all the attention the dog was getting. Holly didn’t talk that way to him.
“I guess that’s all right,” he said, still not overly thrilled with an arrangement that let him have what looked like a perfectly good bed while Holly shared the sofa bed with a dog. “You’ll be warmer down here in front of the fire, anyway.”
“And ready to go to sleep before long. Don’t think you’ll keep me up if you work on the computer, because I’m tired enough that you won’t. But don’t stay up all night working on that, either. Get some rest yourself and start fresh in the morning.”
“I will,” Jake told her, not sure even as he said it if he should promise that. If he had enough luck tracing Barclay’s coded entries, he could be in front of the screen for hours. Even now it was beginning to pull him in. Before he knew it, Holly had gone up the bedroom stairs and started doing things to get ready for bed. King planted himself at the base of the stairs, occasionally whining softly.
