The Cowgirl in Question

by B. J Daniels

  Holt heard the disgust in his father’s voice, saw the worry in his face. No, not worry, the affirmation of what his father had suspected for years.

  “All I need is enough money to tide me over—”

  “VanHorns don’t run like cowards,” his father said through clenched teeth.

  “Right.” Holt saw then that his father would freeze in hell before he’d help him get away from here. “Never mind. I should have known you wouldn’t help me.”

  He turned too quickly, bumping into the end table. The table overturned. The bronze cowboy hit the tile floor with a crash and a curse from his father.

  Holt didn’t stop to pick up the bronze or the table. He headed for the door, wondering how far he could go on thirty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents.

  “If you run, everyone will know you have something to hide,” Mason VanHorn yelled after him.

  Chapter Three

  Cassidy had never run from anything in her life. But as she stood in the kitchen of the Longhorn Café smelling the freshly baked rolls that had just come out of the oven, every instinct told her to take off. Now.

  Rourke was back. She could feel it. The rest of the town seemed to have given up on him. The café had cleared out as the day dragged on and he hadn’t shown. Ellie was taking care of what few customers were left. Cassidy had gone into the kitchen to help Arthur, her cook, who was working on the nightly dinner special.

  Trying to keep to her usual routine, Cassidy made the dinner rolls for that evening. She liked cooking and baking. Especially making bread. She could work out even the worst mood kneading dough.

  But it didn’t work today. Nothing worked. And she knew she had to get out of here. Out of the café. Maybe out of town. The state. The country. She couldn’t face Rourke. Not today. Maybe not ever.

  “I’m going to take off for a while,” she told Ellie, who was sitting in an empty booth reading a magazine, waiting for Kit, the night-shift waitress to come in.

  “You all right?” Ellie asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s not coming back to town. Hell, if I were him I’d head for Mexico or maybe South America,” Ellie said. “I’ve seen pictures of it down there. It’s nice.” Ellie was always dreaming of going somewhere else. But at almost fifty, it wasn’t looking like she would ever go any farther than a couple of hours away to Billings or the thirty-mile drive into Wyoming to Sheridan.

  “Everything under control?” Cassidy asked Arthur as she stuck her head in the kitchen.

  The cook was forty-something, tall, pencil thin, with a shock of dark hair beneath his chef’s hat. He gave her a look filled with sympathy. It was the last thing she needed right now. “Take care of yourself, sweetie.”

  She smiled and nodded, taking off her apron and hanging it up before heading into the small office at the back. Retrieving her purse, she glanced around to make sure there was nothing she would need.

  How could she know what she would need? She had no idea where she was going. Or if she was even going any farther than home. She was new to running and it already didn’t suit her.

  She turned out the office light and started down the hall toward the back door.

  “Not planning to skip town, are you?” asked a strident voice behind her.

  Cassidy froze.

  “Not Cassidy Miller,” the voice mocked.

  She turned slowly, a curse on her lips as she met her cousin’s blue-eyed gaze. “I’m going home for the day, not that it’s any of your business.”

  Blaze Logan nodded, smiling as if she’d always been able to see through her.

  Cassidy feared that might be true.

  “No one would blame you if you turned tail and ran,” Blaze said in her comforting, I’m-your-friend tone.

  Cassidy had fallen for that act when she was young and stupidly confided in her cousin. She was no longer that young or naive. Normally she avoided Blaze when at all possible and Blaze hadn’t gone out of her way, so their paths had crossed little in the past eleven years. Cassidy should have known that Rourke’s return would change all of that.

  “What would I have to run from?” Cassidy asked as she stepped toward her cousin.

  Blaze laughed, a bray of a sound. “Rourke McCall.”

  “I have nothing to fear from Rourke.” If only that were true.

  Blaze eyed her. “I just saw his pickup go by.”

  Cassidy suppressed a shudder, hoping she hid her emotions as well. “Go away, Blaze. This doesn’t have anything to do with you. Or does it? I’ve always suspected you knew something about Forrest’s murder, something you don’t want Rourke to know.”

  Blaze paled under the thick layer of makeup she wore. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it?” Cassidy raised a brow. “I wonder if Rourke will think so?”

  “Don’t you dare try to incriminate me,” Blaze snapped. “You start telling Rourke a bunch of lies—”

  “Oh, I’m sure Rourke has had a lot of time to think about the past. He’s probably figured out by now why you danced with Forrest that night.”

  “How could I know that Rourke would try to cut in, let alone that Forrest would pick a fight with him?”

  “Oh, Blaze, I think you knew exactly what you were doing. Everyone had heard the rumors going around about you and Forrest. And all the time Rourke thought he was the only one you were seeing. It certainly gave Rourke a motive for murder, didn’t it?”

  All the color had gone out of Blaze’s face. “You started those rumors,” she said on a whisper. “You would have done anything to break up Rourke and me.”

  Cassidy let out a laugh that was almost a sob. “It was a junior-high crush, Blaze. I much prefer his brother Cash.” Cash had asked her out a few times. She’d declined.

  But Cassidy knew Blaze was interested in Cash.

  “Cash?” Blaze demanded in a choked cry. “You and Cash?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Cassidy said. “Are you interested in him, too?” She hated the cattiness in her voice. “You change McCall brothers the way you change shoes. It’s hard to keep track. Whatever happened to J.T. McCall? Didn’t work out?” J.T., the eldest and the one in charge of the ranch, hadn’t given Blaze the time of day. Cassidy had seen him cross the street to avoid Blaze. Cassidy knew that feeling only too well.

  Blaze glared, nostrils flared. “Be careful little cousin. If Rourke doesn’t kill you just like he did Forrest, someone else might.” With that, she spun around and stalked out of the café.

  Cassidy stared after her, feeling weak and sick. Blaze always brought out the worst in her. But it was Blaze’s last words that struck to her core. What would an embittered Rourke McCall do? Would he make good on his threat to see her pay for her part in sending him to prison?

  She wondered now why she hadn’t run the moment she heard Rourke was getting out of prison. Her stupid pride. She didn’t want the town to think she was a coward. Or that she had anything to hide.

  Both were a lie.

  She took a breath, then went back into her office, turned on the light, put her purse away. She had work to do. As much as she wished otherwise, she wasn’t cut out to be a runner.

  ROURKE DROVE all the way through Antelope Flats, surprised at how little it had changed. There were a few new houses on the edge of town, a half-dozen different businesses, but basically in eleven years the town had changed little.

  Antelope Flats was like so many other small Montana towns. There were more bars than banks, more churches than places to eat. There was no mall. If you wanted to buy clothes, you either went to the department store on Main that had had the same sign out front since the 1950s or you went to the Western store where you could also buy a rope or a hat or a pair of boots.

  What was new was Antelope Development Corporation or ADC as Brandon had called it. Rourke hadn’t noticed the office the first time he drove past. He’d been too busy looking across the street at the Longhorn Café.

  He’d always asked Brandon about Cassidy, afrai
d she might clear out of town before he got out of prison. So he knew that Cassidy had bought the Longhorn Café and it had been thriving under her management. She’d also bought the old Kirkhoff place at the edge of town.

  “And Blaze?” Rourke would ask his brother.

  “She’s working for Easton Wells. He started ADC across the street from the Longhorn.”

  “What’s ADC?” he’d questioned, frowning.

  “Antelope Development Corporation. Mostly they deal with landowners and coal-bed methane gas well leases.”

  “Our old man must love all those wells everywhere around the property,” Rourke had said. Asa McCall would shoot anyone who even suggested doing anything to his land but farming and ranching it.

  “There’s money in that gas,” Brandon said. “A whole lot of money. You can’t believe the wells that have gone in around the county.”

  “Blaze seeing anyone?”

  Brandon would shrug. “You know Blaze.”

  Yeah. He knew Blaze, he thought as he pulled into a space in front of the Longhorn Café and sat for a moment trying to see inside the café through the front window. The afternoon sun made the glass like a mirror, reflecting him and his old pickup.

  He’d been waiting for this day for so long he could hardly believe it had finally come. He got out, slammed the truck door and walked toward the entrance to the café. Town seemed a lot busier than it had eleven years ago.

  He saw people he used to know, but he didn’t acknowledge them. Most just stared. He knew he’d changed in the past eleven years. He told himself maybe they didn’t recognize him. Or maybe they didn’t want to. Maybe they were afraid of him.

  He pushed open the door to the Longhorn. The bell tinkled and he stepped into the café, and was hit by the mouthwatering smell of freshly baked bread.

  His stomach growled and he realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He took a stool at the counter. The café was empty this late in the afternoon except for one couple he didn’t recognize at a booth. He could hear voices in back, the clang of pots and pans, the creak of an oven door opening and closing.

  He picked up a menu, telling himself that Cassidy probably wasn’t even here. The menu covers were the same plastic with a local color photograph of red bluffs, tall blue-green sage and a longhorn steer in the foreground. It had been a shot of the McCall Ranch. He liked that she hadn’t changed it. And wondered why she hadn’t, given how at least one McCall felt about her.

  The McCall Ranch was the only one around that raised longhorns. There was no money in anything but beef cattle, but his father kept some longhorns, raising them as his great-grandfather had. A reminder of what had started the ranch, a link to the past that Asa hadn’t been able to let go of.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cassidy come out of the back of the café. She didn’t recognize him at first. Not until he looked up from the menu and his eyes met hers.

  CASSIDY STOPPED dead in her tracks. Although all day she’d been expecting to see him walk into the café, she was shocked to see Rourke sitting at the counter, shocked that after all these years, he really was free and home.

  Her heart thudded in her chest so loudly she swore he had to have heard it. Except he wouldn’t know why. He’d think it was out of fear.

  Her biggest shock was how much Rourke had changed. He’d been more of a boy than a man when he’d left, tall and lanky, not yet filled out at twenty-two.

  Now there was no doubt that he’d become a man, from his strong jawline to his broad, muscular shoulders. But there was a coldness to him that showed in the pale blue of his eyes, a hardness that hadn’t been there before. Bitterness and anger showed in the hard set of his jaw, in the way he carried himself, a wariness, a spring-coil tension like a wild animal that knew he had predators nearby.

  Her heart dropped at the thought. Rourke believed she was one of those predators. She shuddered to think what his life had been like the past eleven years in prison. And the part she’d played in sending him there.

  “Rourke,” she said, and forced her feet to move toward him, careful to keep the counter between them. She put down the rack of glasses she’d been carrying, shoving her shaking hands deep into her apron pockets so he wouldn’t realize how much just seeing him affected her.

  She glanced past him to the street and beyond it to the large window of the ADC where Blaze was standing, watching them. Her stomach churned. Blaze was hoping for a show. What did Rourke have planned?

  “Cassidy.” There was a softness to his voice that belied the icy malice in his expression.

  His voice was the only thing about this man that was the same as the boy she’d been unable to get out of her thoughts for years. She hated what just the sound of that voice did to her.

  “I heard you were released,” she said, needing to say something. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  He smiled at that. “I’ll bet.” He looked down at his menu.

  “Rourke, I—”

  “I’ll have the same thing I used to.”

  A hot roast beef sandwich, a coffee and a salad with blue-cheese dressing.

  She stared at him. “I was hoping—”

  “You do remember what I used to order when your mother worked here, don’t you?”

  Fumbling, she pulled her pen and order pad from her pocket and wrote down his order, writing fast so he wouldn’t see how her hands shook.

  He smiled a smile that had no chance of reaching his eyes.

  There was so much she wanted to say to him, but she could see he wasn’t going to let her.

  Back when she and Rourke were teens, Cassidy’s mom would have taken Rourke’s order. Cassidy would have been bussing tables, lurking in the kitchen so Rourke wouldn’t see her, feeling ashamed to be caught sweaty, in her white uniform, her apron soiled from clearing dirty tables.

  He was looking at her as if he knew her deepest, darkest secrets, knew that she hid in the kitchen when he came in, and listened to him talking and joking with her mother.

  “Anything else?” she asked, looking down at the scribbled order on her pad, then up at him.

  “No.” His expression was colder than the grave.

  She stared at him, confused. She’d expected him to lay into her the moment he saw her. She wished he had. His silence was more frightening. Tension arced between them like a tightwire. She felt as if she were balancing on it, unsteady, ready to fall any moment.

  “I’ll put your order in,” she managed to say.

  He picked up the menu to look at it again, then without a word turned away from her to stare out the front window, toward ADC and Blaze? He was enjoying her discomfort. He wanted to make her suffer, drag this out.

  She turned and walked back to put in his order, trying hard not to run. She wished Kit would come in for her shift, but Cassidy knew she wouldn’t leave anyway. She couldn’t escape Rourke. Not in a town the size of Antelope Flats. Not even in a state as large as Montana.

  Needing desperately to keep busy and yet not wanting to hide in the kitchen, she returned to the counter with more clean glasses and utensils.

  She could feel his attention on her, hard as stones, but he didn’t say a word. Nor did she try to talk to him. It was clear Rourke was calling the shots.

  Kit came in finally, passing Cassidy and making big eyes at her as if to say, Did you see who’s sitting at the counter?

  “You want me to wait on him?” Kit whispered on one of Cassidy’s trips to the kitchen.

  “No. I have it covered,” she said, wondering if Rourke was straining to hear their conversation, just as she had strained to hear his so many years ago.

  She returned to the counter to refill the sugar, salt and pepper containers. The one time she looked in his direction he was smirking at her as if he knew what she was up to and it didn’t fool him for a minute.

  She should have picked another task to do. She spilled sugar, knocked over salt and pepper shakers, fumbled and dropped things. Come on, Rourke. Just get it over wi
th.

  The bell dinged that his order was up. She hurried back to get it, so nervous she felt nauseous.

  She wiped perspiration from her forehead with her arm. Her skin felt flushed, then dimpled with goose bumps as a chill rippled over it. She blotted her hands on a clean towel, avoiding the sympathetic looks of Ellie, Kit and Arthur.

  “Don’t you want me to call the sheriff?” Arthur said.

  “No!” She lowered her voice. “Please. I can handle this.”

  Picking up Rourke’s order, she hurried back out to the counter and put it down in front of him.

  “Thank you,” he said, his eyes boring into her.

  “Can I get you anything else?” Her voice only broke a little but she could see that he heard it, relished in the fact that he had her flustered.

  “No thanks. I have everything I need. At least for the moment,” he added.

  She was weary of this game and desperate to say the words she’d wanted to say to him for eleven years. “Rourke, I think we should—”

  “I’ll let you know if I need anything else,” he said, cutting her off.

  He didn’t want to hear her tell him how sorry she was for what had happened to him. Or how badly she felt about the part she’d played in it. He wanted to be angry. To make her suffer. Didn’t he know how much she’d suffered already?

  No, she thought, looking into all that icy blue. He wanted to strike out at her for his own suffering. He wanted someone to pay. And he’d decided eleven years ago, who that person would be.

  She stared at this hardened, cold, embittered man with only one thing on his mind: getting even with her. The realization left her feeling empty inside.

  He’d never paid her any mind at all—except for one kiss when she was thirteen and then again after Forrest’s murder. He’d looked right through her before then.

  She refilled his coffee cup. He thought she’d framed him for murder. That he’d been the only one to live his life under a cloud of suspicion for the past eleven years.

  If he thought he could make her feel more guilty, he was wrong. She had blamed herself all these years.