Defending the Rancher's Daughter

by Carla Cassidy

  “Damage bad?” he asked, and eased into the chair.

  “Bad enough.” She walked over to the counter where a coffeepot was half full. “Want a cup?”

  “All right,” he agreed. This all felt far too civil and every muscle in his body tensed as if in anticipation of some kind of explosion.

  She set a cup of coffee in front of him, then carried her own to the chair next to his and sat. “I lost three cows, six calves and half a fence line.”

  “I also heard you’ve lost a number of your ranch hands in the last couple of weeks.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Smokey mentioned it to me.” Smokey Johnson wasn’t just the cook and housekeeper for the West clan. When Zack’s mother had been murdered years ago, Smokey had been working as the ranch manager. He’d moved into the house to help Zack’s father with the six motherless children, all under the age of ten.

  She shook her head. A faint smile curved her lips, there only a moment, then gone. “That man seems to know everything about everyone in this town. And yes, about half the men walked off in the week following my dad’s death. I’m not sure whether it was because they didn’t want to work for a woman or they assumed I’d be selling the ranch. They ran like cockroaches in the light of day. But I’ve got some good men left.” A frown lowered her perfectly arched eyebrows. “At least, I think they’re good men.”

  “Are you thinking about selling out?”

  “Not a chance.” Her eyes flashed with a touch of anger. “That vulture, Sheila Wadsworth, came to see me the day after my dad’s funeral to see if I was interested in selling. I told her to get off my property and stay off.”

  “Sheila’s just doing her job.” Sheila Wadsworth owned one of the two real-estate agencies in the town.

  “She acts like the Donald Trump of Cotter Creek, wheeling and dealing, and she has the sensitivity of a brick.” She bit her lower lip, a lip he didn’t remember being so full.

  “What happened to your crutches? Aren’t you supposed to be using them?” He needed to focus on something other than the shape and fullness of her lips.

  “Those things are aggravating. I can’t move fast enough with them. Besides, I can bear weight on the ankle this morning.”

  “When you called me yesterday, what did you want me to do? What did you have in mind?” He took a sip of the coffee and found it bitter. It seemed somehow appropriate, a reflection of their past relationship.

  “I want you to investigate my father’s death. I’d like for you to stay here at the ranch, in the bunkhouse, to see if you can find out who might have been responsible for his death and also who spooked my herd yesterday.”

  Zack believed it was a goose chase and apparently his feelings showed on his face. She sighed impatiently. “If you don’t believe what I’ve told you, then why are you here?”

  Why was he here? What had prompted him to leave the self-imposed isolation he’d been in for the past month? To momentarily surface from the darkness that had threatened to destroy him?

  “I’m here because I loved your father.” It was the simplest of explanations. He wouldn’t tell her that the fear he’d seen in her eyes had haunted him, that despite the fact that he thought her spoiled and pushy and obnoxious, he’d seen her fear and couldn’t help but respond.

  His answer seemed to satisfy her, for she nodded and stood. “Then the first thing we should do is get you settled into the bunkhouse.”

  “No, the first thing I’d like to do is see where Gray fell off his horse.” He knew Katie well enough to know that if this was going to work at all he had to establish control from the very beginning.

  Her eyes narrowed, as if she was aware that a power struggle had begun. In those calculating blue depths he saw the moment she decided to acquiesce. She averted her gaze from him. “Fine. We’ll need to saddle up some horses. He was on a trail about a mile from here.”

  They had just stepped off the porch when a handsome blond male approached them. At the sight of her, he swept his dusty brown Stetson off his head and smiled. “Kate, you doing okay this morning? Are you supposed to be off your crutches so soon?”

  “I’m fine, Jake.” She flashed the cowboy a warm smile that Zack felt down to his toes.

  “I’m heading into town to order the lumber for the fence. Do you need anything?”

  Zack took a step toward the man and held out his hand. “Zack West,” he said.

  “Jake Merridan.” He shook Zack’s hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Zack is coming to work for me,” Katie said. “We were just going to saddle up and take a little tour of the place.”

  “Nice to have you aboard,” Jake replied.

  “Jake is fast becoming one of my most valuable ranch hands,” Katie said, once again offering the blond a full smile. “He’s been with us for the last couple of months but has already made himself invaluable.”

  Zack saw the look in Jake’s eyes as he gazed at Katie, a look that told Zack the man would be happy being something much more than a valuable ranch hand. More power to him, Zack thought.

  Within minutes Jake was on his way and Zack and Katie were in the stables saddling up a couple of mounts. “Where did you find Mr. Wonderful?” he asked as he tightened a saddle strap.

  “Who? Oh, you mean Jake? He came to work for Dad when the Wainfield ranch sold.” Despite the obvious tenderness of her ankle, she swung up into the saddle with the grace he remembered from her as a young girl.

  Kate had always been a horsewoman. Like her father, she loved the big creatures and could have been a successful barrel racer, but she’d lacked the discipline and had been too wild, too reckless.

  He mounted, as well, and they left the stables heading west across the hard, dusty earth. The horses walked side by side and Zack found his attention drawn to her over and over again.

  If he didn’t know her at all, if he hadn’t just gone through a terrible lesson about love and loss, he might have found himself attracted to her.

  Her facial features were bold yet feminine and spoke of inner strength. Physically she was the kind of woman who always caught his eye…long-legged and with a little meat on her bones. He frowned, irritated by his observations, and focused his gaze straight ahead.

  They rode toward a wooded area and in the distance he saw several other men on horseback and assumed they were some of her men.

  “I heard you graduated from college,” he said to break the silence.

  She cast him a sideways gaze. “Don’t sound so surprised,” she said dryly. “I might have once been a bit of a handful, but that doesn’t mean I was stupid.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply that you were stupid. I was just kind of surprised to hear that you’d come back here to work with Gray on the ranch.”

  “Why would that surprise you? This is my home.”

  “I don’t know, Gray just mentioned to me several times that you seemed to be enjoying college life in Tulsa.” Actually, Gray had worried about her, afraid that her rebellious and impulsive nature would get her into some kind of trouble.

  “So, why did you quit Wild West Protective Services?”

  He had the distinct impression she was changing the subject on purpose. “I just decided it was time for something different.” He wasn’t about to share with her the personal trauma that had led him to make that particular painful decision.

  “So, what are your plans?”

  “I don’t have any plans other than to give you a couple of days.”

  She stopped her horse in its tracks and stared at him in disbelief. “A couple of days? Zack, I need more than a couple of days of your time. This isn’t just about my father. I think it’s about something bigger, something evil.”

  With the bright sun heralding a beautiful day, her words sounded just shy of silly. It was impossible to imagine evil in this place of sweet smelling grass and lingering morning dew. It was impossible to imagine evil anywhere in the small, picturesque town
of Cotter Creek, Oklahoma.

  But Zack had learned the hard way that evil existed where you least expected it. He’d learned that sometimes no matter how hard you tried, no matter what lengths you went to, evil had its day.

  “Show me where your father fell.”

  “It’s just ahead.”

  They rode a few minutes longer then she stopped and dismounted. He did the same. “Every morning for as long as I can remember, Dad rode this path along the tree line.”

  Her eyes darkened slightly. “He enjoyed his solitude. Anyway, two weeks ago he took off for his ride like he usually did, but an hour later Diamond returned to the stable without him.

  “Jake and Sonny and I took off looking for him and we found him there.” She pointed to an area nearby. “There’s a rock there, and it appeared that he’d fallen or been thrown off the horse and hit his head on the rock in the fall.”

  For the first time he saw a flicker of emotion other than irritation or anger in her eyes and he realized how difficult it had been for her to bring him to this place of her father’s death.

  Despite the fact that he hadn’t particularly liked her as a girl and had no idea what kind of woman she’d become, he couldn’t help the empathy that rippled through him.

  He reached out and lightly touched her on the shoulder, standing so close to her he could smell the scent of her, a clean, sweet scent. “Stay here. I’ll just be a minute or two.”

  He left her with the horses and went to the area she’d indicated that Gray had ridden his last ride. The ground was packed hard and cracked from lack of rain, making it impossible for him to discern any pattern of horse hooves that might have existed.

  As he crouched to look at the ground around the rock where Gray had apparently hit his head and died, a wave of grief overtook him. There had been too much death in his life lately.

  Dammit, he shouldn’t even be here, immersing himself in Katie’s latest drama. Accidents happened. People died. There wasn’t a boogey man behind every curtain and there was no way he intended to get sucked into Kate Sampson’s life.

  He winced as he saw the blood splattered on the top of the rock. Ugly, but keeping with the aspect of a fall and a bang of the head against an unforgiving element.

  He glanced over to Katie, who stood next to her horse, her arm wrapped around the gelding’s neck. For just a moment as their gazes met, their crazy, explosive past was gone and only the present shined from her eyes—fear and regret and a million other emotions he couldn’t begin to understand.

  What he suddenly wanted to do was to put her fears to rest. He wanted to tell her that rungs to lofts rotted, that storms spooked cattle and a good man had been thrown to his death from his horse.

  He wanted to tell her that she was overreacting, falling into her pattern of histrionics, that she needed to deal with her grief and to get on with her life.

  He broke the gaze and instead focused on the rock once again. He picked it up and turned in over and in that instant everything changed.

  Chapter 3

  The moment she saw the expression on his face, she knew. He dropped the rock to the ground and stepped backward, as if the rock was a rattlesnake, and as his gaze caught hers, she knew.

  “What?” she asked, her voice nothing more than a mere whisper. She had no idea what he’d found, what he thought, but she knew it was bad.

  He walked to where she stood by the horses. “We need to call the sheriff. He needs to get out here.”

  “What did you find?” Thick emotion pressed tightly against her ribs, making it hard for her to take a deep, full breath.

  His eyes, normally so distant, were now filled with emotions that frightened her. There was a softness there she’d never seen.

  The grief she’d been fighting off since the morning they’d found her father’s lifeless body swelled up inside her and unwanted tears sprang to her eyes.

  “Gray didn’t just fall and hit his head on that rock.” His voice was steady, but soft. “If I was to guess, that rock was used to beat your father in the head.”

  Every ounce of oxygen seemed to expel from her body. “I knew it.” She managed to gasp as she stumbled away from the horse and turned her back on Zack. Tears tumbled down her cheeks as painful sobs racked her.

  Murdered. She’d known it in her heart. The moment she’d found her father lying motionless on the ground, she’d known deep inside that something wasn’t right.

  Her father had been murdered, and along with this knowledge came the complete and painful acceptance of his death.

  “Katie.”

  She sensed Zack right behind her and she turned blindly into his arms. As she buried her head in the sunshine freshness of his T-shirt, it didn’t matter that she’d disliked him for as long as she could remember. It didn’t matter that she believed him responsible for most of the unhappiness in the early years of her life.

  All that did matter was that she needed somebody to hold her tight and his strong arms enfolded her and pulled her against his solid body.

  She leaned into him, tear after tear escaped.

  She’d never see her father again. She’d never again spend evenings on the porch, rocking and listening to him reminisce with stories of her mother who had died when Kate was a baby. She’d never have the opportunity to prove to him that she was as good as any son might have been.

  Grief slowly gave way to anger. Her father hadn’t died a natural death, nor had he been taken in a tragic accident. Somebody had stolen his life, stolen him from her.

  As the sorrow ebbed away, she became conscious of where she was and whose arms held her. Zack’s chest was solid muscle and his arms radiated strength even as he awkwardly patted her on the back.

  She had once promised herself that Zack West would never see her cry again and within twenty-four hours of seeing him again, she was in his arms weeping.

  She jumped back, mortified by her momentary lapse of control. “I’m sorry,” she said as she wiped her cheeks.

  “No apology necessary.” He stuck his hands into his pockets, his features devoid of all emotion.

  She looked away from him, needing a moment to gain control of herself. She took several deep, cleansing breaths, then looked at him once again.

  “I need you, Zack. I need you to find out who did this to my father. If it takes two days, then I need you for two days. If it takes a year, I need you for a year. But I won’t rest until I know who is responsible for this.”

  He held up his hands and backed away from her, as if what she asked was too much. “Whoa, let’s take it one day at a time. The first thing we need to do is get back to the house and call Sheriff Ramsey.”

  “But you’ll see this through?” She wasn’t sure why, but it seemed imperative that she get a definite commitment from him. “I need to know that you won’t quit until my father’s murderer is behind bars.” She needed to know that the outrage that burned in her was just as white hot in him.

  “One day at a time, Katie. That’s all I’m willing to commit to right now.” His eyes held a distance she didn’t understand, a remoteness that confused her.

  “What is your problem, cowboy?” She stepped closer to him. The anger that coursed through her needed a target and he was the most convenient around. “My father loved you like a son, and he thought you loved him, as well, but obviously he was mistaken about your feelings for him.”

  She started to spin away from him but gasped as he reached out and grabbed her by the wrist. He pulled her closer, so close she could see the tiny flecks of gold in the depths of his green eyes, smell the faint scent of coffee on his breath.

  Her heart seemed to stop beating as his gaze held hers intently. For a moment she felt the crackle of electricity in the air and with it the knowledge that she’d pushed him too hard.

  “Don’t ever doubt the fact that I loved Gray. I told you, we’ll take this one day at a time. If that’s not agreeable to you, then get somebody else. My feelings for your father are mine alone a
nd the way I deal with his murder isn’t any of your business.” He released her wrist. “Now, let’s get back to the house.”

  He mounted his horse and she did the same, her skin still burning from contact with him and her heart pounding just a bit unsteadily.

  “That boy’s nothing but raw emotion,” Gray used to say about Zack. “He just hasn’t figured out how to control it yet.”

  Of course, at the time her father had spoken of Zack, she’d had the feeling he was really trying to tell her something about herself.

  Apparently, Zack had learned control. Or maybe he’d lost his ability to have any emotions. She wasn’t sure which, but as they rode back toward the house, once again his features gave nothing away of his internal thoughts or feelings.

  “If you tell any of my men I lost it and cried, I’ll personally take my shotgun and shoot you in your cold, mean heart.”

  He gave her a wry, tight smile. “Now that’s the Katie Sampson I know and remember, always using vinegar when sugar might work as well.”

  She bit back a retort and for a few moments they rode in silence. Once again she found herself wondering what on earth had possessed her to call him of all people? He’d never pretended to like her, had always shown her nothing but disdain.

  Her father had not only loved Zack, but had admired him, had believed him to be an honorable man. That’s why she’d called him, because she knew no matter what he thought of her, he’d do what was right. He’d find Gray’s killer.

  “You’re sure of what you saw on that rock?” she asked, breaking the silence that had grown distinctly uncomfortable.

  “There’s blood on both sides, and on the underneath there’s some matted hair. That’s not consistent with a fall.” He grimaced. “I wish I’d had on gloves when I picked it up.”

  “Do you think Jim might be able to get fingerprints off it?”

  “Anything is possible. But, even if he does manage to get fingerprints off the rock, they won’t mean anything unless the perpetrator has a record with prints on file.”