Just a Cowboy

by Rachel Lee

Ben’s eyes widened, and Hank guessed that Kelly had come out of the bedroom. “Look,” the agent said more reasonably, “I can give some of the money back.”

  “That’s not the point,” Hank said flatly. “I trusted you.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Kelly said. “I’d have still rented it if I had known about the problems.”

  Hank looked over his shoulder at her. “You’re not helping. I’m trying to take an inch out of his hide here.”

  Kelly surprised him with a giggle.

  In spite of himself, Hank smiled. He loved to hear her laugh. But then he turned back to Ben who was relaxing. “I need to know something.”

  “What?”

  “Did you do anything with the personal information Kelly gave you? A background check?”

  “Of course I did! I had to check her credit rating.”

  Hank heard a thump behind him and turned to see that Kelly had sunk to the floor. That look of terror had come back to her face, and he had the worst urge to just punch Ben.

  “It’s normal procedure,” Ben said, giving Kelly a quizzical look. “You don’t just turn over property to people without making sure they’re reasonably reliable. I’d have been delinquent in my job—”

  Hank cut him off. “You’ve already been delinquent. You didn’t do what I told you. Just get out of here. Now.”

  Ben didn’t argue. Glaring at Hank, he turned and stomped out.

  “Well,” Hank said as he closed the door, “don’t that just put the frosting on the cake.”

  He went to squat by Kelly, reaching for her hand. It was cold. “Lie down, Kelly. You’ve had a shock.”

  She didn’t even argue. She slid down until she was on her back. He grabbed a nearby hassock to elevate her legs.

  “Four days,” she groaned. “Four days.”

  “I know.” At that moment, the inside of his heart was as black as night.

  “Four days,” she said again, and again her tears started to roll.

  There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, either. Four days was long enough to track anyone down. If that guy was following her, if her husband wanted her dead, the killer could already be here.

  “I’m calling the sheriff,” he said. “You’re going to be the best-protected person this side of the president.”

  She shook her head but didn’t say anything. Nor could he really blame her. The sheriff didn’t have enough people to surround her every minute. No way.

  So that left him, a broken-down old cowboy.

  Great. Just great.

  Chapter 6

  As the afternoon began to wane, Hank gave up on tearing up vinyl and linoleum. Through the open windows, he sensed the quickening of the breeze, and when he stepped outside, he saw storm clouds beginning to gather to the Southwest.

  He went back in. “We’re going to get rain. I need to finish caulking those windows now. Will you be okay if I’m right outside?”

  He saw the flicker of hesitation, but it was brief. “Sure.”

  “I can be here in a split second. I’m not going anywhere.” With effort, he squatted beside her and touched her shoulder with his fingertips. “Just promise me you won’t decide to run without letting me know.”

  That eased her expression into a faint smile. “You want the truth? Now I’m afraid to run. Four days, Hank. That’s long enough if he’s hunting for me. He’d have known the instant my credit was queried.”

  “Yeah, I was afraid of that. He subscribes to one of those services?”

  “Ever since somebody tried to use his identity to buy a car.”

  “Hell.” He moved until he gripped her shoulder. “One peep from you and I’ll be in here faster than you can say squat. I promise. But I had to put in wood-frame windows because someone twenty years back decided we needed to preserve our historical heritage. I don’t need to tell you the frames will swell if I don’t get the caulking done.”

  Her smile widened a shade. “You don’t like historic preservation?”

  “Depends. I tried to talk ’em into letting me use vinyl frames that look the same, but no dice. Some people are idiots. Vinyl at least doesn’t change its size with every change in humidity.”

  She nodded. “I don’t know much about it.”

  “I do. Sticky windows are going to be unavoidable over time. On the other hand, I was able to plane the frames for a perfect fit. Couldn’t have done that with metal or vinyl.”

  A dagger sliced through his hip and he had to stand up. “I just need to run next door to get my caulking gear. Wanna come?”

  Again that fleeting hesitation. Then a look of determination. “No, I’ll just keep pulling up the flooring. It’s such a mess now I just want to get it done.”

  “Sorry I can’t get it out of here until they get the big trash container out here tomorrow.”

  “It’s not a big deal. It’s just that I’m starting to see progress. It makes me want to keep going.”

  He looked around and had to agree. They’d definitely made a lot of progress. Sadly, the wood under the vinyl flooring was covered with glue. That was going to take a real cleaning job.

  “Okay. I’ll be back in five. As soon as I get the caulking done, we’re going to get some dinner. Sound good?”

  “Sounds great.”

  It was only as he limped as quickly as he could over to his place that he realized he didn’t want to leave her alone for even five minutes. Not since that little conversation with Ben a few hours ago.

  As irritated as he was with Ben for renting the place in that condition, he couldn’t get irritated with him for doing a background check on Kelly. Under any other circumstances, it was what he would have expected of Ben. The man had just been doing his job.

  And he couldn’t have known it might put Kelly at risk.

  That it probably had.

  Oh, Hank did not like the storm of feelings that had been battering at the edges of his mind all afternoon. Between them, he and Ben may have set a trap for her, with the best intentions in the world. He, with his inquiry to the police because he wanted to know what was really going on; Ben with his principled conduct of his job.

  Didn’t make it feel any better. The thunder that rumbled out of the Southwest echoed the rumbling in his mind. A storm was brewing, all right, and he’d helped make it.

  Although in honesty, he hadn’t meant it to. He hadn’t thought a quiet inquiry to the police might get back to anyone outside the department. But, sadly, Kelly was right. If Dean was playing the distraught soon-to-be-ex concerned about his wife’s disappearance, if he had reported her missing—and he might well have to try to cover himself since she had already been attacked once—then some kind soul at the police department, if he heard about the request for information from Denver, would undoubtedly have let Dean know that she had surfaced.

  That alone wouldn’t do much. No, it was the confluence of things that might now create a serious risk for her. Her being ID’d in Laramie before the query from Denver could have sent Dean and his compadre looking in the wrong direction, but a credit check out of Conard County, Wyoming nailed her whereabouts. Cripes, they might as well have handed over her address.

  He grabbed his caulk and caulking gun and hurried back to the house as swiftly as he could. He was relieved to see Kelly still ripping at the floor, ripping as if her life depended on it.

  She had to be terrified. The amazing thing to him was how little she showed it. It was as if she were a cork, wanting to bob up no matter how many times she got shoved down. He liked that.

  “I’m back,” he said.

  She looked over her shoulder, then sat back on her heels, pushing strands of blond hair back from her face. “I know. You have a distinctive walk.”

  “You mean I hobble. Hard to mistake.”

  The corners of her mouth lifted upward. “What happened?”

  “Another time,” he said, swiftly evading the subject that caused him so much pain. Hell, he apparently wasn’t half as brave as she was. He
waved his caulking gear at her. “This has to come first. That storm is moving in fast.”

  She hesitated. “Can we close the windows?”

  She asked with studied casualness, but he saw past it. “Sure. And lock the doors, too, if you want. I’m just going to be right outside.”

  “Won’t the rain damage the caulking?”

  “Nah. I buy the good stuff. It’ll be set up well enough in half an hour, and it won’t rain before then.”

  Outside, though, he took another look at the sky. Yeah, there was time. For this at any rate. The rest he wasn’t so sure about.

  Kelly pulled up the last of the kitchen flooring and carried it over to add it to the building heap in the living room. Her arms ached, her back ached and she thanked God for the hard physical labor, because without it she’d be crawling out of her skin with nerves.

  How often did Dean get those reports from the credit bureaus? Every day? Only when there was activity? Would a credit check alone send him an immediate alert?

  She ought to know these things, but there was a lot she didn’t know because Dean had controlled everything.

  A gilded cage. Another platitude. Man, the entire past eight years were turning into one big, ugly trite platitude. And she wasn’t happy about it.

  Standing here now at the age of twenty-nine, she could look back and shake her head over her own blindness. And wonder how she could have been so consistently blind.

  How had she done it? How was it possible not to see what was right under your nose? Anyone with half a brain would have wondered what Dean saw in her. Anyone with half a brain would have thought it was a mismatch that simply wouldn’t work because of the age difference, if nothing else.

  He was a man of the world. He’d been around almost every corner. Why hadn’t she wondered what about her could possibly attract him? Why hadn’t she once questioned his declaration of love?

  Looking back at their early dates, she sagged into a kitchen chair with a glass of water, and tried to remember what they’d talked about. And, looking back, she remembered that he’d done most of the talking while she hung on every word. He spun fabulous travelogues of all the exotic places he had visited and wanted to take her. They’d even managed to visit a few of them, always in the company of other friends, though.

  Maybe that should have been a clue. They went to Venice, they went to Dublin, they went to London. But never just the two of them. No, they always travelled with Dean’s friends, and she’d spent her share of time sitting in cafés with the other wives, or reading books waiting for him to get back from some excursion that was just for the “guys.”

  Other times they’d done everything as a group. But never, ever, had Dean seemed the least bit interested in sneaking away with her. Not even their so-called honeymoon had been just the two of them.

  She closed her eyes against a sudden shaft of pain, facing anew the fact that she had been used from the very beginning. There had never been a honeymoon, not in that marriage. Never a time when she had felt that Dean was focused solely on her. Except possibly in bed, and then only when it was new.

  How could she have failed to notice that? Simply because she didn’t have experience? Shouldn’t there at least have been a few early days when Dean had devoted himself to her?

  Or was that hindsight speaking again? Maybe some people never fell in love that way, so intensely that they could think of little else. She had, but that didn’t mean Dean was that type. He was older, after all, maybe past that rush of new love. Maybe that was just a youthful thing.

  Or maybe she was still trying to make excuses for him. Still trying to believe that he hadn’t married her just because she’d look good on his arm and make other men envious.

  A tap startled her. Her eyes flew open and she saw Hank outside the window with his caulking gun. He smiled, gave her a little wave, then started running a bead of caulk around the frame.

  She wondered if Hank would be the type to fall in love the way she had, where the whole world went away in the wonder of it. If he would see the sun rise and set in someone’s eyes the way she had once seen it in Dean’s. The thought made her catch her breath, and her heart skipped a few beats. What a thought!

  It was enough to make her sit straighter in her chair, to quicken her breath and awaken an ache between her thighs.

  To be loved by someone the way she had once loved Dean. To be loved that way by a man like Hank, who seemed so down-to-earth and kind.

  Even as emotionally bruised as she felt, she couldn’t help but envy the woman Hank would someday love. Something about him suggested that he would be a devoted mate. Although maybe she would be smarter to assume she was no judge of such things.

  Dean was proof positive of that.

  Hank disappeared from the kitchen windows and came into the house through the mudroom. Since their reinforcement of the joists, the floor no longer creaked under his weight.

  “Almost done,” he said. “That storm’s getting closer. You want to spend the night at my place? I’ve got that spare room.”

  Her heart nearly stopped. But he’d said spare room. “Why? Is it going to be bad?”

  “It looks like it. But it’s not just the storm. I looked through the kitchen window and…you looked so sad. Plus, I’ve been stewing all afternoon, and I don’t think you should be alone. So either you take my spare room tonight, or I’m sleeping here on the floor.”

  She couldn’t help it. She looked around. “What floor?”

  A crack of laughter escaped him. “That’s a good question.”

  The sound of his laugh brightened her mood a bit. “I guess you leave me no choice.”

  “That was the plan.”

  She looked at him, wondering how it was she had stumbled on a knight errant at the point in her life when she most needed one. Maybe the Fates weren’t entirely without compassion. “Thanks, Hank. The spare room it is.”

  She’d hardly unpacked. In fact, she hadn’t really unpacked in over six weeks, except to do laundry as necessary. Easy, therefore, to pack an overnight bag. Heck, it wasn’t as if she had much at all.

  Hank looked at her duffel as she flung it over her shoulder. “Is that all you left with?”

  “A duffel? Yes. I had to be able to carry it easily.”

  “Hell,” he said quietly. “I could get really, really angry about now.”

  “It’s fine,” she said quickly. “It’s enough. I don’t need much.”

  “Few of us do, I suppose.” He shook his head. “If you have laundry you want to bring, you can use my machines.”

  So she gathered up her dirty clothing in a canvas bag she carried for that purpose and brought it along. Outside, the sky had become overcast, though the darkest clouds still remained a distance away. For the first time, she heard the low growl of distant thunder.

  She had certainly been preoccupied, she thought, because she hadn’t even noticed either the darkening or the rumbling until just now. The air had cooled noticeably, and she shivered.

  “I’m Florida-born and-bred,” she said as they climbed his porch steps. “I’ll have to get a jacket if I’m going to be here long.”

  “We get plenty hot sometimes, but I have to admit most of the time around here it would probably feel cool to you. I have a zippered hoodie you’re welcome to borrow.”

  “I think I’ll take you up on it. I’ve been thinking as I got further north that I’d need something, but I was never anywhere long enough to do something about it.”

  “But you get cold down there, too, don’t you?”

  “Of course. But your summertime temperatures are reminding me of my wintertime temperatures.”

  He flashed her a smile as he let her into his house. “At least now you’re out of the wind. Let me get you that sweatshirt.”

  He dropped her duffel and laundry in a room down the hall as he headed back through the house. Two minutes later he emerged from a room and handed her a navy blue hoodie. “Sorry, it’s the only clean one I have
that isn’t ragged.”

  She shook out the folds and found herself staring at a shirt with a quatrefoil shield on it, like a four-leaf clover, and the letters DFD, only a large Gothic D overlaid the FD. She held it, looking at him, feeling that something very sensitive might be happening.

  “Are you sure you want me to wear this?” For days now, any time the subject came up he had said so firmly that he was just a cowboy now. She was certain this shirt had associations he didn’t like to think about.

  “It’s not a problem,” he said, shrugging one shoulder. “You need to be warm. That’ll work better than anything else I have.” As if to prove it meant nothing, he took it from her, unzipped it and helped slip it around her shoulders. It was huge, but it was also soft and warm, and she hugged it around herself.

  “Thanks, this feels so good.”

  “I thought it might. Feel free to roll up the sleeves.”

  He passed her, heading for the kitchen. “Are you hungry? Because I’m sure getting there.”

  “Ravenous,” she admitted, following him. “What can I do to help?”

  “Just take a seat and keep me company.”

  Thunder boomed loudly and the lights flickered briefly, as if the storm wanted to make sure it had their attention.

  “I guess it’s good I have a gas stove,” he remarked as he opened the refrigerator and began pulling things out. Then he volunteered something about himself for the first time. “I’m not a bad cook.”

  “You make great tuna salad and grilled cheese sandwiches.”

  “I make more than that. When you live at the firehouse, you take turns cooking for everyone. You’d better be passable or you’ll be working with a lot of unhappy guys.”

  “You do that for yourselves?”

  “One of the guys was designated cook, another a designated shopper.” He paused, his hands full of fresh vegetables. “But basically, we can all fill in when needed. You don’t suppose they’re going to hire cooks and cleaners for us, do you?”

  “But cops don’t have to.”

  “They don’t work our shifts. Besides, it’s an old tradition. As old as the first volunteer fire department, I guess.” He placed the vegetables on the counter and stuck his head back in the fridge. “They liked my cooking. So I did a lot of it when I had the time.”