by Alice Sharpe
“Aw, shucks,” she said in a passable Texas accent. “It never crossed my mind you were that kind of guy.”
There were a few open doors off the long wall and Sierra saw part of an office through one doorway and the edge of a bed through another. The kitchen was at the south end of the barn, the living area set up in the middle. The second floor was open and accessible by a broad wooden stairway. A wood-burning fireplace was currently unlit while a fuzzy dog bed occupied one cozy corner.
Daisy had retreated to her cushion, her gaze fastened to Pike but darting to Sierra now and again as though keeping track of the competition. “Your dog can’t take her eyes off you,” Sierra said.
“She’s practicing for motherhood, I guess.”
“She’s going to have puppies?” When Pike nodded, she added, “When?”
“A couple of weeks. The vet said it’s her first litter.”
“You don’t know if she had puppies before?”
“No. I’ve only had her three months. Found her Halloween night. She’d been hit by a car and was out on the road. Thankfully, she wasn’t too badly hurt, but no one claimed her and now she’s mine.”
“She’s a yellow Lab, right?”
“Mostly. There might be something else in there, too, who knows. Have a seat. It’s kind of late to start a fire in the fireplace but I’ll turn up the heat and put the soup on the stove.”
“Let me help you,” she said, knowing that if she sat on the comfortable-looking sofa she probably wouldn’t get up until morning.
“Sure.”
In the end, she sat at the counter and drank a glass of wine he poured her while he heated minestrone soup and toasted slices of bread. She liked watching him move around the kitchen. She’d noticed how fit and handsome he was the minute she saw him—it was just impossible to miss. And now, when the hard day had honed some of his edges while softening others, she admitted to herself he was a very hot guy.
“Are you dating anyone?” she asked.
He spooned steaming soup into a bowl and set it in front of her. “Not currently. Why? Would you like to sign up?”
“I’m kind of over long-distance dating,” she said.
“I take it you aren’t...involved with anyone?”
“Nope. My last boyfriend moved to France when his company transferred him. We tried to keep it together, but it didn’t work. How about you? Any cowgirl’s heart go pitter-patter when she sees you?”
“Well, there’s a kid about Tess’s age at the feed store who has had a crush on me for about five years.”
“Do you like her?”
“Patty? She’s a nice girl, but she’s a kid. I like women.”
“Tall women?” she asked, then took a sip of the soup while keeping her gaze on him. Grace was a good cook.
“Yeah,” he said as he sat across from her with a bowl of his own. He pushed the basket of bread her way and added, “I’m partial to redheads with green eyes.”
“That describes me,” she said with feigned surprise.
He looked at her as though just noticing her appearance. If she hadn’t seen him checking her out a half-dozen times that day, she might have fallen for it. Another grin and he laughed.
“Well,” Sierra said, “besides the distance issue, we have another problem. How are we going to handle Tess?” The spoon was halfway to her lips when a large black shape landed on the counter near her elbow. She threw up her hands and the spoon went flying.
“Sinbad, get down,” Pike demanded and Sierra finally realized the shape belonged to a svelte black cat with yellow eyes. The cat meowed and jumped to the floor, where it proceeded to walk away as though offended.
“How many animals do you have?” she asked.
“Just these two, who hang around inside the barn. Of course, there are a lot of others outside. This is a ranch, remember?” His gaze dropped to her bosom. “And you have soup all over your blouse.
Sierra looked down at her shirt and winced. The dry cleaner’s image appeared again.
Pike replaced her spoon with a fresh one and they finished the soup with idle chatter until Pike sighed. “Looks like you and I are going to LA.”
She nodded. The thought of more travel wasn’t exactly comforting right at that moment.
“Let’s get it over with, okay? I can arrange plane tickets for tomorrow.”
“Okay. Make the flight late enough that I can talk to Tess in the morning and get details about everything she saw and heard.”
“Yeah. I have some ranch work I need to finish up, as well. I’ll see if I can get an evening flight. You have to feel like a dead man walking. Let me show you to your room.”
Sierra nodded. The promise of lying down was the only thing still keeping her on her feet. He toted her suitcase for her, depositing it on top of a dresser in a small room bright with white paint and pine walls. “There’s a bathroom behind that door in the corner. This house is wireless. I know you had business you wanted to take care of. The password is PIKESPLACE, one word, all caps.”
“You seriously need to work on creating secure passwords,” she said with a smile. “However, work can wait until tomorrow, too,” she said, but kind of knew she’d get started on it before she fell asleep.
“This can’t wait,” Pike said and stepped close to her. Staring down into her eyes, he touched her cheek, tilted her chin up, leaned down and kissed her. His lips were vibrant and fabulous and the kiss way more impactful than she would have guessed. It took all her willpower not to pull him back when he moved a few inches away.
“Been wanting to do that since the first moment I saw you,” he said, his voice as warm as a caress.
“Me, too,” she admitted.
He kissed her briefly again. “Good night, Sierra. Sleep well.”
Sierra stripped down to her underwear and hurried under the blankets. The barn was chilly. She’d retrieved her laptop, turned it on and waited for it to boot. The bed was soft and comfortable and the pillow felt like a little cloud. The memory of Pike’s tender and unexpected kiss spread contented tendrils throughout her body. Consciousness lasted about ten more seconds before she fell asleep in the glow of the computer screen.
Chapter Four
Sierra woke up early to find the black cat staring at her from his perch on the nightstand. She sucked in a surprised gasp of cold air that startled the creature. He jumped to the floor and disappeared out the door and she showered and dressed quickly.
She felt rested but a little at odds. She’d been dreaming, she realized, and though she couldn’t recall the content, she did know it hadn’t been pleasant.
Her first thought was of Tess and she picked up her phone and opened her bedroom door. Then she saw the time and decided not to call yet. Instead she wandered over to the painting she’d seen the night before, the one of Pike wearing his glasses.
Kinsey had caught the intelligent glint in his eyes and the angular shape of his face. Sierra had seen each of the brothers and they were all handsome, virile men, but they were all different, too. In the past, she might have been attracted to Chance or Frankie, who each exuded a hint of wild spirit close to the surface. Pike was not usually the kind of man toward whom she gravitated. He was a serious guy with a quiet, strong core; too intense for her, or so she might once have thought. But now he occupied all the spare nooks in her mind.
She used her phone to take a picture of the painting, and then she shot another of a framed map of the Hastings ranch. The place was huge, but at last she saw where the houses were in relation to one another, where the so-called hanging tree ruled a portion of a plateau and the location of the ghost town. She was turning away when a small bronze statue of a man standing beside a horse caught her attention and she snapped a photo of that, too.
A clicking sound announced the arrival of
Pike’s dog, Daisy, who seemed to be smiling as she wagged her tail. “You look like you’re going to pop pretty soon,” Sierra told the dog. Was that the first animal she’d ever addressed as though she could understand the words? Maybe.
Eventually, she started a pot of coffee and settled down on the sofa to read emails and to study the photos she’d taken at the bar.
* * *
“OUR PLANE LEAVES at six o’clock tonight,” Pike announced when he found Sierra sitting on the couch fooling with her laptop. “Do I smell coffee?”
“I put on a pot, hope you don’t mind,” she said. “Come look at something.”
He joined her on the sofa. Whatever soap she’d lathered with hadn’t been found in his shower, he was sure of that. Nothing he owned smelled quite like flowers mixed with sunshine. A pair of eyeglasses sat on the table in front of her. “I didn’t know you wore those,” Pike said.
“They’re clear glass. There’s a camera in the bridge piece.”
He smiled. “Very James Bond.”
“They work pretty good. My dad’s old cohort taught me to use them when I was a kid.”
“Was he a private eye?”
“Nope, he was Dad’s campaign advisor, Rolland Bean. Everyone called him Rollo.”
“Was your dad in politics?”
“He was on the city council. Then he ran for mayor of Dusty Lake, New Jersey, and lost in a landslide. Rollo and his creepy son, Anthony, kind of disappeared after that.”
He smiled at her and leaned in closer. There was a smile twitching her lips as she spoke and he wasn’t sure if it was because of old memories or the fact they were mere inches apart. “Why do you say his son was creepy? Creepy in what way?”
“Hmm. Well, his eyes were two different colors. One brown, one gray, which was kind of cool, but he was always lurking around, buttering up the adults, you know, then acting superior to the kids. And he was sneaky mean.” She fussed with the machine and brought up two photos on the screen. “Tell me what you see.”
“A man in two different places,” he said. One photo showed a guy standing at a counter, looking back over his shoulder. The other one showed the same guy sitting in low light. “Who is he?”
“The one ordering coffee is Spiro Papadakis. He’s the husband of the wealthy client I told you about.”
“The one who wants to protect her money in a divorce,” he said.
“That’s right. A day or two before, Savannah—she’s my client—hired me. Her girlfriend swore she saw Spiro at a New Jersey bar with the woman in this picture. It so happened the girlfriend knew the woman he was with because they’d worked together at a junior college a few years back. Savannah didn’t want me to follow Spiro because she was afraid he’d make my tail and use that against her, so I opted to follow the woman. The first night she went to a retro disco place in New York City, met a guy there and flirted like crazy. I finally left when they did. She went to his place and since he was twenty years too young to be Spiro, I went home. They were so hot and heavy with each other that I thought for sure the girlfriend had been mistaken, maybe not about Spiro but about Natalia. Anyway, the next night Natalia drove out to Dusty Lake, New Jersey, and went into Tony’s Tavern, which is the same place the girlfriend saw her at a few days before. Natalia waited there for the man who looked like Spiro to show up. It seemed I had everything I needed until I heard the guy speak. Spiro is Greek and by all accounts has a pretty distinct accent. The guy in the bar sounded like a longshoreman. I thought I struck out.”
Pike put on his glasses and studied the photo. “There’s damn little to identify either one of them. No scars, no distinctive anything.”
“Just their watches,” Sierra said. “His is hard to see, but hers looks like diamonds.”
“Real diamonds?”
“Who knows? As a counselor she can’t make that much money, but she lives in a nice place and her clothes are fabulous. She doesn’t strike me as a girl who wears fakes.”
“What does Savannah say about the pictures?”
“I don’t know yet. I just emailed a whole slew to her.” She opened her email and clicked. “I copied the email to myself. This is what I sent.”
He whistled. “That’s a lot of photographs.”
“If nothing else, I’m thorough,” she said with a chuckle. “Now listen to this. Savannah responded to the accent thing and that’s what makes it interesting. She said Spiro was an actor back in Greece and still dabbles in small productions. According to her, he can adjust his voice. So now I’m back at square one.”
“This is fun, isn’t it?” he said.
“You mean like putting together a puzzle?”
“Yeah.”
She smiled at him. “It can be.” She closed the laptop and studied him for a moment. “You look pretty damn sexy in those glasses.”
He picked up the tortoise frames and settled them on her face. It was hard to imagine a look she couldn’t pull off. “You’re kind of cute yourself,” he said, and they exchanged bemused smiles. He wasn’t sure why he felt so comfortable with her. By all rights, she should make him uneasy. They were two worlds colliding and yet there appeared to be a little pool of commonality between them.
“I’m going to rustle up some breakfast and then we’d better head over to the house and get things moving,” he said.
She grinned at him. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anyone rustle before. Mind if I watch?”
* * *
THIS TIME THE unexpected vehicle parked beside the main house was a bright blue van with the initials LOGO on a plaque attached to the door. It bore a Washington State license plate.
“Looks as though the television people arrived,” Sierra said.
They went inside to find three men standing around the granite counter sipping from mugs of coffee. Pike’s dad was facing them, hands on his waist, frown on his long, lean face. Tension was thick in the air.
Tess, nose dripping but looking better than the day before, sat nearby on a stool. She wore the same fuchsia T-shirt she’d worn the day before, though it appeared to have been freshly laundered, and pink loafers. It occurred to Sierra that the girl had run away without a change of clothes.
Introductions were made, all too fast to remember for more than a few seconds. The man in charge looked about fifty, with gray on his temples and wire-framed glasses. He introduced himself as Gary Dodge.
“Is something wrong?” Pike asked.
Gary said, “Not really,” at the same time Pike’s dad said, “Hell, yes. They’ve got legal troubles!”
“Now, that’s an overstatement,” Gary said in a calm, reassuring voice. He spread his hands on the counter and addressed Pike, obviously anxious for a different perspective. “We have one former disgruntled employee who tried to sue us for wrongful termination. He lost, but since then weird things have been happening and we’re about one-hundred-percent positive he’s behind it all. He’s made things...difficult...for us lately, with nuisance calls and sporadic crazy behavior, but we don’t believe he poses a threat to anyone’s safety.”
“You told me his behavior was getting more erratic,” Harry said.
Gary swallowed and nodded. “Yes, I wanted to be honest with you. Listen, we’re all set to go on this project. We’ve done a year’s worth of groundwork and no one wants to walk away. It’s true that last August this guy somehow canceled our caterers on a desert shoot and we went thirsty and hungry for a day. And last month he broke into our headquarters and destroyed a couple of computers and ransacked the safe, trying to destroy this project. But we always have backups and nobody has ever been hurt.”
“I don’t know,” Pike said. “It seems to me people like this keep upping the ante. Why haven’t the police stepped in?”
Gary’s eyes shifted to his hands. “We haven’t called them,�
� he said.
“Why not?”
“Because we can’t prove anything and we don’t want the bad publicity.”
Or their insurance and backers to get nervous, Pike thought. He kept that to himself. “So, what’s the upshot?” he asked.
“We’d like to go ahead with everything as it’s planned. Your father is understandably nervous about the possibility this guy would make trouble for you. I’ve been trying to explain that, so far, he’s only made trouble for us.”
“There are women and children living here,” Harry said.
Gary cleared his throat. “Listen. We’ll only be here a couple of days. What if we hire a protection agency to secure this place?”
“More people?” Grace said from the stove where she was frying sausages. The tone of her voice made it clear what she thought about that idea.
“Just a couple.”
“I don’t know,” Harry said. He turned his gaze to Pike. “What do you think?”
Pike shrugged. “What does Frankie say?”
“He says since when does a Hastings get scared of a lunatic? The boy is anxious for this project, you know that.”
“He isn’t the kind to back down from a challenge,” Pike said and, addressing Gary, added, “Personally, I appreciate your disclosure, but I don’t think we need anyone to watch our backs in the winter. There are a lot of us here and we’re all experienced with weapons and, lately, with our share of homicidal maniacs. Come the fall when we’re up to our ears in ranch business, that’s a different story. Let me talk to Frankie. Where is he?”
“He and Oliver went out to your barn,” Gary said. Then he jammed his hands in his pockets and added, “I hesitate feeding fuel to the fire but there’s one more thing you have to know.”
“Now what?” Harry barked.
“In the interest of transparency, the talent we had lined up to do the voice-over had a stroke earlier this week. He’s pulled out of the project.”
“What does that mean for us?”
“It doesn’t mean anything for you right now. It means that we shoot the winter scenes as planned and then I start looking for someone else.”
