“I’ve got two heelers at home,” he said to Mack, straightening up. “Super breed, loyal and smart as the devil but bossy as hell. You have to be top dog. If you let them think they are, they’ll eat your lunch.”
“Hear that, Molly?” Mack said with a chuckle. “Better watch it, girl—he’s got your number.”
Laughing, Ethan handed Mack a plastic sack. “Half pound of bacon was all I had, and I couldn’t find the sausages. But my aunt sent me some real Vermont maple syrup, so I brought that, in case pancakes are still on the menu.” Up close, she saw that his eyes were the color of coffee. Strong coffee. “Toyota first, though,” he added. “I work better on an empty stomach.”
“Good man,” she said approvingly. Leaving his sack in the kitchen, she pulled on a jacket and led him out to the garage. On the way, he glanced at Cheyenne, in her paddock behind the house.
“Nice-looking paint,” he remarked. “Ride much?”
“When I can,” Mack said, adding ruefully. “During hunting season, not so much. Cheyenne thinks she’s been deserted—she’s expecting to spend the rest of her life in that paddock, bored out of her mind.”
“It’s a problem,” Ethan acknowledged. “Same with Buddy Holly. Leave him alone too long and he gets cantankerous. Wants to eat the fence.”
She laughed. “Buddy Holly?”
“Yeah. You know who he was?”
“Do I know? One of my favorites.” Buddy Holly was a Texas musician from the fifties. When she was a kid, she’d had all his records—that was when they were actually records, not a file you downloaded from the Internet.
“No kidding? Amazing. I had another horse once named Willie Nelson. Buddy and Willie. Two great Texans.” He grinned. “Listen, when your workload eases up, let me know and we’ll go riding together. Friend of mine has a ranch over on Blanco Creek. Plenty of open space to work the kinks out of the horses.”
Bemused and by now a little breathless, she nodded. In the garage, she handed him the keys to the Toyota. He started the truck and let it idle for a few minutes, during which it obligingly performed its sudden RPM surge. He left it running, got out, and opened the hood. She went to stand beside him as he scanned the engine compartment for a few minutes. He had big hands, she noticed, hardworking hands, with traces of dirt under short-clipped nails. Her glance went to his cheek, where a long, thin scar traced the line of his jaw.
“Ah,” he said, bending over the motor. He reached down and wiggled something. “That’s not it,” he muttered, and wiggled something else. “Not that one, either.” He reached deeper and bent closer. “Aha,” he said, and appeared to be wrestling with something. Over his shoulder, he said, “Get in and pump the accelerator, would you? Rev it up.”
She followed instructions until he stepped back, dropped the hood, and told her to shut off the engine. “Think that’s got it,” he said. “But it’s only a temporary fix. Probably won’t last more than a few miles.”
“You’re kidding,” she said, getting out of the truck. “But you didn’t do anything. You never even picked up a screwdriver.”
He gave her a mock scowl. “What d’you mean, woman? I fixed it. For the moment, anyway.”
“But all you did was wiggle a thingy or two.”
“What I wiggled was your vacuum hoses,” he explained patiently. “Those thingies stiffen up over the years and start to leak. The business end of the bad one is cracked and loose and it needs to be replaced—there are probably some other hoses that could do with a replacement, too. Next time I’m anywhere close to an auto parts store, I’ll get what you need and put them on for you. Okay?”
Mack found herself thinking that it was a whole lot better than just okay but that it might be dangerous to tell him so. She didn’t stop to ask herself exactly what she meant by dangerous, but she knew she was right.
“I guess that means you think you’re top dog,” she said instead. There was a clean shop rag on a shelf and she tossed it to him.
He gave her a hard look as he wiped his hands. “Hey. I saved you from certain highway disaster, and I’ll lay odds you don’t have Triple A. Is that all the thanks I’m going to get?”
“Of course not,” she said, and smiled sweetly. “I’m about to cook breakfast. How do you like your eggs?”
After the chill outside, the kitchen was warm and fragrant with the smell of fresh coffee. Molly came in and curled up on her bed in the corner beside the stove. When Ethan came in, he (like an investigator, Mack thought) began surreptitiously checking the place out, seeing that it was bachelor-girl tidy and comfortable, definitely not House-Beautiful pretty.
“Hey,” he said, going to her shelf of turtle shells, “you’ve got a Texas tortoise! Super. Did you do the preservation work on this?” Without waiting for her answer, he picked up another. “And a Texas map turtle—now, that’s a nice find.”
They talked turtles for a few minutes, then Mack set to work stirring up a batch of pancakes, frying bacon, and making eggs for two—over easy, since that (it turned out) was the way they both liked them.
While she worked, Ethan hung his jacket on the back of a chair and sat down at the table with a cup of coffee, telling her that he had moved from Williamson County because it was crowded: “Too built-up,” he said. “A twenty-acre shopping mall at every intersection, and hundreds of square miles of nothing but houses with yards the size of a newspaper.” Divorced for a couple of years, he had two children, boys of eight and six who lived with his ex-wife in Round Rock, where he had been a cop for ten years. He took out his cell phone and flipped through a half-dozen photos of smiling, bright-eyed kids for Mack to admire. In his spare time, he said, he fished and hunted and did a little woodworking in the garage of the house he rented. “Cabinets, tables, stuff like that. Nothing spectacular.” He tossed it off carelessly, but Mack heard the quiet pride behind the words.
“My dad loved woodworking,” she said, as she put the food on the table and poured Ethan’s second cup of coffee. “Seems like he was always out there in his workshop, making something for Mom. I loved to hang out and watch him.” Which led to telling Ethan about her father, and how she went hunting with him as a girl, and how he had died, and why becoming a game warden had been her career dream—a mission, almost. Which further led to telling him what she loved about her work and what she didn’t like so much, and eventually to the mountain lion that she and Karen had trapped and freed the day before.
“But keep that to yourself,” she added, putting the second batch of pancakes on the table. “That was an off-the-job thing. Definitely a private project. Not Parks and Wildlife policy.”
“Jeez,” he said admiringly, forking another pancake onto his plate and soaking it with syrup. “You’re either a very brave woman or a freakin’ idiot. I can handle a drunk with a gun, but I wouldn’t want to be that close to a cougar.”
“The lion was sedated,” she said, “while a drunk with a gun can be just plain—” She was interrupted by the chirp of Ethan’s cell phone lying on the table.
“Damn,” he muttered. He picked it up, listened for a moment, then said, “Where?” and “On it.” He clicked off and pocketed the phone. “Gotta get to work.” He forked up what was left of the last pancake, gulped coffee, and pushed his chair back. “I’m really sorry to screw up a perfectly good breakfast, Mack. Rain check?” He pulled his coat off the back of the chair and shrugged into it.
“Rain check,” Mack replied. She heard the sharp disappointment in her voice and blunted it with, “Don’t worry about it. We were pretty much finished, anyway.” The call wasn’t his fault—and how many times had the very same thing happened to her? She followed him out of the kitchen, Molly at her heels. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Somebody broke into Doc Masters’ vet clinic north on 187. Likely after drugs. We had one of those down at the south end of the county a couple of weeks ago. They got a big l
oad of narcotics.” His voice was terse, clipped. “This time, though, they got the doc.”
Mack stared. “Got the . . . doc?” She felt a flutter in her throat. “Doc Masters? Is he—”
“Yeah. He was shot. He’s dead.” Ethan was shrugging into his coat. “The clinic helper—the kid who comes in to feed the boarding animals—found him.” As if in confirmation, they heard the burp and wail of the siren at the volunteer fire department’s garage on Main Street, where the local EMS was headquartered.
Mack pulled in her breath, thinking of the last thing the old vet had said to her, through the open window of her truck, at Derek’s. Nice working with you, Mack. I hope there’ll be a next time. She had smiled, glad to have won the respect she heard in his voice. I’m sure there will was what she’d said. And then she thought of what else he’d told her. The flutter disappeared, replaced by a numbing cold and a tightness deep in her belly, and she made up her mind.
“I’m coming with you.” She reached past the red Windbreaker on the coatrack and took down her green Parks and Wildlife jacket and her duty belt. She wouldn’t take the time to put on her uniform, but this was business. Official business.
“Not your side of the street, Mack.” He fished in his jeans pocket, pulled out his badge, and pinned it on his coat. “Nothing to do with Parks and Wildlife. It was likely another drug thing, and there’ll be deputies swarming all over it. Too bad about the doc, of course. But you don’t need to—”
“Yes, I do.” She slung her duty belt around her hips and snapped the buckle. “I’m a law enforcement officer, and I have a reason for going to that crime scene.” Her gun safe was a step away, in the hallway closet. She unlocked it and took out her Glock. No special need for it, but it was part of her official gear. As she holstered the gun, she glanced at Ethan. “You don’t know for sure that it was an actual drug theft.”
“All I know is what was reported.” He snapped his coat, watching her uneasily. “But no, I don’t know for sure, not until I get over there and take a look. But what the hell else—”
Her mouth was dry and she swallowed. “Doc Masters and I worked together for the first time yesterday, on a call about some anthrax-killed deer on a ranch south of town. He told me he had seen some tattooed fawns on a cattle ranch that doesn’t have a deer-farming permit from Parks and Wildlife.”
Ethan frowned. “Doesn’t have—”
She zipped her jacket. “I tried to get Masters to give me a name and a location, but he said he needed to think about it. I figured he was holding back because the rancher is a friend, or a client. Or a guy who’s prominent in the community—somebody who’s going to face some seriously bad publicity over it.” She took her uniform cap off the shelf above the coat rack and put it on. “I told him I’d call him about it first thing tomorrow morning. That I expected him to give me the name.”
“Tattooed fawns? You’re thinking Masters might’ve been killed over a few lousy fawns?”
“I don’t know.” She pulled her cap down hard. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, but she didn’t want to take the time to skin it back into the ponytail she wore when she was on duty. “Could be just what you said—a drug theft. The doc happened to walk in on a burglary in progress and the thief panicked and shot him. I agree that it’s pretty irrational for somebody to kill over a few illegal deer.”
Irrational, yes. Improbable, yes. But not impossible. And she needed to know. She had liked Doc Masters, had felt good about earning his respect, and was disappointed when he wouldn’t give her the information she asked for. He was dead, and she needed to know why.
At her knee, Molly was pressing hard against her and whining, the stub of a tail wagging urgently. Mack reached down and cupped the dog’s muzzle in her hand, tipping it up to look in her dark eyes.
“Not today, Molly,” she said firmly. “You can’t go today. You have to stay.” Disappointed but knowing that there was no point in arguing, Molly flopped down on the floor and put her muzzle between her paws, looking up under her eyebrows reproachfully. To Ethan, Mack said, “Come on. Let’s go.”
“Guess we know who’s top dog here,” Ethan said, glancing from Molly to Mack. “If you’re bound and determined, I reckon I can’t stop you. But you’d better take your own vehicle. I have no idea how long I’ll be at the scene or what happens after that, and you said something about a date later this afternoon.”
“Not a date.” Mack went to the door. “A late-afternoon dinner with friends. Sam and Leatha Richards and Leatha’s family—you know them? Except,” she added as an afterthought, “Sam had a heart attack last weekend. He may still be in the hospital. I’d better check and make sure that dinner’s still on. But yes, I’ll take the state truck.” She pulled the door open and was stepping through, but he put out a hand, stopping her and pushing the door shut.
“Not a date.” There was a glint in his eyes, and he was close enough that she could smell the faint citrusy scent of aftershave, overlaid by the woodsmoke odor of his canvas jacket. “That’s nice to know. I’d just as soon not have any competition. Hate to say it, but I’m not good with competition. It tends to bring out the worst in me.”
It wasn’t a flirtatious remark, she thought distractedly. He meant it. And it was some kind of declaration. “Don’t tell me you’re the possessive type,” she said, then wished she had said something else, something less coy, less teasing.
“Not usually, no.” He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her firmly toward him. “Actually never. I’m a real mild-mannered guy. Except in exceptional circumstances. Except when I know what I want. Then I tend to go after it.”
There was that tingle again, and more. She could feel it racing up her spine and across her shoulders. She could feel how near he was and how indescribably, indisputably male he was and how suddenly, inexplicably, she wanted—
He put a finger under her chin, tipped up her face, and kissed her. It was direct and impatient and, in an unexpected way, proprietary, not like any first kiss she’d ever tasted. Instinctively she pulled back, thinking in confusion that this was much too soon, too much, too soon, too—
But then she had to stop thinking, because he refused to let her go. His mouth on hers had suddenly become urgent, demanding. He was holding her tight, pinning her full length against him. Her breath quickened and her arms—of their own volition, not hers, she was sure—were going up and around his shoulders. His fingers were in her hair and her cap had fallen off, and she knew that if this went on a moment longer she would never be able to pull away, never, ever.
Summoning her strength, she pulled back again, and this time he stepped back, dropped his arms, and let her go. She couldn’t move. His eyes were searching her face, and she knew, with a sudden hot flush of embarrassment, that he was seeing the unmasked desire written there.
After a moment, he cleared his throat. “I think I’d file that under ‘exceptional circumstances.’” He bent down, picked up her cap, and handed it to her, a quick, wide grin spreading across his face. “But I’d want to try it again, sometime soon. Just to be sure.”
Mack was too breathless to answer. She finally managed, “Yes.” And then wasn’t sure what she was saying yes to. Flustered, she put on her cap. “We’d better be going.”
But he put his hand on the door. “Is there any?” he asked, looking down at her, his eyes intent.
“Any what?”
“Competition. Just for the record,” he added.
She hesitated, thought briefly of Derek, and then told the truth. “No,” she said. “No competition.” She took a breath. “But that doesn’t mean—”
He opened the door. “I know it doesn’t,” he said. “Just wanted to know where I stood at the moment, is all.” As he looked down at her there was a smile in his eyes.
“Top dog,” he said, and touched her face. “Definitely.”
Chapter Seven
> The uniquely pungent scent and taste of rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) make it a flavorful culinary herb. It can be used fresh or dried, with meats, vegetables, eggs, and desserts.
But rosemary also has important therapeutic benefits. Its green, needlelike leaves contain volatile oils that can stimulate the immune system, increase circulation, and improve digestion, as well as anti-inflammatory compounds that may reduce the severity of asthma attacks. Rosemary has been shown to increase blood circulation in the head and brain and has long had a reputation for improving the memory. As well, the antioxidant strength of rosemary has made it a favorite preservative. The needle-like leaves contain carnosic and rosmarinic acids, powerful antimicrobials that help to slow decay. Once used by Egyptian mummy makers, the herb is now employed to slow microbial growth on food products and prevent the oxidation of food oils.
Rosemary is also an important landscaping plant in USDA hardiness zones 7–10. One important asset: deer don’t like it!
China Bayles
“Rosemary: An Herb for all Seasons, All Reasons”
Pecan Springs Enterprise
I got up early on Thanksgiving morning and picked up the phone to call my friend Justine Wyzinski, who earned her nickname in law school—the Whiz—by being faster, smarter, and right far more often than the rest of us second-rate plodders. I managed to earn a nickname, too: Hot Shot. But I wouldn’t have worked so hard if I hadn’t burned with the mad desire to best the Whiz at her own game. Since I’ve left the law, I’ve intentionally slowed down. Hot Shot no longer fits.
But Justine is still the Whiz. She never slows down for anything, not even National Turkey Day. If I knew her (and I do), she was probably going in to her office in downtown San Antonio early this morning, to catch up on a little paperwork while the phone wasn’t ringing itself silly. I was right. She was up and at ’em already, and revved up to Mach 2. At least. She spotted the caller ID of my cell phone and picked up on the first ring.
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