by Nancy Bush
Inside, he found Ricki hugging her daughter. “I’m so proud of you,” she said. “It was really smart to hide in the closet.”
“Don’t leave me here alone again, Mom.”
Ricki’s mouth tightened. “You were supposed to stay at the big lodge. Pilar is such a—piece of work.” She had to bite back what she really wanted to say.
Brook pulled her zebra print blanket tighter over her shoulders. “Where’s Kit?”
“At the stables,” Ricki said, hoping it was true.
“I’m going to head over there now,” Sam said, tucking his flashlight under his arm. “I think you and your mom should be sleeping up at the big lodge. Don’t they have some spare rooms up there?”
“Only about half a dozen,” Ricki said. “You’re right. It’s not safe for Brook to be sleeping here alone while I’m out and about doing police work.” Again, she hugged her still-shivering daughter. “Why don’t you grab some stuff and put your boots on.”
Brook looked up at Sam. “Can I bring Rudolph?”
Ricki opened her mouth to say yes, then stopped herself. She didn’t want to weaken her position when she took on Pilar. “We’ll leave him for now, but he’ll be fine. I promise.”
Brook seemed about to argue, but apparently her fear was too great and she simply nodded jerkily.
“You’re safer up there,” Sam told her. “We don’t want to take any chances.”
There was a meow, and Brook bent down and scooped the white kitten into her arms. “Will you miss me?”
As Brook took the kitten off to gather her things, Ricki clapped a hand on Sam’s shoulder to steady herself. “Nothing is so scary as thinking your kid is in jeopardy.”
Sam rubbed her back—a move meant to comfort, though the contact charged him up in a way that didn’t seem quite right for a man on duty. “She’s going to be fine.”
He dropped his hand away when Brook returned. He would have to learn to keep it to himself. As he and Ricki shifted Brook’s pillow and clothes up to the lodge on the hill, Brook was surprisingly polite and cooperative for a kid her age. Pilar was in bed when they arrived, but Ricki gave Ira a piece of her mind, and Sam followed it up with a stern warning to keep the doors locked and look after his granddaughter.
“I’ll lock the doors and turn on the alarm,” Ira agreed. “But I’ve got a cabinet full of guns, and I always keep a revolver upstairs beside the bed, just in case.”
Sam frowned. “Mind you don’t shoot a family member with that.” Domestic disputes comprised the majority of the shootings in Prairie Creek. “And be careful. You’ve got a child in the house. Have you familiarized Rourke with guns? Does he know how to shoot?”
“Hell, no. Pilar’s mollycoddled him,” Ira grumbled, “but I’ll get him going.” Then he glared balefully at Ricki. “I talked to Delilah. She’s no wedding planner.”
“I know,” Ricki said, exasperated, “but she’s a planner, at least.”
He waved her off with a dismissive hand and Sam was amused to see Ricki roll her eyes after his back was turned.
After Brook headed upstairs, Sam thought he’d be saying good night, but Ricki told him she was coming along to the stables. “I won’t sleep until I know Kit is okay.”
Sam couldn’t help thinking it would be nice to have her along.
When they entered the stables they saw the horses had been fed and settled in their stalls for the night, but there was no sign of either Kit or Davis. Ricki looked in on the pregnant mare; she was resting comfortably for the moment, it appeared. Sam tried to reach Davis on his cell. “No luck,” he told Ricki.
“Well, we’ve got two horses missing, and one of them is Luna, his mount, so he may be out there, out of range of cell service. I’m hoping Kit is with him.”
“Does he usually work this late at night?” Sam asked.
“Sometimes. As long as everything gets taken care of, nobody really cares what hours he works.”
They decided to ride out and follow the tracks leading away from the stables. Ricki showed him the tack room, and he lifted two saddles onto horses she brought over. Working together, they had the two horses ready to ride in a few minutes.
The wind had died down, and snowflakes lingered in the air like a white mist. He could get used to this, having Ricki by his side. He sat high on his mount as she pointed to the tracks in the fresh snow.
“Two sets of tracks, heading down toward Copper Woods. I hope that’s our mark,” Ricki said.
“You have to wonder why Kit would go out in this storm. Where the hell is she going?”
“Nobody knows what she does out on the prairie, or exactly where she stays. She just wanders, and as long as she doesn’t hurt the stock, Dad doesn’t mind.”
“Where was she the night of the church fire?” Sam mused aloud. “When her mother was killed?”
Ricki stared at the fields of white as their horses plodded down the trail. “You think Kit might be the killer?” Her skeptical tone indicated that she thought he was way off base.
“We need to consider everybody. That’s all I’m sayin’. Everyone knows she and Mia never got along. And she’s been in the vicinity of both murders.”
Snow collected on the Stetson she’d grabbed from the barn, and there was something about the contrast of Ricki’s soft, feminine face under a carved, manly hat that appealed to him.
“I don’t suppose you tracked too many people in New York on horseback,” he observed.
“Try none. They use the mounted police mostly for crowd control and parades.”
He nodded, suddenly sober. “It’s a dark day in Prairie Creek when a kid like Brook isn’t safe at home alone.” He didn’t want to think about the things that had happened on his watch. They needed to end the killing, stop the predator. “We’ve got to get this guy.”
“Damn straight.”
Their words fell off and the only sound was the tapping of icy snowflakes on their hats. A companionable silence, Sam thought as he stole a look over at her. Yeah, he could definitely get used to this.
Concealed by a snow-covered pine, Davis watched her dance in the snow and felt a growing alarm. Was Kit a killer? Had animal instinct taken over, defying the laws of man? To leave tonight while Babylon drew closer to birth meant she had something to do that was pretty damn important.
Kit was so far afield … so out there.
Davis Featherstone knew how it felt to live on the outside. Cast out from the safety of a family. Outside the circle of the law.
When he was seventeen, right around Kit’s age, he’d pushed all the limits. Beer and girls and weed. He’d gambled away the few bits he could scrape together. He’d been at the center of plenty of barroom brawls, drunk out of his mind. Wasted and hungry. Surly with the teachers who wanted respect for their useless knowledge. At his best, he was a decent ranch hand. At his worst, he was a common criminal.
One night, feeling his oats, he’d stolen a shiny new truck and made a run for Vegas. He hadn’t gotten too far when the cops found him. The cops had tossed him into jail for grand theft auto. But the vehicle’s owner had demanded that the charges be dropped. He claimed that the truck had been a loan to the kid.
Ira Dillinger was the owner of that truck. He’d saved Davis from doing big-time in a state prison. He’d also given him steady work as a ranch hand and a place to stay in the bunkhouse, away from the violence at home. The boss had saved Davis’s life, but no one had been able to reach Kit in the same way.
She was one of a kind. A snowflake.
Davis looked back in the shadowed forest, checking Luna, who waited quietly where he’d tied her to a tree. Part of him felt like a cad for spying on Kit; the other part wanted to sweep her up on his horse and gallop back to safety.
But so far, he’d taken the easy out, just hanging back in the trees. He watched her sway in the falling snow, dancing around the same tree where the coyote had been abandoned. What was it about this spot near Copper Woods? And what was in that white mound,
now dusted with snow? Another coyote?
Something in her hands sparkled like an icicle when she held them up in the snow. What was it? She moved toward the white mound, then plunged her hands in.
Was she trying to bury the shiny object?
He had seen enough … maybe too much. He came forward, emerging from the cover of trees.
“Kit.”
Lost in another world, she leaned forward, her hands submerged in snow.
“Kit.” He moved closer, calling her until she jerked up and snapped her head toward him.
“Davis?” Her eyes were full of sorrow, her cheeks tracked with tears. The sight of her tweaked a chord of emotion deep inside him, plucking at feelings he’d thought had died with his unhappy childhood. “What are you doing here?”
“Kit, what is this?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “I saw you here earlier this week with that coyote. I didn’t want to say anything when we came across that deer in the cave today, carved up the same way, but I saw you doing this ritual with the coyote carcass. Right here, with the coyote against this same tree. Dancing the same dance.”
She pulled her hands from the snow mound, rolled back on her haunches and wiped her gloves. “This is a sky tree. The coyote was dead so I brought him here to let his spirit rise to the sky.”
“The coyote wasn’t the first time I saw you with a skinned animal.” He hated pinning her down—it was torture for a free spirit like her—but it had to be done. “Last summer … remember when I ran into your camp down by the meadows? There was a skinned lamb hanging from a tree.”
She stared at him. “I ate it. Roasted it over the fire. I was hungry.”
“You should have come to me. Mrs. Mac will feed you any time, you know that. You can’t just kill a lamb.”
Kit rose to her full height, faced him. “I didn’t. Mountain lions were attacking him. They did the damage. I scared them off, but it was too late for the lamb.” She rubbed her gloved hands together, as if kindling a fire. “That wasn’t a good day.”
Davis tipped his hat back, not sure what to think anymore. He didn’t think Kit was lying to him—there wasn’t an ounce of dishonesty in this girl—but it was impossible to get a solid answer out of her.
Her eyebrows rose over her smudged face. “I’ll pay Ira Dillinger back. I have some money buried over by—”
“It’s not the money,” he interrupted. “It was probably a Kincaid lamb, anyway. But, Kit, what is all this?” He looked toward the white mound. “Another carcass?”
“No … it’s stuff that belonged to my mom.” She reached into the snow and removed a glass prism, and then lifted a white trash bag from the snow, shaking out a thick pelt of brown fur. “My father gave it to her,” she said.
“Ahh … Why are you burying them here?”
“These are what she valued. They need to be buried here, so her spirit can rise to the sky.” She then reached into her boot and pulled out a hunting knife, sleek and sharp. A two-inch blade, better for precision cutting. “I don’t hurt animals. I try to help them.”
“What about people?” he had to ask.
“I don’t hurt them either.”
She was right. She was as she’d always been. He’d let himself think terrible thoughts because he’d been too scared for her. “I know. But people make judgments. They jump to conclusions.”
“They’re going to think I killed my own mother because I’m good with a knife?” she said incredulously.
“It’s possible.”
“They’ll be wrong.”
“We’ll have to make them see that.”
Ricki and Sam stood watching from the woods as snow whispered through the branches overhead.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “Is that a knife?”
“Wait,” Sam said, putting a hand on her arm.
At that moment Kit looked over at them. “Who’s there?” she demanded.
As Ricki and Sam stepped out, Davis scowled at them. “Are you kidding me? Even out here, I can’t be left alone.”
“We were looking for Kit,” Sam said, facing his brother squarely. “What’s your problem?”
“Leave Kit alone,” Davis snarled.
“What is this stuff?” Ricki asked, pulling up the prism and fur.
“Put them back,” Kit said tautly, and Ricki, meeting the girl’s gaze, set the items back on the snow.
“Is somebody gonna tell me about this?” Sam asked.
Davis looked to Kit, then back to his brother. “It’s too cold out here for the whole story. We’ll go back to the stables. Check on Babylon.”
“Then come to my place,” Ricki said. “It’s warmer.”
After a moment, both Kit and Davis nodded curtly.
Forty-five minutes later, after a stop at the stables to see Babylon, the four of them convened at the foreman’s house. Ricki tried to keep quiet while Sam did the talking. His voice was low and nonjudgmental and sexy as hell, though it seemed to annoy Davis. She sensed a bit of bad blood between the two of them, though they remained civil.
Davis and Ricki shared the sofa while Kit insisted on sitting on the floor. Leaning against the fat sofa arm, Ricki warmed even more to Kit as Davis told the story of how he had worried that Kit’s firsthand knowledge of the area and her knife skills would make her a suspect in the killings. “I didn’t know the coyote had been all carved up when she found it,” Davis said, raking back his dark hair. “She just took it to the sky tree, trying to do the right thing for its spirit.”
Sam’s voice was level, reserving judgment. “To carve up a human body like something in an anatomy textbook, that takes skill.”
“I cut the throat of a mountain lion caught in a trap once,” Kit said. “He was howling in pain. I had to do it.”
It was a roundabout way of professing her innocence, but Ricki believed her completely. As Sam continued the questioning, Ricki tuned out the voices and focused on her, the animal whisperer who understood creatures so well but had no one to understand her. Her hair and eyes were so distinctively Dillinger, and yet she lived a world apart, self-exiled. Did she ever get lonely? There was definitely grit under those round eyes and long fingers, but there was also a good heart. Ricki believed her.
“So …” Sam summed things up. “You were burying the crystal and fur coat as a sort of memorial to Mia.”
She nodded, then got to her feet, dusting off the seat of her pants.
“Where are you going?” Ricki asked.
“The stables.”
“You need to stay with someone,” Sam said sternly, “for your own protection.”
“Stay here,” Ricki offered. “Brook’s up at the main house. You can have her bed.”
“I’ll be at the stables with Babylon,” Kit said firmly.
“I’ll go with her,” Davis said. “She won’t be alone.”
Sam looked at his brother, then at Kit, then back at his brother. Whatever he was thinking he kept to himself as he turned to Ricki. “Then I’ll walk you up to the lodge.”
As Kit and Davis headed out the door, Ricki turned to Sam. Although exhaustion shaded his face, there was something distinctively sexy about the smoky shadows over his dark eyes. “I’m a deputy. I’ve got two loaded guns and a belly full of vitriol for any intruder who wakes me up before sunrise. And you’re the one who didn’t sleep last night. Why don’t you stay here? It’ll save you driving back into town through all that snow. And you can protect me, like the big, bad-ass sheriff that you are.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I would laugh, but I’m just too tired.”
“Then stay. Here.” She took his arm and guided him to the back of the house. “Let me show you to your room, sir.”
He snorted, then opened his eyes wide when he saw her bedroom with a painting of the prairie on the wall and the double bed with its pale blue comforter. “Your bed? No, Ricki. I’ll stay, but give me the second bedroom.”
“Here’s the thing about that,” she said, escorting him into
her room. “I don’t really know how to explain to my teenaged daughter that a thirty-something man slept in her bed. It seems like something that would be good for years of therapy.”
“Ahhh … didn’t think about that.”
“Just promise me you’ll take your boots off first,” Ricki said briskly. “I can’t stomach the idea of boots in my bed.”
Sam sat on the edge of the bed and leaned down to untie his boots. “I should have taken them off at the door. That’s what happens when a man lives alone. You revert back to the old bunkhouse manners.”
The sight of Sam sitting on her bed, stripping down to his stocking feet was just too homey and familiar; it sent a thrill through Ricki’s nether regions. Damn, the man looked good. It was one of those pinch-me-I’m-dreaming moments, and she sorely wanted to tackle him down to a prone position and tangle in the covers with him.
But that probably wasn’t a good idea. No, she needed to choose option B, Brook’s bed.
“Okay, then.” Her palms were sweating, and she wiped them on her jeans, trying to appear casual. As if she put a gorgeous man to bed in her room every night. “There are towels and soap and stuff in the bathroom, and help yourself to anything you want in the fridge.”
“Thanks.” He stood up, tall and solid and only inches away from her. “But I think I’ll just go to bed.”
She could feel the heat of his body through her sweater. “Good night.”
That was her exit line, but she couldn’t move her feet. And why was he standing so close? Was that a signal? An invitation? Because the answer had to be no, though every nerve ending in her body was shrieking yes.
“Good night.” He leaned down and kissed her cheek, his lips like a brand.
That did it. She tipped her face up to him and pressed her lips to his, testing. She couldn’t help herself.
He hesitated for a heartbreaking moment, then they were kissing, deep, thorough kisses that sent hormones surging, her body pressed to his.
Want pulsed inside her, a steady, hot burn fueled by the erection she felt straining against his jeans. There was an electric thrill at the knowledge that he wanted her, too. She held her body against his, her tender softness embracing his hardness. He was all muscle and bone, but she fit against him like a glove. She was malleable and soft, and as she melted against him, she savored the way that the spaces between them could be so easily filled.
